You’re a Criminal in a Mass Surveillance World – How to Not Get Caught

from DisInformation

by David Montgomery

David Montgomery via Liberty.me:

Sometimes you just get lucky.

I was in Amsterdam when the Snowden story broke. CNN was non-stop asking politicians and pundits, “Is Edward Snowden a traitor?” Those who said he betrayed America also said something else: Mass surveillance is only an issue if you’re a criminal. If you’ve got nothing to hide then you’ve got nothing to fear.

The Snowden story hit me upon my return from – of all places on earth – the Secret Annex of the Anne Frank House. The Secret Annex is where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis for two years. It was during this period of hiding in terror that Anne wrote her world-famous diary. In it she confided, “I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met.”

The “Anne Frank House” — then and now

I say I was lucky because the cosmic unlikeliness of my Secret Annex visit coinciding with Snowden’s mass surveillance revelations led to some revelations of my own. My understanding of law, criminality, and mass surveillance coalesced into a horrifying picture.

It turns out we’re all criminals in a mass surveillance world. The only question is whether we’ll get caught. Let me explain.

What Makes a Criminal?

Merriam-Webster defines crime as “activity that is against the law.” Law is defined as a “set of rules made by the government.” Thus a criminal is someone who breaks government rules.

The law as a whole is an ever-expanding collection of rules that politicians (“lawmakers”) decree and occasionally repeal. Laws are as moral as the politicians who make them.

Simply put, laws are the rules politicians make up, and criminals are people who break them.

It floored me to realize: Anne Frank was, in fact, a criminal. She was a fugitive of the law.

We can express outrage at the designation since Anne did nothing wrong. And we can debate which rules of any particular regime are tolerable or repugnant. But our opinions don’t change the fact that “criminal” is a government-defined standard imposed on us, the governed.

A law-abiding citizen was obligated to turn Anne into the police. To assist her was a crime. In America the Fugitive Slave Law obligated law-abiding citizens to turn in runaway slaves, and assisting them was punishable by 6 months in jail and a $28,000 fine (in today’s dollars).

In early colonial America masturbation, blasphemy, and homosexuality werecrimes punishable by death. Virtually any act you can think of has been criminalized by one regime or another. Being a law-abiding citizen only means you comply with whatever rules politicians have imposed on you.

Throughout history we observe only a slight overlap between the endless supply of laws governments impose on people and the handful of acts we all agree are morally wrong: theft, assault, rape, murder.

The American Crime Complex

To understand why we’re criminals requires a basic overview of how law is created and enforced.

Every law hatches a new crime with an associated punishment. A law is both an order and a threat, for if a law carries no threat of punishment, it’s not a law. It’s a suggestion. Politicians mince words by using different labels for their rules – laws, regulations, statutes, bills, acts, ordinances, et cetera – but they all fundamentally mean the same thing: Obey or be punished.

Every year American politicians create thousands of new laws. They are incorporated into volumes consisting of hundreds of thousands of pages of legalese. The laws are grouped into “codes” such as the CFR, USC, IRS Code, and codes for every state. These codes, along with the Constitution,executive orders, ratified treaties, county and city ordinances, and rulings from district courts to the Supreme Court comprise U.S. law as a whole.

Although the law is incomprehensible to the governed, ignorance of the law is not a defense when you’re prosecuted by the government.

Suspicion of committing even the most trivial crime subjects you to arrest at the discretion of a law enforcement officer. The Supreme Court has ruled that it’s legal to arrest people for crimes such as driving without a seatbelt orhaving unpaid parking tickets. Arrest can result in imprisonment for months or years without ever being convicted of a crime.

In America the punishments for not obeying politicians’ rules may include monetary fines, property confiscation, imprisonment (including de factorape and torture), and execution.

The application of these punishments is wildly inconsistent and often horrifically arbitrary. The minimum sentence for first degree murder in Illinois is 20 years, but in Indiana it’s 45 years. Compare 20 years for murder with 15 years for having sex on a beach. Or a 5 years for stabbing a man to death. Or a 5 days (yes, days) for raping a 14-year old girl. Victimless crimes often carry far harsher sentences than raping and killing people, such as 25 years for selling painkillers to a friend.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that it’s legal for prosecutors to threaten you with catastrophic punishment – even life imprisonment – for a minor crime if you don’t forfeit your right to a jury trial. (In the landmark caseprosecutors secured a life sentence for forging an $88 check because the defendant refused a plea bargain.)

Because prosecutors wield such enormous power, almost everyone takes a plea bargain. Getting your day in court is a myth perpetuated in TV shows and movies. Innocent people often agree to plead guilty and suffer the punishment rather than risk having their lives destroyed. The system isrigged against you, and your chance of conviction at trial is around 90%.

This government prosecutor explains to new prosecutors that the goal of jury selection is to pick people who “are as unfair and more likely to convict than anybody else in that room.”

Given this set of facts, it’s no surprise that millions of Americans today are caged and millions more are on probation or parole. The “land of the free” is the most imprisoned nation in the world on both a total and per capita basis. The prison-industrial complex is booming.

