Political Views and Surveillance

Concerns about the FBI’s domestic surveillance history have been fueled by controversial surveillance programs that targeted individuals and groups based on their political ideologies or religious affiliations. Maybe the most concerning of these historical FBI surveillance programs was the COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) initiative, which was active from 1956 to 1971. Under COINTELPRO, the FBI infiltrated, surveilled, and disrupted civil rights organizations, anti-war movements, and other so-called “progressive groups”. The FBI surveilled social figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. The Black Panther Party was also subjected to intense scrutiny. These FBI surveillance targets may not have been monitored for criminal activity but, instead, for challenging social norms and advocating for change. Some historical views hold that the FBI’s motivations for these actions were likely based on political bias rather than real security concerns. A review of historical documents from the COINTELPRO era revealed that this program actually sought to “neutralize” social leaders who were perceived as threats to the political status quo.

More recently, the FBI has been reprimanded in various circles for reported surveillance of parents who protested against or disagreed with school board policies, decisions, and actions. According to media reports, the FBI’s counterterrorism and criminal investigative programs created an “EDUOFFICIALS” threat designator to track case activities that involved threats against “school board administrators, board members, teachers, and staff”. In October 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo directing the FBI to address threats of violence against school officials. This letter was generated in response to a National School Boards Association letter requesting federal assistance to address threats against school board members. Subsequently, whistleblowers revealed that the FBI opened a number of investigations into parents who were identified as protesting prevailing education policies, to include parents who were upset over previous mask mandates. While the FBI denied this type of activity, there have been repeated calls by national leaders for additional investigation. In the end, the FBI’s perceived targeting of people or groups who dissented from school policies and political positions could have undermined democratic principles, chilled free speech, and fostered a culture of fear in our otherwise free and open society.

Christopher M Piehota, Wanted: The FBI I Once Knew (Freiling LLC, 2024). Available at Barnes and Noble and at Amazon.com .

Religious Views and Surveillance

In addition, the FBI has also been accused of religious profiling in its investigative practices. Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the bureau intensified its focus on Muslim communities, often equating religious practices with potential threats. The FBI’s reported use of undercover informants in mosques and Islamic community centers were cited as examples of this troubling approach. Looking back, it was found that a number of FBI informants may have erroneously targeted individuals with no evidence of criminal or terror activity and created an atmosphere of distrust within communities.

In a more recent issue, the FBI received a great deal of negative attention when a leaked internal intelligence document warned that “radical traditionalist” Catholics pose an extremist threat. This memo discussed monitoring “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” and their possible interest in “Radical-Traditionalist Catholicism”. Basically, this FBI intelligence document noted a growing overlap between the far-right white nationalist movement and Radical Transnational Catholicism, which was described as adhering to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, and white supremacy ideologies. People were shocked at this type of FBI investigative position and the FBI Director confirmed the document was removed from bureau systems, as it did not meet FBI standards. Why did FBI managers allow that kind of intelligence document to be authored to begin with? Maybe, the FBI organizational culture and resultant views and practices merit a critical review for other types of potential bias or shortfalls in objectivity? Such views and practices can alienate affected religious communities, and further exacerbate societal division. We can plainly see how FBI surveillance and intelligence activities can raise questions about the bureau’s observance of the constitutional protections afforded under the First Amendment.

Conclusion

The FBI’s domestic surveillance activities can have far-reaching consequences for the preservation of our democratic governance and civil liberties. Any actual targeting of individuals or groups based on political views or religious beliefs can undermine our foundational principles of freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. These principles are essential to sustaining our democratic processes. Also, questionable FBI’s surveillance activities can erode public trust in law enforcement and domestic security operations. The chilling effect of biased or poorly managed domestic surveillance activities cannot be overstated with targeted people and groups. Knowing that people’s lives and activities may be monitored by the government due to political activism or religious practices can result in self-censorship, stifling dissenting opinions, and weakening of the fabric of our civil society.

The FBI has an awesome responsibility in balancing its domestic surveillance practices and operational effectiveness with the preservation of our foundational principles of democracy, privacy, and justice. While national security is an undeniable priority, security cannot and should not be had at the expense of civil liberties and constitutional rights. The examples above can give the FBI a chance to re-evaluate its current organizational culture, leadership environment, and operational practices in how it is meeting the needs of the American people. Only by addressing these issues with honesty, objectivity, and humility can the FBI do right for the American people. The American people who provide the public trust that the FBI operates under. This is the same public trust that demands that the FBI fulfill its mandate to protect all communities and uphold the Constitution without bias, political hedging, or religious prejudice.

——

Press Release:

November 8, 2024 – Chris Piehota, a 25-year FBI Special Agent who retired as one of the bureau’s eight most senior career executives, shares his personal observations regarding the FBI’s organizational challenges. He shares his thoughts on FBI shortfalls in leadership, cultural norms, and operational decision-making that contributed to the FBI’s current diminished state.

 “Wanted: The FBI I Once Knew” (at Barnes and Noble in paper, at Amazon on Kindle) provides an insider’s view and tells a cautionary tale of how the FBI, once one of the world’s highest-performing organizations, could fall victim to leadership atrophy, cultural erosion, complacency, and core mission distraction. Claims of FBI political polarization and agency misconduct have become the norm. Politicians have discussed the bureau’s disbanding and the American public is losing faith in what was once one of our most trusted and revered institutions.

“Wanted” covers how the FBI fundamentally changed after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, and shifted away from its roots. These drastic shifts in FBI leadership approaches and organizational philosophies negatively impacted what was one of our most respected federal agencies. ‘Wanted” provides the author’s insights and recommendations on how to put our FBI back on a path to restored confidence and credibility in its service to the American people.

“Today’s FBI could benefit greatly from a return to the leadership models, cultural traits, and operational practices that made it great. To some degree, these factors were deprioritized, watered down, and sometimes discarded for new-era management approaches embraced by corporate America…” (Excerpt from “Wanted – The FBI I Once Knew).

“Wanted: The FBI I Once Knew” Published by The Freiling Agency and released in November 2024. (https://www.freilingagency.com/).

( Electronic Frontier Foundation ) – In the wake of this year’s Supreme Court decision in Dobbs overruling Roe v. Wade, sheriffs and bounty hunters in anti-abortion states will try to investigate and punish abortion seekers based on their internet browsing, private messaging, and phone app location data. We can expect similar tactics from officials in states that have prohibited transgender youths from obtaining gender-affirming health care. Indeed, the Texas governor ordered state child welfare officials to investigate such care as child abuse.

Many states are stepping forward to serve as health care sanctuaries for people seeking abortion or gender-affirming care that is not legal at home. These states must also be data sanctuaries. To be the safest refuge, a state that has data about people who sought abortion or gender-affirming health care must lock down that data, and not disclose it to adversaries who would use it to punish them for seeking that health care.

So it is great news that California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed three bills that will help meet these data privacy threats: A.B. 1242, authored by Asm. Rebecca Bauer-Kahan; A.B. 2091, authored by Asm. Mia Bonta; and S.B. 107, authored by Sen. Scott Wiener.

EFF supported all three bills. And we encourage other states to pass similar bills. They create new reproductive and trans health data exemptions from old information disclosure mandates. These laws also place new limits on how courts, government agencies, and businesses handle this data. (You can read here a more detailed explanation of these three new California laws; this post is a summary.)

New exemptions from old mandates. Many states require in-state entities to share data with out-of-state entities. States that respect the rights to abortion and gender-affirming health care must create new exemptions from these old laws, for out-of-state investigations of such health care. The new California bills do this to three old California laws that (1) require certain California digital service providers to treat out-of-state warrants like in-state warrants, (2) require California courts to assist in enforcing out-of-state judicial orders, and (3) require California health care providers to disclose certain kinds of medical information to certain kinds of entities.

New limits on judges. Under the new California laws, state judges cannot authorize wiretaps, pen registers, or search warrants, if they are for the purpose of investigating abortions that are legal in California. Also, state judges now cannot compel someone to identify a person who had an abortion, or issue a subpoena, in connection with an out-of-state investigation of an abortion that is legal in California.

