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<p><span style="font-size: x-large;"><strong>Surveillance Blowback </strong></span><br>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><strong>The Making of the U.S.
Surveillance State, 1898-2020<br>
</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><strong><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175724/tomgram%3A_alfred_w._mccoy%2C_obama%27s_expanding_surveillance_universe/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=f7fb1e61ac-TD_McCoy7_14_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1e41682ade-f7fb1e61ac-308742345">http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175724/tomgram%3A_alfred_w._mccoy%2C_obama%27s_expanding_surveillance_universe/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=f7fb1e61ac-TD_McCoy7_14_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1e41682ade-f7fb1e61ac-308742345</a></small></small></small><br>
</strong></span>By <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/alfredmccoy">Alfred W. McCoy</a></p>
<p>The American surveillance state is now an omnipresent reality, but
its deep history is little known and its future little grasped. Edward
Snowden’s <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/the-nsa-files">leaked documents</a>
reveal that, in a post-9/11 state of war, the National Security Agency
(NSA) was able to create a surveillance system that could secretly
monitor the private communications of almost every American in the name
of fighting foreign terrorists. The technology used is state of the
art; the impulse, it turns out, is nothing new. For well over a
century, what might be called “surveillance blowback” from America’s
wars has ensured the creation of an ever more massive and omnipresent
internal security and surveillance apparatus. Its future (though not
ours) looks bright indeed.</p>
<blockquote></blockquote>
In 1898, Washington occupied the Philippines and in the years that
followed pacified its rebellious people, in part by fashioning the
world’s first full-scale “surveillance state” in a colonial land. The
illiberal lessons learned there then migrated homeward, providing the
basis for constructing America’s earliest internal security and
surveillance apparatus during World War I. A half-century later, as
protests mounted during the Vietnam War, the FBI, building on the
foundations of that old security structure, launched large-scale
illegal counterintelligence operations to harass antiwar activists,
while President Richard Nixon’s White House created its own
surveillance apparatus to target its domestic enemies.
<p>In the aftermath of those wars, however, reformers pushed back
against secret surveillance. Republican privacy advocates abolished
much of President Woodrow Wilson’s security apparatus during the 1920s,
and Democratic liberals in Congress created the FISA courts in the
1970s in an attempt to prevent any recurrence of President Nixon’s
illegal domestic wiretapping.</p>
<p>Today, as Washington withdraws troops from the Greater Middle East,
a sophisticated intelligence apparatus built for the pacification of
Afghanistan and Iraq has come home to help create a twenty-first
century surveillance state of unprecedented scope. But the past pattern
that once checked the rise of a U.S. surveillance state seems to be
breaking down. Despite talk about ending the war on terror one day,
President Obama has left the historic pattern of partisan reforms far
behind. In what has become a permanent state of “wartime” at home, the
Obama administration is building upon the surveillance systems created
in the Bush years to maintain U.S. global dominion in peace or war
through a strategic, ever-widening edge in information control. The
White House shows no sign -- nor does Congress -- of cutting back on
construction of a powerful, global Panopticon that can surveil domestic
dissidents, track terrorists, manipulate allied nations, monitor rival
powers, counter hostile cyber strikes, launch preemptive cyberattacks,
and protect domestic communications.</p>
<p>Writing for TomDispatch four years ago during Obama’s first months
in office, I <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175154/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy%2C_surveillance_state%2C_u.s.a">suggested</a>
that the War on Terror has “proven remarkably effective in building a
technological template that could be just a few tweaks away from
creating a domestic surveillance state -- with omnipresent cameras,
deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identification, and drone
aircraft patrolling ‘the homeland.’"</p>
<p>That prediction has become our present reality -- and with stunning
speed. Americans now live under the Argus-eyed gaze of a digital
surveillance state, while increasing numbers of surveillance drones
fill American skies. In addition, the NSA’s net now reaches far beyond
our borders, sweeping up the personal messages of many millions of
people worldwide and penetrating the confidential official
communications of at least 30 allied nations. The past has indeed
proven prologue. The future is now.</p>
<p><strong>The Coming of the Information Revolution</strong></p>
<p>The origins of this emerging global surveillance state date back
over a century to “America’s first information revolution” for the
management of textual, statistical, and analytical data -- a set of
innovations whose synergy created the technological capacity for mass
surveillance.</p>
<p>Here’s a little litany of “progress” to ponder while on the road to
today’s every-email-all-the-time version of surveillance.</p>
<p>Within just a few years, the union of Thomas A. Edison’s quadruplex
telegraph with Philo Remington’s commercial typewriter, both inventions
of 1874, allowed for the accurate transmission of textual data at the
unequalled speed of 40 words per minute across America and around the
world.</p>
<p>In the mid-1870s as well, librarian Melvil Dewey developed the
“Dewey decimal system” to catalog the Amherst College Library, thereby
inventing the “smart number” for the reliable encoding and rapid
retrieval of limitless information.</p>
<p>The year after engineer Herman Hollerith patented the punch card
(1889), the U.S. Census Bureau adopted his Electrical Tabulating
machine to count 62,622,250 Americans within weeks -- a triumph that
later led to the founding of International Business Machines, better
known by its acronym IBM.</p>
<p>By 1900, all American cities were wired via the Gamewell
Corporation’s innovative telegraphic communications, with over 900
municipal police and fire systems sending 41 million messages in a
single year.</p>
<p><strong>A Colonial Laboratory for the Surveillance State</strong></p>
<p>On the eve of empire in 1898, however, the U.S. government was still
what scholar Stephen Skowronek has termed a “patchwork” state with a
near-zero capacity for domestic security. That, of course, left ample
room for the surveillance version of modernization, and it came with
surprising speed after Washington conquered and colonized the
Philippines.</p>
<p>Facing a decade of determined Filipino resistance, the U.S. Army
applied all those American information innovations -- rapid telegraphy,
photographic files, alpha-numeric coding, and Gamewell police
communications -- to the creation of a formidable, three-tier colonial
security apparatus including the Manila Police, the Philippines
Constabulary, and above all the Army’s Division of Military Information.</p>
<p>In early 1901, Captain Ralph Van Deman, later dubbed “the father of
U.S. Military Intelligence,” assumed command of this still embryonic
division, the Army’s first field intelligence unit in its 100-year
history. With a voracious appetite for raw data, Van Deman’s division
compiled phenomenally detailed information on thousands of Filipino
leaders, including their physical appearance, personal finances, landed
property, political loyalties, and kinship networks.</p>
<p>Starting in 1901, the first U.S. governor-general (and future
president) William Howard Taft drafted draconian sedition legislation
for the islands and established a 5,000-man strong Philippines
Constabulary. In the process, he created a colonial surveillance state
that ruled, in part, thanks to the agile control of information,
releasing damning data about enemies while suppressing scandals about
allies.</p>
<p>When the Associated Press’s Manila bureau chief reported critically
on these policies, Taft’s allies dug up dirt on this would-be critic
and dished it out to the New York press. On the other hand, the
Division of Military Information compiled a scandalous report about the
rising Filipino politician Manuel Quezon, alleging a premarital
abortion by his future first lady. Quezon, however, served the
Constabulary as a spy, so this document remained buried in U.S. files,
assuring his unchecked ascent to become the first president of the
Philippines in 1935.</p>
<p><strong>American Blueprint</strong></p>
<p>During the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, Mark Twain wrote an
imagined history of twentieth-century America. In it, he predicted
that a “lust for conquest” had already destroyed “the Great [American]
Republic,” because “trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her,
by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.” Indeed,
just a decade after Twain wrote those prophetic words, colonial police
methods came home to serve as a template for the creation of an
American internal security apparatus in wartime.</p>
<p>After the U.S. entered World War I in 1917 without an intelligence
service of any sort, Colonel Van Deman brought his Philippine
experience to bear, creating the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence
Division (MID) and so laying the institutional foundations for a future
internal security state.</p>
<p>In collaboration with the FBI, he also expanded the MID’s reach
through a civilian auxiliary organization, the American Protective
League, whose 350,000 citizen-operatives amassed more than a million
pages of surveillance reports on German-Americans in just 14 months,
arguably the world’s most intensive feat of domestic surveillance ever.</p>
<p>After the Armistice in 1918, Military Intelligence joined the FBI in
two years of violent repression of the American left marked by the
