The surveillance state and the swing of the pendulum
John Lewis, one of the most-respected members of the US Congress, a veteran of the civil rights movement who campaigned alongside Martin Luther King, and supposedly President Obama’s moral compass: has referred to Lewis as “the conscience of the US Congress”, has openly come out in support of Edward Snowden, describing the NSA whistleblower’s actions as maintaining the tradition of civil disobedience established by leaders such as Henry David Thoreau or Gandhi.
The Georgia Congressman’s words leave no doubt:
In keeping with the philosophy and the discipline of non-violence, in keeping with the teaching of Henry David Thoreau and people like Gandhi and others, if you believe that something is not right, something is unjust, and you are willing to defy customs, traditions, bad laws, then you have a conscience. You have a right to defy those laws and be willing to pay the price.
Lewis’ statements put him alongside a small, but growing number of US politicians of different political stripes who have made clear their opposition to the official doctrine of “freedom versus security”: politicians such as Democrat Ron Wyden, who has been warning against the excesses of the NSA and other government agencies since 2011, and fellow Democrat Mark Udall of the Senate Intelligence Committee, or the youthful Republican Daniel Zolnikov of the Montana House of Representatives, who in April proposed a law that would require the police or any other government agency to obtain a warrant before accessing an individual’s cellphone GPS and that would give the United States similar privacy protection legislation to Germany’s.
The narrow win by supporters of maintaining mass spying (205 – 217), the result largely of intensive lobbying and huge donations from the industries that feed the NSA’s insatiable appetite for technology represents a shift in the direction of the pendulum prompted by Snowden’s revelations that is still in motion.
Demonstrations and marches, a growing unhappiness in Congress about being denied information requests or that is simply being lied to, surveys that are changing minds, threats to trade, calls for civil disobedience, as well as a growing movement in support of awarding the Nobel Peace Prize jointly to Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, an event that would be a slap in the face for the United States by including it among totalitarian regimes whose dissidents have been given the prize in the past.
These are early days, and there is much to be done still, but the pendulum of public opinion seems to be shifting. Defending mass spying on security grounds is now increasingly seen as unreasonable; the argument of the uninformed, the uneducated, and the shortsighted. And we still don’t know the half of what the US government has been up to. In the coming days we will learn more…
