Students and Protestors, and Quakers. Oh My!
The Washington Post had an editorial yesterday on a parallel Pentagon spying agency that appears to be considerably larger than the NSA's program: 'CIFA, an agency created just under four years ago...now includes nine directorates and more than 1,000 employees'. The proliferation of these activities is indeed troubling, especially since they appear to be unable to distinguish peace activists and student protestors from terrorists.
But this is no surprise. The expansion of these programs is not, or is not merely, the product of Bush using new powers to go after political enemies. Rather, they expand as much as they do because the government doesn't really know who to use these powers against. It's not mere incompetence, but the scope of the problem: al-Qaeda is not the communist party, a civil rights organization, or any other large-scale social movement. The security apparatus grows in an inverse relationship to the scale of the problem.
But this is no surprise. The expansion of these programs is not, or is not merely, the product of Bush using new powers to go after political enemies. Rather, they expand as much as they do because the government doesn't really know who to use these powers against. It's not mere incompetence, but the scope of the problem: al-Qaeda is not the communist party, a civil rights organization, or any other large-scale social movement. The security apparatus grows in an inverse relationship to the scale of the problem.
2 Comments:
As I was researching the Canadian 'national security' machine I kept being struck by the fact that the worst abuses seemed to stem more from boredom and a need to justify their budgets than in response to any actual threat. If governments create giant 'anti-terror' agencies there better be some large terrorist cells littered through North America or these groups will eventually investigate every slightly odd group (judged, of course, by the agents' political-moral discretion) just to have something to do that week.
In the 1970's we had the (pre-CSIS) RCMP investigating hapless marxist discussion groups, feminist potlucks and aboriginal-rights classes trying to root out communist insurgents. The story of deadly seriousness RCMP officers 'inflitrating' sociology courses by posing as students sums up a large part of the WOT to me.
That's some interesting stuff on Canada. I imagine some of this really is merely justifying budgets. That certainly seems to be the case with how the government categorizes 'terrorism-related convictions' - regional DA's call their convictions 'terrorism-related' so they can get promoted. But there's also a broader thing going on about the sheer aimlessness of the government. One can at least understand, in the US, why they tapped Martin Luther King and Malcolm X's phones, they had potential to really change some things. Hard to see what's going on now...
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