The Secret Annex

Back to our heroic criminal, Anne. The Frank family moved from Germany to Amsterdam in 1933. Otto started a successful spice and pectin business. In 1942 the family went into hiding from the Nazis in the rear section of Otto’s building. Anne called it the Secret Annex. It’s a cramped, makeshift living quarters whose hidden entry is masked by a swinging bookcase.

The feeling was overwhelming as I slunk through the space: I am disgusted by my species. This little girl and her family spent two years living with a noose around their necks knowing the floor could drop out at any time.

Then one day it did. An informant tipped off the police. They were arrested and sent to death camps, which were described as “labor camps” to its victims. “Work will set you free” it said above the gate at Auschwitz. The Franks were healthy enough to be put to work rather than gassed straight away.

Are you female? Imagine yourself as a 15-year old being stripped naked by guards, having your head shaved, getting tattooed with a serial number, and then being forced into non-stop hard labor. Take a moment and imagine having a daughter who suffered this fate.

We’re members of a species that does this. Not as an act of spontaneous insanity, but deliberately and methodically. Let us remember: It was legal.

Only Anne’s father Otto survived. His wife and two daughters perished despite the substantial measures he had taken to avoid this horrific fate. They left Germany early on, and he even put his business in a gentile’s name to stay out of government filings. As things got worse, he applied for visas to bring his family to America or Cuba, but they were rejected. How did his family end up trapped in Amsterdam? Laws.

Miep

A heroic woman named Miep Gies rescued Anne’s diary before the police confiscated everything in the Annex. Miep returned the diary to Otto after the war ended. She was one of six souls who risked their lives as outlaws in order to keep them in hiding. Miep not only rescued Anne’s diary. She never read it out of respect for Anne’s privacy. When Otto published it, Miep said if she’d read it she would have felt obligated to destroy it since it was filled with damning information, including her name and all the others who helped the family survive, including an (illegal) underground supply network.

The dramatic irony of Miep not reading Anne’s diary made me cry. Here is an act of human decency which epitomizes everything government is not. Miep not only risked everything trying to keep these people alive. She not only saved Anne’s diary, one of the world’s most powerful pieces of literature. She not only didn’t read it despite its owner getting shipped off to a death camp. After the Franks were arrested, Miep went to the police station and offered the arresting officer a bribe for their release. As fearless as that was, it didn’t work. She escaped punishment because the officer had a soft spot for her being from his home town, Vienna.

If it’s possible to love a dead woman you’ve never laid eyes on, I do. Miep, thank you for showing people that human decency springs from following our conscience, not the law. Millions blindly follow orders. The bravest heroes in this world are law-breakers.

A Single Piece of Data

Walking from Anne’s Secret Annex into CNN’s nothing-to-hide mass surveillance chorus provided a rare moment of clarity in my life. Her father’s disclosure a decade earlier of a single piece of data, their religion, destroyed his family. The disclosure was a legalrequirement to be issued a passport.

To apologists of mass surveillance, what did Anne Frank have to hide? I ask because the person credited with popularizing the nothing-to-hide argument is none other than Joseph Goebbles, Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda for the Third Reich. (Back then the word propaganda didn’t have a negative connotation. It meant public relations.)

After examining the Frank family passports in the Secret Annex, it later struck me how much more information is extracted by the US census and annual American Community Survey. Where were you born? Are you “Black, African Am., or Negro?” Are you Pakistani? Latino? Are you unemployed? What is your profession? How much money do you make? Do you own or rent? How much do you spend on utilities? Who lives with you? Do you have children? How well do you speak English? Do you speak another language at home? What is your marriage status? Have you been divorced? Where did you go to school? Have you been employed by the U.S. military? Which wars did you fight in? And on it goes… All information explained away as needed to hand out “government benefits.”

Collect.It.All.

Minister Goebbels would have wrung his hands with delight at having this depth of data on his regime’s citizens. But this data is absolutely trivial compared to what the U.S. government actually knows about you. Thanks toWilliam Binney and Edward Snowden, we know that the U.S. regime has for many years been secretly constructing the means to monitor and record every aspect of our lives.

Snowden put it in terms everyone can understand: “Even if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you are being watched and recorded.” Thankfully we don’t have to take Snowden’s word for it. The government’s agenda was laid bare in this secret NSA slide from 2011: Sniff It All – Know It All – Collect It All – Process It All – Exploit It All.

Share It All is in reference to swapping surveillance data with New Zealand, Canada, Britain, and Australia – the so-called Five Eyes who are de facto military protectorates of the United States.

Spring Cleaning Who Has Access to Your Data

from the New York Times by Nick Bolton:

It’s almost that time of year again. Wash off the car. Take the cover off the grill. And figure out who has access to your social accounts.

Whether you realize it or not, dozens — if not hundreds — of apps and services have access to your social accounts and can see everything you’re doing online. Tweets, Likes, your location, are all there for the taking. What’s worse, there’s a pretty good chance you unwittingly gave them permission.

On Thursday, this happened to me. I looked at Twitter and noticed that a start-up was tweeting from my account. I immediately deleted the Twitter message and revoked access to the service. But in doing so I noticed that hundreds of old apps have access to my Twitter, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn accounts.

It was time to do a little cleanup.

Just like the spring cleaning rule that says, “If you haven’t worn it in six months, throw it out,” you should use the same edict with your online data: “If you haven’t logged in to an app or site in six months, revoke its access.”

