{"id":18366,"date":"2023-06-05T10:28:06","date_gmt":"2023-06-05T14:28:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=18366"},"modified":"2023-06-06T17:06:51","modified_gmt":"2023-06-06T21:06:51","slug":"snowden-and-the-fight-for-american-privacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2023\/06\/05\/snowden-and-the-fight-for-american-privacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Snowden and the Fight for American Privacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Snowden and the Fight for American Privacy<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Edward Snowden did heroic service in awakening Americans to Washington ravishing their privacy. Snowden\u2019s \u201creward\u201d is to be banished in Russia without a snowball\u2019s chance in hell of a fair trial if he returns to America. But as he courageously declared, \u201cI would rather be without a state than without a voice.\u201d He explained why he leaked classified information: \u201cI can\u2019t in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they\u2019re secretly building.\u201d<\/p>\n

Citizens cannot acquiesce to illegal government surveillance without forfeiting their right to any remaining privacy. <\/span>
\n[Click to Tweet]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

To recognize Snowden\u2019s contribution to liberty, it helps to review the political and legal landscape before his revelations. In 2008, Sen. Barack Obama\u2019s denunciations of the Bush administration\u2019s warrantless wiretaps secured his image as a champion of civil liberties. Campaigning for president, Obama pledged \u201cno more illegal wiretapping of American citizens\u2026. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient.\u201d Unfortunately, Obama didn\u2019t promise not to ignore the law when it was \u201creally, really convenient.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barack Obama: American spy-in-chief<\/b><\/h2>\n

After Obama clinched the Democratic Party presidential nomination, he reversed himself and voted for granting immunity to telecom companies that betrayed their customers to Uncle Sam. This was a bellwether for Obama\u2019s future constitutional depredations. After Obama took office, his appointees speedily expanded National Security Agency seizures of Americans\u2019 personal data. The Washington Post<\/i> characterized Obama\u2019s first term as \u201ca period of exponential growth for the NSA\u2019s domestic collection.\u201d<\/p>\n

The acid drip of revelations of illicit surveillance that began after 9\/11 continued regardless of Obama\u2019s \u201cHope and Change\u201d mantra.<\/strong> Shortly after Obama\u2019s inauguration, former NSA analyst Russell Tice declared that the NSA was monitoring \u201call Americans\u2019 communications. Faxes, phone calls and their computer communications.\u201d Tice also revealed that the NSA had targeted journalists and news agencies for wiretaps. Tice\u2019s revelations failed to hold the media\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n

In June 2009, the NSA admitted that it had accidentally collected the personal information of vast numbers of Americans. The New York Times<\/i> reported that \u201cthe number of individual communications that were improperly collected could number in the millions.\u201d But it wasn\u2019t a crime; it was merely inadvertent \u201covercollection\u201d of Americans\u2019 personal data which NSA would retain for (at least) five years.<\/p>\n

In 2010, the Washington Post <\/i>reported that \u201cevery day, collection systems at the [NSA] intercept and store 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other type of communications.\u201d In 2011, NSA expanded a program to provide real-time location information of every American with a cell phone, acquiring more than a billion cell phone records each day from AT&T. Regardless, the media continued portraying Obama as a civil liberties savior.<\/p>\n

Obama perpetuated perverse Bush-era legal doctrines to totally shield federal surveillance from judicial scrutiny.<\/strong> After the Supreme Court accepted a case on warrantless wiretaps in 2012, the Obama administration urged the justices to dismiss the case. A New York Times <\/i>editorial labeled the administration\u2019s position \u201ca particularly cynical Catch-22: Because the wiretaps are secret and no one can say for certain that their calls have been or will be monitored, no one has standing to bring suit over the surveillance.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court endorsed surveillance<\/b><\/h2>\n

