[News] The making of a global security state

[Anti-Imperialist News]

*The making of a global security state*
By Tom Engelhardt

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-180613.html

As happens with so much news these days, the Edward Snowden revelations 
about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and just how far we've come 
in the building of a surveillance state have swept over us 24/7 - waves 
of leaks, videos, charges, claims, counterclaims, skullduggery, and 
government threats. When a flood sweeps you away, it's always hard to 
find a little dry land to survey the extent and nature of the damage. 
Here's my attempt to look beyond the daily drumbeat of this developing 
story (which, it is promised, will go on for weeks, if not months) and 
identify five
urges essential to understanding the world Edward Snowden has helped us 
glimpse.

*1: The urge to be global*
Corporately speaking, globalization has been ballyhooed since at least 
the 1990s, but in governmental terms only in the 21st century has that 
globalizing urge fully infected the workings of the American state 
itself. It's become common since 9/11 to speak of a "national security 
state". But if a week of ongoing revelations about NSA surveillance 
practices has revealed anything, it's that the term is already grossly 
outdated. Based on what we now know, we should be talking about an 
American global security state.

Much attention has, understandably enough, been lavished on the phone 
and other metadata about American citizens that the NSA is now sweeping 
up and about the ways in which such activities may be abrogating the 
First and Fourth Amendments of the US constitution. Far less attention 
has been paid to the ways in which the NSA (and other US intelligence 
outfits) are sweeping up global data in part via the just-revealed PRISM 
and other surveillance programs.

Sometimes, naming practices are revealing in themselves, and the 
National Security Agency's key data mining tool, capable in March 2013 
of gathering "97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks 
worldwide", has been named "Boundless Informant". If you want a sense of 
where the US intelligence community imagines itself going, you couldn't 
ask for a better hint than that word "boundless". It seems that for our 
spooks, there are, conceptually speaking, no limits left on this planet.

Today, that "community" seeks to put not just the US but the world fully 
under its penetrating gaze. By now, the first "heat map" has been 
published showing where such information is being sucked up from 
monthly: Iran tops the list (14 billion pieces of intelligence); then 
come Pakistan (13.5 billion), Jordan (12.7 billion), Egypt (7.6 
billion), and India (6.3 billion). Whether you realize this or not, even 
for a superpower that has unprecedented numbers of military bases 
scattered across the planet and has divided the world into six military 
commands, this represents something new under the sun. The only question 
is what?

The 20th century was the century of "totalitarianisms". We don't yet 
have a name, a term, for the surveillance structures Washington is 
building in this century, but there can be no question that, whatever 
the present constraints on the system, "total" has something to do with 
it and that we are being ushered into a new world. Despite the recent 
leaks, we still undoubtedly have a very limited picture of just what the 
present American surveillance world really looks like and what it plans 
for our future. One thing is clear, however: the ambitions behind it are 
staggering and global.

In the classic totalitarian regimes of the previous century, a secret 
police/surveillance force attempted, via every imaginable method, 
including informers, wire tappers, torture techniques, imprisonment, and 
so on to take total control of a national environment, to turn every 
citizen's life into the equivalent of an open book, or more accurately a 
closed, secret file lodged somewhere in that police system.

The most impressive of these efforts, the most global, was the Soviet 
one, simply because the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - the USSR - 
was an imperial power with a set of disparate almost-states (those SSRs 
of the Caucasus and Central Asia) within its borders, and a series of 
Eastern European satellite states under its control as well. None of the 
20th-century totalitarian regimes, however, ever imagined doing the same 
thing on a genuinely global basis. There was no way to do so.

Washington's urge to take control of the global communications 
environment, lock, stock, and chat room, to gather its "data" - billions 
and billions of pieces of it - and via inconceivably powerful computer 
systems, mine and arrange it, find patterns in it, and so turn the world 
into a secret set of connections, represents a remarkable development.

For the first time, a great power wants to know, up close and personal, 
not just what its own citizens are doing, but those of distant lands as 
well: who they are communicating with, and how, and why, and what they 
are buying, and where they are traveling, and who they are bumping into 
(online and over the phone).

Until recently, once you left the environs of science fiction, that was 
simply beyond imagining. You could certainly find precursors for such a 
development in, for instance, the Cold War intelligence community's urge 
to create a global satellite system that would bring every inch of the 
planet under a new kind of surveillance regime, that would map it 
thoroughly and identify what was being mapped down to the square inch, 
but nothing so globally up close and personal.

The next two urges are intertwined in such a way that they might be 
thought as a single category: your codes and theirs.

*2: The urge to make you transparent*
The urge to possess you, or everything that can be known about you, has 
clearly taken possession of our global security state. With this, it's 
become increasingly apparent, go other disturbing trends. Take something 
seemingly unrelated: the recent Supreme Court decision that allows the 
police to take a DNA swab from an arrestee (if the crime he or she is 
charged with is "serious"). Theoretically, this is being done for 
"identification" purposes, but in fact it's already being put to other 
uses entirely, especially in the solving of separate crimes.

