July 14, 2013
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The
American surveillance state is now an omnipresent reality, but its deep
history is little known and its future little grasped. Edward
Snowden’s
leaked documents
reveal that, in a post-9/11 state of war, the National Security Agency
(NSA) was able to create a surveillance system that could secretly
monitor the private communications of almost every American in the name
of fighting foreign terrorists. The technology used is state of the art;
the impulse, it turns out, is nothing new. For well over a century,
what might be called “surveillance blowback” from America’s wars has
ensured the creation of an ever more massive and omnipresent internal
security and surveillance apparatus. Its future (though not ours) looks
bright indeed.
In 1898, Washington occupied the Philippines and
in the years that followed pacified its rebellious people, in part by
fashioning the world’s first full-scale “surveillance state” in a
colonial land. The illiberal lessons learned there then migrated
homeward, providing the basis for constructing America’s earliest
internal security and surveillance apparatus during World War I. A
half-century later, as protests mounted during the Vietnam War, the FBI,
building on the foundations of that old security structure, launched
large-scale illegal counterintelligence operations to harass antiwar
activists, while President Richard Nixon’s White House created its own
surveillance apparatus to target its domestic enemies.
In the
aftermath of those wars, however, reformers pushed back against secret
surveillance. Republican privacy advocates abolished much of President
Woodrow Wilson’s security apparatus during the 1920s, and Democratic
liberals in Congress created the FISA courts in the 1970s in an attempt
to prevent any recurrence of President Nixon’s illegal domestic
wiretapping.
Today, as Washington withdraws troops from the
Greater Middle East, a sophisticated intelligence apparatus built for
the pacification of Afghanistan and Iraq has come home to help create a
twenty-first century surveillance state of unprecedented scope. But the
past pattern that once checked the rise of a U.S. surveillance state
seems to be breaking down. Despite talk about ending the war on terror
one day, President Obama has left the historic pattern of partisan
reforms far behind. In what has become a permanent state of “wartime” at
home, the Obama administration is building upon the surveillance
systems created in the Bush years to maintain U.S. global dominion in
peace or war through a strategic, ever-widening edge in information
control. The White House shows no sign -- nor does Congress -- of
cutting back on construction of a powerful, global Panopticon that can
surveil domestic dissidents, track terrorists, manipulate allied
nations, monitor rival powers, counter hostile cyber strikes, launch
preemptive cyberattacks, and protect domestic communications.
Writing for TomDispatch four years ago during Obama’s first months in office, I
suggested
that the War on Terror has “proven remarkably effective in building a
technological template that could be just a few tweaks away from
creating a domestic surveillance state -- with omnipresent cameras, deep
data-mining, nano-second biometric identification, and drone aircraft
patrolling ‘the homeland.’"
That prediction has become our present
reality -- and with stunning speed. Americans now live under the
Argus-eyed gaze of a digital surveillance state, while increasing
numbers of surveillance drones fill American skies. In addition, the
NSA’s net now reaches far beyond our borders, sweeping up the personal
messages of many millions of people worldwide and penetrating the
confidential official communications of at least 30 allied nations. The
past has indeed proven prologue. The future is now.
The Coming of the Information Revolution
The
origins of this emerging global surveillance state date back over a
century to “America’s first information revolution” for the management
of textual, statistical, and analytical data -- a set of innovations
whose synergy created the technological capacity for mass surveillance.
Here’s a little litany of “progress” to ponder while on the road to today’s every-email-all-the-time version of surveillance.
Within
just a few years, the union of Thomas A. Edison’s quadruplex telegraph
with Philo Remington’s commercial typewriter, both inventions of 1874,
allowed for the accurate transmission of textual data at the unequalled
speed of 40 words per minute across America and around the world.
In
the mid-1870s as well, librarian Melvil Dewey developed the “Dewey
decimal system” to catalog the Amherst College Library, thereby
inventing the “smart number” for the reliable encoding and rapid
retrieval of limitless information.
The year after engineer Herman
Hollerith patented the punch card (1889), the U.S. Census Bureau
adopted his Electrical Tabulating machine to count 62,622,250 Americans
within weeks -- a triumph that later led to the founding of
International Business Machines, better known by its acronym IBM.
