Court Rules to Limit GPS Tracking of Suspects

Some great news to report on a topic I've been zeroing in on quite a lot in the past year: government/law enforcement's tracking of citizens through GPS technologies. The issue at hand in the ongoing case just resolved had been over what the proper legal standard should be when law enforcement decides to track a suspects whereabouts?

The ACLU had recently provided documents showing that of the states randomly sampled, New Jersey and Florida used GPS tracking without obtaining probable cause or warrants. Four other states, California, Louisiana, Indiana, Nevada and the District of Columbia reported having obtained GPS data only after showing probable cause.

Those documents were part of the ongoing lawsuit by the ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation, in which they argued government tracking without a probable cause or warrant is a violation of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which guards against unreasonable search and seizure. Government prosecutors have argued that only a court order showing the tracking data is relevant to a criminal investigation is needed.

The essential argument by privacy advocates, be it the tracking of a cell phone user, or placing a tracking device in a suspect's vehicle, is that, whether you're driving a car or carrying a cell phone you should not be more susceptible to government surveillance. The idea being, no one wants to feel as if a government agent is following you wherever you go - be it a friend's house, a place of worship, or a therapist's office - and certainly innocent Americans shouldn't have to feel that way.

This argument won the day, at least in this case, as a federal appeals court ruled Friday that the police can’t covertly track a suspect’s car using a GPS device for an extended period of time without getting a warrant. The ruling in the D.C. Court of Appeals overturned the conviction of a suspected cocaine dealer, saying that the use of a secret GPS tracking device on the man’s vehicle for two months violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU had rightly argued that it's one thing to note someones car location and another to keep hourly data on every single stop you make along a specific route for days or months on end. The government tried to make the case that no such distinction existed.

The appeals court disagreed. "Society recognizes Jones‘ expectation of privacy in his movements over the course of a month as reasonable, and the use of the GPS device to monitor those movements defeated that reasonable expectation," wrote the court.

Thus the court clearly drew the important distinction between short term monitoring that’s not much different from a police tail and ongoing, secret and ubiquitous tracking.

As laid out in the article in Wired Magazine, "Repeated visits to a church, a gym, a bar, or a bookie tell a story not told by any single visit, as does one’s not visiting any of these places over the course of a month. The sequence of a person’s movements can reveal still more; a single trip to a gynecologist’s office tells little about a woman, but that trip followed a few weeks later by a visit to a baby supply store tells a different story.

EFF Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick welcomed the decision, and hoped the reasoning would spread to similar issues with the mobile phones most of us carry in our pockets.

“This same logic applies in cases of cell phone tracking,” Granick said in a press release. “We hope that this decision will be followed by courts that are currently grappling with the question of whether the government must obtain a warrant before using your cell phone as a tracking device.”

However, Friday’s ruling is binding only in the D.C. Circuit. Other circuit courts have found such tracking to be legal, including the 9th (covering many Western states) and 7th (Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana). The split makes it the issue ripe for the Supreme Court to decide the issue, but it’s not clear if the government will appeal this ruling, given that a loss at the Supreme Court would affect the entire country.

ACLU-NCA Legal Director Arthur Spitzer also makes an important point, stating: "GPS tracking enables the police to know when you visit your doctor, your lawyer, your church, or your lover. And if many people are tracked, GPS data will show when and where they cross paths. Judicial supervision of this powerful technology is essential if we are to preserve individual liberty. Today's decision helps brings the Fourth Amendment into the 21st Century."

The Washington Post has more:

In striking down the drug conviction of Antoine Jones, former co-owner of a District nightclub called Levels, the D.C. court said the FBI and District police overstepped their authority by tracking his movements round-the-clock for four weeks, placing a GPS monitoring device on his Jeep after an initial warrant had expired.

U.S. Circuit Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, writing for a unanimous and ideologically diverse panel that included judges David S. Tatel and Thomas B. Griffith, said such surveillance technology represents a leap forward in potential government intrusion that violates constitutional protections against unreasonable searches.

"A single trip to a gynecologist's office tells little about a woman, but that trip followed a few weeks later by a visit to a baby supply store tells a different story," Ginsburg wrote.

He added, "A person who knows all of another's travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups -- and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts."

...

Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the case has important implications for cellphone GPS tracking. The federal government has mandated that U.S. cellphone carriers make nearly all their phones trackable for help in 911 emergencies. However, companies say that the federal law that allows them to turn over data to law enforcement without subpoenas is prone to abuse.

Although federal magistrate judges typically require warrants for GPS-enabled cellphone tracking, the issue is before a federal circuit court for the first time in Philadelphia, Bankston said.

Click here for more.

Let's remember, last December we learned that Sprint received 8 million law enforcement requests for GPS location data in just one year. While that issue is slightly different than the one decided Friday (it was based on putting a GPS tracking device in the suspects car, rather than tracking the cell phone), the general concerns are applicable: Tracking citizens without a warrant (or even probably cause!) seem unconstitutional on its face. We know these GPS chips can locate a person to within about 30 feet. They're also able to gather less exact location data by tracing mobile phone signals as they ping off cell towers.

In a recent Inquirer Op-ed, the ACLU’s Catherine Crump hit it on the head:

"What’s at stake in the case is not whether it’s OK for the government to track the locations of cell phones; we agree that cell-phone tracking is lawful and appropriate in certain situations. The question is whether the government should first have to show that it has good reason to think such tracking will turn up evidence of a crime. We believe it should. This case is not about protecting criminals. It’s about protecting innocent people from unjustified violations of their privacy."

In other words, next to look for is whether this decision effects similar legal arguments being made regarding cell phone tracking...stay tuned...

Government Body Scanners Can Store, Transfer Images

A few weeks ago I wrote about the lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, seeking an emergency stay of the body scanner program. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), who filed the suit, has been leading the charge against the use of these whole body imaging machines in US airports (i.e. "digital strip search").

These scanners essentially see through clothing, producing images of digitally naked passengers. Well, I've got some breaking news on this case I want to discuss today. Documents obtained by EPIC show that the body scanners being used at federal courthouses can store and record the images of those scanned with the devices.

As part of a settlement of its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the U.S. Marshals Service, EPIC obtained more than 100 images of undressed individuals from the scanning devices used at federal courthouses

EPIC has filed two other lawsuits against the Department of Homeland Security related to the use of body scanners. The first FOIA lawsuit is aimed at obtaining more information about the use of body scanners in U.S. airports, including 2,000 images it says DHS has refused to release. A second petition against DHS, filed last month, seeks to obtain an emergency stay against the use of the scanners in U.S. airports.

