David Wheaton: College Tennis Hall of Fame
Monday, July 16, 2012
The Life Giver
A compilation
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Lord, what a change within us one short hour
Spent in Thy presence will prevail to make—
What heavy burdens from our bosoms take,
What parched grounds refresh, as with a shower!
We kneel, and all around us seems to lower;
We rise, and all, the distant and the near,
Stand forth in sunny outline, brave and clear;
We kneel how weak, we rise how full of power!
Why, therefore, should we do ourselves this wrong,
Or others—that we are not always strong;
That we are ever overborne with care;
That we should ever weak or heartless be,
Anxious or troubled, when with us is prayer,
And joy, and strength, and courage, are with Thee?—R. C. Trench
*
As he approached the town gate, a dead person was being carried out—the only son of his mother, and she was a widow … When the Lord saw her, his heart went out to her and he said, “Don’t cry.” Then he went up and touched the coffin, and those carrying it stood still. He said, “Young man, I say to you, get up!” The dead man sat up and began to talk, and Jesus gave him back to his mother.—Luke 7:12–151
This widow’s son. Lazarus. The son of the Shunammite.
All of them looked dead. Were dead.
But then in one instant, everything changed.
Life was reintroduced.
Hope was rekindled.
Vitality was restored.
It reminds me of how sometimes in [American] football, the officials will come out after a play or a call has left a team dead in the water. Everything appears hopeless. Thegame or the opportunity looks over. But then after they have looked at the tape, the officials will say, “Upon further review,” and overturn the play or the call. And in one instant, everything changes.
Every dead area of your life is available for further review from God’s life-giving power.
Maybe a relationship in your life just fell apart.
Maybe you lost your job last year.
Maybe you’ve made some terrible mistakes that have cost you a lot of time and opportunity.
It looks like a dead situation.
But it’s not over as long as Jesus is on the scene.
Upon further review, He can restore your relationships.
Upon further review, He can supply all your needs.
Upon further review, He can forgive you and make you whole.
Most of us give up on God too easily.
Don’t lose hope.
With God, nothing in your life is ever beyond its resuscitation point.—Pastor Steven Furtick
*
Maybe sometimes the Lord just lets us have a problem so that He can give us the answer. He likes to have us pray and find out we can't always solve all our problems and that we need His help. After all, if we could figure it all out and solve all our problems, we wouldn't need Him. So the Lord lets us have a little problem now and then to show us we need Him and we have to pray. He likes to give us answers to remind us that we're dependent on Him and we need Him. He likes us to appreciate His help and to love Him for it—like a father!—David Brandt Berg2
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People are rushing around out in the wings, like they're busy in the service of the King; but the people here under the central dome just stand there quietly and look up, bathed in that beautiful, beautiful golden glow from above, taking big deep breaths of that heavenly air. … You just cannot go on if you only hurry around all the time in the wings and you never step into the rotunda and look up through the dome, spending quiet time, seeing heavenly visions and breathing heavenly air and hearing heavenly music and voices! It just totally renews you and completely refreshes you and gives you new vision and fresh inspiration, new strength, rest and peace and joy!—David Brandt Berg3
*
If you’re always hurrying and rushing around, fretting and impatient, you’ll never be able to focus your full attention—your eyes, your ears, your mind, your heart—on the Lord for the solutions to the problems, the answers to the questions, the best decisions for the situations!
Unless you get quiet and try to seek the Lord, how are you ever going to get anything from the Lord? He says, “Be still, and know that I am God. In quietness and confidence shall your strength be.”4 You’re going to have to get quiet by yourself—somewhere, somehow, sometime—if you’re going to hear from the Lord.
Every great man of God, from Moses to Jesus, had to retreat alone to his mountain for a while in order to have time to meditate, pray, and commune with God. My Lord, if Jesus Himself had to do it, how much more we need to do it! Jesus had to get up at the break of day before His disciples got up and walk out across the hills or up in the mountain to get alone with God and get His orders for the day from His Father.5
If you neglect your fellowship with the King of kings because you’re so busy with the affairs of the kingdom, it can be disastrous to your spiritual life and communion with the Lord! You cannot do the Master’s work without the Master’s power and guidance. And to get it, you must spend time with the Master!
Asking the Lord for the solutions to problems is the easiest way in the world to get them. If you’d spend a little more time praying, you’d probably spend a hell of a lot less time working and trying to get things done!
We all need more quiet time with the Lord in rest and refilling, drinking of the living water of His Word and fellowshipping with Him in the communion of prayer and the sweet lovemaking of the Spirit. It just totally renews you and completely refreshes you and gives you new vision and fresh inspiration, new strength, rest and peace and joy. For “they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint.”6
“In all thy ways acknowledge Him.”7
The Lord is always right there with you. He says, “I’ll never leave thee nor forsake thee,”8 He’s always there. So it’s never God who’s not there; it’s we who are sometimes not always there, when we run off someplace else and leave Him behind when we forget to pray.
So you need to remember that you cannot possibly solve the multitude of problems that you will encounter in your own wisdom, your own strength, your own mind, your own understanding, your own trying to put two and two together. Jesus said, “Without Me, ye can do nothing.”9
The most important thing in our lives is Jesus and to stay close to Him, to let Him lead and guide us. He’s the one who has got to lead us, because only He can! Without Him we don’t know where we are going or how to get there or anything. But He knows exactly where and how, and all we have to do is just sit in the back seat and let Him drive. He knows where to go and the best way to get there.
He’s promised that if you acknowledge Him, He will direct your paths. He said, “You shall hear a voice behind you saying, This is the way, walk ye in it.”10 So ask the Lord about everything before you do it. Make sure it’s what He wants you to do. Seek Him about everything—every problem, every decision—and He will never fail you or let you down!—David Brandt Berg11
*
We dull our understandings with trifles, fill the heavenly spaces with phantoms, waste the heavenly time with hurry. To those who possess their souls in patience come the heavenly visions.—George MacDonald
*
Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to or even into the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you; if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?—C. S. Lewis12
Published on Anchor July 2012. Read by David Salas.
Music by Michael Dooley.
A Visit to the World´s Deadliest Dive Site!
Tarek Omar says that he doesn’t know exactly how many bodies he has recovered. “I stopped counting at some point,” he says. But he can still remember the names of the first two he pulled up from the depths of the Red Sea, bringing them back onto the Egyptian shore.
“They were Conor O’Regan and Martin Gara. Irish. They were considered cautious divers. Both died here on Nov. 19, 1997. They were only 22 and 23. Sad.”
Omar is sitting under an awning on the edge of the desert, drinking tea with milk and looking out over the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba, which wash against the east coast of the Sinai. The nearest settlement, the resort town of Dahab, is 10 kilometers (six miles) to the south.
“I found the bodies at a depth of 102 meters (335 feet),” says Omar. “They were holding each other in an embrace. This is how it must have happened: One of them had problems and kept sinking deeper down. The other wanted to help him. And then both of them lost consciousness. What can you do? Their memorial stone is up there.”
He steps out of the shade and walks along a dusty path. Sunburned tourists in life vests are snorkeling in the water. At the end of the cliff-lined bay, Omar stops walking and points to a slab of black marble set into the ground, with the words “In Loving Memory” inscribed onto it. “It’s only one of many memorials,” he says, and turns around.
“There…,” he says, pointing to a white panel in the cliff: “Yuri, a Russian. On April 28, 2000. Terrible story. Was lying at a depth of 115 meters.” Nearby is a black-and-red panel. “James, June 1, 2003. At 135 meters. And then here,” he says pointing to a gray plaque, “Andrei, another Russian. Aug. 24, 2004. I didn’t find the body. At 170 meters, there is a tank and a neoprene suit; it might have been his equipment.”
The dead also include Karl Marx, an Austrian: Jan. 10, 2007. Stefan Felder from Switzerland: Sept. 23, 2008. Madlen, a diving instructor from Sachsenhausen: May 9, 2009. The beach looks like a cemetery.
There are 14 memorial stones dedicated to divers who have lost their lives in the Blue Hole, an opening of about 80 meters in diameter in the roof of the barrier reef. Its walls taper down like the sides of a funnel, but there is an opening. At a depth of 52 meters, an arch opens into a 26-meter-long tunnel that leads through the reef and into the open sea. The floor of the tunnel slopes from a depth of 102 meters down to 120 meters. On the other side, the seafloor drops in increments, first to 130 meters, then to 150, 250, 300 and, finally, to 800 meters.
It is 10 a.m., and 23 SUVs are bumping along the road to the Blue Hole, where they unload guests from Sharm el-Sheikh. A woman in red bikini briefs and flip-flops takes a picture of the memorial site. It’s a popular subject.
There are more attractive dive sites than the Blue Hole of Dahab, with more colorful corals, and more fish, shipwrecks, channels and caves. But the Blue Hole is considered to be most famous diving spot in the world—because it’s the most dangerous.
