By Norman Solomon

The part of the First
Amendment that prohibits “abridging the freedom … of the press” is now up
against the wall, as the Obama administration continues to assault the kind of
journalism that can expose government secrets.

Last Friday the administration
got what it wanted – an ice-cold chilling effect — from the Fourth
Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled on the case of New York Times reporter James Risen. The court “delivered a blow to investigative journalism in
America by ruling that reporters have no First Amendment protection that would
safeguard the confidentiality of their sources in the event of a criminal trial,”
the Guardian reported.

The Executive Branch fought
for that ruling — and is now celebrating. “We
agree with the decision,” said a Justice Department spokesman. “We are
examining the next steps in the prosecution of this case.” The Risen case, and
potentially many others, are now under the ominous shadow of the Appeals Court’s
pronouncement: “There is no
First Amendment testimonial privilege, absolute or qualified, that protects a
reporter from being compelled to testify … in criminal proceedings.”

At the
Freedom of the Press Foundation, co-founder Trevor Timm calls the court ruling “the most significant reporter’s
privilege decision in decades” and asserts that the court “eviscerated that
privilege.” He’s not exaggerating. Press freedom is at stake.

Journalists who can be compelled to violate the confidentiality of their
sources, or otherwise go to prison, are reduced to doing little more than
providing stenographic services to pass along the official story. That’s what the
White House wants.

The federal Fourth
Circuit covers the geographical area where most of the U.S. government’s
intelligence, surveillance and top-level military agencies — including the NSA
and CIA — are headquartered. The ruling “pretty much guts national security
journalism in the states in which it matters,” Marcy Wheeler writes.

That court decision came
seven days after the Justice Department released its “News Media Policies” report
announcing “significant revisions to the Department’s policies regarding
investigations that involve members of the news media.” The report offered assurances
that “members of the news media will not be subject to prosecution based solely
on newsgathering activities.” (Hey
thanks!) But the document quickly added that the government will take such
action “as a last resort” when seeking information that is “essential to a
successful investigation or prosecution.”

Translation: We won’t prosecute journalists for doing
their jobs unless we really want to.

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By Norman Solomon

For more than a month, outrage has been profuse in response to news about NSA surveillance and other evidence that all three branches of the U.S. government are turning Uncle Sam into Big Brother.

Now what?

Continuing to expose and denounce the assaults on civil liberties is essential. So is supporting Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers — past, present and future. But those vital efforts are far from sufficient.

For a moment, walk a mile in the iron-heeled shoes of the military-industrial-digital complex. Its leaders don’t like clarity about what they’re doing, and they certainly don’t like being exposed or denounced — but right now the surveillance state is in no danger of losing what it needs to keep going: power.

The huge digi-tech firms and the government have become mutual tools for gaining humungous profits and tightening political control. The partnerships are deeply enmeshed in military and surveillance realms, whether cruise missiles and drones or vast metadata records and capacities to squirrel away trillions of emails.

At the core of the surveillance state is the hollowness of its democratic pretenses. Only with authentic democracy can we save ourselves from devastating evisceration of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

The enormous corporate leverage over government policies doesn’t change the fact that the nexus of the surveillance state — and the only organization with enough potential torque to reverse its anti-democratic trajectory — is government itself.

The necessity is to subdue the corporate-military forces that have so extensively hijacked the government. To do that, we’ll need to accomplish what progressives are currently ill-positioned for: democratic mobilization to challenge the surveillance state’s hold on power.

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By Norman Solomon

Rarely has any American provoked such fury in Washington’s high places. So far, Edward Snowden has outsmarted the smartest guys in the echo chamber — and he has proceeded with the kind of moral clarity that U.S. officials seem to find unfathomable.

Bipartisan condemnations of Snowden are escalating from Capitol Hill and the Obama administration. More of the NSA’s massive surveillance program is now visible in the light of day — which is exactly what it can’t stand.

