[lbo-talk] Ellsberg, Gravel, and West

Chuck Grimes cagrimes42 at gmail.com
Thu Jul 4 17:37:20 PDT 2013


The issue right now is not what leftists think of the matter, but whether the population at large is willing to accept that the criminalization of the population of the US will make anyone safer. Can people who are not politically sophisticated understand that this spying is NOT about their safety.

Joanna

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I've mulled this over on and off for several days and about the only thing I have to say is that somehow the issue is framed the wrong way. It's not about the 4th Amendment or public safety or even advanced political awareness.

I still can't frame it right, but the NSA system amounts to a pre-emptive strike against any potentially effective political act. When the surveillance system is coupled with its enabling legislation in the Patriot Act, the government has the power to arrest, try, convict and imprison in secret if necessary, any potential political act including speech in advance of the event, and most certainly after the fact as the Manning and Snowden cases show.

I really don't expect the public to care one way or another, except in the most distant sort of way. They will have to be `educated' and reminded the hard way, by demonstrative acts that strike at the heart of government power to suppress the public will, even if that will doesn't seem to exist.

It does exist in the sense that the press has definitely been suppressed via the AP surveillance based on metadata of its stringers and their sources. It has been suppress through the shutdown of donations and subscriptions via credit cards and paypal to Wikileaks. So this is an on-going battle in slow motion. And most important, it has been suppressed in the surveillance of the ACLU and its communications, which is the basis of a lawsuit based on ACLU rights under the 4th Amendment and no doubt other constitutional violations.

That slow motion drip of revelations has to be amped up and it is a mistake to piddle around the way Greenwald and the UK Guardian seem to be doing. They better have a good reason.

The fact that the US got EU countries to deny passage to Correa's plane and got it grounded in Vienna, tipped the US hand. Yes indeed the US will scramble jets if it can't figure out another way.

You mention no method. Yes and no. The method amounts to assembling an informal group of people in different power relations with the government, to re-enforce eachother. Gravel was in the Senate, Ellsberg was the outsider, and West was a publisher.

Snowden is the obvious outsider. Other evidence related to his enabled the ACLU to file a suit, because they were revealed to be under surveillance via Version, and hence have standing. There are several other organizations involved in whisleblowing suits against the NSA, like Amnesty International, Electronic Fountiers, and EPIC, Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Greenwald and WikiLeaks are the equivalent of the draft resistance and ad hoc publishers, violators of military and civilian law, and that leaves an insider in government like someone in the Senate.

According to this:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/06/28/_26_senators_vs_secret_national_security_law.html

there are 26 senators. All we need is one like Gravel. Now does Wyden have the stuff? I doubt it. He could after all, simply read his own Intelligent Committee NSA briefs on the floor of the Senate and blow the whole trip out of the water. Chances are those briefs are nearly void of meaningful information, i.e. not worth the consequences of their exposure.

Snowden, Greenwald and Co. better have a lot more damaging material and it is now past due...

CG



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