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The Homeland Security
State
By Nick Turse
THE MILITARY HALF
If you're in the United States and
reading this on the Internet, the Federal Bureau
of Information (FBI)may be spying on you at this
very moment.
Under provisions of the USA
Patriot (Uniting and Strengthening America by
Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept
and Obstruct Terrorism) Act, the Department of
Justice has been collecting e-mail and IP
(Internet protocol, a computer's unique numeric
identifier) addresses, without a warrant, using
trap-and-trace surveillance devices ("pen-traps").
Now, the FBI, Justice's principle investigative
arm, may be monitoring the web-surfing habits of
Internet users - also without a search warrant -
that is, spying on you with no probable cause
whatsoever.
In the wake of September 11,
2001, with the announcement of a potentially
never-ending "war on terror" and in the name of
"national security", the administration of
President George W Bush embarked on a global
campaign that left behind it two war-ravaged
states (with up to 100,000 civilian dead in just
one of them); an offshore "archipelago of
injustice" replete with "ghost jails", and a
seemingly endless series of cases of torture,
abuse and the cold-blooded murder of prisoners.
That was abroad. In the US, too, things have
changed as America became "the Homeland" and an
already powerful and bloated national security
state developed a civilian corollary fed by
fear-mongering, partisan politics, and an
insatiable desire for governmental power, turf and
budget.
A host of disturbing and mutually
reinforcing patterns have emerged in the resulting
new Homeland Security State - among them: a
virtually unopposed increase in the intrusion of
military, intelligence, and "security" agencies
into the civilian sector of US society;
federal-government abridgment of basic rights;
denials of civil liberties on flimsy or previously
illegal premises; warrantless sneak-and-peak
searches; the wholesale undermining of privacy
safeguards (including government access to library
circulation records, bank records, and records of
Internet activity); the greater empowerment of
secret intelligence courts (such as the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act court) that threaten
civil liberties; and heavy-handed federal and
local law-enforcement tactics designed to chill,
squelch, or silence dissent.
While it's
true that most Americans have yet to feel the
brunt of such policies, select groups, including
Muslims, Arab immigrants, Arab-Americans and
anti-war protesters have served as test subjects
for a potential Homeland Security juggernaut that,
if not stopped, will only expand.
The
military brings it all back home
Over the
past few years we've become familiar with General
John Abizaid's Central Command (CENTCOM) whose
"areas of responsibility" (AORs) stretch from the
Horn of Africa to Central Asia, including, of
course, the Iraq war zone. Like CENTCOM, the US
has other commands that blanket the rest of the
world, including the Pacific Command (PACCOM,
established in 1947) and the European Command
(EURCOM, established in 1952). In 2002, however,
the Pentagon broke new command ground by deciding,
after a fashion, to bring war to the Homeland. It
established the US Northern Command (NORTHCOM),
whose AOR is "America's home front".
NORTHCOM is much more forthright about
what it supposedly doesn't do than what it
actually does. Its website repeatedly, in many
forms, notes that NORTHCOM is not a police
auxiliary and that the Reconstruction-era Posse
Comitatus Act prevents the military from meddling
much in domestic affairs. Despite this, NORTHCOM
readily, if somewhat vaguely, admits to "a
cooperative relationship with federal agencies"
and "information-sharing" among organizations.
NORTHCOM's commander, General Ralph "Ed" Eberhart,
who, the Wall Street Journal notes, is the "first
general since the Civil War with operational
authority exclusively over military forces within
the US", was even more blunt when he told the
Public Broadcasting System's Newshour, "We
are not going to be out there spying on people,
[but] we get information from people who do."
Even putting NORTHCOM aside, the military
has recently been creeping into civilian life in
all sorts of ways. Back in 2003, for instance,
Torch Concepts, a US Army subcontractor, was given
JetBlue's entire 5.1-million-passenger database,
without the knowledge or consent of those on the
list, for data-mining - a blatant breach of
civilian privacy that the army nonetheless judged
not to violate the federal Privacy Act. Then, in
2004, army intelligence agents were caught
illegally investigating civilians at a conference
on Islam at the University of Texas law school in
Austin.
