Civil Liberties  

AlterNet / By Aaron Cantú

How Private Probation Companies Make Money From the Those They Trap in the Justice System

 

Governments still award services to companies with moneyed interest in jailing ever more people.

January 20, 2014  |  

 

 

Marietta Conner watched the judge expectantly. The 63-year-old assistant minister had just pled guilty to “fail[ing] to yield to a pedestrian”—a criminal misdemeanor in Georgia—and did not have enough money to pay her $140 fine. The judge ordered that she be put on probation. But instead of county probation, Conner was assigned a private probation company supposed to mimic normal court probabation: meet with her once a month through a probation officer, collect payments and confirm her work and address. In the end, the company sapped Conner of well over the original amount of the fine, and even dangled an arrest warrant over her head when it erroneously claimed she had missed a payment.

Conner was lucky. She knew someone at the Southern Center for Human Rights who helped her escape the trap the correctional corporation tried to put her in. Yet for hundreds of thousands of others on probation through a private company, the experience routinely entails prolonged harassment, indebtedness and even imprisonment—and sometimes all with the blessing of a judge.

To be ensnared in America’s system of mass incarceration is to be in prison, on parole, or on probation. In 2012 1 in every 35 American adults was trapped in the criminal justice system. The surging number of people whose lives necessitate constant surveillance and management has exploded the coffers of state and federal budgets, and rather than reform heavy-handed laws to ease this burden on public funds, elected leaders have contracted incarceration services out to companies with a moneyed interest in jailing more Americans. 

The private prison industry has stoked the outrage of progressives and civil libertarians for years, as has the practice of prosecutors pushing plea bargains with heavy parole, but an equally dangerous phenomenon is the rise of private probation businesses across the country.  Since the 1970s, the private probation industry has expanded into at least 20 states—most concentrated in the South—and nearly all of its companies are entirely supported by the fees paid to them by the probationers they “serve.” In the last few years, many of these businesses have been given more power to pursue and imprison probationers, playing a starring role in what one federal judge called a “judicially sanctioned extortion racket.”

When someone is convicted of a misdemeanor crime, he or she is often placed on probation by a judge either in lieu of minor prison time or as part of a payment plan to pay off court fines levied for his charge. Traditionally, the purpose of probation has been to facilitate the rehabilitation of the probationer through constant contact with a representative of the court (a probation officer), although this concept may be farcical in an age when an adult can be placed under “community supervision” for jaywalking. With privatized supervision, the offenders are required to report monthly to a contractor acting in the same capacity as a probation officer, and they must also pay a monthly fee to the company on top of the fines they owe the court.

The distinction between fee and fine is important because, as noted by the Economist, it is through fees that private probation companies can afford to pay the salaries of their staff. A report from the Criminal Justice Review explained that “Private agencies…rely on the probationer’s paying a supervision fee to remain solvent.” Solvency, however, is hardly a concern for many of these corporations, some of which have amassed tens of millions of dollars annually off the fees they charge probationers.

One such company is Sentinel Offender Services, whose combined operations in four different states brought in $30 million in 2009, according to an investigation by NBC. The company has faced many legal challenges on the grounds that its employees demand payment for fees from poor probationers and then issue arrest warrants when they cannot pay, without consideration for their financial situation. Marietta Conner, the impoverished pastor, was under the supervision of Sentinel.

Although a 1983 federal ruling said that probationers cannot be jailed for being indigent, Sentinel has regularly issued arrest warrants for probationers delinquent on their payments, and has even extended the probationary sentences of thousands—illegally—in order to wrest more money from them. Sentinel has terrorized so many lives a Georgia court recently ruled that the company might have to refund thousands of payments to former probationers who had the unfortunate luck to be supervised by a company that “links its probation officers’ performance evaluations to the amount of money collected from probationers,” according to a 2010 ACLU report.

Sentinel is just one in a vanguard of 34 probation corporations in Georgia pushing to have more power to hunt down delinquent probationers. A new bill up for a vote in the Georgia’s House of Representatives, greased for quick passage by funds from industry lobbyists would give private probation officers increased “immunity from liability” and grant them more discretion to extend a person’s probation—and by extension, prolong a probationer’s “payment period.” 

Some courts have actually been complicit in the racket. A circuit court in Alabama ruled in 2012 that the local municipal judiciary in Harpersville, Alabama had operated “debtor’s prisons” together with the private probation firm Judicial Correctional Services by turning over poor misdemeanor defendants to JCS and then allowing the company to fleece them for every cent they had.

In the event that the probationers couldn’t pay their monthly fees to the company—as was the case for many probationers in the nation’s fourth poorest state—they were thrown in jail without a trial at the behest of JCS and under the blessing of the Harpersville court, who would then doom already-indigent defendants to an inescapable pit of debt by piling even more fines and fees. The presiding judge who ruled against Harpersville was scandalized so deeply by the JCS-judiciary collusion that he accused the local court of “violating almost every safeguard afforded by the United States Constitution [and] the laws of the state of Alabama.” Meanwhile, JCS continues to operate in 69 cities throughout four different states.

Perhaps the most pernicious feature of these businesses is how they enable local municipalities to perpetuate debtor’s prisons across the country. In Florida, birthplace of modern privatized probation, courts permit correctional firms to tack on a 40% surcharge on top of the debt a delinquent probationer already owes, as detailed in an investigation by the Brennan Center for Justice. The investigation also found that courts in Missouri regularly condemn people to prison when they cannot pay off the fees imposed by probation companies, and in Illinois, corporations shakedown impoverished probationers for 30% more of their standing debt if they miss payments. In total, the report found that nine states charged probationers excessive fees “payable to private debt collection firms”—in other words, private probation companies.

Efforts to resist the abuses of the private probation system have been scattered and slow building. In addition to the class-action lawsuits filed against Sentinel in Georgia and JCS in Alabama, an Idaho-based probation company was sued in 2011 for perpetually increasing probationer’s sentences by manipulating the results of drug tests (testing positive for drugs is usually a violation of probation and can mean further penalties). That same year in Tennessee, a group of former probationer’s filed a successful lawsuit against the owner of a company called Ada County Misdemeanor Probation Services for having “forced them to overpay” and holding them on probation “longer than necessary.”

Yet despite a proliferation of lawsuits across the country, municipalities seem to show no less willingness to contract out probation services. In addition to the 20 or so states that now allow some form of privatized probation, a state senator in at least one other place—Nebraska—has inquired with policy experts about implementing the correctional model in his home state.

It does not take a legal expert to discern how for-profit correctional services threaten the freedom of Americans. Private probationary companies exist only as long as there is a steady supply of probationers from whom to extract payment, and these companies grow only if the number of people on probation grows. As evidenced further by the case of prison contractors, some of which have compelled state governors to keep prisons 90% full, a privatized correctional model maintains the American system of mass incarceration by further building it into an industry.

What Obama Really Meant Was ...

Published on Monday, January 20, 2014 by TruthDig.com

 

What Obama Really Meant Was ...

 

by Chris Hedges

 

 

 

Remarks by the President on Review of Signals Intelligence
(if he had told the truth)

Department of Injustice
Washington, D.C.

11:15 a.m. EST


THE PRESIDENT: A small, secret surveillance committee of goons and thugs hiding behind the mask of patriotism was established in 1908 in Washington, D.C. The group was led from 1924 until 1972 by J. Edgar Hoover, and during his reign it became known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI agents spied upon and infiltrated labor unions, political parties, radical groups—especially those led by African-Americans—anti-war groups and the civil rights movement in order to discredit anyone, including politicians such as Henry Wallace, who questioned the power of the state and big business. Agents burglarized homes and offices, illegally opened mail and planted unlawful wiretaps. Bureau leaders created blacklists. They destroyed careers and sometimes lives. They demanded loyalty oaths. By the time they were done, our progressive and radical movements, which had given us the middle class and opened up our political system, were dead. And while the FBI was targeting internal dissidents, our foreign intelligence operatives were overthrowing regimes, bankrolling some of the most vicious dictators on the planet and carrying out assassinations in numerous countries, such as Cuba and the Philippines and later Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Throughout American history, intelligence services often did little more than advance and protect corporate profits and solidify state repression and imperialist expansion. War, for big business, has always been very lucrative and used as an excuse to curtail basic liberties and crush popular movements. “Inter arma silent leges,” as Cicero said, or “During war, the laws are silent.” In the Civil War, during which the North and the South suspended the writ of habeas corpus and up to 750,000 soldiers died in the slaughter, Union intelligence worked alongside Northern war profiteers who sold cardboard shoes to the Army as the spy services went about the business of ruthlessly hunting down deserters. The First World War, which gave us the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act and saw President Woodrow Wilson throw populists and socialists, including Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, into prison, produced $28.5 billion in net profits for businesses and created 22,000 new millionaires. Wall Street banks, which lent $2.5 billion to nations allied with the United States, made sure Wilson sent U.S. forces into the senseless trench warfare so they would be repaid. World War II—which consumed more than 50 million lives and saw 110,000 Japanese-Americans hauled away to internment camps and atomic bombs dropped on defenseless civilians—doubled wartime corporate profits from the First World War. Why disarm when there was so much money to be made from stoking fear?

