Tis not just American freedom that is on the line

Tis not just American freedom that is on the line. The civil rights of our 'civilized' world are under attack from a State with too much power. A state that is misusing that power  in ways that George Orwell or even Stalin could not have imagined. 

Civil liberties: American freedom on the line

The fact that police have the right to monitor the communications of all its citizens – in secret – is a classic hallmark of a state that fears freedom

US president Barack Obama with members of his national security team in the Situation Room of the White House. Photograph: Pete Souza/White House via 

A few months before he was first elected president in 2008, Barack Obama made a calculation that dismayed many of his ardent supporters but which he judged essential to maintain his drive to the White House. By backing President Bush's bill granting the US government wide newsurveillance powers – including legal immunity for telecoms companies which had co-operated with the Bush administration's post-9/11 programme of wiretapping without warrants – Mr Obama stepped back from an issue that had initially helped to define his candidacy but was now judged to threaten his national security credentials. It was a big call. Even so, it seems unlikely that either supporters or critics, or even Mr Obama himself, ever believed that five years later a re-elected President Obama would oversee an administration that stands accused of routinely snooping into the phone records of millions of Americans.

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Few Americans believe that they live in a police state; indeed many would be outraged at the suggestion. Yet the everyday fact that the police have the right to monitor the communications of all its citizens – in secret – is a classic hallmark of a state that fears freedom as well as championing it. Ironically, the Guardian's revelations were published 69 years to the day since US and British soldiers launched the D-day invasion of Europe. The young Americans who fought their way up the Normandy beaches rightly believed they were helping free the world from a tyranny. They did not think that they were making it safe for their own rulers to take such sweeping powers as these over their descendants.

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But it is American civil liberties that are primarily in the spotlight now. Ever since 9/11, the US has allowed the war on terror to frame a new domestic authoritarianism that is strikingly at odds with America's passionate sense of its own freedom. This week's revelations have stunned millions of Americans whose justified outrage against 9/11 surely never led them to expect such routine and unrestrained surveillance on such a massive scale. US politicians have a poor post-9/11 record of confronting such powers. Even now, it is possible that many will look the other way. But this is an existential challenge to American freedom. That it has been so relentlessly prosecuted by a leader who once promised to stand up against such authority, makes the challenge more pressing, not less.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/06/civil-liberties-american-freedom-on-the-line