And just recently, on the very
same day the Washington Post reported that "the
Pentagon ... [has] created a new espionage arm and
is reinterpreting US law to give Defense Secretary
Donald H Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine
operations abroad", the New York Times reported
that, as part of the "extraordinary army of 13,000
troops, police officers and federal agents
marshaled to secure the [presidential]
inauguration", the Pentagon had deployed
"super-secret commandos ... with state-of-the-art
weaponry" in the US capital. This was done under
government directives that undercut the Posse
Comitatus Act of 1878. According to the Times, the
black-ops cadre, based out at the ultra-secretive
Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg,
North Carolina, is operating under "a secret
counter-terrorism program code-named Power
Geyser", a program just recently brought to light
in Code Names, a new book by a former
intelligence analyst for the US Army, William M
Arkin, who says that the "special-mission units
[are being used] in extra-legal missions ... in
the United States" on the authority of the
Department of Defense's Joint Staff and with the
support of the DoD's Special Operations Command
and NORTHCOM.
Courtesy of The New Yorker's
Seymour Hersh, we've known for some time of the
creation of "a secret unit that was given advance
approval to kill or capture and interrogate
'high-value' suspects ..." in the name of the "war
on terror". Some of us may have even known that
since 1989, in the name of the "war on drugs",
there has been a multi-service command,
(comprising approximately 160 soldiers, sailors,
marines, airmen and Department of Defense
operatives) known as Joint Task Force Six (JTF-6),
providing "support to federal, regional, state and
local law-enforcement agencies throughout the
continental United States". Now, we know as well
that there are an unknown number of commando
squads operating in the US - in the name of the
war at home. Just how many and exactly what they
may up to we cannot know for sure, since
spokespersons for the relevant army commands
refuse to offer comment and Pentagon spokesman
Bryan Whitman will only say that "at any given
time, there are a number of classified programs
across the government" and that Power Geyser "may
or may not exist".
The emergence of an
American Homeland Security State has allowed the
US Army to alter fundamentally its historic role,
transforming what was once illegal and then
exceptional - deploying federal troops in support
of (or acting as) civilian law-enforcement
agencies - into standard operating procedure. But
the army is not alone in its home-front meddling.
While the army was thwarted in its attempt to
strong-arm University of Texas officials into
releasing a videotape of their conference on
Islam, the US Navy used arm-twisting to greater
effect on a domestic government agency. The Wall
Street Journal reports that, in 2003, the Office
of Naval Intelligence badgered the US Customs
Service to hand over its database on maritime
trade. At first, the Customs Service resisted the
navy's efforts, but in the post-September 11
atmosphere, like other agencies on the civil side
of the ledger, it soon caved to military pressure.
In an ingenuous message sent to the Wall Street
Journal, the commissioner of the Department of
Homeland Security's Bureau of Customs and Border
Protection, Robert C Bonner, excused handing over
the civilian database by stating that he had
received "navy assurances that the information
won't be abused".
While the army, navy and
NORTHCOM naturally profess to having no nefarious
intent in their recent civil-side forays, history
suggests wariness on the subject. After all, the
pre-Homeland Security military already had a long
history of illegal activity and illegal domestic
spying (much of which came to light in the late
1960s and early 1970s) - and never suffered social
stigma, let alone effectual legal or institutional
consequences for its repeated transgressions.