Cynical arguments sufficed for five justices. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, declared that the court was averse to granting standing to challenge the government based on \u201ctheories that require guesswork\u201d and \u201cno specific facts\u201d proving federal targeting, based on fears of \u201chypothetical future harm.\u201d The Supreme Court insisted that the government already offered plenty of safeguards \u2014 such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court \u2014 to protect Americans\u2019 rights. Law professor Stephen Vladeck commented on the decision: \u201cThe coffin is slamming shut on the ability of private citizens and civil liberties groups to challenge government counterterrorism policies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Three months later, newspapers around the world began publishing confidential documents leaked by Snowden. Americans learned that the NSA can tap almost any cell phone in the world, exploit computer games like Angry Birds to poach personal data, access anyone\u2019s email and web browsing history, remotely penetrate almost all computers, and crack the vast majority of computer encryption. The NSA used Facebook and Google apps to send malware to targeted individuals. NSA filched almost 200,000,000 records a month from private computer cloud accounts. Obama\u2019s Justice Department secretly decreed that all phone records of all Americans were \u201crelevant\u201d to terrorism investigations and that the NSA could therefore justifiably seize everyone\u2019s personal data.<\/p>\n

Snowden exposed the surveillance state<\/b><\/h2>\n

Snowden revealed how the NSA had covertly carried out \u201cthe most significant change in the history of American espionage from the targeted surveillance of individuals to the mass surveillance of entire populations.\u201d The NSA created a \u201crepository capable of taking in 20 billion \u2018record events\u2019 daily and making them available to NSA analysts within 60 minutes.\u201d The NSA is able to snare and stockpile a billion times more information than did East Germany\u2019s Stasi secret police, one of the most odious agencies of the post-war era. Snowden later commented, \u201cSuspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it\u2019s only victimizing 95 percent of the world instead of 100 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seeking to defuse the controversy, Obama justified NSA surveillance as simply \u201ca tradeoff we make\u2026. To say there\u2019s a tradeoff doesn\u2019t mean somehow that we\u2019ve abandoned freedom. I don\u2019t think anybody says we\u2019re no longer free because we have checkpoints at airports.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Capitol Hill, the response to Snowden\u2019s disclosures ranged from vacuous to devious.<\/strong> House Speaker John Boehner declared, \u201cWhen you look at these programs, there are clear safeguards. There\u2019s no American who\u2019s going to be snooped on in any way, unless they\u2019re in contact with some terrorists somewhere around the world.\u201d Other congressional leaders quickly denounced Snowden as a \u201ctraitor.\u201d House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and former NSA chief Michael Hayden publicly joked about putting Snowden on a government kill list. Rogers won the \u201cD.C. Knucklehead of the Week\u201d Prize when he defended illicit surveillance: \u201cYou can\u2019t have your privacy violated if you don\u2019t know your privacy is violated.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Regardless of Snowden\u2019s proof, Obama administration appointees and spokesmen insisted that NSA only targeted individuals linked to terrorism, but NSA\u2019s definition of terrorist suspect was ludicrously broad, including \u201csomeone searching the web for suspicious stuff.\u201d If someone used encryption for their emails, that alone justified wiretapping them. Snowden commented in 2014: \u201cIf I had wanted to pull a copy of a judge\u2019s or a senator\u2019s e-mail, all I had to do was enter that selector into XKEYSCORE,\u201d an NSA program that required no warrant from FISA or any other court.<\/p>\n

President Obama sought to quash the controversy by boldly proclaiming: \u201cThere is no spying on Americans.\u201d The New York Times <\/i>headlined its report on Obama\u2019s PR effort: \u201cPresident Moves to Ease Worries on Surveillance; Talks of New Openness.\u201d Talk was cheap.<\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/i> analyzed a cache of 160,000 secret email conversations\/threads (provided by Snowden) that the NSA intercepted and found that nine out of ten account holders were not the \u201cintended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.\u201d Almost half of the individuals whose personal data was inadvertently commandeered were U.S. citizens. The files \u201ctell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes,\u201d the Post<\/i> noted. If an American citizen wrote an email in a foreign language, NSA analysts assumed they were foreigners who could be surveilled without a warrant.<\/p>\n

