Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in ‘changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them‘- – Paulo Freire

The illegal domestic wiretapping of all Americans, the invasive search practices at every airport directed at every single US passenger, the compilation of all data on all citizens in not only one but multiple government databases, the unreasonable and warrantless search and seizure practiced on US masses facilitated arbitrarily by the FBI, are among many known and unknown government practices directed at the entire population of the United States of America.

Despite the current futility, many constitutionalists, legalists, analysts, and activists are writing, talking, and arguing about the legality or illegality, constitutionality or unconstitutionality, practicality or impracticality, of these surveillance and search practices of our ‘National Security State.’ There is a plethora of material out there for you to read or listen to on those points, so there is no need for me to cover all that has been covered already; over and over. I am not going to discuss the tedious and ambiguous laws, nor am I going to waste time on the vague and irrelevant notion of and argument on security. No. I intend to focus on the subjects of these practices; the people; the masses, in fact, the entire population as the willing recipients who have come to view and accept themselves as suspects. Isn’t this what we have become; a nation of suspects?

No one any longer questions the fact that our government has been engaged in domestic surveillance of our communication systems. The news came out. The practitioners admitted to it, in fact, proudly. These activities were challenged in courts and the challenges overridden, thus making the legality or illegality, constitutionality or unconstitutionality, all irrelevant; moot.  Several years have passed and it has become, it is, a fact of life; a fact in every American’s life. And for the majority, not a painful or aggravating fact of life; just ‘a fact’ of life. Why?

Many say ‘look, there are these bad guys out there called terrorists. The government is out there looking for them; everywhere. I ain’t doing nothin wrong, and I ain’t got nothin to hide. So why should I be concerned? My government is doing it to keep me, to keep us all, safe; to protect us against those bad terrorist people lurking here and there…’

If you were to ask most ‘but why do they tap your phone line and capture your data or conversation? You the good citizen?‘ The common answer would be along these lines, ‘I don’t know. They must know something. I don’t understand how intelligence and police stuff like this works. They must know something, if they think tapping my phone and listening to my conversation helps to fight terrorists and keep us safe…I just do my own thing and since I don’t have anything to hide it doesn’t bother me. They’ve got to do what they’ve got to do to protect us…’

Most of you know that the above dialogue is more or less what we get everywhere with almost everyone. I have had that exact same conversation with tens if not hundreds of people, and I can assure you that the above rendition is in no way exaggerated or downplayed. It is the general attitude. It is the common thought and response process. It is a fact of today’s life expressed by today’s people in our country. And to recognize these common beliefs, to draw the most logical conclusion, takes neither a genius nor a philosopher nor a psychologist…But let’s move to the next related fact, and see that same logical conclusion.

Starting immediately after the September 11 terrorist attacks, we began to see, and of course become subject to, jacked up security check points and searches in our airports. First, they already had us all going through big complex metal detectors. Then, they had us do the same thing but remove our belts and other metal containing garments and belongings. Then, they had us bend over like servants before kings, remove our shoes, and humbly walk barefoot through the big complex metal detectors. After that, they prohibited us from carrying our drinking water or any other liquid, and they made our lactating women open up their stored breast milk and sip it before the eyes of the traveling masses passing by…

Meanwhile we learned of their massive databases on fliers, where over one million people were divided into no fly lists, almost no fly lists, and maybe no fly lists, with further division into high-risk fliers, medium-risk fliers, and low-risk fliers…But, despite all these massive, complex and secret multiple lists and databases, we all had to go through those same detectors, with no shoes, no liquids, supposed random but all too frequent pat downs…So we never understood the rationale for having all those lists and databases anyway. No worries. We, most of us, said, ‘we may not understand, it may not make the slightest sense, it can defy all logic…but that doesn’t matter. The government must know things we don’t, and they are protecting us against the big bad terrorists…’ So we went on, kept putting up.

Recently, they said all those practices were not nearly enough, so they’ve been erecting body-scanner temples at security checkpoints, and asking us to step in them to be viewed naked-breasts, penises, arses and all. To be technically correct, they are not forcing us to go through the scanners; in fact, they are giving us options:

-You either step in the scanners and let us view you, all your private parts naked, or,

-You go through grabbing, groping, patting, and worse one-on-one searches.

They have been proudly justifying these invasive procedures by presenting them as reasonable options for people to choose from. Think of a rapist saying the following in court:

‘But I gave her a choice, and I made it clear. I said you either submit willfully and quietly while I rape you, or, you can fight and I’ll beat the hell out of you while I’m raping you….’

