Digital inquisition and secret state, a global issue

Dr Kamal Wickremasinghe

Black people in America were keenly enthused in 2008 by Barack Obama’s ride in to the White House as first-ever black President. They justifiably believed that one of the ‘dreams’ of African-Americans articulated by the civil rights leader Martin Luther King that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character” was becoming reality.

Five years down the track, and after two presidential wins, they are less optimistic today - Obama’s abysmal record of broken promises on the troops ‘surges’ in Iraq and Afghanistan, the gulag at Guantanamo, and other atrocities including murder by drones shows that his ‘race’ was merely deceptive packaging used by the neocons to disguise their evil agenda; Obama has, through his servility to the neocons, disgraced Martin Luther King’s vision.

His flippant dismissal of the public concerns aroused by the revelations of mass scale spying of American citizens by the National Security Agency (NSA) has shattered any remaining delusions that he had some decency left in his inner being.

Obama’s dictate that “You can’t have 100 per cent security and then also have 100 per cent privacy and zero inconvenience” was final proof that he is nothing but a neocon tool cynically presented to America and the world in order to overcome the public’s disgust over the office of US presidency following the Iraqi and Afghan wars.

His outrageous, Orwellian justification of universal spying by the government he presides was rebuffed and challenged by Edward Snowden who served America and the world by disclosing the disgraceful operation - Snowden quoted Benjamin Franklin’s dictum that “Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.” He is a much bigger man than Obama for that!

The NSA spying revelations come on top of Obama presiding over an unprecedented wave of over-classification of government documents as a means of keeping the American public in the dark. He also supplemented the ‘secret state’ with the aggressive use of the archaic Espionage Act (1917) against whistleblowers.

In 2009, early in his first presidency, Obama charged six former intelligence officials at the NSA including Thomas Drake for leaking information about the wire-tapping programme to a New York Times story published in December 2005. Probably no other US President, including the intellectually challenged George W. Bush, has done more to create the infrastructure for a possible future police state. Obama has litigated more whistleblowers than all his predecessors combined.

He committed all such moral and other crimes, hiding behind America’s fraudulent facade of “moral superiority” and claim for “leadership of the free world” in international affairs.

A spying operation of unprecedented proportions

The complexity and the sheer scale of the illegal eavesdropping operations disclosed by Edward Snowden makes “the perpetually open eye and mouth” of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four underwhelming, though chillingly prescient.

While Snowdon happens to be the first NSA insider to walk away with NSA secrets, the existence of the programme has been revealed previously, most notably by the former intelligence operative and best-selling author James Bamford, in his trilogy of books - The Puzzle Palace (1983); Body of Secrets (2002); and The Shadow Factory (2009).

Another book by the American journalist Mathew M. Aid, Secret Sentry (2009) provides detailed accounts of the ever-expanding spectre of the NSA since 1945, when it was created by Harry Truman, and its growth spurt in spying on US citizens under the Bush-Cheney and Obama administrations.

The nerve centre of the NSA responsible for the illegal mass spying is the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) Branch consisting of over 1,000 military and civilian computer hackers, hardware and software designers, and electrical engineers who work in rotating shifts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, hidden inside the massive NSA headquarters complex at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Since Obama became President, the TAO has grown in size to a massive nation-wide operation extending from Fort Meade to Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) intercept and processing centres in Hawaii; Fort Gordon, Georgia; San Antonio, Texas; and Buckley Air Force Base, Denver.

According to former NSA officials, TAO’s mission is to identify target computer systems and networks, break into them, and steal the information contained on the hard drives. The surreptitious invasion of computers also provides access to all the E-mail traffic through the invaded computer. The ultimate aim of the larger operation is to enable the US Cyber Command (Cybercom) to damage or destroy the computers on president’s orders.

The TAO is backed by a massive support infrastructure including the Telecommunications Network Technologies Branch (TNT) that develops the hacking techniques, the Mission Infrastructure Technologies Branch (MIT) that develops the computer and telecommunications monitoring hardware, and the Access Technologies Operations Branch, (ATO) staffed by personnel seconded by the CIA and the FBI trained to surreptitiously gain entry in to buildings and plant eavesdropping devices on computers and telecommunications systems, enabling remote access to TAO’s hackers from Fort Meade.

