Race in Animal Crossing: New Leaf. I’m sitting on my bed for the third day in a row. I’m waiting for 5PM to hit so that I can finally close my 3DS. I’ve been ‘tanning’ my avatar in the latest entry of Nintendo’s long running Animal Crossing series, New Leaf. I put ‘tanning’ in scare quotes because the method doesn’t match my intention. Yes, I’m doing the the thing the game calls tanning, but my objective isn’t just darkening my avatar’s skin tone, it’s being able to see in the screen what I see in the mirror. Why avatar and not character? Because the hallmark of Animal Crossing is expressivity. You play a recent immigrant to a small town, and over the course of many short play sessions you carve out a place for yourself. You go fishing, catch bugs, and harvest fruit to raise the funds to pay off your home loan, and then do it all over again to pay for expansions and for new floors. You go shopping for new furniture and clothing from a rotating stock of available options. Want to look like a sea captain? Grab that ridiculous but charming beard and design yourself a sharp looking pea coat. Want to turn that new add-on into an ad hoc trophy room? Get some shelves and tables, and put those trophies out. You’ve earned it. You get to decide the direction of the little community you live in too: Plop down (and finance) new bridges; Put into place ordinances that require residents to take better care of the plants in town. Animal Crossing is a game you push and pull and stretch and step on until you like what you see, and then you do that some more because aesthetic contentment is a moving target, and AC is all about letting you hit that target again and again. Well, almost. Because no matter how much direct control I have over my house, my wardrobe, or the town I lives in, I don’t ever get to specifically pick one very important thing: my skin color. Technically, you don’t customize your character at all before the game properly starts. You’re asked a few innocuous questions in the opening moments of the game, and based on how you answer, you get an arbitrarily assigned avatar. I got a doofy dude with what looked like an off-brand Fantastic Four t-shirt. I’ve seen people on forums defend the absence of a skin selection option by referencing this opening. They argued that the game would be less charming if it had a checklist-style character creator. It almost goes without saying: this is an argument that comes from a privileged position. It’s easy to make charm your primary concern when discomfort and exclusion aren’t ever possibilities.  Still, I’m okay with having some degree of vagueness here. It works. As above, AC is about making small, discrete choices over the course of weeks and months that slowly brings your vision into being. I don’t mind the t-shirt: I know that I can buy something cooler as soon as it’s in stock (and if it isn’t, I can always design something on my own.) I don’t mind the hairstyle: I know it won’t be for at least a week or two, but eventually a hairdresser will move to town and I’ll be able to get a new ‘do. When I’m sick of these choices I can change them again. That’s where the joy in AC comes from for me: bringing the avatar and the world into line with my whims. And it does it so damned well, except for this one thing. It is 1992. I am 7 years old and standing in Tilt, the local mall arcade. I flip from character to character on the Street Fighter II: Champion Edition screen. Who do I pick? Maybe Ryu? Karate and headbands care cool. Maybe Blanka? Monsters and electricity, right? Woah, definitely not Balrog. He looks, well… He looks dumb. That’s what dumb people look like. He looks like the bad guy. And he is, he’s one of the bad guys. He’s not even the cool bad guy. He doesn’t get a cape, or a catchphrase, or a mask. I don’t know the word brute yet. I don’t know that he’s a crude parody of Mike Tyson, I just see a resemblance. I don’t know know why, I just know that I do not want to associate myself with the only African-American in this game. There are other characters of color, of course. Sagat seems okay, I guess… Dhalsim can spit hot fire, so, okay maybe. Chun-Li maybe… sure she was a girl, but she was fast. And back then, and for years after, I wanted to play as everything I wasn’t. I wanted to be thin, quick, attractive. That word called a great variety of images into my head, but they were rarely (if ever) black men. Especially when we understand ‘attractive’ to incorporate more than physical attributes. So I tried to find affinity in other places. That same year, the X-Men cartoon started airing on Fox, and I’d pretend I was Cyclops because, like me, he had to wear glasses all the time. I got good grades, so I’d choose Donatello on the TMNT machine—he was the smart one. But I never saw myself in any of the few black characters that were available. I chose to run with Vincent or Cid in my third party slot in Final Fantasy VII, never with