Big Brother and You

8/3/2019 Big Brother and You

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Big Brother and You: The Latest from the NSA

by Rahul MahajanMay 15, 2006

http://www.empirenotes.org/bigbrother.html

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0516-22.htm

Big Brother is watching you. At least when youre on the phone -- he knows what

numbers youve called, how many times and for how long, what numbers people at those

numbers have called, and so on.

Last weeks revelation that, for almost five years now, the National Security Agency has

gotten AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth to turn over all the calling records of all their

clients, marks a qualitatively new step in the Bush administrations post -9/11 creation of

the panoptic state, one of its key goals in the constantly metastasizing war on terror.

Before now, every step in the increase of domestic surveillance and repression was, for

all practical purposes, targeted at a small minority of people. The Justice Departmentsdragnet put out shortly after 9/11 affected South Asians and Arabs primarily, as did thelater special registrations. Extended detentions and curtailment of rights up to and

including habeas corpus affected small numbers of supposed terror suspects (again

from those same ethnic groups). The no-fly list was the same, although the so-called

terror suspects on that list included significant numbers of nonviolent activists.Pentagon surveillance of domestic antiwar groups also didnt touch normal people. Even

the warrantless NSA wiretapping revealed last fall supposedly affected about 500 people

at a time, a total of several thousand since 9/11. And, we were assured, except for a few

cases of error in placing the location of a cell phone, at least one end of those monitoredconversations had to be in a foreign country.

Not only did those measures affect small groups and not the general public, they affected

groups the public either hates, dislikes, or at the least doesnt give a damn about. Arabs,South Asians, foreigners trying to get into the country, people with alleged terrorist

connections, and last but not least, leftist activists.

The upshot was that, despite early and constant agitation by activists about the PATRIOTAct and its successors, a notable majority of the public has favored these measures (polls

in 2005 and early 2006 usually showed 50-60% in support of the Patriot Act and 30-40%

againstseehttp://www.pollingreport.com/terror2.htm ).

Although the primary rationale was always that these measures were supposedly

necessary for fighting terrorism, it was difficult to avoid the suspicion that the real reason

was that normal middle Americans did not believe these measures applied to them. In a

so-called war notable for the lack of any calls to sacrifice by the leadership and anydesire for sacrifice by the public, it was hard to believe that a majority would support real

invasions of their privacy in order to fight terrorism.
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Those suspicions have been corroborated. These latest measures affect everyone. The

Rocky-Mountain-based Qwest did not turn over its records to the NSA, citing legalconcerns, so if you use Qwest and only call people who use Qwest and they only call

people who use Qwest and so on, youre fine. For the rest of us, the vast majority, the

government now has access to a huge array of extremely intimate information about us.

Although the data collected is simply call records and not actual contents of the calls, it

would be childs play for an investigator using those records to figure out whether youre

having an affair, making illegal bets on the Rose Bowl, or one of the myriad of other

things that ordinary people would rather not have found out. If this program is actuallydeemed legal by the courts, then those results could, in turn, potentially be used to obtain

search warrantsgiving the final coup de graceto the probable cause requirement,

which has been under assault in the courts for 25 years and which CIA-Director-

designate Michael Hayden, who implemented this program at President Bushs behest,does not believe is part of the Fourth Amendment.

(http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=100

2463957).

Of course, we dont know exactly what the government intends to do with all of this

information. The avowed intention of the NSA is to use this data to perform social

network analysis, to see the pattern of linkages between terror suspects and others.

Analysis of those patterns can tell whether different suspects are part of a cell, whetherdifferent cells are part of an organization, whether hitherto unknown people are involved,

and so on. In theory, analysis of that kind can be a powerful investigative tool. In

practice, the NSA deals with 650 million intercepts a day, only an infinitesimal fraction

of which ever go in front of an actual human analyst. On September 10, the NSAintercepted two transmissions in Afghanistan, one saying "The match begins tomorrow"

and the other, "Tomorrow is zero hour." They werent translated until September 12; to

this day, if dealing with potential attacks was the primary consideration, the best

investment would be in more Arabic translators. Social network analyst Vardis Krebsdismisses this approach as counterproductive, saying, "If you're looking for a needle,

making the haystack bigger is counterintuitive. It just doesn't make sense."