There is no official list, but Omar estimates that more than 130 divers have lost their lives in the hole in the last 15 years. He compares what is happening in the Blue Hole to the madness on Mount Everest.
There is likely no one who knows more about the Blue Hole than Omar. He was the first to explore the hole, touch the bottom and see the bodies on the ocean floor. He still holds the depth record in the area: 209 meters.
Omar, 47, born in a village near the border with Libya, is a Bedouin from the Aulad Ali tribe. He came to Dahab in 1989, looking for a job. In 1992, Omar learned to dive, and he began working as an instructor three years later. Since then, he has undertaken all the missions in the Blue Hole, he says. A “mission” is what Omar calls bringing a dead body to the surface.
He says that he doesn’t wait long to recover a body, usually two or three days, but no more than seven. “The parents want a burial.” Besides, he adds, the body looks terrible when it remains in the water for too long. Because of the crabs, he says. When that happens, it’s better to leave it down below.
Omar squeezes into his neoprene suit ahead of a dive into the hole, but only for fun today. “It isn’t difficult to dive in the Blue Hole. On the contrary,” he says, “but that’s what makes it risky.” Many divers underestimate the hole, he says, which quickly turns it into a trap.
The Blue Hole is easy to reach. It doesn’t take a boat to get there, and you don’t even have to swim out to it. You just hop in. It’s about 10 meters from a beach chair to the Blue Hole. The water is warm, there is no current and visibility is good. It’s the most beautiful in the morning, when the sun rises over Saudi Arabia and shines directly through the tunnel into the Blue Hole. It’s a mystical sight, one that also attracts divers who shouldn’t be down there.
The critical limit for diving with compressed air is 56 meters. The exit from the tunnel is one meter lower at its upper edge.
To avoid accidents, the Egyptian diving association stipulates that divers cannot dive below 40 meters in the Red Sea with compressed air. In Dahab, however, divers can buy depth. It’s easy to find a guide who is willing to surreptitiously take a diver into the tunnel for €100, without asking unnecessary questions.
The rule of thumb among divers is that every 10 meters corresponds to a martini, and first-time drinkers quickly get tipsy. At as little as 30 meters, an inexperienced diver can become confused as a result of what’s called nitrogen narcosis. When the rising pressure causes too much nitrogen to become dissolved in the bloodstream, divers lose their judgment. There are divers who have been inside the tunnel with compressed air in their tanks, and who swear that they heard a Bach organ concerto. Others report memory lapses or that they felt as if they were stoned.
Just as a drinker develops a tolerance against alcohol at the beginning of his addiction, a diver can also become accustomed to high nitrogen concentrations. But even oxygen eventually becomes harmful underwater, where it is transformed into a toxin that causes dizziness, nausea, cramping and, eventually, unconsciousness.
Omar switches on the computer in his diving school because he wants to show us a YouTube video. “Yuri Lipski. He went diving without his buddy. That alone is crazy. Yuri took along a video camera. I brought it up with the body. I thought the camera was broken, but it still worked. Yuri was filming the whole time. He filmed his own death.”
The video lasts seven minutes and 16 seconds. Lipski is diving with compressed air—12 liters. He seems to have everything under control at first, but then he starts dropping and dropping. His dive computer, visible in the picture, shows 81.7 meters, then 85.3 meters and, finally, 91.6 meters, when he hits the bottom. Lipski tries to inflate his buoyancy compensator to make himself more buoyant, but it doesn’t work. He begins to flounder and kicks up sand. Then the image freezes. Omar turns off the computer.
“Yuri was lying with his face on the ground when I found him,” he says, and then he begins to list what went wrong. “First,” he says, sticking out his thumb to count, “Yuri was too heavy. Twelve kilograms of lead on his belt, plus the bottle, the camera and the batteries. He holds up his index finger. “Second, his vest burst open. It was already full when he tried to pump air into it. “Third,” he says, extending his middle finger, “oxygen poisoning. That’s why he was twitching. That was it.”
Yet divers using compressed air aren’t the only ones who lose their lives in the Blue Hole. Technical divers, the ones who are trained to go down as far as 100 meters or more, also make fatal mistakes.
Omar says that technical diving requires discipline, but that there are always tourists in Dahab who party until three in the morning and then go diving in the Blue Hole at 9 a.m. The crazy ones who are determined to get that number into their diving computers—“the magical 100,” with which they hope to impress women at the clubs—are enough to drive him to despair, he says.
On Nov. 7, 2011, Moscow native Igor Shalo dove down to a depth of 150 meters. According to his log book, he had made 400 dives. He didn’t survive dive number 401.
Shalo had little experience with decompression dives. He had been at 40, 50, 66, 85 and 106 meters. During a decompression dive, it’s important to stop several times while returning to the surface. Divers have to remain at certain depths for certain amounts of time, waiting as their bodies become accustomed to the decreasing pressure, so that they’ll be in good shape once they complete their ascent. Igor Shalo, though, was as good as dead when he returned to the surface.
He didn’t drop vertically to the depth he was aiming for, instead hitting ground at 120 meters—his first mistake. Then he dove farther down to 150 meters, staying just above the seafloor—his second mistake, because it cost him strength, time and air. During his ascent, he went into respiratory distress at 130 meters. Shalo panicked and ascended without stopping, shooting to the surface like a balloon.
The ascent should never be faster than 10 meters per minute. A diver expels nitrogen as the pressure decreases. If he ascends too quickly, the gas forms bubbles in the blood that cause pain in the elbows, knees and shoulders. The bubbles can also clog blood vessels and tissue in the brain, heart, lungs and the spinal cord. The last 10 meters are especially tricky, because the pressure decreases by half, from two to one bar.
“Shalo must have been bubbling like a Pepsi-Cola,” says Heikal Tawab, the physician-in-chief at the Hyperbaric Medical Center in Dahab. Divers who ascend too quickly have to be brought there immediately, to its compression chamber.
Tawab is constantly prepared for an emergency, and he never switches off his phone. He saves lives, but sometimes even he can do nothing.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Do All That You Say You Will Do!
Do All That You Say You Will Do ... And More
Posted: 14 Jul 2012 04:28 AM PDT
By Craig Ballantyne, ETR, July 12, 2012
My mother is not the type to get upset. But I could sense the irritation in her voice when I asked, “How’s your new house coming along?”
It had been over three weeks since I last visited the farm, and, unfortunately, there had been practically no progress made on her new house. She listed the excuses she had been given from the contractors, her voice full of exasperation.
Later that afternoon, Bally the Dog and I went for a walk from the current farmhouse over to where the driveway had been laid for her new home. It was less than a mile walk over the stream, through a cornfield, and up a hill. There we found the grounds to be almost exactly the same as they were last month. The foundation had not even been poured.
I could see why she was so disappointed. When the project was initiated, she was assured of a move-in date of July. Now it’s looking like September at best.
This was a classic case of a business over-promising and under-delivering and thus failing to meet the expectations previously set in my mother’s mind. This is one of the biggest, most common communication mistakes that people make on a daily basis.
How many times has someone promised you the following and then left you waiting?
“I’ll be home by seven o’clock.”
“I’ll have that report on your desk by the end of the day.”
“I’ll call you back in an hour.”
Or worse, how many times have you been the one making false promises? How many times this week? How many times today?
It’s a mistake you can’t afford to make, not when you want to build long-term relationships with clients or colleagues.
Instead, you must use the “make a promise-keep a promise” system. That’s the formula for success. That’s the equation for deep relationships.
Make a promise. Keep a promise. It’s so simple, yet day-after-day we see businesses, politicians, and spouses all over the world drop the ball on this.
In your family life, you simply need to do all that you say you’re going to do. If you promise to be somewhere at a certain time to do something, you must fulfill your obligation. And, just as important, as self-improvement legend Jim Rohn advises, “Wherever you are, be there.” That means not being engrossed in your smartphone while at the park with your children or, the ultimate disrespect of all, texting while having dinner with someone. Either don’t promise to have that dinner or have the patience and courtesy to wait until later to send your phone messages. Make a promise to be there, and keep it.
In your business, do all that you say you’re going to do. Honor your contracts. Deliver on the promises made to your customers, suppliers, and partners. Avoid the temptation to over-promise and under-deliver. Be clear in your offer and make sure to avoid overextending yourself in the process. If you know you can’t deliver on a promise, don’t sell it. That mistake will only cause you a nagging headache and dent in your reputation.
That’s how you build relationships the right way, from day one, so that you never lose your prospect’s faith. And so you can avoid disappointed customers, like my mother.
Fortunately, and better late than never, the contractor called my mother and said that everything was now back on track. They would be getting to work on the foundation of the house early next week.
But that relationship is permanently damaged. She’ll never have the same level of trust in the contractor as she did when he first made his promises.
Don’t let this happen in your life or business. Put yourself on the line. Make your promises, keep your promises. Over-deliver value and exceed the expectations of everyone you deal with in life.
As my friend Bedros Keuilian teaches, “You need to over-deliver, give faster results than promised, and become the go-to leader for your market.”
