My most exciting memory of growing up in Boston during the Great Depression was learning how our independence was born. A pivotal event occurred in 1761 in a Boston courtroom. Lawyer James Otis Jr. spent nearly five hours arguing against extension of the “writs of assistance,” which British officials drew up themselves—like today’s FBI does—so they could burst into unspecified colonists’ businesses and homes in search of smuggled goods and other items.

As I chronicled in my book Living the Bill of Rights, Otis told the magistrates: “The freedom of one’s house is an essential liberty, and any law which violates that privacy is an instrument of slavery and villainy.”

Otis lost the case, but in the courtroom was a lawyer named John Adams (later our second President), who wrote in his notebook that very night: “Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance. Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born.”

Otis subsequently proclaimed in a pamphlet that those writs violated the British constitution and Magna Carta. Hence, as I have told American schoolchildren over the years, they inspired the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution. This part of the Bill of Rights guards against unreasonable searches and seizures and decrees that any warrant be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause.

Adams later wrote, “Otis was a flame of fire [that night].” But since 9/11 the Bush- Cheney Administration and Barack Obama’s even more harshly have dimmed that flame.

And now our lawmakers practically eviscerated the Fourth Amendment on December 28, 2012. As Robert Pear reported in the New York Times, “Congress gave final approval… to a bill extending the government’s power to intercept electronic communications of spy and terrorism suspects after the Senate voted down proposals from several Democrats and Republicans to increase protections of civil liberties and privacy.” The vote was 73 to 23.

The dissenters worried that electronic surveillance, though directed at suspected non-citizens abroad in contact with Americans, “inevitably swept up communications of Americans as well.”

More pointedly, despite President Obama’s strong support of the bill and its passage in the House of Representatives, Senate Democrat Richard J. Durbin of Illinois reminded those few of us who were paying attention that this extension of the government’s surveillance authority for five more years “does not have adequate checks and balances to protect the Constitutional rights of innocent American citizens.”

How many of us are still regarded by our intelligence agencies as “innocent American citizens”?

Dig this from Pear’s report: Senator Mark Udall (D-Colorado) said he and Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) “were concerned that ‘a loophole’ in the 2008 law [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] ‘could allow the government to effectively conduct warrantless searches for Americans’ communications.’”

Of course, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. told Congress, “There is no loophole in the law.” So how come, fellow Americans, Pear reported that “by a vote of 52 to 43, the Senate…rejected a proposal by Mr. Wyden to require the national intelligence director to tell Congress if the government had collected any domestic e-mail or telephone conversations under the surveillance law”?

In the midst of Republican and Democratic administrations’ reluctance to tell We the People what the hell is going on as the government invades our privacy ever more contemptuously, Senator Wyden told his colleagues that this impervious secrecy from on high “reminded him of the ‘general warrants that so upset the colonists’ more than 200 years ago.” Me too.

Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) noted, “The Fourth Amendment was written in a different time and a different age, but its necessity and its truth are timeless.” He added: “Over the past few decades, our right to privacy has been eroded. We have become lazy and haphazard in our vigilance.”

We’ll long be paying for our laziness in ways we will not even know while those we keep electing continue to pry into our lives.

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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 and Living the Bill of Rights.

Much to my dismay, I saw little notice, let alone celebrations, around the country on the recent 221st anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Those initial ten amendments to the Constitution guarantee our most essential individual liberties.

But on the occasion the Wall Street Journal ran “U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens,” a front-page story by Julia Angwin. She reported that Attorney General Eric Holder—without a peep of protest from President Obama—signed rules that “now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them. That is a departure from past practice.”

So much for due process and the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of privacy. Moreover, Angwin noted, “The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both were prohibited.” And if that wasn’t enough to shock Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in their graves, “The changes also allow databases of U.S. civilian information to be given to foreign governments for analysis of their own.” For future crimes by us.

But why now snatch the very heart of the Bill of Rights and throw it into the incinerator? You must have guessed why, and the Wall Street Journal was on it: “Under the new rules issued in March [2012],” Angwin reported, “the National Counterterrorism Center, known as NCTC, can obtain almost any database the government collects that it says is ‘reasonably believed’ to contain ‘terrorism information.’ The list could potentially include almost any government database, from financial forms submitted by people seeking federally backed mortgages to the health records of people who sought treatment at Veterans Administration hospitals.”

