Government surveillance is a growing concern that John Whitehead has written about in his book, A Government of Wolves. In a recent column, he analyzes the speech given recently by the president on NSA surveillance.
President Obama opened his speech with these words. “At the dawn of our Republic, a small, secret surveillance committee borne out of the Sons of Liberty was established in Boston. And the group’s members included Paul Revere. At night, they would patrol the streets, reporting back any signs that the British were preparing raids against America’s early Patriots. Throughout American history, intelligence has helped secure our country and our freedoms.”
John Whitehead was on my radio program recently and was amused by the idea that the Sons of Liberty used surveillance (like we have today) to protect the colonists. In his column he also criticized that inference from the president that “rather than condemning the NSA for encroaching on our privacy rights, we should be commending them for helping to ‘secure our country and our freedoms.’ Never mind that the Sons of Liberty were actually working against the British government, to undermine what they perceived as a repressive regime guilty of perpetrating a host of abuses against the colonists.”
Welcome to this upside-down world where greater government surveillance of our daily lives is compared to American patriots fighting the British. Every few days we learn of one more encroachment into our lives from the NSA and other agencies. For example, we learn one day that the NSA has been collecting metadata on all of our phone calls. In another story we learn that the NSA collects 200 million text messages from us each day. In yet another story, we discover that the NSA have implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world that allow it to conduct surveillance and create a digital highway for launching cyberattacks.
John Whitehead also talks about the sophisticated use of drones, the militarization of the police, and a future electronic concentration camp. We face significant threats to our liberty and privacy and are not well served by a president who pretends this is the sort of thing 18th century patriots would have done if they had the technology.