It all starts with doing what you say—and more.
We can all do better. Let’s start today.
Five things I’ve learned on the ground in Portugal
Simon Black on JULY 10, 2012
July 10, 2012
Porto, Portugal
Portugal is a country that I’ve always enjoyed, full of warm, welcoming people, excellent wine, and great weather.
I came to Porto, the country’s second largest city of some 1.5 million, to get a sense of what’s been happening since the eurocalypse.
1. Capitulation of hope
Excluding the city’s still-bustling tourist areas, it’s very quiet around the city.
Street-level retail shops and restaurants are either devoid of customers or have been vacated. On many blocks I’ve seen more “for lease” signs than operating businesses.
Officially, the unemployment rate is 15.2% in Portugal, and the economy will contract 3% this year… yet the clear lack of economic activity suggests the real figures are much greater.
Without doubt, reality has set in. Locals have capitulated ‘hope’ that the good times will magically re-appear and have adjusted their habits accordingly.
2. Austerity: too little, too late
For the last several years, national government spending has contributed nearly 40% of Portugal’s GDP. In Europe, this has only been bested by (you guessed it) Greece and Ireland.
Including local and provincial governments, in fact, total government expenditure here surpasses 50% of GDP. It’s insane.
Under the terms of their bail-out last year, they’ve been forced to cut back. Sort of.
The government recently tried reforming public worker benefits, for example. But Portugal’s Constitutional Court overturned the move, ruling that cutting public workers’ Christmas bonuses and generous paid holidays is unconstitutional.
They’ve also made attempts at overhauling the broken pension system. But then the president himself, Mr. Anibal Cavaco Silva, began complaining about his own pension being trimmed.
You really can’t make this stuff up.
All the national and local governments have really been able to do is cut small, rounding-error line items from the budget… landscaping, trash collection, things like that.
You can see the results on the streets– the grass is growing knee-high in public areas away from Porto’s main tourist spots.
But none of this is going to make a dent in the budget. ‘Austerity’ here is truly meaningless, and these guys are going to slide right back into insolvency. I’d expect Portugal’s 10-year yield (currently 10.3%) to rise.
3. Absurdly cheap.
Portugal is now one of the cheapest civilized places in the world to live. As part of the contraction, both asset prices and many retail prices in Portugal have dropped substantially.
The middle/upper-middle class segments of the real estate market have gone no-bid, and investment property owners with mortgages to service are getting desperate.
To give you an idea, I’m renting a spacious 3-bedroom, 2000 square foot luxury apartment in a new(ish) development that was completed during the real estate boom a few years ago. It’s costing me a whopping $60/night.
The complex is a ghost town. I’ve seen four human beings in as many days, and as I stand on the terrace surveying the other units, most of what I see is vacant.
Property owners I’ve spoken to say that they don’t want to rent to locals under a long-term lease because the locals can’t pay. And when they stop paying, the government makes eviction very difficult.
This makes their market of potential lessees quite small, hence cheap prices.
4. Gold businesses are doing well
All over town you can see these new ‘cash for gold’ type franchises being set up. It’s crazy, you’ll even see two or three of them on the same block across the street from one another. It’s like Starbucks.
Many of them are doing brisk business as locals look to raise spare cash. And the businesses are only buying gold, not selling.
5. Lack of productive youth
There is a noticeable, disproportionate lack of young people between the ages of 15 to 35 or so.
It seems that much of Portugal’s youth is heading to greener pastures, most notably to Brazil where they can easily obtain residency, find a job, and integrate into society… or to frontier markets like Angola (a former colony with a booming resource economy).
No doubt, people with skills and courage are getting the hell out.
America+s Surveillance State-(long article)
By Glenn Greenwald, Salon, July 10, 2012
Excerpts of a speech delivered by Glenn Greenwald at this month’s Socialism 2012 conference
The Surveillance State hovers over any attacks that meaningfully challenge state-appropriated power. It doesn’t just hover over it. It impedes it, it deters it and kills it. That’s its intent. It does that by design.
To begin this discussion, I want to begin with a little story that Ithink is illustrative and significant in lots of ways.
The story begins in the mid-1970s when there were scandals that were erupting, arising out of the Watergate investigation in the Nixon administration and/or scandals surrounding the fact that, as it turned out, the Nixon administration and various law enforcement officials in the federal government were misusing their eavesdropping powers. They were listening in on people who were political opponents, they were doing so purely out of political self-interest, having nothing to do with legal factors or the business of the nation, and this created a scandal, and unlike today, a scandal 40 years ago in the mid-1970s resulted in at least some relatively significant reactions.
In particular, a committee was formed in the Congress and the Senate, and it was headed by someone named Frank Church, who was a Democratic Party of the United States senator from Idaho who had been, in the Senate, at this time, for 20 years as one of the most widely regarded senators, and was chosen because of that. And he led this investigation into these eavesdropping abuses and tried to get into the scandal. One of the things that he discovered was that these eavesdropping abuses were radically more pervasive and egregious than anything that had been known at the start of the investigation.
It was by no means confined to the Nixon administration. In fact, it went all the way back to the 1920s, when the government first began developing the audio capability to eavesdrop on American citizens and heightened as the power heightened through the 1940s, when WWII would justify it; into the ’50s when the Cold War did, and the 1960s when the social unrest justified surveillance. What Senator Church found was that literally every single administration under both Democratic and Republican presidents had seriously abused this power.
And not in isolated ways, but systematically. This committee documented all the ways in which that was true, and the realization quickly emerged that, allowing government officials to eavesdrop on other people, on citizens, without constraints or oversight, to do so in the dark, is a power that gives so much authority and leverage to those in power that it is virtually impossible for human beings to resist abusing that power. That’s how potent of a power it is.
But the second thing that he realized beyond just the general realization that this power had been systematically abused was that, there was an agency that was at the heart of this abuse, and it was the National Security Agency. And what was really amazing about the National Security Agency was that it had been formed 20 years ago back in 1949 by President Truman, and it was formed as part of the Defense Department. It was so covert that literally, for two decades, almost nobody in the government even knew that it existed, let alone knew what it did. Including key senators like Frank Church.
And part of his investigation—and actually, it was a fairly radical investigation, fairly aggressive even looking at it through cynical eyes and realizing that the ultimate impact wasn’t particularly grand, but the investigation itself was pretty impressive—and he forced his way into the National Security Agency and found out as much as he possibly could about it.
And after the investigation concluded, he issued all sorts of warnings about the Surveillance State and how it was emerging, and the urgency of only allowing government officials to eavesdrop on citizens, that they have all kinds of layers of oversight in the courts and Congress, but he issued a specific warning about the National Security Agency that is really remarkable in terms of what he said. And this is what he said—and you can find this anywhere online, in the New York Times, everywhere—he said, as part of a written report, and in an interview:
“The National Security Agency’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter.”
He continued, “There would be no place to hide. If a dictator takes over the United States, the NSA could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”
Now, there are several things that I find extraordinary about that statement. For one, the language that he uses. I mean, this was literally one of the people who was the most established institutional figures in American politics. I mean, he was in the liberal way of the Democratic Party but very much, he was mainstream for many years [ … ] And here he is warning the country of the dangers, not just of the U.S. government but specifically about the National Security Agency using words like “dictator” and “total tyranny” and warning of the way in which this power can be abused such that, essentially it would be irreversible. That once the government is able to monitor everything we do and everything we say, there’s no way to fight back because fighting back requires doing it away from their prying eyes.
And if you look now, 30 years later to where we are, not only would you never, ever hear a U.S. senator stand up and insinuate that the National Security State poses this great danger or use words like “tyranny” and “dictators” to describe the United States the way that Frank Church did only 30 years ago. Now it’s virtually a religious obligation to talk about the National Security State and its close cousin, the Surveillance State, with nothing short of veneration.
Just a few weeks ago, Chris Hayes, who’s an MSNBC host on the weekends, used the opportunity of Memorial Day to express this view in this very tortured, careful and pre-apologetic way that maybe it’s the case that not every single person who has ever served as an American soldier or enlisted in the American military is a hero. Maybe we can think about them in ways short of that. And this incredible controversy erupted, condemnation poured down on him from Democrats and conservatives, liberals and the like, and he was forced in multiple venues in the course of the next week to issue one increasingly sheepish apology after the next. That’s how radically our discourse has changed, so that you cannot talk about the National Security State or the Surveillance State in these kinds of nefarious terms, the way that Frank Church, who probably knew more about it, did just a few decades ago.
The second remarkable aspect of that story, of that quote to me, is that the outcome of that investigation was a series of laws that were grounded in the principle that, as I said earlier, that we cannot allow government officials to eavesdrop on American citizens or in any way to engage in surveillance without all kinds of oversights and checks. The most illustrative of which was the FISA law, which said that no government official can eavesdrop on the occasion without first going through a court and proving to a court that we’re actually doing something wrong and getting the court permission before they can eavesdrop.
