Ooooh, we’re being spied on! How glamorous! Each of us is a Lady Di now, but without the foreign junkets, castles, yachts and fat bank accounts, and instead of being hounded by paparazzi, we’re acting as our own informants and spies. It has never been so easy to track anyone. Narcissism, never in short supply in a materialist culture, is again being used against us. With our compulsive use of Facebook, Twitter, blogging and the email, plus our cellphone, laptop and credit card, our masters know exactly where we are, who our friends are, as well as what we’re buying and thinking.

Eager to bare all, many of us have even uploaded our natural or surgically puffed endowments, whether sad or cheerful. If even Target can tell if some women are pregnant before they themselves know, perhaps US spy agencies have churned through enough numbers and facts to anticipate if you, yes, you, personally, will have sex within the next 24 hours, and what he, she or it will look like, as far as height, weight, age and hair color, not to mention brands of deodorant and toothpaste, and if your partner flosses regularly, sports patriotic, religious or rebellious tattoos. They will have a video of you having sex even before you had sex.

Nineteen cave-dwelling drunks armed with Dollar Store box cutters have supposedly triggered this suffocating web of surveillance, not to mention an endless war that’s bankrupting the country, but, of course, many Americans already know who the real terrorists are.

With so much tax money and manpower devoted to peering into your brain, mouth and, literally, pants, the state allows its corporate sponsors to make tons of money, since security is a huge business, but another key aim is intimidation. With an all-seeing eye, Washington has become a browbeating cyclops, here to cow, if not bomb, everyone into submission.

The totalitarian state must instill fear and paranoia into each citizen, so that he remains isolated and cannot discuss shared problems with his neighbors, much less organize resistance, but the American archetype is already a loner, and often a lone gunman fighting against overwhelming odds, so will the American rebel become a solo terrorist? Rambo vs. State!

Under or unemployed, threatened with foreclosures and hopelessly in debt, many Americans are frustrated and angry, with some even contemplating turning off their babbling TV long enough to join or organize a sustained protest or rebellion, so the state is preempting that by warning that it knows what you’re thinking, and if you step out of line, it can legally arrest, strip search, disappear or even kill you, without anyone knowing.

How’s that for invasion of privacy? Sounds like terrorism. With laws like that, who needs friggin’ laws? But that’s exactly the message. Not only can the state make laws to serve its evil purposes, and apply them retroactively even, it can also disregard its own laws. Though you must obey an increasingly labyrinthine set of laws that dictate all aspects of your life, the American state is beyond all legal or moral jurisdictions.

With a vast surveillance network, you can never escape the reach of the state, and if this state is an empire, with a global reach, then it can zap you even if you’re hiding under a café table in Curriedgoatistan. Yummm! But this is assuming you can even get out. Consistent with the totalitarian transformation of the United States, steps are being implemented to control your travel. Without freedom of mobility, you are effectively arrested or detained, even if the jail is vast. Citizens of Communist dictatorships often compared their countries to enormous prisons, simply because they were not allowed to leave, but had to risk their lives to escape. In those societies, it was difficult to simply move to the next block, because you needed a permit to sleep anywhere, even for a night. Even in a more relaxed Communist country such as present-day Vietnam, the same control apparatus remains. If you got drunk, say, and wanted to crash at a friend’s apartment, he had to register you with the local police before you could do so, because that’s the law, although it’s not always adhered to anymore.

American military might is predicated on air power, above all, so it’s appropriate that this compulsively bombing empire can now ban you, with no due process or appeal, from peacefully entering their drone-abuzz sky. Squeak too loudly and you may be condemned to that dreaded no-fly list, so that you can only leave the country by sneaking across the Rio Grande, like countless Mexicans or Mexican-Americans when chased by US authorities. Heavily guarded, the Canadian border is not an option. The no-fly list contains mostly foreigners, supposedly, but this leaked “fact” is only meant to reassure docile, gullible or xenophobic Americans into believing this totalitarian measure has nothing to do with them. In any case, it’s certainly not about stopping terrorists but you, white bread person, from possibly flying, because if anyone can be proven a terrorist, he needn’t be grounded but simply arrested, then put on trial.

Though our government would have us believe we’re surrounded by thousands if not millions of terrorists, the conviction of over 300 since 9/11 has been routinely corrupted with procedural misconduct, if not prolonged torture, with most of these trials conducted in secret, without adequate legal defense. With so many laws on their books, and so many crooked judges and prosecutors, they can’t even pin suspected terrorists without getting medieval on their detainees’ helpless person. My, what a cute word. It’s so much easier on the ear than waterboarded, strung up, stripped naked, smeared with shit, beaten or raped prisoners. Say, can I detain you for as long as I wish while stripping you of all rights? It’s not a question, foolish voter! It should be our only question.

Investors that shoot for IPO allocations needn’t worry that a high stock price overvalues the company if they are confident they can find a ‘greater fool’ willing to pay more.

— Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2012

With cult-like projections, Mark Zuckerberg’s face was beamed across a screen at Hacker Square.  Facebook was, after all, having its heralded float as a public company, though the occasion could not cease but be a social event of some magnitude.  That, and the fact of its founder’s marriage, which received the usual empty adulation that such a network facilitates.

The shares in the company’s shares finished at $38.37, though at one point stocks were trading at $42 a share.  The value of the company is now $104 billion. That value places Facebook, in terms of the corporate giant stakes, in the 24th position in the US.  The pundits did end up with egg on their beaming faces, predicting rises of 5 to 10 percent, though this was based on the oversubscribing of the IPO by 25 times, notably in the Asian tranche (Business Spectator, May 19).  Behind the scenes, however, underwriters had to step in after an initially promising rise which touched 11 percent.  Morgan Stanley managed to keep the stock price above $38 by tapping its emergency reserve, and the bean counters are claiming that the performance was a disappointing one.

The question then is whether such a value is not just a touch exaggerated, something which might be said of the entire social media experiment.  Social media remains a treacherous form of investment, highly competitive, and entirely liquid.  The fall of MySpace suggested an automatic obsolescence – in time, hidden shallows will be exposed.  Once the bang goes off, the whimper and ultimate end will set in.

With Facebook, we are in a curious situation of producing what we consume in one act.  The Facebook generation is self-serving, self-referencing and self-contained, all interiorised by means of updates, connections, invitations.  There, the virtual and ‘actual’ mingle.  This is Zuckerberg’s cult of false intimacy, though one can hardly claim his own earnings to have been false.

Its value, like its functionality, is fictitious or better still, virtual.  The same argument might be made about company values in general, but Facebook combines this in neat fashion.  While it would be too extreme to call it, as some have, a ‘juvenile business’ model, the pressure to maintain its enormous value will be monumental.  Zuckerberg’s own value – a princely sum of $19 billion – suggests that he would not be averse to the challenge.  And challenges they shall be.

One of those lies in the world of advertising.  Companies such as GM feel that the AdSense run by Google is more efficient.  It is also worth noting that GM is entirely absent from Facebook’s list of customers (Business Spectator, May 19).  Its base of users has grown astronomically, but that has not kept pace with the advertising feature of the business.  The way users employ Facebook is also a problem of sorts, notably in the realm of mobile usage (Crikey, May 18).  A huge revenue base is essentially going untapped.

The hunt for more revenue, however, will bring the company into conflict with a world of privacy it seeks to both undermine and preserve.  Facebook ventures into inner worlds of intimacy, however genuine they might seem.  Users surrender details to Facebook as if it were a Mephistophelian bargain, though they are told that those details can be controlled in terms of access.  That very data, however, is the premise that the company might use to assist advertisers to sharpen their focus.

Besides, Zuckerberg has shown that privacy is a moot point for him, a mutable formality.  His antics in hacking the website of the Harvard University’s student newspaper when he was 19 suggest a certain mania at work.  That mania has paid off even if it wasn’t as spectacular as market analysts would have it.

And now, there will be surveillance drones. Congress recently passed a bill that opens the gates to widespread use of surveillance drones on US soil. There has been relatively little coverage of this alarming development: drones, so far associated with our illegal war in Pakistan and Yemen, are soon to become a domestic mainstay. On our shores, they will be used for law enforcement and border protection, but also commercially, for real estate, entertainment and journalistic purposes, for example. One prominent drone showcased on the internet is a hummingbird drone. As the name suggests, it’s tiny, quick and highly mobile. A popular video shows the hummingbird drone entering a building and flying down a corridor, transmitting everything it sees. Imagine the possibilities.

What is the effect of all this lost privacy? How does it change our behavior? Because surely it does; we are apt to behave differently when we feel we are alone or watched. What will our personal lives be like as so much more of them is made public?

The French philosopher Michel Foucault argues that constant surveillance has a devastating effect. It’s a subtle form of oppression. When we feel we are being watched, we are more self-conscious of our behavior, more likely to watch what we do and conform to what we think the surveyors want or expect. The hawks among us say this is a good thing: if you’re doing nothing wrong, what do you have to fear from a hummingbird drone? But it’s not as simple as that.

Constant surveillance, Foucault maintained, can be a kind of torture—a revelation implemented by 19th century prison architects. It’s also ideal for authoritarian government in that it’s a highly efficient form of power: authority doesn’t need to coerce individuals physically to behave a certain way; surveillance inserts authority’s eye inside the individual, and he monitors himself. Surveillance enables power to be anonymous, Foucault says, which is especially devastating. You don’t know exactly why you are being watched, or exactly what’s expected of you, and ultimately cultivates a kind of inbred paranoia where you are unsure and timid about everything you do.

Further, Foucault suggests, surveillance that is widely established in society softens the ground for overt political oppression, because it makes us less resistant to breaches of our rights.

This thought occurred to me following the Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 decision to uphold the right of prison officials to strip-search anyone entering a prison facility, no matter how minor the offense. In the case in question, a man was strip-searched after being arrested for an unpaid fine; his arrest was mistaken—he had already paid the fine. The Supreme Court defended the right to strip-search him anyway. Clearly this would seem to undermine our cherished notion of presumed innocence, and it grievously offends our personal dignity. But such galling invasions of privacy, and disregard for personal dignity, become increasingly acceptable when we are already accustomed to them more broadly—all the time, in subtle ways.

The political problem with all this surveillance is obvious, if we’d care to admit it. The political authorities have so much more access to the details of our lives, and in the wrong hands, could do real harm. The only thing protecting us is the character of those in power who collect all this information—and swear they will do nothing objectionable with it. Regarding the new National Defense Authorization Act, which sanctions the president’s power to detain indefinitely or even assassinate US citizens suspected of involvement in terrorist organizations, Obama tried to allay fears by arguing that his administration will use discretion and judgment in exercising this power. What about subsequent administrations? Our founding fathers were highly concerned to design a government that was impervious to corruption by the character flaws of individual office holders. The War on Terror has steadily rendered us vulnerable to just that.

What is perhaps most remarkable in all this is how we are largely unperturbed by the growing surveillance state. Indeed, we jump headlong into these new technologies that allow us to be watched. The ACLU is like a voice in the wilderness screaming about civil rights threats, but we’re too busy shopping online, sharing intimate personal details on Facebook, and Tweeting our most mundane revelations.

When I raise these concerns with my students, some consider them overly alarmist. Most are unfazed. I pressed them on this recently, and one student pointed out that they were 10 years old when the Patriot Act was implemented following the 9-11 attacks. They have also spent half their lives with the internet, email, and smartphones, and so, have known nothing else. In short, surveillance is their norm.

And they have known only benevolent, or at least innocuous, surveillance to date. Does this mean they trust the powers that know so much about them, and could do so much with that knowledge? When I ask that question, the response is almost universally negative. They have very little confidence in the ruling parties—and that’s a view shared by populations across the spectrum. So what’s going on? Why are we giving so much information—and ultimately power—to authorities we have such little confidence in?

There are a variety of factors at work here. On one hand, you might say, we’re just lazy, or too enamored with new technologies, to worry about who is watching us and why. Alternately, as Boston College sociologist Juliet Schor has argued, we are a society increasingly suffering from ‘time poverty’: we work long hours, commute long distances, ferry our kids to and from countless activities, and in our frenzy, have come to rely on the multiple conveniences offered by the new technology that helps us get through our frantic schedules. In general, these new media are so fully integrated into our lives that we simply can’t imagine living without them. They have gotten us accustomed to levels of convenience such as we’ve never known before—a convenience directly proportionate to the amount personal information we surrender.

Underlying all of this, however, is something I have thought about for a while. As a society, we have lost sight of the significance of privacy, and that it is essential to freedom—and democracy. We willingly give up our privacy in the belief that our freedom remains untouched through it all. Indeed, in a War on Terror, forgoing our privacy seems like an easy sacrifice, especially when you get the wondrous conveniences of all the new media in return. But freedom without privacy, Foucault points out, is no freedom at all.

The more we are watched, he argues, we come to feel less free to be unique, quirky, sometimes eccentric individuals. Surveillance exerts a covert pressure. Under constant surveillance, we are more prone to conform, less liable to ask vexing social questions that might draw attention to ourselves and upset someone—who? We are less inclined to develop our own ideas and opinions, work them out in our thoughts and words, test them in public venues—and stick to them. We become more careful, less likely to take chances and engage in risky behavior. But democracy requires creative, independent, fearless individualism.

There is no halting the progress of technology, a progress that has become frighteningly quick in the digital age. However, this in itself is no excuse to accept a looming profusion of hummingbird drones on our streets and in our neighborhoods. The surveillance drones will come, to be sure, but we must watch them in turn—and the watchers. It starts when we recall that privacy is an essential good, an inalienable and non-negotiable right, as the authors of our Constitution—in an age very far removed from our technologies—once understood very well.

No longer the exclusive domain of intelligence agencies, a highly-profitable Surveillance-Industrial Complex emerged in the 1980s with the deployment of the NSA-GCHQ ECHELON intercept system. As investigate journalist Nicky Hager revealed in CovertAction Quarterly back in 1996:

The ECHELON system is not designed to eavesdrop on a particular individual’s e-mail or fax link. Rather, the system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. A chain of secret interception facilities has been established around the world to tap into all the major components of the international telecommunications networks. Some monitor communications satellites, others land-based communications networks, and others radio communications. ECHELON links together all these facilities, providing the US and its allies with the ability to intercept a large proportion of the communications on the planet.

With the exponential growth of fiber optic and wireless networks, the mass of data which can be “mined” for “actionable intelligence,” covering everything from eavesdropping on official enemies to blanket surveillance of dissidents is now part of the landscape: no more visible to the average citizen than ornamental shrubbery surrounding a strip mall.

That process will become even more ubiquitous. As James Bamford pointed out in Wired Magazine, “the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (10 to the 24th bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes–so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)”

“It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015,” Bamford reported, “reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) … Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.”

A former top NSA official turned whistleblower, William Binney, who resigned in 2001 shortly after the agency stood-up the Bush regime’s warrantless wiretapping programs (now greatly expanded under Hope and Change™ huckster Barack Obama), “held his thumb and forefinger close together” and told Bamford, “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

Last week, Binney said on Democracy Now when queried whether there were any differences between the Bush and Obama administrations, “Actually, I think the surveillance has increased. In fact, I would suggest that they’ve assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens.”

Add to that the Transportation Security Administration’s invasion of “travel by other means,” as Jennifer Abel pointed out in The Guardian, through the agency’s usurpation of “jurisdiction over all forms of mass transit,” and it should be clear to Americans (though it isn’t) that there is no way of escaping the secret state’s callous trampling of our rights.

Commenting, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald pointed out that the “domestic NSA-led Surveillance State which Frank Church so stridently warned about has obviously come to fruition.”

“The way to avoid its grip is simply to acquiesce to the nation’s most powerful factions, to obediently remain within the permitted boundaries of political discourse and activism.”

“Accepting that bargain,” Greenwald noted, “enables one to maintain the delusion of freedom–’he who does not move does not notice his chains,’ observed Rosa Luxemburg–but the true measure of political liberty is whether one is free to make a different choice.”

But in a militarized Empire such as ours the only “choice” is to shut up, keep your head down — or else.

‘Lower Your Shields and Surrender Your Ships’

Militarist solutions to intractable social contradictions, the oft-maligned class struggle, do not appear out of the blue. Indeed, NSA’s ECHELON system, the template for STELLAR WIND and the agency’s associated email and web search database known as PINWALE, were technological responses by Western elites to challenges posed by the “excess of democracy” decried by Samuel Huntington and his cohorts in The Crisis of Democracy, published by the Rockefeller-funded Trilateral Commission.

Social critic Andrew Gavin Marshall observed that for Huntington and the right-wing ideologues who mounted an intellectual counterattack against the democratic “excesses” of the 1960s, the “massive wave of resistance, rebellion, protest, activism and direct action by entire sectors of the general population which had for decades, if not centuries, been largely oppressed and ignored by the institutional power structure of society,” were “terrifying.”

Fast forward to today. As the global economic crisis deepens and hundreds of millions of people worldwide reject the “austerity” boondoggles of the financial sharks who brought on the crisis through massive frauds disguised as “investment opportunities,” our corporatist masters are fighting back and have turned to police state methods to prop-up their illegitimate rule.

Nor should it surprise us, as George Ciccariello-Maher pointed out in CounterPunch in the wake of last summer’s London “riots,” a mass response to police murder (coming soon to an “urban exclusion zone” near you!): “Irrational, uncontrollable, impermeable to logic and unpredictable in its movements, these undesirables have once again ruined the party for everyone, as they have done from Paris 1789 to Caracas 1989. In Fanon’s inimitable words: ‘the masses, without waiting for the chairs to be placed around the negotiating table, take matters into their own hands and start burning…’”

Call it the great fear of those lording it over the slaves down on the global plantation!

Combining attributes of Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon” and George Orwell’s ubiquitous “Big Brother,” the National Security State, as it works to stave-off its own well-deserved collapse, seeks to root out and marginalize “dangerous” individuals and ideologies thereby “inoculating” the body politic from what were euphemistically called in the halcyon days of J. Edgar’s COINTELPRO operations, “subversive elements.”

It matters little whether today’s “usual suspects” are landless peasants, displaced workers, investigative journalists, civil libertarians or innocent citizens mistakenly caught in one dragnet or another: “threats” will be “neutralized” or more pointedly, in the evocative language employed by spooks: “Terminated with extreme prejudice.”

Operating alongside tried and methods — police repression and violence — contemporary crackdowns are guided by “robust situational awareness” gleaned from the wealth of personal data stored on multiple digital devices (the spies in our pockets) and in huge databases. As Cryptohippie averred: “An electronic police state is quiet, even unseen. All of its legal actions are supported by abundant evidence. It looks pristine.”

“When we produced our first Electronic Police State report,” the privacy professionals wrote, “the top ten nations were of two types:

1. Those that had the will to spy on every citizen, but lacked ability.
2. Those who had the ability, but were restrained in will.

But as they revealed in their 2010 National Rankings, “This is changing: The able have become willing and their traditional restraints have failed.” The key developments driving the global panopticon forward are the following:

• The USA has negated their Constitution’s fourth amendment in the name of protection and in the name of “wars” against terror, drugs and cyber attacks.
• The UK is aggressively building the world of 1984 in the name of stopping “anti-social” activities. Their populace seems unable or unwilling to restrain the government.
• France and the EU have given themselves over to central bureaucratic control.

As Marxist critic and Situationist troublemaker Guy Debord pointed out decades ago in The Society of the Spectacle, “the spectacle is not the inevitable consequence of some supposedly natural technological development. On the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own technological content.”

Mark that well.

Rejecting the orthodoxies and received wisdom of his day, Debord argued that “The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender ‘lonely crowds.’ With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle recreates its own presuppositions.”

It is again worth noting that the much-vaunted “global village” which sprung to life with the widespread deployment of the internet in the 1990s, as a profit-center for the giant telecoms and a spy machine for the secret state, was, after all, a casual by-product of the Pentagon’s quest for a wartime digital communications system.

But now that every facet of daily life has become a war theater, what are we to make of the electronic walled gardens offered for sale by Apple, Facebook and Google, replete with their multitude of proprietary apps which, like Bentham’s “panopticon,” have become prisons of our own choosing?

Ponder Debord’s rigorous theorems in this light; substitute “cell phone” or “GPS” for “automobile,” and “internet” for “television” and it becomes clear pretty quickly that unbeknownst to the militarist inventors of the “digital highway” they had stumbled upon the perfect means for enabling a global control grid.

As Debord averred: “If the spectacle, considered in the limited sense of the ‘mass media’ that are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to be invading society in the form of a mere technical apparatus, it should be understood that this apparatus is in no way neutral and that it has been developed in accordance with the spectacle’s internal dynamics.”

“Internal dynamics” geared only towards its own survival and reproduction come hell or high water. Endless wars on “terror,” “drugs,” “crime,” take your pick. Prison-Industrial Complexes? Genetically-engineered plagues? Ecological collapse? Step right this way! There’s an app for that and much, much more!

Indeed, “if the social needs of the age in which such technologies are developed can be met only through their mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact between people has become totally dependent on these means of instantaneous communication, it is because this ‘communication’ is essentially unilateral,” that is, “the product of the social division of labor that is both the chief instrument of class rule and the concentrated expression of all social divisions.”

Keep in mind that Debord’s seminal text was penned in 1967, long before the wet dreams of securocrats had been brought to life like Frankenstein’s monster. Once a disquieting and uncanny shape looming on some far-off, dystopian horizon, the world of smart phones and dumbed-down people is, simply put, an Americanized Borg cube where “resistance” is always “futile.”

The question is, in our fallen Republic does anyone even notice?

In January, the Obama administration announced the National Northern Border Counternarcotics Strategy. A press release by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) described how the plan seeks, “to reduce the two-way flow of illicit drugs between the United States and Canada by increasing coordination among Federal, state, local, and tribal enforcement authorities, enhancing intelligence sharing between counterdrug agencies, and strengthening ongoing counterdrug partnerships and initiatives with the Government of Canada and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).”

Senator Charles Schumer proclaimed, “I pushed so hard for this strategy to be finalized because we have to immediately stop the flow of drugs from Canada into New York, and it’s going to take an inter-agency and international effort.” He added, “I’m pleased that this agreement lays the groundwork for Canadian and American law enforcement to work hand-in-glove to fight the drug trade.” Schumer has also endorsed the new cross-border action plan. In addition, he is pushing to establish a Northern Border Intelligence Center in Franklin County, NY to better coordinate efforts to fight drug smuggling and other cross-border criminal activities.

While commenting on the new plan to disrupt the flow of drugs over the U.S.-Canada border, ONDCP Deputy Director of State, Local and Tribal Affairs, Ben Tucker explained that, “By strengthening integrated cross-border law enforcement between our two countries, the Strategy supports a key area of cooperation outlined by President Obama and Prime Minister Harper in the Beyond the Border declaration.”

In December of last year, the leaders issued the follow up Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness Action Plan. The deal focuses on addressing security threats early, facilitating trade, economic growth and jobs, integrating cross-border law enforcement, as well as improving infrastructure and cyber-security. As part of the agreement, both countries will, “create integrated teams in areas such as intelligence and criminal investigations, and an intelligence-led uniformed presence between ports of entry.”

The U.S. and Canada continue to expand the nature and scope of joint law enforcement operations, along with intelligence collection and sharing.

The new northern border drug strategy also called for increasing judicial cooperation, improving information-sharing and extradition arrangements, as well as better coordinating cross-border undercover operations and investigations with Canada. It recommended working towards, “operational fusion with Canadian partners in interoperable communications, technology, and activities. The ability to integrate Canadian and U.S. technology, including sensors, videos, radio communications, and radar feeds, will permit automated sharing of timely information.”

The document also argued that:

It is imperative that Canada and the United States work together to expedite the sharing of information from electronic communication service providers; and share information necessary to lay the foundation for intercepting internet and voice communications.

While various new measures are being put in place to thwart illegal drug, terrorist and other criminal activity, they could easily be used to target anyone else the government deems a threat.

The use of technology is emphasized throughout the report:

Technical collection capabilities and programs along the Northern border, such as thermal camera systems, License Plate Readers (LPRs), Mobile Surveillance Systems, Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), national distress and command and control networks, and Remote Video Surveillance Systems will be deployed and carefully coordinated among participating agencies.

The new strategy also recommended enhancing air and maritime domain awareness and response capabilities as another means of disrupting the flow of illegal drugs across the U.S.-Canada border. In February of 2009, U.S. Customs and Border Protection began using unmanned aerial vehicles on the northern border and expanded the program in January of last year. The UAV drones are being deployed in support of border security, counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism missions. Congress recently passed a bill that will make it easier for the government to use surveillance drones and it is projected that that there could be up to 30,000 in operation over U.S. skies by 2020.

On February 9, the Conservative government released the Building Resilience Against Terrorism: Canada’s Counter-terrorism Strategy. The new plan is aimed at countering domestic, as well as international terrorism and better protecting Canadian interests. It outlined counter-terrorism efforts under four pillars, “prevent individuals from engaging in terrorism; detect the activities of individuals who may pose a terrorist threat; deny terrorists the means and opportunity to carry out their activities; and respond proportionately, rapidly and in an organized manner to terrorist activities and mitigate their effects.”

