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We are, all of us, standing on a civil liberties precipice. The systematic degradation of the rights of all citizens is now well underway. Through the pretext of safeguarding safety and security and, ironically, our “way of life,” governments worldwide are imposing limitations (and, within the U.S., unprecedented limitations) on our freedom of movement; rights stripped from us in the name of safety and security.
That the worst of these violations are, for the time being, born disproportionately by those occupying society's margins and whose social value is seen, and treated, as inferior to all others should provide us no comfort nor assurances for our future. Nor does it relieve us of the burden of our complicity or of our conscience.
The emergent “zero tolerant” society has taken, as its central conceit, the proposition that all human affairs must now be intensely scrutinized, and mediated, through the obsessive ministrations of government. The utility of fear in facilitating this continuous erosion, especially the obligatory appeal that all such fearful erosions are “for the benefit of children”, has become the time-honored mechanism through which the rights of all people are routinely diminished.
We should be especially dubious of that appeal when the victims of these laws are, increasingly, children, themselves. Children who are routinely deprived of their own liberty, and permanently and dramatically diminished - as citizens - for crimes that often consisted of nothing more than mutual exploration; explorations once accommodated within a rational society which had yet to lose all sense of fairness or proportion.
The Snowden Alarm Which Finally Woke Us
We have learned, in extraordinary detail, of the wanton illegality in which our governments now engage through the remarkable revelations of Edward Snowden as well as those of Bradley Manning, William Binney, Thomas Drake and others. They have all taken a courageous stand to insist that government must be held to account for policies which identify liberty as incompatible with the interests of safety and security, policies which are, in any case (at least, in the United States) unconstitutional and illegal.
We have also learned, from the treatment of journalists such as American documentary filmmaker and recent Polk Award recipient (and Academy Award and Emmy Award Nominee), Laura Poitras, of the power of the U.S. government, through its Border & Customs authority, to subject anyone, including journalists, whose message they find inconvenient or embarrassing (such as Poitras' searing reporting on U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan) to repeated harassment upon their return to the United States. Poitras has had to endure hours of detention and threatening interrogation (without benefit of counsel) as well as the repeated search and seizure of her laptop computers and electronic devices along with the digital data found within them. [See the companion piece to this article: “'HOMELAND SECURITY'S' ASSAULT ON FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT: How America's sex laws endanger your, your children's and everyone's freedom to travel.”]
We now know that the U.S. Government routinely uses U.S. Customs' warrantless powers of search to record all data contained on the laptops, cellphones and other digital devices of anti-war activists, political dissidents, journalists or of anyone else whom they wish, especially when they possess no probable cause to obtain that information through other means. This is a deliberate program in which law enforcement, and perhaps any government agency, can alert Customs officials to intercept specific individuals in the event that they travel internationally. That most people now store enormous amounts of data - often inadvertently - on their cellphones and laptops represents an opportunity for government to lay claim to the myriad details of their lives when reentering the U.S.
In Poitras' case, she has endured this treatment more than forty times and with such regularity that she simply picked-up and moved to Berlin; rarely returning to the U.S. where she finds her treatment, at her own government's hands, deeply frightening and disturbing. And this, even before she met or became aware of Edward Snowden (who she then introduced to her colleague, Glenn Greenwald) in what would become one of the most extraordinary journalistic collaborations and achievements of all time.
The Next Step Down The Road To Oblivion
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