Obama’s Expanding Surveillance Universe
On the website of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services there is a
list
of rights belonging to all Americans. Chief among them: Freedom to express
yourself. Abdiwali Warsame must have taken them literally. Two days after he
became a U.S. citizen, he created a rollicking news and opinion website covering
his native Somalia. It became popular with many Somalis and Somali-Americans,
but also attracted attention from other quarters. As Craig Whitlock recently
revealed
in the Washington Post, Warsame was, according to public records and
interviews, soon “caught up in a shadowy Defense Department counterpropaganda
operation.”
Warsame’s website became a clearinghouse for articles from various points of
view (including his own fundamentalist Muslim beliefs), but with emphasis on
strong opposition to U.S.-backed military interventions in Somalia, and the
contention that al-Shabab militants are freedom fighters, not terrorists. This,
in turn, attracted the attention of the U.S.-based Navanti Group, which was
“working as a subcontractor for the Special Operations Command to help
conduct ‘information operations to engage local populations and counter nefarious
influences’ in Africa and Europe.” As part of a sophisticated military
effort aimed at manipulating news stories and social media around the world,
Navanti compiled a dossier on Warsame, even though the military is legally barred
from carrying out psychological operations at home. (Navanti claimed it
believed Warsame was based overseas; Whitlock’s reporting indicates otherwise.)
The military contractor eventually sent a copy of its files to the FBI, whose
agents soon showed up on Warsame’s doorstep.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website says
Americans are bound by “the shared values of freedom [and] liberty”
and that “naturalized citizens are… an important part of our democracy.”
Today, this rings about as true as a thump on the side of an empty dumpster.
Abdiwali Warsame is just one of millions of people – Americans and foreigners
– who have found themselves monitored
in some way by the U.S. military over the years.
No one knows this long history of shadowy military surveillance better than
TomDispatch
regular Alfred McCoy, author of Policing
America’s Empire, among other works. For decades, McCoy has
been shedding light on some of the darkest aspects of government
malfeasance from drug
trafficking to spying to torture.
Today, he offers a chilling tour of military surveillance efforts from the turn
of the twentieth century to a near future even more dystopian than our present
– a world in which we’re all liable to end up like Abdiwali Warsame.
~ Nick Turse
Surveillance Blowback: The Making of the U.S. Surveillance State,
1898-2020
By Alfred W. McCoy
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.”
Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison. A TomDispatch
regular, he is the author Policing
America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance
State (University of Wisconsin), which is the source for much of
the material in this essay.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook
or Tumblr. Check out the
newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The
Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases,
and Cyberwarfare.
Copyright 2013 Alfred W. McCoy
Read more by Tom Engelhardt
Republished with permission from: Antiwar
Source: http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/obamas-expanding-surveillance-universe/50327/
