The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of the great Christian humanists of the 20th century, and acknowledged as an outstanding American by Pope Francis during his papal visit.
Since its beginnings in 1933, The Catholic Worker had carried articles about racism, the exploitation of black labor, and justice for minorities. When the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s, other articles added a clear voice for equality and justice among people of all races. When Martin Luther King was killed, Dorothy wrote:
Martin Luther King died daily, as St. Paul said. He faced death daily and said a number of times that he knew he would be killed for the faith that was in him. The faith that men could live together as brothers. The faith in the Gospel teaching of nonviolence. The faith that man is capable of change, of growth, of growing in love. (Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker, April 1968)
"I'm here to say to you this morning that some things are right and some things are wrong. Eternally so, absolutely so. It's wrong to hate. It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong. It's wrong in America, it's wrong in Germany, it's wrong in Russia, it's wrong in China. It was wrong in 2000 B.C., and it's wrong in 1954 A.D. It always has been wrong, and it always will be wrong... Some things are right and some things are wrong, no matter if everybody is doing the contrary. Some things in this universe are absolute. The God of the universe has made it so. And so long as we adopt this relative attitude toward right and wrong, we're revolting against the very laws of God himself."
If you're looking for a solution/something useful to do, see the end of this piece. But I wanted to try once again to explain why I'm posting about all of this to such a degree. A friend said:
"You should not be easily moved to fear. It is unwarranted."
I'm not Jewish, or black, so yeah, I personally don't have nearly as much to fear. But I am Catholic, and I am an American, and the son of a Coast Guardsman. The Nazis and the KKK are enemies of the US. They are enemies of humanity. They are enemies of the Church. Their ideologies are to be opposed absolutely, especially when they are manifesting in marches and rallies.
We who are white, who are safe and far away from these things, can all too easily assume they are nothing to be afraid of, nothing to worry about. The ideologies were defeated. Sauron was destroyed, after all, and Voldemort died trying to kill a baby, and all that's over and done with. Right?
Tell that to the folks who attend the synagogue in Charlottesville. Tell that to the black people who have to live near or alongside people who put on their klan gear on the weekends. Tell that to the non-whites watching the Vice documentary this past week.
I am not afraid--I am in Massachusetts, deep in the North, deep behind Union lines. But I am furious and afraid on behalf of all those people who shouldn't have to be furious and afraid. Not, I hope, out of moral preening, but because Jim Crow endured because so many of us thought it silly to be afraid, thought Martin Luther King a troublemaker and the Civil Rights movement a whole lot of fuss about nothing. I'm writing all this because of Munich, and Chamberlain, and a very near thing for Britain because they disarmed throughout the 1930s, for all that Churchill never stopped speaking. I'm writing all this because let's try not to leave the Jewish people alone in the face of the Nazis again, or the black folks alone in the face of the Klan again.
"Furthermore, you are not asking people to simply state their opposition to Nazisism. You have affirmatively stated that unless someone supports punching people in the face for speaking words of hate, then that person has lost his mind."
No. If you can find it and repost it, I'll acknowledge I made a mistake. But what I've been saying or trying to say is that unless someone is able to empathize and understand why BLM or Antifa or an ordinary citizen punches people in the face for being public neo-Nazis and KKK, then that person has lost his mind. I cringe every time a conservative tries to equate Antifa or BLM with the neo-Nazis and the KKK because it's ridiculous on its face. Antifa and BLM have never held all of Europe in their thrall, never built concentration camps or ovens, never put stars on the Jews or sent forth death squads, the SS. They've never held the South in their thrall, sending and receiving slave ships on which millions died, never torn apart families, had breeding programs for their slaves, never sent forth night riders to lynch or bomb civil rights leaders. To attempt such a comparison is obscene.
"I am concerned that it strikes such fear in your heart that I will not advocate instigating violence. Hopefully you let go of some of that fear long enough to see that those who are not actively advocating for and justifying violence can still be fiercely opposed to the evils of Nazism and White supremacists."
Of course the right can be fiercely opposed to the evils of Nazism and white supremacists, but act and potential are two different things. This is why I keep saying this should be easy--there're all the intellectual and historical resources in the world for Republicans and Americans of all stripes, especially Catholic Christians, to oppose Nazism and white supremacist ideologies.
I'm seeing a lot of Catholic Christians and Republicans very intently defending the president and attempting to equate BLM and Antifa with neo-Nazis and the KKK.
I'm not seeing the Republicans on Facebook fiercely opposing Nazism and the KKK.
... He [President Trump] is also working to destroy and discredit the American Right, pitting us against one another in vicious internecine arguments. Right now there are otherwise good people who, out of partisan habits or long-borne outrage at biased media, are trying to concoct excuses for why Trump’s Q&A wasn’t so bad and all the criticisms of it are just fake news.
It’s time for that to stop. It’s time to stop looking at the latest Trump statement in relation to how bad you think the alternative is on the Left, or how biased the media is, and instead to compare it to what we should actually expect from a president. In a country where 99 percent of the population is opposed to Nazis, it should be the easiest thing in the world for an American president to unite the country by appealing to our shared values. Only Trump could take one of the most uncontroversial ideas in American politics, the Indiana Jones Rule, and turn it into a wrenching national argument. ...
And I'm really sad about that because this shouldn't even be a thing. This is the easiest challenge in the world, really, because conservatism stands against the sort of easy disregard for the common good that led to the Confederacy and the Civil War; conservatism stands for human rights and against totalitarian governments, as happened throughout the Cold War; Christianity calls us to love our neighbor, whoever they may be, and to know that all are one in Christ Jesus, no matter their race, no matter their skin color.
This was such an easy one to knock out of the park--but here we are, arguing instead.
So here's my proposed solution.
Dear conservatives and Christians of my acquaintance: I hold that when the Nazis and the KKK try to get on board the conservative end of the spectrum--that is, when the left hasn't had to lift a finger; the Nazis and the KKK are doing the work themselves--then the Republicans need to be leading the counter-demonstrations out of sheer love of country. Nothing to do with trying to "distance" yourselves from the Nazis. Tell the left, "We've got this. We'll do the counter-protests. We'll unite the right and stand between the 'Unite the Right' rally and the synagogue. Don't bother sending in BLM or Antifa. We'll bring the Knights of Columbus, the pro-life movement, and all the churches. We'll be the ones to get rid of the KKK and the Nazis because you've always been wrong about them being conservative or Republican. We know Christianity demands us oppose these groups. Don't worry. We protest Planned Parenthood; we'll protest the Nazis and the KKK." Why? It's an easy win; all of us are bound by conviction to oppose Nazism and the KKK; and the left is doing it wrong, as this piece makes clear.
