---BREAKAWAY CIVILIZATION ---ALTERNATIVE HISTORY---NEW BUSINESS MODELS--- ROCK & ROLL 'S STRANGE BEGINNINGS---SERIAL KILLERS---YEA AND THAT BAD WORD "CONSPIRACY"--- AMERICANS DON'T EXPLORE ANYTHING ANYMORE.WE JUST CONSUME AND DIE.---
Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, Washington, D.C., March 4, 1861
"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit
it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can
exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their
revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."
"We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers."
DADO RUVIC/Reuters/Corbis
T
he Washington Post has published a massive investigative report
revealing a secret state-run program called PRISM, which allows the
National Security Agency to legally extract "audio and video chats,
photographs, emails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts
to track foreign targets" from the servers of nine U.S. internet
companies. According to the document obtained by The Post, the official roster includes Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. (Here's everything we know about PRISM so far.) The Post has since backtracked on its original stance that
the companies "participated knowingly" in the program, and has added
this hedging paragraph:
It is possible that the
conflict between the PRISM slides and the company spokesmen is the
result of imprecision on the part of the NSA author. In another
classified report obtained by The Post, the arrangement is
described as allowing 'collection managers [to send] content tasking
instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled
locations,' rather than directly to company servers. [Washington Post]
Here are statements from the firms that have so far denied
involvement with the program. Remember: Skype is owned by Microsoft, and
YouTube is owned by Google. AOL has yet to respond, but we'll update
this list when or if it does: Microsoft:
We provide customer data only
when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never
on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for
requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a
broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we
don't participate in it. [Microsoft]
Yahoo:
Yahoo! takes users privacy
very seriously. We do not provide the government with direct access to
our servers, systems, or network. [TechCrunch]
Google:
Google cares deeply about the
security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in
accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From
time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back
door' into our systems, but Google does not have a backdoor for the
government to access private user data. [TechCrunch]
Facebook:
We do not provide any
government organization with direct access to Facebook servers. When
Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we
carefully scrutinize any such request for compliance with all
applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by
law. [All Things D]
We have never heard of PRISM.
We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our
servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a
court order. [All Things D]
Dropbox:
We've seen reports that
Dropbox might be asked to participate in a government program called
PRISM. We are not part of any such program and remain committed to
protecting our users' privacy. [TechCrunch]
So what's going on? A few early possibilities: 1. The Washington Post is wrong. At this point, that doesn't look likely. 2. The companies are being less than forthright.
They could be phrasing their denials in such a way that they're
technically telling the truth. "Comparing denials from tech companies, a
clear pattern emerges," writes Andrea Peterson at ThinkProgress:
Apple denied ever hearing of
the program and notes they "do not provide any government agency with
direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data
must get a court order;" Facebook claimed they "do not provide any
government organization with direct access to Facebook servers;" Google
said it "does not have a 'back door' for the government to access
private user data"; And Yahoo said they "do not provide the government
with direct access to our servers, systems, or network." Most also note
that they only release user information as the law compels them to. [ThinkProgress]
3. PRISM is simply a very, very closely guarded secret.
It could be that the NSA's arrangements with the companies "are kept so
tightly compartmentalized that very few people know about it," writes TheWeek.com's Marc Ambinder.
"Those who do probably have security clearances and are bound by law
not to reveal the arrangement." Security expert Robert David Graham puts
it another way:
Nazi~Industrial~Complex = NEVER ENDING CONFLICT/WARS = $$$ for the Large Families/Mega~Corp's + SPYING = fuck the Citizens & Tried 2 WARN ...U.S. how long ago ? ....here's a 'heresy' we didn't defeat the NAZI'S ..we merged with em ! don't think so ? ..connect the Dot's !!! y 'they' so afraid of Freedom,Creativity ? y do 'they' have to 'control' everything/everybody ? y 'they' so afraid of the free flow of info , tech, ? what is it 'they' don't want the REST of us 2 KNOW ??? y don't 'they' want u & me ..talking 2 each other ...as friends !?! what 'they' so afraid of hummmmmmmmmmm wonder ,wonder ? ...i wonder :)r
We should have listened to Eisenhower
More than 50 years ago, Ike all but predicted the factors that led to the NSA's massive snooping enterprise
Dwight Eisenhower: A five-star general, 34th president of the
U.S., and master of surprisingly accurate predictions.
M. McNeill/Fox Photos/Getty Images
M
ore than 52 years ago, Dwight David Eisenhower gave his final speech
as president. Eisenhower had led the American fight in Europe during
World War II, and played a major part in America's transformation from a
nation of industrial might and relative isolation into the first
superpower of the modern age. The U.S. filled the role played by the
British Empire for the previous few centuries, especially when the
Soviet Union seized eastern Europe and threatened to spread its
totalitarian system around the globe. Eisenhower picked up the Cold War
reins from Harry Truman, building upon the massive modern military that
Eisenhower deployed to defeat the Nazis and safeguard pluralistic
democracy in western Europe.
Eisenhower largely presided over a peacetime military, but one that
grew large enough at the beginning of the Cold War to worry the war hero
about the future of the nation. In his final speech,
televised live on January 17, 1961, Eisenhower warned Americans on a
broad range of topics. Most do not remember his warning on deficit
spending, but Eisenhower implored Americans to "avoid the impulse to
live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the
precious resources of tomorrow." Eisenhower managed to partner with
Congress on three balanced budgets out of eight, but the era after his
would start us on massive deficit spending as a habit rather than
something to be employed only in an emergency. We have, as Eisenhower
predicted, "mortgage[d] the material assets of our grandchildren," and
it remains to be seen whether that has risked "the loss of their
political and spiritual heritage."
Most famously, Eisenhower warned the country about the rise of what
he called the "military-industrial complex," a force that would
eventually erode liberty and public policy choices. "In the councils of
government," Eisenhower said, "we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist." The wealth that got spent on
the defense sector would create enormous influence and power inside and
outside of government, which would eventually pervert a free society
into perpetual warfare for the sake of maintaining power, unless a free
nation exercised exceptional vigilance.
Eisenhower didn't limit this warning to the military-industrial
complex, either. He made the same point about the perverting influence
of federal money and power on science, warning that scientific discovery
could be dominated by Washington, D.C. Conversely, Eisenhower also
posited that there existed "the equal and opposite danger that public
policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological
elite."