NORTHCOM now proudly claims that it has "a
cooperative relationship with federal agencies
working to prevent terrorism". So you might
wonder: just which other "federal agencies" does
NORTHCOM - which shouldn't be sharing information
about American civilians with anyone - share
information with? The problem is, the range of
choices in the world of US intelligence alone is
staggering. If you've read (or read about) the
9-11 Commission Report, you may have seen the now
almost iconic figure of 15 military and civilian
intelligence agencies bandied about. That in
itself may seem a startling total for the nation's
intelligence operations, but, in addition to the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA), National Security
Agency (NSA), FBI and others in the "big 15" of
the US Intelligence Community (IC), there exist a
whole host of shadowy, half-known, and little
understood, if well-acronymed,
intelligence/military/security-related offices,
agencies, advisory organizations, and committees
such as the Counterintelligence Field Activity
(CIFA), the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office
(DARO), the President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board (PFIAB) and the President's
Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB); the Department
of Defense's own domestic cop corps, the Pentagon
Force Protection Agency (PFPA); and the
Intelligence's Community's internal watchdog, the
Defense Security Service (DSS).
Think of
these various arms of intelligence and the
military as the essential cast of characters in
America's bureaucratically proliferating Homeland
Security State where everybody, it seems, is eager
to get in on the act. Nowhere is this more
apparent than in the operations center of the
Department of Homeland Security. In its
horseshoe-shaped war-room, the "FBI, the CIA, the
Secret Service and 33 other federal agencies each
has its own work station. And so do the police
departments of New York, Los Angeles, Washington
and six other major cities." In the operations
center, large signs on walls and doors command:
"Our Mission: To Share Information"; and, to
facilitate this, in its offices local police
officers sit just "a step or two away from the CIA
and FBI operatives who are downloading the latest
intelligence coming into those agencies". With all
previous lines between domestic and foreign, local
and federal spying, policing, and governmental
oversight now blurring, this (according to
outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge) is
"the new model of federalism" in action.
From the military to local governments,
from ostensibly civilian federal agencies to
obscure counter-intelligence organizations,
they're all on the make, creating interagency
alliances, setting up new programs, expanding
their powers, gearing up operations and/or
creating "Big Brother" technologies to more
effectively monitor civilians, chill dissent, and
bring the war back home. Right now, nothing is
closer to the heart of Homeland Security State
officials (and to their budgetary plans) than that
old standby of dictatorships and oppressive
regimes worldwide, surveillance - by and of the
Homeland population. In fact, almost every day,
new examples of ever-hopeful surveillance programs
pop up. Of course, as yet, we only have clues to
the well-classified larger Homeland surveillance
picture, but even what we do know of the growing
public face of surveillance in the United States
should cause some eyes to roll. Here's a brief
overview of just a few of the less publicized, but
mostly public, attempts to ramp up the eye-power
of the Homeland Security State.
Saying
NCIX
A little-known member of the alphabet
soup of federal agencies is the Office of the
National Counterintelligence Executive (more
familiarly known by the unpronounceable acronym
NCIX) - an organization whose main goal is "to
improve the performance of the counterintelligence
(CI) community in identifying, assessing,
prioritizing and countering intelligence threats
to the United States". To accomplish this task,
NCIX now offers that ultimate necessity for
Homeland security, downloadable
"counterintelligence and security awareness
posters". One features the text of the First
Amendment to the US constitution ("... Congress
shall make no law ... prohibiting the free
exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
speech ...") and the likeness of Thomas Jefferson,
but with a new addendum that reads: "American
freedom includes a responsibility to protect US
security - leaking sensitive information erodes
this freedom."
Another NCIX poster might
come straight out of the old East Germany:
"America's Security is Your Responsibility.
Observe and Report." While NCIX is an obscure
agency, its decision to improve on the First
Amendment and a fundamental American freedom is
indicative of where the Homeland Security State is
heading; and the admonition to "Observe and
Report" catches its spirit exactly.
Every wo/man a G-man
Prior to
the Republican National Convention in New York
City, the FBI sent agents across the country in
what was widely seen as a blatant attempt to
harass, intimidate and frighten potential
protesters. The FBI, however, countered by
professing that "we have always followed the
rules, sensitive to Americans' constitutional
rights to free speech and assembly, always drawing
the line between lawfully protected speech and
illegal activity".
