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?

Times‘ journalist Charlie Savage reported that Mueller and the Bureau’s chief counsel, Valerie Caproni, “were scheduled to meet with senior managers of several major companies, including Google and Facebook, according to several people familiar with the discussions.”

Facebook’s public policy manager Andrew Noyes confirmed that Mueller “is visiting Facebook during his trip to Silicon Valley;” Google, on the other hand, “declined to comment.”

Last month, Antifascist Calling reported that the U.S. secret state, in a reprise of the crypto wars of the 1990s, is seeking new legislation from Congress that would “fix” the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) and further curtail our civil- and privacy rights.

When the administration floated the proposal in September, The New York Times revealed that among the “fixes” sought by the FBI and other intrusive spy satrapies, were demands that communications’ providers build backdoors into their applications and networks that will give 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.”

And with a new “security-minded” Congress set to convene in January, chock-a-block with Tea Partying “conservatives” and ultra-nationalist know-nothings, the chances that the administration will get everything they want, and then some, is a sure bet.

“All Your Data Belongs to Us”

Caproni and her cohorts, always up to the challenge when it comes to grabbing our personal data, much like pigs snuffling about a dank forest in search of truffles or those rarer, more elusive delicacies christened “actionable intelligence” by our minders, avowed that said legislative tweaks are “reasonable” and “necessary” requirements that will “prevent the erosion” of the Bureau’s “investigative powers.”

Never mind that the FBI, as Wired Magazine revealed three years ago, “has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device.”

Security journalist Ryan Singel reported that the Bureau’s Digital Collection System Network or DCS-3000, a newer iteration of the Carnivore system of the 1990s, “connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies.”

Documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit revealed that the system was created to “intercept personal communications services delivered via emerging digital technologies used by wireless carriers.” A second system, Red Hook, collects “voice and data calls and then process and display the intercepted information.”

And never mind, as Wired also informed us, that the Bureau’s “computer and internet protocol address verifier,” or CIPAV, once called Magic Lantern, is a malicious piece of software, a virtual keystroke reader, that “gathers a wide range of information, including the computer’s IP address; MAC address; open ports; 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.”

Insidiously, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled at the time, since the Bureau’s malware doesn’t capture the content of communications, it can be conducted without a wiretap warrant, because, as our judicial guardians opined, users have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” when using the internet.

And with the secret state clamoring for the broadest possible access to our data, its become a lucrative business for greedy, I mean patriotic, ISPs who charge premium prices for services rendered in the endless “War on Terror.”

Security Is Patriotic, and Profitable Too!

Last week, The Register informed us that privacy and security researcher Christopher Soghoian revealed that although “Microsoft does not charge for government surveillance of its users,” Google, on the other hand “charges $25 per user.”

This information was revealed in a document obtained by the intrepid activist under the Freedom of Information Act.

Soghoian, whose Slight Paranoia web site has broken any number of stories on the collusive, and patently illegal, collaboration amongst grifting telecoms, niche spy firms and the secret state, revealed in March that the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) system has already been compromised by U.S. and other intelligence agencies. (SSL is the tiny lock that appears in your browser when you log-on to an allegedly “secure” web site for banking or other online transactions.)

In a paper co-authored with researcher Sid Stamm, Certified Lies: Detecting and Defeating Government Interception Attacks Against SSL, Soghoian revealed that a “new attack” against online privacy, “the compelled certificate creation attack, in which government agencies compel a certificate authority to issue false SSL certificates that are then used by intelligence agencies to covertly intercept and hijack individuals’ secure Web-based communications … is in active use.”

The latest disclosure by Soghoian uncovered evidence that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), shelled out some $6.7 million for pen registers and $6.5 million for wiretaps. While a wiretap provides law enforcers with “actual telephone or internet conversations,” a pen register “merely grabs numbers and addresses that show who’s doing the communicating,” The Register averred.

While Microsoft doesn’t charge the government for spying on their users, conveniently doing away with a messy paper trail in the process, Google receives $25 and Yahoo $29 from taxpayers for the privilege of being surveilled. Soghoian points out that “Google and Yahoo! may make more money from surveillance than they get directly from their email users. Basic Google and Yahoo! email accounts are free. Department of Justice documents show that telcos may charge as much as $2,000 for a pen register.”

That 2006 report from the DoJ’s Office of the Inspector General reported that to facilitate CALEA compliance, “Congress appropriated $500 million to reimburse carriers for the direct costs of modifying systems installed or deployed on or before January 1, 1995.”

Ten years on, and $450 million later, the Bureau estimates that “only 10 to 20 percent of the wireline switches, and approximately 50 percent of the pre-1995 and 90 percent of the post-1995 wireless switches, respectively, have CALEA software activated and thus are considered CALEA-compliant.”

Sounds like a serious crisis, right? Well, not exactly. OIG auditors averred that “we could not provide assurance on the accuracy of these estimates;” a subtle way of saying that the FBI could be ginning-up the numbers–and alleged “threats” to the heimat posed by an open internet and wireless networks.

As it turns out, this too is a proverbial red herring.

Whether or not the switches themselves are “CALEA-compliant” is a moot point since the vast majority of ISPs retain search data “in the cloud” indefinitely, just as wireless carriers cache cell phone geolocation and dialed-number data in huge data warehouses seemingly until the end of time, all readily accessible to law enforcement agencies–for a price.

Bringing the Hammer Down

The weakest link in the battle to preserve privacy rights, as Washington Technology revealed, are the corporate grifters feeding at the federal trough. What with the “cybersecurity” market the newest growth center for enterprising capitalist pirates, why bite the hand that feeds.

Couple this with the brisk private market in grabbing online users’ data and selling it to the highest bidder, as The Wall Street Journal uncovered in their excellent “What They Know” series on web- and cell phone tracking, it becomes clear that profit always trumps democratic control and privacy rights.

In light of these disturbing trends, CNET News reported that “Democratic politicians are proposing a novel approach to cybersecurity: fine technology companies $100,000 a day unless they comply with directives imposed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.”

Investigative journalist Declan McCullagh informs us that legislation introduced last week by the lame duck Congress “would allow DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano to levy those and other civil penalties on noncompliant companies that the government deems ‘critical,’ a broad term that could sweep in Web firms, broadband providers, and even software companies and search engines.”

Congressional grifter Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the outgoing chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, claimed that the bill “will make our nation more secure and better positions DHS–the ‘focal point for the security of cyberspace’–to fulfill its critical homeland security mission,” right alongside the National Security Agency as Antifascist Calling reported last month.

Jim Harper, a policy analyst with the right-wing Cato Institute told CNET that “Congress is stepping forward to regulate something it has no idea how to regulate. It’s a level of bureaucracy that actually adds nothing at all.”

While Harper’s assertion is accurate up to a point, he’s missing the boat insofar as demands for expanded–and unregulated–authority by our political minders to access anything and everything even remotely connected to “national security,” from email to web searches and from financial transactions to travel plans, is precisely the point of an electronic police state.

The bill, the Homeland Security Cyber and Physical Infrastructure Protection Act (HSCPIPA), has “other high-profile backers,” including Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) and Yvette Clarke (D-NY), the outgoing chair of the Cybersecurity Subcommittee.

Last week, Antifascist Calling reported that Clarke proclaimed that “the likelihood of a cyberattack that could bring down our [electrical] grid is … 100%. Our networks are already being penetrated as we stand here. We are already under attack.”

Clarke, who raised some $267,938 in campaign contributions during the current election cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org, including tens of thousands of dollars from defense and security grifters such as Honeywell International, Dell, AT&T, Raytheon, Verizon, Boeing and General Dynamics, not to mention that sterling citizen and beacon of financial transparency, Goldman Sachs.

With a straight face, she asserted: “We must stop asking ourselves ‘could this happen to us’ and move to a default posture that acknowledges this fact and instead asks ‘what can we do to protect ourselves’?”

With the introduction of HSCPIPA, we now have our answer!

Hardly slouches themselves when it comes to feeding at the corporate security trough, Harman raked in $654,787 from firms such as Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), while Thompson grabbed $584,938 from firms like SAIC, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, all of whom do yeoman’s work, as readers are well aware, to “keep us safe.”

While no Republicans have signed onto the bill, the incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, ultra-rightist crazy, Rep. Peter King (R-NY), pulled down some $664,657 from his loyal constituents: General Dynamics, Goldman Sachs, AT&T, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, OpenSecrets told us.

King, an apologist for Bush-Obama “War on Terror” policies, told Politico earlier this month that the practice of torturing terrorism suspects “saved many, many lives.” And, like his Democratic Party colleague Clarke, King avers that “cyber-spies from foreign countries have already penetrated our electrical system, mapped it and left behind software that caused disruptions and disabled our electrical system.”

While neither representative has provided a shred of evidence to back their wild claims, both scrupulously avoid addressing the question of who the most egregious planetary perpetrators of “cyber espionage” actually are.

A Seamless Global Surveillance Web

In a sign that the collapsing American Empire will make new wiretap rules a cost of doing business with the greatest country that ever was, foreign governments and firms that do business in the U.S. were warned that overseas internet service providers “would have to route communications through a server on United States soil where they could be wiretapped,” the Times reported.

That would certainly give our corporate grifters a leg up on the competition!

