The Homeland Security State
By Nick Turse
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GB02Aa02.html
THE MILITARY HALF
If you're in the United States and reading this on the Internet, the Federal
Bureau of Information (FBI)may be spying on you at this very moment.
Under provisions of the USA Patriot (Uniting and Strengthening America by
Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism)
Act, the Department of Justice has been collecting e-mail and IP (Internet
protocol, a computer's unique numeric identifier) addresses, without a
warrant, using trap-and-trace surveillance devices ("pen-traps"). Now, the
FBI, Justice's principle investigative arm, may be monitoring the
web-surfing habits of Internet users - also without a search warrant - that
is, spying on you with no probable cause whatsoever.
In the wake of September 11, 2001, with the announcement of a potentially
never-ending "war on terror" and in the name of "national security", the
administration of President George W Bush embarked on a global campaign that
left behind it two war-ravaged states (with up to 100,000 civilian dead in
just one of them); an offshore "archipelago of injustice" replete with
"ghost jails", and a seemingly endless series of cases of torture, abuse and
the cold-blooded murder of prisoners. That was abroad. In the US, too,
things have changed as America became "the Homeland" and an already powerful
and bloated national security state developed a civilian corollary fed by
fear-mongering, partisan politics, and an insatiable desire for governmental
power, turf and budget.
A host of disturbing and mutually reinforcing patterns have emerged in the
resulting new Homeland Security State - among them: a virtually unopposed
increase in the intrusion of military, intelligence, and "security" agencies
into the civilian sector of US society; federal-government abridgment of
basic rights; denials of civil liberties on flimsy or previously illegal
premises; warrantless sneak-and-peak searches; the wholesale undermining of
privacy safeguards (including government access to library circulation
records, bank records, and records of Internet activity); the greater
empowerment of secret intelligence courts (such as the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act court) that threaten civil liberties; and heavy-handed
federal and local law-enforcement tactics designed to chill, squelch, or
silence dissent.
While it's true that most Americans have yet to feel the brunt of such
policies, select groups, including Muslims, Arab immigrants, Arab-Americans
and anti-war protesters have served as test subjects for a potential
Homeland Security juggernaut that, if not stopped, will only expand.
The military brings it all back home
Over the past few years we've become familiar with General John Abizaid's
Central Command (CENTCOM) whose "areas of responsibility" (AORs) stretch
from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia, including, of course, the Iraq war
zone. Like CENTCOM, the US has other commands that blanket the rest of the
world, including the Pacific Command (PACCOM, established in 1947) and the
European Command (EURCOM, established in 1952). In 2002, however, the
Pentagon broke new command ground by deciding, after a fashion, to bring war
to the Homeland. It established the US Northern Command (NORTHCOM), whose
AOR is "America's home front".
NORTHCOM is much more forthright about what it supposedly doesn't do than
what it actually does. Its website repeatedly, in many forms, notes that
NORTHCOM is not a police auxiliary and that the Reconstruction-era Posse
Comitatus Act prevents the military from meddling much in domestic affairs.
Despite this, NORTHCOM readily, if somewhat vaguely, admits to "a
cooperative relationship with federal agencies" and "information-sharing"
among organizations. NORTHCOM's commander, General Ralph "Ed" Eberhart, who,
the Wall Street Journal notes, is the "first general since the Civil War
with operational authority exclusively over military forces within the US",
was even more blunt when he told the Public Broadcasting System's Newshour,
"We are not going to be out there spying on people, [but] we get information
from people who do."
Even putting NORTHCOM aside, the military has recently been creeping into
civilian life in all sorts of ways. Back in 2003, for instance, Torch
Concepts, a US Army subcontractor, was given JetBlue's entire
5.1-million-passenger database, without the knowledge or consent of those on
the list, for data-mining - a blatant breach of civilian privacy that the
army nonetheless judged not to violate the federal Privacy Act. Then, in
2004, army intelligence agents were caught illegally investigating civilians
at a conference on Islam at the University of Texas law school in Austin.
