The vast homeland spying schemes by the National Security Agency (NSA) have little or nothing to do with protecting the U.S. against terrorists. Their real purpose is to help U.S. bosses build a domestic police state to wage wider imperialist wars. The idea that spying on telephone calls or e-mails in the U.S. is “for our own good” is linked to the idea of supporting wars and interventions for “humanitarian” reasons. It’s a mask for the imperialist drive for maximum profit, which requires the control of energy supplies and cheap labor.
The primary aim of the bosses’ spying is to get people accustomed to accepting terror in their daily lives, from racist stop-and-frisk policies and murders by the police to the mass incarceration of mostly black and Latino prisoners. The militarization of public schools — in the name of protecting us against another Newtown slaughter — is in the same vein.
Internationally, our class sisters and brothers in the war-torn Middle East and South Asia are subjected to even worse. Every U.S. consulate masks a CIA station agent ready to instigate attacks against any group opposing U.S. imperialist policies.
In fact, the FBI and big-city police forces have made a routine out of the racist surveillance of mosques and people from targeted countries. There is no such thing as privacy under capitalism. The rulers have been spying on workers for 150 years, going back to the Pinkerton strikebreakers of the 19th century.  In the 1950s and ‘60s, it was the FBI’s Cointelpro and police force Red Squads. In the current Bush-Obama era, it’s the “war on terror” that has used advanced technology to create a more efficient surveillance state.
This spying signals a decisive move towards fascism. It is designed to scare the masses from fighting back against the rulers’ attacks and fascist conditions. All workers are vulnerable, regardless of whether they are “guilty” of any crime. It’s not much of a leap to foresee protesters or strike organizers arrested for “suspicious” e-mails or phone calls.
Liberals Playing Both Sides
On the surface, it seems that liberals are split into two camps over Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA schemes. Al Gore and “grass roots” liberal groups are cheering on the whistleblowing. They claim to challenge Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, who contend that terrorists can be foiled only by monitoring everyone’s electronic communications. But in reality, both camps work toward the same goal: building the domestic police state needed by U.S. bosses to carry out their war plans.
Snowden, Gore & Co. actually help advance the warmakers’ fascist agenda. By apparently exposing the NSA, they enable U.S. rulers to gauge — and respond to — working-class support, acquiescence or opposition to the spying. Immediately after the NSA disclosures, the bosses’ attention focused more on opinion surveys than on Congress. The polls came fast and furious, as CBS, ABC, CNN and Fox rushed to learn just how workers felt about government eavesdropping. But it was the liberal Washington Post, the first U.S. organ to publish the leaks, that hailed a fascist triumph in public opinion, especially among mainly working-class Democrats:
According to a Washington Post-Pew Research poll, 56 percent in the U.S. consider the NSA accessing telephone records of millions of people “acceptable,” while 41 percent call the practice “unacceptable.” What has changed is the partisan makeup of who holds which position. In this poll, 69 percent of Democrats say terrorism investigations, not privacy, should be the government’s main concern, an 18-percentage-point jump from early January 2006, when the NSA’s activity under the George W. Bush administration was first reported. Compared with that time, Republicans’ focus on privacy has increased 22 points (Slate, 6/11/13).
These results were just what the imperialist-backed, “anti-war” outfits expected, even as they feigned dismay. National Public Radio (6/11/1-3) quoted Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the anti-nuke Federation of American Scientists, which is funded by multi-billionaire George Soros and the Carnegie Foundation: “Snowden’s efforts to alert the public to the dangers of such wide surveillance could ultimately backfire. The intelligence community can say we didn’t want this to be made public, but it was, and people shrugged, and now we take it as an explicit endorsement. That would be an ironic outcome.”
Who’s Behind It All?
Other liberal U.S. imperialists played a big role in engineering the NSA exposé. Consider Laura Poitras, whom the New York Times calls “the pivotal connection between the former government contractor Edward J. Snowden and writers for The Guardian and The Washington Post which published his leaked documents” (6/15/13). Last year, “independent” documentary filmmaker Poitras received a half-million dollar “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation while working for the Times on a video about another NSA whistleblower. MacArthur’s president, Robert Gallucci, is a lifelong servant of U.S. imperialism. He taught at the National War College and most recently served as Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs. In addition to the fat check from war planner Gallucci, Poitras appears to have gotten essential spycraft training: “[S]he had the technical ability to hold an encrypted online conversation with Mr. Snowden ... which he insisted on” (Times article).
Another fake “voice of the people,” this one calling itself the “Government Accountability Project” (GAP), ardently defends Snowden. In line with its motto, “Protecting Corporate, Government, & International Whistleblowers Since 1977,” the organization says, “Snowden disclosed information about a secret program that he reasonably believed to be illegal. Consequently, he meets the legal definition of a whistleblower” (GAP website, 6/14/13). Among the sources of “the vast majority of our funds,” according to the GAP site, is the ultra-imperialist Rockefeller Family Fund.
Hypocrisy, Inc.
“Outraged” ex-Clinton Vice President Al Gore added his voice to the chorus of hypocrites denouncing the NSA program: “This in my view violates the constitution. The fourth amendment and the first amendment — and the fourth amendment language is crystal clear” (Guardian, 8/14/13).  Never mind that the U.S. Constitution guaranteed slavery. Gore is a board member for Apple and senior adviser at Google, two firms that willingly funnel their customers’ messages and information to the NSA.
Gore is also a partner at Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm that boasts Colin Powell, Iraq genocide war criminal and advocate of massive force warfare, as a strategic partner. In the same spirit as the NSA, Kleiner proposes buying into “internet, wireless, and media” for use against a potential World War III foe China.
Liberals’ phony soul-searching over the limits of home-front spying mirrors the new fake debate over New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policy. If either Obama or Bloomberg wanted to, they could end such racist searches with the stroke of a pen. But deliberately feeble federal and state litigation allows Bloomberg to lecture, “It’s for your own good” to an increasingly accepting audience. These capitalist liberals are fundamentally imperialist. They mislead people by seeming to critique injustice while they pave U.S. imperialism’s path to war — and to the domestic crackdowns that war requires.
What Is To Be Done?
But the working class, led by communists in the Progressive Labor Party, cannot take these attacks lying down. We must step up our efforts on the job, in the military and in the schools, communities and churches to organize against fascist terror. We must point out that capitalism cannot be reformed. Under the laws of imperialism, rival national groups of capitalist bosses will inevitably escalate their oppression of the working class worldwide.
Only a communist revolution — eliminating the bosses and the racism, sexism, mass unemployment and poverty that flow from their profit system — can solve workers’ problems. A mass PLP is needed to achieve that goal. Join us!