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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Making of a Global Security State: The Five Uncontrollable Urges of a Secrecy-Surveillance World
from TomDispatch:
The Making of a Global Security State
The Five Uncontrollable Urges of a Secrecy-Surveillance World
By Tom Engelhardt
As happens with so much news these days, the Edward Snowden revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and just how far weve 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, its always hard to find a little dry land to survey the extent and nature of the damage. Heres 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 Global
Corporately 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. Its 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of ongoing revelations about NSA surveillance practices has revealed anything, its that the term is already grossly outdated.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 Agencys 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 couldnt 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. ........................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175713/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_you_are_our_secret/
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The Making of a Global Security State: The Five Uncontrollable Urges of a Secrecy-Surveillance World (Original Post)
marmar
Jun 2013
OP
xchrom
(108,903 posts)1. du rec.
Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)2. anyone who is not afraid and dismayed is not paying attention.