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<big><big><strong><font size="3"><big><big>The making of a global
security state</big></big></font></strong></big></big><br>
By Tom Engelhardt
<br>
<br>
<small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-180613.html">http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-180613.html</a></small></small><br>
<br>
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<img src="cid:part1.09020909.00080305@freedomarchives.org"
alt="" style="width: 0px; height: 0px;" height="0" width="0"><br>
urges essential to understanding the world Edward Snowden has helped us
glimpse. <br>
<br>
<b>1: The urge to be global</b><br>
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outdated.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. <br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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?
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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).
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
The next two urges are intertwined in such a way that they might be
thought as a single category: your codes and theirs.
<br>
<br>
<b>2: The urge to make you transparent</b><br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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?
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
<b>3: The urge to make themselves opaque</b><br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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?
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
<b>4: The urge to expand</b><br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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". <br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
<b>5: The urge to leak</b><br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.)
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
You may have secrets, but you are not a secret - and you know it.
<br>
<br>
<i><b>Tom Engelhardt</b>, co-founder of the American Empire Project and
author of </i>The United States of Fear<i> as well as a history of the
Cold War, </i>The End of Victory Culture<i> (just published in a
Kindle edition), runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His
latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is </i>Terminator Planet:
The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.
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