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Another Milestone on the Road to Serfdom
By Scott Horton
12/17/07 "
Harper's" -- - Very rarely, I read a press account
and see the footprint of a new world—there it is, lurking amidst
the smudged black ink in the thin column. Sometimes it is a
technological breakthrough that promises to make life easier,
safer, or longer. But sometimes it is a redefinition of the
parameters of human society. And sometimes it’s downright
frightening. Time to pull it out of the banality of that
newsprint and think.
And it happened on Sunday morning. The article is by Eric
Lichtblau, James Risen and Scott Shane, and it’s called
“Wider Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telecom Industry.” Take the
time to read this article carefully. Here are a few key grafs:
For months, the Bush Administration has waged a
high-profile campaign, including personal lobbying by
President Bush and closed-door briefings by top officials,
to persuade Congress to pass legislation protecting
companies from lawsuits for aiding the National Security
Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program. But the
battle is really about something much bigger. At stake is
the federal government’s extensive but uneasy partnership
with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance
operations in fighting terrorism and crime.
The N.S.A.’s reliance on telecommunications companies is
broader and deeper than ever before, according to government
and industry officials, yet that alliance is strained by
legal worries and the fear of public exposure.
To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the
government has been collecting the phone records of
thousands of Americans and others inside the United States
who call people in Latin America, according to several
government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because the program remains classified. But in 2004, one
major phone carrier balked at turning over its customers’
records. Worried about possible privacy violations or public
relations problems, company executives declined to help the
operation, which has not been previously disclosed.
What Lichtblau, Risen and Shane are describing is the dawn of
a new National Surveillance State in the United States, a
public-private partnership. And the object of this
partnership—which emerges as a criminal conspiracy, quite
literally, between telecom companies and the Bush
Administration—is to watch and listen to you and everything you
do. Of course, they will say it’s about “terrorists,” or about
“narcotics traffickers.” And indeed every authoritarian and
wannabe totalitarian system from the dawn of time has cast its
snooping on citizens in just these terms. No problems with
the honest citizen, they say, it’s the criminals and the
enemies we’re after. We need your cooperation. But the
technology used makes no such distinction—it is snooping on
everyone.
We learn about this mostly thanks to an engineer who saw what
was happening and began to ask questions
The accusations rely in large part on the assertions of a
former engineer on the project. The engineer, who spoke on
the condition of anonymity, said in an interview that he
participated in numerous discussions with N.S.A. officials
about the proposal. The officials, he said, discussed ways
to duplicate the Bedminster system in Maryland so the agency
“could listen in” with unfettered access to communications
that it believed had intelligence value and store them for
later review. There was no discussion of limiting the
monitoring to international communications, he said.
“At some point,” he said, “I started feeling something
isn’t right.”
So the United States intelligence agencies in cahoots with
major telecom providers are intercepting and reviewing your
communications. This is occurring without warrants. And the
legal community is in accord: it was criminal conduct. And
that’s why the Bush Administration is frantically pushing right
now for immunity: to ensure that its collaborators face
no adverse consequences from their criminal acts. What kind of
society does this sound like?
Now let’s tack on one further extremely disturbing fact. One
telecom company said “no.” It was Qwest. The Qwest response to
overtures was simple: “We’d love to work with you on this. But
you do need to change the law so we can do it legally.”
Apparently as soon as that happened, Qwest lost a series of
important government contracts. And the next thing you know, the
Justice Department was feverishly working on a criminal
investigation looking at Qwest’s CEO on insider trading
allegations—amidst very strange dealings between the Justice
Department and the federal judge hearing the case. Of course,
this is all the purest coincidence. Or maybe not. What kind of
society does this sound like?
This is not the America we used to live in. It is not a
nation that stood as a bulwark for civil liberties. It is a
nation with an executive who is drunk on power. An executive who
refuses to respect the legal constraints established by the
Constitution, and even the criminal law.
As dawn turned to midmorning in the era of technology,
thinkers agreed that the great threat facing mankind was the
threat of a totalitarian rule. They saw the vision that Orwell
transcribed, in which human freedom would be horribly
constrained as the species assumed the role accorded to cogs in
some massive machine. This was hard for Americans to
envision—they were born and lived in a country that knew and
seriously guarded civil liberties. But those who traveled abroad
saw the evidence plainly enough, especially in the twenties and
thirties, as totalitarian states rose and enslaved their
peoples. Then fascism rose and fell. And after it, the efforts
to build a Marxist-Leninist world imploded as well. But it’s
wrong to suppose on the basis of these failed nightmare-utopias
that the threat Orwell envisioned had passed. It has merely
moved on, to a new form.
How would America and its market system behave in the face of
such a threat? In the mind of some, like Hayek and Mises, the
forces of the market would restrain an overreaching government
and would serve to maximize human freedom. We needed to be on
guard, of course, against the rise of monopolies and preserve
the competitive edge. And we have to adhere rigorously to a
principle of legality. As Mises reminds us, it is the centering
of power in the hands of a few men and not in the rule of law,
that presents the gravest threat to individual freedom in the
market economies.
I don’t object to private businesses, including those in the
telecommunications sector, cooperating with government,
including the intelligence services. They should do so, of
course, to promote society’s interest in collective security.
But this cooperation needs to occur within the boundaries of the
law, and it must respect the rights of their customers, and more
broadly of the citizenry. What the Bush Administration and the
telecoms did was wrong, and both should be held to account for
their wrongdoing. That’s the way a state committed to the rule
of law works.
The question is now before the Senate for a vote on the
telecom amnesty bill. As usual, the White-Flag Democrats are
abandoning opposition to the Administration’s initiative and are
laying the foundation for it to be steamrolled through the
Senate. Harry Reid’s conduct in particular has been
reprehensible and spineless. This vote is a milestone on the
road to serfdom. It’s time to put up a roadblock instead. Write
or phone your senator immediately and advise them that you
oppose the grant of amnesty for warrantless surveillance to
telecommunications companies and that you expect them to do the
same.
© The Harper's Magazine Foundation
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