If you have nothing to hide, why should you worry about the governmentโs goal of โcollecting it all?โ
Although nearly every law, regulation, or order issued by the federal government is almost indecipherable because of the amount of vague language, when it says it is collecting all information, it really means all information.
That three-word incriminating phrase first appeared in aWashington Postย op-ed featured in a story published earlier this week byย The New American. On July 16,Thomas R. Eddlem wrote:
Theย Washington Postย ran aย lengthy profile of NSA Director Keith B. Alexanderย on July 14, summarizing Alexander’s philosophy with the phrase, โCollect it all.โ A July 15 op-ed byย Washington Postย editorial writer Charles Laneย suggestedย that โthe United States needs to engage in data collection on a wide scale, both at home and abroad.โ
The original NSAย profile pieceย explained the origins of Alexander’s unconstitutional surveillance state during the Iraq War, explaining that it began as an attempt to gather war-related intelligence from foreigners: โThe NSA director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, wanted more than mere snippets. He wanted everything: Every Iraqi text message, phone call and e-mail that could be vacuumed up by the agencyโs powerful computers.โ
In the originalย Washington Postย piece, General Alexander trots out one of the surveillance stateโs favorite tropes: Our snooping keeps you safe. Then, he points out that were it not for the powers granted to the government (unconstitutionally) by the slate of post-9/11 โlaws,โ Iraq wouldnโt be as safe as it is today.
Itโs one thing to explain away his departmentโs disregard for the Constitution and the civil liberties it protects, but it is another degree of daring altogether to hold up Iraq as the epitome as safety.
In his defense, maybe General Alexander is too busy listening to private phone calls or snooping into Skype sessions to readย this recent report fromย theย Economist:
After a lull of nearly five years during which it seemed as if Iraq might be emerging from the legacy of its civil war, the country has been drawn back into a nightmare of spiralling attacks on a widening range of targets. The past four months have been among the bloodiest since 2008; nearly 3,000 people have been killed and over 7,000 injured. But the Islamic State of Iraq, the latest incarnation of al-Qaeda, now appears to have broadened its scope from its trademark attacks on security forces and Shia mosques and markets, to suicide-bombings of cafรฉs and funeral gatherings.
Perhaps thatโs what Alexander meant when he said, โIf we give up a capability that is critical to the defense of this nation, people will dieโ: Thanks to theย NSAโs dragnet surveillance of the electronic communications of millions of Americansย who arenโt suspected of even the slightest criminal intent, the United States will soon be a venue of violence on par with Iraq.
Maybe. Maybe not. Regardless of the governmentโs guarantees of safety, the unavoidable fact is,ย as Ron Paul wrote,ย โIf we give up our Constitution and its protections against a power-hungry government, the United States as we know it will die.โ
Death by a thousand paper cuts seems to be the fate of this union. The โparchment barrierโ is being shredded and the constitutional confetti that remains of the fundamental freedoms it was written to safeguard are tossed onto the heads of the heroes of the surveillance state.
What is the purpose of the wholesale collection of every electronic fingerprint left by Americans? Again, safety is the shield, but statism is the sword.
To understand the depth of the dilemma, one must begin with the threshold understanding that all the data collected by the NSA and its surveillance sisters will be stored indefinitely, so that the data can be analyzed by federal agents for signs of potential criminal behavior.
These sweeping powers resulted from a debate among Obama administration intelligence officials.
โThe debate was a confrontation between some who viewed it as a matter of efficiency โ how long to keep data, for instance, or where it should be stored โ and others who saw it as granting authority for unprecedented government surveillance of U.S. citizens,โ theย Wall Street Journalย reported, claiming that the newspaper received this insight into the process through Freedom of Information requests and interviews with representatives at several agencies familiar with the events.
In a historic and unconstitutional way, the new directives grant the NSA the power to place every American under the constant surveillance of the federal government, not because these people have ever merited the attention, but because someday they might.
Granting an agency of the federal government the power to place innocent citizens under surveillance is not only an unconscionable diminution of due process rights, but a complete regulatory nullification of the Bill of Rights.
Another equally intrusive aspect of the new regulations allows agents of the U.S. government to exchange the information gathered on citizens to be shared with their counterparts in other countries so that they can conduct their own analyses. Should any agentย โ foreign or domesticย โ find any hint of potential threats in these files, the individual will be marked for future surveillance so as to prevent commission of future crimes.
Beyond theย Minority Reportย angle to this story, there are the possible violations on the prohibition of the enactment of ex post facto law.ย Article I Section 9ย is the source of this constitutional restriction on congressional power. The Constitution mandates that no โex post facto Law shall be passed.โ
Turned on its head, the government now insists that that section does not mean that if monitored behavior is legal when the record of it is made, then the person committing the act may not thereafter be subject to prosecution if the act is subsequently outlawed.
The revised interpretation of ex post facto was explained byย Robert Litt, general counsel in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He complained to theย Washington Postย that the former (read: constitutional) framework was โvery limiting.โ โOn Day One, you may look at something and think that it has nothing to do with terrorism. Then six months later, all of a sudden, it becomes relevant,โ Litt said.
Alexander Hamiltonย warnedย against this type of mercurial legislating: “The creation of crimes after the commission of the fact, or, in other words, the subjecting of men to punishment for things which, when they were done, were breaches of no law, and the practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.”
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In a response to theย Postย piece on Alexander and the โcollecting it allโ caption, Ron Paul echoed Hamiltonโs warning of the approach of tyranny presaged by the appearance of an all-seeing, all-powerful federal government. Inย a post published by the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, the former congressman and constitutionalist icon wrote:
What โcollecting it allโ does mean is that our every electronic human interaction is stored indefinitely by the federal government for possible future use against us should we ever fall out of government favor by, for example, joining a pro-peace organization, joining a pro-gun organization, posting statements critical of government spying on our Facebook pages or elsewhere. This massive database will be usedย โ and perhaps has already been usedย โ to keep us in line. The absence of meaningful Congressional oversight โ unless cheerleading counts as oversightย โ means that no one will put the brakes on people like Keith Alexander, whose โpassionโ to โprotectโ us is leading us into totalitarianism.
The key phrase in Paulโs commentary is โleading us into totalitarianism.โ Although the hour is late, Americans zealous of liberty and committed to its preservation need not be led into that abyss.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The article was originally published at The New American and is re-posted here with permission of the author.
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