We’ve been complying with all that. We get to the checkpoints, and as one woman told me:

‘I just go into this auto pilot mode. I remove my shoes and other items. I move forward towards the screening machine while looking into empty space and avoiding any eye contact. I step in there, slightly spread my arms and legs, pause, and step out on the other side. I then let out a deep breath for making it, without sounding off any alarm bells, and without having to be touched, groped and patted everywhere…Then I walk away quickly and try to wipe away all the memories of those long minutes…It’s the best way to deal with these things…’

Again, this sounds very familiar. Just read through documented victim accounts on dealing with highly traumatic experiences. I used to read about and listen to such victims. A woman telling the story of being molested and raped by her father:

‘I used to pretend not being there…you know, almost like an out of body experience. He’d quietly come to my room, his breath reeking with alcohol…I’d close my eyes when he pulled down my panties…I’d spread my legs, close my eyes, and imagine not being there…imagine it was not happening…It was quicker that way. He’d be done and gone. And I would go on trying to forget, pretending I forgot…trying to erase all the memories and the feeling of being violated…’

Doesn’t it feel that way? Don’t we feel violated? Don’t we feel powerless? Doesn’t it feel like total submission to a force greater than any one of us, and obviously the total of all of us?

Think about it. Many elementary schools bring in law enforcement or psychology experts to educate our children about abduction, molestation, rape, etc. One of the things they try to teach our children, in simple and easy to understand language, has to do with recognizing ‘danger’ or ‘criminal’ or ‘wrong’ behavior, approaches, and requests, and to say ‘no,’ or walk away from predators who initiate them. One of the main things they teach:

It is not right or good if people, even friends and family, ask to see your private parts. That’s why we call them ‘private parts.’ They are private. We say ‘no’ if someone asks us to see our private parts. We don’t let people touch our private parts. We run and report to our parents if someone tries to touch our private parts. It is not right. No one should be asking you, or do to you, things like that…

Now, with all the transportation procedures, security screening rules, shouldn’t they add a qualifier to above lecture-training points? Something like:

It is not right or good if people, even friends and family, ask to see your private parts. That’s why we call them ‘private parts.’ … We say ‘no’ if someone asks us to see our private parts. We don’t let people touch our private parts… However, if it’s TSA screeners at the airports, if it’s the security police in front of the congressional building, if it’s the …then all bets are off. You have to let them do whatever they ask you to do. It is okay for TSA men and women to see your private parts. It is perfectly okay, if they pick you for random additional search, and touch your private parts; grope, pat your private body parts. Then, it is okay.

Let’s use common sense here my friends. When put in writing it may sound disgusting or outrageous to some of you, but isn’t it true? Don’t they view us and our children, and all our private parts with their new body-scanner temples? Don’t they give us a thorough pat down, everywhere, including our private parts when we say no to their temples, or, when we become the chosen random one for one-on-one pat down?

What will you tell your kids when they say, ‘But daddy, they told us at school not to let people touch us down there! How come this guy is touching me here?’ No, you tell me, what will you tell your kid when he or she innocently, but far more rationally, asks you that question?!

Now let’s go back to our submission to total surveillance in the name of vague and irrational security. Most people I know, in fact everyone I know in this country, has a reasonable expectation of privacy. Even with our spouses we adhere to respected privacy ethics. You certainly would not like or tolerate it if your partner were to go through your private mail, open and read it. No matter how innocent, worthless or trivial the content of the envelopes. You would be livid to find out your partner has discovered your password to your personal e-mail accounts, and has been reading your correspondence with others. No matter how innocent or unimportant the nature of those communications. You would be outraged if your spouse picked up the phone upstairs and listened in to your conversation with a friend. No matter what the nature or importance of that particular call. Then how is it that all these expectations of privacy, the sense of being violated when that privacy is invaded, and the swift and firm response to these violations, all go out the window when the violators happen to be total strangers hidden in secret castles of our government?

Somehow the same justification, ‘Oh, I’m not doing anything wrong, and I don’t have anything to hide…’ does not wash away the justified feeling of being violated. For some reason, lines like ‘he/she was doing it for my own good, to protect me better, or, to just make sure I wasn’t engaged in anything nefarious or dangerous…’ would seem utterly irrational or stupid. Yet, we’ve been practicing this irrational distinction with far more outrageous violations of privacy inflicted upon us on a daily basis, and by those we don’t even know – to know the extent of the damages they may be able to bring down upon our lives.

