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The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon. Others at SN have also voiced similar opinions so I thought this might be an interesting read for our members.
The voters who put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.
But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons.
Why did the face in the Oval Office change but the policies remain the same? Critics tend to focus on Obama himself, a leader who perhaps has shifted with politics to take a harder line. But Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon has a more pessimistic answer: Obama couldn’t have changed policies much even if he tried.
Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.
[Related]: ‘National Security and Double Government’
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 22 2014, @08:48PM
Nonviolence and intentional subversion of the status quo are definite measures technologists like us can undertake. I offer Napster and Edward Snowden as two ready examples. Napster single-handedly signaled the end of a multi-billion dollar, very influential industry. But it was just file-sharing software, something many of us could have written if we had wanted to. Snowden has massively imploded global perceptions of the American government, but all he did was make documents of the NSA's crimes public. He didn't even have to write software to do that; he just had to want to and to have balls of steel.
I submit that there are many, many ways each and every one of us on SN can apply our skills to kick the "shadow government" in the nads, if we want to. If you're an American and think DC and its controllers are out of control, then I would say it's your patriotic duty to do so. We as a group can be a far, far more effective force for change than X million dirty hippies waving their fists in the street.
Washington DC delenda est.