For Terrorist Fearmongers, It's Always the Scariest Time Ever

By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

03 June 15

wo weeks ago, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham was widely mocked for this breathless, fearmongering tweet:

This morning, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, demanding passage of the USA Freedom Act, said something quite similar: “I have never seen a time of greater potential danger than right now.” After issuing her scary warning, Feinstein claimed: “I’ve never said that before.” That’s very strange, in light of this 2013 headline following a joint appearance she made with GOP Rep. Mike Rogers on CNN:

Web article covering the terror threat in the United States. (photo: The Intercept)

Earlier this month, NSA chief Michael Rogers made the same claim when discussing Patriot Act reauthorization: “‘It just can’t be the government doing this all by itself’ because the number of threats has never been greater.”

For the fearmongers in the West and their allies, it’s always the scariest time ever; that “the threat has never been greater” is basically a slogan they reflexively spew. In March, the right-wing Canadian defense minister, Jason Kenney, arguing for new surveillance powers, announced: “While few believe full-scale conventional war is likely any time soon, the threat of terrorism has never been greater.”

In February, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell, arguing for renewal of the Patriot Act, warned that “the ‘lone wolf’ terrorist threat to the United States has never been greater.” In January, an anonymous senior aide to U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron argued for a new “snooper” bill by saying that “the terrorist threat has never been greater.” In mid-2014, U.K. Prime Minister Cameron himself raised the threat level to “severe” and announced that “Britain faces the ‘greatest and deepest’ terror threat in the country’s history.”

In September of last year, chief of New York state’s Homeland Security department, Jerome Hauer, warned New Yorkers: “I think the threat has never been greater since prior to 9/11.” When discussing ISIS in June of last year, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer told viewers that “the jihadist threat has never been greater.”

Prior to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Rep. Mike McCaul shrieked on Fox News: “Something will detonate . . . I’ve never seen a greater threat in my lifetime.” In June 2014, CNN quoted an anonymous “EU counter-terrorism official” as saying: “The threat of attacks has never been greater — not at the time of 9/11, not after the war in Iraq — never.”

In early 2013, Daily Telegraph’s national political editor, Simon Bensen, warned against cutting intelligence spending on the ground that “the truth, as demonstrated in Boston, is the array of threats has never been greater.” At the same time, India’s Foreign Secretary Ranjan Mathai gave a speech warning “that terrorism is and will remain a pre-eminent security challenge … and the nature of the threat in our region has never been greater.”

In 2010, “the U.S. government issued a warning Sunday that said al-Qaeda might target transport infrastructure and the British raised the terrorist threat level in its advice for citizens travelling to France and Germany” while “Bernard Squarcini, chief of the French internal intelligence agency, told reporters that the threat ‘has never been greater.’”

In 2007, “the UK’s new Security Minister warned that the threat against the UK has never been greater. . . . He said the current threat from terrorism was greater now than six months ago when the former head of the intelligence agency MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, warned her office was tracking 30 terror plots and 200 networks totalling more than 1,600 individuals.” In 2006, German Interior Minster Wolfgang Schäuble told his country that “the threat has never been greater.” In 2004, The Sun’s Senior Crime editor Mike Sullivan warned his readers that “Heathrow has been a major target for terrorists for years — and today the threat has never been greater.”

Throughout the Bush years, scaring Americans by telling them that the threat has never been greater was so routine as to be hard to overstate. As John Mueller wrote in Foreign Affairs back in 2006, in an article entitled “The Myth of the Omnipresent Enemy”:

For the past five years, Americans have been regularly regaled with dire predictions of another major al Qaeda attack in the United States. In 2003, a group of 200 senior government officials and business executives, many of them specialists in security and terrorism, pronounced it likely that a terrorist strike more devastating than 9/11 — possibly involving weapons of mass destruction — would occur before the end of 2004. In May 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft warned that al Qaeda could “hit hard” in the next few months and said that 90 percent of the arrangements for an attack on U.S. soil were complete. That fall, Newsweek reported that it was “practically an article of faith among counterterrorism officials” that al Qaeda would strike in the run-up to the November 2004 election. When that “October surprise” failed to materialize, the focus shifted: a taped encyclical from Osama bin Laden, it was said, demonstrated that he was too weak to attack before the election but was marshalling his resources to do so months after it.

He added that “on the first page of its founding manifesto,” the Department of Homeland Security warns: “Today’s terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon.” Bush officials raised their color-coded terror alerts and issued similar warnings so many times that it became a running joke. It was a particularly beloved tactic in the run-up to the Iraq War:

Web article covering the terror threat in the United States from 2003. (photo: The Intercept)

Years later, the face of that joke, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, admitted he was pressured to issue warnings for political gain.

Here we are 14 years after 9/11, and it’s still always the worst threat ever in all of history, never been greater. If we always face the greatest threat ever, then one of two things is true: 1) fearmongers serially exaggerate the threat for self-interested reasons, or 2) they’re telling the truth — the threat is always getting more severe, year after year — which might mean we should evaluate the wisdom of “terrorism” policies that constantly make the problem worse. Whatever else is true, the people who should have the least credibility on the planet are the Lindsey Grahams and Dianne Feinsteins who have spent the last 15 years exploiting the terror threat in order to terrorize the American population into doing what they want.