There was a similar controversy in the mid 2000s and in 2005 when the New York Times revealed that the Bush administration had been using the NSA to do exactly what Frank Church warned against—which is spying on the communication of American citizens. And the outcome of that was not new laws or new safeguards to constrain these sorts of abuses, it was exactly the opposite. In 2008, the Democratic-led Congress, with the support of President Obama, most of his supporters in the Democratic party and almost all Republicans basically gutted that law. Repealed it in its core and made it much, much easier for the government to eavesdrop on American citizens without constraint, and then immunized the nation’s telecoms that had participated in that illegal program.
So you see the radically different attitudes that the United States has to surveillance just some 30 years ago, when abuses resulted in a whole variety of a weak, but still meaningful legal constraint, versus what we do now when we find out that the government is lawlessly spying on us, which is act as quickly as possible to make it legal.
But the third part of why I think Church’s statements are so remarkable and important: If you look at what he said, he phrased his warning in a conditional sense. He said, If A happens, then B. A was: If the NSA starts using its eavesdropping capabilities and not directing them at foreign, nationals we suspect of spying, but instead at the American people, then B will happen. B being, we’ll essentially live under a dictatorship. There will be total tyranny where the American people will be unable to fight back because this net of surveillance will cover what we do.
And what’s really remarkable is that that conditional that he warned against—the apparatus of the NSA being directed domestically and inwardly rather than outwardly—has absolutely come to pass. That is the current situation, that is the current circumstance of the United States. The NSA, beginning 2001, was secretly ordered to spy domestically on the communications of American citizens. It has escalated in all sorts of lawless, and now lawful ways, such that it is now an enormous part of what that agency does. Even more significantly, the technology that it has developed is now shared by a whole variety of agencies, including the FBI, so that this surveillance net that Frank Church warned so stridently about, in a way that if we stood up now, we’d be immediately be branded a sort of shrill, submarginalized radical, has come to be, in all sorts of entrenched and legal ways.
Now there’s a few ways to think about the Surveillance State and try to understand its scope and magnitude. I think the most effective way to do that is to look at a couple of numbers. And to use the most mainstream sources to do that in terms of where we are, in terms of the American Surveillance State.
In 2010 the Washington Post published a three-part series called “Top Secret America” written by their Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin. The first installment in that series looked at the National Security State and the Surveillance State, how it functions in the United States, and this was one of the sentences that appeared in this article. Listen to this, it said, “Every day—every day, collections systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls, and other types of communication.”
That’s every day, they intercept and store, and keep for as long as they want, 1.7 billion e-mails and other forms of telephonic communications.
William Binney is a NSA official, who is a high-ranking NSA official for decades, and he resigned in the wake of 9/11 because he was so outraged that the NSA was starting to be turned against the American people. And he resigned, and recently he has begun to speak out about the NSA’s abuses and he gave an interview on Democracy Now! three weeks ago, and this is what he said about surveillance under the Obama administration. He said,
“Surveillance has increased every year since 9/11. In fact, I would suggest that they’ve assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens: 20 trillion transactions have been assembled by the NSA and its related agencies about U.S. citizens interacting with other U.S. citizens.”
He then went on to add that, that’s only e-mails and telephone calls, and not things like financial transactions or other forms of video surveillance. So that pretty much tracks with the Washington Post report as well—if you’re storing 1.7 billion e-mails and telephone calls each and every day, it’s likely that you’ll fairly quickly reach the 20 trillion level that William Binney identified.
Now the most amazing thing about the Surveillance State is that we actually know very little about it. We’re almost back to the mid-1970s when nobody even knew what the NSA was. The big joke in Washington whenever anyone would mention the NSA is that the “NSA” stood for “No Such Agency.” It was something that you were not permitted to talk about, even in government. No one knew what it did.
We’re basically at that point. We get little snippets of information like the two statistics that I just described that give us a sense of just how sprawling and all-encompassing the surveillance state is. But we don’t know very much about who runs it, how it’s operated, at whom it’s directed and who makes those decisions. And in fact, so clear is that lack of knowledge that there is an amazing controversy right now about the Patriot Act.
You may remember, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Patriot Act was something that was really controversial. And mid-September, October of 2001, Congress enacted this law and everyone went around warning that it was this massive expansion of surveillance that was unlike anything we had ever seen before—became the symbol of Bush-Cheney radicalism. Now, the Patriot Act is completely uncontroversial. It gets renewed without any notice every three years with zero reforms, no matter which party is in control.
There are two Democratic senators that are very, kind of, mainstream, loyal, Democratic Party supporters. They’re President Obama supporters [ … ] One is Ron Wyden of Oregon and the other is Mark Udall of Colorado. And what these two Democratic Party senators have been doing for the last three years is running around warning that the Patriot Act is so much worse than anything that any of us thought all that time when we were objecting to it. And the reason it’s so much worse is because the U.S. government has secretly interpreted it—what the Patriot Act admits it to do in terms of surveillance on American citizens, is completely unrelated to what the law actually says, and it’s something that almost nobody knows.
Just listen to these two quotes that they gave to the New York Times a month ago. Senator Wyden said:
“I want to deliver a warning this afternoon. When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned, and they will be angry.”
Now he’s talking about a different American people than the one that I know, but the point is that if you were paying attention and cared about these things as you should, you will be stunned and angry to learn about what the government is doing under this already broad act.
Senator Udall said, “Americans will be alarmed if they knew how this law is being carried out.” Now they are two, as I said, established Democrats warning that the Democratic control of the Executive branch is massively abusing this already incredibly broad Patriot Act. And one of the things they are trying to do is extract some basic information from the NSA about what it is they’re doing in terms of the surveillance on the American people. Because even though they are on the Intelligence Committee, they say they don’t even know the most basic information about what the NSA does including even how many Americans have had their e-mails read or had their telephone calls intercepted by the NSA.
So one of the things they did a couple months ago is, they wrote a demand to the NSA saying, we don’t want you to tell us anything sensitive, we just need to know the basic information about what it is that you’re doing. Such as, for example, the thing we want to know, is how many American citizens on U.S. soil have had their e-mails read by you, and their telephone calls listened to by you. That’s what we want to know, most of all.
And the NSA responded two weeks ago by saying—I’m not exaggerating, I’m not saying this to be humorous, I’m not being ironic, I’m not snippeting a part of it to distort it—their answer was, “We can’t tell you how many millions of Americans are having their e-mails read by us, and their telephone calls listened in by us, because for us to tell you that would violate the privacy of American citizens.” (Laughter)
And just so you believe me, because if I were you I’d think, “That’s just ridiculous.” I just want to read you from the letter that the head of the NSA wrote to the Intelligence Committee as a response, “The NSA inspector general and NSA leadership both agree that a review of the sort you’re suggesting would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons.”
So, I think the important thing to realize is how little we know about what it is that they’re doing. But the little that we do know is extraordinarily alarming in exactly the way that Frank Church described. Now, I just want to make a couple other points about the Surveillance State, that don’t get enough attention but that really are necessary for completing the picture about what it really is and what it does.
We talk a lot about things like the NSA and federal government agencies like the FBI, but it actually stands well beyond that. We really live in a culture of surveillance. I mean, if you even go into any normal American city or even, increasingly, small or mid-sized towns, there are all kinds of instruments of surveillance everywhere that you probably don’t even notice. If you wake up in the morning and drive to your local convenience store, you’ve undoubtedly been photographed by all sorts of surveillance cameras on the street. If you go to the ATM to take out money to buy things, that will be then recorded. If you go into a convenience store to buy things you want to buy, you’ll have your photograph taken and will be reported.
An article in Popular Mechanics in 2004 reported on a study of American surveillance and this is what it said: “There are an estimated 30 million surveillance cameras now deployed in the United States shooting 4 billion hours of footage a week. Americans are being watched. All of us, almost everywhere.” There is a study in 2006 that estimated that that number would quadruple to 100 million cameras—surveillance cameras—in the United States within five years largely because of the bonanza of post-9/11 surveilling.
And it’s not just the government that is engaged in surveillance, but just as menacingly, corporations, private corporations, engage in huge amounts of surveillance on us. They give us cell phones that track every moment of where we are physically, and then provide that to law enforcement agencies without so much as a search warrant. Obviously, credit card and banking transactions are reported, and tell anyone who wants to know everything we do. We talk about the scandal of the Bush eavesdropping program that was not really a government eavesdropping program, so much as it was a private industry eavesdropping program. It was done with the direct and full cooperation of AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and the other telecom giants.
In fact, when you talk about the American Surveillance State, what you’re really talking about is no longer public government agencies. What you’re talking about is a full-scale merger between the federal government and industry. That is what the Surveillance State is. They are equally important parts of what the Surveillance State does.
