Domestic Surveillance in America

There seems to be a lot of indifference in the United States regarding domestic surveillance. Perhaps this indifference is a result of a citizenry distracted by the war in Iraq, or because most people feel that they pose no real threat to the government (and therefore do not fear what government employees may seek to learn about the private lives of US citizens). Many people simply may not see how domestic surveillance affects them. Many people may simply desire anything that resembles protection from the nebulous threat of terrorism.

Wired News has published a description of the FBI's domestic surveillance capabilities, to which I posted the following comment (and immediately subsequent to which, the entire commenting feature for the article disappeared). I think these are concerns that every American citizen should consider with respect to the surveillance capabilities of the US government:


Maybe you do nothing wrong and have nothing to fear because you don't mind it when social engineers manage us like cattle.

Maybe you do nothing wrong and don't care if other people see all the personal details you reveal about yourself through your search history. Visit www.aolstalker.com and see if you still feel that way.

Maybe you do nothing wrong and don't mind if a fascist government seeks to suppress or intimidate innovative thinkers who challenge the philosophical premises of successful business models with which government interests are entangled, and you are content to spend your days in a cube and your nights bowing down to the American Idol.

Maybe you don't mind if a foreign government hacks into our surveillance network and uses it against us, at your expense.

Maybe you don't mind being drafted into the War on Terror so long as you don't have to know about it.

Maybe the possibility of all those private contractors with access to your sensitive information doesn't bother you.

Maybe you care more about convenience than justice or liberty.

Maybe you're a terrorist.

Maybe it doesn't matter whether or not all your communications are surveilled because the potential for abuse is enough to make you self-censor any criticisms you may have of a government obsessed with stifling dissent.

Maybe you vote and are willing to boycott the two party system by voting for yourself, because that way you can both register your discontent and help verify the statistical accuracy of our voting system by demanding to see your vote in print after the elections.

Maybe you think our next President will spend every waking hour reversing Executive Orders, Presidential Directives, and un-litigating the last six years.

Maybe you wish the Revolution had never happened, and want to reinstate the Crown.

Gitmo '07 for Fun and Profit

In response to Great Britain's formal request that the United States release five British residents from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, US officials have reiterated that the United States does not want to be the world's jailor.

This is an odd position to take, if one is representing the United States in an official capacity at a time when the United States is seeing dramatic growth in prison populations.

One out of every four people in prison is in the United States. That's no minor accomplishment for a Nation that represents a mere 5% of the World's population.

The USA is #1 in incarcerations, beating out Russia and China. Even if China is under-reporting, the United States is still running in good company.

Whatever cause or purported intent one invokes to account for this phenomenon, the effect disproportionately impacts Black Americans in a variety of ways. For example, 13% of adult Black men cannot vote because of their conviction history.

The Guantanamo Bay detention facility puts a friendly Hollywood face on America's attitude towards imprisonment, but the conditions described as existing there should not seem especially shocking to American sensibilities. Prisons are an awful -- and central -- part of the American Way of Life. For some people, keeping other humans imprisoned is the way to The American Dream.

Americans tolerate a lot of things: not too many inconveniences, but a great many injustices. That prisons represent a struggle against a criminal class is clear. That prisons represent a cultural problem far more significant than street crime is not nearly as often made clear in the popular media.

Prisoners are made by laws. Laws are expressions of cultural values. There have been many generations brought up with the indoctrination of human captivity: what cultural values do Americans hold so as to make so many disrupted lives seem worthwhile, and even lucrative?

Why the President is a Puppet

To understand why the President is a puppet, it is important to think of the President as primarily a communications hub. The volume of sensitive information passing across the President's desk makes the President a valuable intelligence-gathering target.

This is why the President is always surrounded by so many people: it is important to pass information directly from person to person because, for many communications, the use of communications technology is a counter-intelligence liability.

The President probably doesn't carry a cellphone all that often. Since the FBI can access your cellphone's GPS chip, or can remotely activate the microphone, so can some disgruntled Nokia or AT&T employee. The President needs to have many person-to-person communications for security reasons.


