Baltimore, MD -- What happens when you spend a day at home searching the Internet for home appliances and maybe some back-to-school supplies? For most people, you get a lazy afternoon. But one couple in Long Island, N.Y., got a visit from their local police department. They had some questions about their peculiar Internet searches.
Better sit down before you read this. And move away any valuables you might throw at a wall in a fit of rage.
Michele Catalano was doing Google searches for pressure cookers. Her husband was looking for a new backpack. A couple days later, six members of the "Joint Terrorism Task Force" knocked on their door and asked them to explain their actions. These weren't people from the FBI, the NSA, or the Department of Homeland Security. Rather, they were local police officers. Yet they had access to Internet searches that only a few specific agencies were granted.
The news cycle is trying to draw the American attention away from the ongoing spying scandal, but it's stories like this that keep it from completely dying. This story of the Catalano family from New York merely confirms your worst suspicions. So why would police be looking at the Google searches of a normal, middle-class American family?
The government says that they can look at information of only Americans who are connected to terror suspects by no more than two people. And though it sounds small and limited in its scope, a simple example shows just how far their reach extends.
Let's say on average, a person calls or contacts 40 unique people. Under the current guidelines, the government would be able to mine the records of "only" 2.5 million people. So when the people behind the controls say they did "only" a few hundred searches, they're not including all the other records that fall under their extended network.
Which brings us back to the couple from New York. They're probably a lot like you and countless other people in America. People who accidentally fell into a government surveillance net. All because they knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who made a long-distance phone call to someone on a government watch list.
Fortunately, there isn't a sad ending to this story. The joint terrorism task force didn't arrest them for their inopportune Google searches. But it makes you wonder just how anonymous you are in the mass that is the Internet. Unlike getting lost in a physical crowd, there is an electronic marker that distinguishes you from all other Internet users. And now it seems like someone somewhere is always watching.
When Edward Snowden revealed just how deep the NSA spying rabbit hole went, he revealed how little privacy we really have. And as his story continues to unfold, America's reputation and honor quickly loses its credibility. Before, people saw America as a refuge from oppression. Now Americans are looking to our former enemies for the same protection.
But as Laissez Faire's own Jeffrey Tucker writes in today's article, America's fickle relationship with other countries seems to be a familiar theme throughout our history. See what it means for our current situation, and how Edward Snowden plays a key role for the foreseeable future.
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Introducing Jeffrey Tucker's... Thank You, Russia?
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| Jeffrey Tucker |
In other words, Edward is in big trouble for revealing that our government is doing to its own citizens what the U.S. once accused Russia of doing to its citizens. In what is really a bizarre turn of events, Russia has become a safe haven for an American whistle-blower. Any friend of freedom has to join Lon Snowden in expressing gratitude. Because as it turns out, there are only a handful of countries in the world that the U.S. government can't intimidate into compliance.
I'm as glad as the next guy that "we" won the Cold War. But sometimes you just have to wonder: What was the point of those 45 years of nuclear stalemate? All that time, we were told that this was a mighty struggle between individualism and collectivism, between freedom and tyranny, between capitalism and communism.
But at the end of the day, once everything has shaken itself out, it is Russia that is providing sanctuary to our best citizens.
Is this some sort of strange dystopian novel? Well, yes, and it has a name: Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. Murray Rothbard once did a reconstruction of the hidden meaning of that novel. He demonstrated that Orwell was writing about the reality of the wartime and postwar period. A time when Russia's status as an enemy turned to friend and back to enemy again in the blink of an eye.
In Orwell's depiction, the world is dominated by three superpowers: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. Alliances would turn on a dime depending on political priorities. "We've always been at war with Eastasia," says the slogan. Sounds just like something we'd hear today.
Islamic fundamentalists were U.S. allies in my living memory. They were heralded in the 1980s as freedom fighters who held to traditional family values and served as a mighty bulwark against atheistic communism. After the Cold War, our friends became our enemies. Now the right-wing talk shows speak daily of how we've always been at war with Islam.
