RFID: "Smart Cards" in a Surveillance Society

If incorporating personal details into an RFID (radio-frequency identification) chip implanted into a passport or driver's license may sound like a "smart" alternative to endless lines at the airport and intrusive questioning by securocrats, think again.

Since the late 1990s, corporate grifters have touted the "benefits" of the devilish transmitters as a "convenient" and "cheap" way to tag individual commodities, one that would "revolutionize" inventory management and theft prevention. Indeed, everything from paper towels to shoes, pets to underwear have been "tagged" with the chips. "Savings" would be "passed on" to the consumer. Call it the Wal-Martization of everyday life.

RFID tags are small computer chips connected to miniature antennae that can be fixed to or implanted within physical objects, including human beings. The RFID chip itself contains an Electronic Product Code that can be "read" when a RFID reader emits a radio signal. The chips are divided into two categories, passive or active. A "passive" tag doesn't contain a battery and its "read" range is variable, from less than an inch to twenty or thirty feet. An "active" tag on the other hand, is self-powered and has a much longer range. The data from an "active" tag can be sent directly to a computer system involved in inventory control--or surveillance.

But as Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) state in a joint position paper, "RFID has the potential to jeopardize consumer privacy, reduce or eliminate purchasing anonymity, and threaten civil liberties." As these organizations noted:

While there are beneficial uses of RFID, some attributes of the technology could be deployed in ways that threaten privacy and civil liberties:

* Hidden placement of tags. RFID tags can be embedded into/onto objects and documents without the knowledge of the individual who obtains those items. As radio waves travel easily and silently through fabric, plastic, and other materials, it is possible to read RFID tags sewn into clothing or affixed to objects contained in purses, shopping bags, suitcases, and more.

* Unique identifiers for all objects worldwide. The Electronic Product Code potentially enables every object on earth to have its own unique ID. The use of unique ID numbers could lead to the creation of a global item registration system in which every physical object is identified and linked to its purchaser or owner at the point of sale or transfer.

* Massive data aggregation. RFID deployment requires the creation of massive databases containing unique tag data. These records could be linked with personal identifying data, especially as computer memory and processing capacities expand.

* Hidden readers. Tags can be read from a distance, not restricted to line of sight, by readers that can be incorporated invisibly into nearly any environment where human beings or items congregate. RFID readers have already been experimentally embedded into floor tiles, woven into carpeting and floor mats, hidden in doorways, and seamlessly incorporated into retail shelving and counters, making it virtually impossible for a consumer to know when or if he or she was being "scanned."

* Individual tracking and profiling. If personal identity were linked with unique RFID tag numbers, individuals could be profiled and tracked without their knowledge or consent. For example, a tag embedded in a shoe could serve as a de facto identifier for the person wearing it. Even if item-level information remains generic, identifying items people wear or carry could associate them with, for example, particular events like political rallies. ("Position Statement on the Use of RFID on Consumer Products," Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, November 14, 2003)

As the corporatist police state unfurls its murderous tentacles here in the United States, it should come as no surprise that securocrats breathlessly tout the "benefits" of RFID in the area of "homeland security." When linked to massive commercial databases as well as those compiled by the 16 separate agencies of the "intelligence community," such as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) that feeds the federal government's surveillance Leviathan with the names of suspected "terrorists," it doesn't take a genius to conclude that the architecture for a vast totalitarian enterprise is off the drawing board and onto the streets.

As last week's mass repression of peaceful protest at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul amply demonstrated, the Bush regime's "preemptive war" strategy has been rolled out in the heimat. As the World Socialist Web Site reports,

On Wednesday eight members of the anarchist protest group the Republican National Convention Welcoming Committee (RNCWC) were charged under provisions of the Minnesota state version of the Patriot Act with "Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism."

The eight charged are all young, and could face up to seven-and-a-half years in prison under a provision that allows the enhancement of charges related to terrorism by 50 percent. ...

Among other things, the youth, who were arrested last weekend even prior to the start of the convention, are charged with plotting to kidnap delegates to the RNC, assault police officers and attack airports. Almost all of the charges listed are based upon the testimony of police infiltrators, one an officer, the other a paid informant. (Tom Eley, "RNC in Twin Cities: Eight protesters charged with terrorism under Patriot Act," World Socialist Web Site, 6 September 2008)

As the ACLU pointed out, "These charges are an effort to equate publicly stated plans to blockade traffic and disrupt the RNC as being the same as acts of terrorism. This both trivializes real violence and attempts to place the stated political views of the defendants on trial," said Bruce Nestor, president of the Minnesota Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. "The charges represent an abuse of the criminal justice system and seek to intimidate any person organizing large scale public demonstrations potentially involving civil disobedience," he said.

An affidavit filed by the cops in order to allow the preemptive police raid and subsequent arrests declared that the RNCWC is a "criminal enterprise" strongly implying that the group of anarchist youth were members of a "terrorist organization."

Which, as we have learned over these last seven and a half years of darkness, is precisely the point: keep 'em scared and passive. And when they're neither scared nor passive, resort to police state tactics of mass repression. While the cops beat and arrested demonstrators and journalists outside the Xcel Energy Center, neanderthal-like Republican mobs chanted "USA! USA!" while the execrable theocratic fascist, Sarah Palin, basked in the limelight. But I digress...

Likened to barcodes that scan items at the grocery store check-out line, what industry flacks such as the Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility (AIM) fail to mention in their propaganda about RFID is that the information stored on a passport or driver's license is readily stolen by anyone with a reader device--marketers, security agents, criminals or stalkers--without the card holder even being remotely aware that they are being tracked and their allegedly "secure" information plundered. According to a blurb on the AIM website,

Automatic Identification and Mobility (AIM) technologies are a diverse family of technologies that share the common purpose of identifying, tracking, recording, storing and communicating essential business, personal, or product data. In most cases, AIM technologies serve as the front end of enterprise software systems, providing fast and accurate collection and entry of data. ("Technologies," Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility, no date)

Among the "diverse family of technologies" touted by AIM, many are rife with "dual-use" potential, that is, the same technology that can keep track of a pallet of soft drinks can also keep track of human beings.

Indeed, the Association touts biometric identification as "an automated method of recognizing a person based on a physiological or behavioral characteristic." This is especially important since "the need" for biometrics "can be found in federal, state and local governments, in the military, and in commercial applications." When used as a stand-alone or in conjunction with RFID-chipped "smart cards" biometrics, according to the industry "are set to pervade nearly all aspects of the economy and our daily lives."

Some "revolution."

The industry received a powerful incentive from the state when the Government Services Administration (GSA), a Bushist satrapy, issued a 2004 memo that urged the heads of all federal agencies "to consider action that can be taken to advance the [RFID] industry."

An example of capitalist "ingenuity" or another insidious invasion of our right to privacy? In 2006, IBM obtained a patent that will be used for tracking and profiling consumers as they move around a store, even if access to commercial databases are strictly limited.

And when it comes tracking and profiling human beings, say for mass extermination at the behest of crazed Nazi ideologues, IBM stands alone. In his groundbreaking 2001 exploration of the enabling technologies for the mass murder of Jews, communists, Roma and gays and lesbians, investigative journalist Edwin Black described in IBM and the Holocaust how, beginning in 1933, IBM and their subsidiaries created technological "solutions" that streamlined the identification of "undesirables" for quick and efficient asset confiscation, deportation, slave labor and eventual annihilation.

