NSA and GCHQ: mass surveillance is about power as much as privacy
NSA and GCHQ: mass surveillance is about power as much as privacy
Western spying agencies are instruments of control, and their record is disastrous. They have to be held to account
Seumas Milne
The Guardian, Tuesday 11 June 2013 22.15 BST
Democratic institutions have spectacularly failed to hold US and other western states' intelligence and military operations to account. So it's been left to a string of whistleblowers to fill the gap. Link to video: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things'
Nothing to worry the "law-abiding", American and British politicians have assured us, in the wake of the revelations of mushrooming mass US surveillance of phone, email and internet traffic. The electronic harvesting is in fact "very narrowly circumscribed", Barack Obama insisted. The behaviour of Britain's intelligence services was, David Cameron declared, entirely "proper and fitting".
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The NSA and GCHQ, whose collaboration is at the heart of the US and British "special relationship", have been central to that for decades. Their global eavesdropping role is the cornerstone of the "five eyes" alliance of anglophone states (including Australia, Canada and New Zealand) which underpins US-dominated western global power. Both agencies were founded to spy on the rest of the world, but ended up also targeting their own people.
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In reality, both the NSA and GCHQ, along with their sister spying outfits, are fuelling as much as fighting terrorism. It is they who provide the intelligence for drone attacks that have killed thousands of civilians in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. And it's the same US and British intelligence services that have been involved in widespread torture, kidnapping and other crimes in the past decade – as well as scandalous intelligence manipulation over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction – who now claim to be protecting us from some of the consequences.
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The US and allied intelligence services are instruments of both domestic and global power and dominance, far beyond issues of terrorism. Revealingly, the state shown by the leaks to be the NSA's biggest intelligence target in Europe is the economic powerhouse of Germany – to a flurry of cautious protests from German politicians.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/11/surveilllance-about-power-as-much-as-privacy
So it's been left to a string of whistleblowers – from Cathy Massiter and Katharine Gun to Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden – to fill the gap. It's now up to the rest of us to make sure their courage isn't wasted.