The central issue is our dire shortage of democracy. How can we have real consent of the governed when the government is entrenched with extreme secrecy, surveillance and contempt for privacy?

The same government that continues to expand its invasive dragnet of surveillance, all over the United States and the rest of the world, is now asserting its prerogative to drag Snowden back to the USA from anywhere on the planet. It’s not only about punishing him and discouraging other potential whistleblowers. Top U.S. officials are also determined to — quite literally — silence Snowden’s voice, as Bradley Manning’s voice has been nearly silenced behind prison walls.

The sunshine of information, the beacon of principled risk-takers, the illumination of government actions that can’t stand the light of day — these correctives are anathema to U.S. authorities who insist that really informative whistleblowers belong in solitary confinement. A big problem for those authorities is that so many people crave the sunny beacons of illumination.

On Sunday night, more than 15,000 Americans took action to send a clear message to the White House. The subject line said “Mr. President, hands off Edward Snowden,” and the email message read: “I urge you in the strongest terms to do nothing to interfere with the travels or political asylum process of Edward Snowden. The U.S. government must not engage in abduction or any other form of foul play against Mr. Snowden.”

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By
Norman Solomon

A
terrible formula has taken hold: warfare state + corporate digital
power = surveillance state.

“National
security” agencies and major tech sectors have teamed up to make Big Brother a
reality. “Of the estimated $80 billion the government will spend on
intelligence this year, most is spent on private contractors,” the New
York Times noted. The synergy is great for war-crazed snoops
in Washington and profit-crazed moguls in Silicon Valley, but poisonous for
civil liberties and democracy.

“Much of the coverage of the NSA spying scandal has
underplayed crucial context: The capacity of the government to engage in
constant surreptitious monitoring of all civilians has been greatly enhanced by
the commercialization of the Internet,” media analyst Robert McChesney pointed out this week.

Overall,
he said, “the commercialized Internet, far from
producing competition, has generated the greatest wave of monopoly in the
history of capitalism.” And the concentration of online digital power is, to
put it mildly, user-friendly for the surveillance state.

It’s a truly odious and destructive mix — a government bent
on perpetual war and a digital tech industry dominated by a few huge firms with
an insatiable drive to maximize profits. Those companies have a lot to offer
the government, and vice versa.

“The giant monopolistic firms that rule the Internet —
Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Version, AT&T, Comcast, Microsoft — all
have tremendous incentive to collect information on people,” McChesney said.
“There is a great deal of profit for these firms and others to work closely
with the national security apparatus, and almost no incentive to refuse to
participate. In short, there is a military-digital complex deeply embedded into
the political economy and outside any credible review process by elected
representatives, not to mention the public.”

Central pieces of the puzzle — routinely left out of
mainline media coverage — have to do with key forces at work. Why such resolve
in Washington’s highest places for the vast surveillance that’s integral to the
warfare state?

What has not changed is the profusion of corporations making
a killing from the warfare state in tandem with Washington’s quest for
geopolitical positioning, access to fossil fuels and other raw materials — and
access to markets for U.S.-based industries ranging from financial services to
fast food.

Let’s give credit to New
York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman for candor as he wrote approvingly in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree: “The hidden hand of the market will never
work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell
Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that
keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called
the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

On Wednesday, I had a brief on-air exchange with Friedman, live on KQED Radio in San Francisco.

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By
Norman Solomon

Edward
Snowden’s disclosures, the New York Times reported on Sunday, “have renewed a longstanding concern: that young Internet
aficionados whose skills the agencies need for counterterrorism and
cyberdefense sometimes bring an anti-authority spirit that does not fit the
security bureaucracy.”

Agencies like the NSA and CIA — and
private contractors like Booz Allen — can’t be sure that all employees will
obey the rules without interference from their own idealism. This is a basic
dilemma for the warfare/surveillance state, which must hire and retain a huge
pool of young talent to service the digital innards of a growing Big Brother.

