Ideologically Battling the Surveillance State

Glenn Greenwald published a great editorial Friday about the dangers of domestic surveillance drones.  Greenwald points out a number of alarming possibilities, including the seemingly inevitable introduction of weaponized drones onto U.S. soil and the approaching economic viability of an all seeing drone network.  The editorial also refers to the difficulty of explicitly articulating an argument against the vague threat of an all seeing future government/corporatocracy, but it’s here that privacy and freedom lovers should focus their energy.

Laying out the impact of pervasive surveillance is not enough

In July 2012, Greenwald delivered a lengthy speech outlining the contours of the vast, secret U.S. surveillance state.  He attempts to refute the “you don’t have anything to worry about if you’re not doing anything wrong” position by clearly explaining what exactly we lose by constantly being watched.  First, dissident activity is greatly impeded by government surveillance.  Cointelpro-type programs can break up Al Qaeda and hurt the Arian Nation, but they also snuff out nascent Civil Rights and Feminist movements before they start.  More broadly Greenwald notes that being watched curbs “dissent… creativity, and challenges to orthodoxy” and “breeds conformism.”  This constant surveillance creates a “climate of fear” which trains citizens not to engage in certain behavior, ultimately leading people to conform on their own without any threat of external coercion.  As persuasive as all of these arguments are, the most powerful argument against Big Brother is a more basic one:  Some government bureaucrat has no right to read my emails to my mom or listen to me talk to my fucking wife.

Opponents of the surveillance state have to render it completely illegitimate

Here’s a conversation related to murder that you’ll probably never hear:

Chad:  Hey man, why’d you kill Ken?

Bryan:  He had a lot of cool shit bro – nice house that I get to stay in now, nice car I whip around…

Chad: But Ken was a real cool dude man, and he had a long fruitful life to live.

Bryan: Not as long as mine.  I’m twenty fucking three bro and he’s 56.  Think about how much better I’m gonna live it up for decades with all of Ken’s shit, and he would’ve probably died soon anyway.

Chad: But Ken’s earnings were higher so his present value contribution to society would’ve been greater, man, and…

The reason no one would ever talk like this is because murder (at least domestically) is wrong.  That’s it.  There’s no justifying murder with arguments about its impact, no cost-benefit analysis.  The same goes for rape, (formerly) torture, pedophilia, blatant racist speech, cursing dead soldiers and a number of other behaviors society doesn’t tolerate.  The key for privacy advocates and freedom fighters is to transform the discussion about the surveillance state from a debate about safety and civil liberties tradeoffs, to a loud affirmation of your right not to have some government hack sifting through your private life.

Privacy and freedom activists must ridicule spying and the spying bureaucrats

How might this argument look?  “I don’t want some fucking desk jockey in Fort Meade reading my love letters” or “Why should Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly get to sneak a peak at my wang while I piss in Prospect Park?” or “Seattle PD has no right to watch my alley to see whether I throw a banana peel in the recycling bin” or “I don’t want some bored loser at the Department of Justice listening to my weed buying phone calls to get his little thrill for the day” or “Get the hell away from my daughter with your creepy Cryptokids bullshit.”

The key is to delegitimize the process of surveillance and the people that conduct the surveillance without getting into a cost-benefit fight that provides implicit recognition to the watchers.  The Right has done a pretty good job of this by shitting all over TSA officers.  They don’t discuss how the search process won’t make us safer or what the impact of intrusive searches is on our psyche.  Instead, they create sensationalist videos of TSA officers groping people and post heroic stories of citizens stripping down to resist the government’s tyranny.  Although it’s much harder to do this with agencies that operate completely in the dark, opponents of the surveillance state must find a way to delegitimize, ridicule and directly confront the bureaucrats, politicians and law enforcement officers who are intent on snooping through and recording every mundane detail of our lives. Otherwise, we might as well shut the door and turn the clock back to 1984.

The Pravda President

Civil liberties and transparency advocates have long observed that Obama’s White House has been extremely secretive and selective about releasing national security information. The government refuses to acknowledge the existence of the CIA’s drone assassination program in court even as senior administration officials leak favorable classified info that all but claims Obama flew into Yemen on rocket boosters himself and fired a pinpoint strike right into al-Awlaki’s ass. The administration followed a similar strategy with the Stuxnet cyber-attack and worked extensively with Zero Dark Thirty filmmakers to create a propaganda movie while remaining publicly opaque about the Bin Laden raid.

