However paranoid you may be about government surveillance, you aren’t paranoid enough: The Snowden Files + 10

By Scott Ross

“What we saw in 2013 and the years after it is that this is not a story about surveillance. This is a story that involves surveillance. This is a story about democracy and power — how institutions function in what we are taught is a free and open society. But it will not, it cannot, remain a free and open society unless we make it so. And we must make it so over the objections of government.” — Edward Snowden, 6 June 2013

This week marks a decade since the revelations by the former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden, assisted by the journalist Glenn Greenwald and the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (and, initially, before the paper became the official mouthpiece of MI5, the Guardian‘s former defense and intelligence correspondent Ewen MacAskill) of the appalling and terrifying extent of NSA spying, every single day, on all of the American people, and on the United States’ putative allies abroad. A mere three months earlier, one James Clapper sat before the public and lied his head off when asked by Senator Ron Wyden whether NSA collects “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” His tell — one of the most blatant, outrageous and at the same time pathetic I have ever seen — was rubbing his forehead and looking up from beneath nonexistent bangs like a child of five who has just been caught drawing minor obscenities on the living room wall with his Crayons and assures Mommy he didn’t do it. This hilariously naked gesture of Clapper’s was of a piece with his prevaricating answer to the question: “Not wittingly.” Riiiiggghhhht.

^{Harburg by Hirschfeld}

A decade on, the collection of data on everything free Americans do, say, write (and, for all I know, think) continues apace while both parties give cynical lip-service to the protection of something it pleases them to call “our democracy.” If anyone in power uses the phrase “Save Our Democracy™” in a sentence without smirking, run the other way; that man or woman is secretly doing everything in his or her power to reduce the concept of liberty to your ability to choose between Dial or Zest. (Or do I mean Pfizer and Moderna?) As “Yip” Harburg put it in the 1970s:

Democracy gives you a choice
Of which machine to vote with.
Or choose which brand of razor blade
You’d rather cut your throat with.

Today, of course, we don’t need the NSA, or its evil twin brothers in the acronym sweepstakes FBI and CIA, to tell us that there are no greater evils on earth than International White Supremacy, which has apparently taken the place of the previous champ, The Horror of International Communism, and Vladimir (Boo! Hiss!) Putin, nor any greater heroes than the (‘ray! Huzzah!) neo-Nazis of the Azov Battalion currently basking in the aftermath of the blood-stirring mischief of repeatedly bombing and (it seems) finally scuppering a major dam in eastern Ukraine, at U.S. taxpayer expense, and blaming the resulting environmental disaster on the country with the least reason for destroying it. This is done in the full knowledge that the European and American press will nod its collective head in idiot concurrence. But then, as is well known and asserted in the West, Putin has a dismaying habit of deliberately destroying his own infrastructure, for reasons known perhaps only to God, or to William J. Burns, His representative here on earth for the requisite two to three years the Director of CIA habitually serves.

I jest, but only slightly and, although in a roundabout fashion, very much to the point. At least since late November 1963, CIA’s fondest wish has been to rule the United States from the Oval Office as well as from Langley. The Agency has been inching closer and closer to that goal with each passing decade: It currently has the whole of corporate media, and much if not most (if not indeed all) of Congress. What it has lacked is a winnable candidate; its last attempt at one, the hapless Pete Buttigieg, was laughed off the campaign trail, just as its current contender, the genuinely evil Mike Pompeo, will likely never get off the launching pad. In the meanwhile, CIA can content itself with figuratively rifling through our email, calls, social media posts and other online writing as its happy little A.I. ‘bots buzz along sorting us all into the categories by which our unelected rulers will one day label, and contain, us. International White Supremacy, like the FBI’s failed riot at the Capitol, will likely also fail as a Reichstag moment, but one cannot fault these types their single-mindedness; as is often said, when you think of yourself as a hammer, you see everyone else as a nail.

Meanwhile, as the most propagandized people on the planet, Americans may rest assured that the Biden Administration is ever at the ready to complain about the treatment of journalists abroad while prosecuting (or in any event, persecuting) reporters and publishers here, and elsewhere. Something called, with a straight face, World Press Freedom Day, was celebrated about a month ago during which no American employee of a newspaper, magazine or cable news network was permitted to note that the Australian citizen Julian Assange is still sitting in a maximum-security hell-hole in Britain for the alleged crime of exposing the U.S. military’s callous and deliberate slaughter of journalists and other civilians.

And how did NPR, which in my youth provided in its once-envied investigative news division the single great alternative source to the pabulum being disseminated on American television and radio networks and print venues, choose to cover the 10th anniversary of Snowden’s damning evidence of the frightening extent of American government surveillance of its citizens?

With this headline: A decade on, Edward Snowden remains in Russia, though U.S. laws have changed

One would like to imagine the source of this drivel (a certain Greg Myre, whom I have never heard of until today) justifying his stunningly inane coverage with, “But surely someone out there still believes Russia is the font of all human evil. Let’s aim our fear-mongering at him!“

And the band played on…

Text copyright 2013 by Scott Ross