Spy Country
stratoproscopocracy – from Greek: stratos, meaning "army;" proskopos, meaning "scout;" kratia, meaning "rule." This is my own horribly unwieldy coinage for a horribly efficient system: stratoproscopocracy is the oligarchical rule of military, defense, and security intelligence.
Since the Cold War, the societies of developed Western nations have become increasingly reliant on an élite caste of spies, both foreign (CIA) and domestic (NSA) to "look after them." The result is a new form of feudalism, where the populace pledges to serve up rent to an oligarchy of non-elected rulers who "protect" them. This group is completely unaccountable for its actions, and has always taken full advantage of this impunity. The intelligence elite in America has perpetrated more civil, sectarian, and racial violence, supported more coups, violent revolutions, and totalitarian regimes, and created more dangerous power vacuums than any other political body in all of history. Lately, the threat of a further entrenchment of this élite's power has been looming. It's time to do something.
The openness required to hold intelligence agencies and the armed forces (including police at every level of government) accountable to the law and to the opinion of the people would require the disclosure of information which, according to the people who operate these parties, would compromise their ability to protect the people in the first place. But while integrity and trust are integral to the proper functioning of any society, and in themselves can go a long way toward securing a peaceful and prosperous society, history has shown countless times that these moral factors cannot be relied upon to ensure that the élite cast of intelligenciers and enforcers will rule in the interests of the subjects.
That's right, subjects. Not citizens. A citizen is a self-sovereign individual who forms a "social contract" or general peace treaty with everyone else at large to live and let live, to support a certain system of mutual legislation, and support the use of force on those who initiate it against any other member of the contract. That's the theory, anyway. In practice, power structures could only be dissolved to this point when the people could actually pose a threat to the standing army of their lords. It's no coincidence that modern democracy arose in an era where the most sophisticated weapon ever invented was a cheap musket. "God created man, but Colonel Sam Colt made them equal."
Before small firearms became widely available on the market, it was significantly harder for a peasant or group of peasants to pose a threat to a trained mêlée warrior. Therefore, peasants formed a pact with a warrior: the peasant would pay rent, the warrior would defend the peasant and the land from marauders. The situation is similar in the era of weapons of mass destruction: nuclear weapons, chemical and biological weapons, concussion weapons well beyond the scope of what had previously been possible, even the hijacking or sabotage of machines of commerce and industry – all of these weapons can radically alter the balance of power, well beyond even that of individual physical skill.
Clamoring for security, the polity is willing to pass off their freedoms, giving the government wide new privileges to monitor without warrant, to outlaw peaceful assembly and protest, or to withold information on their activities from the public – as long as the government only takes advantage of these privileges in the "best interests" of the subjects. The problem is, when the means of expressing informed opinions on the conduct of the government are infringed, our ability to make known or pursue our interests is compromised. The point of a free society is that everyone has different interests – different diets, different religions, different sexual preferences, different ideas of what is satisfying work, different ideas about what is just and unjust behaviour.
A loss of privacy or freedom isn't directly damaging as long as you're not doing something illegal. But as long as, and in so far as, the police and watchers aren't democratically accountable, there's no way to ensure that they won't start enforcing laws of their own. Perhaps it will become illegal to campaign for changes to the law. Perhaps it will become illegal to criticize the enforcers of the law. Perhaps it will become illegal to practice a certain religion. Perhaps the watchers have been working very hard to enslave a foreign people for your own comfort – it's best you don't know that, and perhaps it will become illegal to learn, or to ask certain kinds of questions. These laws need never make it to the books in order to have deadly effect on the way we conduct our lives.
Recently, New York City police made it clear that they really didn't want to have to deal with protesters at this year's World Economic Forum. Fortunately, the whole thing went off reasonably well, but this kind of statement differs only in degree, but not in kind, from Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's new laws severely restricting journalism and the media. These laws are similar to the imprimatur laws which the Puritan-controlled House of Commons instituted in seventeenth-century England. The point then was to control Catholicism and general criticism of parliament. The point for Mugabe is to be able to seize farmland from white homesteaders, because they are white, without having to answer for it. In any event, the restriction of the rights of free speech and free assembly invariably serves the status quo, regardless of whether that status quo has the support of the majority.
Today we have a dilemma: If we increase the power of the federal government, we reduce our ability to protect ourselves from the government. If we reduce the power of the federal government, we reduce our ability to prevent and resist organized crime and terrorism.
The United Kingdom has had to deal with this problem far more than has the United States, for generations. The IRA has caused trouble throughout the British Isles which threatened the lives and property of British subjects. Their response has been to blanket their public spaces with surveillance systems. While the results have generally been a securer state, it is questionable whether it is any more democratic – and while Britain has, historically, only casually pretended to be a democracy (unlike the modern US, which actively pretends), it is doubtful that the British will tolerate a secret government any more than the Americans will. The result is a state of affairs somewhere between that of the US and that of Singapore: a government which currently has the support of the people, but which would never know it if it lost it overnight; a populace which currently supports their government, but has absolutely little idea what it is that they are supporting them in.
The more the citizens of the US depend on these kinds of measures to bring security, the more their country will come to resemble this. But because the US is far more extroverted, far more ready to engage in war than is the UK, the more likely it is that the government will engage in activities which would not be supported by the polity, if they knew about them. These activities may include the subordination of democratic processes or training tigers to fight wild dogs. This will lead foreign peoples to resent and hate the influence of the US. This, in turn, will create new enemies, thus further threatening the risk of covert war, thus further threatening the security of the homeland – thus making seem reasonable the further sacrifice of power to the spy élite.
Violent revolution is impossible so long as the State Guards are so thoroughly integrated into the Federal Armed Forces command structure, and by and large pointless in this case anyway. We already have the means for a peaceful, legal, democratic revolution or reform, and it looks like we at least still have the freedom to implement them. But what reforms are we going to implement? We'd better figure out quickly, before it's too late.
One option is simply to keep handing over our freedoms to the government when and in so far as they tell us it is essential to our security. This is what happened over the course of Medieval times, turning a contract of mutual support into the Divine Right of Kings and necessitating the American Revolution in the first place. Another option is simply to demand that our freedoms be left uninfringed as they were before, danger be damned. Not only would this be an extremely hard sell to the American public right now, it's also dangerous for the reason that conventional freedoms allow terrorists and criminals to organize and deploy for the purposes of destruction and enslavement.
Right now, the only way to proceed seems to be by open dialogue and mutual trust – the people must trust the government, and the government must trust the people. This is right now our only way to ensure freedom and safety – and it must never become an excuse for renouncing the pursuit of either. In the long run, it is better to err on the side of freedom, because safety is useless if we can't make of it what we want. Greater freedom of information, more open trials (none of this secret military tribunals bullshit), and clearer definitions of exactly what is and what is not acceptable from the government in the name of defense (or in wartime) must be developed. A stricter respect for privacy (and the power of the citizens to enforce that privacy) must be be instituted in any government which heavily monitors public spaces. Examples, both negative and positive, must be understood from both modern politics and history.
Those who instil fear, and ask you to renounce your freedom on the basis of that fear, are terrorists. It doesn't matter if they're not even the ones actively threatening your safety. In fact, they may purport to represent your safety.