Vol. 76/No. 44      December 3, 2012

On Nov. 9, CIA Director Petraeus abruptly announced he was resigning after the FBI found he had an extramarital affair with Paula Broadwell, his biographer.

The media jumped on the story like piranhas on a piece of meat, taking part in the scurry to dig up details about the private lives of the generals. This worthless drivel, of no direct interest to the working class, is of a piece with the deepening factionalism, demagogy and degradation of political discourse that characterizes bourgeois politics in the U.S. today—between and within their two parties, in their armed forces and among their “intelligence community.”

If the FBI has no problem spying on Washington’s highest-ranking military and intelligence officials, much less so do they blink at spying, disrupting, framing-up and victimizing working-class militants and others whom they deem threat to the interests of the capitalist rulers.

According to media reports, the FBI initiated an investigation after Jill Kelley, an acquaintance of both Petraeus and Allen, complained in June she had received threatening emails ultimately traced to Broadwell. While prying into Broadwell’s communications, federal cops discovered her affair with Petraeus.

But as snoops were also poking into Kelley’s emails, they found she had received thousands of communications from Allen. The Pentagon announced Nov. 13 that Allen was under investigation and his nomination to be the next commander of U.S. European Com-mand and the commander of NATO forces in Europe was put on hold.

The events have prompted a spurt of media attention on the accelerated expansion of government spying on electronic communications. This is of direct interest to the working class.

“Authorized snooping has quietly but rapidly reached an unprecedented level in the United States,” wrote Joseph Menn Nov. 17 in a Reuters dispatch. The FBI “can gather technical information about private citizens’ email accounts with only a subpoena,” which “do not require a judge’s approval.”

“The government has search and subpoena powers that can be used to get any and all information, whether it is stored on your computer or, as is more likely these days, stored in the cloud,” i.e. Internet providers’ computers, Nicole Perlroth wrote Nov. 16 in the New York Times.

Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, not even a rubber-stamped warrant is required for emails six months old or older. “Even if e-mails are more recent, the federal government needs a search warrant only for ‘unopened’ e-mail,” Perlroth reported. “The rest requires only a subpoena.”

Internet provider Google reported Nov. 13 it received requests by U.S. government agencies for data on more than 16,000 accounts in the first half of the year, up from 12,000 in the prior half-year. It complied with 90 percent of them.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home