I think the most interesting, and probably revealing, example that I can give you about where we are in terms of surveillance in the United States is a really ironic and unintendedly amusing series of events that took place in mid-2011. What happened in mid-2011 was that the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which as we know are very, very oppressive and hate freedom, they said that what they were going to do was ban the use of Blackberries and similar devices on their soil. The reason is that the corporation that produces Blackberries was either unable or unwilling to guarantee that Saudi and UAE intelligence agencies would be able to intercept all communications.
And the governments in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were horrified by the prospect that people might be able to communicate on their soil without them being able to intercept and surveill their communication. And in response, they banned Blackberries.
This created huge amounts of condemnation in the western world. Every American newspaper editorialized about how this showed how much these governments were the enemies of freedom, the Obama administration issued a stinging denunciation of both governments, saying that they were engaged in the kinds of oppression that we couldn’t tolerate. And yet, six weeks later, the New York Times reported that, “The Obama administration was preparing legislation to mandate that all services that enable communications”—and I’m quoting from the New York Times—“to mandate that all services that enable communication, including in encrypted e-mail transmitters like Blackberry, social networking websites like Facebook, and software that allows direct pure messaging like Skype, be designed to ensure government surveillance,” which is exactly the same principle that everyone can damn United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia for.
The principle being that there can be no human interaction, especially no human communication, not just for international between foreign nations but by America citizens on American soil that is beyond the reach of the U.S. government.
This was the mindset in 2002 when the Bush administration, to dredge up John Poindexter, from wherever it was that he was—and he was going to start the program that they call the Total Information Awareness Program. The logo which, I actually looked in the last couple of weeks, you should go look at that, you won’t believe how creepy it is, has a pyramid with this huge eye hovering over it. This eye is the “all-seeing eye” and the only problem with the Total Information Awareness Program is that, they just put a name on it that was too honest about what it was.
It freaked everybody out and they had to pretend like they weren’t going to go forward with it but what they did was incrementally, in a very clear way, recreated the Total Information Awareness Program under a whole variety of different legislative initiatives. And this idea that every single form of technological communication, by law, must be constructed to permit government backdoor interception and surveillance is an expression of what this Surveillance State mindset is: that there can be no such thing as any form of privacy from the U.S. government. That is the mindset that has led the Surveillance State to beam the sprawling, vast, ubiquitous and always expanding instrument that state and corporate power users employ in order to safeguard their power.
One other point worth making about how this works, about how the Surveillance State works and how powers exercise through it—and this I think is probably the most pernicious part. I refer to this as the one-way mirror. The government’s one-way mirror.
At exactly the same time (this is really, so remarkable to me), at exactly the same time that the government has been massively expanding its ability to know everything that we’re doing it has simultaneously erected a wall of secrecy around it that prevents us from knowing anything that they’re doing. There is this amazing controversy when the documents from WikiLeaks were disclosed, and the American media had to rush to assure everybody simultaneously that this was all a completely meaningless act and a completely horrible act.
So, the two claims that were made was, this horrible, traitorous organization, WikiLeaks, has severely damaged American national security, but at the same time we want you to know, there’s nothing new in anything that they disclosed. There’s nothing worth knowing. That was literally the two claims that was named and nobody ever bothered to reconcile those.
But what was true is that, of the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages that WikiLeaks disclosed, it’s actually an excess of a million now. The vast, vast bulk of it were very banal content. It was stuff that really wasn’t particularly interesting, that didn’t really reveal very much about anything that was worth knowing. And what was actually so scandalous about that was that very fact, because every single page that WikiLeaks disclosed was stamped “Classified” and they made it a crime to disclose any of it. Even though so much of it was banal and revealed nothing worth knowing. And what that reflected is that the U.S. government reflexively labels everything that it does of any conceivable significance as “classified” and “secret.” It keeps everything that it does from us, at the very same time that it knows more and more about what we’re doing. If you think about […] what a radical reversal [that is] of how things are supposed to work, it’s really startling.
The idea is supposed to be—and this is just basic political science, basic design of the founding—that there’s supposed to be transparency for government. We’re supposed to know virtually everything that they do. Individuals are supposed to live in a sphere of privacy. Nobody’s supposed to know what we’re doing unless there’s a demonstrated, good reason to invade that wall of privacy.
We completely reversed that, so that the government now operates with complete secrecy, and we have none. The reason this is so disturbing is—you can just look at the famous aphorism, typically attributed to Francis Bacon that “knowledge is power.” If I’m able to know everything about you, what you do, what you think, what you fear, where you go, what your aspirations are, the bad things that you do, the bad things you think about, and you know nothing about me? I have immense leverage over you in all kinds of ways. I can think about how to control you, I can blackmail you, I can figure out what your weaknesses are, I can manipulate you in all sorts of ways. That is the state of affairs that this Surveillance State, combined with the wall of secrecy, has brought about.
Now if you want to talk a little bit about the mechanisms by which this has been done, and the reasons why it matters so much […] in relationship to the government and the corporate component of the Surveillance State […]
When you look at the way in which the war on terror functioned in the first, say five to seven years after it was declared, and the civil liberties abuses that it ushered in particularly and inevitably, you’ll find that all this, without exception (there were few exceptions), they were directed toward foreign nationals—not American citizens, but foreign nationals—who were on foreign soil, not on U.S. soil. And the reason is that governments, when they want to give themselves abusive and radical powers, typically first target people who they think their citizens won’t care very much about, because they’ll think they’re not affected by it. And that’s pretty much what happened.
We detained, without charges and without trials, a bunch of Muslims who remain nameless, who were being picked up in places that nobody really knew about or cared much about. We sent drones to assassinate them. All of these powers were directed at foreign “others.”
But what has happened in the last three to four years is a radical change in the war on terror. The war on terror has now been imported into United States policy. It is now directed at American citizens on American soil. So rather than simply sending drones to foreign soil to assassinate foreign nationals, we are now sending drones to target and kill American citizens without charges or trial. Rather than indefinitely detaining foreign nationals like Guantanamo, Congress last year enacted, and President Obama signed, the National Defense Authorization Act that permits the detention—without trial, indefinitely—of American citizens on U.S. soil.
Rather than sending drones only over Yemen and Somalia and Pakistan, drones are now being approved at an alarming rate. Not just surveillance drones, but increasingly, possibly, weaponized drones that will fly over American soil, watching everything that we do in ways that say, police helicopters could never possibly accomplish.
Even when President Obama promised to close Guantanamo—and lots of his defenders say, not accurately, that he was prevented from doing so because Congress blocked the closure—the plan that he had was not to close Guantanamo and eliminate the system of indefinite detention that made it so controversial. The plan was to take that system of indefinite detention, close Guantanamo because it had become an upsetting symbol, and import it, move it, onto American soil.
So what you see is the gradual importation of all the abuses of the war on terror. Now they are entrenched and not just into foreign nationals but to U.S. citizens and on U.S. soil as well. That’s the mechanism by which this is being done.
If you listen to US officials—intelligence and defense officials—talk about terrorism, what they emphasize now is not Al-Qaeda in Pakistan, which they largely acknowledge has been eliminated. Or even Al-Qaeda in Yemen, which isn’t really much of a threat to anybody. What they talk about is the threat of a home-grown terrorism.
This is now the grave menace that American terrorism officials will warn, needs to be restrained, and the solution to that has been the gradual transference of all these abuses that we let take root because they weren’t happening to us but were happening to us but were happening to people “over there,” and are now being imported into domestic powers.
And the reason that’s being done isn’t difficult to see. American policymakers know that the financial unraveling that took place in 2008 that’s even more visible in European states like Spain and Portugal and Greece, has never really been rectified, and it can’t be rectified because there are structural problems. The way in which oligarchs in the United States monopolize wealth and then use that wealth to control our political processes, ensure that this is not going to change, it’s only going to worsen. Mass unemployment, mass foreclosure, all these income inequality pathologies are here to stay, and the future that America policymakers see is visible if you look at what happened in London for a weak period of time and what happens all the time in Athens, what is happening with increasing frequency in Spain: huge amounts of social unrest.
And the elites in the United States, both corporate and government, are petrified about that type of unrest, and what people in power always do when they fear unrest, is they start consolidating power in order to constrain it, in order to suppress it.
And this is what the Surveillance State is designed to do. It’s justified, in the name of terrorism, of course that’s the packaging in which it’s wrapped, that’s been used extremely, and in all sorts of ways, since 9/11 for domestic application. And that’s being, that’s happening even more. It’s happening in terms of the Occupy movement and the infiltration that federal officials were able to accomplish using Patriot Act authorities. It’s happened with pro-Palestinian activists in the United States and all other dissident groups that have themselves [dealt with] with surveillance and law enforcement used by what was originally the war on terror powers.
I just want to close by talking about why I think this matters. The attitude that you typically encounter, and it’s not a very easy mindset to address or to refute, is that, and one that the government has sold continuously and peddled…is that privacy in the aspect I can understand as something to value, but ultimately, if I’m not really doing anything wrong, if I’m not one of the terrorists, if I’m not plotting to bomb a bridge, I don’t really have much reason to care, and people are invading my sphere of privacy and watching and learning what it is that I’m doing.