... “The main thing that [hate groups] seek is attention and publicity to disseminate a message of hate,” Robert Trestan, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Boston office, told NPR’s “All Things Considered” during an interview about today’s planned “free speech” rally on Boston Common, which some are concerned will be a magnet for hate groups. “And so the best-case scenario is they come and they speak at the Common and there is nobody there to listen.” And Moises Velasquez-Manoff, a contributing op-ed writer at the Times, explained earlier this week that according to experts, “Violence directed at white nationalists only fuels their narrative of victimhood — of a hounded, soon-to-be-minority who can’t exercise their rights to free speech without getting pummeled.” “I would want to punch a Nazi in the nose, too,” Maria Stephan, a program director at the United States Institute of Peace, told him. “But there’s a difference between a therapeutic and strategic response.” Progressives would be eagerly echoing and retweeting this sort of logic if the wonks in question were talking about ISIS rather than the National Vanguard. Why should their insights suddenly be ignored?
If this line of thinking is correct, anyone disgusted by organized displays of explicit hatred should adopt a stance along the lines of this: “You know what? Let the Nazis rally. Let them try to promote a dying ideology the entire nation finds execrable. Down the road we are going to set up a big, inclusive show of solidarity that will be ten times larger. And anyone who is scared or intimidated or angry should come there, rather than risk their well-being facing down the dregs of society.” To be sure, this approach may not be as satisfying as punching Nazis, but it may increase the odds that in the future, there will be fewer Nazis to punch in the first place. ...
Let's do it right, peacefully, and far more effectively because if Christianity and conservatism makes plain the neo-Nazis and racists have no home on the right, they have no hope of a political home anywhere.
You want BLM and Antifa to become irrelevant? Publicly oppose racism in an organized fashion so they don't have occasion to riot.
And I sympathize to a degree with why conservatives are reluctant to respond to liberal challenges to condemn the Nazis, the KKK, and racism. I absolutely know how the left can attempt to demonize people or positions; I've seen the same sorts of things at Gonzaga; I agree that the ideological legacy of Communism perdures and must still be extricated from politics.
But conservatism, Christianity, and patriotism calls us to oppose the Nazis and the KKK. A pragmatic concern for ending the spectre of Antifa and BLM violence in this country calls us to publicly, clearly, consistently oppose racism, the white supremacists, and the neo-Nazis wherever they arise so that the left doesn't feel the need; so that it's taken care of.
Using the force of reason and public witness against racism is part of the new evangelization, after all, and a necessary part of developing a culture of life, leading to a civilization of love.
So come on--win big, win easily, and do the right thing, the thing demanded by conservatism and Christianity themselves--stand against the racists so the left doesn't have to, even if (when) segments of the left aren't grateful or gracious, when they wish you weren't there so they could attempt to tar you with the same brush. Do the right thing, as the pro-life movement has been doing for so long, even when it's hard, or thankless, or painful, or misunderstood.
Huh. Elizabeth Scalia has the story (from over a year ago). Excerpts:
So, you know all this brouhaha, all these hysterics about how bakers, and photographers, and other service-providers who routinely work for gay clientele (but draw a line at serving gay weddings because they feel it imperils their souls) are horrible people?
And you know the whole “if you think that way, then you’re a bigot,” thing, because governments and pundits have taken it into their heads that it is their job to define “sin” to another person?
And you know that whole, “refusing to serve someone because they think differently than you is all Jim Crow-y and immoral?”
Yeah, well…so much for that.
A gay stylist in Santa Fe refused to cut New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez’s hair due to her stance on same-sex marriage. KOB-TV’s Stuart Dyson reports.
A Santa Fe hairdresser is waging his own boycott of sorts: He is denying service to the governor of New Mexico because she opposes gay marriage.
Antonio Darden, who has been with his partner for 15 years, said he made his views clear the last time Gov. Susana Martinez’s office called to make an appointment.
“The governor’s aides called not too long ago wanting another appointment to come in,” Darden told KOB.com. “Because of her stances and her views on this, I told her aides, ‘no.’ They called the next day asking if I’d changed my mind about taking the governor in, and I said ‘no’ again.”
Martinez has said marriage should be between a man and a woman. Darden, who said he has cut the governor’s hair three times, said he won’t serve her unless she changes her mind about gay marriage.
Darden apparently feels that it would go against his own personal moral code — his individual conscience — to cut the governor’s hair. He does not see this decision as an act of “intolerance.” In his mind, he believes that to cut her hair would be to co-operate with evil — a kind of sin, if not against God, then against his own reason and beliefs. He may fear that serving to the governor could be misconstrued as an affirmation of her views.
And no one in the press is arguing differently on the governor’s behalf...
What's ironic is, firstly, they misspelled Chewie.
Secondly, the book they're featuring on that image is a rather significant entry in the literature of liberation theology. There are a number of footnotes citing Marx and Engels. Communists haven't been known as the greatest defenders of intellectual freedom in the world. Just ask George Orwell, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or Blessed PopeJohn Paul II.
But I do urge you to read Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. And find out who's taking it seriously. Then ask yourself why people might findit problematic. I don't support banning books. I don't support destroying books. I do support intellectually dismantling certain systems of thought.
...While a military-backed dictatorship in Argentina was conducting a clandestine war on suspected dissidents, then-Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the future pope, masterminded a secret strategy to save those being targeted, according to a new book.
Titled "Bergoglio's List: Those Saved by Pope Francis; Stories Never Told," also includes the transcript of the then-cardinal's testimony during a nearly four-hour court interrogation in 2010. A panel of judges was investigating suspected human rights violations committed during the 1976-1983 dictatorship.
The future pope was head of the Jesuit province in the country from 1973 to 1979, the height of the clandestine war, which saw as many as 30,000 Argentines kidnapped, tortured, murdered or disappeared, never to be seen again.
The book, currently only in Italian, was to be released Oct. 1, while excerpts were published in the Italian Catholic daily, Avvenire, Sept. 6.
According to the various testimonies gathered together in the volume, the future pope made sure no one knew who was part of a clandestine network that sheltered or shuttled to safety dissidents, unionists, priests, students, intellectuals, Catholics and others.
"Each person would do one particular favor for (Father Bergoglio) the head of the Jesuits in Argentina: one who would let someone sleep over for one night, another who would give someone a ride, one would put in a good word to a European consulate worker" in getting someone out of the country, said the Vatican paper, L'Osservatore Romano, Sept. 7.
