Orbiting Your Living Room, Cashing in The Bill of Rights

Prism Demo [...], ubiquit23, 2013

Batman: Beautiful, isn't it?
Lucius Fox: Beautiful... unethical... dangerous. You've turned every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone.
Batman: And a high-frequency generator-receiver.
Lucius Fox: You took my sonar concept and applied it to every phone in the city. With half the city feeding you sonar, you can image all of Gotham. This is wrong.
Batman: I've gotta find this man, Lucius.
Lucius Fox: At what cost?
Batman: The database is null-key encrypted. It can only be accessed by one person.
Lucius Fox: This is too much power for one person.
Batman: That's why I gave it to you. Only you can use it.
Lucius Fox: Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job description.
- The Dark Knight, 2008

I didn't open with a quote from The Dark Knight to be facetious. At the time I thought the 9/11 parallels of the film, as well as that of Cloverfield, were never really resolved. Now the day has truly come when the seemingly-absurd surveillance plot of TDK is starkly relevant. The mad, bad, and dangerous to know Joker is loose in the city unleashing 'anarchy' and The Bat Man is forced to grossly invade the privacy of the citizenry to protect them (in addition to violating the sovereignty of Hong Kong earlier on). Aware of how the Roman Republic ended (as discussed in a scene regarding Caesar's appointment as Dictator in response to an emergency that never terminated), Batman decides he can only invest this invasive technology in someone as incorruptible as Lucius Fox. Unfortunately reality is far more muddled and technologies like Prism, XKeyscore, and Tempora are in the hands of shady government organisations where incorruptible paragons of fine upstanding-ness are less likely to be found. Such robots of hard-wired moral fortitude are certainly not going to be found overseeing the legality and constitutionality of these programmes on Capitol Hill or in Whitehall because politics is all about moral flexibility or ditching it all together.

Imagine if Edward Snowden hadn't revealed the existence of those programmes and more. After two months on the run, it's not an exaggeration to say he crucified himself to inform the world. He'd be living his life comfortably with perhaps only a disquieted conscience to silence and we'd be unknowingly walking into the most extensive system of surveillance ever seen. Not only that, also walking into an era of virtually unchecked government power freed by the rational-deadening emotive war on terror to evade public scrutiny in whatever it saw fit to classify. That Snowden broke the law, as has been the line from the White House and the complacent corporately-owned US media, is not in question. The problem is that making it illegal to report unconstitutional activities is unconstitutional in itself - therefore, though it may be illegal a whistle-blower has a moral responsibility to disregard that law. After all, the law can state whatever the law-makers want but that never made the policies of Nazi Germany, to invoke Godwin's Law, moral in any way. That was the entire raison d'etre of the Nuremberg trials - those who do not take action to stop criminal actions abet it and are criminals themselves.

Those laws that have already condemned Bradley Manning to years of imprisonment could always be overturned by a jury exercising its ancient right to refuse to uphold a law. Scotland has it's famous triple verdict of guilty, not guilty, not proven from historically exercising that right. Just as proven/not proven was used to persecute heretics under unjust law to which juries repeatedly passed down not guilty verdicts, so too should Snowden be proven to have broken the law but suffer not guilt for it. Of course, there are no juries in a military court as the one that sentenced Manning, and Snowden is never going to receive a public trial if any at all as the inmates of Guantanamo Bay can attest. For all that US politicians have branded him a traitor and demanded he be handed over for his day in court, no one can be in any doubt that will never occur for that would open these programmes to the public scrutiny that they have avoided in the years since 9/11. All evidence is classified and so could never be presented in open court. Anyone attempting to do so would be in the same position as Snowden. It'll be the Star Chamber for his transgressions. History repeats itself, America.

