In his approach to National Security Agency surveillance, as well as Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) renditions, drone assassinations, and military
detention, President Barack Obama has to a surprising extent embraced the
expanded executive powers championed by his conservative predecessor, George W
Bush.
This bipartisan affirmation of the imperial executive could "reverberate for
generations", warns Jack Balkin, a specialist on First Amendment freedoms at
Yale Law School. And consider
these but some of the early fruits from the hybrid seeds that the "war on
terror" has planted on American soil. Yet surprisingly few Americans seem aware
of the toll that this already endless war has taken on our civil liberties.
Don't be too surprised, then, when, in the midst of some future crisis,
advanced surveillance methods and other techniques developed in our recent
counter-insurgency wars migrate from Baghdad, Fallujah and Kandahar to your
hometown or urban neighborhood. And don't ever claim that nobody told you this
could happen - at least not if you care to read on.
Think of our counter-insurgency wars abroad as so many living laboratories for
the undermining of a democratic society at home, a process historians of such
American wars can tell you has been going on for a long, long time.
Counter-intelligence innovations like centralized data, covert penetration and
disinformation developed during the army's first protracted pacification
campaign in a foreign land - the Philippines from 1898 to 1913 - were
repatriated to the United States during World War I, becoming the blueprint for
an invasive internal security apparatus that persisted for the next half
century.
Almost 90 years later, Bush's "war on terror" plunged the US military into four
simultaneous counter-insurgency campaigns, large and small - in Somalia, Iraq,
Afghanistan, and (once again) the Philippines - transforming a vast swath of
the planet into an ad hoc "counter-terrorism" laboratory. The result?
Cutting-edge high-tech security and counter-terror techniques that are now
slowly migrating homeward.
As the "war on terror" enters its ninth year to become one of America's longest
overseas conflicts, the time has come to ask an uncomfortable question: What
impact have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - and the atmosphere they created
domestically - had on the quality of our democracy?
Every American knows that we are supposedly fighting elsewhere to defend
democracy here at home. Yet the crusade for democracy abroad, largely
unsuccessful in its own right, 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".
Even if its name is increasingly anathema in Washington, the ongoing "war on
terror" has helped bring about a massive expansion of domestic surveillance by
the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National Security Agency
(NSA) whose combined data-mining systems have already swept up several billion
private documents from US citizens into classified data banks.
Abroad, after years of failing counter-insurgency efforts in the Middle East,
the Pentagon began applying biometrics - the science of identification via
facial shape, fingerprints and retinal or iris patterns - to the pacification
of Iraqi cities, as well as the use of electronic intercepts for instant
intelligence and the split-second application of satellite imagery to aid an
assassination campaign by drone aircraft that reaches from Africa to South
Asia.
In the panicky aftermath of some future terrorist attack, Washington could
quickly fuse existing foreign and domestic surveillance techniques, as well as
others now being developed on distant battlefields, to create an instant
digital surveillance state.
The crucible of counter-insurgency
For the past six years, confronting a bloody insurgency, the US occupation of
Iraq has served as a white-hot crucible of counter-insurgency, forging a new
system of biometric surveillance and digital warfare with potentially
disturbing domestic implications.
This new biometric identification system first appeared in the smoking
aftermath of "Operation Phantom Fury", a brutal, nine-day battle that US
Marines fought in late 2004 to recapture the insurgent-controlled city of
Fallujah. Bombing, artillery and mortars destroyed at least half of that city's
buildings and sent most of its 250,000 residents fleeing into the surrounding
countryside. Marines then forced returning residents to wait endless hours
under a desert sun at checkpoints for fingerprints and iris scans. Once inside
the city's blast-wall maze, residents had to wear identification tags for
compulsory checks to catch infiltrating insurgents.
The first hint that biometrics were helping to pacify Baghdad's far larger
population of seven million came in April 2007 when the New York Times
published an eerie image of American soldiers studiously photographing an
Iraqi's eyeball. With only a terse caption to go by, we can still infer the
technology behind this single record of a retinal scan in Baghdad: digital
cameras for US patrols, wireless data transfer to a mainframe computer and a
database to record as many adult Iraqi eyes as could be gathered.
