Politics

Texas Spares No Expense To Kill

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

texas_death_penalty

 

In Texas today,  there is apparently no expense too great when it comes to efficiently killing people, and no expense too small to be called unaffordable and cancelled if it preserves or improves quality of existence for the living.

This has nothing to do with the Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, or the ongoing and contentious argument over abortion; those battles are raging on their own elsewhere.

Rather, this is about the eagerness of the state of Texas to go to any expense and any length to continue dispatching prisoners on death row with clockwork efficiency and regularity, under a veil of secrecy and unknown cost, while any other state expenditures are castigated as a sign of ‘big government’ and pared back – even as those who have (rightly or wrongly) come to depend on that government support suffer grievously as a consequence.

The Guardian reports on the extraordinary lengths to which the Texas state government – which takes every opportunity to position itself as staunchly pro-life and legislate based on the ‘sanctity of human life’ – is willing to go in order to continue performing lethal injections once its current supply of lethal injection drugs runs out at the end of March:

Texas has obtained a new batch of the drugs it uses to execute death row inmates, allowing the state to continue carrying out death sentences once its existing supply expires at the end of the month.

But correction officials will not say where they bought the drugs, arguing that information must be kept secret to protect the safety of its new supplier. In interviews with the Associated Press, officials with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice also refused to say whether providing anonymity to its new supplier of the sedative pentobarbital was a condition of its purchase.

It should be noted that Texas is not the only state to go above and beyond in its zeal to continue killing inmates – Ohio also recently switched to a new cocktail of lethal injection drugs after it found itself unable to obtain new supplies of the original formula.

The fact that no international pharmaceutical company is willing any longer to supply drugs to be used for barbaric executions was a mere obstacle to be overcome for Ohio, who found a new drug and a new supplier, and subsequently botched their first execution using the new method. One eyewitness, a priest, reported:

I was aghast. Over those 11 minutes or more he was fighting for breath, and I could see both of his fists were clenched the entire time. His gasps could be heard through the glass wall that separated us. Towards the end, the gasping faded into small puffs of his mouth. It was much like a fish lying along the shore puffing for that one gasp of air that would allow it to breathe. Time dragged on and I was helpless to do anything, sitting helplessly by as he struggled for breath. I desperately wanted out of that room.

For the next four minutes or so a medical tech listened for a heart beat on both sides of his chest. That seemed to drag on too, like some final cruel ritual, preventing us from leaving. Then, at 10.53am, the warden called the time of death, they closed the curtains, and that was it.

I came out of that room feeling that I had witnessed something ghastly. I was relieved to be out in the fresh air. There is no question in my mind that Dennis McGuire suffered greatly over many minutes. I’d been told that a “normal” execution lasted five minutes – this experimental two-drug concoction had taken 26 minutes. I consider that inhumane.

But let us return to Texas, so often the protagonist in these stories. The reason given by Texas state officials for not releasing details of where their shiny new supply of lethal injection drugs came from – in response to an entirely justified request by the AP – sets a new standard for cognitive dissonance and Orwellian doublethink:

The decision to keep details about the drugs and their source secret puts the agency at odds with past rulings of the state attorney general’s office, which has said the state’s open records law requires the agency to disclose specifics about the drugs it uses to carry out lethal injections.

“We are not disclosing the identity of the pharmacy because of previous, specific threats of serious physical harm made against businesses and their employees that have provided drugs used in the lethal injection process,” said Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark.

It is already well known that Texas’ supposed devotion to the sanctity of life does not apply to those on death row, just as the state that held a prayer event to ask God to intercede and end a long-running drought is also quite happy to ignore Jesus’ teachings about mercy and forgiveness.

But now it also appears that the state of Texas is acting in this opaque and clearly antidemocratic manner because of fears for the safety of those people who are involved in producing the deadly drugs.

Imagine, for a moment, that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice had instead released their statement with the following revision (amendments in brackets):

“We are not disclosing the identity of the [people and organisations involved] because of previous, specific threats of serious physical harm made against businesses and their employees that have provided [services] used in the [abortion] process.”

Pigs would fly and snow fall in hell before the state of Texas would ever consider withholding the names and details of people involved in providing abortion services out of a desire to protect their safety, even though there are many real, tangible examples of such people being subjected to harassment, intimidation, physical harm and assassination. By contrast, anti-death penalty campaigners have shown no signs of wanting to intimidate or harm those with whom they disagree.