For one thing, like a functioning democracy, juries need to be educated. I can only hope the US media conglomerates are not as persuasive as they appear because they have continually pressed the narrative that Snowden is essentially a defector. His departure for Hong Kong (equated with China) plays into that as does his flight to Russia. Hong Kong was in fact a brilliant play off - nominally under Chinese sovereignty it was close enough to the People's Republic to provide cover from US extradition requests and yet far enough from Beijing in autonomy to allow him to speak freely. It is not a contradiction that Snowden is stuck within Russian borders (or surrounded by them, strictly, within the transit zone) when he campaigns for transparency - rather it's more an indictment of the US government's attitude to him regarding using the revocation of his passport as a weapon, and an example of realpolitik that a decidedly authoritarian Russian government was the only state that was going to stand firm against the US; unlike Western Europe which denied airspace to the president of Bolivia clearly under pressure from Washington. Of course, let's remember that Russia was praised for embracing freedom when the Soviet Union disintegrated yet it has slid back into the old constants of autocracy and surveillance just as in the Tsarist era. Everyone knows about the KGB and the gulags, but it's cultural bias (nay, indoctrination) that Americans cannot see their own emerging equivalents - a massive prison population that outstrips all other countries consisting of petty criminals (predominantly of colour) and a surveillance state, as revealed in these leaks, that far surpasses the capabilities and prevalence of that of the bad rooskies in the Cold War.

Let's get it straight: Who are your enemies? What is the national interest? It speaks volumes that these cannot be stated openly. By revealing the actions of the NSA domestically and abroad it informs everyone, including other states. Given the insinuations about Snowden's flight to Chinese and Russian territory, are China and Russia the enemies of the United States? If so, someone should put the People's Republic of China on a trade embargo list and arrest the Treasury. The national interest is far simpler - it's whatever is in the government's interest. Obama ran on it being in the national interest to protect whistle-blowers, however now that he's in power it is the national interest to hunt them down. Change.org which included that campaign promise conveniently went offline and down the memory hole since the Prism affair.

···

As a listener to the podcast version of Bill Maher's Realtime I've been surprised to hear him state twice now that the trade-off between privacy/freedom and security (achieving neither as famously remarked by Benjamin Franklin) is acceptable as the risks are so high. His reasoning is that we live in the age of mass destruction where non-state actors may deploy biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons - unforeseen by the authors of the US constitution. That set me contemplating the effects of nuclear weaponry on the foundation of government and I finally understood what Orwell meant in You and The Atom Bomb by 'undemocratic weapons'.

The apex of state power in the modern world must surely be developing a nuclear arsenal. It isn't just a case of joining the club of powerful nations, as the Cold War proved it was a safer world (for the nuclear powers) if owning those devices raised the cost of war beyond acceptable limits - ie, global destruction. Thus, the dysfunctional government of Pakistan must be maintained while beset by internal troubles because if the Taliban were to seize power then the security of Pakistan would transfer to the Taliban. What this actually means is that the right of the people to overthrow the established power when the social contract is broken is suppressed because continuity of government is vital to preventing these weapons from falling out of state hands (or falling into a new hands). As it prevents global war and preserves the status quo, it prevents internal change and preserves the status quo. If North Korea does indeed have them, then the fate of its people is even more certain.

The Chinese have propped up the degenerate monarchical-military coalition in order to prevent the humanitarian crisis that would result from a collapse of the state. Similarly Obama admits the instability of Pakistan keeps him up at night because of their nuclear weapons. The Soviets sought the atom bomb to protect themselves from the US after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The UK and France sought them to retain relative independence from the Soviets and Americans. The Chinese sought them to remain independent of the Soviets and to establish their ascendant relevancy in the 20th century. Is it any wonder Gadaffi's Libya was at one point engaged in obtaining them when that would have protected his state from foreign intervention which in turn would allow the state to continue to exist and oppress the population? Wasn't that why apartheid South Africa wanted them? The same holds true for North Korea because look at what happened to Gadaffi after he surrendered the Libyan efforts and befriended the West.

¶[1469]