Great summary of the surveillance state

..........Of all the key aspects of an authoritarian regime, secrecy is the most vital in effecting the transition from relative freedom to a full-fledged police state. As the foundations of the liberal democratic order are eaten away by political termites operating in the dark, the democratic polity retains its traditional republican form – but is hollow at its center. That’s why the prescient Garet Garrett called the rising statist trend in the United States a "revolution within the form" – superficially, our old republic appears intact, but the old meanings of such concepts as "democracy" and "the rule of law" have been turned on their heads. Beneath the surface, the tyrant lurks, waiting for his moment….

A real innovation of our "democratic" despotism is the introduction of secret law. One of Snowden’s greatest "crimes" was revealing the text of a routine FISA court orderauthorizing the massive collection of all of Verizon’s meta-data in a given time period: apparently this was one of a series of periodic court orders, issued to other providers as well, giving the government authority to vacuum up all phone records.

The FISA court isn’t really a court in the Western tradition: it is more like something that might have existed in the old Soviet Union, where everything was done in secret and there was no pretense of democratic oversight. The court meets in a special sealed-off soundproof bug-proof chamber, there are only government lawyers present making their case, and there is no public record of the court’s decisions, let alone transcripts of the proceedings. All very Soviet: all that’s lacking is a portrait of Lenin staring down on the participants in this "legal" farce.

Worse, the law itself – or, rather, the administration’s and the FISA court’s interpretation of it – is secret. We aren’t allowed to know the "legal" rationale behind the government’s sweeping data grab. It can’t be discussed in Congress, at least in open session, and can’t be contested by civil libertarians – because they won’t tell uswhat it is! This is a radical innovation that not even the commissars of Stalin’s Russia imagined: leave it to the US Congress, which passed and amended legislation establishing and strengthening the FISA courts, to surpass even the Soviet Politboro in its ability to fasten the noose of state power ’round the necks of its subjects......

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/07/18/is-america-a-free-country-2/#.UektkXpVNPk.email