The
American surveillance state is now an omnipresent reality, but its
deep history is little known and its future little grasped.
Edward Snowden’s
leaked
documents reveal that, in a post-9/11 state of war, the National
Security Agency (NSA) was able to create a surveillance system that
could secretly monitor the private communications of almost every
American in the name of fighting foreign terrorists. The technology
used is state of the art; the impulse, it turns out, is nothing new.
For well over a century, what might be called “surveillance
blowback” from America’s wars has ensured the creation of
an ever more massive and omnipresent internal security and
surveillance apparatus. Its future (though not ours) looks
bright indeed.
In
1898, Washington occupied the Philippines and in the years that
followed pacified its rebellious people, in part by fashioning the
world’s first full-scale “surveillance state” in a
colonial land. The illiberal lessons learned there then
migrated homeward, providing the basis for constructing America’s
earliest internal security and surveillance apparatus during World
War I. A half-century later, as protests mounted during the
Vietnam War, the FBI, building on the foundations of that old
security structure, launched large-scale illegal counterintelligence
operations to harass antiwar activists, while President Richard
Nixon’s White House created its own surveillance apparatus to
target its domestic enemies.
In
the aftermath of those wars, however, reformers pushed back against
secret surveillance. Republican privacy advocates abolished
much of President Woodrow Wilson’s security apparatus during
the 1920s, and Democratic liberals in Congress created the FISA
courts in the 1970s in an attempt to prevent any recurrence of
President Nixon’s illegal domestic wiretapping.
Today,
as Washington withdraws troops from the Greater Middle East, a
sophisticated intelligence apparatus built for the pacification of
Afghanistan and Iraq has come home to help create a twenty-first
century surveillance state of unprecedented scope. But the past
pattern that once checked the rise of a U.S. surveillance state seems
to be breaking down. Despite talk about ending the war on
terror one day, President Obama has left the historic pattern of
partisan reforms far behind. In what has become a permanent state of
“wartime” at home, the Obama administration is building
upon the surveillance systems created in the Bush years to maintain
U.S. global dominion in peace or war through a strategic,
ever-widening edge in information control. The White House
shows no sign -- nor does Congress -- of cutting back on construction
of a powerful, global Panopticon that can surveil domestic
dissidents, track terrorists, manipulate allied nations, monitor
rival powers, counter hostile cyber strikes, launch preemptive
cyberattacks, and protect domestic communications.
Writing
for TomDispatch four years ago during Obama’s first months in
office, I suggested
that the War on Terror has “proven remarkably effective in
building a technological template that could be just a few tweaks
away from creating a domestic surveillance state -- with omnipresent
cameras, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identification, and
drone aircraft patrolling ‘the homeland.’"
That
prediction has become our present reality -- and with stunning speed.
Americans now live under the Argus-eyed gaze of a digital
surveillance state, while increasing numbers of surveillance drones
fill American skies. In addition, the NSA’s net now
reaches far beyond our borders, sweeping up the personal messages of
many millions of people worldwide and penetrating the confidential
official communications of at least 30 allied nations. The past has
indeed proven prologue. The future is now.
The
Coming of the Information Revolution
The
origins of this emerging global surveillance state date back over a
century to “America’s first information revolution”
for the management of textual, statistical, and analytical data -- a
set of innovations whose synergy created the technological capacity
for mass surveillance.
Here’s
a little litany of “progress” to ponder while on the road
to today’s every-email-all-the-time version of surveillance.
Within
just a few years, the union of Thomas A. Edison’s quadruplex
telegraph with Philo Remington’s commercial typewriter, both
inventions of 1874, allowed for the accurate transmission of textual
data at the unequalled speed of 40 words per minute across America
and around the world.
In
the mid-1870s as well, librarian Melvil Dewey developed the “Dewey
decimal system” to catalog the Amherst College Library, thereby
inventing the “smart number” for the reliable encoding
and rapid retrieval of limitless information.
The
year after engineer Herman Hollerith patented the punch card (1889),
the U.S. Census Bureau adopted his Electrical Tabulating machine to
count 62,622,250 Americans within weeks -- a triumph that later led
to the founding of International Business Machines, better known by
its acronym IBM.
