1. Invoke External and Internal Threats
Chapter Summary
After 9/11, there was a clear external threat to the United States. Wolf asserts that Bush capitalized on this moment with the subsequent War on Terror; while other world leaders used phrases like "serious national security concerns," Bush stoked even more fear for American citizens by using words like "evildoers" and referring to Muslims as "Islamofascists". In doing this, he convinced Americans that it was a fair trade to give up their privacy for the greater goal of winning the War on Terror. Security companies began lobbying Congress for investments into surveillance technology. The Department of Homeland Security was created in 2002 and promptly focused a broad surveillance tech industry on American citizens. The new internal threat was Americans who might be supporting or working with terrorists—and it could have been anyone.
What's Happened Since?
DHS has continually expanded and invested in surveillance technology under every administration. The government has not only failed to protect Americans from undue surveillance, it has perpetrated consistent and intentional invasions of our privacy. This has taken place at all levels of government in all administrations since the inception of DHS and the proliferation of mass surveillance technology.
Protect America Act of 2007 and FISA Amendments Act of 2008 were laws passed under the Bush administration which allowed wire tapping and other means of surveillance without a warrant. Americans couldn't be the target but could be impacted if communicating with anyone outside of the country. The 2008 amendment stated that the government was authorized to monitor communications of citizens for up to a week without a warrant. These laws paved the way for an operation called PRISM where several tech companies regularly provided consumer communications information to the U.S. government. This was infamously leaked in 2013 by Edward Snowden who still lives in hiding from the U.S. government in Russia.
The Obama administration proposed a Privacy Bill of Rights in 2012, but took three years to pull language together in the form of a bill which never even made it through its Congressional committee. The bill seems to have been lackluster in a lot of ways (like poor enforcement and unwarranted exceptions), but it could have been something to provide consumers with basic privacy rights. At the very least, it could have been improved upon during the legislative process. I'm not sure why it died so quickly in Congress. That's something I need to look more into.
H.R.4681 Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2015 appears to authorize the U.S. government to maintain records of citizen's communications (via telephone or internet) for only 5 years, except in several broad circumstances. It seems to be framed as a privacy protection law, but instead serves as a gaping loophole for communications retention. I need to look more into this as well to ensure I'm not misconstruing the intent or the impact.
The USA Freedom Act was passed in 2015 and required the NSA to cease its collection of phone call metadata on most Americans while allowing a case-by-case approach with approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Phone companies can still collect this data, though. It seems like another sort of loophole-law where it looks like the government is doing something about our privacy without meaningfully curtailing their ability to surveil Americans.
Today's Comparison
Surveillance technology continues to be a massive industry. Companies like Palantir hold government contracts to spy on Americans and the sale of consumer data is a mainstream concept, widely acknowledged by Americans. Flock supplies police with surveillance technology throughout the country and has worked on pilot programs for DHS. Trump portrays immigrants and drug smugglers as external threats, claiming they flood the country and take up our resources. There are several internal threats which he refers to openly as enemies within: journalists, protestors, "radical left lunatics" (Hey, that's me!:D).Trump has always been a master of invoking both external and internal threats.
Wolf argues that Bush used fear to convince Americans to sacrifice our privacy for safety. No administration since then has meaningfully committed to the reversal of the type of surveillance that began in the early 2000s. While we haven't had another major foreign terror attack since 2001, we experience domestic terrorism so regularly that we're disturbingly desensitized to the trauma and deaths. Has our lack of privacy actually guaranteed us the safety we traded it for?