They have successfully penetrated Chinese computer and telecommunications systems for almost 15 years, while complaining of Chinese cyber-attacks by the broader US government.

The NSA has already launched one such cyber weapon known as Stuxnet, a computer “worm” created in partnership with the Israeli intelligence, against Iran’s nuclear facilities, damaging 1,000 centrifuges used to enrich nuclear material.

The information gathering also takes place in overseas locations through embassies and local agents in government departments feeding the grid, and such information, particularly gossip, is passed on selectively to the compromised members of the local English language media, the NGO workers with contacts at the embassy and other local operatives in respective countries.

Control by way of deception

The incestuous and secretive nature of the spying operations is demonstrated by the fact that Gen. Keith Alexander, a four-star Army General heads up the US Cyber Command (Cybercom), the NSA and the Central Security Service, preventing the incorporation of any counter opinion regarding the ethical and legal issues relating to the operations.

Alexander, an appointee of Donald Rumsfeld is jokingly referred to as ‘Alexander the Geek’ by NSA spies – as to his militarist approach to issues, they compare him with J. Edgar Hoover, who in a nearly 50 year career heading up the FBI amassed secret files on political leaders, political dissenters and activists, using illegal methods. In 2007, as secretary of the Air Force, he is on record to have pledged to “dominate cyberspace” just as “we dominate air and space today.”

The secrecy surrounding the TAO operations is such that only a relatively few NSA officials with special security clearance have physical and other access to its work spaces inside the NSA operations complex, and to information about its work.

The larger real game plan at the NSA, under cover, is focused on the development of offensive “cyber-kinetic” attack capability against an imaginary adversary’s equipment and infrastructure under the pretext of defending America’s critical infrastructure and the military command and control structure from cyberattacks.

The propaganda effort is supplemented by elaborate mechanisms such as the release of a 2013 “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure” giving a “D” on its maintenance of 13,991 dams in the US. In September 2011, Alexander predicted an attack within two to five years. On the back of such fear mongering, Alexander has asked Congress for $4.7 billion for 2014, nearly $1 billion more than the 2013 allocation, to create 13 cyberattack teams for increasing the “cyberspace operations”.

Privatisation of intelligence gathering

Snowden’s decision to turn whistleblower also brings to surface the increasingly significant and unethical role private contractors are playing in highly sensitive security roles involving access to ‘marketable’ sensitive personal information on civilians; It is considered that around a third of operators top secret security clearances at the NSA are private contractors.

To begin with, there is obviously a high degree of collusion between the NSA and the global communications service providers since the programme was introduced in 2007 - Microsoft, whose slogan is “Your privacy is our priority”, was the first to cooperate in 2007, followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and Apple, in 2012. The programme is continuing to expand with other providers compelled to come online.

What is even more disturbing is the virtually ‘seamless’, revolving-door type movement of personnel between the national security establishment and the mega private sector contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden’s former employer, majority owned by the shady Carlyle Group whose major share-holders include the Bush and Saudi Royal families. With an annual turnover of $6bn, employing 25,000 staff, Booz Allen is headquartered in McLean, northern Virginia, within a stone’s throw from the CIA headquarters.

Mike McConnell, the current vice-chairman of Booze Allan came from the company to be the director of national intelligence in the George W. Bush administration and returned to the firm after the Bush era.

The current director of national intelligence James Clapper is also a former Booz Allen executive. James Woolsey, a former CIA director was also a Booz Allen vice-president.

Then comes the issue of involvement of foreign companies with intelligence allegiances to foreign governments in NSA’s secret spying business - the hardware and software for NSA’s ‘prism’ spying equipment have been supplied by two Israeli companies - Narus, now owned by Boeing, and Verint - specialising in “mass surveillance”. To add to the intrigue, the founder and former head of Verint, Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, an Israeli military officer connected to the Odigo instant messaging company whose employees are alleged to have received an early warning of the 9/11 attacks, is currently a fugitive in Namibia after being indicted in America on 35 counts of fraud in 2006.

