America’s Emerging Police State: A Brief History
It didn’t start with the NSA. ■ As Congress and the American people grapple with the fallout from Edward Snowden’s stunning revelations – which continue to come in, thanks to Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian – we are hearing a kind of defense coming from the authoritarians in our midst: none of this is new, they argue, so what’s all the fuss about? In a sense, they are right: the "legal" and political outlines of an American police state have been emerging from the fulcrum of war and the turbulence of our domestic politics since World War II. The only difference now is the technology, which has developed far beyond the imagination of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s first director, who widely deployed the earliest wiretapping capabilities of government snoops. ■ It began, at least in a systematic way, during the presidency of yet another "progressive" hero, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who spied on his political enemies on the right without the least bit of concern with the Fourth Amendment. His aim was to destroy and possibly jail those who opposed his policies at home and abroad. And although wiretapping was widely practiced, low tech often sufficed, as shown in the story of Rose Wilder Lane’s wartime encounter with the authorities.