When did we make these decisions? When did we decide to put in place and live by these distinctions? When did unreasonable search practices somehow come to be accepted as reasonable? When did we accept being watched, being searched and patted down, being treated, and simply living as suspects?

Whether it’s carrying out a conversation over the phone,  whether it’s writing a quick e-mail to a colleague, whether it’s flying home to Milwaukee to see your grandmother for one last time, we, every single one of us, are being listened to, watched and read, and invasively searched as suspects. No matter how clean our background and criminal history, no matter how virtuous our daily lives and conduct, no matter how exemplary our citizenry…no matter; we are all suspects.

Are we witnessing our transformation into Orwellian masses? Because these incremental applications of indiscriminate government surveillance and warrantless-reasonless searches and seizure targeting the entire population, are geared to desensitize, degrade, and ultimately and inevitably, to dehumanize us all.

One of the notions we once tried to live by and be proud of was ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ Now, it seems we are all guilty until…well, until the end of time? Until the end of the last terrorist on earth has been announced? Until we say enough is enough and stand up for our own rights, privacy, dignity, and freedom?

Here is an excerpt from an article published in 2005:

Metro police officers are using new behavioral profiling techniques as they patrol subway stations, identifying suspicious riders and pulling them aside for questioning.

The officers are targeting people who avoid eye contact, loiter or appear to be looking around transit stations more than other passengers, officials said. Anyone identified as suspicious will be stopped and questioned about what they are doing and where they are going.

As part of their preparations for tighter security during the presidential inauguration, the officers have been trained by the Transportation Security Administration to take notice of the same behavioral characteristics and patterns that airport security officials watch for.

Orwellian, isn’t it?

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face … was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime …- – George Orwell

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I am certain all of you know of the infamous New York Times reporter Judith Miller. You know, the dark lady who worked with the Bush administration’s Pentagon to sell us the war with Iraq – based on planted made-up stories on WMD; the one who was involved in the Plame case? The one who ended up not getting fired, but retired from the New York Times, took a job with the Fox News Channel, and joined the conservative Manhattan Institute think-tank? Yes, that Judith Miller you all know about.

I am sure many of you are aware of the New York Times decision to cover up and bury the story on NSA’s illegal domestic wire tapping program. Right? They were later forced to admit that they held the story on the eve of the 2004 presidential election. Basically, they protected the Bush administration and helped them get reelected.

I believe some of you are also familiar with the New York Times’ decision to hire the disgraced LA Times editor, Dean Baquet, after he was exposed for killing AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein’s documented revelations, and voluntarily disclosing those revelations to Negroponte and the head of NSA, Michael Hayden. Exactly! This same man was later hired by the New York Times and put in charge as head of their Washington DC Bureau – the perfect place for a rat who buries stories and leaks whistleblowers and their information to government officials.

Well, here is the latest on another New York Times character with a questionable pedigree who is positioned by the paper in another strategically sensitive and important division:

New York Times fails to disclose Jerusalem bureau chief’s conflict of interest

The New York Times has all but confirmed to The Electronic Intifada (EI) that the son of its Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner was recently inducted into the Israeli army. Over the weekend, EI received a tip suggesting this had been the case and wrote to Bronner to ask him to confirm or deny the information and to seek his opinion on whether, if true, he thought it would be a conflict of interest.

Susan Chira, the foreign editor of The New York Times wrote in an email to The Electronic Intifada this morning:”Ethan Bronner referred your query to me, the foreign editor. Here is my comment: Mr. Bronner’s son is a young adult who makes his own decisions. At The Times, we have found Mr. Bronner’s coverage to be scrupulously fair and we are confident that will continue to be the case.”

The Electronic Intifada also wrote to Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The New York Times, to confirm the information and ask for an opinion on whether this constituted a conflict of interest, but had yet to receive a response.Bronner, as bureau chief, has primary responsibility for his paper’s reporting on all aspects of the Palestine/Israel conflict, and on the Israeli army, whose official name is the “Israel Defense Forces.”

……………………

Read the rest here.

How should we characterize New York Times’ criteria when it comes to selecting, hiring, and promoting their reporters for strategically important divisions of reporting? Do they have an unwritten but consistently practiced policy which says ‘Thou shall be a government approved rat, tied to special interests and agenda, shady and unethical by any standards, to be selected and placed in high places?’

Am I being fair?