Fifty years later, Eisenhower's valediction looks less like a
political speech and more like prophecy. In the NSA controversies, both
with the continuous telecom metadata haul (since at least 2006) and the
PRISM/BLARNEY efforts to sniff through massive amounts of content on the
internet, we have examples of exactly what Ike foresaw. In fact, this
looks much like a marriage between the military-industrial complex and
what we could call the intelligence-industrial complex, both based on
predicates of never-ending war in the age of terror.
The military-industrial complex is familiar enough, but the two NSA
issues show the extent to which scientific-technological industries have
insinuated themselves into the same position. Nine of the largest
providers of internet services in the U.S. have acted against the
interests of their clients' privacy to partner with the NSA — a Defense
Department agency — in their search for clues on terrorism. This
includes some tech-industry leaders, such as the founders and/or CEOs of
Google and Facebook, who publicly supported Obama in 2008 while he
campaigned against the very surveillance that appears to be taking place
now, and then again in 2012.
The shift predicted by Eisenhower, of course, did not happen in a
vacuum. The Cold War held real dangers to America and Americans, and the
age of terror does now. The 9/11 attacks shocked the U.S. badly enough
to create a huge demand for more security. We passed the PATRIOT Act and
amended the FISA law to allow our intelligence and law-enforcement
agencies to "connect the dots" before attacks took place, rather than
seek evidence while the bodies were stacked afterward.
At the same time, we have culturally devalued privacy, in
relationships with commercial as well as governmental entities. The
internet companies involved provide the best evidence of this. US News' Robert Schlesinger argued that government surveillance on the internet followed corporate surveillance of Americans and others,
a surveillance to which we acquiesced with hardly a murmur of protest.
"It's not a given that corporations must collect vast amounts of
information from and about us," Schlesinger writes. "But failing to do
so wouldn't be good for business."
Take Google — one of the major pillars of PRISM and a giant in
internet transactions. Clients use it for email services, maps and GPS
navigation, document storage, and even some cell-phone services. But
Google makes money by learning every piece of information it finds from
clients who use these services and monetizing them, Schlesinger points
out. "What Google is, in fact, is a data collection company: It collects
data on you 15 ways to Sunday, sorts it, chops it up and sells it." And
don't even get Schlesinger started on cell phones in general, devices
that literally track your movements as long as the phones are powered
up.
This is big business for internet providers. In 2011, the Wall Street Journal
reported that both Google and Apple collected location data in order to
grab a piece of the location-based services industry, which at the time
was a $2.9 billion market. At that time, the Journal projected
it to grow to $8.3 billion in 2014. Both of these internet providers
participated in PRISM. Telecoms like Verizon sell location data to
advertisers to allow them to more effectively position billboards, for
instance. "Companies have an incentive to collect and keep user data,"
Schlesinger concludes, "and that trove proves an irresistible target for
the government in its ongoing war on terrorists."
This may be why polls don't exactly show a high level of outrage over the NSA leaks. A Washington Post/Pew Center poll
reported that a 56 percent majority of respondents supported the NSA
survey of telecom metadata on phone calls, while only 41 percent
objected. When it came to surveying internet content, a thin 52 percent
majority opposed the NSA PRISM/BLARNEY effort if applied against
Americans (a point which has yet to be clarified), but that 45 percent
think the government should go further than it claims to do now to watch
our online activities. For an electorate that has given up privacy for
convenience to the commercial market, surrendering it to the government
for security may be a smaller step than Eisenhower might have imagined.
The erosion of that "political and spiritual heritage" of liberty and
limited government has other implications, too. Eisenhower presaged
that the expansion of the government under pressure of the
military-industrial complex would "endanger our liberties or democratic
processes." One cannot help but to draw connections to that expanding
and intrusive government and its unaccountable bureaucracies and the
targeting of political groups opposed to the current administration by
the IRS, the disparate treatment by the EPA on FOIA requests depending
on the politics of the requesters, and the overall lack of
accountability from an administration whose best defense on these and
other scandals has been ignorance of the abuses taking place on their
watch. Even if these incidents come from nothing more than a government
so large as to be unmanageable, Eisenhower's admonitions are still
prescient.
At his heart, though, Eisenhower was still an optimist. Despite
foreseeing the dangers of a perpetual wartime government in a truly
dangerous world, he told Americans that "only an alert and knowledgeable
citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and
military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so
that security and liberty may prosper together." We are now alert, and
we need to become knowledgeable to ensure that we protect our political
and spiritual heritage of liberty — even if that means acknowledging
that we ourselves may in large part be the problem. http://theweek.com/bullpen/column/245418/we-should-have-listened-to-eisenhower Edward Morrissey writes for Hot Air and hosts several internet and radio talk shows. Follow him on Twitter: @EdMorrissey.
What If China Hacks the NSA's Massive Data Trove?
The danger of creating data sets that would permit a foreign
government or non-state actor to wreak havoc on Americans.
Bradley
Manning proved that massive amounts of the government's most secret
data was vulnerable to being dumped on the open Internet. A single
individual achieved that unprecedented leak. According to the Washington Post,
"An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live
in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances." And this
week, we learned that the FBI, CIA and NSA were unable to protect some
of their most closely held secrets from Glenn Greenwald, Richard Engel, Robert Windrem, Barton Gellman, and Laura Poitras.
Those journalists, talented as they are, possess somewhat fewer
resources than foreign governments! So I naturally started to think
about all the data the NSA is storing. In
the wrong hands, it could enable blackmail on a massive scale,
widespread manipulation of U.S. politics, industrial espionage against
American businesses;,and other mischief I can't even imagine. The
plan is apparently to store the data indefinitely, just in case the
government needs it for future investigations. Don't worry, national
security officials tell us, we won't ever look at most of it. Do you trust the government to keep it secure, forever, if others try to look? If so, why? Here are 5 terrifying scenarios: 1) China manages to get the NSA data. 2) Russia manages to get the NSA data. (It isn't like they never succeeded in placing spies in our government before.) 3) Pakistan manages to get the NSA data. (They pulled off stealing the West's nuclear secrets.) 4) Iran manages to get the NSA data. 5) Saudi Arabia manages to get the NSA data. Of course, it could be a non-state actor that gets ahold of the data too. Perhaps a successor to Al Qaeda. What if one of these entities breached the database's security without our even knowing? Even
assuming the U.S. government never abuses this data -- and there is no
reason to assume that! -- why isn't the burgeoning trove more dangerous
to keep than it is to foreswear? Can anyone persuasively argue that it's
virtually impossible for a foreign power to ever
gain access to it? Can anyone persuasively argue that if they did gain
access to years of private phone records, email, private files, and
other data on millions of Americans, it wouldn't be hugely damaging? Think
of all the things the ruling class never thought we'd find out about
the War on Terrorism that we now know. Why isn't the creation of this
data trove just the latest shortsighted action by national security
officials who constantly overestimate how much of what they do can be
kept secret? Suggested rule of thumb: Don't create a dataset of choice
that you can't bear to have breached.
Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.
Perhaps The NSA Should Figure Out How To Keep Its Own Stuff Secret Before Building A Giant Database
Among the questions is how a contract employee at a distant NSA
satellite office was able to obtain a copy of an order from the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court, a highly classified document that would
presumably be sealed from most employees and of little use to someone
in his position.
A former senior NSA official said that the number of agency officials
with access to such court orders is “maybe 30 or maybe 40. Not large
numbers.”
Mr. Snowden has now turned over archives of “thousands” of documents, according to Mr. Greenwald, and “dozens” are newsworthy.
In other words, more leaks are to come. But, considering that people
are already scrambling to see how one pretty junior IT guy could have
access to such things, it's making people wonder just how screwed up the NSA is if information could leak out this way -- and conversely, why should we trust them with our data?
Edward Snowden sounds like a thoughtful, patriotic young man, and I’m
sure glad he blew the whistle on the NSA’s surveillance programs. But
the more I learned about him this afternoon, the angrier I became. Wait,
him? The NSA trusted its most sensitive documents to this guy? And now,
after it has just proven itself so inept at handling its own
information, the agency still wants us to believe that it can securely
hold on to all of our data? Oy vey!
Or, as Farhad Manjoo notes later in that same article:
The scandal isn’t just that the government is spying on us. It’s also
that it’s giving guys like Snowden keys to the spying program. It
suggests the worst combination of overreach and amateurishness, of power
leveraged by incompetence. The Keystone Cops are listening to us all.
And, on top of that, people are pointing out that if Snowden could walk
out with that much supposedly secret information, you have to wonder who else has done so as well,
perhaps with much more nefarious intent, such as selling the
information to a foreign power or group. Conor Friedersdorf points out
that having the NSA collect so much data makes it a key target for the Chinese:
Even assuming the U.S. government never abuses this data -- and there is
no reason to assume that! -- why isn't the burgeoning trove more
dangerous to keep than it is to foreswear? Can anyone persuasively argue
that it's virtually impossible for a foreign power to ever gain access
to it? Can anyone persuasively argue that if they did gain access to
years of private phone records, email, private files, and other data on
millions of Americans, it wouldn't be hugely damaging?
Think of all the things the ruling class never thought we'd find out
about the War on Terrorism that we now know. Why isn't the creation of
this data trove just the latest shortsighted action by national security
officials who constantly overestimate how much of what they do can be
kept secret? Suggested rule of thumb: Don't create a dataset of choice
that you can't bear to have breached.
And, yet, that's exactly what we've done. If Snowden had access, then
it seems only reasonable to assume that he wasn't the only one. Meaning
that plenty of others also had access to the same information, and
there's a decent chance that it's already leaked to others. The NSA is
supposed to be the best of the best, but they don't even seem to know
how to keep their secrets secret.
Senators Introduce Bill To End Secret Law That Enabled NSA Surveillance
from the good-for-them dept
A bipartisan group of eight Senators have now introduced a bill to end the secret interpretation of the law
which enabled the NSA, via the rubber-stamping FISA Court, to claim
that the FISA Amendments Act enabled them to sweep up basically all
phone call data on everyone.
The measure, coming amid daily revelations about the extent to which the
National Security Agency is monitoring communications by Americans,
would require the Attorney General to declassify significant Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinions. The senators say the
move would allow Americans to know how broad of a legal authority the
government is claiming to spy on Americans under the Patriot Act and the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
“Americans deserve to know how much information about their private
communications the government believes it’s allowed to take under the
law,” explains Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat who has been an
outspoken advocate for congressional oversight of surveillance programs.
“There is plenty of room to have this debate without compromising our
surveillance sources or methods or tipping our hand to our enemies. We
can’t have a serious debate about how much surveillance of Americans’s
communications should be permitted without ending secret law.”
The bill will be put forth by Merkley, but co-sponsored by Senators
Patrick Leahy, Dean Heller, Mark Begich, Al Franken, Jon Tester and Ron
Wyden. Leahy, being the chair of the Judiciary Committee, is important,
suggesting that this bill isn't automatically dead in the water.
During the FISA Amendments Act fight at the end of 2012, Leahy was one
of only a few Senators (along with Merkley and Wyden) who pushed back on
just doing a straight reauthorization. In fact, it sounds like this
bill will be similar to the one that Merkley pushed as an amendment to
the renewal of the FISA Amendments Act last year, which got shot down -- but did score 37 votes in the Senate. Perhaps with Leahy's support, and all the news going on, it can get a few more votes.
And, in case you're wondering, yes, Congress can order the executive
branch to declassify anything it wants, though obviously it needs to
pass the law (and get past any potential veto). Declassifying how the
FISC has interpreted the law should not be controversial. As
we've been pointing out for years, under no circumstances would it make
sense to claim that the official interpretation of what's legal and
illegal should be classified. Yes, certain techniques or methods might
need to remain classified, but the law must be public. Hopefully, others in Congress will finally recognize that basic fact.
Google Asks Feds For Permission To Publish FISA Requests In Its Transparency Report
from the the-feds-should-say-yes dept
In
the wake of the revelation of PRISM last week, Google admitted that it
does not include FISA requests in its transparency report -- which has
led some to question the value of the transparency report. Now, Google
has sent a public letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI boss
Robert Mueller, requesting permission to add FISA requests to its transparency report,
suggesting that such transparency would be helpful in clearing up how
frequently the government is asking Google for information.
Assertions in the press that our compliance with these requests gives
the U.S. government unfettered access to our users’ data are simply
untrue. However, government nondisclosure obligations regarding the
number of FISA national security requests that Google receives, as well
as the number of accounts covered by those requests, fuel that
speculation.
We therefore ask you to help make it possible for Google to publish in our Transparency Report
aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA
disclosures—in terms of both the number we receive and their scope.
Google’s numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these
requests falls far short of the claims being made. Google has nothing
to hide.
Google appreciates that you authorized the recent disclosure
of general numbers for national security letters. There have been no
adverse consequences arising from their publication, and in fact more
companies are receiving your approval to do so as a result of Google’s
initiative. Transparency here will likewise serve the public interest
without harming national security.
It would be somewhat ridiculous for the DOJ to refuse this request, but we're used to the DOJ doing stupid things these days.
