Moreover, the state tends to secure its own interests and those of concentrated special interest groups first and foremost. Bills that pose a substantial threat to the NSA, their telecom company collaborators or profiteers like Booz Allen Hamilton will tend to be eroded or defeated due to the power of these predatory interest groups. Or worse, they will be twisted to serve the interests of these oligarchs.

Legislative reform is a dead end, but there’s a better way. We can route around the state, thwart its surveillance efforts, and make it progressively harder to intercept and watch our communications.

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Trevor Timm at the Guardian writes, “in a compromise that moved the formerly strong legislation out of committee and into action, the bill was weakened significantly: in came more immunity for telecoms, and out went tough transparency and provisions for the Fisa court, along with protections against warrantless “backdoor” searches of your communications.”

The bill was later watered down further, widening NSA’s search powers and placing even more power in the hands of the Director of National Intelligence.

The bill’s original backers dropped their support for the USA Freedom Act.  “Under the finalized floor version of the USA Freedom Act, it would be completely legal for the NSA to request all records for an area code, zip code, or even all of the emails for accounts that start with the letter ‘A,’ all without a warrant,” US Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) says. Many civil liberties groups also abandoned support for the bill.

These developments are disappointing, but not surprising. This is how government works. Bills are passed largely through logrolling, a process of give and take where propositions supported by different ideologies or interest groups are put together under one bill to increase its chance of passing. So bills originally intended to protect civil liberties often have provisions added to secure the support of hawks, statists and surveillance enthusiasts.

Moreover, the state tends to secure its own interests and those of concentrated special interest groups first and foremost. Bills that pose a substantial threat to the NSA, their telecom company collaborators or profiteers like Booz Allen Hamilton will tend to be eroded or defeated due to the power of these predatory interest groups. Or worse, they will be twisted to serve the interests of these oligarchs.

Legislative reform is a dead end, but there’s a better way. We can route around the state, thwart its surveillance efforts, and make it progressively harder to intercept and watch our communications. A coalition of civil liberties groups, progressive advocacy organizations and libertarian organizations is urging people to do just that. They’re calling it Reset the Net. On June 5th, they urge Internet users and web developers to begin using a wide variety of internet security tools to thwart the NSA. These tools include everything from open source encryption protocols to anonymity services like Tor. Reset the Net’s privacy pack specifically offers open source tools because these tools allow any user to test, verify and improve their security. Tools like this can be installed, designed and improved by any individual, with no permission needed from any government.

Reset the Net is an inspiring example of mainstream civil liberties groups from across the political spectrum embracing the anarchist tactic of direct action. Rather than begging governments to limit themselves or pass benevolent reforms, direct action takes change into our own hands without asking permission.

Direct action allows us to route around the state, to make its mass surveillance operations much more difficult to perpetuate. This is how we can and must end state criminality. Not by reforming the state, but by treating it as damage and routing around.

Although propaganda of the deed has faded into history as an actuality, it tends to pop up frequently in anti-anarchist demagoguery, and I can’t help but think it’s set to do so once again. Early state and media spin on the killing of Gerardo Hernandez, the first US Transportation Security Administration employee to die “in the line of duty,” already attributes “anti-government views” to his alleged killer, Paul Ciancia.

As an anarchist, I’m not a fan of propaganda by the deed for three reasons:

First, it’s strategically useless. No single act is likely to produce anarchist revolution in an environment not yet primed for such revolution.

Secondly, it’s tactically counter-productive. Anyone with the intelligence and energy to plan such an act could do so much more for the cause in other ways than getting himself killed or imprisoned in this kind of one-off project.

Finally, all such activities carry a heavy risk of “collateral damage” and we anarchists, unlike state actors, actually shoulder true responsibility for our actions instead of seeking excuses for them.

All that said, if Ciancia did what he’s accused of doing, in the manner he’s accused of doing it, whether he intended it as “progaganda of the deed” or not, he deserves the thanks and support of a grateful populace.

Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, a senior adviser to US president Barack Obama, justified the Obama regime’s cold-blooded murder of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki —  a 16-year-old American accused of no crime whatsoever — with the claim that if he didn’t want to be murdered, he should have “had a more responsible father” (his father, Anwar al-Awlaki, was in fact accused of crimes, although the evidence seemed pretty weak).

To riff on Gibbs: If Gerardo Hernandez didn’t want to be gunned down in reprisal for he and his fellow TSA employees’ terrorism, he shouldn’t have accepted employment as a terrorist.

Yes, TSA is a terrorist organization. Its entire purpose is to frighten travelers for political purposes — the very definition of terrorism — by subjecting them to unwanted and unjustifiable searches of their property and persons, sometimes assaulting them sexually or otherwise in the process, sometimes abducting them.

By all accounts, Ciancia was extraordinarily careful in his attack. He asked each person he encountered whether or not they worked for TSA. Those who did not were sent on their way unharmed. He shot terrorists, and ONLY terrorists, with no “collateral damage.”

