by Nat Hentoff

AS AN ENGLISH NOVELIST FORESAW, BIG BROTHER KEEPS GETTING BIGGER AND MORE INTRUSIVE.

During the Presidential campaign, neither candidate has shown any urgent concern for how pervasively this country is becoming what George Orwell envisioned in his futuristic novel 1984. Nor has there been any marked alarm from the citizenry at the extinguishing of our personal privacy—revealing how conditioned Americans have become to being under the government’s unblinking eye.

An exception is the alarm raised in an April 10, 2008, editorial in the conservative Washington Times. Titled “D.C. Police State,” it condemned the District of Columbia police’s “unprecedented access to a city network of 5,200 traffic, school and public housing cameras— now to be used for anticrime and antiterrorism purposes in the D.C. police closedcircuit surveillance system.”

The shaken editorial writer asked, “Do we then install cameras inside homes and offices and automobiles?”

Not yet. But no matter who’s in the White House and who controls Congress in 2009, another 9/11 or its equivalent—a portable nuclear device detonated in New York City’s subway system, for instance—could provide a further negative answer to a recent indignant protest by Andrew Davis of the Libertarian Party: “In America, people should not be forced to assume that they’re being monitored by law enforcement throughout the day.”

However, I’ve been alerted by the Washington- based Defending Dissent Foundation about a Justice Department plan that is to be implemented by the end of this year—a grim farewell gesture by Big Brother George W. Bush.

Have you ever heard of the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005? I hadn’t until Sue Udry, Defending Dissent’s director, reported that once this proposal kicks in, “federal agencies will be required to collect DNA samples of everyone arrested prior to conviction, when you’re still supposed to be considered innocent.”

I turned to Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which is often ahead of the ACLU in detecting and opposing government raids on the Constitution. He explained that “at the end of 2005 a little-noticed provision— the DNA Fingerprint Act—was slipped into the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) reauthorization bill that provided the federal government with broadly expanded powers to collect and permanently keep DNA samples from millions of people. Under this new law the government would collect DNA from anyone arrested for any crime—whether or not they are convicted—any non-U.S. citizen detained by federal authorities for any reason, and everyone in federal prison.”

This would, of course, include those dangerous Americans exercising their First Amendment right “peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances” as they denounce an egregious edict like the DNA Fingerprint Act.

If elected President, would Barack Obama go along with this boundless invasion of our privacy, aware that, as CCR attorney Matthew Strugar warns, “DNA is not a simple fingerprint— it contains vast amounts of private medical information the government has no business keeping on us”?

Well, candidate Obama approved the “compromise” Foreign Intelligence Surveillance bill. As the ACLU points out, this legislation is “an unprecedented extension of government surveillance over Americans…[that] permits only minimal court oversight” over any President’s serial violations of the Fourth Amendment.

Yet Obama concurred with George W. Bush and both Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress that this compromise “firmly reestablishes basic judicial oversight over all domestic surveillance in the future.” A President John McCain, not a notable champion of the Bill of Rights, would hardly disagree.

Not only the Justice Department will be able to harvest the most intimate details of your medical records. Reading the fine print of the Justice Department’s presentation of this rule in the April 18, 2008, Federal Register reveals: “This statute also provides that the Attorney General may ‘direct any other agency of the United States that arrests or detains individuals or supervises individuals facing charges to carry out any function and exercise any power of the Attorney General under this section.’”

An incalculable number of federal eyes would be able to sift through whatever signals your DNA reveals about your potential to be a risk to America’s national security.

As the climate of fear darkens in this nation, it’s not inconceivable that the government could look with interest at a proposal in Orwell’s native land by Gary Pugh, director of forensic services at Scotland Yard. In the March 16, 2008, issue of The Observer, Pugh summarizes how close we are coming to 1984: “Primary schoolchildren should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behavior indicating they may become criminals in later life…some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.”