And just recently, on the very same day the Washington Post reported that
"the Pentagon ... [has] created a new espionage arm and is reinterpreting US
law to give Defense Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld broad authority over
clandestine operations abroad", the New York Times reported that, as part of
the "extraordinary army of 13,000 troops, police officers and federal agents
marshaled to secure the [presidential] inauguration", the Pentagon had
deployed "super-secret commandos ... with state-of-the-art weaponry" in the
US capital. This was done under government directives that undercut the
Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. According to the Times, the black-ops cadre,
based out at the ultra-secretive Joint Special Operations Command at Fort
Bragg, North Carolina, is operating under "a secret counter-terrorism
program code-named Power Geyser", a program just recently brought to light
in Code Names, a new book by a former intelligence analyst for the US Army,
William M Arkin, who says that the "special-mission units [are being used]
in extra-legal missions ... in the United States" on the authority of the
Department of Defense's Joint Staff and with the support of the DoD's
Special Operations Command and NORTHCOM.
Courtesy of The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, we've known for some time of the
creation of "a secret unit that was given advance approval to kill or
capture and interrogate 'high-value' suspects ..." in the name of the "war
on terror". Some of us may have even known that since 1989, in the name of
the "war on drugs", there has been a multi-service command, (comprising
approximately 160 soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen and Department of
Defense operatives) known as Joint Task Force Six (JTF-6), providing
"support to federal, regional, state and local law-enforcement agencies
throughout the continental United States". Now, we know as well that there
are an unknown number of commando squads operating in the US - in the name
of the war at home. Just how many and exactly what they may up to we cannot
know for sure, since spokespersons for the relevant army commands refuse to
offer comment and Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman will only say that "at
any given time, there are a number of classified programs across the
government" and that Power Geyser "may or may not exist".
The emergence of an American Homeland Security State has allowed the US Army
to alter fundamentally its historic role, transforming what was once illegal
and then exceptional - deploying federal troops in support of (or acting as)
civilian law-enforcement agencies - into standard operating procedure. But
the army is not alone in its home-front meddling. While the army was
thwarted in its attempt to strong-arm University of Texas officials into
releasing a videotape of their conference on Islam, the US Navy used
arm-twisting to greater effect on a domestic government agency. The Wall
Street Journal reports that, in 2003, the Office of Naval Intelligence
badgered the US Customs Service to hand over its database on maritime trade.
At first, the Customs Service resisted the navy's efforts, but in the
post-September 11 atmosphere, like other agencies on the civil side of the
ledger, it soon caved to military pressure. In an ingenuous message sent to
the Wall Street Journal, the commissioner of the Department of Homeland
Security's Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, Robert C Bonner, excused
handing over the civilian database by stating that he had received "navy
assurances that the information won't be abused".
While the army, navy and NORTHCOM naturally profess to having no nefarious
intent in their recent civil-side forays, history suggests wariness on the
subject. After all, the pre-Homeland Security military already had a long
history of illegal activity and illegal domestic spying (much of which came
to light in the late 1960s and early 1970s) - and never suffered social
stigma, let alone effectual legal or institutional consequences for its
repeated transgressions.
NORTHCOM now proudly claims that it has "a cooperative relationship with
federal agencies working to prevent terrorism". So you might wonder: just
which other "federal agencies" does NORTHCOM - which shouldn't be sharing
information about American civilians with anyone - share information with?
The problem is, the range of choices in the world of US intelligence alone
is staggering. If you've read (or read about) the 9-11 Commission Report,
you may have seen the now almost iconic figure of 15 military and civilian
intelligence agencies bandied about. That in itself may seem a startling
total for the nation's intelligence operations, but, in addition to the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA),
National Security Agency (NSA), FBI and others in the "big 15" of the US
Intelligence Community (IC), there exist a whole host of shadowy,
half-known, and little understood, if well-acronymed,
intelligence/military/security-related offices, agencies, advisory
organizations, and committees such as the Counterintelligence Field Activity
(CIFA), the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office (DARO), the President's
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) and the President's Intelligence
Oversight Board (IOB); the Department of Defense's own domestic cop corps,
the Pentagon Force Protection Agency (PFPA); and the Intelligence's
Community's internal watchdog, the Defense Security Service (DSS).
