U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has been taking a well-deserved public relations beating since voicing her newly-found outrage over CIA snooping into the computers of the Senate and staff members working on the Intelligence Committee, but she does not deserve to bear the ridicule alone. Most of the Senators flocking to her support are equally guilty of blatant hypocrisy on the subject of unconstitutional spying on ordinary Americans; they cared little about it until they were the victims.
In August 2013, I wrote Senator Feinstein about the administration’s trampling of Fourth Amendment rights; “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.”
In September, I received the canned response, it said in part, “Dear Mr. Richman: I received your communication indicating your concerns about the two National Security Agency programs that have been in the news recently …The programs that were recently disclosed have to do with information about phone calls – the kind of information that you might find on a telephone bill… I cannot provide more detail on the value these programs and the strict limitations placed on how this information is used.” She claimed to work hard to ensure that intelligence activities strictly comply with the Constitution but offered no outrage, legislative or oversight relief. She thought she was safe in the seat of power.
Documents revealed by Edward Snowden showed that the NSA wanted everything, including information allowing NSA employees to track their own love interests. There was a secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over millions of Americans’ phone records daily. How could phone bills require a “secret court order” unless the information enabled access to a lot more than long distance charges?
Ninety-nine-percent of Senate speeches about the invasion of privacy never approached the level of indignation Feinstein showed after she discovered that she was given the same treatment millions of Americans were getting daily – how dare they do this to me? Meanwhile, the serfs, you and I, will still have to fend for ourselves.
This is exactly how fascism happens as eerily detailed in 1955 in the following excerpt from “They Thought They Were Free – The Germans, 1933-45” by Milton Mayer.
“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.”
“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.” (Endnote [i])
Of course that can’t happen here – or so thought Senator Feinstein.
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[i] Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 166-73 of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©1955, 1966 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. (Footnotes and other references included in the book may have been removed from this online version of the text.)
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