So – had a barbecue over the weekend, didja? Invited a few friends, huh? Maybe relaxed around the pool, discussing politics? Played some volleyball?
Yeah, I know. I know all about it.
I know who you invited. I know what car they drove to get there. I know where they were before they came to your place. I know where they went when they left. I know what they brought to the party. I know what you guys did in the backyard. I know how many of you there were in the house. I know that you’d better fix that retaining wall on the west side of the yard – it’s about to go. Oh, and that honey locust tree in the front? Needs replacing, yeah. You might wanna check your sprinkler line under the east end of the lawn, too – I think it’s got a leak.
Hey, no problem, I’m glad to be of service. And no, I wasn’t invited to your party; I invited myself. I mean, I wasn’t actually there, but I might as well have been. Yeah, I pretty much invited myself – and I had a great seat, too: 200 miles up, where I could see everything, even some stuff the people who were at your party couldn’t see. (That’s how I knew about the retaining wall, and the tree, and the sprinklers, heh.)
What’s that, you say? Well, yeah, I work for the government – so what? Y’know, you keep talkin’, it’d be terrible if somethin’ were to happen to one of your kids – maybe the one that’s over at his friend’s house over on Elm Street right now.
Know what I mean?
The Wall Street Journal is reporting on a new alliance among the Department of Homeland Security, the national intelligence community, and local law enforcement agencies which will allow the use of the most sophisticated surveillance assets in the U.S. arsenal to spy on Americans in America.
The decision, made three months ago by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, places for the first time some of the U.S.'s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools at the disposal of domestic security officials. The move was authorized in a May 25 memo sent to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff asking his department to facilitate access to the spy network on behalf of civilian agencies and law enforcement . . .
Access to the high-tech surveillance tools would, for the first time, allow Homeland Security and law-enforcement officials to see real-time, high-resolution images and data, which would allow them, for example, to identify smuggler staging areas, a gang safehouse, or possibly even a building being used by would-be terrorists to manufacture chemical weapons.
Until now, civilian access to use of these military assets has been limited to agencies like the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA, and only to lower-quality, basic data. But now? Watch out:
According to defense experts, MASINT uses radar, lasers, infrared, electromagnetic data and other technologies to see through cloud cover, forest canopies and even concrete to create images or gather data.
The spy satellites are considered by military experts to be more penetrating than civilian ones: They not only take color, as well as black-and-white photos, but can also use different parts of the light spectrum to track human activities, including, for example, traces left by chemical weapons or heat generated by people in a building.
Awesome! You see where this is leading, don’t you? That’s right – to the world’s coolest video game EVER!!!:
Military, intelligence agency and police work is also coming together in numerous "fusion centers" around the country in a joint program run by the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security that has received little public attention. At present, there are 43 current and planned fusion centers in the United States where information from intelligence agencies, the FBI, local police, private sector databases and anonymous tipsters is combined and analyzed by counterterrorism analysts. DHS hopes to create a wide network of such centers that would be tied into the agency's day-to-day activities, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The project, according to EPIC, "inculcates DHS with enormous domestic surveillance powers and evokes comparisons with the publicly condemned domestic surveillance program of COINTELPRO," the 1960s program by the FBI aimed at destroying groups on the American political left.
It doesn't take much imagination to see how powerful technologies, when combined with secretive, growing interagency collaboration, could be misused in a domestic context. In recent years many U.S. cities have deployed sophisticated video cameras throughout their downtown areas that track activity 24 hours a day. And U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies now have at their disposal facial recognition software that can identify one person among thousands in a large crowd. Combine that with the awesome eavesdropping power of the NSA and the ability of the NGA to capture live imagery from satellites and UAVs, and the result could be an ability to track any individual, in real time, as he or she moves around.
Ahhh, COINTELPRO – how quaint. Those were the days: Paper files, guys being followed, antiwar meetings being infiltrated, phone lines actually being tapped – you know, like with wires and everything. Old school, baby:
The FBI tried to disrupt the Students for a Democratic Society at the height of the Viet Nam War by printing anti-SDS newsletters in the names of fictitious radical and right-wing groups and distributing them on college campuses. One leaflet circulated in 1967 showed the faces of four Princeton SDS leaders over sketches of monkeys' bodies, with the caption: "Princeton is not 'The Planet of the Apes.' "
Ahhh, good times, good times . . .
But no more! Nossir, we’re digital now, baby!
The Keyhole satellites are American military surveillance spacecraft . . . The most recent version is the KH-12. This is a large spacecraft, over 4.5m diameter and 15m long, as a result it weighs 18 metric tonnes. The most advanced model in this series of spacecraft could remain in orbit for 300 days.
The payload includes electronic cameras which provide real-time transmission of images to ground stations via relay satellites. Visible and near infra-red are used to produce images. Heat sources can also be detected using thermal infrared. This makes the spacecraft particularly good at detecting camouflaged targets and buried structures. The spacecraft has a 10cm resolution and it can take pictures at high oblique angles and of targets situated hundreds of kilometres from the flight path of the spacecraft.
"The spacecraft has a 10cm resolution" – for those metrically challenged among us, 10cm is about 4 inches.
!!!!!!
So – don’t worry; no one at the NSA is going to mistake your Jaguar for a Ford Taurus, or your Rhodesian ridgeback for a border collie.
And in case you were wondering, "Are they allowed to do that?" – why, yes, they are:
One case, for example, involved the EPA taking surveillance photos of a chemical company's property without a warrant. Even though the chemical company had refused entrance in an attempt to protect trade secrets, the court found that the surveillance was reasonable because it was an industrial setting and because the chemical company had made no attempts to protect itself from aerial intrusions. A similar decision resulted when police officers, while hovering in a helicopter, took photos of marijuana plants growing in the back yard of an individual's home. The individual had built a 10-foot fence to prevent intrusions, but the court reasoned that the officers were in navigable airspace and that there was no physical intrusion. Therefore, the surveillance was reasonable and hence no violation of the Fourth Amendment.
But have no fear – the BushCheney administration reassures us that your civil liberties are in good hands. From the WSJ article:
Mr. Devine says officials who vetted requests for the scientific community also are worried about the civil-liberties implications when DHS takes over the program. "We took very seriously our mission and made sure that there was no chance of inappropriate usage of the material," Mr. Devine says. He says he hopes oversight of the new DHS program will be "rigorous," but that he doesn't know what would happen in cases of complaints about misuse.
Heh. There’s so much irony in that one paragraph, I don’t know where to start.
Here – let’s let Sen. Frank Church, former chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the 1970s, who investigated illegal surveillance of Americans that took place under the Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy and Eisenhower administrations, share some of his thoughts, from 1975. His committee had been investigating another electronic eavesdropping program, Echelon Project Shamrock - an investigation that ultimately resulted in passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA):
At the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.
If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology . . .
I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.
UPDATE: FREEP THIS POLL!!! H/t vbdietz, from the comments; the Wall Street Journal has a poll up right now:
"How well does the U.S. balance national security with individual liberty?"
GO VOTE IN IT!!
Thanks!
(h/t Windowdog, whose earlier diary on this slid off the "Recent" list into oblivion . . . )