In an eerie echo of polices being enacted today against Muslims and left-wing "extremists" by the corrupt Bush regime in their quixotic quest to "keep America safe" in furtherance of capitalist and imperialist goals of global domination, Black writes:

In the upside-down world of the Holocaust, dignified professionals were Hitler's advance troops. Police officials disregarded their duty in favor of protecting villains and persecuting victims. Lawyers perverted concepts of justice to create anti-Jewish laws. Doctors defiled the art of medicine to perpetrate ghastly experiments and even choose who was healthy enough to be worked to death--and who could be cost-effectively sent to the gas chamber. Scientists and engineers debased their higher calling to devise the instruments and rationales of destruction. And statisticians used their little known but powerful discipline to identify the victims, project and rationalize the benefits of their destruction, organize their persecution, and even audit the efficiency of genocide. Enter IBM and its overseas subsidiaries. (IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation, New York: Crown Publishers, 2001, pp. 7-8)

As security and privacy analyst Katherine Albrecht writes describing IBM's patented "Identification and Tracking of Persons Using RFID-Tagged Items in Store Environments,"

...chillingly details RFID's potential for surveillance in a world where networked RFID readers called "person tracking units" would be incorporated virtually everywhere people go--in "shopping malls, airports, train stations, bus stations, elevators, trains, airplanes, restrooms, sports arenas, libraries, theaters, [and] museums"--to closely monitor people's movements. ("How RFID Tags Could Be Used to Track Unsuspecting People," Scientific American, August 21, 2008)

According to the patent cited by Albrecht, as an individual moves around a store, or a city center, an "RFID tag scanner located [in the desired tracking location]... scans the RFID tags on [a] person.... As that person moves around the store, different RFID tag scanners located throughout the store can pick up radio signals from the RFID tags carried on that person and the movement of that person is tracked based on these detections.... The person tracking unit may keep records of different locations where the person has visited, as well as the visitation times."

Even if no personal data are stored in the RFID tag, this doesn't present a problem IBM explains, because "the personal information will be obtained when the person uses his or her credit card, bank card, shopper card or the like." As Albrecht avers, the link between the unique RFID number and a person's identity "needs to be made only once for the card to serve as a proxy for the person thereafter." With the wholesale introduction of RFID chipped passports and driver's licenses, the capitalist panoptic state is quickly--and quietly--falling into place.

If America's main trading partner and sometime geopolitical rival in the looting of world resources, China, is any indication of the direction near future surveillance technologies are being driven by the "miracle of the market," the curtain on privacy and individual rights is rapidly drawing to a close. Albrecht writes,

China's national ID cards, for instance, are encoded with what most people would consider a shocking amount of personal information, including health and reproductive history, employment status, religion, ethnicity and even the name and phone number of each cardholder's landlord. More ominous still, the cards are part of a larger project to blanket Chinese cities with state-of-the-art surveillance technologies. Michael Lin, a vice president for China Public Security Technology, a private company providing the RFID cards for the program, unflinchingly described them to the New York Times as "a way for the government to control the population in the future." And even if other governments do not take advantage of the surveillance potential inherent in the new ID cards, ample evidence suggests that data-hungry corporations will.

I would disagree with Albrecht on one salient point: governments, particularly the crazed, corporate-controlled grifters holding down the fort in Washington, most certainly will take advantage of RFID's surveillance potential.

In 2005 for example, the Senate Republican High Tech Task force praised RFID applications as "exciting new technologies" with "tremendous promise for our economy." In this spirit, they vowed to "protect" RFID from regulation and legislation. Needless to say, the track record of timid Democrats is hardly any better when it comes to defending privacy rights or something as "quaint" as the Constitution.

Under conditions of a looming economic meltdown, rising unemployment, staggering debt, the collapse of financial markets and continuing wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. imperialism, in order to shore up its crumbling empire, will continue to import totalitarian methods of rule employed in its "global war on terror" onto the home front.

The introduction of RFID-chipped passports and driver's licenses for the mass surveillance and political repression of the American people arises within this context.

The Bush Regime's Imperial Affirmation: Endless War, Endless Conquest, Endless Repression

While people around the world begin to celebrate George W. Bush's January 20, 2009 departure from the White House, senior administration officials are crafting legislation, rule changes and executive orders that will make permanent the worst excesses of this criminal regime.

And in an election year, you can count on a Democratic-controlled Congress to continue abdicating their role as a brake on the executive branch, ever-fearful that far-right attack dogs and their media accomplices will label them "soft on terror."

In this light, a recent piece in The New York Times outlines the corporatist trajectory that will cement in place the "friendly fascism" of the Bush administration, inaugurated by the Republican party on December 12, 2000 when the U.S. Supreme Court handed a stolen election to the Bush-Cheney cabal.

As Associate Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his bitter dissent to the Bush v. Gore ruling: "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."

Ponder those words and then consider all that has followed since that infamous ruling eight long years ago undermined the rule of law and democratic processes in the United States--and the capitulatory cowardice of the putative "opposition" party, the Democrats, who sealed the deal.

Eric Lichtblau reports that as the November 4 general election approaches, "Tucked deep into a recent proposal from the Bush administration is a provision that has received almost no public attention, yet in many ways captures one of President Bush's defining legacies: an affirmation that the United States is still at war with Al Qaeda."

Seven years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets known as al-Qaeda, Bush advisers are demanding that Congress "acknowledge again and explicitly that this nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us and who are dedicated to the slaughter of Americans."

That al-Qaeda attacks Western targets and visits outrages upon innocent civilians does not mean it is not also a blunt-edged weapon selectively deployed by imperialism to stoke ethnic and religious tensions in areas deemed vital to U.S. geostrategic interests. As investigative journalist Robert Dreyfuss has documented,

Sixty years earlier, when the United States began its odyssey in the Middle East, there were other voices who wanted conservative Islam, and early fundamentalist groups associated with the nascent Islamic right, to do battle with the secular left, with Nasser, with Arab communists and socialists. Now, six decades later, the Bush administration is pursuing a strategy in the Middle East that seems calculated to boost the fortunes of the Islamic right. The United States is counting on Shiite fundamentalists in Iraq to save its failed policy in that country, and a major theoretician of that campaign explicitly calls for the United States to cast its lot in with the ayatollahs and the Muslim Brotherhood. (Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005, p. 342)

Long after the Bush administration has sailed off into the proverbial sunset, policies launched across the decades by successive Democratic and Republican governments will continue along the same imperial trajectory: war and covert operations as the preferred instruments for capitalist resource extraction and global domination.

Al-Qaeda: Asset and Adversary

One need only review the role played by al-Qaeda in the Balkans during the 1990s when the United States and their NATO allies, particularly Germany and the United Kingdom, provided entrée to demobilized Afghan-Arab mujahedin fighters as the West dismembered the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, culminating in 1999 with NATO's murderous 78-day bombing campaign of Serbia to "liberate" Kosovo.

Earlier in the decade, thousands of Islamist fighters flooded Bosnia-Herzegovina, directly recruited by former Waffen SS Handzar Division foot soldier and Islamist ideologue, Alia Izetbegovic, the President of Bosnia and darling of liberal interventionists such as Bernard-Henri Lévy. In calling for Western intervention, Lévy shamelessly described Izetbegovic's neofascist statelet as an exemplar of "modern, secular Islam"! Quite naturally, Izetbegovic's Nazi past was covered-up by Western interventionists intent on smashing multiethnic Yugoslavia into smithereens.

Indeed, intelligence analyst and senior lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, Cees Wiebes, documents in Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995, how Western intelligence agencies, including the CIA, MI6 and BND assisted major arms transshipments into Bosnia despite a UN arms embargo, often in concert with the reactionary Iranian regime.

Some estimates claim that by 1994, as many as 4,000 mujahedin fighters were present in Bosnia. Indeed, none other than Osama bin Laden himself visited Izetbegovic in Sarajevo. As a gesture of appreciation for his support, Izetbegovic gave bin Laden a Bosnian passport. And, a November 1, 2001 account in the European edition of The Wall Street Journal claimed that bin Laden continued to visit the Balkan region as late as 1996.

By 1995 as Wiebes documented, American Hercules C-130 transport planes accompanied by jet fighters began landing at the Tuzla Air Base in eastern Bosnia laden with arms, ammunition and communications equipment destined for Izetbegovic's Islamist brigades. Similar arms pipelines were opened between Albania, Bosnia, Croatia and later in the decade Kosovo, where Albanian narcotrafficking networks rule the roost and continue to wreck havoc across the region.

As I documented in "Welcome to Kosovo! The World's Newest Narco State," beginning in 1998 and perhaps earlier, the London-based cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed, the "emir" of the al-Qaeda-linked al-Muhajiroun began a recruitment drive for aspiring mujahedin for the "holy war" in Kosovo at London's notorious Finsbury Park Mosque.