But why not go further back? There are now multidimensional sonograms that clearly show the behavior of fetuses in the womb. This might be a new branch of forensics, leading to national security abortions. You think I’ve lost my marbles? When Orwell’s 1984 was first published in 1949, some readers scoffed at haunting passages such as this: “How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate, they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.”

That ain’t fiction anymore. 

————————————–

Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; Living the Bill of Rights ; and the forthcoming Is This America?

by Nat Hentoff

THE SECRETARY OF STATE IS AS CULPABLE AS EVERYONE ELSE IN THE ADMINISTRATION WHEN IT COMES TO THE TORTURING OF SUSPECTED TERRORISTS.

Much has been made of George W. Bush’s having appointed not only a black secretary of state, but also a woman. But although constantly in flight around the globe, what has Condoleezza Rice actually accomplished— aside from being a loyal conjugator of the President’s chronic doublespeak?

For example, whenever questioned about her commander in chief’s having given special covert powers to the CIA to operate secret prisons where terrorism suspects are waterboarded— among other violations of U.S. and international laws—as well as to kidnap alleged terrorists from the streets of other countries to be tortured in the cells of Syria, Egypt, Jordan and other CIA soul brothers, Rice perkily echoes Bush’s story assurances: “The United States government does not authorize or condone torture of detainess. Torture, and conspiracy to commit torture, are crimes under U.S. law, wherever they may occur in the world.”

As former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan says of Rice in his missile of a book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, “I was struck by how deft she is at protecting her reputation. … History will judge her harshly as the person responsible for overseeing a number of the defining…policies of the Bush Administration.”

Historians will take notice of references to Rice in Stephen Grey’s meticulously sourced Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program. Grey asked former U.S. Ambassador Edward Walker, “When Condoleezza Rice and the President now stand in front of people and say we don’t send people to countries where they torture, are they telling the truth?”

“No,” said Walker,“they’re not telling the truth.”

But what startlingly revealed how unclean Rice’s hands are of torture was a May 20, 2008, report by a rare phenomenon in the administration: an insistently independent inspector general from the Justice Department who has been crucial in covering up Bush’s unprecedented lawlessness in the sacrosanct name of national security.

On the release of Inspector General Glenn Fine’s report, the American Civil Liberties Union triumphantly heralded the revelation that “officials at the highest levels of the government— including the White House—received reports on the abuse of prisoners in U.S. military custody overseas as early as 2002, [and] today’s government report is the first to identify that then- National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice received complaints of torture. ” (My emphasis.)

In addition to Rice, among the other very high-level officials who were given such proof—by aghast FBI field agents witnessing CIA torturing of prisoners—were Bush and Attorney Generals John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales. Worse yet, our chief law enforcers— without informing Congress or permitting judicial review—actually authorized these crimes. They signed off on justifying memoranda by such Justice Department lawyers as notorious John Yoo, the primary legal authority to enable the U.S. to become a torture nation.

The present attorney general, Michael Mukasey—steadfastly covering up for the ultimate lawbreaker in the White House—has also diligently tried to prevent any prosecution of the hands-on torturers in the CIA, the military or other government agencies. As he has testified in Congress, Mukasey maintains that none of these perpetrators of what our laws and the Geneva Conventions call war crimes can be held accountable because they acted on legal opinions from the Justice Department!

Under this reasoning, the circle of criminality must remain unbroken because it was the Justice Department that originally and subsequently issued opinions—classified until recently— authorizing the torturing that so appalled FBI agents in attendance that FBI Director Robert Mueller forbade his agents from taking part in those interrogations.

The no-nonsense director of the ACLU’s Washington legislative office, Caroline Frederickson, responds that “the filtering up of information from FBI agents to high government officials makes claims of immunity even more incredulous.”

Obviously, all these criminals—high, midlevel and underlings in the field—have nothing to worry about unless the next President and the next Congress demand and conduct investigations armed with subpoena powers. If they don’t, other countries may put these rampant abusers of international law on trial.

