Thursday, July 30, 2009

Musings: Dirty Secrets

The sky was dense with old friends — bright Venus, twinkling red Mars, glowing Jupiter, Orion, Makalii — some of whom I hadn’t seen for quite a long time, when Koko and I went walking this morning.

The east brightened a dark blue that slowly drained first the stars, and then the planets, from the sky before a floating mass of gray blew in that promised to dampen the land and hide the sun upon its rising.

Meanwhile, a mostly hidden network of police, military and corporations is monitoring civilian groups. And as law professor and former Army intelligence officer Christopher Pyle revealed in a chilling report on Democracy Now yesterday,

The interview followed an earlier report that antiwar activists in Olympia, Wash., had exposed Army spying and infiltration of their groups, as well as intelligence gathering by the Air Force, the federal Capitol Police and the Coast Guard. When asked about the significance of that revelation, Pyle responded:

I think the significance is less that the Army is monitoring civilian political activity than that there is a network, a nationwide network, of fusion centers, these state police intelligence units, these municipal police intelligence units, that bring together the services of the military, of police, and even private corporations to share information about alleged terrorist groups in cities throughout the country. I was fascinated by the story of the Air Force officer from New Jersey making an inquiry to the police in the state of Washington about this group. This is an enormous network. It’s funded by the Homeland Security Department. Police departments get a great deal of money to set up these intelligence units. And they monitor, largely, lawful political activity, in violation of the First Amendment and, when the military is involved, in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.

This is the kind of surveillance society this country does not need.


When host Amy Goodman asked Pyle what he thought needed to be done to curb this abuse of power, he replied:

I think that we need to prosecute the torturers. I think that’s the biggest single message that we could give to the intelligence community, that it is not above the law. That’s even more important than the domestic intelligence, and the domestic intelligence, to me, is extremely important. ….. And when you get into torture, kidnapping, secret illegal detention and assassination, it seems to me you’ve gone over the hill to the most serious abuses any intelligence community can possibly commit, and that’s the place to start. Don’t lose our focus on that.

And then, after that, we need to investigate ways of curbing domestic intelligence activity. And there’s an area of this which has not yet become publicly known, and that is the role of corporations working with the intelligence agencies, corporations which do data processing and data mining, which are totally exempt from any state or federal privacy laws. There’s no control on them at all.


So what is Obama and Congress waiting for? Why won't they delve into the nation's dirty secrets?

Closer to home, we’ve got our own dirty little secret: the contaminated water that laps on so many beaches.

I know what we're waiting for to resolve this problem: money for sewage systems, a clampdown on development that funnels runoff into streams and so into the ocean and most of all, the political will to clean it up.

Care to place any bets on whether the national or local dirty secret gets dealt with first — or at all?

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

"So what is Obama and Congress waiting for? Why won't they delve into the nation's dirty secrets?"

I really think Obama meant to do the right things, just once he was sworn in and then briefed, he learned some type of state secrets making it abundantly obvious that he can't do those types of things.

What is really going on behind the scenes? I don't even know where to begin speculating.

Anonymous said...

by the way, equating domestic protestors with al qaida terrorists in these types of surveillance programs is bullshit.

Anonymous said...

Where are these surveillance programs violating any "expectation of privacy"? Legal or illegal wiretaps? Spies infiltrating closed door meetings? I don't know if that one is even illegal. Engaging paid informants? Not illegal.

I personally like the idea of all the CCTV's all over England, for example. Wish they had them here.

The govn't wanting to know about protesters and/or terrorists is better than OK with me.

Katy said...

My particular worry is that folks engaged in anti-war and other types of social justice organizing will become obsessed with the possibility that their activist circles have been infiltrated.

The history of such infiltration and spying programs in the 1970's demonstrates that one of the primary objectives of this activity is the destabilization of social movements through the fomentation of disunity, suspicion and mistrust between activists. This seems to provide a bigger pay-off for authorities than the actual "intelligence" they glean from their surveillance. Notice how easily the infiltrator in Washington gave activists the information that other moles were present within the organizations he spied upon.

It is my feeling that a good approach for organizers and activists is to not fall for it. Continue to do the work. Don't inadvertently work for the government by speculating about fellow activists.

Some organizers sense that if you're not being watched, you're not working hard enough to change things.

It would be interesting to hear the reflections of some of the veteran activists from the liberation movements of the '70s who were affected directly by COINTELPRO. I wonder what advice they would have for us today, looking back on the way that COINTELPRO was so effective at breaking up organizations like AIM and the Panthers.

Anonymous said...

"The govn't wanting to know about protesters and/or terrorists is better than OK with me."

Then you'll love North Korea where the beloved leader watches everybody and there are no terrorist or protesters.

Anonymous said...

"The govn't wanting to know about protesters and/or terrorists is better than OK with me."

So you're OK with the next step (one or the other political party using the police and/ or military to surrepetiously defeat or destroy the other), too ????

(why is there seemingly always a segment of society that WANTS to live under fascism?)

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't call England a fascist state.

Anonymous said...

"I wouldn't call England a fascist state"

No one did.

Anonymous said...

"So what is Obama and Congress waiting for? Why won't they delve into the nation's dirty secrets?"

-- id bet such things are being intelligently and maturely handled by this administration. part of why we elected some smart adults, this time


as to "contaminated water"

-- seems to have been that way via ag runoff and long standing industrial parks and operations way, way before more recent housing property developments contributed (albeit marginally) to same


ps - i for one dont mind at all some craig supercomputers reading all my transferred electronic and voice data; but id rather resources be put into human intelligence gathering, domestically or overseas...tho that is hard, unrewarded work, and without sexy fed technology contracts


dwps

Dawson said...

It is my feeling that a good approach for organizers and activists is to not fall for it. Continue to do the work. Don't inadvertently work for the government by speculating about fellow activists.

Exactly. To which I would only add, don't expect the engine driving the government's behavior to significantly change over time, no matter how many times the people in the government change. Styles of behavior and appurtenances of action, yes, but not the core engine of bureaucratic paranoia and self protection.

Those mechanisms are unfortunately hardwired into our behavior, to be triggered whenever we join together in that particular social Frankenstein called the State.

Anonymous said...

B.O. ain't gonna change shit.

Anonymous said...

It's OK for the govnt to want to keep tabs on such organizations. You never know when one (or a splinter group of one) might want to go too far into terroristic or definite law-breaking actions such as a denial of service attack on a govnt website.

Monitoring isn't the same as repression...unless lawbreaking actions or conspiracies to lawbreaking action are imminent.

Therefore, I'm all for CCTV's, and all other forms of surveillance.

I don't think this crosses any line into fascism as long as it is generally passive to "non-threatening" groups.

Anonymous said...

Like the Girl Scouts or their terrorist offshoot, the Brownies. Don't buy their cookies!

Anonymous said...

"I don't think this crosses any line into fascism as long as it is generally passive to "non-threatening" groups."

Right, in principle, but that's a big IF. Put these types of programs in place, give 25 years for them to be taken for granted, and viola, they WILL be abused for nefarious gain.

In fact it essentially happened at least once, recently. NIXON. Imagine if he had been more competent, and with today's computer tech. We might have become like Iran is now.