86 Companies And Groups Ask Congress To Put An End To Abusive NSA Spying
from the enough-is-enough dept
A group of nearly 100 civil liberties, public interest groups and internet companies
have asked Congress to put an end to the abusive NSA surveillance that
we've been writing about over the past week (full disclosure: our
company, Floor64, is a part of the coalition, along with the EFF, ACLU,
reddit, Mozilla, the American Library Assocation, the Internet Archive
and many, many more). Along with this effort, a new website has been
launched, called Stop Watching Us, which is collecting more signatures for the letter, while also asking for some specific reforms from Congress.
Enact reform this Congress to Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act,
the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make clear
that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity and phone records of
any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and that violations
can be reviewed in adversarial proceedings before a public court;
Create a special committee to investigate, report, and reveal
to the public the extent of this domestic spying. This committee should
create specific recommendations for legal and regulatory reform to end
unconstitutional surveillance;
Hold accountable those public officials who are found to be responsible for this unconstitutional surveillance.
The full text of the letter is below.
Dear Members of Congress,
We write to express our concern about recent reports published in the Guardian and the Washington Post,
and acknowledged by the Obama Administration, which reveal secret
spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) on phone records and
Internet activity of people in the United States.
The Washington Post and the Guardian
recently published reports based on information provided by a career
intelligence officer showing how the NSA and the FBI are gaining broad
access to data collected by nine of the leading U.S. Internet companies
and sharing this information with foreign governments. As reported, the
U.S. government is extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails,
documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person's
movements and contacts over time. As a result, the contents of
communications of people both abroad and in the U.S. can be swept in
without any suspicion of crime or association with a terrorist
organization.
Leaked reports also published by the Guardian and
confirmed by the Administration reveal that the NSA is also abusing a
controversial section of the PATRIOT Act to collect the call records of
millions of Verizon customers. The data collected by the NSA includes
every call made, the time of the call, the duration of the call, and
other "identifying information" for millions of Verizon customers,
including entirely domestic calls, regardless of whether those customers
have ever been suspected of a crime. The Wall Street Journal has reported that other major carriers, including AT&T and Sprint, are subject to similar secret orders.
This type of blanket data collection by the government
strikes at bedrock American values of freedom and privacy. This dragnet
surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S.
Constitution, which protect citizens’ right to speak and associate
anonymously and guard against unreasonable searches and seizures that
protect their right to privacy.
We are calling on Congress to take immediate action to
halt this surveillance and provide a full public accounting of the
NSA’s and the FBI’s data collection programs. We call on Congress to immediately and publicly:
1. Enact reform this Congress to Section 215 of the
USA PATRIOT Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments
Act to make clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity and
phone records of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law
and that violations can be reviewed in adversarial proceedings before a
public court;
2. Create a special committee to investigate, report,
and reveal to the public the extent of this domestic spying. This
committee should create specific recommendations for legal and
regulatory reform to end unconstitutional surveillance;
3. Hold accountable those public officials who are found to be responsible for this unconstitutional surveillance.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
Access
Advocacy for Principled Action in Government
American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression
American Civil Liberties Union
American Civil Liberties Union of California
American Library Association
Amicus
Association of Research Libraries
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
BoingBoing
Breadpig
Calyx Institute
Canvas
Center for Democracy and Technology
Center for Digital Democracy
Center for Financial Privacy and Human Rights
Center for Media and Democracy
Center for Media Justice
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Consumer Action
Consumer Watchdog
CorpWatch
CREDO Mobile
Cyber Privacy Project
Daily Kos
Defending Dissent Foundation
Demand Progress
Detroit Digital Justice Coalition
Digital Fourth
Downsize DC
DuckDuckGo
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Entertainment Consumers Association
Fight for the Future
Floor64
Foundation for Innovation and Internet Freedom
4Chan
Free Press
Free Software Foundation
Freedom of the Press Foundation
FreedomWorks
Friends of Privacy USA
Get FISA Right
Government Accountability Project
Greenpeace USA
Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA)
Internet Archive
isen.com, LLC
Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)
Law Life Culture
Liberty Coalition
May First/People Link
Media Alliance
Media Mobilizing Project, Philadelphia
Mozilla
Namecheap
National Coalition Against Censorship
New Sanctuary Coalition of NYC
Open Technology Institute
OpenMedia.org
Participatory Politics Foundation
Patient Privacy Rights
People for the American Way
Personal Democracy Media
PolitiHacks
Privacy and Access Council of Canada
Public Interest Advocacy Centre (Ottawa, Canada)
Public Knowledge
Privacy Activism
Privacy Camp
Privacy Rights Clearinghouse
Privacy Times
reddit
Represent.us
Rights Working Group
Rocky Mountain Civil Liberties Association
RootsAction.org
Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic
Big Banks and Other Corporate Bigwigs Benefit from Illegal Spying
You’ve heard that the government spies on all Americans.
But you might not know that the government shares some of that information with big corporations.
Reuters reported in 2011 that the NSA shares intelligence with Wall Street banks in the name of “battling hackers.”
The National Security Agency, a secretive arm of the U.S.
military, has begun providing Wall Street banks with intelligence on
foreign hackers, a sign of growing U.S. fears of financial sabotage.The
assistance from the agency that conducts electronic spying overseas is
part of an effort by American banks and other financial firms to get
help from the U.S. military and private defense contractors to fend off
cyber attacks, according to interviews with U.S. officials, security
experts and defense industry executives.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has also warned banks of
particular threats amid concerns that hackers could potentially exploit
security vulnerabilities to wreak havoc across global markets and cause
economic mayhem.
***
NSA Director Keith Alexander, who runs the U.S. military’s cyber
operations, told Reuters the agency is currently talking to financial
firms about sharing electronic information on malicious software,
possibly by expanding a pilot program through which it offers similar data to the defense industry.
***
NSA, which has long been charged with protecting classified
government networks from attack, is already working with Nasdaq to beef
up its defenses after hackers infiltrated its computer systems last year
and installed malicious software that allowed them to spy on the
directors of publicly held companies.
***
The NSA’s work with Wall Street marks a milestone in the agency’s efforts to make its cyber intelligence available more broadly to the private sector.
***
Greater cooperation with industry became possible after a deal
reached a year ago between the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland
Security, allowing NSA to provide cyber expertise to other government agencies and certain private companies.
“Right now, the ability to share real-time information is
complicated and there are legal barriers. We have to overcome that,”
Gen Keith B. Alexander, director of the National Security Agency and
commander of U.S. Cyber Command, said during a Thursday appearance at
Georgia Tech’s Cyber Security Symposium.