The key difference (and reason for the massive divergence in treatment of the two groups) is that as far as those in power in Texas are concerned, anyone ever involved in facilitating an abortion is inherently evil and deserves whatever comes their way, but anyone who facilitates an execution is doing their God-fearing, patriotic duty.

And this dichotomy exists because the governing majority in Texas, from Rick “Oops” Perry on downwards, do not see the execution of an incarcerated inmate by the all-powerful government as a violation of the commandment Thou Shalt Not Kill.

texas_executions
One of the indispensable functions of government?

 

At this point, two disclaimers:

1. The purpose of this article is not to elicit sympathy for murderers, or even to debate the merits of the death penalty – though this blog will go on record as being resolutely against the death penalty, viewing it as a barbaric practice from a bygone age best relegated to the past.

2. Nor is the purpose of this article to debate the issue of abortion – though this blog will go on record as believing that life begins at conception, but that there are various times and circumstances (rape, incest, catastrophic developmental anomalies, risk to the life of the mother) when two equally terrible choices must be weighed and the resultant answer may come down on the side of terminating the pregnancy at the earliest opportunity; and that in these terrible, heart-wrenching circumstances, no one is better placed to make the awful decision than the mother, least of all government.

The purpose of this blog is to ask a very simple question of the Texas government: where the hell are your priorities?

Why, when Texas struggles with shameful rates of illiteracy, teen pregnancy, teen births, adults in correctional facilities, adults under probation, citizens without health insurance and food insecure children, is the state government rummaging for spare change and wasting precious time and resources in order to continue funding executions, of all things?

Why, when life is so difficult and wretched for so many Texans, is their state government more interested in preserving its ability to smite the guilty (or not guilty) than help the needy?

When conservative Texans are not threatening to secede from the United States in protest of the Tyrannical Kenyan Socialist Marxist Fascist Community-Organising Gun-Confiscating Traitor unlawfully occupying the White House, they often like to pledge their love and respect for the Constitution. Section 13 of Article 1 (Bill of Rights) of their own Texas State Constitution has this to say on the matter of punishing the guilty:

Sec.13. EXCESSIVE BAIL OR FINES; CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT; REMEDY BY DUE COURSE OF LAW. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel or unusual punishment inflicted. All courts shall be open, and every person for an injury done him, in his lands, goods, person or reputation, shall have remedy by due course of law.

“Nor cruel or unusual punishment inflicted.”

In Texas, it appears that selective reading is not limited to the Bible.

What Do The Tories Stand For?

Samuel Hooper2 Comments
Interchangeable
Interchangeable

 

Iain Martin poses an excellent question to restive Conservative ministers and backbenchers currently jostling for position in a 2015 conservative leadership election that may very well never transpire – what would they do for the country if they actually got the job?

A very pertinent question. Watching the unseemly attempts of cabinet member after cabinet member manoeuvre for advantage and brief against perceived rivals provokes unpleasant flashbacks to the time when Gordon Brown finally had his way and muscled Tony Blair out of Number 10 Downing Street, only to become prime minister and realise that he had just fulfilled the extent of his ambition.

With more than a year to go until what will undoubtedly be a closely-fought election campaign, now is really not an appropriate time for self-interested ministers to be promoting their personal prospects at the expense of stable governance. And if they absolutely must indulge in such counterproductive, selfish shenanigans, they could at least give the public some semblance of a reason to believe that they offer a better alternative to David Cameron.

As Iain Martin points out, none of the would-be plotters have yet risen to this challenge:

Some people are positioning ahead of a potential vacancy and talking seriously in private about who the next Tory leader will be. So far it has all been very heavy on personalities and score-settling.

What we hear less of is ideas. What do those who want to succeed Cameron, if he loses, want to do with or for the country? This is, I know, a hopelessly naive question, although I never tire of asking it during a leadership race.

We already have a coalition government that stands for next to nothing. Blaming Labour for the country’s economic predicament and the state of the public finances may be correct, but it doesn’t amount to a platform for governing. And with little more than a year left in the lifetime of this parliament, we can expect precious little more in terms of radical or effective new policies. This mean that the electorate has to make up their minds based on what we can see today. So what is there?

