I was first introduced to the concept of mass surveillance in my junior year of high school with the prophetic novel by George Orwell, 1984. Orwell masterfully created a setting in which the totalitarian government led, by Big Brother, secretly rewrites history in line with its ever-changing motives, punishes “thought-crimes” as if they were traitorous acts of treason, disseminates state-sponsored propaganda on the screens and airwaves of all spaces both public and private, intrudes on every action of every citizen through invasive monitoring and surveillance tactics leaving all unhidden and wages ambiguous false wars as unifying rallying cries over an enemy, keeping the masses in a mixed state of paranoia and patriotism and anger and fear. I was in awe of this dystopian world, understanding the slight parallels between our own and that of Orwell’s Oceania, the main nation of 1984. Keen to the similarities, I was confident that in reality, no rational people would allow such oppression by the state or any institution, no intensive suppression of thought and voices. Especially in the United States of America where the Constitution safeguards us from such awesome dangers. As technology continues to rise with instruments like cell phone technology; the world continues to get even more unpredictable than ever before, my confidence is now waning. Disillusionment, enveloping me. 1984’s fantasy is encroaching on my reality. Mass surveillance, now facilitated by national agencies like the FBI and NSA and even by private corporations creating personal profiles to sell to, developed into an incredibly invasive apparatus, bent on extracting every bit of every resource from every citizen of the free world.
Mass surveillance in the United States began with J. Edgar Hoover who directed the FBI from 1935 until his death on May 2nd, 1972. He laid the foundation by pushing the limits of what was legal or moral. “Hoover is the inventor of the modern American national security state. Every fingerprint file, every DNA record, every iris recorded through biometrics, every government dossier on every citizen and every alien in this country owes its life to him”, Tim Weiner told Terry Gross in an NPR interview on Fresh Air in 2012. Tim Weiner is a Pulitzer Prize winning author who detailed the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover in his book, Enemies: A History of the FBI. The book documents activities such as illegal arrests and detentions, break-ins, burglaries, wiretapping and buggings all done for former presidents, attorney generals, as well as for Hoover himself. It is important to understand this history to understand how we came to the extent of current mass surveillance and to understand what is possible in the United States of America.
Even before becoming the Director of the FBI, Hoover as head of the Justice Department led the Red Raids, mass arresting 6,000-10,000 people for communism and anarchy, or anyone “advocating anarchy, advocating the overthrow of the government”. Thought crimes. Believing ideals the state does not agree with. Roughly 1 in 10 people were convicted of any crime. Hoover then realized it was better to act in secret, where he gathered information without “probable cause” or “search warrants”. At his peak, Hoover had dossiers on 20,000 plus people. Impressive in an age without the internet, cell phones, or satellites. And thus, the mass surveillance apparatus in our great nation began its reign of oppression.
The first time that the gross misuse of secret intelligence was brought to the forefront of America was the exposure of the FBI’s counterintelligence program COINTELPRO. A small group of young middle class American activists who called themselves The Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI, stole printed pages from an FBI office in Media, PA on March 8, 1971 while the rest of the world watched the Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier fight. These pages were photocopied and finally printed by Betty Medsger of the Washington Post. This act stands as a true testament to what journalism stands for. Unbiased, unabashed, unapologetic truth telling with zero allegiance to any institution but facts and mass exposure of grave transgressions. In this case, the transgression was an operation of unwarranted mass surveillance of perceived and often times untrue enemies of the state conducted by the FBI. The stolen pages and Washington Post articles written after show an FBI agenda to in its own words, “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities” of the women’s liberation groups, the KKK, anti-war protesters, the Black Panthers, certain Eagle Scout groups, members of the Civil Rights Movement and Communist Party members. The FBI, without warrant, taped and bugged phones and homes of individuals related to those groups. Undercover agents infiltrated these groups. There is even evidence of a letter sent to King jr. that detailed recorded sexual acts he had with women ending the note with the words, “There is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is”, which King believed meant suicide. The FBI on its own webpage under FBI records, dubbed “The Vault” admitted, in an underwhelming way, “COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging first amendment rights and for other reasons”. What a fitting name for an agency site that holds secrecy in such high regard. It seems that the rhetoric of “rightfully” criticizing a government program that disregarded fair trials and rule of law does no justice to describe how massively nasty of a violation to civil liberties that COINTEL was. The Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI, a small group of Americans, exposed all the freedoms that Americans had given up in the seemingly permanent wartime of the Cold War.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC or FISA), was created soon after the FBI scandal as a watchdog over federal agencies, serving warrants to end the abuse of power. No, the abuse of power did not end. First, on Dec. 16, 2005, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the NY Times, wrote that “months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials”. Next, USA Today exposed the next massive intrusion on American citizens without warrant in 2006. Leslie Cauley, the writer of the now famous 2006 USA Today article noted that by using new provisions of former President G. W. Bush’s 2002 Patriot Act, this time the NSA (National Security Agency) was collecting phone records of tens of millions of Americans with help from AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth. “The agency told the companies that it wanted them to turn over their ‘call-detail records,’ a complete listing of the calling histories of their millions of customers. In addition, the NSA wanted the carriers to provide updates, which would enable the agency to keep tabs on the nation’s calling habits. The sources said the NSA made clear that it was willing to pay for the cooperation”, Leslie writes. At this point, two federal agencies have been revealed as willing participants and contributors of what is becoming an obese surveillance apparatus with a gluttony for personal information. All listening ears on millions of our phones. If walls could talk, the NSA would know the language.
