[D66] “USA Freedom Act”: A fig leaf for illegal spying

[J.N.]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/06/04/pers-j04.html


“USA Freedom Act”: A fig leaf for illegal spying
4 June 2015

In the wake of Senate passage of the USA Freedom Act, signed into law by
President Obama on Tuesday evening, the corporate-controlled American
media has gone into overdrive to portray the legislation as a major
effort to curb mass surveillance by the National Security Agency, the
largest single component of the vast US intelligence apparatus.

In fact, the bill—which has received the endorsement of the Obama
administration and war criminals such as CIA Director John Brennan—is
not an effort to curtail the vast and illegal activities of the US
intelligence agency, but rather a means of ensuring that these
activities can continue, now with a pseudo-legal foundation that has
been explicitly endorsed by Congress.

Just as Obama barred prosecution of CIA officials for torturing
prisoners, and prosecution of Bush administration leaders for waging war
in Iraq based up lies, there will be no accountability for more than a
decade of illegal spying on the American people. On the contrary, the
program of mass surveillance of telecommunications and the Internet,
directed against the democratic rights of the entire population of the
globe, will intensify.

The bill makes only one significant, largely cosmetic, change in the
hundreds of government spying programs directed against the American
people, transferring responsibility for the retention of telephone
metadata from the NSA back to the telecommunications companies. The
telecoms are required to run NSA queries through their databases once
the searches are approved by the FISA court, a longstanding rubber stamp
for the US security services.

As the British-based Financial Times noted, the bill is “a much less
significant change in the way the intelligence community actually
operates” than the political furor surrounding it would suggest. “The
surveillance legislation reform still leaves the US intelligence
community with formidable legal powers and tools to collect data and
other online information,” the newspaper continued, adding that
intelligence officials regarded the legislation as damage control
required after Edward Snowden’s revelations of massive and
unconstitutional NSA spying.

The American media, however, treated the legislation as an historic
watershed, a reversal of the build-up of state security powers that
followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

The Washington Post headlined its analysis, “Congressional action on NSA
is a milestone in the post-9/11 world.” The Wall Street Journal ran the
headline, “Congress Reins In NSA’s Spying Powers,” over a story
reporting that “the Senate voted to curb the collection of millions of
Americans’ phone records, the first significant retrenchment of
government spying powers since the 9/11 attacks.”

The most overstated and effusive presentation of the bill came in the
New York Times, the principal shaper of liberal public opinion and a
slavish supporter of the Obama administration. Its account was
headlined, “US Surveillance in Place Since 9/11 Is Sharply Limited.”
That the bill affected only one of hundreds of intrusive surveillance
programs went unmentioned.

The news analysis claimed, “The legislation signaled a cultural turning
point for the nation, almost 14 years after the Sept. 11 attacks
heralded the construction of a powerful national security apparatus. The
shift against the security state began with the revelation by Edward J.
Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, about the bulk
collection of phone records. The backlash was aided by the growth of
interconnected communication networks run by companies that have felt
manhandled by government prying.”

This paragraph includes a mass of falsifications and distortions. First,
the “powerful national security apparatus” was in existence well before
September 11, 2001—indeed, the role of the CIA, NSA and FBI in
permitting and even directly facilitating the terror attacks, which
allowed the US government to go forward with a long-planned program of
militaristic aggression, including invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq,
raises many troubling questions.

The “shift against the security state” prompted by Snowden’s revelations
was a shift in popular opinion, not a change in the policies of either
Congress or the Obama administration, both of whom defended the
intelligence apparatus and demanded Snowden’s arrest and prosecution for
treason. And Snowden revealed far more than the bulk collection of phone
records, releasing tens of thousands of documents on myriad illegal NSA
spy programs directed at both the American population and the entire world.

Nor did American companies play any significant role in opposing
government spying. On the contrary, Snowden’s revelations included the
exposure of collaboration by Google, Microsoft and dozens of other
Silicon Valley giants, and well as the entire telecommunications
industry, with the build-up of an American police-state apparatus.

The Times article notes the admission by the NSA that the telephone
metadata collection program had played no role in thwarting any
terrorist attack. But it then fails to ask the most obvious question: If
the telephone metadata program has never been effective against
terrorism, why are the NSA, the CIA, the Obama administration and the
leadership of Congress so adamant about defending it and preserving it,
with whatever modifications are needed to give the illusion of “reform”?
What is this data really being used for?

The only politically serious answer is that the US government is
creating a vast database of the social and political views and
associations of the American people, to be used to direct its repression
when a mass movement erupts from below, against the capitalist system.

These efforts have not been halted for a single day, either by the
supposed “shutdown” of the telephone metadata on May 31, or by the
planned transfer of the program from the NSA to the telecoms in six
months. The US military-intelligence apparatus, by far the largest and
most powerful in the world, is the main threat to the democratic rights
of the American people. No amount of media propaganda and peddling of
illusions in “NSA reform” can disguise this reality indefinitely.

There are, unfortunately, indications that Edward Snowden himself may be
among those taken in by the pretense of surveillance “reform.” Snowden
addressed an Amnesty International conference in London Tuesday, before
the final Senate vote, speaking by video link from Russia, where he
remains in exile. Referring to the legislation, he told the group, “This
is meaningful, it is important and actually historic that this has been
refuted, not just by the courts, but by Congress as well and the
president himself is saying this mass surveillance has to end.”

Snowden is dangerously naïve, and misled by his associates in such
groups as Amnesty, the Guardian newspaper, and the ACLU, who share a
liberal political outlook imbued with illusions in the democratic
pretensions of American imperialism, and particularly in the Democratic
Party and the Obama administration. Despite his courage in exposing the
extent of NSA spying—and the considerable, continuing threat to his own
physical security—Snowden is taking an entirely credulous approach to
the maneuvers of official Washington.

He argues, “For the first time in recent history we found that despite
the claims of government, the public made the final decision and that is
a radical change that we should seize on, we should value and we should
push further.” The actual course of events is far different. The
“public” was entirely excluded from the decision-making process. The
military-intelligence apparatus called the shots. The Obama
administration and Congress took their marching orders. The USA Freedom
Act, like the USA Patriot Act before it, serves the interests of the
emerging American police state.

Snowden reacted with revulsion to the massive NSA spying campaign, out
of sincere democratic convictions. But the growth of a surveillance
state is not simply the product of post-9/11 paranoia, or even the drive
for power on the part of individual politicians, generals and
intelligence officials. The growth of a police-state apparatus proceeds,
as it were, organically, out of the extreme levels of social inequality
in American society, and endless wars. In other words, the
military-intelligence apparatus is not the cause, but one malignant
manifestation, of a deep-rooted and historic crisis of American capitalism.

Whatever the gestures to civil liberties made by Obama—while he
continues drone-missile assassinations, Guantanamo, and the whole
panoply of American militarism—the American ruling class he serves has
no intention of diminishing the repressive powers of the state machine
that exists to defend its property and wealth.

There is a profound political lesson here. Courageous individuals like
Snowden and organizations like WikiLeaks can make important exposures.
But only the working class, in the United States and internationally,
can put an end to the ongoing attacks on democratic rights. This
requires the building of a mass revolutionary movement, based on a
socialist and internationalist program, and directed at the defense of
all the social and democratic rights of working people.

Patrick Martin