THE Tory foreign secretary, William Hague, appeared on television yesterday morning to give a less than convincing pledge that ‘law abiding citizens’ have ‘nothing to fear’ from British intelligence services.
Hague was on the Andrew Marr programme to try and head off the mounting tide of anger over the revelations that the American National Security Agency (NSA) has been tapping into the internet and recording everything, including facebook messages, e-mails and phone calls made via the web.
Hague is also due to appear before parliament today to make a statement on allegations that the NSA has been sharing this secret information with its British counterpart, GCHQ.
The accusation is that private information collected on UK citizens by the US spies has been passed on to the British state – information that GCHQ cannot legally obtain for themselves.
Hague was quick to dismiss this saying that it was ‘fanciful’ and ‘nonsense’ to suggest that GCHQ would work with an agency in another country to circumvent the law.
Despite these denials and prevarications – Hague for instance refused to confirm or deny claims that GCHQ had access to the US spy programme codenamed Prism – evidence obtained by the Guardian newspaper suggested that GCHQ had generated 197 intelligence reports from Prism last year.
In fact, last year, the Tory home secretary, Theresa May, attempted to introduce into law the Communications Data Bill (CDB) which requires internet service providers to store for a year all details of online communications in the UK – such as the time, duration, originator and recipient of a communication and the location of the device from which it was made.
All details, including details of messages sent on social media, webmail, voice calls over the internet and gaming, in addition to emails and phone calls, would be made available to the police or security services on the say-so of the home secretary.
This bill was dropped by the coalition this year following an outcry about this massive infringement of civil liberties.
It now appears that the reason why it was dropped so readily is that for years this information had been provided through the back door by the NSA.
The inference being drawn is that it was used precisely to circumvent the law as it stands and provide the security agencies with another piece in the jigsaw of total surveillance of the entire population.
This electronic bugging of all communications stands along with the countrywide CCTV network which provides a record of all car journeys as well as filming people as they walk in the streets.
Such mass surveillance is clearly not aimed at ‘terrorists’ it is squarely aimed at the real enemy of the capitalist system – the working class and its middle class allies.
When Thatcher famously declared that the trade unions were the ‘enemy within’ and mobilised the entire forces of the capitalist state in an unsuccessful attempt to crush the mineworkers in 1985, she was dealing with just one, albeit powerful, section of the working class.
Today, the capitalist class face the entire working class and the middle class who are refusing to have their lives destroyed in order to bail-out a bankrupt system.
As the economic crisis of capitalism drives the working class along the road of insurrection so the capitalist state is forced to drop all pretence of bourgeois democracy and emerge for what it really is – the naked instrument of class domination.
So weak and decayed is the capitalist system that every man, woman or child is now regarded as the enemy and must be watched and bugged, ready to be picked off by the police.
Capitalism is the enemy of the people – offering nothing but a future of acute poverty with the population kept down by a police state.
The time is overripe to put this system out of its agony through the socialist revolution.