“Reasonably believed”? By what criteria? And will those “suspicious” people even know they’re in one of these databases, which could conceivably stigmatize them for the rest of their lives? And since all of this is done secretly, these citizens will have no chance to defend themselves.

Did you know about this “forced retirement” of our Constitution? One former senior administration official told Angwin that it’s “breathtaking” in its scope. Of course, he didn’t reveal his name. And where was the rest of the media? I saw little about this elsewhere.

I have more questions on this sudden flashing red light vis-à-vis what has been eroding this self-governing republic’s very reason for being since 9/11: In how many of our classrooms have future voters been told about how Obama and Holder—along with Bush and Cheney before them—have wholly betrayed their oath of office to protect the Constitution? And if there have been any discussions, how many students or teachers are concerned about or even sensitive to what this country is turning into?

In one of the few other coverages of this rape of the Bill of Rights, Wired magazine posted on its website an article titled “Attorney General Secretly Granted Gov. Ability to Develop and Store Dossiers on Innocent Americans.” Author Kim Zetter pointed out that “the request to expand the [National Counterterrorism] center’s powers led to a heated debate at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, with Mary Ellen Callahan—then-chief privacy officer for the Department of Homeland Security—leading the charge to defend civil liberties. Callahan argued that the new rules represented a ‘sea change’ and that every interaction a citizen would have with the government in the future would be ruled by the underlying question, is that person a terrorist?

“Callahan lost her battle, however, and subsequently left her job, though it’s not known if her struggle over the NCTC debate played a role in her decision to leave.”

Have there been any related resignations from the Obama Administration, whose blatant disregard for privacy is making America more like China and Iran than what used to be an admired land of liberty?

I’m intensely interested in whether there have been any classroom or workplace debates on this throttling of who we are. Then again, how many Americans even remember who we’re supposed to be?

If Eric Holder hasn’t already added me to one of his lists of “suspicious” citizens, I expect he already knows my address.

Among the chief celebrators of the Presidential reelection of the most voracious Big Brother in our history was the FBI, Barack Obama’s tireless partner in putting this country under ubiquitous surveillance. But like the master spy in the White House, the FBI’s head honcho has yet to be satisfied.

Robert Mueller’s zeal has not waned since his May 9, 2012, appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, prompting this comment by Rense.com’s Stephen Lendman: “America now wages war on freedom. It’s perilously close to vanishing. One more major domestic terror attack may end it. Mueller wants unrestricted power to act.”

He nearly has limitless power and multidimensional resources. In light of the fact that the FBI’s tracking of us was never raised in 2012′s Presidential debates, I expect very few Americans remember that, in the final weeks of the George W. Bush Administration, then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey issued “Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations.” As Lendman bristled, “Anyone may be investigated for any reason or none
at all.”

No wonder President Obama extended Mueller’s term until September 4, 2013. And will he replace his shadowy cohort then?

Having rated an FBI file back in the 1960s, “Watch Hentoff,” I in turn watch the FBI continually. I am horrified by its chronic lawlessness, and so is DefendingDissent.org, whose monthly reports I never miss. The Defending Dissent Foundation’s vigilant website made me aware of a nationwide initiative on “Suspicious Activity Reporting.”

It “encourages or requires police to collect information about a long list of legal activities that are considered ‘suspicious,’ including taking pictures (either of police, other security personnel or facilities, buildings or infrastructure).”

Of course, the FBI can do that too. Say an agent sees someone photographing a New York City police officer slamming a black teenager against a wall because he looked “suspicious.” Anyone snapping such a picture to show how evil U.S. police are just might—thanks to law enforcement’s tendency to overreact—be connected to an organization supporting terrorism.

As DefendingDissent.org reported, here’s what happened when Mueller’s agents and local cops banded together in the Pacific Northwest on July 27, 2012: “Dozens of police and FBI agents dressed in paramilitary gear and carrying assault rifles staged a predawn raid on several activist homes…in Seattle, Olympia and Portland, and the search warrant listed ‘Anti-government or anarchist literature or material’ among the items to be seized.”