Here are some tips to clean up who has access to all your personal data:

Twitter

If you venture over to Twitter’s “Applications” page you will be able to see a long list of all the apps and services that currently have access to your Twitter profile. If you’re like me, you’ve probably forgotten about many of these apps — or, as I discovered, some of these companies have since been acquired by other companies. While many of these services use this access only to know who you are on another site, many are also collecting data about you.

To be safe hit the “Revoke Access” button for any apps that you haven’t visited in the last few months. Or any that look a little sketchy.

You will want to be especially careful of applications that have the ability to tweet on your behalf. These apps will have a line of text below their logo that say “Permissions: read and write.” My advice: Limit these to only sites you absolutely trust.

Facebook

When I opened up my Facebook account to look at the apps I’ve given permission to, I thought there was a typo on the page because the number was so high. I’ve given 148 apps access to my Facebook profile, which is a whole lot of information about me floating around on the Internet. It’s clearly time for me to do some cleaning here.

To fix who has access to your Facebook profile you will want to log into your account and then click here. The page you will land on is a list of apps that you have used with Facebook before, but this isn’t the full list. To see all of the apps and services, click the link at the bottom that says “Show all apps.”

Now it’s time to start deleting.

This might take a while, but go through and hit the “x” button at the far right next to every single app or service you no longer use. After you click the “x,” a popup will ask if you’re sure you want to remove the app and then it will give you the option to delete any posts by this service that have appeared in your news feed. If you want to remove this data or content, select the check mark and then click the blue “Remove” button. Voila, you’re done.

Now go through those steps again and again until you’ve removed all your unwanted services.

Google

Your list of apps using Google is most likely pretty small, but just to be safe you should take a look at which services are getting access to your data. To see this list, go to Google’s Account Permission page under its security settings.

If you want to remove access to a service, click on the name of the company and then click the “Revoke Access,” button.

LinkedIn

Just like Google, you probably haven’t granted access to too many apps from LinkedIn, but you should still take the time to investigate.

LinkedIn doesn’t make it easy to find this privacy section. You have to start on the website by clicking on your own personal avatar in the top right corner. Then select “Privacy and Settings.” Once on this page, click on the tab at the bottom of the page that says “Groups, Companies and Applications.” (Hang in there, you’re almost done.) Finally, you will want to click “View your applications.”

Deleting an app is easier than finding this section. To do this, you simply check the box next to the app you want to delete and then select the blue “Remove” button at the bottom of the page.

And that’s it. Spring cleaning of your social sites is complete. That is, until next spring.

from the New York Times by Nick Bolton

Terms and Conditions May Apply: documentary about abusive license terms, privacy and surveillance

from BoingBoing:

Cullen Hoback's documentary "Terms and Conditions May Apply" is a scathing look at the abusive, lengthy fine-print that dominates our online lives. If the YouTube trailer and the non-embeddable Guardian trailer are representative, this is an important and timely film. I do quibble with one point -- the movie doesn't distinguish between the stupid license agreements that are a function of a stupid law (for example, requiring LinkedIn users to license the stuff they give to LinkedIn so that LinkedIn can display it) and the ones that are pure greed and venality (AT&T making you agree to extrajudicial wiretapping).

Hoback has an op-ed in today's Guardian where he sets out his thesis with great clarity, and draws the important connection between Patriot Act surveillance and fine-print "agreements." Unfortunately, the video itself seems to be exclusively available through Itunes, which has some pretty dreadful license terms, and mandatory DRM to boot.

At our DC premiere of Terms and Conditions May Apply, Congressman Dennis Kucinich made a surprise appearance in the crowd and went a step further, standing up after the screening and saying the “NSA should be abolished", and that Edward Snowden should get a “ticker-tape parade".

While this speech tickled users on Reddit and got a lot of press, open criticism of the surveillance-industrial complex is far from the norm. And supporting Edward Snowden as a public official seems to be politically cancerous.

But I have hope, and here’s why:

While in DC, I was reminded of something that stuck with me: Congressmen are just people too. When 9/11 happened, they were rushed to protected sites in what must have been a terrifying moment for them. They surely felt like the next target. And then they were asked to pass a bill that would protect America from the kind of horror they had just been put through, first-hand - a bill called 'The Patriot Act'.

It wasn’t passed because they got together and said, “Let’s gut the Constitution". It happened partially from fear and partially from a misguided sense of duty.

Our data is our digital identity - and we need to reclaim control [Cullen Hoback/The Guardian]

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The Boston Marathon Bombing: Keep Calm and Carry On

from The Atlantic by Bruce Schneier

It is easy to feel scared and powerless in the wake of attacks like those at the Boston Marathon. But it also plays into the perpetrators' hands.

As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it'd be easy to be scared. It'd be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something -- anything -- to keep us safe.

It'd be easy, but it'd be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators' hands -- and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don't have to be scared, and we're not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there's one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.

It's hard to do, because terrorism is designed precisely to scare people -- far out of proportion to its actual danger. A huge amount of research on fear and the brain teaches us that we exaggerate threats that are rare, spectacular, immediate, random -- in this case involving an innocent child -- senseless, horrific and graphic. Terrorism pushes all of our fear buttons, really hard, and we overreact.

But our brains are fooling us. Even though this will be in the news for weeks, we should recognize this for what it is: a rare event. That's the very definition of news: something that is unusual -- in this case, something that almost never happens.

Remember after 9/11 when people predicted we'd see these sorts of attacks every few months? That never happened, and it wasn't because the TSA confiscated knives and snow globes at airports. Give the FBI credit for rolling up terrorist networks and interdicting terrorist funding, but we also exaggerated the threat. We get our ideas about how easy it is to blow things up from television and the movies. It turns out that terrorism is much harder than most people think. It's hard to find willing terrorists, it's hard to put a plot together, it's hard to get materials, and it's hard to execute a workable plan. As a collective group, terrorists are dumb, and they make dumb mistakes; criminal masterminds are another myth from movies and comic books.

Even the 9/11 terrorists got lucky.

If it's hard for us to keep this in perspective, it will be even harder for our leaders. They'll be afraid that by speaking honestly about the impossibility of attaining absolute security or the inevitability of terrorism -- or that some American ideals are worth maintaining even in the face of adversity -- they will be branded as "soft on terror." And they'll be afraid that Americans might vote them out of office. Perhaps they're right, but where are the leaders who aren't afraid? What has happened to "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"?

Terrorism, even the terrorism of radical Islamists and right-wing extremists and lone actors all put together, is not an "existential threat" against our nation. Even the events of 9/11, as horrific as they were, didn't do existential damage to our nation. Our society is more robust than it might seem from watching the news. We need to start acting that way.

There are things we can do to make us safer, mostly around investigation, intelligence, and emergency response, but we will never be 100-percent safe from terrorism; we need to accept that.

How well this attack succeeds depends much less on what happened in Boston than by our reactions in the coming weeks and months. Terrorism isn't primarily a crime against people or property. It's a crime against our minds, using the deaths of innocents and destruction of property as accomplices. When we react from fear, when we change our laws and policies to make our country less open, the terrorists succeed, even if their attacks fail. But when we refuse to be terrorized, when we're indomitable in the face of terror, the terrorists fail, even if their attacks succeed.

Don't glorify the terrorists and their actions by calling this part of a "war on terror." Wars involve two legitimate sides. There's only one legitimate side here; those on the other are criminals. They should be found, arrested, and punished. But we need to be vigilant not to weaken the very freedoms and liberties that make this country great, meanwhile, just because we're scared.

Empathize, but refuse to be terrorized. Instead, be indomitable -- and support leaders who are as well. That's how to defeat terrorists.

original article is here at The Atlantic.

Rachel Maddow: How America's Security-Industrial Complex Went Insane

from AlterNet:

If no one knows if our security-industrial complex is making us safer, why have we built it? Why are we still building it, at breakneck speed?

The following is an excerpt from Rachel Maddow's new book, "Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power,"

In the little town where I live in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, we now have a “Public Safety Complex” around the corner from what used to be our hokey Andy Griffith–esque fire station. In the cascade of post-9/11 Homeland Security money in the first term of the George W. Bush administration, our town’s share of the loot bought us a new fire truck—one that turned out to be a few feet longer than the garage where the town kept our old fire truck. So then we got some more Homeland money to build something big enough to house the new truck. In homage to the origin of the funding, the local auto detailer airbrushed on the side of the new truck a patriotic tableau of a billowing flaglike banner, a really big bald eagle, and the burning World Trade Center towers.

The American taxpayers’ investment in my town’s security didn’t stop at the new safety complex. I can see further fruit of those Homeland dollars just beyond my neighbor’s back fence. While most of us in town depend on well water, there are a few houses that for the past decade or so have been hooked up to a municipal water supply. And when I say “a few,” I mean a few: I think there are seven houses on municipal water. Around the time we got our awesome giant new fire truck, we also got a serious security upgrade to that town water system. Its tiny pump house is about the size of two phone booths and accessible by a dirt driveway behind my neighbor’s back lot. Or at least it used to be. The entire half-acre parcel of land around that pump house is now ringed by an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, and fronted with a motion-sensitive electronically controlled motorized gate. On our side of town we call it “Little Guantánamo.” Mostly it’s funny, but there is some neighborly consternation over how frowsy Little Guantánamo gets every summer. Even though it’s town-owned land, access to Little Guantánamo is apparently above the security clearance of the guy paid to mow and brush-hog. Right up to the fence, it’s my neighbors’ land and they keep everything trim and tidy. But inside that fence, the grass gets eye-high. It’s going feral in there.

###

It’s not just the small-potatoes post-9/11 Homeland spending that feels a little off mission. It’s the big-ticket stuff too. Nobody ever made an argument to the American people, for instance, that the thing we ought to do in Afghanistan, the way we ought to stick it to Osama bin Laden, the way to dispense American tax dollars to maximize American aims in that faraway country, would be to build a brand-new neighborhood in that country’s capital city full of rococo narco-chic McMansions and apartment/office buildings with giant sculptures of eagles on their roofs and stoned guards lounging on the sidewalks, wearing bandoliers and plastic boots. No one ever made the case that this is what America ought to build in response to 9/11. But that is what we built. An average outlay of almost $5 billion a month over ten years (and counting) has created a twisted war economy in Kabul. Afghanistan is still one of the four poorest countries on earth; but now it’s one of the four poorest countries on earth with a neighborhood in its capital city that looks like New Jersey in the 1930s and ’40s, when Newark mobsters built garish mansions and dotted the grounds with lawn jockeys and hand-painted neo-neoclassic marble statues.