By the autumn of 2004,
however, FBI spokespeople had moved on from such
anodyne reassurances and, in conjunction with the
Department of Homeland Security, the bureau was
launching its "October Plan". According to a CBS
news report, this program consisted of "aggressive
- even obvious - surveillance techniques to be
used on ... people suspected of being terrorist
sympathizers, but who have not committed a crime"
while "other 'persons of interest', including
their family members, [might] also be brought in
for questioning ..."
While harassing
citizens at home, the FBI, which can't set up a
successful internal computer system of its own
(despite squandering at least US$170 million on
the project), began dabbling in overseas
e-censorship, by confiscating servers in the
United Kingdom from Indymedia, the activist media
network website "with apparently no explanation".
As Ward Harkavy reported in The Village Voice,
"The network of activists has not been accused of
breaking any laws. But all of the material
actually on some of its key servers and hard disks
was seized." More recently, the creator of an
open-source tool designed to help Internet
security experts scan networks, services and
applications says he's been "pressured" by the FBI
for copies of the web-server log that hosts his
website.
In addition to intimidation
tactics and tech-centric activities, the FBI has
apparently been using Joint Terrorism Task Forces
(teams of state and local law-enforcement
officers, FBI and other federal agents) as well as
local police to conduct "political surveillance"
of environmental activists as well as anti-war and
religious-based protest groups. The bureau is also
eager to farm out such work to ordinary Americans
and has been calling on the public to do some
old-fashioned peeping through the blinds, just in
case the neighbors are up to "certain kinds of
activities [that] indicate terrorist plans that
are in the works".
Into the wild blue
yonder
Strange as it may seem, the US Air
Force has also gotten into the local-surveillance
act as well with an "Eagle Eyes" anti-terrorism
initiative which "enlists" average citizens in the
"war on terror". The Eagle Eyes website tells
viewers, "You and your family are encouraged to
learn the categories of suspicious behavior," and
it exhorts the public to call "a network of local,
24-hour phone numbers ... whenever a suspicious
activity is observed". Just what, then,
constitutes "suspicious activity"? Well, among
activities worth alerting the flying eagles to,
there's the use of cameras (either still or
video), note-taking of any sort, making
annotations on maps, or using binoculars (bird
watchers beware!). And what other patterns of
behavior does the air force think should send you
running to the phone? A surefire indicator of
terrorists afoot: "Suspicious persons out of place
... People who don't seem to belong in the
workplace, neighborhood, business establishment,
or anywhere else." Just ponder that one for a
moment - and, if you ever get lost, be afraid,
very afraid ...
While the air force does
grudgingly admit that "this category is hard to
define", it offers a classic
you-know-it-when-you-see-it definition for calling
your local eagle: "The point is that people know
what looks right and what doesn't look right in
their neighborhoods, office spaces, commutes
[sic], etc, and if a person just doesn't seem like
he or she belongs ..." An ... ahem ...
urban-looking youth in a suburban white community?
Call it in! A crusty punk near Wall Street? Drop a
dime! A woman near the White House wearing an
anti-war T-shirt? Well, that's an out-of-category
no-brainer!
And, in fact, much of this has
already begun to come true. After all, "suspicious
persons out of place" now do get arrested in the
new Homeland Security State for such offenses as
wearing anti-Bush T-shirts, carrying anti-Bush
signs or just heckling the president. Today, even
displaying an anti-Bush sticker is, in the words
of the Secret Service, apparently "borderline
terrorism". Holding a sign that reads "This war is
Bushit" warrants a citation from the cops and, as
an 11-year-old boy found out, the sheriff might
come calling on you if you utter "anti-American"
statements - while parents may be questioned by
law-enforcement officials to ascertain if they're
teaching "anti-American values" at home.