New limits on state agencies. California’s state and local government agencies, including but not limited to law enforcement and prisons, are now barred from disclosing information to an individual or out-of-state agency regarding a person’s abortion or gender-affirming health care.

New limits on communication services. There is a new rule for California corporations, and corporations with principal offices in California, that provide electronic communication services. They shall not, in California, provide information or assistance in response to out-of-state court orders concerning abortions that are legal in California. However, such a corporation is not subject to liability unless it knew or should have known that the court order in question related to such an abortion.

Three cheers for California! These new data sanctuary laws are strong protections for people seeking abortion and transgender health care. Other pro-choice and pro-trans states should enact similar laws.

But more work remains.

Anti-abortion and anti-trans sheriffs will continue to seek information located in the Golden State. California lawmakers must enact new laws as needed. For example, they may need to add new exemptions to an old law that authorizes state courts to command residents to travel out-of-state to testify in criminal proceedings. Eternal vigilance is the price of data sanctuary. States should also be data sanctuaries for immigrants.

Also, Congress and the states must enact comprehensive consumer data privacy legislation that limits how businesses collect, retain, use, and share our data. A great way to stop anti-choice and anti-trans sheriffs from seizing data from businesses is to stop these businesses from collecting and retaining this data in the first place. Legislators should start with Rep. Jacobs’ My Body, My Data bill.

Finally, Congress and the states must limit how law enforcement agencies obtain our data from businesses. For example, police across the country are using “reverse search warrants” to identify all people who used particular keywords in their web searches, and all people who were physically present at a particular geolocation. These schemes violate the Fourth Amendment. Legislators must ban them. New York State legislators tried to do so last year. Anti-abortion sheriffs might use them to identify all people who searched the web for “abortion pill,” or who visited an abortion clinic. Likewise, police across the country are buying detailed location data, often without a warrant, from data brokers who got it from our phone apps. This also violates the Fourth Amendment. Legislators should ban it, too.

Via Electronic Frontier Foundation

The hiding of information by the former president, repeatedly described as “unprecedented” behavior, is actually part of a continuum of withholding that’s been growing at a striking pace for decades. By the time Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, the stage had long been set for removing information from the public record in an alarmingly broad fashion, a pattern that he would take to new levels.

The “Secrecy President”

As recent history’s exhibit number one, this country’s global war on terror, launched soon after the 9/11 attacks, was largely defined and enabled by the withholding of information — including secret memos, hidden authorizations, and the use of covert methods. During President George W. Bush’s first term in office, government lawyers and officials regularly withheld information about their actions and documents related to them from public view, both at home and abroad.

Those officials, for instance, legalized the brutal interrogations of war-on-terror prisoners, while conveniently replacing the word “torture” with the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques” and so surreptitiously evading a longstanding legal ban on the practice. The CIA then secretly utilized those medieval techniques at “black sites” around the world where its agents held suspected terrorists. It later destroyed the tapes made of those interrogations, erasing the evidence of what its agents had done. On the home front, in a similarly secretive fashion, unknown to members of Congress as well as the general public, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to set up an elaborate and far-reaching program of warrantless surveillance on Americans and others inside the United States.

Consider that the launching of an era of enhanced secrecy techniques. No wonder Bush earned the moniker of the “secrecy president.” Only weeks after the 9/11 attacks, for instance, he put in place strict guidelines about who could brief Congress on classified matters, while instituting new, lower standards for transparency. He even issued a signing statement rebuking Congress for requiring reports “in written form” on “significant anticipated intelligence activities or significant intelligence failure.” To emphasize his sense of righteousness in defying calls for information, he insisted on the “president’s constitutional authority to… withhold information” in cases of foreign relations and national security. In a parallel fashion, his administration put new regulations in place limiting the release of information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

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President Obama also withheld information when it came to war-on-terror efforts. Notably, his administration shrouded in secrecy the use of armed drones to target and kill suspected terrorists (and civilians) in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Official reports omitted reliable data about who was killed, where the killings had taken place, or the number of civilian casualties. As the American Civil Liberties Union concluded, administration reporting on civilian harm fell “far short of the standards for transparency and accountability needed to ensure that the government’s targeted killing program is lawful under domestic and international law.”

And well beyond the war-on-terror context, the claim to secrecy has become a government default mechanism. Tellingly, the number of classified documents soared to unimaginable heights in those years. As the National Archives reports, in 2012, documents with classified markings — including “top secret,” “secret,” and “confidential” — reached a staggering 95 million. And while the overall numbers had declined by 2017, the extent of government classification then and now remains alarming.

Erasing the Record Before It’s Created

President Trump’s document theft should be understood, then, as just another piece of the secrecy matrix.

Despite his claim — outrageous, but perhaps no more than so many other claims he made — to being the “most transparent” president ever, he turned out to be a stickler for withholding information on numerous fronts. Taking the war-on-terror behavioral patterns of his predecessors to heart, he expanded the information vacuum well beyond the sphere of war and national security to the purely political and personal realms. As a start, he refused to testify in the Mueller investigation into the 2016 presidential election. On a more personal note, he also filed suit to keep his tax records secret from Congress.

In fact, during his time in office, Trump virtually transformed the very exercise of withholding information. In place of secrecy in the form of classification, he developed a strategy of preventing documents and records from even being created in the first place.

Three months into his presidency, Trump announced that the White House would cease to disclose its visitor logs, citing the supposed risk to both national security and presidential privacy. In addition to hiding the names of those with whom he met, specific high-level meetings took place in an unrecorded fashion so that even the members of his cabinet, no less the public, would never know about them.

As former National Security Advisor John Bolton and others have attested, when it came to meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump even prohibited note-taking. In at least five such meetings over the course of his first two years in office, he consistently excluded White House officials and members of the State Department. On at least one occasion, he even confiscated notes his interpreter took to ensure that there would be no record.

Congress, too, was forbidden access to information under Trump. Lawyers in the Department of Justice (DOJ) drafted memos hardening policies against complying with congressional requests for information in what former DOJ lawyer Annie Owens has described as “a policy that approached outright refusal” to share information. In addition, the Trump administration was lax or even dismissive when it came to compliance with the production of required reports on national security matters. Note as well the reversal of policies aimed at transparency, as in the decision to reverse an Obama era policy of making public the number of nuclear weapons the U.S. possessed.

But don’t just blame Donald Trump. Among the most recent examples of erasing evidence, it’s become clear that the Secret Service deleted the text messages of its agents around the president from the day before and the day of the January 6th insurrection. So, too, the phone records of several top Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials were wiped clean when they left office in accordance with directives established early in the Trump presidency. Similarly, the phone records of top Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security officials were scrapped. In other words, recent reports on the way Trump regularly shredded documents, flushed them down the White House toilet, and generally withheld presidential papers — even classified documents, as revealed during the Mar-a-Lago search — were of a piece with a larger disdain on the part of both the president and a number of his top officials for sharing information.

Erasing the record in one fashion or another became the Trump administration’s default setting, variations on a theme hammered out by his predecessors and taken to new levels on his watch.

A Perpetual Right to Secrecy?

Admittedly, before Trump arrived on the scene, there were some efforts to reverse this pattern, but in the long run they proved anemic. Barack Obama arrived at the White House in January 2009 acknowledging the harm caused by excessive government secrecy. Emphasizing transparency’s importance for accountability, informed public debate, and establishing trust in government, the new president issued an executive order on his first full day in office emphasizing the importance of “transparency and open government” and pledging to create “an unprecedented level of openness in government.”

Nearly a year later, he followed up with another executive order setting out a series of reforms aimed at widening the parameters for information-sharing. That order tightened guidelines around classification and broadened the possibilities for declassifying information. “Our democratic principles require that the American people be informed of the activities of their government,” it read. Six years later, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper produced a report on the “principles of Intelligence transparency for the intelligence community” and a “transparency implementation plan” that again aimed at clarifying the limits, as well as the purposes, of secrecy.