Walking around this Zircon-studded neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khān (named for the general who commanded the Afghan Army’s rout of the British in 1842), one of the weirdest things is that the roads and the sewage and trash situation are palpably worse here than in many other Kabul neighborhoods. Even torqued-up steel-frame SUVs have a hard time making it down some of these desolate streets; evasive driving techniques in Wazir Akbar Khān often have more to do with potholes than potshots. One of the bigger crossroads in the neighborhood is an ad hoc dump. Street kids are there all day, picking through the newest leavings for food and for stuff to salvage or sell.

There’s nothing all that remarkable about a rich-looking neighborhood in a poor country. What’s remarkable here is that there aren’t rich Afghan people in this rich Afghan neighborhood. Whether or not the owners of these giant houses would stand for these undrivable streets, the piles of garbage, the sewage running down the sidewalk right outside their security walls, they’re not here to see it. They’ve moved to Dubai, or to the United States, or somewhere else that’s safer for themselves and their money. (Or our money.) Most of these fancy properties in Wazir Akbar Khān were built by the Afghan elite with profits from the international influx of cash that accompanied the mostly American influx of war a decade ago—built to display status or to reap still more war dollars from the Western aid agencies and journalists and politicians and diplocrats and private contractors who need proper places to stay in the capital. The surges big and small have been good to the property barons of Wazir Akbar Khān: residential real estate values were reportedly up 75 percent in 2008 alone. Check the listings under Kabul “villas” today and you’ll find properties priced from $7,000 to $25,000 a month with specs like this: four floors, a dozen rooms, nine toilets, three big kitchens, sleeps twenty.

No one sold the American people on this incarnation of Wazir Akbar Khān as one of the desired outcomes of all those hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent in Afghanistan. But it is what we have built at Ground Zero Afghanistan. Whatever we were aiming at, this is the manifest result.

Consider also the new hundred-million-dollar wastewater treatment facility in Fallujah, Anbar Province, Iraq, which provides only spotty wastewater treatment to the people of that city. In 2004, after the US military all but demolished Fallujah in the deadliest urban battle of the Iraq War, it was decided that the way to turn the residents of the recalcitrant Sunni Triangle away from Al-Qaeda and toward their country’s fledgling government would be to build a sewage system for all of Fallujah. The initial $33 million contract was let to a South Carolina company in June 2004, while the city was still smoldering. There was no time to waste. The Bush administration’s Iraqi Reconstruction Management Office identified the sewage system as a “key national reconciliation issue.” The goal was to have it up and running by the beginning of 2006.

Nearly five years after the deadline, having clocked in at three times its initial budget, there was still not a single residence on line. Accordingly, the plan was “descoped”—scaled down—to serve just a third of the city. In the midst then of doing a third of the work for triple the money, there was talk of walking away from the project without connecting even that one-third of Fallujah residences to the aborted plant. We had built a shit-processing plant that didn’t process shit.

And it gets worse. According to a 2008 report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, about 10 percent of the money paid to Iraqi subcontractors for the Fallujah project ended up in the hands of “terrorist organizations.” According to that same report, residents near two particular pump stations “[might] become angry” if the system ever did come on line, because “funding constraints” made “odor control facilities” impractical. Even households that were not part of the collection system would still be subject to what the Iraqi minister of municipalities and public works delicately called the “big stink.” The eighty-page report also noted, with dry finality, “The project file lacked any documentation to support that the provisional Iraqi government wanted this project in the first place.”

When, finally, late in 2011, seven years into the project, at a cost of $108 million, we managed to get a quarter of the homes in Fallujah hooked into that system, this partial accomplishment was not met with resounding huzzahs. “In the end it would be dubious to conclude that this project helped stabilize the city, enhanced the local citizenry’s faith in government, built local service capacity, won hearts or minds, or stimulated the economy,” the Special Inspector General said in 2011. “It is difficult to conclude that the project was worth the investment.” A hundred million American dollars, partially diverted to the groups fighting US troops, to build (poorly) a giant, unwanted wastewater-treatment project that provides nothing but the “big stink” for three-quarters of the city. No one would argue for something like this as a good use of US tax dollars. But it is in fact what we bought.

###

Here at home, according to an exhaustive and impressive two-year-long investigation by the Washington Post, the taxpayer-funded Global War on Terror also built enough ultra-high-security office space (Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facilities, or SCIF, in bureaucrat-speak) to fill twenty-two US Capitol Buildings: seventeen million square feet of offices in thirty-three handsome and generously funded new complexes powered up twenty-four hours a day, where an army of nearly one million American professionals spies on the world and the homeland. It’s as if we turned the entire working population of Detroit and Milwaukee into high-security-clearance spooks and analysts.

The spy boom has been a beautiful windfall for architects, construction companies, IT specialists, and above all defense contractors, enriching thousands of private companies and dozens of local economies hugging the Capital Beltway. All those SCIFs and the rest of the government-contractor gravy train have made suburban Washington, DC, home to six of the ten wealthiest counties in America. Falls Church, Loudoun County, and Fairfax County in Virginia are one, two, and three. Goodbye, Nassau County, New York. Take that, Oyster Bay.

