The State And The Cattle

The Brazenness of the Ruling Class

The brazenness of the ruling class is usually quite something to behold. They're not even making a token effort to hide what they are about these days. For instance, the president's nominee to head the NSA, one Vice Admiral Michael Rogers, says we definitely need a more tightly interwoven corporatist State and that the 'law' should be employed in such a way as to ensure that the citizenry has no legal means of challenging it. In other words, he pleads for more fascism. It is like time travel without a time machine:

“President Barack Obama's nominee to head the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command said on Tuesday liability protection for corporations that share information with intelligence agencies is crucial in any new U.S. cybersecurity legislation.

"My sense is it's a critical element in any legislation," the nominee, Vice Admiral Michael Rogers, said at his confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

"I believe to be successful, we ultimately have to provide the corporate partners that we would share information with some level of liability protection," he said. Rogers said companies would be "much less inclined" to share information with the intelligence community without blanket liability protection.

Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the panel is very close to agreement on new cyber legislation. However, he said one sticking point is the issue of how to provide immunity and liability protection for companies.

So our primary concern following the  still ongoing NSA scandal should not be how to better protect the privacy of citizens. It should be how to create a legal framework that does the exact opposite, by making corporations into fully integrated arms of the surveillance state that can no longer be challenged if they violate the trust of their clients. Benito would have been proud.

Mussolini: "The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative.” “The truth is that men are tired of liberty.” “All within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

(Photo via shitalloverhumanity.deviantart.com / Author unknown)

Contemporary History is Akin to a Bad B-Movie

Along similar lines, it has become well known that whenever Senator John McCain shows up at someone's doorstep, it is like a visit by the angel of death: chaos will soon erupt, and blood will copiously flow (Syria, Egypt, Libya, the Ukraine – all were subject to a visitation by the zombie-like McCain shortly before things got ugly). For all of Obama's faults, it is a truly frightening thought that this deeply disturbed and disturbing man might have become the president of the United States. As Daniel McAdams notes, he is 'interventionism's energizer bunny'. McCain's greatest regret at this moment in time is that 'there is no US military option in the Ukraine', a fact he deems 'tragic'. Unfortunately for the people of the region, he is about to travel there again, with an entire delegation in tow. As Mish remarks, it would be great if they simply all stayed there. 

When it comes to the NSA and the GCHQ, what is truly astonishing about them is also the brazen manner in which they are toughing out the steady flow of ever more disturbing news regarding their activities. Let us just consider the recent revelation that the NSA and the British GHCQ are infiltrating the internet to 'manipulate discourse, deceive and destroy reputations'. Or the news that the GCHQ has intercepted millions of webcams and collected the images in bulk, material that 'includes a large quantity of sexually explicit images'. As many people commented, this means that the agency probably possesses the biggest collection of child porn on the planet, as teenagers are well known for their less than cautious use of such devices. So millions of perfectly innocent people have their pictures in the nude collected by the spy agency (which will of course never abuse all that data, perish the thought!) without their permission.  We wonder how many terrorists have been caught this way? The answer is probably the same that applies to the entire surveillance effort to date: zero. According to the NSA though, and this is where the brazenness comes to the fore, the problem is not that spy agencies are abusing their power. The problem are the media that are informing said innocent citizens about these matters:

“The outgoing director of the National Security Agency lashed out at media organizations reporting on Edward Snowden’s surveillance revelations, suggesting that British authorities were right to detain David Miranda on terrorism charges and that reporters lack the ability to properly analyze the NSA’s broad surveillance powers.

General Keith Alexander, who has furiously denounced the Snowden revelations, said at a Tuesday cybersecurity panel that unspecified “headway” on what he termed “media leaks” was forthcoming in the next several weeks, possibly to include “media leaks legislation.”

In perhaps his most expansive remarks to date since Miranda – the partner of former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald – was detained for nine hours at Heathrow airport last summer, Alexander noted that a panel of UK judges found Miranda’s detention to be legal.

“Recently, what came out with the justices in the United Kingdom … they looked at what happened on Miranda and other things, and they said it’s interesting: journalists have no standing when it comes to national security issues. They don’t know how to weigh the fact of what they’re giving out and saying, is it in the nation’s interest to divulge this,” Alexander said.

“And I just put that on the table because that’s a key issue that we as a nation [are] going to face. My personal opinion: these leaks have caused grave, significant and irreversible damage to our nation and to our allies. It will take us years to recover,” he said.”

Outgoing NSA chief Alexander holding forth at the neo-con temple AEI: the bad media shall be crushed by force of law.

(Photo via tracesofreality.com / Author unknown)

This by the way, is the same Keith Alexander who first falsely claimed that the blanket surveillance his agency is performing (not has performed: they keep doing it of course. Nothing has changed.) had foiled '52 terrorist attacks'. This initial lie was later amended to 'perhaps' two terrorist attacks, but as many experts aver, even that assertion is highly unlikely to be true. In other words, they foiled zilch. But “it will take us years to recover” from all this evil reporting on the illegal surveillance, to which we can only say: hopefully. Unfortunately we actually don't think so. The only “damage” that has been done was to the reputation of the spy agencies, but that is really the only damage they have suffered. As far as we can tell, no-one there has been subject to any adverse consequences whatsoever, and their activities continue just as before.