Considering that the National Security Agency’s ECHELON surveillance platform, accused by the European Parliament in their 2001 report of filching communications from EU businesses and passing them on to corporate “friends,” I’m sure they’ll just smile and suck it up.

According to the report, the NSA routinely used the program for corporate and industrial espionage and that information was turned over to American firms for their financial advantage.

For example, EU investigators discovered that ECHELON spies had “lifted…all the faxes and phone calls” between the European aircraft manufacturer Airbus and Saudi Arabian Airlines. The information gleaned was then used by two American companies, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, to outflank their Airbus rivals and win a $6 billion contract. Investigators also found that the French company Thomson-CSF lost a $1.3 billion satellite deal to Raytheon the same way.

Similarly, the new communications spying regime proposed by the FBI also has a long and sordid history. In January, investigative journalist Nicky Hager reported that under terms of New Zealand’s 2004 Telecommunications (Interception Capability) Act, “a basic interception warrant … allows them access to all your emails, internet browsing, online shopping or dating, calls, texts and location for mobile phones, and much more–all delivered almost instantaneously to the surveillance agencies.”

Sound familiar? It should, since the template for global driftnet spying originated deep in the bowels of the UKUSA Security Agreement and the National Security Agency, the dark Pentagon entity that created ECHELON.

Hager, the author of Secret Power, first blew the lid off ECHELON in a 1996 piece for Covert Action Quarterly. He revealed that the origins of New Zealand’s new system “can be traced back 10 years to when British researchers uncovered European Union police documents planning exactly the same sort of surveillance system in Europe.”

That secret plan Hager reports, “known as Enfopol 98 … aimed to create ‘a seamless web of telecommunications surveillance’ across Europe, and involved EU nations adopting ‘International User Requirements for Interception’, to standardise surveillance capabilities.”

Who, pray tell, was in the thick of this nasty business? According to Hager, European researchers discovered “that the moves followed ‘a five-year lobbying exercise by American agencies such as the FBI’.”

Hager tells us, that similar to moves inside the United States, the island nation’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) forced through legislation that empowered spooks “to catch … communications, including people using overseas-based email or other services, all the local communications networks are wired up as well, to monitor messages en route overseas.”

The origin of these intrusive measures, Hager reports, are the series of conferences, first hosted by the FBI-run International Law Enforcement Telecommunications Seminar (ILETS) beginning in the mid-1990s.

According to the document posted by the secrecy-shredding web site Cryptome, international snoops averred that “Law enforcement agencies require access to all interception subjects operating temporarily or permanently within a telecommunications system,” and that “Law enforcement agencies require a real-time, full-time monitoring capability for the interception of telecommunications. Call associated data should also be provided in real-time.”

Fast forward a decade and we learn, Hager writes, that alongside the United States “New Zealand is integrated into the ‘seamless web of telecommunications surveillance’ around the globe–a system which from the start had primarily been about US agencies wanting surveillance capabilities beyond their borders.”

Thus the secret state’s desire, as The New York Times reported, for legislative authority demanding that foreign citizens and firms route their overseas communications through U.S. servers “where they could be wiretapped.”

And with the latest push for “total information awareness”–data retention–looming ever-larger on the horizon, ISPs and wireless carriers “are forced by government to store all their customers’ emails, texts, internet use and phone data…making them available to police and spy agencies to trawl for people’s past correspondence and activities.”

“These developments” Hager writes, “have been introduced quietly. Neither the government nor the phone and internet companies are keen to advertise their Big Brotherish activities.”

Now the repressive American domestic intelligence agency that brought us COINTELPRO, targets the antiwar movement for “special handling” and gives “aid and comfort” to international terrorists like al-Qaeda triple agent, the false-flag specialist Ali Mohamed, is lobbying internet firms Facebook and Google in a bid to expand their onerous surveillance powers.

As the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out last week in their denunciation of the FBI’s sought-after legislation, “this proposal isn’t simply applying the same sort of wiretap system we have for phones to the Internet; it would require reconfiguring and changing the nature of the Internet.”

Laura W. Murphy, the Director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office said they “remain very concerned that this proposal is a clear recipe for abuse and will make it that much easier for the government to gain access to our most personal information.”

“Americans,” Murphy averred, “should not simply surrender their privacy and other fundamental values in the name of national security.”

And with a growing revolt over egregious sexual assaults and virtual strip searches by Transportation Security Agency goons threatening to break out amongst air travelers, including calls to resist being bombarded with ionizing radiation and humiliating TSA “pat-downs,” are we on the cusp of a more generalized rebellion against the capitalist surveillance state?

It’s all in the interest of “cybersecurity” of course, or so we’ve been told, since much of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) driving administration policy is a closely-held state secret.

Authority granted the über spy shop by the Bush and Obama administrations was handed to NSA by the still-classified National Security Presidential Directive 54, Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 (NSPD 54/HSPD 23) in 2008 by then-President Bush.

The Agreement follows closely on the heels of reports last week by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that DHS has been tracking people online and that the agency even established a “Social Networking Monitoring Center” to do so.

Documents obtained by EFF through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, revealed that the agency has been vacuuming-up “items of interest,” systematically monitoring “citizenship petitioners” and analyzing “online public communication.”

The documents suggest that “DHS collected a massive amount of data on individuals and organizations explicitly tied to a political event,” the Obama inauguration.

This inevitably raises a troubling question: what other “political events” are being monitored by government snoops? Following last month’s raids on antiwar activists by heavily-armed FBI SWAT teams, the answer is painfully obvious.

And with new reports, such as Monday’s revelations by The Wall Street Journal that Facebook “apps” have been “transmitting identifying information–in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names–to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies,” online privacy, if such a beast ever existed, is certainly now a thing of the past.

Project 12

With waning national interest in the “terrorism” product line, the “cybersecurity” roll-out (in stores in time for the holidays!) will drive hefty taxpayer investments–and boost the share price–for America’s largest defense and security firms; always a sure winner where it counts: on Wall Street.

The DHS-NSA Agreement came just days after publication of a leaked document obtained by the secrecy-shredding web site Public Intelligence (PI).

“In early 2008,” a PI analyst writes, “President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 (NSPD-54/HSPD-23) formalizing the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI). This initiative created a series of classified programs with a total budget of approximately $30 billion. Many of these programs remain secret and their activities are largely unknown to the public.”

Amongst the programs stood up by CNCI “is an effort to encourage information sharing between the public and private sector called ‘Project 12′.”

The whistleblowing web site “recently acquired the key report from the Project 12 meetings: Improving Protection of Privately Owned Critical Network Infrastructure Through Public-Private Partnerships. This 35-page, For Official Use Only report is a guide to creating public-private partnerships that facilitate the implementation of ‘actionable recommendations that [reflect] the reality of shared responsibility between the public and private sectors with respect to securing the nation’s cyber assets, networks, systems, and functions’.”

According to the document, under the rubric of the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP), Project 12 recommends that “critical infrastructure and key resources (CIKR) be brought into federal cybersecurity efforts through a variety of means.”

As Antifascist Calling readers are well aware, for decades the secret state has outsourced “inherently governmental” functions to private entities. This process has served as a means to both shield illegal activities and avoid public accountability under a cloak of “proprietary business information.”

PI’s secret spillers tell us that Project 12 stresses the “promotion of public-private partnerships that legalize and facilitate the flow of information between federal entities and private sector critical infrastructure, such as telecommunications and transportation.”

“The ultimate goal of these partnerships” the analyst writes, “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.”

What information is to be shared or what the implications are for civil liberties and privacy rights are not spelled out in the report.

As can readily be seen in the dubious relationships forged amongst retired senior military personnel and the defense industry, a top level Pentagon position is entrée to an exclusive club where salary levels and perks, increase the higher one has climbed the food chain.

Much the same can be said for high-level intelligence officials. Indeed, former officials turned corporate executives constellating the security industry are among the most vociferous advocates for strengthening collaboration between the state and private sectors. And the more powerful players on the field are represented by lobby shops such as the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) and Business Executives for National Security (BENS).

Last year I reported that BENS are key players driving the national “cybersecurity” panic. In that piece I wrote that the group is a “self-described ‘nationwide, non-partisan organization’ [that] claims the mantle of functioning as ‘the primary channel through which senior business executives can help advance the nation’s security’.” Project 12 is one area where BENS power-brokers have excelled in mutual backscratching.

We are informed that “the cost of scoping and building a tool that meets the requirements for cyber real-time situational awareness is likely to be significant and would be a high-risk investment of Federal funding.” In other words, while taxpayers foot the bill, private corporations will reap the benefits of long-term contracts and future high-tech development projects.

However, “before making that investment, the U.S. Government and its information sharing security partners must define a clear scope and mission for the development of common situational awareness and should evaluate a variety of interim or simplified solutions.”

Those “solutions” won’t come cheap.

Market Research Media informs us that “the U.S. government sector witnesses a blossoming of investments in cyber security technologies.”

We’re told that with a “cumulative market valued at $55 billion (2010-2015), the U.S. Federal Cybersecurity market will grow steadily–at about 6.2% CAGR [compound annual growth rate] over the next six years.”

Those numbers reflect the merger and acquisition mania amongst America’s largest defense and security firms who are gobbling up the competition at ever-accelerating rates.

Washington Technology reported earlier this month that “government contractors specializing in the most attractive niche segments of the market are experiencing much more rapid growth and, accordingly, enjoying much higher valuation multiples upon selling their businesses than their more generalist counterparts.”

