Below is today’s column in USA Today (the print version is a bit shorter). The column looks at the effort of President Barack Obama and his congressional allies to get citizens to give up privacy as they did protections of the free press, due process, and international legal principles on earlier scandals. It is truly the final measure of devotion demanded in what has become a virtual cult of personality.
Over the course of five years, President Obama has demanded much from his supporters from promising not to prosecute officials for torture to ordering warrantless surveillance to the quashing of dozens of public interest lawsuits seeking judicial review of his policies to the recent attack on the free press. He even claimed, under his “Kill List” policy , the right to kill any U.S. citizen that he believes to be a threat to the United States. Yet, most Democrats stuck with Obama. Now, however, Obama is demanding the final measure of devotion — he is asking supporters to abandon privacy principles in a move that will fundamentally alter our society. Indeed, he and congressional allies are trying to convince Americans that they can free themselves of fear by simply redefining privacy in a new and surveillance friendly image.
At issue are massive surveillance programs through which the administration has seized data on every call made by every citizen. At the same time, data on millions of emails are being stored showing addresses, subject lines, and attachments. The effort allows citizens to be tracked in their associations and communications. In other words, total transparency of citizens in a new fishbowl society. In response to the outcry last week, Obama and others assured citizens that they have nothing to fear from the government collecting their calls and data. It was like a scene out of the movie The Matrix with politicians trying to convince people to give up their fears and learn to love living in the artificial environment created for them. Of course, as with the prior notions of the free press and the unilateral use of lethal force, people have to surrender prior notions of privacy. Obama explained these are just modest intrusions in the new concept of government-approved privacy. He insisted that so long as the government did not read your emails or listen to your calls, there is no danger to privacy. Likewise, Sen. Lindsay Graham scoffed at the notion of any concern over privacy so long as you don’t call a terrorist.
It is true that the Supreme Court in 1979 ruled that there is less protection afforded to phone numbers, which can be acquired under “pen registers.” Yet, even accepting that ill-conceived decision in Smith v. Maryland, the Court was addressing government seizure of numbers to individuals who become material to investigations. The government previously used “national security letters” to get such information. What the Obama administration has done is effectively issue a national security letter for every citizens in America. Recently, the Obama administration admitted to putting reporters under surveillance and seizing such information in what is viewed by many as an extreme attack on the principles of the free press. Many citizens remained quiet as the administration called reporters potential criminals for speaking with sources in the administration. Then, they learned the government was gathering the same information from them and all other citizens.
The new privacy model would protect only the content of your emails and calls — unless the government wants to read them. Before we are lulled back to sleep by our leaders, it is worth noting what you are about to give up.
The government has been secretly collecting all of your contacts from your intimate friends to political associations to doctors to product suppliers. Thus, if you are a government employee seeking information on being a whistleblower, your effort to reach lawyers or whistleblower groups will be seized.
Consider who you have called or emailed in the last month. The government can learn a great deal about you from just the people you call and subjects of your emails. Your “metadata” can reveal peculiar tastes and associations that you may consider hidden from all but your closest friends – and now a few thousand government monitors. The government will now know not only who you are calling but how long you are speaking, how often you call people or groups, where you call from, and even attachments like photos that you send. Ironically, the actual content of your calls or emails are usually not needed to determine the reason and subject of such communications. When you call an abortion clinic repeatedly or a medical marijuana resource line, the likely purpose of the call is self-evident. For citizens with unpopular political or religious views, repeated calls or emails to certain churches or groups indicate an obvious interest. From intimate affairs to political associations, the purpose of most communications are self-evident, particularly when they are placed within a mosaic of all of your contacts and calls.
In his press conference, Obama repeated the siren call of all authoritarian figures throughout history: while these powers are great, our motives are benign. So there you have it. The government is promising to better protect you if you just surrender this last measure of privacy. Perhaps it is time. After all, it was Benjamin Franklin who warned that “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and a member of USA TODAY’s board of contributors.
JUNE 10, 2013
Obama calling this scandal all “hype” is an insult to every American.
Let me see if I’ve got this straight. The corporatist oligarchy insists it has good reason to know who I call and email, but denies Americans have any right to know who administration official are meeting with, much less what they’re discussing, when determining important policy matters like energy and the environment, is that it?
It should be the other way around. Americans should be able to know who our elected officials are talking to and what they are saying. Obama’s all very secretive when it comes to his bidness, isn’t he?