The report stressed partnership and cooperation as the key to achieving these goals which, “will require an integrated approach not only by the Government of Canada, but by all levels of government, law enforcement agencies, the private sector and citizens, in collaboration with international partners and key allies, such as the United States.” The strategy will, “serve to reinforce security initiatives between Canada and the U.S. and will complement the Canada-U.S. Beyond the Border: A Shared Vision for Perimeter Security and Competitiveness.”

The anti-terror policy identified Sunni Islamist extremism as Canada’s top security threat. It also warned of homegrown terrorists and lone wolf attackers, including issue-based domestic extremism which it stated, “tends to be based on grievances—real or perceived—revolving around the promotion of various causes such as animal rights, white supremacy, environmentalism and anti-capitalism.”

CTV News reported that similar intelligence assessments can be found in documents regarding CSIS and RCMP surveillance between 2005-2010 which categorized, “some animal rights, environmental and aboriginal activists alongside terrorists that pose a threat to national security.” The documents were obtained through access to information requests. They became the basis of the research paper Making up Terror Identities where authors Jeffrey Monaghan and Kevin Walby voiced concerns on how, “intelligence agencies have blurred the categories of terrorism, extremism and activism into an aggregate threat matrix. This blurring of threat categories expands the purview of security intelligence agencies, leading to net-widening where a greater diversity of actions are governed through surveillance processes and criminal law.”

The never ending war on drugs and war on terrorism are being used to justify the huge police state security apparatus being assembled. This includes the militarization of the northern border and plans for a North American security perimeter. In the name of national security, there has been a steady erosion of civil liberties and privacy rights in both the U.S. and Canada. Our freedoms are under assault. The amount of information being collected and shared on all aspects of our daily lives has expanded and is being stored in massive databases. Sweeping new surveillance powers targeting terrorists and other criminals are being increasingly turned against those who are critical of government policy. There is a concerted effort to demonize political opponents, activists, protesters and other peaceful groups. We are witnessing the criminalization of dissent where those who oppose the government’s agenda are being labeled as terrorists and a threat to security.

When I returned to Geogia, I wrote a friend in the UK about my hope to interview McKinney. My friend related a story about the Dignity ship, carrying food and medical supplies to Palestine, in 2008, rammed by the Israeli Navy in international waters. McKinney was on that ship, and when it was rammed, she turned to my friend’s brother and said, “David, I can’t swim.” Nothing I had ever heard about McKinney revealed her character more succinctly. This is a woman willing to put her life on the line in support of her principles. Missing from the Mainstream Media depictions were the human and humane aspects of her character. The MSM has too-often portrayed the struggle for justice as irrational, or even fanatical. I needed to know more.—Gary Corseri

Gary Corseri: Let’s start with a big one… about the day that changed everything—9/11.

[And, for a sense of the very sharp way McKinney performed her duties--and the People’s business--in the US House of Representatives, while on the Budget Committee, I recommend checking out this 9-minute 2006 YouTube video of her grilling Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, General Meyers, and Tina Jonas about 9/11 and related matters.]

In 2004, you signed the 9/11 Truth Movement statement, calling for new investigations of “unexplained aspects of the 9/11 events.” More than 7 years have passed since then. What would you say are some of the more egregious “unexplained events”?

Cynthia McKinney: … How is it that the people of the United States can invest trillions of dollars in the military and Intelligence infrastructure—and it failed four times in one day? … That singular question has never been answered.

GC: Staying with 9/11. … Distorted as they have been by the Mainstream Media, your views have caused uninformed Americans to question your patriotism. In 2005, you held Congressional briefings on the official 9/11 Commission Report—

CM: Yeah. … the only official briefing on that subject held on Capitol Hill, period!

GC: Well… The Atlanta-Journal Constitution editorialized that—

CM: Oh… you mean, The Urinal-in-Constipation!

[General laughter in the room. …]

GC: … They editorialized that—

CM: You call them legitimate? I won’t even legitimize them with a response! Whatever they say is bogus! You got another quote from somebody?

GC: No… well, hear me out. …

CM: I’m not going to respond to anything they say!

GC: Well… you did, in fact, respond to an editorial they wrote when they editorialized that the briefings you were holding were to determine whether the Bush administration had prior knowledge of the attacks. That was their editorial! You replied…, but they refused to publish your response. … So, how did you respond? Can you tell us now?

CM: Oh, I can’t even remember back that far…, but, I think the record now reflects what Bush knew… and I’m sure that part of what I said is that I would never try to go inside George Bush’s brain to see what’s there!

GC: Too many maggots?

[Laughter. …]

GC: So, your main question is: Where was our air force, why didn’t they prevent it—

CM: We know where they were. … The question is, Why didn’t they follow standard operating procedures?

GC: And the other questions about buildings free-falling into their footprints… Building 7—

CM: Look, I spent last September 11 in the home of a woman who is afflicted with cancer… because she lived near the World Trade center. And all of that dust came into her apartment… and she had to clean it up. … She will never figure into any of the statistics about who has been affected—her situation will never count… but it counts to me, and to all of the other memebers of the 911 Truth Community.

GC: Let’s explore another controversial issue linked to you. … Ms. McKinney, what does the number “88794” signify for you?

CM: That was the number that was assigned to me by the Israeli prison system when—on my second attempt to get into Gaza—I was kidnapped on the high seas in international waters and taken against my will to Israel and put in prison. … David Halpin, the UK physician, and I sat next to each other because the volunteers—the activists that were on the boat—were international and spoke different languages… so I sat next to the English doctor… and he railed, he railed, he railed as the warship came close to us…, then backed off…, then approached us again—very quickly and very quietly–in this cat-and-mouse game. … And he cursed my government… because it was with the assistance of the United States that those engines had been provided to the Israeli military so that they could do what they were doing to us. …

GC: Did you join him in the cursing?

CM: No. … In fact…, I do a lot of apologizing! I can say this: In the struggle for human rights, I consider prisoner # 88794 a badge of honor that I’ve acquired as a result of what I have chosen to do to assert my own right to recognize the human rights and the dignity of other people. …

GC: Let’s continue with this theme of recognizing other people’s human rights. … More recently, this past year, you were in Tripoli when NATO bombed Libya. What were you doing there… and can you describe that experience?

CM: I voluntarily went to Libya. … Any time the War Machine rolls—I have to oppose that! Libya was a special case, a personal case… because I had just been to Libya. … I had taken a delegation of independent journalists to go to Libya… because I did not believe the explanation that was given to the public about the necessity to bomb Tripoli and other cities in Libya. … While we were there… we experienced what “shock and awe” is all about. The individual who went to the UN with allegations of thousands dying at the hands of Colonel Gaddhafi and the Libyan government—when he was pressed to substantiate his claims, he couldn’t.

GC:That reminds me of the allegations made against the Iraqis in Kuwait, back in 1990–that they were taking babies out of incubators and throwing them on the floor!

CM: It’s also a situation similar to that of the Cuban-American community congregated down in Miami… right after the Cuban Revolution in 1959 where we had a community of expatriates who were willing to unleash terror on their own country… and, a similar thing was happening in Libya… with the United States providing financing for these individuals willing to lie about what was happening.

This information is available on the Internet. Julien Teil interviewed the individual making these false claims at the UN. The interview can be found at www.laguerrehumanitaire.fr. …It’s on YouTube, as well. Julien also interviewed the woman at Amnesty International who had claimed that “African mercenaries” were supporting Gaddafi’s repression of his people; but, when challenged—and this was all after the devastation—she admitted that it was “just a rumor.”

My colleague, David Josue, and I had been in Libya to attend a conference for Africans on the continent as well as Africans in the diaspora. And what the Jamahariya government had devised was a call to Africans in the diaspora who were unhappy with their treatment at the hands of white Americans or white Europeans, etc.—to come back home to Africa and to help Libya rebuild Africa and rebuild itself.

[Interviewer’s NOTE: (from Wikipedia): “Jamahiriya” is a term coined by Gaddafi, usually translated as “state of the masses.”]

… That was the purpose of this conference I had attended. … And it was at that conference that the Jamahiriya committed 90 billion dollars to help in the creation of The United States of Africa. … That would also include a million-person army for continental Africa to drive back the attempts of AFRICOM and others to occupy the African continent. … That was in addition to the proposal for a gold-backed dinar for all of Africa. … The daughter of Kwame Nkruma was at that conference; the son of Patrice Lumumba was at that conference… the grandson of Malcom X was there. … The atmosphere was electric with the idea of the re-building, the re-kindling of the movement that these African leaders—or their forebears—represented. Well… that was all put to an end by NATO’s bombing. …

[Interviewer’s NOTE (from Wikipedia): The United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) is one of nine United Combatant Commands of the United States Armed Forces.]

The attack on Libya was an attack on Africa! It was an attack on my aspirations as a person of African descent to have a free and independent Africa. That’s what was attacked!

GC: I’ve never had as complete a picture of that. … I’d heard that Gaddafi wanted to set up a gold-backed dinar. … In fact, people like Ron Paul even talk about using gold-backed currency… so I’ve heard that as a rationale for what we were doing there—trying to prevent any challenge to the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. … But…, nobody has described the situation as completely as you have.

My final question on Libya is this: You have praised Colonel Gaddafi’s Green Book and the kind of “direct democracy” advocated therein. Can you give us a brief lesson as to how that “direct democracy” differs from our “representative democracy”?

CM: Our “democracy” is neither democratic nor representative! But… let’s start with what the Jamahiriya means to me. … The only stake that I have is that I want to see a free and independent Africa…, but the type of government that Libya has should be determined by the Libyan people. I don’t really have a say in that. … And I shouldn’t have a say in how they dispose of their governmental form. … Therefore, it’s inexcusable to ask another country to bomb your fellow countrymen if you really care about your country!

The Jamahiriya–which had the highest living standard in all of Africa–had free education up through the Ph.D. level; free health care; free utilities, subsidized—and free, if you were poor—housing; subsidized food; subsidized transportaion, including car expenses… and so, the necessities of life were paid for by the direct democracy known as the Jamahiriya.

Can you imagine…? I have a cousin who is $120,000 in student debt in the U.S. She has a Master’s degree as a social worker. Now, if she had been born in Libya—she would have no such debt. … I went to a university outside of Tripoli and asked the students about their tuition fees… and the word didn’t translate. I asked them about what they paid to attend the university. … It was $9.00 per year!

When I was in Congress, one of my allies was Senator Mike Gravel… and Senator Gravel’s initiative is about “direct democracy.” He had been to Libya… and he supported the establishment of the revolutionary committees which was the way Libyans determined how they would use their oil money.

A question under discussion when I attended the conference there was whether the subsidies for gas/petrol or the subsidies for education would be increased! (In the US, under “austerity” measures, people are being told which programs will be eliminated or eviscerated; in Libya, they were voting on which programs would get increased subsidization!)

What I have said publicly is that what we have been seeing is the Israelization of US policy. You know… the only reason the Libyans took any interest in me was that someone in Libya, looking at their television, saw me having all these problems trying to get into Gaza… and they said, “We want to know her!” That’s why I was invited to attend this conference on The Green Book—to explain what I was trying to do in Gaza. And what I observed in Libya was the same kind of collective punishment I observed in Gaza. People supporting their own governments were being punished by outsiders who opposed those governments!

This is the kind of thing that happens in the absence of ethics in jouralism. … Because… we don’t have journalists in the Mainstream—I call it the Special Interests Press–to educate and provide information to citizens so they can make a critical analysis of issues. That is absent. … We need ethics in scholarship; ethics in journalism, as well. …The journalistic community has gone along with the kind of death and destruction that has been visited upon Libya… and so many other countries. We’re setting up drone bases all over Africa… and people here don’t even know… don’t begin to understand. …

GC: You’ve mentioned many potent issues, including the “Israelization of US policy.” I’d like to explore that, and also explore the theme of alliances—even unlikely alliances. …

In the 2002 election to the House of Representatives, people like your father and the editor and commentator Alexander Cockburn alleged that your defeat by Denise Majette was a consequence of out-of-state Jewish organizations and Jewish money working against you—

CM: That’s not an allegation—that’s a fact! I was informed that I had been targeted by the pro-Israel lobby by the media. … I read about it in the papers! … and the evidence is readily available. …So, the fact of being targeted by the number-one special interest lobby in the United States means that there is an engagement in every aspect of one’s political life. …

GC: Well, ah, let’s tackle this head-on: Are you anti-Semitic?

CM: Well, I’m, ah… I’m no more anti-Semitic than than any of the anti-Zionist Jews who I work with on an almost-daily basis to correct US policy. And, I would suggest that the real Semites are the Palestinians. And, therefore, I would suggest that I’m not anti-Semitic, but that there are people who are anti-human rights, and there are some people who are anti-peace, and there are some people who are pro-war… and no matter who they are, I will always be against that… because I. … You see what my… my button says?

(She points to a button she is wearing on her blouse). My button says, “I’m a peace-keeper” And, this one says, “War is a crime!”

GC: “Blessed are the peace-keepers. …”

CM: When I was in Congress, I organized a Press Conference with organizations like “Jewish Workers for Peace,” “Not in My Name, Women in Black [www.womeninblack.org]—we had about ten organizations at that press conference… and it was fantastic. …

That night, the Atlanta news criticized me for associating with “fringe Jewish elements”! Now… what’s a “fringe Jewish element”? It was the Anti-Defamation League that was casting this aspersion!

Now, the Anti-Defamation League that I knew about is supposed to be a Civil Rights organization. But… the Anti-Defamation League, in practice, filed an amicus brief with five white racists to dismantle the district—my district!–that provided an opportunity for black people in the black belt of Georgia to have representation! Those are the people who sent me to Congress to represent them! … I stand on their shoulders, and I did my darnedest to represent them—and I was rewarded by the Anti-Defamation League filing an amicus brief and a lawsuit to dismantle that district and take representation away from those poor, black people.

GC: I can certainly understand your indignation. And I don’t want to hammer this issue. … But, this is on Wikipedia… and, as one researches you—this is what one comes across:

About that election with Majette, your father, a former state representative in Georgia, stated that “Jews have bought everybody… And then he spelled it, “J-E-W-S. …” Now…, personally, I always make a distinction between Jews and Zionists—and you just did. … I try to distinguish between people who follow a religious tradition and those who assert a political-nationalist ideology. … And, ah… I think writers like Gilad Atzmon, for example, have been very clear about making that distinction in his recent work like The Wandering Who?. …

CM: I haven’t read that, but—

GC: I haven’t read it, but I’ve read about it—

CM: Gilad is coming to Atlanta this month—

GC: Is he? I’d like to meet him. …

CM: Yes. … You must come—

GC: I will! But, ah, anyway… do you think, in retrospect, you might recommend changing the terminology a bit– just to broaden the dialogue and widen the base of opposition to inhumane practices?

CM: Well… let me tell you something. … I want to talk to you about. … The first time my daddy got into trouble was when he said, “racist Jew.” And, I had a Jewish friend who was trying to smooth things over. And I asked her, “Is Jew a bad word? I didn’t know “Zionist”—I didn’t even know that word at the time… because… here’s the thing: the Anti-Defamation League says that they represent all Jews—that’s what they tell us. AIPAC, also. So… I didn’t know that there was a word called “Zionist” until I became involved with the Betrand Russell tribunal on Palestine. … And there was a famous Jewish lawyer who was one of the leaders in that tribunal, and I went to him and I said, “Daniel, how does your family feel about your being in this tribunal?” and he said, “My family are anti-Zionist Jews.” And I said, “I don’t know what that is!” I was 50-something years old, and I’d never heard the language! Now, of course, I’ve been exposed… and I’m more sensitive that there’s a difference. … Now… I have marvelous Jewish friends… and I understand the difference between Judaism and Zionism. Whoever prays to whatever God is fine with me…, but, a political ideology is quite different. … I know I have a lot to learn when it comes to Zionism and Judaism. … I’m not very religious… but I am spiritual… and I’m very interested in people’s beliefs… but, I’m more interested in the way people behave. … So, I would always say, Judge me on what I do more than on what I say. … And, I acknowledge that I can be wrong about what I say. … And, my father can be wrong about what he said. …

GC: Thank you very much. … I think you’ve clarified that for a lot of people. …

Now… this idea of building alliances. … I’d like to discuss current events, namely, the Presidential election

CM: Um-ha. …

GC: First, a re-cap: In 2008, disgusted with the Democratic Party, you were the Green Party candidate for president. That same year, you joined a press conference held by 3rd party and independent candidates, including Ralph Nader and Ron Paul. The participants agreed on 4 basic principles:

1. An early end to the Iraq War, and an end to threats of war against other countries, including Iran.

2. Safeguarding privacy and civil liberties, including repeal of the Patriot Act, the Military Commisions Act and FISA legislation.

3. No increase in the National Debt.

4. A thorough investigation, evaluation and audit of the Federal Reserve System.

My question is this: If these different elements of Independent thought could come together on these 4 basic principles in 2008, why can’t they unite behind the same principles in 2012?

CM: They can. …

GC: Isn’t it possible to conceive a party that speaks for the majority of Independents, that unites Independents? The 4 principles that united Independents then are still very much with us—and in many ways the dangers are greater—the possibility of war with Iran looms larger now, and there’s the National Defense Authorization Act, as well as the other intrusions on privacy and civil liberties. More Americans classify themselves as “Independents” than as Republicans or Democrats. How can the varied strands of Independents work together to defeat the Republicrats?

CM: The answer to that question goes to the core of the kind of change we hope to initiate on a policy basis. … So… how do we do that? I think the first thing is that we have to be willing to talk to each other. We have to recognize that there’s commonality despite difference. So… the thing that allowed Nader and me and Paul to come together is that we were at least willing to see areas of commonality. We should be able to do that across the political spectrum. And, in fact, when I was in the Congress, I was forced to do that. … As a Southerner, I—and as someone who had to get votes—not lose them—I needed the endorsement of a leader in the community… and he was a Klan member… and I had no choice. … I asked him for his support—and I got it! (After I sat there for over an hour and he described to me how “confused” the people were because of the way they judged the Ku Klux Klan to be racist!)

[Here, CM gives a strong, hearty guffaw!]

And… I sat there and found a place where we could have a meeting of the minds—and I did it!

GC: Related question then: I’ve been criticized because I wrote an article, about a month ago–“The Lion and the Ox”–praising Ron Paul’s stance on ending the wars, ending the Empire, auditing the Fed. I also think his views on our antiquated, absurd and minority-punishing drug laws are far more enlightened than anyone else’s—with the exception of 2012 Green Party candidate, Jill Stein’s. Paul makes a distinction between Capitalism and Corporatism—an important distinction. Now, I’m not a Libertarian; I don’t agree with “unregulated” Capitalism to the extent Paul and Libertarians do. But, I wonder: Given various points of convergence, how can the Green Party and Libertarians work together to overturn what we have in America today—basically, a one-party system, a Corporate Party system, abetted by corporate media?

CM: Well, one thing is that the Libertarians and the Greens could join forces—kind of a united front. So… I’d like to see if those kinds of talks could get anywhere.

GC: A friend of mine suggested a Paul-McKinney ticket. …

CM: That was your friend, huh?

GC: Well, you know… when I first heard that, I thought, “That’s crazy!” But… I thought about it, and I thought, “Why not? We live in crazy times. …”

CM: Yeah… we do. …

GC: I mean… look what we have to choose from: Santorum, Michelle Bachman, Hermain Cain, Gingrich, Romney–all these crazy people. …

CM: Every time there’s a vote, it gets more outrageous, doesn’t it?

GC: It does! Well… what do you think about Paul-McKinney?

CM: Well… we’re not there yet, so I don’t have to think about it at all!

GC: Well. …

CM: Let me put it this way. … We do have overlapping constituencies. … So… it would be wonderful if the two circles could expand beyond their points of intersection. …And I’m not just talking about Paul. … I’m talking about people on the Left in general. … Because, there’s no more Left and Right. It’s only Right and Wrong now… and the old “Right” is Wrong… and the old “Left” needs to be more Right… does that make sense?

GC: Yes. …

CM: Yeah, because the Left is being co-opted. … So, the Left needs to be more Left!

GC: There needs to be a convergence where the Greens and the Libertarians can meet—

CM: And the militia! You know… I have to deal with the militia, too. I’m from Georgia, right? They participate in the political system—to the extent that they do—and somebody needs to be talking to’em… because, ultimately, they’re a part of the 99%. … And that’s the gift that the Occupy Movement has given to us—they’ve given us a way to self-identify. Now we know—it’s not about color, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation—all of those things. At the end of the day—if you’re part of the 99%, you’re part of us… and if you’re part of the 1%–you’re part of them!

GC: Related question: Okay…also about Current Events: this is about the Occupy Movement, then. …

CM: Okay. …

GC: We live in a Surveilance State. Our license plate numbers are routinely recorded; we’re finger-printed for jobs, our Social Security numbers serve as National I.D.’s, our e-mails are monitored for “code” words or phrases, our homes are surveiled by satellite mapping systems of Google, Yahoo, etc. Those who protest, as in the Occupy Wall Street movement, are arrested, booked, and more closely watched. Now they have “records” that affect their employment. … My question is: how do we battle this pervasive system? Do you get discouraged? What do you do when you are discouraged? Who are your “heroes”? To whom do you turn for inspiration?

CM: Do I get discouraged? Yes! What do I do when I’m discouraged? … find other people who are not yet discouraged!

Who are my heroes? Everybody! Everybody who has a tough row to hoe in life! Those are my heroes. Those are the people who give the most! When I was running for Congress back in 1992–for the first time–I was running to represent the second poorest district in Georgia… and, what I learned was that the poor people gave the most! The people who had… didn’t give as generously as the people who didn’t have! So… my first campaign theme was, “Warriors don’t wear medals, they wear scars!” So… my heroes are the community and neighborhood warriors who have a whole lof of scars, a whole lot of dignity.

GC: I’d like you to talk specifically about what used to be called the Black Liberation Struggle. As a young, white man, I was inspired by the works of black writers like Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Leroi Jones (now called Baraka), Eldridge Cleaver, W.E.B. DuBois, and poets like Langston Hughes. Martin Luther King and Malcom X were inspirational leaders for all people; Rosa Parks was a woman of quiet, dignified courage. But, now, with the election of Obama, and with the prominence of people like Bill Cosby first, and Oprah Winfrey, the billionairess—the great struggles of the past almost seem quaint. What’s your take on this? Who are the great black leaders today? What is the struggle about today?

[Note:There are 7 million Americans now under “correctional observation.” More African-Americans’ lives intersect with our prison-industrial-surveillance complex than there were African-American slaves in 1850!]

CM: You asked me who are my heroes. … One of my heroes is Glen Ford, who writes for The Black Agenda Report. I view him as the most astute political observer of our times.

There’s a whole lot of pundits who are in our faces every Sunday morning who think they are political observers…, but they are not astute! And they’re also not independent. Glen Ford is independent, he’s been through the wars and he has no special interests to kow-tow to. … He just wrote a piece… “Can the Proud African-American Progressive Legacy Survive Another Four Years of Cowing to the Corporate Servant in the White House?” That’s strong stuff…, but right on point!

We have a situation now… it was the Black struggle that really defined morality in the United States. It defined the moral imperative. And the character of the country was measured by how well it answered the call of Black people for justice. But what happens when Black people stop asking for justice? I think you get exactly what we’ve got now—a President who is dropping bombs on Africa… which is un-thought-of; I mean, it would have been un-thought-of four years ago that Africa would be bombed—routinely! But it’s a routine matter now that the United States Africa Command [AFRICOM] would actively establish itself and militarize the US relationship with Africa. AFRICOM represents a kind of US imperial occupation of the continent that we haven’t seen since the days of outright colonialism of the Europeans. We are being told about issues that are “important”…, but we’re ignoring the real issues that are important! Henry Kissinger said that he couldn’t believe the amount of good will that was embodied in this president! But… what people like Kissinger don’t “get” is that this president sits on top of the historic Black struggle that characterized the United States to the world! People around the world thought that Barack Obama characterized the New United States! But… far from it! A lot of people got tricked and fooled and now… as philosopher Michel Foucault has observed—the every-day actions of ordinary people actually entrap them in “powerlessness”. … So, to break out of your powerlessness, you’ve got to break out of your existing paradigm. So, as long as Barack Obama is representative of the existing paradigm, this is what we’re going to get… because the existing paradigm is war and more war!

GC: How do we “break out”? How do we fight the Mainstream Media that’s constantly projecting that paradigm and hammering it into our brains?

CM: The literature suggests that people have to be confronted with a “disorienting dilemma” that causes them to reflect on what they’ve just experienced. …

GC: Cognitive dissonance?

CM: That’s right. … Reflect on what you always assumed… and what you’ve been confronted with that contradicts your assumptions. … For some people, it was the murder of JFK; for others, it was the murder of Malcom; for others, it was the murder of MLK; for a whole bunch of others, it was the murder of RFK; and for some people who began to look and pay attention like me… it was the murder of all of them and then add onto it the murder of the members of the Black Panther Party—who were attacked by our own government. …

You could say that for me, my first “disorienting dilemma” was when I realized that I was black. I realized that the world around me was not like me, and that it didn’t value my black skin! That, for me was when I began to pay attention and wake up!

GC: How old were you?

CM: Seven or eight. …You know… for some people it’s religion, it’s race, it’s gender, it’s, maybe, sexual orientation. … Everyone has their moment of reckoning.

