The House easily passed a bill that would give Donald Trump and future presidents a bludgeon to target and silence dissenting nonprofits on Thursday, in what opponents warned is a step toward allowing the executive branch to wield unchecked, authoritarian power. H.R. 9495, nicknamed the “nonprofit killer” by critics, passed 219 to 184 with 15 Democrats voting “yes.” The legislation…
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An employee at one of my father’s convenience stores was acting strange. He looked uncomfortable and nervous as he questioned my father about the type of payments his convenience store businesses were making and to whom. “I asked my employee if everything was okay,” my father recalled. “He eventually [confessed] that FBI agents approached him and asked him to gather information about my…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The U.S. House on Friday passed legislation to expand a major mass spying authority after voting down a bipartisan push to attach a search warrant requirement to the heavily abused surveillance law. The bill to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for two years passed by a vote of 273-147, with 59 Democrats and 88 Republicans voting no.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Reign of Terror situates the War on Terror as part of a longer story of domination that can be traced back to the founding of the United States as a settler-colonial and slaveholding behemoth.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
The U.S. is now more than 20 years beyond the Patriot Act of October 2001. The immediate aftermath of 9/11 brought a heavy U.S. state focus on Arabs and Muslims in the U.S., rationalizing an expansion of policing and surveillance activities against them. It also inspired the convergence of shared struggles for liberation out of a growing consensus that we cannot abolish policing without abolishing U.S. militarism and empire building.
The “anything goes” context of 9/11 opened up possibilities for expanded forms of policing and surveillance that are unconstitutional. The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), also known as “special registration,” put in place by the Department of Justice in 2002, targeted Arabs and Muslims as well as those from the Middle East and South Asia. Overly broad interpretations of “material support” laws denied people — generally Arabs and Muslims — their freedom and even threatened some forms of humanitarian aid.
But none of this was entirely new. All this was preceded by President Richard Nixon’s “Operation Boulder,” which law professor Susan M. Akram has described as “perhaps the first concerted US government effort to target Arabs in the US for special investigation with the specific purpose of intimidation, harassment, and to discourage their activism on issues relating to the Middle East.”
Ironically, Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 Oklahoma City attack opened the door to the Clinton administration pushing forward a legislative effort allowing the government “to use evidence from secret sources in deportation proceedings for aliens suspected of terrorist involvement. Under the measure, the government would not have to disclose the source of the damaging information to the person whom it is seeking to deport,” The New York Times reported. A white extremist, then, had carried out a deadly bombing, but it was Arabs and Muslims (including Black Arabs and Black Muslims) who faced the prospect of deportation without ever being able to confront their accuser — or even know the identity of those accusing them.
The 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act established a new court charged only with hearing cases in which the government seeks to deport aliens accused of engaging in terrorist activity based on secret evidence submitted in the form of classified information. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act expanded the secret evidence court so that secret evidence could be more easily used to deport even lawful permanent residents as terrorists.
As Arab and Muslim communities were subjected to institutionalized racial profiling, this too frequently encouraged individual anti-Arab and Islamophobic actors who further intimidated and committed acts of violence against Arab and Muslim individuals in everyday life. Between 2000-2009, these violent incidents increased by over 500 percent; since 2016, 484 incidents of hate-motivated violence have been reported and many continue to remain unreported. In the Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian regions, of course, the U.S. military killed people en masse while engaging in torture. The U.S. government also supported authoritarian dictators like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak who would further the U.S. imperialist agenda and simultaneously collaborate in the ongoing colonization of Palestine and siege of Gaza.
According to the Project on Government Oversight’s Jake Laperruque, the U.S., in its rush to crack down on these domestic communities, swept up international communications on an enormous and unprecedented scale. Laperruque also notes that internal U.S. communications were surveilled, as were internet metadata.
When eventually disclosed, this surveillance troubled and infuriated people across the political spectrum, some who cared about ending racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims, and some who generally had spent years inflaming such hatred. Many strands of society were incensed that their communications were being monitored by the government. Yet those with history in U.S.-based Global South liberation movements who were targeted by programs like Nixon’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) or those whose ancestors were killed via collaborations between the KKK and the FBI knew all too well that the Constitution was meant to protect white supremacy rather than protecting us all. At the same time, the Patriot Act truly alarmed liberals and radicals alike in its potential to perpetrate a massive expansion in policing, surveillance and repression.
The George W. Bush administration had effectively circumvented the Fourth Amendment with its protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
Attempts to override the entirely bankrupt legislative action of the USA Freedom Act of 2015, was a consequence less out of concern over targeting Muslims and Arabs than anger over the widespread sweeping up of so much information about U.S. citizens — read: white people.
I lived through these past 20 years between communities in California, Illinois and Michigan. The fear was real. While working-class Arab Muslim immigrant men over the age of 16 were forced to register at their local Immigration and Naturalization Service office as part of the NSEERS program, their loved ones stood outside wondering if they would ever see them again.
The reports of violence against Arabs and Muslims — and those perceived to belong to those categories — were terrifyingly routine. Some stories reached the mainstream media; most circulated simply through word of mouth.
Now, in 2021, following the defeat of former President Donald Trump and his open promotion of anti-Muslim policies, we are witnessing the culmination of efforts led by Muslims and Arabs in the U.S. to build community-based power beyond the psychological and emotional incarceration endured between the Bush and Trump years.
The Arab Resource & Organizing Center in California’s Bay Area along with the Arab American Action Network in Chicago have for years fought back in coalition to support anti-imperialist and abolitionist principles. Left-leaning Arab and Muslim movements are affirming that just because Trump is out doesn’t mean these efforts will relent under President Joe Biden, especially not with his interventionist history and long years of support for Israeli’s colonial policies that have been killing, containing and displacing Palestinians with U.S. weaponry.
These organizations recognize that U.S. empire-building connects movements fighting anti-Black police violence, those pressing back against anti-Arab U.S. militarism and the “war on terror,” as well as groups resisting the militarization of the border and the ongoing colonization of Native land.
The recent news out of Virginia Beach of an ongoing racist attack on a Black family’s home with “music blaring racial slurs and monkey sounds as strobe lights flashed” at the house while authorities dithered sounded all-too-familiar to me. It reminded me of my own research in 2021 with the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy in the Chicago area on the status of racial justice for Arab Americans.
