A Key Similarity Between Snowden Leak and Panama Papers: Scandal Is What’s Been Legalized
By Glenn Greenwald
Source: The Intercept
April 9, 2016
But illegality was never the crux of the scandal triggered by those NSA revelations. Instead, what was most shocking was what had been legalized: the secret construction of the largest system of suspicionless spying in human history. What was scandalous was not that most of this spying was against the law, but rather that the law at least as applied and interpreted by the Justice Department and secret, one-sided FISA courts now permitted the U.S. government and its partners to engage in mass surveillance of entire populations, including their own. As the ACLUs Jameel Jaffer put it after the Washington Posts publication of documents showing NSA analysts engaged in illegal spying: The non-compliance angle is important, but dont get carried away. The deeper scandal is whats legal, not whats not.
Yesterday, dozens of newspapers around the world reported on what they are calling the Panama Papers: a gargantuan leak of documents from a Panama-based law firm that specializes in creating offshore shell companies. The documents reveal billions of dollars being funneled to offshore tax havens by leading governmental and corporate officials in numerous countries (the U.S. was oddly missing from the initial reporting, though journalists vow that will change shortly).
Some of these documents undoubtedly reveal criminality: either monies that were illegally obtained (and are being hidden for that reason) or assets being concealed in order to criminally evade tax debts. But the crux of this activity placing assets offshore in order to avoid incurring tax liability has been legalized. Thats because Western democracies, along with overt tyrannies, are typically controlled by societies wealthiest, and laws are enacted to serve their interests. Voxs Matt Yglesias this morning published a
very good explainer of various aspects of this leak and he makes that point clear:
Even as the worlds wealthiest and most powerful nations have engaged in increasingly complex and intensive efforts at international cooperation to smooth the wheels of global commerce, they have willfully chosen to allow the wealthiest members of Western society to shield their financial assets from taxation (and in many cases divorce or bankruptcy settlement) by taking advantage of shell companies and tax havens.......
Full article:
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/a-key-similarity-between-snowden-leak-and-panama-papers-scandal-is-whats-been-legalized/