The US government through the FBI, federal intelligence agencies, the military, state and local police and private companies, is collecting incredible amounts of personal information about American citizens. This surveillance takes place with little or no oversight by the courts, the legislature or the public. This surveillance activity is not directed solely at terrorists and criminals, but at everybody. Increasingly, the government is engaging in suspicionless surveillance that tracks sensitive information about innocent people. The lack of restrictions on the government's power to collect people's personal information puts the right to privacy and freedom of speech at risk. This situation is only exacerbated by the current trend of giving private companies so much access to the intimate details of our lives.

The idea of the Government wiretapping our phonelines and accessing our private emails would to most of us seem entirely unrealistic. Most of us presume we are not of any interest to be spied on, thus we would not be spied on, and surely the Government would need a very good reason to do so? Technically, the US government must have a warrant to wiretap US citizens However, there are many loopholes which they use in order to keep an eye on the digital lives of its citizens. By presenting a simple subpoena to companies like Google and AT&T, the authorities have instant access to your texts and emails. This may have happened to any of us already and we would never know.

One might wonder exactly how the government can access your digital data without a warrant. Getting a warrant requires showing "probable cause" of a crime. This quite high standard is required for police to listen to your phonecalls. However, to get information on the phone numbers you call and when, as well as incoming calls, police do not need a warrant, but a subpoena, which requires a significantly lower standard of evidence, that of the data being relevant to an investigation. Lesser standards are also required for cell phone location data, text messages, cloud data and emails older than 180 days. For some reason the law gives greater protection to recent emails than to older ones.

Enacted in 1986, the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act, is in dire need of modernization to reflect the new digital economy. The way we communicate using technology has massively changed in 25 years and yet the ECPA has remained exactly the same, creating a gap between the law and users’ reasonable expectations of privacy. The Senate recently took a step toward improving privacy protection for emails, by approving an update to the 1986 ECPA that requires law enforcement officials to obtain a warrant before they can read emails older than 180 days. However, at the end of December, the Senate decided, without explanation, to drop the proposed amendments, and so for the present, law enforcement officials will continue to be able to access cloud-based data with only a subpoena.

Last year, US Magistrate Judge Steven Smith examined the history behind the ECPA court orders, and was shocked to discover, not only the incredible number of emails and other inbox data obtained by the police under the ECPA, but that most people who had been surveilled under it were completely unaware. In his report he comes to the conclusion that it is reasonable to infer that far more law-abiding citizens than criminals had been tracked under the provisions of the ECPA. This emphasises the immediate necessity of enforcing a strict search warrant requirement, as well as a new level of transparency into how and why this data is collected.

The extent of the expanding surveillance state was exposed by the New York Times in 2005 in an article uncovering the NSA's domestic spying program. This program, intended to monitor communications of suspected terrorists within the US, in fact also had an impact on millions of innocent citizens, never suspected of a crime. The government has amassed, through the major telecommunications companies, a database of detailed call-records of customers (which includes customer's names, addresses and calls), without any warrants or judicial supervision. These telecommunications companies also allowed the NSA to install communications surveillance equipment, giving the NSA unfettered access to large streams of digital communications in real-time which they could then data-mine and analyse. If the government need information on a person, they will be able to collect vast amounts of it from their database, and analyse everything that person has done in the previous years. Everything from their emails to their browsing history will be in the hands of the government.

The first necessary step is for a revised ECPA to provide the most basic of protections for communications over the internet. The government should have to obtain a warrant before compelling a service provider to disclose an individual’s private online communications. They should also have to get a warrant before it can track the location of an individual’s wireless communication device. Before it can install a trace device to capture real time transactional data, the government should be obliged to demonstrate to a court that such data is relevant to a criminal investigation. In other words, an outright ban on the ability of law enforcement to obtain emails through subpoenas, and holding law enforcement accountable for its actions are the minimum protections necessary.

In the meantime, we need to ask ourselves why we give so much information to third parties in the first place. We may not have been aware of any bargain being struck, yet services like Google are free because they can get ad data targeted to you just based on your searches. Most people are aware of this, yet choose to turn a blind eye, favouring the familiar convenience of such websites over their intrusion into our privacy. We need to start looking into safe and secure alternatives that do not carry the price of our privacy. We need to find encrypted email services, which protect our private communications from snooping eyes.