By never letting anyone know he was part of a larger, coordinated effort, then-Father Bergoglio could keep "the risk minimal and let information circulate as little as possible," the paper said.
In the book, Argentine Jesuit Father Juan Manuel Scannone said the future pope never let on to anyone what he was doing, and no one even realized what they had been part of until years later...
Rather like the underground work undertaken by Pope John XXIII and Paul VI at the behest of Pius XII. For more, see:
In the first part of this survey of what Conor Friedersdorf has called the "infrastructure of tyranny," we looked at the practice of extraordinary rendition, which is basically the art of making people disappear. In the second part of this survey, we looked at black site prisons, or where people have been disappeared to. In the third part of the series, we looked at secret detention, or simply not acknowledging that a person is in your hands. In the fourth part, we looked at indefinite detention without trial. In the fifth part, we looked at assassination without trial. In the sixth installment, we looked at the goal of Total Information Awareness. In the seventh installment, we examined the repeated enactment of legal decisions secretly without public knowledge or review. In the eighth installment, we took a look at the seemingly innocuous spread of political correctness throughout the Western world. In this ninth post, we'll examine perhaps the most dangerous and deadly part of the infrastructure of tyranny out of all of them: a citizenry that excuses or ignores these things.
Let us begin by observing what should be obvious by now: what once was unthinkably crazy, the realm of the mentally ill and irrationally paranoid, is far from impossible or unthinkable today. Go back through the series, and recognize that I have not touched up all the bits and bobs of the infrastructure of tyranny. Perhaps I'll add more to the series before too long and discuss civil forfeiture, the dangers of eminent domain, or the peculiarities of the Bilderberg gatherings. But I think I've gathered enough information on enough troubling realities to point out that something has gone badly wrong with the way the West works.
The question is whether anyone cares enough to change the direction in which the country is going. Consider, for instance, the following:
There are columnists reassuring us that Big Brother isn't watching. Note also the way in which the left vociferously criticized President Bush's Patriot Act and other policies which pursued an "anything in the name of National Security" course, but have remained astoundingly silent in the face of President Obama's expansion of Bush era policies. The right embraced the notion of anything in the name of National Security under President Bush and are having a hard time doing anything differently under President Obama. Opposition to these policies, then, are unlikely to come from the institutional right or left.
There are signs of rising opposition from the USCCB to certain of the government's policies when it comes to religious liberty. Add to that the religious witness against abortion, the consistent opposition to torture across administrations, and the triumphant religious stances against slavery and for civil rights, and I think the best hope for a renewal of civil liberties and freedoms in this country lies with a religious or at least philosophically motivated defense of human rights and freedoms against the potential for abuse in so many of the structures discussed throughout this series.
...Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth ... then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity... From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable. --Diuturna [The Lasting] (1921) as quoted in Rational Man : A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics (1962) by H. B. Veatch
So it may be increasingly difficult to defend human rights when the citizenry doesn't believe in the existence of human nature or the natural law. It may be impossible to defend that antiquated notion which resides in so quintessentially modern a document as the Declaration of Independence:
...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. ..
The texture of the moment may be seen more clearly when one takes a look at the dystopias of the past and discovers how closely they resemble our daily news, our daily realities. See, for instance, the following, and mark which moment you finally realize what year it supposedly is referring to:
...It is impossible at this time to determine their whereabouts, due primarily to a policy of total media blackout regarding the more extreme government activities (illegal arrests, incarceration without due process of law, torture and grotesque executions—most of which are carried out in secret). Add to this the media disinformation about the more visible government activities which the public can hardly fail to notice (forced closure of churches and schools, arrests on unsubstantiated charges of treason, and the more socially acceptable forms of execution — all of which are apparently “legal” under the new statutes). It is widely believed that our people are being held in “civilian internment camps”, the euphemistic term for concentration camps used in the president’s Omnibus Anti-Terrorism Act of March, 2108.
How has this come to pass? How has the unthinkable become the ordinary? Although Americans are very different from us, they are human after all, and thus quite susceptible to the psychology of perception. The average citizen strolling down an average street in a totalitarian state does not experience his world in terms of continuous absolute madness. However distressed it may be, the passage of months and years gives to even the most extreme of situations a certain semblance of normality. The image Americans once had of their society was a mental construct. And when more than a century ago it began to mutate, they found it extremely difficult to believe that the land of the brave and the home of the free was becoming a landscape of secret nightmare where millions of children were murdered annually, discreetly, hygienically in the clinics and hospitals of their land. Legalized murder, loss of the transcendent vision, and the death of authentic culture should have been sufficient warning to them, for each is a key symptom of a society’s collapse into totalitarianism. But democracies are not immune from self-delusion, although they tend to forms of oppression which are not overtly violent. Democracies in the final stages of decline, however, will degenerate into overt oppression, but they will do so in the name of freedom. That Americans began to realize this fact only when it was far too late, played no small part in the development of outright tyranny...--Michael O'Brien, "Three Views of the Future: The Church in A.D. 2109"
Still far fetched, thank God. Still far future speculation, and perhaps a nightmare never to come. But the powers that have been turned against Al Qaeda and other jihadist terrorists could well some day be turned against other international religious organizations. The infrastructure exists. It has been used against American citizens without trial. Why are we safe, if these others weren't? Why should we assume that we have done no wrong, that we will never trigger a datamining operation, never be flagged on a no fly list or a kill list, never be indefinitely detained on suspicion of being suspicious, never be disappeared and judged too dangerous to ever be released? What safeguards do you have against this apparatus? Innocence? Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was innocent of anything other than being the son of an extremist cleric who exhorted other men to violence. Abdulrahman was innocent. It did nothing to protect him from sudden death from the sky. No arrest. No trial. No Miranda rights. No chance to prove innocence in court. No protection of any kind. Why should you be any different? Why should I?
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.--attributed to Martin Niemöller
No. We must respond--and that response is the subject of the last post in the series.
In the first part of this survey of what Conor Friedersdorf has called the "infrastructure of tyranny," we looked at the practice of extraordinary rendition, which is basically the art of making people disappear. In the second part of this survey, we looked at black site prisons, or where people have been disappeared to. In the third part of the series, we looked at secret detention, or simply not acknowledging that a person is in your hands. In the fourth part, we looked at indefinite detention without trial. In the fifth part, we looked at assassination without trial. In the sixth installment, we looked at the goal of Total Information Awareness. In the seventh installment, we examined the repeated enactment of legal decisions secretly without public knowledge or review. In this eighth installment, we'll take a look at the seemingly innocuous spread of political correctness throughout the Western world, also known in certain circles as "newspeak."
