October 18, 2013 |
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This week may be seen as a turning point in the fight back against NSA spying by creating new systems to overcome the surveillance state.
There have been protests against the NSA’s spying program but they focus only on legislative solutions. While legislation is needed, many of the solutions lie within our own power and often merely require the government to get out of the way. Technological solutions to government surveillance may be more important than legislation.
President
Obama’s independent commission is
anything but independent; it is filled with members of the surveillance state and organized under the auspices of the NSA. We are not going to get a “
Church Committee” in the current Congress. The leadership of both parties and President Obama are too tied to the surveillance state – or, perhaps too afraid of it – to challenge it. The director of National Intelligence, James Clapper was not even reprimanded or forced to resign when he
committed perjury before Congress about surveillance on Americans – something for which he should be criminally prosecuted.
Protests against the surveillance state continue to grow. There is a
mass protest planned for October 26th in Washington, DC against NSA surveillance. We encourage everyone reading this to participate if possible no matter whether you are an Occupier, Tea Partier, progressive or libertarian – the security state is something we all oppose. Public opinion is on our side and the people need to show Washington, DC that there is growing anger about spying on Americans as well as abusive spying on countries and diplomats who are not threatening the United States.
Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation and long-time advocate,
wrote an important article which asks the question: “How much surveillance can democracy withstand?” He provides an analytical framework as well as some solutions to surveillance by security cameras, smart meters, corporations in commerce, travel on airplanes, trains and roadways, as well as in the major area of communication on telephone and the
Internet.
He urges that we consider “surveillance [as] a kind of social pollution” and consistently seek to limit the “surveillance impact of each new digital system.” The key to solving the surveillance crisis is recognizing that once data is collected it will be misused, so we need to shut down data collection at the outset through a combination of law and technology. Sometimes this requires designing a dispersed
surveillance system, e.g. a security camera in a store should not be linked to the Internet where government or others can acquire it. Other times, the system needs to be designed to keep key information secret, e.g. in commerce creating anonymous
payment systems so the payer’s identity is kept secret. He points out there is already technology available for digital cash. When it comes to communications by phone and Internet, laws are needed to limit how long such information can be stored as well as prohibiting government acquisition without a warrant.
He begins his essay discussing an area where we saw a lot of progress this week:
“The current level of general surveillance in society is incompatible with human rights. To recover our freedom and restore democracy, we must reduce surveillance to the point where it is possible for whistleblowers of all kinds to talk with journalists without being spotted. To do this reliably, we must reduce the surveillance capacity of the systems we use.”
There is big news on two fronts regarding these issues this week.
First, a technological breakthrough:
the Freedom of the Press Foundation announced that it is completing development of an open source software system that will allow whistleblowers to submit documents to the media securely and anonymously. One of the beautiful ironies of the SecureDrop system is that it was originally developed by the late Aaron Swartz who committed suicide due to prosecutorial abuse against his transparency activism. Swartz developed SecureDrop with Kevin Poulsen, an editor at Wired. The Free Press Foundation will provide installation support and information on security best practices and long-term technical support. The New Yorker is the first news organization to use the SecureDrop through its
StrongBox project.
Second, the major leak about
Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras teaming up with eBay founder Pierre Omidyar to form a new media outlet.
The new outlet, which has not yet been clearly defined, will be a general audience media source funded with the $250 million Omidyar considered using to buy the Washington Post. Greenwald et al. will focus on the security state and investigative reporting built on the philosophy
that journalism should expose the lying of the powerful rather than be
subservient to it. Indeed, a week before this story was leaked
Greenwald and Scahill announced they were working together on a major investigation of the NSA. As
the Columbia Journalism Review points out, the combination of three established, dissident journalists joining with one of the first Internet-era billionaires is “the best news journalism has seen in a long, long time. Here’s hoping this remarkable pairing realizes its full potential.”
We agree, this project has truly amazing potential. We can think of many important stories that the establishment, mass media does not cover (beyond the security state) and having an independent, well-funded media outlet that will cover these stories will be a very good thing for democracy. We spend a lot of time on
Popular Resistance reporting on news that is not covered in the establishment media, like
protest movements throughout the nation,
the crisis at Fukushima that is a grave risk to the world, the continued pollution from
open pit uranium mines which are
America’s secret Fukushima (these are few examples among many, you can
sign up for our daily digests here, better than a daily newspaper!).
We believe that the first step to mobilizing people is making sure they get the information they need to understand what is going on around them. The corporate, mass media does more to mislead and create myths than to actually report critical news. As
we noted in one of
our series of stories on Columbus Day, “The US is a myth filled country where citizens have to make a conscious effort to find the truth.” This new venture is an opportunity for reporting reality, rather than creating myth.
The other part of the security state beyond surveillance is the use of police to attack protesters and suppress dissent, rather than to protect our freedoms of speech, assembly and our right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
Popular Resistance consistently reports on people exercising their Free Speech rights, working to expand them as well as government attacks on those rights. This week
a new coalition, the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations, issued a report, “Take Back the Streets: Repression and Criminalization of Protest Around the World,” a collection of case studies showing patterns of police crackdown and abuse against peaceful assembly, accompanied by concrete recommendations to expand free speech.