“The larger companies in the federal market” the insider publication reports, “continue to seek to aggressively position themselves as leaders in the cyber market.”

Amongst the “solutions” floated by Project 12 is the notion that “real-time” awareness can be achieved when “government resources” are “co-located with private industry, either virtually or physically, to help monitor security,” PI’s analyst avers.

Therefore, “physical or virtual co-location would maximize the U.S. Government’s investment in network protection by facilitating collaborative analysis and coordinated protective and response measures and by creating a feedback loop to increase value for private-sector and government participants. Another key outcome would be stronger institutional and personal trust relationships among security practitioners across multiple communities.”

One firm, the spooky Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) “formally opened its seven-story cyber innovation center in Columbia, not far from the site of the new Cyber Command at Fort Meade,” NSA headquarters, The Washington Post reported.

Talk about “co-location”! It doesn’t get much chummier than this!

In order to valorize secret state investments in the private sector, the development of “Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs),” or fusion centers, are encouraged. Who would control the information flows and threat assessments are unknown.

However, as the American Civil Liberties Union documented in their report, What’s Wrong with Fusion Centers, private sector participation in the intelligence process “break[s] down the arm’s length relationship that protects the privacy of innocent Americans who are employees or customers of these companies” while “increasing the risk of a data breach.”

This is all the more troubling when the “public-private partnership” envisioned by Project 12 operate under classified annexes of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative.

NSA “Power-Grab”

Last year Rod Beckström, director of Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity Center (NCSC), resigned from his post, citing threats of a NSA “power grab.”

In a letter highly-critical of government efforts to “secure” the nation’s critical infrastructure, Beckström said that NSA “effectively controls DHS cyber efforts through detailees [and] technology insertions.”

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

The administration claimed last week that the Agreement will “increase interdepartmental collaboration in strategic planning for the Nation’s cybersecurity, mutual support for cybersecurity capabilities development, and synchronization of current operational cybersecurity mission activities,” and that DHS and NSA will embed personnel in each agency.

We’re informed that the Agreement’s implementation “will focus national cybersecurity efforts, increasing the overalI 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.”

Accordingly, the “Agreement is authorized under the provisions of the Homeland Security Act (2002); the Economy Act; U.S. Code Title 10; Executive Order 12333; National Security Directive 42; Homeland Security Presidential Directive-5; Homeland Security Presidential Directive-7; and National Security Presidential Directive­ 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive-23.”

What these “authorizations” imply for civil liberties and privacy rights are not stated. Indeed, like NSPD 54/HSPD 23, portions of National Security Directive 42, HSPD 5, and HSPD 7 are also classified.

And, as described above, top secret annexes of NSPD 54/HSPD 23 enabling the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative means that the American people have no way of knowing what these programs entail, who decides what is considered “actionable intelligence,” or where–and for what purpose–private communications land after becoming part of the “critical infrastructure and key resources” landscape.

We’re told that the purpose of the Agreement “is to set forth terms by which DHS and DoD will provide personnel, equipment, and facilities in order to increase interdepartmental collaboration in strategic planning for the Nation’s cybersecurity, mutual support for cybersecurity capabilities development, and synchronization of current operational cybersecurity mission activities.”

The text specifies that the Agreement will “focus national cybersecurity efforts” and provide “integral protection for privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.”

However, as the premier U.S. eavesdropping organization whose “national security mission” is responsible for setting data encryption standards, NSA was ultimately successful in weakening those standards in the interest of facilitating domestic spying.

Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2008 “the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records.”

Investigative journalist Siobhan Gorman informed us that the “NSA enterprise involves a cluster of powerful intelligence-gathering programs” that include “a Federal Bureau of Investigation program to track telecommunications data once known as Carnivore, now called the Digital Collection System, and a U.S. arrangement with the world’s main international banking clearinghouse to track money movements.”

“The effort” the Journal revealed, “also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called ‘black programs’ whose existence is undisclosed,” and include programs that have “been given greater reach” since the 9/11 provocation.

The civilian DHS Cybersecurity Coordinator will take a backseat to the Pentagon since the office “will be located at the National Security Agency (NSA)” and “will also act as the DHS Senior Cybersecurity Representative to U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM).”

Personnel will be assigned by DHS “to work at NSA as part of a Joint Coordination Element (JCE) performing the functions of joint operational planning, coordination, synchronization, requirement translation, and other DHS mission support for homeland security for cybersecurity,” and will “have current security clearances (TS/SCI) upon assignment to NSA, including training on the appropriate handling and dissemination of classified and sensitive information in accordance with DoD, Intelligence Community and NSA regulations.”

TS/SCI (Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information) clearances mean that while civilian DHS employees may have access to NSA and Pentagon “black” surveillance programs, they will be restricted from reporting up their chain of command, or to congressional investigators, once they have been “read” into them. This makes a mockery of assertions that the Agreement does “not alter … command relationships.” The mere fact that DHS personnel will have TS/SCI clearances mean just the opposite.

DHS will “provide appropriate access, administrative support, and space for an NSA Cryptologic Services Group (CSO) and a USCYBERCOM Cyber Support Element (CSE) collocated with the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC), at DHS, and integration into DHS’s cybersecurity operational activities.”

In other words, the civilian, though sprawling DHS bureaucracy will play host for NSA and CYBERCOM personnel answering to the Pentagon, and subject to little or no oversight from congressional committees already asleep at the switch, “to permit both CSG and CSE entities the capability to carry out their respective roles and responsibilities.”

Despite boilerplate that “integral protection for privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties” will be guaranteed by the Agreement, there is no hiding the fact that a NSA power-grab has been successfully executed.

The Agreement further specifies that DHS and NSA will engage “in joint operational planning and mission coordination” and that DHS, DoD, NSA and CYBERCOM “maintain cognizance” of “cybersecurity activities, to assist in deconfliction and promote synchronization of those activities.”

Following Project 12 revelations, new secret state relationships will assist “in coordinating DoD and DHS efforts to improve cybersecurity threat information sharing between the public and private sectors to aid in preventing, detecting, mitigating, and/or recovering from the effects of an attack, interference, compromise, or incapacitation related to homeland security and national security activities in cyberspace.”

However, we do not learn whether “information sharing” includes public access, or even knowledge of, TS/SCI “black programs” which already aim powerful NSA assets at the American people. In fact, the Agreement seems to work against such disclosures.

This is hardly a level playing field since NSA might “receive and coordinate DHS information requests,” NSA controls the information flows “as appropriate and consistent with applicable law and NSA mission requirements and authorities, in operational planning and mission coordination.” The same strictures apply when it comes to information sharing by U.S. Cyber Command.

As Rod Beckström pointed out in his resignation letter, NSA “effectively controls DHS cyber efforts through detailees [and] technology insertions.”

Despite the Agreement’s garbled bureaucratese, we can be sure of one thing: the drift towards militarizing control over Americans’ private communications will continue.

As they walked along the busy, yellow-lit tiers of offices, Anderton said: “You’re acquainted with the theory of precrime, of course. I presume we can take that for granted.

– Philip K. Dick, The Minority Report

What do Google, the CIA and a host of so-called “predictive behavior” start-ups have in common?

They’re interested in you, or more specifically, whether your online interests–from Facebook to Twitter posts, and from Flickr photos to YouTube and blog entries–can be exploited by powerful computer algorithms and subsequently transformed into “actionable intelligence.”

And whethttp://dissidentvoice.org/wp-admin/edit.phpher the knowledge gleaned from an IP address is geared towards selling useless junk or entering a name into a law enforcement database matters not a whit. It’s all “just data” and “buzz” goes the mantra, along what little is left of our privacy and our rights.

Increasingly, secret state agencies ranging from the CIA to the National Security Agency are pouring millions of dollars into data-mining firms which claim they have a handle on who you are or what you might do in the future.

And to top it off, the latest trend in weeding-out dissenters and nonconformists from the social landscape will soon be invading a workplace near you; in fact, it already has.

Welcome to the sinister world of “Precrime” where capitalist grifters, drug- and torture-tainted spy shops are all laboring mightily to stamp out every last vestige of free thought here in the heimat.

The CIA Enters the Frame

In July, security journalist Noah Shachtman revealed in Wired that “the investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time–and says it uses that information to predict the future.”

Shachtman reported that the CIA’s semi-private investment company, In-Q-Tel, and Google Ventures, the search giant’s business division had partnered-up with a dodgy outfit called Recorded Future pouring, according to some estimates, $20 million dollars into the fledgling firm.

A blurb on In-Q-Tel’s web site informs us that “Recorded Future extracts time and event information from the web. The company offers users new ways to analyze the past, present, and the predicted future.”

Who those ubiquitous though nameless “users” are or what they might do with that information once they “extract” it from the web is left unsaid. However, judging from the interest that a CIA-connected entity has expressed in funding the company, privacy will not figure prominently in the “new ways” such tools will be used.

Wired reported that the company, founded by former Swedish Army Ranger Christopher Ahlberg, “scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents–both present and still-to-come.”

“The cool thing is” Ahlberg said, “you can actually predict the curve, in many cases.”

And as for the search giant’s interest in “predicting the future” for the secret state, it wouldn’t be the first time that Google Ventures sold equipment and expertise to America’s shadow warriors.