I think, ultimately… it’s about the love we have for humanity and how we see something is wrong and we have to stop it!

So… by the time I got to Congress… I had had my “reckoning,” and I had had my “break-out” moments, and I guess this gave me strength and vibrancy… and there were people who didn’t like it. I wore my hair differently, I dressed differently from the other people in Congress. There was even a segment of the Capitol Hill police that didn’t like that. …

GC: What year was that?

CM: 1993. …

GC: Wasn’t there a much more recent incident with the Capitol Hill police?

CM: No, no, no. … It happened for twelve years! … Twelve years of harrassment from the Capitol Hill police! They considered it a “sport” to harass me! … It’s available on the Internet… if you go to YouTube and you put in “The Last Plantation.”

GC: The infamous incident is when you apparently struck back at the officer who was harassing you. … Is that correct?

CM: The officer had no business putting his hands on me! … And I reacted like any normal person would react when being attacked by some great big, huge guy from behind! … This was a “hit.” It was a “hit”–a “sport”–for the white officers. You’ll see if you go to that “Last Plantation” site that I had been targeted because I had written a letter of support for the Black Capitol Hill police officers.

GC: And this most infamous incident… that was the same day as House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was indicted?

CM: That’s right. … The Mainstream Media didn’t want to lead with that indictment, did they? It was much more sensational and distracting to lead with the story of a black Congresswoman attacking a Capitol Hill police officer!

[Laughter]

GC: You’re a pretty brave woman, aren’t you?

CM: Everybody can be brave… they just need that break-out moment of recognition. … I’ve stood on some big shoulders. … As I said before–my campaign theme: “Warriors don’t wear medals… they wear scars.”

It has since emerged that despite legal requirements that police do so only with a warrant and only if surveillance intercepts are used to prevent threats to “life, limb or liberty,” authorities are not complying with strict limits laid down by Germany’s Supreme Court.

And while these disclosures may have ignited a political firestorm in Berlin, they will come as no surprise to readers of Antifascist Calling.

Three years ago, I reported that Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND, was caught up in a major scandal after the whistleblowing web site WikiLeaks, published documents which revealed that the agency had extensively spied on, and even recruited, journalists for use in illicit intelligence operations.

Recalling the CIA’s long-running Operation Mockingbird program that enrolled journalists as spies in what are now euphemistically called “influence operations,” the covert manipulation of the domestic and foreign press according to WikiLeaks, showed “the extent to which the collaboration of journalists with intelligence agencies has become common and to what dimensions consent is manufactured in the interests of those involved.”

BBC News reported that “Bavaria has admitted using the spyware, but claimed it had acted within the law.” And Deutsche Welle disclosed that “several additional German states have admitted to deploying spyware,” including “Baden-Württemberg, Brandenburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony,” but like their counterparts in Bavaria, those officials also claimed they had operated “within the parameters of the law.”

As I have written many times, the secret state is bound by their own set of “laws.” Normal rules and procedures which are supposed to protect citizens from unwarranted government intrusions are deemed inoperative for reasons of “national security.”

In the United States, constitutional protections designed to guarantee the right of citizens to protest, enjoy a modicum of privacy in their daily lives or, at the most basic level, have their day in court before being executed, have been overthrown by two successive administrations who assert the right to conduct the affairs of state in secret, according to a set of legal guidelines which are unreviewable by any court.

It would appear that similar moves are underway in Germany.

‘Backdoor Functionality’

The Chaos Computer Club revealed in their analysis that when they reverse engineered the program, variously dubbed “0zapftis”, “Bundestrojaner” or “R2D2,” they discovered that the spyware “found in the wild” and “submitted to the CCC anonymously,” can “not only siphon away intimate data but also offers a remote control or backdoor functionality for uploading and executing arbitrary other programs. Significant design and implementation flaws make all of the functionality available to anyone on the internet.”

Club researchers learned that “the trojan’s developers never even tried to put in technical safeguards to make sure the malware can exclusively be used for wiretapping internet telephony, as set forth by the constitution court. On the contrary, the design included functionality to clandestinely add more components over the network right from the start, making it a bridge-head to further infiltrate the computer.”

“The government malware can,” analysts noted, “unchecked by a judge, load extensions by remote control, to use the trojan for other functions, including but not limited to eavesdropping.”

“This complete control over the infected PC, is open not just to the agency that put it there, but to everyone. It could even be used to upload falsified ‘evidence’ against the PC’s owner, or to delete files, which puts the whole rationale for this method of investigation into question.”

Their study also “revealed serious security holes that the trojan is tearing into infected systems. The screenshots and audio files it sends out are encrypted in an incompetent way, the commands from the control software to the trojan are even completely unencrypted. Neither the commands to the trojan nor its replies are authenticated or have their integrity protected.”

“We were surprised and shocked by the lack of even elementary security in the code. Any attacker could assume control of a computer infiltrated by the German law enforcement authorities,” a CCC spokesperson commented. “The security level this trojan leaves the infected systems in is comparable to it setting all passwords to ’1234′.”

Nothing ‘Magical’ about this ‘Lantern’

There are glaring similarities between the “R2D2″ package deployed by German police and “Magic Lantern” software used by the FBI. As with Bureau spyware, the German program is a keystroke logging virus installed via a malicious email attachment or by exploiting operating system vulnerabilities.

When news of the FBI program first broke back in 2000, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) obtained documents under a Freedom of Information Act request relating to the system, which were part of a suite of surveillance tools then called Carnivore.

At the time, EPIC revealed that the FBI “had developed an Internet monitoring system that would be installed at the facilities of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and would monitor all traffic moving through that ISP.”

Once a user is spoofed into installing the malicious Trojan, it is activated when PGP encryption is used to enhance email security. When switched on, the Trojan will log the PGP password which will then allow the agents to read the encrypted communications unbeknownst to the sender. Since its first iteration in the 1990s, such programs are exponentially more sophisticated and are now capable of scooping-up virtually everything a user stores on a computer or handset.

A 2007 exposé by Wired Magazine revealed that Magic Lantern’s “computer and internet protocol address verifier” or CIPAV, “gathers a wide range of information, including the computer’s IP address; MAC address; open ports; a list of running programs; the operating system type, version and serial number; preferred internet browser and version; the computer’s registered owner and registered company name; the current logged-in user name and the last-visited URL.”

And once that data was obtained, it was siphoned-off to the Bureau’s technology laboratory in Quantico, Virginia via fiber optic splitter cables.

As whistleblower Babak Pasdar revealed in 2008, following earlier disclosures by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, Verizon, and other giant telecommunications firms, including AT&T, maintained a high-speed DS-3 digital line that handed the Bureau and other security agencies “unfettered” access to the carrier’s wireless network, including billing records and customer data “transmitted wirelessly.”

Just after the scandal broke, Wired Magazine disclosed that “two years before the Bavarian state in Germany began using a controversial spy tool to gather evidence from suspect computers, German authorities approached the Federal Bureau of Investigation to discuss a similar tool the U.S. law enforcement agency was using.”

“Bavarian authorities,” Wired reported, “began using their spyware in 2009. It’s not known if that spyware is based on the FBI’s, but in July 2007, German authorities contacted the FBI seeking information about its tool.”

The FBI’s assistant legal attache in Frankfurt “sent an email to Bureau colleagues on July 24, 2007, writing, ‘I am embarrassed to be approaching you again with a request from the Germans … but they now have asked us about CIPAV (Computer Internet Protocol Address Verifier) software, allegedly used by the Bu[reau]‘.”

The email uncovered by Wired was part of a huge cache of files obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in response to their 2007 Freedom of Information Act request for data on CIPAV.

In the years since those disclosures, secret state surveillance is more pervasive than ever and and now includes the “lawful interception” of GPS locational data streamed automatically to their manufacturers or hosting services by smart phones.

It appears that German secret state officials are playing a similar game. According to Der Spiegel, at least two agencies, the Bundeskriminalamt, or BKA, the federal crime investigation agency equivalent to the FBI, and some 16 Landeskriminalamt or LKAs, regional investigative bureaus, may have deployed the malware during wide-ranging investigations unrelated to terrorism.

Following Chaos Computer Club revelations, it is clear that German authorities have been caught red-handed violating a landmark decision by the Supreme Court. “The court,” Der Spiegel noted, “specified that online spying was only permissible if there was concrete evidence of danger to individuals or society.”

In a follow-up piece, Der Spiegel disclosed that the firm DigiTask was the spyware’s developer. Along with hundreds of similar firms, DigiTask is a niche security outfit that develops applications for the so-called “lawful interception” market.

In 2008, WikiLeaks released two documents concerning “interception technology for Skype and SSL in Bavaria, Germany. The first document is a communication by the Bavarian Ministry of Justice to the prosecutors office, relating to cost distribution for the interception licenses between police and prosecution. The second document allegedly presents the offer made by Digitask, the German company developing the technology, and holds information on pricing and license model, high-level technology descriptions and other detail.”

According to the WikiLeaks analysis, the DigiTask offer “introduces a basic description of the cryptographic workings of Skype, and concludes that new systems are needed to spy on Skype calls.”

We were informed in that letter that German police were interested in standing-up a “Skype Capture Unit.”

“In a nutshell: malware is installed onto a target machine, to intercept Skype Voice and Chat. Another feature introduced is a recording proxy, that is not part of the offer, yet would allow for anonymous proxying of recorded information to a target recording station. Access to the recording station is possible via a multimedia streaming client, supposedly offering real-time interception.”

“Another part of the offer,” WikiLeaks noted, was related to “an interception method for SSL based communication, working on the same principle of establishing a man-in-the-middle attack on the key material on the client machine. According to the offer, this method works for Internet Explorer and Firefox web browsers. Digitask also recommends using overseas proxy servers, to cover the tracks of all activities.”

As it turns out those proxy servers were conveniently located in the United States. This raises the distinct possibility that information captured by German secret state officials is also being shared with “partner agencies” of their close NATO ally, the CIA, FBI and NSA.

This was confirmed by CCC’s analysis of R2D2′s code. “To avoid the location of the command and control server, all data is redirected through a rented dedicated server in a data center in the USA. The control of this malware is only partially within the borders of its jurisdiction.”

“Considering the incompetent encryption and the missing digital signatures on the command channel, this poses an unacceptable and incalculable risk. It also poses the question how a citizen is supposed to get their right of legal redress in the case the wiretapping data get lost outside Germany, or the command channel is misused.”

The short answer is, they can’t.

Aside from lining the pockets of DigiTask shareholders, there are more sinister uses for the malware. As the World Socialist Web Site noted “the remote-control function could be used to load and execute malicious software, and to plant bogus digital evidence on the computer, which can then be detected if the computer was seized. A suspect would have no way of proving that this had happened.”

This would certainly be a convenient way to “neutralize” a troublesome politician, journalist or over-eager anticorporate campaigner.

‘Less Democracy’

Following similar efforts in the United States, evidence that police are illegally spying on German citizens using sophisticated malware developed for the government are neither benign nor accidental events.

As a recent article in German Foreign Policy disclosed, leading voices in Europe’s largest state are “pleading for a transition toward ‘less democracy’.” A recent book, published under the title, Dare Less Democracy, claims that the “voice of the people” and the “‘emancipatory Zeitgeist, putting everything into question,’ has a too ‘paralyzing influence” on current governance’.”

“The author,” the critical online leftist magazine observes, “demands to ‘correct the system’ for ‘more efficient policy making.’ These ‘corrections’ must include the dismantlement of democratic participation.”

Author Laszlo Trankovits, the bureau chief of the Deutsche Presse Agentur in South Africa, who had previously worked for the agency in Washington “as its White House correspondent,” explained “it should never be suggested that a ‘democratic society can do away with inequality and establish social justice’.”

“Trankovits,” German Foreign Policy notes, is “a member of the elitist Rotary-Club.” He demands that “the elite clearly ‘commits itself to capitalism and profit,’ and that ‘intelligent forms of public relations’ be used to communicate policy measures to the population. However, the demand for more ‘transparency’ is ‘counterproductive and paralyzing’ for any ‘governance efficiency’ and must be rejected.”

That drivel such as this was penned by a journalist for Germany’s leading news agency, to whit, that the media should serve as a propaganda mouthpiece for casino capitalist interests, is one more sign that democratic norms, already seriously eroded in the West, are now being rapidly jettisoned by our political masters.

With the global capitalist system on the verge of a repeat performance of the 2008 meltdown, and with a worldwide resurgence of opposition to the one-sided costs of saving a system of financial plunder borne by the working class, elite calls for “less democracy” are warning signs that stern measures, including blanket surveillance and naked police violence, are in the offing.

As corporate overlords position themselves to seize what little remains of a tattered social net (adieu Medicare and Medicaid! Social Security? Au revoir!), the Obama administration is moving at break-neck speed to expand police state programs first stood-up by the Bush government.

After all, with world share prices gyrating wildly, employment and wages in a death spiral, and retirement funds and publicly-owned assets swallowed whole by speculators and rentier scum, the state better dust-off contingency plans lest the Greek, Spanish or British “contagion” spread beyond the fabled shores of “old Europe” and infect God-fearin’ folk here in the heimat.

Fear not, they have and the lyrically-titled Civil Disturbances: Emergency Employment of Army and Other Resources, otherwise known as Army Regulation 500-50, spells out the “responsibilities, policy, and guidance for the Department of the Army in planning and operations involving the use of Army resources in the control of actual or anticipated civil disturbances.” (emphasis added)

With British politicians demanding a clampdown on social media in the wake of London riots, and with the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) agency having done so last week in San Francisco, switching off underground cell phone service to help squelch a protest against police violence, authoritarian control tactics, aping those deployed in Egypt and Tunisia (that worked out well!) are becoming the norm in so-called “Western democracies.”

Secret Law, Secret Programs

Meanwhile up on Capitol Hill, Congress did their part to defend us from that pesky Bill of Rights; that is, before 81 of them–nearly a fifth of “our” elected representatives–checked-out for AIPAC-funded junkets to Israel.

Secrecy News reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee “rejected an amendment that would have required the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to confront the problem of ‘secret law,’ by which government agencies rely on legal authorities that are unknown or misunderstood by the public.”

That amendment, proposed by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) was rejected by voice vote, further entrenching unprecedented surveillance powers of Executive Branch agencies such as the FBI and NSA.

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department “demanding the release of a secret legal memo used to justify FBI access to Americans’ telephone records without any legal process or oversight.”

The DOJ refused and it now appears that the Senate has affirmed that “secret law” should be guiding principles of our former republic.

Secrecy News also disclosed that the Committee rejected a second amendment to the authorization bill, one that would have required the Justice Department’s Inspector General “to estimate the number of Americans who have had the contents of their communications reviewed in violation of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 [FAA].”

As pointed out here many times, FAA is a pernicious piece of Bushist legislative detritus that legalized the previous administration’s secret spy programs since embellished by our current “hope and change” president.

During the run-up to FAA’s passage, congressional Democrats, including then-Senator Barack Obama and his Republican colleagues across the aisle, claimed that the law would “strike a balance” between Americans’ privacy rights and the needs of security agencies to “stop terrorists” attacking the country.

If that’s the case, then why can’t the American people learn whether their rights have been compromised?

Perhaps, as recent reports in Truthout and other publications suggest, former U.S. counterterrorism “czar” Richard Clarke leveled “explosive allegations against three former top CIA officials — George Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee — accusing them of knowingly withholding intelligence … about two of the 9/11 hijackers who had entered the United States more than a year before the attacks.”

Clarke’s allegations follow closely on the heels of an investigation by Truthout journalists Jeffrey Kaye and Jason Leopold.

“Based on on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and an interview with a former high-ranking counterterrorism official,” Kaye and Leopold learned that “a little-known military intelligence unit, unbeknownst to the various investigative bodies probing the terrorist attacks, was ordered by senior government officials to stop tracking Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s movements prior to 9/11.”

As readers are well aware, the 9/11 provocation was the pretext used by the capitalist state to wage aggressive resource wars abroad while ramming through repressive legislation like the USA Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act that targeted the democratic rights of the American people here at home.

But FAA did more then legitimate illegal programs. It also handed retroactive immunity and economic cover to giant telecoms like AT&T and Verizon who profited handily from government surveillance, shielding them from monetary damages which may have resulted from a spate of lawsuits such as Hepting v. AT&T.

This raises the question: are other U.S. firms similarly shielded from scrutiny by secret annexes in FAA or the privacy-killing USA Patriot Act?

Echelon Cubed

Last week, Softpedia revealed that “Google has admitted complying with requests from US intelligence agencies for data stored in its European data centers, most likely in violation of European Union data protection laws.”

“At the center of this problem,” reporter Lucian Constantin wrote, “is the USA PATRIOT ACT, which states that companies incorporated in the United States must hand over data administered by their foreign subsidiaries if requested.”

“Not only that,” the publication averred, “they can be forced to keep quiet about it in order to avoid exposing active investigations and alert those targeted by the probes.”

In other words, despite strict privacy laws that require companies operating within the EU to protect the personal data of their citizens, reports suggest that U.S. firms, operating under an entirely different legal framework, U.S. spy laws with built-in secrecy clauses and gag orders, trump the laws and legal norms of other nations.

Given the widespread corporate espionage carried out by the National Security Agency’s decades-long Echelon communications’ intercept program, American firms such as Google, Microsoft, Apple or Amazon may very well have become witting accomplices of U.S. secret state agencies rummaging about for “actionable intelligence” on EU, or U.S., citizens.

Indeed, a decade ago the European Union issued its final report on the Echelon spying machine and concluded that the program was being used for corporate and industrial espionage and that data filched from EU firms was being turned over to American corporations.

In 2000, the BBC reported that according to European investigators “U.S. Department of Commerce ‘success stories’ could be attributed to the filtering powers of Echelon.”

Duncan Campbell, a British journalist and intelligence expert, who along with New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager, helped blow the lid off Echelon, offered two instances of U.S. corporate spying in the 1990s when the newly-elected Clinton administration followed up on promises of “aggressive advocacy” on behalf of U.S. firms “bidding for foreign contracts.”

According to Campbell, NSA “lifted all the faxes and phone-calls between Airbus, the Saudi national airline and the Saudi Government” to gain this information. In a second case which came to light, Campbell documented how “Raytheon used information picked up from NSA snooping to secure a $1.4bn contract to supply a radar system to Brazil instead of France’s Thomson-CSF.”

As Softpedia reported, U.S.-based cloud computing services operating overseas have placed “European companies and government agencies that are using their services … in a tough position.”

With the advent of fiber optic communication platforms, programs like Echelon have a far greater, and more insidious, reach. AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein noted on the widespread deployment by NSA of fiber optic splitters and secret rooms at American telecommunications’ firms:

What screams out at you when examining this physical arrangement is that the NSA was vacuuming up everything flowing in the Internet stream: e-mail, web browsing, Voice-Over-Internet phone calls, pictures, streaming video, you name it. The splitter has no intelligence at all, it just makes a blind copy. There could not possibly be a legal warrant for this, since according to the 4th Amendment warrants have to be specific, “particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. …

This was a massive blind copying of the communications of millions of people, foreign and domestic, randomly mixed together. From a legal standpoint, it does not matter what they claim to throw away later in their secret rooms, the violation has already occurred at the splitter. (Mark Klein, Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine… And Fighting It, Charleston, South Carolina: BookSurge, 2009, pp. 38-39.)

What was Google’s response?

In a statement to the German publication WirtschaftsWoche a Google corporate spokesperson said:

As a law abiding company, we comply with valid legal process, and that–as for any U.S. based company–means the data stored outside of the U.S. may be subject to lawful access by the U.S. government. That said, we are committed to protecting user privacy when faced with law enforcement requests. We have a long track record of advocating on behalf of user privacy in the face of such requests and we scrutinize requests carefully to ensure that they adhere to both the letter and the spirit of the law before complying.” (translation courtesy of Public Intelligence)

Is the Senate Intelligence Committee’s steadfast refusal to release documents and secret legal memos that most certainly target American citizens also another blatant example of American exceptionalism meant to protect U.S. firms operating abroad from exposure as corporate spies for the government?

It isn’t as if NSA hasn’t been busy doing just that here at home.

As The New York Times reported back in 2009, the “National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year.”

Chalking up the problem to “overcollection” and “technical difficulties,” unnamed intelligence officials and administration lawyers told journalists Eric Lichtblau and James Risen that although the practice was “significant and systemic … it was believed to have been unintentional.”

As “unintentional” as ginned-up intelligence that made the case for waging aggressive war against oil-rich Iraq!

In a follow-up piece, the Times revealed that NSA “appears to have tolerated significant collection and examination of domestic e-mail messages without warrants.”

A former NSA analyst “read into” the illegal program told Lichtblau and Risen that he “and other analysts were trained to use a secret database, code-named Pinwale, in 2005 that archived foreign and domestic e-mail messages.”

Email readily handed over by Google, Microsoft or other firms “subject to lawful access” by the Pentagon spy satrapy?

The Times’ anonymous source said “Pinwale allowed N.S.A. analysts to read large volumes of e-mail messages to and from Americans as long as they fell within certain limits–no more than 30 percent of any database search, he recalled being told–and Americans were not explicitly singled out in the searches.”

Nor, were they excluded from such illicit practices.

As Jane Mayer revealed in The New Yorker, “privacy controls” and “anonymizing features” of a program called ThinThread, which would have complied with the law if Americans’ communications were swept into NSA’s giant eavesdropping nets, were rejected in favor of the “$1.2 billion flop” called Trailblazer.

And, as previously reported, when Wyden and Udall sought information from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on just how many Americans had their communications monitored, the DNI stonewalled claiming “it is not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed under the authority.”

Why? Precisely because such programs act like a giant electronic sponge and soak up and data mine huge volumes of our communications.

As former NSA manager and ThinThread creator Bill Binney told The New Yorker, that “little program … got twisted” and was “used to eavesdrop on the whole world.”

Three years after Barack Obama promised to curb Bush administration “excesses,” illegal surveillance programs continue to expand under his watch.

A Permanent “State of Exception”

Under our current political set-up, “states of exception” and national security “emergencies” have become permanent features of social life.

Entire classes of citizens and non-citizens alike are now suspect; anarchists, communists, immigrants, Muslims, union activists and political dissidents in general are all subject to unprecedented levels of scrutiny and surveillance.

From “enhanced security screenings” at airports to the massive expansion of private and state databases that archive our spending habits, whom we talk to and where we go, increasingly, as the capitalist system implodes and millions face the prospect of economic ruin, the former American republic takes on the characteristics of a corporate police state.

Security researcher and analyst Christopher Soghoian reported on his Slight Paranoia blog, that according to “an official DOJ report, the use of ‘emergency’, warrantless requests to ISPs for customer communications content has skyrocketed over 400% in a single year.”

This is no trifling matter.

As CNET News disclosed last month, “Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers’ activities for one year–in case police want to review them in the future–under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today.”

Declan McCullagh reported that “the 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall’s elections.”

Significantly, CNET noted that this is also a “victory” for Democratic appointees of Barack Obama’s Justice Department “who have quietly lobbied for the sweeping new requirements.”

According to CNET, a “last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses.”

However, by “a 7-16 vote, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored.”

Consider the troubling implications of this sweeping bill. While ultra-rightist “Tea Party” Republicans vowed to get “the government off our backs,” when it comes to illicit snooping by securocrats whose only loyalty is to a self-perpetuating security bureaucracy and the defense grifters they serve (and whom they rely upon for plum positions after government “retirement”), all our private data is now up for grabs.

The bill, according to Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who spearheaded opposition to the measure said that if passed, it would create “a data bank of every digital act by every American” that would “let us find out where every single American visited Web sites.”

To make the poison pill legislation difficult to oppose, proponents have dubbed it, wait, the “Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011″ even though, as CNET noted, “the mandatory logs would be accessible to police investigating any crime and perhaps attorneys litigating civil disputes in divorce, insurance fraud, and other cases as well.”

Soghoian relates that the 2009 two-page Justice Department report to Congress took 11 months (!) to release under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Why the Justice Department stonewall?

Perhaps, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation disclosed last year, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security and presumably other secret state satrapies, ordered “an extra layer of review on its FOIA requests.”

EFF revealed that a 2009 policy memo from the Department’s Chief FOIA Officer and Chief Privacy Officer, Mary Ellen Callahan, that DHS components “were required to report ‘significant FOIA activities’ in weekly reports to the Privacy Office, which the Privacy Office then integrated into its weekly report to the White House Liaison.”

Included amongst designated “significant FOIA activities” were requests “from any members of ‘an activist group, watchdog organization, special interest group, etc.’ and ‘requested documents [that] will garner media attention or [are] receiving media attention’.”

Despite the appearance of reporting “emergency” spying requests to congressional committees presumably overseeing secret state activities (a generous assumption at best), “it is quite clear” Soghoian avers, “that the Department of Justice statistics are not adequately reporting the scale of this form of surveillance” and “underreport these disclosures by several orders of magnitude.”

As such, “the current law is largely useless.” It does not apply to “state and local law enforcement agencies, who make tens of thousands of warrantless requests to ISPs each year,” and is inapplicable to “to federal law enforcement agencies outside DOJ.”

“Finally,” Soghoian relates, “it does not apply to emergency disclosures of non-content information, such as geo-location data, subscriber information (such as name and address), or IP addresses used.”

