The Guardians Trevor Timm is, as ever, on the mark, noting (as I also did yesterday at FB) that, despite the endless yakking about the glories of free speech etc. etc., the push to increase surveillance and cut down on such freedoms was almost immediate in our world -- and of course painfully predictable. One of these days someone should write a piece on how any development, no matter how contradictory to other developments used in the defense of more for the national security state, only bolsters the shutting down of our world (and the building up of their apparatus). Tom As politicians drape themselves in the flag of free speech and freedom of the press in response to the tragic murder of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, they’ve also quickly moved to stifle the same rights they claim to love. Government officials on both sides of the Atlantic are now renewing their efforts to stop NSA reform as they support free speech-chilling surveillance laws that will affect millions of citizens that have never been accused of terrorism. This is an entirely predictable response – as civil liberties advocates noted shortly after Wednesday’s tragic attack, the threat of terrorism has led to draconian laws all over the world over the last decade – but this time around, the speed and breadth by which politicians praised free speech out of one side of their mouths, while moving to curtail rights out of the other, has been quite breathtaking... Across the Atlantic in the US, literally within moments of when the Charlie Hebdo attack first became public, conservative members of Congress jumped at the chance for political exploitation. As the District Sentinel reported, multiple Senators called for meager NSA reforms in the wake of the Snowden revelations to be completely disregarded, and for an increase in the intelligence budget, and that the Obama administration should stop trying to close Guantánamo. (By the way, the US intelligence budget was already over $50bn last year and remains far and away the largest in the world, and even George W Bush called Guantánamo “a propaganda tool for our enemies and a distraction for our allies.”.) Former NSA director (and prolific liar) Michael Hayden went on national television to argue the NSA collecting the phone records of every single American “doesn’t look so scary now”, despite the reality that its decade-old mass surveillance program that violates the privacy of hundreds of millions of people every day has never having stopped a terrorist attack. Similarly, the New York Post called on the NYPD to re-institute its suspicionless surveillance program that blanketed the city’s entire Muslim population, while forgetting to mention that in the years it was active, the program never produced a single promising lead, let alone stopped an attack. And Fox News was wall-to-wall “more guns, more surveillance, more race profiling”. As Hamilton Nolan argued at Gawker, this sacrifice of democratic values is exactly the overwrought and fearful reaction that terrorist covet. You can’t claim to stand up against terrorism if you whittle away some of the very human rights rights that you say, at the same time, separates us from them. theguardian/commentisfree/2015/jan/10/charlie-hebdo-attack-free-speech-surveillance
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 18:00:01 +0000