Even Le Carré's latest fiction can't do justice to Snowden
Shocked, or not shocked? The chasm widens. The New York Times this week carried a story from a whistleblower close to Washington's foreign intelligence surveillance court, known as the Fisa court – a secret body set up in 1978 to monitor federal phone taps. It now gives legal cover to intelligence trawling of millions of individuals, at home and abroad.
The recent revelations by another whistleblower, Edward Snowden, accused the court of breaking the fourth amendment to the US constitution. This entitles Americans "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures". The operative word, as so often, is unreasonable.
The new leak alleges that more than a dozen new "rulings" have been passed by Fisa, declaring categories of data-scooping that were within the "special needs" of security, and thus no different from breath-testing or body-searching at airports. NSA operations such as Prism, Tempora and Boundless Informant – many in collusion with Britain's GCHQ – used covert access to Google, Apple and Facebook to go where they pleased. They could cite not just terrorism but espionage, matters of interest to a foreign power, cyber-attacks and "weapons of mass destruction".
These judgments, all in secret, confirmed the gist of Snowden's evidence – and validated his motive. The reason why a previously loyal ex-soldier broke cover was not to aid an enemy. It was to inform a friend, his own country. He was simply outraged by the lies told to Congress by his bosses about NSA operations. As Harvard's Stephen Walt said, Snowden was performing a public service in drawing attention to a "poorly supervised and probably unconstitutional" activity.
The New York Times pointed out that the Fisa court had become a "parallel supreme court". It catered to a mirror universe beyond the reach of Congress or normal courts, servicing a new and burgeoning realm of government and private securocrats. When asked about this world, NSA bosses merely said they could not "jeopardise American security".
Snowden's revelations are in a different league from WikiLeaks. They are not embarrassing diplomatic gossip, but a window on method, on a legal no man's land created in near panic by America and Britain after 9/11. With unconstrained budgets at their disposal and infinite scope to terrify paranoid politicians into doing their bidding, agencies intruded into every corner of the nation's and its citizens' life. They filled their gaping larders with data to be harvested by their algorithm profiles against a rainy day. Nobody controlled them.
http://m.guardiannews.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/09/le-carre-snowden-fiction-truth
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