America’s Security State Is Apparently
Trying to Hassle Its Critics Into Silence
New York - Benjamin Wallace-Wells, 10/03/13
This pattern of picayune harassment — airport detentions, unexplained visa refusals — suggests a far deeper problem. The national security state and the mainstream political process are operating at cross-purposes. Akbar had been invited to Washington by members of Congress, because they thought his views were important. Shibani was visiting London to participate in a wonky panel at Chatham House, something like the Brookings Institute of England, on the future of Yemen. Miranda was a bit player in the Edward Snowden revelations — revelations that, though controversial, have spurred a bipartisan bill aimed at paring back the National Security Agency's surveillance of domestic communications. These are people who are helping to provide information that matters to our mainstream political debate. And yet the national security apparatus, here and in the United Kingdom, is treating them as if they are enemies of the state. This is, to put it very tenderly, a problem.
It is possible that these figures are being deliberately singled out for political reasons, or out of a petty vindictiveness. But it is also possible that the national security state has gotten so vast that in its simple diligence — mapping relationships on top of relationships, until its maps of enemies and suspects encompass even those people multiple degrees of separation from a suspicious individual — it has gone far overboard. "They are stopping people who know people who know people," the spokesman for a French anti-surveillance NGO, who has himself frequently been detained flying in and out of Charles de Gaulle, told me recently.
More: NYMag.com