While the firm may pride itself on the corporate slogan, “don’t be evil,” data is a valuable commodity. And where’s there value, there’s money to be made. Whether it comes in the form of “increasing share value” through the sale of private information to marketeers or state intelligence agencies eager to increase “situational awareness” of the “battlespace” is a matter of complete indifference to corporate bean counters.

After all, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt told CNBC last year, “if you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

But that standard, “only bad people have something to hide,” is infinitely mutable and can be stretched–or manipulated as has so often been the case in the United States–to encompass everything from “Papist” conspiracies, “illegal” migrants, homosexuality, communism, drug use, or America’s latest bête noire: the “Muslim threat.”

Schmidt went on to say that “the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And we’re all subject, in the U.S., to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.”

In February, The Washington Post reported that “the world’s largest Internet search company and the world’s most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity.”

“The alliance” between Google and NSA “is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information without violating Google’s policies or laws that protect the privacy of Americans’ online communications,” the Post alleged.

An anonymous source told the Post that “the deal does not mean the NSA will be viewing users’ searches or e-mail accounts or that Google will be sharing proprietary data.”

Really?

Last spring it was revealed that Google’s Street View cars had been secretly vacuuming up terabytes of private wi-fi data for more than three years across Europe and the United States.

The Sunday Times reported that the firm had “been scooping up snippets of people’s online activities broadcast over unprotected home and business wi-fi networks.”

In July, The Washington Post’s “Top Secret America” investigation disclosed that Google supplies mapping and search products to the U.S. secret state and that their employees, outsourced intelligence contractors for the Defense Department, may have filched their customers’ wi-fi data as part of an NSA surveillance project.

And what about email and web searches? Last year, The New York Times revealed that NSA intercepts of “private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged.” In fact, a former NSA analyst described how he was trained-up fierce in 2005 “for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants.”

That program, code-named PINWALE, and the NSA’s meta-data-mining spy op STELLAR WIND, continue under Obama. Indeed, The Atlantic told us at the time that PINWALE “is actually an unclassified proprietary term used to refer to advanced data-mining software that the government uses.”

But the seamless relationships amongst communications’ giants such as Google and the secret state doesn’t stop there.

Even before Google sought an assist from the National Security Agency to secure its networks after an alleged breech by China last year, in 2004 the firm had acquired Keyhole, Inc., an In-Q-Tel funded start-up that developed 3-D-spy-in-the-sky images; Keyhole became the backbone for what later evolved into Google Earth.

At the time of their initial investment, In-Q-Tel said that Keyhole’s “strategic relationship … means that the Intelligence Community can now benefit from the massive scalability and high performance of the Keyhole enterprise solution.”

In-Q-Tel’s then-CEO, Gilman Louie, said that spy shop venture capitalists invested in the firm “because it offers government and commercial users a new capability to radically enhance critical decision making. Through its ability to stream very large geospatial datasets over the Internet and private networks, Keyhole has created an entirely new way to interact with earth imagery and feature data.”

Or, as seen on a daily basis in the AfPak “theatre” deliver exciting new ways to kill people. Now that’s innovation!

That was then, now the search giant and the CIA’s investment arm are banking on products that will take privacy intrusions to a whole new level.

A promotional offering by the up-and-comers in the predictive behavior marketplace, Recorded Future–A White Paper on Temporal Analytics asserts that “unlike traditional search engines which focus on text retrieval and leaves the analysis to the user, we strive to provide tools which assist in identifying and understanding historical developments, and which can also help formulate hypotheses about and give clues to likely future events. We have decided on the term ‘temporal analytics’ to describe the time oriented analysis tasks supported by our systems.”

Big in the hyperbole department, Recorded Future claims to have developed an “analytics engine, which goes beyond search, explicit link analysis and adds implicit link analysis, by looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events. We do this by separating the documents and their content from what they talk about.”

According to the would-be Big Brother enablers, “Recorded Future also analyzes the ‘time and space dimension’ of documents–references to when and where an event has taken place, or even when and where it will take place–since many documents actually refer to events expected to take place in the future.”

Adding to the unadulterated creep factor, the technocratic grifters aver they’re “adding more components, e.g. sentiment analyses, which determine what attitude an author has towards his/her topic, and how strong that attitude is–the affective state of the author.”

Strongly oppose America’s imperial project to steal other people’s resources in Afghanistan and Iraq, or, crime of crimes, have the temerity to write or organize against it? Step right this way, Recorded Future has their eye on you and will sell that information to the highest bidder!

After all, as Mike Van Winkle, a California Anti-Terrorism Information Center shill infamously told the Oakland Tribune back in 2003 after Oakland cops wounded scores of peacenik longshoremen at an antiwar rally at the port: “You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that (protest). You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act.”

And with Recorded Future’s “sentiment analyses” such “links” will be even easier to fabricate.

Never mind that the prestigious National Academy of Science’s National Research Council issued a scathing 2008 report, Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Assessment, that debunked the utility of data-ming and link analysis as effective counterterrorism tools.

“Far more problematic,” the NRC informs us, “are automated data-mining techniques that search databases for unusual patterns of activity not already known to be associated with terrorists.” Since “so little is known about what patterns indicate terrorist activity” the report avers, dodgy techniques such as link analysis “are likely to generate huge numbers of false leads.”

As for Recorded Future’s over-hyped “sentiment analyses,” the NRC debunked, one might even say preemptively, the dodgy claims of our would-be precrime mavens. “The committee also examined behavioral surveillance techniques, which try to identify terrorists by observing behavior or measuring physiological states.”

Their conclusion? “There is no scientific consensus on whether these techniques are ready for use at all in counterterrorism.” Damningly, the NRC asserted that such techniques “have enormous potential for privacy violations because they will inevitably force targeted individuals to explain and justify their mental and emotional states.”

Not that such inconvenient facts matter to Recorded Future or their paymasters in the so-called intelligence community who after all, are in the driver’s seat when the firm’s knowledge products “make predictions about the future.”

After all, as Ahlberg and his merry band of privacy invaders inform us: “Our mission is not to help our customers find documents, but to enable them to understand what is happening in the world.”

The better to get a leg up on the competition or know who to target.

The “Real You”

Not to be outdone by black world spy agencies, their outsourced corporate partners or the futurist gurus who do their bidding, the high-tech publication Datamation, told us last month that the precrime concept “is coming very soon to the world of Human Resources (HR) and employee management.”

Reporter Mike Elgan revealed that a “Santa Barbara, Calif., startup called Social Intelligence data-mines the social networks to help companies decide if they really want to hire you.”

Elgan averred that while background checks have historically searched for evidence of criminal behavior on the part of prospective employees, “Social Intelligence is the first company that I’m aware of that systematically trolls social networks for evidence of bad character.”

Similar to Recorded Future and dozens of other “predictive behavior” companies such as Attensity and Visible Technologies, Social Intelligence deploys “automation software that slogs through Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs, and ‘thousands of other sources,’ the company develops a report on the ‘real you’–not the carefully crafted you in your resume.”

According to Datamation, “the company also offers a separate Social Intelligence Monitoring service to watch the personal activity of existing employees on an ongoing basis.” Such intrusive monitoring transforms the “workplace” into a 24/7 Orwellian panopticon from which there is no hope of escape.

The service is sold as an exemplary means to “enforce company social media policies.” However, since “criteria are company-defined, it’s not clear whether it’s possible to monitor personal activity.” Fear not, it is.

Social Intelligence, according to Elgan, “provides reporting that deemphasizes specific actions and emphasizes character. It’s less about ‘what did the employee do’ and more about ‘what kind of person is this employee?’”

In other words, it’s all about the future; specifically, the grim world order that fear-mongering corporations are rapidly bringing to fruition.

Datamation reports that “following the current trend lines,” rooted in the flawed logic of information derived from data-mining and link analysis, “social networking spiders and predictive analytics engines will be working night and day scanning the Internet and using that data to predict what every employee is likely to do in the future. This capability will simply be baked right in to HR software suites.”

As with other aspects of daily life in post-constitutional America, executive decisions, ranging from whether or not to hire or fire someone, cast them into a lawless gulag without trial, or even kill them solely on the say-so of our War-Criminal-in-Chief, are the new house rules.

Like our faux progressive president, some HR bureaucrat will act as judge, jury and executioner, making decisions that can–and have–wrecked lives.

Elgan tells us that unlike a criminal proceeding where you stand before the law accused of wrongdoing and get to face your accuser, “you can’t legally be thrown in jail for bad character, poor judgment, or expectations of what you might do in the future. You have to actually break the law, and they have to prove it.”

“Personnel actions aren’t anything like this.” You aren’t afforded the means to “face your accuser.” In fact, based on whether or not you sucked-up to the boss, pissed-off some corporate toady, or moved into the “suspect” category based on an algorithm, you don’t have to actually violate comapny rules in order to be fired “and they don’t have to prove it.”

Datamation tells us, “if the social network scanning, predictive analytics software of the future decides that you are going to do something in future that’s inconsistent with the company’s interests, you’re fired.”

And, Elgan avers, now that “the tools are becoming monstrously sophisticated, efficient, powerful, far-reaching and invasive,” the precrime “concept is coming to HR.”

Big Brother is only a “ping” or mouse click away…

Touted as a simple technical “fix” that would “modernize” existing legislation for wiretaps, government security officials will demand that telecommunication firms and internet service providers provide law enforcement with backdoors that would enable them to bypass built-in encryption and security features of electronic communications.