By
1900, all American cities were wired via the Gamewell Corporation’s
innovative telegraphic communications, with over 900 municipal police
and fire systems sending 41 million messages in a single year.
A
Colonial Laboratory for the Surveillance State
On
the eve of empire in 1898, however, the U.S. government was still
what scholar Stephen Skowronek has termed a “patchwork”
state with a near-zero capacity for domestic security. That, of
course, left ample room for the surveillance version of
modernization, and it came with surprising speed after Washington
conquered and colonized the Philippines.
Facing
a decade of determined Filipino resistance, the U.S. Army applied all
those American information innovations -- rapid telegraphy,
photographic files, alpha-numeric coding, and Gamewell police
communications -- to the creation of a formidable, three-tier
colonial security apparatus including the Manila Police, the
Philippines Constabulary, and above all the Army’s Division of
Military Information.
In
early 1901, Captain Ralph Van Deman, later dubbed “the father
of U.S. Military Intelligence,” assumed command of this still
embryonic division, the Army’s first field intelligence unit in
its 100-year history. With a voracious appetite for raw data, Van
Deman’s division compiled phenomenally detailed information on
thousands of Filipino leaders, including their physical appearance,
personal finances, landed property, political loyalties, and kinship
networks.
Starting
in 1901, the first U.S. governor-general (and future president)
William Howard Taft drafted draconian sedition legislation for the
islands and established a 5,000-man strong Philippines Constabulary.
In the process, he created a colonial surveillance state that ruled,
in part, thanks to the agile control of information, releasing
damning data about enemies while suppressing scandals about allies.
When
the Associated Press’s Manila bureau chief reported critically
on these policies, Taft’s allies dug up dirt on this would-be
critic and dished it out to the New York press. On the other
hand, the Division of Military Information compiled a scandalous
report about the rising Filipino politician Manuel Quezon, alleging a
premarital abortion by his future first lady. Quezon, however,
served the Constabulary as a spy, so this document remained buried in
U.S. files, assuring his unchecked ascent to become the first
president of the Philippines in 1935.
American
Blueprint
During
the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, Mark Twain wrote an imagined
history of twentieth-century America. In it, he predicted that
a “lust for conquest” had already destroyed “the
Great [American] Republic,” because “trampling upon
the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure
with apathy the like at home.” Indeed, just a decade after
Twain wrote those prophetic words, colonial police methods came home
to serve as a template for the creation of an American internal
security apparatus in wartime.
After
the U.S. entered World War I in 1917 without an intelligence service
of any sort, Colonel Van Deman brought his Philippine experience to
bear, creating the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Division
(MID) and so laying the institutional foundations for a future
internal security state.
In
collaboration with the FBI, he also expanded the MID’s reach
through a civilian auxiliary organization, the American Protective
League, whose 350,000 citizen-operatives amassed more than a million
pages of surveillance reports on German-Americans in just 14 months,
arguably the world’s most intensive feat of domestic
surveillance ever.
After
the Armistice in 1918, Military Intelligence joined the FBI in two
years of violent repression of the American left marked by the
notorious Luster raids in New York City, J. Edgar Hoover’s
“Palmer Raids” in cities across the northeast and the
suppression of union strikes from New York City to Seattle.
When
President Wilson left office in 1921, incoming Republican privacy
advocates condemned his internal security regime as intrusive and
abusive, forcing the Army and the FBI to cut their ties to patriotic
vigilantes. In 1924, Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone, worrying
that “a secret police may become a menace to free government,”
announced “the Bureau of Investigation is not concerned with
political or other opinions of individuals.” Epitomizing the
nation’s retreat from surveillance, Secretary of War Henry
Stimson closed the Military Intelligence cipher section in 1929,
saying famously, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."
After
retiring at the rank of major general that same year, Van Deman and
his wife continued from their home in San Diego to coordinate an
informal intelligence exchange system, compiling files on 250,000
suspected “subversives.” They also took reports
from classified government files and slipped them to citizen
anti-communist groups for blacklisting. In the 1950 elections, for
instance, Representative Richard Nixon reportedly used Van Deman’s
files to circulate “pink sheets” at rallies denouncing
California Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, his opponent in a
campaign for a Senate seat, launching a victorious Nixon on the path
to the presidency.