And with Congress poised to pass sweeping data retention legislation, it should be clear that such “requirements” are mere fig leaves covering-up state-sanctioned lawlessness.

War On Terror 2.0.1: Looting the Global Economy

Criminal behavior by domestic security agencies connect America’s illegal wars of aggression to capitalism’s economic warfare against the working class, who now take their place alongside “Islamic terrorists” as a threat to “national security.”

Despite efforts by the Obama administration and Republican congressional leaders to “balance the books” on the backs of the American people through massive budget cuts, as economist Michael Hudson pointed out in Global Research, the manufactured “debt ceiling” crisis is a massive fraud.

The World Socialist Web Site averred that:

As concerns over a double-dip recession in the US and the European debt crisis sent global markets plunging–including a 512-point sell-off on the Dow Jones Industrial Average Thursday–financial analysts and media pundits developed a new narrative. Concern that Washington lacked the ‘political will’ to slash long-standing entitlement programs was exacerbating ‘market uncertainty’.

Leftist critic Jerry White noted that “in fact, the new cuts will only intensify the economic crisis, while the slashing of food stamps, unemployment compensation, health care and education will eliminate programs that are more essential for survival than ever.”

Indeed, as Marxist economist Richard Wolff pointed out in The Guardian, while the “crisis of the capitalist system in the US that began in 2007,” may have “plunged millions into acute economic pain and suffering,” the “recovery” that began in 2009 “benefited only the minority that was most responsible for the crisis: banks, large corporations and the rich who own the bulk of stocks. That so-called recovery never ‘trickled down’ to the US majority: working people dependent on jobs and wages’.”

And despite mendacious claims by political officials and the media alike, the Pentagon will be sitting pretty even as Americans are forced to shoulder the financial burden of U.S. imperial adventures long into an increasingly bleak future.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta “warned Thursday of dire consequences if the Pentagon is forced to make cuts to its budget beyond the $400 billion in savings planned for the next decade,” The Washington Post reported.

The Post noted that “senior Pentagon officials have launched an offensive over the past two days to convince lawmakers that further reductions in Pentagon spending would imperil the country’s security.”

“Instead of slashing defense,” Panetta urged lawmakers to “rely on tax increases and cuts to nondiscretionary spending, such as Medicare and Social Security, to provide the necessary savings.”

But as Hudson points out, “war has been the major cause of a rising national debt.” After all, it was none other than bourgeois icon Adam Smith who argued that “parliamentary checks on government spending were designed to prevent ambitious rulers from waging war.”

Hudson writes that “if people felt the economic impact of war immediately–rather than postponing it by borrowing–they would be less likely to support military adventurism.”

But therein lies the rub. Since “military adventurism” is the only “growth sector” of an imploding capitalist economy, the public spigot which finances everything from cost-overrun-plagued stealth fighter jets to multi-billion dollar spy satellites, along with an out-of-control National Surveillance State, will be kept open indefinitely.

On this score, the hypocrisy of our rulers abound, especially when it comes to the mantra that “we” must “live within our means.”

As Wolff avers:

Where was that phrase heard when Washington decided to spend on an immense military (even after becoming the world’s only nuclear superpower) or to spend on very expensive wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya (now all going on at the same time)? No, then the talk was only about national security needed to save us from attacks.

“Attacks,” it should be duly noted, that may very well have been allowed to happen as the World Socialist Web Site recently reported.

Driving home the point that war, and not social and infrastructure investment fuel deficits, Hudson averred that “the present rise in in U.S. Treasury debt results from two forms of warfare. First is the overtly military Oil War in the Near East, from Iraq to Afghanistan (Pipelinistan) to oil-rich Libya. These adventures will end up costing between $3 and $5 trillion.”

“Second and even more expensive,” the economist observed, “is the more covert yet more costly economic war of Wall Street against the rest of the economy, demanding that losses by banks and financial institutions be passed onto the government balance sheet (‘taxpayers’). The bailouts and ‘free lunch’ for Wall Street–by no coincidence, Congress’s number one political campaign contributor–cost $13 trillion.”

“Now that finance is the new form of warfare,” Hudson wrote, “where is the power to constrain Treasury and Federal Reserve power to commit taxpayers to bail out financial interests at the top of the economic pyramid?”

And since “cutbacks in federal revenue sharing will hit cities and states hard, forcing them to sell off yet more land, roads and other assets in the public domain to cover their budget deficit as the U.S. economy sinks further into depression,” Hudson wrote that “Congress has just added fiscal deflation to debt deflation, slowing employment even further.”

While the global economy circles the drain, with ever more painful cuts in so-called “entitlement” programs meant to cushion the crash now on the chopping block, the corporate and political masters who rule the roost are sharpening their knives, fashioning administrative and bureaucratic surveillance tools, the better to conceal the “invisible hand” of that bitch-slaps us all.

And they call it “freedom.”

Last week, the New York Times disclosed that the FBI “is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.”

Under “constitutional scholar” Barack Obama’s regime, the Bureau will revise its “Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide.” The “new rules,” Charlie Savage writes, will give agents “more latitude” to investigate citizens even when there is no evidence they have exhibited “signs of criminal or terrorist activity.”

As the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) recently pointed out, “When presented with opportunities to protect constitutional rights, our federal government has consistently failed us, with Congress repeatedly rubber-stamping the executive authority to violate civil liberties long protected by the Constitution.”

While true as far it goes, it should be apparent by this late date that no branch of the federal government, certainly not Congress or the Judiciary, has any interest in limiting Executive Branch power to operate lawlessly, in secret, and without any oversight or accountability whatsoever.

Just last week, The New York Times revealed that the Bush White House used the CIA “to get” academic critic Juan Cole, whose Informed Comment blog was highly critical of U.S. imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The former CIA officer and counterterrorism official who blew the whistle and exposed the existence of a Bush White House “enemies list,”, Glenn L. Carle, told the Times, “I couldn’t believe this was happening. People were accepting it, like you had to be part of the team.”

Ironically enough, the journalist who broke that story, James Risen, is himself a target of an Obama administration witchhunt against whistleblowers. Last month, Risen was issued a grand jury subpoena that would force him to reveal the sources of his 2006 book, State of War.

These latest “revisions” will expand the already formidable investigative powers granted the Bureau by former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey.

Three years ago, The Washington Post informed us that the FBI’s new “road map” permits agents “to recruit informants, employ physical surveillance and conduct interviews in which agents disguise their identities” and can pursue “each of those steps without any single fact indicating a person has ties to a terrorist organization.”

Accordingly, FBI “assessments” (the precursor to a full-blown investigation) already lowered by the previous administration will, under Obama, be lowered still further in a bid to “keep us safe”–from our constitutional rights.

The Mukasey guidelines, which created the “assessment” fishing license handed agents the power to probe people and organizations “proactively” without a shred of evidence that an individual or group engaged in unlawful activity.

In fact, rather than relying on a reasonable suspicion or allegations that a person is engaged in criminal activity, racial, religious or political profiling based on who one is or on one’s views, are the basis for secretive “assessments.”

Needless to say, the presumption of innocence, the bedrock of a republican system of governance based on the rule of law, like the right to privacy, becomes one more “quaint” notion in a National Security State. In its infinite wisdom, the Executive Branch has cobbled together an investigative regime that transforms anyone, and everyone, into a suspect; a Kafkaesque system from which there is no hope of escape.

Under Bushist rules, snoops were required to open an inquiry “before they can search for information about a person in a commercial or law enforcement database,” the Times reported. In other words, somewhere in the dank, dark bowels of the surveillance bureaucracy a paper trail exists that just might allow you to find out your rights had been trampled.

But our “transparency” regime intends to set the bar even lower. Securocrats will now be allowed to rummage through commercial databases “without making a record about their decision.”

The ACLU’s Michael German, a former FBI whistleblower, told the Times that “claiming additional authorities to investigate people only further raises the potential for abuse.”

Such abuses are already widespread. In 2009 for example, the ACLU pointed out that “Anti-terrorism training materials currently being used by the Department of Defense (DoD) teach its personnel that free expression in the form of public protests should be regarded as ‘low level terrorism’.”

As I reported in 2009, citing a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Bureau’s massive Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW), is a data-mining Frankenstein that contains more “searchable records” than the Library of Congress.

EFF researchers discovered that “In addition to storing vast quantities of data, the IDW provides a content management and data mining system that is designed to permit a wide range of FBI personnel (investigative, analytical, administrative, and intelligence) to access and analyze aggregated data from over fifty previously separate datasets included in the warehouse.”

Accordingly, “the FBI intends to increase its use of the IDW for ‘link analysis’ (looking for links between suspects and other people–i.e. the Kevin Bacon game) and to start ‘pattern analysis’ (defining a ‘predictive pattern of behavior’ and searching for that pattern in the IDW’s datasets before any criminal offence is committed–i.e. pre-crime).”

Once new FBI guidelines are in place, and congressional grifters have little stomach to challenge government snoops as last month’s disgraceful “debate” over renewing three repressive provisions of the USA Patriot Act attest, “low-level” inquiries will be all but impossible to track, let alone contest.

Despite a dearth of evidence that dissident groups or religious minorities, e.g., Muslim-Americans have organized violent attacks in the heimat, the new guidelines will permit the unlimited deployment of “surveillance squads” that “surreptitiously follow targets.”

In keeping with the Bureau’s long-standing history of employing paid informants and agents provocateurs such as Brandon Darby and a host of others, to infiltrate and disrupt organizations and foment violence, rules governing “‘undisclosed participation’ in an organization by an F.B.I. agent or informant” will also be loosened.

The Times reports that the revised manual “clarifies a description of what qualifies as a “sensitive investigative matter”–investigations, at any level, that require greater oversight from supervisors because they involve public officials, members of the news media or academic scholars.”

According to the Times, the manual “clarifies the definition of who qualifies for extra protection as a legitimate member of the news media in the Internet era: prominent bloggers would count, but not people who have low-profile blogs.”

In other words, if you don’t have the deep pockets of a corporate media organization to defend you from a government attack, you’re low-hanging fruit and fair game, which of course, makes a mockery of guarantees provided by the First Amendment.

As I reported last month, with requests for “National Security Letters” and other opaque administrative tools on the rise, the Obama administration has greatly expanded already-repressive spy programs put in place by the previous government.

Will data extracted by the Bureau’s Investigative Data Warehouse or its new Data Integration and Visualization System retain a wealth of private information gleaned from commercial and government databases on politically “suspect” individuals for future reference? Without a paper trail linking a person to a specific inquiry you’d have no way of knowing.

Even should an individual file a Freedom of Information Act request demanding the government turn over information and records pertaining to suspected wrongdoing by federal agents, as Austin anarchist Scott Crow did, since the FBI will not retain a record of preliminary inquiries, FOIA will be hollowed-out and become, yet another, futile and meaningless exercise.

And with the FBI relying on secret legal memos issued by the White House Office of Legal Counsel justifying everything from unchecked access to internet and telephone records to the deployment of government-sanctioned malware on private computers during “national security” investigations, political and privacy rights are slowly being strangled.

On May 31, The Wall Street Journal disclosed that the Pentagon now asserts “that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.”

One sound bite savvy wag told journalist Siobhan Gorman, “if you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks.”

Also on May 31, The Washington Post reported that America’s shadow warriors have “developed a list of cyber-weapons and -tools, including viruses that can sabotage an adversary’s critical networks, to streamline how the United States engages in computer warfare.”

That “classified list of capabilities has been in use for several months,” with the approval of “other agencies, including the CIA.” Post reporter Ellen Nakashima informed us that this “sensitive program … forms part of the Pentagon’s set of approved weapons or ‘fires’ that can be employed against an enemy.”

Not to be left in the dust by their U.S. and Israeli allies, The Guardian reported that the “UK is developing a cyber-weapons programme that will give ministers an attacking capability to help counter growing threats to national security from cyberspace.”

Armed Forces Minister Nick Harvey told The Guardian that “action in cyberspace will form part of the future battlefield” and will become “an integral part of the country’s armoury.”

It appears that Western military establishments are in the grips of a full-blown cyber panic or, more likely, beating the war drums as they roll out new product lines with encouragement from corporate partners eager to make billions developing new weapons systems for their respective political masters.

And why not? As Bloomberg News reported back in 2008, both Lockheed Martin and Boeing “are deploying forces and resources to a new battlefield: cyberspace.”

Bloomberg averred that military contractors and the wider defense industry are “eager to capture a share of a market that may reach $11 billion in 2013,” and “have formed new business units to tap increased spending to protect U.S. government computers from attack.”

Linda Gooden, executive vice president of Lockheed’s Information Systems & Global Services unit told Bloomberg, “The whole area of cyber is probably one of the faster-growing areas” of the U.S. budget. “It’s something that we’re very focused on.”

As part of the new strategy to be released later this month, the Post reports that the military needs “presidential authorization to penetrate a foreign computer network and leave a cyber-virus that can be activated later.”

However, when it comes to espionage or other activities loudly denounced as illegal intrusions into the sacrosanct world of government and corporate crime and corruption, the “military does not need such approval.”

We’re told such “benign” activities “include studying the cyber-capabilities of adversaries or examining how power plants or other networks operate.”

“Military cyber-warriors,” Nakashima writes, “can also, without presidential authorization, leave beacons to mark spots for later targeting by viruses,” an “unnamed military official” told the Post.

But wait, aren’t those precisely the types of covert actions decried by politicians, media commentators and assorted experts when they’re directed against the heimat? Is there a double standard here? Well, of course there is!

Along with a flurry of Defense Department leaks designed to ratchet-up the fear factor and lay the groundwork for billions more from Congress for giant defense firms servicing the Pentagon’s unquenchable thirst for ever-deadlier weapons systems–cyber, or otherwise–”threat inflation” scaremongering described by researchers Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins in their essential paper, Loving the Cyber Bomb?, take center stage.

Just last week, former Democratic party congressional hack, current CIA Director and Obama’s nominee to lead the Defense Department, Leon Panetta, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “the next Pearl Harbor that we confront could very well be a cyberattack that cripples America’s electrical grid and its security and financial systems,” The Christian Science Monitor reported.

Cripple the financial system? Why greedy banksters and corporate bottom-feeders seem to be doing a splendid job of it on their own without an assist from shadowy Russian hackers, the People’s Liberation Army or LulzSec pranksters!

However, the Pentagon’s propaganda blitz (courtesy of a gullible or complicitous corporate media, take your pick) is neither meant to inform nor educate the public but rather, to conceal an essential fact: the United States is already engaged in hostile cyber operations against their geopolitical rivals–and allies–and have been doing so since the 1990s, if not earlier, as journalist Nicky Hager revealed when he blew the lid off NSA’s Echelon program in a 1997 piece for CovertAction Quarterly.

Botnets and Root Kits: What the HBGary Hack Revealed

When The Wall Street Journal informed readers that the “Pentagon’s first formal cyber strategy … represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country’s military,” what the Journal didn’t disclose is that the Defense Department is seeking the technological means to do just that.

Implying that hacking might soon constitute an “act of war” worthy of a “shock and awe” campaign, never mind that attributing an attack by a criminal or a state is no simple matter, where would the Pentagon draw the line?

After all as The Guardian reported, with the “underground world of computer hackers … so thoroughly infiltrated in the US by the FBI and secret service,” will some enterprising criminal acting as a catspaw for his/her U.S. handlers, gin-up an incident thereby creating Panetta’s “cyber Pearl Harbor” as a pretext for a new resource war?

While fanciful perhaps, if recent history is any guide to future American actions (can you say “Iraq” and “weapons of mass destruction”), such fabrications would have very deadly consequences for those on the wrong side of this, or some future, U.S. administration.

But we needn’t speculate on what the Pentagon might do; let’s turn our attention instead to what we know they’re doing already.

Back in February, The Tech Herald revealed that the private security firms HBGary Federal, HBGary, Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies were contacted by the white shoe law firm Hunton & Williams on behalf of corporate clients, Bank of America and the U.S. Chamber on Commerce, to “develop a strategic plan of attack against Wikileaks.”

The scheme concocted by “Team Themis” was to have included a dirty tricks campaign targeting journalists, WikiLeaks supporters, their families and the whistleblowing group itself through “cyber attacks, disinformation, and other potential proactive tactics.”

But when the CEO of HBGary Federal boasted to the Financial Times that he had penetrated the cyber-guerrilla collective Anonymous, the group struck back and pwned (“owned”) HBGary’s allegedly “secure” servers, seizing a treasure trove of some 70,000 internal emails and other documents, posting them on the internet.

As I reported earlier this year, Team Themis looked like a smart bet. After all, HBGary and the other firms touted themselves as “experts in threat intelligence and open source analysis” with a focus on “Information Operations (INFOOPS); influence operations, social media exploitation, new media development.”

Palantir, which was fronted millions of dollars by the CIA’s venture capitalist arm, In-Q-Tel, bragged that they could deliver “the only platform that can be used at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels within the US Intelligence, Defense, and Law Enforcement Communities,” and that they can draw “in any type of data, such as unstructured message traffic, structured identity data, link charts, spreadsheets, SIGINT, ELINT, IMINT and documents.”

In other words, these firms subsisted almost entirely on U.S. government contracts and, in close partnership with mega-giant defense companies such as General Dynamics, SRA International, ManTech International and QinetiQ North America, were actively building cyber weapons for the Defense Department.

In the aftermath of the HBGary sting, investigative journalist Nate Anderson published an essential piece for Ars Technica which described how HBGary and other firms were writing “backdoors for the government.”

“In 2009,” Anderson wrote, “HBGary had partnered with the Advanced Information Systems group of defense contractor General Dynamics to work on a project euphemistically known as ‘Task B.’ The team had a simple mission: slip a piece of stealth software onto a target laptop without the owner’s knowledge.”

HBGary’s CEO Greg Hoglund’s “special interest,” Anderson reported, “was in all-but-undetectable computer ‘rootkits,’ programs that provide privileged access to a computer’s innermost workings while cloaking themselves even from standard operating system functions. A good rootkit can be almost impossible to remove from a running machine–if you could even find it in the first place.”

The secret-shredding web site Public Intelligence published HBGary’s 2008 paper, Windows Rootkit Analysis Report. Amongst the nuggets buried within its 243 pages we learned that Hoglund suggested to his secret state and corporate clients that “combining deployment of a rootkit with a BOT makes for a very stealth piece of malicious software.”

Readers should recall that back in 2008, an article published in the influential Armed Forces Journal advocated precisely that.

Col. Charles W. Williamson III’s piece, “Carpet Bombing in Cyberspace,” advocated “building an af.mil robot network (botnet) that can direct such massive amounts of traffic to target computers that they can no longer communicate and become no more useful to our adversaries than hunks of metal and plastic.”

It would appear that the project envisioned by HBGary and General Dynamics would combine the stealthy features of a rootkit along with the destructive capabilities of a botnet.

One can only presume that defense firms are building malware and other attack tools for the Defense Department, the CIA, the National Security Agency and USCYBERCOM, and that they constitute the short list of “approved weapons or ‘fires’” alluded to by The Washington Post.

A 2009 HBGary contract proposal released by Public Intelligence, DoD Cyber Warfare Support Work Statement, disclosed that the “contract will include efforts to examine the architecture, engineering, functionality, interface and interoperability of Cyber Warfare systems, services and capabilities at the tactical, operational and strategic levels, to include all enabling technologies.”

The firm proposed an “operational exercise design and construction,” as well as “operations and requirements analysis, concept formulation and development, feasibility demonstrations and operational support.”

“This will include,” the proposal averred, “efforts to analyze and engineer operational, functional and system requirements in order to establish national, theater and force level architecture and engineering plans, interface and systems specifications and definitions, implementation, including hardware acquisition for turnkey systems.”

Under terms of the contract, the company will “perform analyses of existing and emerging Operational and Functional Requirements at the force, theater, Combatant Commands (COCOM) and national levels to support the formulation, development and assessment of doctrine, strategy, plans, concepts of operations, and tactics, techniques and procedures in order to provide the full spectrum of Cyber Warfare and enabling capabilities to the warfighter.”

In fact, during an early roll-out of the Pentagon’s cyber panic product line five years ago, Dr. Lani Kass, a former Israeli Air Force major and acolyte of neocon war criminals Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and who directs the Air Force Cyber Space Task Force under Bush and Obama, submitted a provocative proposal.

During a 2006 presentation titled, A Warfighting Domain: Cyberspace, Kass asserted that “the electromagnetic spectrum is the maneuver space. Cyber is the United States’ Center of Gravity–the hub of all power and movement, upon which everything else depends. It is the Nation’s neural network.” Kass averred that “Cyber superiority is the prerequisite to effective operations across all strategic and operational domains–securing freedom from attack and freedom to attack.”

Accordingly, she informed her Air Force audience that “Cyber favors the offensive,” and that the transformation of a militarized internet into a “warfighting domain” will be accomplished by “Strategic Attack directly at enemy centers of gravity; Suppression of Enemy Cyber Defenses; Offensive Counter Cyber; Defensive Counter Cyber; Interdiction.”

In the years since that presentation such plans are well underway.

In another leaked file, Public Intelligence disclosed that HBGary, again in partnership with General Dynamics, are developing “a software tool, which provides the user a command line interface, that will enable single file, or full directory exfiltration over TCP/IP.”

Called “Task Z,” General Dynamics “requested multiple protocols to be scoped as viable options, and this quote contains options for VoIP (Skype) protocol, BitTorrent protocol, video over HTTP (port 80), and HTTPS (port 443).”

As I reported last year, the Obama administration will soon be seeking legislation that would force telecommunications companies to redesign their system and information networks to more readily facilitate internet spying.

And, as the administration builds upon and quietly expands previous government programs that monitor the private communications of the American people, The New York Times revealed that our “change” regime will demand that software and communication providers build backdoors accessible to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Such “backdoors” will enable spooks trolling “encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct ‘peer to peer’ messaging like Skype” the means “to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.”

These are precisely the technological “fixes” which firms like HBGary, General Dynamics and presumably other defense contractors are actively building for their secret state security partners.

The Fire This Time

While denouncing China, Russia and other capitalist rivals over cyber espionage and alleged hacking escapades, the deployment of digital weapons of mass destruction against selected adversaries, Iran for one, is an essential feature of Pentagon targeting profiles and has now been fully integrated into overall U.S. strategic military doctrine.

This is hardly the stuff of wild speculation considering that evidence suggests that last year’s attack on Iran’s civilian nuclear program via the highly-destructive Stuxnet worm was in all probability a joint U.S.-Israeli operation as The New York Times disclosed.

Nor should we forget, that U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), the Pentagon satrapy directed by NSA Director, Gen. Keith Alexander, is “a sub-unified command subordinate to U. S. Strategic Command,” the lead agency charged with running space operations, information warfare, missile defense, global command, control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR), global strike and strategic deterrence; the trigger finger on America’s first-strike nuclear arsenal.

Will the next crisis trigger an onslaught against an adversary’s civilian infrastructure? The Washington Post informs us that an unnamed U.S. official acknowledged that “‘the United States is actively developing and implementing’ cyber-capabilities ‘to deter or deny a potential adversary the ability to use its computer systems’ to attack the United States.”

However, while the “collateral effects” of such an attack are claimed to be “unpredictable,” one can be sure that civilian populations on the receiving end of a Pentagon cyber attack will suffer mass casualties as water and electrical systems go offline, disease and panic spreads and social infrastructures collapse.

Welcome to America’s brave new world of high-tech war crimes coming soon to a theater near you (3D glasses optional).

And like a horde of flesh-eating zombies shuffling out of a parking garage to feast on what’s left of our freedoms, the Obama administration has promised to revive a proposal thought dead by most: the internet “kill switch.”

On May 12, the White House released a 52-page document outlining administration plans governing cybersecurity. The bill designates the Department of Homeland Security as the “lead agency” with authority to initiate “countermeasures” to protect critical infrastructure from malicious attacks.

But as with other aspects of U.S. policy, from waging aggressive wars to conducting covert actions overseas, elite policy planners at the Pentagon and at nominally civilian agencies like DHS hide offensive plans and operations beneath layers of defensive rhetoric meant to hoodwink the public.

The term “countermeasure” is described by the White House as “automated actions with defensive intent to modify or block data packets associated with electronic or wire communications, internet traffic, program code, or other system traffic transiting to or from or stored on an information system for the purpose of protecting the information system from cybersecurity threats, conducted on an information system or information systems owned or operated by or on behalf of the party to be protected or operated by a private entity acting as a provider of electronic communication services, remote computing services, or cybersecurity services to the party to be protected.” (Section 1. Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity Authority, May 12, 2011, p. 1)

In other words, the proposal would authorize DHS and presumably other federal partners like the National Security Agency, wide latitude to monitor, “modify or block” data packets (information and/or communications) deemed a threat to national security.

It isn’t a stretch to conclude that such “automated actions” would be predicated on the deployment of systems such as “Einstein 3″ or the NSA’s top secret “Perfect Citizen” program throughout the nation’s electronic communications architecture.

NSA’s Einstein 3 project we’re told is designed to prevent malicious attacks on government systems and, controversially, private sector networks. Using NSA hardware and the signatures of previous attacks as a road map, Einstein 3 routes the internet traffic “of civilian agencies through a monitoring box that would search for and block computer codes designed to penetrate or otherwise compromise networks,” The Washington Post reported.