Should that happen, there are countries that Condoleezza Rice—once she leaves government service—may decide not to visit for fear of being put on trial. She is well aware that 25 CIA agents are currently being tried in Milan, Italy—in absentia—for abducting an Egyptian Muslim from Italian soil during one of their “extraordinary renditions.”

What is Condi saying these days about her role as a very major player in a foreign policy that has included sending persons under suspicion to foreign prisons, where electrodes are attached to their private parts? According to the Associated Press, on May 22, 2008, Rice— talking to Google employees at the company’s California headquarters—tried at first to emphasize that immediately after 9/11 the Bush Administration was “in an environment in which saving America from the next attack was paramount.”

Paramount to America’s rule of law? Well, Condi said, America was in “a different place then.” And with her customary resolve to keep her hands clean, the loyal servitor quickly added, “But even in that environment, President Bush made clear that we were going to live up to our obligations at home and to our treaty obligations abroad.” Indeed, as the AP reported, Rice assured her audience that even back then, “Bush’s top aides had been scrupulous in making sure the early interrogations conformed to existing rules.” The rules of the Spanish Inquisition or Stalin’s gulags? I have no doubt that after leaving her lofty post Rice will retain a prestigious role—perhaps as a college president—and will experience nary a pang of guilt.

————————————-
Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; Living the Bill of Rights ; and the forthcoming Is This America?

by Nat Hentoff

THE YOUNGEST VICTIMS OF THE “WAR ON TERROR.”

It is now clear that from the very top of the chain of command in the Oval Office the Bush Administration has systematically violated the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (including complicity in torture). The United States and 151 other nations signed that convention.

If there is ever an international war crimes tribunal— or criminal procedures in the United States—Bush, Cheney and the highest-level lawyers in the Justice and Defense departments should not be alone in the dock. Wherever terrorism suspects have been held, complicit in the torture and other barbarisms are military doctors and psychologists.

How is the waterboarding torturer to know if he’s about to go too far and kill the suspect? An attending physician will tell him. For a newly published, meticulously sourced indictment of these crimes that involve the enlistment of medical professionals, see Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values by international lawyer Philippe Sands.

The definitive book on the criminal involvement of doctors and psychologists is Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror by Dr. Steven Miles, a professor of medicine and bioethics at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Miles, whom I’ve interviewed at length, began his deep research to find out why doctors and psychologists in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo failed to intervene in the torture and other mistreatment of prisoners. Such abuse was partially exposed when CBS-TV released those infamous Abu Ghraib prison photographs, which became a prime recruiting tool for apprentice terrorists around the world.

In Oath Betrayed, Dr. Miles also revealed that medical personnel gave the torturers information— from prisoners’ records and interviews— about what they most feared. So, as Miles reported, doctors and psychologists were actually “involved in setting the harshness of the interrogation plans.” And, dig this: As loyal implementers of Bush Administration terror policy, they delayed reports of homicides (murders) when the interrogators lost control of themselves.

That’s why it took so long for We the People to know what atrocities were being carried out in order to, as the President likes to say, “protect American values.”

Dr. Miles offered additional shocking revelations in the Fall 2007 issue of the American Bar Association’s publication Human Rights. In “Child Prisoners in America’s War on Terror,” which has largely been ignored even by otherwise-intrepid American journalists reporting on this amoral Presidency, Miles began: “German media and Norwegian officials credibly cite a Red Cross report that more than 100 children were detained in various prisons in Iraq. Human Rights Watch reports that three of the 60 or so children once imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay were less than 15 years old.”

Dr. Miles continued with the especially chilling: “No statistics exist for child prisoners in Afghanistan.” Bush-Cheney’s initial “victory” was over Afghanistan’s Taliban, which is now murderously resurgent.The Washington Post ’s Dana Priest has revealed that dungeons at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan are among the most horrifying CIA “black sites.” There suspects were “softened up” for torture by the brutal Special Forces troops so prized by Donald Rumsfeld. We may never know how many children were “disappeared” into those secret prisons and what happened to them.