In 2005, in the wake of the July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks in London, it was revealed that Bakri, a probable MI6 asset and simultaneously an al-Qaeda operative, was the "spiritual" force behind the deadly attacks that claimed 52 lives and wounded hundreds of others. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed reported that,

The reluctance to take decisive action against the leadership of the extremist network in the UK has a long history. According to John Loftus, a former Justice Department prosecutor, Omar Bakri and Abu Hamza, as well as the suspected mastermind of the London bombings Haroon Aswat, were all recruited by MI6 in the mid-1990s to draft up British Muslims to fight in Kosovo. American and French security sources corroborate the revelation. The MI6 connection raises questions about Bakri's relationship with British authorities today. Exiled to Lebanon and outside British jurisdiction, he is effectively immune to prosecution. ("Sources: August terror plot is a 'fiction' underscoring police failures," The Raw Story, Monday, September 18, 2006)

During NATO's Kosovo aggression, analyst Michel Chossudovsky wrote,

Mercenaries financed by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had been fighting in Bosnia. And the Bosnian pattern was replicated in Kosovo: Mujahadeen mercenaries from various Islamic countries are reported to be fighting alongside the KLA in Kosovo. German, Turkish and Afghan instructors were reported to be training the KLA in guerrilla and diversion tactics. ... According to a Deutsche Press-Agentur report, financial support from Islamic countries to the KLA had been channelled through the former Albanian chief of the National Information Service (NIS), Bashkim Gazidede. "Gazidede, reportedly a devout Moslem who fled Albania in March of last year [1997], is presently [1998] being investigated for his contacts with Islamic terrorist organizations." ("Kosovo 'freedom fighters' financed by organised crime," World Socialist Web Site, 10 April 1999)

As I documented, the Kosovo Liberation Army's links to both narcotrafficking networks and al-Qaeda was a defining feature of Western intervention in the former Yugoslavia. Indeed, Hashim Thaci's KLA served as the militarized vanguard for the Albanian mafia whose "15 Families" control virtually every facet of the Balkan heroin trade. Thaci is currently Kosovo's Prime Minister. Kosovar traffickers ship heroin originating exclusively from Asia's Golden Crescent. At one end lies Afghanistan where poppy is harvested for transshipment through Iran and Turkey; as morphine base it is then refined into "product" for worldwide consumption. From there it passes into the hands of the Albanian syndicates who control the Balkan Route.

U.S. destabilization programs and covert operations rely on far-right provocateurs and drug lords (often interchangeable players) to facilitate the dirty work. Throughout its Balkan operations the CIA made liberal use of these preexisting narcotics networks to arm the KLA and provide them with targets. Today, similar features are visible for all the world to see as the U.S. warlord state in Afghanistan battles the Taliban and al-Qaeda for control of the lucrative opium growing and processing regions of that destroyed nation.

As a sometime Western intelligence asset, al-Qaeda is not simply a puppet of the United States and NATO as some believe. Such simplifications mask a harder and crueler reality. In the opinion of this writer, the 9/11 cover-up, rather than burying the Bush administration's alleged orchestration of the attacks (the "inside job" thesis), concealed something far more sinister: U.S. imperialism's decades-long collaboration with Islamist extremists to achieve geopolitical advantage over their capitalist rivals.

As with neo-Nazi networks that were reconstituted by the West for war against their domestic leftist adversaries during the Cold War, al-Qaeda and related terror organizations will, at times, share limited tactical goals with the West, such as the destruction of secular, leftist opponents in the Middle East, or as a force for destabilization operations in target countries such as Iran, as investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has reported in The New Yorker.

That al-Qaeda has reconstituted its military-political-mafia structures along the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands and continues to attack targets across the region at will, is testament to the resilience of the organization and the appeal of its reactionary ideology. There is a deadly irony here, since its murderous "tradecraft" was quite literally bequeathed to it by Western intelligence services and America's preeminent regional allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

The Bush Legacy

As far-right Republican party hordes gather in Minneapolis/St. Paul for the coronation of their presidential candidates, reactionary Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Alaska's Christian fundamentalist governor, Sarah Palin, the Bush regime's strategy of preemptive war is viciously playing out on the home front. Salon's Glenn Greenwald reports,

Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than "fire code violations," and early this morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying. ("Massive Police Raids on Suspected Protesters in Minneapolis," Salon, August 30, 2008)

The raids were orchestrated by local law enforcement agencies with major assistance from various federal spy outfits such as the FBI, NSA and the Pentagon's own Northern Command (NORTHCOM). The raids are purely an intimidation tactic designed to squelch peaceful dissent by citizens outraged by Bushist policies throughout these long years of darkness.

Indeed, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that police and federal agencies utilized the "services" of informants and provocateurs in their targeting of the anarchist RNC Welcoming Committee.

Aided by informants planted in protest groups, authorities raided at least six buildings across St. Paul and Minneapolis to stop an "anarchist" plan to disrupt this week's Republican National Convention.

From Friday night through Saturday afternoon, officers surrounded houses, broke down doors, handcuffed scores of people and confiscated suspected tools of civil disobedience.

The show of force was led by the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office in collaboration with the FBI, Minneapolis and St. Paul police, the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office and other agencies. (Heron Marquez Estrada, Bill McAuliffe and Abby Simons, "Police Raids Enrage Activists, Alarm Others," Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 31, 2008)

The "preemptive" raids targeted activists, alternative media and lawyers on-scene. All were handcuffed and forced to lie face-down, while SWAT teams and federal agents ransacked numerous homes in a quixotic hunt for "weapons."

Greenwald avers, "Targeting people with automatic-weapons-carrying SWAT teams and mass raids in their homes, who are suspected of nothing more than planning dissident political protests at a political convention and who have engaged in no illegal activity whatsoever, is about as redolent of the worst tactics of a police state as can be imagined."

After nearly eight years of massive surveillance and infiltration operations by the federal government across a multitude of federal agencies, often acting in cahoots with reenergized local "red squads" rebranded as Fusion Centers and Joint Terrorism Task Forces coordinated through the Office of National Intelligence, the mutant stepchildren of the FBI's COINTELPRO, the CIA's Operation CHAOS and the NSA's Project SHAMROCK have brought the "war on terror" home in a big way.

The Minneapolis City Pages reported back in May, that police and the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force were "soliciting" informants to keep tabs on local protest groups. According to journalist Matt Snyders's account, FBI Special Agent Maureen A. Mazzola, flanked by a cop, attempted to recruit a University of Minnesota sophomore as a paid "confidential informant." While the student declined the feds' "generous offer," the wider issue of recruiting Stasi-like moles to report "suspicious activities" by citizens exercising their constitutionally-guaranteed right to say "NO!" cuts to the heart of the role of dissent in a democracy.

Outraged by the "preemptive policing" on display in Minneapolis, Glenn Greenwald comments on the virtual blackout by the corporate media, all-too-willing to criticize the actions of repressive government's thousands of miles away while silently acquiescing to the police state in full-bloom here at home.

So here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protesters who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do. And as extraordinary as that conduct is, more extraordinary is the fact that they have received virtually no attention from the national media and little outcry from anyone. And it's not difficult to see why. As the recent "overhaul" of the 30-year-old FISA law illustrated--preceded by the endless expansion of surveillance state powers, justified first by the War on Drugs and then the War on Terror--we've essentially decided that we want our Government to spy on us without limits. There is literally no police power that the state can exercise that will cause much protest from the political and media class and, therefore, from the citizenry. ("Federal Government Involved in Raid on Protesters," Salon, August 31, 2008)

As The New York Times reported, Bushist demands on Congress to "affirm" that the U.S. is at "war" with international terrorism, "carries significant legal and public policy implications for Mr. Bush, and potentially his successor, to claim the imprimatur of Congress to use the tools of war, including detention, interrogation and surveillance, against the enemy," which as we see on a daily basis, is a war on our freedom to exist as individuals rather than as "soldiers" in an imperialist charade.

The Bushist proposal will provide the legal framework to assert broad executive power "during a time of war," an interpretation of the commander in chief's presumed wartime powers that Justice Department lawyers secretly used to gin-up the illegal detention and torture of alleged terrorist suspects and the NSA's driftnet surveillance of Americans outside the rule of law.

