"GLOBAL SPYING".
WASHINGTON'S
"WEAPONIZED DATA" SYSTEM
By Tom Burghardt
Global Research, April 23, 2012
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30466
From
driftnet surveillance to data mining and link analysis, the secret
state has weaponized our data, "criminal evidence, ready for use in a
trial," as Cryptohippie famously warned.
No longer the exclusive domain of
intelligence agencies, a highly-profitable Surveillance-Industrial
Complex emerged in the 1980s with the deployment of the NSA-GCHQ ECHELON intercept system. As investigate journalist Nicky Hager revealed in CovertAction Quarterly back in 1996:
The ECHELON system is not designed to
eavesdrop on a particular individual's e-mail or fax link. Rather, the
system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of
communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of
interest from the mass of unwanted ones. A chain of secret interception
facilities has been established around the world to tap into all the
major components of the international telecommunications networks. Some
monitor communications satellites, others land-based communications
networks, and others radio communications. ECHELON links together all
these facilities, providing the US and its allies with the ability to
intercept a large proportion of the communications on the planet.
With the exponential growth of fiber optic
and wireless networks, the mass of data which can be "mined" for
"actionable intelligence," covering everything from eavesdropping on
official enemies to blanket surveillance of dissidents is now part of
the landscape: no more visible to the average citizen than ornamental
shrubbery surrounding a strip mall.
That process will become even more ubiquitous. As James Bamford pointed out in Wired Magazine,
"the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications
network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (10
to the 24th bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes--so large
that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)"
"It needs that capacity because, according
to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple
from 2010 to 2015," Bamford reported, "reaching 966 exabytes per year.
(A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) ... Thus, the NSA's need for a
1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the
Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about
500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text."
A former top NSA official turned
whistleblower, William Binney, who resigned in 2001 shortly after the
agency stood-up the Bush regime's warrantless wiretapping programs (now
greatly expanded under Hope and Change(TM) huckster Barack Obama), "held
his thumb and forefinger close together" and told Bamford, "We are that
far from a turnkey totalitarian state."
Last week, Binney said on Democracy Now
when queried whether there were any differences between the Bush and
Obama administrations, "Actually, I think the surveillance has
increased. In fact, I would suggest that they've assembled on the order
of 20 trillion transactions about U.S. citizens with other U.S.
citizens."
Add to that the Transportation Security Administration's invasion of "travel by other means," as Jennifer Abel pointed out in The Guardian,
through the agency's usurpation of "jurisdiction over all forms of mass
transit," and it should be clear to Americans (though it isn't) that
there is no way of escaping the secret state's callous trampling of our
rights.
Commenting, Salon's
Glenn Greenwald pointed out that the "domestic NSA-led Surveillance
State which Frank Church so stridently warned about has obviously come
to fruition."
"The way to avoid its grip is simply to acquiesce to the nation's most powerful factions, to obediently remain within the permitted boundaries of political discourse and activism.""Accepting that bargain," Greenwald noted, "enables one to maintain the delusion of freedom--'he who does not move does not notice his chains,' observed Rosa Luxemburg--but the true measure of political liberty is whether one is free to make a different choice."
But in a militarized Empire such as ours the only "choice" is to shut up, keep your head down--or else.
'Lower Your Shields and Surrender Your Ships'
Militarist solutions to intractable social contradictions, the oft-maligned class struggle,
do not appear out of the blue. Indeed, NSA's ECHELON system, the
template for STELLAR WIND and the agency's associated email and web
search database known as PINWALE, were technological responses by
Western elites to challenges posed by the "excess of democracy" decried
by Samuel Huntington and his cohorts in The Crisis of Democracy, published by the Rockefeller-funded Trilateral Commission.
Social critic Andrew Gavin Marshall observed
that for Huntington and the right-wing ideologues who mounted an
intellectual counterattack against the democratic "excesses" of the
1960s, the "massive wave of resistance, rebellion, protest, activism and
direct action by entire sectors of the general population which had for
decades, if not centuries, been largely oppressed and ignored by the
institutional power structure of society," were "terrifying."
Fast forward to today. As the global
economic crisis deepens and hundreds of millions of people worldwide
reject the "austerity" boondoggles of the financial sharks who brought
on the crisis through massive frauds disguised as "investment
opportunities," our corporatist masters are fighting back and have
turned to police state methods to prop-up their illegitimate rule.
Nor should it surprise us, as George Ciccariello-Maher pointed out in CounterPunch
in the wake of last summer's London "riots," a mass response to police
murder (coming soon to an "urban exclusion zone" near you!):
"Irrational, uncontrollable, impermeable to logic and unpredictable in
its movements, these undesirables have once again ruined the party for
everyone, as they have done from Paris 1789 to Caracas 1989. In Fanon's
inimitable words: 'the masses, without waiting for the chairs to be
placed around the negotiating table, take matters into their own hands
and start burning...'"