Barrett—another brute, another parody. Other people saw me as black, but I knew that I was mixed, and I might have clung to that. That’s how I rationalized that I get to play as the white hero instead of the black sidekick. That’s how these things work. I hover over Balrog for a second, one more time. I like Mike Tyson, but I hear he’s a criminal. That meant a lot. I was a good kid. I like Randall Cunningham, the quick-scrambling, play-making quarterback for the Eagles. No, I love him. My dad makes sure I get his autograph once, outside of an open practice in Westchester, PA. On the way home I hear from him about how “black quarterbacks” are a fairly new thing. That for years, white coaches and sports writers thought that blacks were too dumb to play QB—that they were good running backs, good wide receivers, great linebackers, but they just didn’t think quickly enough to be leaders. Even Randall… he says, trailing a bit, knowing the stats, knowing that he makes mistakes, that he throws interceptions. I wonder now if there was ever a point in my father’s life that he wondered, like me then, if what those people said about us might be true. Back at the cabinet. Back in Tilt. I pick Guile, of course. Straight blonde hair, blue eyes, american F-16s and combat fatigues. And I’m a Guile player for years. It’s this past Thursday. I’m at a friend’s house, looking at what might become a spare room in the next month or two. Back in my current apartment, my 3DS sits open on the makeshift end table next to my bed. I forget to turn the volume off when I leave, so when I come home, I can hear the ‘exotic’ island tune chirping out of the tiny speakers. I frantically check to see if Argyle—my twee-as-fuck avatar—has gotten any color yet. It’s been five hours, and nothing. See, it’s not that I have no control over my character’s skin color. Based on past games in the series, I knew that I could tan. Just head to the tropical island that opens up a few days into play and hang out in the sun. Just five hours and you’ll hit the darkest shade. At least, that’s how it used to work. Now, nothing. I’m upset. I’d already been frustrated, but now I’m really upset. If I could go to the island, tan to the level I wanted, and go on about my business for the rest of the game, I wouldn’t be writing this. I’d still be upset that skin color wasn’t a customization option in the game, but the practical effect on my play would’ve been so minimal that it wouldn’t have simmered for so long, it wouldn’t have made me feel so disconnected from the me on the screen. Because the me up here wants to go do other things: he wants to head back to the mainland, shake some trees, talk to the other villagers in town, write some letters, redecorate the house, maybe check out a few of the museum exhibits that I’ve donated to. I can’t do any of that. I adore how a friend of mine has carefully displayed custom ground tile patterns around her village in order to build walkways and boardwalks and plazas, and even though I know it would take a lot of work, I’d love to do something just like that. But I’m stuck on the island hoping for a tan. I don’t even know what is preventing it from happening. After the first day without results I decide I should remove my avatar’s glasses, my hat, my shoes and socks. I wonder if fishing could somehow interfere with the tanning process. What if my inventory is open? Or if I’m designing a new pattern? Does the tan happen live, as I play? Or do I have to wait a day to see the result? It’s all unclear. Not only is this a time sink that keeps me on the island, it’s opaque too. Like I said before, I don’t mind having to work at getting the things I want in this game: that’s the whole point of playing. But this isn’t work. Those other goals require skill or planning—oftentimes both. They result in discrete rewards: selling the bugs you collected for cash you can put towards new clothes; turning in the giant carp you caught at the very last second to net you first place in the fishing tournament (and a sweet trophy). They’re aspirational: a second floor to your house; a community campsite that will attract a new range of characters through your town; a new wing on the museum, maybe even one you can curate yourself. Those things are interactive. This is, well, this is me out at lunch while my 3DS sits and waits. This is patiently waiting for 5 PM when (supposedly) the tanning process ends for the day, and I can get back to work. Get back to play. That’s the crux of it. If ‘tanning’ is a thing you want to do actively, it means stopping ‘normal’ play. There’s only so much you can do on the island. You have a limited access to storage, so you can only save up so many fish and bugs. There’s a character who will buy things from you on the island, but she only offers you 5% of what you can get on the mainland. (I’ll leave someone else to spend a few thousand words on cutting into that.) You can’t even choose to