The Suffocation of Democracy in India

Vijay Prashad

Photograph Source: Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs – GODL-India

On December 18 and 19, 141 members of the two houses of India’s Parliament were suspended, as of December 19, by the Speaker of the lower house, Om Birla. Each of these members belongs to the parties that oppose the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The government said that these elected members were suspended for “unruly behavior.” The opposition had shaped itself into the INDIA bloc, which included almost every party not affiliated with the BJP. They responded to this action by calling it the “murder of democracy” and alleging that the BJP government has installed an “extreme level of dictatorship” in India. This act comes after a range of attempts to undermine India’s elected opposition.

Meanwhile, on December 18, the popular Indian news website Newsclick announced that India’s Income Tax (IT) department “has virtually frozen our accounts.” Newsclick can no longer make payments to its employees, which means that this news media portal is now close to being silenced. The editors at Newsclick said that this action by the IT department is “a continuation of the administrative-legal siege” that began with the Enforcement Directorate raids in February 2021, was deepened by the IT department survey in September 2021, and the large-scale raids of October 3, 2023, that resulted in the arrest of Newsclick’s founder Prabir Purkayastha and its administrative officer Amit Chakraborty. Both remain in prison.

Organs of Indian Democracy

In February 2022, the Economist noted that “the organs of India’s democracy are decaying.” Two years before that assessment, India’s leading economist and Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen said that “democracy is government by discussion, and, if you make discussion fearful, you are not going to get a democracy, no matter how you count the votes. And that is massively true now. People are afraid now. I have never seen this before.” India’s most respected journalist, N. Ram (former editor of the Hindu), wrote in the Prospect in August 2023 about this “decaying” of Indian democracy and the fear of discussion in the context of the attack on Newsclick. This attack, he wrote, “marks a new low for press freedom in my country, which has been caught-up in a decade-long trend of uninterrupted down sliding in the ‘new India’ of Narendra Modi. We have witnessed a state-engineered McCarthyite campaign of disinformation, scaremongering, and vilification against Newsclick.” The world, he wrote, “should be watching in horror.”

In May 2022, 10 organizations—including Amnesty International, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Reporters Without Borders—released a strong statement, saying that the Indian “authorities should stop targeting, prosecuting journalists and online critics.” This statement documented how the Indian government has used laws against counterterrorism and sedition to silence the media, when it has been critical of government policies. Use of technology—such as Pegasus—has allowed the government to spy on reporters and to use their private communications for legal action against them. Journalists have been physically attacked and intimidated (with special focus on Muslim journalists, journalists who cover Jammu and Kashmir, and journalists who covered the farmer protests of 2021-22). When the government began to target Newsclick, it was part of this broad assault on the media. That broader attack prepared the journalist associations to respond clearly when the Delhi Police arrested Purkayastha and Chakraborty. The Press Club of India noted that its reporters were “deeply concerned” about the events, while the Editor’s Guild of India said that the government must “not create a general atmosphere of intimidation under the shadow of draconian laws.”

Role of the New York Times

In April 2020, the New York Times ran a story with a strong headline about the situation of press freedom in India: “Under Modi, India’s Press Is Not So Free Anymore.” In that story, the reporters showed how Modi met with owners of the major media houses in March 2020 to tell them to publish “inspiring and positive stories.” When the Indian media began to report the government’s catastrophic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Modi’s government went to the Supreme Court to argue that all Indian media must “publish the official version.” The Court denied the government’s request that the media must only publish the government’s view but instead said that the media must publish the government’s view alongside other interpretations. Siddharth Varadarajan, editor of the Wire, said that the court’s order was “unfortunate,” and that it could be seen as “giving sanction for prior censorship of content in the media.”

The Indian government’s “administrative-legal siege” on Newsclick began a few months later because the website had offered independent reporting not only on the COVID-19 pandemic but also on the movement to defend India’s constitution and on the movement of the farmers. Despite repeated searches and interrogations, the various agencies of the Indian government could not find any illegality in the operations of Newsclick. Vague suggestions about the impropriety of funding from overseas fell flat since Newsclick said that it followed Indian law in its receipt of funds.