From the article in Tech Daily Dose, "EPIC said documents it has obtained from DHS show the machines used by the department's Transportation Security Administration at some U.S. airports also can record and store images from the body scanners even though they are slightly different from the scanners used at federal courts. When asked if TSA has stored any images from passengers, EPIC staff counsel Ginger McCall said TSA claims it has not stored such images, but EPIC believes that statement is false."

In a more comprehensive piece from CNET News entitled "Feds admit storing checkpoint body scan images", it leaves no doubt:

For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they're viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that "scanned images cannot be stored or recorded."

Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.

This follows an earlier disclosure (PDF) by the TSA that it requires all airport body scanners it purchases to be able to store and transmit images for "testing, training, and evaluation purposes." The agency says, however, that those capabilities are not normally activated when the devices are installed at airports.

...

These "devices are designed and deployed in a way that allows the images to be routinely stored and recorded, which is exactly what the Marshals Service is doing," EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg told CNET. "We think it's significant."

William Bordley, an associate general counsel with the Marshals Service, acknowledged in the letter that "approximately 35,314 images...have been stored on the Brijot Gen2 machine" used in the Orlando, Fla. federal courthouse. In addition, Bordley wrote, a Millivision machine was tested in the Washington, D.C. federal courthouse but it was sent back to the manufacturer, which now apparently possesses the image database.

...

This trickle of disclosures about the true capabilities of body scanners--and how they're being used in practice--is probably what alarms privacy advocates more than anything else.

A 70-page document (PDF) showing the TSA's procurement specifications, classified as "sensitive security information," says that in some modes the scanner must "allow exporting of image data in real time" and provide a mechanism for "high-speed transfer of image data" over the network. (It also says that image filters will "protect the identity, modesty, and privacy of the passenger.")

"TSA is not being straightforward with the public about the capabilities of these devices," Rotenberg said. "This is the Department of Homeland Security subjecting every U.S. traveler to an intrusive search that can be recorded without any suspicion--I think it's outrageous." EPIC's lawsuit says that the TSA should have announced formal regulations, and argues that the body scanners violate the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits "unreasonable" searches.

This information DIRECTLY contradicts the repeated claims by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) that such images are not stored, nor can they be transferred.

As I wrote nearly a year ago in my article "The Politics of Fear and Whole Body Imaging", "Are we really to believe the government won't allow these devices to record any data when the easy "go to" excuse for doing so will be the need to gather and store evidence? What about the ability of some hacker in an airport lounge capturing the data using his wi-fi capable PC - and then filing it to a Flickr album, and then telling of its whereabouts on Twitter?"

These new revelations should add to what has been a growing consumer backlash against the machines. I should also note, early polling - and this should be no surprise when considering all the fear mongering that goes on in this country around terrorism and airports - indicated public support for these scanners in the range of 80%. Of course, that was before passengers started being more regularly subjected to them, and more information regarding the variety of threats they pose have come to light.

At the end of the day, if the flying public revolts against these scanners it will be monumentally more difficult to justify their exorbitant costs. That's why the global public revolt going on right now is hopeful, be it concerns regarding the sheer personal violation people feel to be viewed naked, to concerns over potential health "side effects", to the time time-consuming component, or to the simple fact that they don't really work and aren't needed.

In fact, let me post two comments that were made in response to my last post on this topic:

I flew out of Indianapolis last Friday. (Indy has had these scanners since before last Christmas.) I politely stated I'd rather not go through the body scanner, and was told I would have to "go through special screening." I thought the body scanners were OPTIONAL? So wouldn't I go through the NORMAL screening, and not "special" screening?

I went through the metal detector and was told to stand to the side and wait. The male screener asked for a female screener for a pat-down. From the other side of the machine, the female screener ROLLED HER EYES and said loudly "Oh boy." Her sarcasm was opaque.

The pat-down that followed ensured I wouldn't need my annual Pap Smear.

I am convinced the TSA would simply prefer we go through these untested, unregulated, unsafe machines for their own convenience. They are determined to make the other "screening options" so invasive that we might find the body scanner "safer" than being molested.

I will never step through one of those machines. Not EVER. There is nothing they have done to prove I can trust these machines medically, or them with my privacy. On the off hand, I don't find it optional to fly. My family is 2,000 miles away, and I have to move with military orders (husband is active duty). So what is my option? I MUST fly. It isn't a choice, and I'm not the only one who sees it that way.

And another women commented:

I am a young female who flew out of Heathrow yesterday, on a 45 minute flight to Newcaste upon Tyne. I was randomly (I say randomly,I saw the young male security guards pointing as they chose me) selected for the body scan. I have read all about these machines and had decided I would never go through one, but when I refused I was told I would not be able to travel.

I was visibly upset and did not want to do this scan, I feel it is a total invasion of my privacy. I am a businesswoman and travel regularly, but something about this invasive process really got to me. Well I had no option but to do the scan, but this morning I am still thinking about it and worrying that I will be subjected to this every time I fly. Privacy, health? It just all seems so over the top for the normal traveller like myself.

I don't think I can make the case better than these two, who experienced it for themselves. Now, I want to post a couple clips from a recent article about the lawsuit itself (to read the short article on the images found click here), and then, as I always do with this subject, I want to include a few more thoughts that I think need highlighting, particularly about fear versus reality.

The Boston Herald reports:

The suit says the program, run by the Transportation Security Administration, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, violates the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

The program also violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the lawsuit says, referencing religious laws about modesty.

Court documents allege the scanners also violate the Fourth Amendment by having passengers undergo “a uniquely invasive search without any suspicion that particular individuals have engaged in wrongdoing.’’

...

...one of the petitioners in the lawsuit is Bruce Schneier, a Minneapolis security technologist who said that while he was traveling through Logan Airport he was not told the full-body scan was optional. Nor did he see any signs indicating he could have a pat-down.

Ralph Nader’s Center for Study of Responsive Law has also weighed in on the full-body scanners, raising questions about privacy and safety.

And a group of University of California San Francisco scientists wrote to President Obama’s science adviser in April, stating that the dose of radiation from the X-ray scanners may be “dangerously high.’’

The scanner X-ray emits the same amount of radiation that a passenger receives in two minutes of flight, according to the TSA, but the scientists say this is misleading because the scanner X-rays are not distributed throughout the whole body, but are directed at just the skin and the underlying tissue.

