We have little reason to believe Jim Pavitt’s sentiments, as espoused in his speech to Duke University Law School, have not changed in the six years since he said that despite the best efforts of government, the next terrorist attack is "not a question of if, it’s a question of when." Pavitt, CIA’s Deputy Director for Operations, pointed out an imagined society, removed of civil liberties, could launch a perfect defense against terrorism but would be a society "not worth defending."
Unfortunately, there are growing reasons to believe our current state of affairs is drifting closer and closer to this imagined dystopia. This transformation obviously will not come about overnight, but will be introduced gradually. Power centralizes slowly until what seems unimaginable one month becomes the accepted norm the next. One cannot forget the ‘road paved with good intentions.’
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act bill being debated in Congress is one step down this road. The compromise version of the bill, which has backing from Sen. Barack Obama, expands the federal power to eavesdrop without warrant and grants retroactive immunity to telecom giants who "might have." There is no doubt now that they have helped the Bush administration engage in warrantless wiretapping.
What is the extent of warrantless wiretapping? In the words of one AT’T technician and whistle-blower, "everything." Not just international phone calls and known terrorists e-mail accounts, but everything. Mark Klein, former AT’T technician, assisted in the maintenance of a network that copied the data stream going across critical internet cables to a secret room, to which only one National Security Agency selected technician was allowed access.
The switches used to copy the data could not discriminate from foreign or domestic communications. In Klein’s own words in an interview with Democracy Now on Tuesday, "The NSA was getting everything." The federal government had a copy of every instant message you sent, every Voice Over Internet Protocol call you made, every Web site you visited, every political donation you made, every file you probably should not have downloaded.
Even with this information, it is impossible to know the full extent of wiretapping at AT’T and other telecom corporations. To help gather such information, numerous civil lawsuits have been filed against the telecom giants.
This is when the FISA bill’s retroactive immunity comes into play. Corporate immunity would crush all these legal actions, and the corporations in cahoots with the Federal government can rest easy as they will not be held responsible to the people they serve. The bill literally functions as a "Get Out of Jail Free" card.
This immunity is so critical that the Bush Administration has threatened to veto the whole bill unless this section is included. Is this because Bush is worried that without the immunity, the full extent of his domestic spying might be revealed?
Even wilder are the justifications Obama supporters are attempting to spin to justify his support for the so-called compromise legislation. Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC’s Countdown who originally called the FISA bill’s retroactive immunity fascism and the blinding of corporate and government interests, tried to bend over backwards to justify the presidential hopeful’s position.
Olbermann fell right in line when Obama changed his position on the FISA bill, and Olbermann speculates Obama is trying to appear strong on foreign policy now and advocate criminal charges when elected. Obama, however, has made no such plans public.
Even if Obama held such a plan, the strategy would signal that Democrats cannot win a debate with Republicans on the issue of civil rights and security, and that when dealing with terrorism, the war party of Bush, Cheney, and McCain were right all along. It looks as if there is a virtual consensus, more power needs to be given to the Executive branch of government, Fourth Amendment protections matter little. The only difference is that the populace can trust Obama with the power to ensure there is "proper oversight" (whatever that means) and that we should trust him to use the power for good, not evil.
Now, the American Civil Liberties Union is speaking out against the Democratic presidential candidate for his support of this unprecedented trespass on civil liberties and the Constitution. Coupled with the transformation of the conservatives of old who advocated small government and humble foreign policy, into the party of war, one can only stop and wonder how far we have traveled towards that distant dystopia.
Mark Klein, in his interview with Olbermann in Nov. 2007, said he felt he was in 1984, forced to connect the "big brother machine." We wait to see if it will ever be turned off.
Gilson, a business sophomore, can be reached via [email protected].
