Lux Lucet

English philosopher Jeremy Bentham is best known today for his utilitarian ethics, in which he posited that “the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the measure of right and wrong.” This of course is far from Christian ethics which posits that the law of God is the measure of right and wrong.

Perhaps less well known is that Bentham left directions that, upon his death, his body was to be publicly dissected and his head mummified.

His requests were dutifully carried out, and the philosopher’s mummified haed actually was for many years put on public display at University College London.

But, as they say, all good things must come to an end. Eventually, the head became the object of student pranks and was removed from public view.

The college administrators who made this decision apparently did not share Bentham’s utilitarian ethics. Had they done so, they would have been forced to leave his head on public display, subject as it was to all manner of abuse. After all, Bentham’s mummified noggin provided far more happiness to far more people when it was available to the student pranksters than it ever did after it was locked away.

But there’s another development for which Bentham is famous. Oddly enough, it’s for an idea he had for a new type of prison that he called the Panopticon.

In Bentham’s words, the Panopticon was,

A building circular… The prisoners in their cells, occupying the circumference – The officers in the centre. By blinds and other contrivances, the Inspectors concealed… from the observation of the prisoners: hence the sentiment of a sort of omnipresence – The whole circuit reviewable with little, or…without any, change of place. Once station in the inspection part affording the most perfect view of every cell.

Admittedly, Bentham’s design was rather ingenious. But the idea of an all seeing eye in a guard tower, men who had the power to obverse all while they themselves remained unobservable, that’s just a bit creepy.

Thankfully, we don’t have to deal with this kind of surveillance in our everyday lives. Or do we?

Trump and the Deep State Panopticon

In the news over the past two weeks has been the change by President Trump that Barak Obama spied on him during the time he was President Elect.

Critics of the administration have dismissed this charge by Trump as just another example of an off the cuff Twitter storm by a rogue president.

My take on it is that Trump, for all his bluster and braggadocio, would not make a such an explosive allegation unless he had something to back it up.

Judge Andrew Napolitano has argued that Obama “wiretap” was done in a roundabout way, with the national Security Agency (NSA) doing the data collection, and British intelligence requesting the data – they can do this without a warrant – and passing it along to the Obama administration.

I do not know if Napolitano is correct in what he said, but his story is plausible in light of important but little known facts concerning the current practices of US intelligence gathering.

First, the NSA acts as a giant vacuum cleaner, hoovering up data on every American every day, regardless of whether a warrant has been issued to law enforcement concerning that individual. According to Edward Snowden,

Every time you pick up the phone, dial a number, write an email, make a purchase, travel on the bus carrying a cell phone, swipe a card somewhere, you leave a trace and the government has decided that it’s a good idea to collect it all, everything, even if you’ve never been suspected of any crime. Traditionally the government would identify a suspect, they would go to a judge, they would say we suspect he’s committed this crime, they would get a warrant and then they would be able to use the totality of their powers in pursuit of the investigation. Nowadays what we see is they want to apply the totality of their powers in advance – prior to an investigation.

Second, the NSA shares this data with the intelligence agencies of five other nations as part of a program called The Five Eyes. Snowden explains,

The Five Eyes alliance is sort of an artifact of the post World War II era where the Anglophone countries are the major powers banded together to sort of co-operate and share the costs of intelligence gathering infrastructure.

So we have the UK’s GCHQ, we have the US NSA, we have Canada’s C-Sec, we have the Australian Signals Intelligence Directorate and we have New Zealand’s DSD. What the result of this was over decades and decades what sort of a supra-national intelligence organisation that doesn’t answer to the laws of its own countries.

And you can add Israel to this list. As The Guardian
reported back in 2013, “The National Security agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without fist sifting it to remove information about US citizens.”

Third, Obama would have had good reason to run his request through British intelligence. Had he requested the information from the NSA directly, there would exist an order his making this request that would tie him to it. But by going though British intelligence and letting them pull the information, no such record would be generated.

Once could add to this list the fact that the British government has vehemently denied Napolitano’s charges, with a spokesman for British intelligence agency GCHQ calling his statements “nonsense” and “ridiculous.” Which reminds me of that old saying in politics, never believe a rumor until it’s been officially denied.

At this point, the story is still developing. It has been reported that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunez has “smoking gun” evidence tying the Obama administration to surveillance on Trump’s transition team. If this is true, the next few weeks could be very interesting.

The Larger Issue

In the context of a possible Watergate 2.0, it may seem a bit strange to speak of a “larger issue,” but I believe this is warranted.

For whether or not the charges of spying Trump leveled against Obama are proven true, the problem of out of control Deep State surveillance is still very much an issue.

So much news about unconstitutional spying has come out recently that it’s hard to keep up with it all. Just this week it was reported that, according to the latest Wikileaks release, the CIA has been bugging “factory fresh iPhones” since 2008.

In his book Anatomy of the Deep State, Mike Lofgren wrote , “another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”

Worth noting is Lofgren’s description of the Deep State as a “hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country.” There is a term for this merger of state and corporate powers, and that term is fascism.

If Lofgren is right about the Deep State, and I’m persuaded that he is, you and I are living in a fascist, high tech, Deep State Panopticon with power far beyond anything imagined by Jeremy Bentham.

So how is it that the government of a nation founded by Puritan Calvinists has morphed into a fascist Panopticon? The answer, I think, is that the American people no longer believe what the nation’s founders believed.

In Libertarianism, the individual is sovereign. Various forms of totalitarianism are united by the belief that the state is sovereign. But in Christianity, God alone is sovereign.

But large numbers of American’s, even among those who name the name of Christ, do not believe in the sovereignty of God, believe the locus of sovereignty lies elsewhere.

Would it not be ironic, then, after decades of being harangued by ACLU types with their warped view of the separation of church and state, if it turned out that the doctrine of God’s sovereignty, far from robbing man of his civil liberties, is actually the guarantor of it?