Playing Peekaboo with the NDAA:

A Brief Look at Section 702, Ukraine Funding, and Other Provisions

Our charming Republican and Democratic lawmakers in both the Senate and House of Representatives gave us a wonderful Christmas gift ahead of their end-of-year recess. Congress passes the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) every year, and it is generally tied to raises for military members and their families (this year, it was a 5.2% raise and a bump to $400 per month for family separation pay) and other necessary components to keep the American Empire able to expand its power and influence around the globe (such as $32.4 billion for “atomic weapons activities” and an increase of $1 billion for research and $18.2 billion for housing and military construction). Of course, according to the White House, it is considered “Holding America’s military readiness - as well as service members and their families - hostage to an extreme, divisive political agenda” and detrimental to our national security to not let the thousands of pages of unrelated policy items get through unhindered, and Congress(wo)men do not read the bill but feel good about handing over the reins to the bureaucracy to legislate on their behalf. Ultimately, the status quo gets kicked into the new year, and the fiscal year 2024 version is no different.

There was, of course, some minor bickering over social issues in the $886 billion spending bill, and although Democrats got their wish to allow service members to continue travelling across state lines (including travel leave and expenses paid) to escape polices in “mean” states that will not allow parents and doctors the freedom to murder unborn children (gender-affirming care for military members coveting to change their biological sex was also not restricted), Republicans blocked diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the military. In reality, though, the political theater exhibited was never really any threat to the bill itself, and like normal, the what-should-be-standard practice under a democratic republic, where a bill like this would be voted on one issue at a time, was not followed (there should be one bill for military pay raises, one bill for travel expenses for abortions, one bill for military research, etc.). Instead, Congress just hands the bulk items to the individual agencies to do the actual legislating (gotta pass the bill to see what kind of policies should be created by unelected bureaucrats).

In addition to providing quicker access of Harpoon anti-ship missiles and training programs to Taiwan, handing over nuclear-powered submarines to Australia to counter China (and provoke Beijing), purchasing more electric vehicles for the military, and phasing out federal agencies’ usage of gas-powered vehicles that are considered one of the biggest threats to life on earth; the bill, of course, set aside a new budget to Ukraine to keep the blood spilling in exchange for profits to the military-industrial complex (Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and his buddies at Raytheon thank you from the bottom of their hearts). It also created a new position of a “special inspector general for Ukraine” to rubber stamp the status quo under the guise of making the utilization of American tax dollars more transparent (the corruption in Ukraine will not end because there is a government official, who is beholden to the administration, selected to “watch” the money trail).

On top of the over $100 billion in military and non-military aid that Americans have been forced to pay to support Ukraine since February 2022 (this is excluding the Obama and Trump administrations’ handing over of additional welfare programs to Kiev before Russia’s invasion), another $300 million was authorized right off the bat for the 2024 fiscal year (which seems almost like a drop in the bucket compared to what we have been spending, and the Biden administration asked for $61 billion). Since the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative was approved through 2027, this opens the door for billions or hundreds of billions more of our tax-payer dollars to be funneled to Ukraine in a potentially long-term or never-ending war, like was the case in Iraq.

Most importantly, though, the NDAA included a four-month extension of Section 702, which is part of a 2008 amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA), hidden among its almost 3,100 pages (the provision was set to expire at the end of the year). According to Connecticut Representative Jim Himes, if United States agencies were to not permitted to continue collecting data without warrants on Americans who were in contact with foreign nationals, “Americans and allies would die.” Right, so we need to bypass the Fourth Amendment and allow the federal government to spy on Americans, or we will certainly perish as a nation. Aside from that Hitler- or Stalin-type of logic, even if Section 702 were as useful as the government claims, is there really a harm in obtaining a warrant to search through Americans’ records and phone calls? A reasonable judge, if provided with the proper evidence and specific search criteria, would authorize a warrant easily and in little time, and the fact that the government does not want to go through this process, as the Constitution requires, makes it seem as if there were more nefarious purposes for the utilization of this tool (such as monitoring all Americans’ activities and acquiring evidence of unrelated crimes).

In practice, all the government must do when spying on Americans is claim that a “significant” purpose of an investigation is related to “foreign intelligence information” and appeal to a secret FISA court, which hardly ever declines requests, to approve of the search and target methods. Well, folks, this is just legal mumbo jumbo for the government being able to legally (but not constitutionally) spy on and collect data on anyone that it wants, as long as it can pretend that it is only targeting foreign nationals and not American citizens.

Conversations and records between Americans in a domestic setting are supposed to be filtered out, but post-filtered communications have historically remained (and in reality, probably still do remain) in a collected database for agents to use down the line when obtaining unwarranted evidence for future investigations. Although agents in the post-2015 era are supposed to be required to get a rubber-stamped warrant through a FISA court (FISC), there is ultimately no public accountability on the matter to ensure that domestic communications are protected and kept private (even a FISC warrant is not a true warrant subject to judicial scrutiny).

This Section 702 spying is done through “upstream” surveillance, which includes the National Security Agency (NSA) or Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) partnering with telecommunications corporations to monitor and collect data that flows through fiber optic cables (there have since been some restrictions put in place on this), and “downstream” surveillance, which allows the NSA or FBI to ask or demand that corporations hand over data and not tell their customers of the invasion of their privacy (these surveillance measures and PRISM programs were revealed to us by Edward Snowden in 2013).

In our modern technological era, the federal government and corporations have partnered together into a surveillance-police state, and we just go about our business acting like nothing is wrong and pretending that the government hiding fascist provisions, along with many other unrelated items, into bills linked with funding for our military is perfectly normal and acceptable. We should be worried about the lack of transparency and democratic (republican) procedures in government, which we learned about in school but ignore in reality. Will we wake up and demand reforms, or will we continue down the path of our own destruction?

Thank you for reading, and please check out my book, The Global Bully, and website. Have a Merry Christmas, and I will catch you on the other side of the New Year!