A Barely-Detectable Sideways Smile

By Crispin Sartwell

 

Knowledge, as educators like to intone, is power. If it is, then a universal system of surveillance is power indeed. So much so, I believe, that we have no idea - or at least, we did not until Edward Snowden's revelations - what our actual form of government is. We have no idea who's in charge and what policies they are in fact pursuing; we have no idea how the powers and institutions of the government are really arranged and coordinated.

     Whoever runs a secret system of total surveillance - I mean whoever has day-to-day management of the thing - is the person in charge of the country. Perhaps this is actually Barack Obama. Perhaps it is NSA head Keith Alexander. Perhaps it is someone we have never heard of.

     Consider, for example, the congressional defenders of the NSA programs. Now, a Congressman -  Mike Rogers, say - might be tempted to oppose the thing on the grotesquely obvious grounds that it is entirely incompatible with the basic liberties America was founded to preserve, the form of government prescribed by the Constitution, human decency, and so forth. However, Alexander or whoever it may be has a very simple technique for turning such a person around on a dime: he just gives you a flicker of eyebrow or a barely-detectable sideways smile. That's when you start trying to remember every communication you've had over the last decade. After that, you do what he wants you to do.   

    If all that sounds hyperbolic, consider this: last year, someone was pawing through the email of David Petraeus, the director of the CIA. Now David Petraeus was one of the most powerful people in the world, a fellow who could rain death on you from the sky wherever you were huddled. The person or people who had access to his communications ended Petraeus's career. Someone who can control or destroy the CIA Director can control or destroy anyone who is not a saint, if he has similar access to their communications. And people who rise to positions of power, it seems to me, are considerably less likely to be saints than members of he population as a whole.

        Putting it mildly, a situation in which a population cannot know how their government actually operates - for example, the period during which Egyptians were under the delusion that they had elected their head of state - cannot be a democracy. Imagine what the government of the United States would have been if J. Edgar Hoover had achieved omniscience.

     A person who controls a universal system of surveillance can control the president. He can appoint or delete members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He can work over the Supreme Court like Whitey Bulger working over a snitch. He can flick away attempts by other agencies or powers to rein him in. This replacement of democracy with blackmail conceived as a national security imperative was the essence of Hoover's approach, only he didn't have perfect information. When you create a universal system of surveillance, you create a shadow government that runs the country.

    For such reasons, I wouldn't merely assume that the advocates of the programs, from Obama on down, are sincere. (Snowden asserted, recall, that he could access Obama's communications if he had his email address; everything else Snowden has revealed has been borne out, I believe.) Indeed, to assume that the defenders of the program believe what they're saying is also to assume that they are profoundly evil. It's far more charitable to figure that they're being worked like marionettes.

    If Keith Alexander indeed controls the various NSA surveillance programs revealed by Snowden, then he is either the de facto Dear Leader for Life of America, or he is engaged in an act of sheer charity: he's permitting people to keep whatever power they retain and America to keep whatever shreds or symbols of its political traditions we hold on to.

   You might go to DC to see the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Archives, the White House, and so forth. What you'll need to realize on your jaunt is that the whole thing is a kind of historical re-enactment; DC might as well be Colonial Williamsburg. They're still miming the legislative process, judicial review, Commander in Chiefdom, and so on, which will have some historical interest for any tourist. But you might want to stick to Williamsburg. It 's more realistic.

 

Crispin Sartwell teaches political science and philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.