There should and could be a middle ground. A legal regime where we can use corporations for the benefit of society, maintaining control over our lives and controlling their choices to ensure that they are responsible to life. We should not give up the great things that they provide but we should minimize the harms that they bring with them. Like the spoiled child, they have to act responsibly and they must mature. Until there is proof that a corporation is a contributing and functioning member of our society, I do not think they should have the rights of real persons.

In studying corporate law for the past three years, I have been instructed on more than one occasion to believe that the creation of the corporate veil and the advent of limited liability companies are two of the more important creations in the field of corporate law. This may be true. I was never instructed to ask of what, and to whom, are these creations important? In answering this question, I have realized that these are merely tools used by corporate owners (real people) to escape their social responsibilities. These are tools that get dirty for the people who cannot stand taking responsibility for their own actions. They are more like gloves and these gloves have enough blood on them to bring the death penalty upon many of the corporations that exist in today’s world.

Let’s get some minor things out of the way. For the most part, in American society, the word veil brings to mind weddings and beauty. A quick Google search allows one to see the goodness associated with the word. The corporate veil is not this type of veil. It is a veil as much as Hitler was a leader: it fits the definition but not exactly the first word that comes to mind. When looking beyond the euphemism, one sees the corporate veil more as a protective shield, or for that matter, as an army of protection that fights for personhood but against persons.

For many corporations, the sole purpose of the corporate veil and the limited liability corporate form is to protect the corporation’s owners from facing human consequences. The corporate veil provides the necessary distance for corporate owners to escape social responsibilities in the name of profit and as if that weren’t enough, the formation of a limited liability company builds a whole new level of defense, allowing owners to commit actions through their corporations. Those same actions, if committed by a natural person, could be considered criminal actions and clear violations of human rights.

One would think that corporate owners would be content with a veil and limited liability protecting them from most forms of social responsibility but that is not enough to protect their profits. They desired an even stronger weapon to protect their asse[t]s. They wanted the convenience of picking and choosing when they should have the rights of natural persons. These profit-driven, often inhumane organizations have sought personhood in the court system throughout our country’s history but only when it would be convenient to be deemed a person in the U.S. legal system.

Early on in our nation’s history, courts and government officials were hesitant to give in to these requests. Andrew Jackson was wary, once stating that the problem with corporations is that they have “neither bodies to be kicked nor souls to be damned.” But over time, as corporations gained power in American society, they not only attained the rights of natural persons but were also handed the rights of Superman without the expectations of saving the world and protecting society from evils. They were persons when they wanted to be but they were not to be punished as persons unless the courts were capable, and willing, to pierce their veil.

In the U.S. court system, it has been ruled consistently and frequently that corporations are legal persons. In two well-known cases, Buckley v. Valeo (1976) and Citizens United (2010), corporations quietly snatched up rights that took real people centuries of war and violence to attain, gaining the First Amendment’s right to free speech, including the right to contribute to political campaigns. Look at those dates a little closer and you will see that just a few moments passed between the time that real people, African-Americans, attained the rights of natural U.S. citizens and the time that corporations attained an even stronger right in the political scheme. Citizens of the United States may have the right to vote but corporations have the right to create the electoral process through financing political campaigns and more or less choosing favorable candidates. The right to make the election is much stronger than the right to vote. Yet again, these corporate owners were greedy, and decided that it was not enough for these unnatural beings to gain the right to free speech, toss our country’s democratic system into a flambé dish, and eat the nation’s sweet fruits up as a delectable dessert.