notorious Luster raids in New York City, J. Edgar Hoover’s “Palmer
Raids” in cities across the northeast and the suppression of union
strikes from New York City to Seattle.</p>
<p>When President Wilson left office in 1921, incoming Republican
privacy advocates condemned his internal security regime as intrusive
and abusive, forcing the Army and the FBI to cut their ties to
patriotic vigilantes. In 1924, Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone,
worrying that “a secret police may become a menace to free government,”
announced “the Bureau of Investigation is not concerned with political
or other opinions of individuals.” Epitomizing the nation’s retreat
from surveillance, Secretary of War Henry Stimson closed the Military
Intelligence cipher section in 1929, saying famously, "Gentlemen do not
read each other's mail."</p>
<p>After retiring at the rank of major general that same year, Van
Deman and his wife continued from their home in San Diego to coordinate
an informal intelligence exchange system, compiling files on 250,000
suspected “subversives.” They also took reports from classified
government files and slipped them to citizen anti-communist groups for
blacklisting. In the 1950 elections, for instance, Representative
Richard Nixon reportedly used Van Deman’s files to circulate “pink
sheets” at rallies denouncing California Congresswoman Helen Gahagan
Douglas, his opponent in a campaign for a Senate seat, launching a
victorious Nixon on the path to the presidency.</p>
<p>From retirement, Van Deman, in league with FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover, also proved crucial at a 1940 closed-door conference that
awarded the FBI control over domestic counterintelligence. The Army’s
Military Intelligence, and its successors, the CIA and NSA, were
restricted to foreign espionage, a division of tasks that would hold,
at least <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175718/todd_gitlin_the_wonderful_american_world_of_informers">in
principle</a>, until the post-9/11 years. So armed, during World War II
the FBI used warrantless wiretaps, “black bag” break-ins, and
surreptitious mail opening to track suspects, while mobilizing more
than 300,000 informers to secure defense plants against wartime threats
that ultimately proved “negligible.”</p>
<p><strong>The Vietnam Years</strong></p>
<p>In response to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam protests of the
1960s, the FBI deployed its COINTELPRO operation, using what Senator
Frank Church’s famous investigative committee later called "unsavory
and vicious tactics... including anonymous attempts to break up
marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions,
and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths."</p>
<p>In assessing COINTELPRO’s 2,370 actions from 1960 to 1974, the
Church Committee branded them a "sophisticated vigilante operation"
that "would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the
targets had been involved in violent activity." Significantly, even
this aggressive Senate investigation did not probe Director Hoover’s
notorious “private files” on the peccadilloes of leading politicians
that had insulated his Bureau from any oversight for more than 30 years.</p>
<p>After <em>New York Times</em> reporter <a target="_blank"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh">Seymour Hersh</a>
exposed illegal CIA surveillance of American antiwar activists in 1974,
Senator Church’s committee and a presidential commission under Nelson
Rockefeller investigated the Agency’s “Operation Chaos,” a program to
conduct massive illegal surveillance of the antiwar protest movement,
discovering a database with 300,000 names. These investigations also
exposed the excesses of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, forcing the Bureau to
reform.</p>
<p>To prevent future abuses, President Jimmy Carter signed the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, creating a special court
to approve all national security wiretaps. In a bitter irony, Carter’s
supposed reform ended up plunging the judiciary into the secret world
of the surveillance managers where, after 9/11, it <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret-court-vastly-broadens-powers-of-nsa.html">became
a rubberstamp institution</a> for every kind of state intrusion on
domestic privacy.</p>
<p><strong>How the Global War on Terror Came Home</strong></p>
<p>As its pacification wars in Afghanistan and Iraq sank into bloody
quagmires, Washington brought electronic surveillance, biometric
identification, and unmanned aerial vehicles to the battlefields. This
trio, which failed to decisively turn the tide in those lands,
nonetheless now undergirds a global U.S. surveillance apparatus of
unequalled scope and unprecedented power.</p>
<p>After confining the populations of Baghdad and the rebellious Sunni
city of Falluja behind blast-wall cordons, the U.S. Army attempted to
bring the Iraqi resistance under control in part by <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/12/iraq-biometrics-database/">collecting</a>,
as of 2011, three million Iraqi fingerprints,iris, and retinal scans.