And Obama’s efforts did indeed make some headway. As Steven Aftergood, former director of the Federation of American Scientists, concluded, “The Obama administration broke down longstanding barriers to public access and opened up previously inaccessible records of enormous importance and value.” Among other things, Aftergood reported, Obama “declassified the current size of the U.S. nuclear arms arsenal for the first time ever,” as well as thousands of the president’s daily briefs, and established a National Declassification Center.

Still, in the end, the progress proved disappointing. As Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan put it, the Obama administration’s record on transparency was among “the most secretive” in our history. She also castigated the president’s team for “setting new records for stonewalling or rejecting Freedom of Information Requests.” As an Associated Press analysis of federal data verified, the Obama administration did indeed set records in some years when it came to not granting those FOIA requests.

Executive distaste for sharing information is certainly nothing new and has often been linked, as during the war on terror, to misrepresentations, misdeeds, and outright deceit. After all, half a century ago, the administration of President Richard Nixon (of Watergate fame) defended the right to withhold information from the public as an effective way of covering up the American role in Vietnam. Those withheld materials, eventually released by the New York Times, showed that, over the course of four administrations, the national security state had misled the public about what the U.S. was doing in Vietnam, including hiding the secret bombing of neighboring Cambodia and Laos.

Still, let’s recognize what Donald Trump has, in fact, done. Though no longer president, he’s now taken the withholding of government information well beyond the borders of the government itself and deep into his private realm. In doing so, he’s set a dangerous precedent, one that brought the FBI to his doorstep (after months of attempts to access the documents in less intrusive ways). The challenge now is to address not just Trump’s clumsy efforts to unilaterally privatize a government practice, but the systemic overreach officials have relied on for decades to withhold staggering amounts of information from the public.

The Biden administration is alert to this issue. Notably, President Biden reversed several of Trump’s classification decisions, including his policy of not reporting the number of American nuclear weapons. More systematically, the National Security Council recently launched an effort aimed at revising the nation’s unwieldy classification system, while Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has stated her intention to review the excessive classification of government documents.

In a 2022 letter to Congress, Haines pointed to the downside of a government that refuses to share information. “It is my view,” she wrote, “that deficiencies in the current classification system undermine our national security, as well as critical democratic objectives, by impeding our ability to share information in a timely manner, be that sharing with our intelligence partners, our oversight bodies, or, when appropriate, with the general public.”

True to her word, in the three months following that statement of allegiance to transparency, Haines has released a steady flow of material on controversial topics, including unclassified reports on everything from the origins of Covid to climate change to an assessment of the “Saudi government’s role in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.”

Still, despite such efforts, the powers that be are arguably being hoisted on their own petard. After all, Donald Trump followed in the wake of his predecessors in sanctioning expansive secrecy, then made it a be-all and end-all of his presidency, and now claims that it’s part of his rights as a former president and private citizen. As the head of a political movement, now out of office, he’s done the once unthinkable by claiming that the veil of secrecy, the right to decide what should be known and who should know it, is his in perpetuity.

The horror of his claim to untethered secret authority — no wonder some of his MAGA followers refer to him as their “god-emperor” — violates the very idea that a democracy is a pact between individual citizens and elected officials. The valid response to the holding of documents at Mar-a-Lago shouldn’t just be reclaiming them for the public record or even the clear demarcation of the law as it applies to a private citizen as opposed to a president (though both are essential). What’s needed is a full-throated demand that policies of secrecy, allowed to expand exponentially in this century without accountability or transparency, are destructive of democracy and should be ended.

Copyright 2022 Karen J. Greenberg

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Middle East Monitor) – It has forever been the dream of almost every state, intelligence agency, empire and totalitarian regime to oversee the doings of all of their subjects, to detect any hint of dissent, to control their movements, to influence their thinking and even to peer into their minds. That dream has hardly ever been achieved, no matter their efforts and determination, not because of any moral qualms or principles holding them back, but simply because they lacked the tools to do so.

In this decade leading up to 2030, however, things have changed.

When the vision of ‘The Line’ – that revolutionary, green, eco-friendly, and technologically-advanced, 75-mile-long vertical city in the Arabian desert – was presented to the world in June, it was met with a variety of reactions. Many were shocked at its likeness to a futuristic urban environment seen in a science fiction book or movie, while others praised its ingenuity and breadth of vision, especially in terms of its planned full use of green and renewable energy.

There are others, though, who see it differently and have criticised the potential that such a city can have for expanding authoritarian control, whether that be under states or tech corporations. As a ‘smart city’, the Line and the broader NEOM megacity project will not only adopt renewable energy and flying drone cars, but will also be a key adopter of systems built upon the data of residents, systems which will know one’s every move based on geolocation data.

Even the design of the city itself – despite the shiny reflective surface of the exterior walls and the gardens within – has been likened to a luxury prison, with a journey from one end to the other set to take 20 minutes, and with every amenity, necessity and service within five minutes’ walking distance from each resident’s living accomodation. The purported goal of such a vision is to save space and practically utilise it, but critics worry that it could directly impede freedom of movement.

The question, then, is whether that limit of space and distance will be voluntary or imposed. Will residents be subject to a curfew on the distance they can travel, as took place in many countries throughout the COVID-19 pandemic? Or will it be down to the personal choice and judgement of individuals? Personal vehicle ownership may well even be banned, as there would be no need for one’s own mode of transportation in a pedestrian-friendly environment. Everyone would be equally limited.

There are currently other major smart city or area projects being set up across the world, from Telosa in the United States to the Tristate city in north-western Europe, all of which contain a number of the same characteristics as that in Saudi Arabia. Others include major cities which already exist but are currently having smart technology integrated into their infrastructure.

There have also emerged reports on the development of these cities – an example being the Melbourne Experiment Report – which serve as a framework upon which future sites are planned and built.

Outside of smart cities though, there are a variety of other developments promoted by international organisations which will contribute to entirely transforming the way people in most countries live, spend money, conduct their daily activities and travel. To concisely outline these developments and to avoid explicitly detailing each step, those developments can be summed up in the concept of the ‘digital ID’.

Essentially the digitalisation of identity, the digital ID aims to compile all of one’s documents – from birth to death, with every step of life and every achievement in between – placed into a single online wallet. In the form of an app on one’s smartphone, or through a chip implanted into one’s body or hand, the digital ID will enable its user to purchase things, travel through border control points internationally, and to display their medical records and requirements such as vaccines – all in ways that will make such processes easier, quicker and more efficient.

If this is sounding convenient so far, then perhaps it is and will be once it is fully deployed throughout societies and national and international infrastructures. Above all, it will undoubtedly make it easier for governments and state actors to track and monitor their citizens, that is certain.

An example can already be seen in a few countries which are early adopters of similar systems, such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where citizens and residents are required to hold identity cards which are trackable through their chips. Microchips have also been introduced and offered to be inserted into people’s hands, a technology which is predicted to replace mobile phones by 2050 and record our every move.

In his 2017 book, ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution‘, the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab wrote that just like products or packages are able to be tracked through the supply chain with a chip or tracking system, so will humans. “In the near future, similar monitoring systems will also be applied to the movement and tracking of people,” he wrote.

That is part of the dark side of such convenience, the sacrifice of privacy and self-determination for greater efficiency and centralisation. According to some, that is a necessary sacrifice for the greater good and overall security.

After the Saudi mother and PhD student, Salma Al-Shehab , was sentenced to 34 years in prison by the kingdom’s authorities last month, it was revealed that a security or “snitching” app – Kollna Amn (we are all security) – was potentially behind her initial arrest, as it enabled other social media users to report her to the government over her apparently critical Twitter posts.

If those types of apps are terrifying in their capacity to encourage one to spy on and report fellow citizens, in some quasi-Stalinist attempt to turn the people against one another, then imagine the effects of a digital identity system implanted under one’s skin and obligated to be used for every facet of life.

As the famed Israeli intellectual and author Yuval Noah Harari stated in an interview with CBS‘ 60 Minutes, it will become possible in the near future to “hack” a human just like one would a device or operating system. Through that, it would be possible to “get to know that [hacked] person better than they know themselves. And based on that, to increasingly manipulate you.” He explained that that would be based on “data about what’s happening inside my body. What we have seen so far, it’s corporations and governments collecting data about where we go, who we meet, what movies we watch. The next phase is surveillance going under our skin.”

Harari also warned at the WEF’s Davos meeting almost three years ago that “humans should get used to the idea that we are no longer mysterious souls – we are now hackable animals.” While that hacking can be done for beneficial purposes such as better healthcare, he acknowledged that “if this power falls into the hands of a twenty-first-century Stalin, the result will be the worst totalitarian regime in human history. And we already have a number of applicants for the job of twenty-first-century Stalin.”

The author outlined the picture of North Korea in 20 years when “everybody has to wear a biometric bracelet which constantly monitors your blood pressure, your heart rate, your brain activity twenty-four hours a day. You listen to a speech on the radio by the great leader and they know what you actually feel. You can clap your hands and smile, but if you’re angry, they know, you’ll be in the gulag tomorrow.”

Putting aside such dark dystopian predictions on the future consequences of that technological adoption, there are a multitude of other major issues presented by the introduction of digital IDs. After privacy, the most prominent problem that we can already see today is the exclusion of certain classes of people from national databases and the system altogether.

That is the case in India and Pakistan, where millions are shut out from the digital ID systems, meaning they have no access to services, rights and even educational opportunities that those with a digital ID are granted.

Overall, the adoption of such systems by governments and intelligence agencies – albeit probably inevitable over time – presents the perfect tools for digital authoritarianism and state control with a greater reach than previously imagined.

The totalitarian dream may now be achievable, and with nations like the US, Canada, Australia, and EU member states setting into motion their own vision of those programmes, it is not limited to the Gulf or to Israel.

Muhammad Hussein is an International Politics graduate and political analyst on Middle Eastern affairs, primarily focusing on the regions of the Gulf, Iran, Syria and Turkey, as well as their relation to Western foreign policy.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

It turns out, however, that Netanyahu has himself been given the Pegasus treatment, with his downfall due in part to Israeli police deploying the software against a witness who turned state’s evidence in the disgraced politician’s corruption trial. The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports that last Friday, the Jerusalem central court issued an order to the prosecution, demanding an explanation after reports surfaced that police had extracted information from the smart phone of a witness in the corruption trial without the witness’s knowledge. The prosecution has until Tuesday to reply.

The judge rejected a request by Netanyahu’s attorney that the court take up the issue on Monday. The trial will continue as usual until the prosecutor clears up the question about phone surveillance. Prosecutor Yehudit Tirosh said Thursday that a thorough investigation was being carried out.

Netanyahu’s lawyers asked the court to order the prosecution to disclose all the material gathered by the police via the Pegasus program and any other spyware in the course of their investigation of Netanyahu. Despite making the request two weeks ago, the defense still has not received a response.

Natael Bandel at Haaretz explains that Netanyahu is being tried on three counts of corruption. One of the cases, #4000, alleges that when he was prime minister, Netanyahu offered regulatory concessions to Bezeq Communications if they would make sure to give the prime minister favorable coverage at their Walla news site, which Bezeq then owned. It is the second largest news site in Israel. It is in this case that the issue of cyber-spying on a prosecution witness arose.

The witness whose phone was spied on is Shlomo Filber, whom Netanyahu had appointed director of the Ministry of Communications. He says that Netanyahu’s regulatory favors to Bezeq, which included fast-tracking a big merger, were worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Filber abruptly resigned last spring and agreed to testify against Netanyahu. It is not clear if the ability of the police to turn Filber and have him testify for the prosecution had anything to do with their surveillance of his phone, on which they could have found incriminating evidence they used to pressure him.

Some observers are wondering if the cyber-espionage against Filber could derail the trial of Netanyahu and get him off the hook. He had earlier been said to have accepted a plea deal that would ban him from politics for several years.

The Biden administration has banned Pegasus in the United States and Apple is suing NSO for hacking iPhones. The company may go bankrupt as a result of these measures.

Netanyahu had provided Saudi Arabia with the Pegasus program, which allowed the government of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman to hack the cell phone of Washington Post columnist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi, which led to his murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Business Insider reported this week that after a personal call from Bin Salman, Netanyahu reinstated the Saudi license to the software, after the Israeli Ministry of Defense had cut Riyadh off for using it on Khashoggi. So, murdering dissidents was no bar to Israel peddling the dangerous program to the most oppressive dictatorships.

Israeli intelligence used Pegasus against Palestinian human rights groups.

So after Netanyahu had deployed this nasty cyber-espionage tool against stateless Palestinians and used it to curry favor with Mr. Bone Saw in Riyadh, someone else used it to gather intelligence on his extensive corruption.

He who lives by spyware dies by spyware.

In the wake of the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul and the ouster of the Afghan national government, alarming reports indicate that the insurgents could potentially access biometric data collected by the U.S. to track Afghans, including people who worked for U.S. and coalition forces.

Afghans who once supported the U.S. have been attempting to hide or destroy physical and digital evidence of their identities. Many Afghans fear that the identity documents and databases storing personally identifiable data could be transformed into death warrants in the hands of the Taliban.

This potential data breach underscores that data protection in zones of conflict, especially biometric data and databases that connect online activity to physical locations, can be a matter of life and death. My research and the work of journalists and privacy advocates who study biometric cybersurveillance anticipated these data privacy and security risks.

Biometric-driven warfare

Investigative journalist Annie Jacobson documented the birth of biometric-driven warfare in Afghanistan following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, in her book “First Platoon.” The Department of Defense quickly viewed biometric data and what it called “identity dominance” as the cornerstone of multiple counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies. Identity dominance means being able to keep track of people the military considers a potential threat regardless of aliases, and ultimately denying organizations the ability to use anonymity to hide their activities.

By 2004, thousands of U.S. military personnel had been trained to collect biometric data to support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. By 2007, U.S. forces were collecting biometric data primarily through mobile devices such as the Biometric Automated Toolset (BAT) and Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE). BAT includes a laptop, fingerprint reader, iris scanner and camera. HIIDE is a single small device that incorporates a fingerprint reader, iris scanner and camera. Users of these devices can collect iris and fingerprint scans and facial photos, and match them to entries in military databases and biometric watchlists.

In addition to biometric data, the system includes biographic and contextual data such as criminal and terrorist watchlist records, enabling users to determine if an individual is flagged in the system as a suspect. Intelligence analysts can also use the system to monitor people’s movements and activities by tracking biometric data recorded by troops in the field.

By 2011, a decade after 9/11, the Department of Defense maintained approximately 4.8 million biometric records of people in Afghanistan and Iraq, with about 630,000 of the records collected using HIIDE devices. Also by that time, the U.S. Army and its military partners in the Afghan government were using biometric-enabled intelligence or biometric cyberintelligence on the battlefield to identify and track insurgents.

In 2013, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps used the Biometric Enrollment and Screening Device, which enrolled the iris scans, fingerprints and digital face photos of “persons of interest” in Afghanistan. That device was replaced by the Identity Dominance System-Marine Corps in 2017, which uses a laptop with biometric data collection sensors, known as the Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit.

Over the years, to support these military objectives, the Department of Defense aimed to create a biometric database on 80% of the Afghan population, approximately 32 million people at today’s population level. It is unclear how close the military came to this goal.

More data equals more people at risk

In addition to the use of biometric data by the U.S. and Afghan military for security purposes, the Department of Defense and the Afghan government eventually adopted the technologies for a range of day-to-day governmental uses. These included evidence for criminal prosecution, clearing Afghan workers for employment and election security.

In addition, the Afghan National ID system and voter registration databases contained sensitive data, including ethnicity data. The Afghan ID, the e-Tazkira, is an electronic identification document that includes biometric data, which increases the privacy risks posed by Taliban access to the National ID system.

It’s too soon after the Taliban’s return to power to know whether and to what extent the Taliban will be able to commandeer the biometric data once held by the U.S. military. One report suggested that the Taliban may not be able to access the biometric data collected through HIIDE because they lack the technical capacity to do so. However, it’s possible the Taliban could turn to longtime ally Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, for help getting at the data. Like many national intelligence services, ISI likely has the necessary technology.

