[Mb-civic] The War on Privacy

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Liberty Beat

The War on Privacy
Rumsfeld warns that the enemy can succeed in changing our way 
of life. It already has.
by Nat Hentoff
February 12th, 2006 12:53 PM
	
http://villagevoice.com/news/0607,hentoff,72136,6.html


"The enemy may succeed in changing our way of life."


Inquiry on Bush's Katrina Cover-Up
by James Ridgeway

There was, of course, no way of knowing whether you were being 
watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system the 
Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. . . . 
But at any rate they would plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. 
You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the 
assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in 
darkness, every movement scrutinized. George Orwell

One morning, in his Supreme Court chambers, Justice William 
Brennan was giving me a lesson on the American Revolution. "A main 
precipitating cause of our revolution," he said, "was the general search 
warrant that British customs officers wrote—without going to any 
court—to break into the American colonists' homes and offices, 
looking for contraband." Everything, including the colonists, was turned 
upside down.

He added that news of these recurrent assaults on privacy were 
spread through the colonies by the Committees of Correspondence 
that Sam Adams and others organized, inflaming the outraged 
Americans.

Now, the Congressional Democratic leadership has finally found an 
issue to focus on—the vanishing of Americans' privacy, as happened 
before the American Revolution, but currently on a scale undreamed of 
by Sam Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the other patriots in the 
Committees of Correspondence.

The rising present anger around the country, across party lines, is 
reflected in a February 3 Zogby Interactive poll that "finds Americans 
largely unwilling to surrender civil liberties—even if it is to prevent 
terrorists from carrying out attacks. . . . Even routine security 
measures, like random searches of bags, purses, and other packages, 
were opposed by half (50 percent) of respondents in the survey. . . . 
Just 28 percent are willing to allow their telephone conversations to be 
monitored."

On the other hand, nearly half (45 percent) favored at least "a great 
deal" of government secrecy in the war on terror. But the public's 
awareness that the United States has increasingly become a nation 
under surveillance is indicated by resistance not only to random 
searches and tapping into our telephone conversations. Zogby says: 
This is a "public obsessed with civil liberties."

Well, not obsessed yet, but growingly apprehensive.

In 2001, for example, 82 percent of those surveyed by Zogby favored 
government video surveillance of street corners, neighborhoods, and 
other public places. By 2006, this approval has dropped to 70 percent, 
still a formidable figure. But the decline is part of an across-the-board 
change in public willingness to give up civil liberties from 2001 to the 
present awakening to the vanishing of the "reasonable expectation of 
privacy" that used to be in our rule of law.

James Madison, the principal architect of the Bill of Rights, warned: "It 
is proper to take alarm at the first experiment in our liberties." Because 
of the continually expanding surveillance technology available to the 
government, no administration in our history has been engaged in 
more pervasive "experiments" on our liberties than Bush's regime. And 
even more penetrating means of surveillance will be available to future 
presidents who claim that their "inherent powers" in a war on terrorism 
allow them to ignore laws and the other branches of government. The 
present and future dangers to Americans' individual liberties have been 
underscored in a revealing speech by Defense Secretary Donald 
Rumsfeld on February 2 at the National Press Club in Washington. 
(The ramifications of this analysis of our future are deeper than he may 
have intended.)

Rumsfeld said flatly that this war to keep us secure from worldwide, 
dedicated lethal terrorists can last for decades! At last, this crucial 
difference from all the other wars in which we have been involved is 
sinking into the American consciousness.

In their February 3 Washington Post coverage of the Rumsfeld 
address, Josh White and Ann Scott Tyson valuably added this context: 
"Iraq and Afghanistan are the 'early battles' in the campaign against 
Islamic extremists and terrorists, who are profoundly more dangerous 
than in the past because of technological advances that allow them to 
operate globally, said Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon K. England in 
an address on Wednesday [February 1]."

At the core of Rumsfeld's own remarks is this admission: "Compelled 
by a militant ideology that celebrates murder and suicide with no 
territory to defend, with little to lose, they will either succeed in 
changing our way of life, or we will succeed in changing theirs." 
(Emphasis added.)

But our enemies are changing our way of life, beginning with the 2001 
Patriot Act that, among other invasions, expanded the FBI's ability to 
use National Security Letters—without going to judges—to collect 
personal information about us. This marked the return of the "general 
search warrant" of our colonial past.

Because the New York Times exposed how the National Security 
Agency's spying is further changing our way of life, the administration 
is intent on punishing the Times—with the support of Pat Roberts, 
chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

In an afterword to George Orwell's 1984, Eric Fromm emphasized: 
"Orwell . . . is not a prophet of disaster. He wants to warn and awaken 
us. He still hopes— but . . . his hope is a desperate one. . . . Books like 
Orwell's are powerful warnings, and it would be most unfortunate if the 
reader smugly interpreted 1984 as another description of Stalinist 
barbarism, and if he does not see that it means us, too."

Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, in an interview with the 
New York Times' Bob Herbert, tells how Orwell is indeed speaking to 
us: "The more people grow accustomed to a listening environment in 
which Big Brother is assumed to be behind every wall, behind every e-
mail, and invisibly present in every electronic communication, 
telephonic or otherwise—that is the kind of society, as people grow 
accustomed to it, in which you can end up being boiled to death 
without ever noticing that the water is getting hotter, degree by 
degree." (Emphasis added.)

Will the Democrats become a truly serious opposition party before 
privacy disappears entirely?


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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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