You have the right to remain silent. That's the good news. And you are being watched, but it's for your own good.
You may or may not have the right to an attorney, depending on how we classify you (enemy combatant, suspected conspirator, foreign correspondent, interested third party, international caller, contributor to a charity, frequent library user, etc.) and whether we actually charge you with a crime. Silly me. I thought a private line, private conversation, private residence, private entrance, private property, private information, private parties, and private enterprise were, like, not public. What was I thinking?
Way back in the halcyon days of the Cold War, when the enemy was another country - public life in the USSR was said to be so harsh, dishonest, and inhumane that, in private, people showed some compassion, openness, and humanity. The joke then was that public life in the U.S. was all about caring, openness, and humanity but people in their private lives were solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. The joke now is that public life in the Land of the Free is all hard, cold realism, no more mister nice guy, and everyone for himself, while "private life" as such has been disappeared like some troublesome Chilean dissident. That familiar notion we were all taught to respect, the right to privacy, no longer exists now that it's inconvenient. Look out life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The cat is out of the bag, and it's no longer a big secret that the National Security Agency, with a little help from the phone company, is listening, watching, and reading your everyday communications. Or could be. Which is an even more effective. What better way to stifle criticism than to let it slip that phones are sometimes tapped without cause or authorization. Non-court-ordered domestic surveillance, which quaintly used to be called "illegal," is now authorized by executive fiat, which makes it legal, I guess, if anyone is self-destructive enough to challenge it, which would be like painting a target on your back. The official flunky for the regime that runs the country says the NSA will continue to protect us by listening for any loose talk between you and your co-worker, your mother, your best friend, or your Aunt Tillie. You are hereby put on notice. Don't say you weren't warned.
It's a clever Benthamite move, making telecommunications a big national panopticon. Jeremy Bentham, quite a character himself, dreamed up a fiendishly brilliant design for a prison in which all the individual cells had open sides facing outward in a circle and inward toward a central observation tower. It fit the utilitarian need to watch the inmates' every move by making each cell constantly visible to an unseen observer, greatly simplifying the actual surveillance by guards. Prisoners who know they are being watched, the argument goes, are less likely to say or do anything that actually requires watching. The perfect self-police state quietly removes the illusion of privacy.
Back in the day, only paranoiacs (you know who you are) muzzled themselves from speaking (privately) on the phone, at work, or on the street, for fear of being overheard expressing their (private) beliefs. Only the radical fringe knew for sure there was a file in Washington with their name on it, although some secretly wished there was, automatically making them radically chic. They went on speaking their minds anyway, ignoring or mocking the benevolent guardians of liberty such as J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy who made no secret of wanting them silenced.
As you know, if you've been paying attention to that official stage persona, "we" are at war until further notice, in order to protect our freedoms, which are suspended because we are at war. As part of that war against an unidentified Other, we are protecting us by treating us as the unidentified Other by curbing, cancelling, or conveniently redefining our former civil liberties, including the spurious, so-called right to privacy. What, you didn't know that? Never mind, you're better off not thinking about it; that's what we have leaders for. Just go about your own business, and rest assured that you're being watched.
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Statement - Christopher Hitchens, NSA Lawsuit Client (from http://www.aclu.org/safefree/nsaspying/23485res20060116.html)
Although I am named in this suit on my own behalf, I am motivated to join it by concerns well beyond my own. I have been frankly appalled by the discrepant and contradictory positions taken by the Administration in this matter. First, the entire existence of the NSA's monitoring was a secret, and its very disclosure denounced as a threat to national security.
Then it was argued that Congress had already implicitly granted the power to conduct warrantless surveillance on the territory of the United States, which seemed to make the reason for the original secrecy more rather than less mysterious. (I think we may take it for granted that our deadly enemies understand that their communications may be intercepted.)
This makes it critically important that we establish an understood line, and test the cases in which it may or may not be crossed.
Let me give a very direct instance of what I mean. We have recently learned that the NSA used law enforcement agencies to track members of a pacifist organisation in Baltimore. This is, first of all, an appalling abuse of state power and an unjustified invasion of privacy, uncovered by any definition of "national security" however expansive. It is, no less importantly, a stupid diversion of scarce resources from the real target. It is a certainty that if all the facts were known we would become aware of many more such cases of misconduct and waste.
We are, in essence, being asked to trust the state to know best. What reason do we have for such confidence? The agencies entrusted with our protection have repeatedly been shown, before and after the fall of 2001, to be conspicuous for their incompetence and venality. No serious reform of these institutions has been undertaken or even proposed: Mr George Tenet (whose underlings have generated leaks designed to sabotage the Administration's own policy of regime-change in Iraq, and whose immense and unconstitutionally secret budget could not finance the infiltration of a group which John Walker Lindh could join with ease) was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
I believe the President when he says that this will be a very long war, and insofar as a mere civilian may say so, I consider myself enlisted in it. But this consideration in itself makes it imperative that we not take panic or emergency measures in the short term, and then permit them to become institutionalised. I need hardly add that wire-tapping is only one of the many areas in which this holds true.
The better the ostensible justification for an infringement upon domestic liberty, the more suspicious one ought to be of it. We are hardly likely to be told that the government would feel less encumbered if it could dispense with the Bill of Rights. But a power or a right, once relinquished to one administration for one reason, will unfailingly be exploited by successor administrations, for quite other reasons. It is therefore of the first importance that we demarcate, clearly and immediately, the areas in which our government may or may not treat us as potential enemies.
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