The FBI has also wielded its ever-expanding powers in Boston, Massachusetts, where I grew up and where my reporting and commentary on radio station WMEX caught the attention of the city police and the Feds. But I never thought that having a passionate attachment to the First Amendment would generate as much official hostility there as it does today.

DefendingDissent.org reported that Boston police “have been caught compiling intelligence reports and incident reports on peaceful protests, logging them under the heading of Criminal Activity with the labels ‘Groups–Extremist’ and ‘Homeland Security–Domestic.’”

The ACLU of Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild have documents and video-surveillance tapes revealing that “officers assigned to the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) at the Boston Police Department are collecting and keeping information about constitutionally protected speech and political activity…we don’t know how far and wide the information was shared.”

As DefendingDissent.org disclosed, an “‘Intelligence Report’ on an antiwar speech at a church was kept for over five years. … It is clear from the report that police had infiltrated meetings of the peace coalition, or had access to meeting notes or minutes.”

I attended Boston Latin School. It was founded in 1635, and one of my fellow alumni was a key enflamer of the American Revolution, Samuel Adams. If he, the Sons of Liberty and the Committees of Correspondence that spread the factual reasons for the Declaration of Independence throughout the colonies were still with us, their grievances would include what the FBI is up to: illegally spying on millions of law-abiding citizens.

The science fiction I used to read years ago was only mildly adventurous and rather amusing compared to our government’s real-life bag of tricks. Did you know that high-tech wizardry is making us instantly and suspiciously recognizable to Big Brother?

Brace yourself for “FBI’s Facial Recognition Is Coming to a State Near You,” a chilling report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. That digital watchdog group is the most alert and knowledgeable protector of what’s left of our individual liberties, which have been imperiled by the government’s systematic target-killing of the Constitution. By expanding its Next Generation Identification program (NGI), the FBI now has a “massive biometrics database that combines fingerprints, iris scans, palm prints, facial recognition and extensive biographical data collected from over 100 million Americans.”

Just imagine the reactions of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Patrick Henry if they could have foretold that the nation they were founding would eventually have a government keeping close track of almost one-third of its citizens. Without a doubt, many more millions are destined to be added to what promises to be ever-growing databases. I expect Jefferson would have torn up the Declaration of Independence he’d drafted in 1776 as a prelude to starting another revolution.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation discloses that in its surge to make NGI more wide-ranging, “the FBI is developing ‘Universal Face Workstation software’ to allow states that don’t have their own ‘Face/Photo search capabilities’ to search through the FBI’s images.”

Now dig this: You don’t have to be arrested or even “a person of interest” to be in this FBI gallery, which I’m convinced will be open to searches by all other law-enforcement and intelligence agencies.

As the EFF notes: “This suggests the FBI wants to be able to search and identify people in photos of crowds and in pictures posted on social media sites—even if the people in those photos haven’t been arrested for or even suspected of a crime. The FBI may also want to incorporate those crowd or social media photos into its face-recognition database.”

Why not? To the FBI, anyone in those photos may be thinking of committing a crime someday against national security. When the time comes for them to be busted, there they’ll be!

Perhaps you believe all this data-collecting for facial recognition is being done only here at home. The Electronic Frontier Foundation knows better: “The FBI already has information-sharing relationships with 77 countries,” and its Criminal Justice Information Services “is now trying to partner with ‘Visa Waiver Program countries’ like Ireland, Spain and Australia to allow automatic access to each other’s biometric databases on a ‘hit/no hit basis.’”

I wholeheartedly agree with the EFF’s conclusion that “the time is right for laws that limit face-recognition data collection.”

What’s long overdue are laws prohibiting the various forms of FBI, National Security Agency and CIA dragnet surveillance I’ve reported here. But neither Democratic Presidents nor Democratic-majority Congresses have done anything remotely substantial. Nor have Republicans. Nor is there any credible evidence that President Obama and the current Congress will do a damn realistic thing about this during the commander in chief’s second term.

I’ve already warmed my imagination by picturing how our Founding Fathers would have acted. But I see no prospects of citizens seized by a passionate knowledge of American history putting sustained pressure on Congress to wipe the FBI’s facial-recognition program off the statute books.