From
retirement, Van Deman, in league with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover,
also proved crucial at a 1940 closed-door conference that awarded the
FBI control over domestic counterintelligence. The Army’s
Military Intelligence, and its successors, the CIA and NSA, were
restricted to foreign espionage, a division of tasks that would hold,
at least in
principle, until the post-9/11 years. So armed, during World War
II the FBI used warrantless wiretaps, “black bag”
break-ins, and surreptitious mail opening to track suspects, while
mobilizing more than 300,000 informers to secure defense plants
against wartime threats that ultimately proved “negligible.”
The
Vietnam Years
In
response to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s,
the FBI deployed its COINTELPRO operation, using what Senator Frank
Church’s famous investigative committee later called "unsavory
and vicious tactics... including anonymous attempts to break up
marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their
professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might
result in deaths."
In
assessing COINTELPRO’s 2,370 actions from 1960 to 1974, the
Church Committee branded them a "sophisticated vigilante
operation" that "would be intolerable in a democratic
society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent
activity." Significantly, even this aggressive Senate
investigation did not probe Director Hoover’s notorious
“private files” on the peccadilloes of leading
politicians that had insulated his Bureau from any oversight for more
than 30 years.
After
New
York Times
reporter Seymour
Hersh exposed illegal CIA surveillance of American antiwar
activists in 1974, Senator Church’s committee and a
presidential commission under Nelson Rockefeller investigated the
Agency’s “Operation Chaos,” a program to conduct
massive illegal surveillance of the antiwar protest movement,
discovering a database with 300,000 names. These investigations
also exposed the excesses of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, forcing the
Bureau to reform.
To
prevent future abuses, President Jimmy Carter signed the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, creating a special
court to approve all national security wiretaps. In a bitter
irony, Carter’s supposed reform ended up plunging the judiciary
into the secret world of the surveillance managers where, after 9/11,
it became
a rubberstamp institution for every kind of state intrusion on
domestic privacy.
How
the Global War on Terror Came Home
As
its pacification wars in Afghanistan and Iraq sank into bloody
quagmires, Washington brought electronic surveillance, biometric
identification, and unmanned aerial vehicles to the battlefields.
This trio, which failed to decisively turn the tide in those lands,
nonetheless now undergirds a global U.S. surveillance apparatus of
unequalled scope and unprecedented power.
After
confining the populations of Baghdad and the rebellious Sunni city of
Falluja behind blast-wall cordons, the U.S. Army attempted to bring
the Iraqi resistance under control in part by collecting,
as of 2011, three million Iraqi fingerprints,iris, and retinal
scans. These were deposited
in a biometric database in West Virginia that American soldiers at
checkpoints and elsewhere on distant battlefields could at any moment
access by satellite link. Simultaneously, the Joint Special
Operations Command under General Stanley McChrystal centralized
all electronic and satellite surveillance in the Greater Middle East
to identify possible al-Qaeda operatives for assassination
by Predator drones or hunter-killer raids by Special Operations
commandos from Somalia to Pakistan.
Domestically,
post-9/11, the White House tried to create a modern version of the
old state-citizen alliance for domestic surveillance. In May 2002,
President Bush’s Justice Department launched
Operation TIPS with "millions of American truckers, letter
carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and
others" spying on fellow citizens. But there was vocal
opposition from members of Congress, civil libertarians, and the
media, which soon forced Justice to quietly kill the program.
In
a digital iteration of the same effort, retired admiral John
Poindexter began to set
up an ominously titled Pentagon program called Total Information
Awareness to amass a "detailed electronic dossier on millions of
Americans." Again the nation recoiled, Congress banned the
program, and the admiral was forced to resign.
Defeated
in the public arena, the Bush administration retreated into the
shadows, where it launched secret FBI and NSA domestic surveillance
programs. Here, Congress proved far more amenable and pliable.
In 2002, Congress erased
the bright line that had long barred the CIA from domestic spying,
granting the agency the power to access U.S. financial records and
audit electronic communications routed through the country.
Defying
the FISA law, in October 2001 President Bush ordered
the NSA to commence covert monitoring of private communications
through the nation's telephone companies without the requisite
warrants. According
to the Associated Press, he also “secretly authorized the
NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the
United States” carrying the world’s “emails,
telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions, and more.”
