© Flickr/Abode of Chaos
As happens with so much news these days, the Edward Snowden
revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and just how far we've come in the building of a surveillance state have swept over us 24/7 - waves of
leaks,
videos, charges, claims, counterclaims,
skullduggery, and government threats. When a flood sweeps you away, it's always hard to find a little dry land to survey the extent and nature of the damage. Here's my attempt to look beyond the daily drumbeat of this developing story (which, it is promised, will go on for weeks, if not months) and identify five urges essential to understanding the world Edward Snowden has helped us glimpse.
1. The Urge to be GlobalCorporately speaking, globalization has been ballyhooed since at least the 1990s, but in governmental terms only in the twenty-first century has that globalizing urge fully infected the workings of the American state itself. It's become common since 9/11 to speak of a "national security state." But if a week of ongoing revelations about NSA surveillance practices has revealed anything, it's that the term is already grossly outdated. Based on what we now know, we should be talking about an American global security state.
Much attention has, understandably enough, been lavished on the phone and other metadata about American citizens that the NSA is now
sweeping up and about the ways in which such activities may be
abrogating the First and Fourth
Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Far less attention has been paid to the ways in which the NSA (and other U.S. intelligence outfits) are sweeping up global data in part via the just-revealed
Prism and other surveillance programs.
Sometimes, naming practices are revealing in themselves, and the National Security Agency's key data mining tool, capable in March 2013 of gathering "97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide,"
has been named "boundless informant." If you want a sense of where the
U.S. Intelligence Community imagines itself going, you couldn't ask for a better hint than that word "boundless." It seems that for our spooks, there are, conceptually speaking, no limits left on this planet.
Comment: Read Laura Knight Jadczyk's writing's about possible future (and past) climate and political events:
Comets and the Horns of Moses
The Apocalypse: Comets, Asteroids and Cyclical Catastrophes
Tunguska, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction
Fire and Ice: The Day After Tomorrow
Listen to a discussion on the topic of growing concern:
SOTT Talk Radio: Climate Change, Food Shortages and the Future