Michael Gove’s education reforms spring to mind as something both tangible and in line with conservative principles, but aside from that, what else can the Tories point to? The period from 2010, when the United Kingdom finally escaped the Gordon Brown terror, has been characterised by retrenchment and burden-sharing and sacrifice-making and painful compromise at every turn. There has been almost nothing positive. Whether it is fiscal policy, defence policy, welfare reform (though credit to Iain Duncan Smith for at least trying), privacy or constitutional reform, it has been an exercise in damage limitation on all fronts.

If the conservatives were (heaven forfend) to elect Boris Johnson as their new leader, or Theresa May, or George Osborne or anyone else, what would they do differently? Why go through the trauma of ditching Cameron and choosing someone else who may be identical, or worse?

Iain Martin proposes a good set of questions, well worth asking, that could help distinguish one candidate from another and maybe tease out some real talent or independent thinking amidst a sea of caution and homogeneity. Making the valid point that voters will not warm to a new leader who only attained his or her position by virtue of being ‘next in line’, he issues the following challenge:

Eventually, the rest of us in the audience – taxpayers, the people who live here, Tories and non-Tories alike – might like to hear what applicants to be Conservative leader and trainee prime minister have in mind, other than stopping each other.

Here are his ten questions:

1) How can the country be more productive?

2) How can we maximise the advantages of globalisation without having to concrete over the whole of southern England to accommodate the millions more who want to be here?

3) Are our banks still too big and how do we get more competition to aid consumers and business?

4) Why is the tax system such a mess of conflicting incentives?

5) Is EU membership really compatible with being a self-governing nation state?

6) Is it even possible to be truly self-governing any longer in the age of the EU, big tech and giant corporates that operate across continents?

7) The Blair/Gove education reforms are up and running – how might they be built on?

8) What is the UK’s foreign policy?

9) What are the threats and how will we defend ourselves?

10) Can the UK be remade to give all its constituent parts, especially England, greater autonomy while still holding together the Union?

While it is absolutely right to challenge those seeking to be David Cameron’s successor to answer these questions, in reality it would be good for all politicians and party leaders to have a stab at addressing them, because these ten questions really form the basis of how we currently see ourselves as a country, and where we want to go from here.

Take the first question on productivity. This could lead to an interesting debate along any number of lines, including trade union reform, European Union membership status, working conditions for interns and apprentices, and more. Already we would see a divide between the mainstream Conservative party MPs who remain deeply eurosceptical, and the more Europhile fringe. Similarly, a contrast would be drawn between the mainstream anti-union position and those such as Robert Halfon MP who have been trying to reintroduce a trade union heritage to the party.

The tax system question is also one that urgently requires answering, not just to help search for the ideal future Tory leader but because the current tax code is such a mess. Some are quite keen to continue incentivising certain ‘good’ behaviours such as marriage through the tax code while others (one dares to hope) might argue for a radical stripping down and simplification of the system. While none of the potential candidates are likely to come out in support of a genuinely interesting idea such as a flat tax, we might see ideas about eliminating the myriad of tax credits in order to lower rates for everyone gain some traction.

Martin’s list is not perfect, and some of the questions are more philosophical than immediately useful. The brace of questions on the EU, for example, are the type of topic that one could imagine being debated at length over canapes at Davos or Bilderberg, but which are of no help in distinguishing future Tory leadership candidates. EU membership is clearly increasingly incompatible with being a self-governing nation state, and will remain that way for as long as the Treaty of Rome’s ‘ever closer union’ call continues to be advanced with no democratic mandate from the European people. And no Tory leader is ever likely to publicly surrender British policymaking to the forces of the EU, multinational business or big tech, no matter what compromises may take place in secret.

The questions on foreign policy and preparing to meet future threats are of extreme importance. While Russia’s annexation of Crimea and continued slide back toward authoritarian despotism is not about to herald a new age of big set-piece land wars in Europe, it will at least hopefully remind UK policymakers that the next unknown threat to the UK will by definition come from out of the blue. Having been chastened by that reminder, Tory leadership candidates might have some refreshing opinions on the size, strength and scope of our armed forces, perhaps with a view toward undoing some of the recent damage done.

The final question on remaking the UK to allow greater (and ideally equal) autonomy for all constituent nations of the United Kingdom, and the need to clearly set out those powers that belong at Westminster, those that belong with the home nations and those that should be devolved to local level is perhaps the most important of all. This blog has long advocated for answering this question by holding a UK constitutional convention to decide these matters once and for all. While this is an extremely unlikely prospect, it would be interesting to know the potential candidates’ thoughts on these matters.

