Welcome to Orwellian America:
Land of the Silent, Home of the
Submissive
by Michael
Payne
Something very
ominous is taking place right before the eyes of the people of this nation; far too many Americans don’t
seem to grasp what’s happening all around them; and if they actually do, it may
be that they don’t have it in them to reject and resist the forces that intend
to transform this society into one of subservience and submissiveness.
Since Edward
Snowden blew the whistle and exposed its surveillance activities, the NSA (the
National Security Agency) readily admits that it has been collecting all forms
of communications of the American people, from emails to cell phone
conversations as well as others. It has now also been discovered to have
routinely used these same methods to collect the communications of people in
other countries, many of them allies of America; even the communications of
their leaders.
What we now have
in America is a government that has these characteristics: it is omnipresent
meaning that it is “present everywhere at the same time.” It is omniscient, or,
“it has complete or unlimited knowledge, awareness, or understanding;
perceiving all things.” And lastly, as we well know, it is omnipotent: “it
possesses “unlimited and unrestrained authority and power.”
Do the people of
America even care that their privacy is being violated each and every day; that
their communications of all forms are being monitored closely by the NSA? On
the surface that might be the conclusion because their reaction to this
invasion of privacy has been a deafening silence. But it’s more than likely
that they are well aware of exactly how their Constitutional right of privacy
is being violated and they just don’t have it in them to resist and demand that
these actions be terminated.
One might describe
the mass of Americans as greatly resembling the “proles” that existed in the
era of “1984”, aka the Orwellian age. The proles constituted 85% of the
population of Oceania, they were the working class. Their functions were
simple: to work and raise children. About the only things they concerned
themselves with were diversions such as family get-togethers, friends and
neighbors, playing the lottery, drinking, and watching TV to make them forget
about their meaningless jobs.
The proles in
Oceania were not subjected to intimate government surveillance because the
government considered them to be useless people who would never question or
challenge the government in any way. But in the America of today everyone is
under surveillance because, quite obviously, this government doesn’t trust
anyone; everyone is suspect and needs to have their communications monitored.
So the America of today can be in many ways considered as 1984 on steroids.
We have a
president, Barack Obama, who has strongly supported and defended the policies
and actions of this NSA spying agency and sees absolutely nothing wrong with
how it is invading the privacy of Americans. This president, a Constitutional
“scholar” no less apparently doesn’t see this as a violation of the U.S.
Constitution’s 4th Amendment which guarantees the rights of privacy of the
American people.
So while all
this skullduggery and spying is going on all around us and our cell phones,
emails, and other communications are routinely tapped and recorded for further
examination, what is the response from the mass of the American people? Are
they incensed, are they in a state of rage and outrage because of this gross
intrusion into their privacy?
Apparently not;
there has been little to no response or reaction, just the usual silence that
permeates this society. Many Americans don’t even have the slightest inkling of
what is going on; they are, like the 1984 proles, busy with their own lives,
largely unconcerned with what they government is doing. Others say that they
have nothing to hide and, therefore, the government can do whatever it wishes
with intercepting their communications.
Or they may well
be a throw back to the people in Germany who, in their hearts, knew exactly
what was going on in the prelude to World War II and just looked the other way
when The National Socialist German Workers' Party established control over the
nation and the people no longer had any rights and certainly no privacy. And we
all know what happened next.
The degree to
which this violation of the privacy of the American people has been pursued by
the NSA is simply astounding. It’s starting to feel like we are actually living
in the modern-day version of Orwell’s Oceania here in 2014; and their reaction
to this situation might be best described as “See no evil, hear no evil, speak
no evil.” Or “don’t rock the boat”, “let sleeping dogs lie”, and “I could care
less.”
This article from
Commondreams.org: “Germany's Der Spiegel recently reported that the US
National Security Agency (NSA), working with the CIA and FBI, has been
intercepting laptops and other electronics bought online before delivery to
install malware and other spying tools.” That’s quite clever on its part but
maybe the NSA will come up with even a more effective way to install these
spying tools; they could just direct all the manufacturers of all these
electronic devices to insert these special chips as a part of their normal
production operations so that 100% of all electronics manufactured in this
country will be covered.
The question is:
will there ever be an end to this invasion of the privacy of the American
people? What we may be seeing right now with these spying policies is likely
only the beginning of something far more intrusive and widespread. Would it be
a stretch to think that before long there might be monitoring devices installed
in homes and cars?
These
observations may seem like conspiracy theory to some but who would have, even
five years ago, thought that the everyday monitoring of all forms of
communications in this country would be going on? That kind of thinking would
have been considered to be delusional. But suddenly that once fictional
scenario has become a reality.
Recently a
special panel made recommendations for limiting the surveillance activities of
the NSA and presented them to President Obama for further actions. Since he has
been so supportive of NSA policies and actions does anyone think that he will
actually rein in these activities in order to preserve the Constitutional
rights of privacy of the American people? Or does anyone think that this
Congress will finally say that these practices have gone way too far and enact
legislation to reform this agency?
Don’t look for
either of those possibilities to happen because neither this president nor the
Congress has shown any inclination to curtail the activities of this agency.
