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General News    H3'ed 6/17/13

Tom Engelhardt, You Are Our Secret

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

As happens with so much news these days, the Edward Snowden revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and just how far we've come in the building of a surveillance state have swept over us 24/7 --  waves of leaks, videos, charges, claims, counterclaims, skullduggery,  and government threats.  When a flood sweeps you away, it's always hard  to find a little dry land to survey the extent and nature of the  damage.  Here's my attempt to look beyond the daily drumbeat of this  developing story (which, it is promised,  will go on for weeks, if not months) and identify five urges essential  to understanding the world Edward Snowden has helped us glimpse.  

1. The Urge to be Global

Corporately speaking, globalization has been ballyhooed since at  least the 1990s, but in governmental terms only in the twenty-first  century has that globalizing urge fully infected the workings of the  American state itself.  It's become common since 9/11 to speak of a  "national security state."  But if a week of ongoing revelations about  NSA surveillance practices has revealed anything, it's that the term is  already grossly outdated.  Based on what we now know, we should be  talking about an American global security state.

Much attention has, understandably enough, been lavished on the phone  and other metadata about American citizens that the NSA is now sweeping up and about the ways in which such activities may be abrogating the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.  Far less attention has been paid to the ways  in which the NSA (and other U.S. intelligence outfits) are sweeping up  global data in part via the just-revealed Prism and other surveillance programs.

Sometimes, naming practices are revealing in themselves, and the  National Security Agency's key data mining tool, capable in March 2013  of gathering "97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks  worldwide," has been named "boundless informant."  If you want a sense of where the U.S. Intelligence Community imagines itself going, you couldn't ask for a better hint than that  word "boundless."  It seems that for our spooks, there are, conceptually  speaking, no limits left on this planet.

Today, that "community" seeks to put not just the U.S., but the world  fully under its penetrating gaze.  By now, the first "heat map" has  been published showing where such information is being sucked up from  monthly: Iran tops the list (14 billion pieces of intelligence); then  come Pakistan (13.5 billion), Jordan (12.7 billion), Egypt (7.6  billion), and India (6.3 billion).  Whether you realize this or not,  even for a superpower that has unprecedented numbers of military bases  scattered across the planet and has divided the world into six military commands, this represents something new under the sun.  The only question is what?

The twentieth century was the century of "totalitarianisms."  We  don't yet have a name, a term, for the surveillance structures  Washington is building in this century, but there can be no question  that, whatever the present constraints on the system, "total" has something to do with it and that we are  being ushered into a new world. Despite the recent leaks, we still  undoubtedly have a very limited picture of just what the present  American surveillance world really looks like and what it plans for our  future.  One thing is clear, however: the ambitions behind it are  staggering and global.

In the classic totalitarian regimes of the previous century, a secret police/surveillance force attempted, via every imaginable method, including informers, wire tappers, torture techniques, imprisonment, and so on to take total control of a national environment, to turn every citizen's life into the equivalent of an open book, or more accurately a closed, secret file lodged somewhere in that police system.  The most impressive of these efforts, the most global, was the Soviet one simply because the USSR was an imperial power with a set of disparate almost-states -- those SSRs of the Caucasus and Central Asia  -- within its borders, and a series of Eastern European satellite states under its control as well.  None of the twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, however, ever imagined doing the same thing on a genuinely global basis.  There was no way to do so.

Washington's urge to take control of the global communications environment, lock, stock, and chat room, to gather its "data" -- billions and billions of pieces of it -- and via inconceivably powerful computer systems, mine and arrange it, find patterns in it, and so turn the world into a secret set of connections, represents a remarkable development.  For the first time, a great power wants to know, up close and personal, not just what its own citizens are doing, but those of distant lands as well: who they are communicating with, and how, and why, and what they are buying, and where they are travelling, and who they are bumping into (online and over the phone).

Until recently, once you left the environs of science fiction, that was simply beyond imagining.  You could certainly find precursors for such a development in, for instance, the Cold War intelligence community's urge to create a global satellite system that would bring every inch of the planet under a new kind of surveillance regime, that would map it thoroughly and identify what was being mapped down to the square inch, but nothing so globally up close and personal.

The next two urges are intertwined in such a way that they might be thought as a single category: your codes and theirs.

2. The Urge to Make You Transparent

The urge to possess you, or everything that can be known about you, has clearly taken possession of our global security state.  With this, it's become increasingly apparent, go other disturbing trends.  Take something seemingly unrelated: the recent Supreme Court decision that allows the police to take a DNA swab from an arrestee (if the crime he or she is charged with is "serious").  Theoretically, this is being done for "identification" purposes, but in fact it's already being put to other uses entirely, especially in the solving of separate crimes.

If you stop to think about it, this development, in turn, represents a remarkable new level of state intrusion on private life, on your self.  It means that, for the first time, in a sure-to-widen set of circumstances, the state increasingly has access not just -- as with NSA surveillance -- to your Internet codes and modes of communication, but to your most basic code of all, your DNA.  As Justice Antonin Scalia put it in his dissent in the case, "Make no mistake about it: As an entirely predictable consequence of today's decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason."  Can global DNA databases be far behind?

If your DNA becomes the possession of the state, then you are a transparent human being at the most basic level imaginable.  At every level, however, the pattern, the trend, the direction is the same (and it's the same whether you're talking about the government or giant corporations).  Increasingly, access to you, your codes, your communications, your purchases, your credit card transactions, your location, your travels, your exchanges with friends, your tastes, your likes and dislikes is what's wanted -- for what's called your "safety" in the case of government and your business in the case of corporations.

Both want access to everything that can be known about you, because who knows until later what may prove the crucial piece of information to uncover a terrorist network or lure in a new network of customers.  They want everything, at least, that can be run through a system of massive computers and sorted into patterns of various potentially useful kinds.  You are to be, in this sense, the transparent man or transparent woman.  Your acts, your life patterns, your rights, your codes are to be an open book to them -- and increasingly a closed book to you.  You are to be their secret and that "you" is an ever more global one.

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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