(PHOTO: "People walk past a banner supporting Edward Snowden in Hong Kong's business district. Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP"--Photo caption from The Guardian)
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A fiction would have us believe that a kind of a sudden mutation in the body of "stateness" had occurred on September 11, 2001.
According to that myth, it was Mohamed Atta and his 18 al Qaeda compadres who'd suddenly transmogrified the United States into what it has now become: a global panoptic chronotope.
In other words, Nine-Eleven is a marker, it is alleged, when the United States and its vassal states turned into cannibalistic entities not only towards enemies but towards their own citizens.
Edward Snowden on this state cannibalism:
"The N.S.A., specifically, targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default."
But the simple truth is that since time immemorial, or rather since their inception or emergence, states have strived for that ideal of "total-information-awareness."
And the cluster of programs unveiled by Snowden are just one milestone among several upcoming others towards the ultimate realization of the totally-aware state with fully "biometrized" citizens.
As Noam Chomsky told The Guardian on Wednesday, "governments will use whatever technology is available to them to combat their primary enemy – which is their own population."
Two spurious arguments to debunk:
1) The claim by NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander this past week before Congress that these blanket surveillance programs à la "Stasi state" "have protected our country and allies … over 50 times since 9/11";
2) The claim made Wednesday at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate by Planetarch Barack Obama that, "Our current programs are bound by the rule of law, and they're focused on threats to our security — not the communications of ordinary persons."
A flaw in Gen. Alexander's reasoning: It wasn't the need to thwart terrorist attacks that ushered in the cannibal state; it was the imperative of the total control underlying the very notion of stateness that led to the current global matrix.
The hubris of Exceptionalism in Gen. Alexander's argument: "our country and allies" and the hell with the rest of the world!
What's more, the recent revelations by Snowden about the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ mining intelligence from allies--including South Africans--at the 2008 London G8 and G20 summits erodes the argument that the intelligence effort deployed is utterly being focused on gathering intelligence on al Qaeda operations.
On the other hand, Obama's invocation of the "rule of law" is and will remain untenable until such time when the opinions of the secretive and opaque FISA courts are declassified.
Besides, an insidiously specious argument is being developed these days by supporters of the surveillant state to induce supineness in citizens in reaction to the outrage.
(I owe Crikey's Bernard Keane this notion of "supine reaction" to the current outrage: http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/06/14/australias-supine-reaction-to-our-surveillance-planet/)
The argument goes along this line: Everyone should've known about the blanket surveillance programs as there were scattered media reports that mentioned them these past few years!
An illustration of this stance: Hendrik Hertzberg posts on next week issue of The New Yorker a comment titled "Snoop scoops" that concatenates the investigative reports strung out along the years revealing NSA total surveillance of world citizens!
Investigative reports spanning from 2006 to 2010!
(http://m.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2013/06/24/130624taco_talk_hertzberg)
Strangely, in his concatenation, Hertzberg misses the investigative piece by James Bamford titled "The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)" posted on Wired on March 15, 2012.
The "biggest spy center," called Utah Data Center, is located in Bluffdale, Utah.
The center is more "than five times the size of the US Capitol," writes Bamford.
Adding:
"Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013."
(http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/)
By the way, Bamford just showed us in that piece the proverbial belly of the beast, as it were. The belly of the cannibal state.
In early December 2010, I took position on this blog against another blind supporter of state opacity: the French historian Elisabeth Roudinesco who, in an op-ed published in the Paris daily Libération, had "accused Julian Assange of being a conspiracy theory buff committed to the DICTATORSHIP OF TRANSPARENCY."
(http://alexengwete.blogspot.com/2010/12/wikileaks-dictatorship-of-transparency.html?m=1)
(Roudinesco's op-ed: http://www.liberation.fr/monde/01012305697-wikileaks-la-dictature-de-la-transparence)
Roudinesco is undoubtedly celebrating at this very moment the "dictatorship of opacity" of the Cannibal Planetarchy.
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PHOTO CREDITS: guardian.co.uk