When the case against Newsclick appeared to go cold, the New York Times—in August 2023—published an enormously speculative and disparaging article against the foundations that provided some of Newsclick’s funds. The day after the story appeared, high officials of the Indian government went on a rampage against Newsclick, using the story as “evidence” of a crime. The New York Times had been warned previously that this kind of story would be used by the Indian government to suppress press freedom. Indeed, the story by the New York Times provided the Indian government with the credibility to try and shut down Newsclick, which is what they are now doing with the IT department’s decision.

Upside Down World

The 141 members of Parliament are accused of trying to justify a breach of the parliament building that took place on December 13. Two men jumped from the press gallery into the hall and released smoke canisters to protest the failure of the elected officials to debate issues of inflation, unemployment, and ethnic violence in Manipur. The men received passes to enter parliament from Pratap Simha, a parliamentarian of the BJP. He has not been suspended. The BJP used this incident to suspend the opposition parliamentarians because they either did not condemn the incident, or they came out in defense of colleagues who were suspended.

Neither of the people who threw the smoke bombs into parliament nor those who planned that action have a political background, let alone any linkage to the opposition. Manoranjan D lost his job in an internet firm and had to return to assist his family work their farm; Sagar Sharma drove a taxi after he had to drop out of school due to financial problems at home. Azad had an MA, an MEd, and an MPhil, but could not find a job. These are young people frustrated with Modi’s India, but with no political connections. They tried to use normal democratic means to be heard but were not successful. Their act is one of desperation, a symptom of a broader social crisis; the suspension of the parliamentarians and the attack at Newsclick’s finances are also symptoms of that crisis: the suffocation of democracy in India.

The “election victory” of al-Sisi in Egypt

Johannes Stern

On Monday, the Egyptian electoral authority announced the victory of military dictator General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. He received 89.6 percent in the three-day elections between December 10 and 12 and is therefore set to rule the country until at least 2030. 

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (left) shakes US President Joe Biden's hand at the GCC+3 summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, July 16, 2022. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in the background. [Photo: The White House]

If anything was needed to reduce the human rights propaganda of the imperialist powers to absurdity in the midst of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians, it is their partnership with the Butcher of Cairo.

Al-Sisi, who seized power with Western support almost ten years ago, on July 3, 2013, following mass protests against the Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, leads one of the bloodiest terror regimes in the world. His rule began with a bloody massacre. 

On August 14, 2013, at al-Sisi’s command, Egyptian army and police forces stormed two protest camps of opponents of the coup in Cairo and murdered over a thousand people, including many women and children. Human Rights Watch called the massacre the “worst incident of unlawful mass killings in Egypt’s modern history.”

Hundreds of other opponents of the regime have been killed in the last decade under al-Sisi’s rule. Tens of thousands of political prisoners languish in the country’s notorious torture dungeons. Independent media is censored and strikes and protests are brutally suppressed. The same applies to parties and organisations critical of the regime.

The death penalty is also used excessively under al-Sisi. In 2017 and 2018 alone, over 1,100 people were sentenced to death. At least 356 were executed in 2021. With the exception of China, this is the highest number of death sentences recorded by Amnesty International worldwide in 2021. Executions are being carried out more and more frequently. In 2020, the number tripled to 107 compared to the previous year.

Immediately before the election, the regime intensified its repression of all opposition. “Al-Sisi has deployed the entire state apparatus and the security authorities to prevent any serious candidate from running at all,” commented Hossam Bahgatac, head of the non-governmental Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. “Just like last time, he has handpicked his opponents, who are only running against the president for the sake of appearances and do not criticise his disastrous policies, or do so only very cautiously.”

Al-Sisi’s “counter-candidates”—Farid Zahran from the Egyptian Social Democratic Party (4.49 percent), Hazem Omar from the Republican People’s Party (4.01 percent) and Abdel-Sanad Yamama from the New Wafd Party (1.86 percent)—all came from parties that are in fact part of the regime.

