Why one of America’s top terrorism analysts thinks U.S. government surveillance has gone too far.

[octoberlib]

Brian Jenkins is no bleeding heart when it comes to tracking down terrorists. “I’m not squeamish,” he said in a phone interview Friday morning. “I don’t wring my hands over what has to be done.” Jenkins, in fact, is a pioneer in the field of counterterrorism. A former Special Forces soldier and longtime RAND Corporation analyst, he compiled the first database of international terrorists back in 1971, wrote one of the first monographs on the subject in 1974, and has since served as a frequent high-level consultant on the subject.
And yet, Jenkins thinks that the U.S. government’s counterterrorism policies—which he’s helped influence over the decades—have gone too far. “What we have put in place,” he said, “is the foundation of a very oppressive state.”

The oppressive state doesn’t yet exist, he said, but if a president wanted to move in that direction, “the tools are in place now.” The choice to do so “could be made under circumstances that appear perfectly reasonable,” he went on, noting, “Democracy does not preclude voluntary submission to despotism. Given a frightened population, Congress can legislate away liberties just as easily as tyrants can seize power. That seems to be what has started to happen.” This dynamic has taken hold in many liberal democracies during crises and wars. “In the past, at the end of the emergency, the balance has shifted back and a lot of those powers were ended,” he said. “But we’re in a situation now that doesn’t have a finite ending. If there isn’t an end, then these powers accumulate and accumulate and accumulate. This is a fundamental difference. What we put in place becomes a permanent part of the landscape.


But Jenkins, who still has close contacts inside the intelligence community, has been concerned about these dangers for most of the past decade, beginning with the hasty passage of the Patriot Act and the subsequent news stories about NSA domestic surveillance outside the purview of Congress or the courts set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Congress forced the shutdown of that surveillance program, which was known as Total Information Awareness, and passed new laws, expanding the powers of the FISA courts, so that it could rule not just on individual search warrants but also on massive data-mining expeditions.
In fact, though, these steps were illusory. “They put in place the principle of oversight,” he said, “but the practical impact—the actual oversight—is less than it was before.”

Back in 1974, in his first monograph on the subject, International Terrorism: A New Mode of Conflict, Jenkins wrote:
"Owing to technological developments and changes in the political environment, power—defined crudely as the capacity to kill, destroy, disrupt, cause alarm, and compel society to divert vast resources to security—is coming into the hands of smaller and smaller groups whose grievances, real or imaginary, it would not always be possible to satisfy. How democracies deal with this, and remain democracies, is one of the major challenges we face in the late twentieth century."
Almost 40 years later, well into the 21st century, he now said, “That’s still the major challenge.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2013/06/brian_jenkins_fears_nsa_overreach_a_top_terrorism_expert_thinks_government.single.html

[kenny blankenship]

1. I believe absolute power has been shown to resist corruption absolutely

in test after test. So fear not!