THE CIVILIAN
HALF
Thus far in this saga, our cast
of characters - NORTHCOM, the Office of the
National Counterintelligence Executive, the FBI
and the US Air Force - only represent the usual
(if expansive) suspects. To make the US a total
Homeland Security State will take more than the
combined efforts of the military and intelligence
establishments. The civilian side of government,
the part of the private sector that is deeply
enmeshed in the military-corporate complex, and
America's own citizens will have to pitch in as
well if a total-security state is to truly take
shape and fire on all cylinders.
The good
news is - if, at least, you're a Homeland Security
bureaucrat - this process is already well under
way, thanks, in large part, to the creation of the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which
brought a dazzling array of agencies together
under one roof, including the United States
Customs Service (previously part of the Department
of Treasury), the enforcement division of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service (Department
of Justice), the Animal and Plant Health
Inspection Service (Department of Agriculture),
the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center
(Department of Treasury), the Transportation
Security Administration (Department of
Transportation), the Federal Protective Service
(General Services Administration), the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Strategic
National Stockpile and the National Disaster
Medical System (Health and Human Services), the
Nuclear Incident Response Team (Energy), Domestic
Emergency Support Teams (Justice), the National
Domestic Preparedness Office (FBI), the CBRN
Countermeasures Programs (Energy), the
Environmental Measurements Laboratory (Energy),
the National Biological Warfare Defense Analysis
Center (Defense), the Plum Island Animal Disease
Center (Agriculture), the Federal Computer
Incident Response Center (General Services
Administration), the National Communications
System (Defense), the National Infrastructure
Protection Center (FBI), the Energy Security and
Assurance Program (Energy), the Secret Service
(Treasury), and the Coast Guard (Defense and
Transportation).
The DHS is, not
surprisingly, the poster-child for the emerging
Homeland Security State. But the DHS itself is
just the tip of the iceberg - an archetype for a
brave new nation where the lines between what the
intelligence community and the military do abroad
and what they do in the USA are increasingly
blurred beyond recognition. Today, a host of
agencies on the civilian side of the government
are also setting up new programs; expanding their
powers; gearing up operations and/or creating "Big
Brother" technologies to monitor civilians more
effectively, chill dissent - and bring the war
back home to America.
Freedom of the
road
Recently, it was disclosed that the
Department of Homeland Security had deployed an
X-ray van, previously used in cargo searches at
America's borders, in a test run - taking X-ray
pictures of parked cars in Cape May, New Jersey.
While, the DHS claimed all X-ray surveillance was
conducted on empty cars with their owners'
consent, one wonders how long this will last.
After all, American Science & Engineering Inc,
the manufacturer of the Z Backscatter Van (ZBV),
notes that "it maintains the outward appearance of
an ordinary van", so it can stand unnoticed and
peep into cars as they drive past, or with its
"unique 'drive-by' capability [it] allows one or
two operators to conduct X-ray imaging of suspect
vehicles and objects while the ZBV drives past".
Since we're all increasingly suspects (in our
"suspect vehicles") in the Homeland Security
State, it seems only a matter of time before at
least some of us fall victim to a DHS X-ray
drive-by.
But what happens after a DHS
scan-van X-ray shows a dense white mass in your
car (which could be any "organic material" from
explosives or drugs to a puppy, a baby, or a head
of lettuce)? Assuming that the DHS folks will be
linked up with the Department of Transportation
(DOT), soon they might be able to call on DOT's
proposed Intelligent Transportation Systems' (ITS)
Joint Program Office's (JPO)
"Vehicle-Infrastructure Integration (VII)" system
for help.
According to Bill Jones, the
technical director of the ITS JPO, "The concept
behind VII is that vehicle manufacturers will
install a communications device on the vehicle
starting at some future date, and equipment will
be installed on the nation's transportation system
to allow all vehicles to communicate with the
infrastructure." In other words, the government
and manufacturers will team up to track every new
automobile (X-rayed or not) in the United States.
