Criminalizing Dissent

Guest post by Steven Miller

(This is the 2nd of four guest posts by Steven Miller about the rise of the surveillance state)

So exactly what is the legal definition of a “terrorist” anyway?

The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee (the committee supposedly charged with “oversight”, Diane Feinstein, redefined the term to include many traditional homegrown forms of social protest in the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006. Here “terrorism” is officially determined to mean an act of protest that reduces the profits of a corporation, its suppliers, or partners.

Matt Smith wrote in the SF Weekly in 2006:

“The thing is, however, that violence, threats, vandalism, and harassing assaults of  the sort described by Feinstein are already illegal. Her bill criminalizes ordinary protest activities that weren’t illegal before.

The new Act calls for more lengthy sentences for such activity, and punishes  activists whose protests harm “tertiary targets,” or suppliers and other business  partners of target companies. It includes language saying that the new bill will not infringe on ordinary social protest activities such as boycotts or picketing.

Opponents of the bill say, however, that just by stating that it will be enforced in a way that respects constitutional protections of free speech and protest doesn’t make it so. The law’s very premise, they say, that protest that harms a company’s bottom line should be construed as a type of terrorism, is a frightening prospect for free speech.

The function of civil disobedience and a boycott are to cause loss of profits in order to get a message out. So we don’t think their distinctions make a difference,’ says Boghosian, the Lawyers Guild director.

Most menacing, in my view, was Feinstein’s statement on Nov. 13 crowing about House passage of legislation whose Senate version she sponsored. ‘We can  no longer tolerate criminally based activism regardless of the cause it allegedly advances,’ Feinstein said. ‘This is terrorism and it must be stopped.’ “(5)

Feinstein’s response to Snowden’s whistleblowing was that it’s not treason to illegally spy on the public, but only to expose it! Feinstein, of course, receives huge campaign donations from the very corporations that control and profit from domestic spying, those that she is supposed to “oversee”.

The Rise of the Surveillance State

This then is the context for the developing NSA snooping scandal. Though much is secret, it is certain that the agency can analyze virtually every communication that Americans routinely use during the day, from landline calls to cell phones to emails. Through the program codenamed PRISM, the NSA, the world’s largest surveillance agency, collects the content of communications provided through Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and five other large Internet companies, including Verizon.

PRISM allows the NSA to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders. The NSA is able to reach directly into the servers of the participating companies and obtain stored communications, develop “metadata” – patterns of communication – and read the actual content of targeted individuals. This is unprecedented militarization of domestic communications infrastructure.

But – we are reassured – all the proper controls are in place, even though they can’t be discussed publicly because they are secret.

Despite the fact that every one in Congress and the Administration, with authority over intelligence, has violated their oath of office – prima facie evidence for impeachment – we are supposed to rest assured that nothing secret is aimed at Americans. This goes so far that when James Clapper, national director of intelligence, openly lies to Congress, Diane Feinstein sees no real need to replace him.

Sixty years of propaganda from the 1% has completely confused the basic definitions we use to describe power in America. “Government” refers to the apparatuses for making laws – local, state and federal – and providing money and services for society. This is different than the “state”, which explicitly exists to enforce those laws. Yet these terms are deliberately conflated.

The “state” means organized bodies of armed men, who are empowered to use forms of violence to guarantee what is so euphemistically referred to as “the rule of law”. The state, then, is the army, the police, the Migra, the courts, the prisons, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the secret agencies, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco, etc, etc.

Americans have been propagandized to be against “Big Government”, but you don’t really hear people railing against sewer systems, highways or the national parks. What Americans really don’t like is the “BigState” – the use of armed force to curtail individual liberties. We are supposed to “drown the government in the bathtub”; meanwhile nobody says anything about the incredible growth and transformation of the state since 911.

A “drowned government” means ending government authority to regulate corporations. One interesting aspect of this line deals with the fact that every group of people in society needs to raise money to protect their interests. If you can’t get this money from the government, the only other place you can get it is from corporations and banks. So “drowning the government” is just good business for corporations.

Corporations are the legal attack dogs of the 1%. By law, they specifically protect their directors and decision-makers, better known as capitalists, against liability for breaking the law. Consequently, corporate crime and depredations occur on a daily basis, from Wal-Mart to the XL Pipeline to the unregulated corporate CO2 emissions that, if not controlled, will destroy human society.

Corporate crime and white-collar crime dwarf every form of violent crime caused by individuals. Even more, the system revels in criminality, from the international drug trade that may have saved Wall Street in 2008, due to daily deposits, to the fact that the banks that engaged in illegal foreclosures refuse to payoff their obligations.

Yet the police are assigned to show up at every demonstration to protect corporate headquarters, and generally violate the civil rights of people when it does.

That’s the state in action. It’s hardly neutral, but it real goal is carefully hidden behind the popular idea that the state “administers laws impartially and guarantees social order”. It is obvious today that the state guarantees the rule of the 1%, who just happen to exert their will over government to make the laws the state enforces, through an open system of bribery known as lobbying. It’s all perfectly legal!

Notes and Background

 (5) “Boycott Feinstein”. Matt Smith Wednesday, 11-29-2006. SF Weekly

To be continued.

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Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland’s Flatland high schools. He has been actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nondog2@hotmail.com

 Crossposted at Daily Censored

photo credit: Chris Wieland via photopin cc