‘Snowden Broke the Law’

I confess to being somewhat astonished and perturbed, perhaps even contemptuous, by the lack of committed Evangelical comment on the NSA leaks, particularly by its leadership. On the days after the initial leads (June 5/6, 2013), Albert Mohler dutifully reported the incidents with studied neutrality. Etobicoke (Toronto) pastor and Evangelical-approved book reviewer fashions a pietistic homily¹ on the matter; only obliquely giving indication of his sentiments in an emphatic denial of approving NSA actions in his comment section. There is Lutheran theologian of some note on the Patheos Evangelical channel (Gene Edward Veith) and a few bloggers. The only other Evangelical of note with an intelligent and intelligible opinion on the matter is John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute², who is currently representing a Marine, Brandon Baub, who was taken into psychiatric custody without justifiable cause, based on domestic surveillance of his rantings on his Facebook pages.

Otherwise; na-da!

There are many reasons to explain this dearth of publicly expressed concern about the ramifications of Edward Snowden’s revelations. And many of those reasons, I can think of, would appear as quite mean-spirited toward Gospel-of-Niceness-Truth-Be-Damned ‘evangelicals’ in this era of EVANGELICALISM STUPID and EVANGELICALISM IRRELEVANT and EVANGELICALISM TAINTED WITH CO-OPTION and EVANGELICALISM TIMID and EVANGELICALISM TEPID.

It is not as if the Evangelical leadership is averse to voicing specific opinions to highly complicated political issues. I observe that Rev. Franklin Graham is fast off the mark to opine to Obama about his intervention into Syria, having written an open letter on June 14, 2013.³ And Evangelical pastors are roaming the countryside like Constantinian bishops, rustling up support for an Immigration Reform Bill, googling up 40 Scriptural proof-text verses which have nothing to do with this specific policy initiative. ⁴ Political non-involvement and comment is not for most Evangelical theologians, an issue it would seem.

But for those who earnestly seek to avoid needlessly alienating the general public on secondary matters from considering the Christian message, the global omniscient surveillance state poses a threat to the unimpeded promulgation of the Gospel and Full Counsel of God. If religious liberty has now become a chief sociopolitical concern of Evangelicals; how much more so general liberty? Have we forgotten the logic of the altar and the gift on the altar?

You fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifies the gift? Whoever therefore shall swear by the altar, swears by it, and by all things thereon. And whoever shall swear by the temple, swears by it, and by him that dwells therein. And he that shall swear by heaven, swears by the throne of God, and by him that sits thereon.⁵

However, a full discourse on a nuanced approach to Christian involvement with secular society and politics is beyond the scope of this essay (and is a work in progress).

Of the few comments garnered from evangelical sites, there is evident and understandable conflict about the actions of Edward Snowden and its ramifications, which needs to be fairly addressed. And perhaps, it is time for Evangelicals to go back to school with regard to Christian political thought; revisiting the same sort of issues that Reformers, Anabaptists, Puritans etc of the 16^th, 17^th and 18^th Century needed to deal with in order to promote the Gospel and Full Counsel of God in their time. (This is not to suggest that there exists a legitimate, coherent and consistent Christian political theory on this side of Judgment Day. However, there is much counsel to be ascertained and promulgated from the Protestant/Evangelical thinkers of those times; whose ideas were adopted by more secular-minded writers and founded on more naturalist underpinnings.)

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If a man steals an item from the thief, which had stolen that item from the legitimate owner, in order to restore the item to that original owner, is that theft? What if that thief was a government agent, who used the organs of government to expropriate that item? What if that civic expropriation required a secretive contortionism of interpretation of applicable laws in order to utilize the organs of the state to nick that item?

Perhaps, by the standards of legal niceties and procedural rectitude, the man who steals from a thief, is a thief. But is that natural justice? Common folklore celebrates the mythical Robin Hood; less because his roguery appeals to the baser angels of our natures, although that element certainly exists. It is in recognition that criminality remains criminality, even if a civic official or even a President does it. (Do we not remember Nixon’s Napoleonic complex moment⁶: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”⁷ Sorry Mr. President. Even if state depredations do not quite show up in FBI statistics, they nevertheless remain a crime.