Nor do we know how many detained children were killed there or in our other prisons. Noted Dr. Miles: “Reporters are not allowed to photograph their quarters. … The Abu Ghraib photographs depict men being abused; the pictures of children and women being abused remain classified.” Did you know that? I didn’t.

Having gone through tens of thousands of pages of declassified Defense Department documents, Miles found “the only official record of a child prisoner’s death.” It was in a footnote in the appendix of a 200-page Army Surgeon General’s report about detainees (calling them “prisoners” was forbidden) with advanced-stage tuberculosis. A physician cited “one child hemorrhaging from his cavitary TB and dying.”

If there ever is a war crimes trial of those from Camp Cropper near Baghdad Airport (where this nameless child expired) who are responsible for that small corpse, Dr. Miles’s threnody should be in the court record: “No other document describes this child who died bleeding into his (or her?) lungs while in U.S. custody. The Pentagon does not list this prisoner in its list of deaths. It has not released any death certificate, autopsy report or investigation, as is mandated by Geneva Conventions that the United States says were applicable to its prisons in Iraq.

“We do not know whether the parents were told if, how, or when their child died.…We do not know if the child’s body was returned to the family to bury or if the family was informed of the location of the internment.”

Dr. Miles also cited a sworn statement from General Janis Karpinski, former commander of Abu Ghraib. She used to talk to “juveniles,” as she called them, who kept being brought into that reallife horror movie. “I saw a kid,” Karpinski said, “that looked like he was eight years old. He told me he was almost 12. He told me his brother was with him, but he really wanted to see his mother. Could he please call his mother. He was crying.”

The now-defrocked general maintained that she saw no abuse of juveniles at Abu Ghraib. (If she had and said so, she would have had to do something about it.) Dr. Miles dryly added, “Karpinski does not mention if she helped the boy contact his mother.”

As he reported, a former sergeant at Abu Ghraib, John Ketzer, did see “a dog handler and another soldier allow a leashed but unmuzzled dog to ‘go nuts’ and lunge at two children.”

 Dr. Miles has called what happened—and still may be happening—to Bush’s child prisoners “crimes against the innocent.” But the majority of members of Congress who have never demanded bringing criminal charges against the ultimate torturers and abusers of prisoners of any age are not innocent of these crimes. 

——————————————————-
Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice, the Washington Times and other publications. His books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; The War on the Bill of Rights—And the Gathering Resistance ; and the forthcoming Is This America?

OCTOBER HUSTLER

BIG BROTHER CLAMPS DOWN ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION, ONE DIRTY WORD AT A TIME.

In 2002, during Fox’s live broadcast of the Billboard Music Awards, Cher answered critics who for years had been saying she was through. “So fuck ’em!” the singer/actress exclaimed triumphantly. The next year, on the same Fox program, honoree Nicole Richie asked rhetorically, “Have you ever tried to get cowshit out of a Prada purse? It’s not so fuckin’ simple.”

On March 17, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it will rule in its next term whether or not the Federal Communications Commission has the authority to levy fines on Fox for violating the government’s indecency standards. For the first time since its historic act of censorship in the notorious “Seven Dirty Words” case in 1978, the High Court will decide what words we will be allowed to hear over the airwaves.

Thirty years ago, on the Pacifica Foundation radio network, George Carlin had listed—mocking the silliness of the FCC’s prudery—“the original seven words you couldn’t say on the public airwaves: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.”

The verbatim transcript of Carlin’s hilarious (but also sharply serious) assault on the FCC’s contempt for free speech is an appendix, for all to read, to the Supreme Court’s decision in FCC v. Pacifica Foundation.

The Supreme Court plans a new probe into whether “fleeting” indecency is permitted (as with the spontaneous Cher and Nicole Richie comments). If the law is interpreted on the restrictive side, an offending station or network could be fined, by the current FCC gag rule rates, up to $350,000.