With the Obama administration rivaling, even surpassing antidemocratic moves by the Bush regime to monitor and surveil the private communications of the American people, The New York Times reported last week that “federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet.”

Following closely on the heels of FBI raids on antiwar and international solidarity activists, the “change” administration now wants Congress to require all providers who enable communications “to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order.”

Times’ reporter Charlie Savage informs us that the administration will demand that software and communication providers build backdoors accessible to law enforcement and intelligence agencies, thus enabling 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.”

Calling new legislative strictures a “reasonable” and “necessary” tool for law enforcement that will “prevent the erosion of their investigative powers,” FBI mouthpiece, general counsel Valerie E. Caproni, told the Times, “We’re talking about lawfully authorized intercepts.”

Really?

Caproni’s assertion that the Bureau and spy shops such as the National Security Agency are not interested in “expanding authority” but rather “preserving our ability to execute our existing authority in order to protect the public safety and national security,” is a thin tissue of lies lacking credibility.

In fact, the state’s “existing authority” to spy upon private communications under the USA Patriot Act and assorted National Security- and Homeland Security Presidential Directives (NSPD/HSPD) in areas as such as “continuity of government” (NSPD 51/HSPD 20), “cybersecurity” (NSPD 54/HSPD 23) and “biometrics” (NSPD 59/HSPD 24), have led to the creation of overly broad and highly classified programs regarded as “state secrets” under Obama.

As I have written many times, most recently in August (see: “Obama Demands Access to Internet Records, in Secret, and Without Court Review,” Antifascist Calling, August 12, 2010), since his 2009 inauguration President Obama has done nothing to reverse this trend. Indeed, he has taken further steps through the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), a highly-sanitized version of NSPD 54/HSPD 23, to ensure that the “President’s Surveillance Program” (PSP) launched by Bush remains a permanent feature of daily life in the United States.

In a widely circulated report last year, the inspectors general from five federal agencies, including the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, noted that following advice from the Office of Legal Counsel under torture-enablers Jay Bybee and John C. Yoo, “the President authorized the NSA to undertake a number of new, highly classified intelligence activities” that went far beyond warrantless wiretapping in their scope, encompassing additional unspecified “activities” that have never been disclosed to the public.

What were once regarded by Democrats and their ever-shrinking base of acolytes, cheerleaders and toadies as unspeakable crimes when carried out by Republican knuckle-draggers, are now regarded as “forward thinking,” even “visionary” policies when floated by the faux “progressive” occupying the Oval Office.

And with “homegrown terrorism” and “cybersecurity” high priorities on the administration’s to-do list, White House changelings and their friends from the previous regime are pulling out all the stops.

Last week, speaking at a Washington, D.C. “Ideas Forum,” former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, currently a top executive with the spooky Booz Allen Hamilton private security corp, said that cybersecurity is the “wolf at the door” and that a “large-scale” cyberattack “could impact the global economy ‘an order of magnitude surpassing’ the attacks of September 11,” The Atlantic reported.

McConnell and former Bushist Homeland Security Adviser, Frances Fragos Townsend, the current chairwoman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), a D.C. lobby shop catering to security and intelligence grifters, urged the Obama administration to transform “how it defends against cyberattacks,” claiming that the secret state “lack[s] the organizational ability and authorization to prevent and respond to cybersecurity threats.”

Their prescription? Let NSA pit bulls off the leash, of course! Townsend said that “the real capability in this government is in the National Security Agency.”

True enough as far as it goes, however Townsend mendaciously asserted that NSA is legally forbidden from domestic spying, not that it prevented her former boss from standing up NSA’s internal surveillance apparatus through programs such as STELLAR WIND and PINWALE, the agency’s domestic email interception program.

Both Townsend and McConnell claim that the “laws haven’t kept up” with the alleged threat posed by a cyberattack and urged the administration to give the NSA even more authority to operate domestically.

No mention was made by liberal interventionist-friendly Atlantic reporter Max Fisher that McConnell’s firm has reaped multiyear contracts worth billions for their classified cybersecurity work for the secret state.

Hardly slouches themselves when it comes to electronic eavesdropping, the FBI is seeking to expand their already-formidable capabilities through their “Going Dark” program.

As Antifascist Calling previously reported (see: “FBI ‘Going Dark.’ Budget Request for High-Tech Surveillance Capabilities Soar,” May 17, 2009), the Bureau sought–and received–$233.9 billion in FY 2010 for the development of a new advanced electronic surveillance program.

ABC News first disclosed the program last year, and reported that “the term ‘Going Dark’ does not refer to a specific capability, but is a program name for the part of the FBI, Operational Technology Division’s (OTD) lawful interception program which is shared with other law enforcement agencies.”

According to ABC, “the term applies to the research and development of new tools, technical support and training initiatives.”

The New York Times reported last week that OTD spent $9.75 million last year “helping communications companies” develop “interception capabilities” for the Bureau.

Administration Hypocrisy

The administration’s push for more control is all the more ironic considering that the U.S. State Department according to Reuters, said in August it was “disappointed” that “the United Arab Emirates planned to cut off key BlackBerry services, noting the Gulf nation was setting a dangerous precedent in limiting freedom of information.”

As The Washington Post told us at the time, UAE securocrats claimed that “it will block key features on BlackBerry smartphones because the devices operate beyond the government’s ability to monitor.”

Citing–what else!–”national security concerns,” the measure “could” be motivated “in part” by state fears that “the messaging system might be exploited by”–wait!–”terrorists or other criminals who cannot be monitored by local authorities.”

That regional beacon of democracy, Saudi Arabia, said it would follow suit. In response, State Department shill P.J. Crowley said that the United States is “committed to promoting the free flow of information. We think it’s integral to an innovative economy.”

With a straight face, Crowley told a State Department news briefing, “It’s about what we think is an important element of democracy, human rights and freedom of information and the flow of information in the 21st century.”

“We think it sets a dangerous precedent,” he said. “You should be opening up societies to these new technologies that have the opportunity to empower people rather than looking to see how you can restrict certain technologies.”

Pointing out the Obama regime’s hypocrisy, Yousef Otaiba, the UAE Ambassador to the United States counteracted and said it was Crowley’s comments that were “disappointing” and that they “contradict the U.S. government’s own approach to telecommunication regulation.”

“Importantly,” Otaiba said, “the UAE requires the same compliance as the U.S. for the very same reasons: to protect national security and to assist in law enforcement.”

The BBC informed us in July that Emirate officials are concerned that the encrypted software and networks used by Research in Motion, BlackBerry’s parent company, “make it difficult for governments to monitor communications.”

Although this is precisely the autocratic mindset that rules the roost here in the heimat, corporate media report identical moves by the U.S. government with nary a critical word, failing to point out the disconnect between administration rhetoric and ubiquitous “facts on the ground.”

Among the proposals being considered by the administration, the Times reports that officials “are coalescing” around several “likely requirements” that include the following: “Communications services that encrypt messages must have a way to unscramble them.” U.S. law will apply to overseas businesses, not just domestic firms. The Times avers that “Foreign-based providers that do business inside the United States must install a domestic office capable of performing intercepts.” And finally, a kiss of death for privacy rights, “Developers of software that enables peer-to-peer communication must redesign their service to allow interception.”

Firms that fail to comply “would face fines or some other penalty.” The Times neglected to tell us however, what penalties await software developers or individual users who have the temerity to design–or avail themselves–of systems that bypass backdoors mandated by the secret state.

An Electronic Police State

Far from being an “enhanced security feature,” the administration’s proposal for peer-to-peer snooping would be a boon to hackers, thieves and other miscreants who routinely breech and exploit whatever “firewall” grifting firms and their political allies devise to “keep us safe.”

In fact, as computer security and privacy researchers Christopher Soghoian and Sid Stamm revealed in their paper, Certified Lies: Detecting and Defeating Government Interception Attacks Against SSL, secret state agencies have already compromised the Secure Socket Layer certification process (SSL, the tiny lock that appears during supposedly “secure,” encrypted online transactions), and do so routinely.

In March, Soghoian and Stamm introduced the public to “a new attack, the compelled certificate creation attack, in which government agencies compel a certificate authority to issue false SSL certificates that are then used by intelligence agencies to covertly intercept and hijack individuals’ secure Web-based communications.”

The intrepid researchers provided “alarming evidence” suggesting “this attack is in active use,” and that a niche security firm, Packet Forensics, is already marketing “extremely small, covert surveillance devices for networks” to government agencies.

It now appears that the Obama administration will soon be seeking legislative authority from Congress that legalizes surreptitious snooping by security officials and a coterie of outsourced contractors who grow fat subverting our privacy rights.

Commenting on the administration’s proposal in a recent post, Soghoian points out that when wiretap reporting requirements were amended in 2000, similar arguments were made that strong encryption would “harm national security.”

Congress inserted language that compelled secret state agencies like the FBI to “include statistics on the number of intercept orders in which encryption was encountered and whether such encryption prevented law enforcement from obtaining the plain text of communications intercepted pursuant to such order.”

It didn’t.

However in a replay of the crypto wars of the 1990s, FBI general counsel Caproni brushed off breech of privacy concerns and told the Times that service providers “can promise strong encryption. They just need to figure out how they can provide us plain text.”

