A militaristic foreign policy has real effects on
domestic institutions and poses a genuine threat to domestic liberties.
The
Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal continues to be front-page news. According
to current reports, Cambridge
Analytica obtained private Facebook data, which it used to send pro-Trump
material to targeted Facebook users. These reports have met outrage in
Washington DC. The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation, and
U.S. senators have called for Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, to testify in
front of Congress.
Calls by
Congress for increased oversight to prevent private companies from surveilling
people are extremely ironic given that they recently renewed a
section of the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows for the
warrantless surveillance of Americans. Issues regarding the appropriate use of
government surveillance are also at the center of
special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump administration.
These headlines provide an excellent opportunity to consider the
history of the U.S. government’s surveillance state, which matters for people
across the world whose liberties are at stake as government power expands.
Surveillance Origins: To
Squash Dissent
The origins of the present-day surveillance state can be traced
back to the U.S. government’s military occupation of the Philippines in the
late 1890s. Under the leadership of Ralph Van Deman, who would earn the
informal honorific of “father of U.S. military intelligence,” the U.S.
occupiers established a state-of-the-art surveillance apparatus to squash
dissent by those who resisted U.S. efforts.
After his time abroad, Van Deman returned home and, drawing upon
his experiences abroad, worked tirelessly to establish similar surveillance
infrastructure at home. In May 1917, the Military Intelligence Section (MIS)
was formed, with Van Deman at the helm.
Over the
following decades, the U.S. surveillance state continued to expand and
reorganize, resulting in the founding of the National Security Agency (NSA) in
1952. This coincided with an unprecedented expansion in the scope of government
surveillance of the daily lives and activities of American persons. The
prevalence of unconstrained government surveillance is evident in the four
main concurrent operations undertaken at that time: Project SHAMROCK and Project MINARET, both operated by
the NSA; COINTELPRO,
implemented by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Operation CHAOS, which fell under
the purview of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
These programs monitored all foreign telegraphs passing through
the United States and surveilled individuals the FBI deemed “subversive,” which
included civil rights leaders and anti-war protestors, among many others. This
included not just indirect monitoring, but also infiltrating private
organizations and illegal burglary in the name of protecting against “domestic
dissent.”
Attempts at Restraint
Turn Into License for More
The success
of Van Deman’s vision and influence emerged in the 1970s, when the scale and
scope of the national surveillance state, and the American government’s abuse
of the power derived from controlling that machinery, were publicly revealed
due to the reporting of Seymour Hersh. The
subsequent investigation by the Church Committee revealed the extent of the
abuses by U.S. intelligence operations, noting that “virtually every element of
our society has been subjected to excessive government-ordered intelligence
inquiries.” The committee’s findings made clear that the unchecked surveillance
apparatus had unleashed an unconstrained leviathan that undermined the liberty
of the American people.
In response
to the committee’s findings, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, which was intended to oversee
and place judicial constraints on the government’s surveillance activities. The
act created the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). However,
as the revelations by Edward Snowden in
2013 made clear, these reforms were ineffective, with the members of the
security state acting with few if any real constraints on their behavior.
It is crucial to understand the origins of the U.S. surveillance
state both as an important historical episode, but also because it highlights a
broader point: a militaristic foreign policy has real effects on domestic
institutions and poses a genuine threat to domestic liberties. Many Americans
believe overseas interventions by the U.S. government protect domestic
liberties and promote freedom.
In our
book, “Tyranny Comes Home,” we
argue that this view is incomplete, if not entirely mistaken. When a society
adopts the values of an aggressive empire, it runs the risk of adopting
imperial characteristics at home.
Let’s Discuss the
Boomerang Effect
To explain why, we develop a theory of the “boomerang effect” to
understand the process through which intervention abroad increases the scope
of government power at home and erodes citizens’ liberties. Preparing for and
engaging in foreign intervention provides a testing ground for intervening
governments to experiment with new forms of social control over distant
populations. Under certain conditions, these innovations in social control are
then imported back to the intervening country, expanding the scope of domestic
government activities.
The result is that the intervening government becomes more
effective at controlling not only foreign populations but the domestic
population as well. Under this scenario, preparing and executing foreign
intervention changes domestic political institutions and the relationship
between citizen and government. Domestic freedom from others’ interference and
coercion is eroded or lost altogether as the state gains power over citizens.
The thriving
U.S. surveillance state clearly illustrates the logic of the boomerang effect.
The centralized apparatus of social control that the U.S. government first
developed in the Philippines in the late nineteenth century has boomeranged to
the United States, where it is flourishing more than a century later. As we discuss
in “Tyranny Comes Home,” the boomerang effect also offers important insights into other
cases, including the militarization of police, the domestic use of drones, and
torture in U.S. prisons. Ongoing foreign military interventions with no end in
sight will certainly lead to increased government power at home in the future.
Members of the U.S. government often use the rhetoric of freedom
and virtue to legitimize intervention. This supposed commitment to higher ideals
is indicated by the names assigned to the government’s actions, such as
“Operation Just Cause,” “Operation Enduring Freedom,” “Operation Iraqi
Freedom,” “Operation Valiant Guardian,” and “Operation Falcon Freedom.” Despite
this lofty rhetoric, the pernicious boomerang effect continues to operate:
preparing for and carrying out intervention abroad undermines freedom at home.
It is crucial for Americans to realize this unseen and overlooked
cost of a militarist foreign policy before it is too late and their liberties
are forever lost.
Christopher
J. Coyne is associate professor of economics at George Mason University. He is
the author of multiple books, including "Doing Bad by Doing Good" and
"After War," and co-author of "Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic
Fate of U.S. Militarism." Abigail R. Hall is assistant professor of
economics at the University of Tampa and co-author of "Tyranny Comes
Home."