So I think it’s worth talking about the reasons why that is such an ill-advised way to think. Why it absolutely matters that privacy is being invaded in these systematic ways.
I always use dog examples. I have 11 dogs. I know you probably think I’m crazy, it’s all rescue dogs, it’s one of the things we do, so I draw a lot of lessons from dogs. One of the most amazing things about dog behavior is, if you don’t want dogs to go into a certain place because it’s dangerous for them, one of the things you can do is put a fence around the area that you want to confine them.
But eventually, you can remove the fence and you don’t need the fence anymore because they will have been trained that the entirety of the world is within the boundaries that you first set for them. So even once you remove the fence, they won’t venture beyond it. They’ve been trained that that’s the only world that they want or are interested in, or known.
There are studies in what was formerly East Germany, which was probably one of the most notorious surveillance states in the last 50 years, where even once their boundaries were removed, once the Stasi no longer existed, once the wall fell… the psychological effects on East German people endure until today. The way in which they have been trained for decades to understand that there are limits to their life, even once you remove the limits, they’ve been trained that those are not things they need to transgress.
And that’s one of the things that constantly surveilling people and constantly communicating to them that they’re powerless against this omnipotent government corporate institution does to people, it convinces people that the tiny little box in which they live is really the only box in which they want to live so they don’t even realize being in prison.
You can acculturate people to believing that tyranny is freedom, that their limits are actually emancipations and freedom, that is what this Surveillance State does, by training people to accept their own conformity that they are actually free, that they no longer even realize the ways in which they’re being limited.
Karenlovingheart:comment
One of the things I am most grateful for in my entire life is the grace to know, understand and care that this is so, that it is fulfillment of Bible prophecy and that thankfully, it will end with the best possible solution. TYJ! Even so come quickly Lord Jesus. The youth of this generation are being lost to this reality so quickly it's heartrending. Pray!
Excerpts of a speech delivered by Glenn Greenwald at this month’s Socialism 2012 conference
The Surveillance State hovers over any attacks that meaningfully challenge state-appropriated power. It doesn’t just hover over it. It impedes it, it deters it and kills it. That’s its intent. It does that by design.
To begin this discussion, I want to begin with a little story that Ithink is illustrative and significant in lots of ways.
The story begins in the mid-1970s when there were scandals that were erupting, arising out of the Watergate investigation in the Nixon administration and/or scandals surrounding the fact that, as it turned out, the Nixon administration and various law enforcement officials in the federal government were misusing their eavesdropping powers. They were listening in on people who were political opponents, they were doing so purely out of political self-interest, having nothing to do with legal factors or the business of the nation, and this created a scandal, and unlike today, a scandal 40 years ago in the mid-1970s resulted in at least some relatively significant reactions.
In particular, a committee was formed in the Congress and the Senate, and it was headed by someone named Frank Church, who was a Democratic Party of the United States senator from Idaho who had been, in the Senate, at this time, for 20 years as one of the most widely regarded senators, and was chosen because of that. And he led this investigation into these eavesdropping abuses and tried to get into the scandal. One of the things that he discovered was that these eavesdropping abuses were radically more pervasive and egregious than anything that had been known at the start of the investigation.
It was by no means confined to the Nixon administration. In fact, it went all the way back to the 1920s, when the government first began developing the audio capability to eavesdrop on American citizens and heightened as the power heightened through the 1940s, when WWII would justify it; into the ’50s when the Cold War did, and the 1960s when the social unrest justified surveillance. What Senator Church found was that literally every single administration under both Democratic and Republican presidents had seriously abused this power.
And not in isolated ways, but systematically. This committee documented all the ways in which that was true, and the realization quickly emerged that, allowing government officials to eavesdrop on other people, on citizens, without constraints or oversight, to do so in the dark, is a power that gives so much authority and leverage to those in power that it is virtually impossible for human beings to resist abusing that power. That’s how potent of a power it is.
But the second thing that he realized beyond just the general realization that this power had been systematically abused was that, there was an agency that was at the heart of this abuse, and it was the National Security Agency. And what was really amazing about the National Security Agency was that it had been formed 20 years ago back in 1949 by President Truman, and it was formed as part of the Defense Department. It was so covert that literally, for two decades, almost nobody in the government even knew that it existed, let alone knew what it did. Including key senators like Frank Church.
And part of his investigation—and actually, it was a fairly radical investigation, fairly aggressive even looking at it through cynical eyes and realizing that the ultimate impact wasn’t particularly grand, but the investigation itself was pretty impressive—and he forced his way into the National Security Agency and found out as much as he possibly could about it.
And after the investigation concluded, he issued all sorts of warnings about the Surveillance State and how it was emerging, and the urgency of only allowing government officials to eavesdrop on citizens, that they have all kinds of layers of oversight in the courts and Congress, but he issued a specific warning about the National Security Agency that is really remarkable in terms of what he said. And this is what he said—and you can find this anywhere online, in the New York Times, everywhere—he said, as part of a written report, and in an interview:
“The National Security Agency’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter.”
He continued, “There would be no place to hide. If a dictator takes over the United States, the NSA could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”
Now, there are several things that I find extraordinary about that statement. For one, the language that he uses. I mean, this was literally one of the people who was the most established institutional figures in American politics. I mean, he was in the liberal way of the Democratic Party but very much, he was mainstream for many years [ … ] And here he is warning the country of the dangers, not just of the U.S. government but specifically about the National Security Agency using words like “dictator” and “total tyranny” and warning of the way in which this power can be abused such that, essentially it would be irreversible. That once the government is able to monitor everything we do and everything we say, there’s no way to fight back because fighting back requires doing it away from their prying eyes.
And if you look now, 30 years later to where we are, not only would you never, ever hear a U.S. senator stand up and insinuate that the National Security State poses this great danger or use words like “tyranny” and “dictators” to describe the United States the way that Frank Church did only 30 years ago. Now it’s virtually a religious obligation to talk about the National Security State and its close cousin, the Surveillance State, with nothing short of veneration.
Just a few weeks ago, Chris Hayes, who’s an MSNBC host on the weekends, used the opportunity of Memorial Day to express this view in this very tortured, careful and pre-apologetic way that maybe it’s the case that not every single person who has ever served as an American soldier or enlisted in the American military is a hero. Maybe we can think about them in ways short of that. And this incredible controversy erupted, condemnation poured down on him from Democrats and conservatives, liberals and the like, and he was forced in multiple venues in the course of the next week to issue one increasingly sheepish apology after the next. That’s how radically our discourse has changed, so that you cannot talk about the National Security State or the Surveillance State in these kinds of nefarious terms, the way that Frank Church, who probably knew more about it, did just a few decades ago.
The second remarkable aspect of that story, of that quote to me, is that the outcome of that investigation was a series of laws that were grounded in the principle that, as I said earlier, that we cannot allow government officials to eavesdrop on American citizens or in any way to engage in surveillance without all kinds of oversights and checks. The most illustrative of which was the FISA law, which said that no government official can eavesdrop on the occasion without first going through a court and proving to a court that we’re actually doing something wrong and getting the court permission before they can eavesdrop.
There was a similar controversy in the mid 2000s and in 2005 when the New York Times revealed that the Bush administration had been using the NSA to do exactly what Frank Church warned against—which is spying on the communication of American citizens. And the outcome of that was not new laws or new safeguards to constrain these sorts of abuses, it was exactly the opposite. In 2008, the Democratic-led Congress, with the support of President Obama, most of his supporters in the Democratic party and almost all Republicans basically gutted that law. Repealed it in its core and made it much, much easier for the government to eavesdrop on American citizens without constraint, and then immunized the nation’s telecoms that had participated in that illegal program.
So you see the radically different attitudes that the United States has to surveillance just some 30 years ago, when abuses resulted in a whole variety of a weak, but still meaningful legal constraint, versus what we do now when we find out that the government is lawlessly spying on us, which is act as quickly as possible to make it legal.
But the third part of why I think Church’s statements are so remarkable and important: If you look at what he said, he phrased his warning in a conditional sense. He said, If A happens, then B. A was: If the NSA starts using its eavesdropping capabilities and not directing them at foreign, nationals we suspect of spying, but instead at the American people, then B will happen. B being, we’ll essentially live under a dictatorship. There will be total tyranny where the American people will be unable to fight back because this net of surveillance will cover what we do.
And what’s really remarkable is that that conditional that he warned against—the apparatus of the NSA being directed domestically and inwardly rather than outwardly—has absolutely come to pass. That is the current situation, that is the current circumstance of the United States. The NSA, beginning 2001, was secretly ordered to spy domestically on the communications of American citizens. It has escalated in all sorts of lawless, and now lawful ways, such that it is now an enormous part of what that agency does. Even more significantly, the technology that it has developed is now shared by a whole variety of agencies, including the FBI, so that this surveillance net that Frank Church warned so stridently about, in a way that if we stood up now, we’d be immediately be branded a sort of shrill, submarginalized radical, has come to be, in all sorts of entrenched and legal ways.