The campaign of Ahmed Tantawi, a former leader of the Nasserist Karama Party, was suppressed by the regime. On November 7, the authorities put Tantawi, his campaign manager and 21 previously detained supporters on trial. The next hearing will take place on January 9, 2024.

The regime’s bloodthirsty and dictatorial approach has not diminished al-Sisi’s support from the imperialist powers. On the contrary, immediately after the election results were announced, the US ambassador to Egypt, Herro Kader Mustafa Garg, congratulated the Egyptian tyrant. The Biden administration wanted to continue its “solid partnership with the government of President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi,” Mustafa said in a statement. 

According to an Egyptian media report, she emphasised “the multifaceted nature of the relationship between the US and Egypt, which encompasses a wide range of shared priorities.” These included “bolstering regional stability and security, deepening economic and trade ties, and enhancing cultural and people-to-people connections between Americans and Egyptians.”

The leading European powers and the European Union had already repeatedly expressed their support for al-Sisi before the elections.  

“Germany stands by the side of our Egyptian friends to support them in times of crisis in overcoming existing difficulties,” declared the German ambassador to Egypt, Frank Hartmann, at the beginning of October. Germany was an important partner in Egypt’s “modernisation efforts” and supports the country’s “ambitious reforms,” he said. 

There are two main reasons for the close cooperation between the imperialist powers and al-Sisi. Firstly, like the long-term dictator Hosni Mubarak, who was overthrown in 2011, al-Sisi acts as imperialism’s governor in the region—and is handsomely rewarded and armed to the teeth for this. Egypt receives military aid totaling over one billion euros a year from the US alone. Germany exports more weapons to Egypt than to any other country. In 2021, Berlin authorised arms deliveries worth around 4.3 billion euros to Cairo.

In return, the regime does the dirty work of the imperialists. It is currently playing a key role in the genocide of the Palestinians. Al-Sisi’s criticism of Israel’s actions during the election campaign cannot hide the fact that Egypt is sealing off the Gaza Strip from the south and is closely coordinating its actions with the far-right Netanyahu regime in the blockade of aid deliveries and other measures. 

In the Sinai Peninsula, the Egyptian military is waging a brutal war against the population under the guise of fighting “Islamist terror,” which is similar in its methods to Israel’s actions against the Palestinians. In a two-year investigation published in 2019, Human Rights Watch documented “crimes including mass arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, torture, extrajudicial killings, and possibly unlawful air and ground attacks against civilians.”

The second reason why the imperialist powers as well as Israel and the other Arab governments, Russia and China support al-Sisi lies in the class character of the regime. The military coup in 2013 was not simply directed against the Muslim Brotherhood, to which Morsi also belonged. It was aimed at the bloody suppression of the Egyptian revolution.

At the beginning of 2011, millions of workers and young people had overthrown Mubarak with mass strikes and protests, shaking Egyptian capitalism and the dominance of imperialism in the Middle East. With al-Sisi’s military dictatorship, the Egyptian bourgeoisie tried to drown the mass movement, which continued while Morsi was in power, in blood.

After ten years of brutal repression, this strategy is coming to an end. In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands have protested in Egypt against the genocide in Gaza. On October 20, as part of worldwide mass protests, tens of thousands stormed the central Tahrir Square in Cairo, the epicentre of the revolutionary uprising that led to the fall of Mubarak in 2011.

Following the election victory, the bourgeois media warned of a renewed escalation. “Getting re-elected was the easy part for Sisi. But Egypt is on the brink,” reads a headline from the Washington Post. In addition to the “public anguish over the suffering of Palestinians,” the regime is also confronted with massive social discontent that could erupt at any time. 

“Basically the entire duration of Sisi’s presidency has been an endemic series of economic crises—and it’s not just economic hardship, it’s humiliation,” the Post quotes Timothy Kaldas, deputy director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, as saying. “While all this is happening, Egyptians are watching the regime enrich itself.

