DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA Data mining
you By Tom Engelhardt
I was out of the country only nine days,
hardly a blink in time, but time enough, as it
happened, for another small, airless room to be
added to the American national security labyrinth.
On March 22, Attorney General Eric Holder
and Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper Junior signed off on new guidelines
allowing the National Counter-terrorism Center
(NCTC), a post-9/11 creation, to hold on to
information about Americans in no way known to be
connected to terrorism - about you and me, that is
- for up to five years. (Its previous outer limit
was 180
days.) This, Clapper claimed,
"will enable NCTC to accomplish its mission more
practically and effectively."
Joseph K,
that icon of single-lettered anonymity from Franz
Kafka's novel The Trial, would undoubtedly
have felt right at home in Clapper's Washington.
George Orwell would surely have had a few pungent
words to say about those anodyne words
"practically and effectively", not to speak of
"mission".
For most Americans, though, it
was just life as we've known it since September
11, 2001, since we scared ourselves to death and
accepted that just about anything goes, as long as
it supposedly involves protecting us from
terrorists. Basic information or misinformation,
possibly about you, is to be stored away for five
years - or until some other attorney general and
director of national intelligence think it's even
more practical and effective to keep you on file
for 10 years, 20 years, or until death do us part
- and it hardly made a ripple.
If
Americans were to hoist a flag designed for this
moment, it might read "Tread on Me" and use that
classic illustration of the boa constrictor
swallowing an elephant from Saint-Exupery's The
Little Prince. That, at least, would catch
something of the absurdity of what the National
Security Complex has decided to swallow of our
American world.
Oh, and in those nine days
abroad, a new word surfaced on my horizon, one
just eerie and ugly enough for our new reality:
yottabyte. Thank National Security Agency (NSA)
expert James Bamford for that. He wrote a piece
for Wired magazine on a super-secret, US$2
billion, one-million-square-foot data center the
NSA is building in Bluffdale, Utah.
Focused on data mining and code-breaking
and five times the size of the US Capitol, it is
expected to house information beyond compare,
"including the complete contents of private
e-mails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as
well as all sorts of personal data trails -
parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore
purchases, and other digital 'pocket litter'."
The NSA, adds Bamford, "has established
listening posts throughout the nation to collect
and sift through billions of e-mail messages and
phone calls, whether they originate within the
country or overseas. It has created a
supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look
for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the
agency has begun building a place to store all the
trillions of words and thoughts and whispers
captured in its electronic net."
Which
brings us to yottabyte - which is, Bamford assures
us, equivalent to septillion bytes, a number "so
large that no one has yet coined a term for the
next higher magnitude." The Utah center will be
capable of storing a yottabyte or more of
information (on your tax dollar).
Large as
it is, that mega-project in Utah is just one of
many sprouting like mushrooms in the sunless
forest of the US intelligence world. In cost, for
example, it barely tops the $1.7 billion
headquarters complex in Virginia that the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, with an estimated
annual black budget of at least $5 billion, built
for its 16,000 employees. Opened in 2011, it's the
third-largest federal building in the Washington
area. (And I'll bet you didn't even know that your
tax dollars paid for such an agency, no less its
gleaming new headquarters.) Or what about the 33
post-9/11 building complexes for top-secret
intelligence work that were under construction or
had already been built when Washington Post
reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin wrote
their "Top Secret America" series back in 2010?
In these past years, while so many
Americans were foreclosed upon or had their homes
go "underwater" and the construction industry went
to hell, the intelligence housing bubble just
continued to grow. And there's no sign that any of
this seems abidingly strange to most Americans.
A system that creates its own
reality To leave the country, of course, I
had to briefly surrender my shoes, hat, belt,
computer - you know the routine - and even then,
stripped to the basics, I had to pass through a
scanner of a sort that not so long ago caused
protest and upset but now is evidently as American
as apple pie.
Then I spent those nine days
touring some of Spain's architectural wonders,
including the Alhambra in Granada, the Mezquita or
Great Mosque of Cordoba, and that city's ancient
synagogue (the only one to survive the expulsion
of the Jews in 1492), as well as Antonio Gaudí's
Sagrada Família, his vast Barcelona basilica,
without once - in a country with its own grim
history of terror attacks - being wanded or patted
down or questioned or even passing through a metal
detector. Afterwards, I took a flight back to a
country whose national security architecture had
again expanded subtly in the name of "my" safety.
