While the media and much of the world have been understandably outraged by the revelation of the PRISM program, Barrett Brown's work was pointing towards much deeper problems. First, he showed that this wasn't merely a problem of private intelligence firms spying on us -- it was worse than that. As I recently argued in a New York Times opinion piece, these firms are trying to manufacture a false reality for us. They are engaged in PSYOPS against a civilian population on behalf of their corporate clients.
But even this tells only half the story. One might have thought that private intelligence agencies were simply doing outsourced intelligence work for the U.S. Government. But unfortunately it seems that the tail has begun to wag the dog -- it appears that in many respects the U.S. Government and in particular the Department of Justice is now working for private intelligence firms. This is evident when, for example, Stratfor asks for FBI classified files on PETA or the Department of Justice is used to try and punish journalists for probing into these private intelligence companies.
In The Nation I argued that what we are in effect witnessing is the failure of the rule of law, but on reflection the situation is actually much worse than that. It is not as though the rule of law has simply broken down; it has been inverted from a system that protects us from powerful interests to one that is in the service of powerful interests, and one that will come down with all its might on someone, like Barrett Brown, who attempts to expose this new reality. It is the subversion of the rule of law.
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