The rise of the Iron Curtain and nuclear weapons provided the justification by big business for sustaining a massive arms industry, for a huge expansion of our surveillance capabilities and for more draconian assaults against workers and radicals. The production of weapons was about profits rather than logic. We would go on to produce more than 70,000 nuclear bombs or warheads at a cost of $5.5 trillion, enough weapons to obliterate every Soviet city several times over. And in the early days of the Cold War, with Hoover and Joe McCarthy and his henchmen blacklisting anyone with a conscience in government, the arts, journalism, labor unions or education, President Harry S. Truman created the National Security Agency, or NSA.

Throughout this evolution, Americans were steadily shorn of their most basic constitutional rights and their traditions of limited government. U.S. intelligence agencies were always anchored in a system of secrecy—with little effective oversight from either elected leaders or ordinary citizens. Meanwhile, totalitarian states like East Germany offered a sterling example of what our corporate masters might achieve with pervasive, unchecked surveillance that turned citizens into informers and persecuted people for what they said in the privacy of their homes. Today I would like to thank the architects of this East German system, especially Erich Mielke, once the chief of the communist East German secret police. I want to assure them that the NSA has gone on to perfect what the Stasi began.

In the 1960s, the U.S. government spied on civil rights leaders, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement and critics of the Vietnam War, just as today we are spying on Occupy activists, environmentalists, whistle-blowers and other dissidents. And partly in response to these revelations decades ago, especially regarding the FBI’s covert dirty tricks program known as COINTELPRO, laws were established in the 1970s to ensure that our intelligence capabilities could not be misused against our citizens. In the long, twilight struggle against communism, and now in the fight against terrorism, I am happy to report that we have eradicated all of these reforms and laws. The crimes for which Richard Nixon resigned and the abuses of power that prompted the formation of the Church Commission are now legal. The liberties that some patriots, including Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, have sought to preserve have been sacrificed at the altar of national security. To obtain your personal information, the FBI can now freely issue “national security letters” to your bank, doctor, employer or public library or any of your associates without a judicial warrant. And you will never be notified of an investigation. We can collect and store in perpetuity all metadata of your email correspondence and phone records and track your geographical movements. We can assassinate you if I decide you are a terrorist. We can order the military under Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act to arrest you, strip you of due process and hold you indefinitely in military detention centers. We can continue to throw into prison those who expose the illegality of what we are doing, or force them into exile, as all totalitarian secret police forces from the SS to the KGB to the East German Stasi have done. And we can torture.


The fall of the Soviet Union left America without a competing superpower. This threatened to delegitimize our massive spending on war and state security, now more than 50 percent of our budget. But a group of Islamic radicals who had never posed an existential threat to our country emerged to take the place of the old communist bloc. The politics of fear and the psychosis of permanent war were able to be continued. The war on terror placed new and in some ways more complicated demands on our intelligence agencies. Our illegal and disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and our indiscriminate bombing of other countries, along with the war crimes Israel is carrying out against the Palestinian people, are driving people in the Muslim world into the arms of these militant groups. We are the most hated nation on earth. At the same time, globalization—our corporate policy of creating a worldwide neofeudalism of masters and serfs—means we must spy on citizens to prevent agitation and revolt. After all, if you are a worker, things are only going to get worse. To quash competitors of American companies, we spy on corporations in Brazil, including Brazil’s biggest oil company, Petrobras, and on corporations in Germany and France. We also steal information from the leaders of many countries, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose personal cellphone we tapped. However, Ms. Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, should not, as she has done, accuse us of being the Stasi. We are much more efficient than the Stasi was. We spied successfully on U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in addition to Pope Francis and the conclave that elected him last March. Senior U.N. officials and Roman Catholic cardinals are highly susceptible to recruitment by al-Qaida. The reasons are classified. I won’t share them with you. Believe me.

Threats to the nation raised new legal and policy questions, which fortunately our courts, abject tools of the corporate state, solved by making lawful everything from torture to wholesale surveillance. I would like to take a moment to thank our nation’s compliant judges, the spineless deans of most prestigious law schools and most law professors and lawyers for refusing to defend the Constitution. They have been valued partners, along with the press, in our campaign to eradicate your civil liberties.

The horror of September 11th was masterfully manipulated by the security state and our for-profit military-industrial complex. These forces used the attacks as an excuse to increase the massive pilfering of taxpayer dollars, especially by the Department of Homeland Security, which has a public budget of $98.8 billion. The truth, however, is the system of internal security is so vast and so secret no one in the public has any idea how large our programs are or how much we spend. It is true that our 16 intelligence agencies missed the numerous signs and evidence leading up to the 9/11 attacks. In short, they screwed up, just as they did when they failed to anticipate the fall of the Shah of Iran or the collapse of the Soviet Union, or when they told us Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But we have a rule in Washington: Never reform failed bureaucracies or hold government officials accountable; rather, give them more money. Keep failure secret.

It is a testimony to the hard work and dedication of the men and women of our intelligence community that over the past decade we’ve taken enormous strides in making the Middle East a caldron of rage. New capabilities and new laws have turned us into the most efficient killers on the planet. Relationships with foreign intelligence services have expanded, creating one immense, global corporate system of surveillance and security that obliterates the rights of people at home and abroad. Taken together, these efforts have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. We have terrorized whole countries from the sky and forced millions to become refugees. This will ensure endless war, which ensures endless profits for those who make war—which is the point.

Over the last six months, I created an outside Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies to make recommendations for reform. This group is led by the same intelligence chiefs who carry out the abuses. The chancellor of Germany has, like many of our other allies, demanded we stop spying on citizens of that nation. But, unfortunately for the chancellor, as well as for you, my fellow Americans, we will continue to do whatever we want.

The folks at the NSA and other intelligence agencies are our nation’s voyeurs and peeping Toms. They read your electronic bank and medical records. They know what you and your kids post on Facebook and Instagram. They have all of your emails and text messages. They track your movements through the GPS on your cellphone. They are not alone. Corporations of all kinds and sizes track your online searches and what you buy, then they analyze and store the data and use it for commercial purposes; that’s why those targeted ads pop up on your computer and your smartphone so often.

Given the unique power of the state, it is not enough for leaders to say “trust us, we won’t abuse the data we collect.” History has too many examples of such trust being breached. Our system of government is built on the premise that our liberty cannot depend on the good intentions of those in power; it depends on the law to constrain those in power. And that is why Congress and our courts have rewritten our laws, from the NDAA to the FISA Amendment Act, to strip you of legal protection.

I would not be where I am today were it not for the courage of dissidents like Martin Luther King Jr. who were spied upon by their own government. But I, like Bill Clinton, have sold out those true patriots and gutted those government programs that made possible my own education and ascent into systems of elite power. As president I understand, as do Bill and Hillary, that political power is about us, not about you. I know where power in this country lies. It does not lie with the citizen. It lies with Wall Street and corporate boardrooms. And since my vanity demands that I be famous, wealthy and powerful, I work hard for these centers of power. None of these centers of power want to see any curbs on the security and surveillance state. And so I will make sure there are none.

As a senator, I was critical of practices such as warrantless wiretaps. But as president I have carried out a far more extensive assault on civil liberties than my predecessor, George W. Bush. I have used the Espionage Act eight times to charge patriots such as Edward Snowden who exposed crimes of the state. And I have lied to you often, as I did in the original version of this speech, to defend the right of our security and surveillance apparatus to spy on you without judicial warrants.

