PANDEMIC DIARY
EDWARD SNOWDEN FOR PRESIDENT:
PART 1 — The Origins of Domestic Spying
September 25, 2020
On the morning of September 11, 2001, terrorists flew two hijacked passenger planes into the World Trade Center towers in New York City. The buildings imploded from the heat generated by the explosions and ensuing fires that raged.
[Note: Although Adele and I were living in North Carolina at the time of the terrorist attack, our apartment in New York City was a mere three blocks from the foot of The Brooklyn Bridge as you see it in the picture. (TO THE LEFT OF THE ARCHES AND DOWN THE STAIRS) Brooklyn Heights is an historical landmark community of 19th century brownstones and townhouses with a picturesque 1/3 mile walk on the promenade situated on the lower East River from which vantage point, overlooking Lower Manhattan, is the perfect view of The Twin Towers.]
At that very moment, everything changed for America. Along with the destruction of two of the world’s largest buildings, American Democracy began to burn and collapse. However, the real story is about the self-inflicted wounds. A genealogical tale of paranoia, projection and politics.
The American Flag at the base of the smoldering remains of The Twin Towers
One has to go back to 2006 when Mark Klein, an AT&T engineer provided a sheaf of papers to the lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that revealed and established damning evidence that the National Security Agency [NSA], in cooperation with AT&T, was illegally compiling and amassing the internet usage of American citizens and funneling it into a database.
These same documents, this indisputable evidence, became the crux of a civil liberties lawsuit against the government and AT&T. However, in July 2008, Congress along with then-Senator Barack Obama (D-Illinois) voted to override the rights of American citizens to petition for a redress of grievances. Congress passed a law that absolved AT&T of any legal liability for cooperating with the warrantless spying. The bill, signed quickly into law by President George W. Bush, largely legalized the government's secret domestic-wiretapping program.
Mark Klein faded into history without a single congressional committee asking him to testify. And with that, the government won the battle to turn the internet into a permanent spying apparatus immune to oversight from the nation's courts. Mark Klein opined, “I didn’t expect the terrorists to be so successful ultimately in getting us to abandon our core principles.”
Following years of covert spying, in June 2013, The Guardian newspaper reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) was ‘collecting’ the telephone records of tens of millions Americans. The paper published the secret court order directing telecommunication’s company, Verizon, to hand over all its telephone data to the NSA on an "ongoing daily basis".
That report was followed by revelations in both the Washington Post and Guardian that the NSA tapped directly into the servers of nine internet firms, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, to track online communication in a surveillance program known as Prism — a surveillance system launched in 2007 by the US National Security Agency (NSA).
How did this all come about?
A 1978 law - the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act [FISA] - had set out the conditions under which a special three-judge court would authorize electronic surveillance if people were believed to be engaged in espionage or planning an attack against the US on behalf of a foreign power.
Following the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration secretly gave the NSA permission to bypass the court and carry out warrantless surveillance of al-Qaeda suspects and others.
After this emerged in 2005, Congress voted to both offer immunity to the firms that had co-operated with the NSA's requests and to make amendments to FISA providing greater latitude to surveillance operations without prior authorization.
The relaxation to the rules introduced in 2008, meant officials could now obtain court orders without having to identify each individual target or detail the specific types of communications they intended to monitor so long as they convinced the court their purpose was to gather "foreign intelligence information".
In addition they no longer had to confirm both the sender and receiver of the messages were outside the US, but now only had to show it was "reasonable" to believe one of the parties was outside the country.
In 2019, Edward Snowden’s memoir, ‘Permanent Record’, was published.
He describes the 18 years since the September 11 attacks as “a litany of American destruction by way of American self-destruction, with the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts and secret wars”.
Part 2 to follow…