“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men”--George Orwell
...I first heard the phrase "politically correct" in the late 1940s and early 1950s in reference to the political debates between Socialists and members of the United States Communist Party (CP). These debates were an everyday occurrence in my neighborhood in the Bronx until the McCarthy committee and HUAC silenced political talk on the streets. Members of the CP talked about current party doctrine as the "correct" line for the moment. During World War II, the Hitler-Stalin pact caused many CP members considerable pain and often disgrace on my block, which was all Jewish and mostly Socialist. The "correct" position on Stalin's alliance with Hitler was considered to be ridiculous, a betrayal of European Jewry as well as Socialist ideas. The term "politically correct" was used disparagingly to refer to someone whose loyalty to the CP line overrode compassion and led to bad politics. It was used by Socialists against Communists, and was meant to separate out Socialists who believed in equalitarian moral ideas from dogmatic Communists who would advocate and defend party positions regardless of their moral substance.
Given that history, it was surprising to hear right-wing intellectuals in the 1990s using the phrase "politically correct" to disparage students and professors who advocate multiculturalism and are willing to confront racism, sexism, or homophobia at the university. Yet it is not uncommon, for example, for right-wing critics to accuse students (or other professors) who insist that women's voices or the voices of people of color be included in the curriculum of making rigid, oppressive demands that infringe upon academic freedom. The implication of these accusations is that people calling for compliance with antisexist and antiracist education today are similar to the Communist party hard-liners who insisted on compliance with the "correct" line on the Hitler-Stalin pact. It is a clever ploy on the part of neoconservatives, a number of whom were former CP members and know how the phrase "politically correct" was used in the past, to insinuate that egalitarian democratic ideas are actually authoritarian, orthodox, and Communist-influenced when they oppose the right of people to be racist, sexist, and homophobic. The accusation of being "politically correct" is a weapon used by right-wing professors, and publicized by conservative media critics, to protect themselves against criticisms of their own biases by students or other, usually younger, professors. It is a way of diverting the issue of bias within the university to issues of freedom of speech without acknowledging that the right to question professorial authority is also a free speech matter...--Herbert Kohl, “Uncommon Differences: On Political Correctness, Core Curriculum and Democracy in Education”, The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 16, Number 1, June 1992, pp. 1–16 | 10.1353/uni.0.0216
From the above, we can see that political correctness in its original form meant literally to be correct according to the standards of a certain political group with a particular ideology--that is, to toe the party line. In states with a single party, as in the Russia of Stalin, Lenin, and Khrushchev, all citizens would be expected to do so. In states with many parties, or at least two major parties, wouldn't you expect a certain freedom when it comes to what you say? And yet, behold what until very recently was the law in Canada. Excerpts:
...The effect of killing Section 13 will be debated for years among anti-racist groups and civil libertarians. But it is undoubtedly a turning point. Since 1999, Canadians who felt aggrieved by material transmitted online have been encouraged to seek redress under federal human rights law, which targeted material “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt” based on grounds of discrimination like race, religion or sexual orientation. Storseth’s bill repeals the provision outright, leaving the Criminal Code as the primary bulwark against the dissemination of hate propaganda by electronic means.
With it will go one of the most divisive disputes to grip the country since the introduction of the Charter of Rights itself—a contest of values that over the past five years has pitted Canadians’ desire to protect minorities from discrimination against the bedrock principle of free speech. Mainstream media outlets, most notably Maclean’s, have been hauled before commissions to answer for their published content. The commissions themselves have come under fire for allowing their processes to be used as a bludgeon against legitimate expression, tailored as they are to encourage complainants to come forward. Meantime, a Saskatchewan law similar to Section 13 has become the subject of a Supreme Court challenge that could invalidate hate-speech provisions in most provincial human rights codes. By year’s end, it is conceivable that no human rights commission in the country will be in the business of adjudicating published material...
...It is not the Canadian way to criminalize hard feelings. We criminalize violence or other crimes. Not Section 13. It criminalized the feelings itself, without any proof of any harm coming from it.
It is no surprise that, for the first 32 years in that law’s existence, not a single person who was prosecuted under it was acquitted.
It had a 100% conviction rate — usually a laughable statistic from a dictatorship’s legal system. But that’s the thing — the enforcers of Section 13 had more in common with those countries’ sham trials than with Canada’s tradition of impartial and professional courts.
Canada’s human rights commissions and tribunals — there is one in each province and territory, in addition to the federal one — are not run by real judges. Most of them aren’t even run by lawyers.
They’re political appointees, usually activists who specialize in newfangled human rights. That is, the booming industry of hurt feelings.
Unlike real judges, these rulers are not required to be neutral; are not required to abide by legal precedent; do not have the same rules of evidence as real courts; allow hearsay; do not have the same standard of proof as a court; have powers of warrantless searches and seizures; and do not have legal aid for poor people who are accused.
On the other hand, complainants — people who claim their feelings were hurt — usually have the case prosecuted for them by government-funded lawyers.
And there has never been a case of a frivolous hate speech complaint being rejected with a cost order against the complainer.
No wonder the laws attracted bullies, eager to use what was initially meant as a human rights “shield” instead as a political “sword” to skewer enemies who have “hurt” their “feelings.”
Astoundingly, more than half of all Section 13 prosecutions in the past decade were filed by one man, Richard Warman. He is not gay or black or Jewish; he’s a privileged white man, a lawyer, a government bureaucrat and a former employee of the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
He actually filed complaints to the CHRC while he worked there.
And he won, again and again, and was awarded tens of thousands of dollars from the people he complained against — though they were usually on trial for being rude to gays or blacks or Jews.
After 36 years, this un-Canadian star chamber is now finally shut down. But similar laws against hurt feelings still exist provincially in B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan...
There are also the rising tide of consequences for failing to be politically correct when it comes to gay marriage. Excerpts:
...We are all well aware that even if Parliament tells us that two men — or three or whatever daft thing they next try to enforce — can marry each other, this would have no validity whatever in the Catholic Church. We can’t and won’t attempt to “marry” two people of the same sex.
But the issues at stake do not essentially relate to this. They relate to things that are already happening: a teacher reprimanded for saying that true marriage can only be between a man and a woman; an office worker disciplined for giving his views on the subject in a private email.
We are seeing the enforcement of something horrible, something which, in fact, does not have the true backing of the law but is simply being accepted as standard practice: the crushing of opposition to same-sex “marriage” and the attempt to impose a standard view on the subject on everyone.
