[News] The Surveillance Society: Attempts to suppress oppositional activity

[Anti-Imperialist News]

The Advent of the Surveillance Society

Thursday 8 September 2011
by: Nancy Murray and Kade Crockford, Truthout and ACLU Massachusetts 
| Special Feature
<http://www.truth-out.org/advent-surveillance-society/1314207756>http://www.truth-out.org/advent-surveillance-society/1314207756


<http://www.surveillanceinthehomeland.org/>Ten Years Later: 
Surveillance in the "Homeland" is a collaborative project with 
Truthout and ACLU Massachusetts.

Surveillance now is everyone's business, as the line between 
intelligence-gathering and crimefighting rapidly fades and the public 
is conditioned to play its part.

The work of Deputy Police Chief Michael Downing of the Los Angeles 
Police Department (LAPD) exemplifies the new surveillance 
paradigm.  The head of the 
<http://www.lapdonline.org/inside_the_lapd/content_basic_view/6502>750-strong 
counterterrorism force within the LAPD, he is on the hunt for "people 
who follow al-Qaeda's goals and objectives and mission and ideology." 
He says his officers collect intelligence and practice the "essence 
of community policing" by reaching out to Muslims and asking them to 
"weed out" the 
"hard-<http://truthout.org/sites/default/files/Executive%20Summary_OIG%20Report%285%29.pdf>core 
radicals."

He adds that he is pleased that many Muslims have adopted the LAPD's 
<http://lapdonline.org/iwatchla>iWatch program and are prepared, 
along with the general public, to call in tips about suspicious 
activity. With "violent Islamists" as his main target, Chief Downing 
is also keeping track of "black separatists, white 
supremacist/sovereign citizen extremists and animal rights 
terrorists." If threats materialize, he can draw upon 
the<http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/apr/11/la-police-use-intel-networks-against-terror/print/> 
LAPD's "amazing" backup capacity - SWAT units, direct-action teams, 
air support, counterassault teams and squads that specialize in 
disrupting vehicle bombs.

Here we see several of the components of the new surveillance 
society. A <http://www.privacysos.org/police_state>militarized police 
force no longer leaves intelligence work to federal authorities. It 
seeks out information about anything that can be connected to 
"suspicious" activity and is keeping track of certain individuals and 
groups whether or not there is evidence that they are engaging in 
criminal activity. Police are expected to chase down unsubstantiated 
tips from the public, and not just to pursue evidence of wrongdoing. 
A new notion of "community policing" has emerged, where monitoring 
communities - with all the trust issues that this implies - has taken 
the place of winning community support by being accountable to 
residents and solving crimes.

The LAPD is one of some 3,984 federal, state and local agencies now 
collecting information about "suspicious activity" that could be 
related to terrorism. The Washington Post's 
<http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/monitoring-america/1/>"Top 
Secret America" series states that 854,000 people now hold 
"top-secret" security clearance. We estimate that's about one for 
every 215 working-age Americans. An 
<http://www.hstoday.us/focused-topics/information-technology/single-article-page/an-end-to-infosharing/55915db66128bc355cd71ca0eeb13a6a.html>additional 
3 million people reportedly hold "secret" security clearance.

The federal government spends more annually on civilian and military 
intelligence than the rest of the world put together - $80 billion is 
a conservative figure, 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/28/AR2010102807284.html>according 
to the October 28, 2010, Post. This is in addition to the $42-plus 
billion allocated to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and 
the spending on intelligence activities by the LAPD and other state 
and local police forces. The homeland security industry is 
flourishing, with lucrative contracts being awarded to Lockheed 
Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and other major defense 
contractors.

What exactly is being built with these funds?

