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