Call it the great fear of those lording it over the slaves down on the global plantation!
Combining attributes of Jeremy Bentham's
"Panopticon" and George Orwell's ubiquitous "Big Brother," the National
Security State, as it works to stave-off its own well-deserved collapse,
seeks to root out and marginalize "dangerous" individuals and
ideologies thereby "inoculating" the body politic from what were
euphemistically called in the halcyon days of J. Edgar's COINTELPRO
operations, "subversive elements."
It matters little whether today's "usual
suspects" are landless peasants, displaced workers, investigative
journalists, civil libertarians or innocent citizens mistakenly caught
in one dragnet or another: "threats" will be "neutralized" or more
pointedly, in the evocative language employed by spooks: "Terminated
with extreme prejudice."
Operating alongside tried and
methods--police repression and violence--contemporary crackdowns are
guided by "robust situational awareness" gleaned from the wealth of
personal data stored on multiple digital devices (the spies in our
pockets) and in huge databases. As Cryptohippie averred: "An electronic
police state is quiet, even unseen. All of its legal actions are
supported by abundant evidence. It looks pristine."
"When we produced our first Electronic
Police State report," the privacy professionals wrote, "the top ten
nations were of two types:
1. Those that had the will to spy on every citizen, but lacked ability.
2. Those who had the ability, but were restrained in will.
But as they revealed in their 2010 National Rankings,
"This is changing: The able have become willing and their traditional
restraints have failed." The key developments driving the global
panopticon forward are the following:
• The USA has negated their Constitution's
fourth amendment in the name of protection and in the name of "wars"
against terror, drugs and cyber attacks.
• The UK is aggressively building the
world of 1984 in the name of stopping "anti-social" activities. Their
populace seems unable or unwilling to restrain the government.
• France and the EU have given themselves over to central bureaucratic control.
As Marxist critic and Situationist troublemaker Guy Debord pointed out decades ago in The Society of the Spectacle,
"the spectacle is not the inevitable consequence of some supposedly
natural technological development. On the contrary, the society of the
spectacle is a form that chooses its own technological content."
Mark that well.
Rejecting the orthodoxies and received
wisdom of his day, Debord argued that "The reigning economic system is a
vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation,
and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to
television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce
also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that
engender 'lonely crowds.' With ever-increasing concreteness the
spectacle recreates its own presuppositions."
It is again worth noting that the
much-vaunted "global village" which sprung to life with the widespread
deployment of the internet in the 1990s, as a profit-center for the
giant telecoms and a spy machine for the secret state, was, after
all, a casual by-product of the Pentagon's quest for a wartime digital
communications system.
But now that every facet of daily life has become a war theater,
what are we to make of the electronic walled gardens offered for sale
by Apple, Facebook and Google, replete with their multitude of
proprietary apps which, like Bentham's "panopticon," have become prisons
of our own choosing?
Ponder Debord's rigorous theorems in this
light; substitute "cell phone" or "GPS" for "automobile," and "internet"
for "television" and it becomes clear pretty quickly that unbeknownst
to the militarist inventors of the "digital highway" they had stumbled
upon the perfect means for enabling a global control grid.
As Debord averred: "If the spectacle,
considered in the limited sense of the 'mass media' that are its most
glaring superficial manifestation, seems to be invading society in the
form of a mere technical apparatus, it should be understood that this
apparatus is in no way neutral and that it has been developed in
accordance with the spectacle's internal dynamics."
"Internal dynamics" geared only towards
its own survival and reproduction come hell or high water. Endless wars
on "terror," "drugs," "crime," take your pick. Prison-Industrial
Complexes? Genetically-engineered plagues? Ecological collapse? Step
right this way! There's an app for that and much, much more!
Indeed, "if the social needs of the age in
which such technologies are developed can be met only through their
mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact between
people has become totally dependent on these means of instantaneous
communication, it is because this 'communication' is essentially
unilateral," that is, "the product of the social division of labor that
is both the chief instrument of class rule and the concentrated
expression of all social divisions."
Keep in mind that Debord's seminal text
was penned in 1967, long before the wet dreams of securocrats had been
brought to life like Frankenstein's monster. Once a disquieting and
uncanny shape looming on some far-off, dystopian horizon, the world of
smart phones and dumbed-down people is, simply put, an Americanized Borg
cube where "resistance" is always "futile."
The question is, in our fallen Republic does anyone even notice?
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, 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.