I had been connected to a Muslim woman who was harassed by her neighbors for three years, notwithstanding a restraining order. She told me she felt like a hostage in her own home and police were unwilling to stop the ugly attacks from neighbors coming up to the window and shouting, “F–k Arabs, f–k Muslims.” This would be followed by calls for the family to get out of the U.S.
The animosity both families have faced is painful and traumatic and stems from the same root cause — U.S. racial capitalism and empire building. But younger generations of Black people, Arabs and/or Muslims have also in the last decade recognized more than ever the necessity of conjoining our struggles against racist police violence.
This was seen most visibly in Ferguson, Missouri, but is also witnessed, for instance, in Palestinian-Black solidarity efforts across the country as young Palestinian Arab activists organize against police violence disproportionately targeting Black people, while Black activists align with the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
As the Palestinian Youth Movement said in its 2014 statement of solidarity with Ferguson: “Whether the PATRIOT ACT or COINTELPRO, the targeting and criminalization of our communities must end now.” These efforts have extended through defund the police and abolition efforts uniting both communities.
Shortly after 9/11, I remember the national coalitions like Racial Justice 9/11 that grew overnight when tens of social movements affirmed their unity in the face of the expanding powers of the U.S. nation-state. Today, similar coalitions are inspired by the shared concern over the ways U.S. counterinsurgency tactics that repress movements have expanded, violently justifying the repression of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC)-led groups like the Movement for Black Lives.
When the Bush administration consolidated its internal war on Arabs and Muslims with the Patriot Act, it helped show Trump the power to move a portion of the U.S. public toward increasingly outward-facing white supremacy. Yet it also set in motion new coalitions. These coalitions have urgently grown out of the imperialist and racist policies implemented first by President George W. Bush, and then even more openly by Trump.
I wouldn’t wish those first traumatic months in 2001-2002 on anyone. Yet the solidarity resulting at least in part from the overreach and unconstitutional nature of the Patriot Act, followed by the racism of the Trump administration, gives me a measure of hope.
For all Trump’s efforts to roll back previous social movement wins, many breakthroughs came out of his 2016 presidential victory. More and more grassroots mutual aid movements have materialized, affirming the necessity of growing practices of collective love and reciprocity as alternatives to state violence. Two Muslim women, one Palestinian and one North African, entered the U.S. Congress in 2019 in Palestinian American Rashida Tlaib and Somali American Ilhan Omar. They were joined earlier this year by Rep. Cori Bush, who was active in the Ferguson demonstrations and has openly spoken of solidarity between Black Americans and Palestinians.
In the midst of the Israeli onslaught against Gaza this past May, Representative Bush tweeted: “The fight for Black lives and the fight for Palestinian liberation are interconnected.” She added: “We oppose our money going to fund militarized policing, occupation, and systems of violent oppression and trauma.” Tellingly, she spoke of being anti-apartheid.
Their voices in the halls of Congress are unprecedented. The effort to undermine them is intense. Yet we must remember that the long U.S.-led war on terror is an extension of the U.S.’s colonial, expansionist and racial capitalist project, rather than an exception. We cannot get stuck in celebratory hope after the defeat of Trump. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were not only complicit in the war on terror but also helped expand it.
As Kali Akuno, Brian Drolet and Doug Norberg posted on Facebook on October 27, in their critique of efforts to “save democracy,” this stance is not “an argument to avoid or ignore fighting the further advance of fascistic authoritarianism. It is a critique of a view that restricts people to fighting against certain variants of capitalist governance to the exclusion of fighting against the capitalist system itself.”
If anyone recognizes that President Biden does little to help the U.S. achieve democracy, equality or diversity, it’s my Arab immigrant community. Further, there is no sign of social transformation with Trump continuing to loom on the 2024 horizon and racist provocateurs continuing to organize and contest the 2020 election of a centrist candidate. This is why we need to be willing to imagine a radically alternative future.
Twenty years ago, I remember Arab activists like Rana Elmir demanding an end to the Patriot Act. Forced to reckon with it, they understood its potentially dangerous future. They shouted at protests that it not only expands the containment, repression, and profiling of Arabs and Muslims, but could also massively expand the U.S.’s power to repress all progressive and BIPOC communities.
So here we are. Nicole Nguyen, expert on surveillance and the war on terror, reminds us that by expanding the concept of the “violent extremist” the United States has repressed resistance against the war on terror and resistance against the police.
In the face of this repression, we have no choice but to expand our practices of solidarity, creating hope through the convergence of shared struggles for liberation rooted in collective BIPOC traditions of care, nurturing relations with the land and each other, and in commitments to horizontal, non-hierarchical self-determination.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Despite the modest reforms embraced by lawmakers and the shift in public attitudes toward mass surveillance, Snowden continues to face charges under the Espionage Act and lives in exile under asylum in Russia. Obama reauthorized key provisions in the PATRIOT Act in 2012, but in 2020, the PATRIOT Act’s provisions mostly expired in 2020 when the House of Representatives failed to renew them.
The post The Whistleblowers Who Challenged Mass Surveillance After 9/11 appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
[Editor’s Note: To mark the 20th anniversary of the rise of the American security state after the September 11th attacks, The Dissenter continues a retrospective on this transformation in policing and government.]
Mark Klein worked for over twenty years as a technician for the AT&T Corporation. He blew the whistle on the AT&T’s collaboration with the National Security Agency, which allowed for warrantless wiretapping of phone and internet communications.
In 2006, Klein came to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) with documents of AT&T’s involvement in the United States’ domestic spying program. His whistleblowing became the basis of the organization’s lawsuit against the NSA.
According to Kevin Bankston [PDF], who was an EFF staff attorney, Klein described the “technology behind AT&T’s participation in the program, whereby the NSA had been given complete access to the Internet traffic transiting through at least one, and probably more, AT&T Internet facilities.”
“A secret, NSA-controlled room in an AT&T office” was constructed and splitters copied light signals that were transferred across fiber-optic cables in order to give the government access to AT&T customers’ private data.
The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, or the PATRIOT Act, helped to create a security climate that encouraged this kind of public-private partnership between AT&T and the NSA.
It was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001. However, versions of the legislation, which gave the government expanded authority to engage in mass surveillance and data collection, including against American citizens, were passed earlier in October.
