The year we found our rulers out

As 2013 draws to a close, we can say with some certainty that while none of the major questions facing humanity are any nearer finding a solution, there is a renewed determination amongst ordinary people to reject how things stand in the search for answers.

So we have to thank our political classes for small mercies. Their ineptitude, arrogance, indifference and sheer inability to counter powerful capitalist economic and financial forces has spurred people on throughout the year.

Three inspiring examples of resistance that all began in June stand out from the countless actions around the world this year. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets in Brazil against government corruption and the diversion of resources towards next year’s World Cup. The country’s dash for growth at any price has made a poor population even more impoverished.

The same month, Bulgarians revolted agains the oligarchy that has left the country bankrupt and almost entirely dependent on imported goods, including food. In Turkey, a nation-wide rebellion was prompted by plans to pave over green space in Istanbul. But the quasi-Islamic government’s attack on democratic rights was also a significant factor in the revolt.

As for individual heroes, the awards go to two Americans. Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning defied the might of the American state to blow the whistle and leak evidence of illegal mass surveillance and war crimes. Sentenced to 35 years in a military prison, Manning rebuked her government with the following words:

“Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability…We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government.”

Snowden became a man without a passport as he fled the clutches of the National Security Agency. A conservative in his politics, Snowden was appalled by the secret programmes run by the NSA and GCHQ in Britain to spy on the electronic communications of its citizens. His actions have shaken Washington and London, revealing how fragile these states are behind all the bluster.

That was shown when a groundswell of public anger on both sides of the Atlantic prevented an attack on Syria. Both Congress and Parliament was paralysed by the reaction of the people. It was the first time in modern history that an illegal war was thwarted at the outset.

Nothing demonstrates more sharply the useless nature of our political system than the response to the clear and present danger presented by runaway climate change. In September, a report by thousands of scientists found that humans have used up between a half and two thirds of the amount of emissions possible before we dangerously overheat the planet.

The UK government’s response? To expand gas-fired power stations and to open up half the country to fracking, both of which will add to dangerous emissions. Madness. An international agreement on cutting greenhouse gas emissions is not even on the agenda. Business interests have prevailed – again.

So we have a socio-ecological impasse. The system cannot deliver what we demand in terms of a sustainable environment, decent living standards, affordable shelter and a democracy that reflects our aspirations rather than those of shareholders. Instead, in Britain in particular, there’s a policy race to the bottom between the major parties.

All this suggests in the strongest terms that  the present political and economic system is a barrier to a real democracy and has effectively disenfranchised the majority The right to vote, won in centuries of struggle, has been undermined by a corporatocracy. Increasing numbers of people evidently recognise this to the case, which is perhaps the greatest achievement of 2013 and provides a basis for optimism for the year ahead.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Parliament is spooked by the spooks

A parliament that cannot defend civil liberties and human rights against the secret state is not fit for purpose and ought to be sent packing. That’s one conclusion you could draw from the pathetic performance of the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) yesterday.

Another is that members of the ISC have effectively been so integrated into the three-ringed spying circus of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ that their designated role to check on the work of the agencies is just for show, part of a great game played at our expense.

Each and every member of the ISC is a trusted member of the Commons or Lords, cleared in advance by the same security services they are supposed to be checking up on! No danger of them ever rocking the boat and so it turned out when the chiefs of the three agencies appeared in public together for the first time.

If anyone was waiting for the ISC to grill the three over the extent of mass surveillance revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, they would have been sorely disappointed. "They faced a grilling that wouldn't have scared a puppy," said Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty. "It was tame, predictable, and limp," said Privacy International about the 90-minute session.

They were not asked about issues do with mass surveillance and privacy. No one even mentioned Tempora, the  programme that allows GCHQ to access mountains of date from transatlantic cables that carry internet traffic.

Naturally, no one asked why international encryption standards had been compromised by the joint work of the National Security Agency in the US and GCHQ. Or the compromising of corporations like Google and the eavesdropping on the phones of leaders like Germany’s Angela Merkel.

Above all, no one on the ISC asked why these programmes had been kept secret from the public and possibly the government. It’s not hard to fathom why the spy chiefs got an easy ride. Hazel Blears, former New Labour counter-terrorism minister, admitted on BBC2’s Newsnight that she had been on “several visits” to GCHQ and was aware of the agency’s “broad capabilities”.