Another report indicated that the Taliban have already started to deploy a “biometrics machine” to conduct “house-to-house inspections” to identify former Afghan officials and security forces. This is consistent with prior Afghan news reports that described the Taliban subjecting bus passengers to biometric screening and using biometric data to target Afghan security forces for kidnapping and assassination.

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Concerns about collecting biometric data

For years following 9/11, researchers, activists and policymakers raised concerns that the mass collection, storage and analysis of sensitive biometric data posed dangers to privacy rights and human rights. Reports of the Taliban potentially accessing U.S. biometric data stored by the military show that those concerns were not unfounded. They reveal potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the U.S. military’s biometric systems. In particular, the situation raises questions about the security of the mobile biometric data collection devices used in Afghanistan.

The data privacy and cybersecurity concerns surrounding Taliban access to U.S. and former Afghan government databases are a warning for the future. In building biometric-driven warfare technologies and protocols, it appears that the U.S. Department of Defense assumed the Afghan government would have the minimum level of stability needed to protect the data.

The U.S. military should assume that any sensitive data – biometric and biographical data, wiretap data and communications, geolocation data, government records – could potentially fall into enemy hands. In addition to building robust security to protect against unauthorized access, the Pentagon should use this as an opportunity to question whether it was necessary to collect the biometric data in the first instance.

Understanding the unintended consequences of the U.S. experiment in biometric-driven warfare and biometric cyberintelligence is critically important for determining whether and how the military should collect biometric information. In the case of Afghanistan, the biometric data that the U.S. military and the Afghan government had been using to track the Taliban could one day soon – if it’s not already – be used by the Taliban to track Afghans who supported the U.S.

Margaret Hu, Professor of Law and of International Affairs, Penn State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

—–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Afghanistan: Did the Taliban seize a US biometrics device? • FRANCE 24 English

Video of police in riot gear clashing with unarmed protesters in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has filled social media feeds. Meanwhile, police surveillance of protesters has remained largely out of sight.

Local, state and federal law enforcement organizations use an array of surveillance technologies to identify and track protesters, from facial recognition to military-grade drones.

Police use of these national security-style surveillance techniques – justified as cost-effective techniques that avoid human bias and error – has grown hand-in-hand with the increased militarization of law enforcement. Extensive research, including my own, has shown that these expansive and powerful surveillance capabilities have exacerbated rather than reduced bias, overreach and abuse in policing, and they pose a growing threat to civil liberties.

Police reform efforts are increasingly looking at law enforcement organizations’ use of surveillance technologies. In the wake of the current unrest, IBM, Amazon and Microsoft have put the brakes on police use of the companies’ facial recognition technology. And police reform bills submitted by the Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives call for regulating police use of facial recognition systems.

A decade of big data policing

We haven’t always lived in a world of police cameras, smart sensors and predictive analytics. Recession and rage fueled the initial rise of big data policing technologies. In 2009, in the face of federal, state and local budget cuts caused by the Great Recession, police departments began looking for ways to do more with less. Technology companies rushed to fill the gaps, offering new forms of data-driven policing as models of efficiency and cost reduction.

Then, in 2014, the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, upended already fraying police and community relationships. The killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray and George Floyd all sparked nationwide protests and calls for racial justice and police reform. Policing was driven into crisis mode as community outrage threatened to delegitimize the existing police power structure.

In response to the twin threats of cost pressures and community criticism, police departments further embraced startup technology companies selling big data efficiencies and the hope that something “data-driven” would allow communities to move beyond the all-too-human problems of policing. Predictive analytics and bodycam video capabilities were sold as objective solutions to racial bias. In large measure, the public relations strategy worked, which has allowed law enforcement to embrace predictive policing and increased digital surveillance.

Today, in the midst of renewed outrage against structural racism and police brutality, and in the shadow of an even deeper economic recession, law enforcement organizations face the same temptation to adopt a technology-based solution to deep societal problems. Police chiefs are likely to want to turn the page from the current levels of community anger and distrust.

The dangers of high-tech surveillance

Instead of repeating the mistakes of the past 12 years or so, communities have an opportunity to reject the expansion of big data policing. The dangers have only increased, the harms made plain by experience.

Those small startup companies that initially rushed into the policing business have been replaced by big technology companies with deep pockets and big ambitions.

Axon capitalized on the demands for police accountability after the protests in Ferguson and Baltimore to become a multimillion dollar company providing digital services for police-worn body cameras. Amazon has been expanding partnerships with hundreds of police departments through its Ring cameras and Neighbors App. Other companies like BriefCam, Palantir and Shotspotter offer a host of video analytics, social network analysis and other sensor technologies with the ability to sell technology cheaply in the short run with the hope for long term market advantage.

The technology itself is more powerful. The algorithmic models created a decade ago pale in comparison to machine learning capabilities today. Video camera streams have been digitized and augmented with analytics and facial recognition capabilities, turning static surveillance into a virtual time machine to find patterns in crowds. Adding to the data trap are smartphones, smart homes and smart cars, which now allow police to uncover individuals’ digital trails with relative ease.

The technology is more interconnected. One of the natural limiting factors of first generation big data policing technology was the fact that it remained siloed. Databases could not communicate with one another. Data could not be easily shared. That limiting factor has shrunk as more aggregated data systems have been developed within government and by private vendors.

The promise of objective, unbiased technology didn’t pan out. Race bias in policing was not fixed by turning on a camera. Instead the technology created new problems, including highlighting the lack of accountability for high-profile instances of police violence.

Lessons for reining in police spying

The harms of big data policing have been repeatedly exposed. Programs that attempted to predict individuals’ behaviors in Chicago and Los Angeles have been shut down after devastating audits cataloged their discriminatory impact and practical failure. Place-based predictive systems have been shut down in Los Angeles and other cities that initially had adopted the technology. Scandals involving facial recognition, social network analysis technology and large-scale sensor surveillance serve as a warning that technology cannot address the deeper issues of race, power and privacy that lie at the heart of modern-day policing.

The lesson of the first era of big data policing is that issues of race, transparency and constitutional rights must be at the forefront of design, regulation and use. Every mistake can be traced to a failure to see how the surveillance technology fits within the context of modern police power – a context that includes longstanding issues of racism and social control. Every solution points to addressing that power imbalance at the front end, through local oversight, community engagement and federal law, not after the technology has been adopted.

The debates about defunding, demilitarizing and reimagining existing law enforcement practices must include a discussion about police surveillance. There are a decade of missteps to learn from and era-defining privacy and racial justice challenges ahead. How police departments respond to the siren call of big data surveillance will reveal whether they’re on course to repeat the same mistakes.

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Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, Professor of Law, American University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In former FBI director James Comey’s interview with ABC News, he attempted to position himself as an upholder of the rule of law, of the constitution, and even of the truth.

Human beings are very good at forgetting their own misdeeds and building narratives that justify themselves, which may even be desirable evolutionarily. But the particular shape of Comey’s amnesia is troubling because of what it means for American democracy.

Comey has been a central figure in the gutting of the fourth amendment of the Constitution and in attempts to make sure the FBI and the rest of the US government can break your encryption and spy on you illegally. It is true that Comey did not want to go as far in that direction as former vice president Dick Cheney, but he wanted to go so far as nevertheless to make the constitution meaningless and to make Americans vulnerable to hacking. You see, the tech companies cannot create backdoors for the FBI without creating backdoors for Russian troll farms in St Petersburg.

Am I saying Comey did it to himself? I am saying Comey did it to himself. And to the rest of us.

Comey condemned Edward Snowden for his revelations about illegal government collection of Americans’ data from telephone calls. Even that was misdirection because Snowden’s more important revelation was that the NSA has individual-level tools to monitor emails. But even the telephone metadata issue is grave, since it would tell you to whom Warren Buffet is speaking, potentially allowing manipulation of the stock market; it would tell you if a politician is seeing a specialist in venereal diseases, allowing you to blackmail him.