Think of these various arms of intelligence and the military as the
essential cast of characters in America's bureaucratically proliferating
Homeland Security State where everybody, it seems, is eager to get in on the
act. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the operations center of the
Department of Homeland Security. In its horseshoe-shaped war-room, the "FBI,
the CIA, the Secret Service and 33 other federal agencies each has its own
work station. And so do the police departments of New York, Los Angeles,
Washington and six other major cities." In the operations center, large
signs on walls and doors command: "Our Mission: To Share Information"; and,
to facilitate this, in its offices local police officers sit just "a step or
two away from the CIA and FBI operatives who are downloading the latest
intelligence coming into those agencies". With all previous lines between
domestic and foreign, local and federal spying, policing, and governmental
oversight now blurring, this (according to outgoing Homeland Security
Secretary Tom Ridge) is "the new model of federalism" in action.
>From the military to local governments, from ostensibly civilian federal
agencies to obscure counter-intelligence organizations, they're all on the
make, creating interagency alliances, setting up new programs, expanding
their powers, gearing up operations and/or creating "Big Brother"
technologies to more effectively monitor civilians, chill dissent, and bring
the war back home. Right now, nothing is closer to the heart of Homeland
Security State officials (and to their budgetary plans) than that old
standby of dictatorships and oppressive regimes worldwide, surveillance - by
and of the Homeland population. In fact, almost every day, new examples of
ever-hopeful surveillance programs pop up. Of course, as yet, we only have
clues to the well-classified larger Homeland surveillance picture, but even
what we do know of the growing public face of surveillance in the United
States should cause some eyes to roll. Here's a brief overview of just a few
of the less publicized, but mostly public, attempts to ramp up the eye-power
of the Homeland Security State.
Saying NCIX
A little-known member of the alphabet soup of federal agencies is the Office
of the National Counterintelligence Executive (more familiarly known by the
unpronounceable acronym NCIX) - an organization whose main goal is "to
improve the performance of the counterintelligence (CI) community in
identifying, assessing, prioritizing and countering intelligence threats to
the United States". To accomplish this task, NCIX now offers that ultimate
necessity for Homeland security, downloadable "counterintelligence and
security awareness posters". One features the text of the First Amendment to
the US constitution ("... Congress shall make no law ... prohibiting the
free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech ...") and the
likeness of Thomas Jefferson, but with a new addendum that reads: "American
freedom includes a responsibility to protect US security - leaking sensitive
information erodes this freedom."
Another NCIX poster might come straight out of the old East Germany:
"America's Security is Your Responsibility. Observe and Report." While NCIX
is an obscure agency, its decision to improve on the First Amendment and a
fundamental American freedom is indicative of where the Homeland Security
State is heading; and the admonition to "Observe and Report" catches its
spirit exactly.
Every wo/man a G-man
Prior to the Republican National Convention in New York City, the FBI sent
agents across the country in what was widely seen as a blatant attempt to
harass, intimidate and frighten potential protesters. The FBI, however,
countered by professing that "we have always followed the rules, sensitive
to Americans' constitutional rights to free speech and assembly, always
drawing the line between lawfully protected speech and illegal activity".
By the autumn of 2004, however, FBI spokespeople had moved on from such
anodyne reassurances and, in conjunction with the Department of Homeland
Security, the bureau was launching its "October Plan". According to a CBS
news report, this program consisted of "aggressive - even obvious -
surveillance techniques to be used on ... people suspected of being
terrorist sympathizers, but who have not committed a crime" while "other
'persons of interest', including their family members, [might] also be
brought in for questioning ..."
While harassing citizens at home, the FBI, which can't set up a successful
internal computer system of its own (despite squandering at least US$170
million on the project), began dabbling in overseas e-censorship, by
confiscating servers in the United Kingdom from Indymedia, the activist
media network website "with apparently no explanation". As Ward Harkavy
reported in The Village Voice, "The network of activists has not been
accused of breaking any laws. But all of the material actually on some of
its key servers and hard disks was seized." More recently, the creator of an
open-source tool designed to help Internet security experts scan networks,
services and applications says he's been "pressured" by the FBI for copies
of the web-server log that hosts his website.
In addition to intimidation tactics and tech-centric activities, the FBI has
apparently been using Joint Terrorism Task Forces (teams of state and local
law-enforcement officers, FBI and other federal agents) as well as local
police to conduct "political surveillance" of environmental activists as
well as anti-war and religious-based protest groups. The bureau is also
eager to farm out such work to ordinary Americans and has been calling on
the public to do some old-fashioned peeping through the blinds, just in case
the neighbors are up to "certain kinds of activities [that] indicate
terrorist plans that are in the works".
