The law and constitutional guarantees in any democratic country that offers legal support to those advocating respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms and their application cannot be marginalized, ignored, or annulled under the pretext of defending national security, because sovereignty does not lie in the State but in the citizens who demand those rights and freedoms. These principles are adulterated in countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Russia, or China, but in democratic countries, their respect must be imposed at all costs.
It is unfortunate that we are witnessing in the United States a process of increasing State surveillance and control over its citizens, most of whom have been convinced that it is acceptable and highly desirable to give up some of their fundamental freedoms in exchange for greater security.
This population control process is redounding with impunity in markedly authoritarian procedures that ignore the law and many constitutional guarantees under the pretext of applying them to guarantee national security as perceived by the authorities of multiple organizations that duplicate and even exceed the power that was traditionally reserved for a few intelligence and investigative agencies.
We are referring to no less than 9 departmental organizations established in the last decades (called "agencies" in the US) that compete and even impose their authority over the CIA, the FBI, the DEA, and the military intelligence organizations of each of the five branches of the armed forces. These are:
- Office of the Director of National Intelligence
- National Security Agency (NSA)
- Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
- Bureau of Intelligence and Investigation (under the authority of the Department of State)
- Office of Intelligence and Analysis (under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security, created on 9/11)
- Office of Intelligence and Analysis (under the authority of the Treasury Department)
- Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (under the authority of the Department of Energy)
- National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
- National Recognition Office (NRO)
Apart from the huge bureaucracy that works in the 3 traditional agencies and in the military intelligence centers of the 5 branches of the armed forces, another huge bureaucracy has recently been added with nine more agencies (listed above) that overwhelm citizens with power that allow them to apply measures outside the law and the US Constitution.
It is notable that the Department of Justice's shield (seal) proclaims the motto "
Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur" (Who prosecutes for Lady Justice) and that Lady Justice has been represented through the centuries with paintings and statues of a lady holding scales and blindfolded. In other words, it means that justice is blind, so as not to distinguish between one and the other, and fair to apply its rulings equally.
The problem is complicated when a large sector of the population and the press justify this abuse out of partisan loyalty. They fail to realize the pressing danger of having a surveillance system that, while politically neutral, is not because it is controlled by the multitude of officials and national security agents and their Justice Department cousins, all of whom are arrogating the power to act as if they were a duplicate State. Worse still, it is important to also understand that if we allow the large and complicated "security system" to take that panopticon [method or system of seeing and controlling an entire group from a single point] to make available the infinity of information data (even violating the right to privacy) to an Executive Branch willing to wield it as a repressive weapon against those who qualify as political enemies, then we have a terrifying problem on our hands.