government contractors

Last night, I attended a talk given by Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, in support of a book, Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance, she wrote before Edward Snowden leaked so many of the surveillance secrets of the United States.

Boghosian pointed out that Americans are not just being monitored by governmental officials but by “its corporate partners.”

Popular support for surveillance skyrocketed after September 11-- the most severe attack ever on American mainland soil, she says.

That proved to be a benefit for the security industry, Boghosian says.

“My main critique in the book is that big business benefits from this,” Boghosian said, and “that there's a revolving door” between people who work in government and people who work in the private sector. For example, many ex-generals work in the security industry after retiring from the military, Boghosian said.

And many, many intelligence functions are contracted out to the private industry, she says. Snowden was a private contractor no less.

Boghosian is concerned that “profit comes before human rights and the Constitution.”

The biggest issue from collecting all of this metadata about people is the long-term storage of it, Boghosian said. Who stores the data? Who gets to control it? Who can access medical records, financial records or information about political activism?

“It seems this country is literally in a race to collect as much data on each of us that it can and store it for indeterminate periods of time,” Boghosian said.

Boghosian also specified concerns about the possibility of groups like the ACLU and the Center on Constitutional Rights having attorney-client privilege breached with their clients through surveillance. She also said that it is enormously damaging to the First Amendment to have journalists being monitored by the government and corporate partners.

There is a false premise that public safety has to be chosen over curbing mass surveillance, Boghosian said.

“Many law enforcement individuals themselves have said the old-fashioned” practice of getting a warrant after appearing before an impartial, neutral magistrate is not a bad thing, Boghosian said.

The evening had some very colorful moments, including audience members who were 180-degrees from Boghosian in her point of view, a Christian audience member who said the high level of surveillance made her think the devil was indeed among us, and Boghosian's interviewer, Lewis Lapham, saying he doubted there was any large-scale Islamic terrorism that warranted the “war on terror.”