Total Surveillance
Weekend Edition June 28-30, 2013
The Response to Snowden’s Leak Ignores the Reality of Political
Repression
by KATE EPSTEIN
Although Edward Snowden’s recent revelations about the breadth and scope
of the surveillance-industrial complex didn’t add many facts to the
public record of the ongoing post-9/11 security state saga, it certainly
brought the issue to the forefront, forcing everyone to confront the
stark realities of disappearing privacy and diminishing liberties. Many
who defend the government (and corporate) spying argue that the right to
privacy and anonymous free speech must be balanced against safety and
security.
Many of these defenders are comfortable with government surveillance as
long as the government doesn’t abuse its ability to spy and collect
citizens’ data. If it will help catch terrorists before they attack, the
argument goes, then it’s worth it, even if the idea of total
surveillance is kind of creepy and we all wish this wasn’t the trade off
we have to make. I agree with this commenter, responding to David
Simon’s June 7th
blog post in which the former Baltimore Sun journalist and Wire
creator defended the NSA near-total surveillance, primarily because,
Simon claims, there has been no evidence that the government has abused
its surveillance power:
I’m not sure that actually having lived in a totalitarian society, like
I have in communist Bulgaria, is a prerequisite to grasping that total
surveillance, or the fear of it, kills free expression, and at some
point even thinking. Self-censorship becomes way of life. And the power
of the secret police that hears and knows everything and can pressure
anyone into submission is huge. The Stasi strongmen could have only
dreamt of the richness of detail Google and Facebook are providing to
the NSA. Not to mention the automated analytical tools that are already
available it [sic] are currently being developed. The possibilities of
power misuse are just too big to ignore.
True enough in theory, and even scarier when we consider the
overwhelming evidence that at least one goal the corporate-state
surveillance apparatus is fulfilling is the political repression of
activists on both the left and the right who advocate fundamental,
democratic change to a badly broken system.
A series of legislative developments since 9/11 have expanded the
executive branch’s surveillance and intelligence-gathering functions
drastically, under the umbrella of the
U.S. Intelligence Community, as it calls itself. These policy
changes have loosened
restrictions on intelligence gathering, expanded the definition of
terrorism, inflated the role of
corporations in catching so-called terrorists and protecting “critical
infrastructure and key resources,” and
created fusion centers (regional information sharing centers) under
the direction of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The
seventeen agencies that make up the Intelligence Community reported a
combined
budget of $80 billion in 2010, a figure three times higher than when
it was previously disclosed twelve years earlier.
The FISA Court and the Façade of Oversight
Advocates of the surveillance program argue that government abuse of our
data is prevented by its exposure to judicial oversight. The vehicle for
such oversight is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was
initially set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of
1978. It was a liberal piece of legislation (introduced by Ted Kennedy
and signed into law by Jimmy Carter), and a direct response to the
Church Committee findings that Richard Nixon had been spying on
political and activist groups in violation of the Constitution and the
civil liberties it protects. The original act tightened restrictions on
the gathering of the communications of U.S. citizens.
Since 1978, and especially since 2001, however, FISA has been amended
many times, each time loosening the protections afforded by the original
law, including the
Lone Wolf
Amendment of 2004 and the
Protect America Act
of 2007.
The FISA court is notoriously secret and its processes opaque (despite
Obama’s
recent assertion on Charlie Rose that FISA proceedings are
transparent). Located within the Department of Justice building, the
eleven judges hear evidence solely from the government lawyers at the
Department of Justice about the requisite terrorist or enemy threat, and
then the court either accepts or denies the request. The only
information ever made public is how many requests were accepted and how
many were denied at the end of each year. In the last three years alone,
the FISA court rubber stamped a whopping 4,976 government requests, and
denied none. (See this Bill
Quigley column for more staggering statistics about the FISA court’s
deference to the government. Of course, these figures might not mean
anything at all, given that
we know the Bush administration was wiretapping without warrants and
without the knowledge of the FISA court in 2005—resulting in the
resignation of one of
the FISA court judges, apparently in protest of the secret
surveillance.)