"The whole idea," says Jones, "is that vehicles
would transmit this data to the infrastructure.
The infrastructure, in turn, would aggregate that
data in some kind of a database."
Imagine
it: The federal government tracking you in real
time, while compiling a database with information
on your speed, route, and destination; where you
were when; how many times you went to a certain
location; and just about anything else related to
your travels in your own car. The DOT project, in
fact, sounds remarkably like a civilian update of
the "Combat Zones That See" program developed by
the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA). Noah Shachtman, writing for The
Village Voice, reported in 2003 that DARPA was in
the process of instituting a project at Fort
Belvoir, Virginia, whose aim was "to track 90% of
all of cars within [a] target area for any given
30-minute period. The paths of 1 million vehicles
[would] be stored and retrievable within three
seconds." It gives a whole new meaning to "King of
the Road".
Pssst ... wanna hear a
secret (law)?
Last November, "the
Transportation Security Administration ordered
America's 72 airlines to turn over their June 2004
domestic passenger flight records". With only a
murmur of concern over the privacy of passengers'
credit-card numbers, phone numbers and health
information, the airlines handed the requested
information over so the agency could test its new
Secure Flight system - an expanded version of the
much-maligned terrorist watch list.
More
recently, the Transportation Security
Administration has made headlines with a change in
its pat-down policies. After public outcry,
airport security screeners have been instructed no
longer to grope the breasts of female passengers
as an anti-terror measure. Pat-downs, however,
apparently remain part of TSA airport protocol in
some cases, although we have no idea which ones.
This is because the Transportation Security
Administration has begun to dabble in "secret law"
by subjecting passengers to special screenings
including "pat-down searches for weapons or
unauthorized materials", while denying the public
the right to know under what law(s) such methods
are authorized. As Steven Aftergood of the Project
on Government Secrecy recently observed, "In a
qualitatively new development in US governance,
Americans can now be obligated to comply with
legally binding regulations that are unknown to
them, and that indeed they are forbidden to know."
When Big Brother goes to
college
Since it was enacted in the rough
wake of September 11, 2001, the USA Patriot Act
has enabled the US government to undermine privacy
safeguards such as those once protected by the
Family Education Records Privacy Act. The
government is now allowed access, without a
warrant, to a student's personal, library,
bookstore and medical records, and any disclosure
that such records have either been sought or
turned over is prohibited.
Now, the
Department of Education has suggested upping the
ante with a proposal to create a national registry
that would track every one of the estimated 15.9
million college students in the US through yet
another "massive database" - this one containing
everything from college students' academic
records, tuition payments and financial-aid
benefits to social-security numbers and
information on participation in varsity sports.
Right now, students have to give written
consent for educational and personally
identifiable data to be transferred out of the
college. "With this new proposal, most of that
power is given to the federal government," says
Sarah Flanagan, the vice president for government
relations at the National Association of
Independent Colleges and Universities. Moreover,
if this new database comes to pass, says Jasmine L
Harris, legislative director at the United States
Students Association, it would further erode
various remaining privacy safeguards, allowing
government agencies other than the Education
Department to have greater access to student
records.
Bright lights, big
cities
With the federal government casting
off the Geneva Conventions as "quaint", employing
secret law at home, and tasking average Americans
to become Peeping Toms and undercover informants,
it's little wonder that those in the private
sector have now taken up the task of helping the
feds in fashioning a Homeland Security State.
After all, with surveillance bureaucracies
burgeoning and security budgets growing, there's
suddenly a fortune to be made. Last year alone,
under the Urban Area Security Initiative, the DHS
doled out $675 million to 50 large cities across
the United States. This year, the total will jump
to $854.6 million.