Now, I don't want to overdo it. In truth,
those new guidelines were no big deal. The
information on - as far as anyone knows - innocent
Americans that the NCTC wanted to keep for those
extra 4½ years was already being held ad infinitum
by one or another of our 17 major intelligence
agencies and organizations. So the latest
announcement seems to represent little more than
bureaucratic housecleaning, just a bit of extra
scaffolding added to the Great Mosque or basilica
of the new American intelligence labyrinth. It
certainly was nothing to write home about, no less
trap a fictional character in.
Admittedly,
since 9/11 the US Intelligence community, as it
likes to call itself, has expanded to staggering
proportions. With those 17 outfits having a
combined annual intelligence budget of more than
$80 billion (a figure which doesn't even include
all intelligence expenditures), you could think of
that community as having carried out a statistical
coup d'etat. In fact, at a moment when America's
enemies - a few thousand scattered jihadis, the
odd minority insurgency, and a couple of rickety
regional powers (Iran, North Korea, and perhaps
Venezuela) - couldn't be less imposing, its growth
has been little short of an institutional miracle.
By now, it has a momentum all its own. You might
even say that it creates its own reality.
Of classic American checks and balances,
we, the taxpayers, now write the checks and they,
the officials of the National Security Complex,
are free to be as unbalanced as they want in their
actions. Whatever you do, though, don't mistake
Clapper, Holder, and similar figures for the
Gaudís of the new intelligence world. Don't think
of them as the architects of the structure they
are building. What they preside over is visibly a
competitive bureaucratic mess of overlapping
principalities whose "mission" might be summed up
in one word: more.
In a sense - though
they would undoubtedly never think of themselves
this way - I suspect they are bureaucratic
versions of Kafka's Joseph K, trapped in a
labyrinthine structure they are continually,
blindly, adding to. And because their "mission"
has no end point, their edifice has neither
windows nor exits, and for all anyone knows is
being erected on a foundation of quicksand.
Keep calling it "intelligence" if you
want, but the monstrosity they are building is
neither intelligent nor architecturally elegant.
It is nonetheless a system elaborating itself with
undeniable energy. Whatever the changing cast of
characters, the structure only grows. It no longer
seems to matter whether the figure who officially
sits atop it is a former part-owner of a baseball
team and former governor, a former constitutional
law professor, or - looking to possible futures -
a former corporate raider.
A basilica
of chaos Evidently, it's our fate -
increasing numbers of us anyway - to be
transformed into intelligence data (just as we are
being eternally transformed into commercial data),
our identities sliced, diced, and passed around
the labyrinth, our bytes stored up to be "mined"
at their convenience.
You might wonder:
What is this basilica of chaos that calls itself
the US intelligence community? Bamford describes
whistleblower William Binney, a former senior NSA
crypto-mathematician "largely responsible for
automating the agency's worldwide eavesdropping
network," as holding "his thumb and forefinger
close together" and saying, "We are that far from
a turnkey totalitarian state."
It's an
understandable description for someone who has
emerged from the labyrinth, but I doubt it's on
target. Ours is unlikely to ever be a Soviet-style
system, even if it exhibits a striking urge toward
totality; towards, that is, engulfing everything,
including every trace you've left anywhere in the
world. It's probably not a Soviet-style state in
the making, even if traditional legal boundaries
and prohibitions against spying upon and
surveilling Americans are of remarkably little
interest to it.
Its urge is to data mine
and decode the planet in an eternal search for
enemies who are imagined to lurk everywhere, ready
to strike at any moment. Anyone might be a
terrorist or, wittingly or not, in touch with one,
even perfectly innocent-seeming Americans whose
data must be held until the moment when the true
pattern of eneminess comes into view and
everything is revealed.
In the new world
of the National Security Complex, no one can be
trusted - except the officials working within it,
who in their eternal bureaucratic vigilance
clearly consider themselves above any law. The
system that they are constructing (or that,
perhaps, is constructing them) has no more to do
with democracy or an American republic or the
Constitution than it does with a Soviet-style
state. Think of it as a phenomenon for which we
have no name. Like the yottabyte, it's something
new under the sun, still awaiting its own strange
and ugly moniker.
For now, it remains as
anonymous as Joseph K and so, conveniently enough,
continues to expand right before our eyes,
strangely unseen.
If you don't believe me,
leave the country for nine days and just see if,
in that brief span of time, something else isn't
drawn within its orbit. After all, it's
inexorable, this rough beast slouching through
Washington to be born.
Welcome, in the
meantime, to our nameless new world. One thing is
guaranteed: it has a byte.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
