Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Juan Cole, who just found out he was the target of a CIA spying campaign to discredit him because he dared to question the president's policies, makes a very interesting suggestion in a post about the Patriot Act, which has now been reauthorized yet again with no new safeguards to protect us against illegal surveillance:
The Congress should revisit the PATRIOT Act in the light of the revelation of what was attempted in my regard, and should repeal the damn thing. Failing that, the federal judiciary should find it unconstitutional, which it is. But one of the things that worries me is that some of the key political and judicial personnel who might want to move against it may themselves already have been victims of surveillance, entrapment and blackmailing. Just how corrupt has our whole governmental apparatus become, that clear violations of our Constitution are blithely accepted?
Sounds paranoid, doesn't it? Except it isn't. If the NSA had been using its now near-total ability to intercept private electronic communications -- we're talking every single phone call, text message and email being swept up into their nets, archived and sifted through -- to get damaging information on key government officials with which to blackmail them into compliance, this would not be at all unprecedented.
That is exactly what the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations did under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover to both political enemies and to ordinary Americans who dared to exercise their right to protest and push for social and political change (with that alleged liberal RFK authorizing the illegal wiretaps of MLK Jr. personally). Let me quote from the Church Committee Report that exposed all of this in 1975:
Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone "bugs", surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous -- and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations -- have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity.Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed -- including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials. While the agencies often committed excesses in response to pressure from high officials in the Executive branch and Congress, they also occasionally initiated improper activities and then concealed them from officials whom they had a duty to inform.
Governmental officials -- including those whose principal duty is to enforce the law --have violated or ignored the law over long periods of time and have advocated and defended their right to break the law.
The Constitutional system of checks and balances has not adequately controlled intelligence activities. Until recently the Executive branch has neither delineated the scope of permissible activities nor established procedures for supervising intelligence agencies. Congress has failed to exercise sufficient oversight, seldom questioning the use to which its appropriations were being put. Most domestic intelligence issues have not reached the courts, and in those cases when they have reached the courts, the judiciary has been reluctant to grapple with them.
That last part sounds eerily familiar, doesn't it? In the few cases where such abuses have reached the courts, the president merely invokes the State Secrets Privilege and the case magically goes away. The fact is that we no longer have a functioning constitution. All three branches of government have ignored the checks and balances built into the Bill of Rights to protect our freedom. And it's hardly paranoid, given our own still-recent history, to believe that part of the reason may be political blackmail fueled by illegal surveillance.
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And the case of Thomas Drake is a sobering reminder that our security agencies will retaliate against anyone who dares to challenge the illegal use of power.
NSA is looking a lot like KGB. No?
Posted by: Dr X | June 21, 2011 11:13 AM
I think you have to combine the NSA (domestic spying and surveillance) with the CIA (kidnapping, torture, and murder, with legal immunity for all acts) to get an equivalent of the KGB. But sure, the US is moving quickly in that direction. Control is in, freedom and asking pointed questions is out.
Posted by: Leisureguy | June 21, 2011 12:01 PM
Yes, well, I suggested a scenario along those lines months ago, probably on this very blog. Except I only thought in terms of members of Congress being blackmailed. Should have thought of judges too.
Posted by: Tualha | June 21, 2011 1:34 PM
The paradox of surveillance is that it is most usefully applied to those far from you, but most easily accomplished with those closest to you.
It is easiest for an American surveillance system to capture the communications of highly connected Americans and easiest for computers to sift and analyze written and spoken english, particularly American english. The surveillance state is always easiest to set up and maintain domestically. All the major states, Russia, China, and the USA, have faced the same dynamic and the natural tendency to drift toward a police state.
The US has flirted with being police state. Hoover tried to run one but his desire to maintain personal control, jealous resistance to granting access to the files, and the simple fact that he both kept the size of his workforce small and used paper files, effectively prevented the creation of an effective police state. The KGB was using the same system at the time and their avoidance of micromanagement and application of a huge workforce allowed them to get the system up and running.