The content of the communications with which the President is entrusted contain implicit or explicit instructions regarding how the President ought to behave. Either a piece of information is not to be divulged, or it may only be divulged under certain circumstances. Every communication the President receives says either "do this" or "don't do this," and the President is entrusted with skillfully discerning and faithfully following these instructions.

In many instances, specific phraseology is important. Between the nuances of jargon, inner-circle meetings, and the spin-doctor's propaganda marketing prescription, one word or a few letters can make a world of difference to different people. "At the end of the day," "make no mistake," "going forward," "support the troops," "family values" -- people pledge allegiance to these terms. The President needs to identify which phrases serve as proper nouns, which as verbs, which as convenience, which as ornament; and the President needs to know how to act accordingly.

In many instances, the President may not know what a specific phrase means to a specific group of people, although the phrase may fit quite comfortably inside a sentence of otherwise ordinary speech. The President just follows orders. It was no excuse at Nuremberg, but it's how our present government operates. This is why third-party candidates have difficulty breaking into Washington politics: third-party candidates are outsiders who don't know what phrases motivate various interests, or which phrases tell various interests "I understand what you really want, and I'll help you get it." The consolidation and perpetuation of this pass-phrase system is why the central government seeks to expand its influence into local realms.

Most of the Administration doesn't turn over every four years. The phraseology and popular parlance of various departments have a life of their own, to which any new President must adapt. The concept of "Homeland Security" was already in use among various military circles in the 1990's. This is a concept which has lived in the Administration for years. Sami G. Hajjar discusses "homeland defense" in the 1998 report, "Security Implications of the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East." The Department of Defense Advanced Concepts Technology Demonstration program proposed the Homeland Security Command and Control several months prior to September 11, 2001. Although I can't recall ever thinking of my country as my "Homeland" until after 911, it would seem a good number of military professionals have been working out this doctrine for some time. The Department of Homeland Security is not something the President thought up in a pinch, it is something the President assembled for entrenched political interests. The President may not be fully aware of the scope of the communications he issues, but one thing is clear: whenever the President talks about "homeland security," there are groups of people all over the place who behave according to decades of doctrinal development.

And so the puppet is also a puppeteer, albeit one with a limited understanding of the drama that is unfolding. And so this is why a Washington outsider would serve the American people better than a career politician from the ranks of the political aristocracy: an effective outsider would need to ask all sorts of people what they mean when they speak, whereas a Crown Prince who has lived his life immersed in the secret incantations need not understand them to see how they are used.

Preemption and the New Kind of War

I was reading a little bit about the US Cold War nuclear planning in the 1960's, and came across these two facts, which really struck me:

1) A PREEMPTIVE nuclear war would attack 1000 targets with 3000 warheads;

and

2) A RETALIATORY nuclear strike would attack 700 targets with 1700 warheads.

These two facts struck me because the attitude that informed this war planning seemed counter-intuitive at first. If somebody hits you, and you're going to hit back, don't you want to hit them with everything you've got?

Part of the difference in the scale of attack is certainly due to war planners anticipating some portion of our capabilities being disabled in the case of a retaliatory strike. But the numbers are incredible: in a full scale preemptive strike, 3 nuclear warheads were to be delivered to each target. That's a lot of redundant destruction. Which got me thinking about the character of preemptive strikes in general.

If you're going to hit somebody first, and you don't know whether they've got a black belt in karate, or a knife, or if somebody's got their back, you drop them quick, and make sure they don't get up. Go for the knees, the throat, the eyes, the groin.

A preemptive strike means targets are hit that don't really need to be hit, because a preemptive strike has a lot of strategic redundancy.

Which got me thinking about the attitude of "our leaders," who launched a preemptive war in Iraq, as part of a larger campaign in our New Kind of War. "Our leaders," who rose to prominence during the Cold War, who built their house of cards during the Cold War, find great value in preemption. Whatever THEY're trying to get at now, it's worth an awful lot to them (look out Iran).

Right now, we're reorganizing our Federal Bureaucracies left and right for the War on Terror, spending blood and dollars hand over fist in our Central Front in the War on Terror, using National Security Letters to draft private citizens into the War on Terror. Imagine what the War on Terror costs in terms of administrative overhead alone. Screw bullets, there are bureaucrats to pay. We're going to be paying this off forever...

OUR POLITICIANS ARE UP TO SOMETHING AND WE DESERVE TO KNOW WHAT.

The War on Terror is a preemptive war. The United States has not seen terror anything like what Northern Ireland or Israel have seen. More people dead in Iraq than on 911. More people dead in car accidents every year than on 911. More people shot to death in the ghetto every year than on 911.

We don't re-organize our society because of car accidents, we build more roads and make it cheaper to drive than to use mass transit.

We don't re-organize our society because of inner city violence, we copyright rap music and sell it to white teenagers who play violent video games and manufacture more guns and sell Army surplus AK47's and crack to gangsters and keep the white kids hooked on speed for their attention defect disorder. We make thieves because the wealthy have more money than they know how to possibly spend. We make weapons for peace, use copyright to sell people their culture, we tell people our culture is a culture of peace and we put them in debt and put them to work and brainwash them into USA #1 because YOUR reality is entertainment for some monarch or oligarch.

OUR POLITICIANS ARE UP TO SOMETHING AND WE DESERVE TO KNOW WHAT.

If the War on Terror is a preemptive war, and the War in Iraq is at all part of the War on Terror, it may not really matter what happens in Iraq.

There's a war on for your mind. Propaganda is marketing. If they don't hook you in with Iraq, they've got something else in the pipe, be sure of it.

The War in Iraq is a Decoy

We are told that the War on Terror is a New Kind of War, and that the War in Iraq is the central front in this War.

Why is it, then, that our government and our media go to such great lengths to paint us a picture of a conventional war, when we are in reality engaged with an unconventional enemy?

The War in Iraq has nothing to do with the War on Terror, except insofar as it serves to distract the public from the erosion of civil liberties in the United States, and from the careful establishment of legal precedents by a rogue Administration bent on paving the way for Fascist rule.

One advantage of this approach is the fragmentation of opposition. We have been told there would be more fierce opposition to the War on Iraq were there a draft; we are not often told that the War on Terror does, in fact, have a draft.

One reason we have not heard more about the War on Terror's draft is that those who are drafted are not allowed to discuss it. This means that the 150,000 or so persons who have received national security letters since the start of the Iraq War, and who have been compelled to become agents of the national intelligence infrastructure, are silent warriors in this New Kind of War, with no citizens to rally around them.

Who are these people? What are their duties? To whom do their duties pertain?

We cannot know the answers to these questions. How then can we know that the Constitution is being upheld? How can we be informed voters, or claim to participate in a Democracy with our votes?

Rationale for the Iraq War

One reason President Bush gave as justification for an invasion of Iraq was the imminent threat that Saddam Hussein would give weapons of mass destruction to Al Qaeda.

Our inability to locate these weapons is often attributed to a failure of intelligence. However, the threat of Saddam Hussein giving WMDs to terrorists represents a deliberate effort to mislead the American public.

The most obvious problem with the Administration's rationale is that Al Qaeda viewed Saddam Hussein as an enemy. Saddam Hussein was the head of a secular regime, which did not require women to wear a burka and which allowed women to go to college.

Furthermore, Saddam Hussein was a dictator, and a dictatorship is about control. Why would a dictator in possession of a WMD yield control of such a device by giving it to an enemy?

Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq before we invaded, and we are now deploying the same types of weapons on the battlefield which we, as grounds for our invasion, accused Iraq of attempting to acquire. This is untenable. Our colonial occupying force is actively breeding the very sentiment we ostensibly sought to confront.

While we worry about the rise of Fascism abroad, we omit the threat of Fascism in our Homeland (Fatherland, Motherland). We must be vigilant against Fascism both here and abroad.

Taxation Without Representation

The reason the National Security Agency wants to read your email is because they are trying to use algorithms to detect terrorist activity. This invasion of privacy is based on the assumption that terrorists use the Internet in ways that are statistically distinct from the ways ordinary Americans use the Internet. In order to statistically detect online terrorist activity, the governmet needs a large sample of "normal" Internet use.