FISA court rulings \u201ccreated a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans,\u201d the New York Times <\/i>reported in 2013. The classified rulings (leaked by Snowden) showed that FISA judges rubber-stamped massive seizures of Americans\u2019 personal data that flagrantly contradicted Supreme Court rulings on the Fourth Amendment. The Times <\/i>noted that the FISA court had \u201cbecome almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues\u201d \u2014 and almost always giving federal agencies all the power they sought. The vast majority of members of Congress were unaware that a secret court had secretly nullified much of the Bill of Rights. That did not deter Obama from proclaiming that the FISA court was \u201ctransparent\u201d \u2014 though only the White House could see.<\/p>\n

Snowden\u2019s revelations outraged some judges. In December 2013, Federal judge Richard Leon issued a ruling denouncing the NSA surveillance regime as \u201calmost Orwellian\u201d: \u201cI cannot imagine a more indiscriminate and arbitrary invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obama sought to defuse the controversy by selecting an expert panel that he expected to vindicate his surveillance. But the panel reported that there was not a single case where the telephone data roundup had been necessary to stop a terrorist attack. The panel\u2019s report also warned: \u201cAmericans must never make the mistake of wholly trusting our public officials.\u201d The panel concluded that the \u201cbulk collection of American citizens\u2019 phone records served little useful purpose in combatting terrorism,\u201d ABC News reported. Panel member Richard Clarke commented, \u201cThere are very few pieces of data that have been collected in this program that have been useful.\u201d But as Snowden observed, \u201cThese programs were never about terrorism: they\u2019re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They\u2019re about power.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Obama administration made few substantive changes in response to Snowden\u2019s exposure of sweeping criminality. Author and NSA expert James Bamford observed shortly before the 2016 election, \u201cOver his two terms, Obama has created the most powerful surveillance state the world has ever seen.\u201d Despite the uproars over Snowden\u2019s revelations, neither Congress nor federal courts fundamentally pulled in the reins on the Surveillance State.<\/p>\n

Snowden observed, \u201cThe consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.\u201d<\/strong> Any such consent to Washington has become increasingly a mirage<\/strong>. The pervasive secrecy that has proliferated in post-9\/11 America has made it far more difficult for citizens to leash their rulers. Regardless of the health of U.S. democracy, Snowden\u2019s warnings on the \u201carchitecture of oppression\u201d are more relevant than ever.<\/p>\n

Another Snowden lesson for our democracy is the futility of passive obedience.<\/strong> Vast numbers of Americans presume they will be safe from government wrongdoing or other federal debacles if they simply keep their head down and don\u2019t complain. By blighting resistance to government, however, surveillance unleashes rulers to do far more mischief. If politicians drag this nation into a major war, keeping your mouth shut won\u2019t protect you against incoming missiles.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Citizens cannot acquiesce to illegal government surveillance without forfeiting their right to any remaining privacy. There is no reason for people to trust secretive federal programs more than Washington trusts American citizens. The biggest delusion is that Americans will be more secure after the feds further decimate their privacy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article was originally published in the May 2023 edition of<\/em> Future of Freedom<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Snowden and the Fight for American Privacy by James Bovard Edward Snowden did heroic service in awakening Americans to Washington ravishing their privacy. Snowden\u2019s \u201creward\u201d is to be banished in Russia without a snowball\u2019s chance in hell of a fair trial if he returns to America. But as he courageously declared, \u201cI would rather be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6725,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[52,270,202,159,38,117,55,342,24,30],"class_list":["post-18366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-democracy","tag-fisa","tag-fraud","tag-liberty","tag-obama","tag-privacy","tag-secrecy","tag-snowden","tag-supreme-court","tag-surveillance"],"yoast_head":"\nSnowden and the Fight for American Privacy - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Edward Snowden heroically exposed vast federal crimes that trampled Americans' privacy. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18366"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18376,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18366\/revisions\/18376"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}