Counter-Terror Panoptics: Surveillance Programs and Human Rights NGO Opposition in Comparative Context.

The United States and other democratic polities are in the midst of a sustained expansion of domestic and global electronic and human surveillance projects, ostensibly in order to detect the presence and activities of terrorist cells and networks, and espionage and sabotage activities of enemy states. The mobilization of the surveillance apparatus of democratic polities has not been without controversy and concern, which has voiced by human rights, civil liberties, and privacy NGOs, and investigative reporting in both mainstream and alternative media. While the current wave of expansion, and concern about, surveillance projects, is at times presented as a unique problem created by the various “wars on terror” of the early 21st century, the legacy of previous waves of surveillance mobilization and opposition inform the contemporary debate about the need for, and danger of, massive domesticand global surveillance projects.This paper examines the current mobilization of the surveillance apparatus, and concern about this mobilization, in the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Union, in a comparative historical context. The first section of the paper examines quantitative indicators of the waxing and waning of wiretapping in the United States and the United Kingdom from the immediate pre-World War II period to the present, and utilizes analytic statistics (time series analysis) to examine the correlates of domestic surveillance mobilization. This analysis is designed to answer the following questions: is domestic surveillance mobilization provoked more by external or internal threats, and which types of external or internal threats is surveillance activity most sensitive to (global levels of terrorist events, power differentials between peer competitors, internal disorders and/or criminality)?After discussing the patterns of expansion and contraction of internal surveillance activity of the United States and United Kingdom in historical and global context in the mid-20th to early 21st centuries, the paper moves on to a series of case studies examining specific electronic and human intelligence based surveillance projects in the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union from the 1990s to the present. In particular this paper examines the open source literature on the internal surveillance operations, and enabling legislation, of surveillance programs carried out by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and National Security Agency, UK GCHQ and MI5, and the European Community’s reaction to the Echelon surveillance project, and attempts to integrate the surveillance activities of the member states of the European Union, which was accelerated by the Madrid and London terrorist attacks of 2004 and 2005.These case studies will examine the: 1) debate surrounding the enabling legislation for surveillance projects; 2) open source evidence of the range and intensity of these various surveillance projects; and 3) how NGOs, and mainstream and alternative media, become aware of these surveillance projects, and begin to mobilize against, and draw attention to, the possible threat to human rights, privacy rights, and civil liberties presented by these projects.The goals of these case studies are fourfold. These cases investigate: 1) the rationale for electronic and human surveillance enabling legislation and projects; 2) the origins of concern with, and opposition to, the legislation and projects; 3) the application of political movement literature to examine the mobilization of opposition to these pieces of legislation and projects; and, 4) locating this specific debate in the broader discussion about the domestic impact of the "global war on terror" and other "emergent threats". ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]