But of course we will hear no opinions on any of these matters, because there are no Tory leadership candidates. And there are no Tory leadership candidates because there is no Tory leadership election on the cards.

The bottom line is this – there are a lot of important questions about the current state of our country and how best to move forward. Iain Martin has done a good service by listing some of these, and any politician who can disengage from the daily grind of politicking and governance for long enough to answer them would be making a valuable contribution to the debate.

But those Conservative ministers and prominent backbenchers inclined to look past the 2015 general election to burnish their leadership prospects while refusing to engage in real debate on the issues are just being opportunistic and cowardly, and do not deserve the air time or our attention.

Those who want to replace David Cameron as leader of the Conservative Party ought to try believing in and standing for something themselves – something other than their own selfish career advancement – before the jostling for position and knife-sharpening gets out of hand.

GCH Who?

Samuel HooperLeave a comment
Who?
Who?

 

Watching the debate on government surveillance and citizen privacy play out differently on opposite sides of the Atlantic is both astonishing and depressing.

While the issue has become a hot political topic and an electoral issue leading into the 2014 midterms – with candidates and incumbents lining up to praise Edward Snowden for whistleblowing and revealing the extensive activities of the NSA, or condemn him as a hypocritical traitor – in Britain, the debate has caused barely a murmur.

Despite the fact that as closest allies, the United States and United Kingdom cooperate intensively on surveillance and national security issues, sharing the front-end technology as well as the intelligence results, those responsible from the United Kingdom side have escaped serious political pressure and questioning almost completely.

The closest to uncomfortable scrutiny that anyone from the British security apparatus came was when former GCHQ chief Sir David Omand was asked a softball question at the Home Affairs committee, and used it as an opportunity to bemoan the fact that all of this pesky, pedantic oversight of the intelligence community is harming their morale and making them feel sad.

John Naughton, writing in The Observer, has a theory about this relative lack of interest in Britain. He proposes that people would sit up and pay more attention to the erosion of their right to privacy and protection from unreasonable search if only the technological aspects of the question were explained in a more accessible way:

As someone who is supposed to know about these things, I’m sometimes asked to give talks about computing to non-technical audiences. The one thing I have learned from doing this is that if you want people to understand technological ideas then you have to speak to them in terms that resonate with their experience of everyday things.

Naughton believes that the problem is a lack of technical understanding in the British population – that if only the man on the Clapham omnibus knew what it meant to tap transatlantic fibreoptic cables to eavesdrop on data, to use computer malware to snoop on untargeted citizens or to maintain logs of telephony metadata, he would suddenly take to the streets in anger. This seems somewhat naïve. After all, American citizens are no more technically sophisticated than the British, and yet they managed to generate and sustain a sense of outrage that their privacy was being routinely violated by a government that would have happily continued doing so in secret were they not caught red-handed.

Naughton continues:

One of the things that baffles me is why more people are not alarmed by what Edward Snowden has been telling us about the scale and intrusiveness of internet surveillance. My hunch is that this is partly because – strangely – people can’t relate the revelations to things they personally understand.

The average Brit may not be conversant in the technical details, but they know the broad strokes – that the government is and has long been collecting and sharing data on us all with our international intelligence partners, that this was done without ever bringing the question up for national or parliamentary debate, and that the government is more interested in bullying people who try to report on the truth than in making their activities more transparent and democractically accountable.

The problem is not that the average Brit simply doesn’t understand what it means when GCHQ or the intelligence services collect reams of data indiscriminately with no targeting and no proof or suspicion of ill intent – they understand all too well. The problem is that far too many British people, when asked, simply shrug their shoulders and say something along the lines of “well, if it keeps us safe we should probably keep doing it,” or “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about.”

And more worrying still is the fact that some elements of the press also seem willing and eager to promulgate this attitude.

The reason for this apathy among both the people and the press is the fact that the British people have no real terms of reference when it comes to thinking about what government actions are good and which are bad. In the United Kingdom, the law of the land is only as cast iron and certain as the whims of the current government and current parliament. Aside from the European Union and European law (which act as brakes on British government ambition in almost every other sphere than this), the British citizen has no real defence against any action taken against him by the elected dictatorship of the day. And where it comes down to interpretation of existing law by the intelligence agencies, the cases are fought in court in a very opaque way that hardly anyone understands.

