ABSTRACT
In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, world politics has assumed the shape of a criminal investigation. Not only has the so-called war on terrorism included what the New Yorker magazine has called “probably the most important criminal investigation in American history,” but also civil society itself has been opened up as a field of hidden clues, suspicions, and criminal secrets of foreign aggressions. Part of this, the New Yorker goes on, has to do with how “[t]he new antiterrorism bill, passed after minimal hearings and debate, breaks down Cold War-era barriers between foreign intelligence and domestic law enforcement to an unprecedented degree.” In other words, evidence formerly found in intelligence operations on foreign governments, where warrants were not demanded and civil protections not upheld, could now serve as part of a criminal case. Says Morton Halperin, defense expert and former Clinton official, “[u]nlike a law-enforcement tap, the government never has to tell the subject that they’ve done it. If the government thinks you’re under the control of a foreign government, they can wiretap you and never tell you, search your house and never tell you, break into your home, copy your hard drive, and never tell you that they’ve done it.”1 “Historically,” Halperin continues, “the government has often believed that anyone who is protesting government policy is doing it at the behest of a foreign government and opened counterintelligence investigations of them.” Taking its meaning from the Nixon administration’s active work to criminalize political protest2 and the constructed opposition between civil liberties and public or personal safety, political dissent-now more than ever-appears as an act of war.