Although this may seem reasonable when we are confronted with an indistinct enemy, fighting on ill-defined battlefields, this really amounts to an unconstitutional indirect tax. Just as the Federal government incorporated FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security to hide the cost of creating the largest bureaucracy in the history of civilization, the government's use of private citizens' Internet service for surveillance purposes is used to hide the true cost of the War on Terror.

When the government compels private corporations to comply with national security directives, without compensating these corporations for the cost of implementing such directives, the cost is passed on to consumers.

Because the Administrative branch of government refuses to inform Congress as to the nature of these programs, these programs amount to taxation without representation.

Beyond violating the 4th Amendment right to protection against unwarranted search and seizure, this practice also violates the 5th Amendment, by effectively situating military operatives within private homes, taking private property for public use, and opening up the potential to compel private citizens to, in effect, unwittingly testify against themselves. Not only do these practices appropriate private citizens into the Federal intelligence infrastructure without compensation, but citizens are furthermore charged for this.

Our current Administration has a constitutional duty to either halt these programs, or to fully inform Congress as to their nature. In lieu of such disclosures, we as citizens have a duty to remove these criminals from office.

laying the foundations of the police state

Since 2004, the Bush Administration has aggressively pursued a program of federalizing law enforcement through the creation of "Intelligence Fusion Centers."

These centers are designed to serve as communications hubs, connecting local, state, and federal law enforecement agencies. By incorporating local agencies into the federal infrastructure, these centers expand the purview of federal intelligence gathering and enforcement.

The extent to which Intelligence Fusion Centers seek to expand federal law enforcement powers is perhaps best found in wording from the Fusion Center Guidelines, a document which exhorts state and local officials that "it is the responsibility of leadership to implement and adhere to the Fusion Center Guidelines."

On page 3 of the Guidelines Executive Summary, the document states that "nontraditional collectors of intelligence, such as public safety entities and private sector organizations, possess important information (e.g., risk assessments and suspicious activity reports) that can be 'fused' with law enforcement data to provide meaningful information and intelligence about threats and criminal activity."

The reference to "nontraditional collectors of intelligence" has a disconcerting resonance with the stated goal of Operation TIPS. The Terrorism Information and Prevention System ("TIPS") was an ill-fated Bush Administration effort to use postal workers and cable-TV technicians as informants, which ended when Rep. Dick Armey included specific legislation in the House's Homeland Security Bill to prohibit the program.

The single-mindedness with which the Bush Administration seeks to expand its executive power poses a clear and present danger to American democracy. Secret surveillance laws, secret detentions, secret national security subpoenas, and secret police all deprive Americans of the assurance that executive power is not exercized arbitrarily.

No use watching your back... you better pray the new gestapo doesn't dislike your politics.

paranoid cops and the law above the law (worried yet?)

milwaukee police officers have been disabling the gps units in their squad cars.

trying to hide from the panopticon?

there have been a number of recent cases where police agencies have located individuals using the gps transponders in the target's mobile phone. now government agencies have begun to activate cellphone microphones by remote for surveillance purposes, and have demonstrated the ability to access the computer systems installed in many automobiles. combined with automated voice recognition and automated summary-generation technologies, these tactics represent a significant advance in the potential for mass surveillance of citizens.

the party line's conventional wisdom states, "if you're not a terrorist, then you have nothing to worry about." what, then, are the police worried about?

public service

it bothers me to hear how defensive administration officials become when confronted wih criticism of the wars in iraq and afghanistan. public servants should serve the public, not the other way around.

i would like to see a prewar cost-benefit analysis that considers the effects of proactive programs to strengthen governments in moderate and progressive middle eastern states like lebanon and jordan.

i would like to see footage from multiple angles of the plane that hit the pentagon.

i would like to know why the world has seen over and over the world trade center collapse, but why nobody has seen even a single clear image of the attack on the pentagon.

i would like to know why effective inter-city and inter-state mass transit is not a national security priority: 40,000 people die every year on highways.