And apparently Comey and others corrupted the entire US judicial system by illegally requisitioning telephone metadata to zero in on drug sellers, then notifying local police to arrest them and lie to the judge about how the police began their evidence trail. 100,000 of the inmates in our vast penitentiary gulag are guilty of no more than selling some pot, which most of us don’t even think should be illegal, and many were put there by unconstitutional government surveillance which then concealed itself from the judiciary. Far from standing for the constitution or the truth, Comey dramatically undermined both. Comey has bequeathed these unconstitutional tactics to the weaselly and wholly unscrupulous Jeff Sessions, who is having his minions use them against DACA dreamers and Black Lives Matter.

Comey watched James Clapper lie to Congress about mass warrantless surveillance of the American people. Comey knew Clapper was lying. He did not come after Clapper. He did not resign. His insistence on truth-telling suddenly was abandoned. He was disappointed that Gen. Petraeus was not prosecuted for lying to the FBI about his affair. Clapper’s assassination of the Fourth amendment and dissimulation was not an issue for him.

Comey doesn’t like Trumpworld. Comey helped create Trumpworld.

Then there was his attempt to strongarm Apple into weakening (you might as well say deleting) encryption on its smartphones. Comey saw an opening to get rid of that pesky encryption by creating a legal precedent, and he lied about his true motives, maintaining that there was no other way for the FBI to investigate the San Bernardino shootings. (Let me help him with that; a couple of mentally unstable people were allowed to buy an arsenal and went postal). When the FBI did hack in, they found nothing useful. They did Apple the favor of demonstrating that current encryption is too weak.

National Security elites like Comey are not our friends when it comes to privacy. The NSA used tradecraft and bribery to get an encryption company to adopt an NSA standard, which turned out to have backdoors for the NSA. And, of couse, for everyone else.

American democracy was certainly hacked in 2016. You can argue about whether Putin’s patriots were decisive or not, but you cannot deny the attempt. Comey has been so eager to get the bad guys that he has robbed the rest of us of our 4th amendment rights and of our privacy, and gave Russian and UAE hackers essential tools.

He still can’t see it.

Comey doesn’t like Trumpworld.

Comey helped create Trumpworld.

—————-

Bonus video:

James Comey calls Trump morally unfit for office in exclusive ABC News interview | ABC7

“

[This piece has been adapted and expanded from the introduction to Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.]

In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to a massive expansion of its intelligence infrastructure, particularly of the emerging technologies for digital surveillance, agile drones, and biometric identification. In 2010, almost a decade into this secret war with its voracious appetite for information, the Washington Post reported that the national security state had swelled into a “fourth branch” of the federal government — with 854,000 vetted officials, 263 security organizations, and over 3,000 intelligence units, issuing 50,000 special reports every year.

Though stunning, these statistics only skimmed the visible surface of what had become history’s largest and most lethal clandestine apparatus. According to classified documents that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies alone had 107,035 employees and a combined “black budget” of $52.6 billion, the equivalent of 10% percent of the vast defense budget.

By sweeping the skies and probing the worldwide web’s undersea cables, the National Security Agency (NSA) could surgically penetrate the confidential communications of just about any leader on the planet, while simultaneously sweeping up billions of ordinary messages. For its classified missions, the CIA had access to the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command, with 69,000 elite troops (Rangers, SEALs, Air Commandos) and their agile arsenal. In addition to this formidable paramilitary capacity, the CIA operated 30 Predator and Reaper drones responsible for more than 3,000 deaths in Pakistan and Yemen.

While Americans practiced a collective form of duck and cover as the Department of Homeland Security’s colored alerts pulsed nervously from yellow to red, few paused to ask the hard question: Was all this security really directed solely at enemies beyond our borders? After half a century of domestic security abuses — from the “red scare” of the 1920s through the FBI’s illegal harassment of antiwar protesters in the 1960s and 1970s — could we really be confident that there wasn’t a hidden cost to all these secret measures right here at home? Maybe, just maybe, all this security wasn’t really so benign when it came to us.

From my own personal experience over the past half-century, and my family’s history over three generations, I’ve found out in the most personal way possible that there’s a real cost to entrusting our civil liberties to the discretion of secret agencies. Let me share just a few of my own “war” stories to explain how I’ve been forced to keep learning and relearning this uncomfortable lesson the hard way.

On the Heroin Trail

After finishing college in the late 1960s, I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Japanese history and was pleasantly surprised when Yale Graduate School admitted me with a full fellowship. But the Ivy League in those days was no ivory tower. During my first year at Yale, the Justice Department indicted Black Panther leader Bobby Seale for a local murder and the May Day protests that filled the New Haven green also shut the campus for a week. Almost simultaneously, President Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia and student protests closed hundreds of campuses across America for the rest of the semester.

In the midst of all this tumult, the focus of my studies shifted from Japan to Southeast Asia, and from the past to the war in Vietnam. Yes, that war. So what did I do about the draft? During my first semester at Yale, on December 1, 1969, to be precise, the Selective Service cut up the calendar for a lottery. The first 100 birthdays picked were certain to be drafted, but any dates above 200 were likely exempt. My birthday, June 8th, was the very last date drawn, not number 365 but 366 (don’t forget leap year) — the only lottery I have ever won, except for a Sunbeam electric frying pan in a high school raffle. Through a convoluted moral calculus typical of the 1960s, I decided that my draft exemption, although acquired by sheer luck, demanded that I devote myself, above all else, to thinking about, writing about, and working to end the Vietnam War.

During those campus protests over Cambodia in the spring of 1970, our small group of graduate students in Southeast Asian history at Yale realized that the U.S. strategic predicament in Indochina would soon require an invasion of Laos to cut the flow of enemy supplies into South Vietnam. So, while protests over Cambodia swept campuses nationwide, we were huddled inside the library, preparing for the next invasion by editing a book of essays on Laos for the publisher Harper & Row. A few months after that book appeared, one of the company’s junior editors, Elizabeth Jakab, intrigued by an account we had included about that country’s opium crop, telephoned from New York to ask if I could research and write a “quickie” paperback about the history behind the heroin epidemic then infecting the U.S. Army in Vietnam.

I promptly started the research at my student carrel in the Gothic tower that is Yale’s Sterling Library, tracking old colonial reports about the Southeast Asian opium trade that ended suddenly in the 1950s, just as the story got interesting. So, quite tentatively at first, I stepped outside the library to do a few interviews and soon found myself following an investigative trail that circled the globe. First, I traveled across America for meetings with retired CIA operatives. Then I crossed the Pacific to Hong Kong to study drug syndicates, courtesy of that colony’s police drug squad. Next, I went south to Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam, to investigate the heroin traffic that was targeting the GIs, and on into the mountains of Laos to observe CIA alliances with opium warlords and the hill-tribe militias that grew the opium poppy. Finally, I flew from Singapore to Paris for interviews with retired French intelligence officers about their opium trafficking during the first Indochina War of the 1950s.

The drug traffic that supplied heroin for the U.S. troops fighting in South Vietnam was not, I discovered, exclusively the work of criminals. Once the opium left tribal poppy fields in Laos, the traffic required official complicity at every level. The helicopters of Air America, the airline the CIA then ran, carried raw opium out of the villages of its hill-tribe allies. The commander of the Royal Lao Army, a close American collaborator, operated the world’s largest heroin lab and was so oblivious to the implications of the traffic that he opened his opium ledgers for my inspection. Several of Saigon’s top generals were complicit in the drug’s distribution to U.S. soldiers. By 1971, this web of collusion ensured that heroin, according to a later White House survey of a thousand veterans, would be “commonly used” by 34% of American troops in South Vietnam.

None of this had been covered in my college history seminars. I had no models for researching an uncharted netherworld of crime and covert operations. After stepping off the plane in Saigon, body slammed by the tropical heat, I found myself in a sprawling foreign city of four million, lost in a swarm of snarling motorcycles and a maze of nameless streets, without contacts or a clue about how to probe these secrets. Every day on the heroin trail confronted me with new challenges — where to look, what to look for, and, above all, how to ask hard questions.