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) argued a decade ago that “compiling the statistics would be a ‘far more reliable basis than anecdotal evidence on which to assess law enforcement needs and make sensible policy in this area’.”

“Since then,” Soghoian writes, “the Administrative Office of the US Courts has compiled an annual wiretap report, which reveals that encryption is simply not frequently encountered during wiretaps, and when it is, it never stops the government from collecting the evidence they need.”

In light of statistical evidence provided by the government itself, demands that communications’ providers cough-up their customers’ private data to unaccountable government snoops is quintessentially a political decision, and not, as mendaciously claimed, a “law enforcement” let alone a “national security” problem.

In fact, while police and intelligence agencies “look through thousands of individuals’ email communications, search engine requests or private, online photo albums each year,” they don’t “obtain wiretap orders to intercept that data in real time. Instead,” Soghoian tells us “[they] simply wait a few minutes, and then obtain what they want after the fact as a stored communication under 18 USC 2703,” the Stored Communications Act.

“Unfortunately,” Soghoian avers, “while we have a pretty good idea about how many wiretaps law enforcement agencies obtain each year, we have no idea how many times they go to email, search engine and cloud computing providers to compel them to disclose their customers’ communications and other private data.”

Therefore, “we find ourselves in the same situation as 12 years ago, where law enforcement officials were making anecdotal claims for which no evidence existed to prove, or disprove them.”

As security expert Bruce Schneier pointed out, while the “proposal may seem extreme … it’s not unique.” Averring that sinister snooping laws were “formerly reserved for totalitarian countries,” Schneier writes “this wholesale surveillance of citizens has moved into the democratic world as well.”

Citing moves by Sweden, Canada and Britain to hand “their police new powers of internet surveillance” compelling “communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell,” securocrats, as is their wont, are lusting after the capacity to transform all aspects of daily life into “actionable intelligence.”

On top of this, as Schneier and others such as Cryptohippie and Quintessenz have revealed, so-called democratic states, not just usual suspects like China (whose “Golden Shield” was designed by Western firms, after all) “are passing data retention laws, forcing companies to retain customer data in case they might need to be investigated later.”

In their 2010 report, The Electronic Police State, Cryptohippie informed us that data retention “is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial, and that “it is gathered universally (‘preventively’) and only later organized for use in prosecutions.”

How does such a system work? What are the essential characteristics that differentiate an Electronic Police State from previous forms of oppressive governance? Cryptohippie avers:

“In an Electronic Police State, 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.”

As the World Socialist Web Site points out, the proposal by the Obama regime “goes far beyond anything envisioned by the Bush administration.”

While the White House claims that new legislation is needed to combat “crime” and “terrorism,” socialist critic Patrick Martin writes that “the Obama administration has defined ‘terrorism’ so widely that the term now covers a vast array of constitutionally protected forms of political opposition to the policies of the US government, including speaking, writing, political demonstrations, even the filing of legal briefs.”

Just ask activists raided last month by FBI bully-boys in Minneapolis and Chicago!

The American Civil Liberties Union denounced the proposal and called on Congress to reject calls “to make the Internet wiretap ready.”

ACLU Legislative Counsel Christopher Calabrese derided the move, saying: “Under the guise of a technical fix, the government looks to be taking one more step toward conducting easy dragnet collection of Americans’ most private communications.”

Clamping Down on the Freedom of Information Act

Entreaties by civil libertarians however, are likely to fall on deaf ears in the Democratic-controlled Congress.

In a clear sign that the Obama administration is moving to clamp down further on the free flow of information even as they seek access to all of ours’, Politico reported that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) “appears to be on the verge of prevailing in an attempt to put some information it receives from other intelligence agencies beyond the reach of Freedom of Information Act requests.”

National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter pushed through an onerous section to Intelligence Authorization Act legislation that exempts so-called “operational files” from four secret state agencies–the CIA, NSA, National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency–from FOIA requests.

Apparently the American people, long the targets of illegal driftnet spying by the intelligence and security apparatus, will soon find another door slammed shut, even as the administration claims sweeping new powers, including the right to assassinate American citizens deemed “terrorists,” in secret and without due process, anywhere on the planet.

And they call this transparency…

In the interest of “keeping us safe,” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unveiled a spiffy new surveillance cam “that puts others to shame,” CNET breezily reported last week.

The Imaging System for Immersive Surveillance (ISIS) is a hemispherical group of cameras roughly the size of a basketball that, if one believes giddy accolades by enthusiasts touting the system, will lovingly wrap us in a “high-res video quilt,” a DHS press release gushes.

The ultra-wide camera undergoing field-tests since December at Boston’s Logan International Airport, streams distortion free, real-time stitched video and has a resolution capacity of approximately 100 megapixels which our guardians say is “as detailed as 50 full-HDTV movies playing at once, with optical detail to spare. You can zoom in close…and closer…without losing clarity.”

But with an abundance of acronyms, and a decided lack of imagination from a gaggle of secret state agencies, one shouldn’t confuse Homeland Security’s ISIS with one incubating beneath the dark wings of the Pentagon’s “blue sky” office, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

That program, Integrated Sensor Is Structure, also known as ISIS, is being shepherded along by Lockheed Martin, America’s No. 1 defense corp. DARPA’s ISIS promises to build an autonomous airship powered by solar fuel cells for American warfighters, one capable of staying aloft for a decade above 70,000 feet, well out of the way of an adversary’s surface to air missiles.

According to the description on the Strategic Technology Office’s web site, their ISIS “will develop the technologies that enable extremely large lightweight phased-array radar antennas to be integrated into an airship platform.” This would enable ground commanders “to track the most advanced cruise missiles at 600 km and dismounted enemy combatants at 300 km.”

Pentagon gurus and the corporations they so lovingly serve, recently awarded Lockheed Martin and subcontracting Raytheon Corporation, a $400 million dollar contract for Phase III work on the radar system, Defense Systems reported in April. DARPAcrats claim the high-flying airship will provide “theatre-wide, persistent area surveillance and tracking capabilities” to America’s Borg Army of resource grabbers.

And with The New York Times reporting June 14 that the “United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself,” it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that sometime soon the corrupt Karzai regime, the Taliban, their ISI paymasters and their American overlords will cozy up and play “let’s make a deal”!

Nor should either project be confused with the failed “secure border” scheme known as the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System or ISIS (there it is again!) or its successor, America’s Shield Initiative. No, that corporatist boondoggle which cost taxpayers some $439 million between 1997 and 2006, eventually morphed into the equally useless Secure Border Initiative or SBInet.

Fully in keeping with the tenor of the times, to wit, that government should get “out of the way” and let business work its magic, DHS’s own Inspector General described the troubled history of the project in critical testimony to Congress. The IG criticized lax practices that led the Department to allow the contractors, led by Boeing Corporation, decide what the system would look like and what technology would be used to build it.

Needless to say, that didn’t work out well! Just this week Washington Technology reported that Boeing “could see its lucrative, but troubled Secure Border Initiative contract scaled back as Homeland Security Department officials consider stopping future construction of the ‘virtual-fence’ security systems along the U.S.-Mexico border.”

Like predecessor ISIS, the $800 million program has suffered from delays, technical glitches and “changes” in direction. In March, Home Sec Secretary Janet Napolitano announced the program was “being re-evaluated as part of an ongoing reassessment.” No matter, with cash in hand Boeing, and a string of disappointed subcontractors, can afford to “move on.”

But I digress…

No dear readers, the Heimat Security project I’m describing is close to earth, perhaps only a few feet above the congested street where you trod, oblivious to the legion of minders busily stripping you of your rights; above all, the right to be left alone. Ah, but there’s the rub. Why should any of Oceania’s proud citizens have anything to fear? After all, only evil-doers have something to hide, don’t they? Why wouldn’t you leap with joy at the prospect of being enwrapped in a vid-quilt cocoon lovingly designed by America’s finest minds?

“Traditional surveillance cameras can be of great assistance to law enforcement officers for a range of scenarios,” DHS flacks croon. “Canvassing a crowd for criminal activity during a Fourth of July celebration, searching for who left a suitcase bomb beneath a bench, or trying to pick out a terrorist who has fled the scene and blended into a teeming throng in the subway.”

Who’d oppose that?

But why stop there? Surely there are other applications for the privacy-killing gizmo. Where did that political malcontent go after handing out “subversive” leaflets at the mall? And that flash mob of miscreants protesting an oil firm’s board meeting or, heavens forbid!, bum-rushing grifting merchants of death at an industry trade show; where’d they scram to? Multitasking is the name of the game and DHS has got it covered!

A joint project of the Science and Technology Directorate’s Infrastructure and Geophysical Division, MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, ISIS was built with off-the-shelf cameras, image processors and readily-available commercial software. No need to reinvent the wheel here in these tough economic times!

The innocent-looking array points in all directions and captured images are “stitched” together, creating a creepy “god’s eye” view that allow CCTV operators to easily track people back and forth through the HD “quilt” files without losing a single suspect, I mean American, as they pass from one field to the next.