If a man violates a law or judicial interpretation of a law, which itself violates the plain (and common) understanding of the articles of a Constitution, via deft judicial sophistry and casuistry, is that man a traitor to the Constitution; to the Higher Law? Are laws and constitutions written in pig Latin, such that only credentialed legal priests have capacity to decipher them? But if the understandings of laws and articles of Constitutions become so contorted and distorted as to be inscrutable by the persons for whom they are to apply, is that lawfulness and justice? Have we not entered into Kafka’s version of the Twilight Zone?

If Edward Snowden broke the law and is a traitor to the Constitution, it is only in the sense argued by 21^st Century American administrations and the toads who croak in choreographed unison. Theirs is a lawfulness and constitutionality of procedural rectitude.

We’ve got congressional oversight and judicial oversight…And if people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.⁸

A cadre of duly elected and appointed civic officials has conspired to concoct this “architecture of oppression”. Because this elite priesthood has deemed legal, violations to the Constitution and the plain understanding of the letter and spirit of its Articles, it must be legal. Two and two is equal to five because the duly elected and appointed overseers have all concurred with this madness. It seems incredible and unbelievable! For, even ‘checks and balances’ government is no guarantee against tyranny, wholesale injustice and lawlessness by its civic officials; especially when deft sleight of hand maneuvers were utilized to circumvent the Constitution. 

America (and other modern states) has approached the full fruition and reckoning of that judicial coup d’état of 1803 (Marbury v. Madison), which laid the groundwork for the undermining and overthrow of a written constitution and reversal of the American Revolution through the interpretative duplicity of sophists. “The Constitution on this hypothesis is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”⁹ Ultimately, the blame for the clear cut violations of Constitutional articles rests with the long and winding road of judicial interpretative contortionism, which allows the present President and his Pips, in their superior wisdom and comprehension of pig Latin, to deem wholesale overthrow of civil rights as “modest encroachments on privacy”.

The Administration’s argument is the same argument as that of the medieval Romanist Magisterium against Martin Luther and the Reformers. Over the centuries since Christ, the labyrinth of “proper” Magisterial interpretation of Scriptures became at wide variance and dissonance to common rendering and understanding of the original text. And like in Luther’s time, the duly appointed authorities deemed submission to authorities to be the only lawfulness, regardless of the virtue, wisdom and lawfulness of that authority and its rendering of the Biblical Constitution.

If Jesus of Nazareth had abided to this principle of lawfulness, He would have been a sinner. For, Christ defied the prevailing interpretation of Mosaic Law in regard to Sabbath Laws, the fourth article of the Decalogue, defined by the duly appointed Jewish religious authorities. He did not submit to their duly appointed authoritative interpretation of Mosaic Law. And as Christ pointed out by the deft hermeneutics of Jewish religious scholars in regard to Corban¹⁰, the interpretative traditions of religious jurists had construed to violate the fifth article of the Decalogue (“Honor your father and your mother: that your days may be long on the land which the LORD your God gives you”¹¹)

Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that.¹²

If Luther had capitulated to the Vatican demand that he submit to the duly self-appointed apostolic succession with its accumulation of hermeneutical contortionism which left Scriptures beyond all recognition, the Reformation would not have happened. (To underline the level of contortionism, this Roman Magisterium made the gift of conjugal sex, inherently imbued with evil and made conjugal relations that occurred on 67% or more of the days of the year, a venial sin requiring penitentials of various kinds.)

Without the fundamentally necessary principle of soul competence, the right and requirement that a doctrine, whether religious or secular, requires to be incontrovertibly proven to the subjective faculties of the beholder; the rise of Western Civilization would not have occurred. Yes. An individual may not, through disuse of intellectual faculties, intellectual dishonesty, lack of knowledge and understanding of proper principles of hermeneutics, reason and judgment of artifacts, find the truth. But knowledge of the truth is still a potential. This is a lesser ‘evil’ than the return to a medieval dark age; where cadre of priests, whether religious or secular, is able to pontificate assertions, without being perpetually subjected to scrutiny of any and every kind. It is for this reason; this modern dependence on ‘expert texperts’ and authoritative credentialism, that bullshit reigns in every intellectual discipline and sociopolitical endeavour.