As readers no doubt recall, the September 14, 2001 congressional resolution known as the "Authorization for Use of Military Force," still in effect, became the pseudo-legal justification for the worst excesses of the Bush regime.

But as former Reagan Justice Department official Bruce Fein told the Times, Congress should not "give the administration the wartime language it seeks."

"I do not believe that we are in a state of war whatsoever," Mr. Fein said. "We have an odious opponent that the criminal justice system is able to identify and indict and convict. They're not a goliath. Don't treat them that way."

The same can be said for the war criminals occupying high-office in the Bush administration and Congress. I disagree with Mr. Fein on one salient point: we are indeed "in a state of war." However, it is a one-sided class war waged by a monstrous system of profit based on the exploitation of our living labor and ecocidal resource extraction by mafia-like associations known as multinational corporations.

New Spy Software Coming On-Line: "Surveillance in a Box" Makes its Debut

You've heard of the FBI's "Quantico Circuit" and were outraged by illegal warrantless wiretapping by Bushist minions. To no avail, you flooded Congress with emails and phone calls, angered by the bipartisan "FISA Amendments Act of 2008" and the swell party thrown by AT&T for "Blue Dog" Democrats in Denver this week for the convention.

But just in time for a new administration (and the bundles of cash always at the ready for the expanding homeland security market), comes a complete "surveillance in a box" system called the Intelligence Platform!

According to New Scientist, German electronics giant Siemens has developed software allegedly capable of integrating

...tasks typically done by separate surveillance teams or machines, pooling data from sources such as telephone calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions and insurance records. It then sorts through this mountain of information using software that Siemens dubs "intelligence modules". (Laura Margottini, "Surveillance Made Easy," New Scientist, 23 August 2008)

New Scientist reports that the firm has sold the system to some 60 countries in Europe and Asia. Which countries? Well, Siemens won't say.

However, privacy and human rights advocates say the system bears a remarkable resemblance to China's "Golden Shield," a massive surveillance network that integrates huge information databases, internet and email monitoring, speech and facial recognition platforms in combination with CCTV monitoring.

Designed specifically for "fusion centers" or their European/Asian equivalents, the Intelligence Platform promises to provide "real-time" high-tech tools to foil terrorist plots before they're hatched (or keep tabs on antiwar/antiglobalization activists).

The latest item in the emerging "intelligent" software niche market, Intelligence Platform has been "trained" on a large number of sample documents to zero in on names, phone numbers or places from generic text. "This means it can spot names or numbers that crop up alongside anyone already of interest to the authorities, and then catalogue any documents that contain such associates," New Scientist avers.

In the UK, the Home Office announced it plans to provide law enforcement, local councils and other public agencies access to the details of text messages, emails and internet browsing. This follows close on the heels of an announcement last May that New Labour was considering building a massive centralized database "as a tool to help the security services tackle crime and terrorism." According to The Guardian,

Local councils, health authorities and hundreds of other public bodies are to be given the power to access details of everyone's personal text, emails and internet use under Home Office proposals published yesterday.

Ministers want to make it mandatory for telephone and internet companies to keep details of all personal internet traffic for at least 12 months so it can be accessed for investigations into crime or other threats to public safety. ...

Conservatives and Liberal Democrats last night branded the measure a "snooper's charter". (Alan Travis, "'Snooper's charter' to check texts and email," The Guardian, Wednesday, August 13, 2008)

A blurb posted on Siemens' website claims that the "challenge" is "to foster the well-being of law-abiding citizens" and therefore, "authorized groups need to have direct access to communications between suspects, whether it is individuals, groups or organizations. Only then can they take appropriate action, detect, prevent and anticipate crimes and guarantee peace and security."

In other words, if you've got nothing to hide "trust us:" the shopworn mantra of securocrats everywhere. And in today's climate, this is an especially burdensome challenge for state security and corporate spies who demand "highly-sophisticated, multi-level voice and data recordings" in order to destroy our rights while transforming our respective societies into Orwellian police states. New Scientist reports,

Once a person is being monitored, pattern-recognition software first identifies their typical behaviour, such as repeated calls to certain numbers over a period of a few months. The software can then identify any deviations from the norm and flag up unusual activities, such as transactions with a foreign bank, or contact with someone who is also under surveillance, so that analysts can take a closer look.

But if the experience of U.S. Fusion Centers are any indication of the accuracy of the Siemens system, false positives will be endemic while thousands, if not millions, of perfectly innocent individuals are forever ensnared in the state's data driftnet. According to the American Civil Liberties Union,

The Justice Department's 2006 Guidelines envision fusion centers doing more than simply sharing legitimately acquired law enforcement information across different branches of our burgeoning security establishment. The Guidelines encourage compiling data "from nontraditional sources, such as public safety entities and private sector organizations" and fusing it with federal intelligence "to anticipate, identify, prevent, and/or monitor criminal and terrorist activity." This strongly implies the use of statistical dragnets that have come to be called data-mining. The inevitable result of a data-mining approach to fusion centers will be:

Many innocent individuals will be flagged, scrutinized, investigated, placed on watch lists, interrogated or arrested, and possibly suffer irreparable harm to their reputation, all because of a hidden machinery of data brokers, information aggregators and computer algorithms.

Law enforcement agencies will waste time and resources investing in high-tech computer boondoggles that leave them chasing false leads--while real threats go unaddressed and limited resources are sucked away from the basic, old-fashioned legwork that is the only way genuine terror plots have ever been foiled. (Michael German and Jay Staley, "What's Wrong with Fusion Centers," American Civil Liberties, December 2007)

But perhaps "high-tech computer boondoggles" are precisely the point!

After all, the Boeing Company and their sidekicks at SRI International (which describes itself as "an independent, nonprofit research institute") were recently criticized by a House Science and Technology Subcommittee for "irregularities" in the government's Railhead program, a suite of software "upgrades" to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), "a vast database of names that feeds the nation's terrorist watch list," the Associated Press reported.

Railhead was touted as a "fix" for a system built by Lockheed Martin in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. According to congressional investigators, the system provides data to all federal terrorist watch lists, including the "no-fly" list run by the Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration and the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center, a national clearinghouse for federal, state and local fusion centers.

According to the House committee the program is months behind schedule, millions over budget and "would actually be less capable than the U.S. government terrorist tracking system it is meant to replace." Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported,

When tested, the new system failed to find matches for terrorist-suspect names that were spelled slightly different from the name entered into the system, a common challenge when translating names from Arabic to English. It also could not perform basic searches of multiple words connected with terms such as "and" and "or." (Siobhan Gorman, "Flaws Found in Watch List for Terrorists, The Wall Street Journal, August 22, 2008)

Leaving aside the racist presuppositions of the Journal, to wit, that Arab = terrorist (no small matter when dealing with nativist yahoos here in the "homeland" or elswehere), as Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) said in a statement, "the program appears to be on the brink of collapse after an estimated half-billion dollars in taxpayer funding has been spent on it." According to the committee,

The Railhead program had been undergoing an internal technical implosion for more than one year. But public statements and sworn public testimony to Congress from senior officials within the NCTC [National Counterterrorist Center] and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) never revealed the mounting technical troubles, poor contractor management or lax government oversight that appears to have been endemic throughout the program and has led to Railhead's colossal failure. Astoundingly, the Director of NCTC and the Director of National Intelligence have both specifically pointed to TIDE and NCTC Online as hallmarks of the government’s information sharing accomplishments. ("Technical Flaws Hinder Terrorist Watch List; Congress Calls for Investigation," Committee on Science and Technology, Press Release, August 21, 2008)

In a technical sense, the NCTC and the ODNI may be correct in touting TIDE and NCTC Online as "hallmarks of the government's information sharing accomplishments," if by "sharing accomplishments" they meant handing over unlimited bundles of taxpayer's hard-earned cash to enterprising contractors!

Gorman reports that in "recent weeks, the government has fired most of the 862 private contractors from dozens of companies working on the Railhead project, and only a skeleton crew remains." Boeing and SRI's response? According to the Journal, "calls to officials of Boeing and SRI were not immediately returned."