What very few people are acknowledging, amidst all the discussion about
the Snowden leak and what it reveals, is that a very real purpose of the
surveillance programs—and perhaps the entire war on terror—is to target
and repress political dissent. “Terrorism” is the new “Communism,” and
the war on terror and all its shiny new surveillance technology is the
new Cold War and McCarthyism.
Public-Private Partnerships and the Targeting of Occupy Activists
Given the close partnership between government agencies and the private
sector, it should come as no surprise that those in power were quick to
spy on Occupy encampments and identify anti-Wall Street protestors
as terrorist threats. There are three primary public-private
intelligence partnerships at work on the federal level:
The
Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC),
InfraGard, and the DHS
Private Sector Information-Sharing Working Group. All three are vehicles
for intelligence sharing between all levels of government and the
private sector. Through these groups, often housed in fusion centers,
financial institutions and other corporations warn DHS of terrorism
threats.
These so-called threats are often peaceful dissenters and activists,
although the member corporations and their communications with the
government are kept secret. The
ACLU
has accused InfraGard of “turning private-sector corporations—some of
which maybe in a position to observe the activities of millions of
individual customers—into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI.”
Even before many Occupy encampments were in place, banks and private
companies in cities across America partnered with federal, state, and
local law enforcement to infiltrate, collect intelligence about, and
eventually stop the protests. The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund
(PCJF), after retrieving FBI documents demonstrating the public and
private surveillance of Occupy protestors,
reported that such infiltration had been taking place in Virginia,
Milwaukee, Memphis, Birmingham, Jackson, Denver, and San Francisco, to
name only a few.
The Guardian’s Naomi Wolf, in her reporting on the unclassified
documents showing the FBI surveillance of Occupiers,
wrote: “Why the huge push for counterterrorism ‘fusion centers,’ the
DHS militarizing of police departments, and so on? It was never really
about ‘the terrorists.’ It was not even about civil unrest. It was
always about this moment, when vast crimes might be uncovered by
citizens—it was always, that is to say, meant to be about you.”
A groundbreaking new report from the Center for Media and Democracy and
DBA Press painstakingly details the web of financial, corporate,
municipal, state, and federal interests that collaborated to bring down
Occupy Phoenix. You can read that report, and see the documents
uncovered through their yearlong investigation,
here.
Fracking, Tracking, and Psyops
Several recent exposés have revealed the extent to which corporations
and the government have also inappropriately used surveillance against
peaceful environmental activists in an attempt to quell dissent and
intimidate.
Private security firm The Institute of Terrorism Research and Response
(ITRR),
for example, was including the activities of
a peaceful anti-fracking group in Pennsylvania in the company’s
intelligence bulletins, which were then distributed by the Pennsylvania
Department of Homeland Security to local police chiefs, to state,
federal, and private intelligence agencies, and to the security
directors of the natural gas companies, as well as industry groups and
PR firms.
News of this surveillance and intelligence sharing broke when James
Powers, the director of the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland
Security,
mistakenly sent an email to a retired Air Force officer and
anti-fracking activist he believed was sympathetic to the industry.
Powers wrote: “We want to continue providing this support to the
Marcellus Shale Formation natural gas stakeholders while not feeding
those groups fomenting dissent against those same companies.” The
surveillance had a chilling effect on the group, causing membership to
dwindle when participants worried their phones had been tapped, that
their emails were monitored, and that they were being followed on their
routes to work as teachers, nurses, and doctors.
The fracking industry has a history of tracking, intimidating, and
tricking skeptical landowners who threaten its profitability. At the “Media
& Stakeholder Relations: Hydraulic Fracturing Initiative 2011”
conference in Houston, Fracking company Range Resources’ public
relations chief
confirmed that the company had hired Army and Marine veterans with
combat experience in psychological warfare to influence communities in
which Range drills for gas, saying “We have several former PSYOPs [Psychological
Operations] folks that work for us at Range because they’re very
comfortable in dealing with localized issues and local governments.
Really all they do is spend most of their time helping folks develop
local ordinances and things like that. But very much having that
understanding of PSYOPs in the Army and in the Middle East has applied
very helpfully here for us in Pennsylvania.”