I think what is starting to take shape is that there are in fact a myriad of reasons to oppose the widespread use of these scanners, from the obvious, privacy, to the less so, they won't make us any safer.

In fact, if you define the word "safe" as also including the concept of "safe" from government intrusiveness and corporate profiteering off fear peddling, than I would argue these machines make us less safe, not more.

Consider also the question regarding the actual need for these machines, and the ACTUAL threat posed by terrorists to passengers:

The likelihood that I'll get hit by lightning in one year is 500,000 to 1 while the odds I'll be killed by a terrorist on a plane if I flew constantly over 10 years is 10 million to 1. Does this laughably minuscule risk warrant yet another civil liberties encroachment? Does this irrational fear of being blown up in a plane really warrant supporting wars on countries that did nothing to us, or in this case, wasting HUGE amounts of money on ineffectual security systems?

The bottom line is a rather stark one: Is the loss of freedom, privacy, and quality of life a worthwhile trade-off for unproven protections from a terrorist threat that has a 1 in 10 million chance of killing someone over a ten year time period?

Does this "fear" warrant increasing the already long list of airline passenger indignities? Isn't suffering through long lines while being shoeless, beltless, waterless, and nail clipper-less enough? Now we've got to be digitally strip searched too?

Could all this hype be just another way to sell more security technologies, soften us up for future wars, increased spending on the military, and the evisceration of our civil liberties? I think, at least to an extent, the answer is yes.

For these reasons and more, privacy advocates continue to argue for increased oversight, full disclosure for air travelers, and legal language to protect passengers and keep the TSA from changing policy down the road. Again, what's to stop the TSA from using clearer images or different technology later?

As always, I'll be back with more on this case as it develops.

National Security Letters and Our Expanding Surveillance State

I know I must start sounding like a broken record with each new Obama disappointment on issues related to privacy and civil liberties. But alas, these issues simply don't receive deserved attention, and condemnation, from the media, or even the left.

The latest news - that the Department Of Justice has been pressuring Congress to expand its power to obtain records of Americans' private Internet activity through the use of National Security Letters (NSLs) - is just part of a much larger trend that paints a disturbing narrative, a narrative that points in one direction only: an increasingly intrusive surveillance state with an Executive Branch getting dangerously close to being above the law.

Before I get to these recent revelations - representing another major promise by the President on surveillance being broken - let's take a quick look back at some of the other recent "privacy eviscerating" greatest hits.

We had Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s recent full throated endorsement of Whole Body Imaging machines (“digital strip search) and the expansion of the the government's wiretapping and Internet monitoring capabilities (which this latest news seems to have taken a bit further).

If we go back and remember the dark days of the Bush Administration, we might reminisce about the consistent, vehement, and vocal opposition from the left to Bush assaults on privacy and the constitution, from eavesdropping, to indefinite detention, to the use of state secrets to stifle dissent, to the Patriot Act abuses, and so on, and so forth.

This vehement opposition was of course warranted, and important. But now that Obama is President, and CONTINUING THESE POLICIES, the same outcry that once existed has become a whimper.

As I wrote on this blog a few months ago, "No, I'm not talking about groups like the ACLU or EFF, but certainly Democrats in Congress, left wing talk radio, and even newspaper editorial boards.

And why is this silence so damaging? Because a so called "liberal" President, a constitutional scholar no less, has now codified what just a few years ago were rightly considered radical attacks on the Constitution and Rule of Law. Now those very same policies have not only been embraced by the new President, but has been accepted by the Democrats in Congress!! In other words, the ball has just moved WAY towards the neoconservative worldview, and their interpretation of an all powerful Executive Branch.

Its astonishing how little people on the left have come to grips with the fact that on issues ranging from indefinite detention to rendition to wiretapping to ASSASSINATION OF AMERICAN citizens to use of state secrets to defend Bush Administration civil liberties assaults (something Obama rightly criticized as a candidate) to now OPPOSING whistleblower protections (which he advocated in support of as candidate) to his embrace of all the key Patriot Act provisions he so adamantly criticized as a candidate (and recently even fought behind the scenes to ensure NO REFORMS were added that might protect civil liberties) the President is no different, whatsoever, than Bush.

The concern of course is that once these expanded surveillance powers (and others) are accepted, even codified, by the "left" no less, they are untouchable...and what were once considered inalienable rights, are now gone, for good.

This is my fear, and I don't think its at all an irrational one. So let's get to the latest. As the New York Times noted in a blistering editorial criticizing the President's flip flop on surveillance:

It is just a technical matter, the Obama administration says: We just need to make a slight change in a law to make clear that we have the right to see the names of anyone’s e-mail correspondents and their Web browsing history without the messy complication of asking a judge for permission.

It is far more than a technical change. The administration’s request, reported Thursday in The Washington Post, is an unnecessary and disappointing step backward toward more intrusive surveillance from a president who promised something very different during the 2008 campaign.

In a 1993 update to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, Congress said that Internet service providers have to turn over to the F.B.I., on request, “electronic communication transactional records.” The government says this includes the e-mail records of their subscribers, specifically the addresses to which e-mail messages were sent, and the times and dates. (The content of the messages can remain private.)

It may also include Web browsing records. To get this information, the F.B.I. simply has to ask for it in the form of a national security letter, which is an administrative request that does not require a judge’s signature.

But there was an inconsistency in the writing of the 1993 law. One section said that Internet providers had to turn over this information, but the next section, which specified what the F.B.I. could request, left out electronic communication records. In 2008, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion saying this discrepancy meant the F.B.I. could no longer ask for the information. Many Internet providers stopped turning it over. Now the Obama administration has asked Congress to make clear that the F.B.I. can ask for it.

These national security letters are the same vehicles that the Bush administration used after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to demand that libraries turn over the names of books that people had checked out. The F.B.I. used these letters hundreds of thousands of times to demand records of phone calls and other communications, and the Pentagon used them to get records from banks and consumer credit agencies. Internal investigations of both agencies found widespread misuse of the power, and little oversight into how it was wielded.

President Obama campaigned for office on an explicit promise to rein in these abuses. “There is no reason we cannot fight terrorism while maintaining our civil liberties,” his campaign wrote in a 2008 position paper. “As president, Barack Obama would revisit the Patriot Act to ensure that there is real and robust oversight of tools like National Security Letters, sneak-and-peek searches, and the use of the material witness provision.”

