On August 5, 2002, President George Bush declared, “We’re
fighting ... to secure freedom in the homeland.” Strikingly, he did not use the
word “nation,” or “republic,” but instead adopted a term, with its Germanic
overtones of blood, roots and loyalty going back generations, for a country
that is not the ancestral home of most of its citizens.
Soon after, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 created
the massive Department
of Homeland Security (DHS), an amalgam of 22 agencies and nearly 200,000
employees. The FBI and CIA remained outside the DHS, while the military, in
October 2002, established its own Northern Command (NORTHCOM) to defend the “homeland.”
In the years since then, the full weight of
government has been bent on ensuring “homeland security” - a term rarely heard before
the 2001 attacks. Over the decade, the government’s powers of surveillance have
expanded dramatically. They are directed not just at people suspected of
wrongdoing, but at all of us. Our phone calls, our emails and web site visits,
our financial records, our travel itineraries, and our digital images captured
on powerful surveillance cameras are swelling the mountain of data that is
being mined for suspicious patterns and associations.
It doesn’t take much to come to the attention of the
watchers, as 13-year-old Vito LaPinta discovered earlier this year.
Members of the Secret Service came to his Tacoma, Washington, middle school to
question him about his Facebook posting urging President Obama to be aware of
the danger from suicide bombers in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s assassination.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of
Tennessee was no less surprised to find itself listed by the Tennessee Fusion Center on an
Internet map of “Terrorism Events and other Suspicious Activity.” Why? The organization
had carried out a “suspicious activity” by sending a letter to the state’s
school superintendents encouraging them to be supportive of all religions
during the holiday season.
While the government has gained more and more power
to watch us, we are being kept in the dark about what it is doing. Over the
past decade, a new architecture of mass surveillance has been erected, and we
know very little about it.
Surveillance in what we term the “age of Total
Information Awareness” will be the subject of our Truthout postings throughout
September. After providing an overview of 20th century surveillance, we will
examine both the intelligence failures that opened the door to the attacks of
September 11, 2001, and the government’s response. Rather than fix the obvious
problems and hold specific individuals and institutions accountable, the
government embarked on a radical shift in how intelligence and law enforcement
agencies interact and do their work and rapidly expanded their powers.
Over the decade, we have seen the emergence of a
national security surveillance state, in which some 800,000 local and state
operatives file reports on the most common everyday behaviors and members of
the public contribute hotline tips about “suspicious” people and activities. We
will trace the contours of the new domestic intelligence architecture in terms
of its nationwide and regional structures and its evolving technologies,
drawing upon public sources and information obtained through Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) requests and leaks. We will also describe the impact of
the surveillance system on specific targets - Muslims, political activists,
immigrants - as well as on the general public, and on what have long been
assumed to be core American values.
It is our hope that this series will help stimulate a
broader debate about whether we are on the right track in the “war against
terrorism.” In the decade since 9/11, there has been no sustained national
attempt to probe root causes behind the September 11 attacks and subsequent
plots. The federal government has yet to come up with a single definition of “terrorism,”
and there is not even a public agreement about what constitutes a ‘“terrorist”
attack. So cowed was the DHS by the shrill denunciation of its April 2009 report on the danger of “right-wing extremism”
that it has reportedly decided to focus its attention solely on “homegrown extremism” involving
Muslims - despite the fact that the Southern Poverty Law Center has compiled a
long list of homegrown plots in its report, “Terror from the Right,” and that the DHS itself recognizes
that Muslims have had nothing to do with the majority of terrorist plots and
attacks within the United States in the 21st century.
Amid all these ambiguities, a new surveillance
network has been steadily constructed in the shadows with the help of DHS
grants. Among the questions that should be asked is this: What happens to actual public
safety when “homeland security” commands the lion’s share of federal funds
to fight the “terrorist” threat?
The statistics suggest skewed priorities. According to the FBI, terrorist incidents in the United
States accounted for 3,178 deaths in the period between 1980 and 2005. Apart
from those killed in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the September 11, 2001
attacks, 48 people lost their lives to terrorism in that 25-year period. Within
the same time frame, 500,000 people were murdered in the United States. Being
listed on a terrorist watch list might keep someone from getting on an airplane
- and could conceivably land an American citizen on a government assassination
list - but it will not prevent that person from legally buying a weapon - or several! - at a local gun
store.
What kind of “homeland” will we become if we do not
demand that secretive domestic surveillance operations are brought in line with
longstanding principles of liberty and the Constitution?
No comments:
Post a Comment