Indeed, eight months later, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon had
collected over a million Iraqi fingerprints and iris scans. By mid-2008, the US
Army had also confined Baghdad's population behind blast-wall cordons and was
checking Iraqi identities by satellite link to a biometric database.
Pushing ever closer to the boundaries of what present-day technology can do, by
early 2008 US forces were also collecting facial images accessible by portable
data labs called Joint Expeditionary Forensic Facilities, linked by satellite
to a biometric database in West Virginia. "A war fighter needs to know one of
three things," explained the inventor of this lab-in-a-box. "Do I let him go?
Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?"
A future is already imaginable in which a US sniper could take a bead on the
eyeball of a suspected terrorist, pause for a nanosecond to transmit the
target's iris or retinal data via backpack-sized laboratory to a computer in
West Virginia, and then, after instantaneous feedback, pull the trigger.
Lest such developments seem fanciful, recall that Washington Post reporter Bob
Woodward claims the success of Bush's 2007 troop surge in Iraq was due less to
boots on the ground than to bullets in the head - and these, in turn, were due
to a top-secret fusion of electronic intercepts and satellite imagery. Starting
in May 2006, American intelligence agencies launched a Special Action Program
using "the most highly classified techniques and information in the US
government" in a successful effort "to locate, target and kill key individuals
in extremist groups such as al-Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shi'ite
militias."
Under General Stanley McChrystal, now US Afghan war commander, the Joint
Special Operations Command (JSOC) deployed "every tool available
simultaneously, from signals intercepts to human intelligence" for "lightning
quick" strikes. One intelligence officer reportedly claimed that the program
was so effective it gave him "orgasms". Bush called it "awesome". Although
refusing to divulge details, Woodward himself compared it to the Manhattan
Project in World War II. This Iraq-based assassination program relied on the
authority defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld granted JSOC in early 2004 to "kill
or capture al-Qaeda terrorists" in 20 countries across the Middle East,
producing dozens of lethal strikes by airborne special operations forces.
Another crucial technological development in Washington's secret war of
assassination has been the armed drone, or unmanned aerial vehicle, whose
speedy development has been another by-product of Washington's global
counter-terrorism laboratory.
Half a world away from Iraq in the southern Philippines, the CIA and US Special
Operations Forces conducted an early experiment in the use of aerial
surveillance for assassination. In June 2002, with a specially equipped CIA
aircraft circling overhead offering real-time video surveillance in the pitch
dark of a tropical night, Philippine marines executed a deadly high-seas ambush
of Muslim terrorist Aldam Tilao (aka "Abu Sabaya").
In July 2008, the Pentagon proposed an expenditure of $1.2 billion for a fleet
of 50 light aircraft loaded with advanced electronics to loiter over
battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq, bringing "full motion video and
electronic eavesdropping to the troops". By late 2008, night flights over
Afghanistan from the deck of the USS Theodore Roosevelt were using sensors to
give American ground forces real-time images of Taliban targets - some so
focused that they could catch just a few warm bodies huddled in darkness behind
a wall.
In the first months of Barack Obama's presidency, CIA Predator drone strikes
have escalated in the Pakistani tribal borderlands with a macabre efficiency,
using a top-secret mix of electronic intercepts, satellite transmission and
digital imaging to kill half of the agency's 20 top-priority al-Qaeda targets
in the region. Just three days before Obama visited Canada last February,
Homeland Security launched its first Predator-B drones to patrol the vast,
empty North Dakota-Manitoba borderlands that one US senator has called
America's "weakest link".
Homeland security
While those running US combat operations overseas were experimenting with
intercepts, satellites, drones and biometrics, inside Washington the plodding
civil servants of internal security at the FBI and the NSA initially began
expanding domestic surveillance through thoroughly conventional data sweeps,
legal and extra-legal, and - with White House help - several abortive attempts
to revive a tradition that dates back to World War I of citizens spying on
suspected subversives.
"If people see anything suspicious, utility workers, you ought to report it,"
said Bush in his April 2002 call for nationwide citizen vigilance. Within
weeks, his Justice Department had launched Operation TIPS (Terrorism
Information and Prevention System), with plans for "millions of American
truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees
and others" to aid the government by spying on their fellow Americans. Such
citizen surveillance sparked strong protests, however, forcing the Justice
Department to quietly bury the president's program.
