In 2013, I watched in similar horror the attack on whistleblower Edward Snowden for leaking classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) on its staggering global and national surveillance activities. He also revealed a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court's order for Verizon and other major telephone companies to provide the NSA with the phone records of ordinary Americans on a daily basis.
This was not the country I had ever imagined myself living in or my husband defending. Snowden found himself stranded in Russia in the face of a possible lifetime behind bars here for revealing the true nature of the national security state's version of post-9/11 America.
I had, by then, helped co-found Brown University's Costs of War Project to offer a more accurate picture than most Americans then had of the nature and price (financial and human) of this country's never-ending war on terror. My colleagues and I were working, among other things, to raise awareness here that we were increasingly subject to an all-encompassing kind of surveillance that would undoubtedly have impressed some of our favorite foreign authoritarian leaders maybe even Vladimir Putin himself.
After all, the dust had barely settled around the collapsed Twin Towers in New York City when the administration of President George W. Bush began conducting electronic surveillance of a growing range of Americans without a warrant in sight. In 2008, Congress would allow that Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to approve such programs without any prior indication of individual wrongdoing. As of this year, according to the Costs of War Project, the U.S. government has more Americans under electronic surveillance through wiretapping and the bulk collection of communications without probable cause than it does through wiretaps based on likely involvement in criminal activity (the standard for such surveillance prior to 9/11).
In the war-on-terror years, the FBI's powers to secretly compel the release of information on individual bank and Internet use have dramatically expanded (no individualized suspicion necessary). The FBI also sweeps information from tens of thousands of people citizens and non-citizens alike into its databases, which then becomes available to tens of thousands of government employees, potentially marking a person for life as a suspected terrorist.
Similar developments are taking place at the state and local levels. Some police departments, for instance, have adopted tactics resembling those of a police state. Since 9/11, the New York City Police Department, the largest in the country, has typically used facial-recognition and license-plate-reader cameras to monitor heavily trafficked areas on a constant basis, in the process effectively gaining information on Americans protesting in public.
For instance, the New York Times reports that, based on a recent Amnesty International analysis, a person participating in a protest in part of downtown Manhattan "would be captured on the Police Department's array of Argus video cameras for about 80% of that march." The Department also uses software to sweep social media sites and store information on individuals without a warrant. In Minneapolis, according to former FBI agent Terry Albury, now serving prison time for leaking classified information, FBI agents mobilized local citizens of Somali background, along with local law enforcement, into "Shared Responsibility Committees." These were ostensibly to help ensure neighborhood security by identifying young people at risk of radicalizing, while actually encouraging committee members to report on one another.
Of course, American Muslims have been disproportionately affected by the government's dramatic increase in surveillance. According to the New York Times, U.S. intelligence officials estimated that "anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 Al-Qaeda terrorists" in the United States had come under FBI surveillance in the year after the September 11th attacks, based overwhelmingly on their ethnic and religious identities. Such individual investigations almost invariably led nowhere.
The unease I felt that first time I got a critical text from a higher-ranking military wife wasn't faintly comparable to what a Muslim-American husband might have felt when the FBI knocked on his door and took him away for interrogation. Still, believe me, it does feel awful to be alienated from the community you've spent much of your life trying to contribute to both as a wife, a human-rights activist, and a therapist.
At one of the first "homecomings" for a boat on which my husband was stationed, a young military spouse approached me. She'd been placed on suicide watch by an officer's wife as that sub's deployment began. By then, word had gotten out that I was the author of an anonymous blog on military life. (Not long after, under enormous social pressure, I shut it down.) Staring at the approaching boat, she said in a hushed voice, "My dad sent me your blog. He thought I'd feel less alone. Someone told me the writer was you." Then she promptly moved away from me.
While tears came to my eyes, I also felt less alone, thanks to her small revelation. If people like us can manage, however modestly, to express our solidarity in a place where this has become so much more difficult and dangerous over these years of never-ending war, then others can perhaps begin to think about calling out leaders of all sorts who abuse their power in the name of fighting terror.
Given that being marked as dangerous can forever alter your life in a world in which surveillance is the order of the day, shouldn't we all be holding to task leaders who abuse their power, including the leaders of the U.S. military?
Copyright 2021 Andrea Mazzarino
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