Into the wild blue yonder
Strange as it may seem, the US Air Force has also gotten into the
local-surveillance act as well with an "Eagle Eyes" anti-terrorism
initiative which "enlists" average citizens in the "war on terror". The
Eagle Eyes website tells viewers, "You and your family are encouraged to
learn the categories of suspicious behavior," and it exhorts the public to
call "a network of local, 24-hour phone numbers ... whenever a suspicious
activity is observed". Just what, then, constitutes "suspicious activity"?
Well, among activities worth alerting the flying eagles to, there's the use
of cameras (either still or video), note-taking of any sort, making
annotations on maps, or using binoculars (bird watchers beware!). And what
other patterns of behavior does the air force think should send you running
to the phone? A surefire indicator of terrorists afoot: "Suspicious persons
out of place ... People who don't seem to belong in the workplace,
neighborhood, business establishment, or anywhere else." Just ponder that
one for a moment - and, if you ever get lost, be afraid, very afraid ...
While the air force does grudgingly admit that "this category is hard to
define", it offers a classic you-know-it-when-you-see-it definition for
calling your local eagle: "The point is that people know what looks right
and what doesn't look right in their neighborhoods, office spaces, commutes
[sic], etc, and if a person just doesn't seem like he or she belongs ..." An
... ahem ... urban-looking youth in a suburban white community? Call it in!
A crusty punk near Wall Street? Drop a dime! A woman near the White House
wearing an anti-war T-shirt? Well, that's an out-of-category no-brainer!
And, in fact, much of this has already begun to come true. After all,
"suspicious persons out of place" now do get arrested in the new Homeland
Security State for such offenses as wearing anti-Bush T-shirts, carrying
anti-Bush signs or just heckling the president. Today, even displaying an
anti-Bush sticker is, in the words of the Secret Service, apparently
"borderline terrorism". Holding a sign that reads "This war is Bushit"
warrants a citation from the cops and, as an 11-year-old boy found out, the
sheriff might come calling on you if you utter "anti-American" statements -
while parents may be questioned by law-enforcement officials to ascertain if
they're teaching "anti-American values" at home.
THE CIVILIAN HALF
Thus far in this saga, our cast of characters - NORTHCOM, the Office of the
National Counterintelligence Executive, the FBI and the US Air Force - only
represent the usual (if expansive) suspects. To make the US a total Homeland
Security State will take more than the combined efforts of the military and
intelligence establishments. The civilian side of government, the part of
the private sector that is deeply enmeshed in the military-corporate
complex, and America's own citizens will have to pitch in as well if a
total-security state is to truly take shape and fire on all cylinders.
The good news is - if, at least, you're a Homeland Security bureaucrat -
this process is already well under way, thanks, in large part, to the
creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which brought a
dazzling array of agencies together under one roof, including the United
States Customs Service (previously part of the Department of Treasury), the
enforcement division of the Immigration and Naturalization Service
(Department of Justice), the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service
(Department of Agriculture), the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center
(Department of Treasury), the Transportation Security Administration
(Department of Transportation), the Federal Protective Service (General
Services Administration), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA),
the Strategic National Stockpile and the National Disaster Medical System
(Health and Human Services), the Nuclear Incident Response Team (Energy),
Domestic Emergency Support Teams (Justice), the National Domestic
Preparedness Office (FBI), the CBRN Countermeasures Programs (Energy), the
Environmental Measurements Laboratory (Energy), the National Biological
Warfare Defense Analysis Center (Defense), the Plum Island Animal Disease
Center (Agriculture), the Federal Computer Incident Response Center (General
Services Administration), the National Communications System (Defense), the
National Infrastructure Protection Center (FBI), the Energy Security and
Assurance Program (Energy), the Secret Service (Treasury), and the Coast
Guard (Defense and Transportation).
The DHS is, not surprisingly, the poster-child for the emerging Homeland
Security State. But the DHS itself is just the tip of the iceberg - an
archetype for a brave new nation where the lines between what the
intelligence community and the military do abroad and what they do in the
USA are increasingly blurred beyond recognition. Today, a host of agencies
on the civilian side of the government are also setting up new programs;
expanding their powers; gearing up operations and/or creating "Big Brother"
technologies to monitor civilians more effectively, chill dissent - and
bring the war back home to America.