These were <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2007/121307.html">deposited</a>
in a biometric database in West Virginia that American soldiers at
checkpoints and elsewhere on distant battlefields could at any moment
access by satellite link. Simultaneously, the Joint Special Operations
Command under General Stanley McChrystal <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.brookings.edu/%7E/media/events/2013/1/28%20mcchrystal%20zarqawi/mcchrystal%20transcript.pdf">centralized</a>
all electronic and satellite surveillance in the Greater Middle East to
identify possible al-Qaeda operatives for <a target="_blank"
href="http://us.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/09/09/iraq.secret/index.html">assassination</a>
by Predator drones or hunter-killer raids by Special Operations
commandos from Somalia to Pakistan.</p>
<p>Domestically, post-9/11, the White House tried to create a modern
version of the old state-citizen alliance for domestic surveillance. In
May 2002, President Bush’s Justice Department <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-12-17/news/the-death-of-operation-tips/">launched</a>
Operation TIPS with "millions of American truckers, letter carriers,
train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others" spying
on fellow citizens. But there was vocal opposition from members of
Congress, civil libertarians, and the media, which soon forced Justice
to quietly kill the program.</p>
<p>In a digital iteration of the same effort, retired admiral John
Poindexter began to <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/30/opinion/poindexter-s-follies.html">set
up</a> an ominously titled Pentagon program called Total Information
Awareness to amass a "detailed electronic dossier on millions of
Americans." Again the nation recoiled, Congress banned the program, and
the admiral was forced to resign.</p>
<p>Defeated in the public arena, the Bush administration retreated into
the shadows, where it launched secret FBI and NSA domestic surveillance
programs. Here, Congress proved far more amenable and pliable. In
2002, Congress <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/30/us/threats-responses-law-administration-begins-rewrite-decades-old-spying.html">erased</a>
the bright line that had long barred the CIA from domestic spying,
granting the agency the power to access U.S. financial records and
audit electronic communications routed through the country.</p>
<p>Defying the FISA law, in October 2001 President Bush <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/us/revelations-give-look-at-spy-agencys-wider-reach.html">ordered</a>
the NSA to commence covert monitoring of private communications through
the nation's telephone companies without the requisite warrants. <a
target="_blank"
href="http://bigstory.ap.org/article/secret-prism-success-even-bigger-data-seizure">According
to</a> the Associated Press, he also “secretly authorized the NSA to
plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United
States” carrying the world’s “emails, telephone calls, video chats,
websites, bank transactions, and more.” Since his administration had
already <a target="_blank"
href="http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/national-security-agency-inspector-general-draft-report/277/">conveniently
decided</a> that “metadata was not constitutionally protected,” the NSA
began an open-ended program, Operation Stellar Wind, “to collect bulk
telephony and Internet metadata.”</p>
<p>By 2004, the Bush White House was so wedded to Internet metadata
collection that top aides barged into Attorney General John Ashcroft’s
hospital room to extract a reauthorization signature for the program.
They were <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/27/nsa-data-mining-authorised-obama">blocked</a>
by Justice Department officials led by Deputy Attorney General James
Comey, forcing a two-month suspension until that FISA court, brought
into existence in the Carter years, put its first rubber-stamp on this
mass surveillance regime.</p>
<p>Armed with expansive FISA court orders allowing the collection of
data sets rather than information from specific targets, the FBI’s “<a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2006_hr/050206mueller.html">Investigative
Data Warehouse</a>” acquired <a target="_blank"
href="https://www.eff.org/issues/foia/investigative-data-warehouse-report">more
than a billion documents</a> within five years, including intelligence
reports, social security files, drivers’ licenses, and private
financial information. All of this was accessible to 13,000 analysts
making a million queries monthly. In 2006, as the flood of data surging
through fiber optic cables strained NSA computers, the Bush
administration <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/us/revelations-give-look-at-spy-agencys-wider-reach.html">launched</a>
the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity to develop
supercomputing searches powerful enough to process this torrent of
Internet information.</p>
<p>In 2005, a <em>New York Times</em> investigative report <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html">exposed</a>
the administration’s illegal surveillance for the first time. A year
later, <em>USA Today</em> <a target="_blank"
href="http://yahoo.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm">reported</a>
that the NSA was “secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of
millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon, and
Bell South.” One expert called it "the largest database ever assembled
in the world," adding presciently that the Agency's goal was "to create
a database of every call ever made."</p>
<p>In August 2007, in response to these revelations, Congress
capitulated. It passed a new law, the Protect America Act, which
retrospectively legalized this illegal White House-inspired set of
programs by requiring greater oversight by the FISA court. This secret
tribunal -- acting almost as a “<a target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret-court-vastly-broadens-powers-of-nsa.html">parallel
Supreme Court</a>” that rules on fundamental constitutional rights
without adversarial proceedings or higher review -- has removed any
real restraint on the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of
Internet metadata and <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-foreign-intelligence-surveillance-court/2013/06/07/4700b382-cfec-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_graphic.html?Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost">regularly
rubberstamps</a> almost 100% of the government’s thousands of
surveillance requests. Armed with expanded powers, the National
Security Agency promptly <a target="_blank"
href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-06-06/news/39784046_1_prism-nsa-u-s-servers">launched</a>
its PRISM program (recently revealed by Edward Snowden). To feed its
hungry search engines, the NSA has compelled nine Internet giants,
including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, and Skype, to
transfer what became billions of emails to its massive data farms.</p>
<p><strong>Obama’s Expanding Surveillance Universe</strong></p>
<p>Instead of curtailing his predecessor’s wartime surveillance, as
Republicans did in the 1920s and Democrats in the 1970s, President
Obama has overseen the expansion of the NSA’s wartime digital
operations into a permanent weapon for the exercise of U.S. global
power.</p>
<p>The Obama administration continued a Bush-era NSA program of “bulk
email records collection” until 2011 when two senators <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-udall-statement-on-the-disclosure-of-bulk-email-records-collection-program">protested</a>
that the agency’s “statements to both Congress and the Court...
