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<font size=4><b>Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Intelligence Bureaucracy That
Ate Our World<br><br>
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<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175524/tomgram:_engelhardt,_the_intelligence_bureaucracy_that_ate_our_world/#more" eudora="autourl">
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175524/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_intelligence_bureaucracy_that_ate_our_world/#more<br>
</a></font>Posted by Tom Engelhardt at 9:07am, April 3, 2012.<br><br>
[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]<br><br>
Data Mining You<br>
How the Intelligence Community Is Creating a New American World<br>
By Tom Engelhardt<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.’”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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).<br><br>
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?<br><br>
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.<br><br>
A System That Creates Its Own Reality<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
A Basilica of Chaos<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
For now, it remains as anonymous as Joseph K. and so, conveniently
enough, continues to expand right before our eyes, strangely
unseen.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Welcome, in the meantime, to our nameless new world. One thing is
guaranteed: it has a byte.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on
Facebook.<br><br>
Copyright 2012 Tom Engelhardt<br><br>
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