It’s what I call a “national surveillance state” which succeeds a national security state. And really the issue is what kind we’ll have. Will we have a national surveillance state that uses only information it needs? Does it collect information it doesn’t need? Will it have a proliferation of secret laws? Or will it have more oversight? That’s the choice. Both parties are going to be involved in doing it. And so far the Democratic Party does not seem to be interested in protecting the rights of American citizens. It seems more worried about being accused of being “soft on terrorism.” ...The growth of the internet, changes in technology, changes in the way war is conducted and also the Americans’ demand for various kinds of social services means that one of the things the government is going to do in the future is collect and analyze information and purchase lots of information from private parties. These are just features of governance. ...Jack Balkin, Yale Law School, in an interview*
Tim Shorrock, writing today in Salon, reveals just how widespread and how pervasive domestic surveillance has become. For example, the use of the U-2.
Originally built in secret by Lockheed Corp. for the Central Intelligence Agency, the U-2 has provided some of the most sensitive intelligence available to the U.S. government, including thousands of photographs of Soviet and Chinese military bases, North Korean nuclear sites, and war zones from Afghanistan to Iraq.
But the aircraft that took off that September morning wasn't headed overseas to spy on America's enemies. Instead, for the next six hours it flew directly over the U.S. Gulf Coast, capturing hundreds of high-resolution images as Hurricane Katrina, one of the largest storms of the past century, slammed into New Orleans and the surrounding region.
The U-2 feeds the results of its surveillance to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. The what?
The NGA's role in Hurricane Katrina has received little attention outside of a few military and space industry publications. But the agency's close working relationship with the NSA -- whose powers to spy domestically were just expanded with new legislation from Congress -- raises the distinct possibility that the U.S. government could be doing far more than secretly listening in on phone calls as it targets and tracks individuals inside the United States. With the additional capabilities of the NGA and the use of other cutting-edge technologies, the government could also conceivably be following the movements of those individuals minute by minute, watching a person depart from a mosque in, say, Lodi, Calif., or drive a car from Chicago to Detroit.
Or do they? Evidence indicates that yes, the Bush administration is "casting the widest net possible."
Military, intelligence agency and police work is also coming together in numerous "fusion centers" around the country in a joint program run by the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security that has received little public attention. At present, there are 43 current and planned fusion centers in the United States where information from intelligence agencies, the FBI, local police, private sector databases and anonymous tipsters is combined and analyzed by counterterrorism analysts. DHS hopes to create a wide network of such centers that would be tied into the agency's day-to-day activities, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The project, according to EPIC, "inculcates DHS with enormous domestic surveillance powers and evokes comparisons with the publicly condemned domestic surveillance program of COINTELPRO," the 1960s program by the FBI aimed at destroying groups on the American political left.
So there you have it.
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*An account of how Bush bamboozled Congress into legitimizing these activities and commentary from Jack Balkin, Robert Turner, Charlie Savage, Kevin Drum, and Mark Rotenberg is available at The Scribe.
