NSA Surveillance is about Control & Leverage, not Security
http://www.juancole.com/2014/01/surveillance-leverage-security.html
NSA Surveillance is about Control & Leverage, not Security
By Juan Cole | Jan. 20, 2014
For more than six months, Edward Snowdens revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germanys Der Spiegel, and Brazils O Globo, among other places. Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSAs expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington. The answer is remarkably simple. For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSAs latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line like, in fact, the steal of the century. Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSAs surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.
For well over a century, from the pacification of the Philippines in 1898 to trade negotiations with the European Union today, surveillance and its kissing cousins, scandal and scurrilous information, have been key weapons in Washingtons search for global dominion. Not surprisingly, in a post-9/11 bipartisan exercise of executive power, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have presided over building the NSA step by secret step into a digital panopticon designed to monitor the communications of every American and foreign leaders worldwide.
What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history of U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planets last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors Americas closest allies.
Not only does such surveillance help gain intelligence advantageous to U.S. diplomacy, trade relations, and war-making, but it also scoops up intimate information that can provide leverage akin to blackmail in sensitive global dealings and negotiations of every sort. The NSAs global panopticon thus fulfills an ancient dream of empire. With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable.