What could be a significant legal victory in the on-going battle against blanket surveillance transpired March 31 in district court in San Francisco, along with a stinging rebuke of the Obama administration.
U.S. District Court Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that the government had violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and that the National Security Agency's warrantless spying program was illegal.
In Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Obama, Walker found that the government employed extralegal means in 2004 to wiretap the now-defunct Islamic charity's phone calls, as well as those of their attorneys. Ruling that the plaintiffs had been "subjected to unlawful surveillance," Walker declared that the government was liable to pay them damages.
The court's decision is a strong rejection of administration assertions that an imperious Executive Branch, and it alone, may determine whether or not a case against the government can be examined by a lawful court, merely by invoking the so-called "state secrets privilege."
The Justice Department has not decided whether it will appeal the decision; it appears likely however given the stakes involved, that the case will be remanded back to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Like their Bushist predecessors, the Obama administration has heartily embraced the dubious state secrets theory, a dodgy legalistic invention manufactured to conceal criminal policies and illegal acts authored by the government and their agents.
The March 31 decision is all the more remarkable, in light of Judge Walker's dismissal of a series of lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) over the explosive issues of driftnet surveillance and the CIA's kidnapping and torture program that disappeared alleged terrorist suspects into Agency "black sites."
The latter case, Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., was dismissed by Walker in 2008 after Justice Department attorneys successfully argued that the "state secrets privilege" applied.
The appeals court rejected those arguments and ruled last year that "the state secrets privilege has never applied to prevent parties from litigating the truth or falsity of allegations, or facts, or information simply because the government regards the truth or falsity of the allegations to be secret."
The court added, "According to the government's theory, the judiciary should effectively cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the CIA and its partners from the demands and limits of the law."
Several other cases dismissed by Walker challenged the secret state's authority to spy on the American people in a profitable arrangement with the nation's giant telecommunications firms, internet service providers and a host of shadowy private security corporations.
In late January, Antifascist Calling reported that Walker dismissed EFF's Jewell v. NSA lawsuit challenging the agency's targeting of the electronic communications of millions of U.S. citizens and legal residents.
As AT&T whistleblower Marc Klein told Wired earlier this year, internal AT&T documents suggest that the on-going NSA spy program "was just the tip of an eavesdropping iceberg."
According to Klein, these programs are not "targeted" against suspected terrorists but rather "show an untargeted, massive vacuum cleaner sweeping up millions of peoples' communications every second automatically."
Despite overwhelming evidence that the state acted illegally, Walker dismissed Jewell claiming that driftnet spying by the government was not a "particularized injury" but instead a "generalized grievance" because almost everyone in the United States has a phone and internet service. Chillingly, Walker asserted that "a citizen may not gain standing by claiming a right to have the government follow the law."
What prompted Walker's change of heart in the Al-Haramain case?
During the course of litigation objecting to the government's characterization that Al-Haramain was a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organization," U.S. attorneys inadvertently turned over a classified document from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) that revealed a broad pattern of illegal surveillance.
Based on that document, the charity's lawyers filed a lawsuit under the FISA provision that "an aggrieved person ... shall be entitled to recover ... actual damages, but not less than liquidated damages of $1,000 or $100 per day for each day of violation, whichever is greater" along with "reasonable attorney's fees."
The Bushist DOJ moved to squash the lawsuit, claiming that it would jeopardize "privileged state secrets" and "national security," a position upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. That court, the World Socialist Web Site reported April 6, "issued a truly Orwellian ruling that, due to the states secret doctrine, 'the [classified document], its contents, and any individuals' memories of its contents, even well-reasoned speculation as to its contents, are completely barred from further disclosure in this litigation'."
Once back in the district court, Bush administration lawyers moved to dismiss the case because the charity had "no standing" without the classified document. The Ninth Circuit's ruling was both poison pill and Catch 22 because, as socialist critic John Andrews wrote, without a document "which no one was allowed to remember [Al-Haramain] could not prove that it had actually been spied upon." How's that for circular reasoning and Kafkaesque logic!
When Al-Haramain's attorneys listed 28 publicly available sources to bolster their claims, Walker rejected the government's motion to dismiss and the case went forward.
And when the "change" administration blew into town on January 19, 2009, the Obama regime decided it was time to "look forward, not backward," refusing to open any inquiries or investigations into a host of illegal practices, from waging aggressive war to torture and blanket surveillance, carried out by the previous government.
Once in power, Obama's Justice Department replicated the Star Chamber atmospherics of the Bush administration, arguing that spy operations against the charity were lawful because the President's "wartime powers" allowed him to override FISA.
This too, was a legal fiction crafted by Bush torture-enablers John C. Yoo and (current) U.S. Ninth Circuit Court Judge Jay Bybee when they worked at the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). The pair, along with Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, David Addington, were chief architects of the Bush regime's criminal policies enacted in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Jon Eisenberg, one of the attorneys who represented Al-Haramain, told The New York Times that "Judge Walker is saying that FISA and federal statutes like it are not optional. The president, just like any other citizen of the United States, is bound by the law."
In a follow-up report April 1, Eisenberg told the Times, "If Holder wanted to be really aggressive, he could go into the Justice Department's files and pick out some of the people who were wiretapped and prosecute those cases," Mr. Eisenberg said. "But do they want to do that? No. The Obama administration made a decision a long time ago that they are not going to prosecute Bush's warrantless wiretapping program."
Walker also rejected arguments made by the government that the charity's lawsuit should be dismissed "without ruling on the merits" the Times reported, because allowing the case to go forward could reveal "state secrets."
The judge rejected those arguments out of hand and characterized Obama administration assertions of a "state secrets privilege" as amounting to "unfettered executive-branch discretion" that had "obvious potential for governmental abuse and overreaching."
Additionally, Walker ruled that the government arguments amounted to a demand that the Executive Branch ignore FISA, even though Congress had enacted the statute "specifically to rein in and create a judicial check for executive-branch abuses of surveillance authority."
The constellation of programs now known as the President's Spying Program (PSP) and specifically NSA's Stellar Wind program, which monitored Americans' email messages and phone calls without court approval, as stipulated by FISA, was first revealed by The New York Times in 2005.
Since those disclosures, the severity of the state's illegal activities against the American people have escalated and now pose a far-greater threat to a functioning democracy then at any time in our history.
Why the Ruling Matters
FISA is a 1978 law that was the result of earlier, illegal programs such as the FBI's COINTELPRO, the CIA's Operation CHAOS and the NSA's Operation SHAMROCK during the 1960s and 1970s. When those programs were exposed by investigative journalists and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Church Committee), the secret state was thrown into crisis.
Similar to today's driftnet surveillance and infiltration operations that rely on informants and agents provocateurs to gin-up "national security" and "counterterrorism" cases against official enemies, those earlier programs targeted domestic political dissidents and "suspect" racial and ethnic groups, in full-on counterinsurgency-type "neutralization" actions that all but destroyed the vibrant social movements of the Johnson and Nixon years.
A Justice Department spokeswoman, Tracy Schmaler, told the Times that the Obama administration had "overhauled" procedures for invoking the states secrets privilege and that it would be invoked only when "absolutely necessary to protect national security."
This is a rank mendacity.
Under new guidelines in place since September 2009, as I reported last November, Justice Department officials are supposed to reject the request to deploy the state secrets privilege to quash lawsuits if the Executive Branch's motivation for doing so would "conceal violations of the law, inefficiency or administrative error" or to "prevent embarrassment."
Despite strong legal grounds for allowing surveillance and torture cases to go forward, the Obama administration, like the discredited Bush regime before it, continues to stonewall, obfuscate and obstruct.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder claims that a DOJ "high-level committee" has reviewed relevant material in the Al-Haramain and other cases equally relevant to charges that the secret state, specifically the nexus of programs known as the PSP, violated the law. The guidelines further stipulate that lawbreaking by a specific agency, the FBI and NSA in the Al-Haramain case, must be reviewed by those agency's inspectors general.
This is supposed to occur whenever "invocation of the privilege would preclude adjudication of particular claims," particularly when a specific "case raises credible allegations of government wrongdoing." If such a review has taken place, the results have never be publicly disclosed.
Commenting on the ruling, Salon's Glenn Greenwald wrote April 1 that while news reports have focused on the illegality of Bush's NSA spy program, "the bulk of Judge Walker's opinion was actually a scathing repudiation of the Obama DOJ."
"In fact" Greenwald avers, "the opinion spent almost no time addressing the merits of the claim that the NSA program was legal. That's because the Obama DOJ--exactly like the Bush DOJ in the case before Judge [Ann Diggs] Taylor--refused to offer legal justifications to the court for this eavesdropping."
"Instead" Greenwald writes, the Obama administration advanced "the imperial and hubristic position" that the court, indeed any court, "had no right whatsoever to rule on the legality of the program because (a) plaintiffs could not prove they were subjected to the secret eavesdropping (and thus lacked 'standing' to sue) and (b) the NSA program was such a vital 'state secret' that courts were barred from adjudicating its legality."
In further comments to the media, Eisenberg stated: "The Obama Administration stepped right into the shoes of the Bush Administration, on national security generally and on this case in particular," adding, "even though I have the security clearance, I don't have the 'need to know,' so I can't see anything. This is Obama. Obama! Mr. Transparency! Mr. Change! It's exactly what Bush would have done."
As this writer has argued many times, while the color of the drapes in the Oval Office may have changed since Obama took office, on every substantive issue, from warrantless wiretapping, to indefinite detention and preemptive wars of imperialist aggression, the current regime has recapitulated, indeed expanded, the onerous policies of his predecessor.
Illegal Programs Proliferate Under Obama
Despite pledges from candidate Obama and his acolytes that illegal activities by the secret state would be reined-in, the Obama administration has sought to embellish the Executive Branch's lawless policies as the "War on Terror" metastasizes on a planetary scale.
Both The New York Times and The Washington Post have confirmed that the Obama administration "has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki."
Whether or not al-Awlaki is an operative of the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets known as al-Qaeda, or whether the dodgy cleric's targeting is part of a CIA clean-up operation that would preempt disclosure of the Agency's foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks is besides the point.
What is significant is that the administration is now standing-up a presidential assassination program that would target American citizens far from any battlefield, solely on the basis of unchecked accusations by the Executive Branch that they're involved in terrorism.
No warrant, no arrest, no trial: in place of a lawful conviction by a "jury of his peers," "justice" will come in the form of a Hellfire missile or a bullet in the back of the head!
In November, I wrote of a suggested plan published by the Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) to create a secretive "National Manhunting Agency."
In that piece I said while the text was not an "official" report, the fact that the monograph, Manhunting: Counter-Network Organization for Irregular Warfare, was written by retired Air Force Lt. Colonel George A. Crawford and published by JSOU, lends added weight to arguments by critics that the United States Government has "gone rogue" and is preparing a planet-wide Operation Condor network to capture or kill imperialism's enemies.
In light of last week's reports, does such an entity now exist, either as an official, though compartmented, code-word protected secret operation, or as a privatized Murder, Inc.?
On the domestic surveillance front, as The New York Times revealed in several investigative pieces in 2009, NSA, despite assurances from the Obama administration, continued to intercept "private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year."
According to journalists Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, the "intelligence officials" said that the agency "had been engaged in 'overcollection' of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic."
In a follow-up piece, the Times' reporters disclosed, that a former NSA analyst "described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans' e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation."
Indeed, as a heavily-redacted 38-page report released last year by the inspectors general of five federal agencies found, most "intelligence officials" interviewed "had difficulty citing specific instances" when the National Security Agency's wiretapping program contributed to successes against "terrorists."
But as a means for monitoring the communications of dissident and activist groups, lawless surveillance programs have been a boon to America's political police as they zero-in on anarchists, Muslims, environmentalists, indeed any group perceived to be a "threat" to the capitalist order.
The report goes on to state that when President Bush authorized the illegal warrantless wiretapping operation, he also signed off on a host of other surveillance programs that the secret state has never publicly disclosed. According to multiple published reports, those programs include a massive data-mining operation of the email, internet searches, blog posts, GPS locational data of American citizens.
Security researcher Chris Soghoian, the publisher of the web site Slight Paranoia, discovered at the secretive Intelligent Support Systems (ISS) wiretapping conference last October in Washington, that a niche security outfit, Packet Forensics was marketing internet spying boxes to the federal government.
In December, Soghoian revealed that a Sprint Nextel executive disclosed at ISS that the firm provided law enforcement agencies with its customers' (GPS) location information "over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009" and that this new "tool" for tracking our every move "was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers."
According to Soghoian and researcher Sid Stamm, Packet Forensics has developed technology designed to intercept communications without breaking encryption, by deploying forged security certificates instead of real ones that websites use to verify connections.
SSL certificates are the tiny lock symbol that appears in your web browser when you make a "secure" connection for online banking or to purchase a book or video game.
In a paper published March 24, Certified Lies: Detecting and Defeating Government Interception Attacks Against SSL, Soghoian and Stamm reveal that "a new attack" on individuals' privacy rights is "the compelled certificate creation attack, in which government agencies compel a certificate authority to issue false SSL certificates that are then used by intelligence agencies to covertly intercept and hijack individuals' secure Web-based communications. We reveal alarming evidence that suggests that this attack is in active use."
According to a marketing brochure handed out by Packet Forensics at the ISS conclave, "Users have the ability to import a copy of any legitimate key they obtain (potentially by court order) or they can generate 'look-alike' keys designed to give the subject a false sense of confidence in its authenticity." In other words, secret state agencies, with or without the legal niceties one generally expects in a democracy, can forge security keys "for reasons of state."
Soghoian and Stamm aver that the product is recommended for government investigators and that Packet Forensics stated that "IP communication dictates the need to examine encrypted traffic at will," therefore "your investigative staff will collect its best evidence while users are lulled into a false sense of security afforded by web, e-mail or VOIP encryption."
In blunt terms, all your communications belong to us! And if you don't like it, well, there's a jail cell waiting for you in some quiet, out-of-the-way "secure location" otherwise known as a black site!
How has the "change" administration responded to these, and a raft of other reports? The Washington Post reported April 9, that congressional grifters and privacy advocates "are stepping up the pressure on the Obama administration to fill the five vacant seats on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a panel created in 2004 to ensure that executive branch counterterrorism policies protect Americans' civil liberties."
Post journalist Ellen Nakashima disclosed that the "board has been vacant since the end of the last administration."
On and on it goes.
The securitization and militarization of daily life in the "greatest democracy money can buy" proceeds apace. As anthropologist and social critic David Price revealed in a new piece for CounterPunch, America's military-industrial-intelligence-academic-complex has pressured U.S. universities to welcome the CIA and other secret state agencies back onto campuses with open arms.
"After 9/11" Price writes, "the intelligence agencies pushed campuses to see the CIA and campus secrecy in a new light, and, as traditional funding sources for social science research declined, the intelligence community gained footholds on campuses."
These programs, managed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's (ODNI) Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) "use universities to train intelligence personnel by piggybacking onto existing educational programs."
"Even amid the militarization prevailing in America today," Price writes, "the silence surrounding this quiet installation and spread of programs ... is extraordinary."
Not so extraordinary however, if one considers America's rapid transformation into a police state even as the capitalist Empire runs aground.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Sunday, April 4, 2010
"Managing" Data and Dissent: Where Big Brother Meets Market Fundamentalism
Repression doesn't come cheap, just ask the FBI.
As the securitization of daily life increase at near exponential rates (all to keep us "safe," mind you) the dark contours of an American police state, like a pilot's last glimpse of an icy peak before a plane crash, wobbles into view.
In the main, such programs include, but are by no means limited to the following: electronic surveillance (call records, internet usage, social media); covert hacking by state operatives; GPS tracking; CCTV cameras linked-in to state databases; "smart" cards; RFID chipped commodities and the spooky "internet of things;" biometrics, and yes, the Pentagon has just stood up a Biometrics Identity Management Agency (BIMA); data-mining; watch listing; on and on it goes.
Pity our poor political minders, snowed-under by a blizzard of data-sets crying out for proper "management"! Or, as sycophantic armchair warrior and New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, would have it, "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist--McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15."
So true; yet neither can an aggregate of repressive police and intelligence agencies function without an army of corporate grifters who guide that "hidden hand" and not-so-hidden fist into highly profitable safe harbors. Call it Big Brother meets market fundamentalism.
And so, the heat is on as America's premier political police agency struggles to "modernize" their case file management system.
The FBI's Case Management "Problem"
When circumstances (a massive up-tick in illegal spying since 9/11 courtesy of the USA Patriot Act) forced the Bureau to store a treasure trove of tittle-tattle of "national security interest" on decidedly low-tech storage devices, FBI agents and their all-too-willing helpers from giant telecommunications firms such as AT&T took to scribbling "leads" on post-it notes.
Communications Analysis Unit (CAU) eager-beavers did so in order to speed-up the process of obtaining dodgy "exigent letters" that smoothed over the wrinkles (your rights!) as the Bureau issued tens of thousands of National Security Letters (NSLs).
The secretive lettres de cachet demanded everything: emails, internet searches, call records, bank statements, credit card purchases, travel itineraries, medical histories, educational résumés, even video rentals and books borrowed from public libraries. The contents of such shady administrative warrants cannot be disclosed by their recipients under penalty of stiff fines or even imprisonment.
While such extra-legal missives are supposedly issued only in cases of dire "emergency," the banal, ubiquitous nature of surveillance in post-Constitutional, "new normal" regimes such as the United States, all but guarantee that extraordinary "states of exception" are standard rules of the game in our managed democracy.
As the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General revealed in a heavily-redacted report in January, with all semblance of a legal process out the window, the FBI were caught with their hands in the proverbial cookie jar, repeatedly violating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
Fear not, Obama administration legal eagles cobbled together a new theory justifying the practice and have created, yet another, accountability free zone for agents who violated the rules.
Neatly, seamlessly and silently Obama's Office of Legal Counsel (John Yoo and Judge Bybee's old stomping grounds) granted them, wait!, retroactive immunity for such lawbreaking. The trouble is, the OLC's ruling is classified so we haven't a clue what it entails or how far-reaching is its purview. So much for the new era of "openness" and "transparency."
But I digress...
The New York Times reported March 18, that work on parts of the Bureau's cracker-jack case management program known as Sentinel has been "temporarily" suspended.
While the "overhaul" was supposed "to be completed this fall," Times journalist Eric Lichtblau disclosed that the system will not be ready for prime time until "next year at the earliest."
Overall, American taxpayers have shelled-out some $451 million to an endless parade of contractors, Lockheed Martin being the latest. Delays are expected to cost "at least $30 million in cost overruns on a project considered vital to national security" Lichtblau wrote, citing Congressional "officials."
But problems have plagued the project since its inception. Lockheed Martin, No. 1 on Washington Technology's "2009 Top 100" list of Prime Federal Contractors, secured some $14,983,515,367 in defense-related contracts last year and was brought on-board to revamp the troubled case management project.
This is all the more ironic considering that the defense giant was hailed as Sentinel's savior, after an earlier incarnation of the program known as Virtual Case File (VCF), overseen by the spooky Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), crashed and burned in 2006.
No slouches themselves when it comes to raking-in taxpayer boodle, SAIC is No. 7 on the Washington Technology list, pulling in some $4,811,194,880 in 2009, largely as a result of the firm's close political connections to the Defense Department and the secret state.
SAIC's work on VCF began in June 2001 and was expected to be completed in 36 months. However, after shelling out some $170 million over four years the Bureau concluded the system wouldn't work. Published reports fail to mention whether or not SAIC was forced to hand the loot back to cash-strapped taxpayers. Probably not.
Open-Ended Contracts: Hitting the Corporatist "Sweet Spot"
As with all things having to do with protecting their national security constituency from lean quarterly reports to shareholders, congressional grifters and secret state agencies alike are adept at showering giant defense and security corporations with multiyear, multibillion dollar contracts.
After all, high-end CEO salaries and lucrative remunerations for top executives in the form of handsome bonuses are based, not on a firm's actual performance but rather, on the critical up-tick in the share price; just ask Lehman Brothers or other outstanding corporate citizens such as Goldman Sachs. Or SAIC itself, for that matter!
Unfortunately, effective oversight is not the forte of a plethora of congressional committees; nor are crisp, objective evaluations, better known as due diligence, conducted by outside auditors before scarce federal resources, which could be used for quaint things such as health care, education or other reality-based programs, pour into any number of virtual black holes.
Take VCF as an example.
In a post-mortem of the SAIC program, The Washington Post revealed back in 2006, that after spending months writing 730,000 lines of computer code, corporate officers proclaimed VCF's roll-out "only weeks away."
The trouble was, software problem reports, or SPRs, "numbered in the hundreds." Worse for SAIC, as engineers continued running tests, systemic problems were multiplying quicker than proverbial rabbits.
As Post journalists Dan Eggen and Griff Witte disclosed, citing an unreleased audit of the program hushed-up by the Bureau, because "of an open-ended contract with few safeguards, SAIC reaped more than $100 million as the project became bigger and more complicated, even though its software never worked properly."
Despite evidence that the system was failing badly, SAIC "continued to meet the bureau's requests, accepting payments despite clear signs that the FBI's approach to the project was badly flawed."
Auditors discovered that the "system delivered by SAIC was so incomplete and unusable that it left the FBI with little choice but to scuttle the effort altogether."
David Kay, a former SAIC senior vice president and Bushist chief weapons inspector in Iraq tasked with finding nonexistent "weapons of mass destruction," told the Post even though top executives at the firm were aware the project was going "awry," they didn't insist on changes "because the bureau continued to pay the bills as the work piled up."
"From the documents that define the system at the highest level, down through the software design and into the source code itself," Aerospace, the independent firm that conducted the secretive FBI audit, "discovered evidence of incompleteness, lack of follow-through, failure to optimize and missing documentation."
Even more damning, a report by computer experts from the National Research Council and SAIC insider, Matthew Patton, removed from the program by top executives after posting critical remarks on VCF in an on-line forum, found that the firm "kept 200 programmers on staff doing 'make work'," when a "couple of dozen would have been enough."
SAIC's attitude, according to Patton, was that "it's other people's money, so they'll burn it every which way they want to."
As a cash cow, VCF was a superlative program; however, the IT security specialist told the Post: "Would the product actually work? Would it help agents do their jobs? I don't think anyone on the SAIC side cared about that."
Why would they? After all, $170 million buys much in the way of designer golf bags, pricey Hawaiian getaways or other necessities useful for navigating the dangerous shoals of America's "war on terror"!
As investigative journalist Tim Shorrock detailed in his essential book, Spies For Hire and for CorpWatch, SAIC "stands like a private colossus across the whole intelligence industry." Shorrock writes, "of SAIC's 42,000 employees, more than 20,000 hold U.S. government security clearances, making it, with Lockheed Martin, one of the largest private intelligence services in the world."
As the journalist revealed, while SAIC "is deeply involved in the operations of all the major collection agencies, particularly the NSA, NGA and CIA," failure also seems to come with the corporate territory.
"For example" Shorrock wrote, the firm "managed one of the NSA's largest efforts in recent years, the $3 billion Project Trailblazer, which attempted (and failed) to create actionable intelligence from the cacophony of telephone calls, fax messages, and emails that the NSA picks up every day. Launched in 2001, Trailblazer experienced hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns and NSA cancelled it in 2005."
Is there a pattern here?
No matter. Washington Technology reported March 31, that SAIC's fourth quarter revenues and overall gains for fiscal year 2010 were "$2.68 billion, a 7 percent increase, up from $2.52 billion in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009, the company announced. Full-year revenues were $10.85 billion, up 8 percent from fiscal 2009. Fiscal 2010 ended Jan. 31."
"We are pleased to complete the fiscal year with improved operating margin, earnings per share and cash generation," Walt Havenstein, SAIC's chief executive officer said in a corporate press release.
"We enter fiscal year 2011 with our portfolio of capabilities well aligned with national priorities, emphasizing areas such as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), cybersecurity, logistics, energy, and health technology to fuel our growth and shareholder value prospects," Havenstein added.
If by "national priorities" SAIC's head honcho means the continued bleed-out of taxpayer funds into corporate coffers, then, by all means, 2010 was a banner year!
Which brings us full-circle to Lockheed Martin and Sentinel.
DOJ Inspector General: "Significant Challenges"
The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG) disclosed in a redacted December 2009 report that the Lockheed Martin system "encountered significant challenges." As of August 2009, "the FBI and Lockheed Martin agreed to revise the project's schedule, increase Lockheed Martin's cost to develop Phase 2 to $155 million, and update the remaining costs for Phases 3 and 4."
Sound familiar?
"Consequently" the OIG reported, "the overall project completion date has been extended to September 2010, 3 months later than we previously reported and 9 months later than originally planned." In a new report released in late March, Department of Justice auditors revised their previous analysis. It wasn't a pretty picture.
According to the OIG, "As of March 2010, the FBI does not have official cost or schedule estimates for completing Sentinel. The remaining budget, schedule, and work to be performed on Sentinel are currently being renegotiated between the FBI and Lockheed Martin. While the FBI does not yet have official estimates, FBI officials have acknowledged that the project will cost more than its latest revised estimate of $451 million and will likely not be completed until 2011." That can only be music to Lockheed Martin's ears!
As the Times reported, work on the project has ground to a halt. This was confirmed by the OIG. "On March 3, 2010, because of significant issues regarding Phase 2 Segment 4’s usability, performance, and quality delivered by Lockheed Martin, the FBI issued a partial stop-work order to Lockheed Martin for portions of Phase 3 and all of Phase 4."
The latest set-back to taxpayers mean that the Bureau's "stop-work order returned Phase 2 Segment 4 of the project from operations and maintenance activities to the development phase."
In other words, after four years and nearly $500 million, its back to the drawing board!
After beating out their rivals for work on a program considerably more costly than SAIC's failed VCF, the OIG revealed that multiple issues and problems plague the system designed by the defense giant.
"First, there were significant problems with the usability of electronic forms that were developed for Sentinel." The forms are supposedly the heart of the system and the tools through which FBI repressors "manage" case-related information deployed across the Bureau, particularly when agents add or subtract data gleaned from the FBI's massive Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW).
Last year, Antifascist Calling reported on the Bureau's spooky "Library of Babel," IDW, that does yeoman's work as a virtual Department of Precrime.
A massive project, IDW already holds more than a billion unique, searchable records on American citizens and legal residents that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said would be used to "data-mine ... using unproven science in an attempt to predict future crimes from past behavior."
The IDW is one of the data-mining projects that Sentinel will directly tap into, allowing the migration of data currently held in the FBI's antiquated Automated Case Support (ACS) system.
The OIG report revealed, "there were 26 critical issues related to the functionality of Sentinel that required resolution before deployment" and that "Lockheed Martin had deviated from accepted systems engineering processes in developing the software code for Sentinel."
According to a review of the program by the shadowy MITRE Corporation, more than 10,000 "inefficiencies" in the software code may collectively result in the diminished performance of the "product."
Do these problems pose a "challenge" to either the Bureau or Lockheed Martin executives? Hardly! The OIG disclosed that "FBI officials have stated that in order to meet any increased funding requirements, the FBI plans to request congressional approval to redistribute funds from other FBI information technology programs to Sentinel."
How's that for creative accounting!
Repression: A Game the Whole Corporate "Family" Can Play
With their fingers into everything from missile design and satellite surveillance technology to domestic spying or that latest craze consuming Washington, "cybersecurity," Lockheed Martin is, as they say, a "player."
On the domestic spy game front, Lockheed Martin were one of the contractors who supplied intelligence analysts for the Counterintelligence Field Activity office (CIFA), the secretive Rumsfeld-era initiative that spied on antiwar activists and other Pentagon policy critics.
CIFA was tasked with tracking "logical combinations of keywords and personalities" used to estimate current or future threats. When CIFA was shuttered after public outcry, its functions were taken over by the Defense Intelligence Agency, where Lockheed Martin runs a bidding consortium.
But as with CIFA, the DIA's Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center, relies heavily on the unproven "science" of data-mining and its offshoot, link analysis.
Data-mining by corporate and secret state agencies such as the FBI seek to uncover "hidden patterns" and "subtle relationships" within disparate data-sets in order to "infer rules that allow for the prediction of future results," according to a 2004 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.
Sentinel will undoubtedly deploy data-mining techniques insofar as they are applicable to "managing" alleged foreign "terrorism plots," but also domestic dissidents identified as national security "risks."
Although the Sentinel program has apparently hit a brick wall in terms of operability, it is also clear that the FBI and other national security agencies, will continue their quixotic quest for technophilic "silver bullets" to "manage" domestic dissent.
That such endeavors are illusory, as with the Pentagon's "Revolution in Military Affairs" that promised always-on "persistent area surveillance" of the "battlespace," the deployment of high-priced sensor technologies and data-mining algorithms assure securocrats that "total information awareness" is only a keystroke away.
While "situational awareness" may be an illusive commodity, when it comes to data storage and the indexing of alleged national security threats, systems such as Sentinel or the Investigative Data Warehouse, as well as the broader application of predictive data-mining to map so-called terrorist "nodes" expand the operation and intensification of the "surveillance society" ever-deeper into social life.
As Tim Shorrock revealed in CorpWatch, in 2004 and 2005 Lockheed Martin "acquired the government IT unit of Affiliated Computer Services Inc., inheriting several contracts with defense intelligence agencies and Sytex, a $425 million Philadelphia-based company that held contracts with the Pentagon's Northern Command and the NSA/Army Intelligence and Security Command. By 2007 the company employed 52,000 IT specialists with security clearances, and intelligence made up nearly 40 percent of its annual business, company executives said."
According to Shorrock, one of the firm's "most important intelligence-related acquisitions took place in the 1990s, when the conglomerate bought Betac Corporation. Betac was one of the companies the government hired during the late 1980s to provide communications technology for the secret Continuity of Government program the Reagan administration created to keep the U.S. government functioning in the event of a nuclear attack."
As readers are aware, secretive Continuity of Government programs went into effect after the 9/11 attacks. Details on these programs have never been revealed, although investigative journalists have discovered that some portions of COG have to do with the national security indexing of American citizens in a massive, classified database known as Main Core.
As investigative journalist Christopher Ketcham revealed in 2008, one "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."
Ketcham's source told him that "'the more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help,' he says. 'Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets.' An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but adds that 'it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency databases at the same time'."
Shorrock writes that "Under a 1982 presidential directive, the outbreak of war could trigger the proclamation of martial law nationwide, giving the military the authority to use its domestic database to round up citizens and residents considered threats to national security. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Army were to carry out the emergency measures for domestic security."
And one of the "biggest winners" was Betac Corporation, "a consulting firm composed of former intelligence and communications specialists from the Pentagon. Betac was one of the largest government contractors of its day and, with TRW and Lockheed itself, dominated the intelligence contracting industry from the mid-1980s until the late 1990s."
"Its first project for the Continuity of Government plan," Shorrock reveals, "was a sole-source contract to devise and maintain security for the system. Between 1983 and 1985, the contract expanded from $316,000 to nearly $3 million, and by 1988 Betac had multiple COG contracts worth $22 million. Betac was eventually sold to ACS Government Solutions Group and is now a unit of Lockheed Martin."
While it is de rigueur, particularly since the rise of the Obama administration, to deride critics who point out the perils of an out-of-control national security state armed with meta-databases such as Main Core and secretive COG programs as "conspiracy theorists," such "whistling past the graveyard" is done at great peril to an open and transparent democratic system of governance based on accountability and the rule of law.
As the securitization of daily life increase at near exponential rates (all to keep us "safe," mind you) the dark contours of an American police state, like a pilot's last glimpse of an icy peak before a plane crash, wobbles into view.
In the main, such programs include, but are by no means limited to the following: electronic surveillance (call records, internet usage, social media); covert hacking by state operatives; GPS tracking; CCTV cameras linked-in to state databases; "smart" cards; RFID chipped commodities and the spooky "internet of things;" biometrics, and yes, the Pentagon has just stood up a Biometrics Identity Management Agency (BIMA); data-mining; watch listing; on and on it goes.
Pity our poor political minders, snowed-under by a blizzard of data-sets crying out for proper "management"! Or, as sycophantic armchair warrior and New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, would have it, "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist--McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15."
So true; yet neither can an aggregate of repressive police and intelligence agencies function without an army of corporate grifters who guide that "hidden hand" and not-so-hidden fist into highly profitable safe harbors. Call it Big Brother meets market fundamentalism.
And so, the heat is on as America's premier political police agency struggles to "modernize" their case file management system.
The FBI's Case Management "Problem"
When circumstances (a massive up-tick in illegal spying since 9/11 courtesy of the USA Patriot Act) forced the Bureau to store a treasure trove of tittle-tattle of "national security interest" on decidedly low-tech storage devices, FBI agents and their all-too-willing helpers from giant telecommunications firms such as AT&T took to scribbling "leads" on post-it notes.
Communications Analysis Unit (CAU) eager-beavers did so in order to speed-up the process of obtaining dodgy "exigent letters" that smoothed over the wrinkles (your rights!) as the Bureau issued tens of thousands of National Security Letters (NSLs).
The secretive lettres de cachet demanded everything: emails, internet searches, call records, bank statements, credit card purchases, travel itineraries, medical histories, educational résumés, even video rentals and books borrowed from public libraries. The contents of such shady administrative warrants cannot be disclosed by their recipients under penalty of stiff fines or even imprisonment.
While such extra-legal missives are supposedly issued only in cases of dire "emergency," the banal, ubiquitous nature of surveillance in post-Constitutional, "new normal" regimes such as the United States, all but guarantee that extraordinary "states of exception" are standard rules of the game in our managed democracy.
As the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General revealed in a heavily-redacted report in January, with all semblance of a legal process out the window, the FBI were caught with their hands in the proverbial cookie jar, repeatedly violating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
Fear not, Obama administration legal eagles cobbled together a new theory justifying the practice and have created, yet another, accountability free zone for agents who violated the rules.
Neatly, seamlessly and silently Obama's Office of Legal Counsel (John Yoo and Judge Bybee's old stomping grounds) granted them, wait!, retroactive immunity for such lawbreaking. The trouble is, the OLC's ruling is classified so we haven't a clue what it entails or how far-reaching is its purview. So much for the new era of "openness" and "transparency."
But I digress...
The New York Times reported March 18, that work on parts of the Bureau's cracker-jack case management program known as Sentinel has been "temporarily" suspended.
While the "overhaul" was supposed "to be completed this fall," Times journalist Eric Lichtblau disclosed that the system will not be ready for prime time until "next year at the earliest."
Overall, American taxpayers have shelled-out some $451 million to an endless parade of contractors, Lockheed Martin being the latest. Delays are expected to cost "at least $30 million in cost overruns on a project considered vital to national security" Lichtblau wrote, citing Congressional "officials."
But problems have plagued the project since its inception. Lockheed Martin, No. 1 on Washington Technology's "2009 Top 100" list of Prime Federal Contractors, secured some $14,983,515,367 in defense-related contracts last year and was brought on-board to revamp the troubled case management project.
This is all the more ironic considering that the defense giant was hailed as Sentinel's savior, after an earlier incarnation of the program known as Virtual Case File (VCF), overseen by the spooky Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), crashed and burned in 2006.
No slouches themselves when it comes to raking-in taxpayer boodle, SAIC is No. 7 on the Washington Technology list, pulling in some $4,811,194,880 in 2009, largely as a result of the firm's close political connections to the Defense Department and the secret state.
SAIC's work on VCF began in June 2001 and was expected to be completed in 36 months. However, after shelling out some $170 million over four years the Bureau concluded the system wouldn't work. Published reports fail to mention whether or not SAIC was forced to hand the loot back to cash-strapped taxpayers. Probably not.
Open-Ended Contracts: Hitting the Corporatist "Sweet Spot"
As with all things having to do with protecting their national security constituency from lean quarterly reports to shareholders, congressional grifters and secret state agencies alike are adept at showering giant defense and security corporations with multiyear, multibillion dollar contracts.
After all, high-end CEO salaries and lucrative remunerations for top executives in the form of handsome bonuses are based, not on a firm's actual performance but rather, on the critical up-tick in the share price; just ask Lehman Brothers or other outstanding corporate citizens such as Goldman Sachs. Or SAIC itself, for that matter!
Unfortunately, effective oversight is not the forte of a plethora of congressional committees; nor are crisp, objective evaluations, better known as due diligence, conducted by outside auditors before scarce federal resources, which could be used for quaint things such as health care, education or other reality-based programs, pour into any number of virtual black holes.
Take VCF as an example.
In a post-mortem of the SAIC program, The Washington Post revealed back in 2006, that after spending months writing 730,000 lines of computer code, corporate officers proclaimed VCF's roll-out "only weeks away."
The trouble was, software problem reports, or SPRs, "numbered in the hundreds." Worse for SAIC, as engineers continued running tests, systemic problems were multiplying quicker than proverbial rabbits.
As Post journalists Dan Eggen and Griff Witte disclosed, citing an unreleased audit of the program hushed-up by the Bureau, because "of an open-ended contract with few safeguards, SAIC reaped more than $100 million as the project became bigger and more complicated, even though its software never worked properly."
Despite evidence that the system was failing badly, SAIC "continued to meet the bureau's requests, accepting payments despite clear signs that the FBI's approach to the project was badly flawed."
Auditors discovered that the "system delivered by SAIC was so incomplete and unusable that it left the FBI with little choice but to scuttle the effort altogether."
David Kay, a former SAIC senior vice president and Bushist chief weapons inspector in Iraq tasked with finding nonexistent "weapons of mass destruction," told the Post even though top executives at the firm were aware the project was going "awry," they didn't insist on changes "because the bureau continued to pay the bills as the work piled up."
"From the documents that define the system at the highest level, down through the software design and into the source code itself," Aerospace, the independent firm that conducted the secretive FBI audit, "discovered evidence of incompleteness, lack of follow-through, failure to optimize and missing documentation."
Even more damning, a report by computer experts from the National Research Council and SAIC insider, Matthew Patton, removed from the program by top executives after posting critical remarks on VCF in an on-line forum, found that the firm "kept 200 programmers on staff doing 'make work'," when a "couple of dozen would have been enough."
SAIC's attitude, according to Patton, was that "it's other people's money, so they'll burn it every which way they want to."
As a cash cow, VCF was a superlative program; however, the IT security specialist told the Post: "Would the product actually work? Would it help agents do their jobs? I don't think anyone on the SAIC side cared about that."
Why would they? After all, $170 million buys much in the way of designer golf bags, pricey Hawaiian getaways or other necessities useful for navigating the dangerous shoals of America's "war on terror"!
As investigative journalist Tim Shorrock detailed in his essential book, Spies For Hire and for CorpWatch, SAIC "stands like a private colossus across the whole intelligence industry." Shorrock writes, "of SAIC's 42,000 employees, more than 20,000 hold U.S. government security clearances, making it, with Lockheed Martin, one of the largest private intelligence services in the world."
As the journalist revealed, while SAIC "is deeply involved in the operations of all the major collection agencies, particularly the NSA, NGA and CIA," failure also seems to come with the corporate territory.
"For example" Shorrock wrote, the firm "managed one of the NSA's largest efforts in recent years, the $3 billion Project Trailblazer, which attempted (and failed) to create actionable intelligence from the cacophony of telephone calls, fax messages, and emails that the NSA picks up every day. Launched in 2001, Trailblazer experienced hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns and NSA cancelled it in 2005."
Is there a pattern here?
No matter. Washington Technology reported March 31, that SAIC's fourth quarter revenues and overall gains for fiscal year 2010 were "$2.68 billion, a 7 percent increase, up from $2.52 billion in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009, the company announced. Full-year revenues were $10.85 billion, up 8 percent from fiscal 2009. Fiscal 2010 ended Jan. 31."
"We are pleased to complete the fiscal year with improved operating margin, earnings per share and cash generation," Walt Havenstein, SAIC's chief executive officer said in a corporate press release.
"We enter fiscal year 2011 with our portfolio of capabilities well aligned with national priorities, emphasizing areas such as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), cybersecurity, logistics, energy, and health technology to fuel our growth and shareholder value prospects," Havenstein added.
If by "national priorities" SAIC's head honcho means the continued bleed-out of taxpayer funds into corporate coffers, then, by all means, 2010 was a banner year!
Which brings us full-circle to Lockheed Martin and Sentinel.
DOJ Inspector General: "Significant Challenges"
The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG) disclosed in a redacted December 2009 report that the Lockheed Martin system "encountered significant challenges." As of August 2009, "the FBI and Lockheed Martin agreed to revise the project's schedule, increase Lockheed Martin's cost to develop Phase 2 to $155 million, and update the remaining costs for Phases 3 and 4."
Sound familiar?
"Consequently" the OIG reported, "the overall project completion date has been extended to September 2010, 3 months later than we previously reported and 9 months later than originally planned." In a new report released in late March, Department of Justice auditors revised their previous analysis. It wasn't a pretty picture.
According to the OIG, "As of March 2010, the FBI does not have official cost or schedule estimates for completing Sentinel. The remaining budget, schedule, and work to be performed on Sentinel are currently being renegotiated between the FBI and Lockheed Martin. While the FBI does not yet have official estimates, FBI officials have acknowledged that the project will cost more than its latest revised estimate of $451 million and will likely not be completed until 2011." That can only be music to Lockheed Martin's ears!
As the Times reported, work on the project has ground to a halt. This was confirmed by the OIG. "On March 3, 2010, because of significant issues regarding Phase 2 Segment 4’s usability, performance, and quality delivered by Lockheed Martin, the FBI issued a partial stop-work order to Lockheed Martin for portions of Phase 3 and all of Phase 4."
The latest set-back to taxpayers mean that the Bureau's "stop-work order returned Phase 2 Segment 4 of the project from operations and maintenance activities to the development phase."
In other words, after four years and nearly $500 million, its back to the drawing board!
After beating out their rivals for work on a program considerably more costly than SAIC's failed VCF, the OIG revealed that multiple issues and problems plague the system designed by the defense giant.
"First, there were significant problems with the usability of electronic forms that were developed for Sentinel." The forms are supposedly the heart of the system and the tools through which FBI repressors "manage" case-related information deployed across the Bureau, particularly when agents add or subtract data gleaned from the FBI's massive Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW).
Last year, Antifascist Calling reported on the Bureau's spooky "Library of Babel," IDW, that does yeoman's work as a virtual Department of Precrime.
A massive project, IDW already holds more than a billion unique, searchable records on American citizens and legal residents that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said would be used to "data-mine ... using unproven science in an attempt to predict future crimes from past behavior."