The crown jewel of this sprawling intelligopolis is Liberty Crossing, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington—an 850,000-square-foot (and growing) complex that houses the National Counterterrorism Center. The agency was created and funded in 2004 because, despite spending $30 billion on intelligence before 9/11, the various spy agencies in our country did not talk to one another. So the $30 billion annual intelligence budget was boosted by 250 percent, and with that increase we built ourselves a clean, well-lighted edifice, concealed by GPS jammers and reflective windows, where intelligence collected by 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies under government contract is supposedly coordinated.

It is a big, big idea, and perhaps necessary—the financial commitment to it implies at least that we think it is. But it turns out Liberty Crossing is a bureaucratic haystack into which the now even more vast intelligence community tosses its shiniest needles. When a businessman relayed to CIA agents in Nigeria that his son seemed to be under the spell of terrorists and had gone to Yemen, perhaps for training, that duly reported needle got sucked into the fifty-thousand-reports-per-year haystack, only to be discovered after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit and tried to set off a bomb he’d stuffed into his underpants. “The complexity of this system defies description,” a retired Army lieutenant general and intelligence specialist told the Post reporters. “We can’t effectively assess whether it’s making us more safe.”

###

If no one knows if it’s making us safer, why have we built it? Why are we still building it, at breakneck speed? Liberty Crossing is slated to almost double in size over the next decade. Remember the fierce debate in Congress over whether or not it’s worth it to do that? No? Me neither. But we keep building it. We keep chugging along.

National security is a real imperative for our country—for any country. But the connection between that imperative and what we do about it has gone as frowsy as my hometown’s little pump station in high August. Our national security policy isn’t much related to its stated justifications anymore. To whatever extent we do argue and debate what defense and intelligence policy ought to be, that debate—our political process—doesn’t actually determine what we do. We’re not directing that policy anymore; it just follows its own course. Which means we’ve effectively lost control of a big part of who we are as a country. And we’ve broken faith with some of the best advice the founders ever gave us.

Our constitutional inheritance didn’t point us in this direction. If the colonists hadn’t rejected British militarism and the massive financial burden of maintaining the British military, America wouldn’t exist. The Constitutional Convention debated whether America should even have a standing army. The founders feared that maintaining one would drain our resources in the same way that maintaining the eighteenth-century British military had burdened the colonies. They worried that a powerful military could rival civilian government for power in our new country, and of course they worried that having a standing army around would create too much of a temptation to use it. Those worries about the inevitable incentives to war were part of what led to the division of government at the heart of our Constitution, building into the structure of our new country a deliberate peaceable bias.

But in the past generation or two, we’ve drifted off that historical course. The steering’s gone wobbly, the brakes have failed. It’s not a conspiracy, there aren’t rogue elements pushing us to subvert our national interests to instead serve theirs. It’s been more entertaining and more boneheaded than that.

The good news is we don’t need a radical new vision of post–Cold War American power. We just need a “small c” conservative return to our constitutional roots, a course correction. This book is about how and why we’ve drifted. It wasn’t inevitable. And it’s fixable.



Copyright © 2012 Rachel Maddow From the book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, published by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

Homeland Security memo warned of violent threat posed by Occupy Wall Street

Key phrase to take from the first line of the memo: "A loose coalition of peaceful protests taking place across the United States" etc. etc.. It's incredible to see what the Dept. of Homeland Security says themselves about the movement yet still law enforcement acts totally inappropriately and violent against PEACEFUL PROTEST. Hence the action I attended for some time earlier today at Union Square. "Stop the Suppression of the Occupy Movement!"

from BoingBoing

An October, 2011 Department of Homeland Security memo on Occupy Wall Street warned of the potential for violence posed by the "leaderless resistance movement."

Update: Looks like there's a larger Rolling Stone feature on this document:

As Occupy Wall Street spread across the nation last fall, sparking protests in more than 70 cities, the Department of Homeland Security began keeping tabs on the movement. An internal DHS report entitled “SPECIAL COVERAGE: Occupy Wall Street [PDF]," dated October of last year, opens with the observation that "mass gatherings associated with public protest movements can have disruptive effects on transportation, commercial, and government services, especially when staged in major metropolitan areas." While acknowledging the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of OWS, the report notes darkly that "large scale demonstrations also carry the potential for violence, presenting a significant challenge for law enforcement."

Thanks Xeni!

Noam Chomsky on Suppression of the Occupy Movement

Photographers: Stand Your Ground

thanks, Ryan

10 Most Secure Locations on the Planet

from SAFEKEEPING

They say safety is relative. Some people go their entire lives and NEVER feel safe. Others take incredible precautions to protect both themselves and their loved ones from anyone and anything that may seek to cause them harm (babyproofing anyone?).

Where are you most safe? Are you thinking about places where you can retreat and hide from the world? If so, here are the 10 Most Secure Locations on the Planet that are considered the safest, for various reasons.