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On Christmas Day, 2009, 23-year old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, allegedly tried to blow up a plane on route from Amsterdam to Detroit by detonating a device stitched to his underwear. Fortunately, in yet another example of the level of sophistication of the new league of violent extremists, Abdulmutallab succeeded only in setting fire to his own crotch, before being apprehended by fellow passengers.

Security officials now reveal that the attack was planned by an al-Qaeda network in Yemen, where Abdulmutallab was apparently radicalized and trained, although he had been originally recruited, they say, in London. During his stint in London as a student, Abdulmutallab had been President of the Islamic Society at University College London.

The incident has been described as a major intelligence failure exposing the ongoing weakness of US and British security infrastructures and procedures. According to President Barack Obama, intelligence agencies were unable to “connect and understand” separate strands of information that would have alerted them to the attempted attack. “What we have here is a situation in which the failings were individual, organizational, systemic and technological,” said one US official. “We ended up in a situation where a single point of failure in the system put our security at risk, where human error was compounded by systemic deficiencies in a way that we cannot allow to continue.”

More simply: no one is to blame.

British Security Surveillance

The problem is that the official narrative is already hopelessly littered with contradictions. Abdulmutallab was apparently first added to the UK Border Agency’s immigration watch list in May 2009 after failing to get a UK entry visa. “His refusal was not on national security grounds”, claimed an early BBC report rather earnestly, “but because he had been tagged as a potential illegal immigrant because he had applied to study at a bogus college… This would, in theory, have prevented him from entering the UK – but not from passing through the country, if he was in transit to another country.”

We now know that MI5 had him “tagged” as far more than a “potential illegal immigrant.” “The security services knew three years ago that the Detroit bomber had “multiple communications’ with Islamic extremists in Britain”, reported the Times of London. “Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was ‘reaching out’ to extremists whom MI5 had under surveillance while he was studying at University College London.” And then, another crucial caveat: “None of the information was passed to American officials, which will prompt questions about intelligence failures prior to the attack.”

Unfortunately, it now turns out that MI5’s files on Abdulmutallab were, indeed, passed on to the Americans – despite their initial claims that they had received nothing. As the Scotsman reported: “On Monday, Downing Street revealed that intelligence on Abdulmutallab had been passed to the US authorities before the Detroit incident. That revelation prompted suggestions of a rift between Gordon Brown and the White House, and increased pressure on US security agencies to explain why they had failed to identify the alleged bomber.”

CIA and NSA

The narrative from the American side has now also taken shape. Security analyst Tom Burghardt provides a meticulous overview: Abdulmutallab was placed in a “catch-all” US terrorism watch list, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), containing 550,000 individuals. This by itself was not enough to put him on a no-fly list. But in September 2009, the National Security Agency (NSA) reportedly picked up intercepts among al-Qaeda leaders in Yemen planning an imminent terror plot by a Nigerian man. The intercepts were translated and disseminated “across classified computer networks”, including the National Counterterrorism Centre (NCTC) run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Then in November, Abdulmutallab’s father, a former top Nigerian government official, provided detailed information to the US embassy in Nigeria warning that his son was a violent extremist.

“The father of terrorism suspect Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab talked about his son’s extremist views with someone from the CIA and a report was prepared, but the report was not circulated outside the agency”, reported CNN. The information supposedly sat in CIA headquarters in Langley, Virgina, for five weeks. Yet it is not actually clear whether this was indeed the case: “But an intelligence official said that the son’s name, passport number and possible connection to extremists were indeed disseminated”, CNN continued. “State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said department staff did what they were supposed to have done by sending a cable to the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington about the matter.”

“But officials did not revoke his two-year multiple-entry visa, which was issued in June 2008” added the BBC. “Instead, Mr Abdulmutallab’s file was marked for a full investigation should he ever reapply for a visa.”
 
And the State Department’s initial justification for this studious inaction? … (drum roll)… the information received contained “nothing specific” that would have alerted authorities to the attack.

According to a US source familiar with terrorist watch list processes and procedures:

“Once Abdulmutallab’s dad went to the embassy Nov. 19 and made a complaint, a report was generated and sent to NCTC”

“Once NCTC receives such a report, an intelligence analyst checks to see if the person has any other associations in the database. If it’s the first time the person’s name is coming up, NCTC creates a record under the person’s name, as was done with Abdulmutallab, and that name is added to the TIDE [Terrorism Identities Datamart Environment] list. Agencies across the federal government have access to TIDE.”

