A totalitarian state is only as strong as its informants.
And the United States has a lot of them. They read our emails. They
listen to, download and store our phone calls. They photograph us on
street corners, on subway platforms, in stores, on highways and in
public and private buildings. They track us through our electronic
devices. They infiltrate our organizations. They entice and facilitate
“acts of terrorism” by Muslims, radical environmentalists, activists and
Black Bloc
anarchists, framing these hapless dissidents and sending them off to
prison for years. They have amassed detailed profiles of our habits, our
tastes, our peculiar proclivities, our medical and financial records,
our sexual orientations, our employment histories, our shopping habits
and our criminal records. They store this information in government
computers. It sits there, waiting like a time bomb, for the moment when
the state decides to criminalize us.
Totalitarian states
record even the most banal of our activities so that when it comes time
to lock us up they can invest these activities with subversive or
criminal intent. And citizens who know, because of the courage of Edward
Snowden, that they are being watched but naively believe they “have
done nothing wrong” do not grasp this dark and terrifying logic.
Tyranny
is always welded together by subterranean networks of informants. These
informants keep a populace in a state of fear. They perpetuate constant
anxiety and enforce isolation through distrust. The state uses
wholesale surveillance and spying to break down trust and deny us the
privacy to think and speak freely.
A state security and
surveillance apparatus, at the same time, conditions all citizens to
become informants. In airports and train, subway and bus stations the
recruitment campaign is relentless. We are fed lurid government videos
and other messages warning us to be vigilant and report anything
suspicious. The videos, on endless loops broadcast through mounted
television screens, have the prerequisite ominous music, the
shady-looking criminal types, the alert citizen calling the authorities
and in some cases the apprehended evildoer being led away in handcuffs.
The message to be hypervigilant and help the state ferret out dangerous
internal enemies is at the same time disseminated throughout government
agencies, the mass media, the press and the entertainment industry.
“If you see something say something,” goes the chorus.
In
any Amtrak station, waiting passengers are told to tell
authorities—some of whom often can be found walking among us with
dogs—about anyone who “looks like they are in an unauthorized area,” who
is “loitering, staring or watching employees and customers,” who is
“expressing an unusual level of interest in operations, equipment, and
personnel,” who is “dressed inappropriately for the weather conditions,
such as a bulky coat in summer,” who “is acting extremely nervous or
anxious,” who is “restricting an individual’s freedom of movement” or
who is “being coached on what to say to law enforcement or immigration
officials.”
What is especially disturbing about this
constant call to become a citizen informant is that it directs our eyes
away from what we should see—the death of our democracy, the growing
presence and omnipotence of the police state, and the evisceration, in
the name of our security, of our most basic civil liberties.
Manufactured
fear engenders self-doubt. It makes us, often unconsciously, conform in
our outward and inward behavior. It conditions us to relate to those
around us with suspicion. It destroys the possibility of organizing,
community and dissent. We have built what
Robert Gellately calls a “culture of denunciation.”
Snitches
in prisons, the quintessential totalitarian system, are the glue that
allows prison authorities to maintain control and keep prisoners divided
and weak. Snitches also populate the courts, where the police make
secret deals to drop or mitigate charges against them in exchange for
their selling out individuals targeted by the state. Our prisons are
filled with people serving long sentences based on false statements that
informants provided in exchange for leniency.
There are
no rules in this dirty game. Police, like prison officials, can offer
snitches deals that lack judicial oversight or control. (Deals sometimes
involve something as trivial as allowing a prisoner access to food like
cheeseburgers.) Snitches allow the state to skirt what is left of our
legal protections. Snitches can obtain information for the authorities
and do not have to give their targets a
Miranda warning.
And because of the desperation of most who are recruited to snitch,
informants will do almost anything asked of them by authorities.
Just
as infected as the prisons and the courts are poor neighborhoods, which
abound with snitches, many of them low-level drug dealers allowed to
sell on the streets in exchange for information. And from there our
culture of snitches spirals upward into the headquarters of the National
Security Agency, Homeland Security and the FBI.
Systems
of police and military authority are ruthless when their own, such as
Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, become informants on behalf of the
common good. The power structure imposes walls of silence and harsh
forms of retribution within its ranks in an effort to make sure no one
speaks. Power understands that once it is divided, once those inside its
walls become snitches, it becomes as weak and vulnerable as those it
subjugates.