Presumably she was advised that to reveal this would constitute some kind of crime. Blears didn’t take much convincing. “We've had very, very confidential briefings about what the capabilities were and obviously we were satisfied that they were operating within our legal framework.” So that’s alright then.

As the gentle questioning proceeded, the spy chiefs took advantage to assert that articles based on the Snowden material published by the Guardian, the New York Times and the Washington Post had played into the hands of Al-Qaida. Why, the terrorists were even talking about what the leaks meant for their own security, said GCHQ head Sir Iain Lobban.

The head of MI6, Sir John Sawers added: "Our adversaries are rubbing their hands with glee. Al-Qaida is lapping this up." He went so far as to claim that the leaks could help dangerous criminals and even paedophiles evade the law.

Yes, the whole state is facing collapse as a result of articles showing how the US and Britain have access to just about every communication they want to intercept, with or without legal authority. This is a standard scare tactic  – blame the messenger and accuse them of playing into the hands of the country’s enemies when in fact the real threat comes from the secret spy agencies themselves who are beyond oversight.

The secret state within the state considers itself above parliament, above political control and above the rule of law. They don’t give a jot about the warning from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the scientist who created the world wide web, that weakening encryption had put at risk transactions made by ordinary people.

As for the ISC, if this is the best parliament can come up with, it shows how unrepresentative and undemocratic this present body is. One is reminded of the words used by Cromwell. When faced with a “Rump” parliament that was doing absolutely nothing useful, he told the sitting: “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately ... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Snowden calls for support for A Manifesto for Truth

While the Guardian is targeted by the state for publishing Greenwald’s articles exposing mass surveillance of its citizens, with few public figures coming forward to defend the paper, in Germany the response is different.

A campaign is under way to offer whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum and the weekly magazine Der Spiegel has published Snowden’s Manifesto for Truth a week after it was revealed that chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile had been bugged by the United States.

Green Party deputy Hans-Christian Ströbele last week met with Snowden in Moscow, where he is holed up following Russia’s granting of temporary asylum.

Snowden’s statement warned that the NSA and its counterparts were setting the political agenda. “At the beginning, some of the governments who were exposed by the revelations of mass surveillance initiated an unprecedented smear campaign. They intimidated journalists and criminalised the publication of the truth,” Snowden writes.

"Today we know that this was a mistake, and that such behaviour is not in the public interest. The debate they tried to stop is now taking place all over the world.”

A growing number of public figures are calling for their country to grant Snowden political asylum. They include: leading Christian Democrat (Angela Merkel’s party) Heiner Geissler, writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger; actor Daniel Brühl, novelist Daniel Kehlmann, entrepreneur Dirk Rossmann,  feminist activist Alice Schwarzer, German Football League president, Reinhard Rauball and musician Udo Lindenberg. Writer Ferdinand von Schirach has praised Snowden’s action, saying it is a citizen’s duty to disobey an unjust state.    

Enzenberger has compared Snowden’s predicament with that of Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, the original “man without a passport”, who during the 1930s was finally offered asylum in Mexico while on the run from Stalin’s assassins.  

Meanwhile, in Britain, if you’ve been leaked some information about the state’s covert activities against its own citizens and you plan to publish some articles about it, you can fall foul of anti-terror laws because you “are promoting a political cause”.

That’s the chilling implication of the justification put forward by the Metropolitan Police for detaining David Miranda at Heathrow for nine hours last August. Miranda is the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who has used material supplied by whistleblower Edward Snowden to expose mass surveillance by British and American spy agencies.

Section 7 of the 2000 anti-terror legislation is drawn so widely that it can catch anything in its net. Purportedly aimed at militant Islamists promoting their cause online and in pamphlets, it was pointed at Miranda when he arrived in Britain.

In documents referred to prior to this week’s judicial review of his detention, the Met had it both way in their justification for holding Miranda. First, “intelligence” is cited that Miranda was “likely to be involved in espionage activity which has the potential to act against the interests of UK national security”.

Then the police say that disclosure of the material “is designed to influence a government, and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause”. On those grounds alone, the alleged actions fall within the definition of terrorism, the “justification” adds.

Astonishing but true.

This framing, as Greenwald has warned, equates legitimate journalism with acts of terrorism. It is therefore a huge threat to the very notion of free speech and investigative journalism. Not only that, it is based not on any evidence of alleged criminality but on the security forces “judgement” on what a targeted individual could do or “have the potential” of doing.

