DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Your security's a
joke By Tom Engelhardt
When my daughter was little and I read to
her regularly, one illustrated book was a favorite
of ours. In a series of scenes, it described
frustrating incidents in the life of a young girl,
each ending with the line - which my tiny daughter
would boom out with remarkable force - "that makes
me mad!" It was the book's title and a
repetitively cathartic moment in our reading
lives. And it came to mind recently as, in my
daily reading, I stumbled across repetitively
mind-boggling numbers from the everyday life of
our National Security Complex.
For our
present national security moment, however, I might
amend the book's punch line slightly to: That
makes no sense!
Now, think of something
you learned about the Complex that fried
your brain, try the line
yourself... and we'll get started.
Are
you, for instance, worried about the safety of
America's "secrets"? Then you should breathe a
sigh of relief and consider this headline from a
recent article on the inside pages of my hometown
paper: "Cost to Protect US Secrets Doubles to Over
$11 Billion."
A government outfit few of
us knew existed, the Information Security
Oversight Office or ISOO, just released its
"Report on Cost Estimates for Security
Classification Activities for Fiscal Year 2011"
(no price tag given, however, on producing the
report or maintaining ISOO). Unclassified
portions, written in classic bureaucratese, offer
this precise figure for protecting our secrets,
vetting our secrets' protectors (no leakers
please), and ensuring the safety of the whole
shebang: US$11.37 billion in 2011.
That's
up (and get used to the word "up") by 12% from
2010, and double the 2002 figure of $5.8 billion.
For those willing to step back into what once
seemed like a highly classified past but was
clearly an age of innocence, it's more than
quadruple the 1995 figure of $2.7 billion.
And let me emphasize that we're only
talking about the unclassified part of what it
costs for secrets protection in the National
Security Complex. The bills from six agencies,
monsters in the intelligence world - the Central
Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence
Agency, the National Security Agency, the National
Reconnaissance Office, the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Office of
the Director of National Intelligence - are
classified. The New York Times estimates that the
real cost lies in the range of $13 billion, but
who knows?
To put things in perspective,
the transmission letter from Director John P
Fitzpatrick that came with the report makes it
utterly clear why your taxpayer dollars, all $13
billion of them, are being spent this way:
"Sustaining and increasing investment in
classification and security measures is both
necessary to maintaining the classification system
and fundamental to the principles of transparency,
participation, and collaboration." It's all to
ensure transparency. George Orwell take that! Pow!
Now let's try the line again, this time
with more gusto: That makes no sense!
On
the other hand, maybe it helps to think of this as
the Complex's version of inflation. Security
protection, it turns out, only goes in one
direction. And no wonder, since every year there's
so much more precious material written by people
in an expanding Complex to protect from the prying
eyes of spies, terrorists, and, well, you.
The official figure for documents
classified by the US government last year is -
hold your hats on this one - 92,064,862. And as
WikiLeaks managed to release hundreds of thousands
of them online a couple of years ago, that's meant
a bonanza of even more money for yet more rigorous
protection.
You have to feel at least some
dollop of pity for protection bureaucrats like
Fitzgerald. While back in 1995 the US government
classified a mere 5,685,462 documents - in those
days, we were practically a secret-less nation -
today, of those 92 million sequestered documents,
26,058,678 were given a "top secret"
classification. There are today almost five times
as many "top secret" documents as total classified
documents back then.
Here's another kind
of inflation (disguised as deflation): in 1996,
the government declassified 196 million pages of
documents. In 2011, that figure was 26.7 million.
In other words, these days what becomes secret
remains ever more inflatedly secret. That's what
qualifies as "transparency, participation, and
collaboration" inside the Complex and in an
administration that came into office proclaiming
"sunshine" policies. (All of the above info thanks
to another of those ISOO reports.) And keep in
mind that the National Security Complex is proud
of such figures!
So, today, the "people's"
government (your government) produces 92 million
documents that no one except the nearly one
million people with some kind of security
clearance, including hundreds of thousands of
private contractors, have access to. Don't think
of this as "overclassification," which is a
problem. Think of it as a way of life, and one
that has ever less to do with you.
Now,
honestly, don't you feel that urge welling up? Go
ahead. Don't hold back: That makes no sense!
How about another form of
security-protection inflation: polygraph tests
within the Complex. A recent McClatchy
investigation of the National Reconnaissance
Office (NRO), which oversees US spy satellites,
found that lie-detector tests of employees and
others had "spiked" in the last decade and had
also grown far more intrusive, "pushing ethical
and possibly legal limits." In a program designed
to catch spies and terrorists, the NRO's
polygraphers were, in fact, being given cash
bonuses for "personal confessions" of "intimate
details of the private lives of thousands of job
applicants and employees ... including drug use
... suicide attempts, depression, and sexual
deviancy." The agency, which has 3,000 employees,
conducted 8,000 polygraph tests last year.