“Other neat tricks” enthusiasts effervesce, “will be provided by a suite of software applications called video analytics. One app can define a sacrosanct ‘exclusion zone,’ for which ISIS provides an alert the moment it’s breached. Another lets the operator pick a target–a person, a package, or a pickup truck–and the detailed viewing window will tag it and follow it, automatically panning and tilting as needed.” (emphasis in original)

We’re told that “video analytics at high resolution across a 360-degree field of view, coupled with the ability to follow objects against a cluttered background, will provide”–wait!–”enhanced situational awareness as an incident unfolds.”

“We’ve seen that terrorists are determined to do us harm,” Dr. John Fortune, the I&G’s head honcho told contractors lining up to get a slice of the vid-quilt pie. “ISIS is a great example of one way we can improve our security by leveraging our strengths.”

And should things, pardon the pun, pan out, “ISIS creators already have their eyes on a new and improved second generation model, complete with custom sensors and video boards, longer range cameras, higher resolution, a more efficient video format.”

“Eventually,” we’re told, “the Department plans to develop a version of ISIS that will use infrared cameras to detect events that occur at night.”

South of the Border … Bring On the Drones!

Meanwhile, as Homeland Security unveiled their chic new spy-cam and exiled SBINet to the Isle of Lost Corporatist Dreams, The Hill reported that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) began flying “Predator B aerial drones, which have proved successful fighting insurgents in Afghanistan, were deployed this week along the border between Texas and Mexico.”

CBP, a DHS satrapy plagued by endemic corruption engendered by deep state management of the multibillion dollar drug trade, was accused last week of murdering an unarmed 15-year-old who had the temerity to throw rocks at border agents from the Mexican side of the border.

Democracy Now! disclosed June 10, that U.S. authorities said that “Sergio Adrian Hernandez Güereca was part of a group of boys throwing rocks at Border Patrol agents who were trying to detain two people at the border crossing.”

While intrepid agents claimed they feared for their lives, “a cell-phone video obtained by the Spanish language network Univision shows otherwise,” Amy Goodman reports. “The grainy footage shows the Border Patrol agent detaining one man at gunpoint. While he has the man on the ground, he points his gun toward a second person on the Mexican side of the border. The video shows that person running away as the agent fires several shots. The video then shows a body next to a column under the bridge.”

In other words, there’s nothing to see here, move along!

This latest border killing follows closely on the heels of “change” President Obama’s pledge to station 1,200 National Guard troops along the border to stem the flow of economic migrants hammered by continued depredations resulting from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the highly-lucrative drugs trade.

According to Narco News, “a special operations task force under the command of the Pentagon is currently in place south of the border providing advice and training to the Mexican Army in gathering intelligence, infiltrating and, as needed, taking direct action against narco-trafficking organizations,” investigative journalist Bill Conroy reported June 12.

The deployment of deep cover Special Forces assets are part of the Obama regime’s Mérida Initiative, a “security arrangement” between the U.S. secret state and their Mexican and Central American counterparts.

The alleged aim of the initiative is to stamp out national security threats posed by drug traffickers, transnational criminal syndicates and money laundering by “dirty” banks. To aid the venture, Congress generously allocated some $1.6 billion for training, equipment and intelligence to regional security forces. Undoubtedly, such operations would be greatly enhanced by flying unmanned drones over suspected drug smuggling routes as an assist to our allies.

Last Saturday however, the National Post reported that “an investigation conducted by The Montreal Gazette, CBC Radio and the U.S.’s National Public Radio (NPR) has found powerful elements within the Mexican government and army have no intention of ending the narcotics trade.”

But wait, hasn’t a Special Forces contingent dubbed Task Force 7 by Conroy’s source, been providing expertise for more than a year to the Mexican Army to root out corruption and slay evil-doers, the same Army that has “no intention” of ending the grisly trade responsible for deaths of thousands?

The National Post disclosed that “senior government and military officials are helping the Sinaloa cartel and its leader become the dominant drug-trafficking organization in Mexico. This means the cartel will likely become the most powerful organized crime group on the continent.”

True enough as far as it goes, but I’d offer one slight edit: the Sinaloa cartel would perhaps “become the most powerful organized crime group on the continent,” only were we to ignore the key role played by North American, specifically U.S. banks, in laundering billions of dollars in blood money, a minor, though pertinent detail, omitted by the National Post, the Gazette, NPR and the CBC.

After all as Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime told The Observer in December, “the proceeds of organised crime were ‘the only liquid investment capital’ available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year.” Indeed, Costa claimed that “drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the [2008] global crisis.”

All the more reason then, to bring on the drones!

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX), a close political ally of former President George W. Bush (no slouch when it came to protecting Afghan drug rackets), praised Obama’s move to fly Predators along the border. The good Senator told The Hill, “the beginning of UAV flights over the west-Texas portion of our border with Mexico marks an important advancement for border security in our state.”

The Bushist crony continued: “We are working hard to make round-the-clock aerial surveillance the standard for all 2,000 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, and I hope this development is the first of many steps to bring our border detection and security efforts into the 21st century.”

Not to be outdone by a political “rival” across the aisle, Rep. Henry Cuellar, a south Texas Democrat, praised CBP’s drone deployment and said, “By putting eyes in the sky along the Rio Grande, we will gather real-time intelligence on the ground to augment the good work of federal, state and local law enforcement on the border.”

Or provide those shipping multi-ton loads of cocaine and other illicit drugs northward adequate warning! Indeed, Narco News disclosed in May that “a law enforcement task force in New Mexico that is supposed to target drug-trafficking criminals is instead awash in charges that it is using its nearly $600,000 taxpayer-subsidized budget to fund its own corrupt practices.”

Although an investigation by an internal affairs unit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) revealed “a disturbing trail of bookkeeping irregularities and multiple mysterious bank accounts,” the indefatigable Bill Conroy revealed that “nothing of consequence happened to the task force or its operations, and it continues to operate under the same leadership to this day.”

A minor detail perhaps, but then who cares! Certainly not our intrepid “watchdog” Washington press corps led by CNN’s White House correspondent Ed Henry, The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder and others, who recently cavorted with the Vice President at a “beach party” at Joe Biden’s mansion, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald disclosed!

For the “people who matter” however, unleashing a drone fleet along the border will be music to the ears of General Atomics, the manufacturer of the Predator B. What, with saturation coverage of the Iraq and “Afpak” theatres by the CIA and Pentagon’s armada of killer robots, the $10-12 million dollar price tag per drone is a surefire win-win all around.

Is this a great country or what!

In a February Washington Post op-ed, the latest version of the “grave and gathering danger” big lie repeated endlessly by former President Bush during the run-up to the Iraq invasion, McConnell claims that “the United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing.”

Since leaving the secret state’s employ, McConnell returned to his old beltway bandit firm, Booz Allen Hamilton, as a senior vice president in charge of the company’s national security business unit, a position he held after “retiring” as Director of the National Security Agency back in 1996.

Critics, including security system design experts and investigative journalists, question the alarmist drumbeat that promises to dump tens of billions of federal dollars into the coffers of firms like McConnell’s.

Indeed, Washington Technology reported two weeks ago that Booz Allen Hamilton landed a $20M contract to “foster collaboration among telecommunications researchers, University of Maryland faculty members and other academic institutions to improve secure networking and telecommunications and boost information assurance.”

While we’re at it, let’s consider the deal that L-3 Communications grabbed from the Air Force just this week. Washington Technology reports that L-3, No. 8 on that publication’s “2009 Top Ten” list of federal prime contractors, “will assist the Air Forces Central Command in protecting the security of its network operations under a contract potentially worth $152 million over five years.”

Or meditate on the fact that security giant Raytheon’s soaring first quarter profits were due to the “U.S. military demand for surveillance equipment and new ways to prepare soldiers for wars,” MarketWatch reported Thursday.

Chump-change perhaps in the wider scheme of things, considering America’s nearly $800B defense budget for FY2011, but fear sells and what could be more promising for enterprising security grifters than hawking terror that comes with the threat that shadowy “asymmetric” warriors will suddenly switch everything off?

As Bloomberg News disclosed back in 2008, both Lockheed Martin and Boeing “are deploying forces and resources to a new battlefield: cyberspace.”

As journalist Gopal Ratnam averred, the 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.”

Lockheed’s close, long-standing ties with the National Security Agency all but guarantee a leg up for the firm as it seeks to capture a large slice of the CYBERCOM pie.

The problem with a line of reasoning that U.S. efforts are primarily concerned with defending Pentagon networks reveals a glaring fact (largely omitted from media accounts) that it is the Pentagon, and not a motley crew of hackers, cyber-criminals or “rogue states” that are setting up a formidable infrastructure for launching future high-tech war crimes.

This is clearly spelled out in the DOD’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). In that document Pentagon planners aver that CYBERCOM “will direct the operation and defense of DOD’s information networks, and will prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum cyberspace military operations. An operational USCYBERCOM will also play a leading role in helping to integrate cyber operations into operational and contingency planning.”

The QDR promises to stand-up “10 space and cyberspace wings” within the Department of the Air Force that will work in tandem with Cyber Command.

Last week, Dissident Voice reported how the mission of that Pentagon Command is primarily concerned with waging offensive operations against “adversaries” and that civilian infrastructure is viewed as a “legitimate” target for attack.

In that piece, I cited documents released by the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), publicly available, though buried within a mass of Broad Agency Announcements, that solicited bids for contracts by the various armed service branches from private defense and security corporations for the design of offensive cyber weapons.