Only a few members of Congress raised the kind of objections which contemplated the types of abuses, which Klein and other whistleblowers exposed.
The PATRIOT Act was developed in 45 days. Several representatives admitted they had not read the bill. Open debate was largely forbidden and amendments to the legislation were discouraged.
Only one U.S. senator voted against the bill—Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin.
Feingold nobly attempted on October 11 to amend the PATRIOT Act to remove some of its worst elements. He tried to amend it so an anti-hacking provision was narrowed. He believed it could “allow universities, libraries, and employers to permit government surveillance of people who are permitted to use the computer facilities of those entities. Such surveillance would take place without a judicial order or probable cause to believe that a crime is being committed.”
A second amendment offered urged senators to a safeguard in the “roving wiretap authority” section of the bill. Feingold believed an order in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act should have been required to “ascertain that the target of the surveillance [was] actually in the house that [was] bugged, or using the phone that [was] tapped.”
Yet another amendment involved section 215, which stated all business records could be compelled for production by the FBI, including medical records from a hospital or doctor, educational records, or records of books a person checked out from a library. Feingold tried to make sure this provision did not become “the platform or an excuse for a fishing expedition for damaging information on American citizens who are not the subjects of FISA surveillance.”
Feingold tried to warn senators of what would happen if terrorists were rewarded by the United States weakening freedoms. He also cautioned against the “mistreatment of Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, South Asians, or others” in the United States. “Already, one day after the attacks, we were hearing news reports that misguided anger against people of these backgrounds had led to harassment, violence, and even death.”
“Our national consciousness still bears the stain and the scars of those events: the Alien and Sedition Acts, the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the injustices perpetrated against German Americans and Italian-Americans, the blacklisting of supposed communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era, and the surveillance and harassment of antiwar protesters, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., during the Vietnam War.
“We must not allow this piece of our past to become prologue,” Feingold declared.
But the Senate did not heed his words of caution. All three of the amendments were defeated. In fact, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a Democrat from South Dakota, opposed the amendments on procedural grounds, claiming there was no time to delay passage of the PATRIOT Act.
In the House of Representatives, a small number of representatives objected.
Representative Bobby Scott contended the legislation was not “limited to terrorism.” It reduced standards for foreign intelligence wiretapping, allowed for a roving wiretap, and the ability to use information from a roving wiretap in a criminal investigation. This would allow the government to “conduct a criminal investigation without probable cause.”
Both Scott and Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee were concerned about provisions that could be used to permit the indefinite detention of Americans. Scott was bothered by the parts of the bill that would permit secret searches referred to as “sneak-and-peak.”
Representative Tom Udall protested the fact that members were not allowed to offer amendments. “At no point in the debate in this very profound set of issues have we had a procedure whereby the most democratic institution in our government, the House of Representatives, engages in democracy.”
“This bill, ironically, which has been given all of these high-flying acronyms, it is the PATRIOT bill, it is the U.S.A. bill, it is the stand up and sing the Star-Spangled Banner bill, has been debated in the most undemocratic way possible, and it is not worthy of this institution,” Udall added.
While Congress granted U.S. security agencies enormously expanded power, the FBI detained and questioned hundreds of Arabs, Muslims, or South Asians about the 9/11 attacks. They were held for months and not charged with any crimes. Under the pretext of “immigration violations,” Attorney General Ashcroft kept them in squalid jail conditions and then deported most of them.
As journalist Michael Isikoff reported for Newsweek, Thomas Tamm, an attorney at the Justice Department, “stumbled upon the existence of a highly classified National Security Agency program” that involved spying on citizens. Special rules for the unit enabled the section to hide NSA activities from judges on the FISA court. (It was often referred to as “The Program.”)
Tamm contacted the New York Times and became a source for the Eric Lichtblau and James Risen report published in 2006, which revealed that Bush secretly authorized the NSA to engage in warrantless wiretapping through a program known as Stellar Wind.
“I asked a supervisor of mine if she knew what ‘The Program’ was about,” recalled Tamm during an interview for PBS FRONTLINE. “She told me that she just assumed that what we were doing was illegal and she didn’t want to ask any questions. That really ate away at me and bothered me, because I thought I had gone into law enforcement to enforce the law. I didn’t like the fact that I thought, or that a supervisor thought, that we might be doing something illegal.”
Tamm contacted someone with a top-secret security clearance on Capitol Hill, who he knew from working on a prior case. He asked her to find out what Congress knew and if representatives, especially those on the intelligence committees, understood what was being done. She did not really help him uncover any answers. He emailed and asked again for her assistance. When she said she could not help him, he said he would have to go the press.
“You know, Tom, whistleblowers frequently don’t end up very well,” Tamm’s contact replied.
At first, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller allowed the Bush White House to pressure the media organization into not publishing the story before Bush was re-elected in 2004. After Risen threatened to include it in his book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, the Times moved to publish in December 2005 before Risen’s book was released.
In retaliation for exposing this “separate track” in the government for authorizing secret and illegal surveillance, the FBI raided Tamm’s home on August 1, 2007. His family endured a lot of hardship. He believed he could be indicted by the Justice Department at any moment and turned to Isikoff to get his story out on what he did and why he did it.
Tamm was granted immunity in April 2011 to testify before a grand jury investigating leaks published by Risen from the CIA. He testified on details that were not previously agreed upon, but since he was not ashamed of what he did, Tamm felt no reason to hold back. And once that was over, the Justice Department indicated there would be no charges.
NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake spoke over the phone in October 2001 with one of the top lawyers in the NSA. He was concerned that Stellar Wind or “The Program,” which gathered the phone calls and Internet communications of millions of Americans, was illegal.
When asked about this conversation by PBS FRONTLINE, that lawyer, Vito Potenza, pretended not to remember the phone call. He also indicated he would have ignored Drake’s concerns.
“Don’t bother me with this. I mean, you know, the minute he said, if he did say you’re using this to violate the Constitution, I mean, I probably would have stopped the conversation at that point quite frankly. So, I mean, if that’s what he said he said, then anything after that I probably wasn’t listening to anyway,” Potenza told PBS FRONTLINE.
Drake said he “confronted” Potenza “directly in the most direct language possible,” accusing the NSA of “violating the Constitution.” Potenza knew the truth and “chose to go with ‘The Program.’ And anybody questioning ‘The Program’ was a threat.”