McClatchy adds: "In 2002, the National
Academies, the nonprofit institute that includes
the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that
the federal government shouldn't use polygraph
screening because it was too unreliable. Yet since
then, in the Defense Department alone, the number
of national-security polygraph tests has increased
fivefold, to almost 46,000 annually."
Now,
think about those 46,000 lie-detector tests and
can't you just sense it creeping up on you? Go
ahead. Don't be shy! That makes no sense!
Or talking about security inflation, what
about the "explosion of cell phone surveillance"
recently reported by the New York Times - a
staggering 1.3 million demands in 2011 "for
subscriber information ... from law enforcement
agencies seeking text messages, caller locations
and other information in the course of
investigations"?
From the Complex to local
police departments, such requests are increasing
by 12%-16% annually. One of the companies getting
the requests, AT&T, says that the numbers have
tripled since 2007. And lest you think that 1.3
million is a mind-blowingly definitive figure, the
Times adds that it's only partial, and that the
real one is "much higher." In addition, some of
those 1.3 million demands, sometimes not
accompanied by court orders, are for multiple (or
even masses of) customers, and so could be several
times higher in terms of individuals surveilled.
In other words, while those in the National
Security Complex - and following their example,
state and local law enforcement - are working hard
to make themselves ever more opaque to us, we are
meant to be ever more "transparent" to them.
These are only examples of a larger trend.
Everywhere you see evidence of such numbers
inflation in the Complex. And there's another
trend involved as well. Let's call it by its name:
paranoia. In the years since the 9/11 attacks, the
Complex has made itself, if nothing else, utterly
secure, and paranoia has been its closest
companion. Thanks to its embrace of a paranoid
worldview, it's no longer the sort of place that
experiences job cuts, nor is lack of
infrastructure investment an issue, nor budget
slashing a reality, nor prosecution for illegal
acts a possibility.
A superstructure of
"security" has been endlessly expanded based
largely on the fear that terrorists will do you
harm. As it happens, you're no less in danger from
avalanches (34 dead in the US since November) or
tunneling at the beach (12 dead between 1990 and
2006), not to speak of real perils like job loss,
foreclosure, having your college debts follow you
to the grave, and so many other things. But it
matters little. The promise of safety from terror
has worked. It's been a money-maker, a
stimulus-program creator, a job generator - for
the Complex.
Back in 1964, Richard
Hofstadter wrote a Harper's Magazine essay
entitled "The Paranoid Style in American
Politics." Then, however, paranoia as he described
it, while distinctly all-American, remained
largely a phenomenon of American politics - and
often of the political fringe. Now, it turns out
to be a guiding principle in the way we are
governed.
Yes, we're in a world filled
with dangers. (Paranoia invariably has some basis,
however twisted, in reality.) And significant
among them is undoubtedly the danger the national
security state represents to our lives, which are
increasingly designed to be open books to its
functionaries. Whether you like it or not, want it
or not, care or not, you are ever more likely to
be on file somewhere; you are ever more liable to
be polygraphed until you "confess"; your cell
phone, email, and texts are no longer your
property; and one of the 30,000 employees of the
Complex assigned to monitor American phone
conversations and other communications may be
checking you out. So it goes in
twenty-first-century America.
Maybe if you
haven't said it yet, you're finally feeling the
urge. Go on then, give it a try.
That
makes no sense! There's just one catch. The
direction your government has taken - call it
"transparency" or anything else you want - may
boggle the mind. It may seem as idiotically
wrong-headed as having 17 significant agencies and
outfits in a single government on a budget of $80
billion-plus a year call the product of their work
"intelligence." It may not make sense to you, but
it does make sense to the National Security
Complex. For its "community," the coupling of
security with redundancy - with too much, too
many, and always more - means you're speaking the
language of the gods, you're hearing the music of
the angels.
So much of what the Complex
does may seem like overkill and its operations may
often look laughable and inane. Unfortunately, the
joke's on you. In our country, the bureaucrats of
the Complex increasingly have the power to make
just about any absurdity they want the way of our
world not just in practice, but often in court,
too. And if you really think that makes no sense,
then maybe you better put some thought into what's
to be done about it.
(A note of thanks: to
my friend John Cobb for reminding me of
Hofstadter's essay and to Nick Turse from whose
book title, The Complex: How the Military
Invades Our Everyday Lives, I've long lifted
the idea of the National Security Complex.)
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of
the American Empire Project and author of The
United States of Fear as well as The End of
Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's
TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with
Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First
History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.
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