I don’t have to think that’s smart, or particularly useful to my cause, to admire both the morality of the action and the careful restraint with which it was performed.

The world would be a much nicer place if every government employee dreamed dark dreams of Paul Ciancia and his potential copycats every night, arrived at work every morning with those dreams very much in mind, and aspired only to keep a low, polite profile and cause no offense until such time as he or she could leave the life of crime and find a real job.

On its face the idea seems reasonable. I can imagine hiring a firm to look after some aspect of my security. To do its job the firm may need some information about me that I don’t readily give out. It’s up to me to decide if I like the trade-off. Nothing wrong there. In a freed market, firms would compete for my business, and competition would pressure firms to ask only for information required for  their services. As a result, a minimum amount of information would be requested. If I thought even that was too much, I would be free to choose to look after my security myself. If I did business with a firm that violated the terms of our contract, I would have recourse. At the very least I could terminate the relationship and strike up another or none at all.

In other words, in the freed market I would find the right “balance” for myself, and you would do the same. One size wouldn’t be deemed to fit all. The market would cater to people with a range of security/privacy concerns, striking the “balance” differently for different people. That’s as it should be.

Actually, we can say that there would be no trade-off between privacy and security at all, because the information would be voluntarily disclosed by each individual on mutually acceptable terms. Under those circumstances, it wouldn’t be right to call what the firm does an “intrusion.”

But that sort of situation is not what Barack Obama, Mike Rogers, Peter King, and their ilk mean when they tell us that “we” need to find the right balance between security and privacy. They mean they will dictate to us what the alleged balance will be. We will have no real say in the matter, and they can be counted on to find the balance on the “security” side of the spectrum as suits their interests. That’s how these things work. (See “NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds.”) Unlike in a freed market, what the government does is intrusive, because it is done without our consent and often without our knowledge. (I hope no one will say that voting or continuing to live in the United States constitutes consent to invasions of privacy.)

Of course, our rulers can’t really set things to the security side of the spectrum because the game is rigged. When we give up privacy — or, rather, when our rulers take it — we don’t get security in return; we get a more intrusive state, which means we get more insecurity. Roderick Long made a similar point on his blog, The Austro-Athenian Empire:

In the wake of the recent NSA revelations, there’s increased talk about the need to “balance” freedom against security. I even see people recycling Larry Niven’s law that freedom + security = a constant.

Nonsense. What we want is not to be attacked or coercively interfered with — by anyone, be they our own government, other nations’ governments, or private actors. Would you call that freedom? or would you call it security?

You can’t trade off freedom against security because they’re exactly the same thing.

Likewise, where the state is concerned, you can’t trade off privacy against security becausethey’re exactly the same thing. Anyone who reads dystopian novels knows that government access to personal information about people serves to inhibit and control them. That’s insecurity.

Now it will no doubt be said that while in one respect we are more insecure when “our” government spies on us (the scare quotes are to indicate that I think the U.S. government is an occupying power), in return we gain security against threats from others, say, al-Qaeda. But I see no prima facie case for favoring official domestic threats over freelance foreign threats. I’m reminded of what Mel Gibson’s character, Benjamin Martin, says in The Patriot: “Would you tell me please, Mr. Howard, why should I trade one tyrant three thousand miles away for three thousand tyrants one mile away? An elected legislature can trample a man’s rights as easily as a king can.”

Some foreigners might want to come here and kill Americans, but the U.S. government has been no slouch in that department. How many Americans who were sent by “their” government to fight in foreign wars never came back? How many came back with their lives shattered? The number dwarfs the number of casualties from terrorism.

Throw in the fact that some foreigners want to kill Americans only because Obama’s government (like George W. Bush’s and others before it) is killing them, and the phony nature of this alleged protection is clear.

Obama & Co. say they welcome a public debate about calibrating the trade-off between security and privacy. No, they don’t. They wouldn’t even be going through the motions had it not been for the heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden, whom they are determined to lock away for life — if they catch him. A true debate is the last thing they want. What they want is a simulated debate in order to quiet public concern about spying.

As Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic points out, Obama’s new directive creating the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies is charged with “accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust.” Unlike his public statement, the official directive says nothing about preventing violations of privacy and related abuses.

Friedersdorf comments,

What happened to those goals? The closest the Monday directive comes to them is an instruction to remember “our need to maintain the public trust” as one of many policy considerations.

Forget whether abuses are happening, or whether privacy rights are in fact being protected. [Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper need only probe the perception of trust. Remember, this is a man with a demonstrated willingness to tell lies under oath when he decides doing so serves the greater good.

We should reject the phony debate, the phony trade-off, and the phony “balance” that will be struck. There is a fundamental conflict of interest between the American people and the U.S. government. The sooner we learn that, the safer we’ll be.