i would like to know why those who rely on mass transit pay a larger percentage of their transportation costs compared to those who commute by car.

i would like to know why mass transit is viewed as something subsidized by the weathy for the poor, but roads that are subsidized by the poor for the wealthy are viewed as an entitlement.

i would like to know what sacrifices the president has made for the wars.

i would like to know why there is a bounty on osama in the tens of millions, but we've spent hundreds of billions to get saddam, who never did anything to us.

pavlovian conditioning and the calculation of social paranoia

"only by manipulating humans ever more into skinnerian rats, robots, buying automata, homeostatically adjusted conformists and opportunists (or, bluntly speaking, into morons and zombies) can this great society follow its progress toward ever increasing gross national product..." (p.206 general system theory, ludwig von bertalanffy)

"a dynamic order of parts and processes standing in mutual interaction..." (p.208)

thinking of whole internet as turing test... generally the turing test is conducted by humans interacting through a terminal either with another human or with a specific software program. the object, for human participants, is to determine whether they are interacting with a piece of software or with a human.

an alternate approach may be to set up a terminal where an individual interacts with a piece of software that filters input from many participants, whose combined understanding can more closely approximate the behavior of a single individual.

this approach could be exploited by a malicious entity who, by gaining access to an individual's computer via undocumented exploits installed by any variety of benign plugins or security flaws in the operating system, uses software that examines all electronic transmisssions, looking for patterns and associations in the use of individual words (or the syntax of information that has been encoded in different ways), and with occasional input from "judges," recombines these symbols (the product of patterns and associations) in a manner calculated to elicit certain responses (via the mechanisms of behaviorist psychology).

are you really visiting the web pages you think you are?

are you really afraid of terrorism, or are you conditioned to feel fear whenever you hear or see that word? everybody is afraid of terrorism because, as a concept, it can be used to invoke a variety of thoughts and emotions, from patriotic love to feelings of rage; but few people have any direct experience with terrorism beyond its impact on how their tax money is spent. even so, few people seem to think twice about the cost of the symbolic war in iraq (as opposed to the urban war), or to seriously question whether such an enterprise is worth the expenditure.

conversely, many people are affected by traffic accidents (which kill 40,000 americans every year), but never think once about what the money spent in iraq could do to get drivers off the highways (intercity mass transit would reduce traffic accidents, new urbanism invests in the fabric of the city to promote walkable neighborhoods, etc - fewer drivers=fewer accidents, fewer drunk drivers also = fewer accidents). this is perhaps intentional: the standardization of education in schools emphasizes memorization over analytic abilities. schools don't teach people to form their own opinions, but teache them to react in specific ways to specific stimuli. the centralization of school curricula only makes it easier for a distributed and interconnected media landscape to influence people all over the country in exactly the same way.

quite a few lefties were up in arms when there was talk a few years back about putting reagan on the $20. i find the prospect of putting regan on the $20 infinitely preferable to the indian killer on there now. as a formerly devout lefty myself it took the perspective of a russian linguist from soviet moscow to point out the the fact that, while regan may have made big mistakes (aids), he basically ended the cold war by climbing atop the berlin wall and, without the aid of bodyguards, demanded that the wall be torn down.

if we are to use money, as an abstract form of valuation, to evaluate such disparate entities as love, comfort, shelter, and sustenance, ought we not consider the symbolic value of our metric?

p.s. why should we be afraid of cameras everywhere, in atms, gas stations, and on traffic lights? because software that identifies statistical regularities that correspond to such traits as an individual's characteristic way of walking can gather input from many cameras to accurately track an individual's movement from one camera to another. a central database could be used to track an individual's global movements, to evaluate their behavior, make assumptions about how individuals use the symbols they are given in school to construct value... the federal government is very aware of this: ever wonder why you've seen the planes crash into the world trade center over and over and over again, but you've never seen what hit the pentagon even once? whatever hit the pentagon was recoded by some 80 security cameras around the pentagon, and every private citizen's recording of this event was confiscated by the federal government. this is how the symbolic war on terror is being constructed.