Corporations also sought the right “not to speak” as part of their First Amendment rights. In International Dairy Foods Association et al v. Attorney General of Vermont, a Federal Court overturned a district court decision and ruled that a Vermont labeling law was unconstitutional. That law required products containing recombinant bovine growth hormone to be labeled in order to protect consumers from a dangerous genetically engineered product. The Court stated that “because the statute at issue requires appellants to make an involuntary statement whenever they offer their products for sale, we find that the statute causes the dairy manufacturers irreparable harm…the dairy manufacturer’s right not to speak is a serious one that was not given proper weight by the district court.” Corporations had the right “not to speak” when they knowingly injured real people. Profit concerns for the multinational corporation involved in the case seemed to outweigh the public health concerns of real people. If that case does not do it for you, check out the court battles between Monsanto and the People of Anniston, Alabama, where the food conglomerate, Monsanto Corporation, in the name of profit, withheld knowledge about poisoning an entire town’s worth of people. These are court decisions in the greatest system of justice in the history of the world. These “natural persons” are slowly sweeping across every inch of our country and our planet, sucking up every power they can possibly find with high human costs. When natural persons have tried this in the past, they have always failed because somebody takes a stand against them. Napoleon tried this and lost at Waterloo. When Hitler tried this, the Allied Powers fought back with nuclear weapons. But when a multinational corporation tries this, we try them in court, place a veil over their head, and even in the instances when we pierce this veil, we only do so to ask for a small amount of money from their ever-deepening pockets in the politest way possible, only to hand the money back to them by purchasing their products in the near future. That is not an efficient market according to capitalism. It is a monetary inertia that exhibits little, if any, human progress.

If they are persons, they are persons that should be spending their lives in prison or at least at a psychiatric institution. There are reported studies concluding that if truly classified as persons, many corporations would full under the classification of psychopaths. Instead of dealing with them properly, we have allowed them to they place us in a panopticon, watching our every move to ensure that we are helpless in defending ourselves. They follow us in supermarkets to the point that they know what aisle our shopping carts are in at all times. They read our emails and know our friends. They “know if you’ve been good or bad” but they do not act like Santa Claus. Even if we could defend ourselves, corporations have an advantage over humans. They are legally immortal. They do not die. This is a clear advantage over people because if they want something from us, they can just wait until we die to get their hands on it. They have waited out Alaskan natives to take over properties for oil-drilling purposes.

Some may argue that they have given us so much and I admit the truth in those statements. Some corporations have helped to alleviate poverty, increase our production, etc. but did the corporations intend these beneficial results or were the results just unintended consequences of their profit schemes?

The corporation has come into our lives, taken our property, taken our rights, taken our freedoms, taken our health, paralyzed us with illusory choices, and has recently sucked up all of our savings by convincing us that extreme consumerism and materialism are productive systems of living. They own our world.

If a truly natural person tried to do all of that to you, how would you react? I would hope that you would find a way to stand up for yourself, whether by a legal battle or a bout of physical violence. But for most of us, it is easier to join them than to beat them, pretending that the possibilities corporatism presents to us at least makes the ride fun for our lives. So we accept all of that and sit back in our corporate clothes, on our corporate couches, watch corporate commercials, view corporate advertisements that try to convince us to consume corporate products, ensuring that we stay seated comfortably on our couches.

I do not know if this is just some evolutionary twist but merely observing it is clearly disturbing. It is as if many of us have given up on the human instinct to survive. We have surrendered our freedom and our volition, the exact things that make us living persons, to a group of non-living entities. After studying corporate law for three years, I have learned that the corporation is well protected. I was never instructed to ask whom they were protected from but the answer is people. It finally struck me why I found corporate law so interesting but wanted no part of it in my career search. Corporate law takes the rights of living things and hands them to entities that are treated like spoiled children. Maybe those fines are sending the corporations to their rooms but they have everything they want in those rooms. There is secrecy, security, prosperity, and profit in their rooms. That is not punishment or deterrence; that is just bad parenting. We give them cause to do whatever they want without caring about the consequences and unlike spoiled children, they have enormous voting power.

There should and could be a middle ground. A legal regime where we can use corporations for the benefit of society, maintaining control over our lives and controlling their choices with a regard for real life. We should not give up the great things that they provide but we should minimize the harms that they bring with them. Like the spoiled child, they have to act responsibly and they must mature. Until there is proof that a corporation is a contributing and functioning member of our society, I do not think they should have the rights of real persons.

-- DiegodelaPuente - 15 Nov 2011

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