Things are getting grim in the United States. At the behest of the White House, federal agencies have been carrying out a series of enforcement actions against individuals and groups that develop privacy tools which #humanrights activists around the world rely on for their work and to stay free of authoritarian oppression.
These enforcement actions are being carried out in the context of regulatory ambiguity from FinCEN and other relevant federal bodies. In the process, they are causing a chilling effect to reverberate in the U.S. and beyond, further eroding trust in U.S. institutions and, in many cases, placing lives in danger.
What is at the root of these prejudicial actions? We are left to speculate. Regardless, they are exacting non-trivial collateral damage. These dubious enforcement actions imperil the rights of the American public and they undermine the interests of diverse populations around the world living under the yoke of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes.
Ironically, tragically, these U.S. enforcement actions impact human rights activists and resistance movements fighting tirelessly against regimes which the U.S. government claims also to oppose, often at immense expense to the U.S. taxpayer.
The game afoot appears not to be one of moral righteousness, democratic principle, and the sanctity of the law, but rather, one of power, privilege, and Empire.
These prejudicial enforcement actions come in the wake of recent re-authorization of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which contains new provisions, within Section #FISA702, granting U.S. agencies unprecedented authority to surveil the communications of Americans without a warrant.
These enforcement actions also coincide with the troubling resort to brute force being exacted upon student protestors on campuses throughout the U.S. who are calling for an end to the murder of innocent children, women and men in Palestine. This militarized response, though not centrally coordinated, is one being legitimized by a state-sanctioned mischaracterization of what these protests fundamentally aim to achieve.
A thread runs through it…
Policing tools for privacy.
Enabling the surveillance of Americans.
Squashing dissent and protest with force.
These are the signposts of creeping authoritarianism, of a state apparatus that has detached from its moral foundation and its raison d’être as expressed in its guiding documents: the Constitution, its amendments, and the Bill of Rights.
This creeping authoritarian state seems to grow more self-assured and more self-referential by the week. Having pierced the veil of covert operations, however, it stands naked now before the subjects whom it chooses to villainize: students, privacy tool creators, and no less than the everyday citizen who presumes to transact privately and to communicate freely in the digital world with her peers without fear of interference from and censorship by the state.
A thread runs through it.
It is time for America to hold up a mirror unto itself and ask, which direction now?
cc: @ninaturner @IlhanMN @RepRashida @AOC @SenSanders @RepBobGood @HRF @ACLU @EFF @hrw