By
1900, all American cities were wired via the Gamewell Corporation’s
innovative telegraphic communications, with over 900 municipal police
and fire systems sending 41 million messages in a single year.
A Colonial Laboratory for the Surveillance State
On
the eve of empire in 1898, however, the U.S. government was still what
scholar Stephen Skowronek has termed a “patchwork” state with a
near-zero capacity for domestic security. That, of course, left ample
room for the surveillance version of modernization, and it came with
surprising speed after Washington conquered and colonized the
Philippines.
Facing a decade of determined Filipino resistance,
the U.S. Army applied all those American information innovations --
rapid telegraphy, photographic files, alpha-numeric coding, and Gamewell
police communications -- to the creation of a formidable, three-tier
colonial security apparatus including the Manila Police, the Philippines
Constabulary, and above all the Army’s Division of Military
Information.
In early 1901, Captain Ralph Van Deman, later dubbed
“the father of U.S. Military Intelligence,” assumed command of this
still embryonic division, the Army’s first field intelligence unit in
its 100-year history. With a voracious appetite for raw data, Van
Deman’s division compiled phenomenally detailed information on thousands
of Filipino leaders, including their physical appearance, personal
finances, landed property, political loyalties, and kinship networks.
Starting
in 1901, the first U.S. governor-general (and future president) William
Howard Taft drafted draconian sedition legislation for the islands and
established a 5,000-man strong Philippines Constabulary. In the
process, he created a colonial surveillance state that ruled, in part,
thanks to the agile control of information, releasing damning data about
enemies while suppressing scandals about allies.
When the
Associated Press’s Manila bureau chief reported critically on these
policies, Taft’s allies dug up dirt on this would-be critic and dished
it out to the New York press. On the other hand, the Division of
Military Information compiled a scandalous report about the rising
Filipino politician Manuel Quezon, alleging a premarital abortion by his
future first lady. Quezon, however, served the Constabulary as a spy,
so this document remained buried in U.S. files, assuring his unchecked
ascent to become the first president of the Philippines in 1935.
American Blueprint
During
the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, Mark Twain wrote an imagined
history of twentieth-century America. In it, he predicted that a “lust
for conquest” had already destroyed “the Great [American] Republic,”
because “trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a
natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.” Indeed, just a
decade after Twain wrote those prophetic words, colonial police methods
came home to serve as a template for the creation of an American
internal security apparatus in wartime.
After the U.S. entered
World War I in 1917 without an intelligence service of any sort, Colonel
Van Deman brought his Philippine experience to bear, creating the U.S.
Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) and so laying the
institutional foundations for a future internal security state.
In
collaboration with the FBI, he also expanded the MID’s reach through a
civilian auxiliary organization, the American Protective League, whose
350,000 citizen-operatives amassed more than a million pages of
surveillance reports on German-Americans in just 14 months, arguably the
world’s most intensive feat of domestic surveillance ever.
After
the Armistice in 1918, Military Intelligence joined the FBI in two years
of violent repression of the American left marked by the notorious
Luster raids in New York City, J. Edgar Hoover’s “Palmer Raids” in
cities across the northeast and the suppression of union strikes from
New York City to Seattle.
When President Wilson left office in
1921, incoming Republican privacy advocates condemned his internal
security regime as intrusive and abusive, forcing the Army and the FBI
to cut their ties to patriotic vigilantes. In 1924, Attorney General
Harlan Fiske Stone, worrying that “a secret police may become a menace
to free government,” announced “the Bureau of Investigation is not
concerned with political or other opinions of individuals.” Epitomizing
the nation’s retreat from surveillance, Secretary of War Henry Stimson
closed the Military Intelligence cipher section in 1929, saying
famously, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."
After
retiring at the rank of major general that same year, Van Deman and his
wife continued from their home in San Diego to coordinate an informal
intelligence exchange system, compiling files on 250,000 suspected
“subversives.” They also took reports from classified government files
and slipped them to citizen anti-communist groups for blacklisting. In
the 1950 elections, for instance, Representative Richard Nixon
reportedly used Van Deman’s files to circulate “pink sheets” at rallies
denouncing California Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, his opponent
in a campaign for a Senate seat, launching a victorious Nixon on the
path to the presidency.