save your game from the island. In short, the island is ludically segregated from the rest of the game. On one hand, that makes it different, it makes it special. Trips to and from the island come with a sea shanty sung by an offensive-but-maybe-in-a-charming-way sea captain. You can play mini-games with your friends there. It’s a great place to visit, but… For years I played as white characters. They were inevitably the ones I wanted to be like. Still, there were moments when I’d get to step into someone’s shoes I felt comfortable in. GTA: San Andreas’  Carl Johnson is problematic in his own right, but when I read people on Gamefaqs complaining that Rockstar had “gone ghetto,” I bristled. For the first time ever, I took pride at seeing someone like me in a starring role of a game. He was only like me in this one way, but it was the one way that had never been represented, so it mattered that much more. It got tricky when games started to let me customize my characters. I made huge stables of wrestlers in Fire Pro Wrestling G, and yeah, some of them were black, so I didn’t even notice that I never actually played as anyone but the quick, non-black luchadores. I never even noticed that the black characters I’d made were all from the Balrog or Barrett school. Bruisers. Tough guys. Brutes. I remember my Knights of the Old Republic character so well: he was the asian guy with reddish hair, a smug look on his face, just asking to fall to the dark side. But something in me was upset that he got paler when he went evil. I wanted him to remain a man of color, even if it wasn’t my color. Years later, I split the difference and made my two main characters on the MMO The Old Republic green skinned, alien brothers with Greek features and strange tattoos. In sports games I made myself. No. I made Randall Cunningham, again, but with my name, and with less interceptions. The game knew Austin Walker was black and was a quarterback, but it didn’t know he was a “black quarterback.” It would never run those smarmy editorials, carefully phrasing my trade in such a way as to signal to the “right” readers that I should leave because of how my race affected my performance. The first time I ever played in a long term D&D campaign I made a half-elf—bi-racial, like me. I’m putting this out there because it’s hilarious and says basically everything you need to know about 18 year old Austin Walker: his name was Xanatos Woodshymn, he was a bard who was raised by orcs and who saw himself as the ‘by any means necessary’ advocate for the kobolds who were being used as slave labor in the nearby mines. He was the reincarnation of the Elven god Corellon—it was one of those D&D games—and at the final moment of the first “season” of our campaign, he sided with the orcs, resurrecting their ancient ‘evil’ god and becoming public enemy number one for all of elf-kind. It was a weird year. I had dreadlocks. I had dreadlocks because I’d spent years trying to work out a hairstyle. In high school, I wanted hair like all my white friends. In the end, I chose simply not to have the same hairstyles all my black friends. In the process tried a number of regrettable hair styles, many of which—like the dreads—stuck around for way too long. By the time Mass Effect came out, I’d cut off the dreads. I was sitting with my roommates and making my character, and there was an unspoken pressure there. For weeks, I’d planned to remake my space-asshole Asian character from KoTOR. But what would my roommates say if I did that instead of making someone who looked like me? Would they be surprised? Concerned? Suddenly, for the first time ever, I felt a responsibility to really be me, on the screen. I remembered early interviews with Casey Hudson, how he described Shepard’s indistinct, multi-ethnic background. He was already halfway there, I thought. Let’s just give him a less chiseled chin, tight, curly hair, my lips, my nose. I made Austin Shepard. Since then, I’ve never made an “Austin” again. Since then, I never had to. But all of my characters have had something of me in them. My 3DS is in my bag, at my feet. The volume is down this time, but I keep peeking to make sure that Animal Crossing: New Leaf is still running, that my battery hasn’t run out—I can’t save here on the island, remember. Plus, every half hour or so I pick up the system and flick through a few menus, coming to rest on a new one. I’m terrified of screen burn-in. I’ve read that it’s rare on the 3DS, but I have a history with electronics breakings in remarkable and unlikely ways. Still, it’s worth the risk. Soon—if the past games are to be any indication, it’ll be in mid July—I’ll be able to tan on the mainland too. That is only a relative improvement though. I’ll still have to be careful about becoming too tan—I’m not a “level six” tan, after all. This will never be stable: it is an ongoing, careful project, and it’s one with questionable implications. One is the way in