Essentially, the position is this: If I am a firefighter, a social worker, a teacher, a policeman, an office worker for a local authority — or if I hold any sort of public position, such as that of magistrate or borough councillor, I may face dismissal, serious penalties and massive public humiliation simply because I disagree publicly with the government’s policy in this area.
This has not been spelled out in law, but it is happening; and, over the next months and years, there will be endless legal cases relating to this as people struggle to assert a right to free speech that current practice denies them.
I can announce my opposition to the government’s policy on Afghanistan or Europe or the building of the new high-speed railway, and all this is — at present — recognized as freedom of speech.
But if I announce, for example in a letter to a local newspaper or on Twitter, that it is absurd and gravely wrong to impose on Britain the notion that two men can marry each other, then I may face serious penalties.
The Coalition for Marriage — an excellent campaigning organization fighting to defend true male/female marriage — has publicized some truly shocking cases where people have been disciplined for sharing an opinion supportive of marriage between a man and a woman...
...Knox Thames, director of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom -- a Congress-controlled body tasked with monitoring religious freedom abroad - spoke at a recent briefing about the worry, reportedly saying he sees a change in lingo and that it's not an accident. Well-known religious freedom advocate and Georgetown University professor Thomas Farr reportedly agreed.
The whole subject of what the United States means by the term "religious freedom" may be up for a more full public debate soon, with the new administration and USCIRF scheduled to go out of business next year. Folks like Thames and Farr say limits on religious liberty are often indicators of human rights problems in countries generally, and that health of religious freedom correlates with economic growth. But some American advocates say the United States needs to clarify what it means by "religious freedom" in a post-9/11 world, and what are its priorities? A decade ago the term implied fighting limits on persecuted communities, often Christian, but today religion is discussed differently in foreign policy, with a special emphasis on violence by Muslim extremists.
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Here is the full quote of Knox Thames, the USCIRF director. It's what he said at the Feb. 3 public staff briefing about the future of U.S. religious freedom policy sponsored by the House Foreign Affairs Committee Subcommittee on International Operations, Human Rights and Oversight:
"I have noticed a change in terminology by President Obama and Secretary Clinton over the past months. Starting during the President's trip to Asia, he referred to 'freedom of worship' on several occasions, but never once mentioned 'freedom of religion.' This trend has continued with Secretary Clinton. In her speech at Georgetown University and her more recent Internet freedom speech, both times she only referred to 'freedom of worship.'"
"Religious freedom is one of those unique rights that, to be fully enjoyed, other rights like association and speech must also be protected. Words matter, and so it's unclear whether this new phraseology represents a change in policy. Hopefully this language only reflects speech writers trying to create good prose and not a shift in policy, as it would mean a much narrower view of the right. It will be interesting to hear what language the President uses at the Prayer Breakfast, if he talks about religious freedom issues."...
There's plenty more where all this came from--Ayaan Hirsi Ali's remarkable life story; Theo Van Gogh's death; and more.
In the first part of this survey of what Conor Friedersdorf has called the "infrastructure of tyranny," we looked at the practice of extraordinary rendition, which is basically the art of making people disappear. In the second part of this survey, we looked at black site prisons, or where people have been disappeared to. In the third part of the series, we looked at secret detention, or simply not acknowledging that a person is in your hands. In the fourth part, we looked at indefinite detention without trial. In the fifth part, we looked at assassination without trial. In the sixth installment, we looked at the goal of Total Information Awareness. In this seventh installment, we'll examine the repeated enactment of legal decisions secretly without public knowledge or review, also known as "When the rules are secret, how do you know when you've done something wrong?"
An overview of the problem of a government enacting secret law. Excerpts:
...President Obama is still not committing to full disclosure — which is especially disappointing since he released four detailed torture memos from the Bush years after he took office. Through his actions, or rather inaction, he is betraying a promise of his 2008 campaign as well as a fundamental element of American democracy: Openness between the government and the people it represents. Without that, there is no reliable basis for accountability.
Democracy works best when the government minimizes secrecy, including by recognizing that while the mechanics of national security operations must of course remain covert, there’s no reason not to openly explain the legal basis for these operations.
America re-learned this lesson six years ago, when the public realized that the Bush administration had secretly made law within the executive branch, allowing for the torture of prisoners taken in its war on terror.
Until then, as I’ve written about elsewhere in more detail, the Bush administration had acted in this area outside the bounds of democracy and accountability. When its legal memo about torture surfaced, it became clear that it expressed a political view, not a legally defensible one, and wide agreement developed among experts that the case for torture was unsupported by American or international law...
The Justice Department on Thursday made public detailed memos describing brutal interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency, as President Obama sought to reassure the agency that the C.I.A. operatives involved would not be prosecuted.
In dozens of pages of dispassionate legal prose, the methods approved by the Bush administration for extracting information from senior operatives of Al Qaeda are spelled out in careful detail — like keeping detainees awake for up to 11 straight days, placing them in a dark, cramped box or putting insects into the box to exploit their fears.
The interrogation methods were authorized beginning in 2002, and some were used as late as 2005 in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prisons. The techniques were among the Bush administration’s most closely guarded secrets, and the documents released Thursday afternoon were the most comprehensive public accounting to date of the program...
...On May 26, [2011] on the floor of the Senate, before the Patriot Act was extended, Sen. Ron Wyden said: “I want to deliver a warning this afternoon: When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.”
Backing Wyden was another committee member, Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado: “Americans would be alarmed if they knew how this law is being carried out.” (New York Times, “Senators Say Patriot Act Is Being Misinterpreted,” May 27.)
Wyden, after he helped to file an amendment (which I will expand upon below), added this: “The fact is anyone can read the plain text of the Patriot Act, and yet many members of Congress have no idea how the law is being secretly interpreted by the executive branch, because that interpretation is classified.”
This patriotic amendment (and James Madison would agree with that description) requires Attorney General Eric Holder to “make public the U.S. government’s official interpretation of the Patriot Act.” The immediate focus as I’ll show is on Section 215 of the Patriot Act.
As he explained to me, and in other statements, Wyden (as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee) does know some of this secret law, but cannot yet reveal it publicly because these hidden interpretations are classified.
Now dig this: Wyden’s amendment was never voted on during the debate before the Act’s extension. This tells us that what is being done to our constitutional liberties and rights has become yet another Obama administration “state secret.” As if We the People were the enemy...”
Eight U.S. senators today seized on leaks from the National Security Agency to call for an end to a "secret law" that governs how intelligence agencies electronically spy on Americans.
Secret laws may seem like Kafkaesque jurisprudence borrowed from Soviet Russia, but last week's leak of a secret court order revealed the Obama administration has a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act that allows it to vacuum up logs of all domestic phone calls on a daily basis.