As a presidential candidate in 2008 I promised to “reject the use of national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime.” I promised to close our detention center in Guantanamo Bay. I said I would revisit the Patriot Act. I told you I would overturn unconstitutional executive decisions issued by the Bush administration. I said I would shut down our black sites. And I promised an end to extraordinary rendition. I told you as president last summer that the NSA “cannot target your emails” and that all of our surveillance programs were subject to the full control of Congress. I have, along with our Congress and our highest courts, eradicated the Fourth Amendment, which once protected citizens from government intrusion into their persons, homes, papers and effects. And, to be frank, the only reason I am talking to you today about spying is because Edward Snowden has, through his leaked documents, illustrated that everything I and others in government have promised to do or told you about domestic and international surveillance is a lie.

Today I am announcing a series of cosmetic reforms that my administration intends to adopt administratively or will seek to codify through Congress.

First, I have approved a new presidential directive for our signals intelligence activities both at home and abroad that sounds impressive but means nothing.

Second, we will institute a few bureaucratic programs and procedures to give you the illusion of greater transparency while we continue to sweep up and store your personal information, including your telephone metadata.

Third, I propose more amorphous and undefined protections for government activities conducted under Section 702.

Fourth, the FBI’s national security letters will not be touched. But we could and should be more transparent in how government uses this authority. We really should. But we won’t. To make you feel better, however, I have directed the attorney general to amend how we use national security letters so that this secrecy will not be indefinite, so that it will terminate within a fixed—though unspecified—time unless the government demonstrates a need for further secrecy. That need might last forever.

This brings me to the program that has generated the most controversy these past few months—the bulk collection of telephone records under Section 215. Why is this necessary? It is necessary because in a totalitarian state the secret police must gather information not to solve crimes but, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, “to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” We need all of your emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements for “evidence” should we decide to seize you. And my apologies to Sen. Bernie Sanders, but we can’t make exemptions for members of Congress, especially when they come from Vermont. If you think you are innocent, or that you have nothing to hide, you do not understand what is happening. Justice, like truth, is no longer relevant. Ask Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, along with whistle-blowers like Thomas Drake, where justice and truth got them. One of the main tasks of any security service is blackmail, a tactic the FBI used to try to get Martin Luther King to commit suicide. So if you have any dirt we want to know about it.

I will propose turning over the storage of all your data to a third party, perhaps a private corporation. This will offer you no protection, but it should provide a good government contract to one of my major campaign donors.

The cosmetic reforms I’m proposing today will, I hope, give the American people greater confidence that their rights are being protected, even as our intelligence and law enforcement agencies, along with our courts, continue to eviscerate those rights. I recognize that there are additional issues that require further debate, such as your constitutional right to halt the wholesale capturing and storing of your personal information and correspondence and evidence of your geographical movements. But don’t expect me to help. I sold out long ago.
The bottom line is that people around the world, regardless of their nationality, can be assured that the United States follows everything they do or say. It does not matter if they are ordinary people or foreign leaders. I am not going to apologize for monitoring the communications of friends and allies. We know what we are doing. We know why this is important. The effects of declining incomes for working men and women, the massive debt peonage that keeps people trapped, the slashing of government assistance programs, the chronic, long-term unemployment, and the effects of climate change will eventually trigger volatile unrest. We are ready. The likelihood of totalitarianism no longer comes from fascism or communism. It comes from corporations. Corporations, for which I work, fear those who think and write and speak out and form relationships freely. Individual freedom impedes their profits. And the surveillance system I am protecting today is designed to keep these corporations in power.

Our democracy is a fiction. We seek to maintain this fiction to keep you passive. Should you wake up, we will not shy away from draconian measures. I believe we can meet high expectations. Together, let us chart a way forward that secures your complete subjugation, the iron rule of our corporations and our power elite—at least until we make the planet wholly uninhabitable—while we continue to snuff out the liberties that once made our nation worth fighting for.
Thank you. May God bless you. May God bless Corporate America.

© 2014 Truthdig, LLC.

 

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

 

 

 

 

 

QUICK TAKES | news & newsmaking broken down, with added nutrients

Benghazi: Cover-up By Both Parties?

 

By Russ Baker on Jan 15, 2014 

 

 

The continued finger-pointing between the GOP and the Obama Administration over “what really happened in Benghazi” may be obscuring a much more disturbing narrative—a story in neither party’s interest.

WhoWhatWhy’s discussion of that new possibility comes below, but first, here’s the background:

On September 11, 2012, a heavily armed group of more than 100 gunmen destroyed the US consulate compound and a nearby CIA facility in the Eastern Libyan city; ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans died. The attack has been characterized as “the most significant attack on United States property…since Sept. 11, 2001.”
Shortly after the incident, Susan Rice, then Obama’s UN ambassador, claimed publicly that the uprising was spontaneous—a reaction to an anti-Islam YouTube video that had just aired. She, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others soon came under severe attack for purportedly making a false claim to deflect attention from administration security failures, and the blogosphere has continued to resound with the issue ever since.

The GOP—along with its allies at Fox News and elsewhere—insistently drummed allegations that the Obama Administration was responsible for the tragedy. The charges have ranged from a failure to address Al Qaeda’s purported presence in Benghazi to not properly controlling weaponry in the hands of local militias.

These critics also decry what they say is a long-running cover-up.  According to one count, nearly 80 percent of House Republicans now say they want a Watergate-style inquiry convened. Liberals have charged the Republicans with being recklessly partisan and exhibiting “lunacy.”
Recently, the controversy’s simmer went back to boil when The New York Times published an investigative report on Benghazi. Some of its conclusions vindicated the Obama Administration. It concluded that there was no Al Qaeda role, and that indeed the inflammatory video may have played some role. However, while finding that the crowd attack was partially spontaneous, the paper’s reporter suggested that some intelligence lapses might have contributed. Specifically, he laid out superficial evidence that a local, non-Al Qaeda militia leader played some possible role as an inciter and sympathizer with the attack—and that the man should have already been drawing scrutiny from American spies. In other words, a kind of draw, with neither the GOP nor the Obama administration fully vindicated.

When the Times piece came out, the GOP and its echo chamber, including Donald Trump, raced to accuse the paper of covering up the role of Al Qaeda in the attacks. By most accounts, though, that critique is dependent on perpetuating a still-popular though overly simplified notion of Al Qaeda as a unified, globe-girdling command, ignoring the local origins of so much Islamist activity. The perpetuation of the “Al Qaeda threat” has worked well because it continues as an easy sell for those stoking the fear machine.

On a scorecard comparing the traditional news outlets, the Times would, not surprisingly, score higher on the credibility and integrity meter with the Benghazi story than, say Fox News. But that’s not saying a lot.
Because very few establishment news entities of any stripe are willing to look deeper at the true causes of convulsive events, to wade into the shadowy world of larger interests duking it out through surrogates and deception.

Sometimes, to be sure, such events as the Benghazi “uprising” are as they appear: spontaneous acts of anger and passion. But often enough, there is more to the story.

That appears to be the case here. Delve deep into the particulars and you will uncover clues that, when carefully juxtaposed, suggest a more coherent design.

Here are some of those pieces:

-The date of the assault: anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks

-The evidence of advance planning and preparation

-The timing, content, provenance, and beneficiaries of the inciting video

-The nature of the uprising itself and its similarity to other supposedly spontaneous or locally-ignited debacles with international implications and hints of a guiding hand.

Cui Bono?

Let’s start with the last point.

At least 12 hours before the attack, guards at the US compound had noticed evidence that the complex was under some kind of surveillance. They’d seen a man taking cell phone photos from the second floor of an unfinished building across the street, and when they approached, the man fled in a police car with others—all of whom were wearing the uniform of a quasi-official militia. So if the crowd was whipped up over the video, and spontaneous, then the crowd was phase two of a far less spontaneous, and carefully planned, operation.

If those so obviously “staking out” the building chose to wear uniforms of a Libyan-government-connected militia and to “escape” in a police car, most likely they were neither government nor police.

All investigators know to ask: Cui Bono? It’s Latin, which loosely translates as “who benefits?”  Who benefited from the destruction of the consulate and the deaths of the Americans, and the subsequent US-prompted heat placed on the militias by deeply embarrassed Libyan authorities? Not the militias. Not the Libyan government or the local police. And certainly not the Obama administration.

The net effect of the attack—and the outsized attention devoted to it at the time and over the course of the 16 months since it unfolded—was to revive concerns about global Islamic fundamentalism.