[Alexander has been pushing for the anti-privacy Internet bill known as "CISPA"
to be passed.] “It allows the government to start working with industry
and … discuss with each of these sector about the best approach,” he
said.
CISPA would allow the NSA to more openly share data with corporations
in the name of protecting against “cyber threats.” But that phrase is
too squisy. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes:
A “cybersecurity purpose” only means that a company has
to think that a user is trying to harm its network. What does that mean,
exactly? The definition is broad and vague. The definition allows
purposes such as guarding against “improper” information modification,
ensuring “timely” access to information or “preserving authorized
restrictions on access…protecting…proprietary information” (i.e. DRM).
More importantly, as the ACLU notes, “Fusion Centers” – a hybrid of military, intelligence agency, police and private corporations set up in centers throughout the country,
and run by the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland
Security – allow big businesses like Boeing to get access to classified
information which gives them an unfair advantage over smaller competitors:
Participation in fusion centers might give Boeing access
to the trade secrets or security vulnerabilities of competing companies,
or might give it an advantage in competing for government contracts.
Expecting a Boeing analyst to distinguish between information that
represents a security risk to Boeing and information that represents a
business risk may be too much to ask.
A 2008 Department of Homeland Security Privacy Office review
of fusion centers concluded that they presented risks to privacy
because of ambiguous lines of authority, rules and oversight, the
participation of the military and private sector, data mining, excessive secrecy, inaccurate or incomplete information and the dangers of mission creep.
The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found in 2012 that fusion centers spy on citizens, produce ‘shoddy’ work unrelated to terrorism or real threats:
“The Subcommittee investigation found that DHS-assigned
detailees to the fusion centers forwarded ‘intelligence’ of uneven
quality – oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering
citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally
taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”
Under the FBI’s Infraguard program, businesses sometimes receive intel even before elected officials.
Law enforcement agencies spy on protesters and then share the info – at taxpayer expense – with the giant Wall Street banks
And a security expert says that all Occupy Wall Street protesters had their cellphone information logged by the government.
Alternet notes:
Ironically, records indicate that corporate entities
engaged in such public-private intelligence sharing partnerships were
often the very same corporate entities criticized, and protested
against, by the Occupy Wall Street movement as having undue influence in
the functions of public government.
In essence, big banks and giant corporations are seen as being part of “critical infrastructure” and “key resources”
… so the government protects them. That creates a dynamic where the
government will do quite a bit to protect the big boys against any real
or imagined threats … whether from activists or even smaller
competitors. (Remember that the government has completely propped up the big banks, even though they went bankrupt due to stupid gambles.)
The Investigative Fund at the Nation reports:
The $103,000 no-bid contract
awarded by the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security to the
Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR) in 2009 is a drop in
the bucket. ITRR, a private security firm headed by a former PA chief
of police, was given the task of providing the department with
thrice-weekly intelligence bulletins that identified threats to the
state’s critical infrastructure. Instead of focusing on real threats,
however, ITRR turned its attention to law-abiding activist groups
including Tea Party protesters, pro-life activists, and anti-fracking
environmental organizations. The bulletins included information about
when and where local environmental groups would be meeting, upcoming
protests, and anti-fracking activists’ internal strategy. As I recently
wrote in my Investigative Fund/Earth Island Journal story,
the bulletins were then distributed to local police chiefs, state,
federal, and private intelligence agencies, and the security directors
of the natural gas companies, as well as industry groups and PR firms.
The state’s Department of Homeland Security was essentially providing
intelligence to the natural gas industry about their detractors. And
Pennsylvania taxpayers were footing the bill.
Perhaps because it was a relatively small contract the Pennsylvania
spy scandal was brushed aside as an unfortunate mistake. Then-Governor
Ed Rendell, whose own ties to the natural gas industry have recently
been exposed,
called the episode “deeply embarrassing.” The state terminated its
contract with ITRR, a one-day Senate hearing was held, and the matter
largely forgotten. But the Pennsylvania story is not an isolated case.
In fact, it represents a larger pattern of corporate and police spying
on activists and everyday citizens exercising their First Amendment
rights.
A report
published by the Center for Media and Democracy last month detailed how
Homeland Security fusion centers, corporations, and local law
enforcement agencies have teamed up to spy on Occupy Wall Street
protesters. Fusion centers, created between 2003 and 2007 by the
Department of Homeland Security, are centers for the sharing of
federal-level information between the CIA, FBI, US military, local
governments, and more. The more than 70 fusion centers, whose primary
task is to analyze and share information with public and private actors,
are part of Homeland Security’s growing “Information Sharing
Environment” (ISE). According to their website,
ISE “provides analysts, operators, and investigators with integrated
and synthesized terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and homeland
security information needed to enhance national security and help keep
our people safe.” The other big domestic public-private intelligence
sharing ventures are Infragard, managed by the FBI’s Cyber Division Public/Private Alliance Unit, and the Domestic Security Alliance Council
(DSAC), which openly states that its mission includes “advancing the
ability of the U.S. private sector to protect its employees, assets and
proprietary information.”
The little known DSAC brings together representatives from the FBI,
the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and
Analysis, and some of the nation’s most powerful corporations.
Twenty-nine corporations and banks are on the DSAC Leadership Board,
including Bank of America, ConocoPhillips, and Wal-Mart. The Department
of Homeland Security also has a Private Sector Information-Sharing
Working Group, which includes representatives from more than 50 Fortune
500 companies. They have pushed for increased funding of public-private
intelligence sharing partnerships, largely through the expansion of
fusion centers. According to the Department of Homeland Security website,
“Our nation faces an evolving threat environment, in which threats not
only emanate from outside our borders, but also from within our
communities. This new environment demonstrates the increasingly critical
role fusion centers play to support the sharing of threat related
information between the federal government and federal, state, local,
tribal, and territorial partners.”
***
As Mike German, an FBI special agent for 16 years who now works for
the ACLU told me, “These systems and this type of collection is so rife
with inappropriate speculation and error — both intentional and
unintentional — that your good behavior doesn’t protect you.”
[T]he fossil fuel industry is seeking to protect itself from an
increasingly restless environmental movement. One way of doing so is to
paint the opposition as extremists or potential terrorists. “It’s the
new politics of the petro-state,” Jeff Monaghan, a researcher with the
Surveillance Studies Center at Queen’s University in Ontario, said.
“It’s like this is not only environmental activism it’s activism against
our way of life. It’s activism against the economy and the system.
Because the system is now a petro system.”