With private firms scrambling to
recruit workers for top-secret government contracts, the current situation was
foreshadowed by novelist John Hersey in his 1960 book The Child Buyer.
When the vice president of a contractor named United Lymphomilloid, “in charge
of materials procurement,” goes shopping for a very bright ten-year-old, he
explains that “my duties have an extremely high national-defense rating.” And
he adds: “When a commodity that you need falls in short supply, you have to get
out and hustle. I buy brains.”

That’s what Booz Allen and similar
outfits do. They buy brains. And obedience.

But despite the best efforts of those
contractors and government agencies, the brains still belong to people. And, as
the Times put it, an “anti-authority spirit” might not fit
“the security bureaucracy.”

In the long run, Edward Snowden didn’t
fit. Neither did Bradley Manning. They both had brains that seemed useful
to authority. But they also had principles and decided to act on them.

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By Norman Solomon

House Speaker John Boehner calls Edward Snowden a “traitor.” The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, labels his brave whistleblowing “an act of treason.” What about the leadership of the Congressional Progressive Caucus?

As the largest caucus of Democrats on Capitol Hill, the Progressive Caucus could supply a principled counterweight to the bombast coming from the likes of Boehner and Feinstein. But for that to happen, leaders of the 75-member caucus would need to set a good example by putting up a real fight.

Right now, even when we hear some promising words, the extent of the political resolve behind them is hazy.

“This indiscriminate data collection undermines Americans’ basic freedoms,” Progressive Caucus co-chair Keith Ellison said about NSA spying on phone records. He added: “Our citizens’ right to privacy is fundamental and non-negotiable. . . . The program we’re hearing about today seems not to respect that boundary. It, and any other programs the NSA is running with other telecom companies, should end.”

The other co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, Raul Grijalva, was blunt. “A secretive intelligence agency gathering millions of phone records and using them as it sees fit is the kind of excess many of us warned about after the Patriot Act became law,” he said. “Continuing this program indefinitely gives the impression of being under constant siege and needing to know everything at all times to keep us safe, which I find a very troubling view of American security policy.”

And Grijalva said pointedly: “We’re being assured that this is limited, supervised and no big deal. When we heard the same under President Bush, we weren’t comfortable taking his word for it and moving on. I feel the same today.”

The five vice chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus are a mixed civil-liberties bag.

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By Norman Solomon

Dear Senator Feinstein:

On Thursday, when you responded to news about massive ongoing surveillance of phone records of people in the United States, you slipped past the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. As the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, you seem to be in the habit of treating the Bill of Rights as merely advisory.

The Constitution doesn’t get any better than this: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The greatness of the Fourth Amendment explains why so many Americans took it to heart in civics class, and why so many of us treasure it today. But along with other high-ranking members of Congress and the president of the United States, you have continued to chip away at this sacred bedrock of civil liberties.

As The Guardian reported the night before your sudden news conference, the leaked secret court order “shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk — regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.”

One of the most chilling parts of that just-revealed Surveillance Court order can be found at the bottom of the first page, where it says “Declassify on: 12 April 2038.”

Apparently you thought — or at least hoped — that we, the people of the United States, wouldn’t find out for 25 years. And the fact that we learned about this extreme violation of our rights in 2013 instead of 2038 seems to bother you a lot.

Rather than call for protection of the Fourth Amendment, you want authorities to catch and punish whoever leaked this secret order. You seem to fear that people can actually discover what their own government is doing to them with vast surveillance.

Meanwhile, the Executive Branch is being run by kindred spirits, as hostile to the First Amendment as to the Fourth. On Thursday night, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a statement saying the “unauthorized disclosure of a top secret U.S. court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation.”

That statement from Clapper is utter and complete hogwash. Whoever leaked the four-page Surveillance Court document to Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian deserves a medal and an honorary parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in the Nation’s Capital. The only “threats” assisted by disclosure of that document are the possibilities of meaningful public discourse and informed consent of the governed.

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