Reading all that history had, however, taught me something I didn’t know I knew. Instead of confronting my sources with questions about sensitive current events, I started with the French colonial past when the opium trade was still legal, gradually uncovering the underlying, unchanging logistics of drug production. As I followed this historical trail into the present, when the traffic became illegal and dangerously controversial, I began to use pieces from this past to assemble the present puzzle, until the names of contemporary dealers fell into place. In short, I had crafted a historical method that would prove, over the next 40 years of my career, surprisingly useful in analyzing a diverse array of foreign policy controversies — CIA alliances with drug lords, the agency’s propagation of psychological torture, and our spreading state surveillance.

The CIA Makes Its Entrance in My Life

Those months on the road, meeting gangsters and warlords in isolated places, offered only one bit of real danger. While hiking in the mountains of Laos, interviewing Hmong farmers about their opium shipments on CIA helicopters, I was descending a steep slope when a burst of bullets ripped the ground at my feet. I had walked into an ambush by agency mercenaries.

While the five Hmong militia escorts whom the local village headman had prudently provided laid down a covering fire, my Australian photographer John Everingham and I flattened ourselves in the elephant grass and crawled through the mud to safety. Without those armed escorts, my research would have been at an end and so would I. After that ambush failed, a CIA paramilitary officer summoned me to a mountaintop meeting where he threatened to murder my Lao interpreter unless I ended my research. After winning assurances from the U.S. embassy that my interpreter would not be harmed, I decided to ignore that warning and keep going.

Six months and 30,000 miles later, I returned to New Haven. My investigation of CIA alliances with drug lords had taught me more than I could have imagined about the covert aspects of U.S. global power. Settling into my attic apartment for an academic year of writing, I was confident that I knew more than enough for a book on this unconventional topic. But my education, it turned out, was just beginning.

Within weeks, a massive, middle-aged guy in a suit interrupted my scholarly isolation.  He appeared at my front door and identified himself as Tom Tripodi, senior agent for the Bureau of Narcotics, which later became the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). His agency, he confessed during a second visit, was worried about my writing and he had been sent to investigate. He needed something to tell his superiors. Tom was a guy you could trust. So I showed him a few draft pages of my book. He disappeared into the living room for a while and came back saying, “Pretty good stuff. You got your ducks in a row.” But there were some things, he added, that weren’t quite right, some things he could help me fix.

Tom was my first reader. Later, I would hand him whole chapters and he would sit in a rocking chair, shirt sleeves rolled up, revolver in his shoulder holster, sipping coffee, scribbling corrections in the margins, and telling fabulous stories — like the time Jersey Mafia boss “Bayonne Joe” Zicarelli tried to buy a thousand rifles from a local gun store to overthrow Fidel Castro. Or when some CIA covert warrior came home for a vacation and had to be escorted everywhere so he didn’t kill somebody in a supermarket aisle.

Best of all, there was the one about how the Bureau of Narcotics caught French intelligence protecting the Corsican syndicates smuggling heroin into New York City. Some of his stories, usually unacknowledged, would appear in my book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. These conversations with an undercover operative, who had trained Cuban exiles for the CIA in Florida and later investigated Mafia heroin syndicates for the DEA in Sicily, were akin to an advanced seminar, a master class in covert operations.

In the summer of 1972, with the book at press, I went to Washington to testify before Congress. As I was making the rounds of congressional offices on Capitol Hill, my editor rang unexpectedly and summoned me to New York for a meeting with the president and vice president of Harper & Row, my book’s publisher. Ushered into a plush suite of offices overlooking the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I listened to those executives tell me that Cord Meyer, Jr., the CIA’s deputy director for covert operations, had called on their company’s president emeritus, Cass Canfield, Sr. The visit was no accident, for Canfield, according to an authoritative history, “enjoyed prolific links to the world of intelligence, both as a former psychological warfare officer and as a close personal friend of Allen Dulles,” the ex-head of the CIA. Meyer denounced my book as a threat to national security. He asked Canfield, also an old friend, to quietly suppress it.

I was in serious trouble. Not only was Meyer a senior CIA official but he also had impeccable social connections and covert assets in every corner of American intellectual life. After graduating from Yale in 1942, he served with the marines in the Pacific, writing eloquent war dispatches published in the Atlantic Monthly. He later worked with the U.S. delegation drafting the U.N. charter. Personally recruited by spymaster Allen Dulles, Meyer joined the CIA in 1951 and was soon running its International Organizations Division, which, in the words of that same history, “constituted the greatest single concentration of covert political and propaganda activities of the by now octopus-like CIA,” including “Operation Mockingbird” that planted disinformation in major U.S. newspapers meant to aid agency operations. Informed sources told me that the CIA still had assets inside every major New York publisher and it already had every page of my manuscript.

As the child of a wealthy New York family, Cord Meyer moved in elite social circles, meeting and marrying Mary Pinchot, the niece of Gifford Pinchot, founder of the U.S. Forestry Service and a former governor of Pennsylvania. Pinchot was a breathtaking beauty who later became President Kennedy’s mistress, making dozens of secret visits to the White House. When she was found shot dead along the banks of a canal in Washington in 1964, the head of CIA counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, another Yale alumnus, broke into her home in an unsuccessful attempt to secure her diary. Mary’s sister Toni and her husband, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, later found the diary and gave it to Angleton for destruction by the agency. To this day, her unsolved murder remains a subject of mystery and controversy.

Cord Meyer was also in the Social Register of New York’s fine families along with my publisher, Cass Canfield, which added a dash of social cachet to the pressure to suppress my book. By the time he walked into Harper & Row’s office in that summer of 1972, two decades of CIA service had changed Meyer (according to that same authoritative history) from a liberal idealist into “a relentless, implacable advocate for his own ideas,” driven by “a paranoiac distrust of everyone who didn’t agree with him” and a manner that was “histrionic and even bellicose.” An unpublished 26-year-old graduate student versus the master of CIA media manipulation. It was hardly a fair fight. I began to fear my book would never appear.

To his credit, Canfield refused Meyer’s request to suppress the book. But he did allow the agency a chance to review the manuscript prior to publication. Instead of waiting quietly for the CIA’s critique, I contacted Seymour Hersh, then an investigative reporter for the New York Times. The same day the CIA courier arrived from Langley to collect my manuscript, Hersh swept through Harper & Row’s offices like a tropical storm, pelting hapless executives with incessant, unsettling questions. The next day, his exposé of the CIA’s attempt at censorship appeared on the paper’s front page. Other national media organizations followed his lead. Faced with a barrage of negative coverage, the CIA gave Harper & Row a critique full of unconvincing denials. The book was published unaltered.

My Life as an Open Book for the Agency

I had learned another important lesson: the Constitution’s protection of press freedom could check even the world’s most powerful espionage agency. Cord Meyer reportedly learned the same lesson. According to his obituary in the Washington Post, “It was assumed that Mr. Meyer would eventually advance” to head CIA covert operations, “but the public disclosure about the book deal… apparently dampened his prospects.” He was instead exiled to London and eased into early retirement.

Meyer and his colleagues were not, however, used to losing. Defeated in the public arena, the CIA retreated to the shadows and retaliated by tugging at every thread in the threadbare life of a graduate student. Over the next few months, federal officials from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare turned up at Yale to investigate my graduate fellowship. The Internal Revenue Service audited my poverty-level income. The FBI tapped my New Haven telephone (something I learned years later from a class-action lawsuit).

In August 1972, at the height of the controversy over the book, FBI agents told the bureau’s director that they had “conducted [an] investigation concerning McCoy,” searching the files they had compiled on me for the past two years and interviewing numerous “sources whose identities are concealed [who] have furnished reliable information in the past” — thereby producing an 11-page report detailing my birth, education, and campus antiwar activities.

A college classmate I hadn’t seen in four years, who served in military intelligence, magically appeared at my side in the book section of the Yale Co-op, seemingly eager to resume our relationship. The same week that a laudatory review of my book appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, an extraordinary achievement for any historian, Yale’s History Department placed me on academic probation. Unless I could somehow do a year’s worth of overdue work in a single semester, I faced dismissal.

