The fraudulent debate over NSA reform e musica, film

The fraudulent debate over NSA reform

30 May 2015

The US Senate convenes May 31 in a rare Sunday afternoon session called by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to forestall the expiration of Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. This section of the vast police-state law passed in 2001 has been used as the basis for the National Security Agency’s collection of telephone metadata on every phone call made in the United States, as well as authorizing other forms of domestic spying.

In the week leading up to the Senate session, President Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the heads of the FBI and other security agencies have depicted the potential expiration of Section 215 in apocalyptic terms. Obama made several appearances before television cameras to demand action “because it’s necessary to keep the American people safe and secure.” Lynch said that a failure to act would cause “a serious lapse in our ability to protect the American people.”

Other administration representatives were even more strident. At a press briefing of three top officials, all unidentified at the insistence of the White House, one said, “What you’re doing, essentially, is you’re playing national security Russian roulette. We have not had to confront addressing the terrorist threat without these authorities, and it’s going to be fraught with unnecessary risk.”

This scaremongering is completely cynical. The surveillance powers embodied in Section 215 have nothing to do with defending the American people from terrorist attacks. On the contrary, the American people are the principal target of Section 215, and of the Patriot Act as a whole.

On the eve of the vote, a report by the Justice Department’s own Office of Inspector General conceded that the mass collection of data on telephone metadata—the core of Section 215 as interpreted by both the Bush and Obama administrations—has played no role in any terrorism investigation or prosecution. Another of the key powers under Section 215, authorization of “roving wiretaps” of individuals who change cellphones, has been used in only a handful of cases. A provision for wiretaps of so-called “rogue” terrorists—individuals not connected with any organization—has never been used at all.

Given these facts, how is one to account for the “sky is falling” rhetoric from the Obama administration and its congressional allies, both Republican and Democrat, over the possible expiration of Section 215?

Section 215 is of enormous importance to the government—but not for the reason given. The mass data collection on telecommunications and the Internet is a key element in the development of an authoritarian state that is accumulating vast databases on the political and social views of the entire population. The state is preparing to use this intelligence in an effort to crush popular opposition to ever-growing social inequality, police violence and militarism.

The greatest threat to the democratic rights of the American people comes not from Islamic fundamentalist terrorists or their Internet sympathizers, but from the capitalist state itself, which is the main instrument for defending the profits and wealth of the super-rich against the vast majority of the population, the working class. Whatever form the Senate debate takes on Sunday, this central issue will be evaded and covered up.

The Obama administration is pushing for Senate acceptance of the USA Freedom Act, a bill which makes cosmetic changes in Section 215 while reauthorizing it and placing it on a pseudo-legal foundation. The database of call records would be maintained by the telecommunications companies, rather than directly at NSA headquarters, and the NSA would route its data searches through the telecoms.

This bill passed the House of Representatives with overwhelming bipartisan support, but fell three votes short of winning consideration in the Senate. It appears likely that a dozen or more Republican senators, who initially opposed the bill, will switch their votes in order to beat the May 31 deadline. Procedural obstacles by a handful of Republican and Democratic opponents may delay this several days, which would supposedly lead to a temporary shutdown of the call surveillance program.

There is not the slightest reason to believe that the NSA and the vast military-intelligence complex as a whole will actually take such a step. These agencies engaged in mass domestic spying without any legal authorization long before the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001. As a federal appeals court ruled earlier this month, the Bush-Obama interpretation of Section 215 as an authorization of mass call data collection has no legal basis, meaning that the entire surveillance program has been conducted unlawfully for the past 14 years. Operating outside of and in defiance of the law is second nature to the US spy apparatus.

Even the present half-hearted and thoroughly insincere discussion is only taking place in response to the revelations by whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Thomas Drake about the massive police-state buildup under the guise of “anti-terrorism.” The same senators who claim to be concerned about the “surveillance state” have joined in condemning the actions of the courageous individuals who done the public service of exposing it.

There will be much posturing in Sunday’s debate, both from those hyping the threat of terrorism, and those, a small minority, claiming to defend constitutional rights. But Republican Rand Paul, Democrat Ron Wyden and other professed opponents of Section 215 are objecting to only a small portion of the Patriot Act, which is itself only a series of amendments to earlier police-state laws like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The collection of telephone metadata, moreover, is only one of hundreds, if not thousands, of programs through which the US military-intelligence apparatus collects information on the American population.

Every Republican and Democratic politician defends this state machine as a whole. The struggle to defend democratic rights and to dismantle the police-state apparatus of spying and repression is the task of the working class, and it requires the building of an independent working-class political movement based on a socialist program.

Patrick Martin

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/05/30/pers-m30.html

NSA spying bill stalls in US Senate

By Thomas Gaist
25 May 2015

The US Senate failed to pass the so-called USA Freedom Act Saturday, as a 57-42 vote fell three votes shy of the 60 needed to bring the measure to the Senate floor. Several other measures to replace or revise the expiring Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act also were blocked, marking a temporary setback for efforts to continue the bulk collection of telephone metadata.

Promoters of the USA Freedom Act, approved by the US House of Representatives in a 338-88 vote earlier this month, claim that the law would have ended bulk collection of telephone records and metadata carried out under Section 215, which empowers the NSA, FBI, and other government agencies to seize and spy on telephone records and other forms of private data, including bank and credit card statements.

