It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.
 | Why Americans Don’t Care Much About Government Spy Powers |
If George Orwell had released the book 1984 in 2008, would anyone have bought it? Not if the general American reaction to the FISA Amendments Act is any indication.
The FISA Amendments Act would have made the totalitarian government of Oceania nod in approval. They knew the value of omnipresent spying networks in suppressing dissent. The FISA Amendments Act doesn’t place telescreens in every American home, but it doesn’t have to. We have cellphones with cameras and microphones. We have GPS devices. We have computers with wireless connections, and software that communicates online about what the user is doing with text, sound, and images. We have credit cards sending information back to giant computer databases. We have military satellites that have been redirected to spy on American activities on American soil. Big Brother would have drooled in the anticipation of using this technology.
Once, Americans recoiled against this kind of unrestrained government spying. They passed the fourth amendment in the Bill of Rights to prevent government search or seizure of Americans’ or their private documents. They blasted the secret police of Communist countries, and said that sort of thing could never happen here.
Now, Republican voters who in the past have claimed to not like big government haven’t complained about the FISA Amendments Act. Barack Obama’s supporters have mostly concluded that his vote for the FISA Amendments Act was justifiable and a very wise political move.
For the most part, Americans don’t seem to care that their government has the power to snoop at will into their private lives, to search their homes, and to gather information about their legal political activities. Why?
I’ve been considering this for the last month, and I’ve come up with a rather depressing answer: Most Americans don’t care much about preserving the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution because they have no interest in ever using those freedoms.
The most serious threat that comes with the omnipresent possibility of government spying is not that someone in the FBI will be watching you take a shower. It’s that the government spies can be used to crush political dissent.
The sad fact is that most Americans have no intention of expressing political dissent. Most Americans don’t pay attention to political issues. They think that politics is for nerds. They think that the exercise of the rights of citizenship is boring.
What does interest the majority of Americans? They love action adventure stories about American agents protecting innocent civilians from evil terrorists. They love movies and television shows about good guys chasing down bad guys using really nifty technology, and then making the bad guys pay.
They love the Dark Knight, and they don’t care how dark he gets.
This pathetic political reality is what makes it possible for Democrats in Congress, with just 6 months left in the Bush presidency, to contradict all the promises they made about accountability, and open government, and the Constitution, and capitulate to the demands of George W. Bush by passing the FISA Amendments Act into law.
What use is freedom, if you never intend to use it? For most Americans, freedom is like a power tool that’s been sitting, gathering dust in the basement for 30 years. They never even took it out of the box, and have forgotten what it’s for. They’re more than happy to sell it at a garage sale for one dollar, just to get rid of the clutter.
As bad as Congress is for passing George W. Bush’s FISA Amendments Act, the American people are even more disappointing, for letting it pass without much more than a whimper.
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“If we can’t think for ourselves, if we’re unwilling to question authority, then we’re just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.” -Carl Sagan, Demon Haunted World
Comment by EvilPoet — 7/18/2008 @ 10:54 am
I read that book a long time ago, but had forgotten that passage.
Sadly, this is not the America that Sagan hoped for, and the enveloping darkness is gathering, thickly.
Comment by J. Clifford — 7/18/2008 @ 11:17 am
Participating in the process that creates and amends the rules we all must live by is for nerds, eh?
“it says here that your shit is all fucked up and that you talk like a faggot” - Idiocracy
We are almost there my friends…
Comment by AT — 7/18/2008 @ 12:52 pm
http://www.examiner.com/a-1500738~Land_of_the_free__home_of_the_monitored.html
Editorial
Land of the free, home of the monitored
The Baltimore Examiner Newspaper
2008-07-23
BALTIMORE -
In a story that would seem right at home in the former Eastern bloc countries, the ACLU revealed last week state police spied on law-abiding peace activists and death penalty opponents for 14 months.
Undercover Maryland state troopers attended protests and meetings of three groups from March 2005 to May 2006, logging at least 288 hours on the project, and shared the information with federal, state and county agencies. No reports indicated any member of the groups, Baltimore Pledge of Resistance, the Coalition to End the Death Penalty and the Committee to Save Vernon Evans, committed a crime. Yet agents recommended that monitoring continue and even placed one activist, Max Obuszewski, in a database funded by the federal government to help federal, state and local law enforcement share information on drug traffickers and terrorists.
State police said they did not impinge on any of the activists’ civil liberties. But how do their actions abide with the First Amendement’s guarantee that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”?
They don’t. As David Rocah, a staff attorney for the ACLU, said, “In our America, you should be able to attend a meeting about an issue you care about without having to worry that government spies are entering your name into a database used to track alleged terrorists and drug traffickers.”
The ACLU had to file a lawsuit to get the information. So what is the average citizen to do without the financial means to stand up to the government?
And who is monitoring the monitors? Wouldn’t six months of surveillance without evidence of wrongdoing be enough to halt the investigation? And will Mr. Obuszewski face unwarranted scrutiny at airports, from the Internal Revenue Service or in his day-to-day dealings with the government?
Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., called for a “full accounting” of surveillance activities by federal, state and local officials. At the very least, state police must reveal who ordered the surveillance and whether then-Gov. Robert Ehrlich and Baltimore City Mayor Martin O’Malley supported the investigation. And federal law enforcement officials must prove they have removed Mr. Obuszewski from all watch lists implicating him as a potential terrorist.
How ironic is it that as young men and women volunteer their lives to die for the freedom of Iraqis and the people of Afghanistan, our own government violates its most basic principles at home.
Incidents like this show how important a vigorous press and freedom of information laws are to holding the government accountable when it oversteps its bounds. As President Ronald Reagan was fond of saying of the Soviet Union, “Trust, but verify.” As citizens, we must not be afraid of holding our government to account. The ACLU deserves a resounding thank you for it’s fearlessness in fighting this encroachment on our most fundamental of rights.
Examiner
Comment by Ortiz — 7/23/2008 @ 9:10 am