It's a scandal that continues to widen in its scope and yet
in the United States nothing is being done, or even seriously entertained. In
fact under Trump, surveillance technology continues to increase and law
enforcement is being encouraged to use everything from facial recognition to
sundry tracking systems. Some of the latest intrusions have been able to slip
'under the radar' as it were, under the aegis of combating illegal immigration.
Europe of course has a long and dark history with
surveillance and authoritarianism. In addition to the regimes that antedate the
20th century, the last century alone saw the horrors of fascism and
the various communist regimes, phenomena associated with the lead up to the
world wars and their fallout.
I think it safe to say that most people in Europe don't want
to revisit that past or re-travel those roads and thus there is a spark of hope
within Europe that some of this tracking technology will be blocked. Of course
the revelations concerning US tracking and surveillance within Europe continue
to widen as a recent story regarding a US-CIA tech proxy in Switzerland
reveals. This revelation comes at an unfortunate time for the apologists of
Atlanticism. The fact that the US has been spying on its allies for decades
won't go over well, even as the US seeks to convince European powers to reject
Huawei.
This isn't the first time the US has stabbed its allies in
the back. In the coming years I expect more and more European politicians to
re-visit the legacy of Gladio, a topic that was a brief but largely suppressed scandal
in the 1990's, and yet if ever fully understood would bring an end to
Atlanticism once and for all. For it reveals not only the treachery of
Washington and its clear contempt for its stated values but it also unveils the
ugliest side of the American Empire, an entity willing to manipulate and even
kill allied politicians and civilians in order to maintain its grip on power.
While Europe is ever so slightly trending away from the
surveillance state, China has embraced it with gusto and is at risk of slipping
into totalitarianism. Meanwhile nations like the United States are ever
flirting with authoritarianism. Security fears (and paranoia) and social instability
are pushing the state into a semi-authoritarian position. It's being done
quietly and incrementally but when one reflects on the state of society and
even mindset of the average citizen when compared with the pre-9/11 world, the
change is actually pretty startling. The US is a long way from what's being
seen in China but in other aspects it's not as distant as some would think. The
death of the 4th Amendment, a major plank of the US Bill of Rights
has actually received very little attention in the mainstream.
The fact that the Snowden revelations did not shake society
to its core and are at this point a matter of non-interest only further
emphasises the magnitude of the change. Revelations that would have once sent
people out onto the streets, today elicit little more than a yawn and a return
to one's touchscreen.
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