[NCUC-DISCUSS] A bit of history

[DeeDee Halleck]

*Surveillance Blowback *
*The Making of the U.S. Surveillance State, 1898-2020 *
By Alfred W. McCoy <http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/alfredmccoy>

The American surveillance state is now an omnipresent reality, but its deep
history is little known and its future little grasped.  Edward Snowden’s leaked
documents <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/the-nsa-files> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Writing for TomDispatch four years ago during Obama’s first months in
office, I suggested<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175154/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy%2C_surveillance_state%2C_u.s.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.’"

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.

*The Coming of the Information Revolution*

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.

Here’s a little litany of “progress” to ponder while on the road to today’s
every-email-all-the-time version of surveillance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

*A Colonial Laboratory for the Surveillance State*

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

*American Blueprint*

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

>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 in
principle<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175718/todd_gitlin_the_wonderful_american_world_of_informers>,
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.”

*The Vietnam Years*

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."

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.

<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299234142/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>After *New
York Times* reporter Seymour
Hersh<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh> 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.

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 became a rubberstamp
institution<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret-court-vastly-broadens-powers-of-nsa.html>
for
every kind of state intrusion on domestic privacy.

*How the Global War on Terror Came Home*

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.

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
collecting<http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/12/iraq-biometrics-database/>,
as of 2011, three million Iraqi fingerprints,iris, and retinal scans.
These were deposited <http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2007/121307.html> 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
centralized<http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/events/2013/1/28%20mcchrystal%20zarqawi/mcchrystal%20transcript.pdf>
all
electronic and satellite surveillance in the Greater Middle East to
identify possible al-Qaeda operatives for
assassination<http://us.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/09/09/iraq.secret/index.html>
by
Predator drones or hunter-killer raids by Special Operations commandos from
Somalia to Pakistan.

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
launched<http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-12-17/news/the-death-of-operation-tips/>
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.

In a digital iteration of the same effort, retired admiral John Poindexter
began toset up<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/30/opinion/poindexter-s-follies.html>
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.

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 erased<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/30/us/threats-responses-law-administration-begins-rewrite-decades-old-spying.html>
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.

Defying the FISA law, in October 2001 President Bush
ordered<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/us/revelations-give-look-at-spy-agencys-wider-reach.html>
the
NSA to commence covert monitoring of private communications through the
nation's telephone companies without the requisite warrants. According
to<http://bigstory.ap.org/article/secret-prism-success-even-bigger-data-seizure>
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 conveniently
decided<http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/national-security-agency-inspector-general-draft-report/277/>
that
“metadata was not constitutionally protected,” the NSA began an open-ended
program, Operation Stellar Wind, “to collect bulk telephony and Internet
metadata.”

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
blocked<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/27/nsa-data-mining-authorised-obama>
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.

Armed with expansive FISA court orders allowing the collection of data sets
rather than information from specific targets, the FBI’s “Investigative
Data Warehouse <http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2006_hr/050206mueller.html>”
acquired more than a billion
documents<https://www.eff.org/issues/foia/investigative-data-warehouse-report>
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 launched<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/us/revelations-give-look-at-spy-agencys-wider-reach.html>
the
Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity to develop supercomputing
searches powerful enough to process this torrent of Internet information.

In 2005, a *New York Times* investigative report
exposed<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html> the
administration’s illegal surveillance for the first time. A year later, *USA
Today* reported<http://yahoo.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm>
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."

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 “parallel
Supreme Court<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret-court-vastly-broadens-powers-of-nsa.html>”
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 regularly
rubberstamps<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>
almost
100% of the government’s thousands of surveillance requests. Armed with
expanded powers, the National Security Agency promptly
launched<http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-06-06/news/39784046_1_prism-nsa-u-s-servers>
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.

*Obama’s Expanding Surveillance Universe*

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.