From retirement, Van Deman, in league with
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, also proved crucial at a 1940 closed-door
conference that awarded the FBI control over domestic
counterintelligence. The Army’s Military Intelligence, and its
successors, the CIA and NSA, were restricted to foreign espionage, a
division of tasks that would hold, at least
in principle,
until the post-9/11 years. So armed, during World War II the FBI used
warrantless wiretaps, “black bag” break-ins, and surreptitious mail
opening to track suspects, while mobilizing more than 300,000 informers
to secure defense plants against wartime threats that ultimately proved
“negligible.”
The Vietnam Years
In response
to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s, the FBI
deployed its COINTELPRO operation, using what Senator Frank Church’s
famous investigative committee later called "unsavory and vicious
tactics... including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt
meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target
groups into rivalries that might result in deaths."
In assessing
COINTELPRO’s 2,370 actions from 1960 to 1974, the Church Committee
branded them a "sophisticated vigilante operation" that "would be
intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been
involved in violent activity." Significantly, even this aggressive
Senate investigation did not probe Director Hoover’s notorious “private
files” on the peccadilloes of leading politicians that had insulated his
Bureau from any oversight for more than 30 years.
After
New York Times reporter
Seymour Hersh
exposed illegal CIA surveillance of American antiwar activists in 1974,
Senator Church’s committee and a presidential commission under Nelson
Rockefeller investigated the Agency’s “Operation Chaos,” a program to
conduct massive illegal surveillance of the antiwar protest movement,
discovering a database with 300,000 names. These investigations also
exposed the excesses of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, forcing the Bureau to
reform.
To prevent future abuses, President Jimmy Carter signed
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, creating a
special court to approve all national security wiretaps. In a bitter
irony, Carter’s supposed reform ended up plunging the judiciary into the
secret world of the surveillance managers where, after 9/11, it
became a rubberstamp institution for every kind of state intrusion on domestic privacy.
How the Global War on Terror Came Home
As
its pacification wars in Afghanistan and Iraq sank into bloody
quagmires, Washington brought electronic surveillance, biometric
identification, and unmanned aerial vehicles to the battlefields. This
trio, which failed to decisively turn the tide in those lands,
nonetheless now undergirds a global U.S. surveillance apparatus of
unequalled scope and unprecedented power.
After confining the
populations of Baghdad and the rebellious Sunni city of Falluja behind
blast-wall cordons, the U.S. Army attempted to bring the Iraqi
resistance under control in part by
collecting, as of 2011, three million Iraqi fingerprints,iris, and retinal scans. These were
deposited
in a biometric database in West Virginia that American soldiers at
checkpoints and elsewhere on distant battlefields could at any moment
access by satellite link.
Simultaneously, the Joint Special Operations
Command under General Stanley McChrystal
centralized all electronic and satellite surveillance in the Greater Middle East to identify possible al-Qaeda operatives for
assassination by Predator drones or hunter-killer raids by Special Operations commandos from Somalia to Pakistan.
Domestically,
post-9/11, the White House tried to create a modern version of the old
state-citizen alliance for domestic surveillance. In May 2002, President
Bush’s Justice Department
launched
Operation TIPS with "millions of American truckers, letter carriers,
train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others" spying
on fellow citizens. But there was vocal opposition from members of
Congress, civil libertarians, and the media, which soon forced Justice
to quietly kill the program.
In a digital iteration of the same effort, retired admiral John Poindexter began to
set up
an ominously titled Pentagon program called Total Information Awareness
to amass a "detailed electronic dossier on millions of Americans."
Again the nation recoiled, Congress banned the program, and the admiral
was forced to resign.
Defeated in the public arena, the Bush
administration retreated into the shadows, where it launched secret FBI
and NSA domestic surveillance programs. Here, Congress proved far more
amenable and pliable. In 2002, Congress
erased
the bright line that had long barred the CIA from domestic spying,
granting the agency the power to access U.S. financial records and audit
electronic communications routed through the country.
Defying the FISA law, in October 2001 President Bush
ordered
the NSA to commence covert monitoring of private communications through
the nation's telephone companies without the requisite warrants.
