It's Not About Terrorism, It Never Was

"We are information rich and question poor." --Baroness Susan Greenfield


Everybody's pitching fits about the NSA's phone monitoring project, the one that AT&T/SBC and Verizon signed up for, no questions asked. The one that will provide the government with literally billions of records of phone calls (from cell and land lines), email transactions, videos downloaded and web sites visited. Only Qwest media had the sense to question the legality of the request. Only Quest said, hey, don't you need to give us some paperwork before we hand over records of every call or email, everybody we service, ever made?

The NSA declined to provide the requested/required documentation, so Quest kept their records private, as well they should have. Somebody give them a medal, please.

USA Today's big story, which broke Friday, focuses on the fact that the other two communication giants (AT&T and SBC recently merged) just stepped on up and handed over their stuff. Naturally, people are upset. But nobody's upset for the same reason I am, at least nobody I know of, except Greg Palast. He's the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and one of the few journalists in this country who isn't afraid to put two and two together.

Palast has done a lot of research into this and he believes, as do I, that our government is merely using the terrorist threat to intimidate people into complying with requests that would otherwise be seen as both illegal and reprehensible--and, of course, it's working. I can imagine no other circumstance under which the heads of either AT&T or Verizon would so unthinkingly hand over their customers' records. But if you say it's to fight terrorism, what choice do they have, really?

Yet, if this program were a remotely effective tool for fighting terrorism, the NSA could easily have received approval from FISA. In fact, when asked why they didn't go through FISA, at least one official actually said it was because they didn't think FISA would give them approval. Why? Because access to billions of private citizens' records is not a terrorism-fighting tool; it's an information gathering tool that helps the Bush administration understand/control the public mindset.

They aren't using the information to track down Al Qaeda; they're trying to figure out where their biggest political threats are and to eliminate them through some seemingly innocuous legislation that we won't see for what it is and therefore won't know enough to be afraid of. It's not about them spying on us, it's about them preventing us from spying on them. We're not the ones doing stuff we shouldn't--they are. It's another brilliant plan executed by the men who stole two elections, manipulated intelligence and sent us to war so they would have a constant reason to infringe on our personal freedoms and take our money.

The only area of competence, literally, the ONLY area of competence this administration has demonstrated is in the area of public manipulation of information. They have failed, miserably, at every other task put to them. They have focused all their energy and expertise on controlling what we believe and none of their efforts have gone into addressing actual problems and/or providing effective programs to help the American people be safe and prosperous.

The NSA is not cataloguing and monitoring call patterns in order to protect us from terrorism; they're doing it to see which 527s are having the strongest impact via email campaigns. Remember when Republicans tried to make 527s illegal? Well, that didn't work so now they're doing what they think will work, they're going to find a way to compare the political situation in the country with the patterns they see in internet traffic. This will tell them exactly which organizations to target/discredit so they can eliminate or at least minimize political damage done when information they don't like (like how they actually operate and who wins/loses) finds its way into the public domain.

They need to monitor our communications so they can know how the internet hurts/helps them politically. They are looking for patterns. In fact, as one official put it, the data are used for "social network analysis." This is not about fighting Al-Qaeda, this is data mining.

This is at the heart of what should be the national debate and it's time we started facing facts: if they get away with the NSA program and we let them slide on the failure to enforce net neutrality, we will lose our democracy. The only thing that keeps us from being a dictatorship now is our immediate, uncensored, access to critical information. It's that simple.

As for their idiotic claim that, by removing names from phone numbers in the database, people's identities are protected, that's just another technicality. The fact that they aren't getting the phone numbers from the same search they get the phone tracking from is irrelevant in practical terms. However, it's an important distinction because it allows them to claim that they are not performing an illegal search, since they aren't accessing names. Of course, "the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information." In other words, they'll put the names right back into those records the second they choose to, but it won't be illegal because it wasn't done up front. That's how these people work. Remember Bush promising to fire anybody involved in the leak of Valerie Plame's name?

They tried the same twisted argument then. They claimed that by saying "Joe Wilson's wife" instead of "Valerie Plame" administration officials didn't 'out' her. Of course, Joe Wilson only has one wife. It doesn't matter if they said the name, she was 'outed' just the same. But to them, a group of extremely limited thinkers who don't appear to understand that despite their own twisted thought processes, content is more important than packaging, this is a perfectly legitimate argument.

But that's not the main point either. The real issue here, under all the hoopla over terrorism and invasion of privacy is something infinitely more sinister: the current administration is trying to stop you and me from having the true power of a Democracy at our disposal--they are working furiously to find a way to curtail your ability to access uncensored information.

Do you think the Chinese government is the only client Google can create custom web browser tools for? Think again. I don’t know exactly how the Chinese internet works, but don't think our government can't implement something like that here. They took us to war against our will. They put a puppet president in place and rigged two consecutive elections. Let's not forget that.

When the 2006 mid-term elections create the usual political in-fighting, let's hope somebody is smart enough to disable the argument about our privacy rights being a rational sacrifice to the fight on terror and start calling it like it is. This is a clear violation of our Constitutional rights for the purpose of understanding and manipulating OUR information gathering processes, such that we lose our access to free and unfettered information about our own government. That's what's at stake here.

And while we're at it, it's time to make a distinction between conspiracy theorists (who make stuff up) and people who merely have the ability to recognize a conspiracy when they see one.