Donald Trump Has the Keys to the Most Invasive Surveillance State in History | Foreign Policy

 

"In one campaign speech, Trump said of the ability to hack his political enemies, “I wish I had that power. Man, that would be power.” He has also expressed support for the NSA’s collection of telephone metadata, which is now outlawed. “As far as I’m concerned, that would be fine,” Trump said in a December 2015 radio interview. “When you have the world looking at us and would like to destroy us as quickly as possible, I err on the side of security.” His recent picks for attorney general (Jeff Sessions) and head of the CIA (Mike Pompeo) agree. “Congress should pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database,” Pompeo wrote in the Wall Street Journal in January 2016. “Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed.”

Trump has presented distressing views on spying that would target specific communities and individuals. “I want surveillance of certain mosques,” he told a rally in November 2015. He has called the Black Lives Matter movement a “threat” that, “[a]t a minimum, we’re going to have to be watching.” Also troubling are the repercussions that Trump’s opponents might face. Infamously, Trump said on Fox and Friends in 2013 that Snowden is “a terrible traitor” and, “You know, spies in the old days used to be executed.” Trump’s CIA pick favors exactly that course of action. “I think the proper outcome would be that [Snowden] would be given a death sentence,” Pompeo said on C-SPAN last February."

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Donald Trump Has the Keys to the Most Invasive Surveillance State in History | Foreign Policy

Illustration by Matthew Hollister