According to multiple media reports, AT&T, one of the Agency’s private partners in Bush and now, Obama administration warrantless wiretapping programs variously known as “Stellar Wind,” “Pioneer,” its data-mining portion and “Pinwale,” the agency’s secret email collection program, was the Bush administration’s choice to test the system. In fact, before agreeing to participate in the pilot project AT&T attorneys sought assurances from the Justice Department “that it would bear no liability for participating,” the Post averred.

Since 2009, under Obama, Einstein 3 testing has proceeded apace.

Last summer, The Wall Street Journal revealed that NSA and a private corporate partner, the giant defense firm Raytheon, were standing up a new program known as “Perfect Citizen.”

According to investigative journalist Siobhan Gorman, the black project “would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack.”

An email from a Raytheon insider that the Journal obtained recounted that “the overall purpose of the [program] is our Government…feel[s] that they need to insure the Public Sector is doing all they can to secure Infrastructure critical to our National Security.” It concluded with this ominous warning: “Perfect Citizen is Big Brother.”

While NSA initially downplayed serious threats to privacy, claiming that “Perfect Citizen” is no more intrusive than traffic cameras on a busy street, The Register cautioned that “mission creep” was a distinct possibility, given that sensitive, private information could migrate “outside an infrastructure-security context.”

How would such programs and proposals play out in the real world?

According to Government Computer News “proposed cybersecurity legislation released by the Obama administration earlier this month is similar to legislation now pending in the Senate, but it does not contain the explicit emergency powers contained in the bill introduced by Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan M. Collins (R-Maine).”

Pretty good so far? Not so fast! GCN reports, “instead, it seems to rely on a 77-year-old law that gives the president broad authority to shut down communications networks.”

Got that? There’s no need for a legislative fix to expand the president’s power to pull the plug, only in the event of an unspecified “national emergency” of course, since the White House already possesses the means to do just that, the Communications Act of 1934.

The Act, amended in 1996, specifically empowers the president “during the continuance of a war in which the United States is engaged,” control over media under circumstances determined by the Executive Branch. Accordingly, Section 706 [47 U.S.C. 606] authorizes the president “if he finds it necessary for the national defense and security, to direct that such communications as in his judgment may be essential to the national defense and security shall have preference or priority with any carrier subject to this Act.”

But the law goes further and in fact authorizes the president “whenever in his judgment the public interest requires, to employ the armed forces of the United States to prevent any such obstruction or retardation of communication.”

This would seem to open the door even further to intrusions into domestic affairs by the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, which after all are Pentagon combat support agencies, charged with carrying out electronic communications warfare.

In the event of a declared “national” or, in today’s language, a “cyber emergency,” the president “may suspend or amend, for such time as he may see fit, the rules and regulations applicable to any or all stations within the jurisdiction of the United States as prescribed by the Commission, and may cause the closing of any station for radio communication and the removal therefrom of its apparatus and equipment, or he may authorize the use or control of any such station and/or its apparatus and equipment by any department of the Government under such regulations as he may prescribe, upon just compensation to the owners.”

Substitute the word “internet” for “radio” and “network” for “station” and it becomes all-too-clear that presidential authority for an internet “kill switch” is already a reality.

And in the context of America’s “War on Terror,” described by war criminal and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as a conflict having “no known metrics” to determine its endpoint, “war time” powers to be exercised solely at the discretion of the president over the nation’s communications infrastructure too, seem to be virtually limitless and without constraints imposed either by Congress or the federal judiciary as recent “state secrets” rulings readily attest.

Right-wing senator Collins cried foul, saying that Executive Branch authority under the Communications Act “is far broader than the authority in our bill,” claiming that legislation she and neocon hawk Lieberman introduced would “carefully constrain” the president’s power over the internet.

Sure, just as the War Powers Act “constrained” the president from carrying out preemptive wars against countries which haven’t attacked the United States but have the singular misfortune of possessing valuable resources (can you say oil, Iraq and Libya), lusted after by American multinationals.

During last week’s hearings before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, outgoing DHS Undersecretary for the National Protection and Programs Directorate, Philip R. Reitinger, told the Committee that the administration “would use the authority that [1934 law] brings to bear in the right way.”

“Trust us,” top Obama administration officials explain. We wouldn’t do anything that threatens the free flow of information, not to mention privacy rights or civil liberties, would we?

This from a White House that’s expanded the already formidable, and illegal, warrantless wiretapping programs of the previous regime while continuing to withhold secret legal memos cobbled together by the Office of Legal Counsel; memos justifying everything from the seizure of personal records to electronic communications by various intelligence fiefdoms under the Patriot Act, as I reported last week.

Reitinger, who’ll leave his post next month, reportedly to “spend more time with his family,” or more likely, before taking a plum position with one of the innumerable defense firms staking out the lucrative cybersecurity market, said that White House authority during a “cyber emergency,” say a sudden revolt by outraged citizens against capitalist depredations like the ones which shook Tunisia and Egypt earlier this year or are currently exploding across Spain are “one of the areas that would need to be negotiated,” GCN reported.

Of course, congressional grifters are not talking about political upheavals per se, although the response by repressive governments such as Egypt to citizens clamoring for more rights, no doubt with encouragement by certain three-lettered U.S. agencies, helped the former Mubarak regime reach their decision to flip the switch and cut off cell phone and internet access for a time.

As Washington’s cyber scare gathers steam, one of the “more controversial elements of any new cybersecurity law,” the right-wing Washington Times avers, are “what powers the president should have over the Internet in the event of a catastrophic attack on vital U.S. assets.”

“Clearly, if something significant were to happen, the American people would expect us to be able to respond and respond appropriately,” Reitinger said.

“Experts,” according to the Washington Times, “say that in the event of a major cyber-attack, authorities might have only a short time to respond and might need to temporarily divert some Internet traffic or take it off-line.”

Wringing her hands, Collins said she was “baffled” by administration plans to rely on the 1934 law.

Reitinger said that while presidential powers embedded in the Communications Act “were not designed with the current environment that we have in mind,” he insisted “there are authorities there.”

And where “authorities” exist, you can be certain that the National Security State will find the means to use them, or invent new ones, in secret and without disclosing the fact either to Congress or the public.

During hearings before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet, Obama administration officials “faced pointed questions” over White House proposals, the National Journal reported.

“Lawmakers,” reporter Josh Smith wrote, “worried that the administration’s plan provides too much government control in cybersecurity issues.”

In a replay of the repulsive FISA Amendments Act (FAA), the White House plan “would grant legal immunity to companies who cooperate with federal cyber investigations.” North Carolina Democrat Melvin Watt was skeptical, saying that Obama’s proposal was similar to FAA’s retroactive immunity clause that handed out get-out-of-jail-free cards to telecom companies that collaborated with the secret state’s driftnet spying operations.

Watt said, “these companies could then do something that’s unconstitutional just because you say it’s not. People get very uncomfortable with the idea that the government can just call up someone, demand information, and then provide them immunity.”

And under the proposal, the federal courts would be barred from determining whether or not to grant immunity to cooperating firms accused of handing over the personal details of their customers to the government; that too, would be left to the Executive Branch.

As I have written many times (most recently here, here and here), the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, along with private partners who stand to make billions hyping the cyber threat, are driving U.S. policy.

During recent hearings, Richard J. Butler, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy said that the “Defense Department is sharing cybersecurity information, capabilities and expertise with the Homeland Security Department,” the Armed Forces Press Service reported.

According to Butler, cybersecurity requires a “whole government approach,” and that the “Defense and Homeland Security departments already are doing that,” citing last fall’s Memorandum of Agreement between NSA and DHS that “laid the foundation for the collaboration … to share operational planning and technical development.”

“Since then,” Butler said, “the collaboration has grown into joint coordination at U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md., and the sharing of information, capabilities, and employees.”

Just how real is the threat?

In an essential paper published last month, Loving the Cyber Bomb?, George Mason University researchers Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins wrote that despite a “steady drumbeat of alarmist rhetoric coming out of Washington about potential catastrophic cyber threats,” the rhetoric of “‘cyber doom’ employed by proponents of increased federal intervention, however, lacks clear evidence of a serious threat that can be verified by the public.”

“As a result,” Brito and Watkins averred, “the United States may be witnessing a bout of threat inflation similar to that seen in the run-up to the Iraq War.”

“Additionally,” the researchers cautioned, “a cyber-industrial complex is emerging, much like the military-industrial complex of the Cold War. This complex may serve to not only supply cybersecurity solutions to the federal government, but to drum up demand for them as well.”

“The official consensus,” Brito and Watkins wrote, “seems to be that the United States is facing a grave and immediate threat that only quick federal intervention can address.”

As we have seen, most recently during rushed congressional votes that reauthorized expiring sections of the constitution-shredding USA Patriot Act, the Executive Branch will do everything in its power to continue hyping unverified threats, thus concealing just how far we’ve traveled along the road towards a National Surveillance State.

After all, as Wired reported last week, if “you think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens … Sen. Ron Wyden says it’s worse than you know.”

The Oregon Democrat, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told journalist Spencer Ackerman that there’s “a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says.”

During testimony last March before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, the Justice Department’s top national security official, Todd Hinnen, told congressional grifters that Section 215, the “business records” provision “has been used to obtain driver’s license records, hotel records, car rental records, apartment leasing records, credit card records, and the like.”

However, Hinnen testified that Section 215 has “also been used to support important and highly sensitive intelligence collection operations, on which this committee and others have been separately briefed,” behind closed doors.

Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department will comment on what that secret interpretation of the law might entail. However, security and privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian averred that the secret state’s “sensitive collection program” is likely “related to warrantless, massive scale collection of geo-location information from cellular phones.”

“Clearly,” Soghoian writes, “there are many unanswered questions–we do not know what kind of data collection is occurring, and why it is problematic enough to cause four senators to speak up publicly. However, given that four senators have now spoken up, this strongly suggests that there is something seriously rotten going on.”

Commenting on the rush to pass Patriot Act legislation, CNET News investigative journalist Declan McCullagh averred: “It’s true that exabytes upon exabytes of data could, in theory, be helpful in investigating terrorism and other crimes. This was the motivation behind the Total Information Awareness idea, after all. But it’s also true that nobody in the U.S. Congress believed that they were giving the FBI such sweeping authority when enacting the law nearly a decade ago.”

Magnify those concerns by a factor of ten or even a thousand when it comes to the formidable array of surveillance capabilities already deployed by the National Security Agency.

And if the interpretation of the Communications Act favored by top Obama administration officials gain traction in Congress then, as the ACLU recently warned “there are [cybersecurity] proposals out there that would permit information grabs that make the Patriot Act look quaint.”

And with a lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court in Florida by two iPhone users, The Register reports, Apple guru Steve Jobs was forced to respond to complaints after the firm’s usual tactic–deafening silence–failed to assuage customer’s anxieties.

The lawsuit alleges that “irreparable injury has resulted and continues to result from Apple’s unauthorized tracking of millions of Americans,” plaintiffs Vikram Ajjampur and William Devito averred. They are requesting their case be granted class-action status, a move likely to send shudders along the silicon spine of the secretive Cupertino high-tech powerhouse.

In response to the outcry, The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple “is scaling back how much information its iPhones store about where they have been and said it will stop collecting such data when consumers request it, as the company tries to quell concerns it was tracking iPhone owners.”

But as journalists Yukari Iwatani Kane and Jennifer Valentino-Devries point out, “a week of silence on the growing controversy, raised new questions and criticism about its data-handling practices.”

The ecumenical nature of the smartphone spying scandal tapped another firm, beloved by Wall Street grifters and national security mavens alike, on the shoulders last week.

The Detroit News reported that two “Oakland County women have filed a $50 million class-action lawsuit against Google Inc. to stop the company from selling phones with Android software that can track a user’s location.”

Like Apple, Google claims that tracking software is meant “to provide a better mobile experience on Android devices,” and stressed that “any location sharing is done with the user’s permission.”

That’s rather rich coming from a firm whose former CEO, Eric Schmidt, told CNBC in 2009, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” a telling statement all the more pertinent here when secret state snoops demand access to your search history, conveniently “retained” for the asking by the search and advertising giant.

“If Android location services are turned on,” independent security researcher Samy Kamkar told The Register, “the OS sends Google a MAC addresses, network signal strength, and GPS coordinates for each Wi-Fi network, as well as a unique identifier for the phone that grabs the information and the time of day.” (emphasis added)

“By combining the identifier with the location data,” Kamkar told the nose-tweaking UK publication, “Google could easily determine where you work and where you live. If this location information and unique IDs remain on Google’s servers, it could potentially be extracted via subpoena or national security letter.”

As privacy and security researcher Christopher Soghoian revealed in 2009, “Sprint Nextel” and other telecom giants “provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009.”

Soghoian wrote that this “massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers,” a service eagerly provided our political minders by the telecoms as the secrecy-shredding web site Cryptome revealed with their publication of dozens of Online Spying Guides.

As we now know, secret state agencies such as NSA and the FBI routinely grab customer records from the telecoms to obtain dialed telephone numbers, text messages, emails and instant messages, as well as web pages browsed and search engine queries in addition to a staggering mountain of geolocational data, oftentimes with a simple, warrantless request.

The NSA’s so-called “President’s Surveillance Program” for example, vacuums-up huge volumes of “transactional” records gleaned from domestic emails and internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel itineraries and phone records from other secret state satrapies as well as banks, credit reporting agencies and data-mining firms.

As The Wall Street Journal reported more than three years ago, “the NSA’s enterprise” is linked to “a cluster of powerful intelligence-gathering programs, all of which sparked civil-liberties complaints when they came to light.”

Investigative journalist Siobhan Gorman revealed that “the effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called ‘black programs’ whose existence is undisclosed,” the tip of a vast surveillance iceberg.

But such programs could not function without the close, one might argue incestuous, collaboration between the secret state and their corporate partners as The Washington Post disclosed last year in their Top Secret America investigation.

In fact, as Soghoian and other researchers have learned, internet service providers and the telecoms “all have special departments, many open 24 hours per day, whose staff do nothing but respond to legal requests. Their entire purpose is to facilitate the disclosure of their customers’ records to law enforcement and intelligence agencies–all following the letter of the law, of course.”

Plaintiffs Julie Brown and Kayla Molaski said they neither “opted-in” to Google’s surveillance features nor approved of being tracked, by their phones no less, asserting that Android’s tracking capability puts “users at serous risk of privacy invasions, including stalking,” according to their complaint.

And with congressional grifters on both sides of the aisle poised to hold hearings this month about the controversy, it appears that smartphone manufacturers will have some ‘splainin’ to do. Right-wing congressman Joe Barton (R-TX) told the Journal that Apple “apparently ‘lied’ to him and another lawmaker last year when it said its phones don’t collect and transmit location-based data when location services such as mapping are turned off.”

Damage Control

Seeking to tamp down criticism, Apple claimed it was all a mistake, the result of “software bugs” which they are now striving mightily to “fix.”

Strange then, or perhaps not, given the company’s notorious penchant for secrecy, that nary a hint of a problem passed their granola-flecked lips prior to revelations which researchers Pete Warden and Alasdair Allen posted on their iPhone Tracker blog.

To wit, the researchers discovered that the geolocation file is stored on both the iOS device and “any computers that store backups of its data,” and “can be used to reconstruct a detailed snapshot of the user’s comings and goings, down to the second.”

A particularly convenient “feature” when the feds, local cops, your boss or a seedy private snoop comes a calling.

According to iPhone Tracker’s FAQ: “If you run it on an OS X machine that you’ve been syncing with an iPhone or an iPad with cellular plan, it will scan through the backup files that are automatically made, looking for the hidden file containing your location. If it finds this file, it will then display the location history on the map.”

In response to the question: “Why is Apple collecting this information?” the researchers answer “it’s unclear.” However, “one guess might be that they have new features in mind that require a history of your location, but that’s pure speculation. The fact that it’s transferred across devices when you restore or migrate is evidence the data-gathering isn’t accidental.”

“The more fundamental problem,” Warden and Allen write “is that Apple are collecting this information at all.”

An April 27 damage control statement from the firm claims that “Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.”

They assert that “iPhone is not logging your location,” but rather, is “maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location.” You see it’s all an innocent misunderstanding, nothing more than a convenient means for users to “quickly find GPS satellites.”

While the “entire crowd-sourced database is too big to store on an iPhone,” we’re told that they “download an appropriate subset (cache) onto each iPhone.”

Further claiming that “this cache is protected but not encrypted,” it’s “backed up in iTunes whenever you back up your iPhone. The backup is encrypted or not, depending on the user settings in iTunes.”

In other words, we won’t tell you we’re downloading an unencrypted locational cache onto your iTunes library where it can be read by anyone with access to your laptop or home computer, so any trouble that might attend an unauthorized peek at your data is your problem.

But because “we care,” and not because of the adverse publicity generated by the firm treating their customers “like little particles that move in space … that occasionally communicate with each other,” as physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi told The Wall Street Journal, Apple plans “to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon.”

However, CNET News reported last week that Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA), “isn’t satisfied with Apple’s explanation of why iPhones keep track of their users’ locations and wants a federal probe into the Cupertino software marker’s privacy practices.”

For their part Microsoft, journalist Declan McCullagh writes, “says it does not save location histories directly on Windows Mobile 7 devices,” but acknowledge that “in some circumstances” the firm “collects information including a unique device ID, details about nearby Wi-Fi networks, and the phone’s GPS-derived exact latitude and longitude.”

Like Apple and Microsoft, CNET reports that “Android devices store a limited amount of location information but transmit to Google current and recent GPS coordinates, nearby Wi-Fi network addresses, and two 16-letter strings apparently representing a device ID that’s unique to each phone,” a point emphasized by the women suing Google over the firm’s privacy breach.

Paranoia or Well-Founded Suspicions? You Make the Call!

Surveillance concerns are inevitable, especially when advert pimps seek to market useless junk to consumers or unaccountable secret state agencies monitor political dissidents at home and abroad, by peeping at locational data when the “unique device ID is transmitted, which allows a company to track a customer’s whereabouts over an extended period of time,” as CNET cautions.

Similar privacy and surveillance issues also surround unencrypted connections to the internet with the largely opaque practice of deep-packet inspection (DPI), a favorite tool beloved by marketeers and government spies alike, as Antifascist Calling reported back in December.

It now appears that smartphone manufacturers have joined their telecom partners in the spy game, a scandal that first broke the surface when whistleblower Mark Klein spilled the beans about AT&T’s close collaboration in NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, a constitution-shredding operation that continues apace under the “change” regime of “transparency president,” Barack Obama.

Concerns over the uses of geolocational databases are not fodder, as some would have it, for “privacy conspiracy theorists screaming back to their panic rooms,” but rather is an inevitable outgrowth of a culture of secrecy and deceit that permeates the opaque universe shared by corporations and governments.

As Declan McCullagh and other journalists have pointed out, “location databases can be a gold mine for police or civil litigants: requesting cell phone location information from wireless carriers has already become a staple of criminal investigations, often without search warrants being sought.”

Increasingly, niche security outfits such as the Israeli-owned firm Cellbrite, whose top executives possess high-level security résumés, along with probable connections to Israel’s NSA equivalent, Unit 8200, tout their ability to customers in global police, military and intelligence agencies to extract location histories from smartphones in under two minutes as The Tech Herald reported.

Such marketing ploys however, are fully in tune with today’s “cybersecurity” paradigm, the latest front (and profit center) in America’s endless “War On Terror.”

As George Mason University researchers Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins reported in an essential new study, Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy, “the rhetoric of ‘cyber doom’” that calls forth new control measures, “lacks clear evidence of a serious threat that can be verified by the public. As a result, the United States may be witnessing a bout of threat inflation similar to that seen in the run-up to the Iraq War.”

“Additionally,” Brito and Watkins write, “a cyber-industrial complex is emerging, much like the military-industrial complex of the Cold War. This complex may serve to not only supply cybersecurity solutions to the federal government, but to drum up demand for them as well,” a point that Antifascist Calling has reported many times.

While criminals, stalkers, identity thieves and other miscreants exploit systemic vulnerabilities for their own sociopathic ends, much the same can be said of private security firms such as HBGary, Palantir and hundreds of others servicing the secret state, all capitalizing on “zero day vulnerabilities” in software and operating systems while designing stealthy, undetectable “root kits” for their government partners.

One can imagine that similar “black programs” exist for exploiting smartphone vulnerabilities, a likely prospect made all the easier when they are built-in features of the operating systems.

High-Tech Misery Fuels Windfall Profits

Spying isn’t the only issue battering tech giant Apple’s squeaky-clean image.

As workers around the world celebrate May Day, The Observer revealed that some 500,000 workers at the Shenzhen and Chengdu factories owned by Foxconn, Apple’s primary contractor, which produces millions of iPhones and iPads yearly for the global market are treated “inhumanely, like machines.”

Growth by the firm is predicated on driving production and labor costs down, a strategy that helped rocket Apple past software giant Microsoft as Bloomberg News reported last week.

Microsoft’s share price “declined as much as 74 cents to $25.97 in extended trading,” and “shares dropped 9 percent last quarter, while the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index rose 5.4 percent.”

“The results,” Bloomberg reports, “underscore the ascendance of Apple, which surpassed Microsoft as the world’s most valuable technology company in May. Apple’s profit in the period that ended in March almost doubled to $5.99 billion, compared with $5.23 billion for Microsoft in the same period. That was the first time Apple’s profit topped Microsoft’s in two decades.”

These results tend to emphasize the predatory nature of the entire high-tech sector, fueled both by consumer demand for new products and the windfall profits generated by production in low-wage, highly-repressive states such as China.

Several studies of Apple’s production practices undertaken by the Netherlands-based Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) revealed “disturbing allegations of excessive working hours and draconian workplace rules at two major plants in southern China. It has also uncovered an ‘anti-suicide’ pledge that workers at the two plants have been urged to sign, after a series of employee deaths last year,” The Observer reports.

While the Taiwanese-owned firm denies wrongdoing, researchers disclosed that “in some factories badly performing workers are required to be publicly humiliated in front of colleagues.”

A second report released by the Hong Kong-based labor rights group Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) “describes how a culture of absolute obedience is imposed on workers from the first day of their recruitment. Workers are punished for all kinds of ‘misconduct,’ including not meeting their daily production quota, making mistakes or taking too much time for a bathroom visit.”

“Disciplinary actions,” the group reports, “include taking away bonus points, making workers publicly confess their mistakes and scolding and humiliating them in front of gathered colleague workers, making workers copy quotations of CEO Terry Gou, etc.”

“Security guards,” according to testimony by Foxconn employees, “were found to regularly assault workers verbally and physically.”

With a basic 48-hour work week, Chinese workers are forced to work up to 98 hours of overtime a month to meet demands by Western consumers for Apple products. Foxconn manager Louis Woo however, told The Observer that “all the extra hours were voluntary.”

Last month, SACOM reported that a second, grifting capitalist outfit, Wintek, had routinely poisoned workers by substituting the toxic chemical “n-hexane in violation of local codes and without proper safety equipment.”

Used in the production of touch screens for Apple, SACOM revealed that “medical maladies … began when their employer, a factory owned by Taiwan’s Wintek, swapped basic rubbing alcohol with the more dangerous toxin n-hexane in the final cleaning process of touch screens to shave off a few seconds off production time. N-hexane is a known toxin and prolonged, high-level exposure can caused nerve damage and a long list of medical problems.”

In response to the charges, Apple said they are “committed to ensuring the highest standards of social responsibility throughout our supply base. Apple requires suppliers to commit to our comprehensive supplier code of conduct as a condition of their contracts with us. We drive compliance with the code through a rigorous monitoring programme, including factory audits, corrective action plans and verification measures.”

But as with all aspects of the globalized capitalist economy, profits by Western firms like Apple and other high-tech parasites take precedence over the labor and social rights of workers. Chantal Peyer, a researcher with the Swiss group Bread for All said that “A brand like Apple has a very high profit margin on hardware: more than 40%. But it asks suppliers, which have a much lower profit margin of about 4%, to lower production costs. As a result, labour costs are squeezed and workers never get living wages.”

Such outrages however, are not the result of a few “bad apples, but rather, lie at the heart of a heartless system that profits off the misery of the vast majority of the world’s population, including here in the United States.

As researcher and economist Michel Chossudovsky points out in The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century: “The development of world capitalism is predicated on a profit-driven global cheap labor economy. One of the main features of this system has been the development (over the last thirty to forty years) of industrial colonies in low-wage countries. The relocation of industry to these countries has led to corporate downsizing and layoffs, as well as the outright closing down of a wide range of productive activities in the developed countries.”

“Mass poverty and a worldwide decline in living standards,” Chossudovsky writes, “are largely the result of this global cheap labor economy.” This trend has accelerated since the 2008-2009 global economic meltdown. “In developing countries, including China,” Chossudovsky avers, which is America’s largest industrial colony, the levels of employment are in a freefall. The pre-existing structures of Third World poverty are replaced by social destitution and, in many regions of the developing world, by outright starvation.”

As workers globally, and the United States is no exception to the rule imposed by the ruthless, continue to be squeezed as living standards and social benefits decline, revolt becomes inevitable. In this context, the burgeoning police state that functions as a well-armed pit bull for financial swindlers and capitalist oligarchs alike, are being marshaled to surveil and when necessary, repress, those challenging the prevailing “free market” paradigm.