“Once a person is added to TIDE, as Abdulmutallab was, an intelligence analyst determines if there is ‘reasonable suspicion’ that he is engaged or intends to engage in a terrorist attack. If the person is found to have ‘reasonable suspicion,’ then an unclassified list with that person’s name on it is sent to the Terrorist Screening Center. That did not happen with Abdulmutallab because the intelligence analyst at NCTC did not find ‘reasonable suspicion’ based on the State Department report, which the source said consisted only of what the Nigerian man’s father said — that he was concerned about his son.”

Unfortunately, we now know that this explanation cannot wash. Only two days after the failed attack, Associated Press reported that: “Abdulmutallab came to the attention of intelligence officials months earlier though [than November 2009], according to a U.S. government official involved in the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because it is ongoing.”

 Unjoining the Dots

Indeed, highly specific MI5 surveillance and reports tracking Abdulmutallab’s contacts with UK extremists and his “journey” of radicalization as early as 2007, were passed onto US authorities contrary to early official claims; detailed NSA intercepts uncovered al-Qaeda plot preparations in Yemen led by a Nigerian; urgent warnings from his own father documented by the CIA culminating in an extensive dossier covering issues from his educational history to his plans to study Islamic law in Yemen. If standard security procedures had been followed, Abdulmutallab should have been in the system and red-flagged. As Burghardt rightly observes:

“Despite the fact that Abdulmutallab was denied re-entry into Britain, paid $2,800 in cash for his ‘ticket to Paradise,’ and had no luggage that normally would accompany a person holding a 2-year entry visa into the U.S., the erstwhile lap bomber scored a goal each time and eluded every intrusive ‘profile’ presumably in place to keep us ‘safe.’ Talk about a hat trick!

Available evidence suggests that Abdulmutallab should have landed on TSA’s hush-hush ‘Selectee list’ for additional screening, or the agency’s ‘No-fly list.’ And given NSA intercepts and a CIA biographical report on the suspect, this alone should have barred him from entering the country if ‘normal’ security procedures were followed. They weren’t.”

Similarly, Mark Thompson of Time Magazine also noted, even disregarding the wider intelligence: “Abdulmutallab’s recent stay in Yemen, combined with his father’s warning and the fact that he paid cash for a one-way ticket and didn’t check any luggage, should have been sufficient to set off alarm bells.”

President Barack Obama has now declared that this was a “systemic failure” that was “totally unacceptable.” But how could such a failure occur yet again, nearly 10 years after 9/11, which was blamed precisely on the same kind of “systemic failures” that should have been resolved given the billions of dollars of taxpayer’s funding already poured into a discredited intelligence community? Curiously, a Wired report in October 2009 noted that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was “shutting down two of its more important collaboration tools, called uGov and BRIDGE” – uGov being the most significant here:

“ODNI frequently stands up temporary analytical groups that take in analysts from agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the DIA and the National Security Agency (NSA); the uGov domain made it easy to give all of them a common platform… UGov has been especially popular among the large tranche of analysts who joined the community after 9/11. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) runs the network.”

So just as critical information was coming into the intelligence community about Abdulmutallab, the ODNI began to dismantle one of its most important interagency information-sharing initiatives.

Profiteering from Fear: The Brennan Connection

It gets worse. The wider context that has been totally ignored by mainstream media is the wholesale privatization of the US national security infrastructure.

As Burghardt also notes, the NCTC responsible for the terror watch list is “outsourced” to The Analysis Corporation (TAC), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Global Strategies Group USA (GSG), a British firm. GSG USA’s President is John Hillel – a former contributing editor to the neoconservative propaganda outlet National Review, a defence policy advisor to George W. Bush during his first presidential campaign, and a Bush appointee to the post of Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs (2005-7). Previously the NCTC’s first director, John Brennan became CEO of TAC in November 2005. Citing investigative journalist Tim Shorrock, Burghardt goes on to note that TAC provides counterterrorism support to “most of the agencies within the intelligence community”. One of its biggest clients is the NCTC, and one of its first tasks was the creation of the TIPOFF terrorist database, which later became TIDE.

Now, Obama has appointed John Brennan to lead a “comprehensive interagency review” of travel security measures. But in the words of IntelNews, “A veteran CIA official appointed to review the US government’s defective terrorism watch-list system, was actually involved in designing it, and later helped sustain it through a lucrative private-sector contract.” The report continues, noting that “not only was Brennan part of the US National Counterterrorism Center team that designed the terrorism watch-list system, but he also helped sustain it while heading the Analysis Corporation, a scandal-prone private contractor charged with overseeing the watch-list system.”