It is likely that the current Roberts-Alito-Scalia Supreme Court will agree with the FCC that the children of America must not be exposed to such shockingly coarse language on the public airwaves. Such a ruling—especially if the next President fills vacancies on the Court with other upholders of the 17th-century Puritan standards of the Massachusetts Bay Colony— means the FCC could go on to purify cable and satellite television and radio. And after that, why not the Internet?

The contagious nature of government censorship—particularly when “family values” are at stake—was evident to me when I did not see one mainstream newspaper or magazine or a publication devoted to the law itself (Legal Times in Washington being the sole exception) use the word fuck in reporting on the Supreme Court’s taking on FCC v. Fox Television Stations. But the print media are not licensed by the government. That’s why we have a First Amendment.

As Harvey Silvergate—a Constitutional lawyer, a veteran and a formidable defender of free speech in the courts and his writings— said in Boston’s Phoenix Weekly : “[A]ny newspaper that voluntarily keeps out vital information—something that the broadcast networks are fighting not to have to do— betrays our First Amendment right to free speech and free press. As Lenny Bruce might have observed, it’s a fucking outrage.”

And by contrast, that’s why I feel privileged to write for HUSTLER. Why shouldn’t the First Amendment also apply beyond the print media? Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who wrote of the First Amendment the way Louis Armstrong played trumpet, answered that question in logical and Constitutional terms: “TV and radio stand in the same protected position under the First Amendment as newspapers and magazines. … The fear that Madison and Jefferson had of government intrusion…was founded not only on the specter of a lawless government but [on the specter] of government under the control of a faction that desired to foist its
views of the common good on the people. …The sturdy people who fashioned the First Amendment would be shocked at the intrusion of government into a field which in this Nation has been reserved for individuals.”

I quoted Douglas’s ringing of the Liberty Bell in my 1980 book The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America (Dell). Douglas was no longer here when cable, satellite radio and the Internet began to abound, but I have no doubt he would have included them. In its coverage of the Supreme Court’s ominous intention to rule on FCC v. Fox Television Stations, the New York Times did not dare tell its readers that Cher and Nicole Richie had committed the speech crime of saying “fuck.”

Dissenting in the 1978 “Seven Dirty Words” case, Justice William Brennan accused the majority of his brethren of a misguided intention “to impose its notions of propriety on the whole of the American people…[violating] the broadcaster’s right to send, and the right of those interested to receive, a message entitled to full First Amendment protection.”

However, writing for the Court in upholding the FCC and exiling George Carlin’s right to swear forbidden words on the public airwaves was Justice John Paul Stevens, for years since a leader of the so-called liberal wing of the Supreme Court. But as for those “dirty words,” Stevens in 1978 brushed off the First Amendment: “To say that one may avoid further offense by turning off the radio when he hears indecent language is like saying that the remedy for an assault is to run away after the first blow. One may hang up on an indecent phone call, but that option does not give the caller a Constitutional immunity or avoid a harm that has already taken place.”

The “harm” inflicted by the FCC is to the core of what differentiates us—if the Constitution is alive—from all other countries. John Paul Stevens still sits on the Supreme Court of the United States. Will he repent? And as you would expect, the Bush Administration is enthusiastically supporting the FCC.

Nat Hentoff Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice, the Washington Times, the United Media Newspaper Syndicate and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; Living the Bill of Rights ; Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee ; The War on the Bill of Rights—And the Gathering Resistance ; and the forthcoming Is This America?

In my youth, I watched Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In it, against enormous odds, a young congressman played by Jimmy Stewart triumphed over that body’s corruption and indifference to the U.S. Constitution. I felt truly inspired at being an American. But growing up, after more than 50 years of reporting  on Congress, I never expected that movie to become real.

On December 17, 2007, it became real. Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut successfully stopped the Bush Administration’s fierce attempt to push through a bill that would give amnesty from prosecution to the huge telecommunications companies that have been—and still are—partners with the President and the National Security Administration in unlawful wiretapping and other eavesdropping on millions of us in pursuit of links to terrorism.