Contrast this to the situation in our closest ally, the United States of America, where precisely the same debate is playing out but at a much louder volume. The debate is much more accessible to the average American because the US government is structured in a much more understandable way and the powers and limitations of each branch of government are delineated by the Constitution. Though ambiguities and disagreements naturally always occur, the Constitution at least provides a frame of reference.

When issues such as bulk collection of telephony metadata or the recording of international telephone calls or the intercepting of emails come up, Americans can point to the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which clearly states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

There it is, in black and white. And it protects Americans in perpetuity until such time as it may be repealed or replaced with a new amendment (for which the bar for passage is prohibitively high).

That’s not to say that the US Constitution has done anything much to help American citizens defend themselves from unwarranted government intrusion. The Obama administration, and the Bush administration before, are able to come up with all manner of tortured (no pun intended) interpretations of the law to justify both the illegal things that they do and the fact that they try so hard to keep them secret.

But the mere fact that the highest echelon of law concerning search and seizure of property is so comparatively well known in the United States means that shady government activities suspected of falling on the wrong side of the line between legality and unconstitutional overreach are noticed much sooner and debated much more vigorously. By contrast, it would be astounding if any more than one in a thousand Britons of voting age could point to the relevant laws and statutes which define the British government’s legal powers to monitor the communications and data of its citizens.

The sad irony is that the Fourth Amendment protections enjoyed (or at least referred to) by American citizens derive largely from British legal doctrine, and yet it is the former colony which now tenuously keeps alive something which has been slowly and deliberately extinguished in the mother country.

John Naughton is right to be alarmed at public apathy toward the growing British surveillance state – it is perhaps the greatest threat to our democracy and free speech currently in existence. But public opinion will not be inflamed by holding a national technology seminar to explain the small print; there will only ever be opposition to government overreach on spying or anything else when we sit down together as a country and agree exactly what should be the limits on government power.

Holding a constitutional convention for the United Kingdom – as this blog has consistently advocated – to determine once and for all the powers that we are willing to grant the government and those which we would keep for ourselves may not be popular or sexy. But it is needed now more than ever.

The BBC, Impregnable Fortress of Conservative Bias?

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

owenjones

 

List your top three current threats to British national security and democracy.

What did you write down? Government electronic surveillance and public apathy toward the erosion of privacy? The government bullying a national newspaper into destroying its computers as a vengeful and intimidating act in response to the Edward Snowden leaks?

How about the government detaining relatives of journalists at the airport under risibly inappropriate anti-terrorism laws? Or maybe you cited Russia’s increasing assertiveness and Vladimir Putin’s apparent desire to reassemble the USSR? Islamic extremism and the threat of terrorism? Climate change? The Only Way Is Essex?

Not if you are Owen Jones, the ubiquitous, telegenic new face of left wing punditry and author of “Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class”. According to Jones, British democracy and journalism are most under threat from that evil right-wing juggernaut that extends into all of our homes – the BBC.

Jones has apparently had it with claims from the right of leftwing political bias at the BBC, and has responded with a whinnying, foot-stomping tantrum in The Guardian where he single-handedly attempts to redress the balance. As he sees it, the BBC has become a hotbed of right-wing propaganda, stacked with conservative personalities and pumping out unchallenged conservative viewpoints 24/7:

The truth is the BBC is stacked full of rightwingers. The chairman of the BBC Trust is Chris Patten, a former Conservative cabinet minister. The BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, was once chairman of the Young Conservatives. His former senior political producer, Thea Rogers, became George Osborne’s special advisor in 2012. Andrew Neil, the presenter of the BBC’s flagship political programmes Daily Politics and This Week, is chairman of the conservative Spectator magazine. His editor is Robbie Gibb, former chief of staff to the Tory Francis Maude. After the BBC’s economics editor Stephanie Flanders left for a £400,000-a-year job at that notorious leftwing hotbed, JP Morgan, she was replaced by its business editor Robert Peston.

How shocking that successful people (whom the BBC naturally looks to recruit for senior positions) have held strong political views or been allied with political parties in the past. What should happen instead, according to Jones, is that candidates for BBC positions are automatically rejected if they appear on the electoral roll, have voted in a past election or have ever expressed a political opinion on social media.