USA Freedom Act Passes: What We Celebrate, What We Mourn, and Where We Go From Here

By Cindy Cohn and Mark Jaycox, EFF

03 June 15

he Senate passed the USA Freedom Act today by 67-32, marking the first time in over thirty years that both houses of Congress have approved a bill placing real restrictions and oversight on the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers. The weakening amendments to the legislation proposed by NSA defender Senate Majority Mitch McConnell were defeated, and we have every reason to believe that President Obama will sign USA Freedom into law. Technology users everywhere should celebrate, knowing that the NSA will be a little more hampered in its surveillance overreach, and both the NSA and the FISA court will be more transparent and accountable than it was before the USA Freedom Act.

It’s no secret that we wanted more. In the wake of the damning evidence of surveillance abuses disclosed by Edward Snowden, Congress had an opportunity to champion comprehensive surveillance reform and undertake a thorough investigation, like it did with the Church Committee. Congress could have tried to completely end mass surveillance and taken numerous other steps to rein in the NSA and FBI. This bill was the result of compromise and strong leadership by Sens. Patrick Leahy and Mike Lee and Reps. Robert Goodlatte, Jim Sensenbrenner, and John Conyers. It’s not the bill EFF would have written, and in light of the Second Circuit's thoughtful opinion, we withdrew our support from the bill in an effort to spur Congress to strengthen some of its privacy protections and out of concern about language added to the bill at the behest of the intelligence community.

Even so, we’re celebrating. We’re celebrating because, however small, this bill marks a day that some said could never happen—a day when the NSA saw its surveillance power reduced by Congress. And we’re hoping that this could be a turning point in the fight to rein in the NSA.

For years, the larger EFF community has proven itself capable of fighting bad legislation that would hamper rights and freedoms online, with the clearest example being the 2012 annihilation of the Internet blacklist legislation SOPA. Lawmakers have feared that technology users—organized, politically-savvy, articulate, and educated about the law and its effects on tech—would strike out to stop their misguided legislative efforts. But for all our many victories in stopping bad legislation, we have struggled to pass bills that would better protect our freedoms. Passing a bill is far more difficult than simply killing a bad bill, and takes more sustained pressure from the public, a massive publicity campaign around a central issue, deep connections to lawmakers, and the coordination of diverse groups from across the political spectrum.

The USA Freedom Act shows that the digital rights community has leveled up. We’ve gone from just killing bad bills to passing bills that protect people’s rights.

We’re going to need those skills as we turn to our larger mission: ending overbroad surveillance of our digital lives. EFF has been in legal battles to stop the NSA’s mass Internet surveillance since January 2006. While the USA Freedom Act may have neutered the phone records surveillance program and provided much needed transparency to the secretive FISA Court overseeing the spying, it didn’t solve the broader digital surveillance problem. That’s still firmly on our agenda.

Certain provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act are scheduled to sunset in 2017, including Section 702, one of the main legal authorities the government relies on to engage in mass surveillance of people’s online communications. We’re going to campaign for the reform—or expiration—of Section 702 in the next year and a half, using the resources, communities, networks, and many of the strategies we developed in the battle around the USA Freedom Act. 

We’ve also been speaking out publicly against Executive Order 12333, an executive order that the NSA relies on for most of its digital surveillance of people worldwide. We’ll be launching a big campaign to attack this Executive Order, putting pressure on President Obama. Our goal is to get the president to address the biggest problems with EO 12333 with a new executive order before he leaves office.

Above all, we’re taking aim at the problem of overclassification. The government has used secrecy and the claim of national security interests to ward off public oversight. No reform can be effective unless we bring more sunlight into how the government is interpreting the law and the surveillance programs it is turning against law-abiding citizens. This necessitates an overhauling of the classification system, reforms to the security clearance process, strong protections for whistleblowers, even more transparency to the FISA Court, and addressing the abuses of the state secrets privilege.

The USA Freedom Act will likely affect EFF’s ongoing litigation against the NSA, including Smith v. Obama, First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA, and Jewel v. NSA cases, all of which include claims against phone records surveillance. It will also affect several cases in which we serve as amicus (including Klayman v Obama and ACLU v. Clapper). How we proceed in each of these cases will play out in the coming weeks and months. But whatever happens, we will continue fighting in the courts to ensure that the government does not exceed its statutory authority to spy or violate our constitutional rights.

We fought hard to get to this moment in history. Our long-term goals are ambitious—the end of overbroad surveillance of all digital communications, a recognition of the privacy rights of people outside the United States, and strong accountability and oversight for surveillance practices. Today’s Senate vote did not accomplish these things, but it did move us a bit closer. It also demonstrated the political will and organization of the digital rights community, which we know will continue to fight for stronger reforms. It will also hopefully embolden Congress to feel that they can bring a sensible balance to surveillance policy and practice. We extend our thanks to all of our supporters across the globe who fought so hard to bring us to this historic moment, and we look forward to working alongside you as we continue to curb abuses by the surveillance state in the years to come.