The Surveillance Society and the IED
More than a decade ago, we knew the government had instituted a program, called “Total Information Systems, conceived by John Poindexter, a Reagan appointee, who had been disgraced and almost prosecuted for his participation in the Iran-Contra, guns for hostages scandal. Reagan himself came to power in California, thanks to snitching to the FBI about college presidents and student free speech advocates. As president of the screen actors’ guild in the 50s, Reagan named names.
Fast forward to the post 9/11 era and one can remember news reports about the way Osama Bin-Laden escaped American security forces in the Tora-Bora area of Afghanistan, partially due to ditching his cell phone. Bin-Laden knew, like the drug-dealers in The Wire, that cell phone activity could be traced. Now the government and their private corporate contractors have instituted a program called PRISM, which goes far beyond anything imaginable except as portrayed in science fiction movies.
The uproar over the latest National Security Administration revelations, the total communications oversight of email, phone, and Internet activity, should not come as news but as mainstream confirmation about alleged secret doings and the compromise of U.S. Constitutional privacy and speech safeguards. Now it’s on television and in The New York Times. The revelations have less to do with security breaches but more to do with the breaches of traditional constitutional protections, i.e. the customary belief in American principles, the reasons we fought King George’s redcoats. But the U.S. Constitution is no longer sacred but but seems quaint, to be interpreted by the collusion of corporate and government leaders, who watch, listen, and read about average Americans and residents throughout the world, potential targets for profit but without real warrants.
What’s more interesting is how the surveillance project is dependent on technical operatives, like Edward Snowden, the leaker, an army vet and private security contractor, who made the information available to journalists like Glenn Greenwald, who reported in the pages of the Guardian newspaper. Snowden himself says he carefully vetted the documents so as not to reveal real secrets about CIA operatives or stations and their spy activities. So the massive security state is dependent on what we lay people might call “geeks” or “nerds” or members of the hacker culture.
Just as the Wikileaks operatives, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, released embarrassing news about Iraqi war crimes and cables that display the diplomatic establishment’s cynical disregard for human life while supporting unpalatable regimes, so the Snowden—Greenwald reports merely show an incompetent NSA and its megalomaniac approach to surveillance.
Given the scope of the surveillance project and the dependence on computer geeks, we can expect more secrets to be leaked, what with the number of laptop desk jockeys stationed hither and yon, who have access. More troubling is how one can expect private grievances to surface when an angered operative or corporate competitor decides to denounce a neighbor or family member or economic threat due to a perceived slight or because of envidia. Human behavior, aggrieved, will out when passion bypasses reason. How many detainees at Gitmo were merely denounced by pissed-off neighbors to American security forces.
Despite all reason and the lack of a realistic plan, Kit Carson Electric Cooperative was awarded a Broadband grant and loan of $60 million in taxpayer dough by the Obama administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. KCEC is merely acting as the government’s agent in the spy and surveillance business. I have an acquaintance, who I used to consider “paranoid” because he worried that KCEC, Tri-State, and the FBI might be spying on him due to his activism. Now, I think he’s a realist.
The aim of Corporate America, and there is little difference today between elected representatives and our corporate masters, is to turn Americans into indentured servants: tax and spend or raise the rates and keep it. A generation of college students has borrowed money to pay for tuition but can’t get jobs or relief to dissolve debt. The finance establishment has commodified dreams, the dream of getting an education just as the energy establishment is privatizing the right to clean air and water via mining, fracking, and burning coal. The lucky old sun is a threat until the solar industry can commodify it. The necessities of life—gas, electricity, water and air, public safety—will continue to rise in cost until the price of survival turns free citizens into slaves, not unlike cross-border immigrants today, who are held in thrall by coyotes or addicts, who are dependent on the narco trade.
The corporate state and its supporters act in the short term, focused on the immediate gratification of quarterly profits, profits for fraudsters or Coopsters, even as the progenitors of Prism gather billions of information bytes by day but have no idea of how and when the information will be ultimately used. Establishment figures, who once worked for the NSA for up to forty years and designed the elements of the surveillance systems, have come forward to elucidate the total communication project. Be careful what you wish for.
During the next few years, we can expect more “information” revelations as kids with laptops in suburban basements or techno-operatives with a wild hair become irritated by their betters or their bosses. Tales of espionage in corporate mailrooms and rebellious fast-food employees who spit in burger preparation are common. Shoplifting and insider theft at big box stores has become epidemic. An avalanche of secret information will soon flood the Internet as the kid next door becomes the hacker next time. Call it a new form of IED—Information Explosive Device.