Well fuck. Just when I think the Bush administration's invasion of my privacy and the relentless Pentagon spin machine can get no worse, well, they do. In the latest round of "let's spy on and lie to our citizens," we learn that the FBI has been amassing a huge database of information on the internet habits and activities of thousands of Americans, according to The Raw Story, citing a ZDNet article. Then we learn that under the Pentagon's "Information Operations Roadmap," the military has been engaged since at least 2003 in psyops propaganda operations it admits are to be "consumed by [the] domestic audience" and replayed by the media to the American people, according to BBC News.
Details below
The Raw Story artice quotes ZDNet's Declan McCullagh as reporting that the FBI's internet sweeps are targeting "thousands of Internet users" rather than merely specific individuals of interest to particular investigations. This "full-pipe" surveillance technique
can record all Internet traffic, including Web browsing -- or, optionally, only certain subsets such as all e-mail messages flowing through the network. Interception typically takes place inside an Internet provider's network at the junction point of a router or network switch.
The resulting databases allegedly amass even more information on ordinary Americans than the FBI's controversial Carnivore surveillance system and the NSA's warantless wiretap program.
So welcome to 1984, Daily Kos, where Big Brother is actively engaged in listening to your phone calls and monitoring your Internet activity. Of course, this is being done in the name of the Great War on Terror, so I suppose we should all be grateful, right? Am I right?
Hopefully, the Democratic Congress will add this FBI Internet surveillance program to the long list of Bush administration civil liberties abuses to be investigated and terminated. Please lobby your elected representatives to do so.
The other lovely piece of related news is the revelation that as part of a 2003 Pentagon electronic warfare program known as the Information Operations Roadmap, signed by the great Donald Rumsfeld himself, the US military has been actively engaged, through an army of public affairs officers, psyops troops and computer network specialists, in putting out propaganda "to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of [the] enemy" and for foreign consumption. Fair enough; we're at war, right? Problem is, the Roadmap acknowledges that an unavoidable consequence of such propaganda efforts will be their inevitable consumption by the American public:
"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads.
"Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.
While paying lip service to the idea that the military should not intentionally engage in domestic propaganda activities, the plan is silent on any methods or rules to keep exactly that from happening. Numerous instances of stories and websites planted by the military regarding Iraq, Africa, the Balkans and Cuba have already been disclosed.
But it gets better still. Part of the Pentagon's all-out, balls-to-the-wall approach to electronic warfare in the Internet age is to develop the capacity to "disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum." In other words:
The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.
Including the capacity to take down the Internet on any scale they want.
Feeling safer yet? I sure am. Because that's why I've been giving up more and more of my precious, God-given, Constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties every day for the last 6 years, to feel more secure. Right? Right?
Personally, it gives me the heeby-jeebies to know that not only is my government using the Internet to spy on me, but that the nutjobs currently running the Pentagon reserve the right to just take down the Internet if it suits their purposes. And when they decide its suits their purposes to do so, where then will we go to express our righteous dissent?