Glenn Greenwald [1] points to three extraordinary events this week that earn Barack Obama the title of Surveillance President [1]. These events dovetail with the President’s previous conduct aimed at furthering government secrecy [2] at the expense of an informed citizenry. These events also need to be seen in the context of Obama’s War on whistleblowers [3], as reported by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. “[T]he Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. . . . [I]t has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined.” But that is just the beginning. Here’s one more excerpt from The New Yorker:
Jack Balkin, a liberal law professor at Yale, agrees that the increase in leak prosecutions is part of a larger transformation. “We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state,” he says. In his view, zealous leak prosecutions are consonant with other political shifts since 9/11: the emergence of a vast new security bureaucracy, in which at least two and a half million people hold confidential, secret, or top-secret clearances; huge expenditures on electronic monitoring, along with a reinterpretation of the law in order to sanction it; and corporate partnerships with the government that have transformed the counterterrorism industry into a powerful lobbying force. Obama, Balkin says, has “systematically adopted policies consistent with the second term of the Bush Administration.”
[4]But back to the three recent events:
1. Top congressional leaders agreed Thursday to a four-year extension of the Patriot Act;
2. The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation; and
3. The nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation alleges in a lawsuit filed Thursday that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel violated federal open-records laws by refusing to release its legal opinion that concludes that the FBI may obtain telephone records of international calls made from the U.S. without any formal legal process, a watchdog group asserts.
Welcome to the United States of Surveillance.
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