Everybody’s a Target in the American Surveillance State

By John W. Whitehead

“Everybody’s a tar­get; every­body with com­mu­ni­ca­tion is a target.”—A senior intel­li­gence offi­cial pre­vi­ously involved with the Utah Data Center

In the small town of Bluff­dale, Utah, not far from bustling Salt Lake City, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment is qui­etly erect­ing what will be the crown jewel of its sur­veil­lance empire. Ris­ing up out of the desert land­scape, the Utah Data Cen­ter (UDC)—a $2 bil­lion behe­moth designed to house a net­work of com­put­ers, satel­lites, and phone lines that stretches across the world—is intended to serve as the cen­tral hub of the National Secu­rity Agency’s vast spy­ing infra­struc­ture. Once com­plete (the UDC is expected to be fully oper­a­tional by Sep­tem­ber 2013), the last link in the chain of the elec­tronic con­cen­tra­tion camp that sur­rounds us will be com­plete, and pri­vacy, as we have known it, will be extinct.

At five times the size of the U.S. Capi­tol, the UDC will be a clear­ing­house and a depos­i­tory for every imag­in­able kind of information—whether inno­cent or not, pri­vate or public—including com­mu­ni­ca­tions, trans­ac­tions and the like. Any­thing and every­thing you’ve ever said or done, from the triv­ial to the damning—phone calls, Face­book posts, Twit­ter tweets, Google searches, emails, book­store and gro­cery pur­chases, bank state­ments, com­muter toll records, etc.—will be tracked, col­lected, cat­a­logued and ana­lyzed by the UDC’s super­com­put­ers and teams of gov­ern­ment agents. In this way, by sift­ing through the detri­tus of your once-private life, the gov­ern­ment will come to its own con­clu­sions about who you are, where you fit in, and how best to deal with you should the need arise.

What lit­tle we know about this highly clas­si­fied spy center—which will be oper­ated by the National Secu­rity Agency (NSA)—comes from James Bam­ford, a for­mer intel­li­gence ana­lyst and an expert on the highly secre­tive gov­ern­ment agency. Bamford’s expose in Wired (March 15, 2012), a must-read for any­one con­cerned about the loss of our free­doms in a tech­no­log­i­cal age, pro­vides a chill­ing glimpse into the government’s plans for total con­trol, a.k.a., total infor­ma­tion awareness.

As Bam­ford notes, the NSA “has trans­formed itself into the largest, most covert, and poten­tially most intru­sive intel­li­gence agency ever cre­ated. In the process—and for the first time since Water­gate and the other scan­dals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its sur­veil­lance appa­ra­tus on the US and its citizens.”

Sup­pos­edly cre­ated by the NSA in order to track for­eign threats to Amer­ica, as well as to shore up cyber­se­cu­rity and bat­tle hack­ers, the UDC’s tech­no­log­i­cal capa­bil­i­ties are astound­ing. As the cen­tral depos­i­tory for all of the infor­ma­tion gath­ered by the NSA’s vast spy cen­ters, the UDC’s super­com­put­ers will be capa­ble of down­load­ing data amount­ing to the entire con­tents of the Library of Con­gress every six hours. How­ever, the data being tar­geted goes far beyond the scope of ter­ror­ist threats. In fact, as Bam­ford points out, the NSA is inter­ested in noth­ing less than the “so-called invis­i­ble web, also known as the deep web or deepnet—data beyond the reach of the pub­lic. This includes password-protected data, US and for­eign gov­ern­ment com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and non­com­mer­cial file-sharing between trusted peers.”

The loss of pri­vacy result­ing from such aggres­sive sur­veil­lance sys­tems high­lights very dra­mat­i­cally the grow­ing prob­lem of large pub­lic and pri­vate insti­tu­tions in rela­tion to the indi­vid­ual cit­i­zen. What we are wit­ness­ing, in the so-called name of secu­rity and effi­ciency, is the cre­ation of a new class sys­tem com­prised of the watched (aver­age Amer­i­cans such as you and me) and the watch­ers (gov­ern­ment bureau­crats, tech­ni­cians and pri­vate corporations).

The grow­ing need for tech­ni­cians neces­si­tates the bureau­cracy. The mas­sive bureaucracies—now computerized—that admin­is­ter gov­ern­men­tal pol­icy are a per­ma­nent form of gov­ern­ment. Pres­i­dents come and go, but the non­elected bureau­crats remain.

The ques­tion looms before us. Can free­dom in the United States con­tinue to flour­ish and grow in an age when the phys­i­cal move­ments, indi­vid­ual pur­chases, con­ver­sa­tions, and meet­ings of every cit­i­zen are con­stantly under sur­veil­lance by pri­vate com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ment agencies?

Whether or not the sur­veil­lance is under­taken for “inno­cent” rea­sons, does not sur­veil­lance of all cit­i­zens, even the inno­cent sort, grad­u­ally poi­son the soul of a nation? Does not sur­veil­lance limit per­sonal options—deny free­dom of choice—for many indi­vid­u­als? Does not sur­veil­lance increase the pow­ers of those who are in a posi­tion to enjoy the fruits of this activ­ity? Is not con­trol the name of the game?