"It is impossible for the American people to have an informed public debate about laws that are interpreted, enforced, and adjudicated in complete secrecy," Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and member of the Senate Intelligence committee, said in a statement. "When talking about the laws governing intelligence operations, the process has little to no transparency." Sen. Patrick Leahy, the head of the Judiciary committee, also signed on to today's request.
Wyden, along with senators Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), have warned for years of the problems with secret interpretations of the Patriot Act. A CNET article from 2011 quoted him as saying at the time: "I believe that the American people would be absolutely stunned" if they knew what was actually going on...
The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.
The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.
The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.
The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.
Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.
The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government's domestic spying powers...
The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI's request for its customers' records, or the court order itself...
It is not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone provider to be targeted with such an order, although previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks. It is also unclear from the leaked document whether the three-month order was a one-off, or the latest in a series of similar orders.
The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration's surveillance activities.
For roughly two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on "secret legal interpretations" to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be "stunned" to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted.
Because those activities are classified, the senators, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, have been prevented from specifying which domestic surveillance programs they find so alarming. But the information they have been able to disclose in their public warnings perfectly tracks both the specific law cited by the April 25 court order as well as the vast scope of record-gathering it authorized...
...Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.
Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.
“He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go,” said Thomas E. Donilon, his national security adviser. “His view is that he’s responsible for the position of the United States in the world.” He added, “He’s determined to keep the tether pretty short.”
Nothing else in Mr. Obama’s first term has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentary and the president’s own deep reserve...
When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”
His first term has seen private warnings from top officials about a “Whac-A-Mole” approach to counterterrorism; the invention of a new category of aerial attack following complaints of careless targeting; and presidential acquiescence in a formula for counting civilian deaths that some officials think is skewed to produce low numbers...
...The problem isn’t the leaks, it’s the policy. It’s the assertion of a presidential prerogative that the administration can target for death people it decides are terrorists — even American citizens — anywhere in the world, at any time, on secret evidence with no review...Over the last three years, the Obama administration has carried out at least 239 covert drone strikes, more than five times the 44 approved under George W. Bush...The administration is at pains to suggest that no one is targeted for death until after extensive review, internal checks and balances and administrative “due process” of a sort. But this rationale is refuted by what we know from the administration’s own limited releases of information. Officials distinguish between “personality strikes” — which are targeted at named operatives — and “signature strikes” — which are triggered by evidence of allegedly threatening activity by unidentified persons. Not surprisingly, the latter have been notorious for the “collateral damage” — innocent civilians — who have been casualties...
Most Americans support the drones — after all they’re going after terrorists. But the administration is claiming the right to charge, try and execute an American citizen without a hearing or a trial and conviction. The Constitution, Attorney General Holder argues, “guarantees due process, not judicial process.” But once more, this tramples the entire framework of the Bill of Rights, which was devised to limit the power of the state to lock up political dissenters without an independent tribunal.
It is vital that Congress reassert its constitutional authority. In the 1952 Steel Seizure case, Justice Felix Frankfurter argued that “a systematic, unbroken, executive practice, long pursued to the knowledge of Congress and never before questioned . . . may be treated as a gloss on the executive power” vested in the president by the Constitution. The practice doesn’t just become legal, it becomes part of the Constitution, and Congress cannot thereafter challenge the authority that has been ceded.
Over twenty legislators led by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) have written formally to the president asking that he explain openly “the process by which signature strikes are authorized and executed; the mechanisms used to “ensure such killings are legal;” and the mechanisms to track civilian casualties. The Congress should also insist that the Justice Department memo detailing the legal arguments relied on by the president be made public. And then Congress needs to hold a grand inquest on presidential war powers and the rights of both the Congress and American citizens...
President Barack Obama on Wednesday ordered the Justice Department to share with Congress a classified memo that explains the legal rationale that justifies the targeted killing of Americans suspected of being members of al Qaida.
The decision came after years of refusing to make the memo available and two days after a Justice Department "white paper" that described the memo’s contents was made public. The memo provides the legal framework for U.S. drone attacks that have killed at least three American citizens and as many as 3,500 others...A further explanation provided by the White House said Obama made the decision in an effort to include Congress in discussion of the country’s counterterrorism policies. The explanation called the decision "an extraordinary action."...
The Obama administration repeatedly has denied requests that the memo justifying the program be released and has fought in court to keep it secret. In December, a federal judge in Manhattan rejected a request that the memo be made public under the country’s Freedom of Information Act.
A bipartisan coalition in Congress that includes both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans nevertheless have demanded that the memo be made public, most recently on Monday when three Republican and eight Democratic senators wrote the president asking that he share the memo.
Obama’s decision to allow members of the House and Senate intelligence committees to see the memo came after the publication of a so-called "white paper" that described the reasoning behind the Justice Department memo. U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the 16-page white paper had been provided to her committee last June and had provided the background the committee needed to oversee the drone program. The memo leaked to NBC News, which published it Monday...
...Democratic Senator Ron Wyden has been among the most vocal of lawmakers demanding to know details of how the administration interprets its power to take out US citizens who are waging war against their own nation.
He said lawmakers needed to see the information to ensure that such power was subject to the appropriate safeguards and limitations.
"Every American has the right to know when their government believes that it is allowed to kill them," Wyden said Tuesday.
"I will continue to press the administration to provide Congress with any and all legal opinions that outline the president's authority to use lethal force against Americans.
"I will not be satisfied until I have received them."...
...Mr. Wyden has repeatedly called on the administration to release its legal memorandums laying out what the executive branch believes it has the power to do in national security matters, including the targeted killing of a citizen. Earlier on Wednesday, at a Democratic retreat in Annapolis, Md., he had hinted at a potential filibuster of Mr. Brennan’s nomination by vowing to “pull out all the stops to get the actual legal analysis, because without it, in effect, the administration is, in effect, practicing secret law.”
Mr. Wyden said that committee members would have immediate access to the material, and that there would be a process for other senators to read it eventually. It was not clear whether lawmakers’ legal aides would also be allowed to read it.
He said the administration’s decision to allow lawmakers “to finally see the legal opinions” was an “encouraging first step, and what I want to see is a bipartisan effort to build on it, particularly right now, when the lines are blurring between intelligence agencies and the military.”
The Congressional Intelligence Committees were created in the late 1970s to exercise oversight after a series of scandals at the spy agencies. The law requires that the committees be kept informed of intelligence activities. But most administrations withhold at least some legal opinions, treating them as confidential legal advice to the president and agency officials...
...Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, called the paper “a profoundly disturbing document,” and said: “It’s hard to believe that it was produced in a democracy built on a system of checks and balances. It summarizes in cold legal terms a stunning overreach of executive authority — the claimed power to declare Americans a threat and kill them far from a recognized battlefield and without any judicial involvement.”
The release of the white paper comes as President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser and nominee as C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan, awaits a confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday. Pressure has been growing on the administration to make the secret legal documents public, or at least to provide the Intelligence Committees with more of them.
On Tuesday, eight Democratic and three Republican senators, including some Intelligence Committee members, wrote to Mr. Obama asking for the legal opinions authorizing the killing of Americans. The letter followed one sent by Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, a member of the Intelligence Committee who has long sought access to the legal opinions.
The senators wrote that they needed the legal opinions to judge “whether the president’s power to deliberately kill American citizens is subject to appropriate limitations and safeguards.”...
Sit and ponder for a moment with me the specter of this America in which we live. The federal government writes up secret legal memos and gets determinations from secret courts permitting the collection of massive amounts of data on its citizenry, the torture of people judged to be enemies of the state, and the assassination even of American citizens without trial. Oh, yes, right now most of these actions are taken against foreign nationals, perhaps even enemies of the human race. But not always. Consider again the case of the son of Anwar al-Awlaki. Excerpts:
He was just a boy.
Let's start there. He was an American boy, born in America. Though he'd lived in Yemen since he was about seven, he was still an American citizen, which should have made it harder for the United States to kill him.
It didn't.
It should at the very least have made it necessary for the United States to say why it killed him.
It didn't.
His name was Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, and he was 16 years old when he died — when he was killed by a drone strike in Yemen, by the light of the moon. He was the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was also born in America, who was also an American citizen, and who was killed by drone two weeks before his son was, along with another American citizen named Samir Khan. Of course, both Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan were, at the very least, traitors to their country — they had both gone to Yemen and taken up with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and al-Awlaki had proven himself an expert inciter of those with murderous designs against America and Americans: the rare man of words who could be said to have a body count...
But Abdulrahman al-Awlaki wasn't on an American kill list. Nor was he a member of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninusla. Nor was he "an inspiration," as his father styled himself, for those determined to draw American blood; nor had he gone "operational," as American authorities said his father had, in drawing up plots against Americans and American interests.
He was a boy who hadn't seen his father in two years, since his father had gone into hiding. He was a boy who knew his father was on an American kill list and who snuck out of his family's home in the early morning hours of September 4, 2011, to try to find him. He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he'd lived while on his search, and the friends he'd made. He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all...
If him, why not others? If we've turned this machinery against Al Qaeda, why not other organizations? Indeed, why not domestic organizations? Why not?
In the first part of this survey of what Conor Friedersdorf has called the "infrastructure of tyranny," we looked at the practice of extraordinary rendition, which is basically the art of making people disappear. In the second part of this survey, we looked at black site prisons, or where people have been disappeared to. In the third part of the series, we looked at secret detention, or simply not acknowledging that a person is in your hands. In the fourth part, we looked at indefinite detention without trial. In the fifth part, we looked at assassination without trial. In this sixth installment, we'll look at the goal of Total Information Awareness, also known as "Big Brother is watching you."
The title of this blog post is borrowed from the proposed title of an actual surveillance and data mining program which made headlines shortly after 9/11. MSNBC has more. Excerpts:
...Total Information Awareness was the brainchild of John Poindexter, the Reagan administration official who got his conviction in the Iran-Contra scandal overturned on appeal. At the time, it was designed to be a sweeping new electronic data-mining program, to access all sorts of digital information from just about anywhere. The idea was that a potential terrorist would leave a digital trail. But in order to find that trail, you had to collect all of the digital information there was, from anywhere and everywhere you could find it. And the program had this creepy Illuminati logo, of a pyramid with this all-seeing eye looking down on the earth. If you were to ask Alex Jones to design a logo to make every single neuron in his conspiratorial brain fire, this would be it. It’s almost as if the government was trying to troll conspiracy theorists.
But Total Information Awareness was creepy enough that it didn’t just set off the Alex Joneses of the world. There was a huge backlash against the idea of just collecting everyone’s data. From left, right and center, it sounded to a lot of folks like the kind of data mining that treats everyone in America as a potential terror suspect. So Congress used the 2004 defense appropriations bill to defund Total Information Awareness...
The proposed logo really was a thing of fear and a terror forever. I mean, look at it!
...When I asked Farber if U.S. citizens need to worry about the U.S. acting like Big Brother, he replied, “Yeah.”
He noted that average citizens now generate huge amounts of digital information. This “Big Data” can be used in two different ways. First, corporations can analyze the data for commercially beneficial insights. Second, government agencies can examine the data for evidence that you are engaged in suspicious activities. “Once you have the data out there,” he said, “there is a whole set of things you can do with it, some of them justifiable and some not justifiable.”
Farber recalled that shortly after 9/11, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency initiated “Total Information Awareness,” a surveillance program that called for recording and analyzing all digital information generated by all U.S. citizens. (See Wikipedia for a history of the program.)
After news reports provoked criticism of the Darpa program, it was officially discontinued. But Farber suspected that new surveillance programs represent a continuation of Total Information Awareness. “I can’t get anyone to deny that there’s a common thread there,” he said.
In fact, this week’s news reports that the U.S. has been carrying out what is in effect a Total Information Awareness program should not have come as a huge surprise. Last year, long-time spy-watcher James Bamford revealed in WIRED that the National Security Agency is building a vast, $2 billion facility in Utah “to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks.”
Bamford asserted that the facility, called the Utah Data Center, “is, in some measure, the realization of the ‘total information awareness’ program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.”...
...Undeterred, President Bush secretly directed the NSA to expand and refine its information gathering in the United States — instructing them to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts if necessary. With authority from the President and billions of dollars, they set up a secret project called Stellar Wind...
In 2006, a whistleblower at AT&T disclosed that he had helped set up a secret NSA splitter on one of these peering points in the San Francisco AT&T building. The splitter copies all the digital traffic passing through the line and sends it to a secure room hidden deep within the building. The equipment in that room then copies and processes all the information — Voice over Internet Protocols (VoIP), emails, texts, web traffic, etc. — and transmits it to the NSA for storage. In subsequent lawsuits filled by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, they alleged the NSA had set up these “black rooms” at dozens of telecom and Internet switching stations across the United States.
With these splitters, the NSA’s operating principal seemed to have shifted from targeted surveillance to “collect everything and sort through it later..."