In the long stretches of quiet, public sentiment tends to move toward cutting aggressive foreign military action and the tremendous costs, as well as the domestic equivalent, in the form of the post-9/11 government and highly profitable private enterprises all grouped under “homeland security.” When Obama has tried at various points to rein in military operations and to promote diplomatic initiatives over armed intervention, especially in his second term, he has faced staunch opposition, including in Congress, where those benefiting most from war and discord spend heavily to influence members.

It was no surprise, really, that the Benghazi attack was quickly followed by claims that the Obama administration is not doing enough to protect American lives and property. And the result almost certainly has not been further restraint in spending or implementation of security measures. Indeed, with the emphasis on Benghazi as “the most significant attack on United States property…since Sept. 11, 2001,”  the US compound attack became the far bookend on a period of actual substantive safety and calm for Americans, lasting eleven years since the Twin Towers came under attack.

The GOP and its allies have, remarkably, even sought to create some kind of equivalency between Benghazi and 9/11—but on the Democrats’ watch, instead of George W. Bush’s. However, given that four people died in Benghazi, compared to nearly three thousand deaths from 9/11, the alacrity with which the Republicans, their partners at Fox and the like have pummeled Obama tells you something about their cynicism.
Practically, though, the Benghazi attack sends the message that the US must continue to be aggressive abroad, and that it expects the same from “friendly” regimes in the Middle East.

And no friendly regime was watching developments more closely than the one right next door—in Egypt.

For Answers, Look Next Door

For decades, dictators ruled Egypt with the full support of European powers and the US government. With the Arab Spring uprising—which was viewed with consternation by US authorities—the country finally embraced democracy. But it brought new perils, as Egyptian voters elected Islamists.

On June 30, 2012, Mohamed Morsi of the Islamic Brotherhood was sworn in as president of Egypt. He won 51.73 percent of the vote in that country’s first free election, becoming its first civilian president.
The Brotherhood, however, did not last long. A year later, the army overthrew Morsi.

At the time, US authorities predictably issued restrained condemnations of the army and its overtly anti-democratic action. In the ensuing months, however, the criticism became more and more muted as the mandarins of American foreign policy argued that military dictators were preferable to elected Islamists.

While the Egyptian military could be expected to serve the interests of the wealthy and of transnational corporations, as it had in the past, its supporters abroad cited humanitarian concerns as justification.
Among these concerns was the instability and intolerance that Islamist control heralded, particularly in the form of retribution against Egypt’s religious minorities. Most notably, these included the affluent Coptic Christian community, traditionally protected by the Egyptian government just as minorities in Syria have   been protected by President Assad. Assad himself is a member of a minority Muslim sect, the Alawites.

With this background, consider the role of that briefly infamous viral video in the Benghazi attack. The video was a strikingly crude production characterized by the secrecy of the sponsors and the seeming intention to antagonize Muslims—and perhaps direct the antagonism against Christians.

The video, with its Egyptian roots, appeared barely two months after Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood took power. It was publicized heavily by Egyptian television stations closely allied with the country’s military–stations whose audience includes Libyans, and specifically  much of the population of Benghazi. We learned that the odd figures behind it were….Coptic Christians.

The details of the production of this amateurish film remain hazy; no serious investigation has yet established who was ultimately behind it. But the multiple deceptions involved in tricking the actors and others who worked on the film, the subsequent overdubbing of dialogue highly offensive to Muslims, the criminal past of the Coptic Egyptian purportedly responsible for the film, all these cry out for further investigation. They also send up flares that we’re looking at a classic, multilayered disinformation operation orchestrated by someone with lots of skin in the game.

That it appeared on television channels closely associated with the Egyptian military just as the anniversary of 9/11 rolled around, and that it allegedly became the match that set off the Benghazi mini-conflagration cannot be ignored.

When Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and others were noting the role of the video in the tragedy, they may well have been right. But we heard no more from the administration on who they believed was responsible for the video or the timing of its release.

Given the strong Egyptian connection, it’s hard to imagine that no one put two and two together and wondered if the attack on the American mission, with its apparent advance planning and sophisticated deception, were not the work of some disciplined entity with substantial interests and resources.

So far, the evidence pointing to Egypt is purely circumstantial. But the net effect, and the message, is clear: North Africa is a tinderbox, and we’d be well to leave the Egyptian military alone while it pursues its brutal and bloody campaign to eradicate the Muslim Brotherhood. (The latest of a constant series of moves to quash the Islamists was the announcement by the Egyptian minister of education that the government had taken over more than 150 Brotherhood-run schools.)
Hence, our question: Were Egyptian intelligence services responsible for the inciting video, for stirring up the crowd, and essentially stage managing the attack on their “friend’s” consulate, with the goal of firming US support for their “get tough” policy? The net effect, more than a year later, has certainly been favorable to the military government. The dictatorship is firmly ensconced in power, and the US government has made little effort to get the military to withdraw to its barracks which would allow for democracy, however messy, to prevail in Egypt.

For the US military-industrial complex that has profited mightily from Egyptian military purchases, much of which is subsidized by US taxpayers, the benefits of a continued justification are apparent. Although the US has periodically announced modest and highly temporary freezes on military assistance to Egypt to symbolically protest aggression, these moves do nothing to seriously restrain aid that has typically run up to $1.5 billion dollars a year. And Secretary of Defense Hagel and Secretary of State Kerry have been supportive of the military regime; Kerry has been public in his praise of purportedly democratic moves by the generals in charge.

Whipping up unwitting crowds is nothing new. It’s been done in Iran, Chile, and in other places—including, as WhoWhatWhy has reported, a covert French role in the initiatory incident for the Libyan “Arab Spring” itself in 2011. It is a classic trick of the covert operations trade. It would not have been hard to light the match that turned into the Benghazi conflagration. Many of the veterans in “friendly” foreign intelligence services were trained by masters of public opinion manipulation from the West, spiritual heirs of familiar old intriguers such as David Atlee Phillips and E. Howard Hunt.

If our hunch on Benghazi is correct—and despite the indications, it is only a hunch—this pattern might mirror what happened with 9/11. In that situation, an attack bearing evidentiary signs of Saudi sponsorship paradoxically resulted not in investigations but in a strengthening of the US relationship with the dictatorial Saudi royal family. (For more on that, see this, this, and this.) In the case of 9/11, the US government has consistently blocked disclosure of relevant documents, apparently on the grounds of undefined “national security” interests. Is the Obama administration in the same self-imposed “bind” regarding Benghazi?

And here we see another convergence. Besides the Egyptians, another power that made sure everyone heard about that inflammatory video was Egypt’s traditional ally, Saudi Arabia. In a confidential memo from Clinton family confidant Sid Blumenthal to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, later obtained by a hacker and released, a “sensitive” source cites information from the French intelligence services which

“indicates that the funding (for the Benghazi attack) originated with wealthy Sunni Islamists in Saudi Arabia.”

Our Media, Unhelpful As Always

Did you hear any of this in the conventional media? Doubtful. From the Times to Fox News, we’ve seen little more than perpetuation of the Democratic-versus-Republican slugfest. This makes easy-to-follow coverage, but it obscures deeper patterns of behavior benefiting institutions and individuals that transcend party.

Fox and the GOP, however, ought to be singled out for the extent of their cynicism, whipping up their typically uninformed and perpetually choleric base. By hammering away relentlessly at the Obama administration for its purported “failures” and alleged “cover-up” of Benghazi, and by not looking at the likelihood of what really happened, they have only heaped manure on any original cover-up.

As always, the only hope for getting to the bottom of things is to turn to non-traditional “muckrakers” and whistleblowers.

Door Closes to Open Internet, But All May Not Be Lost

Published on Thursday, January 16, 2014 by Common Dreams

Door Closes to Open Internet, But All May Not Be Lost

by Michael Winship

 

 

In the words of Howard Beale, the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves in the movie Network, “Woe is us! We’re in a lot of trouble!” And, as Beale would shout, we should be mad as hell.

(Image: FreePress.net)

Issuing a decision that triggered dismay and anger among supporters of an Internet open and free to all, a federal appeals court on Tuesday overruled the Federal Communications Commission and set the stage for a near future in which such service providers as Verizon and AT&T could give preferential treatment to websites willing to pay a higher price for access and speed.

The ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is a potentially lethal blow to net neutrality – the principle that the Internet should be available equally to anyone who wishes to use it as a medium for creativity and information, regardless of who they are and no matter the size of their checkbooks.