Indeed, because of its enormous shale gas reserves, the United States is already being talked of as a future petro-state, and shale gas development a matter of national security. In his keynote address
at the 2011 Shale Gas Insight Conference sponsored by the Marcellus
Shale Coalition, Tom Ridge, former head of the Department of Homeland
Security, described shale gas as vital to US national security.
Everything that goes along with it — the rigs, pipelines, and compressor
stations (not to mention air and water pollution) — will be viewed as
part of the nation’s critical infrastructure. According to the Center for Media and Democracy report,
“The stated purpose of protecting ‘critical infrastructure/key
resources’ has come to serve as the single largest avenue for corporate
involvement in the ‘homeland security’ apparatus.”
And given that some 70% of the national intelligence budget is spent on private sector contractors. that millions of private contractors
have clearance to view information gathered by spy agencies – including
kids like 29 year old spying whistleblower Edward Snowden, who
explained that he had the power to spy on anyone in the country – and that information gained by the NSA by spying on Americans is being shared with agencies in other countries, at least some of the confidential information is undoubtedly leaking into private hands for profit, without the government’s knowledge or consent.
As the ACLU noted in 2004:
There is a long and unfortunate history of cooperation
between government security agencies and powerful corporations to
deprive individuals of their privacy and other civil liberties, and any
program that institutionalizes close, secretive ties between such
organizations raises serious questions about the scope of its
activities, now and in the future.
Indeed, the government has been affirmatively helping the big banks, giant oil companies and other large corporations cover up fraud and to go after critics. For example, Business Week reported on May 23, 2006:
President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence
czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national
security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual
accounting and securities-disclosure obligations.
U.S. securities regulators originally treated the New
York Federal Reserve’s bid to keep secret many of the details of the
American International Group bailout like a request to protect matters
of national security, according to emails obtained by Reuters.
The DHS issued a directive to employees in July 2009
requiring a wide range of public records requests to pass through
political appointees for vetting. These included any requests dealing
with a “controversial or sensitive subject” or pertaining to meetings
involving prominent business leaders and elected
officials. Requests from lawmakers, journalists, and activist and
watchdog groups were also placed under this scrutiny.
In an effort to protect Bank of America from the threatened Wikileaks expose of wrongdoing – the Department of Justice told Bank of America to a hire a specific hardball-playing law firm to assemble a team to take down WikiLeaks (and see this)
The government and big banks actually coordinated on the violent crackdown of the anti-big bank Occupy protest.
The government is also using anti-terrorism laws to keep people from
learning what pollutants are in their own community, in order to protect
the fracking, coal and other polluting industries. See this, this, this, this and this.
Investigating factory farming can get one labeled a terrorist.
Infringing the copyright of a big corporation may also get labeled as
a terrorist … and a swat team may be deployed to your house. See this, this, this and this. As the executive director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School notes:
This administration … publishes a newsletter about its efforts with language that compares copyright infringement to terrorism.
Are Emergency Plans Meant Only for Nuclear War the Real Justification for Spying?
To understand the scope and extent of government spying on all
Americans – and the reasons for such spying – you have to understand
what has happened to our Constitutional form of government since 9/11.
State of Emergency
The United States has been in a declared state of emergency from
September 2001, to the present. Specifically, on September 11, 2001, the
government declared a state of emergency. That declared state of
emergency was formally put in writing on 9/14/2001:
A national emergency exists by reason of the terrorist
attacks at the World Trade Center, New York, New York, and the Pentagon,
and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the
United States.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of
America, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President by the
Constitution and the laws of the United States, I hereby declare that
the national emergency has existed since September 11, 2001 . . .
That declared state of emergency has continued in full force and
effect from 9/11 to the present. President Bush kept it in place, and
President Obama has also.
For example, on September 9, 2011, President Obama declared:
CONTINUATION OF NATIONAL EMERGENCY DECLARED BY PROC. NO. 7463
Notice of President of the United States, dated Sept. 9, 2011, 76 F.R. 56633, provided:
Consistent with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act, 50
U.S.C. 1622(d), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency
previously declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with
respect to the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001, and the continuing and immediate threat of
further attacks on the United States. Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities
adopted to deal with that emergency must continue in effect beyond
September 14, 2011. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an
additional year the national emergency that was declared on September
14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat.
This notice shall be published in the Federal Register and
transmitted to the Congress.
Simply by proclaiming a national emergency on Friday,
President Bush activated some 500 dormant legal provisions, including
those allowing him to impose censorship and martial law.
The White House has kept substantial information concerning its
presidential proclamations and directives hidden from Congress. For
example, according to Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy:
Of the 54 National Security Presidential Directives
issued by the [George W.] Bush Administration to date, the titles of
only about half have been publicly identified. There is descriptive
material or actual text in the public domain for only about a third. In
other words, there are dozens of undisclosed Presidential directives
that define U.S. national security policy and task government agencies,
but whose substance is unknown either to the public or, as a rule, to
Congress.
Continuity of Government
Continuity of Government (“COG”) measures were implemented on 9/11.
For example, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, at page 38:
At 9:59, an Air Force lieutenant colonel working in the
White House Military Office joined the conference and stated he had just
talked to Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. The White House requested (1) the implementation of continuity of government measures, (2) fighter escorts for Air Force One, and (3) a fighter combat air patrol over Washington, D.C.
The Washington Post notes that Vice President Dick Cheney initiated the COG plan on 9/11:
From the bunker, Cheney officially implemented the emergency continuity of government orders . . .
(See also footnotes cited therein and this webpage.)
CNN reported that – 6 months later – the plans were still in place:
Because Bush has decided to leave the operation in place,
agencies including the White House and top civilian Cabinet departments
have rotated personnel involved, and are discussing ways to staff such a
contingency operation under the assumption it will be in place
indefinitely, this official said.
Similarly, the Washington Post reported in March 2002 that “the shadow government has evolved into an indefinite precaution.” The same article goes on to state:
Assessment of terrorist risks persuaded the White House to remake the program as a permanent feature of ‘the new reality, based on what the threat looks like,’ a senior decisionmaker said.
As CBS pointed out, virtually none of the Congressional leadership knew that the COG had been implemented or was still in existence as of March 2002:
Key congressional leaders say they didn’t know President Bush had established a “shadow government,”
moving dozens of senior civilian managers to secret underground
locations outside Washington to ensure that the federal government could
survive a devastating terrorist attack on the nation’s capital, The
Washington Post says in its Saturday editions.
Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) told the Post he
had not been informed by the White House about the role, location or
even the existence of the shadow government that the administration
began to deploy the morning of the Sept. 11 hijackings.