Simultaneously, inside the Pentagon, Admiral John Poindexter, president Ronald
Reagan's former national security advisor (swept up in the Iran-Contra scandal
of that era), was developing a Total Information Awareness program which was to
contain "detailed electronic dossiers" on millions of Americans. When news
leaked about this secret Pentagon office with its eerie, all-seeing eye logo,
Congress banned the program, and the admiral resigned in 2003. But the key data
extraction technology, the Information Awareness Prototype System, migrated
quietly to the NSA.
Soon enough, however, the CIA, FBI and NSA turned to monitoring citizens
electronically without the need for human tipsters, rendering the
administration's grudging retreats from conventional surveillance at best an
ambiguous political victory for civil liberties advocates. Sometime in 2002,
Bush gave the NSA secret, illegal orders to monitor private communications
through the nation's telephone companies and its private financial transactions
through SWIFT, an international bank clearinghouse.
After the New York Times exposed these wiretaps in 2005, the US Congress
quickly capitulated, first legalizing this illegal executive program and then
granting cooperating phone companies immunity from civil suits. Such
intelligence excess was, however, intentional. Even after congress widened the
legal parameters for future intercepts in 2008, the NSA continued to push the
boundaries of its activities, engaging in what the New York Times politely
termed the systematic "overcollection" of electronic communications among
American citizens. Now, for example, thanks to a top-secret NSA database called
"Pinwale", analysts routinely scan countless "millions" of domestic electronic
communications without much regard for whether they came from foreign or
domestic sources.
Starting in 2004, the FBI launched an Investigative Data Warehouse as a
"centralized repository for ... counter-terrorism". Within two years, it
contained 659 million individual records. This digital archive of intelligence,
social security files, drivers' licenses and records of private finances could
be accessed by 13,000 bureau agents and analysts making a million queries
monthly. By 2009, when digital rights advocates sued for full disclosure, the
database had already grown to over a billion documents.
And did this sacrifice of civil liberties make the United States a safer place?
In July 2009, after a careful review of the electronic surveillance in these
years, the inspectors general of the Defense Department, the Justice
Department, the CIA, the NSA and the Office of National Intelligence issued a
report sharply critical of these secret efforts. Despite Bush's claims that
massive electronic surveillance had "helped prevent attacks", these auditors
could not find any "specific instances" of this, concluding such surveillance
had "generally played a limited role in the FBI's overall counter-terrorism
efforts".
Amid the pressures of a generational global war, congress proved all too ready
to offer up civil liberties as a bipartisan burnt offering on the altar of
national security. In April 2007, for instance, in a bid to legalize the Bush
administration's warrantless wiretaps, congressional representative Jane Harman
(Democrat, California) offered a particularly extreme example of this urge. She
introduced the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act,
proposing a powerful national commission, functionally a standing "star
chamber" to "combat the threat posed by homegrown terrorists based and
operating within the United States". The bill passed the House by an
overwhelming 404 to six vote before stalling, and then dying, in a senate
somewhat more mindful of civil liberties.
Only weeks after Obama entered the Oval Office, Harman's life itself became a
cautionary tale about expanding electronic surveillance. According to
information leaked to the Congressional Quarterly, in early 2005, an NSA
wiretap caught Harman offering to press the Bush Justice Department for reduced
charges against two pro-Israel lobbyists accused of espionage. In exchange, an
Israeli agent offered to help Harman gain the chairmanship of the House
Intelligence Committee by threatening House Democratic majority leader Nancy
Pelosi with the loss of a major campaign donor. As Harman put down the phone,
she said, "This conversation doesn't exist."
How wrong she was. An NSA transcript of Harman's every word soon crossed the
desk of CIA director Porter Goss, prompting an FBI investigation that, in turn,
was blocked by then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. As it happened, the
White House knew that the New York Times was about to publish its sensational
revelation of the NSA's warrantless wiretaps, and felt it desperately needed
Harman for damage control among her fellow Democrats. In this commingling of
intrigue and irony, an influential legislator's defense of the NSA's illegal
wiretapping exempted her from prosecution for a security breach discovered by
an NSA wiretap.