Now there’s a few ways to think about the Surveillance State and try to understand its scope and magnitude. I think the most effective way to do that is to look at a couple of numbers. And to use the most mainstream sources to do that in terms of where we are, in terms of the American Surveillance State.
In 2010 the Washington Post published a three-part series called “Top Secret America” written by their Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin. The first installment in that series looked at the National Security State and the Surveillance State, how it functions in the United States, and this was one of the sentences that appeared in this article. Listen to this, it said, “Every day—every day, collections systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls, and other types of communication.”
That’s every day, they intercept and store, and keep for as long as they want, 1.7 billion e-mails and other forms of telephonic communications.
William Binney is a NSA official, who is a high-ranking NSA official for decades, and he resigned in the wake of 9/11 because he was so outraged that the NSA was starting to be turned against the American people. And he resigned, and recently he has begun to speak out about the NSA’s abuses and he gave an interview on Democracy Now! three weeks ago, and this is what he said about surveillance under the Obama administration. He said,
“Surveillance has increased every year since 9/11. In fact, I would suggest that they’ve assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens: 20 trillion transactions have been assembled by the NSA and its related agencies about U.S. citizens interacting with other U.S. citizens.”
He then went on to add that, that’s only e-mails and telephone calls, and not things like financial transactions or other forms of video surveillance. So that pretty much tracks with the Washington Post report as well—if you’re storing 1.7 billion e-mails and telephone calls each and every day, it’s likely that you’ll fairly quickly reach the 20 trillion level that William Binney identified.
Now the most amazing thing about the Surveillance State is that we actually know very little about it. We’re almost back to the mid-1970s when nobody even knew what the NSA was. The big joke in Washington whenever anyone would mention the NSA is that the “NSA” stood for “No Such Agency.” It was something that you were not permitted to talk about, even in government. No one knew what it did.
We’re basically at that point. We get little snippets of information like the two statistics that I just described that give us a sense of just how sprawling and all-encompassing the surveillance state is. But we don’t know very much about who runs it, how it’s operated, at whom it’s directed and who makes those decisions. And in fact, so clear is that lack of knowledge that there is an amazing controversy right now about the Patriot Act.
You may remember, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Patriot Act was something that was really controversial. And mid-September, October of 2001, Congress enacted this law and everyone went around warning that it was this massive expansion of surveillance that was unlike anything we had ever seen before—became the symbol of Bush-Cheney radicalism. Now, the Patriot Act is completely uncontroversial. It gets renewed without any notice every three years with zero reforms, no matter which party is in control.
There are two Democratic senators that are very, kind of, mainstream, loyal, Democratic Party supporters. They’re President Obama supporters [ … ] One is Ron Wyden of Oregon and the other is Mark Udall of Colorado. And what these two Democratic Party senators have been doing for the last three years is running around warning that the Patriot Act is so much worse than anything that any of us thought all that time when we were objecting to it. And the reason it’s so much worse is because the U.S. government has secretly interpreted it—what the Patriot Act admits it to do in terms of surveillance on American citizens, is completely unrelated to what the law actually says, and it’s something that almost nobody knows.
Just listen to these two quotes that they gave to the New York Times a month ago. Senator Wyden said:
“I want to deliver a warning this afternoon. When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned, and they will be angry.”
Now he’s talking about a different American people than the one that I know, but the point is that if you were paying attention and cared about these things as you should, you will be stunned and angry to learn about what the government is doing under this already broad act.
Senator Udall said, “Americans will be alarmed if they knew how this law is being carried out.” Now they are two, as I said, established Democrats warning that the Democratic control of the Executive branch is massively abusing this already incredibly broad Patriot Act. And one of the things they are trying to do is extract some basic information from the NSA about what it is they’re doing in terms of the surveillance on the American people. Because even though they are on the Intelligence Committee, they say they don’t even know the most basic information about what the NSA does including even how many Americans have had their e-mails read or had their telephone calls intercepted by the NSA.
So one of the things they did a couple months ago is, they wrote a demand to the NSA saying, we don’t want you to tell us anything sensitive, we just need to know the basic information about what it is that you’re doing. Such as, for example, the thing we want to know, is how many American citizens on U.S. soil have had their e-mails read by you, and their telephone calls listened to by you. That’s what we want to know, most of all.
And the NSA responded two weeks ago by saying—I’m not exaggerating, I’m not saying this to be humorous, I’m not being ironic, I’m not snippeting a part of it to distort it—their answer was, “We can’t tell you how many millions of Americans are having their e-mails read by us, and their telephone calls listened in by us, because for us to tell you that would violate the privacy of American citizens.” (Laughter)
And just so you believe me, because if I were you I’d think, “That’s just ridiculous.” I just want to read you from the letter that the head of the NSA wrote to the Intelligence Committee as a response, “The NSA inspector general and NSA leadership both agree that a review of the sort you’re suggesting would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons.”
So, I think the important thing to realize is how little we know about what it is that they’re doing. But the little that we do know is extraordinarily alarming in exactly the way that Frank Church described. Now, I just want to make a couple other points about the Surveillance State, that don’t get enough attention but that really are necessary for completing the picture about what it really is and what it does.
We talk a lot about things like the NSA and federal government agencies like the FBI, but it actually stands well beyond that. We really live in a culture of surveillance. I mean, if you even go into any normal American city or even, increasingly, small or mid-sized towns, there are all kinds of instruments of surveillance everywhere that you probably don’t even notice. If you wake up in the morning and drive to your local convenience store, you’ve undoubtedly been photographed by all sorts of surveillance cameras on the street. If you go to the ATM to take out money to buy things, that will be then recorded. If you go into a convenience store to buy things you want to buy, you’ll have your photograph taken and will be reported.
An article in Popular Mechanics in 2004 reported on a study of American surveillance and this is what it said: “There are an estimated 30 million surveillance cameras now deployed in the United States shooting 4 billion hours of footage a week. Americans are being watched. All of us, almost everywhere.” There is a study in 2006 that estimated that that number would quadruple to 100 million cameras—surveillance cameras—in the United States within five years largely because of the bonanza of post-9/11 surveilling.
And it’s not just the government that is engaged in surveillance, but just as menacingly, corporations, private corporations, engage in huge amounts of surveillance on us. They give us cell phones that track every moment of where we are physically, and then provide that to law enforcement agencies without so much as a search warrant. Obviously, credit card and banking transactions are reported, and tell anyone who wants to know everything we do. We talk about the scandal of the Bush eavesdropping program that was not really a government eavesdropping program, so much as it was a private industry eavesdropping program. It was done with the direct and full cooperation of AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and the other telecom giants.
In fact, when you talk about the American Surveillance State, what you’re really talking about is no longer public government agencies. What you’re talking about is a full-scale merger between the federal government and industry. That is what the Surveillance State is. They are equally important parts of what the Surveillance State does.
I think the most interesting, and probably revealing, example that I can give you about where we are in terms of surveillance in the United States is a really ironic and unintendedly amusing series of events that took place in mid-2011. What happened in mid-2011 was that the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which as we know are very, very oppressive and hate freedom, they said that what they were going to do was ban the use of Blackberries and similar devices on their soil. The reason is that the corporation that produces Blackberries was either unable or unwilling to guarantee that Saudi and UAE intelligence agencies would be able to intercept all communications.
And the governments in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were horrified by the prospect that people might be able to communicate on their soil without them being able to intercept and surveill their communication. And in response, they banned Blackberries.
This created huge amounts of condemnation in the western world. Every American newspaper editorialized about how this showed how much these governments were the enemies of freedom, the Obama administration issued a stinging denunciation of both governments, saying that they were engaged in the kinds of oppression that we couldn’t tolerate. And yet, six weeks later, the New York Times reported that, “The Obama administration was preparing legislation to mandate that all services that enable communications”—and I’m quoting from the New York Times—“to mandate that all services that enable communication, including in encrypted e-mail transmitters like Blackberry, social networking websites like Facebook, and software that allows direct pure messaging like Skype, be designed to ensure government surveillance,” which is exactly the same principle that everyone can damn United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia for.
The principle being that there can be no human interaction, especially no human communication, not just for international between foreign nations but by America citizens on American soil that is beyond the reach of the U.S. government.
This was the mindset in 2002 when the Bush administration, to dredge up John Poindexter, from wherever it was that he was—and he was going to start the program that they call the Total Information Awareness Program. The logo which, I actually looked in the last couple of weeks, you should go look at that, you won’t believe how creepy it is, has a pyramid with this huge eye hovering over it. This eye is the “all-seeing eye” and the only problem with the Total Information Awareness Program is that, they just put a name on it that was too honest about what it was.