Along with NSA whistleblowers Bill Binney, Ed Loomis, and Kirk Wiebe, Drake found that a program called ThinThread no longer had its privacy protections when collecting data. The automatic encryption of U.S. person-related data was suspended. Instead, an algorithm called Mainway linked phone numbers together as data was collected. The agency then went to telecommunications companies like AT&T and requested “bulk-copy records” of Americans.
This convinced Binney, Loomis, and Wiebe to leave the NSA, but Drake remained and attempted to blow the whistle through “proper channels.”
In September 2002, Binney, Wiebe, and Diane Roark, who worked for the House Intelligence Committee, filed a “confidential complaint” with the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Defense. They complained about a “billion dollar boondoggle” called Trailblazer and how officials all the way up to NSA chief Michael Hayden violated regulations by going with this project instead of ThinThread.
It was a felony to engage in this kind of warrantless surveillance, but the names of these individuals who worked for NSA were passed along to the Justice Department for investigation.
After the New York Times finally published the story from Risen and Lichtblau exposing the Bush wiretapping scandal, the FBI targeted them. They had their homes raided. Drake was prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
During that phone call, Drake attempted to warn the the NSA’s top lawyer that what the NSA was doing after the 9/11 attacks was illegal.
“The hair literally was up on the back of my neck, because he proceeded to tell me: ‘You don’t understand. All the lawyers have approved it. It’s legal. The White House has authorized NSA to serve as the executive agent for ‘the Program.’”
In 2008, Congress deliberated over legislation known as the FISA Amendments Act that included retroactive immunity for telecommunications corporations like AT&T, which were vulnerable to lawsuits following revelations from whistleblowers like Mark Klein and Thomas Tamm.
Babak Pasdar, an information technology security expert, came forward [PDF] in February 2008 with evidence that indicated a “major telecommunications giant” likely gave a U.S. government entity “access to every communication coming through that company’s infrastructure, including every email, internet use, document transmission, video, and text message, as well as the ability to listen in on any phone call.”
Members of Congress, including John Dingell, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote in a “Dear Colleague” letter, described the “Quantico Circuit” that Pasdar observed.
“In the course of his work, he discovered that an unidentified third party had been given unfettered and unsecured access to all of the data transmissions it carried,” the letter added. “When Mr. Pasdar identified this security breach and made suggestions about how to correct the situation, representatives of the carrier reportedly refused to secure the network. Moreover, they refused to implement tracking programs to identify what data were accessed.”
According to Pasdar, the access to the carrier’s data center infrastructure included the carrier’s fraud detection system. That was not benign to him. The fraud detection system had the ability to “track all mobile devices by geography.”
Pasdar’s allegations echoed those from Klein, but one key issue for members of Congress was that the telecommunications companies that participated in wiretapping without any court orders or warrants were prohibited from talking to Congress. President George W. Bush would not let them.
Unfortunately, the whistleblowing of Klein and Pasdar was disregarded by Congress. The FISA Amendments Act, as the ACLU put it, legalized “mass, untargeted, and unwarranted spying” on international phone calls and emails. It restricted judicial oversight of surveillance by the FISA court and granted companies like AT&T retroactive immunity.
Senator Barack Obama made it clear during his presidential campaign that he would “support a filibuster of any bill that [included] retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.” When it came time, he declined to filibuster, and he voted for the FISA Amendments Act, which passed 69-28 in the Senate.
Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden made the decision to become a whistleblower after he came across a classified 2009 inspector general’s report on the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program developed under Bush.
“You can’t read something like that and not realize what it means for all of these systems we have,” Snowden declared in an interview with Risen in 2013. “If the highest officials in government can break the law without fearing punishment or even any repercussions at all, secret powers become tremendously dangerous.”
In 2013, Snowden provided numerous documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras that exposed NSA mass surveillance programs, especially those established after the 9/11 attacks, to unprecedented scrutiny.
The first major revelation from Snowden concerned a document that showed the NSA was collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily under section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. In 2015, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals determined [PDF] the collection was illegal and outside the scope of what Congress authorized.
Further revelations included (but were not limited to): a program called PRISM, which involved real-time collection of communications from companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Skype, etc; the collection of email and chat contact lists from millions of people around the world; a “Dishfire” program that collected 200 million text messages per day that the NSA could use to mine contact information, location data, and credit card details; an NSA “loophole” that allowed agents to search U.S. citizens’ emails and phone calls without a warrant; and the targeting of messaging apps like Signal or WhatsApp or encryption tools like Tor.
What Snowden disclosed about surveillance, which was justified by the passage of the PATRIOT Act, showed U.S. security agencies were collecting all the data they could vacuum and copy on to their servers. It prompted a serious but rare conversation among lawmakers and the media about the powers the NSA abuses and the legal authorities the government claimed, which were never granted. Quite a number of programs that officials could not publicly defend were paused or discontinued.
Even a Drug Enforcement Administration program called USTO that harvested the records of billions of American’s international phone calls for more than two decades was ended by the Justice Department in September 2013 because of Snowden’s whistleblowing.
As the New York Times wrote in an editorial in January 2014, “Snowden told The Washington Post earlier this month that he did report his misgivings to two superiors at the agency, showing them the volume of data collected by the NSA, and that they took no action. (The NSA. says there is no evidence of this.) That’s almost certainly because the agency and its leaders don’t consider these collection programs to be an abuse and would never have acted on Mr. Snowden’s concerns.
“Snowden was clearly justified in believing that the only way to blow the whistle on this kind of intelligence-gathering was to expose it to the public and let the resulting furor do the work his superiors would not.”
Despite the modest reforms embraced by lawmakers and the shift in public attitudes toward mass surveillance, Snowden continues to face charges under the Espionage Act and lives in exile under asylum in Russia.Obama reauthorized key provisions in the PATRIOT Act in 2012, but in 2020, the PATRIOT Act’s provisions mostly expired in 2020 when the House of Representatives failed to renew them.
The post The PATRIOT Act And The Whistleblowers Who Challenged Mass Surveillance After 9/11 appeared first on Shadowproof.