1. Fort Knox

Located in Kentucky south of Louisville, Fort Knox is home to the United States’ monetary assets, said to hold tons of gold – 5,000 tons at last estimate (equal to about 2% of ALL Gold ever mined from the Earth). To make it safe enough (if the location surrounding by the military camp isn’t enough) there is a bank vault within a deep basement of the building that has a 250 ton door marking its entrance.

Source

2. Cheyenne Mountain

This is also in the United States, located just outside of Colorado Springs, CO. It is the command center and control, communication and the intelligence center for both the United States Space Command missions and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Built at the height of the Cold War, the facility is said to be sturdy enough to survive a multimegaton nuclear detonation within 1 nautical mile (1.9km) of it’s center. It has blast doors that each weigh, individually, 25 tons.



Source

3. Haven Co

Located in the Sealand in the North Sea, about six miles off the coast of Britain, this location is a company base founded in 2000. The company provides data protection. The only way you can get in is if you are an authorized staff member, an investor in the company or you are a Royal Family member. Although services for HavenCo ceased without explanation in 2008, it’s an example of the type of “island data haven” that is very secure do to it being SO HARD to get to traditionally.



Source

4. Area 51

The famed stories be true or not, this area in the remote deserts of Las Vegas is more than just strange. It is also one of the most secure locations on the planet. It is a United States military base ( a detachment from Edwards Air Force Base in CA) where no one knows what’s occurring, except those that work there and the President. Known by many names (Groom Lake, Dreamland, Paradise Ranch, etc.) Area 51 is believed to be a testing ground for advanced and experimental aircraft.

Source

5. Air Force One

One of the most well built planes in the world and what many consider the world’s most secure moving location, Air Force One has plenty of security. The United States President travels in a modified Boeing 747-200B series aircraft. It has the world’s most advanced flight avoidance, air-to-air defense, and electronics technology packages available anywhere in the World, all for the protection of the Commander-in-Chief and his entourage.



Source

6. ADX Florence Prison

The Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX for short) is a supermax prison (for men) in Colorado housing the baddest of the bad. These criminals are considered the most dangerous cons in the US and has earned the prison the nickname of “Alcatraz of the Rockies.” Described by one former ADX warden as “a cleaner version of hell”, security measures at the prison include attack dogs guarding the area between the prison walls and 12 ft. high razor wire fences, 1,400 remotely controlled steel doors, motion detecting laser beams, pressure pads and cameras. Current residents of the prison include infamous “Shoe Bomber” Richard Reid, 9/11 terrorist mastermind Zacarias Moussaoui, and Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols among many, many others.



Source

7. The 1960’s Bar

Located 100 feet underground within Britain’s secret subterranean Burlington bunker complex in Wiltshire, England, the 1960’s Bar is a recreation of a pub popular with British Government officials. This top secret base was first constructed during the Cold War and designed to be a refuge for the higher-ups to reconstruct Britain in the event of a nuclear attack…needless to say they figured they would need a few pints to wait out the radiation.



Source

8. Bold Lane

Located in Derby, England, this car park is multi-story stronghold for 440 cars. First conceived and designed by an agricultural engineer after he had the window of his car smashed and his radio stolen while in an airport parking structure. Sophisticated security measures include CCTV cameras, panic buttons, bar-code scanning entry doors, and advanced sensors controlled by a central computer that detect any and all movements of each car. Although, at over $30 dollars an hour, keeping your auto safe in the UK isn’t cheap.

Source

9. Deposed Iraqi Leader Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad Bunker

The 2,150 square-yard bunker was originally designed to withstand the blast of a nuclear bomb and house 50 people. Located nearly 100 feet underground, security measures for the Dictator’s refuge included three-ton Swiss-made doors, 5ft-thick walls, a 6ft-thick steel-reinforced concrete ceiling, and two escape tunnels. The bunker survived seven American dropped bunker busters and 20 cruise missles during the war. Unfortunately, it couldn’t survive looting and was picked almost completely clean during the last days of the war by Iraqi soldiers.

Source

10. Granite Mt. Mormon Church Records Facility

The records storage of the Mormon Church is a massive vault encased in rock at Granite Mountains, Utah first opened in 1965. Armed guards waving metal detector wands usher visitors into a concrete bunker before swinging open metal gates to a tunnel entrance. Excavated 600 ft inside the mountain, the vault features state-of-the-art environmentally controlled document storage chambers as well as administrative offices, shipping and receiving docks, a processing facility and a restoration laboratory for microfilm.



Source

These are just a sampling of some of the world’s most SECURE locations. With the near daily unrest that occurrs even in developed countries today, there has been a lot of discussion about how secure any location really is. However, chances are good that if you are deep within these systems, you will be safe at least for some time.

Barack Obama's Top Secret Tent

from the BBC

A rare photo, released by the White House, shows Barack Obama fielding calls from a tent in Brazil, to keep up with events in Libya. The tent is a mobile secure area known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, designed to allow officials to have top secret discussions on the move.

They are one of the safest places in the world to have a conversation.

Designed to withstand eavesdropping, phone tapping and computer hacking, Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities are protected areas where classified conversations can be held.

They can be permanent enclosures within a building, or mobile areas set up when a world leader is on the move, to allow them to view sensitive documents or have secret conversations without any outsiders listening or hacking in.

When operations in Libya commenced at the weekend, President Obama was in Brazil on a pre-arranged trip.