Like Jimmy Stewart, Dodd stayed on the floor for some ten hours to stymie Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), who was willing to accede to Bush’s “compromise” Foreign Intelligence Service Act “reform” bill that would let the telecommunications companies off the hook.

Also capitulating to Bush was Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Said Caroline Frederickson, the ACLU’s admirably tough legislative director on National Public Radio (October 18, 2007): “The Democrats seem consistently worried. Every time the President mentions the word terrorism, they fall down and roll over.”

Chris Dodd—author of the Restoring the Constitution Act, ignored by the Senate—wouldn’t roll. “For the last six years,” he said while blocking the Bush Administration deal, “our largest communications companies have been spying on their own American customers. Secretly, and without a warrant, they delivered to the federal government the private, domestic communications records of millions of Americans—records this administration has compiled into a database of enormous scale and scope.”

Then, without a touch of exaggeration, Chris Dodd added that in his long career in public office, he has never seen a President of the United States with “contempt of the rule of law equal to this.”

Two days later and not at all surprisingly, our new attorney general, Michael Mukasey (far more dangerous than Alberto Gonzales because he is light-years smarter and more cunning), told an American Bar Association panel in Washington that these telecom giants must be protected from lawsuits by us citizens that would “run into the hundreds of billions of dollars.”

Good Lord, laments Mukasey, they “face bankruptcy, they face loss of reputation, they face millions of dollars in legal fees—all because they are alleged to have helped the government in obtaining intelligence information after 9/11.” They were good soldiers.

Alleged to have helped the government? The evidence against the cooperative telecommunication companies is so clear that so far some lower court lawsuits have been silenced by the government, which claims the “state secrets” privilege. Thus, the evidence is sealed from us.

Fighting forcefully against these companies is the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Hepting v. AT&T, which may yet tear down the “state secrets” wall. On the day Dodd stopped Bush, Cheney, Reid and Rockefeller—December 17, 2007—EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohen said, “The biggest hero today is Senator Dodd, who recognized the profound Constitutional issues at stake in [the government’s] taking this key issue away from the courts, and [Dodd] refused to let it be rammed trough the Senate without a fight.”

With the Senate back in session, Dodd continues his fight. Even if he gets enough of his colleagues—and some Republican senators who fear the growing outrage of their constituents, many of whom, as in the Jimmy Stewart movie, bombarded the Senate in support of Dodd’s battle—George W. Bush vows to veto any FISA “reform” bill that does not grant immunity to the telecommunications companies.

Since the Roberts-Bush Supreme Court is far from a notable defender of our Constitutional liberties, unless the next President and Congress protect us from immersion into the quicksand of these databases provided to the government by the communication companies, here is what we’re in for: Former AT&T technician Mark Klein revealed that, while in its employ, he found a secret room in which the National Security Administration was tapping into the fiber optic cables. This made George W. Bush the master spy of all time.

On National Public Radio (November 7, 2007), whistleblower Klein described what he had already told the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “It’s not just AT&T’s traffic going through these cables, because these cables connected AT&T’s network with other networks like Sprint, Qwest, Global Crossing, UUNet. … These cables went through what they called a splitter…a device that just copies the entire data without any selection going on. So it’s a complete copy of the data stream.”

And that unfiltered stream can be sent to the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, and state and local police and intelligence agencies—without your knowing anything of what’s in that stream about you.
George Orwell was a piker. If he were still with us, he’d have to rewrite 1984. But as for us now, have any of the Presidential candidates of either party—except for Chris Dodd and Joe Biden, who have dropped out for lack of support from civil libertarians—shown any alarmed interest in preserving even part of what Justice Louis Brandeis insisted is the most basic of all our rights: “the right to be left alone”?

In the first Supreme Court case making wiretapping Constitutional, Olmstead v. United States (1928), dissenting Justice Louis Brandeis prophetically warned: “The progress of science furnishing the government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wiretapping. Ways may someday be developed by which the government—without removing papers from your secret drawers—can reproduce them in court. … Can it be that the Constitution affords no protection against such invasions of individual security?”

