[News] The Intelligence Bureaucracy That Ate Our World

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Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Intelligence Bureaucracy That Ate Our World

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175524/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_intelligence_bureaucracy_that_ate_our_world/#more
Posted by Tom Engelhardt at 9:07am, April 3, 2012.

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: To catch Timothy 
MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which 
I reflect on the unnatural growth of the U.S. 
national security state, click here, or download 
it to your iPod here.  It's a subject that lies 
at the heart of my new book, The United States of 
Fear, a signed, personalized copy of which -- for 
a contribution of $75 -- is still yours by 
visiting our donation page.  My thanks to all of 
you who have already given.  Your generosity keeps this website afloat! Tom]

Data Mining You
How the Intelligence Community Is Creating a New American World
By Tom Engelhardt

I was out of the country only nine days, hardly a 
blink in time, but time enough, as it happened, 
for another small, airless room to be added to 
the American national security labyrinth.  On 
March 22nd, Attorney General Eric Holder and 
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, 
Jr. signed off on new guidelines allowing the 
National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a 
post-9/11 creation, to hold on to information 
about Americans in no way known to be connected 
to terrorism -- about you and me, that is -- for 
up to five years.  (Its previous outer limit was 
180 days.)  This, Clapper claimed, “will enable 
NCTC to accomplish its mission more practically and effectively.”

Joseph K., that icon of single-lettered anonymity 
from Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, would 
undoubtedly have felt right at home in Clapper’s 
Washington.  George Orwell would surely have had 
a few pungent words to say about those anodyne 
words “practically and effectively,” not to speak of “mission.”

For most Americans, though, it was just life as 
we’ve known it since September 11, 2001, since we 
scared ourselves to death and accepted that just 
about anything goes, as long as it supposedly 
involves protecting us from terrorists.  Basic 
information or misinformation, possibly about 
you, is to be stored away for five years -- or 
until some other attorney general and director of 
national intelligence think it’s even more 
practical and effective to keep you on file for 
10 years, 20 years, or until death do us part -- and it hardly made a ripple.

If Americans were to hoist a flag designed for 
this moment, it might read “Tread on Me” and use 
that classic illustration of the boa constrictor 
swallowing an elephant from Saint-Exupéry’s The 
Little Prince.  That, at least, would catch 
something of the absurdity of what the National 
Security Complex has decided to swallow of our American world.

Oh, and in those nine days abroad, a new word 
surfaced on my horizon, one just eerie and ugly 
enough for our new reality: yottabyte.  Thank 
National Security Agency (NSA) expert James 
Bamford for that.  He wrote a piece for Wired 
magazine on a super-secret, $2 billion, 
one-million-square-foot data center the NSA is 
building in Bluffdale, Utah.  Focused on data 
mining and code-breaking and five times the size 
of the U.S. Capitol, it is expected to house 
information beyond compare, “including the 
complete contents of private emails, cell phone 
calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts 
of personal data trails -- parking receipts, 
travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’”

The NSA, adds Bamford, “has established listening 
posts throughout the nation to collect and sift 
through billions of email messages and phone 
calls, whether they originate within the country 
or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of 
almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns 
and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has 
begun building a place to store all the trillions 
of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net.”

Which brings us to yottabyte -- which is, Bamford 
assures us, equivalent to septillion bytes, a 
number “so large that no one has yet coined a 
term for the next higher magnitude.”  The Utah 
center will be capable of storing a yottabyte or 
more of information (on your tax dollar).

Large as it is, that mega-project in Utah is just 
one of many sprouting like mushrooms in the 
sunless forest of the U.S. intelligence 
world.  In cost, for example, it barely tops the 
$1.7 billion headquarters complex in Virginia 
that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, 
with an estimated annual black budget of at least 
$5 billion, built for its 16,000 
employees.  Opened in 2011, it's the 
third-largest federal building in the Washington 
area.  (And I’ll bet you didn’t even know that 
your tax dollars paid for such an agency, no less 
its gleaming new headquarters.)  Or what about 
the 33 post-9/11 building complexes for 
top-secret intelligence work that were under 
construction or had already been built when 
Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William 
Arkin wrote their “Top Secret America” series back in 2010?

In these last years, while so many Americans were 
foreclosed upon or had their homes go 
“underwater” and the construction industry went 
to hell, the intelligence housing bubble just 
continued to grow.  And there’s no sign that any 
of this seems abidingly strange to most Americans.

A System That Creates Its Own Reality

To leave the country, of course, I had to briefly 
surrender my shoes, hat, belt, computer -- you 
know the routine -- and even then, stripped to 
the basics, I had to pass through a scanner of a 
sort that not so long ago caused protest and 
upset but now is evidently as American as apple 
pie.  Then I spent those nine days touring some 
of Spain’s architectural wonders, including the 
Alhambra in Granada, the Mezquita or Great Mosque 
of Cordoba, and that city’s ancient synagogue 
(the only one to survive the expulsion of the 
Jews in 1492), as well as Antonio Gaudí’s Sagrada 
Família, his vast Barcelona basilica, without 
once -- in a country with its own grim history of 
terror attacks -- being wanded or patted down or 
questioned or even passing through a metal 
detector.  Afterwards, I took a flight back to a 
country whose national security architecture had 
again expanded subtly in the name of “my” safety.

Now, I don’t want to overdo it.  In truth, those 
new guidelines were no big deal.  The information 
on -- as far as anyone knows -- innocent 
Americans that the NCTC wanted to keep for those 
extra 4½ years was already being held ad 
infinitum by one or another of our 17 major 
intelligence agencies and organizations.  So the 
latest announcement seems to represent little 
more than bureaucratic housecleaning, just a bit 
of extra scaffolding added to the Great Mosque or 
basilica of the new American intelligence 
labyrinth.  It certainly was nothing to write 
home about, no less trap a fictional character in.

Admittedly, since 9/11 the U.S. Intelligence 
Community, as it likes to call itself, has 
expanded to staggering proportions.  With those 
17 outfits having a combined annual intelligence 
budget of more than $80 billion (a figure which 
doesn't even include all intelligence 
expenditures), you could think of that community 
as having carried out a statistical coup 
d'état.  In fact, at a moment when America’s 
enemies -- a few thousand scattered jihadis, the 
odd minority insurgency, and a couple of rickety 
regional powers (Iran, North Korea, and perhaps 
Venezuela) -- couldn’t be less imposing, its 
growth has been little short of an institutional 
miracle.  By now, it has a momentum all its 
own.  You might even say that it creates its own reality.

Of classic American checks and balances, we, the 
taxpayers, now write the checks and they, the 
officials of the National Security Complex, are 
free to be as unbalanced as they want in their 
actions.  Whatever you do, though, don’t mistake 
Clapper, Holder, and similar figures for the 
Gaudís of the new intelligence world.  Don’t 
think of them as the architects of the structure 
they are building.  What they preside over is 
visibly a competitive bureaucratic mess of 
overlapping principalities whose “mission” might 
be summed up in one word: more.

In a sense -- though they would undoubtedly never 
think of themselves this way -- I suspect they 
are bureaucratic versions of Kafka’s Joseph K., 
trapped in a labyrinthine structure they are 
continually, blindly, adding to.  And because 
their “mission” has no end point, their edifice 
has neither windows nor exits, and for all anyone 
knows is being erected on a foundation of quicksand.

Keep calling it “intelligence” if you want, but 
the monstrosity they are building is neither 
intelligent nor architecturally elegant.  It is 
nonetheless a system elaborating itself with 
undeniable energy.  Whatever the changing cast of 
characters, the structure only grows.  It no 
longer seems to matter whether the figure who 
officially sits atop it is a former part-owner of 
a baseball team and former governor, a former 
constitutional law professor, or -- looking to 
possible futures -- a former corporate raider.

A Basilica of Chaos

Evidently, it’s our fate -- increasing numbers of 
us anyway -- to be transformed into intelligence 
data (just as we are being eternally transformed 
into commercial data), our identities sliced, 
diced, and passed around the labyrinth, our bytes 
stored up to be “mined” at their convenience.

You might wonder: What is this basilica of chaos 
that calls itself the U.S. Intelligence 
Community?  Bamford describes whistleblower 
William Binney, a former senior NSA 
crypto-mathematician “largely responsible for 
automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping 
network,” as holding “his thumb and forefinger 
close together” and saying, “We are that far from 
a turnkey totalitarian state.”

It’s an understandable description for someone 
who has emerged from the labyrinth, but I doubt 
it’s on target.  Ours is unlikely to ever be a 
Soviet-style system, even if it exhibits a 
striking urge toward totality; towards, that is, 
engulfing everything, including every trace 
you’ve left anywhere in the world.  It’s probably 
not a Soviet-style state in the making, even if 
traditional legal boundaries and prohibitions 
against spying upon and surveilling Americans are 
of remarkably little interest to it.

Its urge is to data mine and decode the planet in 
an eternal search for enemies who are imagined to 
lurk everywhere, ready to strike at any 
moment.  Anyone might be a terrorist or, 
wittingly or not, in touch with one, even 
perfectly innocent-seeming Americans whose data 
must be held until the moment when the true 
pattern of eneminess comes into view and everything is revealed.

In the new world of the National Security 
Complex, no one can be trusted -- except the 
officials working within it, who in their eternal 
bureaucratic vigilance clearly consider 
themselves above any law.  The system that they 
are constructing (or that, perhaps, is 
constructing them) has no more to do with 
democracy or an American republic or the 
Constitution than it does with a Soviet-style 
state.  Think of it as a phenomenon for which we 
have no name.  Like the yottabyte, it’s something 
new under the sun, still awaiting its own strange and ugly moniker.

For now, it remains as anonymous as Joseph K. and 
so, conveniently enough, continues to expand 
right before our eyes, strangely unseen.

If you don’t believe me, leave the country for 
nine days and just see if, in that brief span of 
time, something else isn't drawn within its 
orbit.  After all, it’s inexorable, this rough 
beast slouching through Washington to be born.

Welcome, in the meantime, to our nameless new 
world.  One thing is guaranteed: it has a byte.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire 
Project and the author of The American Way of 
War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as 
The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation 
Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The 
United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), has just 
been published.  To listen to Timothy MacBain’s 
latest Tomcast audio interview in which 
Engelhardt reflects on the unnatural growth of 
the U.S. national security state, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook.

Copyright 2012 Tom Engelhardt




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