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Listen to a reading of this article:
Glenn Greenwald has a new article out titled “Questions About the FBI’s Role in 1/6 Are Mocked Because the FBI Shapes Liberal Corporate Media” about the backlash against right wing media highlighting the incredibly suspicious fact that rank-and-file participants in the January 6 Capitol riot have been harshly prosecuted while many of its actual leaders and organizers have not been.
Greenwald goes over the FBI’s extensive and well-documented history of using undercover agents and informants to entrap easily manipulated individuals into participating in “terror” plots that they themselves initiated and then swooping in to save the day, how unlikely it is that such informants and undercover agents would not have been active in the groups responsible for the Capitol riot, and how unacceptable it is that so little is known about what the FBI and other government agencies were actually doing with regard to these groups in the lead-up to an incident they absolutely knew was coming.
Greenwald also ridicules the way the mass media have used punditry by literal FBI veterans to mockingly dismiss these points as crazy conspiracy theories using fallacious arguments.
Questions About the FBI's Role in 1/6 Are Mocked Because the FBI Shapes Liberal Corporate Mediahttps://t.co/wuHhoj5zSB
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 18, 2021
Journalist Whitney Webb also has a new article out titled “Who Is A ‘Terrorist’ In Biden’s America?” about the White House’s new government-wide strategy for confronting the latest big scary boogie man the US public is being trained to fear, namely “domestic terrorism”. Webb flags how the strategy is framed as an approach to countering widely loathed groups like white supremacists, but the White House document describing what it actually does makes it clear that it intends to operate in “an ideologically neutral, threat-driven manner,” as the law “makes no distinction based on political view—left, right or center.”
“However, the document itself puts ‘anti-government’ or ‘anti-authority’ ‘extremists’ in the same category as violent white supremacists in terms of being a threat to the homeland,” Webb writes. “The strategy’s characterization of such individuals is unsettling.”
“For instance, those who ‘violently oppose’ ‘all forms of capitalism’ or ‘corporate globalization’ are listed under this less-discussed category of ‘domestic terrorist,’” Webb adds. “This highlights how people on the left, many of whom have called for capitalism to be dismantled or replaced in the US in recent years, could easily be targeted in this new ‘war’ that many self-proclaimed leftists are currently supporting. Similarly, ‘environmentally-motivated extremists,’ a category in which groups such as Extinction Rebellion could easily fall, are also included.”
(This lines up with an assessment by the ODNI released in March in which the US intelligence cartel places “anarchist violent extremists” and “anti-government/anti-authority violent extremists” on the same level as racially motivated extremist violence. The document says that activism and mere advocacy of political or social positions “may not constitute violent extremism, and may be constitutionally protected,” which of course implies that it “may” not be.)
Webb describes the dangers in the White House strategy’s “call to essentially fuse intelligence agencies, law enforcement, Silicon Valley, and ‘community’ and ‘faith-based’ organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, as well as unspecified foreign governments, as partners in this ‘war,’ which the strategy makes clear will rely heavily on a pre-crime orientation focused largely on what is said on social media and encrypted platforms.”
NEW for TLAV- Far from being a war against “white supremacy,” the Biden administration’s new “domestic terror” strategy clearly targets primarily those who oppose US government overreach and those who oppose capitalism and/or globalization.https://t.co/JR0V88RSRA
— Whitney Webb (@_whitneywebb) June 18, 2021
And you can call me a crazy tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist if you like, but I can’t help wondering if these two stories might perhaps be related somehow. If maybe, just maybe, the FBI’s suspicious behavior before and after the Capitol riot has something to do with the agenda to implement authoritarian measures designed to stomp out any revolutionary impulses that might emerge in an increasingly impoverished and oppressed population.
If maybe, just maybe, the opaque government agencies who run America in alliance with the plutocratic class are deeply afraid of the rising discontent of the masses who greatly outnumber them.
If maybe, just maybe, the fact that the mainstream narrative about the Capitol riot has been full of plot holes, outright falsehoods and narrative spin from the very beginning and has been used to advance preexisting agendas from day one is a bit odd.
If maybe, just maybe, the fact that the incoming Biden administration had already been working on adding new domestic terror policies before January 6 should raise a few eyebrows.
If maybe, just maybe, the fact that Biden has often boasted that he was the original author of the Patriot Act is not irrelevant to the timing of all this.
If maybe, just maybe, the fact that the Capitol riot was immediately used as an excuse to target the left should have been seen as a warning of things to come.
If maybe, just maybe, the leftists who jumped aboard the CNN narrative about the Capitol “coup” in the hope that it could be used to rally the left were misguided and should now adopt a more critical posture.
If maybe, just maybe, the agenda to sustain an unsustainable economic model and an unsustainable empire is expected to require a few more screw turns than the public is likely to accept voluntarily, and precautions are being put in place to prevent a meaningful backlash.
If maybe, just maybe, there was an agenda to implement frightening new “domestic terror” laws to keep Americans from mobilizing against their rulers, and an excuse was cooked up to manufacture support for that agenda.
Patriot Act 2.0 will be rolled out with a lot of mindless bleating about white supremacists and fighting fascism and the actual policies and laws put into place will have virtually nothing to do with any of those things.
— Caitlin Johnstone
(@caitoz) January 10, 2021
I know I’m being a crazy, mentally ill conspiracy theorist here by using this space to wonder about these things. I know it’s practically against the law to voice theories about what conspiracies might be taking place behind the thick walls of government secrecy which prevent us from seeing anything. I know we’re not supposed to speculate, and are supposed to instead trust that these known liars and abusers are doing the right thing until they see fit to inform us that they are not. I know we’re supposed to wait patiently until all the facts come in from institutions which we all know will never give us the facts.
I am behaving badly. I am breaking the rules.
But hey, don’t mind me. I’m just your friendly neighborhood lunatic.
_________________________
The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
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The US political/media class have been pushing hard for more authoritarian policies to stave off the threat of “domestic terrorism” in the wake of the Capitol riot. President Biden, who was already working on rolling out new domestic terror policies well before January sixth, confirmed after the riot that he is making these new measures a priority. Political internet censorship is becoming increasingly normalized, anti-protest bills are being passed, and now we’re seeing liberals encouraged to form “digital armies” to spy on Trump supporters to report them to the authorities.
And an amazingly large percentage of the US population seems to have no problem with any of this, even in sectors of the political spectrum that should really know better by now.