Since his administration had already conveniently
decided that “metadata was not constitutionally protected,”
the NSA began an open-ended program, Operation Stellar Wind, “to
collect bulk telephony and Internet metadata.”
By
2004, the Bush White House was so wedded to Internet metadata
collection that top aides barged into Attorney General John
Ashcroft’s hospital room to extract a reauthorization signature
for the program. They were blocked
by Justice Department officials led by Deputy Attorney General James
Comey, forcing a two-month suspension until that FISA court, brought
into existence in the Carter years, put its first rubber-stamp on
this mass surveillance regime.
Armed
with expansive FISA court orders allowing the collection of data sets
rather than information from specific targets, the FBI’s
“Investigative
Data Warehouse” acquired more
than a billion documents within five years, including
intelligence reports, social security files, drivers’ licenses,
and private financial information. All of this was accessible
to 13,000 analysts making a million queries monthly. In 2006, as the
flood of data surging through fiber optic cables strained NSA
computers, the Bush administration launched
the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity to develop
supercomputing searches powerful enough to process this torrent of
Internet information.
In
2005, a New
York Times
investigative report exposed
the administration’s illegal surveillance for the first time. A
year later, USA
Today
reported
that the NSA was “secretly collecting the phone call records of
tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T,
Verizon, and Bell South.” One expert called it "the
largest database ever assembled in the world," adding
presciently that the Agency's goal was "to create a database of
every call ever made."
In
August 2007, in response to these revelations, Congress capitulated.
It passed a new law, the Protect America Act, which retrospectively
legalized this illegal White House-inspired set of programs by
requiring greater oversight by the FISA court. This secret
tribunal -- acting almost as a “parallel
Supreme Court” that rules on fundamental constitutional
rights without adversarial proceedings or higher review -- has
removed any real restraint on the National Security Agency’s
bulk collection of Internet metadata and regularly
rubberstamps almost 100% of the government’s thousands of
surveillance requests. Armed with expanded powers, the National
Security Agency promptly launched
its PRISM program (recently revealed by Edward Snowden). To
feed its hungry search engines, the NSA has compelled nine Internet
giants, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, and Skype,
to transfer what became billions of emails to its massive data farms.
Obama’s
Expanding Surveillance Universe
Instead
of curtailing his predecessor’s wartime surveillance, as
Republicans did in the 1920s and Democrats in the 1970s, President
Obama has overseen the expansion of the NSA’s wartime digital
operations into a permanent weapon for the exercise of U.S. global
power.
The
Obama administration continued a Bush-era NSA program of “bulk
email records collection” until 2011 when two senators
protested
that the agency’s “statements to both Congress and the
Court... significantly exaggerated this program’s
effectiveness.” Eventually, the administration was forced
to curtail this particular operation. Nonetheless, the NSA has
continued to collect
the personal communications of Americans by the billions under its
PRISM
and other programs.
In
the Obama years as well, the NSA began cooperating with its long-time
British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters
(GCHQ), to tap
into the dense cluster of Trans-Atlantic Telecommunication fiber
optic cables that transit the United Kingdom. During a visit to a
GCHQ facility for high-altitude intercepts at Menwith Hill in June
2008, NSA Director General Keith Alexander asked, “Why can’t
we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer
project for Menwith.”
In
the process, GCHQ’s Operation Tempora achieved
the “biggest Internet access” of any partner in a “Five
Eyes” signals-intercept coalition that, in addition to Great
Britain and the U.S., includes Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
When the project went online in 2011, the GCHQ sank probes into 200
Internet cables and was soon collecting 600 million telephone
messages daily, which were, in turn, made accessible to 850,000 NSA
employees.
The
historic alliance between the NSA and GCHQ dates
back to the dawn of the Cold War. In deference to it, the
NSA has, since 2007, exempted its “2nd party” Five
Eyes allies from surveillance under its “Boundless Informant”
operation. According to another recently
leaked NSA document, however, “we can, and often do, target
the signals of most 3rd party foreign partners.”
This is clearly a reference to close allies like Germany, France, and
Italy.
On
a busy day in January 2013, for instance, the NSA collected
60 million phone calls and emails from Germany -- some 500 million
German messages are reportedly collected annually -- with lesser but
still hefty numbers from France, Italy, and non-European allies like
Brazil.
