America: The Return to McCarthyism

No sooner had the talk about the Obama administration’s scandals, especially those related to the spying on journalists in the famous American news agency Associated Press, calmed, when a major strike on Washington happened; it seemed that this time Obama himself had surpassed the rest of the U.S. Congress. The National Security Agency was involved in eavesdropping on phone calls, Internet, faxes and all modes of social media.

What are the mechanics of this scandal?

The story started with information that was revealed on Twitter by the American newspaper The Washington Post and the British newspaper The Guardian. These stories covered the existence of two NSA secret programs that permit it direct entrance to the servers of Internet service providers in order to track the movements of individuals on the network through sound, pictures, video and emails.

What do the details of the PRISM program mean, both inside America and in the international community?

Without oversimplifying the violation, it clearly appears that the NSA has relied on this program for about seven years — meaning it began before Obama’s first term of office and he continued it through to his second term, during which the NSA had obtained all the information that Internet companies sold about conversation history, pictures, names, sent files, voice calls, videos and even the times users logged in and logged out of sites.

Who stands behind the PRISM scandal and why was it revealed?

According to The Guardian, the American Edward Snowden is 29 years old. He is a former intelligence officer at the CIA who was responsible for the NSA’s computer systems. In his interview with The Guardian, Snowden said, "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions," but "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant."

Snowden’s idea to expose the secret spying devices his country uses on its citizens and the global population first fermented in 2007. The CIA sent him on a secret assignment to Geneva, where he was briefed on the NSA’s work, its officers and its secret electronic files. In that time, he wanted to inform the citizenry about what was being plotted against them in the dead of night.

Is the PRISM program one manifestation of the legendary American strategic “Library of Babel”?

Before delving into the middle of the discussion about this Babel program, maybe it is necessary to recall an American program the United States directed after the end of World War II called Echelon, which intercepted telephone communications, fax networks and the Internet via satellites all over the world. Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand all participated in the network. Its biggest headquarters were in Portugal.

A program called Carnivore formed from the manifestations of the Echelon system, as in the “eater of meat.” It was activated after Sept. 11, 2001 to spy on nearly 155 million Internet users in Europe, later developed to monitor the movement of all email in the world. Then, the Carnivore system was integrated into the core of the work of basic Internet companies around the world. It has become the eye, always surveying every email sent from any place to any place around the Earth. Where does all information that the 16 American intelligence agencies acquire across their diverse arms go?

We found the answer in Matthew Aid’s interesting book, “The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency.” In it, he talks about what happened in the remote end of the dry, arid desert in Utah, where the temperature often exceeds 100 degrees. There, construction workers with hard hats were working in complete secret to build what might become the equivalent of the American “Library of Babel,” which the Argentine writer [Jorge] Luis Borges devised. It is a place that includes information at once frightening and tremendous. It stores the knowledge of the world as a whole, but without anyone understanding a word in it.

The tremendous building covers 1 million square meters and costs $2 billion. It will be bigger than the U.S. Congress by more than a third. It will consume as much energy as all the houses in Salt Lake City consume combined.

Who praises this terrible construction, and what are its goals?

That building was built before the founding of the NSA; the goal was to gather and analyze different forms of communication that could exceed trillions of phone calls, emails, scattered data, Internet searches, receipts for parking lots, numbers of library visitor book sales, notebooks, personal digital data. Due to a lack of sufficient space and energy at the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, which is equivalent to the size of a city, the agency also built other archives of data in San Antonio, Texas, near the site of the famous Alamo.

Does this discussion, from Echelon to the Babel library, mean that the information released through the PRISM scandal maybe does not represent a mosquito's wing in the truth of the NSA’s eavesdropping and spying on the world, on Americans, on heaven and earth?

It seems that America is entering into a new stage of McCarthyism. However, this current scandalous image points to three primary benefits. We need to look at their significance in the near future. What are they?

1. Individual freedom, both within America and outside it, is already threatened. There is no longer any privacy for anyone, especially Americans. The argument and the usual pretext is maintenance of U.S. national security from the threat of terrorism and terrorists.

The real major disaster is that Congress was informed of this type of eavesdropping and spying in 2007. At the same time, a number of its members announced that the court order revealed in The Guardian was only a routine renewal of existing practices, which means that this marginalization of basic democratic rights in a secret fashion by the NSA was not held accountable by anyone. Thus, the idea of American freedoms goes unheeded.

2. Washington will face global concern with this spying scandal — especially the PRISM program linking the biggest nine Internet companies in the world, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Facebook — in the coming days. It is likely that Europe is also among those about whom the NSA is fishing for information. Thus, we see that Europe is scared and concerned. At the same time, most of its companies are lined by Internet giants and use their devices, their programs, their databases, various applications and systems established by the giants. This means that the curtailment of all European data is in American hands. The scene does not exempt the Arab countries; they are connected to the same networks. That is to say all countries are under the eyes of the American Big Brother.

3. The PRISM scandal will inevitably complicate the U.S.-Chinese relationship, which is congested and complicated as it is. Why?

Edward Snowden, who revealed this problem, confirmed that he has no plans to leave Hong Kong. He indicated in his discussion with the newspaper South China Morning Post that he has evidence of American spy operations on the Internet in Hong Kong and China. Thus, the man is a valuable catch for the Chinese, especially in a time of U.S.-Chinese reciprocal accusations of spying on each other and trying to hack each other. It is inevitable that Snowden will top the American government apparatuses’ most wanted lists, now and in the future.

Is the PRISM scandal an Obama scandal?

Certainly he will receive his share of injury, but bearing fear in its body is problematic in the American quest for empire. It became unaware of the real dimensions of the necessary resolution of the crisis between private life and security. What that means is that it is no longer the country on the mountain that illuminates the free and democratic world. Rather, it emanates anxiety during the day and watchfulness at night until further notice.