Freedom of the road
Recently, it was disclosed that the Department of Homeland Security had
deployed an X-ray van, previously used in cargo searches at America's
borders, in a test run - taking X-ray pictures of parked cars in Cape May,
New Jersey. While, the DHS claimed all X-ray surveillance was conducted on
empty cars with their owners' consent, one wonders how long this will last.
After all, American Science & Engineering Inc, the manufacturer of the Z
Backscatter Van (ZBV), notes that "it maintains the outward appearance of an
ordinary van", so it can stand unnoticed and peep into cars as they drive
past, or with its "unique 'drive-by' capability [it] allows one or two
operators to conduct X-ray imaging of suspect vehicles and objects while the
ZBV drives past". Since we're all increasingly suspects (in our "suspect
vehicles") in the Homeland Security State, it seems only a matter of time
before at least some of us fall victim to a DHS X-ray drive-by.
But what happens after a DHS scan-van X-ray shows a dense white mass in your
car (which could be any "organic material" from explosives or drugs to a
puppy, a baby, or a head of lettuce)? Assuming that the DHS folks will be
linked up with the Department of Transportation (DOT), soon they might be
able to call on DOT's proposed Intelligent Transportation Systems' (ITS)
Joint Program Office's (JPO) "Vehicle-Infrastructure Integration (VII)"
system for help.
According to Bill Jones, the technical director of the ITS JPO, "The concept
behind VII is that vehicle manufacturers will install a communications
device on the vehicle starting at some future date, and equipment will be
installed on the nation's transportation system to allow all vehicles to
communicate with the infrastructure." In other words, the government and
manufacturers will team up to track every new automobile (X-rayed or not) in
the United States. "The whole idea," says Jones, "is that vehicles would
transmit this data to the infrastructure. The infrastructure, in turn, would
aggregate that data in some kind of a database."
Imagine it: The federal government tracking you in real time, while
compiling a database with information on your speed, route, and destination;
where you were when; how many times you went to a certain location; and just
about anything else related to your travels in your own car. The DOT
project, in fact, sounds remarkably like a civilian update of the "Combat
Zones That See" program developed by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Noah Shachtman, writing for The Village
Voice, reported in 2003 that DARPA was in the process of instituting a
project at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, whose aim was "to track 90% of all of
cars within [a] target area for any given 30-minute period. The paths of 1
million vehicles [would] be stored and retrievable within three seconds." It
gives a whole new meaning to "King of the Road".
Pssst ... wanna hear a secret (law)?
Last November, "the Transportation Security Administration ordered America's
72 airlines to turn over their June 2004 domestic passenger flight records".
With only a murmur of concern over the privacy of passengers' credit-card
numbers, phone numbers and health information, the airlines handed the
requested information over so the agency could test its new Secure Flight
system - an expanded version of the much-maligned terrorist watch list.
More recently, the Transportation Security Administration has made headlines
with a change in its pat-down policies. After public outcry, airport
security screeners have been instructed no longer to grope the breasts of
female passengers as an anti-terror measure. Pat-downs, however, apparently
remain part of TSA airport protocol in some cases, although we have no idea
which ones. This is because the Transportation Security Administration has
begun to dabble in "secret law" by subjecting passengers to special
screenings including "pat-down searches for weapons or unauthorized
materials", while denying the public the right to know under what law(s)
such methods are authorized. As Steven Aftergood of the Project on
Government Secrecy recently observed, "In a qualitatively new development in
US governance, Americans can now be obligated to comply with legally binding
regulations that are unknown to them, and that indeed they are forbidden to
know."
When Big Brother goes to college
Since it was enacted in the rough wake of September 11, 2001, the USA
Patriot Act has enabled the US government to undermine privacy safeguards
such as those once protected by the Family Education Records Privacy Act.
The government is now allowed access, without a warrant, to a student's
personal, library, bookstore and medical records, and any disclosure that
such records have either been sought or turned over is prohibited.
Now, the Department of Education has suggested upping the ante with a
proposal to create a national registry that would track every one of the
estimated 15.9 million college students in the US through yet another
"massive database" - this one containing everything from college students'
academic records, tuition payments and financial-aid benefits to
social-security numbers and information on participation in varsity sports.