Likewise, the same dynamics and principles that required an overthrow of duly appointed and credentialed authority in religious matters, requires a same application to secular political constitutions. The current understandings and practices by the civic agents of the state are at a great dissonance to the plain scrutable rendering of a Constitution that has neither been legally abrogated nor amended to justify such strange understandings of its wording. Just because the incompetent and compromised buffoons in Congress, the arrogant Pretender in the White House, kowtowing to the military-industrial complex, and judicial deceit have incestuously conspired to fashion a Kafkaesque lawlessness that blatantly contradicts reasonable understanding of the Constitution; their practicable interpretations of constitutions are no more legal than the ways that the Nazi regime contorted the non-abrogated Constitution of the Weimar Republic. It was through clear violations of a common understanding of the Weimar Constitution that German war criminals were convicted at Nuremberg.

Martin Luther repudiated the vow of celibacy that was insisted upon all Romanist theologians. His argument was that it was not an oath that was justified by the plain rendering of Scriptures but was that coerced through magisterial contortionism by a religious judicial tradition that had contorted the original and reasonable understanding of Biblical text. Edward Snowden’s oath, which he has violated, can be deemed similarly to be more valid, if by that oath he is required to do nothing while lawlessness and evil is perpetuated. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” (Edmund Burke) If Snowden violated laws, which themselves violated the Higher Law; in this case, the plain rendering of the Constitution, he is no more a criminal and traitor to the American Constitution than Jesus Christ or Martin Luther was to the Law of God. 

Something is constitutional or lawful, when the plain and scrutable rendering of the constitution or law allows for it; not when some judicial priest contorts and distorts the meaning of said constitution or law beyond all recognition!

Christians are a People of the Book. We have a long history of contending with those many deceitful persons and artifices which have construed to make the Biblical Constitution state what it does not state, and to not state what it does state. We ought to inherently understand the dangers of a political establishment which has done much the same and in which the Constitution is becoming thoroughly unrecognizable in its practicable application by the duly elected and appointed.

 ©Copyright Johnny Hutchinson

 

 

NOTES

1. Tim Challies, “Fear God More Than the NSA”, …Informing the Reforming, June 12, 2013, Accessed http://www.challies.com/articles/fear-god-more-than-the-nsa on June 18, 2013.
2. John Whitehead is a Christian civil rights lawyer, having represented Paula Jones against Bill Clinton. There was a write up by Ted Olsen of Christianity Today “The Dragon Slayer” (December 7, 1998). Otherwise, his perspective can be found at https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/.
3. Franklin Graham, “Letter to President Obam”, Samaritan’s Purse, June 14, 2013, Accessed http://www.scribd.com/doc/148384711/Rev-Franklin-Graham-urges-President-Obama-to-keep-America-out-of-Syrian-conflict on June 18, 2013.
4. It should be understood that I have conflicted thoughts on this matter. I am not a citizen of the jurisdiction in which this issue is being debated. My contempt is for the unjustified conscription of Scriptures to support a political issue. See “Evangelical Support for Immigration Reform is Biblical, Not Political” reblogged on Timothy Dalrymple’s Patheos Philosophical Fragments blog, March 13, 2013, Accessed  http://www.patheos.com/blogs/philosophicalfragments/2013/03/13/evangelical-support-immigration-reform-biblical-not-political-soerens/ on June 18, 2013.
5. Matthew 23:19-22
6. As understood by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, (1866) as beyond above the laws of God and men.
7. David Frost, Interview with Richard Nixon, Part 3, May 19, 1977.
8. President Barack Obama, “Speech in San Jose, California”, June 7, 2013.
9. Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Spencer Roane, 1819.
10. Mark 7:7-13
11. Exodus 20:12
12. Mark 7:13

 

 

 

GCHQ and the G20 Meeting of 2009

This week’s timely revelation from Snowden and company exposed the practicable willingness of Anglo-Saxon states to use their superior surveillance technological know-how for national economic advantage. The particulars of their duplicity include:

·        monitoring email messages and voice calls on delegates’ Blackberrys

·        setting up ‘dummy’ Internet cafes for delegates and using email interception programs and key-logging software to spy on their activities

·        targeting the Turkish finance minister and his entourage (also South Africa)