significantly exaggerated this program’s effectiveness.” Eventually,
the administration was forced to curtail this particular operation.
Nonetheless, the NSA has continued to <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order">collect</a>
the personal communications of Americans by the billions under its <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-collection-documents/">PRISM</a>
and other programs.</p>
<p>In the Obama years as well, the NSA began cooperating with its
long-time British counterpart, the Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ), to <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa">tap
into</a> the dense cluster of Trans-Atlantic Telecommunication fiber
optic cables that transit the United Kingdom. During a visit to a GCHQ
facility for high-altitude intercepts at Menwith Hill in June 2008, NSA
Director General Keith Alexander asked, “Why can’t we collect all the
signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith.”</p>
<p>In the process, GCHQ’s Operation Tempora <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa">achieved</a>
the “biggest Internet access” of any partner in a “Five Eyes”
signals-intercept coalition that, in addition to Great Britain and the
U.S., includes Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. When the project
went online in 2011, the GCHQ sank probes into 200 Internet cables and
was soon collecting 600 million telephone messages daily, which were,
in turn, made accessible to 850,000 NSA employees.</p>
<p>The historic alliance between the NSA and GCHQ <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/25/intelligence-deal-uk-us-released">dates
back</a> to the dawn of the Cold War. In deference to it, the NSA has,
since 2007, exempted its “2nd party” Five Eyes allies from surveillance
under its “Boundless Informant” operation. According to another <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/secret-documents-nsa-targeted-germany-and-eu-buildings-a-908609.html">recently
leaked</a> NSA document, however, “we can, and often do, target the
signals of most 3rd party foreign partners.” This is clearly a
reference to close allies like Germany, France, and Italy.</p>
<p>On a busy day in January 2013, for instance, the NSA <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/secret-documents-nsa-targeted-germany-and-eu-buildings-a-908609.html">collected</a>
60 million phone calls and emails from Germany -- some 500 million
German messages are reportedly collected annually -- with lesser but
still hefty numbers from France, Italy, and non-European allies like <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/07/nsa-brazilians-globo-spying">Brazil</a>.
To gain operational intelligence on such allies, the NSA <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/30/nsa-leaks-us-bugging-european-allies">taps
phones</a> at the European Council headquarters in Brussels, bugs the
European Union (EU) delegation at the U.N., has planted a “Dropmire”
monitor “on the Cryptofax at the EU embassy DC,” and eavesdrops on 38
allied embassies worldwide.</p>
<p>Such secret intelligence about its allies gives Washington an
immense diplomatic advantage, <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/02/world/europe/france-and-germany-piqued-over-spying-scandal.html">says</a>
NSA expert James Bamford. “It’s the equivalent of going to a poker game
and wanting to know what everyone’s hand is before you place your bet.”