With money flowing in
and representatives of the District of Columbia
Metropolitan Police Department, the New York
Police Department and the Los Angeles Police
Department, among others, sitting beside
operatives from the National Security Agency,
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense
Intelligence Agency, FBI and other defense and
intelligence agencies at the DHS's Homeland
Security Operations Center, it's little wonder
that major urban centers such as Chicago (which is
getting $45 million in Urban Area Security
Initiative funds this year), Los Angeles ($61
million in UASI money) and New York City (which is
raking in a cool $208 million) have moved toward
implementing wide-ranging, increasingly
sophisticated covert surveillance systems.
In Chicago, a program code-named Operation
Disruption consists of at least 80 street
surveillance cameras that send their feed to
police officers' laptop computers in squad cars
and "a central command center, where retired
police officers ... monitor activity". The
ultimate plan, however, is to use a grant from the
Department of Homeland Security and city monies to
purchase 250 new cameras and link them to "some
2,000 un-networked video cameras installed around
the Chicago (and at O'Hare International Airport)
to create a network of as many as 2,250
surveillance cameras throughout the Windy City".
"We're so far advanced than [sic] any other city,"
said Chicago's Mayor Richard M Daley of the
program, "sometimes the state and federal
governments - they come here to look at the
technology."
In New York, Mayor Michael
Bloomberg recently announced a "major upgrade" for
the city's high-tech crime-tracking system,
Compstat, through the creation of a "Real Time
Crime Fighting Center" to provide "same-day
information" for tracking and analysis purposes.
Private eyes
While the doings of
"private contractors" still pop up in articles
about prisoner abuse in Iraq, what such mercenary
outfits are up to on the home front is hardly ever
mentioned. For example, CACI International Inc,
whose employees were linked in news accounts to
the Abu Ghraib torture scandals, boasts that its
customers include not only a "majority of US
defense and civilian agencies and the US
intelligence community", but "44 US state
governments" and "more than 200 cities, counties
and local agencies in North America". CACI
proclaims that it plays "many roles in securing
our homeland" and that it "support[s]
law-enforcement agencies such as the Department of
Justice [and] design[s] and prototype[s] systems
that collect intelligence information". One of
CACI's fellow contractors, Titan Corp (which was
also linked in news accounts to the Abu Ghraib
torture cases), is at work in the "Defense of the
Homeland" with programs such as Data Warehousing
and Data Mining for the Intelligence Community and
a Command and Control Concept for North American
Homeland Defense.
Of course, these are
only two of the many companies helping to secure
the homeland (and fat contracts). In 2003 alone,
the DHS spent "at least $256.6 million in 1,609
separate contracts or amendments to contracts to
hire what the [General Services Administration]
described as 'security guards and patrol
services'" and doled out $6.73 billion in total.
This year the DHS has raked in a cool $28.9
billion in net discretionary spending - including
$67.4 million "to expand the capabilities of the
National Cyber Security Division (NCSD), which
implements the public and private sector
partnership protecting cyber security"; $104.7
million for "Aerial Surveillance and Sensor
Technology" projects; and $340 million for the
United States Visitor and Immigrant Status
Indicator Technology program (US-VISIT), which
"expedites the arrival and departure of legitimate
travelers".
Your role in the Homeland
Security State
In the latter years of the
Vietnam era, a series of exposures of official
lies regarding the FBI's various COINTELPROs, a
host of surveillance and dirty-tricks programs
aimed at American activists, and the analogous CIA
program known as MHCHAOS; of domestic spying by
military-intelligence agents and of the Nixon
administration's various Watergate surveillance
and illegal break-in operations brought home to
Americans at least some of the abuses committed by
their military, intelligence and security
establishments. Congressional bodies such as the
Church Commission and the Senate Watergate
Committee even helped to rein in some of the most
egregious of these abuses and to reinforce the
barriers between what the CIA and military could
do overseas and what was permissible on the home
front.
In the 1980s and 1990s, however,
oversight and constraints on illegal domestic
activities by the military and intelligence
community slowly began to drain away; and with the
September 11 attacks, of course, everything
changed. Three years later, what was once done on
the sly is increasingly public policy - and done
with pride - though much of it still flies under
the mainstream media radar as the administration
of President George W Bush transforms the US into
an unabashed Homeland Security State.
