PRISM and The Divine Right of Kings

Dear Mr. President,

Your assurances that the NSA snooping is no big deal and essential for “national security” rings as hollow as your 2008 campaign promises. Your statement on the Charlie Rose show about the FISA court being “transparent” shows how out of touch with reality you are—today’s revelation about how the FISA court warrants authorized by rubber-stamp judges are not specific but broad and general with few restriction show that the FISA court is nothing more than a thin mask for the abuse of power by our government. Snowden’s leaks show the scope of NSA spying, the big brotherism of the U.S. government, the hypocrisy and lies of our leaders, but what upset me most this morning was a line buried in a short article (“Obama to Pick Bush-Era Justice Dept. Official to Lead F.B.I.”, p. A15) in today’s NY Times: “…the F.B.I. has been transforming into a domestic intelligence agency bent on detecting plots and preventing terrorist attacks rather than just solving crimes.” Even the Untouchables have been corrupted to serve the Secret State. The greatest threats to national security, it turns out, is not the Taliban or Al Qaeda or “militants” in the mountains of Waziristan or Yemen, but NSA snoops, CIA assassins and the FBI, for they operate under a cloak of secrecy and secrecy is the antithesis of freedom and democracy. This week’s New Yorker, has an insightful article on the history of secrecy (mystery) and spying versus transparency (publicity) and privacy (“The Prism” by Jill Lepore), which traces the evolution of these terms from the inscrutability of God to the mystery and divine right of kings to the concept of an open and democratic republic based on transparency where there are no secrets of state, no secret deals and no secret laws made by leaders, a fundamental tenet of democracy. The U.S., Lepore points out, was founded as a “republic whose politics would be open to scrutiny, its mysteries of state discabineted. The Constitution was meant to mark the end of an age of political mystery.” But you, Mr. Nobel-Peace-Prize Winner, are leading us back to the dark days of mystery surrounding the king and his court “…where people are too ignorant to judge their rulers,” where “Secrecy is but another word for fear” and where “…cloaking a secret in mystery is a very good way to hide the exercise of power.” We are fast returning to that age of the divine right of kings where fear and secrecy rule the land and democracy and freedom are quaint anachronisms.