The court ruled in a lawsuit filed by Verizon that “the FCC cannot subject companies that provide Internet service to the same type of regulation that the agency imposes on phone companies,” The New York Times reported. “It cited the FCC’s own decision in 2002 that Internet service was not a telecommunications service – like telephone or telegraph – but an information service, a classification that limits the FCC’s authority.”

The entertainment industry news site Variety noted, “The decision has broad implications for Internet businesses of all kinds, including Google, Yahoo, Netflix, Amazon.com, Apple and Facebook — as well as traditional media companies that rely on broadband networks for content distribution. The ruling for now establishes that government regulators can’t dictate how Internet service providers manage their networks and how they choose to prioritize data.”

In an Ask Me Anything discussion on Reddit Tuesday afternoon, telecommunications policy expert Susan Crawford further described the implications of the court decision:

It means that the major providers of high-speed Internet access in the US, who have systematically divided markets and tacitly agreed mostly not to compete with one another, can treat high-speed Internet access like a cable TV service. They can be gatekeepers, charge content providers (any business) for the privilege of reaching us, the subscribers; and, of course, charge us. A lot. For lousy service compared to, say, Stockholm or Seoul. 

In an official statement, Craig Aaron, president and CEO of the media reform group Free Press added, “[The court’s] ruling means that Internet users will be pitted against the biggest phone and cable companies — and in the absence of any oversight, these companies can now block and discriminate against their customers’ communications at will… They’ll establish fast lanes for the few giant companies that can afford to pay exorbitant tolls and reserve the slow lanes for everyone else.”

Nonetheless, the court’s decision could be reversed, either on appeal to the Supreme Court or by the FCC backing away from decisions it made during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations and taking a stronger stand on behalf of the American people instead of the Verizon’s and AT&T’s. In an article for The Huffington Post, Craig Aaron notes:

New FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler recently stated that the FCC must be able to protect broadband users and preserve the Internet’s fundamental open architecture. Now he has no other choice but to restore and reassert the FCC’s clear authority over our nation’s communications infrastructure.
… Now the free and open Internet is flat-lining. But Wheeler has the paddles in his hands and the power to resuscitate Net Neutrality. We’ll know soon if he has the political guts to use them. 

Wheeler, after the court’s decision was announced, said, “We will consider all available options, including those for appeal, to ensure that these networks on which the Internet depends continue to provide a free and open platform for innovation and expression, and operate in the interest of all Americans.”

But there will be congressional opposition. And the FCC has a long, sad track record of spinning pro-industry positions to make them sound good and good for you. It’s too soon to tell on which side Wheeler, a former lobbyist for the mobile phone and cable TV industries, ultimately will come down. Which means that once again, as has been the case so many times since this fight began, people have to stand up and be heard.
You can start by contacting the FCC chairman’s office and demanding that he and his colleagues stand resolute and forthright in favor of net neutrality, an Internet open to all.

Send an e-mail at the FCC’s website. Or tweet @TomWheelerFCC.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

 

Michael Winship, senior writing fellow at Demos and president of the Writers Guild of America-East, is senior writer for Bill Moyers' new weekend show Moyers & Company.

You'll Be Shocked at What 'Surveillance Valley' Knows About You

  Media  

PandoDaily / By Yasha Levine

You'll Be Shocked at What 'Surveillance Valley' Knows About You

 

The most intimate details about a person’s life, packaged and sold over and over again to anyone willing to pay.

 

 

January 8, 2014  |  

 

 

This article first appeared on Pando Daily.

“In 2012, the data broker industry generated 150 billion in revenue that’s twice the size of the entire intelligence budget of the United States government—all generated by the effort to detail and sell information about our private lives.” — Senator Jay Rockefeller IV
“Quite simply, in the digital age, data-driven marketing has become the fuel on which America’s free market engine runs.” — Direct Marketing Association

* *

Google is very secretive about the exact nature of its for-profit intel operation and how it uses the petabytes of data it collects on us every single day for financial gain. Fortunately, though, we can get a sense of the kind of info that Google and other Surveillance Valley megacorps compile on us, and the ways in which that intel might be used and abused, by looking at the business practices of the “data broker” industry.

Thanks to a series of Senate hearings, the business of data brokerage is finally being understood by consumers, but the industry got its start back in the 1970s as a direct outgrowth of the failure of telemarketing. In its early days, telemarketing had an abysmal success rate: only 2 percent of people contacted would become customers. In his book, “The Digital Perso,” Daniel J. Solove explains what happened next:

To increase the low response rate, marketers sought to sharpen their targeting techniques, which required more consumer research and an effective way to collect, store, and analyze information about consumers. The advent of the computer database gave marketers this long sought-after ability — and it launched a revolution in targeting technology.

Data brokers rushed in to fill the void. These operations pulled in information from any source they could get their hands on — voter registration, credit card transactions, product warranty information, donations to political campaigns and non-profits, court records — storing it in master databases and then analyzing it in all sorts of ways that could be useful to direct-mailing and telemarketing outfits. It wasn’t long before data brokers realized that this information could be used beyond telemarketing, and quickly evolved into a global for-profit intelligence business that serves every conceivable data and intelligence need.

Today, the industry churns somewhere around $150 billion in revenue annually. There are up to 4,000 data broker companies — some of the biggest are publicly traded — and together, they have detailed information on just about every adult in the western world.

No source of information is sacred: transaction records are bought in bulk from stores, retailers and merchants; magazine subscriptions are recorded; food and restaurant preferences are noted; public records and social networks are scoured and scraped. What kind of prescription drugs did you buy? What kind of books are you interested in? Are you a registered voter? To what non-profits do you donate? What movies do you watch? Political documentaries? Hunting reality TV shows?

That info is combined and kept up to date with address, payroll information, phone numbers, email accounts, social security numbers, vehicle registration and financial history. And all that is sliced, isolated, analyzed and mined for data about you and your habits in a million different ways.

The dossiers are not restricted to generic market segmenting categories like “Young Literati” or “Shotguns and Pickups” or “Kids & Cul-de-Sacs,” but often contain the most private and intimate details about a person’s life, all of it packaged and sold over and over again to anyone willing to pay.

Take MEDbase200, a boutique for-profit intel outfit that specializes in selling health-related consumer data. Well, until last week, the company offered its clients a list of rape victims (or “rape sufferers,” as the company calls them) at the low price of $79.00 per thousand. The company claims to have segmented this data set into hundreds of different categories, including stuff like the ailments they suffer, prescription drugs they take and their ethnicity:

These rape sufferers are family members who have reported, or have been identified as individuals affected by specific illnesses, conditions or ailments relating to rape. Medbase200 is the owner of this list. Select from families affected by over 500 different ailments, and/or who are consumers of over 200 different Rx medications. Lists can be further selected on the basis of lifestyle, ethnicity, geo, gender, and much more. Inquire today for more information.

MEDbase promptly took its “rape sufferers” list off line last week after its existence was revealed in a Senate investigation into the activities of the data-broker industry. The company pretended like the list was a huge mistake. A MEDbase rep tried convincing a Wall Street Journal reporter that its rape dossiers were just a “hypothetical list of health conditions/ailments.” The rep promised it was never sold to anyone. Yep, it was a big mistake. We can all rest easy now. Thankfully, MEDbase has hundreds of other similar dossier collections, hawking the most private and sensitive medical information.

For instance, if lists of rape victims aren’t your thing, MEDbase can sell dossiers on people suffering from anorexia, substance abuse, AIDS and HIV, Alzheimer’s Disease, Asperger Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Bedwetting (Enuresis), Binge Eating Disorder, Depression, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Genital Herpes, Genital Warts, Gonorrhea, Homelessness, Infertility, Syphilis… the list goes on and on and on and on.

Normally, such detailed health information would fall under federal law and could not be disclosed or sold without consent. But because these data harvesters rely on indirect sources of information instead of medical records, they’re able to sidestep regulations put in place to protect the privacy of people’s health data.

MEBbase isn’t the only company exploiting these loopholes. By the industry’s own estimates, there are something like 4,000 for-profit intel companies operating in the United States. Many of them sell information that would normally be restricted under federal law. They offer all sorts of targeted dossier collections on every population segments of our society, from the affluent to the extremely vulnerable:

• people with drug addictions
• detailed personal info on police officers and other government employees
• people with bad credit/bankruptcies
• minorities who’ve used payday loan services
• domestic violence shelter locations (normally these addresses would be shielded by law)
• elderly gamblers

If you want to see how this kind of profile data can be used to scam unsuspecting individuals, look no further than a Richard Guthrie, an Iowa retiree who had his life savings siphoned out of his bank account. Their weapon of choice: databases bought from large for-profit data brokers listing retirees who entered sweepstakes and bought lottery tickets.