·        eavesdropping (via NSA) on Russian leader, Dmitry Medvedev voice calls to Moscow via satellite

·        supplying round-the-clock summaries of communications between delegates (signal intelligence)

The Timing

One must be impressed with the shrewdness of Snowden and company. Snowden either has an overwhelming catalogue of malfeasance by U.S. and British officials for any possible scenario. Or he has amassed the type of documents to correspond with the itinerary of current U.S. / U.K. officials. Last week, it was about NSA spying on Hong Kong university undergraduates etc just as Obama met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, This week, the G20 revelation corresponds with the British hosted G8 meeting. The U.S. / U.K. officials might want to start changing their itinerary. In any case, depredations about Snowden’s lack of education credentials continue to backfire as college graduates, many of whom are Ivy League, are being outwitted by this drop-out.

The Ramifications

In getting a feel for official and public mood, a revelation of this sort logically should and empirically seems to have initially soured Snowden’s standing amongst his own nationals. The commentariat regarding the Washington Post article articling this revelation¹ seems to have strengthened the hands of those who are “officially disgusted with this treacherous little nerd”, whose “ideology trumps education and common sense”. However, one gets the impression that Snowden is not playing to a self-centered narcissistic American crowd but to greater humanity.

Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it’s only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%. Our founders did not write that “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are created equal.”²

And in Snowden’s love of his country, he is advocating a tactic that could be said to be taken out of Christian Scriptures in order to reach his ‘Chosen People’.

First, Moses says, “I will make you envious by those who are not a nation; I will make you angry by a nation that has no understanding.”³

Rather, because of their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious.⁴

The immediate impact ought to scuttle the strength of secular Turkish protests in Istanbul

The country’s embattled prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has blamed the international media, and in particular the BBC, for fomenting violent unrest and protests against his rule. Erdoğan has spoken repeatedly of an “international conspiracy”. News that his finance minister really was the victim of a British surveillance operation will strengthen his view.⁵

This revelation weakens the credibility of the secular faction in Turkey, who have long advocated and practiced laïcité while they were in rule, who are now on the defensive against a resurging Muslim population (largely rural and eastern). Indeed, in combination with other anti-Muslim Western policies and attitudes, mostly in Europe, it is quite probable that this NATO ally will increasingly drift into the Islamist and Russian camp; or at least towards a geopolitical neutrality.

And that is the rub. American foreign policy has since the 1960s, like its culture in general, moved toward a myopic, short-term, ad hoc, unprincipled, unenlightened self-interest. Henry Kissinger could be iconized as the first true personification of this self-serving indulgence, which finds itself consistently arming its future enemies, such as Iraq or Al-Qaida.

This devolution to raw self-interest is a far cry from Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points or the Truman Doctrine or Marshall Plan. Even if one disagrees with the particulars of Wilson’s plan, for instance; it is historically evident that an unenlightened self-interest contributed to the global propaganda coup by America against the small-minded, unenlightened self-serving interests of petty colonial European powers in the first half of the 20^th Century.

Having spied on their allies; of whom many delegates were evidently too naïve and gullible (i.e. delegates using Internet Café of the host country) to distrust their hosts; responsible national self-interest can only lead to detrimental long-term consequences which hurt the Anglo-Saxon world. Even presuming that the elite class of every nation is aware of the duplicitous realities of their international counterparts, their less savvy masses become fodder to such revelations, which these elites can exploit at will. (This ‘everybody does it’ argument, found in the American commentariat is indicative of the old worldly-wise jaded whore that America has become, just like their European counterparts in previous centuries).

America/Britain has lost most, if not all, of their global moral authority. They can hardly castigate and preach about Chinese cyber and industrial espionage with straight face. And as a historical political observation and principle; attempting to govern without moral authority, requires considerably more blood and treasure than governing with moral authority. And as a historical political observation and principle, those elites, who lose moral authority, soon find a loss of raw power on the coattails.

The Significance Back Home

The British equivalent to NSA, GCHQ, which is led by that histrionic, patronizing prig, the Right Honorable William Hague, has a legislative mandate to gather information ‘in the interests of the economic wellbeing of the United Kingdom’ through the 1994 Intelligence Services Act.