The IDW is one of the data-mining projects that Sentinel will directly tap into, allowing the migration of data currently held in the FBI's antiquated Automated Case Support (ACS) system.
The OIG report revealed, "there were 26 critical issues related to the functionality of Sentinel that required resolution before deployment" and that "Lockheed Martin had deviated from accepted systems engineering processes in developing the software code for Sentinel."
According to a review of the program by the shadowy MITRE Corporation, more than 10,000 "inefficiencies" in the software code may collectively result in the diminished performance of the "product."
Do these problems pose a "challenge" to either the Bureau or Lockheed Martin executives? Hardly! The OIG disclosed that "FBI officials have stated that in order to meet any increased funding requirements, the FBI plans to request congressional approval to redistribute funds from other FBI information technology programs to Sentinel."
How's that for creative accounting!
Repression: A Game the Whole Corporate "Family" Can Play
With their fingers into everything from missile design and satellite surveillance technology to domestic spying or that latest craze consuming Washington, "cybersecurity," Lockheed Martin is, as they say, a "player."
On the domestic spy game front, Lockheed Martin were one of the contractors who supplied intelligence analysts for the Counterintelligence Field Activity office (CIFA), the secretive Rumsfeld-era initiative that spied on antiwar activists and other Pentagon policy critics.
CIFA was tasked with tracking "logical combinations of keywords and personalities" used to estimate current or future threats. When CIFA was shuttered after public outcry, its functions were taken over by the Defense Intelligence Agency, where Lockheed Martin runs a bidding consortium.
But as with CIFA, the DIA's Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center, relies heavily on the unproven "science" of data-mining and its offshoot, link analysis.
Data-mining by corporate and secret state agencies such as the FBI seek to uncover "hidden patterns" and "subtle relationships" within disparate data-sets in order to "infer rules that allow for the prediction of future results," according to a 2004 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.
Sentinel will undoubtedly deploy data-mining techniques insofar as they are applicable to "managing" alleged foreign "terrorism plots," but also domestic dissidents identified as national security "risks."
Although the Sentinel program has apparently hit a brick wall in terms of operability, it is also clear that the FBI and other national security agencies, will continue their quixotic quest for technophilic "silver bullets" to "manage" domestic dissent.
That such endeavors are illusory, as with the Pentagon's "Revolution in Military Affairs" that promised always-on "persistent area surveillance" of the "battlespace," the deployment of high-priced sensor technologies and data-mining algorithms assure securocrats that "total information awareness" is only a keystroke away.
While "situational awareness" may be an illusive commodity, when it comes to data storage and the indexing of alleged national security threats, systems such as Sentinel or the Investigative Data Warehouse, as well as the broader application of predictive data-mining to map so-called terrorist "nodes" expand the operation and intensification of the "surveillance society" ever-deeper into social life.
As Tim Shorrock revealed in CorpWatch, in 2004 and 2005 Lockheed Martin "acquired the government IT unit of Affiliated Computer Services Inc., inheriting several contracts with defense intelligence agencies and Sytex, a $425 million Philadelphia-based company that held contracts with the Pentagon's Northern Command and the NSA/Army Intelligence and Security Command. By 2007 the company employed 52,000 IT specialists with security clearances, and intelligence made up nearly 40 percent of its annual business, company executives said."
According to Shorrock, one of the firm's "most important intelligence-related acquisitions took place in the 1990s, when the conglomerate bought Betac Corporation. Betac was one of the companies the government hired during the late 1980s to provide communications technology for the secret Continuity of Government program the Reagan administration created to keep the U.S. government functioning in the event of a nuclear attack."
As readers are aware, secretive Continuity of Government programs went into effect after the 9/11 attacks. Details on these programs have never been revealed, although investigative journalists have discovered that some portions of COG have to do with the national security indexing of American citizens in a massive, classified database known as Main Core.
As investigative journalist Christopher Ketcham revealed in 2008, one "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."
Ketcham's source told him that "'the more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help,' he says. 'Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets.' An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but adds that 'it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency databases at the same time'."
Shorrock writes that "Under a 1982 presidential directive, the outbreak of war could trigger the proclamation of martial law nationwide, giving the military the authority to use its domestic database to round up citizens and residents considered threats to national security. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Army were to carry out the emergency measures for domestic security."
And one of the "biggest winners" was Betac Corporation, "a consulting firm composed of former intelligence and communications specialists from the Pentagon. Betac was one of the largest government contractors of its day and, with TRW and Lockheed itself, dominated the intelligence contracting industry from the mid-1980s until the late 1990s."
"Its first project for the Continuity of Government plan," Shorrock reveals, "was a sole-source contract to devise and maintain security for the system. Between 1983 and 1985, the contract expanded from $316,000 to nearly $3 million, and by 1988 Betac had multiple COG contracts worth $22 million. Betac was eventually sold to ACS Government Solutions Group and is now a unit of Lockheed Martin."
While it is de rigueur, particularly since the rise of the Obama administration, to deride critics who point out the perils of an out-of-control national security state armed with meta-databases such as Main Core and secretive COG programs as "conspiracy theorists," such "whistling past the graveyard" is done at great peril to an open and transparent democratic system of governance based on accountability and the rule of law.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Leaked Document Discloses CIA Plans to Target European Public Opinion over Afghan War
Since their 2007 launch, the whistleblowing web site WikiLeaks have been the subject of "hostile acts" by state and private security services for spilling the beans on crime, corruption and violence perpetrated by the capitalist deep state.
But rather than being deterred by government threats or overt acts of violence, including the murder of two human rights attorneys in Nairobi last March, who provided the whistleblowers with reports on extrajudicial killings by Kenyan police, WikiLeaks have turned the tables on the CIA.
On March 26, the group published a remarkable document that lays out the Agency's strategy to manipulate European public opinion over waning support for the Afghanistan war.
Classified "Confidential/NOFORN" (No Foreign Nationals) the 11 March 2010 document is titled, "Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission--Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough."
Prepared by the CIA Red Cell, the entity is described in the text as an Agency subunit "charged by the Director of Intelligence with taking a pronounced 'out-of-the-box' approach that will provoke thought and offer an alternative viewpoint on the full range of analytic issues."
According to WikiLeaks staff, "The proposed PR strategies focus on pressure points that have been identified within these countries. For France it is the sympathy of the public for Afghan refugees and women. For Germany it is the fear of the consequences of defeat (drugs, more refugees, terrorism) as well as for Germany's standing in the NATO. The memo is an recipe for the targeted manipulation of public opinion in two NATO ally countries, written by the CIA."
Curiously, in an echo of capitalism's real and not imagined, living social content, the CIA evokes Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. After all, it was Debord who, commenting on the ability of contemporary societies to produce and reproduce a monstrous world "mediated by images," first identified the media as a central locus for managing reality itself.
Langley's best and brightest now counsel America's political masters that although "apathy" may be their strongest ally in waging the endless "war on terror," it cannot be counted upon indefinitely to sustain the imperial project.
Contrast the CIA's evocation of "apathy" as a "warfighting" tool with Debord's insight that "the spectacle ... expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep." One might add that the Agency's proposed media assault on Western public opinion is being prepared precisely to guarantee that the masses continue to slumber.
France and Germany: Heading Towards the Exits?
Last month's fall of the neoliberal Dutch government over their continued support for the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan was a wake-up call for Washington.
The news was greeted with dismay by partisans of the Afghan intervention and their media sycophants. The New York Times reported February 21, that when a "last-ditch effort" to keep Dutch troops in Afghanistan failed, it immediately raised "fears that the Western military coalition fighting the war was increasingly at risk."
As U.S. and British forces step-up operations across the entire "AfPak" theatre, launching murderous and indiscriminate drone strikes in Pakistan and "targeted killings" and massacres in Afghanistan, the spectre of a significant climb-down by the French and German governments set alarm bells ringing in the Pentagon.
The planned withdrawal by December of some 2,000 Dutch troops from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), would undoubtedly throw a spanner in the works. The Dutch are currently operating in the restive southern province of Oruzgan, north of the Taliban strongholds of Helmand and Kandahar provinces where major military operations are underway; their imminent departure will significantly alter NATO plans.
While the cover-story for stepped-up operations in Afghanistan by Washington is ostensibly to destroy the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets known as al-Qaeda, and halt the avalanche of drugs from reaching Western consumers, this is, and always has been, a ludicrous fairy-tale.
As we know through countless investigations and exposés across the decades, from Vietnam through Watergate and from Iran-Contra to the endless "War on Terror," the international drugs trade is the handmaiden of Pentagon counterinsurgency campaigns, CIA operations and elite violence world-wide.
The New York Times reported March 21 that Afghanistan's lucrative opium crop is no longer a target of military operations. According to the Times, "the military's position is clear: 'U.S. forces no longer eradicate,' as one NATO official put it. Opium is the main livelihood of 60 to 70 percent of the farmers in Marja, which was seized from Taliban rebels in a major offensive last month. American Marines occupying the area are under orders to leave the farmers' fields alone."
But with the biggest players in Afghanistan's drug rackets linked to America's close allies in the corrupt Karzai government, the subtext is clear; as analysts Michel Chossudovsky and Peter Dale Scott have long argued, American interventions tend to manage, not eliminate, global drug flows, favoring narcotraffickers who play ball whilst targeting for destruction those who don't.
As Scott reported in January for Global Research, none other than Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, claimed that "drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the [2008] global crisis." Indeed, Costa told The Observer last December that he has seen evidence that "the proceeds of organised crime were 'the only liquid investment capital' available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year."
And as Chossudovsky revealed back in 2005, according to a U.S. Senate report "some $500 billion to $1 trillion in criminal proceeds are laundered through banks worldwide each year, with about half of that amount moved through United States banks."
Above all else, the CIA's strategy is meant to head-off any attempt by Europe's citizens to corral their governments and force an end to their participation in U.S.-led efforts to recolonize Central- and South Asia.
One wag, Julian Lindley-French, a professor of defense strategy at the Netherlands Defense Academy in Breda told the New York Times, "If the Dutch go, which is the implication of all this, that could open the floodgates for other Europeans to say, 'The Dutch are going, we can go, too'."
Given these sentiments, the CIA and Pentagon will turn to "other means" to stop their NATO partners heading towards the exits.
A Cynical Media Operation
CIA media operations are fully consonant with the aims and methods employed by U.S. war planners; indeed, the manipulation of public opinion by battalions of public relations specialists, pollsters and former high-ranking military officers, often employed by giant defense and security corporations with "dogs in the hunt," are part of the secret state's army of "message force multipliers."
That such operations have disastrous consequences for functioning democracies, not to mention the victims of NATO's tender mercies, cannot be stressed often enough. To ensure that the bombs continue falling and Western control over access to vital Central Asian gas and petroleum reserves continue, public opinion, treated as an essential front of the imperial "battlespace," must be "softened up."
Accordingly, the CIA found that "Afghanistan mission's low public salience has allowed French and German leaders to disregard popular opposition and steadily increase their troop contributions to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Berlin and Paris currently maintain the third and fourth highest ISAF troop levels, despite the opposition of 80 percent of German and French respondents to increased ISAF deployments, according to INR polling in fall 2009."
State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) pollsters found:
"If some forecasts of a bloody summer in Afghanistan come to pass," CIA planners write, "passive French and German dislike of their troop presence could turn into active and politically potent hostility. The tone of previous debate suggests that a spike in French or German casualties or in Afghan civilian casualties could become a tipping point in converting passive opposition into active calls for immediate withdrawal."
This must be avoided at all costs. Cynically, CIA analysts conclude that "tailoring messaging could forestall or at least contain backlash."
From the looks of things on the ground, the CIA will have much "tailoring" to do in order to stitch-up NATO's fraying pretext for the Afghanistan intervention.
As an investigation by journalist Jerome Starkey revealed in The Times on March 13, "a night raid carried out by US and Afghan gunmen led to the deaths of two pregnant women, a teenage girl and two local officials in an atrocity which Nato then tried to cover up."
According to Starkey, when details of the botched raid came to light, NATO officials claimed the force had found the women's bodies "tied up, gagged and killed" in a room, implying the gruesome murders were the work of insurgents.
"A Times investigation" Starkey writes, "suggests that Nato's claims are either wilfully false or, at best, misleading. More than a dozen survivors, officials, police chiefs and a religious leader interviewed at and around the scene of the attack maintain that the perpetrators were US and Afghan gunmen. The identity and status of the soldiers is unknown."
As with the roll-out of any new product line, or moves to increase flagging interest in an existing commodity, niche consumers, French and German public opinion in the case of the Afghan intervention, are now subjects of a targeted marketing strategy by the CIA.
Accordingly, since INR surveys have found that the "French [are] focused on civilians and refugees," CIA analysts aver that "citing examples of concrete gains could limit and perhaps even reverse opposition to the mission. Such tailored messages could tap into acute French concern for civilians and refugees." Indeed, "contradicting the 'ISAF does more harm than good' perception is clearly important, particularly for France's Muslim minority."
Such cynical constructs are all the more remarkable considering that "France's Muslim minority" are cast by the French state, its far-right supporters and American secret warriors as a veritable "fifth column" to be closely surveilled and when necessary, repressed, lest an alleged "Islamist contagion" take root in the heart of Europe itself!
In this respect, "messaging that dramatizes the potential adverse consequences of an ISAF defeat for Afghan civilians could leverage French (and other European) guilt for abandoning them. The prospect of the Taliban rolling back hard-won progress on girls' education could provoke French indignation, become a rallying point for France's largely secular public, and give voters a reason to support a good and necessary cause despite casualties."
Never mind, that the warlord and Islamist/Mafia-backed coalition that comprises the Karzai government, as documented by innumerable human rights' organizations and Afghan women themselves, such as ousted parliamentarian Malalai Joya, have found that the same brutal conditions persist for women today as under the retrograde U.S./Pakistan-backed Taliban regime of the 1990s.
For Germans however, xenophobic and nationalist cards will be played. "Messages that dramatize the consequences of a NATO defeat for specific German interests could counter the widely held perception that Afghanistan is not Germany's problem. For example, messages that illustrate how a defeat in Afghanistan could heighten Germany’s exposure to terrorism, opium, and refugees might help to make the war more salient to skeptics."
Additionally, CIA analysts stress that "emphasis on the mission's multilateral and humanitarian aspects could help ease Germans' concerns about waging any kind of war while appealing to their desire to support multilateral efforts. Despite their allergy to armed conflict, Germans were willing to break precedent and use force in the Balkans in the 1990s to show commitment to their NATO allies. German respondents cited helping their allies as one of the most compelling reasons for supporting ISAF, according to an INR poll in the fall of 2009."
Considering that U.S./NATO allies jumped into the Balkans only when it became clear that German imperialism under the bankrupt government of Helmut Kohl, was intent on destroying the multicultural Yugoslav socialist state, and did so only not to be left in the dust by a resurgent unified German state with eyes clearly focused on lucrative East European markets, is a remarkable rewriting of history!
Another card which the CIA clearly intends to play is the alleged "confidence of the French and German publics in President Obama's ability to handle foreign affairs in general and Afghanistan in particular."
Indeed, appeals from America's new capo tutti capo "suggest that they would be receptive to his direct affirmation of their importance to the ISAF mission--and sensitive to direct expressions of disappointment in allies who do not help." Such direct appeals from the global Godfather "might provide at least some leverage for sustaining contributions to ISAF."
GMF polling data cited by the CIA found that "when respondents were reminded that President Obama himself had asked for increased deployments to Afghanistan, their support for granting this request increased dramatically, from 4 to 15 percent among French respondents and from 7 to 13 percent among Germans. The total percentages may be small but they suggest significant sensitivity to disappointing a president seen as broadly in sync with European concerns."
Another exploitable bullet point cited by the CIA are Afghan women. Accordingly, "Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban because of women's ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory."
However, as I pointed out above, only some "Afghan women" would be viewed as "ideal messengers" in these media operations. Leftist, feminist or other internal critics of the Karzai Warlord-Mafia-Islamist regime would, by definition, be excluded from such forums. For the chosen few who pass muster, "outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission."
Conclusion
The United States and their NATO allies are encountering stiff resistance in Afghanistan. In order to buttress political support from skeptical North American and European citizens, the CIA and their "friends" amongst the giant media conglomerates are pulling out all the stops.
The publication of the CIA's analytical document by Wikileaks, provides the antiwar movement with insight into how imperialism intends to sell the wretched Afghan war to the public.
Counterstrategies that leverage this knowledge can potentially provide critics with ammunition that directly challenge American propaganda, disarm academic, media and political sycophants and more importantly, derail the policy of waging aggressive, "preemptive" wars well into the future.
But rather than being deterred by government threats or overt acts of violence, including the murder of two human rights attorneys in Nairobi last March, who provided the whistleblowers with reports on extrajudicial killings by Kenyan police, WikiLeaks have turned the tables on the CIA.
On March 26, the group published a remarkable document that lays out the Agency's strategy to manipulate European public opinion over waning support for the Afghanistan war.
Classified "Confidential/NOFORN" (No Foreign Nationals) the 11 March 2010 document is titled, "Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission--Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough."
Prepared by the CIA Red Cell, the entity is described in the text as an Agency subunit "charged by the Director of Intelligence with taking a pronounced 'out-of-the-box' approach that will provoke thought and offer an alternative viewpoint on the full range of analytic issues."
According to WikiLeaks staff, "The proposed PR strategies focus on pressure points that have been identified within these countries. For France it is the sympathy of the public for Afghan refugees and women. For Germany it is the fear of the consequences of defeat (drugs, more refugees, terrorism) as well as for Germany's standing in the NATO. The memo is an recipe for the targeted manipulation of public opinion in two NATO ally countries, written by the CIA."
Curiously, in an echo of capitalism's real and not imagined, living social content, the CIA evokes Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. After all, it was Debord who, commenting on the ability of contemporary societies to produce and reproduce a monstrous world "mediated by images," first identified the media as a central locus for managing reality itself.
Langley's best and brightest now counsel America's political masters that although "apathy" may be their strongest ally in waging the endless "war on terror," it cannot be counted upon indefinitely to sustain the imperial project.
Contrast the CIA's evocation of "apathy" as a "warfighting" tool with Debord's insight that "the spectacle ... expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep." One might add that the Agency's proposed media assault on Western public opinion is being prepared precisely to guarantee that the masses continue to slumber.
France and Germany: Heading Towards the Exits?
Last month's fall of the neoliberal Dutch government over their continued support for the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan was a wake-up call for Washington.
The news was greeted with dismay by partisans of the Afghan intervention and their media sycophants. The New York Times reported February 21, that when a "last-ditch effort" to keep Dutch troops in Afghanistan failed, it immediately raised "fears that the Western military coalition fighting the war was increasingly at risk."
As U.S. and British forces step-up operations across the entire "AfPak" theatre, launching murderous and indiscriminate drone strikes in Pakistan and "targeted killings" and massacres in Afghanistan, the spectre of a significant climb-down by the French and German governments set alarm bells ringing in the Pentagon.
The planned withdrawal by December of some 2,000 Dutch troops from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), would undoubtedly throw a spanner in the works. The Dutch are currently operating in the restive southern province of Oruzgan, north of the Taliban strongholds of Helmand and Kandahar provinces where major military operations are underway; their imminent departure will significantly alter NATO plans.
While the cover-story for stepped-up operations in Afghanistan by Washington is ostensibly to destroy the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets known as al-Qaeda, and halt the avalanche of drugs from reaching Western consumers, this is, and always has been, a ludicrous fairy-tale.
As we know through countless investigations and exposés across the decades, from Vietnam through Watergate and from Iran-Contra to the endless "War on Terror," the international drugs trade is the handmaiden of Pentagon counterinsurgency campaigns, CIA operations and elite violence world-wide.
The New York Times reported March 21 that Afghanistan's lucrative opium crop is no longer a target of military operations. According to the Times, "the military's position is clear: 'U.S. forces no longer eradicate,' as one NATO official put it. Opium is the main livelihood of 60 to 70 percent of the farmers in Marja, which was seized from Taliban rebels in a major offensive last month. American Marines occupying the area are under orders to leave the farmers' fields alone."
But with the biggest players in Afghanistan's drug rackets linked to America's close allies in the corrupt Karzai government, the subtext is clear; as analysts Michel Chossudovsky and Peter Dale Scott have long argued, American interventions tend to manage, not eliminate, global drug flows, favoring narcotraffickers who play ball whilst targeting for destruction those who don't.
As Scott reported in January for Global Research, none other than Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, claimed that "drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the [2008] global crisis." Indeed, Costa told The Observer last December that he has seen evidence that "the proceeds of organised crime were 'the only liquid investment capital' available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year."
And as Chossudovsky revealed back in 2005, according to a U.S. Senate report "some $500 billion to $1 trillion in criminal proceeds are laundered through banks worldwide each year, with about half of that amount moved through United States banks."
Above all else, the CIA's strategy is meant to head-off any attempt by Europe's citizens to corral their governments and force an end to their participation in U.S.-led efforts to recolonize Central- and South Asia.
One wag, Julian Lindley-French, a professor of defense strategy at the Netherlands Defense Academy in Breda told the New York Times, "If the Dutch go, which is the implication of all this, that could open the floodgates for other Europeans to say, 'The Dutch are going, we can go, too'."
Given these sentiments, the CIA and Pentagon will turn to "other means" to stop their NATO partners heading towards the exits.
A Cynical Media Operation
CIA media operations are fully consonant with the aims and methods employed by U.S. war planners; indeed, the manipulation of public opinion by battalions of public relations specialists, pollsters and former high-ranking military officers, often employed by giant defense and security corporations with "dogs in the hunt," are part of the secret state's army of "message force multipliers."
That such operations have disastrous consequences for functioning democracies, not to mention the victims of NATO's tender mercies, cannot be stressed often enough. To ensure that the bombs continue falling and Western control over access to vital Central Asian gas and petroleum reserves continue, public opinion, treated as an essential front of the imperial "battlespace," must be "softened up."
Accordingly, the CIA found that "Afghanistan mission's low public salience has allowed French and German leaders to disregard popular opposition and steadily increase their troop contributions to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Berlin and Paris currently maintain the third and fourth highest ISAF troop levels, despite the opposition of 80 percent of German and French respondents to increased ISAF deployments, according to INR polling in fall 2009."
State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) pollsters found:
• Only a fraction (0.1-1.3 percent) of French and German respondents identified "Afghanistan" as the most urgent issue facing their nation in an open-ended question, according to the same polling. These publics ranked "stabilizing Afghanistan" as among the lowest priorities for US and European leaders, according to polls by the German Marshall Fund (GMF) over the past two years.
• According to INR polling in the fall of 2009, the view that the Afghanistan mission is a waste of resources and "not our problem" was cited as the most common reason for opposing ISAF by German respondents and was the second most common reason by French respondents. But the "not our problem" sentiment also suggests that, so for, sending troops to Afghanistan is not yet on most voters' radar. (CIA Red Cell, Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission--Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough, 11 March 2010)
"If some forecasts of a bloody summer in Afghanistan come to pass," CIA planners write, "passive French and German dislike of their troop presence could turn into active and politically potent hostility. The tone of previous debate suggests that a spike in French or German casualties or in Afghan civilian casualties could become a tipping point in converting passive opposition into active calls for immediate withdrawal."
This must be avoided at all costs. Cynically, CIA analysts conclude that "tailoring messaging could forestall or at least contain backlash."
From the looks of things on the ground, the CIA will have much "tailoring" to do in order to stitch-up NATO's fraying pretext for the Afghanistan intervention.
As an investigation by journalist Jerome Starkey revealed in The Times on March 13, "a night raid carried out by US and Afghan gunmen led to the deaths of two pregnant women, a teenage girl and two local officials in an atrocity which Nato then tried to cover up."
According to Starkey, when details of the botched raid came to light, NATO officials claimed the force had found the women's bodies "tied up, gagged and killed" in a room, implying the gruesome murders were the work of insurgents.
"A Times investigation" Starkey writes, "suggests that Nato's claims are either wilfully false or, at best, misleading. More than a dozen survivors, officials, police chiefs and a religious leader interviewed at and around the scene of the attack maintain that the perpetrators were US and Afghan gunmen. The identity and status of the soldiers is unknown."
As with the roll-out of any new product line, or moves to increase flagging interest in an existing commodity, niche consumers, French and German public opinion in the case of the Afghan intervention, are now subjects of a targeted marketing strategy by the CIA.
Accordingly, since INR surveys have found that the "French [are] focused on civilians and refugees," CIA analysts aver that "citing examples of concrete gains could limit and perhaps even reverse opposition to the mission. Such tailored messages could tap into acute French concern for civilians and refugees." Indeed, "contradicting the 'ISAF does more harm than good' perception is clearly important, particularly for France's Muslim minority."
Such cynical constructs are all the more remarkable considering that "France's Muslim minority" are cast by the French state, its far-right supporters and American secret warriors as a veritable "fifth column" to be closely surveilled and when necessary, repressed, lest an alleged "Islamist contagion" take root in the heart of Europe itself!
In this respect, "messaging that dramatizes the potential adverse consequences of an ISAF defeat for Afghan civilians could leverage French (and other European) guilt for abandoning them. The prospect of the Taliban rolling back hard-won progress on girls' education could provoke French indignation, become a rallying point for France's largely secular public, and give voters a reason to support a good and necessary cause despite casualties."
Never mind, that the warlord and Islamist/Mafia-backed coalition that comprises the Karzai government, as documented by innumerable human rights' organizations and Afghan women themselves, such as ousted parliamentarian Malalai Joya, have found that the same brutal conditions persist for women today as under the retrograde U.S./Pakistan-backed Taliban regime of the 1990s.
For Germans however, xenophobic and nationalist cards will be played. "Messages that dramatize the consequences of a NATO defeat for specific German interests could counter the widely held perception that Afghanistan is not Germany's problem. For example, messages that illustrate how a defeat in Afghanistan could heighten Germany’s exposure to terrorism, opium, and refugees might help to make the war more salient to skeptics."
Additionally, CIA analysts stress that "emphasis on the mission's multilateral and humanitarian aspects could help ease Germans' concerns about waging any kind of war while appealing to their desire to support multilateral efforts. Despite their allergy to armed conflict, Germans were willing to break precedent and use force in the Balkans in the 1990s to show commitment to their NATO allies. German respondents cited helping their allies as one of the most compelling reasons for supporting ISAF, according to an INR poll in the fall of 2009."
Considering that U.S./NATO allies jumped into the Balkans only when it became clear that German imperialism under the bankrupt government of Helmut Kohl, was intent on destroying the multicultural Yugoslav socialist state, and did so only not to be left in the dust by a resurgent unified German state with eyes clearly focused on lucrative East European markets, is a remarkable rewriting of history!
Another card which the CIA clearly intends to play is the alleged "confidence of the French and German publics in President Obama's ability to handle foreign affairs in general and Afghanistan in particular."
Indeed, appeals from America's new capo tutti capo "suggest that they would be receptive to his direct affirmation of their importance to the ISAF mission--and sensitive to direct expressions of disappointment in allies who do not help." Such direct appeals from the global Godfather "might provide at least some leverage for sustaining contributions to ISAF."
GMF polling data cited by the CIA found that "when respondents were reminded that President Obama himself had asked for increased deployments to Afghanistan, their support for granting this request increased dramatically, from 4 to 15 percent among French respondents and from 7 to 13 percent among Germans. The total percentages may be small but they suggest significant sensitivity to disappointing a president seen as broadly in sync with European concerns."
Another exploitable bullet point cited by the CIA are Afghan women. Accordingly, "Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban because of women's ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory."
However, as I pointed out above, only some "Afghan women" would be viewed as "ideal messengers" in these media operations. Leftist, feminist or other internal critics of the Karzai Warlord-Mafia-Islamist regime would, by definition, be excluded from such forums. For the chosen few who pass muster, "outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission."
Conclusion
The United States and their NATO allies are encountering stiff resistance in Afghanistan. In order to buttress political support from skeptical North American and European citizens, the CIA and their "friends" amongst the giant media conglomerates are pulling out all the stops.
The publication of the CIA's analytical document by Wikileaks, provides the antiwar movement with insight into how imperialism intends to sell the wretched Afghan war to the public.
