Big Brother Comes of Age

     When George Orwell wrote his prophetic novel “1984” in 1948, he envisioned a society where all information was totally controlled, all citizens were under constant surveillance, and even THINKING negatively about the current conditions was considered a crime.

As the actual date of 1984 approached there was much speculation about whether Orwell’s chilling predictions would come true. Essentially, the nation breathed a huge sigh of relief when the magical year arrived with no “Big brother” cameras installed in people’s homes, no monitoring of public sentiment to detect unpatriotic speech, and no attempts to control information through language (what Orwell called “Newspeak”).

     Now, with the leaks of information suggesting new encroachments on our civil liberties, it looks like Orwell may have been right, it just took a few decades later than he thought to get there. 

Cameras now monitor our every movement in pretty much every public space. All residents now carry personal tracking devices which broadcast their location in real-time to anyone with the equipment to see it. Consumers have been convinced that it is better to store all of your personal data in “the cloud”, where it is easily accessed by government snoopers. The English language, itself, has been twisted so that words often mean exactly the opposite of what they are (e.g. “job creators”, “peacekeeper” missiles, “pro-life”) or totally innocuous words are used to describe horrible things. We use the word “drone”, for instance, when we actually mean “flying killer robot.” In many ways, it seems, we have reached the kind of society that Orwell warned us about.

     When the Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency has been routinely been gathering personal information on EVERYBODY, not just terrorists, we all seemed shocked, although we should have seen it coming. Ever since the beginning of the Cold War, a secret power has grown within the government. This hidden manipulation, by what Bill Moyers calls the “Invisible Government,” has grown continuously and after the events of 9/11 it expanded even more. This powerful force behind the scenes in our nation is 

The powerful forces of the military, CIA, NSA and agencies we don’t even know about have been pulling the strings behind World events totally outside all 3 branches of government for more than 50 years. President John F. Kennedy discovered it when he was informed of an imminent invasion of Cuba, something planned completely outside the Executive Branch. We learned about it in the 1980s when President Reagan secretly used the Intelligence agencies to sell arms to Islamic terrorists so he could raise money for his own terrorists in Nicaragua. Although today’s conservatives are falling all over themselves accusing the whole thing as yet one more nefarious plot by our Nazi/Commie/Fascist/Kenyan usurper to bring down the jack-booted thugs of the IRS on innocent civilians, this invisible government operates totally outside of the President’s control and began its work long before Obama came on the scene. 

     In fact, some of this is the result of the Republican Party, which took the lead after 9/11 in calling for the most aggressive intelligence operations. I watched many of the C-Span hearings when the rules for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) were being hammered out. In every case, the Republicans wanted to give intelligence agencies more authority and leeway than the Democrats, in fact they demanded it.

     It was at this point where America went off the rails.

     We all learned from High School civics that our unique 3-branch political system was designed to protect Americans from governmental abuse. With the addition of the Bill of Rights, our Constitution provided essential protections to Americans that we all take for granted today. The First and Second Amendments get discussed frequently, but it may be that the Fourth Amendment turns out to be the most important. This basically says that all Americans are free from unreasonable search and seizure unless there is PROBABLE CAUSE to believe they are committing a crime. The term “probable cause” has been well-defined in past judicial rulings and law-enforcement officers have been bound to follow its restrictions. If there is a suspicion that someone is engaged in illegal activity, the police must go to a judge, present evidence of that crime, and only then are allowed to intervene. Initially, this was the case with the FISA rules. Intelligence agencies had to make their case before a judge if they wanted to wiretap or search anyone because they had to follow rules laid down after the FBI/CIA abuses of the 1970s.

     Of course, probable cause had already been thrown out the window because of the drug war. Using the thinly-disguised excuse of “sobriety checks” ALL police agencies are now allowed to set up roadblocks anywhere, anytime and stop and search EVERY vehicle that comes by. The first thing they do is ask for “your papers.” The public hasn’t even noticed that this important protection has been removed.

     During the hearings on FISA legislation, intelligence chiefs assured Congress that the surveillance would NEVER involve Americans unless a terrorist’s phone calls were to or from an American’s telephone. The Republicans were not happy with this provision, saying that it hampered ongoing investigations into terrorism and they sought to get fewer restrictions on surveillance activities. The Bush administration was more than happy to support their efforts and very quietly, they removed the Fourth Amendment from the Constitution. This was done by a top-secret ruling which determined that from now on, the standard would be “reasonable suspicion” rather than “probable cause.” It may not seem like that much of a difference, but legally, reasonable suspicion is a loose, poorly-defined standard that essentially means that, if any intelligence official even suspects someone is a criminal or could in any way be associated with a terrorist, they are free to ignore the Fourth Amendment. Even if they are an American citizen. No evidence is necessary. No judge needs to be consulted. Nobody needs to be informed. They have been acting under this standard ever since.

     It should be no surprise, then that the intelligence agencies have interpreted this Patriot Act disaster to mean they are allowed to vacuum up information en masse, in the hopes that they may divine some future terrorist plot by doing so. No more probable cause. No more terrorist-only surveillance. No more judicial review. Add to this the fact that ALL parties involved (Verizon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.) are forbidden to even admit they have cooperated with the authorities, thus the denials by all of them that their data has been compromised. If they were to admit it, they would be subject to criminal prosecution, so it’s no surprise they all act like they never heard of it.

    To be fair, there are some problems with the Washington Post report. Their story outlines the PRISM project, which they claimed was the code name for this massive intelligence-gathering project. Their “evidence” was in the form of 4 leaked Top-Secret Powerpoint slides which seemed to suggest that the major Internet vendors were providing information to the government. There is a website listed on one of the slides which eventually gets you to the Federal Airline Administration’s vendor database, nick-named PRISM. The FAA page describes PRISM as just the gathering of information from Google and friends on its own government contractors and vendors, nothing even resembling the Post story. One of the Powerpoint slides also lists the entire PRISM project as costing only $20 million dollars, chicken feed for a massive data-gathering program that is vacuuming up huge amounts of personal data and storing it somewhere. Either the entire FAA/PRISM is a major misdirection funded by a black budget, or the Post found a few slides and inferred nefarious activity when the explanation was much simpler.

     At any rate, we are now faced with answering some tough questions about the future of our society. Will we try to put curbs on this practice of massive intelligence gathering? How much more of our civil liberties are we willing to give up? Can anyone put the genie back in the bottle? I have found that many Americans are unaware of this loss of liberty and have, in many ways, helped to bring it on. George Orwell would never have imagined that all you needed to do to follow somebody’s movements is give them some flashy toys with apps on it and they will willingly carry their own tracking device. We have all been seduced by the promises of “the Cloud” and are willingly shoveling mass amounts of our private data into online repositories where we have little control over it. We must demand more control over our own information or we may just end up living in the world that Orwell imagined…….