Ring of Steel

In order to keep abreast of events a mobile war room was set up in his hotel so he could hold a secure conference call with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, among others.

A photo released by the White House showed the president and advisers gathered around a video phone, inside what looked like a standard blue tent, erected on the hotel's floral carpets.

Making sure no-one can intercept the activities in the room requires detailed planning, says Mark Pfeifle, who worked as a deputy National Security Adviser in the White House under George W Bush.

"When a president travels in the US or internationally one thing a team is doing in advance of the visit is locating and securing a certain area where the tent could be placed," explains Mr Pfeifle.

It has to be positioned carefully in relation to windows, and concentrations of people.

Hotel rooms, as used by President Obama in Brazil, are a popular place to locate them, but it can depend on the nature of the trip and where the president is.

Once you have found a place for the tent, the next issue is making sure it is completely secure.

Windowless rooms

This can mean creating a self sufficient pod with its own air supply, says Phil Lago, who is one of the founders of Command Consulting Group, a company which provides SCIFs to government agencies.

"We have to make sure that any kind of emissions don't get out. That could be from your laptop, your radio, your telephone," he explains.

Rather than a ring of steel around a secure complex, he likens it to a "ring of electronic waves" which prevents signals from getting in and out of the tent. The only signal which can get out is the encrypted communications, which are made through a secure and encrypted phone line, which sends conversations through a satellite, he says.

Mr Lago recalls travelling with George W Bush to Kennebunkport, where the president used his mobile SCIF to conduct discussions with Tony Blair, who was in Downing St, about Afghanistan and Iraq.

The exact specifications of a mobile pod are top secret, but a public document (The intelligence community directive 705) states that a SCIF, mobile or not, needs not only to be totally soundproofed, but built with an "Intrusion Detection System" to detect any break-ins.

The tent itself is windowless and is made from a secret material which is designed to keep emissions in and listening devices out.

Only those specially authorised can go inside a SCIF, with entry usually requiring a combination of pin numbers, access badges and biometric data.

The perimeters of the tent might be controlled by guards, but there would also be people monitoring outside to see if any data gets out. "You have a line of defence for everything," says Mr Lago.

Carrying a mobile SCIF around is an important part of any presidential trip, he says, adding that they are getting easier to transport.

"You can usually fit them into two large foot lockers and that's most of the equipment you need. In the old days you had to put them in the back of a trailer," he says.

'Not infallible'

As well as mobile tents used to hold conversations, many permanent SCIFs are used to hold secure meetings, in offices and embassies. They are typically constructed with bomb proof walls and similarly tight security measures, explains Michael Creasey, director of development at CSG partners, another company which provides SCIFs.

He says most of his customers are government or defence contractors and departments, but might also be companies who are working on a new design for a plane or a ship and want to hold secure conversations.

When creating SCIFs for clients Mr Creasey says he can use a range of equipment, from a fence which alerts you when someone is touching it to cameras, or devices which can tell when someone has just received an e-mail.

"Nothing in a SCIF is allowed to operate on a remote control because that's a frequency that can be tapped," he says. "Much of what is distributed is done on fibre, not copper as fibre as yet can't be hacked into."

Mr Creasey says demand for SCIFs is particularly high in the Baltimore and Washington area, where many US government agencies are based, and where the cost of setting one up can vary widely from $200 to $5,000 a square foot.

While they are designed to be as impenetrable as possible, and are constantly becoming more sophisticated, Mr Lago says they are not 100% infallible.

"We call them 99.9% infallible."

thanks, Presurfer

Taking Photos In Public Places Is Not A Crime

from our friend Xeni at BoingBoing

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has a piece in Popular Mechanics about the growing trend of cops bullying photographers who take pictures in public places, and why officials who believe such photography is against the law are mistaken.

I believe there is a good case to be made that having lots of cameras in the hands of citizens makes us more, rather than less, safe. Here's how bad it has gotten: Not long ago, an Amtrak representative did an interview with local TV station Fox 5 in Washington, D.C.'s Union Station to explain that you don't need a permit to take pictures there--only to be approached by a security guard who ordered them to stop filming without a permit.

Legally, it's pretty much always okay to take photos in a public place as long as you're not physically interfering with traffic or police operations. As Bert Krages, an attorney who specializes in photography-related legal problems and wrote Legal Handbook for Photographers, says, "The general rule is that if something is in a public place, you're entitled to photograph it." What's more, though national-security laws are often invoked when quashing photographers, Krages explains that "the Patriot Act does not restrict photography; neither does the Homeland Security Act." But this doesn't stop people from interfering with photographers, even in settings that don't seem much like national-security zones.

Taking Photos In Public Places Is Not A Crime: Analysis (popularmechanics.com, Illustration by Rui Ricardo, courtesy Popular Mechanics)

Choose Privacy: video from the American Library Association

from Cory Doctrow at Boing Boing

Choose Privacy Week Video from 20K Films on Vimeo.

The American Library Association's "Choose Privacy" week kicks off with a ~20 minute video featuring writers and thinkers talking about the value of privacy in simple, accessible, thought-provoking terms. Included are me, Neil Gaiman, and many others. Produced by Laura Zinger and 20K films, it's a really fine little introduction to subject from the towering heroes of the information revolution: the librarians.