NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] The Soviet Surveillance States of America
The Soviet Surveillance States of America
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001039.html
[Please note: Reference links associated with this item are at the end
of the posting.]
In Theodore J. Flicker's prescient, darkly comical 1967 film -- "The
President's Analyst" -- there's a bit of dialogue I've quoted many
times over the decades. A Soviet spy and an American spy, friends of
long standing, despite being on opposite sides, are working together
informally. When the object of their common search appears to have
been kidnapped right under their noses, the American spy suggests that
the phone booth they'd been using was tapped.
The Russian is incredulous. "Are you trying to tell me that every
phone in the country is tapped?" "That's what's in my head," replies
the U.S. agent. "But Don! This is America, nor Russia!" exclaims the
Russian.
The film's parallels go even further. The U.S. is being essentially
run by the bureaucrats of the law enforcement and intelligence
agencies -- spying and wiretapping everywhere, while the president is
implicitly relegated to the role of a largely impotent bystander.
Needless to say, the movie did not go over well with the U.S.
authorities in 1967. It's likely nobody would dare produce such a
film today.
For students of U.S. intelligence and law, the new confirmation that
the federal government has been collecting phone call detail records
en masse on Americans shouldn't come as a big surprise. The major
phone companies have long considered such data a mere commodity, and
built enormous businesses selling this kind of information to third
parties, emboldened by a variety of court decisions.
The knee-jerk PATRIOT Act legislation following 9/11 set the stage for
even worse abuses in this sphere -- even though one of its authors is
today claiming that this isn't what he actually had in mind. Apology
not accepted -- the abuse potential of PATRIOT was obvious from day
one.
Still, the current round of revelations are obviously very upsetting,
more so for how they help us connect the dots than for their specifics
in this case.
While we've only seen one leaked document so far in this round, we can
safely assume that similar orders exist for every other major telecom
carrier, reaching back to at least 2006 and the Bush administration.
Given NSA's known proclivity for the "vacuum cleaner" approach to data
collection -- essentially that they don't consider "mere" collection
an abuse, or even really collection at all until specific data is
analyzed -- such activities likely go back even further in at least
some respects.
We now also have confirmation that top Congressional leaders have
known about this -- some of them likely since the very beginning.
Their remarks today are enormously telling and troubling.
We're told that this massive operation was justified because it
"stopped a terrorist" attack. That could mean pretty much anything,
considering the low threshold now employed to define violent acts as
terrorism. But how are we to know if any sort of reasonable balance
has been achieved between our civil rights vs. "preventing attacks" of
any sorts? Would the same effect be achievable in a much less
invasive manner? Why bother even figuring that out if you can just
order the phone companies to give you everything.
Leaders are now also informing us that there were no complaints from
citizens about the program (unsurprising, given that it was, you know,
classified) and that we shouldn't be concerned because it's been going
on for at least seven years -- it's nothing new, we're reassured. (Why
are you upset that you just found out I've been sleeping with your
wife? We've been screwing each other since 2006!)
The generally bipartisan nature of the "nothing to worry about"
pronouncements today are quite noteworthy, and while we already knew
pretty well how Congress operates, one might wonder why President
Obama has been co-opted into such invasions of our civil liberties,
apparently by continuing the abuses initiated by his GOP predecessor.
I have a theory about that, which explains why political parties just
don't matter in these situations.
Remember that law enforcement and intelligence agencies are mainly
bureaucratic organizations, desperate to protect their own turfs and
funding. (In "The President's Analyst" the "FBR" and "CEA" were
always at each other's throats -- the "real" initials were dubbed out
in post-production after actual threats from the government!)
My guess is that as soon as a new president is sworn in -- regardless
of political party -- the heads of the various interested agencies
march into the Oval Office and present the new head of state with "The
Briefing Book of Doom (BBD)."