What has happened to this nation conceived and nurtured by the Declaration of Independence? Astonishingly, citizen passivity continues to mount. In my book Free Speech for Me—But Not for Thee, I quoted Ronald Reagan: “We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. … If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.”

Where is the American spirit while the White House and Congress treat our “guaranteed” Constitutional liberties like garbage?

by Nat Hentoff

In years to come, no matter who’s President, if America is to remain a self-governing republic, more of us have to be directly engaged in civic life. For example, by working with neighbors to improve and strengthen our communities. But preoccupied by the sorry state of the economy and fear of terrorism that has lingered since 9/11, too many Americans have shirked their responsibility to be active citizens. It’s a shortcoming that must be remedied.

How many of you have heard of the Corporation for National & Community Service or the National Conference on Citizenship? I’m supposed to be a nut on civics but wasn’t aware of those organizations until I read about their disturbing report “Civic Life in America: Key Findings on the Civic Health of the Nation” in a recent Judges’ Journal article by Jason L. S. Raia. He’s vice-president of education at Freedoms Foundation and also serves as Pennsylvania State Coordinator for We The People and Project Citizen.

According to “Civic Life in America,” less than 20% of Americans—aside from voting in elections—participate “in political activities” all the rest of the time. What especially depresses me is that just 3.1% participate “in a protest or demonstration.” Bush, Cheney and Obama have given us so much to protest.

I’ve often asked where the hell are the organized demonstrations in the streets and anywhere else that the Founders expected when they made a point of adding to First Amendment rights “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

More from “Civic Life in America”: “Nearly 60% of suburban and rural residents voted in 2008, while only 53% of urban residents voted.” (I expect those percentages were somewhat higher in the 2010 elections but sank back in 2012.) More surprising to me—considering myself, a lifelong city-dweller, to be hipper than those inhabiting the quiet areas of the country— is this finding: “Rural residents were also more likely to overcome the distance and join [political groups] than urban residents were.” Trying to explain these declines in engaged, participatory civic life, the report’s reasons include: “With stagnation in wages, more people are working longer hours and second or even third jobs to make ends meet, leaving little time for civics engagement.”

“Civic Life in America” makes a useful point that legislatures can do something to increase citizens’ involvement in the electoral process: “The fact that we still vote on a workday instead of Sunday, like many industrialized democracies around the world, makes voting inconvenient and, for some, nearly impossible.”

Ah, finally, the report gets back to a crucial distinction between many voters and non-voters: “More education equates to more likely civics behaviors that benefit our democracy. More than 73% of those who have received a bachelor’s degree voted in 2008 compared to 31% of those who did not complete high school.”

There’s another significant gap in the “Civic Life in America” report: “52% [of the educated] compared to 17% [without a degree] participated in organizations; 42% compared to 9% volunteered and participated in non-electoral political activities, and 14% compared to just 3% worked with a neighbor to fix a community problem.”

Jason L. S. Raia’s valuable article ends too gently: “Further research might discover whether those who demonstrate greater civics engagement are the product of more intensive civics learning in school.”

How could they not? Therefore, it’s imperative that school-board members and principals— some of whom may have flunked a civics class, if indeed such a course was ever offered—uphold a quintessential responsibility of educators. As Supreme Court Justice William Brennan personally told me, to make the Constitution part of the very lives of all students of whatever age. Otherwise, if many more Americans neglect to engage in civic life, the Fourth of July will be commemorated only by a few sadly appreciative citizens mourning the authors of our nation’s most cherished document.

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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 and Living the Bill of Rights .

With more and more unmanned drones flying overhead, has the President or Congress told you that the U.S. Air Force, like the CIA, does not have the authority to conduct domestic “nonconsensual surveillance” unless the spying (so it says) is “accidental”? Secrecy scholar Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists dug up an Air Force rule you may never have heard of.

Thanks to a Pentagon directive permitting limited domestic surveillance, when this lawless snooping takes place, the Air Force has up to 90 days to bury the results while it decides whether to keep and share that data. In a Wired.com article titled “Oops! Air Force Drones Can Now (Accidentally) Spy on You,” Spencer Ackerman sheds light on Aftergood’s discovery: “Acceptable surveillance includes flying drones over natural disasters; studying environmental changes; or keeping tabs above a domestic military base.”