Where is the “robust oversight” that voters were promised? Earlier this year, the administration successfully pushed for crucial provisions of the Patriot Act to be renewed for another year without changing a word. Voters had every right to expect the president would roll back authority that had been clearly abused, like national security letters. But instead of implementing reasonable civil liberties protections, like taking requests for e-mail surveillance before a judge, the administration is proposing changes to the law that would allow huge numbers of new electronic communications to be examined with no judicial oversight.

Its these national security letters that allow the FBI to secretly demand data from phone companies and internet service providers about the private communications of ordinary citizens - in mass! But that's not all, the letters include a gag order, which forbids recipients from ever revealing the letters' existence to their coworkers, their friends, or even to their family members, much less the public.

As pointed out by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "The gag order and the lack of oversight make this power ripe for abuse. Indeed, the FBI's systemic abuse of this power was confirmed both by a Department Of Justice investigation and in documents obtained by EFF through Freedom of Information Act litigation. Yet, in the years since that abuse became publicly known, there has been no reform of the law governing NSLs.

Now, the DOJ is asking Congress to pass vague and broad new language meant to expand the kinds of data that can be acquired through NSLs. This morning's Washington Post article suggests that the new language could allow access to detailed web browsing history, search history, location information, or even Facebook friend requests.

Considering the FBI's dismal record on surveillance abuses, this is a stunning and brazen request. They're asking Congress to reward bad behavior by allowing even more bad behavior. We're hoping that Congress will have the courage and integrity to turn them down.

Pete Yost goes into greater detail on whether this is only a "clarification" of the law, or an expansion, writing:

The bureau engaged in widespread and serious misuse of its authority to issue the letters, illegally collecting data from Americans and foreigners, the Justice Department's inspector general concluded in 2007. The bureau issued 192,499 national security letter requests from 2003 to 2006.

Weathering that controversy, the FBI has continued its reliance on the letters to gather information from telephone companies, banks, credit bureaus and other businesses with personal records about their customers or subscribers — and Internet service providers.

That last source is the focus of the Justice Department's push to get Congress to modify the law.

The law already requires Internet service providers to produce the records, said Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Justice Department's national security division. But he said as written it also causes confusion and the potential for unnecessary litigation as some Internet companies have argued they are not always obligated to comply with the FBI requests.

...

The administration's proposal to change the Electronic Communications Privacy Act "raises serious privacy and civil liberties concerns," Leahy said Thursday in a statement.

"While the government should have the tools that it needs to keep us safe, American citizens should also have protections against improper intrusions into their private electronic communications and online transactions," said Leahy, who plans hearings in the fall on this and other issues involving the law.

Critics are lined up in opposition to what the Obama administration wants to do.

Critics, however, point to a 2008 opinion by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel which found that the FBI's reach with national security letters extends only as far as getting a person's name, address, the period in which they were a customer and the numbers dialed on a telephone or to that phone.

The problem the FBI has been having is that some providers, relying on the 2008 Justice opinion — issued during the Bush administration — have refused to turn over Internet records such as information about who a person e-mails and who has e-mailed them and information about a person's Web surfing history.

To deal with the issue, there's no need to change the law since the FBI has the authority to obtain the same information with a court order issued under a broad section of the Patriot Act, said Gregory Nojeim, director of the Project on Freedom, Security and Technology at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit Internet privacy group.
In other words, this is simply about removing one last protection we have from FBI surveillance abuses, namely, federal judges and courts and the scrutiny they could supply to requests for sensitive information made by the government. We know, for a fact, that under the Bush Administration the VAST MAJORITY of Patriot Act abuses had nothing to do with terrorism, or trying to actually catch terrorists or stop terrorist acts.

No, what makes this kind of expansion of surveillance capabilities so dangerous is that they are more often than not used to target political enemies (think peace protesters, anti-globalization protesters) or just small time drug dealers. Let's hope the President does not get rewarded the same way his predecessor did every time he starts crying about the big bad terrorist wolf.

Secret Government Part 2: National Security Inc.

I realize that the Washington Post "Secret Government" series only marginally relates to privacy issues (at least not directly...yet). Nonetheless, there is a relationship worth delving into, one I started earlier in the week (see my last post).

Part 2 of the series is entitled "National Security Inc.", and, while not that privacy specific, again, I think the privatization of what was once government intelligence agencies has all kinds of deeply disturbing ramifications - including for privacy and civil liberties.

To remind everyone of one tidbit from part 1: Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications."

To call that an out-of-control, privacy-destroying Surveillance State is to understate the case. But the fact that a growing percentage of intelligence agents are corporate employees, serving shareholders first, the Constitution and the public second, adds to my concerns.

Before I get to some important critiques of the Washington Post series, in particular all those questions it does not answer or even ask, let me share a few choice clips from Part 2 of the series.

Priest and Arkin write:

The intent of the memorial is to publicly honor the courage of those who died in the line of duty, but it also conceals a deeper story about government in the post-9/11 era: Eight of the 22 were not CIA officers at all. They were private contractors.

To ensure that the country's most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation's interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called "inherently government functions." But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.

...

It is also a system in which contractors are playing an ever more important role. The Post estimates that out of 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, 265,000 are contractors. There is no better example of the government's dependency on them than at the CIA, the one place in government that exists to do things overseas that no other U.S. agency is allowed to do.

Private contractors working for the CIA have recruited spies in Iraq, paid bribes for information in Afghanistan and protected CIA directors visiting world capitals. Contractors have helped snatch a suspected extremist off the streets of Italy, interrogated detainees once held at secret prisons abroad and watched over defectors holed up in the Washington suburbs. At Langley headquarters, they analyze terrorist networks. At the agency's training facility in Virginia, they are helping mold a new generation of American spies.

...

Nine years later, well into the Obama administration, the idea that contractors cost less has been repudiated, and the administration has made some progress toward its goal of reducing the number of hired hands by 7 percent over two years. Still, close to 30 percent of the workforce in the intelligence agencies is contractors.

...

Contractors can offer more money - often twice as much - to experienced federal employees than the government is allowed to pay them. And because competition among firms for people with security clearances is so great, corporations offer such perks as BMWs and $15,000 signing bonuses, as Raytheon did in June for software developers with top-level clearances.

...

The National Security Agency, which conducts worldwide electronic surveillance, hires private firms to come up with most of its technological innovations. The NSA used to work with a small stable of firms; now it works with at least 484 and is actively recruiting more.

...

Each of the 16 intelligence agencies depends on corporations to set up its computer networks, communicate with other agencies' networks, and fuse and mine disparate bits of information that might indicate a terrorist plot. More than 400 companies work exclusively in this area, building classified hardware and software systems.