Earlier this month, New Scientist reported that “a new way of working out where you are by looking at your internet connection could pin down your current location to within a few hundred metres.”

Although similar techniques are already in use, they are not very accurate in terms of closing the surveillance trap. “Every computer connected to the web has an internet protocol (IP) address, but there is no simple way to map this to a physical location,” reporter Jacob Aron informs us. “The current best system can be out by as much as 35 kilometres.”

However, Yong Wang, “a computer scientist at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu, and colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have used businesses and universities as landmarks to achieve much higher accuracy.”

According to New Scientist, “Wang’s team used Google Maps to find both the web and physical addresses of such organisations, providing them with around 76,000 landmarks. By comparison, most other geolocation methods only use a few hundred landmarks specifically set up for the purpose.”

With geolocation tracking devices embedded in smartphones (and, as we’ll see below, this data is stored without their users’ consent), all of which is happily turned over to authorities by telecoms (for the right price, of course!), as privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian revealed in 2009, it becomes abundantly clear that sooner than most people think they’ll be no escaping Big Brother’s electronic dragnet.

“The new method,” Aron writes, “zooms in through three stages to locate a target computer.” First, the team of public-private financed research snoops measured “the time it takes to send a data packet to the target and converts it into a distance–a common geolocation technique that narrows the target’s possible location to a radius of around 200 kilometres.”

Wang and his cohorts then “send data packets to the known Google Maps landmark servers in this large area to find which routers they pass through.” New Scientist reports that when “a landmark machine and the target computer have shared a router, the researchers can compare how long a packet takes to reach each machine from the router; converted into an estimate of distance, this time difference narrows the search down further.”

“We shrink the size of the area where the target potentially is,” Wang cheerfully explained.

“Finally,” Aron writes, “they repeat the landmark search at this more fine-grained level: comparing delay times once more, they establish which landmark server is closest to the target.”

“On average,” we’re told, “their method gets to within 690 metres of the target and can be as close as 100 metres–good enough to identify the target computer’s location to within a few streets.”

While New Scientist focused their attention on how an IP address tracking tool might be a boon to advert pimps, who else might find the method “useful in certain situations”?

Tightening the Surveillance Noose

Back in December, The Wall Street Journal reported that “few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner’s real name–even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off.”

As part of the Journal‘s excellent “What They Know” series, reporters Scott Thurm and Yukari Iwatani Kane revealed that an examination of more than 100 smartphone apps for Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android platforms “showed that 56 transmitted the phone’s unique device ID to other companies without users’ awareness or consent,” 47 apps “transmitted the phone’s location in some way,” and “five sent age, gender and other personal details to outsiders.”

Like the New Scientist report above, the Journal focused their investigative lens on “intrusive effort[s] by online-tracking companies to gather personal data about people in order to flesh out detailed dossiers on them.”

Without a doubt, such data is already being collected by various police intelligence agencies at the local, state and federal levels.

In all likelihood, smartphone geolocation data has now been added to the dossier creation mix, another component of the secret state’s massive national security index called “Main Core” by investigative journalists Christopher Ketchum and Tim Shorrock.

As Ketchum reported in his 2008 piece, three unnamed former intelligence officials told him that “8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect” and, in the event of a national emergency, “could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and even detention.”

We’ve now learned that Apple’s iPhone and iPad and Google’s Android smartphone platforms “constantly track users’ physical location and store the data in unencrypted files that can be read by anyone with physical access to the device,” The Register disclosed.

And with technological advances far-outstripping legal remedies to protect Americans’ privacy as Soghoian wrote last week, and with Congress and the Obama administration further lowering the boom, the notion that our personal communications are off-limits to advertisers and government officials is as quaint as the concept that financial institutions should be transparent when it comes to investing our hard-earned dollars.

According to researchers Pete Warden and Alasdair Allen, who first reported their findings on the iPhone Tracker blog, the geolocation file is stored on both the iOS device and “any computers that store backups of its data,” and “can be used to reconstruct a detailed snapshot of the user’s comings and goings, down to the second.”

The researchers aver that despite Apple’s refusal to even acknowledged the existence of these files, or frankly what the firm does with the data once its been downloaded to their servers, users of iPhones and iPads are put at risk that their movements are available to any and all comers with the requisite skills to access their information.

“The most immediate problem is that this data is stored in an easily-readable form on your machine,” Warden and Allen wrote.

“Any other program you run or user with access to your machine can look through it. By passively logging your location without your permission, Apple have made it possible for anyone from a jealous spouse to a private investigator to get a detailed picture of your movements.”

Needless to say, such information would be a boon to police agencies seeking to “terminate with extreme prejudice” the ability of protest organizers to communicate with demonstrators, as happened during the G20 protests in Pittsburgh, as Antifascist Calling reported in 2009.

Elliot Madison was arrested after he relayed a police order to disperse message via Twitter to demonstrators during the protests. A week later, his New York City home was raided by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (!) which carted off his computers and cell phone as “evidence.” Madison and co-defendant Michael Wallschlaeger were criminally charged with using computers, cell phones and a police scanner to track the movements of “Pittsburgh’s finest.” Federal prosecutors charged the activists with “hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility, and possession of instruments of crime.”

While such repressive acts may have raised eyebrows two years ago, they have now become part of the seamless panopticon spreading across the “shining city on a hill” like an invisible swarm of privacy-killing locusts.

Last week, in the wake of the smartphone tracking scandal, CNET News reported that “law enforcement agencies have known since at least last year that an iPhone or iPad surreptitiously records its owner’s approximate location, and have used that geolocation data to aid criminal investigations.”

Security journalist Declan McCullagh revealed that although “Apple has never publicized the undocumented feature buried deep within the software that operates iPhones and iPads,” the secretive Mountain View firm acknowledged to Congress last year that “cell tower and Wi-Fi access point information” is “intermittently” collected and “transmitted to Apple” every 12 hours.

CNET reported that “phones running Google’s Android OS also store location information,” according to Swedish programer Magnus Eriksson. Another researcher told McCullagh that “‘virtually all Android devices’ send some of those coordinates back to Google.”

“Among computer forensics specialists,” CNET avers, “those location logs–which record nearby cell tower coordinates and time stamps and cannot easily be disabled by someone who wants to use location services–are not merely an open secret. They’ve become a valuable sales pitch when targeting customers in police, military, and intelligence agencies.”

In other words, enterprising grifters from niche security firms servicing the secret state–or anyone willing to pay for their unique services, say a dodgy employer, a jealous spouse or a sociopathic freak for that matter–can take advantage of a smartphone’s embedded location files.

CNET reported that the “U.K-based company Forensic Telecommunications Services advertises its iXAM product as able to ‘extract GPS location fixes’ from an iPhone 3GS including ‘latitude, longitude, altitude and time’.”

“Its literature boasts,” McCullagh writes, that “‘these are confirmed fixes–they prove that the device was definitely in that location at that time’.”

“Another mobile forensics company, Cellebrite,” CNET avers, even “brags that its products can pluck out geographical locations derived from both ‘Wi-Fi and cell tower’ signals, and a third lists Android devices as able to yield ‘historical location data’ too.”

Just last week, The Tech Herald disclosed that the Michigan State Police have been using a handheld device and “secretly extracting information from cell phones during traffic stops,” and have refused to release information on this program to the ACLU.

The Tech Herald reports that for “nearly three years, the ACLU has attempted to get the Michigan State Police (MSP) to answer questions over their use of Cellebrite’s UFED Physical Pro scanner.”

“The handheld device allows police to extract data from phones and SIM memory,” journalist Steve Ragan writes, and that “in addition to the normal information, such as contact lists, email, and text messages, the UFED is also able to recover hidden and deleted data.”

Manufactured by security outfit Cellebrite, the company boasts that their “mobile forensics products enable extraction and analysis of invaluable evidentiary data including deleted and hidden data for military, law enforcement, governments, and intelligence agencies across the world,” according to a blurb on their web site.

The ACLU charges that the device is routinely used during traffic stops and that state troopers were able to access the mobile devices without their users being aware their data was being grabbed.

In their letter to the MSP, the ACLU cautioned that “The Fourth Amendment protects citizens from unreasonable searches. With certain exceptions that do not apply here,” the civil liberties watchdogs averred, “a search cannot occur without a warrant in which a judicial officer determines that there is probable cause to believe that the search will yield evidence of criminal activity.”

“A device that allows immediate, surreptitious intrusion into private data creates enormous risks that troopers will ignore these requirements to the detriment of the constitutional rights of persons whose cell phones are searched.”

Sounds reasonable, right? The MSP responded by demanding the ACLU fork over $544,680 before they’d even consider releasing these public documents!

But as Cryptohippie reported in their excellent study, The Electronic Police State, “two crucial facts about the information gathered under an electronic police state are these: 1. It is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial. 2. It is gathered universally (‘preventively’) and only later organized for use in prosecutions.”

“In an Electronic Police State,” researchers averred, “every surveillance camera recording, every email sent, every Internet site surfed, every post made, every check written, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping… are all criminal evidence, and all are held in searchable databases. The individual can be prosecuted whenever the government wishes.”

Called a “Universal Forensic Extraction Device,” Cellebrite claims their “UFED family of products is able to extract and analyze data from more than 3000 phones, including smartphones and GPS devices.”

According to the firm, such tools will prove invaluable to secret state snoops. “Diving deeper into a mobile phone’s memory than ever before provides them with the ability to gather data and establish connections between networks and people that is quicker and easier to arrive at.”

The secret-spilling web site Cryptome has generously provided us with with Cellebrite’s Smartphone PDA Spy Guide. Amongst other things, we’re told that the firm’s “UFED Forensics system empowers law enforcement, anti-terror and security organizations to capture critical forensic evidence from mobile phones, Smartphones and PDAs.”

“UFED,” we’re informed, “extracts vital data such as phonebook, camera pictures, videos, audio, text messages (SMS), call logs, ESN IMEI, ICCID and IMSI information from over 1,600 handset models, including Symbian, Microsoft Mobile, Blackberry and Palm OS devices.”

Think you’ve erased those messy call logs or text messages to your girl- or boyfriend? Better think again! With Cellebrite on the job, “the UFED can extract data from a phone, or directly from the SIM card. When extracting from phone, the UFED connects to the phone via cable, Bluetooth or infrared, and the data is read logically from the phone. It also performs a physical extraction from SIM cards, allowing extraction of additional data such as deleted SMS, ICCID, IMSI, location information and more.”

We’re told that the company’s UFED “helps intelligence agencies widen their view and form a complete picture with access to content that can be repurposed, analyzed, and linked to information existing in databases,” Main Core, or a similar national security index, perhaps?

“For us, people look like little particles…”

While digital technologies advance by leaps and bounds, the Empire’s political-economic requirements are determining how new devices will be used, who has access to the data points and, once our personal details are extracted–by corporations or shadowy intel outfits (public and private) who do their bidding–what happens to it once it’s been stored in giant data farms.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers are conducting a study that “has tracked 60 families living in campus quarters via sensors and software on their smartphones–recording their movements, relationships, moods, health, calling habits and spending.”

“In this wealth of intimate detail,” reporter Robert Lee Hotz writes, MIT researcher Alex Pentland “is finding patterns of human behavior that could reveal how millions of people interact at home, work and play.”

According to preliminary findings, “the data can predict with uncanny accuracy where people are likely to be at any given time in the future,” and the data “can reveal subtle symptoms of mental illness, foretell movements in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and chart the spread of political ideas as they move through a community much like a contagious virus, research shows.”

“Advances in statistics, psychology and the science of social networks are giving researchers the tools to find patterns of human dynamics too subtle to detect by other means,” the Journal reports.

At Northeastern University in Boston for example, “network physicists discovered just how predictable people could be by studying the travel routines of 100,000 European mobile-phone users.”

“After analyzing more than 16 million records of call date, time and position,” Hotz reports, “the researchers determined that, taken together, people’s movements appeared to follow a mathematical pattern,” and that given enough information about past movements, scientists averred “they could forecast someone’s future whereabouts with 93.6% accuracy.”

Chillingly, Northeastern physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, who conducted the study, told the Journal: “For us, people look like little particles that move in space and that occasionally communicate with each other. We have turned society into a laboratory where behavior can be objectively followed.”

Ruthless “objectivity” such as this have real world consequences, not that it matters to those whose butter their bread by bludgeoning our privacy and cratering our political rights.

“As a reward when the [MIT] experiment was done,” the Journal laconically observed, “the students were allowed to keep the smartphones used to monitor them.”

Last week, senators John Kerry (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ) introduced legislation in the U.S. Senate, the “Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011,” they claimed would “establish a framework to protect the personal information of all Americans.”

During a D.C. press conference, McCain told reporters that the proposed law would protect a “fundamental right of American citizens, that is the right to privacy.”

While Kerry and McCain correctly state that “The ease of gathering and compiling personal information on the Internet and off, both overtly and surreptitiously, is becoming increasingly efficient and effortless due to advances in technology which have provided information gatherers the ability to compile seamlessly highly detailed personal histories of individuals” (p. 4), there’s one small catch.

CNET’s Declan McCullagh reported that the bill “doesn’t apply to data mining, surveillance, or any other forms of activities that governments use to collect and collate Americans’ personal information.”

While the measure would apply to “companies and some nonprofit groups,” CNET disclosed that “federal, state, and local police agencies that have adopted high-tech surveillance technologies including cell phone tracking, GPS bugs, and requests to Internet companies for users’ personal information–in many cases without obtaining a search warrant from a judge” would be exempt.

As we know, a gaggle of privacy-killing agencies inside the secret state, the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as well as offices and subunits sprinkled throughout the Pentagon’s sprawling bureaucracy, including U.S. Cyber Command, all claim authority to extract personal information on individuals from still-secret Office of Legal Counsel memoranda and National Security Presidential Directives.

As the American Civil Liberties Union reported in March, what little has been extracted from the Executive Branch through Freedom of Information Act litigation is heavily-redacted, rendering such disclosures meaningless exercises.

For example, the bulk of the November 2, 2001 21-page Memorandum for the Attorney General, penned by former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C. Yoo, which provided the Bush administration with a legal fig-leaf for their warrantless wiretapping programs, is blank. That is, if one ignores exemptions to FOIA now claimed by the Obama administration. (B1, b3, b5, exemptions relate to “national security,” “inter-departmental communications” and/or programs labelled “TS/SCI”–Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information, the highest classification).

And, as of this writing, the American people still do not have have access to nor even knowledge of the snooping privileges granted securocrats by the Bush and Obama administrations under cover of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI).

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, CNCI derives authority from classified annexes of National Security Presidential Directive 54, Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 (NSPD 54/HSPD 23) first issued by our former “decider.”

Those 2008 presidential orders are so contentious that both the Bush and Obama administrations have even refused to release details to Congress, prompting a 2010 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) demanding that the full text, and underlying legal authority governing federal cybersecurity programs be made public.

McCullagh points out that the bill “also doesn’t apply to government agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration, the Census Bureau, and the IRS, which collect vast amounts of data on American citizens.”

Nor are there provisions in the bill that would force federal or state agencies to notify American citizens in the event of a data breach. No small matter considering the flawed data security practices within such agencies.

Just last week, InformationWeek revealed that the “Texas comptroller’s office began notifying millions of people Monday that their personal data had been involved in a data breach. The private data was posted to a public server, where it was available–in some cases–for over a year.”

“The posted records,” we’re told, “included people’s names, mailing addresses, social security numbers, and in some cases also dates of birth and driver’s license numbers.”

None of the data was encrypted and was there for the taking by identity thieves or other shady actors. InformationWeek pointed out although “most organizations that experience a serious data breach” offer free credit monitoring services to victims, “to date, Texas has not said it will offer such services to people affected by the comptroller’s breach.”

CNET reminds us that the “Department of Veterans Affairs suffered a massive security breach in 2006 when an unencrypted laptop with data on millions of veterans was stolen.”

McCullagh avers that “a government report last year listed IRS security and privacy vulnerabilities” and that “even the Census Bureau has, in the past, shared information with law enforcement from its supposedly confidential files.”

The limited scope of the Kerry and McCain proposal is underscored by moves by the Obama Justice Department to actually increase the secret state’s already formidable surveillance powers and short-circuit anemic privacy reforms that have been proposed.

In fact, as Antifascist Calling reported last week, during hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Associate Attorney General James A. Baker warned the panel that granting “cloud computing users more privacy protections and to require court approval before tracking Americans’ cell phones would hinder police investigations.”

But even when it comes to reining-in out-of-control online tracking by internet advertising firms, the Kerry-McCain bill comes up short.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the Kerry-McCain bill won’t stop online tracking by advert pimps who hustle consumers’ private details to the highest bidder.

The civil liberties’ watchdogs aver, “the privacy risk is not in consumers seeing targeted advertisements, but in the unchecked accumulation and storage of data about consumers’ online activities.”

“Collecting and retaining data on consumers can create a rich repository of information,” EFF’s legislative analyst Rainey Reitman writes, one that “leaves consumer data vulnerable to a data breach as well as creating an unnecessary enticement for government investigators, civil litigants and even malicious hackers.”

Additionally, the proposal is silent on Do Not Track, “meaning there is no specific proposal for a meaningful, universal browser-based opt-out mechanism that could be respected by all large third-party tracking companies,” and consumers “would still need to opt-out of each third party individually,” a daunting process.

Worst of all, consumers “won’t have a private right of action in the new Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights. That means consumers won’t be granted the right to sue companies for damages if the provisions of the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights are violated.” In other words, even when advertising firms and ISPs violate their users’ privacy rights, the bill would specifically prohibit individuals from seeking relief in the courts.

Moving in for the Cybersecurity Kill

While the Kerry-McCain bill would exempt government agencies from privacy protections, the Defense Department is aggressively seeking more power to monitor civilian computer networks.

NextGov reported that General Keith Alexander, the dual-hatted commander of U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency said that his agency “cannot monitor civilian networks” and that congressional authorization will be required so that CYBERCOM can “look at what’s going on in other government sectors” and other “critical infrastructures,” i.e., civilian networks.

Mendacity aside, considering that NSA already vacuums-up terabytes of America’s electronic communications data on a daily basis, reporter Aliya Sternstein notes that Alexander “offered hints about what the Pentagon might be pushing the Obama administration to consider.”

“Civil liberties and privacy are not [upheld] at the expense of cybersecurity,” he said. “They will benefit from cybersecurity,” available only, or so we’ve been led to believe, from the military, well-known for their commitment to civil liberties and the rule of law as the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning amply demonstrates.

Cyberspace, according to Alexander, is a domain that must be protected like the air, sea and land, “but it’s also unique in that it’s inside and outside military, civilian and government” domains.

Military forces “have to have the ability to move seamlessly when our nation is under attack to defend it … the mechanisms for doing that have to be laid out and agreed to. The laws don’t exist in this area.”

While Cyber Command currently shares network security duties with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as I reported last year, a Memorandum of Agreement between DHS and NSA, claims that increased “interdepartmental collaboration in strategic planning for the Nation’s cybersecurity, mutual support for cybersecurity capabilities development, and synchronization of current operational cybersecurity mission activities,” will be beneficial.

We were informed that the Agreement “will focus national cybersecurity efforts, increasing the overall capacity and capability of both DHS’s homeland security and DoD’s national security missions, while providing integral protection for privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.”

But as Rod Beckström, the former director of Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity Center (NCSC), pointed out in 2009 when he resigned his post, he viewed increased control by NSA over national cybersecurity programs a “power grab.”

In a highly-critical letter to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, Beckström said that NSA “effectively controls DHS cyber efforts through detailees [and] technology insertions.”

Citing the agency’s role as the secret state’s eyes and ears that peer into America’s electronic and telecommunications’ networks, Beckström warned that handing more power to NSA could significantly threaten “our democratic processes…if all top level government network security and monitoring are handled by any one organization.”

Those warnings have gone unheeded.

National Defense Magazine reported that retired Marine Corps General Peter Pace, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “would hand over the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity responsibilities to the head of the newly created U.S. Cyber Command.”

Seconding Pace’s call for cybersecurity consolidation, under Pentagon control, Roger Cressey, a senior vice president with the ultra-spooky Booz Allen Hamilton firm, a company that does billions of dollars of work for the Defense Department, “agreed that putting all the responsibility for the federal government’s Internet security needs would help the talent shortage by consolidating the responsibilities under one roof.”

“The real expertise in the government,” Cressey told National Defense, “capable of protecting networks currently lies in the NSA.”

Cressey’s is hardly an objective opinion. The former member of the National Security Council and the elitist Council on Foreign Relations, joined Booz Allen after an extensive career inside the secret state.

A military-industrial complex powerhouse, Booz Allen clocks-in at No. 9 on Washington Technology’s list of 2010 Top 100 Contractors with some $3.3 billion in revenue.

As Spies For Hire author Tim Shorrock pointed out for CorpWatch, “Among the many services Booz Allen provides to intelligence agencies … are data-mining and data analysis, signals intelligence systems engineering (an NSA specialty), intelligence analysis and operations support, the design and analysis of cryptographic or code-breaking systems (another NSA specialty), and ‘outsourcing/privatization strategy and planning’.”

With “data mining, surveillance, or any other forms of activities that governments use to collect and collate Americans’ personal information” off the Kerry-McCain “privacy” bill table, as CNET reported, enterprising security firms are undoubtedly salivating over potential income–and lack of accountability–which a cybersecurity consolidation, Pentagon-style, would all but guarantee.

As echoes from last month’s disclosures by the cyber-guerrilla collective Anonymous continue to reverberate, leaked HBGary emails and documents are providing tantalizing insight into just how little daylight there is between private companies and the government.

The latest front in the ongoing war against civil liberties and privacy rights is the Pentagon’s interest in “persona management software.”

A euphemism for a suite of high-tech tools that equip an operative–military or corporate, take your pick–with multiple avatars or sock puppets, our latter day shadow warriors hope to achieve a leg up on their opponents in the “war of ideas” through stealthy propaganda campaigns rebranded as “information operations.”

A Pervasive Surveillance State

The signs of a pervasive surveillance state are all around us. From the “persistent cookies” that track our every move across the internet to indexing dissidents already preemptively detained in public and private data bases: threats to our freedom to speak out without harassment, or worse, have never been greater.

As constitutional scholar Jack Balkin warned, the transformation of what was once a democratic republic based on the rule of law into a “National Surveillance State,” feature “huge investments in electronic surveillance and various end runs around traditional Bill of Rights protections and expectations about procedure.”

“These end runs,” Balkin wrote, “included public private cooperation in surveillance and exchange of information, expansion of the state secrets doctrine, expansion of administrative warrants and national security letters, a system of preventive detention, expanded use of military prisons, extraordinary rendition to other countries, and aggressive interrogation techniques outside of those countenanced by the traditional laws of war.”

Continuing the civil liberties’ onslaught, The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Barack Obama’s “change” regime has issued new rules that “allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades.”

The Journal points out that the administrative “revision” of long-standing rules and case law “marks another step back from [Obama's] pre-election criticism of unorthodox counterterror methods.”

Also last week, The Raw Story revealed that the FBI has plans to “embark on a $1 billion biometrics project and construct an advanced biometrics facility to be shared with the Pentagon.”

The Bureau’s new biometrics center, part of which is already operating in Clarksburg, West Virginia, “will be based on a system constructed by defense contractor Lockheed Martin.”

“Starting with fingerprints,” The Raw Story disclosed, the center will function as “a global law enforcement database for the sharing of those biometric images.” Once ramped-up “the system is slated to expand outward, eventually encompassing facial mapping and other advanced forms of computer-aided identification.”

The transformation of the FBI into a political Department of Precrime is underscored by moves to gift state and local police agencies with electronic fingerprint scanners. Local cops would be “empowered to capture prints from any suspect, even if they haven’t been arrested or convicted of a crime.”

“In such a context,” Stephen Graham cautions in Cities Under Siege, “Western security and military doctrine is being rapidly imagined in ways that dramatically blur the juridical and operational separation between policing, intelligence and the military; distinctions between war and peace; and those between local, national and global operations.”

This precarious state of affairs, Graham avers, under conditions of global economic crisis in the so-called democratic West as well as along the periphery in what was once called the Third World, has meant that “wars and associated mobilizations … become both boundless and more or less permanent.”

Under such conditions, Dick Cheney’s infamous statement that the “War on Terror” might last “decades” means, according to Graham, that “emerging security policies are founded on the profiling of individuals, places, behaviours, associations, and groups.”

But to profile more effectively, whether in Cairo, Kabul, or New York, state security apparatchiks and their private partners find it necessary to squeeze ever more data from a surveillance system already glutted by an overabundance of “situational awareness.”

“Last October,” Secrecy News reported, “the DNI revealed that the FY2010 budget for the National Intelligence Program (NIP) was $53.1 billion. And the Secretary of Defense revealed that the FY2010 budget for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP) was $27.0 billion, the first time the MIP budget had been disclosed, for an aggregate total intelligence budget of $80.1 billion for FY 2010.”

This excludes of course, the CIA and Pentagon’s black budget that hides a welter of top secret and above Special Access Programs under a dizzying array of code names and acronyms. In February, Wired disclosed that the black budget “appears to be about $56 billion, the same as last year,” but this “may only be the tip of an iceberg of secret funds.”