Here comes the curveball the government doesn’t want you to see: “once the drones’ powerful sensors and cameras sweep up imagery and other data from Americans nearby, the Air Force won’t simply erase the tapes. It’ll start analyzing whether the people it’s recorded are, among other things, ‘persons or organizations reasonably believed to be engaged or about to engage in international terrorist or international narcotics activities.’” But you could unwittingly be nearby!

But how does the government “reasonably” believe who’s a criminal suspect? Ah, adds trenchant reporter Ackerman, “It doesn’t stop with the Air Force. ‘U.S. person information in the possession of an Air Force intelligence component may be disseminated pursuant to law, a court order’” or—now dig this— “the Pentagon directive that governs acceptable domestic surveillance.”

Ackerman provides a plausible example of what dragnet surveillance fosters: “So what begins as a drone flight over, say, a national park to spot forest fires could end up with a dossier on campers passed on to law enforcement.”

Loaded with sophisticated cameras and eavesdropping equipment, drones can document all sorts of information. What are those campers reading and talking about? Are they making furtive movements?

To make you feel a little more uneasy as you look skyward, Ackerman points out that “police departments across the country are beginning to buy and fly drones from the military. Now the Air Force’s powerful spy tools could creep into your backyard in a different way.”

So this is where we are in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. With deadly calm, the American Civil Liberties Union’s “Surveillance & Privacy” declaration lays out what will become of American values unless the spirit of Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Thomas Paine inspires future firebrand patriots to take to the streets while also becoming digital Paul Reveres as they strive to save our republic.

Like all the Bush-Obama unbounded spying on We the People, the ACLU reminds us, drones are the responsibility of the White House and Congress. What, if anything, will they do from January 2013 on—and what will we demand they do—to change the naked truth of the ACLU’s “Surveillance & Privacy” indictment of Bush and Obama?

As the ACLU warns, “the government can compile vast dossiers about innocent people. The data sits indefinitely in government databases, and the names of many innocent Americans end up on bloated and inaccurate watch lists that affect whether we can fly on commercial airlines, whether we can renew our passports…and even whether we can open bank accounts. … Dragnet surveillance undermines the right to privacy and the freedom of speech, association and religion.”

Moreover, the ACLU stipulates, “The FBI, the intelligence agencies, the military, state and local police, private companies and even firemen and emergency medical technicians are gathering incredible amounts of detailed information about us.”

When I talk to students, I ask if they can see that government agents secretly databasing what they say and think violates their freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. “Is there anything,” I inquire, “you’d rather the government doesn’t know?” More than ever before in our history, it’s the job of We the People to make sure the government is no longer allowed to spy on us.

Or don’t you give a damn?

I was once very fond of Google. It’s given me whatever information I needed, and if it doesn’t at first, I get the answer by rephrasing my request. I even considered thanking Google on the acknowledgements page of my next book.

But having learned that Google is in a partnership with the National Security Agency (NSA)—the world’s most mammoth surveillance organization—and that I’m not allowed to find any details of what personal data they’re going to share, how can I thank Google? Will I still be prancing toward Google to make myself look like a masterful, knowledgeable reporter in many different fields? Somewhat cautiously. I still use a typewriter because it’s been part of me for so many years, and also I’m told the FBI can’t get into it the way they pick up whatever they want from the Internet and all kinds of digital communication.

Neither the NSA nor Google will provide any details about the scope of their partnership. And when the Electronic Privacy Information Center went to court with its concern for further raids on our privacy, the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals— which blocked the U.S. Supreme Court’s approval of granting habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo prisoners—derided the ingenuous contention that “the public has the right to know about any spying on citizens.”

Decided the federal appellate court: Not only can the NSA reject requests for information on what it is doing in alliance with Google, Yahoo! News reported, but it also “does not even have to confirm whether it has any arrangement with the Internet giant.” I bet judges in China and Iran smiled at that one.

Ah, but what if Mitt Romney becomes President? Will he demand that the NSA and Google disclose what they’re looking into? This brings us to a penetratingly disturbing analysis of how the post-9/11 fears shaped and sustained by Bush, Cheney and Obama are affecting the relationship between an imperious government and us individual citizens.

