Friday, June 7, 2013

Civil liberties: American freedom on the line

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


The Guardian,

"....Yet that is the situation at the heart of the Guardian's exclusive story this week that America's immense National Security Agency is doing just this on Mr Obama's watch. The revelation that a secret order, issued by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, requires one of the largest telecoms providers in the US to provide a daily diet of millions of US phone records to the FBI, poses Americans with a major civil liberties challenge. Under the terms of the order, everything about every call made during a three month period – excepting only the calls' actual contents – is offered up to the bureau and the NSA on a gargantuan routine basis. It seems improbable that the order revealed yesterday is the only one of its kind. So the assumption has to be that this is the new normality of American state surveillance. The special courts set up to monitor and approve industrial data-harvesting appear to provide little check on the scale of the activity......

But it is American civil liberties that are primarily in the spotlight now. Ever since 9/11, the US has allowed the war on terror to frame a new domestic authoritarianism that is strikingly at odds with America's passionate sense of its own freedom. This week's revelations have stunned millions of Americans whose justified outrage against 9/11 surely never led them to expect such routine and unrestrained surveillance on such a massive scale. US politicians have a poor post-9/11 record of confronting such powers. Even now, it is possible that many will look the other way. But this is an existential challenge to American freedom. That it has been so relentlessly prosecuted by a leader who once promised to stand up against such authority, makes the challenge more pressing, not less."

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