It freaked everybody out and they had to pretend like they weren’t going to go forward with it but what they did was incrementally, in a very clear way, recreated the Total Information Awareness Program under a whole variety of different legislative initiatives. And this idea that every single form of technological communication, by law, must be constructed to permit government backdoor interception and surveillance is an expression of what this Surveillance State mindset is: that there can be no such thing as any form of privacy from the U.S. government. That is the mindset that has led the Surveillance State to beam the sprawling, vast, ubiquitous and always expanding instrument that state and corporate power users employ in order to safeguard their power.
One other point worth making about how this works, about how the Surveillance State works and how powers exercise through it—and this I think is probably the most pernicious part. I refer to this as the one-way mirror. The government’s one-way mirror.
At exactly the same time (this is really, so remarkable to me), at exactly the same time that the government has been massively expanding its ability to know everything that we’re doing it has simultaneously erected a wall of secrecy around it that prevents us from knowing anything that they’re doing. There is this amazing controversy when the documents from WikiLeaks were disclosed, and the American media had to rush to assure everybody simultaneously that this was all a completely meaningless act and a completely horrible act.
So, the two claims that were made was, this horrible, traitorous organization, WikiLeaks, has severely damaged American national security, but at the same time we want you to know, there’s nothing new in anything that they disclosed. There’s nothing worth knowing. That was literally the two claims that was named and nobody ever bothered to reconcile those.
But what was true is that, of the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages that WikiLeaks disclosed, it’s actually an excess of a million now. The vast, vast bulk of it were very banal content. It was stuff that really wasn’t particularly interesting, that didn’t really reveal very much about anything that was worth knowing. And what was actually so scandalous about that was that very fact, because every single page that WikiLeaks disclosed was stamped “Classified” and they made it a crime to disclose any of it. Even though so much of it was banal and revealed nothing worth knowing. And what that reflected is that the U.S. government reflexively labels everything that it does of any conceivable significance as “classified” and “secret.” It keeps everything that it does from us, at the very same time that it knows more and more about what we’re doing. If you think about […] what a radical reversal [that is] of how things are supposed to work, it’s really startling.
The idea is supposed to be—and this is just basic political science, basic design of the founding—that there’s supposed to be transparency for government. We’re supposed to know virtually everything that they do. Individuals are supposed to live in a sphere of privacy. Nobody’s supposed to know what we’re doing unless there’s a demonstrated, good reason to invade that wall of privacy.
We completely reversed that, so that the government now operates with complete secrecy, and we have none. The reason this is so disturbing is—you can just look at the famous aphorism, typically attributed to Francis Bacon that “knowledge is power.” If I’m able to know everything about you, what you do, what you think, what you fear, where you go, what your aspirations are, the bad things that you do, the bad things you think about, and you know nothing about me? I have immense leverage over you in all kinds of ways. I can think about how to control you, I can blackmail you, I can figure out what your weaknesses are, I can manipulate you in all sorts of ways. That is the state of affairs that this Surveillance State, combined with the wall of secrecy, has brought about.
Now if you want to talk a little bit about the mechanisms by which this has been done, and the reasons why it matters so much […] in relationship to the government and the corporate component of the Surveillance State […]
When you look at the way in which the war on terror functioned in the first, say five to seven years after it was declared, and the civil liberties abuses that it ushered in particularly and inevitably, you’ll find that all this, without exception (there were few exceptions), they were directed toward foreign nationals—not American citizens, but foreign nationals—who were on foreign soil, not on U.S. soil. And the reason is that governments, when they want to give themselves abusive and radical powers, typically first target people who they think their citizens won’t care very much about, because they’ll think they’re not affected by it. And that’s pretty much what happened.
We detained, without charges and without trials, a bunch of Muslims who remain nameless, who were being picked up in places that nobody really knew about or cared much about. We sent drones to assassinate them. All of these powers were directed at foreign “others.”
But what has happened in the last three to four years is a radical change in the war on terror. The war on terror has now been imported into United States policy. It is now directed at American citizens on American soil. So rather than simply sending drones to foreign soil to assassinate foreign nationals, we are now sending drones to target and kill American citizens without charges or trial. Rather than indefinitely detaining foreign nationals like Guantanamo, Congress last year enacted, and President Obama signed, the National Defense Authorization Act that permits the detention—without trial, indefinitely—of American citizens on U.S. soil.
Rather than sending drones only over Yemen and Somalia and Pakistan, drones are now being approved at an alarming rate. Not just surveillance drones, but increasingly, possibly, weaponized drones that will fly over American soil, watching everything that we do in ways that say, police helicopters could never possibly accomplish.
Even when President Obama promised to close Guantanamo—and lots of his defenders say, not accurately, that he was prevented from doing so because Congress blocked the closure—the plan that he had was not to close Guantanamo and eliminate the system of indefinite detention that made it so controversial. The plan was to take that system of indefinite detention, close Guantanamo because it had become an upsetting symbol, and import it, move it, onto American soil.
So what you see is the gradual importation of all the abuses of the war on terror. Now they are entrenched and not just into foreign nationals but to U.S. citizens and on U.S. soil as well. That’s the mechanism by which this is being done.
If you listen to US officials—intelligence and defense officials—talk about terrorism, what they emphasize now is not Al-Qaeda in Pakistan, which they largely acknowledge has been eliminated. Or even Al-Qaeda in Yemen, which isn’t really much of a threat to anybody. What they talk about is the threat of a home-grown terrorism.
This is now the grave menace that American terrorism officials will warn, needs to be restrained, and the solution to that has been the gradual transference of all these abuses that we let take root because they weren’t happening to us but were happening to us but were happening to people “over there,” and are now being imported into domestic powers.
And the reason that’s being done isn’t difficult to see. American policymakers know that the financial unraveling that took place in 2008 that’s even more visible in European states like Spain and Portugal and Greece, has never really been rectified, and it can’t be rectified because there are structural problems. The way in which oligarchs in the United States monopolize wealth and then use that wealth to control our political processes, ensure that this is not going to change, it’s only going to worsen. Mass unemployment, mass foreclosure, all these income inequality pathologies are here to stay, and the future that America policymakers see is visible if you look at what happened in London for a weak period of time and what happens all the time in Athens, what is happening with increasing frequency in Spain: huge amounts of social unrest.
And the elites in the United States, both corporate and government, are petrified about that type of unrest, and what people in power always do when they fear unrest, is they start consolidating power in order to constrain it, in order to suppress it.
And this is what the Surveillance State is designed to do. It’s justified, in the name of terrorism, of course that’s the packaging in which it’s wrapped, that’s been used extremely, and in all sorts of ways, since 9/11 for domestic application. And that’s being, that’s happening even more. It’s happening in terms of the Occupy movement and the infiltration that federal officials were able to accomplish using Patriot Act authorities. It’s happened with pro-Palestinian activists in the United States and all other dissident groups that have themselves [dealt with] with surveillance and law enforcement used by what was originally the war on terror powers.
I just want to close by talking about why I think this matters. The attitude that you typically encounter, and it’s not a very easy mindset to address or to refute, is that, and one that the government has sold continuously and peddled…is that privacy in the aspect I can understand as something to value, but ultimately, if I’m not really doing anything wrong, if I’m not one of the terrorists, if I’m not plotting to bomb a bridge, I don’t really have much reason to care, and people are invading my sphere of privacy and watching and learning what it is that I’m doing.
So I think it’s worth talking about the reasons why that is such an ill-advised way to think. Why it absolutely matters that privacy is being invaded in these systematic ways.
I always use dog examples. I have 11 dogs. I know you probably think I’m crazy, it’s all rescue dogs, it’s one of the things we do, so I draw a lot of lessons from dogs. One of the most amazing things about dog behavior is, if you don’t want dogs to go into a certain place because it’s dangerous for them, one of the things you can do is put a fence around the area that you want to confine them.
But eventually, you can remove the fence and you don’t need the fence anymore because they will have been trained that the entirety of the world is within the boundaries that you first set for them. So even once you remove the fence, they won’t venture beyond it. They’ve been trained that that’s the only world that they want or are interested in, or known.
There are studies in what was formerly East Germany, which was probably one of the most notorious surveillance states in the last 50 years, where even once their boundaries were removed, once the Stasi no longer existed, once the wall fell… the psychological effects on East German people endure until today. The way in which they have been trained for decades to understand that there are limits to their life, even once you remove the limits, they’ve been trained that those are not things they need to transgress.
And that’s one of the things that constantly surveilling people and constantly communicating to them that they’re powerless against this omnipotent government corporate institution does to people, it convinces people that the tiny little box in which they live is really the only box in which they want to live so they don’t even realize being in prison.
You can acculturate people to believing that tyranny is freedom, that their limits are actually emancipations and freedom, that is what this Surveillance State does, by training people to accept their own conformity that they are actually free, that they no longer even realize the ways in which they’re being limited.
Karenlovingheart:comment
One of the things I am most grateful for in my entire life is the grace to know, understand and care that this is so, that it is fulfillment of Bible prophecy and that thankfully, it will end with the best possible solution. TYJ! Even so come quickly Lord Jesus. The youth of this generation are being lost to this reality so quickly it's heartrending. Pray!
