freedom of expression and state induced fear - in the land of the free

 Another great Glenn Greenwald article.

 "Meaningful Challenge" of the State and its policies seems to be the  key. Do that and you can spend 900 torturous days in prison - without trial. Or get droned to death, even you are not in the Homeland.  Or you will be  harrased so that  fear makes u retreat into self censorship.

Freedom in the land of the free, is actaully all about Fear. State induced Fear aimed at making You just lie down and be  " Free". Quietly . No hard questions, please.

In a free society, those who wield political power fear those over whom the power is wielded: specifically, they harbor a healthy fear of what will happen to them if they abuse that power. But the hallmark of tyranny is that the opposite dynamic prevails: the citizenry fears its government because citizens know that there are no actual, meaningful limits on how power can be exercised. A nation in which liberties are systematically abused - in which limitations on state power are ignored without consequence - is one which gives rise to a climate of fear.

This climate of fear, in turn, leads citizens to refrain from exercising their political rights, especially to refrain from posing meaningful challenges to government authority, because they know the government can act against them without real constraints. This is a more insidious and more effective form of tyranny than overt abridgment of rights: by inducing - intimidating - a citizenry into relinquishing their own rights out of fear, a state can maintain the illusion of freedom while barring any meaningful dissent from or challenge to its power. 

So here is a highly accomplished documentarian who has produced two films and is working on a third - all of which, in one way or another, pose challenges to US policy. Despite the fact that she has never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime, she has been subjected to serial invasion and harassment by the US government - so much so that she is now afraid, quite rationally, of being in her own country while editing her film.

As she has conveyed to me for that article I wrote in April, Poitras is afraid to talk on a US telephone to anyone involved in her project, travel into her own country with any materials relating to her film work, or physically keep any of her unedited film on US soil. Does that sound like the behavior of a citizen and a filmmaker of a free country? 

Abidor is a US citizen (he also holds French citizenship). His parents live in Brooklyn, and he was traveling to visit them the first time this happened. He has never been charged with any crime, nor notified that he is suspected of one. But, obviously for good reason, he is now petrified of traveling into his own country, refrains from flying or taking a train, and feels compelled to erase almost all data from his laptop - all because he is studying to be a scholar in Islamic studies and is learning Arabic. As he put it previously:

"As an American, I've always been taught that the Constitution protects me against unreasonable searches and seizures. But having my laptop searched and then confiscated for no reason at all made me question how much privacy we actually have. This has had an extreme chilling effect on my work, studies and private life – now I will have to go to untenable lengths to assure that my academic sources remain confidential and my personal dignity is maintained when I travel."

Does that sound like a citizen and academic of a free country? 

Even a former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers is sufficiently intimidated by these measures that she reacted only with paralysis and compliance: she just dutifully handed over her laptop to government agents to search through and copy at will. And it requires little prescience to understand the message being sent here to other lawyers or activists who challenge government policy: if someone in Wayne's position can and will be subjected to these invasions, who won't be?

In essence, the bargain offered by the state is as follows: if you meaningfully challenge what we're doing, then we will subject you to harsh recriminations. But if you passively comply with what we want, refrain from challenging us, and acquiesce to our prevailing order, then you are "free" and will be left alone. The genius is that those who accept this bargain are easily convinced that repression does not exist in the US, that it only takes place in those Other Bad countries, because, as a reward for their compliant posture, they are not subjected to it.

But even in most of the worst tyrannies, those who are content with the status quo and who refrain from meaningfully challenging prevailing power systems are free of punishment. Rights exist to protect dissidents and those who challenge orthodoxies, not those who acquiesce to those orthodoxies or support state power; the latter group rarely needs any such protections. The effect, and intent, of this climate of fear is to force as many citizens as possible into the latter group.

The true measure of how free a society is how its dissidents are treated, not those who refrain from meaningful anti-government activism and dissent. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/04/us-constitution-and-civil-liberties