Friday, March 07, 2008
Our Growing Surveillance State
From Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com:
The grave dangers from [our] growing Surveillance State don't require nefarious, cartoon-like government plots. The most genuine dangers are far more banal than sinister. Just as Priest suggests, it doesn't take cackling, Lex-Luthor-like government villains to cause serious abuse. Particularly given the almost complete lack of oversight in how the executive branch functions, it's very easy to imagine the definition of what's "relevant" and "appropriate" [datapoints upon which we're gathering information on Americans without warrants] slowly (though inexorably) being moved increasingly outward even by well-intentioned though overzealous intelligence officials, to say nothing of the ones who aren't well-intentioned. In fact, it's almost impossible to imagine that not happening.
It's extremely easy to find people who believe that attendance at a political rally, or membership in certain political groups, or even more pedestrian conduct referenced by Priest, constitutes reasonable grounds for "suspicion." That mentality is obviously prevalent among some substantial segment of federal government employees and intelligence officers. The decades of intelligence abuses leave no doubt about that.
People who think that way, and who are empowered to maintain dossiers on Americans and investigate them, don't think they're doing anything wrong by using those activities to consider certain American suspicious and to spy on them or investigate them further. They think they're doing their jobs, battling dangers. And as is true for all government power, the greater the scope of the domestic dossiers, the larger it will grow, the more uses that will be found for it. And that's true regardless of the good faith of the Government at any given moment or its party or ideology. Variables like ideology or bad faith can simply make those dangers even more pronounced.
The danger comes from ineptitude and the inevitably creeping nature of unchecked government power at least as much as it does from more dramatic, malicious spying plots. As one blogger put it yesterday in commenting on the new domestic spying data base:
I fear a surveillance society not because I think that the government will actually catch me in my subversion, but because I fear that it will think that it's caught me in my subversion. The pressure to "produce results" leads to the issuance of too many traffic tickets. Imagine what it will do when someone has to justify spending a bajillion dollars on some kind of algorithmic AI that's supposed to psychohistorically predict when a new 9/11 will change everything all over again forever. The more I order from Amazon, the kookier its recommendations for me. Entrail-reading isn't science, no matter how much one wishes it were so.
The real problem here, as is true for virtually every one of the political developments that actually matter, is that these issues are almost completely removed from establishment political discourse. This is all justified by the all-purpose Magic Word -- "Terrorists" -- and so very few political figures are able or willing to oppose any of it or articulate the reasons why it's a concern.
The political faction which forever claimed to stand for limitations on federal power (the "conservative" movement) is its principal cheerleader, while the "opposition party" either supports it just as much or doesn't care nearly enough to talk about it. Thus, outside of a few advocacy groups and other scattered commentators, the dangers posed by these developments are virtually never heard, let alone considered. So the Surveillance State just continues not only to grow and grow, but does so without any real attention, oversight, or limitations. As usual, there is an inverse relationship between the most consequential matters and the attention such matters receive in mainstream political debates.
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