According to
the Associated Press, he also “secretly authorized the NSA to plug into
the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United States” carrying
the world’s “emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank
transactions, and more.” Since his administration had already
conveniently decided
that “metadata was not constitutionally protected,” the NSA began an
open-ended program, Operation Stellar Wind, “to collect bulk telephony
and Internet metadata.”
By 2004, the Bush White House was so
wedded to Internet metadata collection that top aides barged into
Attorney General John Ashcroft’s hospital room to extract a
reauthorization signature for the program. They were
blocked
by Justice Department officials led by Deputy Attorney General James
Comey, forcing a two-month suspension until that FISA court, brought
into existence in the Carter years, put its first rubber-stamp on this
mass surveillance regime.
Armed with expansive FISA court orders
allowing the collection of data sets rather than information from
specific targets, the FBI’s “
Investigative Data Warehouse” acquired
more than a billion documents
within five years, including intelligence reports, social security
files, drivers’ licenses, and private financial information. All of
this was accessible to 13,000 analysts making a million queries monthly.
In 2006, as the flood of data surging through fiber optic cables
strained NSA computers, the Bush administration
launched
the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity to develop
supercomputing searches powerful enough to process this torrent of
Internet information.
In 2005, a
New York Times investigative report
exposed the administration’s illegal surveillance for the first time. A year later,
USA Today reported
that the NSA was “secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of
millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon, and
Bell South.” One expert called it "the largest database ever assembled
in the world," adding presciently that the Agency's goal was "to create a
database of every call ever made."
In August 2007, in response to
these revelations, Congress capitulated. It passed a new law, the
Protect America Act, which retrospectively legalized this illegal White
House-inspired set of programs by requiring greater oversight by the
FISA court. This secret tribunal -- acting almost as a “
parallel Supreme Court”
that rules on fundamental constitutional rights without adversarial
proceedings or higher review -- has removed any real restraint on the
National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Internet metadata and
regularly rubberstamps
almost 100% of the government’s thousands of surveillance requests.
Armed with expanded powers, the National Security Agency promptly
launched
its PRISM program (recently revealed by Edward Snowden). To feed its
hungry search engines, the NSA has compelled nine Internet giants,
including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, and Skype, to
transfer what became billions of emails to its massive data farms.
Obama’s Expanding Surveillance Universe
Instead
of curtailing his predecessor’s wartime surveillance, as Republicans
did in the 1920s and Democrats in the 1970s, President Obama has
overseen the expansion of the NSA’s wartime digital operations into a
permanent weapon for the exercise of U.S. global power.
The Obama administration continued a Bush-era NSA program of “bulk email records collection” until 2011 when two senators
protested
that the agency’s “statements to both Congress and the Court...
significantly exaggerated this program’s effectiveness.” Eventually,
the administration was forced to curtail this particular operation.
Nonetheless, the NSA has continued to
collect the personal communications of Americans by the billions under its
PRISM and other programs.
In
the Obama years as well, the NSA began cooperating with its long-time
British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ),
to
tap into
the dense cluster of Trans-Atlantic Telecommunication fiber optic
cables that transit the United Kingdom. During a visit to a GCHQ
facility for high-altitude intercepts at Menwith Hill in June 2008, NSA
Director General Keith Alexander asked, “Why can’t we collect all the
signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith.”
In the process, GCHQ’s Operation Tempora
achieved
the “biggest Internet access” of any partner in a “Five Eyes”
signals-intercept coalition that, in addition to Great Britain and the
U.S., includes Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. When the project went
online in 2011, the GCHQ sank probes into 200 Internet cables and was
soon collecting 600 million telephone messages daily, which were, in
turn, made accessible to 850,000 NSA employees.
The historic alliance between the NSA and GCHQ
dates back
to the dawn of the Cold War. In deference to it, the NSA has, since
2007, exempted its “2nd party” Five Eyes allies from surveillance under
its “Boundless Informant” operation. According to another
recently leaked
NSA document, however, “we can, and often do, target the signals of
most 3rd party foreign partners.” This is clearly a reference to close
allies like Germany, France, and Italy.