To gain operational intelligence on such allies, the NSA taps
phones at the European Council headquarters in Brussels, bugs the
European Union (EU) delegation at the U.N., has planted a “Dropmire”
monitor “on the Cryptofax at the EU embassy DC,” and
eavesdrops on 38 allied embassies worldwide.
Such
secret intelligence about its allies gives Washington an immense
diplomatic advantage, says
NSA expert James Bamford. “It’s the equivalent of going
to a poker game and wanting to know what everyone’s hand is
before you place your bet.” And who knows what scurrilous bits
of scandal about world leaders American surveillance systems might
scoop up to strengthen Washington’s hand in that global poker
game called diplomacy.
This
sort of digital surveillance was soon supplemented by actual Internet
warfare. Between 2006 and 2010, Washington launched the
planet’s first cyberwar, with Obama ordering
devastating cyberattacks against Iran's nuclear facilities. In 2009,
the Pentagon formed
the U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), with a cybercombat center at
Lackland Air Base initially staffed
by 7,000 Air Force employees. Over the next two years, by appointing
NSA chief Alexander as CYBERCOM’s concurrent commander, it
created an enormous concentration of power in the digital shadows.
The Pentagon has also declared
cyberspace an “operational domain” for both offensive and
defensive warfare.
Controlling
the Future
By
leaking a handful of NSA documents, Edward Snowden has given us a
glimpse of future U.S. global policy and the changing architecture of
power on this planet. At the broadest level, this digital shift
complements Obama’s new defense strategy, announced in 2012, of
reducing
costs (cutting, for example, infantry troops by 14%), while
conserving Washington’s overall power by developing a capacity
for “a combined arms campaign across all domains -- land, air,
maritime, space, and cyberspace.”
While
cutting conventional armaments, Obama is investing billions in
constructing a new architecture for global information control. To
store and process the billions of messages sucked up by its worldwide
surveillance network (totaling
97 billion items for March alone), the NSA is employing
11,000 workers to build a $1.6 billion data center in Bluffdale,
Utah, whose storage
capacity is measured in “yottabytes,” each the
equivalent of a trillion terabytes. That’s almost
unimaginable once you realize that just 15 terabytes could store
every publication in the Library of Congress.
From
its new $1.8 billion headquarters, the third-biggest building in the
Washington area, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency deploys
16,000 employees and a $5 billion budget to coordinate a rising
torrent of surveillance data from Predators, Reapers, U-2 spy planes,
Global Hawks, X-37B space drones, Google Earth, Space Surveillance
Telescopes, and orbiting satellites.
To
protect those critical orbiting satellites, which transmit most U.S.
military communications, the Pentagon is building an aerospace shield
of pilotless drones. In the exosphere, the Air Force has since April
2010 been successfully
testing the X-37B space drone that can carry
missiles to strike rival satellite networks such as the one the
Chinese are currently creating.
For
more extensive and precise surveillance from space, the Pentagon has
been replacing
its costly, school-bus-sized spy satellites with a new generation of
light, low cost models such as the ATK-A200.
Successfully launched in May 2011, this module is orbiting 250 miles
above the Earth with remote-controlled, U-2 quality cameras that now
provide the “U.S. Central Command an assured ISR (Intelligence,
Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) capability.”
In
the stratosphere, close enough to Earth for audiovisual surveillance,
the Pentagon is planning to launch
an armada of 99 Global Hawk drones -- each equipped with
high-resolution cameras to surveil all terrain within a 100-mile
radius, electronic sensors to intercept communications, and efficient
engines for continuous 24-hour flight.
Within
a decade, the U.S. will likely deploy this aerospace shield, advanced
cyberwarfare capabilities, and even vaster, more omnipresent digital
surveillance networks that will envelop the Earth in an electronic
grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield, atomizing
a single suspected terrorist, or monitoring millions of private lives
at home and abroad.
Sadly,
Mark Twain was right when he warned us just over 100 years ago that
America could not have both empire abroad and democracy at home.
To paraphrase his prescient words, by “trampling upon the
helpless abroad” with unchecked surveillance, Americans have
learned, “by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like
at home.”
