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“The
N.S.A., in a practice that dates back to the depths of the Cold War and that has
never ended, was recording her conversations and those of a range of leaders in
Germany and elsewhere, storing them in databases that could be
searched later, if the need arose. It is unclear how often they
searched the databases for her conversations, if at all.”
If
I may share my opinion, I believe the same purpose could underlie the collection
of American citizen’s information. One doesn’t need to be a conspiracy theorist
to speculate how a Dick Cheney as president, or his daughter, could use all of
one’s words against a political enemy or a dissident, during “wartime.” If
Nixon, or even LBJ possibly, had had these tools during the Vietnam War, and if
they had followed the advice of Generals and Admirals running the war, war would
have been declared just for the purpose of imposing censorship, punishing
violators, and suppressing dissent. As some prominent law professors argued as
we entered World War I, the government had authority to try dissenters by
military commission. But Ex parte Milligan was fresh in people’s minds yet, so
we got the Espionage Act, with the Sedition Act a year later, instead. But at
least defendants then received some due process (not that it did them any good
during the war hysteria of the day that had been created). One doesn’t
need to speculate how far some military leaders of today have internalized the
Vietnam War officer’s advocacy of censorship and punishment of “seditious
speech;” General Alexander displayed that for us with his advocacy of
censorship, which would logically then need to be enforced in some manner. In a
time when we have antiwar activists under Grand Jury investigation yet of
whether they provided material support for terrorism in opposing war and when
the DOJ admits that a Chris Hedges could be put under military detention for
speech alone, it would be dereliction to avoid considering how far this could
all be taken in the future now that we have the “U.S. domestic common law of
war” to breach that parchment barrier of the Constitution.
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