The American Surveillance State

By John White­head– March 26, 2012 — In the small town of Bluff­dale, Utah, not far from bustling Salt Lake City, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment is qui­etly erect­ing what will be the crown jewel of its sur­veil­lance empire. Ris­ing up out of the desert land­scape, the Utah Data Cen­ter (UDC)—a $2 bil­lion behe­moth designed to house a net­work of com­put­ers, satel­lites, and phone lines that stretches across the world—is intended to serve as the cen­tral hub of the National Secu­rity Agency’s vast spy­ing infra­struc­ture. Once com­plete (the UDC is expected to be fully oper­a­tional by Sep­tem­ber 2013), the last link in the chain of the elec­tronic con­cen­tra­tion camp that sur­rounds us will be com­plete, and pri­vacy, as we have known it, will be extinct.

At five times the size of the U.S. Capi­tol, the UDC will be a clear­ing­house and a depos­i­tory for every imag­in­able kind of information—whether inno­cent or not, pri­vate or public—including com­mu­ni­ca­tions, trans­ac­tions and the like. Any­thing and every­thing you’ve ever said or done, from the triv­ial to the damning—phone calls, Face­book posts, Twit­ter tweets, Google searches, emails, book­store and gro­cery pur­chases, bank state­ments, com­muter toll records, etc.—will be tracked, col­lected, cat­a­logued and ana­lyzed by the UDC’s super­com­put­ers and teams of gov­ern­ment agents. In this way, by sift­ing through the detri­tus of your once-private life, the gov­ern­ment will come to its own con­clu­sions about who you are, where you fit in, and how best to deal with you should the need arise.

What lit­tle we know about this highly clas­si­fied spy center—which will be oper­ated by the National Secu­rity Agency (NSA)—comes from James Bam­ford, a for­mer intel­li­gence ana­lyst and an expert on the highly secre­tive gov­ern­ment agency. Bamford’s expose in Wired (March 15, 2012), a must-read for any­one con­cerned about the loss of our free­doms in a tech­no­log­i­cal age, pro­vides a chill­ing glimpse into the government’s plans for total con­trol, a.k.a., total infor­ma­tion aware­ness. As Bam­ford notes, the NSA “has trans­formed itself into the largest, most covert, and poten­tially most intru­sive intel­li­gence agency ever cre­ated. In the process—and for the first time since Water­gate and the other scan­dals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its sur­veil­lance appa­ra­tus on the US and its citizens.”

Sup­pos­edly cre­ated by the NSA in order to track for­eign threats to Amer­ica, as well as to shore up cyber­se­cu­rity and bat­tle hack­ers, the UDC’s tech­no­log­i­cal capa­bil­i­ties are astound­ing. As the cen­tral depos­i­tory for all of the infor­ma­tion gath­ered by the NSA’s vast spy cen­ters, the UDC’s super­com­put­ers will be capa­ble of down­load­ing data amount­ing to the entire con­tents of the Library of Con­gress every six hours. How­ever, the data being tar­geted goes far beyond the scope of ter­ror­ist threats. In fact, as Bam­ford points out, the NSA is inter­ested in noth­ing less than the “so-called invis­i­ble web, also known as the deep web or deepnet—data beyond the reach of the pub­lic. This includes password-protected data, US and for­eign gov­ern­ment com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and non­com­mer­cial file-sharing between trusted peers.”

That the NSA, which has shown itself to care lit­tle for con­sti­tu­tional lim­its or pri­vacy, is the dri­ving force behind this spy cen­ter is no sur­prise. The agency, which is three times the size of the CIA, con­sumes one third of the intel­li­gence bud­get and has a global spy net­work, has a long his­tory of spy­ing on Americans—whether or not it has always had the autho­riza­tion to do so. Take, for instance, the war­rant­less wire­tap­ping pro­gram con­ducted dur­ing the Bush years, which resulted in the NSA mon­i­tor­ing the pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tions of mil­lions of Americans—a pro­gram that con­tin­ues unabated today, with help from pri­vate telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies such as AT&T. The pro­gram recorded 320 mil­lion phone calls a day when it first started. It is esti­mated that the NSA has inter­cepted 15 to 20 tril­lion com­mu­ni­ca­tions of Amer­i­can cit­i­zens since 9/11.

What has proven to be sur­pris­ing to some is that the Obama White House has proven to be just as bad, if not worse, than the Bush White House when it comes to invad­ing the pri­vacy rights of Amer­i­cans. As Yale law pro­fes­sor Jack Balkin notes, “We are wit­ness­ing the bipar­ti­san nor­mal­iza­tion and legit­imiza­tion of a national-surveillance state. [Obama has] sys­tem­at­i­cally adopted poli­cies con­sis­tent with the sec­ond term of the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion.” Unfor­tu­nately, whereas those on the Left raised a hew and cry over the Bush administration’s con­stant encroach­ments on Amer­i­cans’ pri­vacy rights, it appears that the polit­i­cal lean­ings of those on the Left have held greater sway than their prin­ci­ples. Con­se­quently, the Obama admin­is­tra­tion has faced much less crit­i­cism for its bla­tant efforts to rein­force the sur­veil­lance state.

Clearly, the age of pri­vacy in Amer­ica is com­ing to a close. We have moved into a new par­a­digm in which sur­veil­lance tech­nol­ogy which ren­ders every­one a sus­pect is dri­ving the bureau­cratic ship that once was our demo­c­ra­tic repub­lic. By the time this UDC spy cen­ter is fully oper­a­tional, no phone call, no email, no Tweet, no web search is safe from the pry­ing eyes and ears of the gov­ern­ment. Peo­ple going about their daily busi­ness will no longer be assured that they are not being spied upon by fed­eral agents and other gov­ern­ment bureaucrats.

Posted by Randa Wagner on Apr 2 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.