which your desired skin color affects the degree to which you have to monitor your avatar’s time in the summer sun. Because New Leaf’s tanning doesn’t seem to happen in real time, and because it seems to take days instead of hours now, trying to get a particular mid-level skin tone is more precarious than maintaining a pale complexion. Not only is the outcome hard to predict, but someone who wants the default skin to stay only has to bring a parasol around with them in the summer sun. They literally have access to tools and methods I don’t. It is very hard not to just write “DO YOU GET IT?” over and over again. I don’t have a tanning booth, or tanning lotion. I certainly don’t have a way to lock in my current tan level. The other implication is that it might be the case that tanning is a disincentive to overplaying. I hadn’t realized it until my friend with the cobblestone roads pointed it out. Let’s say, hypothetically, that you’ve kept your game running for five straight hours for some odd reason. You might notice that your town’s other villagers will greet you with an admonishment. You look tired they say, you should take a rest. You should stop playing. There is a strange, formal parallel between this directive and tanning. Both come only after hours of uninterrupted play. The same activity results in both outcomes. Coupled with the fact that players are outfitted with ways to prevent, but not cause tanning, it’s hard not to draw some connections. My argument isn’t that Nintendo has gone out of its way to be racist, it’s that the question of race seems to have never been brought up to begin with, and that has its own problems. Privilege works by naturalizing one position, or one set or style of positions. It isn’t as simple as valuing that position over others: even that would acknowledge a field of differences. To work in a system of privilege is to start all projects from a set of premises that are believed to be inviolable. You don’t get more pale, in New Leaf, you only get darker. The natural position is whiteness—or, at least, one without melanin like mine. I’m sitting at Starbucks. I’m writing this from an armchair I’ve sat in before, hundreds of times. Once, as I did so, two older women, white, glared up at me from across the communal table when I started to read, and relocated across the room. They shot me dirty looks for hours. Games rarely got race right, but sometimes they’d cede control to me, and let me figure out what I thought “right” meant. I craved those experiences, and I still do. Not all of my characters are black, or men, or straight like me. I get to craft something along with the game, something that ‘fits.’ That can be an awkward experience: fiddling with skin color sliders, augmenting breast size, giving a character a deeper or higher voice. Figuring out what ‘fits’ for the character I have in mind feels somehow almost fascist. There is something actually sadistic in all authorship, after all. But there are moments when I want to see more of myself on the screen. Times like this. I rarely use terms like ‘privilege’ in my writing, whether here or academically. It isn’t my field. Or, I guess, part of the way this particular power relation is structured, it is my field even if I didn’t want it to be. I remember that I’ve been called nigger more times in the last two years of walking this small stretch of Canadian road than I did in 25 years of living on US soil. Someone threw an egg at me once. I haven’t felt like sharing many of my New Leaf screenshots. Sometimes, something is too clever not to share, but I position my character so that he’s obscured. On seeing the head-on shot of Argyle wearing my cobblestone road friend’s absurd t-shirt design (above), another friend said “That’s my mental picture of Austin almost exactly.” He meant that in the nicest way possible, but it stung. I knew part of why it was only ”almost” exactly. A girl I dated here suggested that my skin tone prevented me from getting important vitamin D from the sunlight. Vitamin D, she said, necessary to make deep, interpersonal relationships. I see some irony now, desperate that my little avatar soak in as much sun as possible I want to be on this screen. I want to be black on this screen. Across from me—and I can hardly believe this is happening right now—a group of twenty something student teachers are whispering about how black students don’t understand apostrophes or commas. I hear the phrase “drug issues” and “them” a few times in a row. But still. My 3DS is in my bag, open, my avatar staring back up at me in the island sun. I wanted to end this piece by saying that I’d closed it. I haven’t. The sun is still out on the island. I can’t be sure tanning actually stops at 5, so I wait. I’m hoping he’ll look more like me, soon. This piece was originally posted on Austin's tumblr, Clockwork Worlds, and is reposted here with his permission. The original article can be found here.