Says the Rutherford Institute’s John Whitehead: “What we are witnessing, in the socalled name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).

The growing need for technicians necessitates the bureaucracy. The massive bureaucracies— now computerized—that administer governmental policy are a permanent form of government. Presidents come and go, but the nonelected bureaucrats remain.”

Whitehead continues: “Can freedom in the United States continue to flourish and grow in an age when the physical movements, individual purchases, conversations and meetings of every citizen are constantly under surveillance by private companies and agencies?”

As I, and others, have reported, Whitehead also makes the disheartening point that “the Obama White House has proven to be just as bad, if not worse, than the Bush White House when it comes to invading the privacy rights of Americans.”

How worried are We the People about the government’s unblinking eye? Dig this from the May 17, 2012, edition of the New York Daily News: “A plan to launch six drone testing sites in the U.S. has New York and two dozen other states battling to roll out the welcome wagon for robotic eyes in the sky. The Federal Aviation Administration’s call for comment drew a flood of pitches from groups and governments around the country clamoring for a slice of the pie.”

According to the Daily News, getting a slice of that pie is being expedited: “The FAA recently announced it would streamline the approvals for use of smaller unmanned aerial vehicles by police and other public safety agencies.” These much-harder-to-spot airborne spies— some reportedly no larger than a golf ball—will be added to the other surveillance drones already being used by local and state police, the FBI and Homeland Security. Which current or future alarmed U.S. President will dare to try to ground these eager destroyers of what’s left of our privacy? When you’re looking up to the sky, don’t make furtive movements.

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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?

AIRCRAFT WITHOUT PILOTS, PASSENGERS OR BEVERAGE CARTS—JUST CAMERAS AIMED AT YOU—MAY SOON FILL THE SKY

by Nat Hentoff

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Barack Obama have convinced some Americans that no matter how or where they express themselves, their thoughts may wind up in a Big Brother database. But most of us are more preoccupied with immediate, all-too-real fears like higher gasoline prices and unemployment.

In his article “Dawn of the Drone: The Realization of the Total Surveillance State,” the Rutherford Institute’s John Whitehead offers a scarier scenario: implementation of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Reauthorization Act. In a few years, this legislation may prompt a lot of us to look skyward with chilling apprehension.

“Imagine a robot hovering overhead as you go about your day, driving to and from your work,” Whitehead envisions. “The robot records your every movement with a surveillance camera and streams the information to a government command center. … If you make a wrong move or even appear to be doing something suspicious, the police will respond quickly.”

You see, the FAA Reauthorization Act mandates that there will be about 30,000 pilotless aircraft in our skies by 2020. As I’ve reported, these ghostlike carriers of surveillance cameras have already been sent out by the Department of Homeland Security and local and state police to observe “suspicious” activists’ meetings or to follow likely narcotics distributors.

The ACLU insists that “drones not be deployed indiscriminately unless there are grounds to believe the unmanned aerial planes will collect evidence about a specific crime.” Voicing optimism, the ACLU also acknowledges, “If we can set some good privacy ground rules, our society can enjoy the benefits of this technology without having to worry about its darker potentials.”

We’ll all be protected under the supposedly transparent Obama Administration? And in view of the millions of dollars to be harvested by the aviation industry thanks to law enforcement’s delight in the drone, would a Republican administration be any more of a threat to the rapidly fading Fourth Amendment than Obama and our current Congressional leaders?

Regarding drones, John Whitehead is a deeply experienced realist: “Until the American people succeed in raising their collective voices against this technological tyranny, the powers that be will continue on the path of total control, and the condition of our civil liberties will become more dire with every passing day.”

So will this really be “the realization of the total surveillance state”? Don’t count on it. I have never forgotten the dissenting opinion of Justice Louis Brandeis in the U.S. Supreme Court’s first wiretapping case, Olmstead v. United States (1928). Recognizing that the creation of inventive technologies would be boundless, he wrote: “Ways may someday be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home.”

In Constitution 3.0: Freedom and Technological Change, Jeffrey Rosen—whose byline on these dread matters I never miss—wrote: “The technologies that Brandeis imagined have now come to pass—and they do not only affect privacy; they affect a broad range of Constitutional values.”