The purpose is to give the UK a competitive and negotiating advantage. It is justified on legal grounds because the 1994 Intelligence Services Act says the job of GCHQ is gather information “in the interests of the economic wellbeing of the United Kingdom”.⁶

In other words, the purposes of global omniscient surveillance are not only because of due concern for protection against potential terrorist and other defense-related threats. No. It is also useful to give the UK a competitive and negotiating advantage, even against its allies. Ah! What else it this global omniscient surveillance useful for?

As much as having surveillance capabilities would be a wet dream for corporate managers in contract negotiations with unions, (or vice versa); a public would find such means of acquiring competitive and negotiating advantage unlawful and unjust. I doubt that the global community, who constitute 94-95% of the world population, beyond Anglo-America, thinks otherwise.

More importantly, NSA/GCHQ and their political overlords demonstrate a willingness to transcend or transgress the ostensible purposes of global omniscient surveillance that are being propagated. The argument by persons like Pat Buchanan, that the Defense and Intelligence boys are of a different quality of human being from other bureaucrats, such as those at the IRS, withers on the vine of this duplicity.

 

NOTES

 

1.       Anthony Faiola, “The Guardian: Britain, United States spied at summits”, The Washington Post, June 17, 2013, accessed http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/britain-united-states-spied-at-summits/2013/06/17/b4c3166c-d72b-11e2-b418-9dfa095e125d_allComments.html?ctab=all_& on June 18, 2013.

2.       Glenn Greenwald, “Edward Snowden Q&A: Dick Cheney traitor charge is ‘the highest honor’”, The Guardian, June 17, 2013, accessed http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-nsa-files-whistleblower on June 18, 2013.

3.       Romans 10:19

4.       Romans 11:11

5.       Julian Borger et al, “G20 summits: Russia and Turkey react with fury to spying revelations” The Guardian, June 17, 2013, accessed http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/turkey-russia-g20-spying-gchq on June 18, 2013.

6.       Richard Norton-Taylor, Spying for spying’s sake: spooks and their intelligence addiction”, The Guardian, June 17, 2013, Accessed http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/defence-and-security-blog/2013/jun/17/spying-spooks-intelligence-addiction on June 18, 2013.

 

NSA and the Circling of the Wagons

In these weeks following the Snowden revelations, we are witnessing a coming together, a circling of wagons by the current American elites, both political operatives and pundits, regardless of political persuasion. This abrupt ad hoc unity contrasts with the all-too-familiar and perennial internecine schism that has predominated for decades. This unity, granting unmitigated justification for invasion of privacy and violation of Constitutional precepts, and which denounces and disparages Snowden for daring to confront this established consensus, defies an increasing and virulent opposition as the governed are temporarily stirred from their long somnolence with worthless baubles and silly trivialities.

Odd Bits Gleaned from Internet – June 11, 2013

Headlines

World’s oldest person and oldest man ever, dies in Japan at age 116

The elderly do only get about 15 minutes of fame.

 Gatineau (Quebec) man turns unfixed pothole in front of his house into (flower) garden

Fastest way to get governments to fix potholes.

Ex Post Facto Law – (retroactive law)

It has generally been considered to be unjust in Western civilization, probably globally, certainly Divinely.

Senators Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and Christopher S. Bond, a Republican sent a letter to Department of Justice Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr., on December 2, 2010, which included:

If Mr. Assange and his possible accomplices cannot be charged under the Espionage Act (or any other applicable statute), please know that we stand ready and willing to support your efforts to “close those gaps” in the law, as you also mentioned this week.

Apparently, ranking U.S. Senators missed that class on ethics and civics. In light of historical accumulation of phone calls, internet chats, visited Internet sites, emails etc.; might not this sense of Senatorial justice be cause for alarm?

 

Edward Snowden: Traitor or Hero

In interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos on June 11, 2013.

Republican House Speaker John Boehner: “He’s a traitor”

Two points:

Republicans taking the White House in 2016 probably not a done deal with leaders with political IQs of less than 100 and political theory IQs of less than 75.

Why the antinomy? Edward Snowden is both traitor and hero. He is a traitor to the American state; a hero to humanity.