And who knows what scurrilous bits of scandal about world leaders
American surveillance systems might scoop up to strengthen Washington’s
hand in that global poker game called diplomacy.</p>
<p>This sort of digital surveillance was soon supplemented by actual
Internet warfare. Between 2006 and 2010, Washington launched <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/general-keith-alexander-cyberwar/all/">the
planet’s first cyberwar</a>, with Obama <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html">ordering</a>
devastating cyberattacks against Iran's nuclear facilities. In 2009,
the Pentagon <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/technology/24cyber.html">formed</a>
the U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), with a cybercombat center at
Lackland Air Base initially <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/us/01cyberwar.html">staffed</a>
by 7,000 Air Force employees. Over the next two years, by <a
target="_blank" href="http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123205791">appointing</a>
NSA chief Alexander as CYBERCOM’s concurrent commander, it created an
enormous concentration of power in the digital shadows. The Pentagon
has also <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/14/us-usa-defense-cybersecurity-idUSTRE76D5FA20110714">declared</a>
cyberspace an “operational domain” for both offensive and defensive
warfare.</p>
<p><strong>Controlling the Future</strong></p>
<p>By leaking a handful of NSA documents, Edward Snowden has given us a
glimpse of future U.S. global policy and the changing architecture of
power on this planet. At the broadest level, this digital shift
complements Obama’s new defense strategy, announced in 2012, of <a
target="_blank"
href="http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/01/obama-defense-cuts/1#.UdzpKkK_LA4">reducing
costs</a> (cutting, for example, infantry troops by 14%), while
conserving Washington’s overall power by developing a <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.defense.gov/news/Defense_Strategic_Guidance.pdf">capacity</a>
for “a combined arms campaign across all domains -- land, air,
maritime, space, and cyberspace.”</p>
<p>While cutting conventional armaments, Obama is investing billions in
constructing a new architecture for global information control. To
store and process the billions of messages sucked up by its worldwide
surveillance network (<a target="_blank"
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-datamining">totaling</a>
97 billion items for March alone), the NSA is <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/secret-documents-nsa-targeted-germany-and-eu-buildings-a-908609.html">employing</a>
11,000 workers to build a $1.6 billion data center in Bluffdale, Utah,
whose <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1">storage
capacity</a> is measured in “yottabytes,” each the equivalent of a
trillion terabytes. That’s almost unimaginable once you realize that
just 15 terabytes could store every publication in the Library of
Congress. </p>
<p>From its new $1.8 billion headquarters, the third-biggest building
in the Washington area, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency <a
target="_blank"
href="http://blogs.reuters.com/gregg-easterbrook/2011/01/20/undisciplined-spending-in-the-name-of-defense/">deploys</a>
16,000 employees and a $5 billion budget to coordinate a rising torrent
of surveillance data from Predators, Reapers, U-2 spy planes, Global
Hawks, X-37B space drones, Google Earth, Space Surveillance Telescopes,
and orbiting satellites.</p>
<p>To protect those critical orbiting satellites, which transmit most
U.S. military communications, the Pentagon is building an aerospace
shield of pilotless drones. In the exosphere, the Air Force has since
April 2010 been <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jun/16/unmanned-air-force-space-plane-lands-calif/">successfully
testing</a> the X-37B space drone that can <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11911335">carry
missiles</a> to strike rival satellite networks such as the one the
Chinese are currently creating.</p>
<p>For more extensive and precise surveillance from space, the Pentagon
has been <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/spy-sat-faster-cheaper/">replacing</a>
its costly, school-bus-sized spy satellites with a new generation of
light, low cost models such as the <a target="_blank"
href="https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missions/o/ors-1">ATK-A200</a>.
Successfully launched in May 2011, this module is orbiting 250 miles
above the Earth with remote-controlled, U-2 quality cameras that now
provide the “U.S. Central Command an assured ISR (Intelligence,
Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) capability.”</p>
<p>In the stratosphere, close enough to Earth for audiovisual
surveillance, the Pentagon is planning to <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/business/global-hawk-is-poised-to-replace-u-2-spy-plane.html">launch</a>
an armada of 99 Global Hawk drones -- each equipped with
high-resolution cameras to surveil all terrain within a 100-mile
radius, electronic sensors to intercept communications, and efficient
engines for continuous 24-hour flight.</p>
<p>Within a decade, the U.S. will likely deploy this aerospace shield,
advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and even vaster, more omnipresent
digital surveillance networks that will envelop the Earth in an
electronic grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield,
atomizing a single suspected terrorist, or monitoring millions of
private lives at home and abroad.</p>
<p>Sadly, Mark Twain was right when he warned us just over 100 years
ago that America could not have both empire abroad and democracy at
home. To paraphrase his prescient words, by “trampling upon the
helpless abroad” with unchecked surveillance, Americans have learned,
“by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.”</p>
<p><em>Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. A </em><a target="_blank"
href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175614/alfred_mccoy_superweapons_and_global_dominion"><em>TomDispatch
regular</em></a><em>, he is the author </em><a target="_blank"
href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299234142/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">Policing
America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of
the Surveillance State</a><em> (University of Wisconsin), which is the
source for much of the material in this essay.</em></p>
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