If you stop to think about it, this development, in turn, represents a 
remarkable new level of state intrusion on private life, on your self. 
It means that, for the first time, in a sure-to-widen set of 
circumstances, the state increasingly has access not just - as with NSA 
surveillance - to your Internet codes and modes of communication, but to 
your most basic code of all, your DNA. As Justice Antonin Scalia put it 
in his dissent in the case, "Make no mistake about it: as an entirely 
predictable consequence of today's decision, your DNA can be taken and 
entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly 
or wrongly, and for whatever reason." Can global DNA databases be far 
behind?

If your DNA becomes the possession of the state, then you are a 
transparent human being at the most basic level imaginable. At every 
level, however, the pattern, the trend, the direction is the same (and 
it's the same whether you're talking about the government or giant 
corporations). Increasingly, access to you, your codes, your 
communications, your purchases, your credit card transactions, your 
location, your travels, your exchanges with friends, your tastes, your 
likes and dislikes is what's wanted - for what's called your "safety" in 
the case of government and your business in the case of corporations.

Both want access to everything that can be known about you because who 
knows until later what may prove the crucial piece of information to 
uncover a terrorist network or lure in a new network of customers. They 
want everything, at least, that can be run through a system of massive 
computers and sorted into patterns of various potentially useful kinds. 
You are to be, in this sense, the transparent man or transparent woman. 
Your acts, your life patterns, your rights, your codes are to be an open 
book to them - and increasingly a closed book to you. You are to be 
their secret and that "you" is an ever more global one.

*3: The urge to make themselves opaque*
With this goes another reality. "They" are to become ever less 
accessible, ever more impenetrable, ever less knowable to you (except in 
the forms in which they would prefer you to know them). None of their 
codes or secrets are to be accessed by you on pain of imprisonment. 
Everything in the government - which once was thought to be "your" 
government - is increasingly disappearing into a professional universe 
of secrecy.

In 2011, the last year for which figures are available, the government 
classified 92 million documents. And they did so on the same principle 
that they use in collecting seemingly meaningless or harmless 
information from you: that only in retrospect can anyone know whether a 
benign-looking document might prove anything but. Better to deny access 
to everything.

In the process, they are finding new ways of imposing silence on you, 
even when it comes to yourself. Since 2001, for instance, it has become 
possible for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to present you with a 
National Security Letter, which forces you to turn over information to 
them, but far more strikingly gags you from ever mentioning publicly 
that you got such a letter. Those who have received such letters (and 
15,000 of them were issued in 2012) are legally enjoined from discussing 
or even acknowledging what's happening to them; their lives, that is, 
are no longer theirs to discuss. If that isn't Orwellian, what is?

President Barack Obama offered this reassurance in the wake of the 
Snowden leaks: the National Security Agency, he insisted, is operating 
under the supervision of all three branches of the government. In fact, 
the opposite could be said to be true. All three branches, especially in 
their oversight roles, have been brought within the penumbra of secrecy 
of the global security state and so effectively co-opted or muzzled. 
This is obviously true with our ex-professor of constitutional law and 
the executive branch over which he now presides and which has in recent 
years been ramping up its own secret operations.

When it comes to congress, the people's representatives who are to 
perform oversight on the secret world have been presented with the 
equivalent of National Security Letters; that is, when let in on some of 
the secrets of that world, they find they can't discuss them, can't tell 
the American people about them, can't openly debate them in congress. In 
public sessions with congress, we now know that those who run our most 
secret outfits, if pushed to the wall by difficult questions, will as a 
concession respond in the "least untruthful manner" possible, as 
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper put it last week.

Given the secret world's control over congress, representatives who are 
horrified by what they've learned about our government's secrecy and 
surveillance practices, like Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Mark 
Udall, can only hint at their worries and fears. They can, in essence, 
wink at you, signal to you in obscure ways that something is out of 
whack, but they can't tell you directly. Secrecy, after all.

Similarly, the judiciary, that third branch of government and other body 
of oversight, has, in the 21st century, been fully welcomed into the 
global security state's atmosphere of total secrecy. So when the 
surveillance crews go to the judiciary for permission to listen in on 
the world, they go to a secret court, a Foreign Intelligence 
Surveillance (FISA) court, locked within that secret world.

It, in turn, notoriously rubber-stamps whatever it is "they" want to do, 
evidently offering no resistance whatsoever to "their" desires. (Of the 
6,556 electronic surveillance requests submitted to the court in Obama's 
first term in office, for instance, only one was denied.) In addition, 
unlike any other court in America, we, the American people, the 
transparent and ignorant public, can know next to nothing about it. And 
you know perfectly well why: the overriding needs of secrecy.

What, though, is the point of "oversight" if you can't do anything other 
than what that secret world wants you to do? We are, in other words, 
increasingly open to them and "they" are increasingly closed to us.

*4: The urge to expand*
As we've known at least since Dana Priest and William Arkin published 
their stunning series, "Top Secret America", in the Washington Post in 
2010, the US intelligence community has expanded post-9/11 to levels 
unimaginable even in the Cold War era. Then, of course, it faced another 
superpower, not a small set of jihadis largely located in the backlands 
of the planet. It now exists on, as Arkin says, an "industrial scale". 
And its urge to continue growing, to build yet more structures for 
surveillance, including a vast US$2 billion NSA repository in Bluffdale, 
Utah, that will be capable of holding an almost unimaginable yottabyte 
(equivalent of 1 trillion terabytes) of data, is increasingly written 
into its DNA.