I bet they weren't! Especially since the committee said "Railhead insiders" allege that the government paid Boeing some $200 million to retrofit the company's Herndon, Virginia office with security upgrades so that top secret software work could be performed there. The government then leased the same office space from Boeing. How's that for hitting the old corporate "sweet spot."

None of this of course, should surprise anyone, least of all defense lobby dollar-addicted members of Congress who, like Captain Renault in Casablanca are "shocked, shocked" to find their corporate "partners" have failed to deliver--again.

According to Washington Technology's list of "2008 Top 100 Government Prime Contractors," Boeing clocked-in at No. 2 with $9,706,621,413 in taxpayer handouts. No slouches themselves, Siemens placed No. 79 with some $186,292,146 in prime government contracts across an array of defense and civilian agencies. With Railhead's imminent demise, perhaps the German electronics giant has a future in the U.S. "homeland security" market with its Intelligent Platform?

Then again, perhaps not. Computer security expert Bruce Schneier told New Scientist, "'currently there are no good patterns available to recognise terrorists,' he says, and questions whether Siemens has got around this." But since the business of government is business, maybe they do after all.

Meanwhile, the PRISE consortium of security technology and human rights experts funded by the European Union, called "for a moratorium on the development of fusion technologies, referring explicitly to the Siemens Intelligence Platform," Margottini reported.

According to New Scientist, PRISE analysts told the EU, "The efficiency and reliability of such tools is as yet unknown. More surveillance does not necessarily lead to a higher level of societal security. Hence there must be a thorough examination of whether the resulting massive constraints on human rights are proportionate and justified."

But here in the United States concern over trivial things such as "massive constraints on human rights," unlike state attacks against the "quaint" rights of the average citizen are, like the impeachment of a regime studded with war criminals, most definitely "off the table."

While the Democrats celebrate Barack Obama's coronation in Denver this week and the Republicans are poised to do the same for John McCain in the Twin Cities rest assured, administrations may change, but the corporate grift is eternal.

Defense Intelligence Agency Seeking "Mind Control" Weapons

A new report from the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council (NRC) argues that the Pentagon should harvest the fruits of neuroscientific research in order to enhance the "warfighting" capabilities of U.S. soldiers while diminishing those of enemy personnel.

The 151-page report issued by a 16-member blue ribbon commission, "Cognitive Neuroscience Research and National Security," was quietly announced in an August 13 National Academy of Sciences Press Release.

Commissioned by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon spy shop, the study asserts that the U.S. intelligence "community" must do a better job following cutting-edge research in neuroscience or as is more likely, steering it along paths useful to the Defense Department. According to the NRC,

A 2005 National Research Council report described a methodology for gauging the implications of new technologies and assessing whether they pose a threat to national security. In this new report, the committee applied the methodology to the neuroscience field and identified several research areas that could be of interest to the intelligence community: neurophysiological advances in detecting and measuring indicators of psychological states and intentions of individuals, the development of drugs or technologies that can alter human physical or cognitive abilities, advances in real-time brain imaging, and breakthroughs in high-performance computing and neuronal modeling that could allow researchers to develop systems which mimic functions of the human brain, particularly the ability to organize disparate forms of data. ("National Security Intelligence Organizations should Monitor Advances in Cognitive Neuroscience Research," National Academy of Sciences, Press Release, August 13, 2008)

Unlocking the secrets of the brain is projected as the next growth industry for the military, academia and corporate grifters hoping to land huge Pentagon contracts. As defense analyst Noah Shachtman reported in Wired, the "Army has given a team of University of California researchers a $4 million grant to study the foundations of "synthetic telepathy." Unlike "remote viewing" research funded by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency between 1972 and 1996, variously known as "Grill Flame," "Sun Streak" and finally, "Star Gate" before the plug was pulled, the Army-U.C. Irvine joint venture are exploring thought transmission via a brain-computer mediated interface.

Recently New Scientist reported on a series of bizarre experiments at the University of Reading in the UK. Researchers there have connected 300,000 disembodied rat neurons suspended in "a pink broth of nutrients and antibiotics" to 80 electrodes at the base of the growth medium. As journalist Paul Marks informs us, the "rat neurons have made--and continue to make--connections with each other." The voltages sparked by the firing cells are displayed on a computer screen.

Welcome to the "brave new world" of neural prosthetics and the militarists who are exploiting science and technology for new weapons applications.

Declaring that emerging technologies such as brain imaging and cognitive and physical enhancers are "desired by the public," NRC avers "such forces act as strong market incentives for development." But as Rick Weiss cautions on the Science Progress blog,

But even more interesting to me is the report's discussion of the emerging market in brain-targeted, performance-degrading techniques. Some experiments, it turns out, suggest that magnetic beams can be used to induce seizures in people, a tempting addition to the military's armamentarium. More conventionally, as scientists discover new chemicals that can blur thinking or undermine an enemy's willpower, and as engineers design aerosolized delivery systems that can deliver these chemicals directly to the lungs (and from there, the brains) of large groups of people, the prospect of influencing the behavior of entire enemy regiments becomes real. ("Minding Mental Minefields," Science Progress, August 15, 2008)

The use of so-called calmative agents as non-lethal weapons are already under development. As Antifascist Calling reported last month in "The Calmative Before the Storm," the Pentagon's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) are carrying out experiments into what it euphemistically calls "Human Effects Research" and developing an "Advanced Total Body Model for predicting the effects of non-lethal impacts."

Apparently the DIA has taken this a step further and will now explore the possibility of creating aerosolized pharmacological agents that can disrupt and perhaps influence, the mental functioning of targeted populations abroad, enemy soldiers or dissenting citizens here in the United States.

Neil Davison, a researcher with the Bradford Disarmament Research Centre (BDRC) at Bradford University in the UK, wrote an important 2007 study, "'Off the Rocker' and 'On the Floor': The Continued Development of Biochemical Incapacitating Weapons." Davison examined the historical differentiation made by weaponeers between "off the rocker" agents such as LSD, PCP and psilocybin in their allegedly weaponized forms versus "on the floor" agents such as sedatives, opiate analgesics and anesthetic chemicals.

During the "golden age" of the CIA and U.S. Army's quixotic search for "mind control" agents during the 1950s and 1960s, researchers were seeking a reliable mechanism that would unlock the secrets of the mind--and gain control over witting or unwitting subjects--for intelligence and counterintelligence purposes. Hundreds, if not thousands, of unethical experiments were carried out on psychiatric patients, civilians and soldiers. The results were subsequently suppressed on grounds on "national security."

While the majority of CIA MKULTRA files were ordered destroyed by former Agency Director Richard Helms in 1973, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence held landmark 1977 hearings and issued a report, "Project MKULTRA, The CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification." As Senator Ted Kennedy discussed in his opening remarks,

Some 2 years ago, the Senate Health Subcommittee heard chilling testimony about the human experimentation activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over 30 universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations." ...

We believed that the record, incomplete as it was, was as complete as it was going to be. Then one individual, through a Freedom of Information request, accomplished what two U.S. Senate committees could not. He spurred the agency into finding additional records pertaining to the CIA's program of experimentation with human subjects. ... The records reveal a far more extensive series of experiments than had previously been thought. Eighty-six universities or institutions were involved. New instances of unethical behavior were revealed.

The Central Intelligence Agency drugged American citizens without their knowledge or consent. It used university facilities and personnel without their knowledge. It funded leading researchers, often without their knowledge. (emphasis added)

While the CIA's MKULTRA project and related Army ventures carried out at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, may have failed to develop specific agents that could be wielded as a "mind control" weapon, the research did result in the development of abusive interrogation techniques that can only be characterized as torture.

As Antifascist Calling queried in "Neuroscience, National Security & the 'War on Terror'," "If behavioral psychology was handmaid to the horrors perpetrated at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and CIA transnational 'black sites,' what new nightmares are in store for humanity when advances in neuroscience, complex computer algorithms and a secretive national security state enter stage (far) right?"

Apparently horrors of the "mind control" variety, particularly when it comes to applications for ever-newer and more insidious interrogation/control techniques to be used on "enemy combatants" or dissenting malefactors in the heimat.