The Obama administration continued a Bush-era NSA program of “bulk email
records collection” until 2011 when two senators
protested<http://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-udall-statement-on-the-disclosure-of-bulk-email-records-collection-program>
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 collect<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order>
the
personal communications of Americans by the billions under its
PRISM<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-collection-documents/>
and
other programs.

In the Obama years as well, the NSA began cooperating with its long-time
British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), to tap
into<http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa>
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.”

In the process, GCHQ’s Operation Tempora
achieved<http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa>
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.

The historic alliance between the NSA and GCHQ dates
back<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/25/intelligence-deal-uk-us-released>
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 recently
leaked<http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/secret-documents-nsa-targeted-germany-and-eu-buildings-a-908609.html>
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.

On a busy day in January 2013, for instance, the NSA
collected<http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/secret-documents-nsa-targeted-germany-and-eu-buildings-a-908609.html>
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
Brazil<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/07/nsa-brazilians-globo-spying>.
To gain operational intelligence on such allies, the NSA taps
phones<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/30/nsa-leaks-us-bugging-european-allies>
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.

Such secret intelligence about its allies gives Washington an immense
diplomatic advantage,
says<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/02/world/europe/france-and-germany-piqued-over-spying-scandal.html>
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.

This sort of digital surveillance was soon supplemented by actual Internet
warfare.  Between 2006 and 2010, Washington launched the planet’s first
cyberwar<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/general-keith-alexander-cyberwar/all/>,
with Obama ordering<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html>
devastating
cyberattacks against Iran's nuclear facilities. In 2009, the Pentagon
formed<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/technology/24cyber.html> the
U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), with a cybercombat center at Lackland Air
Base initiallystaffed <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/us/01cyberwar.html> by
7,000 Air Force employees. Over the next two years, by
appointing<http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123205791>NSA
chief Alexander as CYBERCOM’s concurrent commander, it created an enormous
concentration of power in the digital shadows.  The Pentagon has also
declared<http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/14/us-usa-defense-cybersecurity-idUSTRE76D5FA20110714>
cyberspace
an “operational domain” for both offensive and defensive warfare.

*Controlling the Future*

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 reducing
costs<http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/01/obama-defense-cuts/1#.UdzpKkK_LA4>
(cutting,
for example, infantry troops by 14%), while conserving Washington’s overall
power by developing a
capacity<http://www.defense.gov/news/Defense_Strategic_Guidance.pdf>
for
“a combined arms campaign across all domains -- land, air, maritime, space,
and cyberspace.”

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
(totaling<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-datamining>
97
billion items for March alone), the NSA is
employing<http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/secret-documents-nsa-targeted-germany-and-eu-buildings-a-908609.html>11,000
workers to build a $1.6 billion data center in Bluffdale, Utah, whosestorage
capacity <http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1> 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.

>From its new $1.8 billion headquarters, the third-biggest building in the
Washington area, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
deploys<http://blogs.reuters.com/gregg-easterbrook/2011/01/20/undisciplined-spending-in-the-name-of-defense/>
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.

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 successfully
testing<http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jun/16/unmanned-air-force-space-plane-lands-calif/>
the
X-37B space drone that can carry
missiles<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11911335> to
strike rival satellite networks such as the one the Chinese are currently
creating.

For more extensive and precise surveillance from space, the Pentagon has
beenreplacing<http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/spy-sat-faster-cheaper/>
its
costly, school-bus-sized spy satellites with a new generation of light, low
cost models such as the
ATK-A200<https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missions/o/ors-1>.
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.”

In the stratosphere, close enough to Earth for audiovisual surveillance,
the Pentagon is planning to
launch<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/business/global-hawk-is-poised-to-replace-u-2-spy-plane.html>
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.

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.

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.”

*Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison. A **TomDispatch
regular*<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175614/alfred_mccoy_superweapons_and_global_dominion>
*, he is the author *Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the
Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance
State<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299234142/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>
* (University of Wisconsin), which is the source for much of the material
in this essay.*
*
*


-- 
http://www.deepdishwavesofchange.org
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