Everybody's
a Target in the American Surveillance State
March
26, 2012
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.
WC:
1535
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