All in the name of the indisputable notion of national security. Who in their right mind can argue with safety? In the face of terror what would one exchange for temporary safety? We have unwillingly given up privacy. Privacy, now a relic of the past. Edward Snowden, gave up his freedom and is now charged with “theft of government property” and “two further charges under the 1917 Espionage Act” according to the Courage Foundation’s website dedicated to helping Snowden. He was formerly an employee of the clandestine NSA, who sacrificed his freedom when he leaked classified NSA documents and escaped to China then now under asylum in Russia. The leaked documents exposed continued extensive storage of all internet activity and phone activity of all American citizens without warrant under President Obama, the US breaching electronic system as other countries hold their elections, CIA attempts to extract encryption keys from Apple products, evidence of Muslim prejudice within the agency and spying on prominent Muslim-Americans, communications to and from journalists working at major news organisations including the BBC, Reuters, New York Times, le Monde, the Sun, NBC and the Washington Post, and so much more. Snowden felt that his work was so alarming that the “American people at least [needed] to learn about what this massive spying apparatus is, and what the capabilities are, so that we can have an open, honest debate about whether that’s the kind of country that we want to live in”. According to Connor Simpson and Abby Ohlheiser of The Atlantic on June 9, 2013 gave up his girlfriend, a home and a life making $200,000 a year living in Hawaii. That sounds like a nice living. Nice enough that most people would not want to give it up easily. Edward Snowden, a former NSA analyst, exposed all the freedoms we have given up in the in the permanent wartime of the War on Terrorism.
To put the invasiveness of his work in perspective, Snowden recalled a regular work occurrence in an interview with Guardian’s journalists Alan Rusbridger and Ewen MacAskill in 2014, “You’ve got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old, they’ve suddenly been thrust into this position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your private records. Now in the course of their daily work they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work in any sort of necessary sense for example intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation but they’re extremely attractive. So what do they do they turn around in that chair and show their co-worker… records of private lives and intimate moments is itself a violation of your rights… and seen as a fringe benefit”.
With today’s technology (cell phones, internet, GPS, cameras, voice recording, etc.) the line between our private lives and the eyes of federal agencies has blurred into nothingness. Understand that everything that you’ve done on the internet starting from the early 2000’s, any webpage you have visited, everything that you looked up, any sent or received messages, every conversation, every photo you’ve ever taken, anything you’ve ever done in the dark, any place you have ever gone with your cell phone, every video, just about everything you’ve done in the dark is stored away and can be viewed in the future, just like God is watching, but we’ll go with Big Brother. Now, here lies the kicker, you bought and willingly own the device that comes with a GPS, a camera, a microphone, records your correspondence, that allows such surveillance, and you pay for it every month.
As the mighty Mos Def once called it on his emblematic album The Ecstatic, this is “Life in Marvelous Times”.
A House Divided: The Oppression Series; Part 1: Mass Surveillance by Wendyam Ouedraogo
Notes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/bush-lets-us-spy-on-callers-without-courts.html
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm
https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/verizon-telephone-data-court-order
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5161811
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