Privacy is eroding fast as technology offers government increasing ways to track and spy on citizens. The Washington Post reported there are 3,984 federal, state and local organizations working on domestic counterterrorism. Most collect information on people in the US.
There are now 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies that work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, The Washington Post reported in a 2010 series by Dana Priest and William M. Arken. There are 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances, the reporters wrote, and in Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2011. Investigative reporter James Bamford wrote in the latest issue of Wired magazine that the National Security Agency is building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah, as part of a secret NSA surveillance program code-named “Stellar Wind.” Bamford noted that the NSA has established listening posts throughout the country to collect, store and examine billions of email messages and phone calls.
At Democracy Now, Amy Goodman spoke with Wired's James Bamford about the NSA's big new computer surveillance center in Utah.
First of all, how big is it?
Well, it’s going to be a million square feet. That’s gigantic. There’s only one data center in the country that’s larger, and it’s only slightly larger than that. And it’s going to cost $2 billion. It’s being built in this area on a military base outside of Salt Lake City in Bluffdale. As I said, they had to actually extend the boundary of the town so it would fit into it.
Next, what is the NSA up to?
So, what I would like to do—I quote from a number of people in the article that are whistleblowers. They worked at NSA. They worked there many years. One of my key whistleblowers was the senior technical person on the largest eavesdropping operation in NSA. He was a very senior NSA official. He was in charge of basically automating the entire world eavesdropping network for NSA. So—and one of the other people is a intercept operator that was actually listening to these calls, listening to journalists calling from overseas and talking to their wives and having intimate conversations. And she tells about how these people were having these conversations, and she felt very guilty listening to them. These people came forward and said, you know, this shouldn’t be happening. Bill Binney, the senior official I interviewed, had been with NSA for 40 years almost, and he left, saying that what they’re doing is unconstitutional.
What I’d like to see is, why don’t we have a panel, for the first time in history, of some of these people and have them before Congress, sitting there telling their story to Congress, instead of to me, and then have NSA respond to them? I mean, this is the American public who we’re talking about whose phone calls we’re talking about, so—and email and data searches and all that. So I think it’s about time that the Congress get involved, instead of asking questions from a newspaper or from a magazine article, and start actually questioning these people on the record in terms of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it and to whom they’re doing it—you know, to whom they’re doing it.
Take a look at this short video by Jonathan Corbett. He makes a pretty good case that the nude body scanners at American airports constitute an $8 Billion fraud, in addition to exposing us to supposedly safe radiation and invasive searches. Most important, these scanners are technically flawed to such a degree that any terrorist can slip virtually anything into an airplane. Corbett points out that the Israelis refused to invest in these scanners, because they are "useless." This is a rather unsurprising accusation against the folks who never considered locking the cockpit doors prior to 9/11--boondoggle and ineffective. But at least a lot of Americans will see those shiny expensive new nude body scanners and assume that they are safe. After all, these new scanners are newer than the "old fashioned" metal detectors that actually work. But it seems to be the prime objective of the TSA to cause people to believe that they are safe.
For more information, see Corbett's website posts on this topic here and here.
If Corbett's analysis is correct, these nude body scanners exemplify this country's approach to many issues. Hype a problem, inject with the fear of terrorists, spend a lot of money that isn't really needed, violate lots of fundamental civil liberties and cover up the fact that the money is not being well-spent.
The U.S. government is trying to redefine what have been long-accepted journalistic methods. If the Pentagon is to have its way, it will be the end of national-security journalism in the United States . . . They're trying to interpret the Espionage Act to say that any two-way communication with a source is a collaboration with a source, and is therefore a conspiracy to commit espionage where classified information is involved. The Pentagon, in fact, issued a public demand to us that we not only destroy everything we had ever published or were ever going to publish in relation to the U.S. government, but that we also stop "soliciting" information from U.S. government employees. The Espionage Act itself does not mention solicitation, but they're trying to create a new legal precedent that includes a journalist simply asking a source to communicate information.
Here's one more quote from the above article:
When you shake something up, you have a chance to rebuild. But we're not interested in shaking something up just for the hell of it. I believe that if we look at what makes a civilization civilized, it is people understanding what is really going on. When Gutenberg invented the printing press, the end result was that people who knew something of what was going on could convey that information to others. And as a result of the Internet, we are now living in a time where it's a lot easier to convey what we know about our corner of the world and share it with others.
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