The United States: a police state by any definition
Facebook has published the requests from governments around the world for information about its users: the United States is the only country where no exact figure is available: instead it says that there were between between the 11,000 and 12,000 requests for data on some 20,000 to 21,000 users, almost as many as the rest of the world put together.
GigaOM has done a very good job presenting Facebook’s data along with previous similar reports done by Google, Twitter, Microsoft and Skype. The picture that it presents is terrifying: the United States leads the pack in requiring such companies to provide it with information by a wide margin, only beaten by Turkey in the case of Microsoft, and by the United Kingdom in relation to Skype.
The figures are worrying: the extent to which the United States spies on its own citizens is out of all proportion. This is a government obsessed with knowing what its people write, what they read, who they talk to, who their friends are, which websites they visit, where they go, and who they talk to on the phone. The huge gap between the US government’s need to know what its citizens are up to, compared to other countries, is worthy of greater study, but would probably require sending the entire population to a psychoanalyst’s couch.
Of course the information that is coming out about the US government’s surveillance of its own people is but the tip of the iceberg: a more shocking reality lies beneath: these lists also include requests for information about private companies. The documents leaked by Edward Snowden show that this “official” activity is but a small part of the information gathered, and to which we should add the huge range of activities that the NSA carries out beyond any public scrutiny or official control, violating every right to privacy enshrined in the US Constitution, and that involves lying to Congress about the extent of its spying activities.
This is an utterly disproportionate system of control constructed using the most sophisticated technologies, combined with a system that has helped lock up more people than any other country in the world, in a country where police is turning into a paramilitary force. This is a country with which it is no longer possible to do business with any degree of security, and that has violated every established norm of international relations.
Sadly, the time has come for the rest of the world to rethink the way it sees the United States. I lived there for four marvelous years, and in no way do I feel any animosity toward the country; nothing could be further from the truth. Nobody could have predicted that the combination of the collective psychosis produced by September 11 and progressive growth in the popularity of the internet would convert this country into what we have learned in the post-Snowden era: a police state by any definition.
