With the recent and extensive disclosures brought by Edward Snowden about the ever-growing consolidation of a global surveillance state, many things have been said and explored. On one side, many disinformation and personal attacks have been made towards those facilitating the transparency needed for an open debate regarding surveillance, attacks coming from the small centers of power that benefit from the destruction of our privacy (not a surprise, neither the attacks nor their sponsors); on the other side, that very same vibrant debate has taken shape in a global conversation, among academics, privacy advocates, software developers, journalists and politicians from all over the world, but most important, among the society that uses those same services, a cyber society if we will.
In this robust debate, including the ill-intentioned expected propaganda, perhaps one of the most neglected aspects is the historical one. Though occasionally we have been reminded of Woodrow Wilson’s measures against civil rights during WW1 (including the draconian 1917 Espionage Act that Obama throws at any conscience defector of the surveillance state that he inherited and abuses), or another instance of abuse such as the concentration camps for Japanese during WW2; in the global debate, there has not been much effort in linking this history of surveillance together, an effort that could, almost certainly, be illuminating.
There is one book however that predicted the capabilities of this surveillance state by going into the history of US empire, and drawing from its deep research not only historical precedents, in this case the US colonial experience in the Philippines, alongside the information revolution that made possible the use of surveillance at the time as an effective pacification tactic, but also bringing into light what I find one of its most remarkable conclusions, the effect that it has had on the US polity, from Van Deman‘s WW1 Military Intelligence Division to the current NSA, an effect that was somehow highlighted by Mark Twain’s warning at the time, that “trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home”; in other words, colonization has its own nefarious, anti-democratic, effects on the dominant society, not only on those subjugated by it.
Policing America’s Empire – The United States, The Philippines and the Rise of the Surveillance State, is the title of this magnificent 2011 book by professor Alfred W. McCoy. Though the book’s main subject is the Philippines, from colonial times until the Arroyo administration (which I will examine in a future post), McCoy takes a couple of chapters to describe how the military intelligence that was developed to pacify a restive colony, in the outset of WW1 came home to eventually become an outstanding part of government; let me rephrase this so the effect won’t be lost, measures and tactics developed to ensure the domination and rule of a foreign minority over a restive native population, in the case of the Philippines pacification campaign, were adapted to fight an “enemy within” with WW1, the American Protective League being an example, and extended, throughout the Red Scare, WW2, McCarthyism, the Islamophobia marketing machine that keeps on bombarding the US populace with dumb PR and psy-ops, and of course the modern NSA and countless intelligence agencies that erode democracy by covert means; these are exercises of population control as applied in colony pacification.
Following some examples:
-Among the measures taken from the colonial “handbook” used in the Philippines, were the Espionage Act of 1917, used against antiwar dissenters such as Eugene V. Debs, that resembled similar laws passed to silence nationalists and radical Filipinos 10 years before, and that is now being used, both in full and as threat to future whistle-blowers, to silence these same kind of antiwar dissenters such as Chelsea Manning, or anyone who wishes more accountability from governmental institutions.
-The use of civilian adjutants as in the already mentioned American Protective League, that reached some 250000 members, and that used an ethnic template to conduct its surveillance and policing operations; once dismantled amid scandal for its abuses, remnants would participate alongside federal agencies and the army in the major crackdown on unions, the IWW and the radical left that happened during and right after WW1, using both surveillance and vigilante violence. This crackdown, that was marked by mass arrests of union leaders, deportations, violent raids, would have its peak when J. Edgar Hoover managed to mobilized police forces and these civilian auxiliaries to conduct raids in thirty-three cities, which led to the arrest of four thousand suspects.
-The forced mass relocation of population, as it happened in Bacoor, would be used against people of Japanese heritage during WW2, where around 110000 where confined to concentration camps, the US pacific coast declared as an “exclusion zone” based on ethnicity, no Japanese could live there except those on camps, all thanks to Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. Only ten people were ever convicted of spying for the Japanese, and they were all Caucasian.
-The use of disinformation and scandal as a tool against different groups, that took shape during McCarthyism, the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the blacklisting of people based simply on beliefs or surveillance intel and gossip. The apex of this strategy would be COINTELPRO, the FBI program that even tried to force Martin Luther King Jr. into suicide by threatening to reveal his extramarital affairs; however, we can see that this continues, the cases of Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange being examples of how these government agencies use politics of scandal to try to destroy social movements or to hide and deflect from the real issue, their illegal activities.
One lastly comparison that is worth mentioning, the pacification of the Philippines through surveillance was only possible because of a technological revolution, the telephone, telegraph, typewriter, photograph were then what today are emails, computers, data storage, and so on. At the dawn of empire the US used technology to maintain control over a nascent nation as it today uses it to create a global surveillance state, that in and out, acts pretty much as a colonial overlord, protecting the interests of a plutocratic elite.
Overall, the connections are clear as in Van Deman’s role in the Philippines and then at home in shaping military intelligence. The challenges of different eras brought the colonial experience into US polity, as reluctant as people in the US are to see the effect of their government abroad, and until now where the discussion on the Snowden leaks is framed as security or liberties (a ridiculous proposition as “terrorism” is less likely to kill a US citizen than their own falling furniture), the effect of ongoing wars of choice keeps on turning technologies as surveillance drones, biometrics, and so on, against an “enemy within”, who turn out to be those that choose not to follow these imperial mandates. At the end, under a global surveillance state, for a common person, the enemy is not an emotion, nor some plants or chemicals, neither is a religion or a race, the enemy is the system that created these false conceptions, and that uses them to maintain an illegitimate hold on the lives of millions; hopefully, with the same technologies of information, with knowledge and in the streets, resistance will follow and enforce a crisis of legitimacy that brings social change and an end to these colonial patterns in our societies.