Re: American counterparts?
by
Arlington
08/04/2008, 4:47 PM #
As Courtland hinted, I'm not famous. I don't write for a newspaper. I don't publish books. I'm not the leader of any group or organization that criticizes the government, although I do belong to a couple such organizations.
So, a few items I posted here have probably been reviewed and tossed in the dust bin with a big yawn. "Another bleeding heart liberal com-symp."
If I made a bunch of phone calls to Iran to research my upcoming expose' of CIA complicity in the assassination of dissidents, you can bet "they" would come poking around. If I taught a seminar on domestic spying at some college, you better believe somebody would have a copy of my reading list, and might strike up some casual conversations with my students.
It wasn't that long ago the United States used the Stalinist tactic of fear to extract information from citizens. In the McCarthy era, many people named names to avoid punishment. Once the "investigations" got going, they fed on the sense of alarm people felt when they learned the government was infiltrated by thousands of communists, dupes and sympathizers. The only way to perpetuate this fiction was to keep expanding the scope of the inquiry, bringing more and more people under scrutiny, suggesting more agencies and institutions had been penetrated by spies.
It's different now. Nobody thinks the Taliban recruited ordinary Americans from all walks of life to steal state secrets. There's not a spy under every bed. Instead, the proposition is that lax immigration policy, freedom of religion and liberal tolerance have allowed smaller numbers of fanatics to set up secret organizations that raise money for foreign terrorists and, to a lesser degree, plot mischief here in the homeland.
Because these mysterious people don't all hold one ideology or belong to the modern equivalent of the Communist Party, we can't just make a list of suspect organizations and interview everyone on the membership rolls. We have to cast a wider net, and the only way to do this is spy on everyone and sort it all out by analysis. Monitor everything everybody says or writes, then pay closer attention to those who stimulate a certain number of "hits" when they're run through the computerized sifting process.
And the government learned a lesson from the HUAC fiasco. Don't do any of this in public. Don't let the courts in on the deal. Don't reveal to the public that we're building a huge domestic spying organizations, spanning several agencies, and blowing enormous sums of money, just to catch a few loonies.
So, nobody knows who's being watched. I think I'm too unimportant to merit any attention, but that's probably wrong in the literal sense. Somewhere in some concrete building, some "intelligence analyst" has probably reviewed something I posted on Slate, picked out a few key words, and added them to a few other key words under my name. If the list ever grows long enough, someone might actually retrieve the content and read what I said, but that's unlikely.
The point is, nobody is completely under the radar anymore. That's what makes it more efficient than the old Soviet system. Electronic compilation and evaluation means "they" don't have to spy on everyone to a significant extent. They just spy on everyone a tiny bit, and in ways we'll never discover. We can't object to our civil rights being violated, because the violations, if they're even violations, are so small as to be harmless.
But they're still watching. Don't doubt that for a moment.