Glenn Greenwald ‘NSA Keeps Extremely Precise Statistics’
NSA, FISA Whistleblower Eric Snowden
There’s one phone call the administration is practically guaranteed not to monitor – my call to the White House to register my disapproval of these surveillance measures
The death of democracy and the ‘land of the free’. Sad and troubled by this. I never thought this would occur.
To grasp where this is going, one only needs to read the scoop on the practices of J. Edgar Hoover who collected “dirty laundry” on political figures so he could blackmail them into silence or otherwise manipulate them.
Ellsberg calls Snowden a hero (Huffington Post).
In fourth grade I lost the spulling Bee when I mis-spelled grammar. The author of this topic has to go to a class on grammar, not for the spelling but for the continuous grammar errors. See the first sentence of the second paragraph of the article above. Get a proof reader and perhaps a cite checker. I did not go on to read the rest of the article
Telling some one to leave the country when he criticizes the government is inappropriate. What’s next? Making someone leave the country because they criticize the government? The NSA program is an abomination. Obama knows that but he is hoping, not without justification, that because he is OBAMA and not Bush the supine Democrats will keep their mouths shut and turn their brains off. He already has the “support” of the GOP!? Professor Turley, don’t leave. More criticism please. I hope someone will listen.
George W. Obama, Commader in Heat…..
Now, what country do we live in…. And why…. Are they allowed to do this….
Dr. Turley,
The wheels of life turn in ways beyond our comprehension.
But, if you’re not happy here, leave.
I’d love to see you in… France? I’m partial to Canada myself, but there’s a whole planet out there.
The chattering class is talking about how legal the domestic spying is, even as the Department of Just Us is refusing to release an 86 page FISA court opinion that says certain of their activities violate the Fourth Amendment (FISA Court Rules Domestic Spying Violates Constitution).
Prof Turley, thank you for identifying the mystic criticism-deflecting halo around Barack Obama as what it is, a cult of personality, at least to the nation’s news media. Many of us in the hinterlands never were impressed. However, there are staunch Obama supporters (many in the media) who seem to believe that any criticism of the man or his policies are, at center, “racist.” Thus, his actions and policies have not received the public scrutiny they warranted. Even my Obama-admiring s.o. has come around and told me over the weekend that I’d been correct all along. I reminded her that all we’re seeing in terms of IRS persecution, wiretapping, and snooping is simply “the Chicago way.” As for the effects of a cult of personality on the nation’s life, I refer her, and your readers, to the historical examples. Do not believe that democratic institutions can protect us; the Soviet Union also was, at least on paper, a democratic country, albeit with strange institutions.,
Professor Turley,
I enjoyed your interview with John Cusack. I’ll ask you, as I did him, what remedy do, “We the People”, have regarding the immediate ousting and charging of ALL government officials who seek to nullify the Bill of Rights and usurp The Constitution? In light of recent events, millions of citizens are likely infuriated, but feel powerless to do anything about it, because they’ve no idea what they can do. Obama’s adversaries will not enlighten the general public, because they want his powers and more when they’re able to wrangle the office away from him. Thank you for at writing about the gall of the past and current administrations. Please inform myself and the public at large, what we can do to save our country.
Thank You,
RJ
I commented with this link in the “Massive Surveillance” post.
http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/
It is appropriate here too.
“Trust Us” (TM)
aka
“Trust Us But Don’t Even Think About Irritating Us In Any Way” (TM)
I wonder if the true motive for the government to do what is claimed to be harmless privacy control is for them to gain experience and expertise about obtaining and processing privacy information so that they can use the sophistication and expertise on enemy states and evil people in order to formulate the strategy to effectively target and destroy them with minimum efforts and costs based on all the information on their details of lives obtained from such surveillance. They are only practicing to perfect the skills, so to speak. . .
I have never voted for a Republican to be president, but I never voted for Obama either. He came across and still comes across as a power seeker that rivals and exceeds that of GWB. His transformation in office from “try to work with the GOP” to “will work in secret” is disturbing. Unfortunately, when you have a public more concerned about the winner of Dancing with the Stars than the slow shredding of the Constitution, it will take more than the occasional outcry to stop the menace now unleashed.
I lived out of the country for years and feel like I came back to some other country. Ive been home since Oct., but it feels like some alternate universe. When I read what the president spoke the other day about the modest intrusions to our privacy, I felt ill. What country did I come home to? Why was I blithely ignoring the national news so much simply because I wasn’t living here? This is MY country and I remember the bicentennial celebration where we celebrated the freedoms that we have in this country. Was everyone in our present government playing expat then and missed that?