I have been decrying the rapid emergence of a British panoptic total surveillance state but do not think this is a purely British problem. A NYTimes article reports Pentagon plans a computer system that would peek at personal data of Americans
(Free registration required to link). Peek is of course a euphemism for ‘spy on’.
Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States.
Admiral Poindexter, who has described the plan in public documents and speeches but declined to be interviewed, has said that the government needs to “break down the stovepipes” that separate commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence agency analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.
“We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we find new sources of data, mine information from the new and old, generate information, make it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge, and create actionable options,” he said in a speech in California earlier this year.
Naturally anyone who values civil liberties and is not blindly trusting of the state is far from enthusiastic about this.
“A lot of my colleagues are uncomfortable about this and worry about the potential uses that this technology might be put, if not by this administration then by a future one,” said Barbara Simon, a computer scientist who is past president of the Association of Computing Machinery. “Once you’ve got it in place you can’t control it.”
[…]
If deployed, civil libertarians argue, the computer system would rapidly bring a surveillance state. They assert that potential terrorists would soon learn how to avoid detection in any case.
Yet of course that is not what the official line. Predictably…
“What we are doing is developing technologies and a prototype system to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists, and decipher their plans, and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully pre-empt and defeat terrorist acts,” said Jan Walker, the spokeswoman for the defense research agency.
And how will they “detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists”? By spying on the communications of tens of millions of Americans daily without so much as a search warrent of course. This is far from just a British problem.
Frankly, a lot of us thought they already had this. If it can prevent another WTC or something worse, I can live with it, at least for the duration of the war.
Now, there have been rumblings from General Hayden about people wanting to give increased surveillance rights to the NSA or create other spy agencies. This, however, isn’t it. The FBI will still require a search warrant to spy on any communications. Granted, that search warrant is obtained from a semi-secret court, but they do publish records. (You are almost certainly right to be skeptical, but I can tell you that the FBI and the rest of the government agencies take the letter of the law very seriously.)
This has nothing to do with spying on communications, Perry. This particular system is about collecting and pooling all the various data already held in various government (and perhaps also commercial) databases. Under the current system, for example, the INS may not know all the facts or criminal records that other Federal agencies know about someone attempting to enter the country, because the various agencies don’t have a shared database.
Remember, that’s exactly some of the things the Federal government got criticized for not doing– not using the information it already had more effectively.
That said, the idea of all the data already out there being pooled is rather ominious. A government more able to enforce its laws means that fewer things will slip through cracks– which can be both good and bad.
There are, of course, no such requirements for a warrant when the US government spies on foreign persons. However, it is strictly illegal to spy on US persons (a term broader than US citizens) without a warrant. The NSA, FBI, CIA, and other agencies follow this law very carefully.
As a final comment, no doubt there will be calls for amending this program or passing laws that do make it possible to spy without a warrant on US persons, or make the warrant easier to get. However, in its current proposed form, this is not it. Plans are subject to distressing changes for the worse, as always.
The FBI will still require a search warrant to spy on any communications.
Yup. However GCHQ, the British equiv of NSA, needs no warrents to spy on Americans if their ‘cousins’ ask for that to be done. Menwith Hill anyone?
The fact is much of the info being shared will be the result of CARNIVORE/ECHELON based intercepts… which is to say, warrentless data mining.
So much for doing the leave us alone stuff at home.
Very nice blog