War is the Health of Government Spying & Secrecy

[sad sally]

John Glaser, July 05, 2012

Lesson one from Cato’s Julian Sanchez is that “Government surveillance is now almost entirely off the books.” The old way of tallying how many times the national security state attempts to spy on citizens is not taking into account the digital internet age. He explains:

…Verizon reported fielding more than 88,000 requests for data in 2006 alone. These would have ranged from traditional wiretaps, to demands for stored text messages and photos, to “pen registers” revealing a target’s calling patterns, to location tracking orders, to simple requests for a subscriber’s address or billing information. Google, which is virtually unique among major Internet services in voluntarily disclosing this sort of information, fielded 12,271 government requests for data, and complied with 11,412 of them. In other words, just one large company reports far more demands for user information than all the wiretaps issued last year combined. And again, that is without even factoring in the vast amount of intelligence surveillance that occurs each year: the thousands of FISA wiretaps, the tens of thousands of National Security Letters (which Google is forbidden to include in its public count) and the uncountably vast quantities of data vacuumed up by the NSA. At what point does the wiretap report, with its minuscule piece of the larger surveillance picture, just become a ridiculous, irrelevant formality?

snip

Following Google’s example of disclosing government requests for user information this week was Twitter, revealing that the US government requested user information 679 times just in the last six months. And as Andy Greenberg at Forbes explains, even as phone wiretaps have decreased, surveillance through the internet is increasing.

snip

It’s important to understand where this kind of government comes from. We don’t have an appallingly secret government as a result of farm subsidies or our ballooning entitlement system. The state does not submerge itself in the shadows and hide the truth from its own citizens as a result of haggling over income tax policy or the definition of marriage. Washington doesn’t choose to spy on its own citizens in order to protect against individual mandate dissidents. We get this kind of government because of its penchant for war and its resulting national security state. Every great leap into secrecy and spying on US citizens has been achieved under the rubric of protecting “us” from “enemies,” foreign and domestic.

http://antiwar.com/blog/2012/07/05/war-is-the-health-of-government-spying-secrecy/

[cprise]

1. Dim view

"ballooning entitlement system"...?

Perhaps (our) government has a penchant for war because its endemic to capitalism, injecting competition and conflict and monetization into everything at all levels. World peace has to be disrupted because otherwise the captains of industry would not have enough opportunities to acquire vast resources around the globe (nor would the war machine be able to keep its currency backed by those resources).

Its not surprising the people from Cato (libertarian-right think tank) avoid incorporating the industrial part of the military-industrial complex into its views. Instead, they deem government (all governments) to possess the war-mongering attitude intrinsically, rather than considering this country's recent lessons with putting oil executives into power.