Because corporations conduct much of the government’s surveillance for
them (by 2007,
seventy percent of the US intelligence budget—or about $38 billion
annually—was spent on private contractors), the potential for
peaceful anti-corporate activism to be labeled terrorism is huge. And
because corporations have state of the art technology and techniques,
surveillance has become a sprawling industry of its own outside of
government contracts. Overall annual spending on corporate security and
intelligence is
roughly $100 billion, which is double what it was a decade ago.
Hundreds of private spying organizations (or “para-CIAs”) have popped up
in recent years to meet corporate demand, many of them staffed by former
spies for agencies like the CIA and MI6. Other corporations, like
Wal-Mart, have their own, in-house surveillance and security
departments, staffed by former CIA, FBI, and State Department experts.
Domestic Terrorism
Which is not to say the government doesn’t take environmental activism
as a serious terrorism threat in its own right. In 2005, John Lewis, an
FBI deputy assistant director,
said the animal rights and environmental movements were “one of the
FBI’s highest domestic terrorism priorities.” The 2006
Animal
Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) labels anyone a terrorist who causes
a “loss of profits” to an animal enterprise. For the first time, in this
law, the use of force or violence was removed from the list of criteria
for terrorism.
In an
FBI “domestic terrorism” training PowerPoint obtained by the ACLU,
the trainees are urged to focus on groups such as “black separatists,”
anarchists, animal rights activists, and environmentalists. And recently
it broke that TransCanada has been training federal and state agents on
laws that could be used to specifically target Keystone XL protesters.
Specifically, the
leaked PowerPoint slides advise officers to arrest protestors on
“anti-terrorism statutes,” despite the campaign’s unwavering commitment
to nonviolence since its inception almost a year ago.
Recent reports show that many potentially violent “terrorist” plots,
including
a NATO protest that arose out of Occupy Chicago, are actually
concocted by undercover cops who then con other protesters into
collaborating. So-called “terrorism-enhancement laws,” written and
strengthened since 9/11, ratchet up sentences for criminal acts such as
property destruction from months or years into decades or life, even
when no people were killed or even injured. And the
National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 (NDAA), signed by Obama
on New Year’s Eve, allows the government to indefinitely detain, without
trial, US citizens for suspicions of ties to terrorism.
The Road to Serfdom
You only need to open your eyes to see the countless ways in which the
government and corporations are misusing and abusing surveillance
technology. Combined with the ever-expanding definition of terrorism, an
all-knowing, all-secret, all-powerful military-corporate state should
scare all of us—not just those of us attempting to exercise our right to
free speech and assembly on a regular basis. In the absence of good
journalism, we need to connect the dots ourselves, from one scandal to
the next. Surveillance is creepy and we like our privacy, but the
conversation needs to be broader.
In 1952, in
a
famous Supreme Court case that arose when President Truman attempted
to seize control of the steel industry to support the Korean War effort
when workers threatened to continue striking, Justice Jackson delivered
a cautionary tale about the dangers of suspending constitutionally
guaranteed liberties, even in times of emergency, even when national
security is at stake:
Germany, after the First World War, framed the Weimar Constitution,
designed to secure her liberties in the Western tradition. However, the
President of the Republic, without concurrence of the Reichstag, was
empowered temporarily to suspend any or all individual rights if public
safety and order were seriously disturbed or endangered. This proved a
temptation to every government, whatever its shade of opinion, and, in
13 years, suspension of rights was invoked on more than 250 occasions.
Finally, Hitler persuaded President Von Hindenberg to suspend all such
rights, and they were never restored.
Since 9/11, despite a major recession, we have continued to feed the
military-industrial complex whatever it can gobble up, and the trend
shows no signs of stopping. The question we are faced with is this: Will
we take a stand against the expansion of executive power, the stripping
of our civil liberties, and the blatant political repression of our
post-9/11 world gone mad, or will we wait passively until, as Justice
Jackson warned, it’s too late?
Kate Epstein is a lawyer and activist who manages the blog The
Lone Pamphleteer. She can be reached at katepstein@gmail.com.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/28/total-surveillance/
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