The End of Privacy

By Elliot Cohen, Truthdig. Posted January 28, 2008.

Amid the controversy brewing in the Senate over Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) reform, the Bush administration appears to have changed its strategy and is devising a bold new plan that would strip away FISA protections in favor of a system of wholesale government monitoring of every American's Internet activities. Now the National Director of Intelligence is predicting a disastrous cyber-terrorist attack on the U.S. if this scheme isn't instituted.

It is no secret that the Bush administration has already been spying on the e-mail, voice-over-IP, and other Internet exchanges between American citizens since as early as and possibly earlier than September 11, 2001. The National Security Agency has set up shop in the hubs of major telecom corporations, notably AT&T, installing equipment that makes copies of the contents of all Internet traffic, routing it to a government database and then using natural language parsing technology to sift through and analyze the data using undisclosed search criteria. It has done this without judicial oversight and obviously without the consent of the millions of Americans under surveillance. Given any rational interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, its mass spying operation is illegal and unconstitutional.

But now the administration wants to make these illegal activities legal. And why is that? According to National Director of Intelligence Mike McConnell, who is now drafting the proposal, an attack on a single U.S. bank by the 9/11 terrorists would have had a far more serious impact on the U.S. economy than the destruction of the Twin Towers. "My prediction is that we're going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens," said McConnell. So the way to prevent this from happening, he claims, is to give the government the power to spy at will on the content of all e-mails, file transfers and Web searches.

McConnell's prediction of something "horrendous" happening unless we grant government this authority has a tone similar to that of the fear-mongering call to arms against terrorism that President Bush sounded before taking us to war in Iraq. Now, Americans are about to be asked to surrender their Fourth Amendment rights because of a vague and unsupported prediction of the dangers and costs of cyber-terrorism.

The analogy with the campaign to frighten us into war with Iraq gets even stronger when it becomes evident that along with the establishing of American forces in Iraq, the cyber-security McConnell is calling for was, all along, part of the strategic plan, devised by Dick Cheney and several other present and former high-level Bush administration officials, to establish America as the world's supreme superpower. This plan, known as the Project for the New American Century, unequivocally recognized "an imperative" for government to not only secure the Internet against cyber-attacks but also to control and use it offensively against its adversaries. The Project for the New American Century also maintained that "the process of transformation" it envisioned (which included the militarization and control of the Internet) was "likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor." All that appears to be lacking to make the analogy complete is the "horrendous" cyber-attack -- the chilling analog of the 9/11 attacks -- that McConnell now predicts.

Apparently, the Bush administration had hoped to continue its mass surveillance program in secret, but as many as 40 civil suits were filed against AT&T and other telecoms, threatening to blow the government's illegal spying activities wide open. Unable to have these cases dismissed in appellate court by once again playing the national security card, the administration drafted and tried to push through Congress a version of the FISA Amendments Act of 2007 that gave retroactive immunity to telecom corporations for their assistance in helping the government spy en mass on Americans without a court warrant. The administration's plan was to use Congress' passage of this provision of immunity to nullify any cause of civil action against the telecoms, thereby pre-empting the exposure of the administration's own illegal activities.

See more stories tagged with: internet, surveillance, fisa, privacy, mike mcconnell

Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D., is a media ethicist and critic. His most recent book is The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government Are Turning America Into a Dictatorship. He is a first-prize winner of the 2007 Project Censored Award.

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