Domestic spying by numerous government agencies and private companies a threat to our freedoms.

 By Samantha Laura Kelley:

In the past few months, a mounting number of small but substantial protests have taken place within the United States. They have emerged in opposition to various legislative and governmental efforts to obtain ex-post facto permissions to engage in expansive domestic spying and employ unfettered authority of detention, search, and extraordinary rendition against U.S. citizens.

In particular, political dissidents, activists, whistleblowers, and otherwise “threatening” entities have been the focus of these initiatives, as well as the loudest voices of protest against these punitive forces. Three recent legislative initiatives have bolstered widening public objections; namely, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), and the Cyber Internet Security Protection Act (CISPA). The combination of these three efforts represents a brazen attempt at the full-on assault of civil liberties and amounts to the greatest movement towards an authoritarian, oppressive state within this country in modern times.

President Barack Obama signed the legislative specter known as the National Defense Authorization Act into law in late 2011, though he issued a rather dodgy “signing statement,” claiming that he would not employ the newly legalized powers of extraordinary rendition and indefinite detention of U.S. citizens provided for by the bill during his presidency.

This is the type of maneuver one is immediately inclined to balk at; ignoring the odor of suspicion which inevitably emanates, anyone devoting  any thought to the issue knows they need only wait until the administration does feel comfortable exercising this power for its effects to be wrought. But this had probably been a farce in the first place, as the administration had actually been given the opportunity to exempt U.S. citizens from the constitutional violations enabled by the bill's provisions and refused.

The NDAA would create a veritable leviathan of military-governmental authority, with its provisions enabling the military to jail indefinitely any person worldwide considered to be a terrorism suspect, without issuing charges, without trial, and without legal representation.  The military would also be afforded the power of extraordinary rendition of any so-called “covered persons” to any country in the world. It would create a reality where one can and should expect government agents and military personnel to snatch people off the street, whenever and wherever they please, within or without the United States and deliver them to military prisons or to foreign countries where legal protections pose no obstacle and such persons can swiftly disappear and be treated according to the discretion of their captors.
        
Following the passage of this bill, a group of journalists, activists, and academics,  including veteran war correspondent Chris Hedges, filed suit against the Obama administration in response to the passage of the NDAA. Hedges explained his decision to sue in an interview on Pacifica's Democracy Now!, saying that the act was “clearly unconstitutional... a huge and egregious assault against our democracy,” and that “It overturns over 200 years of law, which has kept the military out of domestic policing."

New York City is in many ways a perfect prism through which to view the battleground on which the nascent war between forces of power and the masses. Following the terrorism attack on September 11, 2001, New York City was extensively equipped with a vast network of security cameras, anti-terrorism task forces, and advanced artificial intelligence tools, all of which could be readily employed towards any such effort which might strike the NYPD's fancy.

More recently, the advent of security surveillance towers, oddly reminiscent of the Scout Walkers famously featured in Star Wars, as well as the increasing employment of paramilitary weaponry by city police forces, has cast an even more ominous,  threatening cloud over the cityscape, with each towering apparatus and lurking camera serving as a kind of signpost, a reminder to the people that someone is watching.

There are currently thousands of NYPD security cameras within the city obtaining continuous live footage of day-to-day activities, all feeding back to a single “counter-terrorism” hub in downtown Manhattan, as revealed by a CBS' “60 Minutes” exclusive from September 2011. Further revelations on the matter have detailed the hub's location at 55 Wall Street and exposed the unit's joint operation by a combination of the NYPD and the largest Wall Street firms, including JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, and Goldman Sachs,  which have all been outfitted with specialized observation desks and are granted access to the footage and artificial intelligence capabilities possessed by the hub.

The current surveillance problem is in every respect a national disaster. The  overlord of domestic spying, the National Security Agency, came under some media scrutiny earlier this spring after the publication of James Bamford's article in Wired magazine, which revealed the agency's plans to construct a one-million square-foot data center in the remote region of Bluffdale, Utah. The center would be equipped with virtually unlimited data storage and data  analysis capacities. Designed to process the unimaginably huge amount of emails, phone calls, Web search/history information, financial information, and other personal data the NSA has amassed over the years since the expansive surveillance began following September 11, with enough room to store even more vast collections obtained in the future. The Bluffdale center serves essentially as a hub for a sophisticated information-gathering network.

Not only does the agency refuse to disclose the extent or amount of their surveillance, it issues highly secret “security letters,” which justify the collection of data on individuals without informing them, and, when necessary, obtains secret warrants signed by judges enabling them to act with stealth around targeted individuals' lives.

The agency has long relied upon a friendly  relationship of mutual cooperation with major cell phone, cable, and Internet companies. And, with the impending passage of CISPA, the NSA is now on a fast track to obtaining ex-post facto legal permission to exchange freely with these companies --  which it has been implementing secretly on a massive scale for a decade.

Provisions of CISPA also grant huge incentives to the private companies which store citizens’ data, as they no longer face legal threats for turning over private data. Simultaneously, the bill renders the people totally unaware of these actions by their Internet service providers, nullifying all previously existing privacy agreements between the companies and their customers. This essentially removes the obstacle of the required court order which would have previously protected their information, at least to some extent.

The introduction of these measures paints a grim picture of what “freedom” will mean in  America's near future. This will be a country in which unelected governmental and military agencies, armed with an unlimited storage capacity and a vast surveillance network, will soon be able to obtain any and all of the data they please from private companies, including personal Web searches, communications, credit card transactions, and phone calls, without either the particular agency or the company requirement to even notify the persons whose private lives they've just invaded. Once in the hands of government entities, a person's data may be appropriated for whatever use is seen as necessary and can be shared between any number of separate federal and state entities.

Read more:
http://highbrowmagazine.com/1289-surveillance-domestic-spying-and-invasion-privacy-post-sept-11-america