Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Surveillance dystopia looms
By Alfred W McCoy
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 US 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 US 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 US, 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 UN, 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 "US 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 US 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 of 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.
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