His outrage at the staffing of the BBC’s business and economics positions is particularly unreasonable. One might think that those who have worked in business and have a functional understanding of the financial industry are well placed to write or broadcast about it – assuming they are professional and operate under the same editorial policy as everyone else – given their expertise and links to the industry. But Jones seems shocked that the BBC didn’t select someone from Occupy Wall Street or Greenpeace to take on these high profile roles.

And it is not just the personalities that Owen takes issue with, but also the resulting coverage. When the global financial system teetered on the brink of disaster in 2008, Jones was apparently livid that the BBC interviewed so many people with knowledge of the industry who could explain to audiences what was happening. These people, despite being involved in the system and deeply impacted by what was happening, were not the right people to speak to, according to Owen Jones. He would have preferred more interviews with sleepy left-wing academics, aging hippies and assorted other people ready and willing to say variations on “I told you so”:

When the financial system went into meltdown, BBC interviews were dominated by City voices like stockbrokers and hedge fund managers, rather than critics of a sector that had plunged the country into disaster.

And at the end of his hit-piece, Jones makes his true intentions fully transparent. He has no interest in correcting this non-existent right wing bias at the BBC and restoring what he would see as some kind of non-partisan parity. No, he wants to transform the BBC into a fully-fledged mouthpiece of the left. It’s about giving conservatives a black eye for perceived past injustices using the BBC as a weapon, and he is willing to indulge in any amount of hyperbole or scaremongering to achieve this end:

For too long, the right has got away with weaving a fairytale of BBC leftwing bias. Until the left starts complaining – and loudly too – the BBC’s agenda will be shaped by supporters of government, big business, the free market and western foreign policy. That does not just subvert honest journalism: it undermines our democracy.

The Owen Jones phenomenon is not unique – whenever someone has a cause to promote (often a losing or flawed one, it seems) there are accusations and recriminations that the media has not jumped on the pro-whatever-the-idea-is bandwagon and given it unwavering support. Any and all instances of giving coverage to the opposing point of view is scrutinised, and any occasional discrepancies – which almost always even out over the long run when it comes to any issue or party – are held up as the “smoking gun” evidence of institutional bias.

Owen Jones' views being airbrushed and ignored on BBC television
Owen Jones’ views being airbrushed and ignored on BBC television

 

If Owen Jones were to take a step back from his outrage and really consider the BBC’s media coverage, someone as intelligent as he seems to be will surely have to concede that he overstepped the mark with his criticisms. No, the BBC has not shared his stridently left-wing viewpoint on almost every issue – but nor can they. They have a charter to represent and produce content for the entire country, not just left-wing activists. And from the charter come strict editorial guidelines and policies, which are carried out diligently and in good faith by human beings working to a high standard but as prone to error as the rest of us.

All of us – left or right leaning – can point to instances where television and radio and online news output has left us feeling hard done by, or shouting at the screen, convinced that the buffoon they chose to represent our side of the argument is a stooge, deliberately undermining our own, perfectly logical beliefs. But that’s just the nature of having strong political opinions. And as concerned, active citizens we should put our efforts toward actively convincing people of the merits of our arguments, not running off to a non-existent referee for redress whenever we feel the other side came out on top.

Owen Jones has enjoyed considerable airtime across the British political media, and has had ample opportunity to set forth his own strong opinions in a very articulate, persuasive way. It was the BBC, which he now chooses to castigate, that gave him many of these opportunities as part of their news coverage.

To then accuse the BBC, who have done so much to help his own career as a left-wing ‘intellectual’ and pundit, of political and institutional bias, is more than a little rich.

Rolling Back Surveillance – What’s The Catch?

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

 

Supporters of ending the practice of bulk data collection by the NSA and enacting safeguards on requesting permission to monitor the communications of private citizens have found a very unexpected ally in Democratic congressman Dutch Ruppersberger, the NSA’s hometown representative and one of the agency’s key supporters.

The Guardian reports:

This week, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger, who represents the Maryland district home to the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters, came out in favor of a remedy for the controversial surveillance.

Ruppersberger, in interviews with the Washington Post, National Journal and Politico, said he was working to craft a proposal that would require court orders for government requests for Americans’ phone records – perhaps on an individual basis – from the telephone companies, without requiring the companies to expand retention of their customer records beyond current practice.

