Orwell 2011: Towards a Pervasive "Surveillance State" in America
Biometrics, Facial Mapping, "Computer-Aided ID"....
By Tom Burghardt
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23992
Global Research, March 28, 2011
Not since AT&T whistleblower Marc Klein's 2006 revelations
that U.S. telecommunications giants were secretly collaborating with
the government to spy on Americans, has a story driven home the point
that we are confronted by a daunting set of invisible enemies: the
security and intelligence firms constellating the dark skies of the
National Security State.
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.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, he is a Contributing Editor with Cyrano's Journal Today. His articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.