In fact, in another display of their brazen disrespect for what is laughably called the 'rule of law', they have deflected all court challenges before they could even get to the merits stage, on the grounds that the plaintiffs 'have no standing'. Unless one can prove beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt that one has been targeted, one cannot challenge the agency's activities in court. The evidence may exist, but it is classified, so it is not possible to produce it. Pliant courts have knuckled under and accepted this circular reasoning as valid. It is almost as though one were watching a bad B-Movie. One could speculate as to why, but generally it can simply be stated that whenever one challenges the State in the courts, one expects the State to act against itself, since the courts are obviously part of the State. As Murray Rothbard notes in 'The Anatomy of the State', judicial review has been transformed from a device limiting State power to a device justifying it:

“Certainly the most ambitious attempt to impose limits on the State has been the Bill of Rights and other restrictive parts of the American Constitution, in which written limits on government became the fundamental law to be interpreted by a judiciary supposedly independent of the other branches of government.

All Americans are familiar with the process by which the construction of limits in the Constitution has been inexorably broadened over the last century. But few have been as keen as Professor Charles Black to see that the State has, in the process, largely transformed judicial review itself from a limiting device to yet another instrument for furnishing ideological legitimacy to the government’s actions. For if a judicial decree of “unconstitutional” is a mighty check to government power, an implicit or explicit verdict of “constitutional” is a mighty weapon for fostering public acceptance of ever-greater government power.”

Occasionally though the sad state of affairs discussed above is relieved by a moment of unintentional humor. One such moment has just arrived via the confrontation between the Senate Intelligence Committee and another burgeoning 'top secret' alphabet bureaucracy, the CIA.

Feinstein and the CIA – A Case of Unintentional Empire Humor

It is rare to see the 'overseers' actually clash with the bureaucrats they are supposed to keep tabs on, especially in the 'national security' space. Dianne Feinstein, the current head of the Senate intelligence committee is well known for supporting and defending the unconstitutional spying by the NSA at every turn. However, she has apparently just rediscovered the fourth amendment because it seems she and her colleagues have been on the receiving end of some unauthorized spying themselves, courtesy of the CIA. This is extremely funny, to say the least. We may well ask: what has she got to hide? After all, we keep being told that there is nothing to worry about with respect to  surveillance by 'national security' bureaucrats if we 'have nothing to hide'.

“The chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein, on Tuesday accused the Central Intelligence Agency of a catalogue of cover-ups, intimidation and smears aimed at investigators probing its role in an “un-American and brutal” programme of post-9/11 detention and interrogation.

In a bombshell statement on the floor of the US Senate, Feinstein, normally an administration loyalist, accused the CIA of potentially violating the US constitution and of criminal activity in its attempts to obstruct her committee’s investigations into the agency’s use of torture. She described the crisis as a “defining moment” for political oversight of the US intelligence service.

Her unprecedented public assault on the CIA represented an intensification of the row between the committee and the agency over a still-secret report on the torture of terrorist suspects after 9/11.

Feinstein, who said she was making her statement “reluctantly”, confirmed recent reports that CIA officials had been accused of monitoring computer networks used by Senate staff investigators. Going further than previously, she referred openly to recent attempts by the CIA to remove documents from the network detailing evidence of torture that would incriminate intelligence officers.”

We seem to faintly recall that the CIA's tortu … err, 'enhanced interrogation' techniques were ordered and condoned from on high, but it is of course understandable that the spooks would want to cover their behinds in view of this investigation. And they are of course employing spook methods to do so – what  did Feinstein expect?

Her following comment is both unintentionally funny and revealing:

“Feinstein said the two investigations, launched at the behest of the CIA, amounted to an attempt at “intimidation”. She revealed that CIA officials had also been reported to the Department of Justice for alleged violations of the fourth amendment and laws preventing them from domestic spying.

“This is a defining moment for the oversight role of our intelligence committee … and whether we can be thwarted by those we oversee,” said Feinstein in a special address on the floor of the the US Senate.

“There is no legitimate reason to allege to the Justice Department that Senate staff may have committed a crime… this is plainly an attempt to intimidate these staff and I am not taking it lightly.”

But, but….blanket surveillance of the citizenry by the NSA is A-OK, isn't it? No 'fourth amendment' issues to be worried about there, according to Ms. Feinstein herself. Nothing seems to have shaken her conviction in this respect. So what should we conclude from this? That the founders meant to limit the applicability of the forth amendment to Senate staffers?

Dianne Feinstein, suspiciously scanning the audience for hidden spies.

(Photo credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

Quod Licet Iovi …

However, the most important part of the statement concerns her complaint that the surveillance she and her staff have been subjected to can be brought into context with 'intimidation'. Indeed, that is precisely one of the main problems with the surveillance State as such: it intimidates people. We cannot even be sure at this stage if the Snowden revelations don't amount to what is known as a 'limited hangout': reveal some, but not all of the truth intentionally, so as to keep more important parts hidden and intimidate the citizenry at the same time as an added bonus.

However, when people become careful what information they are willing to share because they can no longer be certain that not every piece of mail and every telephone conversation is recorded by faceless bureaucrats, an essential feature of civilization is undermined: the free flow of information.

In other words, there is a cost to these activities even from the point of view of their most fervent supporters, a cost that easily exceeds any alleged or perceived 'benefits' (which solely exist in the minds of the perpetrators anyway). By undermining free speech and the free flow of information – which is an inevitable consequence of the intimidation blanket surveillance causes – they inadvertently contribute to their own downfall. After all, unless the State can continue to confiscate wealth to keep these agencies funded, they will cease to exist. Wealth creation in the modern economy is however intimately connected with the free flow of information.

While Ms. Feinstein is undoubtedly correct to complain about the CIA's tactics, she thereby also reveals her double standards and hypocrisy. It is a case of “Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi” as the old Romans have put it (literally: "What is legitimate for Jupiter, is not legitimate for the ox." – or putting it slightly differently, "Gods may do what cattle may not").

It should be perfectly clear that a different set of laws applies to this guy … mere mortals can go pound sand.

(Photo credit: Andrew Bossi)