World Health Organization designates Omicron JN.1 a “variant of interest” due to its rapid global spread

Benjamin Mateus

On Tuesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) classified the Omicron JN.1 strain of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, a “variant of interest” due to its rapid global spread. Although the WHO acknowledged that JN.1 (a descendent of the BA.2.86 variant nicknamed “Pirola”) is more immune-evasive and infectious than any other variants, they added the unsubstantiated claim that it does not appear to pose a greater risk to the population than the recent slew of variants that have spread globally.

Such statements should be taken with a large grain of salt and placed in their appropriate socio-political context. The decision of the WHO to end its public health emergency (PHE) declaration for COVID-19 last May precipitated the virtual scrapping of all pandemic surveillance systems in most countries, making it far more difficult for scientists and public health experts to determine the true severity of a given variant.

Based on the limited data available, it is clear that JN.1 is fueling substantial waves of infection throughout the world, with thousands of ongoing global excess deaths each day and untold masses newly suffering from Long COVID.

In the US, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), JN.1 is becoming dominant nationally this week, coinciding with the Christmas travel season. The latest data from Biobot Analytics released Monday show that SARS-CoV-2 wastewater levels have continued to surge. The peak of the wave is still weeks away, and will be fueled dramatically by JN.1 and the millions of travelers visiting family for the holidays without masks or any mitigation measures.

Data analyst Dr. Mike Hoerger noted, “We are headed into potentially the second largest COVID surge all-time in the US. If wastewater levels follow historic trends, we will reach two million infections per day at peak surge with 4.2 percent of the population actively infectious on January 10.” According to his model, the peak will arrive between January 3-17, with an estimate of 1.7 to 2.2 million infections per day.

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Hospitalizations for COVID-19 have risen more than 50 percent across the US in less than six weeks and stand at 23,432 for the week ending on December 9.

In their report, the WHO said that the Western Pacific Region is seeing the biggest jump in JN.1 based on sequencing data. In Singapore, where vaccination rates are among the highest in the world, wastewater and hospitalization rates are surging quickly. While official weekly cases were hovering around 15,000 for the past 2-3 months, by December 9 these shot up to 56,043, the highest recorded in the year. Hospitalizations have nearly tripled in recent weeks, from 136 at the end of November to 350 by mid-December.

In response to this wave, Singapore’s ministry of health recently released a statement “strongly encouraging” people to don their masks once again. The ministry added, “To preserve our healthcare capacity, MOH has been working with public hospitals for contingency planning, including ensuring adequate manpower and deferring non-urgent electives o maximize bed capacity for urgent cases in need of acute care.”

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Several countries in Europe, including Denmark, Spain, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, have seen an exponential increase in COVID wastewater levels and an attendant spike in hospitalizations.

In Germany, wastewater data are currently reaching the highest on record. Practitioners are reporting large numbers of people with upper respiratory infections, half of which are COVID. With approximately 10 percent of the country currently suffering from respiratory infections, public health services and physician offices are having difficulty keeping pace.

Data scientist and modeler Jay Weiland wrote on December 16, “Witnessing some of these record setting wastewater signals is now MANY European countries after Pirola dominance is eye opening. We have to prepare ourselves for at least the possibility that we see a very large spike in the US in coming weeks.” He also noted that once JN.1 became dominant in France, hospital admissions began to rapidly climb. 

Variant tracker Ryan Hisner remarked on December 4, “If a new variant is going to cause an increase in infections or hospitalizations, we usually don’t see any indications of that until it’s surpassed 50 percent of cases. With JN.1, some European countries are about there. But the UK, Sweden, the US, and Asia are weeks behind.”

Hisner made the point with the Alpha variant in London in early December 2020. Once it passed 50 percent of overall sequences, COVID infections began to rise dramatically and with it the hospitalizations and deaths.  

The rapid global spread of JN.1 is ushering in the fifth year of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has already caused over 27 million excess deaths and potentially hundreds of millions of cases of Long COVID globally.

Recent studies published in The Lancet and Statistics Canada reaffirm the immense dangers that the virus continues to pose to global society, and that even if most people develop little to no symptoms during the acute phase of a COVID infection, the impact on their organ system and potential for Long COVID remain considerable.