Digital electronics and Moore's law have made storage and processing, speech recognition, have made pretty much all typed or spoken English communications an open book. It can all be sifted, sorted, analyzed, and filed automatically. Essentially without any human intervention.
Even when the specifics of any communications cannot be determined the pattern of communications, who speaks to whom, who initiates contact, who has the final word and frequency and timing of contact tells the system a lot. Stress analysis can be done on voice communications to tell a casual conversation from an important one and direction of information flow.
A big bottleneck is language. Speak in Swahili and the speech recognition system draws a blank. The speech recognition systems are best at handling spoken English. They can handle some Spanish and french. Ironically, they don't do very well with spoken Russian or Chinese but they keep working on them. So far Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and most of the languages of the places we are fighting wars and dropping bombs are fairly opaque to the speech recognition. This will change and it won't be announced.
Irony is if you want secure communications one of the best ways to do it is to simply write a letter and mail it. To intercept it they have to physically hunt it down, hold it in their grubby little hands, and scan and/or read it. The necessity for human intervention makes widespread monitoring of snail mail impractical. Write it by hand to add another layer of bother as handwriting is always difficult to digitize automatically.
One small nuance that needs pointing out is that the Drake affair was always more about institutional resistance to his interference with a large government contractor, and their ability to get lucrative contracts and not deliver a useable product, than any great resistance to his shutting unwarranted surveillance.
Drake was not anti-surveillance. He was pushing a smaller, more nimble, and much more effective surveillance system and criticizing a much larger and more comprehensive and unworkable system pushed by a major contractor. Military and government contractors don't like small. They make their profits on the interstices between between working groups, subsystems, subcontracts let out to subsidiaries with layers of government red tape artfully applied to keep the connection sloppy, inefficient, and highly profitable while maintaining a parody of accountability. People have to remember that contractors are not interested in performance. It is profits they crave.
Half of defense contracting is structured to provide a credible system of excuses for nonperformance. The more comprehensive system Drake shut down would likely have never worked. It would have been Hoover all over again. A system where conflicting institutional goals and requirements, user versus contractor and flow versus control, keep it from developing the structures necessary to allow it to work effectively. That system was crippled, if not stillborn, from the start. Drake caused this larger ineffective system to be dropped and inserted his own much smaller, but more effective system to be adopted. In doing so Drake has helped create an effective surveillance state.
Posted by: Art | June 21, 2011 2:01 PM
All three branches of government have ignored the checks and balances built into the Bill of Rights to protect our freedom.
At the risk of quibbling, I can't think of any checks and balances built into the Bill of Rights.
Posted by: Miko | June 21, 2011 4:44 PM
Miko, have you looked closely? It's the Bill of "Rights".
Posted by: Modusoperandi | June 21, 2011 5:49 PM
I nearly puked when I was recently watching Mike McConnell debate with Bruce Schneier and a guy from EPIC - McConnell kept saying disingenous things like "If I tapped your home phone line, it would be illegal" (not saying anything about CELL phones) and how "There are laws against wiretapping US citizens" (not mentioning that he knows they are being flagrantly violated) etc.
Welcome to the police state. It'll keep going on this trajectory for probably longer than most of us will live, before the people get sick of it and the tumbrils roll, unless the plutocrats and vulture capitalists get too greedy and we need something to eat.
I think it's time to scrap most of the constitution and re-write it, with an emphasis on direct vote democracy (we don't need 'representatives' in this era of electronic voting) including doing away with capital punishment, holding breaking a campaign promise as an impeachable offense and making deploying military force require a plebiscite.
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | June 22, 2011 1:15 AM
I can't think of a current politician who isn't compromised in some way, and throw in that most of them are yellow, and it all adds up to the current state of affairs.
Posted by: Old | June 22, 2011 5:01 AM