The Attacks Against the NSA Leakers—and the Reality of “Democracy” Under This System

September 1, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Ever since the truth about the massively invasive spying being carried out by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was leaked by Edward Snowden, the U.S. and its allies have been thuggishly threatening not only Snowden himself but those who helped this former CIA contractor bring the information into the light of day and anyone else who the U.S. accuses of aiding him. The latest incident was an outrageous attack against Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first published the Snowden leaks in the British paper the Guardian—in the form of detention and harassment of Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda.

Demonstrators in Sao Paulo, Brazil protest on July 18 against the Brazilian government's rejection of asylum for Edward Snowden. Photo: AP

On August 18, Miranda was flying home from Berlin to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he lives with Greenwald. He had gone to Berlin to meet with documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras—she and Greenwald were the first people that Snowden approached and entrusted with the knowledge he wanted to share about the secret NSA programs. According to the Guardian, Miranda was helping Greenwald and Poitras with their work around the Snowden files by acting as a courier, since electronic communication between the two had become very insecure in the wake of the NSA leaks.

As he was transiting through London’s Heathrow international airport, Miranda was stopped and then detained by the police under Britain’s Terrorism Act. This repressive law allows the police to detain people for up to nine hours without any charges. Miranda was held for the full nine hours and aggressively questioned, without a lawyer present, about the reporting that Greenwald and Poitras were working on. The police threatened to send him to prison under terrorism charges, and in the end confiscated all his electronic equipment, including laptop, cell phone, USB sticks, DVDs, and video game consoles. Miranda says he was also coerced into surrendering the passwords to his social media accounts. So far the police have not returned any of the electronic gear.

The new Utah Data Center of the National Security Agency, where millions of electronic messages are stored and reviewed. Photo: AP

The law that was invoked to detain Miranda is highly repressive, giving the police the power to detain people without any actual evidence but merely on supposed suspicion that they may be “preparing, instigating or commissioning terrorism.” But the authorities acted outside even their own laws, since they were clearly aware that Miranda had nothing to do with any terrorist organization or plot.

The U.S. government had advance knowledge of this action by their close ally. A White House spokesman said that the Obama administration had been given a “heads up” about Miranda’s detention. A Reuters news agency report makes clear the intention behind the incident: “One US security official told Reuters that one of the main purposes of the British government’s detention and questioning of Miranda was to send a message to recipients of Snowden’s materials, including the Guardian, that the British government was serious about trying to shut down the leaks.”

In an article posted shortly after he learned of Miranda’s detention, Greenwald wrote, “This is obviously a rather profound escalation of their attacks on the news-gathering process and journalism. It’s bad enough to prosecute and imprison sources. It’s worse still to imprison journalists who report the truth. But to start detaining the family members and loved ones of journalists is simply despotic…

“If the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further. Beyond that, every time the US and UK governments show their true character to the world when they prevent the Bolivian President’s plane from flying safely home, when they threaten journalists with prosecution, when they engage in behavior like what they did today—all they do is helpfully underscore why it’s so dangerous to allow them to exercise vast, unchecked spying power in the dark.”

After the Miranda detention, the Guardian revealed another incident of blatant intimidation. A month before Miranda’s detention at Heathrow, agents from the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ—the British equivalent of the NSA) came to the Guardian offices to oversee the physical destruction of the computer hard drives and memory chips on which the encrypted files containing material leaked by Snowden had been stored. This had followed weeks of threats by UK officials to legally shut down Guardian’s reporting on the Snowden leaks (which has also included exposures about GCHQ’s close links to the NSA spying). One official told the Guardian editors, “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.” As the Guardian notes, they had pointed out to security officials that there were other copies of the Snowden files, including with Guardian reporters overseas. But the officials continued to demand that the files be destroyed if the Guardian was not going to hand them over—making clear, again, that their aim was to deliver a Mafia-like warning.

For people of conscience, the basic stand to take on people like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning) is clear: these whistleblowers who expose crimes and injustices carried out by the government must be supported and defended.

Aside from threats from the U.S. and British governments, Snowden and those helping to bring the NSA revelations to the people are coming under attack from voices in the media and apologists for imperialism. Jeffrey Toobin, CNN legal analyst, compared David Miranda to a “drug mule” on the Anderson Cooper show. When Glenn Greenwald appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press, the host David Gregory asked him, “Why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?”

In the title for an online New York Times piece, Richard Moberly, a law professor and academic expert on whistleblowers in the federal government, describes Snowden as “No Democratic Hero. He Subverted the Process.” He writes that “all three government branches approved the [NSA] program” and that Snowden “does not have the right to usurp the democratic process by leaking national security information.”

This argument actually reveals something essential about democracy in this country and under capitalism-imperialism generally (although that was not the writer’s intention). Think about it: Snowden saw how the U.S. is carrying out vast, unprecedented levels of surveillance on the phone and Internet communications of hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. and around the world—and how the government was keeping all this secret and lying to people about it. He felt the people had a right to know about this, and courageously took the responsibility (fully knowing the risks involved to his own safety) to bring out the truth. So according to the rulers of this system and their defenders, Snowden “subverted the democratic process” and should be considered a “criminal.” What this points to is the kind of democracy that exists in this country and the nature of the system that this democracy is part of and serves.

As Revolution wrote in “Five Points of Orientation on the Revelations of Government Surveillance”:

All this surveillance is not just about monitoring everyone’s thoughts and actions (horrific as that is), it is about CONTROLLING everyone’s activity, communications, and thinking. It is about being able to bring the full power of the state down on them at a moment’s notice. This system kills people—even U.S. citizens—simply on the president’s say-so. It has “rendered” people to secret “black sites” around the world for horrific torture (and Obama has steadfastly refused to expose or prosecute those torturers and those who gave the orders). This is a system that locks up more of its population than any nation on earth—by a long shot.

For all their talk about democracy and rights, what has been revealed so far is activity that shreds basic rights supposedly guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution... So all this surveillance is not only immoral and illegitimate, it is unlawful to boot. The fact that there are so few in Congress who even intend to make a show of objecting to all this, and so many who have vented “righteous indignation” in attacking those who have made the leaks, further reveals that virtually everyone at the top levels of government actually takes for granted that this society really is—beneath all the promises of democracy for all—a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over everyone else.

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