On a busy day in January 2013, for instance, the NSA
collected
60 million phone calls and emails from Germany -- some 500 million
German messages are reportedly collected annually -- with lesser but
still hefty numbers from France, Italy, and non-European allies like
Brazil. To gain operational intelligence on such allies, the NSA
taps phones
at the European Council headquarters in Brussels, bugs the European
Union (EU) delegation at the U.N., has planted a “Dropmire” monitor “on
the Cryptofax at the EU embassy DC,” and eavesdrops on 38 allied
embassies worldwide.
Such secret intelligence about its allies gives Washington an immense diplomatic advantage,
says
NSA expert James Bamford. “It’s the equivalent of going to a poker game
and wanting to know what everyone’s hand is before you place your bet.”
And who knows what scurrilous bits of scandal about world leaders
American surveillance systems might scoop up to strengthen Washington’s
hand in that global poker game called diplomacy.
This sort of digital surveillance was soon supplemented by actual Internet warfare. Between 2006 and 2010, Washington launched
the planet’s first cyberwar, with Obama
ordering devastating cyberattacks against Iran's nuclear facilities. In 2009, the Pentagon
formed the U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), with a cybercombat center at Lackland Air Base initially
staffed by 7,000 Air Force employees. Over the next two years, by
appointing
NSA chief Alexander as CYBERCOM’s concurrent commander, it created an
enormous concentration of power in the digital shadows. The Pentagon
has also
declared cyberspace an “operational domain” for both offensive and defensive warfare.
Controlling the Future
By
leaking a handful of NSA documents, Edward Snowden has given us a
glimpse of future U.S. global policy and the changing architecture of
power on this planet. At the broadest level, this digital shift
complements Obama’s new defense strategy, announced in 2012, of
reducing costs (cutting, for example, infantry troops by 14%), while conserving Washington’s overall power by developing a
capacity for “a combined arms campaign across all domains -- land, air, maritime, space, and cyberspace.”
While
cutting conventional armaments, Obama is investing billions in
constructing a new architecture for global information control. To store
and process the billions of messages sucked up by its worldwide
surveillance network (
totaling 97 billion items for March alone), the NSA is
employing 11,000 workers to build a $1.6 billion data center in Bluffdale, Utah, whose
storage capacity
is measured in “yottabytes,” each the equivalent of a trillion
terabytes. That’s almost unimaginable once you realize that just 15
terabytes could store every publication in the Library of Congress.
From
its new $1.8 billion headquarters, the third-biggest building in the
Washington area, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
deploys
16,000 employees and a $5 billion budget to coordinate a rising torrent
of surveillance data from Predators, Reapers, U-2 spy planes, Global
Hawks, X-37B space drones, Google Earth, Space Surveillance Telescopes,
and orbiting satellites.
To protect those critical orbiting
satellites, which transmit most U.S. military communications, the
Pentagon is building an aerospace shield of pilotless drones. In the
exosphere, the Air Force has since April 2010 been
successfully testing the X-37B space drone that can
carry missiles to strike rival satellite networks such as the one the Chinese are currently creating.
For more extensive and precise surveillance from space, the Pentagon has been
replacing its costly, school-bus-sized spy satellites with a new generation of light, low cost models such as the
ATK-A200.
Successfully launched in May 2011, this module is orbiting 250 miles
above the Earth with remote-controlled, U-2 quality cameras that now
provide the “U.S. Central Command an assured ISR (Intelligence,
Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) capability.”
In the stratosphere, close enough to Earth for audiovisual surveillance, the Pentagon is planning to
launch
an armada of 99 Global Hawk drones -- each equipped with
high-resolution cameras to surveil all terrain within a 100-mile radius,
electronic sensors to intercept communications, and efficient engines
for continuous 24-hour flight.
Within a decade, the U.S. will
likely deploy this aerospace shield, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities,
and even vaster, more omnipresent digital surveillance networks that
will envelop the Earth in an electronic grid capable of blinding entire
armies on the battlefield, atomizing a single suspected terrorist, or
monitoring millions of private lives at home and abroad.
Sadly,
Mark Twain was right when he warned us just over 100 years ago that
America could not have both empire abroad and democracy at home. To
paraphrase his prescient words, by “trampling upon the helpless abroad”
with unchecked surveillance, Americans have learned, “by a natural
process, to endure with apathy the like at home.”
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