The US government and the NSA is committing a series crime in allowing such individuals and private companies access to sensitive personal health, financial and tax information of American citizens, and others on a global scale, an issue that deserves to be pursued by the UN as a violation of the fundamental human right of right to privacy.

The reaction of the secret state

The disgraceful reaction of the Obama administration and America’s corporate media to Snowden’s revelations was typified by outright dismissal of privacy concerns and attempts to tarnish Snowden’s character as a disreputable “traitor” - these were the same tactics used against Daniel Ellsberg who blew the whistle on the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

Such laughably sanctimonious venom of the secretive establishment was accompanied by other below-the-belt tactics such as the release photographs of Snowden on the internet, showing his tomfoolery as a young man on his 19th birthday. It was also ‘revealed’ that he used the screen name “The True HOOHA” in social media.

Secretary of State John Kerry accused Snowden a “traitor to his country who places himself above the law, having betrayed his country with respect to the violation of his oath”. Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, the leading Zionist in Congress, arrogantly declared - “I hope we’ll chase him to the ends of the earth, bring him to justice and let the Russians know there will be consequences if they harbour this guy.”

The House intelligence committee chairman Mike Rogers set out to tarnish Snowden’s integrity, accusing him of being a “Beijing partisan”, without producing any evidence. A member of the committee, Congressman Peter King said - “I think it is important for the American people to realise that this guy is a traitor, a defector, he’s not a hero.”

Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein was angry, not about the NSA conducting mass surveillance, but that Americans had learnt about it. The committee vice chairman Saxby Chambliss attempted to justify the mass collection of telephone records on the grounds it is “necessary to fight terrorism and bad guys”.

General Keith Alexander, director of the NSA still had egg white dripping from his face, metaphorically, when he ventured to attack Snowden as “an individual who is not acting with noble intent”.

Attempts were being made to mete out the same treatment to the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald who broke the news about the NSA surveillance programme - he pre-empted a disgraceful attempt by the corporate media, New York Daily News and The New York Times newspapers, to smear him with fabricated emails, and some past financial and tax issues. Greenwald told the media - “I am 46 years old, and like most people, have lived a complicated and varied adult life. These distractions about my past and personal life – or anything else – will not deter me from continuing to report on what the NSA is doing in the dark.”

The overall reaction of this dishonourable group of men portrayed the arrogance typical of the neocon elite and “we are the good guys” belief system that pervades their thinking. In their cockiness, they expect the ‘hoi polloi’ to buy their warped reasoning without question.

Another strand to NSA’s defence, that mass spying helped prevent “more than fifty” terrorist attacks was laughable nonsense in view of the fact that at least five of the alleged 9/11 hijackers were living in Laurel, Maryland, within a short drive from the NSA headquarters. The NSA has “failed miserably” in preventing attacks, missing everything from the first World Trade Centre attack in 1993 to the recent Boston Marathon bombing!

The truth is that despite its phenomenal growth of its “technical” capacity to vacuum communications off optic cables and satellites, the NSA does not have “intelligent” human brains to analyse and evaluate the information in a timely manner. In the absence of such predictive capability, the NSA is merely producing a marketable commodity of personal information that may at times be used to undermine politicians and dissenting members of the public.

The American public are only vaguely aware of the secret state

Following the Snowden revelations, it has become apparent that the well-known, total disengagement of the majority of American public from matters political now extends to the arena of privacy too - opinion polls show that the majority of Americans are either unaware of the problem, or are happy to accept the government’s word that such mass surveillance is necessary to save them from “terrorist attacks”.

Such American ignorance that provides oxygen to the neocon agenda was noted by James Bamford in his books - in fact he is fascinated by Americans’ willingness to “buy the company line” of spymasters who assure them that the letter of the law is being followed and civil liberties are respected, even as evidence such as Snowden’s revelations are emerging, suggesting the opposite.

This hopeless state of affairs gives credence to the observation of the British citizenry on the US Army in Europe in WWII, that they are “Oversexed, overpaid and over here”.

We are lucky that “they are over there”!