Welcome to the USSA (Footnote 1)

From my earliest youth, I held excessive zeal for liberty. And thus, the Revolutionary Land of the Free to our south and the political principles by which such liberty was constructed, had always attracted me. I detested the faint residue of conservative Loyalist and Monarchist sentiment still persisting in the mid-1960s. It represented a mildly psychic oppression. During the 1967 Centennial Year, I sang with Bobby Gimby for the Queen as part of a ragtag children’s choir at Centennial Stadium in Etobicoke. I recall thinking, at 9 years old, how much of a hypocrite I was, considering that I detested the pompous falsity and pretentious decorum of the Monarchy and Imperial British sentiment.

Canadian history was a bore. While national America was fashioned out of ideas in salons, national Canada was forged out of self-interests at a business meeting. This nation has failed to contribute any unique and useful political idea or perspective to world civilization. Thus, while I was never taken in by any civic religion to speak of in this hotel room, we call Canada; I must confess that the American civic religion held powerful sway (and blighted clarity of thought) until George W. Bush completely eviscerated any remaining delusions.

But the America of my dream had really suffered its death knell with the assassination of Lincoln and the rise of the first Gilded Age. It had hitherto been a nation, largely dedicated to the commonweal by consent; in which the common man deferred to no one, to the chagrin of European aristocratic observers. I am under no illusion that it was paradise on earth or that it was bereft of its own set of travesty and atrocity. However, it retained soul and vitality, amassing an inheritance of social capital that would take over a century to completely deplete. Ronald Reagan’s ‘City on a Hill’ represented that last gasp of nostalgia for an America that was.

Because what happens in the U.S. has such huge repercussions in the rest of the West, I recall opinionating in the mid-2000s that I would have impeached Bush Jr. for deception concerning entry into the Iraq War (2003). Even as sort-of-conservative-minded orthodox Evangelical, I recall arguing against a whole family of neo-Cons, social and small-c conservatives in the Christmas period of 2004/5 about the folly of that war. I asserted that the U.S. was entering into an Islamic version of Yugoslavia; ostensibly imposing liberal democracy upon people with an underlying ideology which is irreconcilable and existentially threatened by Western thought and institutions. The Americans would retreat with tails between their legs, leaving a fragile Iraqi government, presiding over a bloodily divided nation, waiting for the next Saddam Hussein to restore a coercive unity. Meanwhile, America would have lost complete moral authority; only able to keep Pax Americana by raw force alone; thereby requiring higher exactions of its own blood and treasure than when it is perceived the imperial power is governing, to some extent, for the benefit of all. That prediction is almost fully complete.

Nevertheless, as the lesser of two evils, I would still have voted for Bush in 2004.  There is something terribly wrong with this picture!

In the aftermath of his term, I concluded that George W. Bush had been the worst president since James Buchanan (1857-1861). And I expected that Obama would be worst still; back-to-back political calamities. But Obama has exceeded expectations on that count. For, if George Walker Bush was a buffoon; Barack Hussein Obama is a barbarian. Rather than James Buchanan, one must go back to the foreign English parliament serving King George III for comparison with Obama.

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The prudence of the Founding Fathers and the generations immediately preceding and following, noted threats on both sides of any narrow path or orbit. And thus they sought to maintain civil and social peace by balancing government against itself and balancing government against the medley of private interests, ideologies and factions within society.

Since then, one political party has since Woodrow Wilson completely repudiated the prudence of the Founding Fathers; believing in the goodness of humanity whose fault is occasionally intellectual incompetence. Thus, a large and encroaching state is pursued. And the arrogance of that faction is constantly imposed upon all others. The other political party has sought to return to the letter of the original Constitution, not realizing that it was merely a Montesquieun political device to balance the apparent social forces of their times. But concentration of private wealth/power becomes itself a tyrannical threat in a minimalist government. Thus, the changing dynamics of the 19^th and 20^th Century requires constant amending to reflect those altering realities.

But we dwell in an era of the simple-minded; who react to one threat in pendular and singular extremes; without concern for balance. Unmitigated security is pursued against the haphazard threats of largely private enemies; ignoring the insecurity against the person and nation, posed by unmitigated power of the state and state bureaucracies.

