Vol. 78/No. 4      February 3, 2014

President Barack Obama’s Jan. 17 speech on National Security Agency spying was intended to convince us that expanding spy operations and methods are nothing “ordinary folks” need to pay attention to. That’s for the bad guys. Don’t worry, we are told, spies are our friends, they’re just like us, and the president himself is on the case.

While the NSA’s data mining program is not directed at the working class in the U.S. today, the ongoing assault on rights and constitutional protections by the capitalists’ government is very much our concern.

Starting in the 1970s and escalating rapidly after 9/11, the propertied rulers have sought acceptance for their stepped-up spying as minor intrusions of privacy required of “us all” in face of “terrorist” threats to the homeland. “Why should you care if you’re not a terrorist?” they say.

NSA Internet spying is just one small piece of the government’s network of snoops, informants and provocateurs. The mass collection of communications records are an extension of airport luggage and body searches, X-ray screening in government buildings, appeals to report “suspicious bags” on the subway, increasing use of conspiracy charges to “stop attacks before they happen,” and stepped-up targeting of foreign-born residents, whether “legal” or “illegal.”

While many of these efforts are today primarily used by Washington against al-Qaedist organizations and adherents, the rulers seek to have them in place because they know they will face greater challenges in the future. As the crisis of capitalist production and trade deepens, the bosses will continue to increase their attacks on the living standards, working conditions and rights of the working class. They have a premonition of the coming class battles it will engender, which is part of what drives their attack on rights today.

The working class is the ultimate target of the bosses’ wiretaps, black-bag jobs, frame-ups and provocations. In addition to NSA electronic spying, the rulers are ramping up the FBI’s “counterterrorism” units. The New York cops’ Intelligence Unit alone numbers over 1,000. As labor actions and political protests increase, government plants and informers will be deployed to disrupt them.

The big majority of workers and farmers do not yet directly feel these developments are aimed at them. But increasingly more focused probes by the rulers will be seen as what they are — and resisted — as working people and the labor movement are pressed into struggle.
 
 
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Obama says must keep spy ‘tools,’ seeks to legitimize gov’t intrusions
 
 
 
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