The NYT had an oddly reported article today about America’s Western European allies being outraged by accusations that the US and other English-speaking countries are using the espionage apparatus of the Cold War years nowadays for extensive surveillance of phone conversations and e-mails not only of American citizens, but of people and organizatons all around the world. Some of this international intelligence has been used to tip off American-based companies to gain a competitive edge. It’s government sponsored economic espionage, in other words. The project, called Echelon, wasn’t even acknowledged to exist until recently. It’s part of the super-secret National Security Agency. No one really knows what the mission and activities of the NSA are, especially when the US already has two other enormous surveillance bureacracies: the FBI domestically and the CIA internationally . Echelon is another example about what “globalization” really means, and whose interests its really set up to serve.
The US government trotted out James Rubin, its State Department’s Fibber in Chief, to deny the accusations. It seems the more he sneers, the less he tells the truth, and the ever-oily British Prime Minister Tony Blair flatly declared: “The simple answer is: no.” Which makes one wonder what the more detailed, complicated answer really is.
While the non-native-English speaking Europeans are hardly paragons of virtue, they’re right to be screaming and finger-pointing this time around. They seem to be increasingly exasperrated at the arrogance of American-British leaders, who share a Puritan heritage and never seem to be able to keep from lecturing friend and foe alike that they are indeed, purer than everyone else: purer capitalists, purer protectors of liberty, and the purest practicers of democracy. Everyone from Bill Clinton to Jesse Helms, to the toothy Tony Blair and the dragon lady Thatcher, speak with one voice (in English though, they’re all monolingual): “we are superior”.
How the British can go around lecturing their EU partners is especially galling, because the French, the Germans, the Dutch, the Danes, the Swedes have more successful economies and higher standards of living than the UK. The US has always seen itself as exceptional, and behaves accordingly. And it’s always at a loss to understand why nearly everything it says and does is resented, even by friends.
The sad fact is that in recent years Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have released reports on human rights violations in the United States, criticizing everything from the heavy-handed tactics of the police, to the inhumane treatment of prisoners, to the appalling practice of placing refugees applying for asylum into privatized for-profit detention centers or in ordinary prisons, treated as convicted criminals although they are neither charged with or convicted of a crime. The American media reports all this usually with a smirk or a wink, as if the inside joke is: how could anyone criticize the US for violating fundamental human rights?
The United States declares that there is liberty and justice for all within its borders, but most Americans from government officials on down, are deeply disturbed when people want to actually exercise their freedom. New York is an example of an environment where the mayor and the police routinely use intimidation, manipulation of city ordinances, state and federal law to control and quell dissent, and it’s one of the most liberal parts of the country. It’s forbidden to assemble peacefully on the steps of City Hall in New York. To peacefully petition the government to protest, the protestors have to ask permission from the police to be allowed to do so. If the police (or especially the mayor) don’t like your opinions, they just deny the permit. Why do Americans need permission from the police to protest anyway? Imagine what goes on in rural Mississippi.
Freedom in the US means primarily the freedom to be marginalized and ignored. The mainstream media has extremely narrow confines of permissible debate, and in a country of 270,000,000 people, there are only a few hundred (actually more like a few dozen) opinion-makers who regularly appear on American television. Their viewpoints generally run the gamut of moderate to extreme right-wing.
The point is not to expose some immense secret conspiracy between English-speakers, or between US government agencies and private enterprise. It’s doubtful such an organized collusion could exist from the sheer number of people it would take to participate and keep the secret. Why wouldn’t their be some squealors? The point is that globalization is in the interests primarily of the US government and American industry, and co-operation with sympathetic “cousins” sharing the links of a common language make for natural co-operation, and not always with a noble purpose.
More disturbing is the rapid loss of privacy that new technology is creating, and how in the US particularly, personal information is like absolutely everything else: a commodity to be traded and sold without controls. What little attention is paid to the topic by government authorities is more observational than reactive. In this respect, the EU has been far more proactive in protecting personal privacy rights and is increasingly critical of the US hands-off approach, but the idea always seems to be "the business of America is business". Government controls would reduce profits.
Another disturbing trend is the acceptance in a democratic country of an immense surveillance apparatus which routinely snoops into the private lives of its citizenry, and now it seems, beyond its own borders. Whatever the intentions: to catch criminals, drug-dealers etc, is it really necessary to systematically organize information-gathering on such a large scale that contradicts what living in a free country should mean?
Of course, government snooping and violation of privacy is nothing new in America. In recent years, FBI files have been released on many celebrities who for one reason or another voiced opinions (usually leftist). They’re often heavily censored, but what is remarkable is that they existed at all, and that in nearly all cases, the information collected was mundane and useless. Why was it necessary for the government of a free country to spy on its own citizens, sometimes for years and at great expense? I’ve read about the activities of the Stasi in the former East Germany, and the lengths to which it went to spy on its own citizens, with a network of informants that worked out to be one of about 50 people. One country we know wasn’t free, one country declares itself the freest in the world. With its legacy for saying one thing but doing just the opposite, where is the credibility in accepting that in this latest episode, the US powers-that-be are being forthright and can be trusted? It’s fortunate in this increasingly globalized world, there are other democratic countries who can say: “hey, wait a minute!” Whether they can shame the most powerful country in the world to live up to its ideals is the unanswered question. More likely,the US will just try to be more discrete in its snoopery.
(February 24, 2000)
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