Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
I’ve never understood what Trump’s most staunch supporters ever saw in the man, other than the laudable fact that he’s not Hillary Clinton, a distinction that has become mostly meaningless in the last several weeks. Just as Obama did, it is a safe bet that had Clinton been elected, she would have thrown her unwavering support behind the widespread, warrantless, unconstitutional government electronic surveillance that began under George W. Bush and continued unabated and with increased funding under Obama.
Trump, it turns out, is exactly no different.
“’We support the clean reauthorization and the administration believes it’s necessary to protect the security of the nation,’ the official said on condition of anonymity,” Dustin Volz and Steve Holland wrote for Reuters yesterday, quoting an unnamed White House official speaking about the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act, (FISA) a key part of which, Section 702, is set to expire on Dec. 31 of this year.
Section 702 contains the authorization for two strictly evil surveillance programs, Prism and Upstream. You know they’re evil because the only way we know about them is due to the heroism of Edward Snowden – the fact the government wants him in prison or dead tells you all you need to know about how valuable Prism and Upstream are.
“Prism gathers messaging data from Alphabet Inc’s Google , Facebook Inc , Microsoft Corp, Apple Inc and other major tech companies that is sent to and from a foreign target under surveillance. Upstream allows the NSA to copy Web traffic flowing along the ‘internet backbone’ located inside the United States and search that data,” Reuters reported a tiny portion of what those programs likely actually do.
Of course, U.S. intelligence officials say both programs and all the rest of FISA are vital to national security; because government stooges always jealously guard their budgetary turf. If FISA is diminished, so too would be the powers of the National Security Agency and other government bureaus tasked with domestic spying, and theoretically their budgets; so, of course intelligence officials will claim that every penny is spent on something vital and even more money is needed.
To their credit, some lawmakers do want changes made to the law, and the House Judiciary Committee met Wednesday to discuss possible amendments; although from the tone of the unnamed White House official, it doesn’t sound like the president wants his surveillance powers diminished at all.
Make no mistake however, that the preservation of Section 702 has exactly nothing to do with keeping individual American citizens safe from anything. As Reuters reported, the programs scour social media, yet the social media activities of the San Bernardino shooters and the Orlando shooter only came to light after their ISIS-inspired, self-radicalized-via-the-Internet shooting sprees took place. Leave it to government to spend untold billions of stolen loot on a massive, illegal, secret surveillance program that doesn’t even do what they tell us it’s meant to do; but be sure, it is doing something, it’s scooping up huge amounts of data about us all. This wouldn’t be such an issue if we didn’t live in a country where just about everything is illegal. If the government has the power to instantly monitor and intercept digital communications, they will use it, and they will use it to arrest and incarcerate people in the United States for things like drug law violations that have nothing to do with national security and everything to do with protecting government’s cronies.
Simply leaving the sort of power Section 702 grants in the hands of government is akin to giving an irresponsible child a fully-armed M1A2 Abrams main battle tank and hoping for the best.
Leave a Reply