Once more the notion of “pre-crime”, foretold in the Tom Cruise’s sci-fi film Minority Report, comes back to haunt.

So much so that Conservative MP Dominic Raab has broken ranks with his political masters, Home Secretary Teresa May and Prime Minister David Cameron by questioning police tactics. Their total backing for MI5 Chief Andrew Parker and GCHQ spooks is fronted by Tory backbencher Julian Smith, who has accused newspapers who publish Snowden’s revelations of “treason”.

The repercussions of Miranda’s arrest show that the ConDemns, with the connivance of the non-opposition in the form of One Nation Labour, will stop at nothing to ensure the illegal and criminal activities of its surveillance state. 

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win

Cameron and Obama: puppets of the state within the state

There are two “democracies” where the secret state within the state is pulling the strings of politicians so hard that their movements resemble those of puppets. The hidden apparatus is so powerful that to challenge it is to court accusations tantamount to treason.

We refer, of course, to the United States and Britain, where yesterday the prime minister issued a veiled threat against the Guardian for continuing to publish articles based on material supplied by whistleblower Edward Snowden.  

In Washington, meanwhile, Barack Obama’s spokesman convinced no one with his denial of the president’s prior knowledge of the National Security Agency’s bugging of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile for more than a decade. Somewhere, someone surely has a “smoking gun” email which says the opposite?

The reality is that neither the NSA nor GCHQ are dependent on political approval for their insidious activities. Quite the opposite, both are fiefdoms of the inner state, that part which is hidden below the waterline and which, like icebergs, can seriously damage your health.

That’s why prime minister Cameron is determined to keep a lid on GCHQ’s activities. Yesterday he warned MPS of the dangers of a "lah-di-dah, airy-fairy view" about the dangers of leaks,  and warned that if the Guardian didn’t “demonstrate some social responsibility it would be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act." Naturally, that other poodle, one Ed Miliband, rushed to praise the work of “our intelligence services”, adding: “It is vital, it keeps us safe and, by its very nature, it goes unrecognised.”

But this deception won’t wash. The stories that the Guardian have extracted from Snowden’s files show the methods and scope of the NSA/GCHQ’s activities. It was long believed that these agencies were intercepting emails and phone, breaking into the back door of internet providers when necessary. Snowden provided chapter and verse rather than revealing names of any secret agents or stuff like that.

The truth is that a comprehensive surveillance state has been established behind our backs through agencies that act with impunity. At the weekend, the Guardian revealed how GCHQ feared a "damaging public debate" on the scale of its activities because it could lead to legal challenges.

Memos in the Snowden files, for example, showed how GCHQ and the other spy agencies have thwarted plans supported by the three main parties to make intercept evidence admissible as evidence in criminal trials. The report also revealed how GCHQ helped the Home Office to find “sympathetic” people to help with “press handling”.

Surprise, surprise they included Liberal Democrat peer and former intelligence services commissioner Lord Carlile. Last week, right on cue, he criticised the Guardian’s coverage of Snowden’s material.

Meanwhile, in the US, the Washington Post is sceptical of the claim that Obama did not know about the bugging of foreign leaders. Opinion writer Eugene Robinson says: “Either somebody’s lying or Obama needs to acknowledge that the NSA, in its quest for omniscience beyond anything Orwell could have imagined, is simply out of control.”

Either way, the revelations by Chelsea Manning, when he was as an army private known as Bradley Manning, and then Snowden, have angered millions in Europe and America and thrown governments into disarray. In a perceptive article for the US journal Foreign Affairs, Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore dismiss the so-called threat to national security and instead talk of the "collapse of hyprocisy" in the US. They add:   

This system needs the lubricating oil of hypocrisy to keep its gears turning. To ensure that the world order continues to be seen as legitimate, US officials must regularly promote and claim fealty to its core liberal principles; the United States cannot impose its hegemony through force alone. But as the recent leaks have shown, Washington is also unable to consistently abide by the values that it trumpets. This disconnect creates the risk that other states might decide that the US-led order is fundamentally illegitimate. 

Exactly! Calls for better “oversight” of GCQH and the NSA miss the point. The sponsoring states, as the authors point out, have a “dangerous dependence on doublespeak”. When that cover is blown, as it has been, the case for creating an alternative, democratic political system, where surveillance of the kind we have know, is banned can only grow.

   

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Exclusive: Sell the Acropolis, says Merkel in bugged phone call

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has complained to President Barack Obama about the bugging of her mobile phone by America’s infamous National Security Agency. In fact, according to whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA has access to just about everyone’s emails and phone conversations.

