“Little did I dream you could be so reckless and cruel”: Surveillance and the Abuse of Power

McCarthy and assistant Roy Cohn during the hearings

On 9 June 1954, in a packed Senate Caucus Room in Washington, D.C., televised live to 80 million Americans, a historic subcommittee hearing was reaching its climax.  Senator Joseph McCarthy was taking his anti-communist crusade to the United States Army.  Beginning on 17 April, the hearings had been broadcast in their entirety, and, 30 days in, a now famous exchange took place between McCarthy and Army special counsel Joseph Welch.  McCarthy, who had been revealed as a crude bully, repeatedly shouting “point of order” to cut off people when he didn’t like what they had to say, irrelevantly revealed that a member Welch’s staff had been a member of the National Lawyers’ Guild, the only lawyers willing to defend those accused of being communists during the period.  Welch responded by calling McCarthy “reckless and cruel”, asking “have you no sense of decency, sir?” Welch’s response was met with cheers from the gallery.

Though they concluded no wrongdoing on his part, the Army-McCarthy hearings are widely perceived to mark the beginning of Joe McCarthy’s downfall.  The junior Senator from Wisconsin had first come to prominence in February 1950, when he made a speech in which he claimed to have the names of numerous individuals in the State Department “who would appear to be either card carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party.”[1]  McCarthy’s claim made headlines, and despite a Senate Committee concluding that none of the names on McCarthy’s list had links with the communist party, he became a household name in America.  Having assumed the chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953, McCarthy was able to widen the target of his attacks, holding 169 hearings throughout 1953 and 1954.  Taking on the US Army proved to be a step too far, however.  Following the Army hearings, McCarthy was censured by the Senate in December 1954 and in January 1955 lost his position as the Subcommittee chair.  His influence declined from this point onwards until his death in 1957.

Surveillance by official bodies is by no means a 21^st century phenomenon.  Whilst McCarthy leant his name to the age of McCarthyism, his activities constituted only a fraction of the anti-communist movement in the US, which had begun in the 1940s.  As World War II ended and the Cold War began, the communist threat posed by the Soviet Union, and subsequently China, to the American way of life became a major concern for the US government.  The prominent convictions of Alger Hiss, Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs on espionage charges served only to fuel the American people’s paranoia.  In the name of protecting the US from this threat, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the FBI, under the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover, conducted widespread surveillance of US citizens and thousands were added to blacklists which ended their careers.

There are no longer reds under the beds.  Nowadays the bogeyman is not the communist but the terrorist.  Contrary to the popular view of McCarthyism, many of those accused were, or had been, members of the Communist Party.  Many had links to the Soviet Union.  Whether or not they can be deemed to be ‘innocent’ victims depends on your view of communism.  In advocating the overthrow of the government, communists would doubtless argue that their actions are intended for the betterment of mankind.  Doubtless fundamentalist terrorists would argue this too.  The crucial difference for the average citizen is that terrorism directly threatens their lives and communism does not.  There are a large number of people in the UK who probably feel that not voting for the Tories was their contribution to the betterment of mankind.  Does that give the government the right to label them a subversive threat and monitor their communications?

The leaks about the NSA PRISM programme released over the last month have stirred up arguments about the right to privacy and the nature of surveillance carried out by the government.  On the surface it would seem reasonable to argue that openness can only be good for a society, if it prevents more expenses scandals, regulatory body cover-ups and police smear campaigns.  Openness is the key to combatting corruption.  As McCarthyism teaches us, we enter dubious moral territory when those in power are left to their own devices to decide who constitutes a threat to the government.

On the other hand, we understandably rely on our governments to keep us safe.  In his defence of PRISM, Obama argued that we “can’t have a hundred per cent security and also then have a hundred per cent privacy and zero inconvenience”, and maybe he’s right.  I want to be safe.  And I know that terrorists of all guises couldn't care less about me as an individual, and my views on privacy, when they take a bomb onto the London Underground or fly a plane into a skyscraper.  It would be fantastic if there was no requirement for security services, but the fact remains that there are people out there who want to kill, indiscriminately, as many others as possible.  Some level of surveillance is necessary and the intelligence services cannot protect us if our enemies know exactly how they are doing it.

I am undecided as to whether Edward Snowden is a champion of civil liberties or simply a nobody seeking notoriety.  Everybody likes a guy who knows a secret and despite our apparent outrage we have an insatiable appetite for government conspiracy theories.  But, traitor or not, Snowden’s actions have certainly highlighted the need for serious debate on this topic.

If there is a lesson to be taken away from all this it is that our privacy laws are outdated and desperately need reviewing in order to catch up with developments in electronic communication.  To say that we should not expect anything on the internet to be private ignores the fact that huge portions of our lives are lived online nowadays, from banking, to shopping, to passport applications.  We would not expect our post to be intercepted and read and our electronic communications should be treated with the same respect.  There is a difference between that which we choose to make public, our Twitter posts for example, and those communications (emails, text messages) which are intended for specific recipients.  The law has not caught up with technology and it badly needs to.  Unfettered, warrantless access to our emails, internet browsing history and mobile phone records is completely disproportionate.  Under existing legislation in the UK the police can demand communications data for terror and serious crime suspects, and these powers have been widely used already.  Judicial oversight can be given to accessing electronic communications without compromising our security, in the same way a search warrant can be obtained to enter a suspect’s house.

I am more than happy for my government to develop the tools to keep me safe from terrorists in the cyber age, but as the excesses of McCarthyism demonstrate, the abuse of power is not purely the purview of totalitarian states.  This is a universal truth that can be transposed from phone tapping in the 1950s to email hacking in the 2010s.  The solution is an urgent review of legislation accompanied by robust regulation; terrorists will not be defeated by the creation of a police state.  Sending back the McCarran Security Act in 1950 (a veto which would be overridden by Congress), President Truman wrote that “we will destroy all that we seek to preserve, if we sacrifice the liberties of our citizens in a misguided attempt to achieve national security.”[2]  The leaders of the ‘free world’ should take note.

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[1] Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents, (Bedford, 2002), p.240.

[2] Ibid., p.220.