An aide to House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said he was also unaware of the administration’s move.
Among Congress’s GOP leadership, aides to House Speaker J. Dennis
Hastert (Ill.), second in line to succeed the president if he became
incapacitated, and to Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (Miss.) said
they were not sure whether they knew.
Aides to Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W. Va.) said he had not been told. As
Senate president pro tempore, he is in line to become president after
the House speaker.
Similarly, the above-cited CNN article states:
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota, said Friday he can’t say much about the plan.
“We have not been informed at all about the role of the shadow
government or its whereabouts or what particular responsibilities they
have and when they would kick in, but we look forward to work with the
administration to get additional information on that.”
Indeed, the White House has specifically refused to share information
about Continuity of Government plans with the Homeland Security
Committee of the U.S. Congress, even though that Committee has proper
security clearance to hear the full details of all COG plans.
Specifically, in the summer 2007, Congressman Peter DeFazio, on the
Homeland Security Committee (and so with proper security access to be
briefed on COG issues), inquired about continuity of government plans,
and was refused access. Indeed, DeFazio told Congress that the entire Homeland Security Committee of the U.S. Congress has been denied access to the plans by the White House.
(Or here is the transcript).
The Homeland Security Committee has full clearance to view all information about COG plans.
DeFazio concluded: “Maybe the people who think there’s a conspiracy out there are right”.
University of California Berkeley Professor Emeritus Peter Dale Scott points out
that – whether or not COG plans are still in effect – the refusal of
the executive branch to disclose their details to Congress means that
the Constitutional system of checks and balances has already been
gravely injured:
If members of the Homeland Security Committee cannot
enforce their right to read secret plans of the Executive Branch, then
the systems of checks and balances established by the U.S. Constitution
would seem to be failing.
To put it another way, if the White House is
successful in frustrating DeFazio, then Continuity of Government
planning has arguably already superseded the Constitution as a higher authority.
Top leaders of the “new government” called for in the COG would
entirely or largely go into hiding, and would govern in hidden locations
Those within the new government would know what was going on. But
those in the “old government” – that is, the one created by the framers
of the Constitution – would not necessarily know the details of what was
happening
Normal laws and legal processes might largely be suspended, or superseded by secretive judicial forums
The media might be ordered by strict laws – punishable by treason – to only promote stories authorized by the new government
See this, this and this.
Could the White House have maintained COG operations to the present day?
I don’t know, but the following section from the above-cited CNN article is not very reassuring:
Bush triggered the precautions in the hours after the September 11 strikes, and has left them in place because of continuing U.S. intelligence suggesting a possible threat.
Concerns that al Qaeda could have gained access to a crude nuclear
device “were a major factor” in the president’s decision, the official
said. “The threat of some form of catastrophic event is the trigger,”
this official said.
This same official went on to say that the U.S. had no confirmation —
“and no solid evidence” — that al Qaeda had such a nuclear device and
also acknowledged that the “consensus” among top U.S. officials was that
the prospect was “quite low.”
Still, the officials said Bush and other top White House officials
including Cheney were adamant that the government take precautions
designed to make sure government functions ranging from civil defense to
transportation and agricultural production could be managed in the
event Washington was the target of a major strike.
As is apparent from a brief review of the news, the government has,
since 9/11, continuously stated that there is a terrorist threat of a
nuclear device or dirty bomb. That alone infers that COG plans could,
hypothetically, still be in effect, just like the state of emergency is
still in effect and has never been listed.
Indeed, President Bush said on December 17, 2005, 4 years after 9/11:
The authorization I gave the National Security Agency
after Sept. 11 helped address that problem in a way that is fully
consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities.
The activities I have authorized make it more likely that killers
like these 9/11 hijackers will be identified and located in time.
And the activities conducted under this authorization have helped
detect and prevent possible terrorist attacks in the United States and
abroad. The activities I authorized are reviewed approximately every
45 days. Each review is based on a fresh intelligence assessment of
terrorist threats to the continuityofourgovernment and the threat of catastrophic damage to our homeland.
During each assessment, previous activities under the authorization
are reviewed. The review includes approval by our nation’s top legal
officials, including the attorney general and the counsel to the
president. I have reauthorized this program more than 30 times since the Sept. 11 attacks [45 days times 30 equals approximately 4 years] and I intend to do so for as long as our nation faces a continuingthreatfromAlQaeda and related groups.
The N.S.A.’s activities under this authorization are thoroughly
reviewed by the Justice Department and N.S.A.’s top legal officials,
including N.S.A.’s general counsel and inspector general.
In other words, it appears that as of December 2005, COG plans had
never been rescincded, but had been continously renewed every 45 days.
In 2008, Tim Shorrock wrote at Salon:
A contemporary version of the Continuity of Government
program was put into play in the hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks,
when Vice President Cheney and senior members of Congress were
dispersed to “undisclosed locations” to maintain government functions. It
was during this emergency period, Hamilton and other former government
officials believe, that President Bush may have authorized the NSA to
begin actively using the Main Core database for domestic surveillance
[more on Main Core below]. One indicator they cite is a statement by
Bush in December 2005, after the New York Times had revealed the NSA’s
warrantless wiretapping, in which he made a rare reference to the
emergency program: The Justice Department’s legal reviews of the NSA
activity, Bush said, were based on “fresh intelligence assessment of
terrorist threats to the continuity of our government.”
In 2007, President Bush issued Presidential Directive NSPD-51, which
purported to change Continuity of Government plans. NSPD51 is odd
because:
Beyond cases of actual insurrection, the President may
now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a
natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack, or to any ‘other
condition.’ Changes of this magnitude should be made only after a
thorough public airing. But these new Presidential powers were slipped
into the law without hearings or public debate.
As a reporter for Slate concluded after analyzing NSPD-51:
I see nothing in the [COG document entitled presidential
directive NSPD51] to prevent even a “localized” forest fire or hurricane
from giving the president the right to throw long-established
constitutional government out the window
White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said that “because of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the American public needs no explanation of [Continuity of Government] plans”
This is all the more bizarre when you realize that COG plans were originally created solely
to respond to a decapitating nuclear strike which killed our civilian
leaders. (It was subsequently expanded decades before 9/11 into a
multi-purpose plan by our good friends Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
See this, this and this.)
Does COG Explain the Pervasive Spying on Americans?
5 years ago, investigative reporter Christopher Ketcham disclosed the spying which was confirmed last week by whistleblower Edward Snowden:
The following information seems to be fair game for
collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and
receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers
you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of
the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web
searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts
and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you
purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on
government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the
Main Core database.