“What else can we do?” they reason. “What other solution could there possibly be to the threat of dangerous fascists and conspiracy theorists continuing to gain power and influence?”
Well there’s a whole lot that can be done, and none of it includes consenting to sweeping new Patriot Act-like authoritarian measures or encouraging monopolistic Silicon Valley plutocrats to censor worldwide political speech. There’s just a whole lot of mass-scale narrative manipulation going on to keep it from being obvious to everyone.
The New Domestic War on Terror is Cominghttps://t.co/DEBw4qB1yr
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 19, 2021
The way to stem the tide of Trumpism (or fascism, or white supremacism, or Trump cultism, or whatever term you use for what you’re worried about here) is to eliminate the conditions which created it.
Trump was only able to launch his successful faux-populist campaign in the first place by exploiting the widespread pre-existing opinion that there was a swamp that needed draining, a corrupt political system whose leadership does not promote the interests of the people.
Conspiracy theories only exist because the government often does evil things and lies about them with the help of the mass media, forcing people to just guess what’s happening behind the opaque wall of government secrecy.
People only get it in their heads that they need a trustworthy strongman to overhaul the system if the system has failed them.
People who are actually interested in ending Trumpism would be promoting an end to the corruption in the political system, an end to the opacity of their government, an end to their uniquely awful electoral system, and an end to the neoliberal policies which have been making Americans poorer and poorer with less and less support from the government which purports to protect them.
But these changes are not being promoted by the US political/media class, because the US political/media class speaks for an empire that depends on these things.
Without corruption, the plutocratic class couldn’t use campaign donations and corporate lobbying to install and maintain politicians who will advance their interests.
Without government secrecy, the oligarchic empire could not conspire in secret to advance the military and economic agendas which form the glue that holds the empire together.
Without a lying mass media, people’s consent could not be manufactured for wars and a system which does not serve their interests.
Without widespread poverty and domestic austerity, people could not be kept too busy and politically impotent to challenge the massive political influence of the plutocrats.
Since the day of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, at least nine states have introduced 14 anti-protest bills. https://t.co/TcyifxsS9D
— The Intercept (@theintercept) January 22, 2021
So the option of stopping the rise of Trumpism by changing the system is taken off the table, which is why you never hear it discussed as a possibility in mainstream circles. The only option people are being offered to debate the pros and cons of is giving more powers to that same corrupt system which created Trump, powers which will be under the control of the next Trumpian figure who is elevated by that very system.
You’re not going to prevent fascism by creating a big authoritarian monster to stomp it into silence, and even if you could you would only be stopping the fascism by becoming the fascism. To stop the rise of fascism you need to actually change. Drastically. Believing you can just make it go away without changing your situation is like believing you can avert an oncoming train by putting your hands over your eyes.
There is no valid argument against what I am saying here. Saying the powerful won’t allow any positive change is just confirming everything I’m saying and confirming the need to remove the powerful from power. Saying that ending corruption, government secrecy and injustice would just be giving the terrorists what they want would be turning yourself into a bootlicker of such cartoonish obsequiousness there aren’t words in the English language adequate to mock you.
Yes, change is desperately needed. Yes, the powerful will resist that change with everything they have. But the alternative is letting them plunge the world into darkness and destruction. We’re going to have to find a way to win this thing.
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Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
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It’s been obvious for a long time that the best way to stop the rise of right-wing extremism in America that everyone’s so worried about today is not to pass a bunch of authoritarian laws, but to reverse the policies of soul-crushing neoliberalism and domestic austerity which led to Donald Trump. Instead of doing this, the next president is already pushing a Patriot Act sequel and reducing the stimulus checks he’d promised the public before he’s even been sworn in.
President-elect Biden promised unambiguously that if voters gave the Democratic Party control of the Senate by electing Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia earlier this month, checks of $2,000 would “go out the door immediately”. Warnock blatantly campaigned on the promise of $2000 checks if elected, literally using pictures of checks with “$2000” written on them to do so. This was not an unclear promise by any stretch of the imagination, yet when Biden unveiled the “American Rescue Plan” on Thursday, the number 1400 was written where the number 2000 should have been.
Boss: Here's your check.
Employee: This is $1400. You said $2000 for the job.
Boss: Yeah but that's minus the $600 I paid you for the last job. You're welcome.— Caitlin Johnstone
The argument being pushed out at the moment is that when Democrats were blatantly promising stimulus checks of $2000 what they really meant was that Americans would receive $1400 on top of the $600 checks they’d received earlier, and everyone should have just known this somehow (perhaps via some sort of psychic precognition or sorcery). Which of course makes as much sense as someone hiring you to do a job for a given amount of money and then paying you the amount promised minus the amount you’d made at your last job.
It’s just so emblematic of US austerity policies, which are so normalized they don’t even use that word. Keep people stretched so thin that even a paltry $2000 after months and months of nothing can be spun as an excessively exorbitant indulgence which must be scaled back to keep it reasonable. In reality a grand total of $2600 in the richest nation on earth after all this time would still be a huge slap in the face, but generations of media spin have gone into keeping Americans from attaining that level of rightful entitlement.
So as of this writing the internet is full of angry Americans actually typing the words “$1400 is not $2000”, which is totally bananas. People should not have to say that the number 1400 is not the same as the number 2000. It feels like if my Twitter feed was full of people saying “Cars are not birds”, or “Pogs are not iPhones”, or “Mimes are not salad”. People should not have to make such self-evident clarifications.
But they apparently do need to make such clarifications, because scumbags like Adam Schiff are looking them right in the eye, sharing information that says “$1,400 checks” on it, and telling them that it says “$2000 relief checks”.
2 + 2 = 5.
So again, it’s pretty clear that America isn’t going to attempt to reverse the conditions which created Trump and all the extremist factions that everyone’s been freaking out about since the Capitol riot. Obama led to Trump, and the strategy going forward is to just keep tightening the neoliberal screws like both Obama and Trump did throughout their entire administrations. And, of course, to advance new “domestic terrorism” laws.
As we discussed previously, Biden has often boasted of being the original author of the Patriot Act years before it was rapidly rolled out amid the fear and blind obsequiousness of the aftermath of 9/11. Now in the aftermath of the Capitol riot we are seeing a push to roll out new authoritarian laws around terrorism, this time taking aim at “domestic terror”, which were also in preparation prior to the event used to manufacture support for them.