Counterstrategies that leverage this knowledge can potentially provide critics with ammunition that directly challenge American propaganda, disarm academic, media and political sycophants and more importantly, derail the policy of waging aggressive, "preemptive" wars well into the future.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Cheneyism with a Human Face: Obama's New Imperial Presidency
Call me a cynic, but I was hardly surprised to learn that the "change" regime is threatening to veto the 2010 intelligence authorization bill "over a provision that would force the administration to widen the circle of lawmakers who are informed about covert operations and other sensitive activities," The Washington Post reported.
Never mind that churlish congressional Democrats, like their corporatist Republican colleagues across the aisle, would crush each other in a stampede to see who'd be first in handing the Executive Branch whatever it wants.
Under the proposed bills (S. 1494 and H.R. 2701), the White House would have to inform all members of both House and Senate intelligence committees of the "main features" of covert operations disclosed to the all-too-pliable "Gang of Eight." Whether this would include specific disclosure to Congress of CIA or Pentagon "black programs," identified in budget authorizations only by code words or cryptonyms, is unknown.
Comprised of the Speaker and minority leader of the House, the majority and minority leaders of the Senate, and the chairman and ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, this "Gang"--torture and aggressive war enablers all--have earned a place in the dock alongside Executive Branch criminals--for their facilitation of every law-breaking, constitution-shredding practice of the Bush and now, Obama governments.
According to the Post and other published reports, in a letter sent to "senior members" of the intelligence panels March 15, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter R. Orszag affirmed that "Gang of Eight notifications are made in only 'the most limited of circumstances' affecting 'vital interests' of the United States, arguing that the new requirement would 'undermine the president's authority and responsibility to protect sensitive national security information'."
"Sensitive" as in criminal operations designed to advance the geopolitical agenda of America's multinational corporations, particularly the giant energy, weapons and financial conglomerates who rule the roost.
Orszag is a close confidant of Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary and CEO at the criminal financial enterprise known as Citigroup. In a series of extraordinary reports, Narco News investigative journalist Al Giordano described how Citigroup "has been caught time and time again in narco-money laundering trails in our América and across the globe."
In December 2008, Reuters reported that a group of investors filed a lawsuit against the firm, charging Citigroup executives, including Rubin, with selling shares at inflated prices whilst concealing the firm's risks. Both Orszag and Rubin were "senior fellows" at the neoliberal Brookings Institution where Orszag directed The Hamilton Project before joining the "change" regime as OMB Director.
The deal killer according to Orszag comprise several items "of serious concern to the Intelligence Community (IC)." If implemented by Congress "the President's senior advisors" would then recommend the bill be vetoed. These include: "the Congressional notification provisions, GAO provisions, and provisions regarding the amounts authorized for the National Intelligence Program."
According to Secrecy News security analyst Steven Aftergood, the "dispute over an increased role for GAO in intelligence oversight is particularly illustrative of the disparate and conflicting interests of the legislative and executive branches."
The answer to Aftergood's rhetorical question, whether the "status quo is good enough?" when it comes to increased oversight, given Executive Branch malfeasance in crafting make believe intelligence during the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, would inevitably be "no."
Recall the oft-quoted statement by the former Director of the British intelligence agency MI6, Richard Dearlove, who infamously told the Blair regime in the leaked Downing Street Memo that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed (by the U.S.) around the policy."
A million dead Iraqis later, Dearlove's grim assessment still stands.
Indeed, following a script written by Bushist war and torture enablers John Yoo, Jay Bybee and David Addington, Orszag alleges that "allowing GAO to conduct intelligence oversight ... would fundamentally change the statutory framework for oversight of the IC through the intelligence oversight committees and alter the long-standing relationship and information flow between the IC and intelligence committee members and staff."
In other words, despite fundamentally restrictive and opaque methods deployed by the Executive Branch to conceal covert operations, including blatantly illegal programs barred by U.S. and international law, Salon's Glenn Greenwald notes that so-called "Gang of Eight" briefings are a "sham process."
According to Greenwald, the current rigged game "allowed the administration to claim that it 'briefed' select Congressional leaders on illegal conduct, but did so in a way that ensured there could be no meaningful action or oversight, because those individuals were barred from taking notes or even consulting their staff and, worse, because the full Intelligence Committees were kept in the dark and thus could do nothing even in the face of clear abuses."
As readily apparent, particularly where Bush's torture and warrantless wiretapping programs were concerned, the former, and now current, administration can claim they had "informed" congressional leaders of secret administration policies. Never mind that the allegedly "co-equal" branch of government, Congress, can do nothing to stop these dubious programs; not to worry, our "representatives" are "in the loop"!
Regardless of whether or not these programs violated the law--under international treaty obligations and U.S. law in the case of torture or the protection of Americans' First and Fourth Amendment rights with respect to illegal spying--the administration has simply declared that abiding by any statutory requirements vis-à-vis Congress's lawful oversight of the Executive Branch are simply null and void.
"Team B" Nation
The Obama administration, like their Bushist predecessors, have also declared that Federal Courts are also off-limits when it comes to reeling in abuses by the "unitary executive," a novel constitutional theory promulgated by the ultrarightist Federalist Society and wholly embraced by the current government.
In the wake of 1970s revelations of widespread spying and other abuses against the American people by successive administrations--COINTELPRO (FBI), Operation CHAOS (CIA), Project MINARET (NSA)--Congress briefly asserted its prerogatives to rein-in the Executive Branch by creating the FISA court (a rubber-stamp to be sure) that on paper at least if not in practice, would oversee the surveillance activities of the secret state.
Push-back wasn't long in coming, however. With the rise of the Reagan administration, neoconservative corporate toadies such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others asserted that the hypermilitarized American capitalist state was "under siege" by a "resurgent" Soviet Union (already in the throes of collapse) and that the intelligence agencies had been "gutted" by "overzealous" civil liberties "extremists."
As investigative journalist Robert Parry has pointed out, under former CIA Director and future President George H.W. Bush, the "Team B" concept for ginning-up intelligence gained favor in the corridors of power.
Gone were the secret, though brutally frank assessments, made by security and intelligence analysts across government as revealed by Daniel Ellsberg's 1971 leaking of the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. Such appraisals as Parry averred were now considered "treasonous," indeed, were grounds for witchhunts and purges of intelligence officials who didn't toe the neocon party line during the run-up to the Iraq invasion.
With the lies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations exposed by Ellsberg and his colleagues, and the basis for the American invasion of Southeast Asia revealed for what it was, a monumental fraud, elite managers were thrown into crisis.
As a transcript of President Nixon's June 14, 1971 Oval Office tape disclosed, White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman described the situation thusly: "To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: You can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment; and the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the President wants to do even though it's wrong, and the President can be wrong."
Haldeman's bleak assessment has now become the basis for the capitalist state's descent into presidential dictatorship; after all, as the "democratically elected" leader of the "free world," one must enforce, by all means necessary "the implicit infallibility of presidents."
A decade after Pentagon Papers' revelations, the ascendance of Reagan regime neocons laid the ideological foundations for the assault on America's republican form of governance, by many of the same players who are now permanent embeds, in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.
Presidential Dictatorship
Subverting the long-standing notion of "judicial supremacy" articulated by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall in 1803, that the Court is the "final arbiter" of what is and what is not the law, Bushist doctrine (firmly embraced by Obama "change" mavens) asserts that the "unitary executive" has full license to overrule, indeed bypass Congress and the Courts, based on the thinnest of reeds: that the President can interpret the Constitution and even violate long-established laws and treaties in his role as "Commander-in-Chief."
This was made clear most recently when the Federal District Court in San Francisco dismissed the Electronic Frontier Foundation's landmark Hepting v. AT&T and Jewel v. NSA lawsuits.
Currently, the Obama administration is challenging the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals April 2009 ruling that the ACLU's lawsuit against the CIA's illegal torture flights, facilitated by a Boeing Corporation subsidiary, in Mohamed et. al. v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. can go forward. Like Bush's Justice Department, the Obama administration is arguing that the suit cannot go to court, thereby denying CIA torture victims a measure of justice, on grounds that privileged "state secrets" would be disclosed.
EFF filed an appeal with the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco March 19, citing the dangerous precedent set by U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker, who ruled in January that "that because so many people have been impacted by the widespread surveillance, no individual person has a 'particularized injury'."
In other words, precisely because illegal driftnet spying, data mining and national security indexing of "U.S. persons" are so pervasive, mere background noise as the secret state's noose tightens around all our necks, citizens and legal residents alike will no longer be afforded a legal remedy to challenge specious national security claims made by Executive Branch repressors.
EFF's Legal Director Cindy Cohn writes: "This ruling is not only wrong--the NSA's interception of your private emails with your doctor, spouse or child is an individual harm to you regardless of whether it also happened to other people too--but also extremely dangerous because it would have the courts blind themselves to massive violations of the law and the Constitution on the grounds that they impact too many people."
Not that congressional grifters in either capitalist political party, "liberal" Democrats or "conservative" Republicans give a damn about our rights, as they amply demonstrated when they passed the scurrilous FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA).
That onerous piece of legislative flotsam legalized Bush regime warrantless wiretapping whilst providing the giant telecommunications firms and Internet service providers with retroactive immunity for their profitable role as partners alongside America's secret state.
Recall that feckless Senator and now President, Barack Obama, who might have said he "opposed FAA before he supported it," has embraced, indeed expanded every single illegal maneuver--from aggressive war to wholesale spying--as his Bushist counterparts. One might even say, if "only Nixon could go to China," then only an Obama (covered by his "progressive" acolytes) could enlarge the repressive writ of the intelligence agencies!
As Federal Computer Week reported March 17, the public-private enterprise fueling domestic repression known as "fusion centers" are expanding rapidly as a result of cold, hard cash pumped into the system by the federal government.
According to FCW journalist Patrick Marshall, "DHS and the Justice Department have driven the development of fusion centers." Both departments have provided a "variety of resources, including personnel and grants" that have seen such data mining centers balloon from 38 in 2006 to some 72 currently in operation nationwide, with more on the horizon.
But as the ACLU revealed in two incisive reports in 2007 and 2008, the "types of information they seek for analysis has also broadened over time to include not just criminal intelligence, but public and private sector data, and participation in these centers has grown to include not just law enforcement, but other government entities, the military and even select members of the private sector."
According to the civil liberties' watchdog, their proliferation "raise very serious privacy issues at a time when new technology, government powers and zeal in the 'war on terrorism' are combining to threaten Americans' privacy at an unprecedented level." Indeed, the ACLU reported in September 2009 that fusion centers have been caught spying on antiwar, environmental and religious groups and will, under Obama, now receive access to classified military intelligence.
That Congress will roll-over and accede to administration demands over the issue of intelligence oversight is a foregone conclusion. One would expect nothing less from the best Congress money can buy! But these legislative vampires are now planning to take things a step further.
Arizona Senator and failed presidential candidate, John McCain, introduced the Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010 (S. 3081) in the Senate on March 4.
McCain, and co-sponsors Scott Brown (R-MA), Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), James Inhofe (R-OK), George LeMieux (R-FL), Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT), Jeff Sessions (R-AL), John Thune (R-SD), David Vitter (R-LA), and Roger Wicker (R-MS) are crafting legislation that Glenn Greenwald has described as "the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act."
Greenwald writes that the bill literally "empowers the President to imprison anyone he wants in his sole discretion by simply decreeing them a Terrorist suspect--including American citizens arrested on U.S. soil."
The bill mandates that all such individuals "be placed in military custody," and explicitly states that they "may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners."
As The Atlantic's national security correspondent Marc Ambinder writes, although the bill is being treated by the "national security community" as a "standard proposal" and a simple response "to the administration's choices in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt," a closer reading reveals that it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the U.S. based on "suspected activity."
Welcome to the Orwellian world of Precrime. It can't happen here? It already has.
Never mind that churlish congressional Democrats, like their corporatist Republican colleagues across the aisle, would crush each other in a stampede to see who'd be first in handing the Executive Branch whatever it wants.
Under the proposed bills (S. 1494 and H.R. 2701), the White House would have to inform all members of both House and Senate intelligence committees of the "main features" of covert operations disclosed to the all-too-pliable "Gang of Eight." Whether this would include specific disclosure to Congress of CIA or Pentagon "black programs," identified in budget authorizations only by code words or cryptonyms, is unknown.
Comprised of the Speaker and minority leader of the House, the majority and minority leaders of the Senate, and the chairman and ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, this "Gang"--torture and aggressive war enablers all--have earned a place in the dock alongside Executive Branch criminals--for their facilitation of every law-breaking, constitution-shredding practice of the Bush and now, Obama governments.
According to the Post and other published reports, in a letter sent to "senior members" of the intelligence panels March 15, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter R. Orszag affirmed that "Gang of Eight notifications are made in only 'the most limited of circumstances' affecting 'vital interests' of the United States, arguing that the new requirement would 'undermine the president's authority and responsibility to protect sensitive national security information'."
"Sensitive" as in criminal operations designed to advance the geopolitical agenda of America's multinational corporations, particularly the giant energy, weapons and financial conglomerates who rule the roost.
Orszag is a close confidant of Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary and CEO at the criminal financial enterprise known as Citigroup. In a series of extraordinary reports, Narco News investigative journalist Al Giordano described how Citigroup "has been caught time and time again in narco-money laundering trails in our América and across the globe."
In December 2008, Reuters reported that a group of investors filed a lawsuit against the firm, charging Citigroup executives, including Rubin, with selling shares at inflated prices whilst concealing the firm's risks. Both Orszag and Rubin were "senior fellows" at the neoliberal Brookings Institution where Orszag directed The Hamilton Project before joining the "change" regime as OMB Director.
The deal killer according to Orszag comprise several items "of serious concern to the Intelligence Community (IC)." If implemented by Congress "the President's senior advisors" would then recommend the bill be vetoed. These include: "the Congressional notification provisions, GAO provisions, and provisions regarding the amounts authorized for the National Intelligence Program."
According to Secrecy News security analyst Steven Aftergood, the "dispute over an increased role for GAO in intelligence oversight is particularly illustrative of the disparate and conflicting interests of the legislative and executive branches."
The answer to Aftergood's rhetorical question, whether the "status quo is good enough?" when it comes to increased oversight, given Executive Branch malfeasance in crafting make believe intelligence during the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, would inevitably be "no."
Recall the oft-quoted statement by the former Director of the British intelligence agency MI6, Richard Dearlove, who infamously told the Blair regime in the leaked Downing Street Memo that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed (by the U.S.) around the policy."