The new report from the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards busts the myth that pay has fallen since the crash. One of the many myths busted by today's report from the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards is that bankers' pay has fallen significantly since the crash. In his testimony to the inquiry, George Osborne noted estimates that the total City bonus pool fell from from £11.5bn in 2006 to £1.5bn in 2013, while Anthony Browne, the head of the British Bankers Association, pointed out that since 2007, cash bonuses are down 77 per cent and the total bonus pool has more than halved. But what neither mentioned is that bankers have compensated themselves by simply claiming higher basic salaries. As the report notes, total remuneration across RBS, Lloyds, HSBC and Barclays has remained relatively stable. Indeed, since staff numbers have fallen significantly, per-capita remuneration has actually increased. As the graph below shows, pay at most banks has already returned to or exceeded its pre-crisis level.  The report rightly goes on to argue:  Public anger about high pay in banking should not be dismissed as petty jealousy  or ignorance of the operation of the free market. Rewards have been paid for failure. They are unjustified. Although the banks and those who speak for them are keen to present evidence that bonuses have fallen, fixed pay has risen, offsetting some of the effect of this fall. The result is that overall levels of remuneration in banking have largely been maintained. Aggregate pay levels of senior bankers have also been unjustified. Given the performance of the banks, these levels of pay have produced excessive costs. Indeed, at a time of pay restraint in the public and private sectors, they will raise significant anger amongst taxpayers who have been required to subsidise these banks. These elevated levels of remuneration are particularly unacceptable when banks are complaining of an inability to lend owing to the need to preserve capital and are also attempting to justify rises in charges for consumers. But while the bankers have already recovered all the losses from the crisis, average household incomes are not expected to return to their pre-recession level until 2023 (£22,000 in real terms). Another timely reminder, then, that we're not "all in this together". 

Urges shareholders to reject $13.65 per share offer of Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners.Investor Carl Icahn, through his firm Icahn Associates, has proposed to pay $14 a share to buy 62 per cent of stake in Dell if shareholders rejected an offer of $13.65 per share (totalling $24.4bn) placed by Michael Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake Partners. Dell shareholders are expected to vote on Michael Dell’s offer on 18 July 2013. Icahn intends to finance the offer of $16bn for 1.1 billion shares, through $5.2bn new debt, $7.5bn in cash from Dell and $2.9bn through the sale of Dell receivables. Meanwhile, Southeastern Asset Management has sold over 72 million shares, which is half of its stake in Dell, to Icahn at a price of $13.52 a share. Icahn now holds 4.1 per cent in the personal computer manufacturing giant. Icahn and Southeastern jointly own 13 per cent of Dell. Southeastern Asset Management, in a release, said that it continues to believe that the Michael Dell / Silver Lake management buyout proposal undervalues the company and its prospects going forward. “Southeastern and Icahn Associates have been working diligently to provide a better alternative for shareholders. Southeastern has determined that Icahn is in the best position to lead the development of an alternative transaction and to generate a better outcome for shareholders,” it said. The company said that it will vote, at Dell’s Annual Meeting, for a new group of directors. A statement issued by Special Committee of the Board of Dell said that they are reviewing the latest concept put forth by Carl Icahn, but called it a further deviation from Icahn’s original proposal of a buyout at $15 per share. It observed that Ichan’s concept would likely force shareholders to continue to own shares in the highly leveraged company that would result. “Mr. Icahn’s concept is not, in its present state, a transaction that the Special Committee could endorse and execute – there is neither financing, nor any commitment from any party to participate, nor any remedy for the company and its shareholders if the transaction is not consummated. In addition, the concept does not adequately address the liquidity issues and other risks the Committee previously highlighted,” the statement added.

News stories from around the web.Running of UK banks slated (FT) The UK government has “interfered” in the running of the part-nationalised banks in a manner that is “clearly not acceptable”, a sweeping parliamentary review into the failings of the British banking system has concluded. Google challenges US surveillance gag (FT) Google has challenged the US ban on disclosing the extent of its involvement in secret government surveillance, in the latest move by an internet company to counter the damage caused by the recent National Security Agency internet spying scandal. Japan exports rise by most since 2010 (BBC) Japanese exports rose in May by the most since 2010 as the yen weakened, providing a boost to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's plan to revive the economy. Food labelling: Consistent system to be rolled out (BBC) A new consistent system of front-of-pack food labelling is to be introduced in the UK, the government says. Banking Commission: Bankers should face threat of jail and loss of bonuses (Telegraph) Senior bankers should face jail and the loss of millions of pounds in bonuses if they are involved in a future banking collapse, according to a report by a cross-party group of MPs and peers.