In order to end the abuse of active citizens, government needs to change its philosophy on protests. The report begins its recommendations saying:
“Participation in protest and public assembly should be viewed not as a ‘necessary evil’ in democratic countries, but as a healthy democratic exercise that ensures good governance and accountability. It is a social good that is a vital part of a vibrant democracy. Unfortunately, however, the case studies profiled in this publication highlight that, whether through violence, criminalization or unnecessarily obstructionist laws, protest is being stifled rather than encouraged.”
When viewed as a social good the appropriate policies, laws and regulations become evident, i.e. government should be facilitating the right to protest rather than undermining it, they should recognize the human rights of people to protest their government with or without a permit and they should restrict the use of force by police including lethal and non-lethal force, e.g. tasers, tear gas, water hoses.
This abuse of police power was on display in Canada on Thursday, October 17, when the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police launched an attack on peaceful protesters of the Elsipogtog First Nation who were blockading hydro-fracking on their tribal lands. According to
this insider’s report, the police sent in hundreds of troops, with camouflaged sharpshooters and lethal weapons to attack the indigenous people protecting their land from extreme energy extraction. They used fire-hoses on the crowd and several dozen, including the chief and council were arrested. Five police cars were set on fire in response to the attack. (
Twitter reports indicate this was done by a police informant.)
The next day solidarity actions were held in more than two dozen locations in North America.
Canada has indicated it intends to steal resources from native lands and destroy them with hydro-fracking.
The attack on the Elsipogtog protesters who were protecting their tribal land occurred two days after the Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Rights left Canada. After spending nine days in Canada
he issued preliminary observations that said: “From all I have learned, I can only conclude that Canada faces a crisis when it comes to the situation of indigenous peoples of the country.” He found Canada was taking insufficient steps to confront this crisis despite being aware of it and is failing to respect the treaty rights of First Nations peoples and gave as one example the rapid development of resources while negotiations with First Nations were ongoing.
The abuse of power in the United States has been evident against the occupy movement, climate justice, economic justice, antiwar, animal rights and so many others who are seeking to create a better world. Since the late 1990’s when Bill Clinton added 100,000 police and the military began to provide civilian police with equipment, gear and training, police abuse, a long-term problem, has become routine. It infects not just police but prosecutors who are
using grand juries to intimidate protesters, a
phony court proceeding for mass deportations of
immigrants and the
unjust treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo. When an
officer who was arrested in a motorcycle gang attack was found to have been undercover in the Occupy Movement, it led the New York Times to write –
undercover police are everywhere.
October 22nd is a national day of protest against police abuse.
We can expect conflicts in the United States to continue as the government moves toward an austerity budget that is likely to cut basic social services like food stamps, healthcare and Social Security. People know, as Joseph Stiglitz wrote this week, that
inequality is a choice elected officials are making. While partisans cheer the Democrat’s victory over the abusive shut down of the government by the Republicans, the reality is this was no victory for the people. Part of the agreement requires a new budget that begins with the austerity budgets of the House, based on Rep. Paul Ryan’s extreme plan, and the less extreme but still austere Senate budget. This debate among two neoliberal budgets will result in more protest as the people lose but
banks continue to be bailed out. At the local level people see
examples like in Philadelphia where the city closed 23 schools and laid off thousands but is building a huge prison.
Cutbacks in government combined with
corporations that do not even provide their employees a wage on which they can live – paying them so poorly that
they require $7 billion annually in public assistance – as well as
unsafe working conditions will stoke unrest. And, the
continued privatization of government services which puts America’s poor and working class at risk, will fuel citizen anger. The corruption of the economy and government by the rule of money is more evident to more Americans. On
November 2nd there will be an international day of protest against corruption caused by money-dominated government and a
corrupt economy.
Fred Branfman, who recently completed a five-part series on the abuses of executive power in the United States,
wrote in concluding his series:
“For those alarmed by the steady growth of lawless, violent and authoritarian U.S. Executive power for the last 50 years, the events of the past few months have been exciting. The emergence of a de facto coalition of progressives and conservatives opposing the National Defense Authorization Act giving the Executive the right to unilaterally detain or execute American citizens without a trial, and NSA mass surveillance of phone and Internet data, has been unprecedented, and offers the first hope in 70 years that Executive power can be curbed.”
He writes that citizens must unite across the political spectrum in a “Coalition for Freedom” to make the United States a functioning democracy. We need to demand transparency, real congressional and judicial oversight, protection for whistleblowers and journalists (including citizen and independent journalists) as well as create new technologies that protect our privacy. The beast of the national security state can be controlled, but it will take millions of Americans demanding that our nation become a functioning democracy to end this tyranny.
This article is produced by PopularResistance.org in conjunction with AlterNet. It is based on PopularResistance.org’s weekly newsletter reviewing the activities of the resistance movement.
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