The BBD would be designed to scare the president out his or her wits
by drawing the bleakest, most alarming possible picture of world
threats, and emphasizing how any attempt to reign in previous abuses
by these agencies could (it is claimed) result in catastrophe ("and by
the way, we need much more money, too!")
Few persons are going to have the spine to stand up to such a
collective onslaught from the spooks, designed to appeal to emotion
rather than reason and logic. It matters not if your affiliation is
Republican, Democrat, or Jedi Master.
In this way, the unelected bureaucrats have usurped enormous power, in
a manner eerily reminiscent in some ways of the old Soviet Union.
Back to connecting those dots. Even as I'm typing these words, more
new revelations are circulating today, about a highly classified
program named "PRISM" tying the FBI and NSA directly into major
Internet services to gather email, audio, video, photographs,
documents, and connection logs. This appears to have also begun under
Bush, and grown exponentially since then. Some in Congress have
reportedly known about this all along also. PRISM is reportedly not a
mass data collection system per se, but rather a means for the
government to access specified data as quickly as possible.
Again, such a program has been long suspected, and helps to explain
the government's push for extended CALEA access and their increasingly
loud demands for easy means to obtain the "plain text" (unencrypted)
contents of encrypted Internet data streams and associated services.
We can also assume that most postal transactions have long been at
least tracked.
I'm frequently asked if it's likely that the government is collecting
the actual contents of phone calls on a large-scale basis, bringing us
back around to our Soviet and American movie spy friends.
As far back as 2006, I speculated that the technology to do this was
within reach, but that for practical reasons a "record every call"
approach seemed unlikely. Even now, with the massive improvements in
tech since then, I still suspect that actual call recording tends to
be quite focused, rather than comprehensive, for technical reasons
beyond the scope of this posting. In absolute terms though, it may
still be quite large.
We also now can begin to understand the depths of the threats and
pressures that the government -- via National Security Letters and
these various classified programs -- have been asserting against major
Internet firms.
Reading between the lines of the cases we already knew about, firms
like Google and others have been trying to warn us about this -- the
best that they could do given the constraints forced upon them by a
secretive, data-hungry government.
I also personally believe that we now can see more clearly the depth
of hypocrisy and diversion involved in the government spending so much
effort publicly attacking harmless, anonymous, personalized Internet
ad systems, while at the same time engaging in such massive, secret,
highly personal, and deeply invasive intrusions of their own citizens'
lives.
Beyond all this, there's a truly upsetting question. If our own
government is willing to go this far at this stage in such a
bipartisan manner -- republicans and democrats alike -- what might
happen if someday a small nuke or dirty bomb is detonated in a U.S.
city? Even if relatively few persons were actually harmed, how long
would any of our remaining civil liberties be intact? You know the
answer.
I called this posting "The Soviet Surveillance States of America" --
but perhaps not for the reasons you might have suspected. While the
old Soviet Union (and unfortunately, increasingly the new Russia)
certainly have engaged in evil acts, it would not be truthful to
suggest that all of their associated motivations were necessarily
actually evil themselves.
Much more dangerous than true evil itself is leaders who honestly feel
that they are doing the right thing for their countries and people,
and slide down the slippery slope of increasingly intrusive civil
liberties decimations in the process. It is in this way that many of
history's worst tyrannies were gestated -- pulled into a putrid pit
via a chain of ostensibly noble deeds.
The old USSR likely would have made many of the same pro-surveillance
arguments that our leaders here are making today, if the technology in
focus now had actually existed then.
We've all heard it said that "The road to hell is paved with good
intentions."
It's something to remember, comrades. Something definitely to
remember.
--Lauren--
- - -
References:
"NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily":
http://j.mp/18XKs62 (Guardian)
"U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in
broad secret program":
http://j.mp/11kJcRC (Washington Post)
"NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program":
http://j.mp/11kJbgw (Washington Post)
- - -
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
- Data Wisdom Explorers League: http://www.dwel.org
- Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://vortex.com/g+lauren / Twitter: http://vortex.com/t-lauren
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
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