Whistleblowers
Thomas Drake and Coleen Rowley spoke to Aaron Maté and the Real
News about the horrifying consequences of the new
bill that is about to extend the government's warrantless
surveillance of American citizens.
As they
point out:
The
database is so large that if people now check a name, and they don't
need probable cause to check any American's name in there, and they
come up with something, they can build a criminal case based on
whatever information is already collected in that database. That
would just affect ordinary Americans.
What
it's doing is simply extending the Executive Branch's ability to do
warrant-free monitoring of a significant portion of domestic
communications involving Americans. It also permits what-about
searches against the database and it provides a "loophole,"
what Senator Ron Wyden has referred to as the backdoors mechanism,
and all under the guise of "conducting foreign intelligence
for national security purposes."
Not only
does it monitor, which is otherwise known as surveilling Americans as
part of this program, if Jeff Sessions declares that it's for
National Security purposes, it is unreviewable by the courts. In
essence, the Executive Branch is now taking onto itself the review
process, which is a violation of the separation of powers in terms
of the three branches of the government. Of course, Congress is
just going along with this.
This
is simply a continuation of what has been in place now since shortly
after 9/11 under "legal means."
A first
serious impact here is that Whistleblowers will be fiercely
prosecuted automatically with absolutely zero chance to fight-back in
courts, even if they expose big crimes of any US administration
against US citizens or foreign countries. Which is actually the key
target of this totalitarian bill on the pretext of 'terrorism'.
But we
have to look back at some
stories related with the first days of the
Internet to understand that the US deep state will become more
powerful and authoritarian than ever.
One
of the leading exponents of the idea that cyberspace could be a place
where we would be liberated from the old, corrupt hierarchies of
politics and power and explore new ways of being, was John
Perry Barlow.
Barlow
wrote a manifesto that he called A
Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.
It was addressed to all politicians, telling them to keep out of this
new world. It was going to be incredibly influential, because what
Barlow did was give a powerful picture of the internet not as a
network controlled by giant corporations, but, instead, as a kind of
magical, free place. An alternative to the old systems of power. It
was a vision that would come to dominate the internet over the next
20 years.
But
two young hackers in New York thought that Barlow was describing a
fantasy world, that his vision bore no relationship at all to what
was really emerging online. They were cult figures on the early
online scene and their fans followed and recorded them. They called
themselves Phiber
Optik
and Acid
Phreak
and they spent their time exploring and breaking in to giant computer
networks that they knew were the hard realities of modern digital
power.
In
a notorious public debate online, the two hackers attacked Barlow.
What infuriated them most, was Barlow's insistence that there was no
hierarchy, or, controlling powers in the new cyber world. The hackers
set out to demonstrate that he was wrong.
Acid
Phreak hacked into the computers of a giant corporation called TRW.
TRW had originally built the systems that ran the Cold War for the US
military. They had helped create the delicate balance of terror.
Now,
TRW had adapted their computers to run a new system, that of credit
and debt. Their computers gathered up the credit data of millions of
Americans and were being used by the banks to decide individuals’
credit ratings. The hackers broke into the TRW network, stole
Barlow’s credit history and published it online. The hackers were
demonstrating the growing power of finance. How the companies that
ran the new systems of credit knew more and more about you, and,
increasingly, used that information to control your destiny.
Today,
the US deep state becomes more powerful than ever. It will be able to
do what corporations and hackers did, combined, almost twenty years
ago.
But
it's even worse: its mechanisms will be able to collect any kind of
data, any time, without being prosecuted by any court. If you still
believe that Democracy is not dead in the US empire then you are
suffering heavily from some kind of illusion ...
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