We are all becom­ing data col­lected in gov­ern­ment files. Alek­sandr Solzhen­it­syn, who suf­fered under the secret police in the Soviet Union, wrote about this process some years ago:

As every man goes through life he fills in a num­ber of forms for the record, each con­tain­ing a num­ber of questions….There are thus hun­dreds of lit­tle threads radi­at­ing from every man, mil­lions of threads in all. If these threads were sud­denly to become vis­i­ble, the whole sky would look like a spider’s web, and if they mate­ri­al­ized like rub­ber bands, buses and trams and even peo­ple would lose the abil­ity to move and the wind would be unable to carry torn-up news­pa­pers or autumn leaves along the streets of the city.

Thus, we come back to the NSA’s spy cen­ter. That the NSA, which has shown itself to care lit­tle for con­sti­tu­tional lim­its or pri­vacy, is the dri­ving force behind this spy cen­ter is no sur­prise. The agency, which is three times the size of the CIA, con­sumes one third of the intel­li­gence bud­get and has a global spy net­work, has a long his­tory of spy­ing on Americans—whether or not it has always had the autho­riza­tion to do so. Take, for instance, the war­rant­less wire­tap­ping pro­gram con­ducted dur­ing the Bush years, which resulted in the NSA mon­i­tor­ing the pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tions of mil­lions of Americans—a pro­gram that con­tin­ues unabated today, with help from pri­vate telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies such as AT&T. The pro­gram recorded 320 mil­lion phone calls a day when it first started. It is esti­mated that the NSA has inter­cepted 15 to 20 tril­lion com­mu­ni­ca­tions of Amer­i­can cit­i­zens since 9/11.

What has proven to be sur­pris­ing to some is that the Obama White House has proven to be just as bad, if not worse, than the Bush White House when it comes to invad­ing the pri­vacy rights of Amer­i­cans. As Yale law pro­fes­sor Jack Balkin notes, “We are wit­ness­ing the bipar­ti­san nor­mal­iza­tion and legit­imiza­tion of a national-surveillance state. [Obama has] sys­tem­at­i­cally adopted poli­cies con­sis­tent with the sec­ond term of the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion.” Unfor­tu­nately, whereas those on the Left raised a hew and cry over the Bush administration’s con­stant encroach­ments on Amer­i­cans’ pri­vacy rights, it appears that the polit­i­cal lean­ings of those on the Left have held greater sway than their prin­ci­ples. Con­se­quently, the Obama admin­is­tra­tion has faced much less crit­i­cism for its bla­tant efforts to rein­force the sur­veil­lance state.

Clearly, the age of pri­vacy in Amer­ica is com­ing to a close. We have moved into a new par­a­digm in which sur­veil­lance tech­nol­ogy which ren­ders every­one a sus­pect is dri­ving the bureau­cratic ship that once was our demo­c­ra­tic repub­lic. By the time this UDC spy cen­ter is fully oper­a­tional, no phone call, no email, no Tweet, no web search is safe from the pry­ing eyes and ears of the gov­ern­ment. Peo­ple going about their daily busi­ness will no longer be assured that they are not being spied upon by fed­eral agents and other gov­ern­ment bureaucrats.

While the responses to the news of the Bluff­dale facil­ity have been var­ied, with some Amer­i­cans cleav­ing to the over-used gov­ern­ment line “if you have noth­ing to hide, you have no need to worry,” more and more peo­ple are start­ing to feel like Mike Newell, a Wired reader who had this to say about the UDC:

Not very long ago.…. I actu­ally believed that I would be will­ing to sac­ri­fice a bit of free­dom for secu­rity. I believed that a guard or cop at the entrance to my com­mu­nity, check­ing I.D. would be bet­ter than car loads of gang mem­bers roam­ing through cre­at­ing havoc. I once laughed at those who mis­trusted the gov­ern­ment and pre­pared for sur­vival, should things go side­ways. I sup­ported efforts by our so called “lead­ers” to mon­i­tor soci­ety, in search for the ever present evil. Not long ago.…. I slept.

I just fin­ished build­ing my fourth M-4. I just fin­ished load­ing my 3rd case of 5.56. Today my Saiga 12 arrives. My wife has canned enough food to feed a city. I have taken great steps at a great cost to ensure that I am fully self reliant under any cir­cum­stance. I am awake.

Any­one who really believes that the sim­ple act of dis­cussing this on the inter­net, has not steered elec­tronic ears in your direc­tion.… is sound asleep and I under­stand that. Some­one eluded to it and I repeat this truth. In 1935 Ger­many… many cit­i­zens felt uneasy and sensed that doom was on the way. More laughed such talk off and con­tin­ued to find rea­sons to smile and enjoy the day. We all know the end of that story.

The new I Pad was released!!!!! Snooky had a melt­down! My Mac Pro is awe­some!!! These trin­kets that keep us gig­gling and focused on noth­ing.… this addic­tion to instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion.….… this will be our downfall.

There’s a storm brewing.

Posted by Guest 1 Columnist on Apr 2 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.