The Snowden affair isn’t the first time the NSA’s domestic spying has been revealed. In 2006 the New York Times — despite threats and appeals from Bush and his administration — exposed aspects of the NSA’s extrajudicial wiretapping citing unnamed insider sources including Binney. In the ensuing outcry, Congress investigated the program, and it was brought, ostensibly, back under FISC oversight. But as we now know, the NSA’s mass surveillance continued, operating under the legal interpretation that a communication is only “intercepted” when a human reviews the information or listens to the call. Thus the NSA still collects grand swathes of domestic surveillance, organizing it autonomously through various algorithms and storing it away, only needing a FISC warrant when they actually enter a name into their data banks The full extent of this continuing surveillance is impossible to know, but thanks to Edward Snowden much of it is coming to light. Whether PRISM replaced the Stellar Wind program or is just one of its operations remains to be seen.
When President Obama was elected, many hoped he would dismantle the post 9/11 culture of surveillance, conspiracy and unchecked executive power, but it’s clear the breadth and scale of state power has only increased since 2008. The Obama administration continues to push for a Haussmannization of cyberspace, demanding that email, VoIP, and social networking platforms construct backdoors and thoroughfares for police surveillance and anti-piracy measures. It has created massive initiatives to carry out cyber war — and may have already participated in the first major cyber attack with the Stuxnet virus. All the while, the NSA and other military intelligence agencies carry on the dream of Total Information Awareness, working at the level of the Internet’s very architecture.
* * *
On a technical level, a few hackers, libertarians and software developers are constantly designing programs to hide our virtual identity and protect our digital communications. The Onion Router (Tor) bounces Internet traffic through proxy servers to hide a user’s identity, allowing someone to visit proscribed websites without detection or even maneuver around government firewalls, as in China or Syria. The open source Pretty Good Privacy encryption (PGP) is the gold standard for protecting sensitive information — the NSA even recommends it for classified government documents — and, as far as anyone knows, is currently considered unbreakable by even the world’s fastest computers. If everyone used PGP, their digital communications would be secure, at least from mass interception. But most people don’t use PGP, and encryption software is under attack legally — there have been attempts to ban or restrict its use by private citizens — and physically. The NSA is supposedly building a new supercomputer that will crack current encryption methods using the wide information cache in the Utah Data Center to search for patterns.
Another hope is that the sheer volume of digital information, growing exponentially as millions of people link into the Internet, will simply overwhelm the surveillance capability of even the most technically advanced security services. Perhaps somewhere a rogue programmer is developing applications that will increase this incoherence and overwhelm surveillance algorithms, or perhaps they are creating an encryption standard that is even harder to break.
These are mere technical stopgaps, however, and they need to be situated within broader questions about the changes in modern life and governance...
...Adm. Poindexter assures us that TIA will be designed to respect constitutional guarantees of privacy and shield law-abiding citizens from the Pentagon’s all-seeing eye. But if the history of military surveillance of civilians is any indication, accepting that assurance amounts to the triumph of hope over experience.
Opponents of new government surveillance measures such as TIA or Operation TIPS, the Justice Department’s aborted plan to utilize citizen informants, often invoke the specter of the East German secret police and communist Cuba’s block watch system. But we don’t have to look to totalitarian states for cautionary tales. There’s a long and troubling history of military surveillance in this country. That history suggests that we should loathe allowing the Pentagon access to our personal information...
...According to its Web site, which features a Latin slogan that means ''knowledge is power,'' ''Total Information Awareness of transnational threats requires keeping track of individuals and understanding how they fit into models.'' To this end, T.I.A. seeks to develop architectures for integrating existing databases into a ''virtual, centralized, grand database.'' In addition to analyzing financial, educational, travel and medical records, as well as criminal and other governmental records, the T.I.A. program could include the development of technologies to create risk profiles for millions of visitors and American citizens in its quest for suspicious patterns of behavior...
The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.
The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called Prism, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.
The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers. Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program...
The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012.
The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US.
It also opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants...
Some of the world's largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan "Your privacy is our priority" – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007.
It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online. Collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks...
The extent and nature of the data collected from each company varies.
Companies are legally obliged to comply with requests for users' communications under US law, but the Prism program allows the intelligence services direct access to the companies' servers. The NSA document notes the operations have "assistance of communications providers in the US"...
A chart prepared by the NSA, contained within the top-secret document obtained by the Guardian, underscores the breadth of the data it is able to obtain: email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers, social networking details, and more...
The Prism program allows the NSA, the world's largest surveillance organisation, to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders.
With this program, the NSA is able to reach directly into the servers of the participating companies and obtain both stored communications as well as perform real-time collection on targeted users...
Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy, that it was astonishing the NSA would even ask technology companies to grant direct access to user data.
"It's shocking enough just that the NSA is asking companies to do this," he said. "The NSA is part of the military. The military has been granted unprecedented access to civilian communications.
"This is unprecedented militarisation of domestic communications infrastructure. That's profoundly troubling to anyone who is concerned about that separation."
Tons more in the Guardian piece, including graphics from the leaked Powerpoint.
...Former NSA and DNI director Mike McConnell now happens to be vice chairman of Booz Allen Hamilton—Snowden's employer up to this week. Talk about revolving door; from the NSA to Booz Allen to DNI and back to Booz Allen. Only this year McConnell has already raked in US $1.8 million by selling Booz Allen shares and options.[3] Clapper, the current DNI, is a former Booz Allen executive...
Anyone—with the right clearance—may use TIA to amass serious inside financial information and make staggering profits. So yes, follow the money...
Snowden is surfing the PR tsunami as a master—and controlling it all the way. Yes, you do learn a thing or two at the CIA. The timing of the disclosure was a beauty; it handed Beijing the ultimate gift just as President Obama was corralling President Xi Jinping in the California summit about cyber war. As David Lindorff nailed it, now Beijing simply cannot let Snowden hang dry.[5] It's culture; it's a matter of not losing face.
And then Snowden even doubled down—revealing the obvious; as much as Beijing, if not more, Washington hacks as hell.[6]
Following the money, the security privatization racket and Snowden's moves—all at the same time—allows for a wealth of savory scenarios, starting with selected players embedded in the NSA-centric Matrix node making a financial killing with inside information...
A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.
The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.
"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.
"It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations..."
Anyone else feel like a nice, relaxing review of 1984?
, or 
, or 
.
. And find out who's taking it seriously. Then ask yourself 
. It was an eyeopening experience for me.
."
of the Human Rights Commissions in Canada, 
, 
