Milestones of Modern American History - Essay Example

Guarded secrets by the modern government, who ideally should seek to be democratic in nature, violate the first commandment of liberalism: right to information. With the heightened alert on terrorism, the government has come too close to violating all rules cherished by the Human Rights activists and believers. It has become the enemies of its own people, throttling their right to knowledge to such threatening limits that modern governments have come to resemble bureaucratic despots. They have come to promise "National" security at the expense of the citizen's private security and their fundamental right to freedom. Thus, the advent of nuclear weapons has created profound difficulties to the very spirit of liberal democracy; and the tension between nuclear weapons secrecy and the values of liberal democracy is not new now. During the Cold War, the U.S. intelligence community had maintained maddening level of secrecy, especially on matters of defense and to question it was to run the risk of being accused of lack of patriotism, which became the defense mechanism of the McCarthy era. Is it any different now Can we anymore defend our human rights without appearing to be being "for" the terrorists The answer lies somewhere else. Since Machiavelli, secrecy has been seen as a way of the Republic, which must exercise bureaucratic power by governing through such means that must not be concealed. Such intrigue is the first step towards attaining a stronghold into affairs that is free of public scrutiny and thus becomes rigid, canonical and powerful. The present state has become a panopticon who must gaze into the public and private affairs of its people with distinct "mistrust" and hence raise an air of constant alarm. Woodrow Wilson's Woodrow anti-secrecy assertion during the 1912-election campaign held the view that "Government ought to be all outside and no inside," he said, and "there ought to be no place where anything can be done that everybody does not know aboutcorruption thrives in secret places, and we believe it a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety."1 However, what actually tilted the balance beam towards governmental secrecy were the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 and the National Security Act of 1947 just during the Cold War era, which established this determined requirement for secrecy beyond the public's eye and beyond their acquiescence. Political theorist Robert Dahl observes this phenomenon of a sudden urge for nuclear secrecy and comments that such requirements are "a tragic paradox" since "these decisions have largely escaped the control of democratic process."2 Secrecy and its norms have largely become effectively dogmatic after September 11. The whole world has really changed forever but not for good. The government terms this as moral obligation to protect secret and balance it constantly against the public's right to access in a culture of openness. Thus is the question is not secrecy oppressive On the contrary, even in the face of such turbulence one can draw the example of the European Convention of Human Rights. The Rights of people, as per ECHR (European Convention of Human Rights) are put above the rights of states out of a realization, borne out of harsh reality, that states acted in self-interest to the detriment of humanity throughout history. From time immemorial, the concept of States always shares a sense of being threatened (especially superpowers like us Americans): a cause and effect relation of dominating and trying to offer resistance. It is generally believed that though there are peaceful and controlled environments existing within states, the international arena is anarchical and prone to uncontrollable violence. What these motifs do is put the focus of national security on the protection of one's territorial boundaries and sovereignty. Power comes to be measured through military capability, where everybody starts sharing a sense of being marginalized. The world begins to have an absurd dynamism and begins to operate on a zero-sum game in which, according to Peter Stoett, "security is obtained at the expense of others."3 When talking about the freedom from fear, Roosevelt referred to arms control, and not to human rights or individual security!4 This is precisely what the Bush Government is resorting to now. Thus, when John Friedman talks about 'governments and the powerful have submerged truths that do not serve their interests' he is talking about manipulation of knowledge - about loss of clarity and Kantian transparency when it comes to Governmental necessity for security (and therefore secrecy) juxtaposed against the willingness for secrecy (and therefore the big drama about security). This "submerged truth" arises when such cases where military is used as a tool of repression, not necessarily physically repressive though. The State therefore is able to monopolize the concept and practice of security and influencing media and common democratic edicts into surrendering their staunch stances against a government that is becoming oppressive day by day. Consider the measures taken to reinforce the powers of governments and law enforcement bodies, like accessing individuals' personal data, permanent and automated surveillance to steer the behavior of individuals: under surveillance, an individual will act differently than without, even if he/she does not act or intend to act illegitimately. This evolution seems to turn into hard reality what the American sociologist Gary Marx in 1988 already called the 'maximum security society'.5 This 'maximum security society' relies on a refined technological framework to influence and even 'programme' the daily lives of citizens. Harsh investigation techniques are