According to the NRC and the corporate-academic grifters involved in the research, cognitive warfare should be sold as a "more humane" method of advancing imperialist objectives. As the report baldly states, the equation "pills instead of bullets" will be the preferred marketing technique employed for "selling" the program to the American people. As anthropologist Hugh Gusterson wrote,

The military and scientific leaders chartering neuroweapons research will argue that the United States is a uniquely noble country that can be trusted with such technologies, while other countries (except for a few allies) cannot. They will also argue that these technologies will save lives and that U.S. ingenuity will enable the United States to dominate other countries in a neuroweapons race. When it is too late to turn back the clock, they will profess amazement that other countries caught up so quickly and that an initiative intended to ensure American dominance instead led to a world where everyone is threatened by chemicalized soldiers and roboterrorists straight out of Blade Runner. (The militarization of neuroscience," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 9 April 2007)

But as the world looked on in horror at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, this "uniquely noble country" guided by "ethical principles," resorted to repugnant methods such as sensory deprivation, near drowning and "self-inflicted pain" techniques (short-shackling and the like) to achieve control over defenseless prisoners.

As the NRC would have it, academics in thrall to corporate funding and state agencies staffed by war criminals now expect us to believe that "ethics" will guide those exploring pharmacological methods to obtain more insidious means to subjugate humanity.

Weiss reports that the NRC notes in its report, the motivation, or lack thereof, to fight, is of great concern to Pentagon bureaucrats and policy makers. "So one question," for military-corporate-academic funded research "would be, 'How can we disrupt the enemy's motivation to fight?' Other questions raised by controlling the mind: 'How can we make people trust us more?' 'What if we could help the brain to remove fear or pain?' 'Is there a way to make the enemy obey our commands?'...As cognitive neuroscience and related technologies become more pervasive, using technology for nefarious purposes becomes easier."

But as is usual with all such screeds, the psychoanalytic theory of projection comes in handy when deciphering the monstrous intent of Pentagon weaponeers. It is all-too-clear whether we are discussing nuclear, biological, chemical or contemporaneously, cognitive weapons that Western proponents of preemptive war, always couch their acts of violent imperialist aggression in purely defensive terms.

In this light, Freud and his followers have defined projection as a form of defense in which unwanted feelings are displaced onto another person, and where aggressive impulses then appear as a threat from the external world. In the case of corporate defense and security grifters, their militarist pit bulls and the academic sycophants who fuel their deranged "cognitive warfare" fantasies, the other--a nation, a dispossessed class or a bogeyman such as "international terrorism"--are always the external harbingers of apocalyptic death and destruction, when in reality such fantasies are wholly reflective of their own desire to aggressively dominate and plunder other nations.

Therefore, the NRC maintains, and note the ideologically-skewed reference to the eternal verities of "the market," the Holy Grail of capitalism in its hyperimperialist phase:

The fear that this approach to fighting war might be developed will be justification for developing countermeasures to possible cognitive weapons. This escalation might lead to innovations that could cause this market area to expand rapidly. Tests would need to be developed to determine if a soldier had been harmed by a cognitive weapon. And there would be a need for a prophylactic of some sort. (NRC, op. cit.)

Who, pray tell, is driving this "escalation" and counting on academia to produce "innovations" in "this market area"? One might also quite reasonably inquire: Who profits?

As Christopher Green, the chairman of the NRC investigative panel championing neuroweapons research avers in a roundtable discussion sponsored by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,

Big Pharma is global. Drug discovery research is both ponderous (not as much as arms control, however) and increasingly beyond the control of governments and the public. The development of cognitive enhancers and anti-aging aides during the next two decades (the time needed for drug discovery to become successful) will be...ethically worrisome. But it will be beyond opprobrium. Drugs will be developed and marketed, and not necessarily under the auspices of traditional Western controls and good laboratory practices. ("The potential impact of neuroscience research is greater than previously thought," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 9 July 2008) [emphasis added]

While Green claims he is opposed to developing drugs "with safe and efficacious properties for military use," the NRC study, after all, was funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency, hardly a "neutral party" when it comes to "enhanced interrogation techniques" and other horrors of this horrible system!

One must also dissect the linguistic formulations and assumptions deployed by those advocating this line of research. By referring to neuroweapons production as a "market area," those contemplating unleashing devilish pharmacological forms of warfare on unsuspecting populations behave, in you'll pardon the pun, as if they were brainstorming the release of a new video game or suite of luxury condominiums in an American city "ethnically cleansed" of its urban poor!

Green and his acolytes claim that "battlefield commanders of all nations hold sacrosanct the right to determine the applications" of weapon deployments that may cause "collateral damage" to civilian noncombatants. Therefore, Green argues that "if governments or scientists were to try to develop a system to pre-screen neuroscientific cognitive manipulators, which would be HIPAA approved and tested, and robust in its core science, success would be as likely as it was with mines and cluster-bombs--meaning not likely." Translation: full-speed ahead!

While the NRC allege that their approach to monitoring neuroweapons research is "ethical," the committee ponders whether "the concept of torture could also be altered by products in this market. It is possible that someday there could be a technique developed to extract information from a prisoner that does not have any lasting side effects."

Other than the hollowing-out of one's personality and the unique traits that make us human, that is. "Paging Winston Smith, white courtesy telephone!"

While Nazi theories of Aryan superiority may have been displaced by a uniquely American ultranationalist, though no less predatory utilitarian praxis, behind the glittering technological promises trumpeted by today's biotech weaponeers lurk the same murderous mental constructs that guided Indian hunters and slave traders of yore.

Only this time, we're all Manchurian candidates.

COINTELPRO 2.0: Mukasey Loosens Guidelines on Domestic Spying

The waning months of the Bush administration can be characterized by an avalanche of changes to long-standing rules governing domestic intelligence operations.

The revisions proposed by U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey and other top administration officials, represent the greatest expansion of executive power since the Watergate era and should been viewed as an imminent threat to already-diminished civil liberties protections in the United States.

The slippery slope towards open police state methods of governance may have begun with the 2001 passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, but recent events signal that a qualitative acceleration of repressive measures are currently underway. These changes are slated to go into effect with the new fiscal year beginning October 1, and are subject neither to congressional oversight nor judicial review.

Bush allies in Congress kicked-off the summer with the shameful passage by the House and Senate of the FISA Amendments Act, an unconstitutional domestic spying bill that gutted Fourth Amendment protections. With broad consensus by both capitalist political parties, the FISA Act eliminates meaningful judicial oversight of state surveillance while granting virtual immunity to law-breaking telecoms.

Despite posturing by leading Democrats, including the party's presumptive presidential nominee, Sen. Barack Obama, the FISA legislation legalized the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program and set the stage for further assaults on the right to privacy and dissent.

Further attacks were not long in coming.

In the last month alone, mainstream media have reported that the FBI illegally obtained the phone records of overseas journalists allegedly as part of a 2004 "terrorism investigation."

Other reports documented how the Department of Homeland Security asserts the right to seize a traveler's laptop and other electronic devices for an unspecified period of time and without probable cause.

Still other reports revealed that the administration has expanded the power of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to issue "overarching policies and procedures" and to coordinate "priorities" with foreign intelligence services that target American citizens and legal residents.

And on Wednesday, The Washington Post exposed how the federal government has used "its system of border checkpoints to greatly expand a database on travelers entering the country by collecting information on all U.S. citizens crossing by land, compiling data that will be stored for 15 years and may be used in criminal and intelligence investigations." Ellen Nakashima writes,

The disclosure of the database is among a series of notices, officials say, to make DHS's data gathering more transparent. Critics say the moves exemplify efforts by the Bush administration in its final months to cement an unprecedented expansion of data gathering for national security and intelligence purposes. ("Citizens' U.S. Border Crossings Tracked," The Washington Post, August 20, 2008)

The Post also revealed that the information will be linked to a new database, the Non-Federal Entity Data System, "which is being set up to hold personal information about all drivers in a state's database." Posted at the Government Printing Office's website, the notice states that the information may even be shared with federal contractors or consultants "to accomplish an agency function related to this system of records."

