There’s been a spate of news about various government initiatives that could be used to turn the land of the free into the full-surveillance society, where everyone would be under the eye, and perhaps the thumb, of government. Now, the Pentagon is working on new technology that could pull together information from its proliferating snooping and analysis programs in chilling ways.
Naturally, this is all being done in the name of good intentions. It’s supposed to make our troops safer on the battlefield and to make it harder for terrorists to operate in the U.S. or against our interests elsewhere. Who could disagree with that? But it is inevitable that once these tools exist they’ll be turned on the U.S. citizenry at large – and it’s not just me who thinks so, as we’ll see.
Noah Shachtman, who runs the Defensetech.org site that has led the way in reporting on some of this technology long before the establishment press caught on, has a highly readable piece in the Village Voice on the newest program, Combat Zones That See (or CTS), which is expected to be operating on a trial basis next year.
"Its architects at the Pentagon say it will help protect our troops in cities like Baghdad, where for the past few weeks fleeting attackers have been picking off American fighters in ones and twos," Shactman writes. "But defense experts believe the surveillance effort has a second, more sinister, purpose: to keep entire cities under an omnipresent, unblinking eye. This isn't some science fiction nightmare. Far from it. CTS depends on parts you could get, in a pinch, at Kmart."
But before clicking over to Shachtman's piece, let’s review some of the government’s other projects that CTS could draw on – and some equally creepy developments in Europe that you most likely haven’t heard about.
Total Information Awareness is a massive Pentagon database that integrates every piece of “transactional” information about individuals that is legally available to the government from public records, with court orders or under “emergency” orders from the U.S. attorney general’s office. These days, that includes bank, travel and medical records, cell and landline phone records, every piece of e-mail sent or received, credit card purchases, web sites visited and just about anything else that an imaginative government snoop might dream up. The Patriot Act and Patriot II pave the way for making collection of all this information ever simpler legally, and ever more threatening to basic civil liberties, as James Bovard details at Pat Buchanan’s site, The American Conservative.
Total Information Awareness caused enough of a stink when it came to light that its parent, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), changed the program’s name to Terrorist Information Awareness. DARPA’s recent report to Congress has a useful FAQ page, but its soothing answers to concerns about civil liberties are scarcely convincing, coming from a government whose agencies have periodically and with impunity illegally spied on ordinary Americans.
LifeLog, another DARPA project, would expand exponentially on TIA. As Shachtman explained in this piece for Wired, all the information from TIA could be combined with other useful intelligence “gleaned from a variety of sources: a GPS transmitter to keep tabs on where that person went, audio-visual sensors to capture what he or she sees or says, and biomedical monitors to keep track of the individual's health. This gigantic amalgamation of personal information could then be used to ‘trace the “threads” of an individual's life,’ to see exactly how a relationship or events developed… “
According to DARPA, someone with access to the database could "retrieve a specific thread of past transactions, or recall an experience from a few seconds ago or from many years earlier ... by using a search-engine interface."
And, yes, they are serious. Here is DARPA’s notice to potential contractors.
Things are no better across the pond, where European governments are on a surveillance binge of their own. First, let’s drop in on Paris, the capital of what the administration snidely calls “Old Europe” – and where, surprise!, a U.S. delegation recently visited to work with our erstwhile adversaries, the French, on developing standards for new passports incorporating computer chips containing the bearer’s “biometric” data – fingerprints, an iris scan and the like. The objective is to get these adopted by all members of the so-called G8 nations, which besides us and the French include Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, Italy, Canada and Russia. If you renew your passport in 2005, you’ll probably receive one of these (but only after paying a fee that no doubt will be considerably stiffer than the current $55).
Now off to London, where you would hope things might be better. Sadly, no. The BBC reports that, “Police and other officials are making around a million requests for access to data held by net and telephone companies each year, according to figures compiled from the government, legal experts and the internet industry.”
The British government also wants to make those new high-tech passports serve as mandatory national identity cards.
Back here in the U.S., the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators -- representing the friendly folks from the DMV -- is pushing hard for the authority to include biometric data on your driver’s license – so it can be used as a national identity card.
Shouldn't Americans raise more hell about all this?
Note: With all this spying, we’re clearly going to need a lot more computer storage. So, coming soon is the petabyte-size hard drive. If you’re wondering, a petabyte is 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes. Talk about hard-drive clutter!
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