No conflict of interest then.                                                                                   

This analysis suggests that the failure to red-flag Abdulmutallab in advance was not a consequence of “nothing specific” in terms of intelligence information (the first narrative of explanation); not the consequence of systemic loopholes in a flawed travel security system that prevented the joining of dots (the second narrative of explanation); but was the consequence of a failure to implement existing normal security procedures. But given the Obama administration’s current official discourse focusing on the idea of a flawed system, Brennan’s review will no doubt call for more taxpayer’s money to be poured into the expansion and consolidation of exotic new surveillance, profiling and security powers – from which his own company, TAC, will no doubt reap lucrative dividends.

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is a bestselling author and political analyst. He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, and has taught courses in contemporary history and international relations theory at the University of Sussex. His Doctoral thesis investigated the radicalization processes and dynamics of violent conflict in the context of hierarchical social systems in the modern world. Dr. Ahmed has also published extensively on international security issues, including The London Bombings; The War on Truth; Behind the War on Terror; and The War on Freedom. He has been an expert commentator for BBC News 24, BBC World Today, Al-Jazeera English, among others. He is currently advising the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst on engaging British Muslim communities. Visit Dr. Nafeez’ website.

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Mark Klein provides us with his personal account of the illegal spying apparatus installed at AT&T by the National Security Agency and his battle as a whistleblower to bring it to light. He talks about the difficulties in getting a reluctant media to report the story, the incredible betrayal by the L.A. Times, his role as a witness in a lawsuit brought against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the alarming state of our civil liberties today, the need for vigilant activism, and more.

Mark Klein is a former AT&T technician who disclosed knowledge of his company’s cooperation with the United States National Security Agency (NSA) in installing network hardware to monitor and process American telecommunications. The subsequent media coverage became a major story in May 2006. In recognition of his actions, the Electronic Frontier Foundation picked Klein as one of the winners of its 2008 Pioneer Awards. Klein worked for AT&T as a technician for over 22 years, first in New York and then in California, before retiring in 2004. He is the author of Wiring Up The Big Brother Machine And Fighting It.

Here is our guest Mark Klein unplugged!

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In Part one of my piece, I attempted to explain the nature and scope of the US Warrantless Wiretap Program and the growing Surveillance Regime being built in this country. In Part 2, I will compare and contrast the growth and structure of the aforementioned Surveillance Regimes with other countries’ corresponding Systems of surveillance and control. I will also spotlight the International Surveillance Industry and its efforts to market its products by offering this technology to governmental power centers around the world.

Back in 1992, I was living in Vallejo, Ca, a working-class/Navy town in the northeastern San Francisco Bay Area. At that time, there was a local news story about a local drug dealer facing his third-strike conviction under California’s Three-Strikes law who had a brilliant idea. If I blow up the police evidence room and destroy my incriminating evidence, they can’t convict me. He knew the local police evidence storage wasn’t in the Police station, but at the local library of all places. He also knew that if he blew up just the library, sooner or later, the police would get around to him as a suspect. So he hired two other guys he knew who actually managed to find and steal enough explosives to construct three bombs. They planted the first bomb outside the local Solano County government office which detonated late at night doing little damage. The second bomb they planted against the outside wall of the evidence storage room at the library, but a local kid discovered it and the police were able to successfully defuse the bomb. So the two guys planted the third bomb next to the ATM at the local Wells Fargo branch, which also detonated with little damage, as another diversion. Unfortunately, for all concerned, the ATM camera had captured perfect pictures of the two men and police were able to solve the case in short order.

I offer the preceding story to illustrate a point. Had those 2 men just left town in 1992, taken a powder, gone to Buffalo, chances are they would have probably gotten away with it as the surveillance technology had not become so advanced, ingrained and integrated into society. Had those guys attempted the same crime today, their first bomb placement would have been recorded by surveillance cameras surrounding the government building, their facial features subjected to facial recognition software and their identities established from police and prison records, their fingerprints correlated to evidence from the explosives theft site, and their movements tracked from RFID chips embedded in their new “Real ID” driver’s licenses  thus apprehending them before they had a chance to place their second bomb.

I had my first personal experience in Biometric Access in 2000 at Level 3. I had been administratively transferred from the Outside Plant Department on the Central Coast of California to the LA Metro office as I had responsibilities for their fiber routes out to San Bernardino and up to Santa Barbara. Level 3 had installed fingerprint scanners at all access points into their equipment rooms and my prints had to be inputted into the system. I also saw the installations of workplace cameras throughout the facility, where the main long haul fibers terminated into my equipment and then branched off to two floors full of Cisco routers. Since Level 3 was marketing itself as “The Carriers’ Carrier” and selling off a lot of dark fiber to other firms, I took note.