The Russia case is particularly interesting. In the 1920s, American politics was sporadically consumed with the Red Scare. By the 1930s, Russia had become a kind of paradigm of progress. It was a model after which the New Deal copied its planning schemes for agriculture and large industry. By wartime, Russia was our dearest friend, a heroic ally in the struggle against Japanese and German imperialism. But only a year after WWII ended, President Truman spun it again: Now Russia was the biggest threat to Europe's freedom, and thus began the long Cold War.
But it is even more complicated than that. As Rothbard wrote in 1986:
"Our deadly enemies in World War II, Germany and Japan, are now considered prime Good Guys, the only problem being their unfortunate reluctance to take up arms against the former Good Guys, the Soviet Union. China, having been a much lauded Good Guy under Chiang Kai-shek when fighting Bad Guy Japan, became the worst of the Bad Guys under communism, and indeed, the United States fought the Korean and Vietnamese wars largely for the sake of containing the expansionism of Communist China, which was supposed to be an even worse guy than the Soviet Union. But now all that is changed, and Communist China is now the virtual ally of the United States against the principal Enemy in the Kremlin."And today? Following some years of friendship in union with the anti-Islamist cause (the U.S. has tacitly backed President Putin in all his imperial wars), Russia is the enemy again. After all, this awful state is protecting a whistle-blower from capture by the U.S.! Meanwhile, Japan doesn't figure into world politics at all, while China is said to be an unrelenting menace to our industrial superiority due to its propensity to steal trade secrets.
As should be clear, Orwell was not so much writing about a future that might come to pass as a present that had already revealed itself in politics throughout the 20th century. This was the century of the total state. What does that mean? It means that no aspect of life is conceptually out of reach for the government. All your data belong to them. All your products, services, and activities are their business. Our property we own only at their discretion. No aspect of life is unplanned by our masters, provided they have the interest and means to make it happen.
The totalitarian mind is revealed in its fullness in the attitude toward war. Beginning in the age of democracy of the 20th century, entire populations were considered to be combatants and potential targets. You know how during U.S. wars, we hear about how civilians are just as culpable for tyrannical power because they are somehow permitting the dictator to rule by failing to overthrow him? We heard this constantly during the Iraq War.
This is a totalitarian mentality. No one is considered outside the political constellation.
Freedom and the total state are incompatible, except that, of course, any state is happy to use propaganda to proclaim itself to be the true land of the free and home of the brave. The reality is borne out in the state's attitude toward dissidents. If you see something and say something bad about the government, what happens to you? It's a basic test of freedom. In this case, the U.S. has been failing miserably.
But the humiliation is increased for Americans to see our former enemies (well, one-time enemies turned friends turned enemies turned friends, etc....) now providing a safe haven to a young man who told the truth about the U.S. surveillance state. Edward Snowden, said Doug Casey last week at Agora Financial's Vancouver Symposium, is not just a hero, but a superhero. He gave up everything to do a public service, all in the interest of making a dent in the inexorable tendency toward total control.
What's fascinating is to see how completely lacking in cynicism Snowden truly is. He thinks that the system can change. He wants Congress to do something. He wants the American people to rise up and demand that their government keep to normal standards of civility and afford their citizens some degree of privacy. In expressing that hope, Edward Snowden revealed himself as one of the last men to actually believe that the system can work to the good. Most of the rest of us lost that hope long ago.
Now he hides... in Russia.
Or as George Orwell might write, "Yet, after all, we've always been at war with Russia."
Sincerely,
Jeffrey Tucker
P.S. Try to remember for a moment what some of your most recent Google searches were. Maybe they were just harmless inquiries that popped into your head. But to some government employee looking for a lead on the next big break, it could be an unlucky combination for you and your family.
Police knocking on your door because you made an innocuous search at the wrong time. Someone combing through your emails because something you wrote as a joke could be construed the wrong way...
Imagine that one day as they're watching your Internet activity everything goes silent. Your electronic trail goes cold. And there's nothing on the Internet that ties you to anything. You've gone dark, and the watchers have no idea what happened.
This isn't the beginning of a new science-fiction techno thriller. It's what thousands of Americans are doing in response to the NSA's surveillance program. Compliance means consent, and a growing number of people in the country have not consented, nor will they ever consent, to this level of government overreach. And now, if you haven't already, you can join their ranks.
Click here to find out how to go dark
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