Read the article in its entirety here.

The article also documents the growing size, wealth, and power of these "intelligence" corporations, both that supply contractors, and security technologies. In other words, we've got a growing, private army on our hands...an army that has increasing access to hi tech equipment that can monitor and capture nearly everything we do...and fight wars and kill innocent people...while not subject to international law.

I also feel obligated to point out that the likelihood a terrorist like Bin Laden will destroy us is extremely low…but the likelihood that our banana republic economy will is extremely high (made only higher by the amount we spend on “defending” against a mythical “enemy”). Yet, we are being led to believe there is this grave, terrorist threat out there…even though the risk of being hit by lightning is far greater than that of being killed by a “terrorist”.

So, aside from this surveillance state being too costly, and a threat to our privacy and freedom (actually, its already destroyed them), the very premise that we NEED IT in such size and magnitude is patently false. This series does does not however touch on the fundamental scam that the "war on terror" itself is...Nor, from what I’ve seen so far, does it delve into what all these private contractors are ACTUALLY DOING in our name (I’m talking specifics, not generalizations).

Here’s Robert Dreyfuss of The Nation:

"The core problem...is that Al Qaeda and its affiliates, its sympathizers, and even self-starting terrorist actors who aren't part of Al Qaeda itself, are a tiny and manageable problem. Yet the apparatus that has been created is designed to meet nothing less than an existential threat. Even at the height of the Cold War ... there was nothing like the post-9/11 behemoth in existence. A thousand smart intelligence analysts, a thousand smart FBI and law enforcement officers, and a few hundred Special Operations military folk are all that's needed to deal with the terrorism threat."

Even at the height of the cold war, when the Soviet Union and its allies were engaged in a brutal, country-by-country battle across Asia, Africa and Latin America to combat the United States, NATO, and American hegemonism, there was nothing like the post-9/11 behemoth in existence. A thousand smart intelligence analysts, a thousand smart FBI and law enforcement officers, and a few hundred Special Operations military folk are all that's needed to deal with the terrorism threat. It's been hugely overblown. Yet in the Post story, sage-like gray beards of the counterterrorism machine stroke their chins and pontificate about how difficult it is to coordinate all these agencies, absorb all the data, read all the reports and absorb the 1.7 billion e-mails and phone calls that are picked up every day by the National Security Agency. It's an "Emperor's New Clothes" problem. The emperor isn't naked, but no one,

What's missing from the story, however, is any assessment of the threat against which this vast and growing machinery is arrayed. The Post notes that twenty-five separate agencies have been set up to track terrorist financing, which admirably shows the overlapping and redundant nature of the post-9/11 ballooning of agencies and organizations targeting terrorism. But the article barely mentions that there are hardly any terrorists to track.

Also, here’s Jeremy Scahill (who knows a thing or two about private contractors and their crimes against humanity):

The misplaced hype surrounding the Post series speaks volumes to the ahistorical nature of US media culture. Next week, if the New York Times published a story on how there were no WMDs in Iraq, there would no doubt be cable news shows that would act like it was an earth-moving revelation delivered by Moses on the stone tablet of exclusive, groundbreaking journalism.

...

In reality, there is little in the Post series that, in one way or another, has not already been documented …In 2007, Shorrock obtained and published a document from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence showing that 70 percent of the US intelligence budget was spent on private contractors. Shorrock was way out in front of this story and, frankly, corporate media ignored it …

The Post and its reporters, Shorrock told me, "are doing their best to obfuscate what contractors really do for US intelligence. They're eight years behind and still haven't caught up. Basically their stories are throwing big numbers at readers-such as the fact that of 854,000 people with top security clearances, 265,000 are contractors. But that's work that can be done by interns; there's virtually nothing in their series about the broader picture-like what it means to have private for-profit companies operating at the highest levels of our national security."

But instead of revealing new details on these types of operations and naming names and employers and specific incidents, none of that is to be found. The discussion of torture and extrajudicial killings committed by private contractors is relegated to a whitewashing by the Post…I'm sorry, Blackwater "added fuel" to "chaos?" "America run amok?" These are very strange descriptions of the take-away message from the massacre of seventeen innocent Iraqi civilians, the alleged murder of a bodyguard to the Iraqi vice president and night-hunting Iraqis as "payback" for 9/11.

Not to mention the allegations of young prostitutes performing oral sex for a dollar, guns smuggled on private planes in dog food bags, hiding weapons from ATF agents and on and on. But more important, where in the Post series is the examination of the CIA assassination program that relied on Blackwater and other private contractors? Where is the investigation of Erik Prince's hit teams that operated in Germany and elsewhere? What about the ongoing work of contractors in the drone bombing program? What about Blackwater contractors calling in air-strikes in Afghanistan or operating covertly in Pakistan?
And let me just add what I believe are some of the most pertinent "take aways" from this series so far, as explained by the great Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com:

In sum, if you combine this second Post installment with the first one from yesterday, the picture that emerges is that we have a Secret Government of 854,000 people so vast and secret that nobody knows what it does or what it is. Roughly 30% of that Secret Government -- engaged in the whole litany of functions from spying to killing -- is composed of private corporations...That there is a virtually complete government/corporate merger when it comes to the National Security and Surveillance State is indisputable...

As little oversight as National Security State officials have, corporate officials engaged in these activities have even less. Relying upon profit-driven industry for the defense and intelligence community's "core mission" is to ensure that we have Endless War and an always-expanding Surveillance State. After all, the very people providing us with the "intelligence" that we use to make decisions are the ones who are duty-bound to keep this War Machine alive and expanding because, as the Post put it, they are "obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest."

Our military, our CIA, our spying agencies (such as NSA) are every bit corporate as they are governmental: in some cases more so. So complete is the merger that it's the same people who switch seamlessly back and forth between governmental agencies and their private "partners," which means we have not only a vast Secret Government, but one that operates with virtually no democratic accountability and is driven not by National Security concerns but by its own always-expanding private profits.

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Everyone should decide for themselves if we have the "alert and knowledgeable citizenry" which Eisenhower said was necessary to "compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." If we empower a massive private industry this way -- with core governmental authorities -- to gorge on unchecked power and huge private profits at the public expense, all derived from Endless War and civil liberties abridgments, why would one expect anything other than Endless War and civil liberties abridgments to be the inevitable outcome?

It's unfortunate that the Washington Post piece does not delve so deeply into these far more important questions...but at least it has elicited them from others...these are extraordinarily important questions to ponder...while there's still time to take a step back from the abyss.

