To the people in control of the Executive Branch, violating our civil
liberties is an essential government service. So -- to ensure total
fulfillment of Big Brother’s vast responsibilities -- the National
Security Agency is insulated from any fiscal disruption.
The NSA’s surveillance programs are exempt from a government
shutdown. With typical understatement, an unnamed official told
[1] _The Hill_ that “a shutdown would be unlikely to affect core NSA
operations.”
At the top of the federal government, even a brief shutdown of “core
NSA operations” is unthinkable. But at the grassroots, a permanent
shutdown of the NSA should be more than thinkable; we should strive to
make it achievable.
NSA documents, revealed by intrepid whistleblower Edward Snowden, make
clear what’s at stake. In a word: _democracy_.
Wielded under the authority of the president, the NSA is the main
surveillance tool of the U.S. government. For a dozen years, it has
functioned to wreck our civil liberties. It’s a tool that should not
exist.
In this century, the institutional momentum of the NSA -- now fueled by
a $10.8 billion annual budget [2] -- has been moving so fast in such a
wrong direction that the agency seems unsalvageable from the standpoint
of civil liberties. Its core is lethal to democracy.
A big step toward shutting down the National Security Agency would be to
mobilize political pressure for closure of the new NSA complex
[3] that has been under construction in Bluffdale, Utah: a gargantuan
[4] repository for ostensibly private communications.
During a PBS “NewsHour” interview [5] that aired on August 1, NSA
whistleblower William Binney pointed out that the Bluffdale facility has
a “massive amount of storage that could store all these recordings and
all the data being passed along the fiberoptic networks of the world.”
He added: “I mean, you could store 100 years of the world’s
communications here. That's for content storage. That's not for
metadata.”
The NSA’s vacuum-cleaner collection of metadata is highly intrusive,
providing government snoops with vast information about people’s
lives. That’s bad enough. But the NSA, using the latest digital
technology, is able to squirrel away the content of telephone, e-mail
and text communications -- in effect, “TiVo-ing” it all, available
for later retrieval.
“Metadata, if you were doing it and putting it into the systems we
built, you could do it in a 12-by-20-foot room for the world,” Binney
explained. “That’s all the space you need. You don’t need 100,000
square feet of space that they have in Bluffdale to do that. You need
that kind of storage for content.”
Already the NSA’s Bluffdale complex in a remote area of Utah -- seven
times the size of the Pentagon -- is serving as an archive repository
for humungous quantities of “private” conversations that the agency
has recorded and digitized.
Organizing sufficient political power to shut down the entire National
Security Agency may or may not be possible. But in any event, we should
demand closure of the agency’s mega-Orwellian center
in Bluffdale. If you’d like to e-mail that message to your senators
and representative in Congress, click here. [6]
“The U.S. government has gone further than any previous government …
in setting up machinery that satisfies certain tendencies that are in
the genetic code of totalitarianism,” Jonathan Schell wrote
[7] in _The Nation_ as this fall began. “One is the ambition to
invade personal privacy without check or possibility of individual
protection. This was impossible in the era of mere phone wiretapping,
before the recent explosion of electronic communications -- before the
cellphones that disclose the whereabouts of their owners, the personal
computers with their masses of personal data and easily penetrated
defenses, the e-mails that flow through readily tapped cables and
servers, the biometrics, the street-corner surveillance cameras.”
“But now,” Schell continued, “to borrow the name of an
intelligence program from the Bush years, ‘Total Information
Awareness’ is technologically within reach. The Bush and Obama
administrations have taken giant strides in this direction.”
Those giant strides have stomped all over the Fourth Amendment, leaving
it gasping for oxygen. That amendment now reads like a profound
articulation of opposition to present-day government surveillance -- a
declaration of principle that balks at the lockstep of perpetual war
mentality and rote surrender of precious civil liberties. To acceptance
of the NSA and what it stands for, we must say and say and say: _No
way. No way. No way._
_______________________________________
Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of
the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy:
How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” Information
about the documentary based on the book is
at
www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org [8].