We’ve been passed a transcript of a three-way conversation between Merkel, Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt and Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, who was in Washington at the time. The call took place in May 2012 when the Greek government was close to collapse over its plans for further drastic cuts in public spending before a new bail-out was agreed.

Merkel: What are we going to about Greece? German taxpayers are fed up with their attitude. We can’t keep bailing them out if they are not going to make sacrifices. If they won’t sack civil servants and cut their pensions, we should throw them out of the euro.

Draghi: Madame chancellor, with all due respect, we can’t just eject them from the euro because it could easily lead to the domino effect.

Merkel: What is a domino?

Draghi: It a piece of black plastic or ivory used in a game, it is oblong shaped and has white dots on one side. You stand them on their end, next to each other. If you push one over, the others will fall too. This is called a domino effect. Many wars start this way.

Lagarde: Madame chancellor, I think what Signor Draghi is saying is that if Greece leaves the euro, others may consider that the single currency is only for rich countries. Others like Spain and Portugal may also run into difficulties and the euro could collapse.

Merkel: Ah, so. We keep Greece in the euro but insist they cut their spending before they get more bail-out funds. Is that correct?

Draghi: The difficulty is that it’s hard to see what how they can reduce their spending much more. I am told that the government has run out of money to pay for imported medicines and that hospitals cannot pay their electricity bills. We may have to lend them more money so that they can repay the banks the interest on the loans they gave them in the first place.

Merkel: We have to do something. Tourists from Germany are being abused when they go on holiday in Greece. The Greeks seem to blame us for their problems yet we have gone out of our way to help them. Perhaps they could sell the Acropolis or the Palace of Knossos? That would raise some money, surely?

Lagarde: Yes. I know some hedge funds here in Washington that would buy these monuments and lease them back to the Greeks. There must be many more temples and palaces that could be sold in this way. We should ask their government to draw up a list. We have to stand shoulder to shoulder over Greece. Other countries must know that if they get into debt that the most important thing is saving the banks and the financial system. These are our priorities.

Draghi: Many European banks are still in some difficulties over the excessive debt on their balance sheets. Protecting them has to be top of our agenda.

Merkel: Agreed. So we will tell the Greek government to, how do you say, swallow the medicine because in the long run it will cure them! By the way, who do you think will win the European Champions League final in Moscow [between Bayern Munich and Chelsea]?

Draghi: It won’t be a Greek team!

Lagarde: Nor a French one!

The surveillance state tightens its grip on us all

New laws that will mean ID checks for all, state supervision of the media, gagging of campaigns in the run-up to an election and a threat against publishers of devastating accounts of secret surveillance. Russia? China? Nope, dear old Britain.

The ConDems’ new anti-immigrants Bill will mean checks on status before people can access housing or health. This will hit everyone, as the Immigration Law Practitioners' Association (Ilpa) has pointed out.

"What this means in practice is a system of identity checks for all, since it is necessary for British citizens or people with permanent residence to prove that they are lawfully present in the UK if and when checked," says their response to the Home Office consultation.

Moving swiftly past the decision by the mainstream parties to introduce a legal oversight of the media through the unelected, secretive, feudal institution known as the Privy Council, let’s deal with state surveillance which we’re not supposed to know about.

US whistleblower Edward Snowden has just been given the Sam Adams Award by former CIA officers, who gave it to him in Russia, for “exhibiting integrity in intelligence”. The Guardian’s decision to publish Snowden’s revelations has run into a wall of hostility and intimidation.

Britain’s secret services – backed by Labour, Tory and LibDem politicians – have all but accused the Guardian of treason for printing chapter and verse of how the state can access every digital transmission you make – at will and without you knowing.

MI5 chief Andrew Parker’s accusation that Snowden was “handing the advantage to terrorists” ratcheted up the offensive on behalf of the secret state. He was predictably backed by No 10 and the ultra-reactionary Daily Mail, which accused the Guardian of “lethal irresponsibility”.   

But it’s not simply the Tories versus the Guardian. Former Labour home secretary Jack Straw has leapt into the fray. He claims that the Guardian was arrogant and naïve and guilty of “adolescent excitement” in its handling of Snowden’s material.

At least Straw’s consistent. It was New Labour that laid the legal ground for mass surveillance with its passing of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIP) 2000.