In the US, excess deaths for 2023 have remained stubbornly high (160,000), while disproportionately affecting young working-age people. As actuarial reports have noted, the causes for many of these deaths showed higher mortality from liver, kidney, and cardiovascular diseases, as well as diabetes, all of which have been proven to be precipitated by COVID infection.

In the UK, excess deaths were up 7.2 percent for 2022 and 8.6 percent for 2023 compared to the five-year average before 2020. In a recent published report on the UK in the Lancet Regional Health, the authors wrote,

in the period from week ending 3 June 2022 to 30 June 2023, excess deaths for all causes were relatively greatest for 50-64 years old (15 percent higher than expected), compared with 11 percent higher for 25-49 and those under 25 years old, and about nine percent higher for over 65 years old group.

In particular, for middle-aged adults, deaths from cardiovascular diseases, strokes, respiratory infections, and diabetes were considerably higher.

The evolution of JN.1 underscores the continued ability of SARS-CoV-2 to mutate into potentially more dangerous variants. It makes abundantly clear the fraudulent character of the decisions by the WHO, the Biden administration and virtually every world government to declare the pandemic no longer a global public health emergency.

The present state of the pandemic, which is now met with a collective shrug by world capitalism, epitomizes the complete inability of this social system to address the most urgent needs of humanity. A highly damaging and dangerous virus is simply being ignored and allowed to circulate among billions of people, to the great detriment of the population.

Deadly earthquake strikes impoverished region of China

Peter Symonds

An earthquake of magnitude 6.2 hit one of the poorest regions in China late on Monday night, destroying or damaging more than 150,000 homes, forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of people and damaging vital infrastructure.

Residents pass by a house that crumbled after an earthquake in Dahejia town in northwestern China's Gansu province, Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2023. A strong overnight earthquake rattled a mountainous region of northwestern China, authorities said Tuesday, destroying homes, leaving residents out in a below-freezing winter night and killing many in the nation's deadliest quake in nine years. [AP Photo/Ng Han Guan]

As of Wednesday morning, according to the state media, at least 134 people were killed and around a thousand injured in northwestern Gansu province and the neighbouring province of Qinghai. The toll could rise as rescuers search for survivors in very cold conditions, with temperatures of minus 16 degrees Celsius on Tuesday morning.

In Gansu, the worst-affected province, some 87,000 people have been moved to temporary shelters. The injured have either been sent to hospital or treated at a mobile field hospital set up by the Gansu Provincial Peoples Hospital’s emergency medical relief team, equipped to carry out emergency surgical operations.

Reporting from the sixth commune of Dahe village in Gansu province, the state media found many houses were either at risk of collapse, or had already crumbled to the ground. Many homes were built from earth and clay. An old man being carried out of his damaged home said: “I’ve lived for more than 80 years and had never seen such a big earthquake.”

Conscious of the disaster’s potential to trigger social unrest, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for “all-out” search and rescue efforts and assistance to the people affected by the earthquake, including for their resettlement.

The rescue and relief effort has involved about 2,200 personnel from the Gansu provincial fire department and 900 from the forest brigade, as well as 260 professional emergency rescue workers, according to the Xinhua news agency. Hundreds of military personnel and police were also sent.

Officials from the hard-hit county of Jishishan told the media that they lacked the resources to cope with the disaster and had to rely on the provincial government. The county has a population of around 260,000 people, mostly spread out in villages and townships.

The Gansu provincial government allocated 20 million yuan ($US2.8 million) for the emergency work and also sent supplies of cotton tents, beds, quilts, cotton mattresses and stoves.

In phone interview with Agence France Presse on Tuesday, Ma Dongdong explained that his home had been destroyed and his business, a milk tea shop, damaged. “I just feel anxious, what other feelings could there be?” he said.

Ma spent the first night in a field with his wife, children and some neighbours huddled around a fire, as they were fearful of returning home due to aftershocks. They went to a tent settlement housing about 700 people the following morning but by the afternoon were still waiting for blankets and warm clothes.