Right now, students have to give written consent for educational and
personally identifiable data to be transferred out of the college. "With
this new proposal, most of that power is given to the federal government,"
says Sarah Flanagan, the vice president for government relations at the
National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. Moreover, if
this new database comes to pass, says Jasmine L Harris, legislative director
at the United States Students Association, it would further erode various
remaining privacy safeguards, allowing government agencies other than the
Education Department to have greater access to student records.
Bright lights, big cities
With the federal government casting off the Geneva Conventions as "quaint",
employing secret law at home, and tasking average Americans to become
Peeping Toms and undercover informants, it's little wonder that those in the
private sector have now taken up the task of helping the feds in fashioning
a Homeland Security State. After all, with surveillance bureaucracies
burgeoning and security budgets growing, there's suddenly a fortune to be
made. Last year alone, under the Urban Area Security Initiative, the DHS
doled out $675 million to 50 large cities across the United States. This
year, the total will jump to $854.6 million.
With money flowing in and representatives of the District of Columbia
Metropolitan Police Department, the New York Police Department and the Los
Angeles Police Department, among others, sitting beside operatives from the
National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense
Intelligence Agency, FBI and other defense and intelligence agencies at the
DHS's Homeland Security Operations Center, it's little wonder that major
urban centers such as Chicago (which is getting $45 million in Urban Area
Security Initiative funds this year), Los Angeles ($61 million in UASI
money) and New York City (which is raking in a cool $208 million) have moved
toward implementing wide-ranging, increasingly sophisticated covert
surveillance systems.
In Chicago, a program code-named Operation Disruption consists of at least
80 street surveillance cameras that send their feed to police officers'
laptop computers in squad cars and "a central command center, where retired
police officers ... monitor activity". The ultimate plan, however, is to use
a grant from the Department of Homeland Security and city monies to purchase
250 new cameras and link them to "some 2,000 un-networked video cameras
installed around the Chicago (and at O'Hare International Airport) to create
a network of as many as 2,250 surveillance cameras throughout the Windy
City". "We're so far advanced than [sic] any other city," said Chicago's
Mayor Richard M Daley of the program, "sometimes the state and federal
governments - they come here to look at the technology."
In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced a "major upgrade"
for the city's high-tech crime-tracking system, Compstat, through the
creation of a "Real Time Crime Fighting Center" to provide "same-day
information" for tracking and analysis purposes.
Private eyes
While the doings of "private contractors" still pop up in articles about
prisoner abuse in Iraq, what such mercenary outfits are up to on the home
front is hardly ever mentioned. For example, CACI International Inc, whose
employees were linked in news accounts to the Abu Ghraib torture scandals,
boasts that its customers include not only a "majority of US defense and
civilian agencies and the US intelligence community", but "44 US state
governments" and "more than 200 cities, counties and local agencies in North
America". CACI proclaims that it plays "many roles in securing our homeland"
and that it "support[s] law-enforcement agencies such as the Department of
Justice [and] design[s] and prototype[s] systems that collect intelligence
information". One of CACI's fellow contractors, Titan Corp (which was also
linked in news accounts to the Abu Ghraib torture cases), is at work in the
"Defense of the Homeland" with programs such as Data Warehousing and Data
Mining for the Intelligence Community and a Command and Control Concept for
North American Homeland Defense.
Of course, these are only two of the many companies helping to secure the
homeland (and fat contracts). In 2003 alone, the DHS spent "at least $256.6
million in 1,609 separate contracts or amendments to contracts to hire what
the [General Services Administration] described as 'security guards and
patrol services'" and doled out $6.73 billion in total. This year the DHS
has raked in a cool $28.9 billion in net discretionary spending - including
$67.4 million "to expand the capabilities of the National Cyber Security
Division (NCSD), which implements the public and private sector partnership
protecting cyber security"; $104.7 million for "Aerial Surveillance and
Sensor Technology" projects; and $340 million for the United States Visitor
and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program (US-VISIT), which
"expedites the arrival and departure of legitimate travelers".
Your role in the Homeland Security State
In the latter years of the Vietnam era, a series of exposures of official
lies regarding the FBI's various COINTELPROs, a host of surveillance and
dirty-tricks programs aimed at American activists, and the analogous CIA
program known as MHCHAOS; of domestic spying by military-intelligence agents
and of the Nixon administration's various Watergate surveillance and illegal
break-in operations brought home to Americans at least some of the abuses
committed by their military, intelligence and security establishments.