Accordingly, the Air Force Research Laboratory-Rome issued a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA-10-04-RIKA) February 25, for “Full Spectrum Cyber Operations Technology” that will address issues related to “the integration and better coordination of the day-to-day defense, protection, and operation of DoD networks as well as the capability to conduct full spectrum cyberspace military operations.”

The BAA explicitly states that “research efforts under this program are expected to result in functional capabilities, concepts, theory, and applications ideally addressing cyber operations problems including projects specializing in highly novel and interesting applicable technique concepts will also be considered, if deemed to be of ‘breakthrough’ quality and importance.”

Unsurprisingly, “technical information relevant to potential submitters is contained in a classified addendum at the Secret level to this BAA.”

But the military aren’t the only players leading the charge towards the development of highly-destructive cyberweapons. Indeed, the Cyber Conflict Research Studies Association (CCSA), a Washington, D.C. based think tank is top-heavy with former intelligence, military and corporate officials doing just that.

The group’s board of directors are flush with former officers or consultants from the FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Air Force, National Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security and the CIA. Other board members are top officers in the spooky “public-private” FBI-affiliated spy outfit InfraGard, the Council on Foreign Relations as well as high-powered firms such as General Dynamics, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and Goldman Sachs.

Demonstrating the interconnected nature of domestic surveillance, repression and military cyberwar operations, CCSA’s Treasurer, Robert Schmidt, is currently a member of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Council on Domestic Intelligence and the secretive Intelligence and National Security Association (INSA). Additionally, Schmidt is the President/CEO of InfraGard and “leads the operational side of private sector involvement with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s InfraGard program.” How’s that for a hat trick!

What that “operational side” entails has never been publicly disclosed by the organization, but as I wrote back in 2008, citing Matthew Rothschild’s chilling piece in The Progressive, martial law is high on InfraGard’s agenda.

Members on CCSA’s board of directors, like others whirling through the revolving door between government and the private sector were/are officers or consultants to the FBI, NSA, DHS and other secret state intelligence agencies. Others were/are key advisers on the National Security Council or serve as consultants to industry-sponsored associations such as the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) and INSA.

Dovetailing with research conducted by the Pentagon and their Intelligence Community partners, one CCSA study will explore “the full spectrum of military computer network operations, defined as computer network defense (CND), computer network exploit (CNE) and computer network attack (CNA), and examines the potential synergies and tradeoffs between those three categories.”

As befitting research conducted by the Military-Industrial-Security-Complex (MISC), CCSA’s study “will involve key academicians, strategists, military and intelligence community leaders and operational cyber practitioners to analyze key dilemmas of doctrine, organization, training, and planning, particularly with respect to integrating cyber warfare capabilities with kinetic operations.”

Key questions to be answered, among others, include “How can cyberwarfare capabilities be best integrated with other military forces?” and “How can leaders and personnel for conducting cyberwarfare be trained, educated and grown?”

Clearly, these are not academic issues.

DARPA to the Rescue

The Pentagon’s “blue sky” research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is chock-a-block with programs investigating everything from Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts to Operationally-Focused Systems Integration (OFSI) “that align DARPA technologies with explicit opportunities for military operational impact.”

Certainly, given the precarious state of the global capitalist economy, the enfeebled nature of American democratic institutions, and with no end in sight to planet-wide imperial adventures to secure access to increasingly shrinking energy reserves and other strategic resources, technological “silver bullets” are highly sought-after commodities by corporate and military bureaucracies. Such technophilic preoccupations by the MISC all but guarantee that the “state of exception” inaugurated by the 9/11 provocation will remain a permanent feature of daily life.

Several, interrelated DARPA projects feed into wider Pentagon cyberwar research conducted by the Army, Navy and Air Force.

One component of this research is DARPA’s National Cyber Range (NCR). The brainchild of the agency’s Strategic Technical Office (STO), NCR is conceived as “DARPA’s contribution to the new federal Comprehensive National Cyber Initiative (CNCI), providing a ‘test bed’ to produce qualitative and quantitative assessments of the Nation’s cyber research and development technologies.”

While DARPA claims that it is “creating the National Cyber Range to protect and defend the nation’s critical information systems,” a “key vision” behind the program “is to revolutionize the state of the art of test range resource and test automation execution.”

While short on specifics, DARPA’s “vision of the NCR is to create a national asset for use across the federal government to test a full spectrum of cyber programs.”

Many of the military programs slated for testing at NCR are highly classified, including those that fall under the purview of Pentagon Special Access or black programs. As defense analyst William M. Arkin pointed out in Code Names, such programs are hidden under the rubric of Special Technical Operations that have their own “entire separate channels of communication and clearances.” STO’s “exist to compartment these military versions of clandestine and covert operations involving special operations, paramilitary activity, covert action, and cyber-warfare.” Arkin identified nearly three dozen cyberwar programs or exercises back in 2005; undoubtedly many more have since come online.

As Aviation Week reported in 2009, “Devices to launch and control cyber, electronic and information attacks are being tested and refined by the U.S. military and industry in preparation for moving out of the laboratory and into the warfighter’s backpack.”

But as “with all DARPA programs,” the agency “will transition the operation of the NCR at a later date to an operational partner. No decision has been made on who will operate the final range.”

Amongst the private defense, security and academic “partners” involved in NCR’s development are the usual suspects: scandal-tainted BAE Systems; General Dynamics-Advanced Information Systems; Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory; Lockheed Martin; Northrop Grumman-Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Systems Division; Science Applications International Corporation; and SPARTA.

The aggressive nature of what has since evolved into CYBERCOM is underscored by several planning documents released by the U.S. Air Force. In a 2006 presentation to the Air Force Cyber Task Force, A Warfighting Domain: Cyberspace, Dr. Lani Kass unabashedly asserts: “Cyber is a war-fighting domain. 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 the electromagnetic spectrum 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.”

While the Pentagon and their embedded acolytes in academia, the media and amongst corporate grifters who stand to secure billions in contracts have framed CYBERCOM’s launch purely as a defensive move to deter what Wired investigative journalist Ryan Singel has denounced as “Cyberarmaggedon!” hype to protect America’s “cyber assets” from attack by rogue hackers, states, or free-floating terrorist practitioners of “asymmetric war,” CYBERCOM’s defensive brief is way down the food chain.

Indeed, “options for the Operational Command for Cyberspace” include the “scalability of force packages” and their “ease of implementation” and, as I wrote last week citing but two of the fourteen examples cited by the Senate, “research, development, and acquisition” of cyber weapons. This is attack, not defense mode.

Americans’ Privacy: a Thing of the Past

Situating CYBERCOM under the dark wings of U.S. Strategic Command and the National Security Agency, is a disaster waiting to happen.

As we now know, since 2001 NSA under dubious Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) findings that are still classified, and the despicable 2008 FISA Amendments Act, the Executive Branch was handed the authority the spy on American citizens and legal residents with impunity.

During his confirmation hearing as Cyber Command chief on April 15, NSA Director Lt. General Keith Alexander sought to assure the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) that “this is not about the intent to militarize cyber-space. My main focus is on building the capacity to secure the military’s operational networks.”

He told the Senate panel that if called in to help protect civilian networks, both NSA and Cyber Command “will have unwavering dedication to the privacy of American citizens.”

Alexander was far cagier however in his written responses in a set of Advanced Questions posed by the SASC.

While corporate media like the dutiful stenographers they are, repeated standard Pentagon boilerplate that the secret state has an “unwavering dedication” to Americans’ privacy, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a Freedom of Information Act request demanding answers and the release of the classified supplement.

Alexander stated in his written testimony that although “U.S. Cyber Command’s mission will not include defense of the .gov and .com domains, given the integration of cyberspace into the operation of much of our critical infrastructure and the conduct of commerce and governance, it is the obligation of the Department to be prepared to provide military options to the President and SECDEF if our national security is threatened.”

He also defended the statement that “DOD’s mission to defend the nation ‘takes primacy’ over the Department of Homeland Security’s role in some situations.”

“Of greater concern” EPIC wrote in their brief, “may be the questions that Lt. Gen. Alexander chose to respond to in classified form. When asked if the American people are ‘likely to accept deployment of classified methods of monitoring electronic communications to defend the government and critical infrastructure without explaining basic aspects of how this monitoring will be conducted and how it may affect them,’ the Director acknowledged that the Department had a ‘need to be transparent and communicate to the American people about our objectives to address the national security threat to our nation–the nature of the threat, our overall approach, and the roles and responsibilities of each department and agency involved–including NSA and the Department of Defense,’ but then chose include that the rest of his response to that question in the ‘classified supplement’.”

“Most troubling of all” EPIC averred “is the classified nature of the responses to advance questions 27b) and 27c). After responding to the question of how the internet could be designed differently to provide greater inherent security by describing vague ‘technological enhancements’ that could enhance mobility and possibly security, Lt. Gen. Alexander responded to ‘Is it practical to consider adopting those modifications?’ and ‘What would the impact be on privacy, both pro and con?’ by referring the Senators to the ‘classified supplement.’ No answer to either question was provided in the public record.”

But in considering these questions, perhaps the SASC should have referred to ex-spook McConnell’s February Washington Post op-ed: “More specifically, we need to reengineer the Internet to make [it] more manageable. The technologies are already available from public and private sources and can be further developed if we have the will to build them into our systems and to work with our allies and trading partners so they will do the same.”

Is this a great country, or what!