Today, freedom - to be spread abroad by US
force of arms - is increasingly a privilege that
can be rescinded at home when anyone acts a little
too free. Today, the United States is just another
area of operations for the Pentagon; while those
who say the wrong things; congregate in the wrong
places; wear the wrong T-shirts; display the wrong
stickers; or just look the wrong way find
themselves recast as "enemies" and put under the
eye of, if not the care of, the state. Today, a
growing Homeland Security complex of federal,
local and private partners is hard at work
establishing turf rights, garnering budgetary
increases, and ramping up a new security culture
across the US. And unfortunately, the programs and
abuses highlighted in this series are but the
publicly known tip of the iceberg. For example:
It was recently revealed through the
Freedom of Information Act that "the FBI obtained
257.5 million Passenger Name Records following
[September 11, 2001], and that the bureau has
permanently incorporated the travel details of
tens of millions of innocent people into its
law-enforcement databases".
Outgoing DHS
chief Tom Ridge recently called for US passports
to include fingerprints. Meanwhile, OTI, a Fort
Lee, New Jersey-based subsidiary of the Israeli
company On Track Innovations, was just selected to
provide electronic passports that utilize a
biometrically coded "digitized photograph, which
is accessed by a proximity reader in the
inspection booth and compared automatically to the
face of the traveler".
In November,
California passed the Orwellian-sounding "DNA
Fingerprint, Unsolved Crime and Innocence
Protection Act", which "allows authorities to take
DNA samples from anyone - adult or juvenile -
convicted of a felony" and "in 2009 ... will
expand to allow police to collect DNA samples from
any suspect arrested for any felony ... whether or
not the person is charged or convicted. It's
expected that genetic data for 1 million people -
including innocent suspects - will be added to
California's DNA databank by 2009."
The
Department of Housing and Urban Development
announced plans to "use the latest in database
technologies" to store information on and count
the homeless, which, the Electronic Privacy
Information Center notes, "lay[s] the groundwork
for a national homeless tracking system, placing
individuals at risk of government and other
privacy invasions".
According to a recent
report in ISR Journal, "the publication of record
for the global network-centric warfare community",
a "high-level advisory panel recently told US
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld" that the
Pentagon needs ultra-high-tech tracking tools that
"can identify people by unique physical
characteristics - fingerprint, voice, odor, gait
or even pattern of iris" and that such a system
"must be merged with new means of 'tagging' so
that US forces can find enemies who escape into a
crowd or slip into a labyrinthine slum".
Imagine if this last program were
integrated with any of the aforementioned ventures
- in our increasingly brave new (blurred) world.
Yet for all their secret doings, vaunted programs,
futuristic technologies and their powerful urge to
turn all US citizens into various kinds of
tractable database material, our new Homeland
Security managers require one critical element: us
Americans. They require our "Eagle Eyes", our
assent, and - if not our outright support - then
our ambivalence and acquiescence. They need us to
be their dime-store spies; they need us to drive
their tracking device-equipped cars; they need us
to accede to their revisions of the first
amendment.
That simple fact makes us
powerful. If you don't dig the Homeland Security
State, do your best to thwart it. Of course, such
talk, let alone action, probably won't be popular
- but since when has anything worthwhile, from
working for peace to fighting for civil rights,
been easy? If everyone was for freedom, there
would be no need to fight for it. The choice is
yours.
Nick Turse is a doctoral
candidate at the Center for the History and Ethics
of Public Health in the Mailman School of Public
Health at Columbia University. He writes for The
Village Voice and regularly for Tomdispatch on the
military-corporate complex. This article appeared
in two parts on Tomdispatch
http://www.tomdispatch.com and is used here
with permission.
(Copyright 2005 Nick
Turse.) |
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