America's Secret Government and the Surveillance State

Part 1 of Dana Priest and William Arkin's "Secret America" series in the Washington Post is now up on their site, and let's just say its sobering...in the kind of way that keeps one up at night.

But even more enlightening than the piece itself is Constitutional Scholar Glenn Greenwald's analysis of it. The general thesis of the article shouldn't necessarily be a surprise to anyone that's been reading this blog, nonetheless it documents in the most detail yet, just how expansive, secret, and all encompassing our secret government has become since 9/11.

I once referred to this expanding surveillance state as something akin to a Fear-Industrial-Complex (i.e. Department of Defense, corporate media, talk radio, security technologies industry, Congress, the White House, “the intelligence community”, weapons/defense contractors, etc.), and I think the description fits. Of course, what the Priest and Arkin article exposes in particularly is the growing size and scope of a secret government that lurks in the shadows, answers to no one, and has a nearly endless supply of funding.

"Terrorist hysteria" has been the rage in this country for 9 solid years now, and we're starting to reap what we've sowed. It wasn’t long ago that the idea of our government wiretapping American citizens without warrants for purposes other than national security would have been revolting. Now its official Government policy – and the telecom companies that participated in these crimes have been given retroactive immunity while continuing to make billions off overcharging the same customers they betrayed.

Nor was it long ago that we would have been rightly outraged by Patriot Act provisions – recently renewed – that allow for broad warrants to be issued by a secretive court for any type of record, without the government having to declare that the information sought is connected to a terrorism investigation; or that allow a secret court to issue warrants for the electronic monitoring of a person for whatever reason — even without showing that the suspect is an agent of a foreign power or a terrorist; and of course, that allow the government to search your home as long as it doesn't tell you it did.

And of course, with advancements in security technologies that may serve certain important purposes in specific situations, more often than not, represent the continuing expansion of Big Brother's ability to monitor and record nearly everything we do - usually under the guise of "keeping us safe".

And before I get to some of Greenwald's brilliant musings on all of this, I just want to make a point I've been making over and over here that bares repeating. We must, as a society, redefine what it means to be "safe" and "secure", and why privacy matters.

For every "liberty" we give up, we should first ask whether in fact we are safer by giving it up at all. But I think it goes deeper than that. I would argue that we need to expand the definition of the word "safe" to include the concept of being "safe" from government surveillance and corporate profiteering.

Are we really made "safer" by being eavesdropped on or digitally strip searched at airports? In fact, there is a substantial amount of evidence – including the case of the “underwear bomber” itself - that suggests our government is gathering TOO MUCH information, and our expanding surveillance state is making us LESS safe, not more.

As Glenn Greenwald noted last year, “The problem is never that the U.S. Government lacks sufficient power to engage in surveillance, interceptions, intelligence-gathering and the like. Long before 9/11 -- from the Cold War -- we have vested extraordinarily broad surveillance powers in the U.S. Government to the point that we have turned ourselves into a National Security and Surveillance State. Terrorist attacks do not happen because there are too many restrictions on the government's ability to eavesdrop and intercept communications, or because there are too many safeguards and checks. If anything, the opposite is true: the excesses of the Surveillance State -- and the steady abolition of oversights and limits -- have made detection of plots far less likely. Despite that, we have an insatiable appetite -- especially when we're frightened anew -- to vest more and more unrestricted spying and other powers in our Government, which -- like all governments -- is more than happy to accept it.”

Now to today's article by Greenwald:

Consider this: "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications." To call that an out-of-control, privacy-destroying Surveillance State is to understate the case. Equally understated is the observation that we have become a militarized nation living under an omnipotent, self-perpetuating, bankrupting National Security State. Here's but one flavoring anecdote:

Command centers, internal television networks, video walls, armored SUVs and personal security guards have also become the bling of national security.

"You can't find a four-star general without a security detail," said one three-star general now posted in Washington after years abroad. "Fear has caused everyone to have stuff. Then comes, 'If he has one, then I have to have one.' It's become a status symbol."

What's most noteworthy about all of this is that the objective endlessly invoked for why we must acquiesce to all of this -- National Security -- is not only unfulfilled by "Top Secret America," but actively subverted by it. During the FISA debate of 2008 -- when Democrats and Republicans joined together to legalize the Bush/Cheney warrantless eavesdropping program and vastly expand the NSA's authority to spy on the communications of Americans without judicial oversight -- it was constantly claimed that the Government must have greater domestic surveillance powers in order to Keep Us Safe. Thus, anyone who opposed the new spying law was accused of excessively valuing privacy and civil liberties at the expense of what, we are always told, matters most: Staying Safe.

But as I wrote many times back then -- often by interviewing and otherwise citing House Intelligence Committee member Rush Holt, who has been making this point repeatedly -- the more secret surveillance powers we vest in the Government, the more we allow the unchecked Surveillance State to grow, the more unsafe we become. That's because the public-private axis that is the Surveillance State already collects so much information about us, our activities and our communications -- so indiscriminately and on such a vast scale -- that it cannot possibly detect any actual national security threats. NSA whistle blower Adrienne Kinne, when exposing NSA eavesdropping abuses, warned of what ABC News described as "the waste of time spent listening to innocent Americans, instead of looking for the terrorist needle in the haystack."

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That's really the only relevant question: how much longer will Americans sit by passively and watch as a tiny elite become more bloated, more powerful, greedier, more corrupt and more unaccountable -- as the little economic security, privacy and freedom most citizens possess vanish further still? How long can this be sustained, where more and more money is poured into Endless War, a military that almost spends more than the rest of the world combined, where close to 50% of all U.S. tax revenue goes to military and intelligence spending, where the rich-poor gap grows seemingly without end, and the very people who virtually destroyed the world economy wallow in greater rewards than ever, all while the public infrastructure (both figuratively and literally) crumbles and the ruling class is openly collaborating on a bipartisan, public-private basis even to cut Social Security benefits?

The answer, unfortunately, is probably this: a lot longer. And one primary reason is that our media-shaped political discourse is so alternatively distracted and distorted that even shining light on all of this matters little.

...