I had been following Britain’s efforts to beef up its internal security systems using lessons learned from dealing with the IRA. I was also familiar with China’s telecommunications architecture and it’s conversion to a DWDM fiber optic-based system, ending any effective NSA electronic eavesdropping on the Chinese government’s communications. So, after Klein’s revelations, I started seeing stories like This in trade magazines. I had been familiar with the growth of the security industry after the Atlanta Olympic Bombing and 9/11.

Then, last year, Naomi Klein’s article on China appeared in Rolling Stone in advance of the Beijing Olympics. Her analysis of the convergence of governmental and corporate power in the surveillance and control of China’s minorities and populations was very insightful. I began seeing similarities between the Communications Security infrastructures. The methods the Chinese government used in their news reports of the Tibetan unrest prior to the Olympics as well as the recent Uigher uprisings controlled information flow out of those areas to images favorable to the government. The rapidly growing surveillance camera networks integration into first local and then regional network control centers allowed Chinese authorities to track and identify strikers and demonstrators while utilizing images of violent demonstrators juxtaposed with police showing restraint. The facts that most of this technology was supplied by Western Corporations and the true scope of the international security business was staggering.

I watched the methods of security control for both the Denver and St. Paul conventions in 2008 with the police’s use of biometric and DNA information gathering and pre-event detentions of political activists at St. Paul and Denver as National Special Security Event and started to see the convergence of architecture and methodology of these geographically diverse systems with the drumbeat of system integration as the war cry.

Despite all this doom and gloom of what appears to be shaping up as a global security regime, there are datum of hope that crop up here and there. The Chinese government’s efforts to channel civic discontent into existing governmental institutions and it’s immediate reactions to the devastating quakes there stand in stark contrast to FEMA’s woeful performance in the wake of Katrina. The use of alternate web hosting to facilitate the demonstrations in Iran after last year’s election was another possible bright spot. They show that mass action is still possible and can be effective using the Internet and Telecomm systems as political organizing tools. But it also spotlights the need for greater dialogue and cooperation among dissident populations across the globe to counterbalance corporate influence on government to ensure some semblance of control by the governed. At the same time, these same efforts show a strategy to channel popular discontent and unrest into approved channels without effecting any real change to the overall state structure. It also shows how little difference there is in the main goals of all these surveillance regimes. Witness the Latest Frontier of data mining being used by

Iran, Britain and the US. The last article linked also illustrates how Police and Security entities have used their systems to identify and arrest dissidents and perceived enemies of the regime..

In conclusion, the Global Authoritarian Capitalist Security State I see being established will be a two-class system. If you’re one with a skill or with capital to offer to it, you’ll be thoroughly vetted before being allowed into your job, or school. You’re movements will be tracked to and from work, on the job and at any recreational activity. You’re banking and spending habits will be scrutinized along with every other form of electronic communications activity. Your associations and friends will be catalogued and, as long as you represent no threat to authority, you will live in a new, worldwide Pax Corporatica with the freedom to indulge in any form of material consumption. If you’re poor or marginalized, you will live outside that world with the full panoply of state and corporate power utilized against you to keep you from becoming an organized threat to the Pax Corporatica.

Forty-seven years ago, Marshall MacLuhan wrote in “The Guttenberg Galaxy”, addressing what he termed “The Global Village”:

“Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library, the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western World a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.”

Are we conforming to that vision, something darker or a hybrid of the two? What Village do YOU want to live in?

Be Seeing You. 

This piece will attempt to analyze the US Government’s Warrantless Wiretap Program utilizing open source information including A.T.&T. Whistleblower Mark Klein’s EFF affidavit, podcasts by James Bamford and Russell Tice available on this site, and comparisons with similar surveillance networks currently in use in Great Britain and China. The rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the past thirty years has been touted as a mechanism of information freedom and open societies, a global clearinghouse for political and personal empowerment and a panacea against the forces of repression and censorship. What I will attempt to show in this piece is how those lofty goals remain largely unrealized and how governments, under the guise of “security” are, in fact, using the Internet as a new, overarching and suffocating surveillance state to monitor, compile and track the personal and private lives of virtually everyone who uses modern telecommunications in any form. I will attempt to demonstrate that, because of the erection of this surveillance regime, privacy of communications is essentially dead. I will also attempt to show how information gathered under this program can be used to populate private corporation databases and affect the general populace through credit reports, employment opportunities and the convergence of private and government databases.