Here’s a 2007 New York Timesstory describing the racket:

Mr. Guthrie, who lives in Iowa, had entered a few sweepstakes that caused his name to appear in a database advertised by infoUSA, one of the largest compilers of consumer information. InfoUSA sold his name, and data on scores of other elderly Americans, to known lawbreakers, regulators say.
InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change.”

Data brokers argue that cases like Guthrie are an anomaly — a once-in-a-blue-moon tragedy in an industry that takes privacy and legal conduct seriously. But cases of identity thieves and sophistical con-rings obtaining data from for-profit intel businesses abound. Scammers are a lucrative source of revenue. Their money is just as good as anyone else’s. And some of the profile “products” offered by the industry seem tailored specifically to fraud use.

As Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sergeant Yves Leblanc told the New York Times: “Only one kind of customer wants to buy lists of seniors interested in lotteries and sweepstakes: criminals. If someone advertises a list by saying it contains gullible or elderly people, it’s like putting out a sign saying ‘Thieves welcome here.’”

So what is InfoUSA, exactly? What kind of company would create and sell lists customized for use by scammers and cons?

As it turns out, InfoUSA is not some fringe or shady outfit, but a hugely profitable politically connected company. InfoUSA was started by Vin Gupta in the 1970s as a basement operation hawking detailed lists of RV and mobile home dealers. The company quickly expanded into other areas and began providing business intel  services to thousands of businesses. By 2000, the company raised more than $30 million in venture capital funding from major Silicon Valley venture capital firms.
By then, InfoUSA boasted of having information on 230 million consumers. A few years later, InfoUSA counted the biggest Valley companies as its clients, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL. It got involved not only in raw data and dossiers, but moved into payroll and financial, conducted polling and opinion research, partnered with CNN, vetted employees and provided customized services for law enforcement and all sorts of federal and government agencies: processing government payments, helping states locate tax cheats and even administrating President Bill Clinton “Welfare to Work” program. Which is not surprising, as Vin Gupta is a major and close political supporter of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

In 2008, Gupta was sued by InfoUSA shareholders for inappropriately using corporate funds. Shareholders accused of Gupta of illegally funneling corporate money to fund an extravagant lifestyle and curry political favor. According to the Associated Press, the lawsuit questioned why Gupta used private corporate jets to fly the Clintons on personal and campaign trips, and why Gupta awarded Bill Clinton a $3.3 million consulting gig.

As a result of the scandal, InfoUSA was threatened with delisting from Nasdaq, Gupta was forced out and the company was snapped up for half a billion dollars by CCMP Capital Advisors, a major private equity firm spun off from JP Morgan in 2006. Today, InfoUSA continues to do business under the name Infogroup, and has nearly 4,000 employees working in nine countries.

As big as Infogroup is, there are dozens of other for-profit intelligence businesses that are even bigger: massive multi-national intel conglomerates with revenues in the billions of dollars. Some of them, like Lexis-Nexis and Experian, are well known, but mostly these are outfits that few Americans have heard of, with names like Epsilon, Altegrity and Acxiom.

These for-profit intel behemoths are involved in everything from debt collection to credit reports to consumer tracking to healthcare analysis, and provide all manner of tailored services to government and law enforcement around the world. For instance, Acxiom has done business with most major corporations, and boasts of  intel on “500 million active consumers worldwide, with about 1,500 data points per person. That includes a majority of adults in the United States,” according to the New York Times.

This data is analyzed and sliced in increasingly sophisticated and intrusive ways to profile and predict behavior. Merchants are using it customize shopping experience— Target launched a program to figure out if a woman shopper was pregnant and when the baby would be born, “even if she didn’t want us to know.” Life insurance companies are experimenting with predictive consumer intel to estimate life expectancy and determine eligibility for life insurance policies. Meanwhile, health insurance companies are raking over this data in order to deny and challenge the medical claims of their policyholders.

Even more alarming, large employers are turning to for-profit intelligence to mine and monitor the lifestyles and habits of their workers outside the workplace. Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal described how employers have partnered with health insurance companies to monitor workers for “health-adverse” behavior that could lead to higher medical expenses down the line:

Your company already knows whether you have been taking your meds, getting your teeth cleaned and going for regular medical checkups. Now some employers or their insurance companies are tracking what staffers eat, where they shop and how much weight they are putting on — and taking action to keep them in line.
But companies also have started scrutinizing employees’ other behavior more discreetly. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina recently began buying spending data on more than 3 million people in its employer group plans. If someone, say, purchases plus-size clothing, the health plan could flag him for potential obesity — and then call or send mailings offering weight-loss solutions.
…”Everybody is using these databases to sell you stuff,” says Daryl Wansink, director of health economics for the Blue Cross unit. “We happen to be trying to sell you something that can get you healthier.”

“As an employer, I want you on that medication that you need to be on,” says Julie Stone, a HR expert at Towers Watson told the Wall Street Journal.

Companies might try to frame it as a health issue. I mean, what kind of asshole could be against employers caring about the wellbeing of their workers? But their ultimate concern has nothing to do with the employee health. It’s all about the brutal bottom line: keeping costs down.

An employer monitoring and controlling your activity outside of work? You don’t have to be union agitator to see the problems with this kind of mindset and where it could lead. Because there are lots of things that some employers might want to know about your personal life, and not only to “keep costs down.” It could be anything: to weed out people based on undesirable habits or discriminate against workers based on sexual orientation, regulation and political beliefs.

It’s not difficult to imagine that a large corporation facing a labor unrest or a unionization drive would be interested in proactively flagging potential troublemakers by pinpointing employees that might be sympathetic to the cause. But the technology and data is already here for wide and easy application: did a worker watch certain political documentaries, donate to environmental non-profits, join an animal rights Facebook group, tweet out support for Occupy Wall Street, subscribe to the Nation or Jacobin, buy Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine”? Or maybe the worker simply rented one of Michael Moore’s films? Run your payroll through one of the massive consumer intel databases and look if there is any matchup. Bound to be plenty of unpleasant surprises for HR!

This has happened in the past, although in a cruder and more limited way. In the 1950s, for instance, some lefty intellectuals had their lefty newspapers and mags delivered to P.O. boxes instead of their home address, worrying that otherwise they’d get tagged as Commie sympathizers. That might have worked in the past. But with the power of private intel companies, today there’s nowhere to hide.
FTC Commissioner Julie Brill has repeatedly voiced concern that unregulated data being amassed by for-profit intel companies would be used to discriminate and deny employment, and to determine consumer access to everything from credit to insurance to housing. “As Big Data algorithms become more accurate and powerful, consumers need to know a lot more about the ways in which their data is used,” she told the Wall Street Journal.

Pam Dixon, executive director of the Privacy World Forum, agrees. Dixon frequently testifies on Capitol Hill to warn about the growing danger to privacy and civil liberties posed by big data and for-profit intelligence. In Congressional testimony back in 2009, Dixon called this growing mountain of data the “modern permanent record” and explained that users of these new intel capabilities will inevitably expand to include not just marketers and law enforcement, but insurance companies, employers, landlords, schools, parents, scammers and stalkers. “The information – like credit reports – will be used to make basic decisions about the ability of individual to travel, participate in the economy, find opportunities, find places to live, purchase goods and services, and make judgments about the importance, worthiness, and interests of individuals.”

* *

For the past year, Chairman John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV has been conducting a Senate Commerce Committee investigation of the data broker industry and how it affects consumers. The committee finished its investigation last week without reaching any real conclusions, but issued a report warning about the dangers posed by the for-profit intel industry and the need for further action by lawmakers. The report noted with concern that many of these firms failed to cooperate with the investigation into their business practices:

Data brokers operate behind a veil of secrecy. Three of the largest companies – Acxiom, Experian, and Epsilon – to date have been similarly secretive with the Committee with respect to their practices, refusing to identify the specific sources of their data or the customers who purchase it. … The refusal by several major data broker companies to provide the Committee complete responses regarding data sources and customers only reinforces the aura of secrecy surrounding the industry.

Rockefeller’s investigation was an important first step breaking open this secretive industry, but it was missing one notable element. Despite its focus on companies that feed on people’s personal data, the investigation did not include Google or the other big Surveillance Valley data munchers. And that’s too bad. Because if anything, the investigation into data brokers only highlighted the danger posed by the consumer-facing data companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Apple.

