by PRATAP CHATTERJEE
US President Barack Obama PHOTO/Cool Spotters
Nine Things Obama Could Do Before Leaving Office to Reveal the Nature of the National Security State
In less than seven weeks, President Barack Obama will hand over the government to Donald Trump, including access to the White House, Air Force One, and Camp David. Trump will also, of course, inherit the infamous nuclear codes, as well as the latest in warfare technology, including the Central Intelligence Agency’s fleet of killer drones, the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance and data collection apparatus, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s enormous system of undercover informants.
Before the recent election, Obama repeatedly warned that a Trump victory could spell disaster. “If somebody starts tweeting at three in the morning because SNL [Saturday Night Live] made fun of you, you can’t handle the nuclear codes,” Obama typically told a pro-Clinton rally in November. “Everything that we’ve done over the last eight years,” he added in an interview with MSNBC, “will be reversed with a Trump presidency.”
Yet, just days after Obama made those comments and Trump triumphed, the Guardian reported that his administration was deeply involved in planning to give Trump access not just to those nuclear codes, but also to the massive new spying and killing system that Obama personally helped shape and lead. “Obama’s failure to rein in George Bush’s national security policies hands Donald Trump a fully loaded weapon,” Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, observed recently. “The president’s failure to understand that these powers could not be entrusted in the hands of any president, not even his, have now put us in a position where they are in the hands of Donald Trump.”
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Surveillance
4. Disclose Mass Surveillance Programs: Even though Senator Obama opposed the collection of data from U.S. citizens, President Obama has vigorously defended the staggering expansion of the national security state during his two terms in office. “You can’t have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said in 2013, days after Edward Snowden leaked a trove of National Security Agency data that transformed our view of what our government has collected about all of us. “You know, we’re going to have to make some choices as a society.”
Thanks to Snowden, we also now know that the U.S. government secretly received permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to collect all U.S. telephone metadata via programs like Stellarwind; created a program called Prism to tunnel directly into the servers of nine major Internet companies; tapped the global fiber optic cables that lie on the ocean beds; collected text messages via a program called Dishfire; set up a vast database called X-Keyscore to track all the data from any given individual; and even built a program, Optic Nerve, to turn on users’ webcams, allowing for the collection of substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. (For a searchable index of all such revelations so far, click here.)
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