Eyes in the Sky

As the saying goes; do you ever get the feeling that someone is watching you? Well, as Nat Hentoff at the Village Voice tells us, that feeling could soon become a reality:

Among the additional new extensions of surveillance power over us by the king [President Bush] and his ministers is a plan to give national and local law-enforcement officials much more access to photos taken by spy satellites and aircraft sensors that, as the August 16 Washington Post warned, "can see through cloud cover and even penetrate buildings. . . . [This] broader domestic use of secret overhead imagery" can begin as early as this fall. However, officials at the Department of Homeland Security and in the office of the Director of National Intelligence give us "total assurance" that our civil liberties will be protected. Play it again, Sam.

Meanwhile, another ceaseless guardian of our civil liberties, the FBI, is working on a project, the System to Assess Risk (STAR), that will allegedly detect traces of terrorist "sleeper cells" here at home before they can strike.

The Bush administration has already set national (and, I expect, world) records for databasing its citizens. But the FBI, in its budget request to Congress for the STAR project—as reported by National Public Radio's ever-watchful Dina Temple-Raston on July 17—"expected the new center would be sifting through some six billion pieces of data by 2012." Temple-Raston added: "That translates to 20 records for every man, woman, and child in America." It's too soon for my newest grandchild, two-year-old Ruby Hentoff, to be included, but if STAR continues under the next president, then Ruby—considering her already-databased grandfather—could well become "a person of interest."

So who can we count on to protect us from these building-penetrating spy satellites? Hentoff notes that at least one Senator from Oregon can be counted on to oppose this assault on civil liberties:

Among the Democratic presidential candidates, only Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut has introduced a bill, the Restructuring the Constitution Act, that cuts out some of this president's most dangerous exclusive powers under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Unlike Dodd, the two leading Democratic contenders, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, have not focused on this regal assumption of unconstitutional authority, which few Americans are likely to have in mind when they vote in November 2008 (though Dennis Kucinich has spoken of it).

But as George Will angrily writes in Newsweek's August 13 issue, the Military Commissions Act, building on the Bush administration's previous arrogation of dark powers, "treats all of America as a battlefield on which even American citizens can be declared 'enemy combatants,' seized and held indefinitely, as intelligence can be collected by any means the president orders"—something that Bush's July 2006 executive order on the CIA's torture techniques further asserts.

In the current Democrat-controlled Congress, what will the leadership do regarding the FBI's STAR program and the surveillance of American citizens from on high by spy satellites? I know I can count on senators Pat Leahy and Ron Wyden—but how many other Democrats, fearful of being tarred as soft on terrorism by our commander-in-chief, will once more refuse to take a stand?

Read the rest.

Discuss.