But perhaps the most controversial move towards increasing the federal government's surveillance powers were unveiled by the Justice Department in late July. According to The Washington Post, "a new domestic spying measure...would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years."

New rules for police intelligence-gathering would apply to any of the 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive some $1.6 billion each year in federal grants. These proposed changes, as with other administration measures, were quietly published July 31 in the Federal Register.

The McClatchy Washington Bureau reported August 13, that Mukasey confirmed plans to "loosen post-Watergate restrictions on the FBI's national security and criminal investigations," under cover of improving the Bureau's "ability to detect terrorists." Marisa Taylor wrote,

Mukasey said he expected criticism of the new rules because "they expressly authorize the FBI to engage in intelligence collection inside the United States." However, he said the criticism would be misplaced because the bureau has long had authority to do so.

Mukasey said the new rules "remove unnecessary barriers" to cooperation between law enforcement agencies and "eliminate the artificial distinctions" in the way agents conduct surveillance in criminal and national security investigations. ("FBI to Get Freer Rein to Look for Terrorism Suspects," McClatchy Washington Bureau, August 13, 2008)

While the Justice Department's draft proposals have been selectively leaked to the media, and DoJ is expected to release its final version of the changes within a few weeks, even then the bulk of these modifications will remain classified on grounds of "national security."

Under the new regulatory regime proposed by Mukasey, state and local police would be given free rein to target groups as well as individuals, and to launch criminal intelligence investigations based on the "suspicion" that a target is "engaged in terrorism." The results of such investigations could be shared "with a constellation of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and others in many cases," according to Post reporters Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson.

With probable cause tossed overboard, domestic intelligence as envisaged by the Bush Justice Department is little more than a fishing expedition intended to cast a wide driftnet over Americans' constitutional rights, reducing guarantees of free speech and assembly to banal pieties mouthed by state propagandists.

These changes are intended to lock-in Bush regime surveillance programs such as warrantless internet and phone wiretapping, data mining, the scattershot issuance of top secret National Security Letters to seize financial and other personal records, as well as expanding a security index of individuals deemed "terrorist threats" by the corporatist state.

Simultaneous with the release of new DoJ domestic spying guidelines, the Bush administration's "modernization" of Reagan-era Executive Order 12333, as The Washington Post delicately puts it, also calls for intensified sharing of intelligence information with local law enforcement agencies.

In addition to consolidating power within the ODNI, E.O. 12333 revisions direct the CIA "and other spy agencies," in a clear violation of the Agency's charter, to "provide specialized equipment, technical knowledge or assistance of expert personnel" to state and local authorities.

The latest moves to expand executive power follow close on the heels of other orders and rule changes issued by the Bush regime. As researcher and analyst Michel Chossudovsky reported in June, the Orwellian National Security Presidential Directive 59/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 24 (NSPD 59/HSPD 24), entitled "Biometrics for Identification and Screening to Enhance National Security," is directed against U.S. citizens. Chossudovsky wrote,

NSPD 59 goes far beyond the issue of biometric identification, it recommends the collection and storage of "associated biographic" information, meaning information on the private lives of US citizens, in minute detail, all of which will be "accomplished within the law."

The directive uses 9/11 as an all encompassing justification to wage a witch hunt against dissenting citizens, establishing at the same time an atmosphere of fear and intimidation across the land.

It also calls for the integration of various data banks as well as inter-agency cooperation in the sharing of information, with a view to eventually centralizing the information on American citizens. ("Big Brother" Presidential Directive: "Biometrics for Identification and Screening to Enhance National Security," Global Research, June 11, 2008)

Indeed, NSPD 59/HSPD 24 creates the framework for expanding the definition of who is a "terrorist" to include other categories of individuals "who may pose a threat to national security."

In addition to al Qaeda and other far-right Islamist terror groups, many of whom have served as a cat's paw for Western intelligence agencies in the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and the Balkans, NSPD 59/HSPD 24 has identified two new categories of individuals as potential threats: "Radical groups" and "disgruntled employees."

In other words, domestic anarchist and socialist organizations as well as labor unions acting on behalf of their members' rights, now officially fall under the panoptic lens of federal intelligence agencies and the private security contractors who staff the 16 separate agencies that comprise the U.S. "intelligence community."

These moves represent nothing less than an attempt by the Bush administration to return to the days of COINTELPRO when the Bureau, acting in concert with state and local police "red squads" targeted the left for destruction.

"After 9/11, the gloves come off"

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. national security state has ramped-up its repressive machinery, targeting millions of Americans through broad surveillance programs across a multitude of state and private intelligence agencies.

While the FBI, CIA, NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may be the federal "tip of the spear" of current intelligence operations, they certainly are not alone when it comes to domestic spying.

Outsourced contractors from communications, defense and security corporations such as AT&T, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Verizon Communications, Northrop Grumman, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), L-3 Communications, CACI International and many more, have collaborated with Bush regime war criminals in fashioning a hypermodern, high-tech police state.

That these corporations have staked-out "homeland security" as a niche market to expand their operations has been explored by Antifascist Calling in numerous articles. As I have previously reported, it is estimated that some 70% of the personnel employed by U.S. intelligence agencies are now private contractors holding top secret and above security clearances.

Unaccountable actors virtually beyond congressional scrutiny, outsourced intelligence agents first and foremost are employees answerable to corporate managers and boards of directors, not the American people or their representatives. Chiefly concerned with inflating profit margins by overselling the "terrorist threat," the incestuous relationships amongst corporate grifters and a diminished "public sector" demonstrate the precarious state of democratic norms and institutions in the U.S.

New rules governing FBI counterintelligence investigations will allow the Bureau to run informants for the purpose of infiltrating organizations deemed "subversive" by federal snoops. Many of the worst abuses under COINTELPRO, the CIA's Operation CHAOS and the U.S. Army's deployment of Military Intelligence Groups (MIGs) for illegal domestic operations during the 1960s, employed neofascists as infiltrators and as nascent death squads.

While the Bureau may have eschewed close collaboration with fascist gangs, will sophisticated, high-tech private security corporations now play a similar role in Bureau counterintelligence and domestic security operations?

If history is any judge, the answer inevitably will be "yes."

Currently equipping the "intelligence community" with electronic specialists, network managers, software designers and analysts, will defense and security corporations bulk-up the Bureau and related agencies with "plausibly deniable" ex-military and intelligence assets for targeted infiltration and "disruption" of domestic antiwar and anticapitalist groups?

It can't happen here? Why its happening already! As investigative journalist James Ridgeway revealed in April, a private security firm,

organized and managed by former Secret Service officers spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organizations from the late 1990s through at least 2000, pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating confidential meetings. According to company documents provided to Mother Jones by a former investor in the firm, this security outfit collected confidential internal records--donor lists, detailed financial statements, the Social Security numbers of staff members, strategy memos—from these organizations and produced intelligence reports for public relations firms and major corporations involved in environmental controversies. ("Cops and Former Secret Service Agents Ran Black Ops on Green Groups," Mother Jones, April 11, 2008)

The firm, Beckett Brown International (later called S2i) provided a range of services for corporate clients. According to Ridgeway, the private snoops engaged in "intelligence collection" for Allied Waste; conducted background checks and "performed due diligence" for the Carlyle Group; handled "crisis management" for the Gallo wine company and Pirelli; engaged in "information collection" for Wal-Mart. Also listed as BBI/S2i records as clients were Halliburton and Monsanto.

Mike German, a former FBI agent and whistleblower who is now the policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that once proposed changes are implemented, police may collect intelligence even when no underlying crime is suspected. This is nothing less than "preemptive policing" and a recipe for tightening the screws on dissent. The Post averred,

German, an FBI agent for 16 years, said easing established limits on intelligence-gathering would lead to abuses against peaceful political dissenters. In addition to the Maryland case [that targeted antiwar and death penalty opponents], he pointed to reports in the past six years that undercover New York police officers infiltrated protest groups before the 2004 Republican National Convention; that California state agents eavesdropped on peace, animal rights and labor activists; and that Denver police spied on Amnesty International and others before being discovered.