The ten must-read comment pieces from this morning's papers.1. Ed Miliband is standing firm on Syria, but is he caught in a trap? (Daily Telegraph) Labour is haunted by Iraq, but doing nothing as catastrophe unfolds brings its own risks, writes Mary Riddell. 2. The toxic legacy of the Greek crisis (Financial Times) That Greece was the first to fall into trouble gave weight to the view that the crisis was fiscal, writes Martin Wolf. 3. Big ideas can be bad ideas - even in the age of the thinktank (Guardian) Forget the US model. British academics should aspire to offer more than just intellectual fig leaves for policymakers, writes Mark Mazower. 4. What’s to be gained from arming the rebels? (Times) Whether or not Britain takes sides in Syria, these are the issues facing military analysts, writes Roger Boyes. 5. Britain's response to the NSA story? Back off and shut up (Guardian) Snowden's revelations are causing outrage in the US, writes Simon Jenkins. In the UK, Hague deploys a police-state defence and the media is silenced. 6. We must never forget our debt to America (Times) Ahead of Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin we should remember that the US made the choice to protect Europe, says Daniel Finkelstein. 7. Russia has mixed motives in Syria (Financial Times) To ordinary people, a defeat of the rebels is seen as a victory over the west, writes Andrei Nekrasov. 8. Did Stuart Hall's victims relive their agony just for this? (Daily Mail) Hall's lenient sentence shows judges learnt nothing from Savile, says Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. 9. Co-op structures don’t solve all management issues (Independent) We must make the shareholder-owned model work as well as possible, says Hamish McRae. 10. It's now time we reaped the rewards of GM crops (Daily Telegraph) A disastrous harvest ahead and poor productivity mean farmers need all the help they can get, says Philip Johnston.

The NSA doesn't keep us safe. It makes the world more dangerous by the day. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper DEFENDERS OF the American surveillance state have a simple response to the criticisms they've faced in the wake of revelations about the National Security Agency's (NSA) lying and spying: You should be happy we've violated your rights because the world is a safer place for it. "The events of September 11, 2001, occurred, in part, because of a failure to connect the dots," said Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the NSA. "I would rather be here explaining these programs than explaining why it is we failed to prevent another 9/11." Alexander went on to claim that the NSA's spying on telephone records and Internet communications foiled 50 terror plots in 20 countries, including the U.S. The political establishment's campaign to defend its formerly top-secret surveillance programs has followed a predictable pattern: frighten people with claims about the constant threat of terrorist attacks; reassure them that our "leaders" will protect "us" so long as we accept some "modest encroachments" on our constitutional rights--and, of course, demonize the whistleblower who exposed their dirty secrets. Former Vice President Dick Cheney took to the airwaves to slander Edward Snowden, the source of the leaks about the NSA spying programs, as a "traitor" and possible spy for China. Of course, given Cheney's own record of circumventing the Constitution and openly advocating torture, Snowden was absolutely right to see Cheney's denunciation as "the highest honor." But if Cheney's return to scaremongering and scapegoating was laughable, the Obama administration's response has been simultaneously chilling and more potent. The Democratic White House has already distinguished itself as the most aggressive administration in history in its pursuit of government officials who turn to the press to expose corruption or lawbreaking. Before 2009, the Espionage Act of 1917 had only been used three times in the previous century to prosecute government officials accused of leaking classified information. The Obama administration has used it six times--so far. The same administration insists it's accountable to Congress and the courts. But in truth, the powers of the U.S. state are wielded with almost no real accountability to the majority of the U.S. population. There's no guarantee that officeholders will respond to popular opinion, rather than the interests of corporations and the rich, as we know from any number of political questions in the last few years. And that's to speak of elected officials--when a large part of the U.S. government, particularly its national security apparatus, never even has to face an election. Thus, the government's police and spies--not to mention its generals and bureaucrats and politicians--are empowered to carry out policies that are directly contrary to the beliefs and convictions of most people in the U.S., whether they're violating our constitutional right to privacy or our human right to health care or a job or a comfortable retirement. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - FEAR IS a powerful motivator--and politicians know it. As Noam Chomsky explained, a frightened populace is more easily manipulated into accepting policies it would otherwise oppose. That explains why so many political leaders are invoking the tragedy of September 11, 2001, as they struggle to defend the NSA surveillance programs a dozen years later. Thus, Republican Sen. John McCain--after claiming that terrorism is "getting worse," though he offered no evidence--delivered what he obviously considers his trump card: "If this was September 12, 2001, we might not be having the argument that we are having today." At the same time, political leaders say they should be trusted that the proper checks and balances are in place to prevent the NSA and FBI and CIA and the rest from abusing our rights. But the record of the U.S. government clearly shows that these statements are precisely the ones that should be most distrusted. Back in March, during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Sen. Ron Wyden asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Clapper's answer: "No, sir." Today, Clapper says he was giving the "least untruthful" answer he could. Okay, so "least untruthful" is another way of saying he lied to the Senate. But at least the NSA's Prism program for spying on Internet communications successfully foiled a 2009 plot to bomb a subway in New York City, right? That's one of the many claims made by intelligence officials, openly and anonymously, in recent days. This is the fallback position when ordinary people seem hesitant to trust the government with their rights--claim instead that the national security apparatus has kept us all safe from terrorism. Only the chief "success" claimed for the Prism program is disputed. According to BuzzFeed's Ben Smith, "British and American legal documents from 2010 and 2011 contradict [the claim that NSA spying helped expose the subway plot], which appears to be the latest in a long line of attempts to defend secret programs by making, at best, misleading claims that they were central to stopping terror plots." As legal scholar Jonathan Turley wrote in USA Today, referring specifically to a plan in Chicago to install even more surveillance cameras in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings: We need to resist the calls for a greater security state and put this attack into perspective...[P]rivacy is dying in the United States by a thousand paper cuts from countless new laws and surveillance systems. Before we plunge ahead in creating a fishbowl society of surveillance, we might want to ask whether such new measures or devices will actually make us safer or just make us appear safer. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BUT THE idea that all this surveillance is directed at "preventing terrorism" is itself a deception. Writing in the Guardian, Nafeez Ahmed reports: Since the 2008 economic crash, security agencies have increasingly spied on political activists, especially environmental groups, on behalf of corporate interests. This activity is linked to the last decade of U.S. defense planning, which has been increasingly concerned by the risk of civil unrest at home triggered by catastrophic events linked to climate change, energy shocks or economic crisis--or all three. Ahmed cites several military strategy documents, including a report by the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute that states: DoD [Department of Defense] might be forced by circumstances to put its broad resources at the disposal of civil authorities to contain and reverse violent threats to domestic tranquility. Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, DoD would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security is already working with local law enforcement agencies on pre-emptive efforts to derail "civil disturbances"--even in the case of nonviolent, legal protest. Despite the denials of intelligence officials, this is an essential component--rather than an inadvertent consequence--of the U.S. surveillance apparatus. Government officials want to reduce the issue of NSA surveillance to a simple proposition: the terrorists want to get us, but we can get them first by employing advanced technological methods for gathering intelligence on them. But among other things, this ignores how the "war on terror" itself--the use of torture and indefinite detention, drone strikes and Barack Obama's secret kill lists, Special Forces operations and NSA surveillance--keeps stoking more bitterness and hatred toward the U.S., potentially the source of future violence. The government's spies and soldiers don't keep us safe. They are making the world more unstable, more dangerous and more violent by the day. That's glaringly obvious in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Yemen--but it's also true in the U.S. itself. As Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers some 40 years ago, exposing U.S. war crimes in Vietnam, wrote in the Guardian: In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material...Snowden's whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an "executive coup" against the U.S. Constitution. Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the Bill of Rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago. In particular, the Fourth and Fifth amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended... Obviously, the United States is not now a police state. But given the extent of this invasion of people's privacy, we do have the full electronic and legislative infrastructure of such a state. If, for instance, there was now a war that led to a large-scale antiwar movement--like the one we had against the war in Vietnam--or, more likely, if we suffered one more attack on the scale of 9/11, I fear for our democracy. These powers are extremely dangerous. The first step in challenging all this is to expose the surveillance state to the light of day. The second is to state in no uncertain terms: We don't accept the national security shakedown that trades our rights for a safer--and in reality, a far more dangerous--world.