While the scandalous nature of such outlays during a period of intense economic and social attacks on the working class are obvious, less obvious are the means employed by the so-called “intelligence community” to defend an indefensible system of exploitation and corruption.

Which brings us back to the HBGary hack.

“Operation MetalGear”

While media have focused, rightly so, on the sleazy campaign proposed to Bank of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by the high-powered law firm and lobby shop Hunton & Williams (H&W) to bring down WikiLeaks and tar Chamber critics, the treasure trove of emails leaked by Anonymous also revealed a host of Pentagon programs pointed directly at the heart of our freedom to communicate.

In fact, The Tech Herald revealed that while Palantir and Berico sought to distance themselves from HBGary and Hunton & William’s private spy op, “in 2005, Palantir was one of countless startups funded by the CIA, thanks to their venture funding arm, In-Q-Tel.”

“Most of In-Q-Tel’s investments,” journalist Steve Ragan wrote, “center on companies that specialize in automatic collection and processing of information.”

In other words Palantir, and dozens of other security start-ups to the tune of $200 million since 1999, was a recipient of taxpayer-funded largess from the CIA’s venture capitalist arm for products inherently “dual-use” in nature.

“Palantir Technologies,” The Tech Herald revealed, was “the main workhorse when it comes to Team Themis’ activities.”

In proposals sent to H&W, a firm recommended to Bank of America by a Justice Department insider, “Team Themis said they would ‘leverage their extensive knowledge of Palantir’s development and data integration environments’ allowing all of the data collected to be ‘seamlessly integrated into the Palantir analysis framework to enhance link and artifact analysis’.”

Following the sting of HBGary Federal and parent company HBGary, Anonymous disclosed on-going interest and contract bids between those firms, Booz Allen Hamilton and the U.S. Air Force to develop software that will allow cyber-warriors to create fake personas that help “manage” Pentagon interventions into social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

As Ragan points out, while the “idea for such technology isn’t new,” and that “reputation and persona management techniques have been used by the government and the private sector for years,” what makes these disclosures uniquely disturbing are apparent plans by the secret state to use the software for propaganda campaigns that can just as easily target an American audience as one in a foreign country.

While neither HBGary nor Booz Allen secured those contracts, interest by HBGary Federal’s disgraced former CEO Aaron Barr and others catering to the needs of the militarist state continue to drive development forward.

Dubbed “Operation MetalGear,” Anonymous believes that the program “involves an army of fake cyber personalities immersed in social networking websites for the purposes of manipulating the mass population via influence, crawling information from major online communities (such as Facebook), and identifying anonymous personalities via correlating stored information from multiple sources to establish connections between separate online accounts, using this information to arrest dissidents and activists who work anonymously.”

As readers recall, such tools were precisely what Aaron Barr boasted would help law enforcement officials take down Anonymous and identify WikiLeaks supporters.

According to a solicitation (RTB220610) found on the FedBizOpps.Gov web site, under the Orwellian tag “Freedom of Information Act Support,” the Air Force is seeking software that “will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly [sic] consistent.”

We’re informed that “individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries.”

Creepily, “personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms. The service includes a user friendly application environment to maximize the user’s situational awareness by displaying real-time local information.”

Aiming for maximum opacity, the RFI demands that the licence “protects the identity of government agencies and enterprise organizations.” An “enterprise organization” is a euphemism for a private contractor hired by the government to do its dirty work.

The proposal specifies that the licensed software will enable “organizations to manage their persistent online personas by assigning static IP addresses to each persona. Individuals can perform static impersonations, which allow them to look like the same person over time. Also allows organizations that frequent same site/service often to easily switch IP addresses to look like ordinary users as opposed to one organization.”

While Barr’s premature boasting may have brought Team Themis to ground, one wonders how many other similar operations continue today under cover of the Defense Department’s black budget.

Corporate Cut-Outs

Following up on last month’s revelations, The Guardian disclosed that a “Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an ‘online persona management service’ that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.”

That firm, a shadowy Los Angeles-based outfit called Ntrepid is devoid of information on its corporate web site although a company profile avers that the firm “provides national security and law enforcement customers with software, hardware, and managed services for cyber operations, analytics, linguistics, and tagging & tracking.”

According to Guardian reporters Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain, Ntrepid was awarded a $2.76M contract by CENTCOM, which refused to disclose “whether the multiple persona project is already in operation or discuss any related contracts.”

Blurring corporate lines of accountability even further, The Tech Herald revealed that Ntrepid may be nothing more than a “ghost corporation,” a cut-out wholly owned and operated by Cubic Corporation.

A San Diego-based firm describing itself as “a global leader in defense and transportation systems and services” that “is emerging as an international supplier of smart cards and RFID solutions,” Cubic clocks in at No. 75 on Washington Technology’s list of 2010 Top Government Contractors.

Founded by Walter J. Zable, the firm’s Chairman of the Board and CEO, Cubic has been described as one of the oldest and largest defense electronics firms on the West Coast.

Chock-a-block with high-level connections to right-wing Republicans including Darrell Issa, Duncan Hunter and Dan Coates, during the 2010 election cycle Cubic officers donated some $90,000 to Republican candidates, including $25,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee and some $30,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, according to the Center for Responsive Politics’ OpenSecrets.org.

With some $1 billion in 2009 revenue largely derived from the Defense Department, the company’s “Cyber Solutions” division “provides specialized cyber security products and solutions for defense, intelligence and homeland security customers.”

The RFI for the Air Force disclosed by Anonymous Ragan reports, “was written for Anonymizer, a company acquired in 2008 by intelligence contractor Abraxas Corporation. The reasoning is that they had existing persona management software and abilities.”

In turn, Abraxas was purchased by Cubic in 2010 for $124 million, an acquisition which Washington Technology described as one of the “best intelligence-related” deals of the year.

As The Tech Herald revealed, “some of the top talent at Anonymizer, who later went to Abraxas, left the Cubic umbrella to start another intelligence firm. They are now listed as organizational leaders for Ntrepid, the ultimate winner of the $2.7 million dollar government contract.”

Speculation is now rife that since “Ntrepid’s corporate registry lists Abraxas’ previous CEO and founder, Richard Helms, as the director and officer, along with Wesley Husted, the former CFO, who is an Ntrepid officer as well,” the new firm may be little more than an under-the-radar front for Cubic.

Amongst the Security Services offered by the firm we learn that “Cubic subsidiaries are working individually and in concert to develop a wide range of security solutions” that include: “C4ISR data links for homeland security intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions;” a Cubic Virtual Analysis Center which promises to deliver “superior situational awareness to decision makers in government, industry and nonprofit organizations,” human behavior pattern analysis, and other areas lusted after by securocrats.

The Guardian informs us that the “multiple persona contract is thought to have been awarded as part of a programme called Operation Earnest Voice (OEV), which was first developed in Iraq as a psychological warfare weapon against the online presence of al-Qaida supporters and others ranged against coalition forces.”

“Since then,” Fielding and Cobain wrote, “OEV is reported to have expanded into a $200m programme and is thought to have been used against jihadists across Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East.”

While CENTCOM’s then-commander, General David Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee last year that the program was designed to “counter extremist ideology and propaganda,” in light of HBGary revelations, one must ask whether firms involved in the dirty tricks campaign against WikiLeaks have deployed versions of “persona management software” against domestic opponents.

While we cannot say with certainty this is the case, mission creep from other “War on Terror” fronts, notably ongoing NSA warrantless wiretapping programs and Defense Department spy ops against antiwar activists, also involving “public-private partnerships” amongst security firms and the secret state, should give pause.

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s ruling last week that the names of the 1.3 million people with Firearm Owners Identification cards (FOID) in the state is public information has gun owners up in arms, pun intended.

The same groups that declare no one would put a sign in front of their home saying NO GUN now fear the opposite. They’re no longer worried about their right to bear arms, they’re worried about their right to bear arms anonymously. Their right to privacy.

1,000 to 1,500 gun owners converged on the Statehouse this week in Springfield to oppose the decision and push for conceal and carry laws. In Peoria, Circuit Judge Scott Shore halted disclosure with a temporary restraining order. And in a related privacy concern, Amish Illinois residents lobbied their state representatives and law enforcement officers to keep their photos off their FOID cards after former Illinois State Police Director Jonathon Monken said the policy would be reversed.

The Illinois State Police’s Firearms Services Bureau conducts background checks and updates FBI databases on the 230,000 gun owner applications it receives a year. That amount rose to 326,000 in 2009 says bureau chief Lt. John Coffman which he attributes to last year’s Supreme Court decision that overturned Chicago’s handgun ban and extension of the card’s validity to 10 years, reports the State Journal-Register.

In 2005 Illinois State Police procedures were also under scrutiny when an employee with guns in his truck at the agency’s training academy shot his girlfriend and himself says the Chicago Tribune. A state police firearms official said the agency could have confiscated the man’s weapons but didn’t in a different court case.

Two years ago a similar name disclosure flap occurred when the Memphis Commercial Appeal decided to publish a searchable base of state firearm permit holders, despite gun owner identity protection laws in states like Florida, Ohio and South Dakota that sealed names. The Appeal found that 70 of 154 state permit holders had criminal records including Bernard Avery (arrested 25 times with a murder charge dismissed on mental competency) and Reginald Miller (a felon with 11 arrests). Oops!

Chris Cox, then executive director of Illinois’ NRA, wrote the Appeal after the disclosures and called the decision “dangerous” — as if gun safety advocates and employers were armed instead of gun-owners. Hello?

Even though 25 other states call gun owner information public or do not specifically call it private, pro-gun Illinois politicians say the public has no right to the information and have introduced counter legislation to Madigan’s ruling. The Illinois State Police has also refused to release the information, which it has held confidential for forty years, in defiance of Madigan’s ruling and a Freedom of Information Act request from the Associated Press.

Pro-disclosure and gun safety activists, on the other hand, say knowing whether a neighbor, daycare worker or the kid sitting next to your son or daughter at community college is armed is very much their business. Especially since 10,222  firearm  applications the Illinois State Police received in 2009 were denied and 5,952 were outright revoked.

Though the firearm owner information which Madigan wants to release would not include addresses, phone numbers or photos, gun activists worry they will be harassed in their community, by gun control activists or by anti-gun employers. They also worry that criminals will break into their houses and steal their weapons.

In fact, gun activists are so worried about others knowing they’re armed, you have to wonder if the weapons make them safe — or unsafe. And if they need to buy more weapons to defend their weapons.

Scarcely batting an eyelash, Madame Clinton told her audience at George Washington University that “the goal is not to tell people how to use the internet any more than we ought to tell people how to use any public square, whether it’s Tahrir Square or Times Square.”

Rich with rhetorical flourishes that should have evoked gales of laughter but didn’t (this is America, after all), Clinton averred that “together, the freedoms of expression, assembly, and association online comprise what I’ve called the freedom to connect. The United States supports this freedom for people everywhere, and we have called on other nations to do the same.”

Really?

Has the honorable Secretary attended a demonstration of late, or found herself on the receiving end of a police baton, a rubber bullet, a jolt from a taser or ear-piercing blast from a “nonlethal” sonic weapon?

Or perhaps Madame Clinton has been served with a National Security Letter that arrives with its own built-in, permanent gag order, had her organization infiltrated by provocateurs, been the focus of “spear phishing” attacks by a secret state agency, say the FBI or one of their private contractors, who’ve implanted surveillance software on her laptop or smart phone, or summoned by subpoena to appear before a Star Chamber-like grand jury?

I didn’t think so.

The Secretary’s hypocrisy and mendacity would be amusing if the American people hadn’t already lived through a decade where the cheapening of constitutional rights, particularly First and Fourth Amendment guarantees, hadn’t been eroded to the point of savage annihilation by all branches of government and by both capitalist parties.

After all, in the filthy Washington trough where money rules, “liberal” Democrats and “conservative” Republicans alike are joined at the hip and outdo one another in paying obeisance to the National Security State.

Indeed, just a hop, skip and a jump across the icy Potomac, an Alexandria courthouse witnessed the “change” regime’s Justice Department move to seize the contents of private Twitter accounts, including those of left-wing Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir, and other WikiLeaks supporters.

While Mrs. Clinton hypocritically praised the role of social networking sites in helping to bring down torture-friendly, corrupt regimes in Egypt and Tunisia (close U.S. allies in the multibillion dollar kabuki dance known as the “War on Terror”), a grand jury was investigating whether there are grounds for filing criminal charges against WikiLeaks, its founder Julian Assange, and the heroic Bradley Manning, the incarcerated Army private suspected of leaking compromising files to the organization.

Outraged by revelations of American war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Apache helicopter gunship murder of a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists, as well as the release of thousands of diplomatic cables, the secret state is bringing the full weight of its formidable machinery down upon anyone, anywhere who have the temerity to challenge the lies of our militarist masters.

Denouncing the Obama regime’s latest assault, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argued that forcing Twitter to turn over users’ data to the government would hand the state a veritable road map of people connected to WikiLeaks, including journalists who may have communicated with the group, and would seriously chill free speech.

EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn pointed out that “Twitter is a publication and communication service, so the information sought by the government relates to what these individuals said and where they were when they said it. This raises serious First and Fourth Amendment concerns. It is especially troubling since the request seeks information about all statements made by these people, regardless of whether their speech relates to WikiLeaks.”

Public knowledge of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s criminal probe recently surfaced when U.S. Magistrate Theresa Carroll Buchanan, granted a motion by three Twitter clients that partially unsealed some government filings in the case.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys argued that Buchanan should overturn her earlier ruling ordering Twitter “to disclose its clients’ data, as well as unseal documents in the case, including requests from prosecutors to get information from other technology companies,” the The Washington Post reported.

When news of the federal government’s fishing expedition first broke in January, The New York Times reported that what made the case unusual weren’t de rigueur secret state subpoenas, but the fact that Twitter challenged the Justice Department’s gag order “and won the right to inform the people whose records the government was seeking.”

The Times noted that “WikiLeaks says it suspects that other large sites like Google and Facebook have received similar requests and simply went along with the government.”

Such demands, and long-suspected capitulation by internet behemoths Google and Facebook, are at the heart of current debates over data retention.

As security analyst and surveillance critic Christopher Soghoian pointed out last month, “The hypocrisy of the government’s push for such data retention is clear when compared to the extreme efforts that government agencies go to in order to shield their own communications, documents and other records from the American people.”

Particularly when lawbreaking by favored contractors are cloaked by bogus claims of “national security.”

Shielding a “War on Terror” Fraudster

One sordid example among hundreds of similar cases which have come to light was recently uncovered The New York Times.

Investigative journalists Eric Lichtblau and James Risen disclosed that for “eight years, government officials turned to Dennis Montgomery, a California computer programmer, for eye-popping technology that he said could catch terrorists.”

Montgomery’s “eye-popping technology” was a fraud, a multimillion grift that bamboozled the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command and other secret state agencies and almost resulted in the 2003 shoot-down of passenger planes heading towards the U.S.

Hardly the “smartest guy in the room,” Montgomery is awaiting trial in Nevada on charges “of trying to pass $1.8 million in bad checks at casinos.” However, “he has not been charged with wrongdoing in the federal contracts, nor has the government tried to get back any of the money it paid.”

In the last few months Obama’s Justice Department, Lichtblau and Risen inform us, have “gotten protective orders from two federal judges keeping details of the technology out of court,” and “says it is guarding state secrets that would threaten national security if disclosed.”

According to the Times, the software suite Montgomery sold the Pentagon was chock-a-block with snake-oil claims that it “could find terrorist plots hidden in broadcasts of the Arab network Al Jazeera; identify terrorists from Predator drone videos; and detect noise from hostile submarines.”

These claims “prompted an international false alarm that led President George W. Bush to order airliners to turn around over the Atlantic Ocean in 2003.”

In a famous incident of Bush administration fear mongering that coincided with the Christmas holidays for maximum effect, and hyped of course by the media as the latest in a series of “grave threats” to the heimat, Montgomery reported the alarming news to his CIA contacts.

But as Global Research analyst Michel Chossudovsky pointed out at the time, the Bush administration had “chosen the Christmas holiday to wage a campaign of fear and intimidation. Its ultimate objective consists in manipulating Americans into accepting a de facto military government, as a means to ‘protect their civil liberties’.”

Chossudovsky averred, and facts that came to light years later proved beyond all reasonable doubt that “the terrorist alert was fabricated by the CIA.” A cynical deceit facilitated by “War on Terror” fraudster Montgomery.

According to the Times, Montgomery had claimed that “hidden in the crawl bars broadcast by Al Jazeera, someone had planted information about specific American-bound flights from Britain, France and Mexico that were hijacking targets.”

CIA officials then “rushed the information to Mr. Bush, who ordered those flights to be turned around or grounded before they could enter American airspace.”

“Senior administration officials,” the Times revealed, “even talked about shooting down planes identified as targets because they feared that supposed hijackers would use the planes to attack the United States, according to a former senior intelligence official who was at a meeting where the idea was discussed.”

While the anonymous official later called the idea “crazy,” nevertheless snake-oil salesman Montgomery had convinced intelligence officials that the fabricated threat was “real and credible.”

Despite the fact the United States was a hair’s breath from blasting commercial airliners from the skies and killing hundreds of innocent people, the CIA “never did an assessment to determine how a ruse had turned into a full-blown international incident, officials said, nor was anyone held accountable.”

“In fact,” the Times reports, “agency officials who oversaw the technology directorate–including Donald Kerr, who helped persuade George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, that the software was credible–were promoted, former officials said.”

“”Nobody was blamed,” a former CIA official told the Times. “They acted like it never happened.”

Kerr, a long-time fixture in the national security establishment, was formerly an executive vice president with the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). After serving as the CIA’s Deputy Director for Science of Technology, he was rewarded for his role in the “planes incident” fiasco with an appointment by Bush as the Director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the top secret Pentagon satrapy that flies America’s fleet of intelligence satellites. And since being well-connected means never having to say your sorry, Kerr is currently the Deputy Director of U.S. National Intelligence where he continues to labor mightily to “keep us safe.”

Despite serious misgivings about Montgomery’s firm, eTreppid Technologies, the secret state was eager to buy his company’s dodgy software. Why? As it turns out, Montgomery was, as they say, juiced.

Along with partner Warren Trepp, described as a former “top trader for the junk-bond king [and convicted fraudster] Michael Milken,” Montgomery’s company “with the help of Representative Jim Gibbons, a Republican who would become Nevada’s governor and was a longtime friend of Mr. Trepp’s, the company won the attention of intelligence officials in Washington.”

Some of Montgomery’s “friends” also included “Edra Blixseth, a onetime billionaire who with her former husband had run the Yellowstone Club in Montana.”

Back in October, the Associated Press reported that the FBI had opened a criminal probe and was investigating the former co-owner of the swank Yellowstone Club, whose members include Bill Gates and former Vice President Dan Quayle, over charges that she bilked creditors at the time of her messy divorce.

A well-connected Republican insider, according to AP, investigators are probing “a massive real estate scheme fueled by greed, fraud and hundreds of millions of dollars in ill-advised loans.”

“The current federal inquiry into Edra Blixseth,” AP informed us, “involves a series of multimillion dollar loans she took out or guaranteed around the time of her divorce, according to an attorney familiar with the matter.”

“Court records show,” according to AP, that “she claimed to be worth $782 million at the time of another loan, for $950,000. Within months, she filed for personal bankruptcy owing creditors at least $157 million.”

Like her pal Montgomery, Blixseth claims she did “nothing wrong.” What’s that old saw about birds of a feather?

“Hoping to win more government money,” the Times reported, “Ms. Blixseth turned to some influential friends, like Jack Kemp, the former New York congressman and Republican vice-presidential nominee, and Conrad Burns, then a Republican senator from Montana. They became minority stakeholders in the venture, called Blxware.”

Burns told the Times he was “impressed” by a video presentation Montgomery gave to an unnamed “cable company.” The former senator told Lichtblau and Risen that the security grifter “talked a hell of a game.”

For his part, Kemp leveraged his connections with war criminal and then-Vice President Dick Cheney, “to set up a meeting in 2006 at which Mr. Kemp, Mr. Montgomery and Ms. Blixseth met with a top Cheney adviser, Samantha Ravich, to talk about expanding the government’s use of the Blxware software.”

When Ravich didn’t jump fast enough and hand over more taxpayer boodle, Montgomery’s former attorney Michael Flynn “sent an angry letter to Mr. Cheney in May 2007″ and “accused the White House of abandoning a tool shown to ‘save lives’,” the Times reported.

But Montgomery and Blixseth still had a card to play and had some powerful friends in the Air Force who helped play them.

Lichtblau and Risen disclosed that “an Air Force contracting officer, Joseph Liberatore,” who described himself as a “believer,” despite skepticism from other secret state agencies including the CIA, was concerned by “problems with the no-bid contract.”

According to an email obtained by the Times, Liberatore wrote that if other agencies examined the deal “we are all toast.”

“In 2009,” Lichtblau and Risen inform us, “the Air Force approved a $3 million deal for his technology, even though a contracting officer acknowledged that other agencies were skeptical about the software.”

As Montgomery’s firm crashed and burned, the Bush and now, the Obama administration, sought to cover their ass-ets and “declared that some classified details about the use of Mr. Montgomery’s software were a ‘state secret’ that could cause grave harm if disclosed in court.”

“The secrecy was so great that at a deposition Mr. Montgomery gave in November,” Lichtblau and Risen report, that “two government officials showed up to monitor the questioning but refused to give their full names or the agencies they worked for.”

Bottom line: while the U.S. government affirms that the private communications of American citizens are fair game to be trolled by secret state snoops, fraud and serious crimes carried out under the dark banner of an endless “War on Terror” are treated, like evidence of torture and other crimes against humanity, as if they “never happened.”

Criminalizing Whistleblowing

The National Security State’s assault on our right to privacy comes hard on the heels on moves in Congress, spearheaded by troglodytic Republicans (with “liberal” Democrats running a close second) to criminalize whistleblowing altogether.

Last week, the Muslim-hating Rep. Peter King (R-NY) introduced the SHIELD Act in the House, a pernicious piece of legislative flotsam that would amend the Espionage Act and make publishing classified information, and investigative journalism, a criminal offense.

Also last week, legislation was introduced in the Senate that “would broadly criminalize leaks of classified information,” Secrecy News reported.

Sponsored by Senator Benjamin Cardin (D-MD), the bill (S. 355) “would make it a felony for a government employee or contractor who has authorized access to classified information to disclose such information to an unauthorized person in violation of his or her nondisclosure agreement,” Secrecy News disclosed.

In an Orwellian twist, Cardin, who received some $385,000 in campaign swag from free speech advocates such as Constellation Energy, Goldman Sachs and Patton Boggs (Mubarak’s chief lobbyist in Washington) according to OpenSecrets.org, said that the bill would “promote Federal whistleblower protection statutes and regulations”!

As Secrecy News points out, the bill “does not provide for a ‘public interest’ defense, i.e. an argument that any damage to national security was outweighed by a benefit to the nation.” In other words, you don’t need to know about government high crimes and misdemeanors. Why? Because we say so.

In November, shortly after WikiLeaks began publishing Cablegate files, King fired off a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder demanding that WikiLeaks be declared a “foreign terrorist organization” and the group’s founder declared a “terrorist ringleader.”

We know the fate reserved for “terrorists,” don’t we?

As the United States sinks ever-deeper into a lawless abyss where the corporate state is lowering the boom on democracy altogether, is the day far off when Madam Clinton’s avowal that we ought not “tell people how to use any public square, whether it’s Tahrir Square or Times Square,” come back with a vengeance to haunt America’s venal ruling class?

Faced with an unprecedented economic crisis that has destroyed the lives of tens of millions our fellow citizens, not to mention aggressive wars which have cratered entire societies and murdered hundreds of thousands of people who have done us no harm, when, pray tell, will the “conversation” turn to the unprecedented annihilation of democratic institutions and the rule of law which exonerates, even celebrates, those who murder, maim and torture on an industrial scale?

Just last week, the Obama administration announced plans to roll-out an “identity ecosystem” for the internet. Although passed over in silence by major media, at the risk of being accused of “incivility,” particularly when it comes to the “hope” fraudster and war criminal in the Oval Office, Americans need to focus — sharply — on the militarists, political bag men and corporate gangsters working to bring George Orwell’s dystopian world one step closer to reality.

Earlier this month, CNET disclosed that the administration “is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cyber security effort to create an Internet ID for Americans.”

White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said that the secret state’s latest move to lower the boom on privacy and free speech will embed the surveillance op at the Commerce Department. Schmidt, speaking at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research said Commerce is “the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government” to centralize these efforts.

According to CNET, the move “effectively pushes the department to the forefront of the issue, beating out other potential candidates, including the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.”

Really? I don’t think so.

NSA Clearly in the Frame

Last week, Government Computer News reported that the secretive Pentagon spy shop broke ground on a “massive new National Security Agency cyber intelligence center in Utah.”

The multibillion dollar facility (cost overruns not included) “will have 100,000 square feet of raised-floor data center space and more than 900,000 square feet of technical support and administrative space” that “will support the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative.”

In September, NextGov reported that then Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Collection, Glenn Gaffney, said the new data center “would support the intelligence community in providing foreign intelligence about cybersecurity threats and protect Defense Department networks.”