And what would happen if they even tried to do just that? Here is a very
powerful government agency that has the most sophisticated kinds of electronic
equipment in existence. Suppose that they were told that certain of their
methods of capturing communications could no longer be pursued or would have to
be restricted. Could the Congress or this president ever know for certain that
they were complying with the directives or know what goes on within that
agency’s walls?
What’s really
difficult to understand is that we Americans proudly proclaim for all the world
to hear that we live in the land of the free and the home of the brave, that we
are the seat of world democracy, and our Constitution and the rights it
provides for us are sacred and cannot and must not be violated. And then the
vast majority of us watch in silence and apathy as these violations occur.
The next version
of this surveillance of the American people is being prepared as we speak.
Coming in the near future will be hundreds of drones that will fill the skies
over America. We might call this new intrusion into our privacy as the Big Eye
in the sky, watching what the American people do, where they go and what they might
be up to. That’s real freedom, real democracy and upholding the Constitution,
right?
So what are we
to do as these invasions of our privacy continue to evolve? Well, there is
nothing that can match the power and voices of over 300 million American people
if the majority of them speak out and loudly demand that these attacks on our
Constitution and our personal privacy be stopped.
But there is no
such outcry, there is no anger and outrage and all we hear from far too many
Americans is a deafening silence. Welcome to Orwellian America.
From Nation of
Change @ http://www.nationofchange.org/blogs/michael-payne/welcome-orwellian-america-land-silent-home-submissive-1390874156
Beyond Orwell's Worst Nightmare
by Marjorie
Cohn
"Big Brother is Watching You," George Orwell wrote in his disturbing book 1984. But, as Mikko Hypponen points out, Orwell "was an optimist." Orwell never could have imagined that the National Security Agency (NSA) would amass metadata on billions of our phone calls and 200 million of our text messages every day. Orwell could not have foreseen that our government would read the content of our emails, file transfers, and live chats from the social media we use.
In his recent speech on NSA reforms, President Obama cited as precedent Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty, who patrolled the streets at night, "reporting back any signs that the British were preparing raids against America's early Patriots." This was a weak effort to find historical support for the NSA spying program. After all, Paul Revere and his associates were patrolling the streets, not sorting through people's private communications.
Orwell never could have imagined that the NSA would amass metadata on billions of our phone calls and 200 million of our text messages every day. -- Marjorie Cohn
To get a more accurate historical perspective, Obama should have considered how our founding fathers reacted to searches conducted by the British before the revolution. The British used "general warrants," which authorized blanket searches without any individualized suspicion or specificity of what the colonial authorities were seeking.
At the American Continental Congress in 1774, in a petition to King George III, Congress protested against the colonial officers' unlimited power of search and seizure. The petition charged that power had been used "to break open and enter houses, without the authority of any civil magistrate founded on legal information."
When the founders later put the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures into the Bill of Rights, they were attempting to ensure that our country would not become a police state.
Those who maintain that government surveillance is no threat to our liberty should consider the abuse that occurred nearly 200 years later, when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover conducted the dreaded COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence program). It was designed to "disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize" political and activist groups. During the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s, in an effort to eradicate the perceived threat of communism, our government engaged in widespread illegal surveillance to threaten and silence anyone with unorthodox political views. Thousands of people were jailed, blacklisted, and fired as the FBI engaged in "red-baiting."
In the 1960's, the FBI targeted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a program called "Racial Matters." King's campaign to register African-American voters in the South raised the hackles of the FBI, which disingenuously claimed that King's organization was being infiltrated by communists. But the FBI was really worried that King's civil rights campaign "represented a clear threat to the established order of the U.S." The FBI went after King with a vengeance, wiretapping his phones, and securing personal information which it used to try to discredit him, hoping to drive him to divorce and suicide.
Obama would likely argue that our modern day "war on terror" is unlike COINTELPRO because it targets real, rather than imagined, threats. But, as Hypponen says, "It's not the war on terror." Indeed, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent federal privacy watchdog, found "no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack."
The NSA spying program captures all of us, including European leaders, people in Mexico, Brazil, the United Nations, and the European Union Parliament, not just the terrorists. Although Obama assured us that the government "does not collect intelligence to suppress criticism or dissent," our history, particularly during COINTELPRO, tells us otherwise.
Obama proposed some reforms to the NSA program, but left in place the most egregious aspects. He said that the NSA must secure approval of a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before it gets access to the phone records of an individual. But that is a secret court, whose judges are appointed by the conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, and it has almost never turned down an executive branch wiretapping request since it was created in 1978. Most significantly, Obama did not say that surveillance without judicial warrants or individual suspicion should be halted.
"One of [Obama's] biggest lapses," a New York Times editorial noted, "was his refusal to acknowledge that his entire speech, and all of the important changes he now advocates, would never have happened without the disclosures by [Edward] Snowden, who continues to live in exile and under the threat of decades in prison if he returns to this country."
Snowden's revelations will reportedly continue to emerge. And you can bet that Orwell will continue to turn in his grave for a long time to come.
Marjorie Cohn is a professor of law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, a past president of the National Lawyers Guild, and deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her next book, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues," will be published this fall by University of California Press.
From Huffington Post @ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marjorie-cohn/beyond-orwells-worst-nigh_b_4698242.html
For more information about your surveillance see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/surveillance%20society
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