The earthquake, at a depth of 10 km, struck Jishishan county on Monday just before midnight. The epicentre was 5 km from the provincial border between Gansu and Qinghai. Nine aftershocks of magnitude 3.0 and above were recorded by Tuesday morning. Two of those were greater than 4.0 in magnitude.

Li Haibing from the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences told the media that that the relatively high number of casualties was in part because the quake was shallow and mainly a vertical motion, causing more violent shaking. Li also pointed to the low quality of buildings in the relatively poor region and the fact that the quake took place in the middle of the night.

The earthquake also triggered landslides and half buried one village in silt. In the village of Jintian, the homes of 36 families, totaling 177 villagers, were destroyed by sand boils. As of yesterday, 13 people were still missing, including a pregnant woman. Four bodies had been found by rescuers.

Villages like Jintian are in a dry area, near no river and have seen no rainfall. Asked why it had suffered a severe landslide, Wang Tun, head of an earthquake early warning laboratory in China’s Sichuan Province, told the Global Times that a strong earthquake, due to its violent impact on the Earth’s crust, can liquify water-saturated sand and soil situated deep underground, then force the liquid sludge to the surface.

A rescue worker told the Global Times that rescue work in Jintian village had been difficult as the mud made it impossible for workers to walk. A floating bridge had to be constructed of wooden planks to reach the affected area.

Earthquakes are virtually impossible to predict with any accuracy. However, the South China Morning Post reported that researchers in the Chinese province of Shaanxi have developed a method that has enabled them to forecast every quake with a magnitude of 7.0 or more in the past 10 years, but not their exact locations.

The researchers said they knew the latest earthquake was on the way when they received a text alert about abnormal data readings from multiple sensors. They calculated that a quake of magnitude around 6.27 had a high probability of hitting within three to five days, but not where precisely.

Earthquakes are common in China’s western provinces such as Gansu, which lies on the boundary of the tectonically active Qinghai-Tibetan plateau. China’s deadliest quake in recent decades was in 2008 when a massive tremor of magnitude 8.0 struck the province of Sichuan, killing nearly 70,000 people.

The Sichuan disaster provoked an outpouring of anger from victims who had lost their loved ones in schools and other buildings that collapsed. Relatively new schools were flattened a matter of seconds, making it impossible for children to escape, while surrounding buildings were still standing. Angry parents denounced the schools as substandard “Tofu” projects in which corrupt local officials and businessmen had siphoned off public money.

In a bid to assuage public anger, the Chinese government committee was finally forced to acknowledge that shoddy workmanship and substandard materials were behind the collapse of some 7,000 school classrooms.

Today, under conditions of rapidly worsening social tensions, Xi’s call for an “all out” effort following the latest earthquake has the character of a pre-emptive action to head off any outburst of public questioning and anger. Xi declared the eradication of “extreme poverty” in China in 2021, but the dismal photos of collapsed earth and clay dwellings speak otherwise.

National defense budget extends illegal electronic spying on US citizens

Kevin Reed

In a politically dishonest and devious manner, another four months of illegal warrantless electronic surveillance of the American public was slipped into the bipartisan National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) approved by both houses of Congress on December 14. The $890 billion bill is expected to be signed into law by President Joe Biden soon.

NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland [Photo by Fort George G. Meade Public Affairs Office / CC BY 4.0]

As part of the massive spending on the US proxy-war in Ukraine against Russia, funding for Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, preparations for military conflict with China and expansion of nuclear third world war readiness, the Democrats and Republicans kept a critical element of their strategy in place: ongoing spying on the American public in violation of basic democratic rights.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 2008 states that the US intelligence community—including the National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)—cannot target American citizens when performing electronic surveillance of foreigners, because they are protected against such targeting by the Fourth Amendment.

In fact, the justifications given for using warrantless surveillance of non-US citizens are also a violation of fundamental rights because they are connected with lies spread by the entire political establishment and military intelligence apparatus about threats to US national security posed by the enemies of American imperialism. These purported threats are then used by the intelligence agencies to spy on everyone, regardless of their country of origin, whenever they want.