This has rightly aroused suspicion from some civil libertarians – partly because Ruppersberger admits that elements of his proposal still remain to be “worked out” (read: emasculated before coming up for a vote) and partly because Ruppersberger’s track record on standing up to his district’s largest employer is predictably weak.

Others, however, seem to take his proposal in good faith:

On the other hand, sources said, Ruppersberger’s evolving position represents what one called a “huge step forward” toward an outright end to bulk domestic metadata collection. Ruppersberger’s credibility with the NSA might also be an asset for such an effort.

I’m sceptical. Though any politician turning away from embracing the unchallenged omniscience of the intelligence services is a good thing, we should avoid ascribing too many noble motivations to those who do so. This can be difficult, given the serious way in which such lawmakers are suddenly discussing the issue. Here, Ruppersberger could pass for a concerned member of the ACLU were it not for his voting record and numerous other public statements to the contrary:

“I believe that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act must be reformed. We must improve the American public’s confidence in, and perception of, our national security programs, by increasing transparency, strengthening oversight, and safeguarding civil liberties,” Ruppersberger said.

“I also believe that any proposal to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act must preserve critical intelligence tools that protect our country and its allies.  I am concerned with any approach that would eliminate this important intelligence tool and make the country more vulnerable to terrorist attacks, without providing a workable alternative.”

Ruppersberger’s decision and newfound concern about civil liberties could well be no more than what Glenn Greenwald has called the ‘Angela Merkel’ effect – a term used to describe a phenomenon where a public civil liberty infringement is tolerated quite happily by a public official until they realise that they too have become victims (in Merkel’s case, she was largely silent on the fact that the NSA had been intercepting the communications of German citizens but incandescent with rage that her own private communications might also have been monitored).

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California also falls into this category – long an NSA apologist and advocate for massive secret public surveillance, but suddenly up in arms when the work of her own committee was monitored by the CIA. While it would be nice to believe that a dyed-in-the-wool surveillance hawk such as Feinstein has undergone some kind of road-to-Damascus style conversion to the cause of privacy rights, sadly the greater likelihood is that hypocrisy and political calculation played the larger part in her Senate floor outburst.

Not everyone is convinced
Not everyone is convinced

The likelihood is that the most hawkish, reflexively pro-surveillance lawmakers realise that the political sands have shifted beneath their feet, and have deemed it wise to be seen giving a little ground now to avoid complete defeat in the future.

In Ruppersberger’s case, that defeat would be epitomised by the passing of the rival USA Freedom Act, sponsored by Wisconsin Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, which goes further in setting stricter standards for collecting communications data on individuals, standards that would need to pass a certain burden of evidence in order to gain a court order:

With the details still undetermined in Ruppersberger’s proposal, it is difficult to know how far the new effort would go in requiring court-ordered individual suspicion to access phone records, as well as requiring a specific “relevance” connection to an ongoing terrorism investigation, as required in the Patriot Act and the proposed USA Freedom Act – without which, privacy advocates argue, would leave the door open to dubious searches of government records.

While the gradual conversion – or defensive rearguard action – of politicians like Dutch Ruppersberger and Dianne Feinstein can be cautiously welcomed, the public should never forget that that if these people had their way, we would not be having a national conversation about government surveillance and civil liberties at all.

National security fanatics from both parties have lined up to condemn Edward Snowden for whistleblowing and making the public aware of what the government had been doing, going so far as to call him a traitor and make up all manner of ludicrous unproven assertions to cast doubt on his moral integrity.

If the Ruppersbergers and Feinsteins had their way, the American political debate would continue to bounce back and forth between Obamacare, Benghazi and 2016 speculation because we simply would not know about bulk data collection, the PRISM program, back door access into the servers of our most commonly used internet applications or any of the other “protective measures” that the government felt the need to take without glancing at the Constitution or mentioning what they were doing to the people.

So by all means, let us welcome those genuine converts to the cause of civil liberties. But let’s hold off on the ticker-tape parade in their honour just a little while, until their motives become clearer with time.

UPDATE – 15/03/2014: Whatever the limitations of the debate on surveillance may be in the United States, let us be grateful at least that a debate is taking place at all. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, there has been no apology or sign of contrition from David Cameron, no real admission that the British government had overstepped the mark, and certainly no real political movement underway to start properly overseeing the British security services.