But things have moved on dramatically since 2000 as novelist John Lanchester has concluded. Acknowledging his initial scepticism, he spent a week reading the Snowden files in New York (those in London were destroyed on MI5’s orders).   

Tempora is the clandestine security electronic surveillance program established by GCHQ in 2011.  It was exposed by Snowden, along with Prism, which is the US’s own mass data mining programme. The two programmes have a cable and network tapping capability called Upstream which allows spooks to extract information in “real time”.

Lanchester notes that the “basic intention of the UK-spy base GCHQ engineers is “to get everything”. GCHQ’s eavesdropping abilities “are on a scale unmatched anywhere in the free world, and they privately boast about the ‘more permissive legal environment’ in the UK”.

He rightly says that we are already “the most spied on, monitored and surveilled democratic society there has ever been”. And, in case you think that Snowden simply told us what we already knew – think again.

“We are right on the verge of being an entirely new kind of human society, one involving an unprecedented penetration by the state into areas which have always been regarded as private. Do we agree to that? If we don't, this is the last chance to stop it happening. Our rulers will say what all rulers everywhere have always said: that their intentions are good, and we can trust them. They want that to be a sufficient guarantee.”

The chilling fact is that the law governing surveillance is “so broadly drafted and interpreted, it’s almost impossible to break”, Lanchester admits.   

We don’t live in a democracy, or at least one that is anything more than a sham. A corporate-driven surveillance state, with the major parties cosying up to each other on education and other policies, is no use to anyone except the powerful and the corrupt. We definitely need a new people-centred, democratic constitution, an Agreement of the People for the 21^st century.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Salute Bradley Manning, victim of the secret state

The front pages are full of a statement by Bradley Manning that he will try now to live as a woman, reconciling what he explains has been a lifelong personal difficulty. They lasciviously reprint the picture that was introduced into his trial.

But if his lawyers thought that would win the sympathy of the court they were truly whistling in the dark. The US state was always planning to make an example of Manning, just as they would do with Edward Snowden if they could get their hands on the ex-NSA computer specialist.

Now Manning faces 35 years in a military prison, and daily challenges one fears are too horrible to imagine. This is a brutal world where a gentle person like him is condemned for decisions made "out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in", as he said in his statement to the court (which got one tenth the coverage of his more recent statement).

Manning joined up agreeing with the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq but when he was reading secret military reports on a daily basis he realised that, as he eloquently put it, "we have forgotten our humanity”. His statement added:

"Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.
 "In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.
 "Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy—the Trail of Tears [forced relocation of native Americans], the Dred Scott decision [1857 Supreme Court ruling that African Americans could not be US citizens], McCarthyism, the Japanese-American internment camps — to name a few. I am confident that many of our actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light."

He concludes: "If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society."

And his lawyer, Lt.Col David Coombs, did not mince his words either, saying that a country in which “you are faced with a death-penalty offence” for the simple act of disclosing information to a journalist “is not the America that I would hope that we live in.”

Manning joins an honourable list of US citizens prepared to risk everything to expose their country's secret state, which breaks every law –  American and international – in its pursuit of “national” – aka corporate – interests. 

- Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst who released "The Pentagon Papers" that showed that the US State Department knew the US could not win the war in Vietnam and carried on knowing there would be thousands more casualties.

- Philip Agee, former CIA agent who exposed the agency's active support of murderous regimes in South America, that sent oppositionists to torture and death.

-         Jesselyn Radack, Department of Justice official sacked and then hounded out of her next job because she told Newsweek the department lied about the interrogation of John Walker Lindh, a US citizen captured in Afghanistan.

And that is to name only a few - there is a list of whistleblowers going back to the 18th century here which shows that there are always women and men ready to risk their lives and freedom to expose illegal actions by so-called democratic states.

Manning may be ridiculed by those who have no human feeling, but we salute his courage and look forward to the day when the prison gates are opened and he is set free.

Penny Cole

Kafka's nightmare goes global

We are all potential “terrorists” now, at least in the eyes of the state. Why else would the police want to stop 61,000 people at entry points into Britain during the last year under the infamous schedule 7 of the anti-terror laws of 2000.

That’s the equivalent of the population of the town of Lowestoft or a full stadium when Arsenal play at home. This amounts to state intimidation on a scale that the notorious Stasi of East Germany or the KGB of the former Soviet Union would salute.