In those days, the ties between the CIA and Yale were wide and deep. The campus residential colleges screened students, including future CIA Director Porter Goss, for possible careers in espionage. Alumni like Cord Meyer and James Angleton held senior slots at the agency. Had I not had a faculty adviser visiting from Germany, the distinguished scholar Bernhard Dahm who was a stranger to this covert nexus, that probation would likely have become expulsion, ending my academic career and destroying my credibility.

During those difficult days, New York Congressman Ogden Reid, a ranking member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, telephoned to say that he was sending staff investigators to Laos to look into the opium situation. Amid this controversy, a CIA helicopter landed near the village where I had escaped that ambush and flew the Hmong headman who had helped my research to an agency airstrip. There, a CIA interrogator made it clear that he had better deny what he had said to me about the opium. Fearing, as he later told my photographer, that “they will send a helicopter to arrest me, or… soldiers to shoot me,” the Hmong headman did just that.

At a personal level, I was discovering just how deep the country’s intelligence agencies could reach, even in a democracy, leaving no part of my life untouched: my publisher, my university, my sources, my taxes, my phone, and even my friends.

Although I had won the first battle of this war with a media blitz, the CIA was winning the longer bureaucratic struggle. By silencing my sources and denying any culpability, its officials convinced Congress that it was innocent of any direct complicity in the Indochina drug trade. During Senate hearings into CIA assassinations by the famed Church Committee three years later, Congress accepted the agency’s assurance that none of its operatives had been directly involved in heroin trafficking (an allegation I had never actually made). The committee’s report did confirm the core of my critique, however, finding that “the CIA is particularly vulnerable to criticism” over indigenous assets in Laos “of considerable importance to the Agency,” including “people who either were known to be, or were suspected of being, involved in narcotics trafficking.” But the senators did not press the CIA for any resolution or reform of what its own inspector general had called the “particular dilemma” posed by those alliances with drug lords — the key aspect, in my view, of its complicity in the traffic.

During the mid-1970s, as the flow of drugs into the United States slowed and the number of addicts declined, the heroin problem receded into the inner cities and the media moved on to new sensations. Unfortunately, Congress had forfeited an opportunity to check the CIA and correct its way of waging covert wars. In less than 10 years, the problem of the CIA’s tactical alliances with drug traffickers to support its far-flung covert wars was back with a vengeance.

During the 1980s, as the crack-cocaine epidemic swept America’s cities, the agency, as its own Inspector General later reported, allied itself with the largest drug smuggler in the Caribbean, using his port facilities to ship arms to the Contra guerrillas fighting in Nicaragua and protecting him from any prosecution for five years. Simultaneously on the other side of the planet in Afghanistan, mujahedeen guerrillas imposed an opium tax on farmers to fund their fight against the Soviet occupation and, with the CIA’s tacit consent, operated heroin labs along the Pakistani border to supply international markets. By the mid-1980s, Afghanistan’s opium harvest had grown 10-fold and was providing 60% of the heroin for America’s addicts and as much as 90% in New York City.

Almost by accident, I had launched my academic career by doing something a bit different. Embedded within that study of drug trafficking was an analytical approach that would take me, almost unwittingly, on a lifelong exploration of U.S. global hegemony in its many manifestations, including diplomatic alliances, CIA interventions, developing military technology, recourse to torture, and global surveillance. Step by step, topic by topic, decade after decade, I would slowly accumulate sufficient understanding of the parts to try to assemble the whole. In writing my new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, I drew on this research to assess the overall character of U.S. global power and the forces that might contribute to its perpetuation or decline.

In the process, I slowly came to see a striking continuity and coherence in Washington’s century-long rise to global dominion. CIA torture techniques emerged at the start of the Cold War in the 1950s; much of its futuristic robotic aerospace technology had its first trial in the Vietnam War of the 1960s; and, above all, Washington’s reliance on surveillance first appeared in the colonial Philippines around 1900 and soon became an essential though essentially illegal tool for the FBI’s repression of domestic dissent that continued through the 1970s.    

Surveillance Today

In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, I dusted off that historical method, and used it to explore the origins and character of domestic surveillance inside the United States.

After occupying the Philippines in 1898, the U.S. Army, facing a difficult pacification campaign in a restive land, discovered the power of systematic surveillance to crush the resistance of the country’s political elite. Then, during World War I, the Army’s “father of military intelligence,” the dour General Ralph Van Deman, who had learned his trade in the Philippines, drew upon his years pacifying those islands to mobilize a legion of 1,700 soldiers and 350,000 citizen-vigilantes for an intense surveillance program against suspected enemy spies among German-Americans, including my own grandfather. In studying Military Intelligence files at the National Archives, I found “suspicious” letters purloined from my grandfather’s army locker.  In fact, his mother had been writing him in her native German about such subversive subjects as knitting him socks for guard duty.

In the 1950s, Hoover’s FBI agents tapped thousands of phones without warrants and kept suspected subversives under close surveillance, including my mother’s cousin Gerard Piel, an anti-nuclear activist and the publisher of Scientific American magazine. During the Vietnam War, the bureau expanded its activities with an amazing array of spiteful, often illegal, intrigues in a bid to cripple the antiwar movement with pervasive surveillance of the sort seen in my own FBI file.

Memory of the FBI’s illegal surveillance programs was largely washed away after the Vietnam War thanks to Congressional reforms that required judicial warrants for all government wiretaps. The terror attacks of September 2001, however, gave the National Security Agency the leeway to launch renewed surveillance on a previously unimaginable scale. Writing for TomDispatch in 2009, I observed that coercive methods first tested in the Middle East were being repatriated and might lay the groundwork for “a domestic surveillance state.”  Sophisticated biometric and cyber techniques forged in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq had made a “digital surveillance state a reality” and so were fundamentally changing the character of American democracy.

Four years later, Edward Snowden’s leak of secret NSA documents revealed that, after a century-long gestation period, a U.S. digital surveillance state had finally arrived. In the age of the Internet, the NSA could monitor tens of millions of private lives worldwide, including American ones, via a few hundred computerized probes into the global grid of fiber-optic cables.

And then, as if to remind me in the most personal way possible of our new reality, four years ago, I found myself the target yet again of an IRS audit, of TSA body searches at national airports, and — as I discovered when the line went dead — a tap on my office telephone at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Why? Maybe it was my current writing on sensitive topics like CIA torture and NSA surveillance, or maybe my name popped up from some old database of suspected subversives left over from the 1970s. Whatever the explanation, it was a reasonable reminder that, if my own family’s experience across three generations is in any way representative, state surveillance has been an integral part of American political life far longer than we might imagine.

At the cost of personal privacy, Washington’s worldwide web of surveillance has now become a weapon of exceptional power in a bid to extend U.S. global hegemony deeper into the twenty-first century. Yet it’s worth remembering that sooner or later what we do overseas always seems to come home to haunt us, just as the CIA and crew have haunted me this last half-century.  When we learn to love Big Brother, the world becomes a more, not less, dangerous place. 

Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the now-classic book The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, which probed the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over 50 years, and the forthcoming In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch Books, September) from which this piece is adapted.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, as well as John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2017 Alfred W. McCoy

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Alfred McCoy’s new Dispatch Book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, won’t officially be published until September, but it’s already getting extraordinary attention.  That would include Jeremy Scahill’s powerful podcast interview with McCoy at the Intercept, a set of striking prepublication notices (Kirkus Reviews: “Sobering reading for geopolitics mavens and Risk aficionados alike”), and an impressive range of blurbs (Andrew Bacevich: “This is history with profound relevance to events that are unfolding before our eyes”; Ann Jones: “eye-opening… America’s neglected citizens would do well to read this book”; Oliver Stone: “One of our best and most underappreciated historians takes a hard look at the truth of our empire, both its covert activities and the reasons for its impending decline”).  Of him, Scahill has said, “Al McCoy has guts… He helped put me on the path to investigative journalism.”  In today’s post, adapted by McCoy from the introduction to In the Shadows of the American Century, you’ll get a taste of just what Scahill means.  So read it and then pre-order a copy of the latest book from the man who battled the CIA and won.

Via Tomdispatch.com

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

ABC News: “Edward Snowden Full Interview on Trump, Petraeus, & Having ‘No Regrets'”