Let me begin by defining some terms to help the reader understand the overall scope of Warrantless Wiretaps. These terms will give the reader an idea of the masses of data being monitored:

The basic building block circuit for our purposes is called a DS-3. Each DS-3 contains 28 T-1s, each containing 24 voice channels. So 1 DS-3 equals 24 times 28 or 672 voice channels. These DS-3s are multiplexed to the Optical Channel level and have a numerical value of 1. Therefore, an Optical Channel or OC-3 circuit contains 3 DS-3s capacity or 2016 voice channels. An OC-12 circuit contains 12 DS-3s or 8064 voice channels; an OC-48 circuit contains 48 DS-3s or 32,556 voice channels. These circuits are multiplexed to an OC-192 DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplex) level for long distance transport. What the last term means is anywhere from 24 to 36 OC-192 (192 DS-3s) modulated on a single fiber for long distance transport. So a single optic fiber can carry almost 5,000,000 individual phone channels at once. Most single mode fiber cables contain between 50 and 100 individual fibers providing a transmit and receive path for 25-50 OC-192 DWDM circuits. I am personally certified on equipment up to and including the OC-192 DWDM level.

Now we turn to Mark Klein’s EFF affidavit in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit, Hepting v A.T.&T. :

In it, Klein describes his tasks as an A.T.&T. data communications technician in general terms as well as a project he was tasked to perform at the A.T.&T. Central Office located in 611 Folsom St., San Francisco. He describes how he was charged with the installation, test and turn-up of optical hybrid splitters to tap off optical signals from an array of A.T.&T. and other OCC (Other Common Carrier) circuits for transport and analysis within secret rooms installed  in Central Offices in San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles and Seattle, among others, for the National Security Agency. Inside these rooms, the traffic was routed through a Semantic Traffic Analyzer provided by Narus, an Israeli-owned company affiliated with Israel’s counterpart agency to the NSA, as documented by James Bamford in his podcast interview available on this site. It was also routed to the main NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, MD where it was stored for further data mining as part of the WWP. The splitter circuit diagrams are included on page 24 of the affidavit with the circuit cutover diagram visible on page 15. Of particular interest to me is the engineering document on page 17 of his affidavit, listing the Other Common Carriers leasing A.T.&T. facilities whose circuits and customers were also being monitored. It reads like a Who’s Who of major telecommunications IXCs (Inter-Exchange Carriers) including Qwest, Level3, Cable & Wireless, Global Crossing and a host of others. It also lists the size of each circuit routed to the NSA by it’s OC-x number as detailed above. Since Klein’s declaration only spotlights the West Coast central offices affected by this nationwide program, it is fair to assume it was also being carried out in corresponding offices on the East Coast as well.

The official justification offered by both the Bush and Obama administrations is that these circuits were only used for overseas traffic and, therefore, within the NSA’s lawful mandate to monitor overseas communications. The fallacy of that argument is that all the offices mentioned, while having some overseas circuits originating from them, primarily contained domestic telecommunications traffic. If the NSA wished to stay within its official mandate, this program could have been accomplished with far less cost by placing the NSA rooms with their equipment at overseas cable terminal offices such as the Transpacific Cable Terminal at Los Osos, near Morro Bay, CA.

Both Bamford and Tice, in their podcast interviews, speak of the two massive new NSA data storage facilities being built in Utah and Texas. Those locations are where all this information will be stored once they come online. Now consider the outsourcing of intelligence work to private contractors and security firms like CACI, Choicepoint and others who specialize in data mining from public sources as well and you begin to see the scope and impact of this program on ordinary citizens. Consider, also, Bamford and Tice’s revelations of a parallel National Telecommunications Traffic Control Center being constructed at Fort Meade identical to A.T.&T.‘s National Traffic Control Center in Bedminster, NJ. The eventual merging and sharing of this information between government and corporate entities is almost inevitable. Remember, as Benito Mussolini defined it:

“Fascism is the convergence of governmental and corporate power.”

So the questions I have are this.

1. Why is such an overarching, intrusive, draconian wiretap program necessary?

2. What mechanisms are there in place to prevent government-sourced private information from being shared with corporate entities?

3. Is the NSA positioning itself to take control of all telecommunications in the event of a national emergency? 

4. What national emergency might provide a trigger mechanism for the assumption of such control?