In addition to providing a facade of “reform,” the Freedom Act was also to serve as the vehicle for renewal of other surveillance powers established by the Patriot Act that are currently set to expire on June 1. The Senate will reconvene May 31, with the prospect that failure to enact last-minute legislation would remove the legal authority for a sub-set of the NSA’s vast activities.

Leading congressional supporters and opponents of “surveillance reform” alike are united by their support for the maintenance of the massive surveillance programs, which they present as necessary instruments in defense of the American people against “terrorist” attack.

Democratic Senators Barbara Mikulski and Barbara Boxer issued dire warnings about the possibility that spy powers may lapse, saying that the failure of the Republican-led Senate to pass new surveillance legislation called into question the “ability to govern.”

“This is as serious as it gets,” Boxer said, saying that legislation to reauthorize and update the Patriot Act spy powers is necessary to “protect the country.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said failure to renew the Section 215 powers was creating a “high threat period” by hampering surveillance.

A second attempt to pass emergency legislation extending the spy powers is to proceed on May 31. The Obama administration announced last week that the NSA has begun “winding down” operations associated with Section 215 in anticipation that such efforts will fail. Both the NSA and the White House have refused to offer specifics about the surveillance programs they claim are being closed down.

Like the USA Freedom Act itself, the failure of Congress thus far to renew the Patriot Act powers is being hailed, falsely, in some quarters as a major victory for democracy and blow against the illegal mass spying.

Wired magazine enthused that expiration of Section 215 would represent an “end to bulk collection of telephone data,” and proclaimed that “the government’s bulk collection of phone records from US telecoms is on hold.”

The Guardian announced last week that the failure of Congress thus far to renew Section 215 represents a “wholesale rollback of a wide swath of post-9/11 domestic surveillance.”

“The tides are shifting,” a spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union said in response to the non-renewal of 215, praising the Senate for “taking a stand against simply rubber-stamping provisions of the Patriot Act that have been used to spy on Americans.”

A spokesman for Demand Progress hailed the vote as “a victory for democracy over totalitarianism” and for “open government over secret law.”

Republican Senator Rand Paul, who waged a much-publicized 10-hour filibuster Wednesday against renewal of Section 215, tweeted over the weekend that ongoing moves in Congress have the potential to “end illegal NSA spying once and for all.”

One barely knows where to begin in countering such absurdities. First of all, the provisions in the USA Freedom Act do not even address the bulk of the pseudo-legal framework that underpins the criminal spying operations.

Even if the Patriot Act were repealed completely, this would amount to little more than the purely formal curtailment of one section of the legislative and executive authorizations for mass surveillance programs that began long before the bill’s passage.

Solely on the basis of Executive Order 12333, a decree issued by the Reagan administration and updated during subsequent presidencies, US government spies are empowered to collect any and all data from foreign sources that they deem relevant for intelligence and national security purposes. In the age of global communications, when virtually all forms of data are stored simultaneously on servers located on multiple continents, such power to collect data overseas effectively empowers the NSA to collect all data worldwide.

In an admission that must raise doubts about the government’s claim that the mass spying is necessary to fight “terrorism,” the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General issued a report on the use of Internet activity logs, one of the activities authorized under Section 215, and concluded that it was unable to “identify any major case developments that resulted from records obtained through Section 215 orders.”

Rather than targeting terrorists, the NSA and FBI are compiling ever-growing databases on the social, political and cultural affiliations of the American people, as part of systematic preparations for mass repression against the population. Washington’s security agencies are collecting virtually every type of data in existence, and analyzing and disseminating the latter throughout the state apparatus through the use of “fusion centers,” as well as direct wholesale transfers of bulk data from the NSA to the FBI and other police agencies.

Surveillance technologies are becoming increasingly integrated into covert and paramilitary operations by federal, state and local police agencies. Police agencies down to the local level now routinely deploy StingRays and other surveillance technologies to seize cell phone data in bulk from crowds and cell phone towers.

Just last week, new NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed that the spy agency developed malicious hacking and surveillance software designed to download onto smartphones by piggybacking on apps sold by Google and Samsung. By deploying from leading corporate platforms, the NSA’s IRRITANT HORN program can potentially infect tens of millions of devices with spyware that gives the agency unfettered control over the devices and data stored in their memory.

Such is the behind-the-scenes reality of the “surveillance reform” touted by promoters of the USA Freedom Act. As the stage-managed wrangling in Congress drags on, the actual spying programs continue to grow in complexity and scale.

The stubborn fact, laid bare for all to see through the heroic actions of Snowden and other whistleblowers, is that the US ruling elite is charging ahead as rapidly as possible with plans to expand and develop its mass surveillance programs, as part of an agenda to prepare repression against impending political upheavals.

While one cannot be certain of the precise outcome of the theatrics on Capitol Hill, there is no doubt that one or another legal basis will be found or invented to suit the needs of the state. The military-intelligence apparatus now operates as a law unto itself, doing whatever is necessary to expand and defend its own power and interests and those of its masters on Wall Street.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/05/25/surv-m25.html

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