As intrusive as data brokers are, the level of detail in the information they compile on Americans pales to what can be vacuumed up by a company like Google. To compile their dossiers, traditional data brokers rely on mostly indirect intel: what people buy, where they vacation, what websites they visit. Google, on the other hand, has access to the raw uncensored contents of your inner life: personal emails, chats, the diary entries and medical records that we store in the cloud, our personal communication with doctors, lawyers, psychologists, friends. Data brokers know us through our spending habits. Google accesses the unfiltered details of our personal lives.

A recent study showed that Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to having their online activity tracked and analyzed. Seventy-three percent of people polled for the Pew Internet & American Life Project  viewed the tracking of their search history as an invasion of privacy, while 68 percent were against targeted advertising, replying: “I don’t like having my online behavior tracked and analyzed.”

This isn’t news to companies like Google, which last year warned shareholders: “Privacy concerns relating to our technology could damage our reputation and deter current and potential users from using our products and services.”

Little wonder then that Google, and the rest of Surveillance Valley, is terrified that  the conversation about surveillance could soon broaden to include not only government espionage, but for-profit spying as well.

Yasha Levine is an editor for eXiledonline.com. He is the author of the book, The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell (2012).

Ten Myths About the NSA, Debunked

Ten Myths About the NSA, Debunked

You can’t opt out.

Peter Van Buren

 

 

January 13, 2014   

 

 

 

A reporter takes a picture of NSA Director and U.S. Army General Keith Alexander as he testifies before a House Committee on Intelligence hearing on NSA surveillance programs. (Reuters/Jonathan Ernst) 

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

The debate Edward Snowden envisioned when he revealed the extent of National Security Agency (NSA) spying on Americans has taken a bad turn. Instead of a careful examination of what the NSA does, the legality of its actions, what risks it takes for what gains and how effective the agency has been in its stated mission of protecting Americans, we increasingly have government officials or retired versions of the same demanding—quite literally—Snowden’s head and engaging in the usual fear-mongering over 9/11. They have been aided by a chorus of pundits, columnists and present as well as former officials offering bumper-sticker slogans like “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” all the while claiming our freedom is in direct conflict with our security.

It’s time to face these arguments directly. So here are ten myths about NSA surveillance that need debunking. Let’s sort them out.

1) NSA surveillance is legal.

True, if perhaps you put “legal” in quotes. After all, so was slavery once upon a time in the US and apartheid in South Africa. Laws represent what a government and sometimes perhaps even a majority of the people want at a given point in time. They change and are changeable; what once was a potential felony in Colorado is now a tourist draw.
Laws, manipulated for terrible ends, must be challenged when they come into conflict with the fundamental principles and morals of a free society. Laws created Nelson Mandela, the terrorist (whom the US kept on its terror watch list until 2008), and laws created Nelson Mandela, the president.

There’s a catch in the issue of legality and the NSA. Few of us can know just what the law is. What happens to you if you shoplift from a store or murder someone in a bar fight? The consequences of such actions are clearly codified and you can look them up. Is it legal to park over there? The rules are on a sign posted right where you’d like to pull in. If a cop tickets you wrongly, you can go to court and use that sign to defend yourself. Yet almost all of the applicable “law,” when it comes to the National Security Agency and its surveillance practices, was secret until Edward Snowden began releasing his documents. Secret interpretations of the shady Patriot Act made in a secret court applied. The fact that an unknown number of legal memos and interpretations of that secret law (themselves still classified) are operative means that we really don’t know what is legal anymore.

The panel of experts appointed by President Obama to review the Snowden revelations and the NSA’s actions had a peek into the issue of “legality” and promptly raised serious questions—as did one of the two federal courts that recently ruled on some aspects of the issue. If the Obama administration and the Justice Department really believe that all the NSA’s activities will be proven legal in a court of law, why not allow them to be tested openly and unambiguously in public? After all, if you’ve done nothing illegal, then there’s nothing to hide.

When Amnesty International first tried to bring such a question before the courts, the case was denied because that organization couldn’t prove that it had been subject to monitoring—that was a secret, of course!—and so was denied standing even to bring the suit. Snowden’s revelations seem to have changed all that. The documents made public have given “standing” to a staggering array of individuals, organizations and countries. For the first time in twelve years, they pave the way for the issue to come to its proper venue in front of the Supremes. Openly. Publicly.

2) If I’ve done nothing wrong, I have nothing to hide. So why should I care about any of this?

Keep in mind that the definition of “wrong” can quickly change. And if you don’t know what the actual law really is, how can you say that you know you have done nothing wrong? If you’ve got nothing to hide, post your social security number and credit card information online, leave your curtains open at night and see how that sits with you.

In a larger sense, however, the very idea that “I’ve got nothing to hide” is a distraction. The Fourth Amendment guarantees a right to privacy. The Constitution does not ask if you want or need that right; it grants it to everyone, and demands that the government interfere with it only under specific circumstances.

The Fourth Amendment came into being because of the British use of general warrants in the colonial era. Under that “law,” they could legally search whole groups of people, their possessions and their papers without having to justify searching any specific person. Called “writs of assistance,” these general warrants allowed the King’s agents to search anyone, anytime, regardless of whether they suspected that person of a crime. The writs were most often used by Royal Customs agents (an irony perhaps, given the draconian powers now granted to US Customs agents to search anyone’s personal electronics, including those of American citizens, at the border).

The US fought a revolution, and James Madison wrote the Fourth Amendment, against broad government authority to search. Whether you personally do or do not have anything to hide is not even a question that should be on the table. It should be almost un-American to ask it.

3) But the media says the NSA only collects my “phone metadata,” so I’m safe.

My older, conservative neighbor quickly insisted that collecting this metadata thing she had heard about on Fox was necessary to protect her from all the terrorists out here in suburbia. She then vehemently disagreed that it was okay for President Obama to know whom she called and when, from where to where and for how long, or for him to know who those people called and when, and so forth.

Think of metadata as the index to all the content the NSA can sweep up. That agency is able to record, say, twenty-four hours worth of Verizon phone calls. Its operatives can then easily locate any particular call within that huge chunk of metadata. Such basic information can also provide geo-location information to track physical movements. Metadata showing that you called your doctor, followed by metadata about which lab department she called next, followed by a trip to the pharmacy might fall into the “something you want to hide” category. (Actually, using metadata to learn about your medical history may not be even necessary. An exception to the privacy policy of one of America’s larger HMOs, Kaiser Permanente, states: “We may also disclose your PHI [personal health information] to authorized federal officials as necessary for national security and intelligence activities.” BlueCross BlueShield has a similar exception as do regional medical outfits.)

Metadata is important. Ever play the game “Six Degrees of Separation”? Silly as it seems, almost anyone is indeed just six hops away from anyone else. You know a guy in Detroit who has a friend in California who has a sister who cuts hair whose client is Kevin Bacon’s high school classmate’s cousin. You and that cousin are connected. Publicly available information tells us that the NSA traces “three hops” from a target: A knows B, C and D. But once C morphs into a target, C’s three hops mean the NSA can poke into E, F and G and so forth. The Guardian calculated that if A has fifty friends, the number of targets generated under the three-hop rule would be over 1.3 million people. I really do hope that you (and everyone you know, and they know) have nothing to hide.

4) Aren’t there are already checks and balances in our system to protect us against NSA overreach?

In recent years, the government has treated the king of all checks and balances, the Constitution, like a used Kleenex. The secret Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Court (FISA) was set up to provide judicial oversight in a classified setting to the intelligence community.
Theoretically, the government is required to make a compelling case for the issuance of orders authorizing electronic and other surveillance, physical searches, and compelled production of business records. Either the government is very good at making its case, or the court has become a rubber stamp: that secret FISA court approved all 1,789 requests submitted to it in 2012.

