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01 March 2011 By Stephen
Lendman In 2003, an ACLU report warned
that "Big Brother" no longer is fiction, America
having advanced to where total surveillance is now
possible. Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU's
Technology and Liberty Program said: "Given the capabilities of
today's technology, the only thing protecting us from
a full-fledged surveillance society are the legal and
political institutions we have inherited as Americans.
Unfortunately, the September 11 attacks have led some
to embrace the fallacy that weakening the Constitution
will strengthen America." As a result, civil liberties fast
eroded. In 2007, another ACLU report warned about
America being six minutes to midnight "as a
surveillance society draws near...." Powerful new
technologies potentially make total monitoring
possible under a president, a compliant Congress and
courts that believe national security takes precedence
over constitutional freedoms. As a result, "we confront the
possibility of a dark future where our every move,"
transaction, and communication is "recorded, compiled,
and stored away" for ready access for whatever
authorities may want. One of several earlier articles
on institutionalized spying can be accessed through
the following link: http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2008/01/institutionalized-spying-on-americans.html It reviewed undiscussed police
state tools used without congressional authorization,
oversight, or legal standing - state-of-the-art
technology, including satellite imagery, to spy on
unsuspecting Americans. In his article titled, "Creating
the Domestic Surveillance State," Alfred McCoy
explained that Obama embraced the same executive
powers as Bush, including NSA surveillance, CIA
renditions, drone assassinations, indefinite military
detentions, and more - virtual lawlessness across the
board. As a result, constitutional Law Professor Jack
Balkin believes bipartisan affirmation of unchecked
executive powers could "reverberate for generations,"
subverting constitutional freedoms. As concerned, McCoy said
Americans are largely unaware of the "war on terror"
toll on their rights. "Think of our counterinsurgency
wars abroad as so many living laboratories for the
undermining of a democratic society at home, a process
historians (say) has been going on for a long, long
time." In his book titled, "Policing
America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines
and the Rise of the Surveillance State," McCoy
chronicled over a century of US imperialism from the
1899 - 1902 Philippines conquest to the present. As a result, America developed a
coercive policing, intelligence, and surveillance
apparatus to ensure absolute imperial domination,
using covert infiltration and violence to curb all
remnants of resistance. Repressive tactics now include a
state-of-the-art coercive national
security/surveillance/counterintelligence apparatus.
Established in the Philippines, it was used: -- during the 1920s Red Scare; -- for mass WW II incarceration
of Japanese Americans; -- during post-war McCarthy
witch-hunts and secret blacklisting of suspected
communists; and -- for many decades against human
rights, labor, anti-war and civil liberties
activists. Other techniques include: -- psychological warfare; -- targeted or sweeping
assassinations; -- death squads killing thousands
from Korea to Southeast Asia, Central America, Iraq,
Afghanistan, and dozens of other countries covertly
and overtly on the ground and overhead by drones and
attack aircraft; -- FBI subversion from
red-baiting to COINTELPRO to later tactics to disrupt,
sabotage and neutralize dissent by surveillance,
political repression, infiltration, disinformation,
assassinations, and denigration of targeted
individuals or groups; and -- sophisticated forms of
intelligence, subversion and violence throughout the
Cold War and thereafter, especially post-9/11 in the
war on terror. McCoy's book exposed imperial
America's dark side, a shadowy public/private world of
repressive policing, sophisticated surveillance,
active informers, counterintelligence, secret agents,
and state terror, undermining human rights, civil
liberties, and democratic freedoms at home and abroad.