Since the arrival of Obama in the White House, the auto-pilot expansion of
digital domestic surveillance has in no way been interfered with. As a result,
for example, the FBI's "Terrorist Watchlist", with 400,000 names and a million
entries, continues to grow at the rate of 1,600 new names daily.
In fact, the Obama administration has even announced plans for a new military
cyber command staffed by 7,000 US Air Force employees at Lackland air base in
Texas. This command will be tasked with attacking enemy computers and repelling
hostile cyber-attacks or counterattacks aimed at US computer networks - with
scant respect for what the Pentagon calls "sovereignty in the cyber domain".
Despite the president's assurances that operations "will not - I repeat - will
not include monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic", the
Pentagon's top cyber warrior, General James E Cartwright, has conceded such
intrusions are inevitable.
Sending the future home
While US combat forces prepare to draw-down in Iraq (and ramp up in
Afghanistan), military intelligence units are coming home to apply their
combat-tempered surveillance skills to our expanding homeland security state,
while preparing to counter any future domestic civil disturbances here.
Indeed, in September 2008, the Army's Northern Command announced that one of
the Third Division's brigades in Iraq would be reassigned as a Consequence
Management Response Force (CMRF) inside the US. Its new mission: planning for
moments when civilian authorities may need help with "civil unrest and crowd
control". According to Colonel Roger Cloutier, his unit's civil-control
equipment featured "a new modular package of non-lethal capabilities" designed
to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals - including Taser guns, roadblocks,
shields, batons, and beanbag bullets.
That same month, Army Chief of Staff General George Casey flew to Fort Stewart,
Georgia, for the first full CMRF mission readiness exercise. There, he strode
across a giant urban battle map filling a gymnasium floor like a conquering
Gulliver looming over Lilliputian Americans. With 250 officers from all
services participating, the military war-gamed its future coordination with the
FBI, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and local authorities in the event
of a domestic terrorist attack or threat.
Within weeks, the American Civil Liberties Union filed an expedited freedom of
information request for details of these deployments, arguing: "[It] is
imperative that the American people know the truth about this new and
unprecedented intrusion of the military in domestic affairs."
At the outset of the "war on terror" in 2001, memories of early Cold War
anti-communist witch-hunts blocked Bush administration plans to create a corps
of civilian tipsters and potential vigilantes. However, far more sophisticated
security methods, developed for counterinsurgency warfare overseas, are now
coming home to far less public resistance. They promise, sooner or later, to
further jeopardize the constitutional freedoms of Americans.
In these same years, under the pressure of "war on terror" rhetoric,
presidential power has grown relentlessly, opening the way to unchecked
electronic surveillance, the endless detention of terror suspects, and a
variety of inhumane forms of interrogation. Somewhat more slowly, innovative
techniques of biometric identification, aerial surveillance, and civil control
are now being repatriated as well.
In a future America, enhanced retinal recognition could be married to
omnipresent security cameras as a part of the increasingly routine monitoring
of public space. Military surveillance equipment, tempered to a technological
cutting edge in counter-insurgency wars, might also one day be married to the
swelling domestic databases of the NSA and FBI, sweeping the fiber-optic cables
beneath our cities for any sign of subversion. And in the skies above,
loitering aircraft and cruising drones could be checking our borders and
peering down on American life.
If that day comes, our cities will be Argus-eyed with countless thousands of
digital cameras scanning the faces of passengers at airports, pedestrians on
city streets, drivers on highways, ATM customers, mall shoppers and visitors to
any federal facility. One day, hyper-speed software will be able to match those
millions upon millions of facial or retinal scans to photos of suspect
subversives inside a biometric database akin to England's current National
Public Order Intelligence Unit, sending anti-subversion SWAT teams scrambling
for an arrest or an armed assault.
By the time the "war on terror" is declared over in 2020, if then, the American
world may be unrecognizable - or rather recognizable only as the stuff of
dystopian science fiction. What we are proving today is that, however detached
from the wars being fought in their name most Americans may seem, war itself
never stays far from home for long. It's already returning in the form of new
security technologies that could one day make a digital surveillance state a
reality, changing fundamentally the character of American democracy.
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