The United States: A Democracy or State of Emergency?

President Barack Obama has no reason to be jealous of George W. Bush as far as violating the Constitution and the United States’ founding values. Furthermore, with regard to the mass spying on millions of private communications facilitated by the Patriot Act, including on his own fellow citizens, the current tenant of the White House has far exceeded the level reached by his predecessor.

The Guardian and The Washington Post made this clear through unbelievable revelations of top secret American documents that reveal a massive phone and Internet tapping operation on an international level — even on social networks — particularly involving U.S. citizens. The documents released thus far show a secret judicial order given in April to the cell phone giant Verizon for it to report basic information on its users’ telephone traffic to the National Security Agency on a daily basis. Another leaked document from the agency detailed the PRISM program that began in 2007, which allows the NSA to monitor each message exchanged by users of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype and other Internet messaging services. It is worth remembering that the bulk of the international traffic on the Web goes through U.S. systems; therefore, it is reasonable to assume that this program will be extended to the whole world. Obama maintains that telephone conversations are not being recorded. According to the official version, only the origin and destination telephone numbers and the duration of the calls are registered.

However, the statement made to The Guardian by Edward Snowden, former CIA and NSA employee and the source of these revelations, says the opposite: “The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept … the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested…. If, [for example,] I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards. … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”

Additionally, although it appears to be mainly directed toward foreign countries, the subsequent leakage of the order given by Obama to the national security team to prepare a list of possible targets for military cyberattacks abroad — without ruling out the possibility that it may be carried out in the United States — tends to add to American citizens’ rising fears regarding the total loss of their constitutional right to privacy. Both newspapers maintain that they have verified the authenticity of the documents of the high-quality photocopies they have published.

An October 2012 order from Obama coined the term “Offensive Cyber Effects Operations” (OCEO); these operations can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance the United States’ national objectives throughout the world, with little or no warning given to the enemy or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damaging. In January, the Pentagon announced a large expansion of the [U.S.] Cyber Command — the unit responsible for executing offensive and defensive cyber operations — under the supervision of General Keith Alexander, who is also the director of the NSA.

The order has serious international repercussions after exposing Obama’s government not only as an omnipresent spy machine, but also — as can be read in the copy published in The Guardian — as a potential global aggressor with plans, calculated in advance, to inflict damage to other world powers. And it accuses China? However, probably the scariest thing for the Obama administration is the snowball effect that is forming within the United States, with an important part of society protesting and demanding explanations for these worrying facts.

If we add to this the operation of the drones — whose targets are decided by Obama by name and surname in secret every week, thus establishing him as prosecutor, judge and jury — it begs the question of whether the way that Washington has conducted itself in the world after 9/11 has less to do with democracy and more to do with a regime of military exception.