Politico recently expanded this analysis of the administration’s lack of transparency to include the White House’s day-to-day stonewalling of media. It labeled President Obama “the puppet master” after exhaustingly detailing the White House’s continuous attempts to contain and strictly control press coverage. Administration officials frequently call reporters to try to influence coverage, have refused interviews from any major newspaper in years and select press conference questioners based on the favorability of their reporting on the President. Obama’s also given only one-third as many post-announcement or photo-op talks with the media as President Bush.

Executive branch recalcitrance and manipulation of the media is nothing new, but it’s been getting worse in recent years. George W. Bush famously captured the mainstream press in the run-up to the attack on Iraq, using selective leaks and misinformation to push the nation to war.  He also successfully pressured news outlets to suppress major stories about his domestic spying program for a year. During the 2012 campaign, both Mitt Romney and President Obama requested and received veto power for all quotes from senior campaign officials, family members and candidates used by many MSM outlets including Bloomberg, The Washington Post and the New York Times. According to Politico, the Obama administration has also pioneered the production of its own media content (photos, videos, blog posts etc…) which it can directly release to the public or offer to the media. Given this recent history, is it a stretch to envision a near future where the White House demands that, in exchange for access to government created media (i.e. propaganda), newspapers and TV stations must run the content unedited? Does that differ at all from the state-controlled media in an authoritarian regime?

Access-hungry reporters have no idea how to push back against White House restrictions, choosing to accept their diminished role and play ball rather than risk a further diminution in access. But what if instead of throwing up their hands and growing more obedient, they played their FUCKING ROLE and acted ADVERSARIALLY!? If administration officials refuse to comment on the drone program, interview Yemeni tribesman who’ve lost family members; interview angry congressmen tired of being sidelined; interview international legal scholars who question the legality and ethics of incinerating young foreign men. Similar approaches could be taken to political events like sequestration, Medicare cuts, Obama’s pre-K push etc… If the executive branch refuses to offer anything substantial or on the record, then don’t quote anyone from the fucking executive branch and rely exclusively on other interested parties.

The sad truth is that mainstream outlets have become so subservient to government interests that publishing genuinely critical articles, without copious and lengthy anonymous rebuttals from government officials, is basically unthinkable. So the White House will continue to restrict access, administration staffers will continue to use the press for favorable leaking and the American media will continue its gradual transformation into an official mouthpiece of the government.

Officials Abuse Power – In Other News Pope Catholic

Florida police officers repeatedly misused the state’s Driving and Vehicle Information Database (D.A.V.I.D.) in 2012 according to an Orlando Sentinel investigation.  At least seventy-four officers used D.A.V.I.D. to look up potential love interests, investigate celebrities or just peruse for private information.  Given the police code of silence and the tendency of any bureaucracy to play down internal issues, these numbers are likely orders of magnitude lower than the actual number of officers abusing the system.

If police officers abuse this somewhat innocuous database – which contains phone numbers, addresses, pictures, demographic information and other relatively limited data – imagine the field day government bureaucrats will have with the richer data sources coming into existence.  The NSA is building the world’s largest data complex in Utah, with one million square feet of storage and computing space, allegedly set to begin storing Americans’ phone, email and business records in 2013.  Tens of thousands of drones equipped with advanced recording equipment, some small enough to fit in your palm, are taking to the skies for personal, governmental and law enforcement surveillance.  And the Department of Homeland Security has shown a strong interest in audio recording devices, placed in public buses and street lights, to record citizen conversations.

Desk jockeys from DC to Deschutes will have the ability to read your email, check out your weirder purchases, scrutinize your phone records, watch you through the windows of your home and listen to your personal conversations.  There will undoubtedly be safeguards set up, but does anyone doubt that people will abuse this system?  Latter-day Lotharios will check to see if that secretary on the third floor is single; Spurned lovers will read for evidence of infidelity; Unscrupulous day-traders will sneak a peek at sensitive business correspondence; and Perverts gon’ perv.

This is to say nothing of the huge potential for state-sanctioned blackmail.  Jestingly call your white friend a cracker-ass-cracker?  You’re a dangerous racial nationalist.  Joke about taking a toke?  You’re a drug dealer.  Reveal details of a closeted homosexuality, illicit affair, criminal act or extreme political opinion and you can bet that the ABC boys will be more than tempted to use it.  If the FBI did it to King, they’ll do it to you (provided you’re powerful enough to present any sort of threat).

Americans are thus left with a choice: acquiesce to government intrusions and naively accept pronouncements that the new surveillance state is manned by unassailable patriots taking aim squarely at terrorists.  Or, acknowledge the inevitable fallibility of human nature and demand strong restrictions/bans on the insidious surveillance technology that is weaving itself into this nation’s fabric.