But large nations and civilizations do not fall, merely because of the loss of one battle or the collapse of tall buildings. The Roman city state with its Latin allies survived in cohesion, after ten years of Hannibal’s ravaging the Italian peninsula, while a much larger Empire had so rotted within, that barbarians with much smaller populations and resources finally swarmed it in the 5^th Century.

Islamic terrorists might constitute a chaotic threat to individual safety. But they are not, in themselves, a threat to the survival of the nation. Indeed, they pose a much smaller threat to individual safety than the 15,000 murders each year or fatalities due to vehicular accidents. Get a grip people! The overreaching and increasing tyrannical power of the bureaucratic state, given much impetus in these last dozen years, is a far greater threat to individual safety and security and ultimately to the survival and welfare of the American nation.

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With wholesale recording of virtually every electronic transaction (voice, email, credit card, web, chat) in a society whose livelihood and lifestyle requires considerable interaction with a virtual world; one wonders what remaining unreasonable search and seizure provisions of the Constitution are left, which U.S. Administrations could violate.

Really! Modest encroachments to privacy, Mr. President! Such a suggestion can only be a product of a consummate comedian or truly defective mind. If this was a Third Amendment infraction (quartering of soldiers in private homes), a modest encroachment in Obama’s mind would be the right for soldiers to sleep naked in the same bed as the daughters of the household; as long as it didn’t involve penetration.

Dragnets of metadata can easily provide sufficient red flags for further fishing; especially in the disingenuity of interpretations of what constitutes threat. and surely, if it easy enough to shop around for a sympathetic and/or compliant judge to obtain a blanket general warrant, how hard should it be to get judicial approval to open the package of any flagged individual item.

We witness these public officials and their courtiers, dismissing the potential dangers against civil rights infractions, totalitarianism and tyranny as alarmist; just as they did in my youth in my country. I recall the mantra. “Surely, one has nothing to worry about if one hasn’t done anything wrong.” The problem with such drivel is that it presumes upon the virtue of the public guardians.

Vice is inherent and universal in humanity. The passing of a civil service exam, or hair-brained psychological profile tests or acceptance into public service does not transform that same private individual, prone to self-interest and vice, into paragons of virtue and wisdom. Indeed, as unscrupulous opportunists survey the sociopolitical landscape, they will be times when ‘public service’ serves as the best means for feathering their own nest; through the organs of government than apart from it; as the shrewd operators of the late Roman Empire can attest

It is ironic that the NSA and PRISM revelations followed so soon on the heels of the chilling surveillance and harassment of journalists; or the preferential EPA and IRS treatment of one sociopolitical faction over the other; or the egregious leakage of records of donators to the National Organization for Marriage by IRS officials in California during the Proposition 8 referendum, so that opponents could threaten the livelihoods of employer and employees who disagreed with them. This is the stuff that begets civil war!

So it is not merely about the potential of providing “All the Infrastructure a Tyrant Would Need, Courtesy of Bush and Obama”². Violations of constitutional protections are already presently exploited. The current administration might consider those who visit web sites about the Constitution, marriage or the history of English civil rights more of a threat to national security or the welfare of society and state. But perhaps a future administration, which represents the opposite sociopolitical faction, might deem those who frequent the porn and polyamory pages or donators to the ACLU or Planned Parenthood, to be more of a menace. Americans should be more concerned presently with the organs of the state apparatus being exploited as civic weapons in culture wars than with a theoretical tyranny.

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Last year (February 14, 2012), Canada had a similar concern crop up with the aborted attempt to pass the so-called “Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act” (Bill C-30).

The bill would have granted authorities new powers to monitor and track the digital activities of Canadians in real-time, required service providers to log information about their customers and turn it over if requested, and made back door entrances mandatory allowing remote access of individuals’ electronic information, each without needing a warrant. Documents obtained under the Access to Information Act show that the government desired to use the expanded powers in cases not involving criminality.³

Although, the legislation spoke nothing about pedophiles, the Harper government felt is useful to alarm their conservative base with this misdirection. We could “either stand with us or with the child pornographers”. However, I was part of that base; as is arch-conservative Lorne Gunter.