The "Information Sharing Environment"

Essentially, the "total information awareness" assumption that the 
nation can be made safe by applying advanced technology to massive 
databases has been married to the call for a "unity of effort in 
sharing information" issued by the 
<http://www.9-11commission.gov/>bipartisan 9/11 National Commission. 
The commissioners had recommended a fundamental change in how the 
nation's 16 intelligence agencies carried out their business. They 
urged that the "need to know" culture be replaced with a "need to 
share" imperative, with information being transmitted horizontally 
among agencies, not just vertically within agencies. They further 
recommended that the FBI be equipped to assume prime responsibility 
for domestic intelligence-gathering, that it incorporate a 
"specialized and integrated national security workforce," and that it 
form collaborative relationships with state and local police for this purpose.

To construct a new domestic surveillance network, the 
<http://www.nctc.gov/docs/irtpa.pdf>Intelligence Reform and Terrorism 
Prevention Act of 2004 mandated the creation of 
an<http://www.ise.gov/> Information Sharing Environment (ISE) under 
the director of national intelligence. Defined as "an interrelated 
set of policies, processes and systems," ISE was intended to 
facilitate the sharing of terrorism-related information with 
stakeholders at all levels of government and the private 
sector.  Eventually, foreign governments are supposed to be brought 
into the ISE loop. The ISE requires the standardization of 
information systems and technology to provide access to the 
burgeoning number of databases that serve as its connective tissue, 
the enlistment of mission partners across federal, state, local, and 
tribal agencies and the private sector to keep the databases supplied 
with the information that is its lifeblood, and the use of "analysts, 
operators and investigators" from "law enforcement, public safety, 
homeland security, intelligence, defense and foreign affairs" to 
extract, analyze and disseminate timely intelligence.

Fusion Centers and Suspicious Activity Reports

The nerve centers of the ISE are the nation's 72 regional and state 
fusion centers, which were in part a response to the FBI's reluctance 
to share threat information with state and local law enforcement 
because of turf and security clearance issues. With considerable 
variation in what they do and how they do it, fusion centers were 
established over the past seven years with DHS funding to "fuse" and 
analyze information from a wide variety of sources and databases and 
facilitate information-sharing among themselves through the FBI's 
eGuardian database. The secretive fusion centers represent 
a<http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/privacy/fusioncenter_20071212.pdf> 
significant departure from traditional law enforcement objectives and 
methods, with few legal limits on what they can and cannot do, little 
respect for long-established jurisdictional boundaries between local, 
state, federal, military and private entities and a notable absence 
of accountability mechanisms. Given the scarcity of domestic 
terrorism plots, it is not surprising that most fusion centers almost 
immediately changed the focus of their data collection from fighting 
terrorism to a broad "all crimes, all hazards" mission. Many now use 
federal counterterrorism funds to collect, store and share data that 
has little or no relation to terrorism and, often, no relation to 
actual crimes.

According to DHS head Janet Napolitano, along with fusion centers, 
the <http://nsi.ncirc.gov/>Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting 
Initiative serves as the "heart" of the government's effort to keep 
Americans safe from "homegrown terrorism." The idea behind the 
initiative is to collect as much data about anything "suspicious" 
that just may (or may not) be related to criminal activity. Or, to 
quote the government's own alarmingly broad definition: a Suspicious 
Activity Report (SAR) is "official documentation of observed behavior 
that may be indicative of intelligence gathering, or preoperational 
planning related to terrorism, criminal, or other illicit intention."

SARS programs, piloted by the LAPD, Boston and a handful of other 
cities, vary from place to place and are often in competition with 
one another for federal dollars. Today some 800,000 state and local 
law enforcement officers are 
encouraged<http://www.publiceye.org/liberty/matrix/reports/sar_initiative/sar-full-report.pdf> 
to file SARs on even the most common everyday behaviors, such as 
looking through binoculars, taking pictures of buildings, taking 
notes in public and espousing "radical" beliefs.