In a new article for Washington Monthly titled “It’s Time for a Domestic Terrorism Law“, Bill Scher argues against left-wing critics of the coming laws like Glenn Greenwald and Jacobin‘s Luke Savage saying such “knee-jerk reactions” against potential authoritarian abuses fail to address the growing problem. He opens with the acknowledgement that “Joe Biden’s transition team was already working on a domestic terrorism law before the insurrection,” and then he just keeps on writing as though that’s not weird or suspicious in any way.
Scher lists among the growing threat of domestic terror not just white supremacists and right-wing extremists but “extremist left-wing domestic terrorism” as well. He approvingly cites Adam Schiff’s Confronting The Threat of Terrorism Act, which “creates a definition of domestic terrorism broadly encompassing plots that carry a ‘substantial risk of serious bodily injury’ along with an ‘intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population’ or ‘influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.’” The ACLU has unequivocally denounced Schiff’s bill, saying it “would unnecessarily expand law enforcement authorities to target and discriminate against the very communities Congress is seeking to protect.”
This is sketchy. Anonymous FBI officials basically tell NBC the violence at the Capitol could have been stopped if it wasn't for free speech and the first amendment. They're priming us for domestic terrorist laws.https://t.co/wJP7UhEIFB
— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) January 13, 2021
Known CIA asset Ken Dilanian has also been trotted out to make the case that Americans have too many rights for their own good, co-authoring an NBC article titled “Worried about free speech, FBI never issued intelligence bulletin about possible Capitol violence“.
“FBI intelligence analysts gathered information about possible violence involving the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6., but the FBI never distributed a formal intelligence bulletin, in part because of concerns that doing so might have run afoul of free speech protections, a current and two former senior FBI officials familiar with the matter told NBC News,” the article warns, making sure to inform readers that “experts say the lack of a domestic terrorism statute constrains the FBI from treating far-right and far-left groups the same as Americans who are radicalized to violence by Al Qaeda or ISIS ideology.”
We can expect to see more such articles going forward.
The only way to sincerely believe more Patriot Act-like laws will benefit Americans is to believe that the US will only have wise and beneficent leaders going forward, and the only way to sincerely believe the US will only have wise and beneficent leaders going forward is to be completely shit-eating stupid. The trajectory has already been chosen, and that trajectory is the one that has already given rise to Trump. Continuing along that same trajectory can only give rise to something far uglier, and that something far uglier will have whatever new authoritarian powers are added by Joe Biden.
They’re not actually worried about “domestic terror”, they’re worried about any movement which threatens to topple the status quo. They want to make sure they can adequately spy, infiltrate, agitate and incarcerate into impotence any movement which provides a threat to America’s rulers and the system which funnels them wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. The movements which most threaten this are not rightists, who are generally more or less aligned with the interests of the oligarchic empire, but the left.
This is who they’ll end up targeting going forward, and whatever Biden and Company wind up rolling out to fight “domestic terrorism” will help them do so.
_____________________________
Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
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Patriot Act 2.0 will be rolled out with a lot of mindless bleating about white supremacists and fighting fascism, and the actual policies and laws put into place will have virtually nothing to do with any of those things. They will be geared at preventing the revolutionary changes that need to be pushed for in the United States by the American people.
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Listening to US politicians and pundits the last few years you’d assume it’s been raining actual 9/11s and Pearl Harbors in America 24/7.
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“Our democracy has been attacked!” screamed the political establishment that just forced you to choose between Donald Trump and Democrat Donald Trump for president.
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Saying there’s been an attack on American democracy is like saying there’s been an attack on Kazakhstan’s fjords.
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Liberals learned the words “coup” and “insurrection” like five seconds ago and now they are academic experts on both of these things.
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The narrative managers’ ability to move liberals and progressives from “Defund the police” to “MOAR POLICING” in just a few months was even more impressive than their ability to move them from “Believe Women” and #MeToo to “Tara Reade is a lying grifter”.
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Here’s how politicians, media and government could eliminate conspiracy theories if they really want to:
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To support the censorship of online speech is to support the authority of monopolistic tech oligarchs to exert more and more global control over human communication. Regardless of your attitude toward whoever happens to be getting deplatformed today, supporting this is self-destructive.
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I don’t share people’s magical fascination with the word “tolerance”. As far as I can tell it’s an empty and irrelevant concept. This isn’t about tolerance, it’s about trusting government-tied tech oligarchs to regulate speech around the world on monopolistic speech platforms.
The future of humanity depends on our ability to wake up a critical mass of people to how fucked things really are, and if speech which doesn’t conform to establishment orthodoxy is censored on the platforms the mainstream crowd use to share ideas, that will become impossible.
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“We need to stop fascism so let’s give massive sweeping powers to an elite alliance of unelected authoritarians.”
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“Well I’m a leftist and I haven’t been banned on social media.”
That’s because the left is politically impotent in our society. Unless this is just a hobby for you, at some point you should plan on the left becoming a threat to the oligarchs and warmongers. What do you think happens then?
Do you really think if the left actually becomes a threat to the status quo the Neera Tandens and Rachel Maddows aren’t going to suddenly discover a reason why you’re dangerous and need to be censored? The only way to be fine with censorship is to plan on never challenging power.
Tech billionaires are not on your side, and neither are the government agencies and plutocratic media leaning on them to implement censorship. Those institutions don’t give a shit about silencing the right, they want to implement measures to silence you. The left is being censored already, but it hasn’t seen anything yet.
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“As a leftist I’m fine with censorship because it’s not like the leftist revolution is going to be organized on social media.”
Social media isn’t for organizing the leftist revolution you bonehead, it’s for creating more leftists. It’s for reaching the mainstream.
A leftist’s first and foremost job is to create more leftists. If the left becomes a potent political force, all the censorship protocols they’ve been putting into place these last few years will be used to stop it from infecting the mainstream herd. You shouldn’t want this.
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Trying to stop fascism by making it invisible is like trying to avert a charging bull by putting your hands over your eyes.
If you want to stop the rise of fascism you need to change. Change your sick society. Profoundly. Not just cover up the manifestations of that sickness. Compartmentalizing and covering up the problem instead of pouring money and resources into creating a healthy society which addresses the underlying problems is the most shitlib thing ever.