Here is how the ACLU is trying to protect you: “Now we have joined together with our coalition partner, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, to petition the FAA to ‘address the threat to privacy and civil liberties involved in the integration of drones in the national airspace.’” Remember: Some drones may soon have facialrecognition capability.

“You should sign too,” the ACLU continues. “Let’s make it clear that Americans are deeply concerned that drones not become a common feature of our skies until strong privacy protections are in place to ensure they do not become tools for routine aerial surveillance of American life.”

Are we “deeply concerned”? Then how come we don’t make that clear? For instance, do you know or care that the FBI publishes characteristics of people we should report as possible terrorists? As U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) notes in his National Review Online article “Indefinite Detention and American Citizens,” the list includes “the possession of ‘meals ready-toeat,’ missing fingers, brightly colored stains on clothing, paying for products in cash and changes in hair color.”

Like his father, Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas), Rand Paul is one of the few members of Congress who truly cares about Americans’ right to privacy. So when you see a drone up in the sky, try to look as if you’re not a national security risk.

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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 and Living the Bill of Rights.

THE NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FURTHER SOURS THE SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY

by Nat Hentoff

When the Tea Partiers broke into the national consciousness, with copies of the Constitution in their pockets as they rallied, I was too quickly impressed. I titled one of my syndicated columns “The New American Revolution.” But in the months since President Barack Obama signed a law passed by a bipartisan Congress that smashes key parts of the Bill of Rights, the Tea Partiers have not risen to defend those most basic personal liberties. Nor have Republicans, except for a few, been publicly criticizing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The Democrats, of course, are nearly unanimous in support of their hollow leader.

On that fateful day—December 31, 2011— ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero declared that Obama “will forever be known as the President who signed indefinite detention, without charge or trial, into law. The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future Presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield.” This includes American citizens caged (a more accurate term than detained ) right here in this country.

In his signing statement, Obama tried to pretend that by interpreting the law in his own regal way, American citizens won’t be subject to detention by the military. He’s the boss!

But, Mr. President, even you cannot “interpret” what is plainly in the NDAA. Enter former federal judges Abner Mikva, William Sessions and John Gibbons, who are cited in an Antiwar.com article by Carl Mirra.They warn that the law “codifies methods such as indefinite detention without charge and mandatory military detention and make[s] them applicable to virtually anyone…including U.S. citizens.”

And dig this from the same story: Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) “is one of the few supporters of the NDAA to plainly admit that ‘the statement of authority to detain does apply to American citizens, and it designates the world as the battlefield, including the homeland.’” Whose homeland?

That American citizens can and will be subject to military imprisonment subverts the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that “no person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be… deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.” Yet Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) maintains that a law existing before Obama signed the NDAA has been held by the U.S. Supreme Court as having no bar “to indefinite detention of American citizens.” But the High Court also gave habeas corpus rights to such prisoners. And it has yet to rule on a law that radically nullified the Fifth Amendment’s very core of the American system of justice.

There’s more to this astonishing transmogrification of what all Presidents embrace as “our values.” Remember the controversy surrounding previous administrations’ renditions? The CIA would kidnap suspected terrorists, then send them to foreign nations known for torturing their captives during “enhanced interrogations.”

As pointed out by Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis in the article “2012’s Civil Liberties Apocalypse Has Already Happened,” the NDAA “allows trial by military tribunal, or ‘transfer to the custody or control of the person’s country of origin’ or transfer to ‘any other foreign country or any other foreign entity.’” Any other country? Huh? Somalia? North Korea? Afghanistan?

To what extent will Obama’s signature on this utter contempt for the Bill of Rights affect the President’s reelection campaign? This could depend on how many American voters are familiar with the Bill of Rights. And even if they are, how many have paid attention to the National Defense Authorization Act? Jonathan Turley—one of this country’s most knowledgeable civil liberties lawyers and law professors— notes: “The almost complete failure of the mainstream media to cover this issue is shocking. Many reporters have bought into the spin of the Obama Administration as they did the spin over torture by the Bush Administration.”

Affirming my belief that the Constitution has virtually become wastepaper, Wasserman and Fitrakis have come to this doomsday conclusion: “What most of the nation doesn’t realize is that the end of our basic civil liberties, in place since the December 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights, has already taken place.”