The provisions of Section 702 that are now being extended to April 2024 have been used repeatedly by US government agencies to collect and search the online communications of tens of thousands of Americans without a warrant. While the public is universally opposed to Section 702, politicians from both parties voted 310 to 118 in the House and 87 to 13 in the Senate to extend the provisions and allow this illegal spying to continue.

According to a report on December 8 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), “FBI agents have been using the Section 702 databases to conduct millions of invasive searches for Americans’ communications, including those of protesters, racial justice activists, 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, journalists, and even members of Congress.”

This statement by the EFF is based on the findings of a 297-page report on Section 702 surveillance published on September 28 by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), a body tasked by the White House to monitor and investigate the functioning of warrantless surveillance by the intelligence agencies.

In a section called “Improper Queries,” for example, the PCLOB reports on page 258 that an FBI field office analyst “routinely queried the names of victims and witnesses of crimes, even though there was not a basis to believe there would be any relevant information in the Section 702 database.”

In another section called, “Queries related to First Amendment Activities,” the report says on page 197 that an FBI agent, “conducted 141 queries of identifiers associated with activists who were arrested in connection with protesting the murder of George Floyd in Washington, DC between June 3 and June 5, 2020, despite the lack of any reason to believe there would be information on these individuals in Section 702 databases.”

These two brief examples prove that references to the protected status of US citizens in the Section 702 rules are completely bogus. The database of electronic communications being gathered by the US government contains everyone, whether they are US citizens or not. The police agencies, especially the FBI, are scanning this data on a regular basis and abrogating basic democratic rights that are guaranteed by the US Constitution, including the prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizure.

As Edward Snowden, who courageously leaked evidence of the worldwide program of US government illegal spying in 2013, tweeted on December 14:

Congress has voted to pass the NDAA—in which they deceitfully concealed an extension of the warrantless spying program (“Section 702”) universally opposed by the public. 

Last year the FBI exploited 702 to spy on Americans (protestors, donors—even Congress) more than 200k times.

Congress needed to move swiftly to extend Section 702 because it was set to expire on January 1, 2024. By getting the extension, it is clear that the Democrats and Republicans are planning to review competing proposals to reauthorize the existing rules for up to eight years or adopt a so-called “reform” bill that will significantly strengthen the warrantless surveillance of the public.

As EFF put it, plans are in the works to authorize “the use of this unaccountable and out-of-control mass surveillance program as a new way of vetting asylum seekers by sifting through their digital communications. … This new authority proposes to give immigration services the ability to audit entire communication histories before deciding whether an immigrant can enter the country.”

The draft of a bill by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), according to EFF, would expand the definition of electronic communication service to include “a much broader range of providers, including those who merely provide hardware through which people communicate on the Internet. Even without knowing the details of the secret court fight, this represents an ominous expansion of 702’s scope.”

The drive by the US ruling establishment to continue and expand electronic spying on the public was spelled out in no uncertain terms by the Wall Street Journal in its lead editorial on December 11. The leading voice of the American billionaire elite said that the continuation of mass surveillance, “has never been more important” given that the “risk of terrorism has gone up since Hamas’s massacre in Israel, and the US needs all the intel it can get to detect and prevent further attacks on the American homeland.”

The Journal editors call for Congress to use the four-month extension to implement “thoughtful changes that won’t hamper national security.” As has come to light during the ethnic cleansing operation by Israel in Gaza—and was also the case during the events of 9/11 in the US in 2001—it turns out the state intelligence agencies were aware of the planned attacks beforehand, did nothing to stop them and then used them to pursue long-prepared aggressive military operations to carry out their strategic goals.

The arguments that the threat of “terrorism” requires the destruction of fundamental democratic rights are being revived once again. Illegal surveillance of the public is being stepped up just as a mass movement of millions opposed to the imperialist-backed Zionist genocide in Gaza is taking place in countries around the globe, including within the US and Israel.