A View From The Left-“War on Terror” Targets Everyone’s Rights-Feds Hands Off Our Phones!

Workers Vanguard No. 1085	11 March 2016

“War on Terror” Targets Everyone’s Rights-Feds Hands Off Our Phones!

 

Waving the bloody shirt of “terrorism,” the capitalist state has stepped up its campaign to snoop into everyone’s private information, this time targeting Apple’s iPhone encryption. The Feds are seeking to compel the technology company to by-pass the security built into the phone of Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the killers in last December’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, California. This sinister move by the FBI signals that it will tolerate no constraints on its surveillance activities and now demands backdoor access to your phone. As one former FBI agent put it, “When you listen to the tone of the argument, it’s as if they think that if data exists, they have a right to it.” Make no mistake: the government is out to create a precedent that imperils everyone’s rights.

The stage for this confrontation was set in 2013 by the revelations of whistle-blower Edward Snowden, who was driven into exile in Russia. His leaks documented massive illegal government spying on electronic communications, with and without the cooperation of telecom and tech companies. Worried about market share and reputation, some of the tech giants moved to shut backdoors into the information of their users. In 2014, both Apple and Google announced plans for default phone encryption. Consumers and privacy advocates were delighted, but the FBI launched a hysterical campaign claiming that the companies were aiding criminals. FBI director James Comey has tried to whip up hysteria over encryption preventing police from accessing “evidence,” which he calls “going dark.”

Whatever Apple’s reasons for standing up to the Feds, we are glad, while it lasts, that there is some obstacle to the nefarious aims of the capitalist state and its secret police. But Apple is hardly a consistent champion of privacy. Prior to this case, Apple happily complied with at least 70 court orders to access data on phones using earlier versions of its operating system. It even instructed law enforcement agencies on how to correctly request such orders from judges. In the first half of last year, Apple handed over iCloud content in response to nearly 300 law enforcement requests.

In the wake of the Snowden revelations, Apple and other tech heavyweights, including Microsoft, Facebook and Google, formed Reform Government Surveillance (RGS), ostensibly to lobby for privacy and against mass spying. RGS has issued a statement defending Apple against the government’s order. But its real purpose has been to help companies clean up their images while continuing to aid government snooping. RGS campaigned for the USA Freedom Act—a reauthorization of the Patriot Act with a little window-dressing that was passed last year. The group continued to support the act even as its “reform” clauses were stripped away and the Director of National Intelligence endorsed the measure.

In case Obama’s FBI loses to Apple in the courts, Democratic Senate battle-ax Dianne Feinstein of California is preparing legislation to force the Silicon Valley company to give the FBI what they want, beating the drums about the “terrorist attack in my state.” At the same time, some ruling-class representatives adamantly oppose restrictions on encryption, which they depend on to secure their financial transactions and military secrets. Encryption is fundamental to Internet commerce: without it, credit card transactions would be open to any thief. As every information security professional and hacker knows, it is impossible to provide a backdoor for the government without weakening security in general. In that vein, a lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal (2 March) headlined “Apple Is Right on Encryption” warned, “The FBI doesn’t want merely one phone, and its warrant is legally suspect.”

If the FBI can strong-arm the world’s most valuable company, then where does that leave the rest of us? Like the National Security Agency, whose snooping was at the heart of the Snowden revelations, the FBI is one of many tentacles of the capitalist state—a body that is not neutral, but which exists to maintain the rule of the bourgeoisie. The purpose of such state organs is to suppress workers and the oppressed when they pose a challenge to the bosses. We oppose any strengthening of the repressive powers of the state. Any leftist, opponent of imperialism, advocate of black freedom, or trade unionist should know that the FBI is precisely who should not have your data.

The perils of FBI snooping on opponents of racial oppression were highlighted in a March 3 letter to the judge in the San Bernardino FBI-Apple case from a number of black activist groups. The letter, signed by groups including Beats, Rhymes & Relief and the Justice League NYC, noted: “Many of us, as civil rights advocates, have become targets of government surveillance for no reason beyond our advocacy or provision of social services for the underrepresented.” As Malkia Cyril, director for the Center for Media Justice, which also signed the letter, aptly put it in a February 24 tweet: “In the context of white supremacy and police violence, Black people need encryption.”

The crimes of the FBI are legion. During WWII, the bureau compiled lists of “suspicious” Japanese Americans who were rounded up for internment camps. In 1956, the FBI launched COINTELPRO, a program of disruption, infiltration, intimidation and dirty tricks aimed initially at the Communist Party, and later expanded to include everyone from Puerto Rican nationalists and civil rights activists to protesters against the Vietnam War. The COINTELPRO campaign against the Black Panthers took the lives of 38 Panthers, including Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter, who was murdered in his bed in 1969.

The bloody dirty tricks didn’t cease when COINTELPRO was disbanded after its exposure in the early 1970s. A “former” FBI informant rode shotgun in the Nazi/KKK caravan that gunned down five leftists in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1979. Since the inception of the “war on terror” in 2001, the FBI has particularly spied on American Muslim groups, antiwar activists and advocates for Palestinian freedom. The bureau employs over 15,000 informants and provocateurs for infiltration and entrapment, instigating bogus “terror plots” and then rounding up innocent people caught up in the webs it has spun. In 2010, the FBI targeted 23 Midwestern leftists, antiwar organizers and union activists because of their political activities in solidarity with oppressed people in the Near East and Latin America (see “Protest FBI Raids on Leftists, Union Activists!” WV No. 966, 8 October 2010).

Whatever transpires in its case against Apple, the FBI’s history is not one of abiding by the limits of the law. Indeed, its purpose is precisely to carry out dirty deeds, largely under the cover of secrecy, regardless of bourgeois legality. The tiny wealthy minority that lords it over this society ultimately depends on force of arms to maintain its rule. What is necessary is a workers revolution to sweep the capitalist state and its apparatus of spies and thugs into the dustbin of history.