For this vast, restless, endless expansion of surveillance of every sort 
and at every level, for the nearly half-million or possibly far more 
private contractors, aka "digital Blackwater", now in the government 
surveillance business - about 70% of the national intelligence budget 
reportedly goes to the private sector these days - and the nearly 5 
million Americans with security clearances (1.4 million with top 
security clearances, more than a third of them private contractors), the 
official explanation is "terrorism".

It matters little that terrorism as a phenomenon is one of the lesser 
dangers Americans face in their daily lives and that, for some of the 
larger ones, ranging from food-borne illnesses to cars, guns, and what's 
now called "extreme weather", no one would think about building vast 
bureaucratic structures shrouded in secrecy, funded to the hilt, and 
offering Americans promises of ultimate safety.

Terrorism certainly rears its ugly head from time to time, and there's 
no question that the fear of some operation getting through the vast US 
security net drives the employees of our global security state. As an 
explanation for the phenomenal growth of that state, however, it simply 
doesn't hold water. In truth, compared to the previous century, US 
enemies are remarkably scarce on this planet.

So forget the official explanation and imagine our 
global-security-state-in-the-making in the grip of a kind of compulsive 
disorder in which the urge to go global makes the most private 
information of citizens everywhere the property of the American state 
and expanding surveillance endlessly simply trumps any other way of 
doing things.

In other words, "they" can't help themselves. The process, the 
phenomenon, has them by the throat, so much so that they can imagine no 
other way of being. In this mood, they are paving the way for a new 
global security - or rather insecurity - world. They are, for instance, 
hiking spending on "cyber-security", have already secretly launched the 
planet's first cyber-war, are planning for more of them, intend to 
dominate the future cyber-landscape in a staggering fashion, continue to 
gather global data of every sort on a massive scale, and more generally 
are acting in ways that they would consider criminal if other countries 
engaged in them.

*5: The urge to leak*
The massive leaks of documents by Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden 
have few precedents in American history. Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon 
Papers leak is their only obvious predecessor. They are not, however, 
happenstances of our moment. They are signs of what's to come. If, in 
surveillance terms, the urge to go global and impose ultimate secrecy on 
both the state's secrets and yours, to prosecute whistleblowers to the 
maximum (at this point usually via the Espionage Act or, in the case of 
Manning, via the charge of "aiding the enemy", and with calls of 
"treason" already in the air when it comes to Snowden), it's natural 
that the urge to leak will rise as well.

If the surveillance state has reached an industrial level of operations, 
and ever more secrets are being brought into computer systems, then vast 
troves of secrets exist to be revealed, already cached, organized, and 
ready for the plucking. If the security state itself goes global, then 
the urge to leak will go global, too.

In fact, it already has. It's easy to forget that WikiLeaks was 
originally created not just for American secrets but any secrets. 
Similarly, Manning uploaded his vast trove of secrets from Iraq, and 
Snowden, who had already traveled the world in the service of secrecy, 
leaked to an American columnist living in Brazil and writing for a 
British newspaper. His flight to Hong Kong and dream of Icelandic 
citizenship could be considered another version of the globalizing impulse.

Rest assured, they will not be the last. An all-enveloping atmosphere of 
secrecy is not a natural state of being. Just look at us individually. 
We love to tell stories about each other. Gossiping is one of the most 
basic of human activities. Revealing what others don't know is an 
essential urge. The urge, that is, to open it all up is at least as 
powerful as the urge to shut it all down.

So in our age, considering the gigantism of the US surveillance and 
intelligence apparatus and the secrets it holds, it's a given that the 
leak, too, will become more gigantic, that leaked documents will 
multiply in droves, and that resistance to regimes of secrecy and the 
invasion of private life that goes with them will also become more global.

It's hard from within the US to imagine the shock in Pakistan, or 
Germany, or India, on discovering that your private life may now be the 
property of the US government. (Imagine for a second the reaction here 
if Snowden had revealed that the Pakistani or Iranian or Chinese 
government was gathering and storing vast quantities of private emails, 
texts, phone calls, and credit card transactions from American citizens. 
The uproar would have been staggering.)

As a result of all this, we face a strangely contradictory future in 
which ever more draconian regimes of secrecy will confront the urge for 
ever greater transparency. President Obama came into office promising a 
"sunshine" administration that would open the workings of the government 
to the American people. He didn't deliver, but Bradley Manning, Edward 
Snowden, and other leakers have, and no matter how difficult the 
government makes it to leak or how hard it cracks down on leakers, the 
urge is almost as unstoppable as the urge not to be your government's 
property.

You may have secrets, but you are not a secret - and you know it.

/*Tom Engelhardt*, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author 
of /The United States of Fear/ as well as a history of the Cold War, 
/The End of Victory Culture/ (just published in a Kindle edition), runs 
the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored 
with Nick Turse, is /Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone 
Warfare, 2001-2050.
-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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