Food for Thought

While we're all appalled and/or disgusted by the revelations of NSA hijinks (is there anyone they haven't spied on?), I had a sobering thought -- this is just the top end of a trend that's been happening for a long time, and it's all of a piece: the increasingly interlocked nature of the Internet, with what seems to be a natural phenomenon: a few corporations starting to gobble up everything else so that you have one account for everything -- "for your convenience." (Google keeps trying to sign me into everything with my Google account, which I don't use -- I just created it because of a server glitch causing a site I needed to get into to reject my regular account.)

At any rate, let's start with something a little closer to home for most of us. (At least it used to be, but more on that in a minute.) Notice how militarized our police departments are getting? SWAT teams, assault rifles, body armor, the whole works. Here's the Tampa police department, from their official website:

The 12-ton Armored Personnel Carrier (APC) can drive through five feet of water and withstand winds up to 130 mph helping police operate under the most severe conditions. The carrier, nicknamed "high-top shoe" for its tall silhouette look, can be used for search and rescue during a natural disaster or a terrorist attack. The APC is bullet resistant, can hold 13 passengers and it is virtually unstoppable. On pavement, it can reach speeds of 60 mph. This one of a kind APC was purchased from the military and it was paid for with a Federal security grant.

It's worth going to the site just to see the pictures. Is this Tampa, or Baghdad?

The bottom line is that we're putting huge amounts of lethal force in the hands of people who overreact (remember Chicago, 1968? Imagine that with today's armaments), who make mistakes (and that story is by no means the worst in that vein), who stage full-scale raids on flimsy pretexts (and that story is not the only one about the authorities finding "probable cause" after the fact), and whose judgment is open to question (remember the pepper-spray incident at UC Davis? And to underscore my point, the campus police lieutenant who "pulled the trigger" as it were has filed for worker's comp.).

Which brings us to the surveillance state. The police are armed and ready, now they just need a target. Any target will do, and that's where NSA and its subsidiaries come in. The trend toward constant surveillance started a long time ago -- maybe with police radar to catch speeders. Then we went to cameras in high-crime areas. (They don't actually prevent any crime, as it turns out.) But now, with the advent of the Great War on Terror, there are not only a larger pool of suspects, but a ready-made excuse for watching them. This is choice:

The New York Police Department has secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorism organizations, a designation that allows police to use informants to record sermons and spy on imams, often without specific evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Designating an entire mosque as a terrorism enterprise means that anyone who attends prayer services there is a potential subject of an investigation and fair game for surveillance.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD has opened at least a dozen “terrorism enterprise investigations” into mosques, according to interviews and confidential police documents. The TEI, as it is known, is a police tool intended to help investigate terrorist cells and the like.

Many TEIs stretch for years, allowing surveillance to continue even though the NYPD has never criminally charged a mosque or Islamic organization with operating as a terrorism enterprise.

Digby has a very good, must-read post on the effect of all this on us, the targets. Her summation:

The surveillance society naturally results in less creativity, less innovation, less dissent, less freedom. I know it sounds ridiculously hyperbolic, but this strikes me as a potentially huge social change that nobody's talking about. What kind of a world will it be when people no longer have an inner self, at least an inner self that has any possibility of expression without being revealed to everyone else. What happens when you lose control over your identity, your history, your ability to reinvent yourself and take second chances?

My reaction: Connect the dots: wages sinking, the 1%'s war on the middle class, constant surveillance, get out of jail free passes for the banks* and "energy" companies (not to mention their very sophisticated use of propaganda). Less dissent, less freedom? That's what they want.

* A footnote: ran across this post this morning. From Henry Paulson, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury during the financial collapse in 2008:

“There was such a total lack of awareness from the firms that paid big bonuses during this extraordinary time.”

That is what Henry M. Paulson Jr., former Treasury secretary, said last week. We were discussing the 2008 financial crisis in light of the approaching five-year anniversary of those white-knuckled days, when Lehman Brothers collapsed and the government stepped in to bail out the American International Group and then the banking system….

"Lack of awareness?": Pot, meet kettle. Read on:

He said the hardest part of the bailouts for him was in the disconnect between the bailouts’ ugly image with the public and his faith that the bailouts would help keep the economy from collapsing.

“I understood that people were angry,” Mr. Paulson said. “They wanted to hear that those that made the mistakes were going to be held responsible. Then on the other side was stability. It’s hard to punish and save the banks at the same time.” He paused for a moment. “I was much more concerned with stability.”

I don't understand how that became an either/or proposition. It seems to me that reining in the bonuses and obscene compensation packages for those who caused the crisis might have contributed to public confidence. Maybe the DoJ going after them would have helped as well. But then, I'm not a economics guru, like Hank Paulson -- who, arguably, is one of the people who created the mess.

Draw your own conclusions.