Meanwhile, the Real U.S. Government -- the network of secret public and private organizations which comprise the National Security and Surveillance State -- expands and surveills and pilfers and destroys without much attention and with virtually no real oversight or accountability. It sucks up the vast bulk of national resources and re-directs the rest to those who own and control it. To their immense credit, Dana Priest and William Arkin will spend the week disclosing the details of what they learned over the past two years investigating all of this, but the core concepts have long been glaringly evident. But Sarah Palin's Twitter malapropism from yesterday will almost certainly receive far more attention than anything exposed by the Priest/Arkin investigation. So we'll continue to fixate on the trappings and theater of government while The Real Government churns blissfully in the dark -- bombing and detaining and abducting and spying and even assassinating -- without much bother from anyone.

Read more here.

Here's a few of the findings from the Washington Post piece:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

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Every day across the United States, 854,000 civil servants, military personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances are scanned into offices protected by electromagnetic locks, retinal cameras and fortified walls that eavesdropping equipment cannot penetrate.

This is not exactly President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," which emerged with the Cold War and centered on building nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union. This is a national security enterprise with a more amorphous mission: defeating transnational violent extremists.

Much of the information about this mission is classified. That is the reason it is so difficult to gauge the success and identify the problems of Top Secret America, including whether money is being spent wisely. The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 21/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn't include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.

Click here to read the article in its entirety. I'll cover some of the rest of the series too.

So when"redefining what it means to be safe" I would also add this: Are we really safe if we continue to bankrupt our country in the name of war and "national security"? Are we safe in a country that allows 45,000 Americans to die every year because they can't afford health insurance? Are we "safe" when millions of unemployed Americans are having their unemployment checks denied even as we spend more on the military than all other countries in the world combined? Are children "safe" when 1 in 5 go to bed hungry...yet trillions are spent on the military, "intelligence", and wars?

As I have written many times before, if we're truly trying to reduce the threat of terrorism there are DEMONSTRABLY more effective ways than those currently being pursued. A few alternative tactics to consider: stop bombing and occupying Muslim nations, arming their enemies, torturing and indefinitely jailing their people, and supporting ruthless dictators in their countries and around the world.

While we're at it we should reinstate every gay Arabic translator (which we have a critical shortage of today) expelled from the military due to their sexual preference (in fact all gays that were expelled), and focus our attention on intelligence gathering rather than war making to catch the real extremists that want to do our country harm.

No one is denying that terrorism is a threat, but how does creating more of them make us safer?

An analysis of official data for the government-supported RAND corporation found that the invasion of Iraq caused a "seven-fold increase in jihadism." If you really hate jihadism, perhaps we should figure out what reduces it, rather than engaging in things that increase it.

As Noam Chomsky recently wrote in describing the growing rebellions in Afghanistan:

"People have the odd characteristic of objecting to the slaughter of family members and friends."

He also said

"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."

Which leads me to the rights we are giving up here at home. Why should we fall prey to exactly what actual terrorists supposedly want: to cause us fear and terror...enough to give up our own freedoms and way of life. The only forces I see benefitting from this growing secret government is precisely those aspects of our government that shouldn't have more power and the corporate interests that profit off our fear.

Instead of spending one more minute listening to the grumblings of a war criminal like Dick Cheney, let's heed the words of Martin Luther King Jr. instead:

"We all have to be concerned about terrorism, but you will never end terrorism by terrorizing others."

EPIC Files Lawsuit Against Airport Body Scanners, Growing Consumer Backlash

Good news: The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the organization that has really led the charge against the recent expansion of whole body imaging machines in US airports (i.e. "digital strip search"), has sued the Department of Homeland Security in federal court, seeking an emergency stay of the body scanner program.

As I wrote in my article "The Politics of Fear and "Whole-Body-Imaging", these full-body scanners see through clothing, producing images of naked passengers.

As I also lay out in detail, there are MANY reasons to oppose the widespread use of these scanners, from the obvious, privacy, to the less so, they won't make us any safer. In fact, if you define the word "safe" as also including the concept of "safe" from government intrusiveness and corporate profiteering off fear peddling, than I would argue these machines make us less safe, not more.

But, before I run down all the reasons why I personally have a BIG problem with these scanners, I want to discuss in a little more detail both the EPIC lawsuit, as well as what appears to be a growing consumer backlash too.

As for the EPIC suit, Roger Yu of the USA TODAY reported the following last week:

The program is "unlawful, invasive, and ineffective," says Marc Rotenberg, president of EPIC and lead counsel in the case.

According to the EPIC filing, the Transportation Security Administration program violates the federal Privacy Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Administrative Procedures Act.

It also asserts that the program violates the Fourth Amendment, as the body scanners are "highly invasive and are applied to all air travelers without any particular suspicion."

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In an editorial written for the Washington Post in January, Chertoff said the machines are "configured to prevent TSA officers from storing or retaining any images."

But Rotenberg says government records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit revealed that "the TSA required that the devices be able to store and record images of naked air travelers."

This is clearly an important step. But perhaps more important to the prospects of these scanners invading individual privacy in airports across the country is whether the public remains supportive of them. Early polling indicated in the range of 80% support - but that was before passengers started being more regularly subjected to them.

Gary Stoller, also of USA TODAY, recently documented what appears to be a growing backlash against these digital strip search devices. This is particularly hopeful news, because at the end of the day, if the flying public revolts against these scanners it will be monumentally more difficult to justify their exorbitant costs. He writes:

Opposition to new full-body imaging machines to screen passengers and the government's deployment of them at most major airports is growing.

Many frequent fliers complain they're time-consuming or invade their privacy. The world's airlines say they shouldn't be used for primary security screening. And questions are being raised about possible effects on passengers' health.

"The system takes three to five times as long as walking through a metal detector," says Phil Bush of Atlanta, one of many fliers on USA TODAY's Road Warriors panel who oppose the machines. "This looks to be yet another disaster waiting to happen."

The machines — dubbed by some fliers as virtual strip searches — were installed at many airports in March after a Christmas Day airline bombing attempt. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has spent more than $80 million for about 500 machines, including 133 now at airports. It plans to install about 1,000 by the end of next year.

The machines are running into complaints and questions here and overseas:

•The International Air Transport Association, which represents 250 of the world's airlines, including major U.S. carriers, says the TSA lacks "a strategy and a vision" of how the machines fit into a comprehensive checkpoint security plan. "The TSA is putting the cart before the horse," association spokesman Steve Lott says.

•Security officials in Dubai said this month they wouldn't use the machines because they violate "personal privacy," and information about their "side effects" on health isn't known.

•Last month, the European Commission said in a report that "a rigorous scientific assessment" of potential health risks is needed before machines are deployed there. It also said screening methods besides the new machines should be used on pregnant women, babies, children and people with disabilities.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office said in October that the TSA was deploying the machines without fully testing them and assessing whether they could detect "threat items" concealed on various parts of the body. And in March, the office said it "remains unclear" whether they would have detected the explosives that police allege Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to detonate on a jet bound for Detroit on Christmas.

