The Great American Surveillance State

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Last Thursday, the United States Senate voted to pass the USA Freedom Act that reauthorizes portions of the Patriot Act regarding government surveillance that have recently lapsed. Once again, the United States government has the authority to peek into the private lives of its citizens. An amendment was passed that adds legal protections and oversight, which is certainly a step in the right direction, but it didn’t accomplish anything significant.

The USA Freedom Act passed the Senate by a margin of 80–16. It is worrisome enough that the Senate once again voted to pass the Patriot Act, a clear invasion of privacy of Americans. I am much more concerned about the Senate’s failure to pass a bill that would protect the rights of Americans. The Justice Department has been gathering Americans’ internet data through its interpretation of the Patriot Act despite a lack of explicit permission from Congress, and the failure of the Wyden-Daines amendment is sure to reinforce their interpretation.

Perhaps the most devastating part of this bill is just how close it came to passing, making Bernie Sanders’s absence from the vote all the more damning. Regardless, there is no excuse for any of the Senators who voted against the amendment, given that it is a clear attempt to protect the constitutional rights of Americans. At any rate, the thirty-seven senators that voted against the amendment betrayed their vow to the constitution and should be held accountable during the next election.

It is now up to the House to strike down the bill or at least amend it to give the American people more protection from the government’s attempts to spy on their private lives. It is extremely likely that the bill will pass and be sent to President’s desk however, given that the House already passed the bill before it was amended to give the American people slightly more protections. The bill would then land on President Trump’s desk. There is a slim chance that lobbying from Senator Rand Paul will cause Trump to veto it, but his record indicates that he will almost certainly sign it into law, and he will almost certainly have Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham in his ear, his two biggest cheerleaders in the Senate, encouraging him to sign it into law.

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September 11th, the catalyst for the Patriot Act, was an incredibly tragic event that it is still affecting policy nearly two decades removed. Unfortunately, the huge overreaction in its wake is still affecting us today: we are still embroiled in the “War on Terror”, ICE and the rest of the Department of Homeland Security has continued to expand in power, and the Patriot Act will likely be renewed in full once again. Unable to let a tragedy go by without exploiting it, the government took advantage of fear and moved to expand its power in a way that would have made Joseph McCarthy giddy. We had an opportunity to take the first step out of the fear that 9/11 caused, but our elected officials once again failed the American people and maintained and expanded the grasp of the government. I disagree with Rand Paul on a lot of things, but I think he put it best: “The Patriot Act was begotten of the most unpatriotic of ideas — that liberty can be exchanged for security.”

America has been exchanging its freedom for protection from faceless evil for a long time now, whether it’s terrorism or addiction or immigration, and the fact that people view the recent government actions to fight the coronavirus as an unprecedented overreach of authority shows that we have become complacent with the surveillance state. Really, how ironic is it that the same people who cheered as ICE expanded its powers are now worried that the government is now trampling on rights and will start herding people into internment camps? In the same way, Americans seem to accept the Patriot Act and surveillance of their personal lives as a matter of course. Sure, there may be some distant rumblings about it by a few disgruntled people every now and then, but Americans in general don’t seem to care anymore. In fact, we are all so blindly complacent towards authority that many people’s default position towards police brutality is “the victim should have followed orders”. It isn’t shocking that the Patriot Act was reauthorized, and I doubt that it will get any real coverage in the media and will quickly be drowned out by whatever stupid video that Trump decides to tweet out next.

At any rate, the failure of the Wyden-Daines amendment and success of the US Freedom Act did nothing to assuage the damage caused by the Patriot Act. In fact, it likely increased America’s slide into a surveillance state, given its reinforcement of the Justice Department’s interpretation of the Patriot Act. If we want to achieve any measure of freedom, we have to overturn or significantly reform the Patriot Act.

“Big Brother is Watching You” — George Orwell