truthdig | This is our last gasp as a democracy. The state’s wholesale intrusion
into our lives and obliteration of privacy are now facts. And the
challenge to us—one of the final ones, I suspect—is to rise up in
outrage and halt this seizure of our rights to liberty and free
expression. If we do not do so we will see ourselves become a nation of
captives.
The public debates about the government’s measures to prevent
terrorism, the character assassination of Edward Snowden and his
supporters, the assurances by the powerful that no one is abusing the
massive collection and storage of our electronic communications miss the
point. Any state that has the capacity to monitor all its citizenry,
any state that has the ability to snuff out factual public debate
through control of information, any state that has the tools to
instantly shut down all dissent is totalitarian. Our corporate state may
not use this power today. But it will use it if it feels threatened by a
population made restive by its corruption, ineptitude and mounting
repression. The moment a popular movement arises—and one will arise—that
truly confronts our corporate masters, our venal system of total
surveillance will be thrust into overdrive.
The most radical evil, as Hannah Arendt
pointed out, is the political system that effectively crushes its
marginalized and harassed opponents and, through fear and the
obliteration of privacy, incapacitates everyone else. Our system of mass
surveillance is the machine by which this radical evil will be
activated. If we do not immediately dismantle the security and
surveillance apparatus, there will be no investigative journalism or
judicial oversight to address abuse of power. There will be no organized
dissent. There will be no independent thought. Criticisms, however
tepid, will be treated as acts of subversion. And the security apparatus
will blanket the body politic like black mold until even the banal and
ridiculous become concerns of national security.