The 
<http://www.ise.gov/docs/sar/NSI_CONOPS_Version_1_FINAL_2008-12-11_r5.pdf>ISE 
program manager recommended that SARs are reviewed within the police 
department before being sent to a fusion center for further review by 
an intelligence analyst. If it "meets SAR criteria," it is then 
entered into the ISE for wide distribution and "fusion with other 
intelligence information." But a January 2010 
<http://www.4shared.com/document/Ew1KSF_Z/NSI_EE.html>evaluation of 
the ISE and National SAR Reporting Initiative has shown little 
uniformity in how SARs are being collected, vetted and shared, and 
how much personably identifiable information is being aggregated and 
disseminated through the fusion center network and sent to the FBI's 
<http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2008/september/eguardian_091908>eGUardian 
system, which is now serving as "an ISE/SAR shared space." In an 
effort to address criticisms voiced by civil liberties groups, ISE 
adopted a policy requiring that only behavior indicating some kind of 
connection to criminal activity or terrorism should be shared among 
federal intelligence agencies. But this civil rights protection does 
not apply to sharing by state and regional fusion centers.

A New Policing Paradigm

In addition to writing up SARS, police departments, often working 
directly with the FBI through its multi-agency Joint Terrorism Task 
Forces (JTTFs), sift "tips and leads" provided in field reports, 
through public tip lines, by private entities, by confidential and 
anonymous sources, or culled from media sources. Time that used to be 
spent investigating reasonable suspicion of criminal activity is now 
allocated to assessing randomly collected information to decide 
whether it is credible enough to be deposited in the Information 
Sharing Environment (ISE) and sent to the FBI's eGuardian database 
for preliminary analysis before being sent to fusion centers for 
further analysis and wide distribution.

When local police work with the FBI in JTTFs, they become federal 
officers who are no longer under the supervision of and accountable 
to their local departments and communities, and instead must act in 
conformity with the<http://www.privacysos.org/degraded_standards> 
FBI's guidelines on domestic investigations - regulations that are 
now so loose that they allow agents to conduct "assessments" 
involving monitoring of meetings and people, infiltration of groups, 
and personal interviews with no suspicion of wrongdoing - some 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/us/27fbi.html?_r=1>11,667 
assessments were conducted just in the four-month period beginning in 
December 2009, with only a fraction leading to full investigations. 
And when local police participate with fusion centers in information 
collection and the building of personal files about activities that 
can be wholly innocent and may be constitutionally protected, they 
are integrated into a domestic surveillance network that is national 
in scope, beyond accountability, and far removed from community 
policing and public trust.

In the process, the line between traditional crimefighting and 
terrorism detection has been erased and something new has been born: 
a concept of policing that is no longer primarily reactive and 
focused on solving crimes or on collecting concrete evidence that a 
crime might be about to be committed. In 
<http://www.privacysos.org/predictive>"predictive policing," local 
police officers serve as a resource for gathering information on a 
range of potential threats and situations on the assumption that 
criminal activity can be stopped<http://www.slate.com/id/2282252/> 
before it develops. They are trained to use 
<http://www.privacysos.org/technologies_of_control>advanced 
technologies and tools, including powerful surveillance cameras 
provided through DHS grants, to monitor broad sections of the 
population, looking for indicators of future crimes before they are committed.

When the net is cast so wide, everything and anything begins to look 
like "terrorism-related activity," forcing police officers to waste 
time checking out dead-end tips. It is not surprising that 
<http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/fusion-center-declares-nation-s-oldest-universities-possible-terrorist-threat>leaks 
from fusion centers have revealed that files compiled on individuals 
and groups are full of inaccurate information and focus on activities 
that may be both entirely innocent and constitutionally protected.

Constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein, a former associate deputy attorney 
general in the Reagan 
administration,<http://www.securitymanagement.com/news/fusion-centers-should-be-dismantled-expert-says-005461> 
told Congress in 2009 that fusion centers and SARs were worthy of the 
Soviet Union's KGB and East Germany's Stasi, and should be abandoned: 
"To an intelligence agent, informant, or law enforcement officer, 
everything unconventional or unorthodox looks like at least a 
pre-embryonic terrorist danger."



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