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Saying you are free to leave these monopolistic platforms and go to some fringe website no one uses is the same as saying you are free to dig a hole and yell into it. There is no magical free market solution to this problem, because the problem is that imperial power structures are deliberately herding people onto monopolistic speech platforms that they can then censor under the guise of terms of service.
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All of the most critical factors determining what people’s lives are like are invisible now. Most people don’t even know they’re happening. Oligarchy. Neoliberalism. Imperialism. Used to be you knew who the king was, and he’d openly do anything he wanted. Now that’s all kept carefully hidden.
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Why is it kept hidden now? Well there are a lot of factors, but mostly it’s because the rank-and-file public discovered guillotines. Ever since then your rulers are out of necessity kept hidden from you, and so is their totalitarianism.
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The US government is the most evil and destructive force in the world. Not Trump. The US government. This will not change in any meaningful way when Trump leaves. Massive amounts of manipulation have been poured into keeping you from seeing this.
____________________
Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Poems For Rebels or my old book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
A lot’s been happening really fast. It’s a white noise saturation day and it’s impossible to keep track of everything going on, so I’m just going to post my thoughts on a few of the things that have happened.
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Biden has announced plans to roll out new domestic terrorism laws in the wake of the Capitol Hill riot.
“Mr. Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them,” Wall Street Journal reports.
Did you know that Biden has often boasted about being the original author of the US Patriot Act?
The first draft of the civil rights-eroding USA PATRIOT Act was magically introduced one week after the 9/11 attacks. Legislators later admitted that they hadn’t even had time to read through the hundreds of pages of the history-shaping bill before passing it the next month, yet somehow its authors were able to gather all the necessary information and write the whole entire thing in a week.
This was because most of the work had already been done. CNET reported the following back in 2008:
“Months before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, [then-Senator Joe] Biden introduced another bill called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995. It previewed the 2001 Patriot Act by allowing secret evidence to be used in prosecutions, expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and wiretap laws, creating a new federal crime of ‘terrorism’ that could be invoked based on political beliefs, permitting the U.S. military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and allowing permanent detention of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review. The Center for National Security Studies said the bill would erode ‘constitutional and statutory due process protections’ and would ‘authorize the Justice Department to pick and choose crimes to investigate and prosecute based on political beliefs and associations.’
Biden’s bill was never put to a vote, but after 9/11 then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly credited his bill with the foundations of the USA PATRIOT Act.
“Civil libertarians were opposed to it,” Biden said in 2002 of his bill. “Right after 1994, and you can ask the attorney general this, because I got a call when he introduced the Patriot Act. He said, ‘Joe, I’m introducing the act basically as you wrote it in 1994.’”
The post 9/11 era is over. The single greatest national security threat right now is our internal division. The threat of domestic terrorism. The polarization that threatens our democracy. If we don't reconnect our two Americas, the threats will not have to come from the outside. pic.twitter.com/ADgGcf7qEo
— Rep. Elissa Slotkin (@RepSlotkin) January 8, 2021
A recent Morning Joe appearance by CIA analyst-turned House Representative Elissa Slotkin eagerly informed us that the real battle against terrorism is now inside America’s borders.
“The post 9/11 era is over,” Slotkin tweeted while sharing a clip of her appearance. “The single greatest national security threat right now is our internal division. The threat of domestic terrorism. The polarization that threatens our democracy. If we don’t reconnect our two Americas, the threats will not have to come from the outside.”
“Before Congress, Elissa worked for the CIA and the Pentagon and helped destabilize the Middle East during the Bush and Obama admins,” tweeted journalist Whitney Webb in response. “What she says here is essentially an open announcement that the US has moved from the ‘War on [foreign] terror’ to the ‘War on domestic terror’.”
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In response to pressures from all directions including its own staff, Twitter has followed Facebook’s lead and removed Donald Trump’s account.
And it wasn’t just Trump. Accounts are vanishing quickly, including some popular Trump supporter accounts. I myself have lost hundreds of followers on Twitter in the last few hours, and I’ve seen people saying they lost a lot more.
It also wasn’t just Trump supporters; leftist accounts are getting suspended too. The online left is hopefully learning that cheering for Twitter “banning fascists” irrationally assumes that (A) their purges are only banning fascists and (B) they are limiting their bans to your personal definition of fascists. There is no basis whatsoever for either of these assumptions.
Wow! These people hold rallies protesting the unjust evictions of poor people during the Covid. We have been telling you. They will come for the Progressives as well. That is why we must protect our freedom of speech and our civil liberties. pic.twitter.com/IXVW86HjL6
— Craig Pasta Jardula (@yopasta) January 9, 2021
Google has ratcheted things up even further by removing Parler from its app store, and Apple will likely soon follow. This push to marginalize even the already fringey social media sites is making the libertarian/shitlib argument of “If you don’t like censorship just go to another platform” look pretty ridiculous.
This is all happening just in time for the Biden administration, about which critics had already been voicing grave concerns regarding the future of internet censorship.
The censorship of a political faction at the hands of a few liberal Silicon Valley billionaires will do the exact opposite of eliminating right-wing paranoia and conspiracy theories, and everyone knows it. You’re not trying to make things better, you’re trying to make them worse. You’re not trying to restore peace and order, you’re trying to force a confrontation so your political enemies can be crushed. You’re accelerationist.
A Venn diagram of people who support the latest social media purges and people who secretly hope Trumpers freak out and attempt a violent uprising would look like the Japanese flag.
"Domestic terrorists"; "coup"; "attacks on our democracy"; welcome to the latest iteration of the War on Terror.
— Richard Medhurst (@richimedhurst) January 8, 2021
The Boutique Left, in the blink of an eye, discards all talk of healthcare & stimulus checks to help lay the groundwork and usher in a new age of authoritarianism. pic.twitter.com/qwMwe8WtjZ
The correct response to a huge section of the citizenry doubting an electoral system we’ve known for years is garbage would have been more transparency, not shoving the process through and silencing people who voice doubts and making that entire faction more paranoid and crazy.
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Supporting the censorship of online speech is to support the authority of monopolistic tech oligarchs to exert more and more global control over human communication. Regardless of your attitude toward whoever happens to be getting deplatformed today, supporting this is suicidal.
____________________
Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Poems For Rebels or my old book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
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