There’s no other explanation for the detention of David Miranda, a Brazilian citizen whose only “crime” was to be the partner of and assistant to Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who has helped publicise the material leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Miranda says he was forced to hand over passwords and other information while at Heathrow or face arrest. All his electronic equipment was confiscated by the police, who got clearance from Downing Street for their action. And no doubt the ConDems told the American authorities, who have plans to put Snowden in jail.

Snowden’s “crime”? To reveal that the National Security Agency had created an unlawful, secret surveillance programme on a scale so immense that it put everyone under suspicion. And, naturally, the British end of the operation, GCHQ at Cheltenham, collaborated all the way.

To imply that revealing this is tantamount to an “act of terrorism”, as the US and British authorities do, is to create a world where the state can make anything a crime at the stroke of a pen. In Franz Kafka’s frightening novel The Trial, a man is arrested by an inaccessible authority and is never able to establish the nature of the charges.

Nearly 90 years after the book’s publication, Kafka’s nightmare has gone global.

Thus The Guardian was visited by no less an eminence than the cabinet secretary himself. Sir Jeremy Heywood was despatched by David Cameron and Nick Clegg to instruct the newspaper to hand over computer files containing Snowden’s leaked material.

Since when has the country’s most senior civil servant been a messenger boy for the secret state? After the newspaper refused, two spooks from GCHQ oversaw the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement.

Where’s the outcry? Who will protect our liberties? Labour? Parliament? You must be joking. Labour enacted the very legislation used to hold Miranda and the other 61,000. Blair’s governments created a surveillance state framework that the ConDems are busily using.

So not a peep from Ed Miliband about freedom of the press. As for parliament, its committee charged with intelligence oversight is, as libertarian Simon Jenkins puts it, “a charade, a patsy of the secrecy lobby”. The very same committee, you will recall, recently announced that GCHQ was not breaking the law in spying on our communications.

In any case, oversight is an over-used term. In the US, Congressional committees charged with checking on the NSA were repeatedly lied to or misled. They couldn’t get to the bottom of things even if they wanted to. That was one of the reasons that prompted Snowden to blow the whistle on the secret Prism programme.

The emergence of secret, unaccountable, security-surveillance states on both sides of the Atlantic over the last two decades is part of a wider process of change in the way we are ruled. Corporate-driven globalisation has resulted in a market-oriented state that in turn has lost legitimacy in the eyes of large numbers of people, particularly since the global crisis that began in 2007.

Like all states, the capitalist type needs constant justification for its raison d’être. An elusive external enemy that their policies helped create and which can never be defeated – aka global terrorism – answers the need.

And at the same time it creates the perfect cover for spying on dissent of any kind. The state’s claims to be protecting us are therefore useless as well as spurious. What we should ask is: who will protect us from the state?

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

US-UK security state strikes back

The outrageous detention of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner for nine hours at Heathrow airport yesterday gives a new meaning to the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States.

This was clearly a joint operation of overt intimidation by the burgeoning Anglo-US security state against the partner of a journalist who has helped expose the covert operations of GCHQ in Britain and the NSA in America.

David Miranda was held incommunicado for the maximum nine hours allowed under the Terrorism 2000 Act. His property – including his mobile phone – was taken from him and he was not allowed legal representation.

Under schedule seven of the Terrorism Act 2000, the police can detain people at British border points with or without probable cause. The detained person does not have the right to a lawyer and it is a criminal offence to refuse to answer questions, whether or not a lawyer is present.

Greenwald only knew of the arrest three hours into the interrogation when a “security official” – who only gave his number 203654 – called him at 5.30am on the east coast of the US.

His partner who is a Brazilian citizen was in transit from Berlin to Rio when seized. Neither Brazilian officials nor Guardian lawyers were allowed access to him.

It was a blatant act of revenge by the US and UK authorities to punish anyone associated with whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about Prism, the mass snooping programme on US, British citizens and others around the world.

Miranda did not represent any terrorist threat, and the authorities knew that. His arrest was purely to punish his partner Greenwald for analysing the data released by Snowden, who remains in Russia on temporary asylum to escape arrest by the US authorities.

In enacting the Terrorism Act in 2000, New Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett flouted human rights and deeply enshrined principles, including the right to remain silent. When Blunkett was warned that it was a catch-all law, he notoriously poured scorn on human rights’ organisations.

In 2001 New Labour’s attorney general Lord Goldsmith, who approved the legal cover for the attack on Iraq, used the terror laws to detain asylum seekers for 10 days, despite judicial opposition.