Back in 2009, investigative journalist, James Bamford, wrote in The New York Review of Books that “the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.”

While corporate media tell us that the center will “enhance” the nation’s capacity to thwart “cyber threats” the fact is, Bamford wrote, the complex will “house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital ‘pocket litter’.” In other words, the vast data repository will serve as “spy central” for our digital minders.

“Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples?” Bamford wondered. According to a report prepared for the Pentagon by the ultra-spooky MITRE Corporation, “as the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve, the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (10 to the 24 Bytes) by 2015.”

This is “roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven’t yet been named,” Bamford avers.

Leaving aside disinformational pyrotechnics by media cheerleaders that the NSA’s data equivalent of a Wal-Mart super center will primarily exist for “cyber security,” “foreign intelligence” and protecting “Defense Department networks,” Bamford counters that “once vacuumed up and and stored in these near-infinite ‘libraries,’ the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be — or may one day become — a terrorist.”

“In the NSA’s world of automated surveillance on steroids” Bamford avers, “every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.”

Or as Cryptohippie puts it far less delicately, every keystroke or cellphone ping is “criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial.”

Just what are they up to? Even Congress, always willing to give the Executive Branch a free pass when it comes to blanket surveillance, doesn’t know. Last week the Associated Press reported that “the Pentagon failed to disclose clandestine cyber activities in a classified report on secret military actions that goes to Congress.”

Citing “gaps” in reporting requirements on clandestine operations, “emerging high-tech operations are not specifically listed in the law,” AP averred. After all, “cyber oversight is still a murky work in progress for the Obama administration.”

Perhaps AP and other media outlets should look more closely at what’s hidden inside that “murky work” and where its authority comes from. “Oversight” is certainly not part of the equation.

Cybersecurity’s Brave New World

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, the operational nuts-and-bolts of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) is a closely-held state secret that derives authority from classified annexes of the National Security Presidential Directive 54, Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 (NSPD 54/HSPD 23) issued by our former “decider.”

Those 2008 orders are so contentious that both the Bush and Obama administrations have refused to release details to Congress, prompting a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) demanding the full text of the underlying legal authority governing “cybersecurity” be made public.

Details on the “trusted identity” scheme are scarce, but back in July Antifascist Calling reported that the secret state had deployed New York Times reporterm, John Markoff, as a conduit for administration scaremongering.

Schmidt told the “Gray Lady” that administration plans involved “a ‘voluntary trusted identity’ system that would be the high-tech equivalent of a physical key, a fingerprint and a photo ID card, all rolled into one.”

According to the Times, “the system might use a smart identity card, or a digital credential linked to a specific computer, and would authenticate users at a range of online services.”

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke was quick to downplay the more sinister implications of the hustle saying, “We are not talking about a national ID card.”

CNET reported Locke’s claim that “we are not talking about a government-controlled system. What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy, and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities.”

Why bother with privacy when surrendering your rights is so convenient!

Touted as a warm and fuzzy “identity ecosystem,” Government Computer News reported that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has even launched a dedicated website hawking the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC).

According to NIST, “NSTIC envisions a cyber world — the Identity Ecosystem — that improves upon the passwords currently used to login online.”

We’re informed that the “Identity Ecosystem will provide people with a variety of more secure and privacy-enhancing ways to access online services. The Identity Ecosystem enables people to validate their identities securely when they’re doing sensitive transactions (like banking) and lets them stay anonymous when they’re not (like blogging). The Identity Ecosystem will enhance individuals’ privacy by minimizing the information they must disclose to authenticate themselves.”

Government Computer News tells us that the “identity ecosystem” isn’t envisaged as a “national Internet ID to track online activities.” The devil’s in the details and what little we do know should set alarm bells ringing.

The program office will “support and coordinate interagency collaboration” and “promote pilot projects and other implementations.” Which agencies are we talking about here? What pilot projects and “other implementations” are being alluding to? We don’t know.

We do know, however, that the National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security have forged a Memorandum of Agreement which will increase Pentagon control over America’s telecommunications and electronic infrastructure.

In fact, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation disclosed in October, DHS has been tracking people online and that the agency even established a “Social Networking Monitoring Center” to explicitly do so.

Documents obtained by the civil liberties watchdog group revealed that the agency has been vacuuming-up “items of interest,” systematically monitoring “citizenship petitioners” and analyzing “online public communication.”

Wouldn’t an “identity ecosystem” greatly facilitate online spying, despite administration claims to the contrary?

While the system is “voluntary” and individuals will not be compelled to sign up, the secret state is lusting after a sure fire means to identify the billions of computers, smart phones and other digital devices that plague us.

And even if you choose not to “opt in,” well, plans are already afoot by advertising pimps and their partners in the national security state “to collect the digital equivalent of fingerprints from every computer, cellphone and TV set-top box in the world,” The Wall Street Journal recently disclosed.

As with all other aspects of the “War on Terror” threatscape, the closer one looks at the Obama regime’s “identity ecosystem” the less warm and fuzzy it becomes.

In a stunning rebuke of U.S. policies the February 2010 memo, “Chancellor Merkel Angered by Lack of German MEP Support for TFTP,” 10BERLIN180 provided new evidence that the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (also known as Swift) is viewed skeptically by the European public and their representatives.

Distrust of the Swift program runs deep and its “War on Terror” pedigree is considered little more than a pretext for American spies to carry out economic espionage on behalf of U.S. multinationals.

Alarmed over privacy breaches by American firms and criminal acts, such as the illegal U.S. transfer of prisoners on CIA “black flights,” aided and abetted by European intelligence agencies, outraged public opinion forced the hand of parliamentarians, who voted overwhelming to suspend the program.

German opposition to Swift “was particularly damaging” The New York Times reported, “because the country was among a handful of allies that, according to a 2006 cable, made up a ‘coalition of the constructive’ organized to ensure that the Swift operation was not ‘ruined by privacy experts’.”

Launched shortly after the 9/11 provocation by the Bush administration, the secret program handed American officials unprecedented access to global financial information on bank transactions routed through a vast database administered by the Swift consortium in Brussels.

Access to such unique data would be particularly valuable to U.S. corporations. In light of evidence published in a 2001 European Parliament report that the National Security Agency’s ECHELON program was a cover for economic espionage, such fears are not unfounded.

Since the program’s disclosure in 2006 by The New York Times, criticism over its operations have mounted steadily.

CIA and Treasury Department officials secretly poured over records of some $6 trillion dollars in daily financial transactions flowing through global banks and brokerage houses.

“European Union regulators,” the ACLU reported, “found that the mass financial prying was not legally authorized, was conducted without proper checks and balances, and violated several important rules established to protect the privacy of Europeans.”

Increasing the “creep factor” amongst EU officials, the ACLU disclosed that the ultra-spooky Booz Allen Hamilton corporation had been hired to “oversee” the program by the federal government.

Concluding that the firm was not an “independent check” on Swift surveillance, the civil liberties’ watchdogs wrote that “Booz Allen is one of the largest U.S. Government contractors, with hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. Government contracts awarded each year. Booz Allen has a history of working closely with U.S. Government agencies on electronic surveillance, including the Total Information Awareness program.”

Initial misgivings amongst the public and privacy advocates have since blossomed into outright hostility, thus setting the stage for last summer’s vote.

Cynical Maneuvers

Noting that the American-led “War on Terror” coalition is fraying at the seams, U.S. Ambassador to Berlin Philip Murphy, wrote that “Merkel is particularly irritated with German MEPs from her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and sister Christian Social Union (CSU) parties, most of whom reportedly voted against the agreement despite previously indicating they would support it.”

The ambassador claimed that “public German reactions” to the European Parliament’s vote “have come exclusively from TFTP detractors who portrayed the veto as a sign that the European Parliament has won a victory over an arrogant Commission/Council, as well as delivering a rebuke to U.S. counterterrorism policies that undervalue data privacy.”

Free Democratic Party (FDP) Federal Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, a member of Merkel’s coalition, was derided by Murphy as “a strong proponent of data privacy rights,” who had welcomed the vote saying that “‘the citizens of Europe have won a victory today that strengthened not just data protection, but democracy in all of Europe.”

That’s certainly a “diplomatic” way of saying they don’t trust their American allies!

Undeterred however, Murphy recommended that the U.S. crank up the “Mighty Wurlitzer” disinformation machine a decibel or two.

“These events,” the ambassador wrote, “suggest the need to intensify our engagement with German government interlocutors, Bundestag and European parliamentarians, and opinion makers to demonstrate that the U.S. has strong data privacy measures in place.”

Murphy said this “debate was not just about TFTP;” the ambassador averred that “paranoia runs deep especially about U.S. intelligence agencies.”

Those quaint denizens of “old Europe,” where do they ever get such fanciful ideas!

U.S. Embassies: Global Spy Nets

In the Cablegate file, “Reporting and Collection Needs: The United Nations,” 09STATEE80163, dated July 31, 2009 and classified SECRET/NOFORN (“no foreign distribution”) we learned last week that under America’s revised National HUMINT Collection Directive (NCHD) U.S. diplomats and State Department employees under CIA cover are directed to spy on key UN personnel, including Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

State Department documents revealed that diplomats have been ordered to gather “as much of the following information as possible when they have information relating to persons linked to: office and organizational titles; names, position titles and other information on business cards; numbers of telephones, cell phones, pagers and faxes; compendia of contact information, such as telephone directories (in compact disc or electronic format if available) and e-mail listings; internet and intranet ‘handles’, internet e-mail addresses, web site identification-URLs; credit card account numbers; frequent flyer account numbers; work schedules, and other relevant biographical information.”

U.S. overlords demanded that their diplomat-spies collect relevant data on “about current and future use of communications systems and technologies by officials or organizations, including cellular phone networks, mobile satellite phones, very small aperture terminals (VSAT), trunked and mobile radios, pagers, prepaid calling cards, firewalls, encryption, international connectivity, use of electronic data interchange, Voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP), Worldwide interoperability for microwave access (Wi-Max), and cable and fiber networks.”

Documents released so far have revealed that similar “diplomatic” spying operations are underway globally and target Bulgaria; Romania; Slovenia; Hungary; Venezuela; Paraguay; Palestine; African Great Lakes; and West Africa.

Denouncing WikiLeaks for the embarrassing disclosures, not for U.S. duplicity and deceit, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who authorized the surreptitious collection programs, said last week that covert action by its foreign service “is the role our diplomats play in serving America.”

A “Well-Placed Source”

Despite full knowledge, “we were astonished to learn” ambassador Murphy wrote, “how quickly rumors about alleged U.S. economic espionage–at first associated with the new U.S. air passenger registration system (ESTA), then with TFTP–gained currency among German parliamentarians in the run-up to the February 11 vote in Strasbourg.”

Are there legitimate reasons perhaps, why “paranoia” would “run deep” among the public, or the German government for that matter, considering the track record of “U.S. intelligence agencies”?

Last Friday, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle’s chief of staff, Helmut Metzner, was sacked after he confessed he was the “young, up-and-coming party loyalist” who served as an American asset inside the Free Democratic Party, a coalition partner of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s right-wing government.

Der Spiegel reported that Metzner was the “top-level national party employee responsible for passing secret information on to US diplomats during the negotiations to form the current German government in 2009.”

According to the 2009 Cablegate file 09BERLIN1271, “Westerwelle Firm on Removal of Nuclear Weapons,” Metzner is described therein as “a well-placed FDP source.”

From his perch, Metzner was privy to sensitive information that he passed on to his American handlers; in fact the go-getter was “the head of international relations for the national party.” Rather conveniently, one might say!

Indeed, the strategist-spy “shared with Emboffs and visiting Senior Germany Desk Officer October 7 information on issues discussed during the first two days of these negotiations as well as the negotiations schedule and working group make-up. Source serves as his party’s notetaker for the negotiations and has been a long-standing close Embassy contact.”

“It’s now clear,” Der Spiegel reported, “why the US ambassador appeared so pleased in his cables back to Washington–after all, his mole had the ear of the head of the party and was part of the inner circle of party leadership.”

Eventually, ambassador Murphy’s call to “intensify our engagement with German government interlocutors, Bundestag and European parliamentarians, and opinion makers” over the Swift program paid off.

In July, “after mobilizing top administration officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.,” the Obama administration was able to reverse the vote in the European Parliament, “after the United States made modest concessions that promised greater European oversight,” The New York Times reported.

“Concessions” that will accelerate the erosion of privacy rights while enhancing U.S. efforts to steal economic secrets from their capitalist rivals.

Tuesday’s arrest of Julian Assange in Britain on a dubious Swedish warrant, and the court’s refusal to grant the activist/journalist bail, will not stop the leaks. Despite intense pressure from the Pentagon, the State Department and lickspittle American politicians, more than 500 web sites currently mirror WikiLeaks.

The steady drip, drip, drip of dark secrets will continue, as will further revelations of U.S. crimes.

Within that dusky haze, obscured by claims of national security or proprietary business information, take your pick, would you bet your life that the wizards of misdirection and deception care a whit that you really are more than a disembodied data point?

Lost in the debate surrounding privacy invasion and data mining however, is the key role that internet service providers (ISPs) play as intermediaries and gatekeepers. From their perch, ISPs peer deeply into and collect and analyze the online communications of tens of millions of users simultaneously, in real-time.

Concerted efforts to eliminate online anonymity, in managed democracies and authoritarian regimes alike, are greatly enhanced by the deployment of deep packet inspection (DPI) sensors and software on virtually all networks.

As Canadian privacy watchdogs DeepPacketInspection.ca tell us, DPI offer ISPs “unparalleled levels of intelligence into subscribers’ online activities.”

“To unpack this a little” they aver, “all data traffic that courses across the ‘net is contained in individual packets that have header (i.e. addressing) information and payload (i.e. content) information. We can think of this as the address on a postcard and the written and visual content of a postcard.”

All of which is there for the taking, “criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial,” Cryptohippie chillingly informs.

Still the illusion persists that communication technologies are somehow “neutral.” Neither good nor bad but rather, much like a smart phone loaded with geolocation tracking chips or the surveillance-ready internet itself, simply there for all to use.

Reality as is its wont, bites with ever-sharper teeth.

As with other recent advances touted as breakthroughs–from the biomedical and pharmaceutical research that spawned factory farming and genetically-modified crops to something as seemingly banal as the highway system that ushered in exurban sprawl–from the workplace to the car-pool lane to idle hours spent trolling the web, our techno-toys function rather handily as instruments of social control.

Simply put, DPI hand our minders an unprecedented means to examine and catalogue our online communications. From blog posts to web searches to the content of email and video files, we’re delivered up every day, figuratively and literally, to advertising pimps or law enforcers, a faceless army of gatekeepers guarding an indefensible system in perpetual crisis.

“Reengineering” the Internet … for Persistent Surveillance

Subtly guiding internet traffic into fast and slow lanes, based on the size and content of a particular file, or examining said file for malicious or illegal content, DPI has been deployed as a means of conserving bandwidth and as a defense against viral attacks.

Leaving aside the critical issue of net neutrality, linked to moves to further monetize the internet and hold communications hostage to the ability to pay for quicker network speeds, there is no question that ISPs and individual users should have a keen interest in defending themselves against the depredations of organized gangs of identity thieves and predators.

If DPI were solely a tool to weed out malicious hacks or channel traffic in more equitable ways, thereby ensuring the broadest possible access to all, it could provide concrete benefits to users and contribute to a safer and more secure communications’ environment.

This hasn’t happened. Instead, securocrats and corporatists alike are working feverishly to “reengineer the internet”–for the delivery of targeted ads and as a surveillance platform–and both view DPI’s ability to read individual messages, the “deep packet” as it were, as a singular means to do just that.

Last year, Antifascist Calling reported on moves by surveillance mavens to deploy deep packet sniffing Einstein 3 software developed by the National Security Agency on the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure.

As with the agency’s pervasive driftnet spying on Americans, as AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein revealed in his release of internal company documents, DPI and the hardware that powers it is the “secret sauce” animating these illegal programs.

Earlier this year, Klein told Wired Magazine that the documents suggest that NSA’s warrantless wiretapping “was just the tip of an eavesdropping iceberg,” evidence of “an untargeted, massive vacuum cleaner sweeping up millions of peoples’ communications every second automatically.”

Ostensibly designed for detecting and thwarting malicious attacks aimed at government networks, The Wall Street Journal revealed that the packet sniffing Einstein 3 program, developed under the code name TUTELAGE, can screen computer traffic flowing into state portals from private sector networks, including those connecting people to the internet.

“Its filtering technology,” journalist Siobhan Gorman wrote, “can read the content of email and other communications.”

Einstein 3 is considered so toxic to privacy that AT&T sought “legal assurance that it will not be sued for participating in the pilot program,” The Washington Post reported. Although they were given assurances by Bush’s former Attorney General, Michael B. Mukasey, that the firm “would bear no liability,” AT&T deferred until the Obama administration granted the waiver in 2009. So far, the federal government has expended some $2 billion on the program.

Jacob Appelbaum, a security researcher with the Tor Anonymity Project told CNET News in March that expanding Einstein 3 to private networks “would amount to a partial outsourcing of security” to unaccountable corporations.

But it will do much, much more. Appelbaum averred that the project represents “a clear loss of control [for the public]. And anyone with access to that monitoring system, legitimate or otherwise, would be able to monitor amazing amounts of traffic.”

A year later, a related program under development by NSA and defense giant Raytheon, “Perfect Citizen,” relies on a suite of sensors deployed in computer networks that will persistently monitor whichever system they are plugged into. While little has been revealed about how Perfect Citizen will work, it was called by a corporate insider the cyber equivalent of “Big Brother,” according to an email obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

I have pointed out many times that under the rubric of cybersecurity (the latest profit-generating “War on Terror” front), the secret state, America’s telecoms and internet service providers are conjoined at the hip in what are blandly called “public-private partnerships.”

Indeed, the secrecy-shredding web site Public Intelligence, posted a confidential document that provided details on the inner workings of one such initiative, Project 12.

Ultimately, the goal of the secretive enterprise, Public Intelligence averred, “is not simply to increase the flow of ‘threat information’ from government agencies to private industry, but to facilitate greater ‘information sharing’ between those companies and the federal government.”

This will be accomplished once “real-time cyber situational awareness” is achieved across all eighteen critical infrastructure and key resources (CIKR) sectors identified in the report.

Simply put, NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program and a constellation of top secret cybersecurity projects will come to nought if filtering software that examines–and catalogues–the content, or deep packets, of those spied upon aren’t deployed across all networks, public and private.

No surprise then, that the origins of the ghost in the internet surveillance machine lie in unscrupulous efforts by advert pimps to deliver us to market.

“Opting In” to the Corporate Police State

Readers are familiar with the practice of web sites that install tracking “cookies” and other nasty bits of code that follow our antics across the internet.

This information is sold to advertisers by firms such as Google and Yahoo who charge a premium price for the privilege of peering into browsing habits.

Last month The Wall Street Journal reported that a gaggle of niche firms “harvest online conversations and collect personal details from social-networking sites, résumé sites and online forums where people might discuss their lives.”

We’re told that the dubious practice of “web scraping” provides the “raw material” in a rapidly expanding “data economy.” Journal reporters found that marketers “spent $7.8 billion on online and offline data in 2009″ and that “spending on data from online sources is set to more than double, to $840 million in 2012 from $410 million in 2009.”

And with incentives such as these, and virtually nothing in the way of regulation, is it any wonder we find ourselves preyed upon.

While we might garner a measure of privacy from the prying eyes of ISPs, marketing vultures and our political minders through the use of strong encryption, as I reported last month, the Obama administration will soon seek congressional authorization which mandates that software designers and social networking sites build backdoors into their systems.

According to The New York Times, the administration claims this is necessary so that law enforcement and intelligence snoops have a surefire means “to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages,” because their “ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is ‘going dark’.”

Mendacious administration claims are more than matched by those in the online advertising industry.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that deep packet inspection, “one of the most potentially intrusive technologies for profiling and targeting Internet users with ads is on the verge of a comeback, two years after an outcry by privacy advocates in the U.S. and Britain appeared to kill it.”

Advertising grifters Kindsight and Phorm “are pitching deep packet inspection services as a way for Internet service providers to claim a share of the lucrative online ad market.”

Right up front, Phorm declares that theirs’ is a “global personalisation technology company” that “delivers a more interesting online experience,” that is, if your interests lie in having a behavioral profile of yourself created, centered around intrusive web tracking and data mining technologies.

While both firms claim that user privacy is of “paramount” concern, the industry’s track record suggests otherwise. In 2008 for example, internet marketing firm NebuAd planned to “use deep packet inspection to deliver targeted advertising to millions of broadband subscribers unless they explicitly opted out of the service.”

An outcry ensued when the scheme became public knowledge. While NebuAd has gone out of business, “several U.S. ISPs who signed deals with NebuAd have been hit with class-action lawsuits accusing them of ‘installing spyware devices; on their networks,” the Journal averred.

According to Ars Technica, the lawsuit charged the firm and ISPs “Bresnan Communications, Cable One, CenturyTel, Embarq, Knology, and WOW! of all being involved in the interception, copying, transmission, collection, storage, usage, and altering of private data from users.”

NebuAd was accused by plaintiffs of exploiting “normal browser platform security behaviors by forging IP packets, allowing their own JavaScript code to be written into source code trusted by the web browser,” the complaint reads. “NebuAd and ISPs together cooperate in this attack against the intentions of the consumers, the designers of their software, and the owners of the servers they visit,” attorneys charged.

“All of the involved parties,” journalist Jacqui Cheng wrote, were “alleged to have violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, California’s Computer Crime Law, the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the California Invasion of Privacy Act.”

In Britain, a similar controversy erupted when BT Group PLC were forced to disclose that they “had tested Phorm’s technology on some subscribers without telling them. Last year, BT and two other British ISPs that explored deploying Phorm’s service–Virgin Media Inc. and TalkTalk–abandoned it,” the Journal reported.

At the time, the nose-tweaking tech web site The Register revealed that although Phorm refused to state how many BT customers had been profiled, “at the absolute least there are 38,000 BT Retail customers unaware their communications have been allegedly criminally intercepted in the last two years. The number could be as high as 108,000.”

When grilled by The Register as to why Phorm doesn’t believe “people have the right to know how likely it is they were part of a secret test,” a Phorm spokesperson replied “‘We’re just not going to disclose that’.” He claimed “‘they were BT customers and you have to ask BT about that’.”

BT also refused to respond to inquiries. How’s that for transparency!

Why then, should users believe industry professions of faith that ISPs won’t provide them with subscribers’ real identities? After all, as one wag told the Journal, ISPs “feel like they have data and they ought to be able to use it” and “they really desperately want to.”

Accordingly, the Journal reported that Kindsight, owned by telecommunications giant Alcatel-Lucent SA (talk about a seamless web!), “says six ISPs in the U.S., Canada and Europe have been testing its security service this year although it isn’t yet delivering targeted ads. It declined to name the clients.”

CEO Mike Gassewitz told Journal reporters that the company “has been placing ads on various websites to test the ad-placement technology and build up a base of advertisers, which now number about 100,000.”

Phorm’s history hardly inspires confidence. CEO Kent Ertugrul, “a Princeton-educated, former investment banker,” we’re informed by the Journal, honed his business skills in the early 1990s when he formed “a joint venture with the Russian Space Agency to offer joy rides to tourists in MiG-29 fighter jets.”

Coming at the height of the Yeltsin kleptocracy that looted billions of dollars in assets from the sell-off of the prized possessions of the former Soviet Union, at the very least this should have raised an eyebrow or two.

Before changing its name to Phorm in 2007, Ertugrul ran an enterprise called 121Media. According to numerous published reports, the firm produced a spyware application called PeopleOnPage. “This application,” Wikipedia averred, “acted as a browser hijacker and passed details of the user’s currently visited website to central ContextPlus servers, so that the user could be targeted with advertising” in the form of intrusive pop-ups.

The adware component, AproposMedia, was described by InternetSecurityZone.com as “…a malicious executable program that is usually installed without user consent or knowledge. AproposMedia may have the ability to secretly monitor, record, and transmit computer activity.” Indeed, The Register reported that Ertugrul’s PeopleOnPage ad network “was blacklisted as spyware by the likes of Symantec and F-Secure.”

Former pop-up king Ertugrul has called online rights’ campaigners “privacy pirates” who represent a “neo-Luddite retrenchment,” and told The Daily Telegraph last year that Phorm’s technology is a “game changer” in “protecting users’ privacy.”

But armed with a marketing scheme that promises “the potential for companies to collect substantially more revenue for literally any page on the internet,” serious privacy concerns are a real issue when deep packet inspection technologies are touted as a splendid means to do so.

Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee told New Scientist in 2009 that the “ever-increasing power of computers that is helping the internet to grow is also threatening its future.”

Berners-Lee “likened DPI to wiretapping, and pointed out that companies could use it to learn a huge amount about our ‘lives, hates and fears’.”

Information I might add, that is portable and readily exploitable by our political minders and the corporate grifters they so lovingly serve.

And with a national security state already monitoring huge volumes of data collected from the internet and other electronic communications’ platforms, The Guardian warns that Britain and other managed Western democracies are “sleepwalking into a surveillance society.”

Isn’t it time we woke up?