Congressional bodies such as the Church Commission and the Senate Watergate
Committee even helped to rein in some of the most egregious of these abuses
and to reinforce the barriers between what the CIA and military could do
overseas and what was permissible on the home front.
In the 1980s and 1990s, however, oversight and constraints on illegal
domestic activities by the military and intelligence community slowly began
to drain away; and with the September 11 attacks, of course, everything
changed. Three years later, what was once done on the sly is increasingly
public policy - and done with pride - though much of it still flies under
the mainstream media radar as the administration of President George W Bush
transforms the US into an unabashed Homeland Security State.
Today, freedom - to be spread abroad by US force of arms - is increasingly a
privilege that can be rescinded at home when anyone acts a little too free.
Today, the United States is just another area of operations for the
Pentagon; while those who say the wrong things; congregate in the wrong
places; wear the wrong T-shirts; display the wrong stickers; or just look
the wrong way find themselves recast as "enemies" and put under the eye of,
if not the care of, the state. Today, a growing Homeland Security complex of
federal, local and private partners is hard at work establishing turf
rights, garnering budgetary increases, and ramping up a new security culture
across the US. And unfortunately, the programs and abuses highlighted in
this series are but the publicly known tip of the iceberg. For example:
It was recently revealed through the Freedom of Information Act that "the
FBI obtained 257.5 million Passenger Name Records following [September 11,
2001], and that the bureau has permanently incorporated the travel details
of tens of millions of innocent people into its law-enforcement databases".
Outgoing DHS chief Tom Ridge recently called for US passports to include
fingerprints. Meanwhile, OTI, a Fort Lee, New Jersey-based subsidiary of the
Israeli company On Track Innovations, was just selected to provide
electronic passports that utilize a biometrically coded "digitized
photograph, which is accessed by a proximity reader in the inspection booth
and compared automatically to the face of the traveler".
In November, California passed the Orwellian-sounding "DNA Fingerprint,
Unsolved Crime and Innocence Protection Act", which "allows authorities to
take DNA samples from anyone - adult or juvenile - convicted of a felony"
and "in 2009 ... will expand to allow police to collect DNA samples from any
suspect arrested for any felony ... whether or not the person is charged or
convicted. It's expected that genetic data for 1 million people - including
innocent suspects - will be added to California's DNA databank by 2009."
The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced plans to "use the
latest in database technologies" to store information on and count the
homeless, which, the Electronic Privacy Information Center notes, "lay[s]
the groundwork for a national homeless tracking system, placing individuals
at risk of government and other privacy invasions".
According to a recent report in ISR Journal, "the publication of record for
the global network-centric warfare community", a "high-level advisory panel
recently told US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld" that the Pentagon needs
ultra-high-tech tracking tools that "can identify people by unique physical
characteristics - fingerprint, voice, odor, gait or even pattern of iris"
and that such a system "must be merged with new means of 'tagging' so that
US forces can find enemies who escape into a crowd or slip into a
labyrinthine slum".
Imagine if this last program were integrated with any of the aforementioned
ventures - in our increasingly brave new (blurred) world. Yet for all their
secret doings, vaunted programs, futuristic technologies and their powerful
urge to turn all US citizens into various kinds of tractable database
material, our new Homeland Security managers require one critical element:
us Americans. They require our "Eagle Eyes", our assent, and - if not our
outright support - then our ambivalence and acquiescence. They need us to be
their dime-store spies; they need us to drive their tracking device-equipped
cars; they need us to accede to their revisions of the first amendment.
That simple fact makes us powerful. If you don't dig the Homeland Security
State, do your best to thwart it. Of course, such talk, let alone action,
probably won't be popular - but since when has anything worthwhile, from
working for peace to fighting for civil rights, been easy? If everyone was
for freedom, there would be no need to fight for it. The choice is yours.
Nick Turse is a doctoral candidate at the Center for the History and Ethics
of Public Health in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia
University. He writes for The Village Voice and regularly for Tomdispatch on
the military-corporate complex. This article appeared in two parts on
Tomdispatch http://www.tomdispatch.com and is used here with permission.
(Copyright 2005 Nick Turse.)
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