Politicians or police will talk themselves into the wisdom of using the same technology to find tax cheats, divorced parents falling behind on child support or even human-rights violators […] What if you’re a member of a faith that believes homosexuality is a sin and you send out emails arguing against gay marriage or gay adoption and you use language that is a little too strong? Or maybe you’re having your basement renovated and you boast to a friend that you’re avoiding the HST by paying cash — should that send off an alarm at the Canada Revenue Agency?⁴

In my youth, Conservatives were complicit conspirators with Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s War Measures Act of 1970; a legislative mallet to swat a relative fly. It made martyrs of those political prisoners imprisoned for many months without warrant or charge. It discredited the ideals of individual civil rights in Quebec, hitherto promoted by the federal authorities. And it led to the first separatist PQ government in 1976.

Bill C-30 was withdrawn after much opposition by all factions in this country. And thus, how strange and ironic that the so-called “Land of the Free” has now become the more oppressive; and my native country, which I felt had proved too dismissive of civil liberty, has a little more sensibility and backbone than I remember in my youth. It is not that Canada hasn’t also increasingly lost the important liberties to an all-encroaching state. It is just that the military-industrial complex of our southern neighbour has deteriorated all that much faster.

◊          ◊          ◊          ◊          ◊          ◊          ◊

The secular delusion that America is a city on a hill, beaming an example to the world, is exposed to have now become a fraud. The present folly that exists there points more toward a trajectory of the black hole of Calcutta; of extreme vitriolic polarization with the collapse of the ideological middle; of extreme economic disparity (with ensuing social, legal and political injustices) with the collapse of the middle class; of loss of economic opportunity, even economic growth as consequence; of an astonishingly incompetent and foolish fiscal and monetary policy which can only lead to another financial asset meltdown, albeit with no further ability to ameliorate; even to a currency crisis. Bush and Obama have indeed provided the infrastructure for future tyranny and destruction of a free civic polity. And real and substantive causes already exist, which give reason for such a totalitarian autocracy to emerge.

I have read many comments on U.S. message boards, which perceive that to correct this devolution toward the totalitarian, tyrannical surveillance state; it will require civil insurrection and bloodshed. Unlike their ancestors however, I don’t think there exists in America, the moral fiber and civic courage to seriously challenge the oligarchic sociopolitical priesthood of both Republican and Democratic parties and their benefactors. The muted opposition to the TSA depredations of physical modesty proved that case. And it would require a rational and coherent political philosophy, which attracted both mutually suspicious wings of the sociopolitical continuum. And most citizens…er subjects will, after being momentarily irritated from their stupor of silly trivialities and confronted by truth, will return to their porn, gaming and social media after voicing their half-hearted and perfunctory outrage.

And thus I lament for the loss of liberty; not only in the Land of the Free; but also for every other jurisdiction in the world. The arrogant hyenas of tyrannical busybodies will have defeated the Lioness. Everything from then on will just be a mopping operation.

Even if you’re not doing anything wrong you’re being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.⁵

And it cannot be lost on all those outside of American jurisdiction that Americans are only concerned about their own liberties, while the rest should be subject to their surveillance. Whenever, a dissident foreign critic was becoming too unwieldy to American interests, these officials could find a way to discredit or harass him/her by fair means or foul. I doubt that this xenophobic imperialist nation has even considered the blowback from that corollary consequence.

 

 NOTES

 

1.      With special thanks to a commentator with pseudonym akpat for the title, from article Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program, Washington Post, June 6, 2013, Accessed http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html on June 9, 2013.

2.       Conor Friedersdorf, “All the Infrastructure a Tyrant Would Need, Courtesy of Bush and Obama”, The Atlantic Monthly, June 7, 2013. Accessed http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/all-the-infrastructure-a-tyrant-would-need-courtesy-of-bush-and-obama/276635/ on June 9, 2013.

3.       Wikipedia, Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, Accessed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Children_from_Internet_Predators_Act on June 9, 2013.

4.       Lorne Gunter, “Want to read my email, Vic Toews? Get a warrant”, The National Post, February 17, 2013, Accessed http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/02/17/lorne-gunter-want-to-read-my-email-get-a-warrant/ on June 9, 2013.

5.       Glenn Greenwald, “Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations” (transcript of interview)”, The Guardian, June 9, 2013, accessed http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance on June 9, 2013.