(http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002399.html)

Those problems are further exacerbated by the way we know that this administration uses

such data. First, they develop an ide fixe about who their enemy is and what he is doing,

then they try to manipulate that data to prove what they already know to be true. This

takes forms that range from the Pentagon spying on antiwar groups holding peacefulvigils to torturing captured al-Qaeda operatives until they admit nonexistent links with

Saddam Husseins government.

But even if this information is useless for foiling terrorist plots, other potential usesabound. What I wonder about most with this administration that has done its best to

identify the Republican Party and, indeed, the partys right wing, with the national

interest and national security (to the point that even the Democrats are upset) is

whether any of this information has been or will be used for Nixon-style dirty tricks
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002399.htmlhttp://www.defensetech.org/archives/002399.htmlhttp://www.defensetech.org/archives/002399.htmlhttp://www.defensetech.org/archives/002399.html


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against political opponents. If its done carefully, it might not at all be obvious that NSA-

obtained information was being used. If it is to be done, there will be no betteropportunity than the 2006 elections, about which the Republicans are deeply worried.

Whether this is a real possibility or not, the point is that the information is there and can

be used at any time against any of us by the government for any nefarious purpose thatcomes up. As some of this starts to sink in, polls are showing a majority of Americans

opposed to this program; USA Today

(http://www.usatoday.com/news/polls/tables/live/2006-05-14-nsa-poll.htm ) showed 51%

disapproving to 43% approving, with 31 of that 51 saying such a program would never beright in any circumstances. Newsweek

(http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12771821/site/newsweek/) had 53% saying the program goes

too far in invading peoples privacy to 41 saying it was a necessary tool to combat

terrorism.

Those poll results indicate that this issue may finally be able to gain some traction. The

answer is not to start yet another campaign or yet another organization weve got morethan enough of those -- but to mount a renewed effort to explain to the public what thewar on terror really is. In a nutshell, its an organizing principle to be used to transform

not only U.S. military policy but also, domestically, the relationship between government

and society, in the direction of increased authoritarianism and militarization.

In foreign policy, the Bush administration articulated the notion of pre-emption, a

supposed right that past administrations have come very close to asserting, but have never

quite done in such an open fashion (in terms of international law, the correct term is not

pre-emptive war, which implies that there is a real, gathering threat but ratherpreventive war, fought against an enemy that might conceivably become a threat at

some nebulous point in the future). Its quite clear now that the ever-evolving plans for

domestic surveillance embody the same principle. Going far beyond finding terrorists

before they strike, this latest program involves finding necessary information about all ofus before we become terrorists. Combine that with a very broad view of who the enemy

is (potentially including all those who disagree with the administration) and you have not

only a rather frightening vision of the destruction of liberty in this country, you have a

paranoid, secretive, incompetently run proto-panopticon that is collapsing under its ownweight.

The conventional wisdom is that the war on Iraq is a failure and a distraction from the

important war on terror the truth is that the war on terror itself, as a concept, is amassive failure, even from the point of view of the string-pullers in the Bush

administration.

Rahul Mahajan is an author, freelance journalist, and publisher of the weblog EmpireNotes (http://www.empirenotes.org). He has been to occupied Iraq twice and reported

from the first siege of Fallujah. His most recent book is Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S.

Power in Iraq and Beyond.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/polls/tables/live/2006-05-14-nsa-poll.htmhttp://www.usatoday.com/news/polls/tables/live/2006-05-14-nsa-poll.htmhttp://www.usatoday.com/news/polls/tables/live/2006-05-14-nsa-poll.htmhttp://msnbc.msn.com/id/12771821/site/newsweek/http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12771821/site/newsweek/http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12771821/site/newsweek/http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12771821/site/newsweek/http://www.usatoday.com/news/polls/tables/live/2006-05-14-nsa-poll.htm


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(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583225781/empirenotes-20) He can be

reached at [email protected].

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Big Brother and You