If Obama manages to occupy the White House for another four years, America will continue turning into a country the Founding Fathers would deplore. Not that I have faith in a Republican coming to the rescue.

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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 Still America?

REMEMBER THOSE CLAIRVOYANT COPS IN THE TOM CRUISE MOVIE MINORITY REPORT? THEY JUST MIGHT BE AROUND THE CORNER.

Nat Hentoff

President Obama’s ever-suspicious Department of Homeland Security is, of course, “renowned” for earnestly probing the private parts of travelers at U.S. airports. But the range of its inquiries into likely disloyal Americans is growing wider and deeper. Dig this header for a dispatch from the international news agency Reuters: “Homeland Security watches Twitter, social media.” That’s just to start with.

Journalist Mark Hosenball reported that since June 2010, Secretary Janet Napolitano and her insatiable Homeland Security colleagues have been “operating a ‘Social Networking/Media Capability,’ which involves regular monitoring of ‘publicly available online forums, blogs, public Web sites and message boards.’”

Hosenball also wrote that “such monitoring is designed to help DHS and its numerous agencies,” including the Secret Service and Federal Emergency Management Agency.

They may be looking at some of you on such Internet targets as YouTube and Facebook. And if you express opinions via Twitter or popular blogs, you may be databased for what you leave there. If you believe your government, then you’ll believe the DHS official who pledged that “the department would not keep permanent copies of the Internet traffic it monitors.” The DHS vows to hold it only “for no more than five years.” But whom will the Department of Homeland Security give it to then? The FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency? That’s not for citizens to know. Aren’t you aware there’s a war on?

This rampant tracking of us, which is funded by our tax money, is conducted at the DHS’s National Operations Center (NOC).What is surely going to more than casually interest many journalists looking into this massive surveillance operation is that they too are being monitored and cataloged even though there is barely a shred of evidence that those winding up in this dragnet have done anything illegal.

On January 7, 2012, RT (formerly Russia Today ) reported on a Department of Homeland Security announcement that the NOC’s Office of Operations Coordination “can collect personal information from news anchors, journalists, reporters or anyone who may use ‘traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.’”

On what Constitutional grounds is the government digging into the personal lives of journalists doing their job? Now that I’ve asked this hostile question, I guess the Department of Homeland Security and its Big Brother cohorts will eventually find out I have an FBI file starting with my long and irreverent disrespect for J. Edgar Hoover. On one page, an FBI official instructed his field hands: “Watch Hentoff!” My favorite insertion in that file was a footnote in a report to Hoover about something I’d written questioning whether the bureau’s longtime director had ever read the Constitution.

Said footnote went beyond characterizing me as “a person of interest.” It also mentioned: “Besides, he’s a lousy writer.” I figured that if I were to ever sue that FBI agent for defamation and lose, the upholding of the FBI’s judgment on what I do for a living could have hurt my career. Meanwhile, Robert Mueller’s FBI—I guess he has that lifetime director job now—is going much further to discover not only what citizens have allegedly done to threaten national security but also what we’re supposedly thinking of doing.

On January 26, 2012, DigitalTrends.com delivered a chilling preview of how the government can track our most speculative thoughts, not even dim intentions:“The FBI is looking into the creation of a new application that would allow them to not only monitor ongoing threats but also predict potential terrorist attacks and other crimes before they even happen. … If that sounds suspiciously like Minority Report, you’re not alone.”

This reference was a reminder that Minority Report , starring Tom Cruise, had scared me when I first viewed it. The 2002 film revolved around special cops in the year 2054 who could actually read the minds of people who looked law-abiding but would soon terrorize.

So what are we to make of today’s snooping? It is painfully clear that everything we post online is being watched. And if the FBI gets its new social media alert application—which seems inevitable— the eyes with which it scrutinizes our tweets and other messages will have superhuman vision. Less obvious is how the government’s quest to “protect” the public good will be abused by technology to further trample legitimate free speech.

Since the 9/11 attacks, Republican and Democratic majorities in Congress, as well as Presidents Bush and Obama, have shredded the U.S. Constitution. Keep and protect a copy of your own lest it be banned eventually.

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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 Still America?