It proved Mark Twain right saying you can't have an
overseas empire and democracy at home. From 1898, America developed an
invasive internal security blueprint, more
sophisticated than ever today. Today's global war on
terror developed a "technological template,
(including) omnipresent cameras, deep data-mining,
nono-second biometric identification," global drone
patrols, killer drones, satellite surveillance, and
other forms of sophisticated lawless spying,
intelligence, subversion, disruption, and destruction
of constitutional freedoms. McCoy said America's war on
terror involves a "massive expansion of (FBI, NSA,
Pentagon, and CIA) data-mining systems, (amassing
billions of) private documents (on) US citizens" kept
in classified data banks. "Abroad, after years of failing
counterinsurgency efforts in the Middle East, the
Pentagon began applying biometrics - the science of
identification via facial shape, fingerprints, and
retinal or iris patterns - to the pacification of
Iraqi cities, as well as....electronic intercepts for
instant intelligence and split-second" satellite
imagery use to aid drone assassinations from Africa to
South Asia to perhaps America after a future homeland
attack. Today, the combination of
biometric identification, global surveillance, and
digital warfare makes counterinsurgency more
sophisticated than ever. With everyone in a database,
authorities can get instantaneous feedback from iris,
retinal, or other data to identify, target, arrest or
kill. In Iraq under General Stanley
McChrystal, "every tool available....from signal
intercepts to human intelligence (was employed for)
lightening quick strikes." The same technology is used
in Afghanistan, Pakistan, dozens of other countries,
and perhaps soon, if not already, in communities
across America. McCoy explained: "While those running US combat
operations overseas were experimenting with
intercepts, satellites, drones, and biometrics, inside
Washington....FBI and NSA (operatives) began expanding
domestic surveillance through thoroughly conventional
data sweeps, legal and extra-legal, and - with White
House help - several abortive attempts to revive a
tradition that dates back to World War I of citizens
spying on suspected subversives." In 2002, Operation TIPS
(Terrorism Information and Prevention System) was
launched to have "millions of American truckers,
letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains,
utility employees and others" snitch on other
Americans. At the same time, the Pentagon
developed a Total Information Awareness program with
"detailed electronic dossiers" on millions of
unsuspecting Americans. Public outrage got Congress to
ban it, but the NSA, CIA and FBI continued it,
monitoring Americans electronically, including private
email and phone communications as well as access to
financial, medical and other personal information. In 2004, the FBI established an
Investigative Data Warehouse "centralized
(counterterrorism) repository," and in two years
amassed 659 million individual records, now perhaps
double that amount. It includes social security data,
drivers' licenses, financial records, and virtually
any information considered important to monitor -
potentially making everyone's private life an open
book to know about and abuse, including by warrantless
wiretaps and other lawless methods. Since taking office, Obama
advanced the Bush agenda, endangering Americans more
than ever under surveillance. For example, the FBI's
"Terrorist Watchlist" adds 1,600 names daily to
hundreds of thousands already included. A new Lackland
Air Base cyber-command is charged with targeting enemy
computers and repelling hostile cyber-attacks against
US networks. Official denials notwithstanding, no one
escapes surveillance. The combined
intelligence/Homeland Security/US Northern Command (NORTHCOM)/local
authorities apparatus constitutes a formidable force
against civil unrest, mass protests, designated
terrorists, dissidents, and other perceived homeland
threats - their combined might and sophisticated
technology charged with containing them. Already,
constitutional freedoms have been seriously
compromised on their way toward total abolition. Moreover, "presidential power has
grown relentlessly" after Bush claimed "unitary
Executive" authority, what Chalmers Johnson called a
"ball-faced assertion of presidential supremacy
dressed up in legal mumbo jumbo," but it persists
under Obama to rule by Executive Orders and other
unilateral directives, unchecked by congressional
approval. McCoy said it "open(ed) the way
to unchecked electronic (satellite, drone, biometric,
and other type) surveillance, the endless detention of
(uncharged) terror suspects (including US citizens),
and a variety of inhumane forms of interrogation"
after Bush made torture official US policy. It
continues seamlessly, though quietly, under Obama more
than ever hardening America's police state apparatus. Big Brother now watches everyone,
including with growing numbers of digital cameras
monitoring streets, commercial areas, airports,
highways, public and private transportation,
government and office buildings, and shopping malls -
virtually everywhere people congregate, work, reside,
recreate, or inhabit for any reason. Anti-terrorist
SWAT teams are ready to react against any suspected
provocation or threat. As a result, American democracy
fundamentally changed. Always more illusion than
reality, total surveillance reveals a harshness too
ugly to hide, especially when sophisticated
technologies target anyone for any reason, what McCoy
calls "the stuff of dystopian science fiction." Stephen Lendman lives in
Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and
listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished
guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the
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time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs
are archived for easy listening.
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