Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power and Public Resistance

352 Pages·2013·0.17 MB·English

by  Heidi Boghosian

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR SPYING ON DEMOCRACY BY HEIDI BOGHOSIAN
“Modern life has a way of making us forget the deep political power of privacy. Spying
on Democracy shakes that complacency, explaining how journalists, attorneys, political
dissidents, religious groups, even children, are subject to ever new forms of surveillance
in the name of convenience, marketing, and security. This book’s great contribution is
to remind us how government and private-sector control over information can have
shocking implications for freedom and democracy.”
—Alexandra Natapoff, author of Snitching: Criminal
Informants and the Erosion of American Justice
“Heidi Boghosian’s Spying on Democracy is the answer to the question ‘If you’re not
doing anything wrong, why should you care if someone’s watching you?’ It’s chock full
of stories about how innocent people’s lives were turned upside-down by public and
private sector surveillance programs. But more importantly, it shows how this
unrestrained spying is inevitably used to suppress the most essential tools of
democracy: the press, political activists, civil rights advocates and conscientious
insiders who blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance and government abuse.”
—Michael German, former FBI agent and ACLU
senior policy counsel
“It’s about time someone reverses the spy lens and exposes the corporations and
government agencies behind a new wave of surveillance. In Spying on Democracy,
Heidi Boghosian draws on her extensive legal and activist experience to document a
web of surveillance stretching between private industry and the state. It’s a chronicle of
rogue spy operations, but it’s also a damning indictment of how our privacy rights are
violated in ways that are shockingly legal. The material here is unsettling, but
Boghosian’s message is not that we should attempt to hide in the shadows; it’s that we
must be out front, loud, and on the side of the journalists and dissidents whose rights are
most threatened.”
—Will Potter, author of Green Is the New Red: An
Insider’s Account of a Social Movement under Siege
“Spying on Democracy puts a laser focus on a challenge faced by millions of Americans
who, like me, took a solemn oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign
and domestic. What does that oath require of us now, as most of our co-citizens nod an
acquiescent ‘yes’ when New York Mayor Bloomberg (of ‘stop-and-frisk’ fame) tells us
that, after the Boston bombing, ‘our interpretation of the Constitution has to change’?
“The naïve ‘but-I’ve-got-nothing-to-hide’ reaction betrays how little most
Americans know of history, and how willing they are to watch our Constitution
shredded, ‘as though from a box at the theater.’ That is how Raimund Pretzel, a young
German lawyer described (in his autobiographical book, Defying Hitler) the reaction in
Germany after the parliament was burned down in 1933. It was Germany’s 9/11, so to
speak, after which (and you’ve heard the words a thousand times) ‘everything
changed!’
“Pretzel was there in Berlin to describe what he called the ‘collective, limp collapse
. . . the nervous breakdown’ of the German people:
“‘There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which we
watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution. . . . With sheepish submissiveness, the
German people accepted that, as a result of the fire, each one of them lost what little
personal freedom and dignity was guaranteed by the constitution, as though it followed
as a necessary consequence. No one saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that,
from now on, one’s telephone would be tapped, one’s letters opened, and one’s desk
might be broken into.’
“Are we now ‘Back to the Future’? Grateful applause for another young lawyer
with the guts to tell it like it is. Let’s hope Americans will read Heidi Boghosian’s
Spying on Democracy and learn from it. For, as Dr. King put it, ‘There is such a thing as
too late.’”
—Raymond McGovern, Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
SPYING ON
DEMOCRACY
Government Surveillance,
Corporate Power,
and Public Resistance
Heidi Boghosian
Foreword by Lewis Lapham
Open Media Series | City Lights Books
San Francisco
© Copyright 2013 by Heidi Boghosian
Foreword © Copyright 2013 by Lewis Lapham
All Rights Reserved
Cover design by Malcolm Grear Designers
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
ISBN: 978-0-87286-599-0
eISBN: 978-0-87286-603-4
City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore,
261 Columbus Avenue,
San Francisco, CA 94133.
www.citylights.com
The First Amendment was designed to allow rebellion to remain as our heritage. The
Constitution was designed to keep government off the backs of the people. The Bill of
Rights was added to keep the precincts of belief and expression, of the press, of
political and social activities free from surveillance. The Bill of Rights was designed to
keep agents of government and official eavesdroppers away from assemblies of people.
—From Justice William O. Douglas’s
dissenting opinion (with Justice Thurgood
Marshall concurring) in Laird v. Tatum,
408 U.S. 1 (1972)
Contents
FOREWORD BY LEWIS LAPHAM
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
Trafficking Imagination in the Streets
CHAPTER TWO
A Whopper, a Coke, and an Order of Spies
CHAPTER THREE
Enemies at Home
CHAPTER FOUR
Always Deceptive, Often Illegal
CHAPTER FIVE
Spying on Children
CHAPTER SIX
Green Squads
CHAPTER SEVEN
Listening in on Lawyers
CHAPTER EIGHT
Spying on the Press
CHAPTER NINE
The Constitutional Cost of Contracting
CHAPTER TEN
Computers Can’t Commit Crimes
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Celestial Eyes
CHAPTER TWELVE
Location, Location, Location
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Troublemakers Bring Us to Our Senses
CONCLUSION
Custodians of Democracy
ENDNOTES
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Acknowledgments
Friends and colleagues at the National Lawyers Guild are a constant source of
inspiration. Many individuals gave feedback, including Lesley Alderman, Geoff Brady,
Nora Eisenberg, Johanna Fernandez, Kris Hermes, Sarah Hogarth, Karen Menge,
Rachel Rosnick, and Liz Templeton. Dan Gregor’s assistance was invaluable.
My editor Greg Ruggiero taught me that a narrative needs more than “just the
facts.” From our first conversation aboard a train to Washington, D.C., his guidance has
been gracious, his encouragement generous.
Marilyn and Varujan Boghosian appreciated the influence of corporations and the
power of individual action as I learned after an incident involving a locked chain and
the door of an unprincipled insurance company. Alice Wolff abetted an early fascination
with spying.
Some books have ghostwriters. This one had a ghost thinker. Bill DiPaola’s
unstinting contributions of ideas and analysis about government and corporate
surveillance were instrumental in shaping this compendium. I deeply appreciate his
insights and ongoing collaboration.