Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power and Public Resistance PDF
Preview Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power and Public Resistance
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR SPYING ON DEMOCRACY BY HEIDI BOGHOSIAN “Modern life has a way of making us forget the deep political power of privacy. Spying on Democracy shakes that complacency, explaining how journalists, attorneys, political dissidents, religious groups, even children, are subject to ever new forms of surveillance in the name of convenience, marketing, and security. This book’s great contribution is to remind us how government and private-sector control over information can have shocking implications for freedom and democracy.” —Alexandra Natapoff, author of Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice “Heidi Boghosian’s Spying on Democracy is the answer to the question ‘If you’re not doing anything wrong, why should you care if someone’s watching you?’ It’s chock full of stories about how innocent people’s lives were turned upside-down by public and private sector surveillance programs. But more importantly, it shows how this unrestrained spying is inevitably used to suppress the most essential tools of democracy: the press, political activists, civil rights advocates and conscientious insiders who blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance and government abuse.” —Michael German, former FBI agent and ACLU senior policy counsel “It’s about time someone reverses the spy lens and exposes the corporations and government agencies behind a new wave of surveillance. In Spying on Democracy, Heidi Boghosian draws on her extensive legal and activist experience to document a web of surveillance stretching between private industry and the state. It’s a chronicle of rogue spy operations, but it’s also a damning indictment of how our privacy rights are violated in ways that are shockingly legal. The material here is unsettling, but Boghosian’s message is not that we should attempt to hide in the shadows; it’s that we must be out front, loud, and on the side of the journalists and dissidents whose rights are most threatened.” —Will Potter, author of Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement under Siege “Spying on Democracy puts a laser focus on a challenge faced by millions of Americans who, like me, took a solemn oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. What does that oath require of us now, as most of our co-citizens nod an acquiescent ‘yes’ when New York Mayor Bloomberg (of ‘stop-and-frisk’ fame) tells us that, after the Boston bombing, ‘our interpretation of the Constitution has to change’? “The naïve ‘but-I’ve-got-nothing-to-hide’ reaction betrays how little most Americans know of history, and how willing they are to watch our Constitution shredded, ‘as though from a box at the theater.’ That is how Raimund Pretzel, a young German lawyer described (in his autobiographical book, Defying Hitler) the reaction in Germany after the parliament was burned down in 1933. It was Germany’s 9/11, so to speak, after which (and you’ve heard the words a thousand times) ‘everything changed!’ “Pretzel was there in Berlin to describe what he called the ‘collective, limp collapse . . . the nervous breakdown’ of the German people: “‘There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which we watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution. . . . With sheepish submissiveness, the German people accepted that, as a result of the fire, each one of them lost what little personal freedom and dignity was guaranteed by the constitution, as though it followed as a necessary consequence. No one saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from now on, one’s telephone would be tapped, one’s letters opened, and one’s desk might be broken into.’ “Are we now ‘Back to the Future’? Grateful applause for another young lawyer with the guts to tell it like it is. Let’s hope Americans will read Heidi Boghosian’s Spying on Democracy and learn from it. For, as Dr. King put it, ‘There is such a thing as too late.’” —Raymond McGovern, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity SPYING ON DEMOCRACY Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance Heidi Boghosian Foreword by Lewis Lapham Open Media Series | City Lights Books San Francisco © Copyright 2013 by Heidi Boghosian Foreword © Copyright 2013 by Lewis Lapham All Rights Reserved Cover design by Malcolm Grear Designers Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file ISBN: 978-0-87286-599-0 eISBN: 978-0-87286-603-4 City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133. www.citylights.com The First Amendment was designed to allow rebellion to remain as our heritage. The Constitution was designed to keep government off the backs of the people. The Bill of Rights was added to keep the precincts of belief and expression, of the press, of political and social activities free from surveillance. The Bill of Rights was designed to keep agents of government and official eavesdroppers away from assemblies of people. —From Justice William O. Douglas’s dissenting opinion (with Justice Thurgood Marshall concurring) in Laird v. Tatum, 408 U.S. 1 (1972) Contents FOREWORD BY LEWIS LAPHAM INTRODUCTION CHAPTER ONE Trafficking Imagination in the Streets CHAPTER TWO A Whopper, a Coke, and an Order of Spies CHAPTER THREE Enemies at Home CHAPTER FOUR Always Deceptive, Often Illegal CHAPTER FIVE Spying on Children CHAPTER SIX Green Squads CHAPTER SEVEN Listening in on Lawyers CHAPTER EIGHT Spying on the Press CHAPTER NINE The Constitutional Cost of Contracting CHAPTER TEN Computers Can’t Commit Crimes CHAPTER ELEVEN Celestial Eyes CHAPTER TWELVE Location, Location, Location CHAPTER THIRTEEN Troublemakers Bring Us to Our Senses CONCLUSION Custodians of Democracy ENDNOTES INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHOR Acknowledgments Friends and colleagues at the National Lawyers Guild are a constant source of inspiration. Many individuals gave feedback, including Lesley Alderman, Geoff Brady, Nora Eisenberg, Johanna Fernandez, Kris Hermes, Sarah Hogarth, Karen Menge, Rachel Rosnick, and Liz Templeton. Dan Gregor’s assistance was invaluable. My editor Greg Ruggiero taught me that a narrative needs more than “just the facts.” From our first conversation aboard a train to Washington, D.C., his guidance has been gracious, his encouragement generous. Marilyn and Varujan Boghosian appreciated the influence of corporations and the power of individual action as I learned after an incident involving a locked chain and the door of an unprincipled insurance company. Alice Wolff abetted an early fascination with spying. Some books have ghostwriters. This one had a ghost thinker. Bill DiPaola’s unstinting contributions of ideas and analysis about government and corporate surveillance were instrumental in shaping this compendium. I deeply appreciate his insights and ongoing collaboration.
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