Do you remember those heady days when you understood the rules in life? In your own home, be it a humble mobile in a park in the deep South or a monstrous mansion in Montecito, you were private with your own life – or that of your family – free to live as you chose. The only intrusion you might feel would be from the nosey person in the market trying to judge you by the contents of your shopping cart.
You also knew that you had nothing to fear from the CIA, because they only spied in other countries. That changed during the Nixon years when he instructed the Agency to threaten the FBI to stop a domestic investigation, on the grounds of national security. That investigation? Why, Watergate!
Bob Woodward, of the Washington
Post, reported in his book
The Secret Man (ISBN 0-7432-8715-9) that the agents working the investigation had already smelled a cover-up and they threatened to resign en masse. It was one of the reasons, Woodward speculated, why Mark Felt (then number two at the FBI) quietly helped the investigation he and his colleague, Carl Bernstein, were deep into. Felt avoided breaking the law – as he understood it – by confirming information rather than offering it. He was dubbed
Deep Throat after the title of a porn movie going around at the time.
The sleaze of Nixon has, very unfortunately, returned to the city on the Potomac and citizens’ rights have been eroded over the last seven years. It seems that privacy is a thing of the past and our telephones, faxes and e-mails are the property of others. The accumulation of information about us, from both public and private sectors, is par for the course now. And there will be no going back. It is as if the intelligence seekers have become addicted to it, craving more and more. And it probably will not matter a hoot who is in the White House; the flywheel is moving too fast for it to be stopped.
But you know that when the animals are let loose in the farmyard there is always going to be one or more that turns on its own kind. That now seems to have happened.
Many people don’t know that there is nearly always two of
everything in Washington; parallel universes, if you will. Like signing statements, there is another insidious document that the president can sign: Executive Orders, now known as Directives in the Bush White House. They are an effective way for the Executive Branch to avoid Congressional Oversight. But at least you hear all about them, right? Wrong: because there are also non-published classified Directives to cover the dark side of government.
On January 8, 2008, the Washington
Post reported, Bush signed a classified National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 that puts the NSA in the driving seat of monitoring all the government departments and their networks, internal and public. The initial plan had been to give this power to the Department of Homeland Security, but the security agencies (I’m glad not to know how many) declared vehemently that the department didn’t have enough experience. The NSA was created to monitor traffic outside the US but with its success tapping phones and PCs in the US it was a natural to expand its universe. And, being strong silent types, they won’t tell anyone else what they heard…
The official reasons for the overview of the rest of government is to track and respond to intruders into department systems – most of which seem to have come from China in the last eighteen months – in other words an Internet
war… But if you just wanted to track unwanted, illegitimate traffic patterns, why would you need to listen to content?
The real reason? Control, of course. Stalin would be proud; all we need now are the purges to begin. As per Shakespeare's exhortation, let’s start with the lawyers – that should empty congressional offices!
No, this all smacks of George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four where Big Brother looked after us all. But the news that the new Attorney General, Michael Mukasey – you know, the guy who cannot make up his mind as to whether waterboarding is torture – has a portrait of Orwell
hanging in his office is most revealing, is it not? Of course that Reuters report failed to note that Orwell was just a nom de plume – his real name was Eric Arthur Blair, and he also wrote, famously,
Animal Farm...where the pigs ran the government. As the little porkies shrewdly observed, like they were the inventors of Communism, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Doesn’t that just explain everything?