A million dead Iraqis later, Dearlove's grim assessment still stands.
Indeed, following a script written by Bushist war and torture enablers John Yoo, Jay Bybee and David Addington, Orszag alleges that "allowing GAO to conduct intelligence oversight ... would fundamentally change the statutory framework for oversight of the IC through the intelligence oversight committees and alter the long-standing relationship and information flow between the IC and intelligence committee members and staff."
In other words, despite fundamentally restrictive and opaque methods deployed by the Executive Branch to conceal covert operations, including blatantly illegal programs barred by U.S. and international law, Salon's Glenn Greenwald notes that so-called "Gang of Eight" briefings are a "sham process."
According to Greenwald, the current rigged game "allowed the administration to claim that it 'briefed' select Congressional leaders on illegal conduct, but did so in a way that ensured there could be no meaningful action or oversight, because those individuals were barred from taking notes or even consulting their staff and, worse, because the full Intelligence Committees were kept in the dark and thus could do nothing even in the face of clear abuses."
As readily apparent, particularly where Bush's torture and warrantless wiretapping programs were concerned, the former, and now current, administration can claim they had "informed" congressional leaders of secret administration policies. Never mind that the allegedly "co-equal" branch of government, Congress, can do nothing to stop these dubious programs; not to worry, our "representatives" are "in the loop"!
Regardless of whether or not these programs violated the law--under international treaty obligations and U.S. law in the case of torture or the protection of Americans' First and Fourth Amendment rights with respect to illegal spying--the administration has simply declared that abiding by any statutory requirements vis-à-vis Congress's lawful oversight of the Executive Branch are simply null and void.
"Team B" Nation
The Obama administration, like their Bushist predecessors, have also declared that Federal Courts are also off-limits when it comes to reeling in abuses by the "unitary executive," a novel constitutional theory promulgated by the ultrarightist Federalist Society and wholly embraced by the current government.
In the wake of 1970s revelations of widespread spying and other abuses against the American people by successive administrations--COINTELPRO (FBI), Operation CHAOS (CIA), Project MINARET (NSA)--Congress briefly asserted its prerogatives to rein-in the Executive Branch by creating the FISA court (a rubber-stamp to be sure) that on paper at least if not in practice, would oversee the surveillance activities of the secret state.
Push-back wasn't long in coming, however. With the rise of the Reagan administration, neoconservative corporate toadies such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others asserted that the hypermilitarized American capitalist state was "under siege" by a "resurgent" Soviet Union (already in the throes of collapse) and that the intelligence agencies had been "gutted" by "overzealous" civil liberties "extremists."
As investigative journalist Robert Parry has pointed out, under former CIA Director and future President George H.W. Bush, the "Team B" concept for ginning-up intelligence gained favor in the corridors of power.
Scary assessments of Soviet power and U.S. weakness also fueled Ronald Reagan's campaign in 1980, and after his election, the Team B hard-liners had the keys to power. As Reagan and his vice presidential running mate, George H.W. Bush, prepared to take office, the hard-liners wrote Reagan's transition team report, which suggested that the CIA analytical division was not simply obtuse in its supposed failure to perceive Soviet ascendancy, but treasonous. (Robert Parry, "Why U.S. Intelligence Failed," Consortium News, October 22, 2003)
Gone were the secret, though brutally frank assessments, made by security and intelligence analysts across government as revealed by Daniel Ellsberg's 1971 leaking of the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. Such appraisals as Parry averred were now considered "treasonous," indeed, were grounds for witchhunts and purges of intelligence officials who didn't toe the neocon party line during the run-up to the Iraq invasion.
With the lies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations exposed by Ellsberg and his colleagues, and the basis for the American invasion of Southeast Asia revealed for what it was, a monumental fraud, elite managers were thrown into crisis.
As a transcript of President Nixon's June 14, 1971 Oval Office tape disclosed, White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman described the situation thusly: "To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: You can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment; and the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the President wants to do even though it's wrong, and the President can be wrong."
Haldeman's bleak assessment has now become the basis for the capitalist state's descent into presidential dictatorship; after all, as the "democratically elected" leader of the "free world," one must enforce, by all means necessary "the implicit infallibility of presidents."
A decade after Pentagon Papers' revelations, the ascendance of Reagan regime neocons laid the ideological foundations for the assault on America's republican form of governance, by many of the same players who are now permanent embeds, in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.
Presidential Dictatorship
Subverting the long-standing notion of "judicial supremacy" articulated by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall in 1803, that the Court is the "final arbiter" of what is and what is not the law, Bushist doctrine (firmly embraced by Obama "change" mavens) asserts that the "unitary executive" has full license to overrule, indeed bypass Congress and the Courts, based on the thinnest of reeds: that the President can interpret the Constitution and even violate long-established laws and treaties in his role as "Commander-in-Chief."
This was made clear most recently when the Federal District Court in San Francisco dismissed the Electronic Frontier Foundation's landmark Hepting v. AT&T and Jewel v. NSA lawsuits.
Currently, the Obama administration is challenging the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals April 2009 ruling that the ACLU's lawsuit against the CIA's illegal torture flights, facilitated by a Boeing Corporation subsidiary, in Mohamed et. al. v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. can go forward. Like Bush's Justice Department, the Obama administration is arguing that the suit cannot go to court, thereby denying CIA torture victims a measure of justice, on grounds that privileged "state secrets" would be disclosed.
EFF filed an appeal with the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco March 19, citing the dangerous precedent set by U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker, who ruled in January that "that because so many people have been impacted by the widespread surveillance, no individual person has a 'particularized injury'."
In other words, precisely because illegal driftnet spying, data mining and national security indexing of "U.S. persons" are so pervasive, mere background noise as the secret state's noose tightens around all our necks, citizens and legal residents alike will no longer be afforded a legal remedy to challenge specious national security claims made by Executive Branch repressors.
EFF's Legal Director Cindy Cohn writes: "This ruling is not only wrong--the NSA's interception of your private emails with your doctor, spouse or child is an individual harm to you regardless of whether it also happened to other people too--but also extremely dangerous because it would have the courts blind themselves to massive violations of the law and the Constitution on the grounds that they impact too many people."
Not that congressional grifters in either capitalist political party, "liberal" Democrats or "conservative" Republicans give a damn about our rights, as they amply demonstrated when they passed the scurrilous FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA).
That onerous piece of legislative flotsam legalized Bush regime warrantless wiretapping whilst providing the giant telecommunications firms and Internet service providers with retroactive immunity for their profitable role as partners alongside America's secret state.
Recall that feckless Senator and now President, Barack Obama, who might have said he "opposed FAA before he supported it," has embraced, indeed expanded every single illegal maneuver--from aggressive war to wholesale spying--as his Bushist counterparts. One might even say, if "only Nixon could go to China," then only an Obama (covered by his "progressive" acolytes) could enlarge the repressive writ of the intelligence agencies!
As Federal Computer Week reported March 17, the public-private enterprise fueling domestic repression known as "fusion centers" are expanding rapidly as a result of cold, hard cash pumped into the system by the federal government.
According to FCW journalist Patrick Marshall, "DHS and the Justice Department have driven the development of fusion centers." Both departments have provided a "variety of resources, including personnel and grants" that have seen such data mining centers balloon from 38 in 2006 to some 72 currently in operation nationwide, with more on the horizon.
But as the ACLU revealed in two incisive reports in 2007 and 2008, the "types of information they seek for analysis has also broadened over time to include not just criminal intelligence, but public and private sector data, and participation in these centers has grown to include not just law enforcement, but other government entities, the military and even select members of the private sector."
According to the civil liberties' watchdog, their proliferation "raise very serious privacy issues at a time when new technology, government powers and zeal in the 'war on terrorism' are combining to threaten Americans' privacy at an unprecedented level." Indeed, the ACLU reported in September 2009 that fusion centers have been caught spying on antiwar, environmental and religious groups and will, under Obama, now receive access to classified military intelligence.
That Congress will roll-over and accede to administration demands over the issue of intelligence oversight is a foregone conclusion. One would expect nothing less from the best Congress money can buy! But these legislative vampires are now planning to take things a step further.
Arizona Senator and failed presidential candidate, John McCain, introduced the Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010 (S. 3081) in the Senate on March 4.
McCain, and co-sponsors Scott Brown (R-MA), Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), James Inhofe (R-OK), George LeMieux (R-FL), Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT), Jeff Sessions (R-AL), John Thune (R-SD), David Vitter (R-LA), and Roger Wicker (R-MS) are crafting legislation that Glenn Greenwald has described as "the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act."
Greenwald writes that the bill literally "empowers the President to imprison anyone he wants in his sole discretion by simply decreeing them a Terrorist suspect--including American citizens arrested on U.S. soil."
The bill mandates that all such individuals "be placed in military custody," and explicitly states that they "may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners."
As The Atlantic's national security correspondent Marc Ambinder writes, although the bill is being treated by the "national security community" as a "standard proposal" and a simple response "to the administration's choices in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt," a closer reading reveals that it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the U.S. based on "suspected activity."
Welcome to the Orwellian world of Precrime. It can't happen here? It already has.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Beyond Orwell: The Electronic Police State, 2010
A truism perhaps, but before resorting to brute force and open repression to halt the "barbarians at the gates," that would be us, the masters of declining empires (and the chattering classes who polish their boots) regale us with tales of "democracy on the march," "hope" and other banalities before the mailed fist comes crashing down.
Putting it another way, as the late, great Situationist malcontent, Guy Debord did decades ago in his relentless call for revolt, The Society of the Spectacle:
"The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender 'lonely crowds.' With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle recreates its own presuppositions."
And when those "presuppositions" reproduce ever-more wretched clichés promulgated by true believers or rank opportunists, take your pick, market "democracy," the "freedom to choose" (the length of one's chains), or even quaint notions of national "sovereignty" (a sure fire way to get, and keep, the masses at each others' throats!) we're left with a fraud, a gigantic swindle, a "postmodern" refinement of tried and true methods that would do Orwell proud!
Ponder Debord's rigorous theorem and substitute "cell phone" and "GPS" for "automobile," and "Internet" for "television" and you're soon left with the nauseating sense that the old "infobahn" isn't all its cracked up to be. As a seamless means for effecting control on the other hand, of our thoughts, our actions, even our whereabouts; well, that's another story entirely!
In this light, a new report published by Cryptohippie, The Electronic Police State: 2010 National Rankings, delivers the goods and rips away the veil from the smirking visage of well-heeled corporate crooks and media apologists of America's burgeoning police state.
"When we produced our first Electronic Police State report" Cryptohippie's analysts write, "the top ten nations were of two types:
But as they reveal in new national rankings, "This is changing: The able have become willing and their traditional restraints have failed." The key developments driving the global panopticon forward are the following:
In France, the German newsmagazine Spiegel reported that a new law passed by the lower house of Parliament in February "conjures up the specter of Big Brother and the surveillance state."
Similar to legislation signed into law by German president Horst Köhler last month, police and security forces in France would be granted authority to surreptitiously install malware known as a "Trojan horse" to spy on private computers. Remote access to a user's personal data would be made possible under a judge's supervision.
While French parliamentarians aligned with right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy insist the measure is intended to filter and block web sites with criminal content or to halt allegedly "illegal" file sharing, civil libertarians have denounced the legislation.
Sandrine Béllier, a member of the European Parliament for the Green Party, said that "when it comes to restrictions, this text is preparing us for hell."
Additionally, the new law will include measures that will further integrate police files and private data kept by banks and other financial institutions. French securocrats cynically insist this is a wholly innocent move to "maintain the level and quality of service provided by domestic security forces," Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux told Spiegel.
Generalized political measures such as these that hinder free speech and expression, whilst enhancing the surveillance capabilities of the state, also indicate that so-called "Western democracies" are not far behind beacons of freedom such as China, North Korea, Belarus and Russia when it comes to repressive police measures. Indeed, Cryptohippie's rankings place the United States a mere 2/100ths of a point behind Russia when it comes to Internet and other forms of electronic spying.
The top ten scofflaws in 2010 are: 1. North Korea; 2. China; 3. Belarus; 4. Russia; 5. United States; 6. United Kingdom; 7. France; 8. Israel; 9. Singapore and, 10. Germany.
A Profit-Driven Panopticon
In a capitalist "democracy" such as ours where the business of government is always business and individual liberties be damned, grifting North American and European telecommunications and security firms, with much encouragement and great fanfare from their national security establishments and a lap-dog media blaze the path for Western versions of the sinister "Golden Shield."
Recently in the United States, whistleblowing web sites such as Cryptome and Slight Paranoia have come under attack. Both sites have been hit by take down notices under the onerous Digital Millennium Copyright Act for posting documents and files that exposed the close, and very profitable arrangements, made by giant telecommunications firms and ISPs with the American secret state.
In Cryptome's case, administrator John Young had his site shuttered for a day when the giant software firm, Microsoft, demanded that its so-called "lawful spying guide" be removed by Young. All five files are currently back on-line as Zipped files at Cryptome and make for a very enlightening read.
But the harassment didn't stop there. When Young published PayPal's "lawful spying guide," the firm froze Cryptome's account, in all likelihood at the behest of America's spy agencies, allegedly for "illegal activities," i.e., offering Cryptome's entire archive for sale on two DVDs!
Why would the secret state's corporate partners target Young? Perhaps because since 1996, "Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance--open, secret and classified documents--but not limited to those. Documents are removed from this site only by order served directly by a US court having jurisdiction. No court order has ever been served; any order served will be published here--or elsewhere if gagged by order. Bluffs will be published if comical but otherwise ignored."
In previous reports, Cryptohippie characterized an electronic police state thusly:
Silent and seamless, our political minders have every intention of deploying such formidable technological resources as a preeminent--and preemptive--means for effecting social control. Indeed, what has been characterized by corporate and media elites as an "acceptable," i.e. managed political discourse, respect neither national boundaries, the laws and customs of nations, nor a population's right to abolish institutions, indeed entire social systems when the governed are reduced to the level of a pauperized herd ripe for plunder.
How then, does this repressive metasystem work? What are the essential characteristics that differentiate an Electronic Police State from previous forms of oppressive governance? Cryptohippie avers:
"In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording, every email sent, every Internet site surfed, every post made, every check written, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping... are all criminal evidence, and all are held in searchable databases. The individual can be prosecuted whenever the government wishes."