replaced by softer versions that can be applied without knowledge of the persons observed. Large databases have been established and linked containing data on the people at large, suspect or not. Robert O'Harrow's "No Place to Hide" actually supplements some of Marx's theses, by emphasizing the more aggressive and dominant role of private data hunters in America's security policy today.6 The negative reactions were based on the feeling that this use of surveillance technology has implications for human rights in general and privacy in particular, as its potentiality to exploit people or exert social control is unregulated. Thus, when Friedman says that, "with the rise of the modern bureaucratic state, the cult of secrecy has grown exponentially"; I cannot but agree with it completely because a privacy-infringing initiative replaces the question of whether such an initiative infringes privacy. America's mass installation of security technologies (metal detectors, scanners, CCTV's, iris recognition systems, alarms, locks, intercoms, and other forms of surveillance, detection, access control and biometric equipment) in schools, government premises, stores, offices, workplaces, recreation areas, streets and homes; and other public places, without understanding all the purposes behind this security build-up is abominating to an individuals sense of privacy. Thus, ironically, secrecy in the name of national security does not always mean that citizens of those nations benefit from such government policy. Britain's war against Iraq was justified after manipulating the law to ensure that it justified the political decision that had already been taken. Unable to obtain the necessary resolution from the UN Security Council authorizing military intervention in Iraq, the laws were re-interpreted to side-step the institution established by international agreement to avoid states acting arbitrarily. The destruction of communities in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, communities allowed dying due to unwillingness both to accept international agreements on global warming and due to the diversion of resources to an illegal war. If a government exceeds its power and defines "security" in the interests of a few, then it threatens democracy and loses the legitimacy to govern. The truth is that the greatest protection comes from upholding the rights of all citizens rather than fuelling the alienation through such secrecy, which feeds terrorism, and ultimately destroys the rule of law. Exploiting the international climate favoring "counter-terrorism", many governments reinforced and renewed their crack-down on political opponents and others whose loyalty they doubt, such as trade unionists, journalists, religious and racial minorities, and human rights defenders and resorted to "secrecy". Governments are not entitled to respond to terror with terror. Governments should be obliged to act within the framework of international human rights and humanitarian law, especially during emergencies and not resort to secrecy that ultimately is detrimental to public freedom by intervention upon their regular life and by putting far too many constraints in the name of safety. All too often secret governmental measures harm the innocent as well as the guilty. All too often political leaders exploit public fears and prejudices in such face of ignorance and "submerged truths" to avoid accountability and promote their own interests. Greater emphasis on security, far from making the world a safer place, has made it more dangerous by curtailing human rights and undermining the rule of international law; by shielding governments from scrutiny; by deepening divisions among people of different faiths and origins; and by diverting attention from festering conflicts and other sources of insecurity. Where is the face of Truth in any of this Works Cited 1. Wilson, Woodrow. "The New Freedom" 113-14. 2. "Congressional Record", 1941, Vol. 87, Pt. I. 'In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression - everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way - everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want - which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings, which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants - everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear - which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -anywhere in the world'. 3. Dahl, Robert. "Controlling Nuclear Weapons: Democracy versus Guardianship" (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 1985). 4. Deleuze: see Serge Gutwirth, Privacy and the information age, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield Publ., 2002, 71-78 ("Controlling societies"). 5. Marx., Gary T. 'La socit de scurit maximale', Dviance et socit, 1988, 147-166. For a discussion of this concept and similar concepts by Michel Foucault, Stanley Cohen and Gilles 6. O'Harrow Robert jr. "No Place to Hide. Behind the Scenes of of our Emerging Surveillance Society", Free Press, 2005, 368p. 7. Stoett, Peter. "Human and Global Security: An Exploration of Terms" (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 17. 8. 'Your Identity, Open to All', Wired, consulted May 2005, http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,67407,00.html: "A search for personal data on ZabaSearch.com - one of the most comprehensive personal-data search engines on the net - tends to elicit one of two reactions from first-timers: terror or curiosity. Which reaction often depends on whether you are searching for someone else's data, or your own. Zaba Search queries return a wealth of info sometimes dating back more than 10 years: residential addresses, phone numbers both listed and unlisted, birth year, even satellite photos of people's homes". Read More