In 2008, financial crime experts were shocked at the use of anti-terror laws to seize the assets of Icelandic banks, when Reykjavik-based Landsbanki Islands bank got into trouble.

In 2010, the Equality and Human Rights Commission expressed its concerns about the introduction of body scanners at ports of entry, again under the pretext of terrorism threats. It was alarmed about the infringement of the right to privacy and access and use of intimate body images,

The repeated use and abuse of the anti-terror laws by state forces has been so blatant that eminent experts such as David Anderson QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, felt obliged to admonish the police.

In 2011 he cautioned the police over the arrest of six North African street cleaners, which had been prompted by a canteen joke. During the Olympics, in June 2012 Anderson stated that you were just as likely to die of a bee sting as of a terror attack.

Snowden’s revelations, like those of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, are doing serious damage to the Obama administration and, with the help of the compliant British authorities, they are seeking to intimidate, smear, frame and generally harass anyone involved.  

Greenwald has courageously said that he will not be cowed. He deserves total support. While anti-terror legislation remains on the statute books it will be used by the state in whatever way it sees fit. An argument if there ever was one that a new democratic constitution for the 21st century that enshrines basic rights is an urgent necessity.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Snowden exposes how a whole country is under suspicion

US whistleblower Edward Snowden’s courageous decision to lift the lid on the secret state is dramatically changing the stakes in the war between covert spy agencies and ordinary people.

Snowden, a former National Security Agency senior advisor, released 41 Powerpoint slides (link) to reporters which detail the vast nature and the scale of surveillance by US spy agencies through the backdoor of all the main internet giants.

So far the Guardian and the Washington Post have chosen to publish only five of the slides, on the grounds the others could be “too explosive”. Snowden felt he couldn’t live with himself if he kept secret what he knew. He says:

"You don’t have to have done anything wrong, you simply have to have eventually fall under suspicion ... and then they can use this system to go back in time and ... derive suspicion from an innocent life”

Fearing for his security, Snowden has now disappeared from a Hong Kong hotel after naming himself as the source of a leak reckoned to be the most devastating of all time by Daniel Ellsberg, who is someone who should know.

In 1971, Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, a top secret study into military decision-making during the Vietnam War.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, seeking refuge in London’s Ecuadorean embassy to avoid extradition, says Snowden’s request that all 41 should be made public should be honoured.

Whatever the missing slides may contain, Snowden’s actions show snooping on a scale that goes far beyond that of even the Stasi, to the secret police in the former German Democratic Republic. 

During the Cold War, the Stasi spied on the entire population through a huge bureaucracy of spies, informants and phone tapping. Now Ellsberg has described the NSA, the Federal Bureau of Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency “the United Stasi of America”.

  

Ellsberg has praised Snowden’s action. He says that what Snowden has revealed show that the 9/11 terror attacks became an opportunity to carry out an “executive coup” against the US constitution.

In his extraordinary interview with the Guardian, Snowden explained why he decided to go public, despite the enormous personal risk.  Although he had a highly paid senior post as an advisor and “telecommunications systems officer”,  he was increasingly horrified by the NSA and intelligence communications targeting everyone and storing the information they gathered from internet companies.

And it was exactly the indiscriminate, secret and unaccountable nature of the surveillance that disturbed him so much.

“Even if you aren’t doing anything that is wrong, they can paint anyone in the context of a wrong-doer ... they may intend to target someone suspected of terrorism but they are targeting everyone,” he said.

Like Ellsberg he is frightened of what he describes as an “architecture of oppression”. He says the secret agencies are “subverting the power of government”.

It’s clear that Snowden has gone to ground because, as he has said, “you can’t come forward against the world’s most powerful intelligence agency” and not be under threat.

Many aspects of the mass surveillance of an entire citizenry recalls the plot of the science fiction film, Minority Report, a dystopia in which people could be found guilty of “pre-crime”.

In Britain as in the US, we could all be found guilty of pre-crime in what Snowden describes as a possible “turnkey tyranny” – an autocratic state in which the government will give itself even greater powers.

Snowden’s action tears a great hole in the web of lies behind which the secret state that its political apologists like Barack Obama and David Cameron try to hide.

Their state, a corporatocracy which facilitates the rule of corporate profit making, is the gravest danger to the limited forms of democracy we still have.

As David Talbot, of the US Alternet website says, if whistleblowers like Bradley Manning and Snowden are “weird”, then it’s definitely time for all of us to get weird.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary