by Dr. Elliot D. Cohen
There is a silent war afoot that corporate media do not cover, the most pervasive war that could ever be waged. It uses high-tech equipment and involves the largest, most powerful corporations on earth; it is more lucrative for these corporate allies than any other war that has been or ever will be fought. This war’s battlefield has no barriers. It is being fought everywhere and anywhere, including in cyberspace, and involves anyone on the planet who has the power to think.
The war in question is the acquisition and control of the rich supply of information growing exponentially with the advances of science: a paranoid, vigilant campaign by government, across borders, to ensure that no one has the franchise of knowledge except the highest echelons of national command and control.
Not only is this an all-out war on anyone who has information, it is a war on the freedom to possess information, to keep it confidential, to communicate freely, and to publish. It is a war against the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, press, and assembly. All these previously protected modes of communication are quietly under attack.
Like all wars, there is a pretext for invasion. The Iraq War was officially fought to free the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical rule—never mind the profits amassed by the military-industrial complex, and never mind the Downing Street Memos that summed up the reality but were censored then summarily dismissed by servile corporate media.
The war in Afghanistan, we were led to believe, was a war to quash al-Qaeda and the Taliban—never mind that giant oil companies, notably Chevron, sought to make billions through construction of the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline for natural gas transport across the region, and the Taliban were sabotaging the project—or that the secretary of state during the Bush administration was the former chief executive officer of Chevron. And it may be just another coincidence that Obama is withdrawing (most of) the US troops by 2014, when that pipeline is slated for completion.
Most Americans have believed these pretexts, so have supported or helped to fight these wars. The war to acquire and control information is the same. Most Americans believe they need to surrender their privacy to be safe. They believe that mass, warrantless surveillance of all their e-mails, telephone calls, and Internet searches is intended to protect them from another 9/11 attack, or worse. They believe that they should willingly surrender their right to privacy and allow the National Security Agency (NSA) to access even their most intimate and personal electronic correspondence. They do not ask questions because it would be unpatriotic, and who would want to sell out the safety and security of a “free” nation?
The paradox of giving up one’s freedom to defend one’s freedom quietly perpetuates with no vigilant media to drive home the self-defeating nature of the expectation. “National security” has become the buzzword for trumping the right to control one’s personal information. Yet hardly anyone asks whether there is a more balanced approach to national security. Is it really a matter of all or nothing—either we are safe, or we retain control over our personal information, but not both?
TOWARD “TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS”
In 2002, John Poindexter, the ex-felon who came up with the idea of Total Information Awareness, proposed the idea of a “privacy appliance” that could protect the masses of private information stored on NSA mega-computers. According to a 2003 congressional report, “this device cryptographically protected to prevent tampering . . . would ensure that no one could abuse private information without an immutable digital record of their misdeeds.”1
The appliance would work by hiding personal information behind a veil of encryption, and when emerging behavior patterns would suggest a terrorist plot, a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FIS) court warrant would be issued to un-encrypt the information relevant to the possible terrorist plot, leaving all other encrypted information in the massive database intact. Thereby, privacy would be protected without sacrificing the integrity of the search for terrorist operations.
This could have worked, but the budget to support development of the software was scrapped. Yet massive stores of private information data continue to grow exponentially, along with the probabilities of serious privacy violations.
If the government were truly interested in preserving citizens’ rights to control their personal information, it would have made the investment in the research and development of such a “privacy appliance.” A more consistent explanation for the failure to protect privacy is that the government prefers to maintain full control of all information in the database, whether or not it has anything to do with potential terrorist plots.
Under the USA PATRIOT Act, if the federal government, in the course of investigating a suspected terrorist plot, learns that you are growing marijuana plants, it can use this information to prosecute you for a federal violation of narcotics laws. Contrary to the Fourth Amendment, probable cause is not necessary to obtain the information. The pretext of having discovered your illegal activity while hunting for terrorists would be sufficient to render the evidence against you admissible.
So, the government interest is not merely in stopping terrorism, and it is certainly not about protecting privacy. The government seeks the acquisition and control of information—“Total Information Awareness”—and it is willing to give itself the legal authority to obtain it.
INTERNET FREEDOMS UNDER SIEGE
Freedom of speech is now quietly under attack in this war to acquire and control the vast sea of information. The most magnificent forum for the free exchange of ideas ever conceived is, of course, the Internet. But the Internet’s free architecture is under attack and it appears that, on this front, the war is being won.
The first major legal victory that threatened the democratic potential of the Internet came in 2005 in the Brand X case, when the US Supreme Court changed the legal status of the Internet from a common carrier to a private one.2 Prior to this decision, the Internet pipes were considered to be like a telephone line or a public roadway: public utilities open for use by anyone. The telecommunication and telephone companies who operated them could not restrict their use to select individuals or companies. But with the change in legal status, giant Internet gatekeepers like Comcast and AT&T overcame a major barrier in giving special priority to some voices over others. No longer was every bit necessarily equal. These companies could now restrict traffic on the Net, much as the owner of a private road could keep out trespassers.
Accordingly, in the 2010 case Comcast v. FCC, a federal appeals court gave Comcast and other telecoms the legal right to block and slow Internet traffic in order to “manage” their networks.3 On the surface, the pretense was to prevent file-sharing websites from “hogging” bandwidth, but what it really meant was that these companies did not have to treat all information equally and could therefore determine what data (programming, electronic messages, applications, etc.) could be transmitted over their networks.
Now, the companies’ next logical step is to use this legal authority to set up a system of Internet “toll booths” where content providers would have to “pay for priority.”4 This means that the amount of bandwidth a website operator would get would depend on how much the operator could afford to pay.
Bandwidth determines the speed at which data can be download-ed—the higher the bandwidth, the faster the download. Thus, for giant corporate media like News Corp. (Fox), Time Warner (CNN), and Comcast (NBC), which can afford the highest bandwidth, this would mean the power to dominate the Internet and to effectively preempt the messages of independent media and other content providers.
The kicker is that giant Internet service providers, such as Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon, work for the United States government. Pursuant to the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act, these companies must assist the federal government in providing the facility for monitoring all electronic communications passing through their switches.5 These companies also receive special government perks including tax breaks, favorable antitrust laws and decisions, and government contracts.
Moreover, pursuant to the 2012 National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order decreed by the Obama administration, the government now has the legal authority to install government equipment (which includes surveillance equipment) inside electronic communication service providers.6 So, the giant telecom companies presently serve as conduits for government exercise of power and control over mass data transport.
For democracy, the marriage between giant electronic communication companies and government portends grave danger. These behemoth corporations have legal discretionary power to block or slow content providers; and they, in turn, work for the government. Unless clear limits on this discretionary power are established, the government now not only has the legal authority to police all online activities, it also has a segue into censoring them.
In fact, the 2011–12 session of Congress attempted to expand its power to block websites through passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). On the surface, SOPA sought to protect intellectual property rights, such as those of the motion picture and book publishing industries, by preventing foreign websites from posting pirated material. However, on closer inspection, this act would have given government—again going through Internet service providers—the power to shut down websites adverse to its own political interests.
The act would have deputized these companies with the discretionary power to block any website if they had “reasonable belief” that some of the website’s content violated copyright law. Thus, the uploading of a single objectionable file could have led to the blocking of an entire website by the service provider, pursuant to the act.7 Public outcry, along with protests from Google and Wikipedia, appear to have helped stop SOPA’s passage, but this was only a temporary reprieve.
On the heels of SOPA, another bill has at the time of this writing passed the House of Representatives. The Cyber Intelligence and Sharing Protection Act (CISPA) would go further than SOPA in monitoring and controlling information. Although SOPA was restricted to information alleged to violate intellectual property rights, CISPA allows for the sharing of personal information between government and private industry for purposes of addressing possible “cyber threats.”8
According to the act, “notwithstanding any other provision of law,” Internet service providers such as Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T, and other private cybersecurity and data management companies, can with legal impunity share their customers’ personal information with the federal government.9 This means that CISPA, if passed, will trump all other civil rights protections, thereby making all of our personal information, from health care records to credit card information, fair game for the government.
According to an amendment added to the act prior to passing the House, data can be shared with government for purposes of “(1) cybersecurity, (2) investigation and prosecution of cybersecurity crimes,(3) protection of individuals from the danger of death or physical injury, (4) protection of minors from physical or psychological harm, and (5) protection of the national security of the United States.”10 Given this range of “harms,” spanning both physical and psychological types, as well as vague terms such as “cybersecurity” and “national security,” it is evident that CISPA, if it becomes law, would seriously increase the likelihood of government abuses of personal and confidential information.
From the perspective of giant cybersecurity companies, CISPA would be a gold mine. One such notable company is Sciences Applications International Corporation (SAIC).11 This military contractor was at the front lines of helping the Bush administration to build the technologies for launching its warrantless, mass spying program. Now SAIC is lobbying for CISPA12 because the bill would make it a major player in putting the final legal touches on the Total Information Awareness system of mass surveillance that SAIC helped build during the Bush administration.
Not surprisingly, SAIC is already assisting the NSA in building a giant, data-mining center in Utah.13 As discussed in the “The Police and Civil Liberties” Censored News Cluster in chapter 1, this stateof-the-art surveillance center will provide the hub of electronic data monitoring for all electronic information including e-mail messages, Internet searches, and phone conversations. With CISPA in place, there will also be a direct legal route to integrate all other private information into this massive database. SAIC’s role in this process will be to help create the software infrastructure that would seamlessly link and analyze masses of data.
In this attempt to monitor and control the world’s information, the quid pro quo relationship between government and companies like SAIC and other cybersecurity and data-mining companies is crucial. It is a violation of the Fourth Amendment for the US government to access personal data such as health care records and credit card information directly—but this same constitutional restriction does not apply to private corporations like SAIC and the giant telecoms. Thus the government can obtain this information through corporate mediators and claim not to have violated the Fourth Amendment. Without our knowledge or consent, American citizens’ constitutional rights are being bypassed.
The modus operandi here is a familiar one, of the government retroactively legalizing its own prior illegal activities or those of its corporate helpers. It was practiced frequently by the George W. Bush administration, such as when millions of Americans were illegally wiretapped without court warrants. By passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act (FISA) in 2008, the administration gave itself permission to continue the practice. More specifically, the 2008 act canceled the requirement of an earlier 1973 FISA Act that required an FIS court warrant for wiretapping; it also gave full retroactive and prospective legal immunity to electronic communications companies that helped the government spy on millions of Americans.14 FISA rendered null and void class action lawsuits filed against these companies on behalf of Americans who had had their right to privacy abridged.
Now the Obama administration is doing the same thing. For the past decade, the government has installed surveillance equipment in private telecommunications and telephone companies. Pursuant to the 2008 FISA, it requires electronic communications companies to cooperate in mass, warrantless, surveillance dragnets. Following the 2012 National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order, the Obama administration has given itself permission to continue to install and operate such equipment in these private companies. And, with the possible passage of CISPA, or (eventually) a similar law, the Obama administration is in the process of giving itself permission to trump all privacy protections in acquiring everyone’s personal information from these same companies.
THE LEGALIZATION OF DOMESTIC PROPAGANDA
Not only private, personal information is under attack. In May 2012, the Obama administration permitted itself to infect the reservoir of public information with government propaganda. The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 trumps prior antigovernment propaganda legislation and gives the government legal authority to spread propaganda domestically as well as abroad. The act permits government to spread its propaganda “to foreign audiences through press publications, radio, motion pictures, the Internet, and other information media,” and then to circulate this same propaganda within the United States.15
The Obama administration has already begun influencing social media: “sock puppet” software secretly manipulates social media sites such as Facebook, by using fake online personas to start Internet conversations in order to spread pro-American propaganda.16
Such information warfare was no stranger to the Bush administration, which, for a time, operated an Office of Strategic Influence: a high-level Pentagon program intended to manipulate the public by waging information warfare against the media.17 The difference now is that the Obama administration has passed a law giving itself permission to pollute public information with government propaganda. It’s all quite “legal” now.
Given this modus operandi, law has devolved into a network of permissions granted by government to itself to violate the laws that had previously been in place. Thus, government has eviscerated the rule of law—and is now poised to obtain unfettered access to all of our personal information, to control what flows down the information pipes, and to pollute the mainstream with government propaganda.
This most insidious war of them all, unannounced and unpublished, quietly steals off with our most valuable possession: the freedom and autonomy to make informed judgments and to maintain control over our personal information.
THE HORIZON OF INFORMATION WARFARE TECHNOLOGY
It can—and predictably will—get much worse, considering the information warfare technology on the horizon. Already in existence are private companies that crawl the Internet and collect information on employees, predicting their future behavior and determining whether or not they should be fired.18 Imagine a state in which your DNA and other biometric data is on file and used to determine if you are a health risk and should be fired from your job—and know that the government is already developing a massive biometric database.19 Imagine that your thoughts and emotions could be recorded and stored in a data file so that your subjective world would be visible to the government. Imagine that the government could remotely control your thoughts and emotions, and reprogram you if deemed necessary. Chillingly, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is currently experimenting with and attempting to develop such technologies.20
The next generation of Internet is slated to be an “Internet of Things” in which objects are chipped and tracked online. In subsequent generations of Internet we may look forward to an “Internet of People,” whereby people are chipped and tracked online for the sake of “national security”—with the companies doing the tracking on the government payroll. This is already beginning to happen, with a growing trend toward placing computer chips into human beings in order to track them.21
Think about the endgame. Total information awareness and control, taken to its logical conclusion, would divest us of our individuality and our humanity, turning us into mere things, manipulated and used, leading to devastation potentially worse than a nuclear holocaust: the enslavement of the human mind itself, the utter demise of the human spirit.
Ironically, those who defend the government’s information warfare—its intrusions into our private sphere of knowledge, and its attempt to control public knowledge—generally do so on the grounds of saving freedom. Beware these patriotic protractors of freedom, for they are supporting the end of freedom.
POPULAR RESISTANCE TO INFORMATION WARFARE
How can we fight back?
In addition to supporting the emergence of new, independent media outlets that keep the vital fluids of information circulating through the corpus of the free world, we must insist on privacy protections, to prevent these lifelines from being “tapped.” The more information we acquire, the less vulnerable and easy to manipulate we will become. And the greater our range of privacy protections, the less ammunition government will have to use against us.
All Americans, as well as all citizens of the free world, must insist on their privacy. Organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are already actively attempting to defend the right to privacy through court systems. But these public interest organizations, and others like them, are only as good as the grassroots support they receive. Therefore, we should all be willing to join petitions and class action suits to stop steady government encroachments on our privacy.
At least for now, the Internet remains a magnificent platform for democratic resistance in the war being waged to acquire and control our information. Citizens of the world must use this forum while it lasts to denounce the trends and policies described here. This window of opportunity is diminishing day by day; unless we act now, it may close forever.
We can no longer depend on corporate media to keep us apprised of government activities. The people must emerge as the “Fifth Estate,” to keep a watchful eye on our so-called “Fourth Estate,” thereby keeping it honest. Accordingly, we must look forward to a worldwide movement and establish a league of citizen journalists who use the Internet to bond, train, and speak truth to power. In authentic democracy, the power to govern in an informed way never leaves the people, and where information is itself under attack by the politico-corporate media establishment, the people must be the purveyors of real news.
We must therefore build a strong universal voice, and a public consciousness that speaks unequivocally of the urgency to protect our reservoir of information—both public and private. We must preserve human freedom and the constitutional rights that protect it. Passive acquiescence is not an option.
Notes
1. Shane Harris and Tim Naftali, “Tinker, Tailor, Minor, Spy: Why the NSA’s Snooping is Unprecedented in Scale and Scope,” Slate, January 3, 2006, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ politics/politics/2006/01/tinker_tailor_miner_spy.html.
2. Elliot D. Cohen, “Web of Deceit: How Internet Freedom Got the Federal Ax, And Why Corporate News Censored the Story,” BuzzFlash, July 18, 2005, http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/05/07/con05238.html.
3. “Key Issues: Comcast v. FCC,” Public Knowledge, http://www.publicknowledge.org/issues/ comcast-v-fcc.
4. Marguerite Reardon, “Verizon CTO Predicts ‘Toll Free’ Data,” CNET, May 8, 2012, http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-12261_7-57430190-10356022/verizon-cto-predicts-toll-free-data.
5. FISA Amendments Act of 2008, HR 6304, 110th Cong. (2008), http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-h6304/text.
6. White House, “Executive Order, National Defense Resources Preparedness,” March 16, 2012, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/03/16/executive-order-national-defense-resources-preparedness.
7. Cohen, “Congress May Pass a Bill Similar to China’s Internet Censorship, With Corporations in Charge,” BuzzFlash, November 22, 2011, http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13171.
8. T. C. Sottek, “The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act: CISPA Explained,” Verge, April 27, 2012, http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/27/2976718/cyber-intelligence-sharing-andprotection-act-cispa-hr-3523.
9. Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011, HR 3523, 112th Cong. (2011), http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr3523ih/pdf/BILLS-112hr3523ih.pdf.
10. Amendments to HR 3523, 112th Cong. (2012), http://www.rules.house.gov/Media/file/ PDF_112_2/Reports/HRPT-112-HR3523HR4628.pdf.
11. Lee Fang, “CISPA (aka SOPA 2.0) Pushed Forward by For-Profit Spying Lobby,” Truthout, April 16, 2012, http://truth-out.org/news/item/8538-cispa-aka-sopa-20-pushed-forward-by-for-profit-spying-lobby.
12. “SAIC, Inc: Bill Lobbied,” Open Secrets, http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientbills. php?id=D000000369&year=2012.
13. Fang, “CISPA (aka SOPA 2.0).”
14. FISA Amendments Act of 2008, HR 6304, 110th Cong., § 702 h(1) (2008), http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/110/hr6304.
15. Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, HR 5736, 112th Cong. (2012), http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr5736.
16. Jeff Jarvis, “Revealed: US Spy Operation That Manipulates Social Media,” Guardian, March 17, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks.
17. See, for example, Rachel Coen, “Behind the Pentagon’s Propaganda Plan,” FAIR Extra!, April 2002, http://www.fair.org/extra/0204/osi.html.
18. Mike Elgan, “‘Pre-Crime’ Comes to the HR Dept.,” Datamation, September 29, 2010, http://www.datamation.com/entdev/article.php/3905931/Pre-crime-Comes-to-the-HR-Dept.htm.
19. Alissa Bohling, “First, Your Shoes; Next, Your DNA: Elliot Cohen on How Surveillance Is Erasing Freedom and Autonomy, Step by Incremental Step,” Truthout, January 5, 2011, http:// archive.truthout.org/first-your-shoes-next-your-dna-elliot-cohen-how-surveillance-erasing-freedom-and-autonomy-step-incre.
20. Cohen, Mass Surveillance and State Control: The Total Information Awareness Project (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 142ff.
21. Ibid., 140.
ELLIOT D. COHEN is a contributor to Truthout and Truthdig, editor in chief of The International Journal of Applied Philosophy, ethics editor for Free Inquiry magazine, and blogger for Psychology Today. One of his more recent books is Mass Surveillance and State Control: The Total Information Awareness Project (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).