The Patriot Act elevated a once rarely used tool, the National Security Letter (NSL), into the mainstream of government practice. National Security Letters are an extraordinary search procedure that gives the FBI the power to compel the disclosure of customer records held by banks, telephone companies, Internet service providers, public libraries and others. These entities are prohibited, or “gagged,” from telling anyone about their receipt of the NSL. Though the Justice Department itself cited abuse of the letters by the FBI in 2008, in 2012 the FBI used 15,229 National Security Letters to gather information on Americans. NSLs do not require judicial approval and the built-in gag orders prevent anyone from seeking judicial relief; indeed, most people will never even know that they were the subject of an NSL. And at the moment, the Department of Justice is trying to keep classified an eighty-six-page court opinion that determined the government violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and engaged in unconstitutional spying.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper directly lied to that check-and-balance branch of the government, Congress, in a public session. (He later termed his response the “least untruthful” answer.) And we wouldn’t even know that he lied, or much of anything else about the NSA’s surveillance activities here or globally, if it weren’t for one man’s courage in exposing them. The government had kept it all from us for twelve years and never showed the slightest sign of reconsidering any part of that policy. Without Snowden, we would not even know what needs checking and balancing.

5) But I trust Obama (Bush, the next president) on this.

I can guess what your opinions are of the people that run the Transportation Safety Administration or the Internal Revenue Service. On what basis, then, can you conclude that the NSA or any other part of the government is any more trustworthy or competent, or any less petty?
While the government does not trust you to know what it does, thanks again to the Snowden revelations, we know that the NSA trusts some foreign governments more than you. The NSA is already sharing at least some data about Americans with, at a minimum, British intelligence and the Israelis. And who knows how those governments use it or whom they share it with downstream?

Do you really trust all of them all the time to never make mistakes or act on personal grudges or political biases? History is clear enough on what former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover did with the personal information he was able to collect on presidents, the Supreme Court, Congressional representatives, Martin Luther King and others in the civil rights movement. Among other things, he used his secretly obtained information to out gay members of government. As for the NSA, so far it hasn’t even been willing to answer the question of whether it’s been spying on, surveilling, or gathering metadata on members of Congress.
Still, let’s assume that Obama or the next president or the one after that will never do anything bad with your personal data. Once collected, however, that data potentially exists forever. If the NSA is to be believed, it claims to hold metadata for only five years, though it can keep copies of intercepted communications from or about US citizens indefinitely if the material contains “significant intelligence” or “evidence” of crimes. The NSA can hold on to your encrypted communications as long as is needed to break the encryption. The NSA can also keep indefinitely any information gathered for “cryptanalytic, traffic analysis, or signal exploitation purposes.” Data held is available to whoever can access it in the future, using whatever technologies come to exist. Trusting anyone with such power is foolish. And as for data security, we know of at least one recent instance when more than 1.7 million highly-classified NSA documents just walked out the door.

6) But don’t private companies like Facebook already have access to and share a lot of my personal data? So what’s wrong with the government having it, too?

While private companies can pass your private information to the government, either willingly or under secret compulsion, there still are some important differences.

At least in theory, it’s your choice to give data to private companies. You could stop using Facebook, after all. You can’t, however, opt out of the NSA. About the worst that Facebook and the others directly want is to take your money and send you spam. While certainly no angel, Facebook can’t arrest you, put you on the No-Fly list with no recourse, seize your property or put you under investigation, audit your finances, imprison you without trial as a terrorist, or order you assassinated by drone. Facebook can’t suspend your civil rights; the government can. That is a big, big difference. And by the way, a proposed solution to the metadata collection problem—having private companies, not the NSA, hold the data—is no solution at all. Data stored and available to NSA analysts, wherever it is, is data stored and available to NSA analysts.

7) All this surveillance is distasteful and maybe even illegal, but isn’t it necessary to keep us safe? Isn’t it for our own good? Haven’t times changed and shouldn’t we acknowledge that?

This isn’t a new argument; it’s Old Reliable. It was the argument that Hoover, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and so many others made to justify the particular acts they chose to endorse to protect us against Communism. The 1976 Church Committee Report, the first and only large-scale review of America’s internal spy networks, found that between 1953 and 1973 nearly a quarter of a million first-class letters were opened and photographed in the United States by the CIA. Like the NSA, it was at that time officially forbidden to spy on Americans domestically. It nonetheless produced a computerized index of nearly one and one-half million names. At least 130,000 first class letters were also opened and photographed by the FBI between 1940 and 1966, all to keep us safe and for our own good in changing times. I doubt many people now believe any of that is what kept the Reds at bay.

The same argument was made about the necessity of domestic surveillance during the Vietnam War. Again, from the Church Report, we learned that some 300,000 individuals were indexed in a CIA computer system and that separate files were created on approximately 7,200 Americans and more than 100 domestic groups under the umbrella of Operation MH/CHAOS, designed to ferret out supposed foreign influence on the antiwar movement. Intelligence files on more than 11,000 individuals and groups were created by the Internal Revenue Service between 1969 and 1973 and tax investigations were started on the “basis of political rather than tax criteria.” I doubt many people now believe any of that is what kept the nation from descending into chaos.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights have matured with our nation, growing to end slavery, enhance the rights of women and do away with Jim Crow and other immoral laws. The United States survived two world wars, the Cold War and innumerable challenges without a massive, all-inclusive destruction of civil rights. Any previous diversions—Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War is a favorite instance cited—were short, specific and reversed or overturned. The Founders created the Bill of Rights to address, point-by-point, the abuses of power they experienced under an oppressive British government. (Look up the never-heard-from-again Third Amendment.) A bunch of angry jihadis, real and imagined, seems a poor reason to change that system.

8) Terrorists are everywhere and dangerous.

From 1776 to 2001 the United States did not experience a terror attack anywhere close to the scale of 9/11; the worst terror attack against the United States as of 9/10, the Oklahoma City bombing, claimed 168 lives compared to some 3,000 at the Twin Towers. Since 9/11 we have not had a comparable mass-scale terror attack. No dirty bombs at the Super Bowl, no biochemical nightmares, no suicide bombers in our shopping malls or theme parks. There have been only about twenty domestic terror-related deaths since 9/11. Your chances as an American of being killed by a terrorist (the figures are for the world, not just inside the US) are about 1 in 20 million. The inevitable comparison shows the odds of being struck by lightning at 1 in 5.5 million. You are, in other words, about four times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist. Most of the “terrorists” arrested in this country post-9/11 have been tragicomic fabrications of the FBI. 9/11 was a one-off, an aberration, so unique that its “success” stunned even Osama bin Laden. It was a single morning of disaster and cannot be the justification for everything the government wishes to do forever after.

9) We’ve stayed safe. Doesn’t that just prove all the government efforts have worked?

No, that’s called false causality. There simply is no evidence that it’s true, and much to the contrary. It’s the same as believing government efforts have prevented Martian attacks or wild lions in our bedrooms. For one thing, we already know that more NSA spying would not have stopped 9/11; most of the needed information was already held by the US government and was simply not properly shared or acted upon. 9/11 was a policy failure, not a matter of too-little snooping. Today, however, it remains a straw-man justification for whatever the NSA wants to do, a way of scaring you into accepting anything from the desecration of the Fourth Amendment to taking off our shoes at airport security. But the government uses this argument endlessly to promote what it wants to do. Even the NSA’s talking points recommend their own people say: “I much prefer to be here today explaining these programs, than explaining another 9/11 event that we were not able to prevent.”

At the same time, despite all this intrusion into our lives and the obvious violations of the Fourth Amendment, the system completely missed the Boston bombers, two of the dumbest, least sophisticated bro terrorists on the planet. Since 9/11, we have seen some 364,000 deaths in our schools, workplaces and homes caused by privately owned firearms, and none of the spying or surveillance identified any of the killers in advance.

Maybe we should simply stop thinking about all this surveillance as a matter of stopping terrorists and start thinking more about what it means to have a metastasized global surveillance system aimed at spying on us all, using a fake argument about the need for 100 percent security in return for ever more minimal privacy. So much has been justified in these years—torture, indefinite detention, the Guantánamo penal colony, drone killings, wars and the use of Special Operations forces as global assassination teams—by some version of the so-called ticking time bomb scenario. It’s worth getting it through our heads: there has never been an actual ticking time bomb scenario. The bogeyman isn’t real. There’s no monster hiding under your bed.

10) But doesn’t protecting America come first—before anything?

What exactly are we protecting from what? If, instead of spending trillions of dollars on spying and domestic surveillance, we had spent that same money on repairing our infrastructure and improving our schools, wouldn’t we now have a safer, stronger America? Remember that famously absurd Vietnam War quote from an American officer talking about brutal attack on Ben Tre, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it”? How can anyone say we are protecting our liberty and freedom by taking it away?

Read Next: David Cole on why we need to update the Fourth Amendment. 

Peter Van Buren

January 13, 2014