We will not be able to reclaim our democracy
and free ourselves from tyranny until the informants and the vast
networks that sustain them are banished. As long as we are watched 24
hours a day we cannot use the word “liberty.” This is the relationship
of a master and a slave. Any prisoner understands this.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
in his masterpiece “The Gulag Archipelago,” which chronicles his time
in Josef Stalin’s gulags and is a brilliant reflection of the nature of
oppression and tyranny, describes a moment when an influx of western
Ukrainians who had been soldiers during World War II arrived at his
camp, at Ekibastuz. The Ukrainians, he wrote, “were horrified by the
apathy and slavery they saw, and reached for their knives.” They began
to murder the informants.
Solzhenitsyn continued:
“Kill
the stoolie!” That was it, the vital link! A knife in the heart of the
stoolie! Make knives and cut the stoolie’s throats—that was it!
Now
as I write this chapter, rows of humane books frown down at me from the
walls, the tarnished gilt on their well-worn spines glinting
reproachfully like stars through the cloud. Nothing in the world should
be sought through violence! By taking up the sword, the knife, the
rifle, we quickly put ourselves on the level of tormentors and
persecutors. And there will be no end to it. …
There will be no end. … Here, at my desk, in a warm place, I agree completely.
If
you ever get twenty-five years for nothing, if you find yourself
wearing four number patches on your clothes, holding your hands
permanently behind your back, submitting to searches morning and
evening, working until you are utterly exhausted, dragged into the
cooler whenever someone denounces you, trodden deeper and deeper into
the ground—from the hole you’re in, the fine words of the great
humanists will sound like the chatter of the well-fed and free.
There will be no end of it! ... But will there be a beginning? Will there be a ray of hope in our lives or not?
The oppressed at least concluded that evil cannot be cast out by good.
The
eradication of some snitches and intimidation of others transformed the
camp. It was, Solzhenitsyn admits, an imperfect justice since there was
no “documentary confirmation that a man was an informer.” But, he
noted, even this “improperly constituted, illegal, and invisible court
was much more acute in its judgments, much less often mistaken, than any
of the tribunals, panels of three, courts-martial, or Special Boards
with which we are familiar.”
“Of the five thousand men
about a dozen were killed, but with every stroke of the knife more and
more of the clinging, twining tentacles fell away,” he wrote. “A
remarkable fresh breeze was blowing! On the surface we were prisoners
living in a camp just as before, but in reality we had become free—free
because for the very first time in our lives we had started saying
openly and aloud all that we thought! No one who has not experienced
this transition can imagine what it is like!
And the informers … stopped informing.”
The
camp bosses, he wrote “were suddenly blind and deaf. To all
appearances, the tubby major, his equally tubby second in command,
Captain Prokofiev, and all the wardens walked freely about the camp,
where nothing threatened them; moved among us, watched us—and yet saw
nothing! Because a man in uniform sees and hears nothing without
stoolies.”
The system of internal control in the camp
broke down. Prisoners no longer would serve as foremen on work details.
Prisoners organized their own self-governing council. Guards began to
move about the camp in fear and no longer treated prisoners like cattle.
Pilfering and theft among prisoners stopped. “The old camp
mentality—you die first, I’ll wait a bit; there is no justice so forget
it; that’s the way it was, and that’s the way it will be—also began to
disappear.”
Solzhenitsyn concluded this chapter, “Behind the Wire the Ground Is Burning,” in Volume 3 of his book, with this reflection.
Purged
of human filth, delivered from spies and eavesdroppers we looked about
and saw, wide-eyed that … we were thousands! That we were … politicals!
That we could resist!
We had chosen well; the chain would snap if
we tugged at this link—the stoolies, the talebearers and traitors! Our
own kind had made our lives impossible. As on some ancient sacrificial
altar, their blood had been shed that we might be freed from the curse
that hung over us.
The revolution was gathering strength. The wind
that seemed to have subsided had sprung up again in a hurricane to fill
our eager lungs.
Later in the book
Solzhenitsyn would write, “Our little island had experienced an
earthquake—and ceased to belong to the Archipelago.”
Freedom
demands the destruction of the security and surveillance organs and the
disempowering of the millions of informants who work for the state.
This is not a call to murder our own stoolies—although some of the 2.3
million prisoners in cages in America’s own gulags would perhaps rightly
accuse me of writing this from a position of privilege and comfort and
not understanding the brutal dynamics of oppression – but instead to
accept that unless these informants on the streets, in the prisons and
manning our massive, government data-collection centers are disarmed we
will never achieve liberty. I do not have quick and simple suggestions
for how this is to be accomplished. But I know it must.
. These aircraft have been employed in Iraq, Afghanistan and on the Mexican border because they can be equipped with radars and high-altitude surveillance systems that are capable of spotting flying objects up to 340 miles away. These systems are militarily valuable because they are capable of tracking low-flying missiles and movement on the ground.
