Posted on 06/09/2013 10:49:40 PM PDT by Jyotishi
Over the past week all the ugliest truths about America and Americans are out — it considers whistleblowers “traitors” but protects soldiers who massacre innocent women and children abroad. And yes, Uncle Sam thinks nothing of tapping all our phone and email communications
What is the breaking point, I found myself asking as the British paper, Guardian, followed by The Washington Post, inundated my sensibilities with details of the data mining operations of America’s top secret spy organisation, the National Security Agency.
The first alert came in the form of Guardian’s publication of a copy of a secret court order handed by a court set up under the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to broadband and telecommunications giant Verizon requiring it to hand over, on a daily and ongoing basis, information about all the calls on its network - records of originating and receiving phone numbers, theduration of calls and, even cell phone location.
Soon, Guardian, joined by the Post, went on to reveal how the NSA, under a top-secret programme called PRISM, has since 2007 obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other internet giants material which includes search histories, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats. Some whistleblower had obviously leaked to the two papers a classified 41-slide PowerPoint presentation used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the programme. The document claimed “collection directly from the servers” of major US service providers.
No one can doubt any longer that America is a police state. Otherwise why should it pump an estimated (never verifiable) $ 8-10 billion annually into maintaining what writer-expert Jane Mayer (The Dark Side: the inside story on how the war against terror turned into a war on American ideals, Washington 2008) called “the largest, most costly, and most technologically sophisticated spy organisation the world has ever known?” Historian Matthew Aid (The Secret Sentry: the untold history of the NSA, Washington 2010) wrote, “It spies on all foreign communications, and it also encodes US government communications. About 75 per cent of its budget is spent on vacuuming up outside communications, and about 25 per cent goes to protecting US government communications.” Guardian commented as Saturday Special went to Press: The fact that police have the right to monitor the communications of all its citizens — in secret — is a classic hallmark of a State that fears freedom.”
Whose business?
The Americans can have their NSA, which is reportedly three times the size of the CIA, operating out of a 5,000-acre campus at Fort Meade protected by iris scanners and facial recognition devices. Best of luck at its next location, which I am told is a million-acre joint somewhere in the Utah desert in a facility costing more than $ 10 billion. Frankly, nobody is missing any sleep here over the “freedoms” lost by the American people. For all I care, the American people deserve a sip of the same medicine they are delivering on half of humanity day in and day out.
Wait a minute, did I say “half of humanity?” Dreadfully sorry — this involves all of us. The calls heard in on between an American and an Indian compromises the privacy rights of not only the former but the latter as well. A peeping tom violates all the occupiers of a ladies’ room and not just the object of his lust. The American government has got to answer to entire humanity how it proposes to compensate for its evil offensive on human values.
Except those wonderful Chinese who are getting their backs through a devastating hacking programme which the Americans are only now beginning to understand, the only “freedom” the rest of us seem to be enjoying these days is the removal from the reality that Uncle Sam is data mining us three times a day at Fort Meade. According to Aid, NSA has several satellites of its own tracking us all the time, apart from remote listening posts whose locations will be known only from the next whisteblower.
Mayer, who I interviewed on tape two years back, told me in unequivocal terms that America is indeed “offending” its “allies” (a charmed society which includes India) by eavesdropping/snooping. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act prescribes procedures for the physical and electronic surveillance and collection of “foreign intelligence information” between “foreign powers” and “agents of foreign powers” (which may include American citizens and permanent residents suspected of espionage or terrorism) but it is not supposed to apply outside the United States.
But the point we are missing, and Mayer agreed with me there, is that most of the actual work of listening-in is done by private sector contractors who cannot, and should not, be trusted with the information which passes through their ears. Who knows how these contractors are linked with entities hostile to India? Or, at a more benign level, one that is keen on winning an Indian contract? India, for instance, is the world’s biggest armaments and military hardware customer. Often times, a telephone conversation or email picked up through one of NSA’s dedicated satellites or remote listening posts (locations never revealed but some could well be located in India) could give away an Indian bargaining position on a aircraft or destroyer purchase deal. Is that not betrayal of trust? Mayer agreed it was.
Matthew Aid, who I befriended in the course of my research (I still have some of the recordings of the Skype sessions I’d recorded with him) told me of the awful state of preparedness which exists in most countries, including India. We are smug in the belief that they are out of Uncle Sam’s radar screen. We don’t have a culture of encrypting messages. If some entities under the Raksha Mantranalaya have woken up to the need to use cipher-coded lines for its internal communications, there is no compulsion on the private sector companies who do business with it to follow the same regimen. Everybody in Washington or Beijing comes to know what the Indian government is thinking on X, Y or Z by following the phone calls and emails of the Tatas, the Ambanis, etc. Besides, the technologies used for making the encryption hardware at the Defence Ministry companies in Bangalore are known to be Chinese discards.
Broad front
In its dealings with opponents — whether “Islamic terrorists” or its own citizens alarmed by the daily abuse of the fundamental values of its nationhood — the American State is increasingly manifesting fascist tendencies. By prosecuting Pvt. Bradley Manning as a “traitor” for leaking to WikiLeaks the dark facts of American diplomacy and foreign military adventures, the government of the United States is plainly resurrecting the worst of Stalin and Hitler.
At the same time as it is preparing to put Manning away for life without possibility of parole, it is in a forgiving mode on Sergeant Robert Bales, who last year gunned down 12 innocent Afghan villagers, most of them women and children. This week, under a plea bargain which would give him immunity from the death sentence, Bales pleaded guilty. By September, he could even win the right to parole.
We Indians have got a taste of American double standards through the Richard Coleman Headley episode. The man behind the “Indian 9/11” got away with just 35 years in jail and avoided transfer to his victim country despite a clear extradition law. But thousands of innocent Afghans, Pakistanis, Iraqis and others have had to die for the “real 9/11”.
Why do we, the intellectuals of the free world, acquiesce in Pax Americana? Why has America’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from journalists, authors, playwrights and film makers the world over? In middle age, I recall the debates between Soviet acolytes and American ‘dalals’ (agents) which was so much a feature of my childhood. I think it is time to recall that hoary age, albeit in a more inclusive way.
(Udayan Namboodiri is an author and Senior Editor of The Pioneer)
I sincerely doubt it. Are you against surveillance programs that target innocent Americans, or merely against all surveillance programs including ones that target our enemies?
Are you against surveillance programs that spy on innocent American citizens or simply against all surveillance programs, innocent and guilty i.e. suspected terrorists?
I am against surveillance programs that have no specific target, that have no checks and balances. That are outsourced to companies like Booz Allen, with private individuals like Snowden, who may choose instead to look up on private emails of people who don’t pose a threat to peace.
If you like an 1984 kind of state, what are you doing on FR?
If you suggest that a typical Freeper would like a 1984 kind of state, maybe you better think about getting over yourself.
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