"If police officers no longer see themselves as engaged in protecting their communities from criminals and instead as domestic intelligence agents working on behalf of the CIA, they will be encouraged to collect more information," German said. "It turns police officers into spies on behalf of the federal government." (Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson, "U.S. May Ease Police Spy Rules," The Washington Post, August 16, 2008)

In a related report on Fusion Centers, that German coauthored with Jay Staley for the ACLU, they documented how so-called "counterterrorist" national collection agencies are "characterized by ambiguous lines of authority, excessive secrecy, troubling private-sector and military participation, and an apparent bent toward suspicionless information collection and data mining."

As I reported earlier this month, citing research from German and Staley's report, U.S. Marine Corps officers, enlisted personnel and an analyst with U.S. NORTHCOM, pilfered intelligence files and shared them with private defense contractors in hope of securing future employment.

Money talks, particularly in a political culture where the business of government is, after all, business!

With little oversight from a compliant Congress, and an "opposition" party in league with their "constituents"--multinational corporate grifters out to make a buck--the final nails are being hammered into the coffin of America's former democratic Republic.

Air Force Pulls the Plug on Cyber Command

In July, Antifascist Calling reported on the imminent launch of U.S. Air Force Cyber Command (AFCYBER).

With a unified organizational structure and a $2 billion budget for its first year of operations, and a projected $30 billion cost for the first five years of operations, AFCYBER promised an offensive capability that would deliver withering attacks on adversaries.

As I wrote, "Eventually, if Air Force securocrats have their way, it 'will grow into one of the service's largest commands.' With a mission to 'deceive, deny, disrupt, degrade, and destroy' an enemy's information infrastructure, the potential for mischief on the part of American 'warfighters' and 'public diplomacy' black propaganda specialists shouldn't be underestimated."

Now however, numerous reports reveal that the Air Force has suspended plans for the controversial unit. NextGov broke the story Wednesday. According to investigative journalist Bob Brewin,

The Air Force on Monday suspended all efforts related to development of a program to become the dominant service in cyberspace, according to knowledgeable sources. Top Air Force officials put a halt to all activities related to the establishment of the Cyber Command, a provisional unit that is currently part of the 8th Air Force at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, sources told NextGov.

An internal Air Force e-mail obtained by NextGov said, "Transfers of manpower and resources, including activation and reassignment of units, shall be halted." Establishment of the Cyber Command will be delayed until new senior Air Force leaders, including Chief of Staff Norton Schwartz, sworn in today, have time to make a final decision on the scope and mission of the command. ("Air Force Suspends Cyber Command Program," NextGov, August 13, 2008)

Air Force spokesman Ed Gulick told Federal Times, the "freeze" was necessary "because we have new leaders and they want to make sure they're on the right course." But he said the Air Force "remains committed to cyberspace."

With an October 1 launch date, it appears that aggressive efforts by Major General William Lord, the unit's commander, to hype its capabilities may have been its undoing. Brewin reports the "hard sell" by Lord and other AF securocrats "seemed to be a grab by the Air Force to take the lead role" in U.S. cyberdefense efforts.

Bureaucratic in-fighting may play a significant role in pulling AFCYBER's plug. Philip Coyle, a senior adviser with the Center for Defense Information (CDI), a liberal defense think tank, told NextGov that he believes "the Navy's Network Warfare Command and the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center have led the way in cyberspace. The Army engages in cyberspace operations daily in Afghanistan and Iraq, said Coyle, who served as assistant secretary of Defense and director of its operational test and evaluation office from 1994 to 2001."

Accordingly, Coyle believes the decision may have come from Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who wants to see a more "robust role" for the Navy in cyberspace. Lord's high public profile and hard-sell may have shot-down AF plans to "dominate cyberspace" and the AF "is now suffering from its own hubris."

It appears that AFCYBER's aggressive public posture and its assertion that cyberspace is a "warfighting domain," may have angered Department of Defense bureaucrats who favor a "softer" approach when it comes to plans for imperialist domination.

In this light, recent Air Force scandals, including the unauthorized transfer of nuclear weapons in 2007 and the dismantling of the service's top command by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as a result, the Air Force's lax organizational structure may have been a deciding factor.

In June, Gates fired Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Mosley and Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne for their incompetence over the service's handling of nuclear weapons.

Many readers will recall that on August 30, 2007 a B-52 Stratofortress bomber flew nearly 1,500 miles from Minot Air Force base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana with six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles fixed to its wings. For nearly six hours the Air Force was unable to account for the weapons. When Military Times broke the story, it elicited a yawn from major media outlets that amounted to self-censorship.

While brief media reports emphasized that the public was "never in danger," as physicist Pavel Podvig reported,

The point is that the nuclear warheads were allowed to leave Minot and that it was surprised airmen at Barksdale who discovered them, not an accounting system that's supposed to track the warheads' every movement (maybe even in real time). We simply don't know how long it would've taken to discover the warheads had they actually left the air force's custody and been diverted into the proverbial "wrong hands." Of course, it could be argued that the probability of this kind of diversion is very low, but anyone who knows anything about how the United States handles its nuclear weapons has said that the probability of what happened at Minot was also essentially zero. ("U.S. loose nukes," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 12 September 2007)

In the wake of the scandal, Mosley and Wynne were forced to fall on their swords. Similar forces may be at play regarding AFCYBER. According to CDI researcher Chelsea Dilley,

It is unclear what AFCYBER's exact mission is, what capabilities are being developed, what circumstances warrant a cyber attack, what actions will be taken in response to an attack, who can authorize an attack, what steps will be taken to prevent crisis escalation, what the budgets are and exactly where the money is coming from. AFCYBER's relation to the Department of Homeland Security and to the Air Force Space Command is also hazy, which could prove problematic, as all have claimed some responsibility for maintaining control of cyberspace. 
 
Alarmingly, there are many similarities in the ways used to promote AFCYBER and those used in the Air Force's increasingly belligerent counterspace mission. The diction used in the 2004 Air Force Counterspace Operations Doctrine and the 2008 Air Force Cyber Command Strategic Vision is in many places exactly the same, and it is uncertain if the task that was given to the Air Force Space Command to maintain cyberspace has actually been transferred to or just appropriated by the new Cyber Command. ("Air Force Cyber Command: Defending Cyberspace, or Controlling It?," Center for Defense Information, August 7, 2008)

Whether or not a bureaucratic tussle amongst competing branches of the military and the Department of Homeland Security may have played a role in AFCYBER's apparent demise, the Air Force is continuing to develop new and more hideous weapons to insure that the American Empire's dream of global domination remains a viable option for our capitalist masters.

New Scientist reported August 12 on an airborne laser weapon, dubbed the "long-range blowtorch." According to defense analyst David Hambling,

The Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) is to be mounted on a Hercules military transport plane. Boeing announced the first test firing of the laser, from a plane on the ground, earlier this summer.

Cynthia Kaiser, chief engineer of the US Air Force Research Laboratory's Directed Energy Directorate, used the phrase "plausible deniability" to describe the weapon's benefits in a briefing on laser weapons to the New Mexico Optics Industry Association in June. ("U.S. Boasts of Laser Weapon's 'Plausible Deniability'," New Scientist, August 12, 2008)

As readers are aware, "plausible deniability" is a term used to describe aggressive covert operations where those responsible for an event, say the assassination of a political opponent or the terrorist bombing of a civilian target, could plausibly claim to have neither knowledge nor involvement in the atrocity since command responsibility by design is highly compartmentalized.

According to Hambling, "a laser is silent and invisible. An ATL can deliver the heat of a blowtorch with a range of 20 kilometres, depending on conditions. That range is great enough that the aircraft carrying it might not be seen, especially at night."

Whatever the eventual fate of AFCYBER rest assured, as Aviation Week reported back in December, "U.S. Air Force leaders working on the nascent cyber command believe there will be a 'huge' need for contracted services to support the embryonic effort as it faces personnel, technology and funding headwinds."

Army, Navy, Air Force? Who cares! Enterprising corporate grifters will certainly be there, pushing for "full-spectrum dominance" as they lunge after multiyear, high-end contracts that just might hit the corporatist "sweet spot"!