Given that Ketcham was proven right, let’s see what else he reported:
Given that Ketcham was right about the basics, let’s hear what else the outstanding investigative journalist said in 2008:
There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the
slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who,
in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and
locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and
other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that
8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect.
In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to
everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct
questioning and possibly even detention.”
***
According to one news report, even “national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad” could be a trigger [for martial law ].
***
When COG plans are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively
unregulated by Congress or the courts, and married to an overreaching
surveillance state—as seems to be the case with Main Core—even
sober observers must weigh whether the protections put in place by the
federal government are becoming more dangerous to America than any
outside threat.
Another well-informed source—a former military operative regularly
briefed by members of the intelligence community—says this particular
program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with
help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the
program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of
targets’ behavior and tracks their circle of associations with “social
network analysis” and artificial intelligence modeling tools.
***
A former NSA officer tells Radar that the Treasury Department’s
Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using an electronic-funds transfer
surveillance program, also contributes data to Main Core, as does a
Pentagon program that was created in 2002 to monitor antiwar protesters and environmental activists such as Greenpeace.
***
If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any indication, the Main
Core database includes dissidents and activists of various stripes,
political and tax protesters, lawyers and professors, publishers and
journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great
many other harmless, average people.
A veteran CIA intelligence analyst who maintains active high-level
clearances and serves as an advisor to the Department of Defense in the
field of emerging technology tells Radar that during the 2004 hospital
room drama, [current nominee to head the FBI, and former Deputy Attorney
General] James Comey expressed concern over how this secret
database was being used “to accumulate otherwise private data on
non-targeted U.S. citizens for use at a future time.” [Snowden and high-level NSA whistleblower William Binney have since confirmed this] …. A source regularly briefed by people inside the intelligence community adds: “Comey
had discovered that President Bush had authorized NSA to use a highly
classified and compartmentalized Continuity of Government database on
Americans in computerized searches of its domestic intercepts.
[Comey] had concluded that the use of that ‘Main Core’ database
compromised the legality of the overall NSA domestic surveillance
project.”
***
The veteran CIA intelligence analyst notes that Comey’s suggestion
that the offending elements of the program were dropped could be
misleading: “Bush [may have gone ahead and] signed it as a National
Intelligence Finding anyway.” But even if we never face a national
emergency, the mere existence of the database is a matter of concern. “The capacity for future use of this information against the American people is so great as to be virtually unfathomable,” the senior government official says.
In any case, mass watch lists of domestic citizens may do nothing to make us safer from terrorism.
Jeff Jonas, chief scientist at IBM, a world-renowned expert in data
mining, contends that such efforts won’t prevent terrorist conspiracies.
“Because there is so little historical terrorist event data,” Jonas
tells Radar, “there is not enough volume to create precise predictions.”
***
[J. Edgar Hoover's] FBI “security index” was allegedly maintained and
updated into the 1980s, when it was reportedly transferred to the
control of none other than FEMA (though the FBI denied this at the
time).
FEMA, however—then known as the Federal Preparedness Agency—already
had its own domestic surveillance system in place, according to a 1975
investigation by Senator John V. Tunney of California. Tunney, the son
of heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and the inspiration for
Robert Redford’s character in the film The Candidate, found that the
agency maintained electronic dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans that
contained information gleaned from wide-ranging computerized
surveillance. The database was located in the agency’s secret underground city at Mount Weather, near the town of Bluemont, Virginia. [One of the main headquarter of COG operations.] The senator’s findings were confirmed in a 1976 investigation by the Progressive magazine, which found that the Mount Weather computers “can obtain millions of pieces [of] information on the personal lives of American citizens
by tapping the data stored at any of the 96 Federal Relocation
Centers”—a reference to other classified facilities. According to the
Progressive, Mount Weather’s databases were run “without any set of
stated rules or regulations. Its surveillance program remains secret even from the leaders of the House and the Senate.”
***
Wired magazine turned up additional damaging information, revealing
in 1993 that [Oliver] North, operating from a secure White House site,
allegedly employed a software database program called PROMIS (ostensibly
as part of the REX 84 plan). PROMIS, which has a strange and
controversial history, was designed to track individuals—prisoners, for
example—by pulling together information from disparate databases into a
single record. According to Wired, “Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States.
Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon’s enemies list or Senator Joe
McCarthy’s blacklist look downright crude.” Sources have suggested to
Radar that government databases tracking Americans today, including Main
Core, could still have PROMIS-based legacy code from the days when
North was running his programs.
***
Marty Lederman, a high-level official at the Department of Justice
under Clinton, writing on a law blog last year, wondered, “How extreme
were the programs they implemented [after 9/11]? How egregious was the
lawbreaking?” Congress has tried, and mostly failed, to find out.
***
“We are at the edge of a cliff and we’re about to fall off,”
says constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official
Bruce Fein. “To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a
danger to stability. There’s no doubt that Congress would have the
authority to denounce all this—for example, to refuse to appropriate
money for the preparation of a list of U.S. citizens to be detained in
the event of martial law. But Congress is the invertebrate branch.
***
UPDATE [from Ketcham]: Since this article went to
press, several documents have emerged to suggest the story has longer
legs than we thought. Most troubling among these is an October 2001
Justice Department memo that detailed the extra-constitutional powers
the U.S. military might invoke during domestic operations following a
terrorist attack. In the memo, John Yoo, then deputy assistant attorney
general, “concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations.”
(Yoo, as most readers know, is author of the infamous Torture Memo
that, in bizarro fashion, rejiggers the definition of “legal” torture to
allow pretty much anything short of murder.) In the October 2001 memo,
Yoo refers to a classified DOJ document titled “Authority for Use of
Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States.”
According to the Associated Press, “Exactly what domestic military
action was covered by the October memo is unclear. But federal documents
indicate that the memo relates to the National Security Agency’s
Terrorist Surveillance Program.” Attorney General John Mukasey last month refused to clarify before Congress whether the Yoo memo was still in force.
Americans have the right to know whether a COG program is still in
effect, and whether the spying on our phone calls and Internet usage
stems from such COG plans. Indeed, 9/11 was a horrible blow, but it was
not a decapitating nuclear strike on our leaders … so COG and the state
of emergency should be lifted.
If COG plans are not still in effect, we have the right to
demand that “enemies lists” and spying capabilities developed for the
purpose of responding to a nuclear war be discarded , as we have not
been hit by nuclear weapons … and our civilian leaders – on Capitol
Hill, the White House, and the judiciary – are still alive and able to
govern.
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