"Long term" Cryptohippie writes, the secret state (definitionally expanded here to encompass "private" matters such as workplace surveillance, union busting, persecution of whistleblowers, corporate political blacklisting, etc.), "the Electronic Police State destroys free speech, the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, and other liberties. Worse, it does so in a way that is difficult to identify."
As Antifascist Calling and others have pointed out, beside the usual ruses deployed by ruling class elites to suppress general knowledge of driftnet spying and wholesale database indexing of entire populations, e.g., "national security" exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act, outright subversion of the rule of law through the expansion of "state secrets" exceptions that prohibit Courts from examining a state's specious claims, one can add the opaque, bureaucratic violence of corporations who guard, by any means necessary, what have euphemistically been christened "proprietary business information."
In a state such as ours characterized by wholesale corruption, e.g., generalized financial swindles, insider trading, sweetheart deals brokered with suborned politicians, dangerous pharmaceuticals or other commodities "tested" and then certified "safe" by the marketeers themselves, the protection of trade secrets, formulas, production processes and marketing plans are jealously guarded by judicial pit bulls.
Those who spill the beans and have the temerity to reveal that various products are harmful to the public health or have deleterious effects on the environment (off-loaded onto the public who foot the bill as so-called "external" costs of production) are hounded, slandered or otherwise persecuted, if not imprisoned, by the legal lackeys who serve the corporatist state.
How does this play out in the real world? According to Cryptohippie, the objective signs that an electronic net has closed in to ensure working class compliance with our wretched order of things, are the following:
Daily Documents: Requirement of state-issued identity documents and registration.
Border Issues: Inspections at borders, searching computers, demanding decryption of data.
Financial Tracking: State's ability to search and record all financial transactions: Checks, credit card use, wires, etc.
Gag Orders: Criminal penalties if you tell someone the state is searching their records.
Anti-Crypto Laws: Outlawing or restricting cryptography.
Constitutional Protection: A lack of constitutional protections for the individual, or the overriding of such protections.
Data Storage Ability: The ability of the state to store the data they gather.
Data Search Ability: The ability to search the data they gather.
ISP Data Retention: States forcing Internet Service Providers to save detailed records of all their customers' Internet usage.
Telephone Data Retention: States forcing telephone companies to record and save records of all their customers' telephone usage.
Cell Phone Records: States forcing cellular telephone companies to record and save records of all their customers' usage, including location.
Medical records: States demanding records from all medical service providers and retaining the same.
Enforcement Ability: The state's ability to use overwhelming force (exemplified by SWAT Teams) to seize anyone they want, whenever they want.
Habeas Corpus: Lack of habeas corpus, which is the right not to be held in jail without prompt due process. Or, the overriding of such protections.
Police-Intel Barrier: The lack of a barrier between police organizations and intelligence organizations. Or, the overriding of such barriers.
Covert Hacking: State operatives copying digital evidence from private computers covertly. Covert hacking can make anyone appear as any kind of criminal desired, if combined with the removing and/or adding of digital evidence.
Loose Warrants: Warrants issued without careful examination of police statements and other justifications by a truly independent judge.
Sound familiar? It should, since this is the warped reality manufactured for us, or, as Debord would have it: "The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective."
That such a state of affairs is monstrous is of course, an understatement. Yet despite America's preeminent position as a militarist "hyperpower," the realization that it is a collapsing Empire is a cliché only for those who ignore history's episodic convulsions.
If, as bourgeois historian Niall Ferguson suggests in the March/April 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs, the American Empire may "quite abruptly ... collapse," and that this "complex adaptive system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability," what does this say about the efficacy of an Electronic Police State to keep the lid on?
Despite the state's overwhelming firepower, at the level of ideology as much as on the social battlefield where truncheons meet flesh and bullets fly, Marx's "old mole" is returning with a vengeance, the "specter" once again haunting "rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations," as Churchill described the West's system of organized plunder.
Against this loss of "faith" in the system's "viability," Debord points out, although the working class "has lost its ability to assert its own independent perspective," in a more fundamental sense "it has also lost its illusions." In this regard, "no quantitative amelioration of its impoverishment, no illusory participation in a hierarchized system, can provide a lasting cure for its dissatisfaction."
Forty years on from Debord, sooner rather later, an historical settling of accounts with the system of global piracy called capitalism will confront the working class with the prospect of "righting the absolute wrong of being excluded from any real life."
As that process accelerates and deepens, it will then be the "watchers" who tremble...
Putting it another way, as the late, great Situationist malcontent, Guy Debord did decades ago in his relentless call for revolt, The Society of the Spectacle:
"The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender 'lonely crowds.' With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle recreates its own presuppositions."
And when those "presuppositions" reproduce ever-more wretched clichés promulgated by true believers or rank opportunists, take your pick, market "democracy," the "freedom to choose" (the length of one's chains), or even quaint notions of national "sovereignty" (a sure fire way to get, and keep, the masses at each others' throats!) we're left with a fraud, a gigantic swindle, a "postmodern" refinement of tried and true methods that would do Orwell proud!
Ponder Debord's rigorous theorem and substitute "cell phone" and "GPS" for "automobile," and "Internet" for "television" and you're soon left with the nauseating sense that the old "infobahn" isn't all its cracked up to be. As a seamless means for effecting control on the other hand, of our thoughts, our actions, even our whereabouts; well, that's another story entirely!
In this light, a new report published by Cryptohippie, The Electronic Police State: 2010 National Rankings, delivers the goods and rips away the veil from the smirking visage of well-heeled corporate crooks and media apologists of America's burgeoning police state.
"When we produced our first Electronic Police State report" Cryptohippie's analysts write, "the top ten nations were of two types:
1. Those that had the will to spy on every citizen, but lacked ability.
2. Those who had the ability, but were restrained in will.
But as they reveal in new national rankings, "This is changing: The able have become willing and their traditional restraints have failed." The key developments driving the global panopticon forward are the following:
● The USA has negated their Constitution's fourth amendment in the name of protection and in the name of "wars" against terror, drugs and cyber attacks.
● The UK is aggressively building the world of 1984 in the name of stopping "anti-social" activities. Their populace seems unable or unwilling to restrain the government.
● France and the EU have given themselves over to central bureaucratic control.
In France, the German newsmagazine Spiegel reported that a new law passed by the lower house of Parliament in February "conjures up the specter of Big Brother and the surveillance state."
Similar to legislation signed into law by German president Horst Köhler last month, police and security forces in France would be granted authority to surreptitiously install malware known as a "Trojan horse" to spy on private computers. Remote access to a user's personal data would be made possible under a judge's supervision.
While French parliamentarians aligned with right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy insist the measure is intended to filter and block web sites with criminal content or to halt allegedly "illegal" file sharing, civil libertarians have denounced the legislation.
Sandrine Béllier, a member of the European Parliament for the Green Party, said that "when it comes to restrictions, this text is preparing us for hell."
Additionally, the new law will include measures that will further integrate police files and private data kept by banks and other financial institutions. French securocrats cynically insist this is a wholly innocent move to "maintain the level and quality of service provided by domestic security forces," Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux told Spiegel.
Generalized political measures such as these that hinder free speech and expression, whilst enhancing the surveillance capabilities of the state, also indicate that so-called "Western democracies" are not far behind beacons of freedom such as China, North Korea, Belarus and Russia when it comes to repressive police measures. Indeed, Cryptohippie's rankings place the United States a mere 2/100ths of a point behind Russia when it comes to Internet and other forms of electronic spying.
The top ten scofflaws in 2010 are: 1. North Korea; 2. China; 3. Belarus; 4. Russia; 5. United States; 6. United Kingdom; 7. France; 8. Israel; 9. Singapore and, 10. Germany.
A Profit-Driven Panopticon
In a capitalist "democracy" such as ours where the business of government is always business and individual liberties be damned, grifting North American and European telecommunications and security firms, with much encouragement and great fanfare from their national security establishments and a lap-dog media blaze the path for Western versions of the sinister "Golden Shield."
Recently in the United States, whistleblowing web sites such as Cryptome and Slight Paranoia have come under attack. Both sites have been hit by take down notices under the onerous Digital Millennium Copyright Act for posting documents and files that exposed the close, and very profitable arrangements, made by giant telecommunications firms and ISPs with the American secret state.
In Cryptome's case, administrator John Young had his site shuttered for a day when the giant software firm, Microsoft, demanded that its so-called "lawful spying guide" be removed by Young. All five files are currently back on-line as Zipped files at Cryptome and make for a very enlightening read.
But the harassment didn't stop there. When Young published PayPal's "lawful spying guide," the firm froze Cryptome's account, in all likelihood at the behest of America's spy agencies, allegedly for "illegal activities," i.e., offering Cryptome's entire archive for sale on two DVDs!
Why would the secret state's corporate partners target Young? Perhaps because since 1996, "Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance--open, secret and classified documents--but not limited to those. Documents are removed from this site only by order served directly by a US court having jurisdiction. No court order has ever been served; any order served will be published here--or elsewhere if gagged by order. Bluffs will be published if comical but otherwise ignored."
In previous reports, Cryptohippie characterized an electronic police state thusly:
1. It is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial.
2. It is gathered universally ("preventively") and only later organized for use in prosecutions.
Silent and seamless, our political minders have every intention of deploying such formidable technological resources as a preeminent--and preemptive--means for effecting social control. Indeed, what has been characterized by corporate and media elites as an "acceptable," i.e. managed political discourse, respect neither national boundaries, the laws and customs of nations, nor a population's right to abolish institutions, indeed entire social systems when the governed are reduced to the level of a pauperized herd ripe for plunder.
How then, does this repressive metasystem work? What are the essential characteristics that differentiate an Electronic Police State from previous forms of oppressive governance? Cryptohippie avers:
"In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording, every email sent, every Internet site surfed, every post made, every check written, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping... are all criminal evidence, and all are held in searchable databases. The individual can be prosecuted whenever the government wishes."
"Long term" Cryptohippie writes, the secret state (definitionally expanded here to encompass "private" matters such as workplace surveillance, union busting, persecution of whistleblowers, corporate political blacklisting, etc.), "the Electronic Police State destroys free speech, the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, and other liberties. Worse, it does so in a way that is difficult to identify."
As Antifascist Calling and others have pointed out, beside the usual ruses deployed by ruling class elites to suppress general knowledge of driftnet spying and wholesale database indexing of entire populations, e.g., "national security" exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act, outright subversion of the rule of law through the expansion of "state secrets" exceptions that prohibit Courts from examining a state's specious claims, one can add the opaque, bureaucratic violence of corporations who guard, by any means necessary, what have euphemistically been christened "proprietary business information."
In a state such as ours characterized by wholesale corruption, e.g., generalized financial swindles, insider trading, sweetheart deals brokered with suborned politicians, dangerous pharmaceuticals or other commodities "tested" and then certified "safe" by the marketeers themselves, the protection of trade secrets, formulas, production processes and marketing plans are jealously guarded by judicial pit bulls.
Those who spill the beans and have the temerity to reveal that various products are harmful to the public health or have deleterious effects on the environment (off-loaded onto the public who foot the bill as so-called "external" costs of production) are hounded, slandered or otherwise persecuted, if not imprisoned, by the legal lackeys who serve the corporatist state.
How does this play out in the real world? According to Cryptohippie, the objective signs that an electronic net has closed in to ensure working class compliance with our wretched order of things, are the following:
Daily Documents: Requirement of state-issued identity documents and registration.
Border Issues: Inspections at borders, searching computers, demanding decryption of data.
Financial Tracking: State's ability to search and record all financial transactions: Checks, credit card use, wires, etc.
Gag Orders: Criminal penalties if you tell someone the state is searching their records.
Anti-Crypto Laws: Outlawing or restricting cryptography.
Constitutional Protection: A lack of constitutional protections for the individual, or the overriding of such protections.
Data Storage Ability: The ability of the state to store the data they gather.
Data Search Ability: The ability to search the data they gather.
ISP Data Retention: States forcing Internet Service Providers to save detailed records of all their customers' Internet usage.
Telephone Data Retention: States forcing telephone companies to record and save records of all their customers' telephone usage.
Cell Phone Records: States forcing cellular telephone companies to record and save records of all their customers' usage, including location.
Medical records: States demanding records from all medical service providers and retaining the same.
Enforcement Ability: The state's ability to use overwhelming force (exemplified by SWAT Teams) to seize anyone they want, whenever they want.
Habeas Corpus: Lack of habeas corpus, which is the right not to be held in jail without prompt due process. Or, the overriding of such protections.
Police-Intel Barrier: The lack of a barrier between police organizations and intelligence organizations. Or, the overriding of such barriers.
Covert Hacking: State operatives copying digital evidence from private computers covertly. Covert hacking can make anyone appear as any kind of criminal desired, if combined with the removing and/or adding of digital evidence.
Loose Warrants: Warrants issued without careful examination of police statements and other justifications by a truly independent judge.
Sound familiar? It should, since this is the warped reality manufactured for us, or, as Debord would have it: "The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective."
That such a state of affairs is monstrous is of course, an understatement. Yet despite America's preeminent position as a militarist "hyperpower," the realization that it is a collapsing Empire is a cliché only for those who ignore history's episodic convulsions.
If, as bourgeois historian Niall Ferguson suggests in the March/April 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs, the American Empire may "quite abruptly ... collapse," and that this "complex adaptive system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability," what does this say about the efficacy of an Electronic Police State to keep the lid on?
Despite the state's overwhelming firepower, at the level of ideology as much as on the social battlefield where truncheons meet flesh and bullets fly, Marx's "old mole" is returning with a vengeance, the "specter" once again haunting "rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations," as Churchill described the West's system of organized plunder.
Against this loss of "faith" in the system's "viability," Debord points out, although the working class "has lost its ability to assert its own independent perspective," in a more fundamental sense "it has also lost its illusions." In this regard, "no quantitative amelioration of its impoverishment, no illusory participation in a hierarchized system, can provide a lasting cure for its dissatisfaction."
Forty years on from Debord, sooner rather later, an historical settling of accounts with the system of global piracy called capitalism will confront the working class with the prospect of "righting the absolute wrong of being excluded from any real life."
As that process accelerates and deepens, it will then be the "watchers" who tremble...
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