Under the Bush-Cheney Administration’s  ever-expanding use of surveillance technology that pries into our telephone calls, e-mails, and bank and travel records, that question becomes more chilling every day. Nonetheless, I find my friends and family members unconcerned with vanishing privacy because, they say, “I have nothing to hide.”

The answer to that comes from privacy scholar Jim Harper of the Cato Institute, a civil liberties think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. “When people say they have nothing to hide, so they have nothing to worry about,” Harper says, “I ask them for their wallet and start to look through it. And they will blanch at that, if not refuse outright. And that puts a lie to the idea that people don’t want their own privacy. They do.”
Despite what Americans might want, the Bush Administration plans to use spy satellites to keep an unblinking eye on us. According to a report by AlterNet.org’s Tim Shorrock, the new National Applications Office creates “a legal mechanism that would make the United States one of the world’s most closely monitored nations.”

Down here on the ground, Big Brother is already marshalling new ways to track what we do at home behind so-called closed doors. On November 23, 2007, the Associated Press reported: “Firefighters in major cities are being trained to take on a new role as lookouts for terrorism. … Unlike police, firefighters and emergency medical personnel need no warrants to enter hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings each year—which puts them in a position to spot behavior that could indicate terror activity or planning.” (Emphasis added.)

Why worry about firefighters? Well, in my own city, New York, “they are told to be alert for a person who is hostile, uncooperative or expressing hate or discontent with the United States.”
Discontent? Are there copies of any of my HUSTLER columns lying about?
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has refused to review a San Diego County (California) policy that permits warrantless home searches of people on welfare to determine if they really qualify for government benefits. (Is that a new digital television set? How much did it cost you?)

How come no warrant is required? Because, explains David Savage of the Los Angeles Times, these suspicious inspectors “do not seek evidence of a crime.” They just want to be sure these people supposedly living on the edge should get welfare.

No matter who becomes President in the future or which party controls Congress, global terrorism will continue for decades, with an accompanying culture of fear and government surveillance in this country. Kids as well as adults, therefore, will grow up accustomed to being spied on.

The Rutherford Institute’s John Whitehead, a national town crier against Big Brother, reported on November 28, 2007, that “schools in Demarest, New Jersey, have installed surveillance cameras with live feeds to police headquarters.” And “Viewmont High School in Utah recently installed 36 cameras to provide school officials a bird’s-eye view of every square inch of the school’s hallways and common areas. ‘I can just simply scan through the school in less than a minute,’ boasts the school’s principal.”

Growing up knowing that you can be under the government’s gaze at any given time, how free will future citizens feel about engaging in public or private criticisms of their government?
No town or city is now immune from government privacy invaders. Two years ago in the small town of Loda, Illinois, the school board put videocameras in all school buses, but pledged there wouldn’t be any audio recordings because that would violate the state’s law against eavesdropping. Now the Illinois legislature has ruled that listening in—as well as watching—kids on school buses is not eavesdropping.

A parent I know in Loda—whom I will not name lest he or she get into trouble—asked me: “Is this policy legal under the Constitution? These kids have rights. I am disgusted at how easily people are willing to take children’s rights away, supposedly in the name of security. Where will this electronic intrusion stop?”
I told that apprehensive citizen to contact the Chicago chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Maybe a lawsuit will stop the Illinois legislature from continuing to violate those kids’ individual rights under the Constitution. After all, we still have a Bill of Rights in the Constitution, don’t we?

I remember during the Watergate hearings that sent President Richard Nixon back to private life, Senator Sam Ervin (D-North Carolina), head of the investigating committee, said: “When the government knows all of our secrets, we stand naked before official power. The Bill of Rights then becomes just so many words.”
Will enough Americans wake up and pound Congress while they still have some privacy left? Otherwise, Big Brother will be our constant companion.