This is a pretty damning list of complaints if you ask me. But let me go back to some of what I have written on this subject because I think there's an even more fundamental problem that none of these address: the politics of fear and the corrosive effect it has on our right to privacy and our ability to make informed decisions.

So before embracing the latest "terror fix", we should remember that for every specific "terror tactic" we target with a new, expensive, and often burdensome security apparatus, the terrorist's tactics themselves will change.

Risks can be reduced for a given target, but not eliminated. If we strip searched every single passenger at every airport in the country, terrorists would try to bomb shopping malls or movie theaters.

The likelihood that I'll get hit by lightning in one year is 500,000 to 1 while the odds I'll be killed by a terrorist on a plane if I flew constantly over 10 years is 10 million to 1. Does this laughably minuscule risk warrant yet another civil liberties encroachment? Does this irrational fear of being blown up in a plane really warrant supporting wars on countries that did nothing to us, or in this case, wasting HUGE amounts of money on ineffectual security systems?

Does this "fear" warrant increasing the already long list of airline passenger indignities? Isn't suffering through long lines while being shoeless, beltless, waterless, and nail clipper-less enough? Now we've got to be digitally strip searched too?

Then there are the privacy concerns regarding how images could be stored...and just the basic guttural reaction of "screw you, I'm not letting you see me naked just so I can board a plane!" argument.

EPIC published documents in January revealing that the machines can record, store and transmit passenger scans - in contradiction to TSA claims.

Are we really to believe the government won't allow these devices to record any data when the easy "go to" excuse for doing so will be the need to gather and store evidence? What about the ability of some hacker in an airport lounge capturing the data using his wi-fi capable PC - and then filing it to a Flickr album, and then telling of its whereabouts on Twitter?

For these reasons, privacy advocates are seeking increased oversight, full disclosure for air travelers, and legal language to protect passengers and keep the TSA from changing policy down the road. Again, what's to stop the TSA from using clearer images or different technology later?

As the ACLU pointed out, "A choice between being groped and being stripped, I don't think we should pretend those are the only choices. People shouldn't be humiliated by their government" in the name of security, nor should they trust that the images will always be kept private. Screeners at LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) could make a fortune off naked virtual images of celebrities...The Bill of Rights extends beyond curbside check-in and if the government insists on using these invasive search techniques, it is imperative that there be vigorous oversight and regulation to protect our privacy. Before these body scanners become the status quo at America's airports, we need to ensure new security technologies are genuinely effective, rather than merely creating a false sense of security."

In other words, is yet another invasion of personal privacy a worthwhile trade-off for unproven protections against a terrorist threat that has a 1 in 10 million chance of killing someone over a ten year time period? To me this represents a line that I'd prefer not to cross. What's next? Cavity searches?

More on this issue to come...

ACLU Study Highlights US Surveillance Society, Launches "Spyfiles"

Do we live in a surveillance society? According to the ACLU's recent report the answer is yes. And, after making its case, the organization has also launched a new website to track incidents of domestic political surveillance by the government.

According to the report there have been 111 incidents of illegal domestic political surveillance since 9/11 in 33 states and the District of Columbia.

The report shows that law enforcement and federal officials work closely to monitor the political activity of individuals deemed suspicious, an activity that was previously common during the Cold War. That includes protests, religious activities and other rights protected by the first amendment, German said.

The spying could take the form of listening to phone calls, intercepting wireless communications, harassing photographers or infiltrating protest groups. Also discovered was the way in which agencies' are increasingly connected through various information sharing measures, making it more likely that information collected on an individual by a small police department could end up in an FBI or CIA database.

The report also noted how the FBI monitors peaceful protest groups and in some cases attempts to prevent protest activities. Its not hard to make the obvious connection between the increase in domestic political surveillance to an erosion of the standards of privacy and civil liberties in the wake of 9/11. The Patriot Act of course serves as exhibit A, as it authorized law enforcement to use tools domestically that were formerly restricted to hostile groups in foreign nations.

Let's go through some of the studies findings, as described by David Kravetz of Wired magazine:

The report, Policing Free Speech: Police Surveillance and Obstruction of First Amendment-Protected Activity, surveys news accounts and studies of questionable snooping and arrests in 33 states and the District of Columbia over the past decade.

The survey provides an outline of, and links to, dozens of examples of Cold War-era snooping in the modern age.

"Our review of these practices has found that Americans have been put under surveillance or harassed by the police just for deciding to organize, march, protest, espouse unusual viewpoints and engage in normal, innocuous behaviors such as writing notes or taking photographs in public," Michael German, an ACLU attorney and former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, said in a statement.

Here are a few examples:

At a California State University, Fresno lecture on veganism, six of the 60 in attendance were undercover officers from the local and campus police. The Oakland Police Department in California had infiltrated a police-brutality demonstration, and its undercover officers selected "the route of the march."

A vegetarian activist in Georgia was arrested for jotting down the license plate of a Department of Homeland Security agent who was snapping photos of a protest outside a Honey Baked Ham store. A Joint Terrorism Task Force in Illinois went on a three-day manhunt in Chicago searching for a Muslim man for his suspicious activity of using a hand counter on a bus. As it turned out, the man was counting his daily prayers.

A Kentucky minister was detained at Canadian border trying to enter the United States because he had purchased copies of the Koran on the internet following the 2001 terror attacks. A New York, Muslim-American student journalist was detained for taking pictures of Old Glory outside a Veterans Affairs building as part of a class project. The authorities deleted the pictures before releasing her an hour later.

In a kind of response to their own study, the ACLU launched "Spyfiles" in order to track domestic surveillance.

On the home page of the site it states, "Today the government is spying on Americans in ways the founders of our country never could have imagined. Intelligence agencies, the military, state and local police, private companies, and even emergency services are gathering detailed information and sharing it through new institutions like joint terrorism task forces, fusion centers, and public-private partnerships, allowing any one of them to instantly produce electronic dossiers on ordinary Americans with a simple mouse-click. More

Michael German, ACLU Policy Counsel and a former FBI Special Agent sums up the issue nicely:

"In our country, under our Constitution, the authorities aren't allowed to spy on you unless they have specific and individual suspicion that you are doing something illegal. Unfortunately, law enforcement in our country seems to be reverting to certain old, bad behaviors when it comes to political surveillance."