On Monday February 27th, 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files, over five million e-mails from the Texas headquartered “global intelligence” company Stratfor. The e-mails date between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor's web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods.
The executive order signed by Obama March 16, 2012, authorizes widespread federal (and often military) control and manipulation of the national economy and resources “under both emergency and non-emergency conditions” as well as the right to install “government owned equipment” in private industrial facilities.
It is understandable that reasonable precautions and preparations should be taken for defense and emergency conditions. The question here is what is “reasonable” and democratic – and to what extent does THIS kind of preparation actually make sense when compared, for example, to developing decentralized energy and industrial capacity which is less susceptible to attack. (We won't even mention here the development of nonviolent “civilian based defense” as advocated by Harvard historian Gene Sharp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian-based_defense to make a country ungovernable by a domestic dictatorship or foreign power.)
I recommend that you read over the whole executive order. However, for your convenience, I've excerpted particularly interesting parts of it below.
By now, you’d think we’d be entering the end of the 9/11 era. One war over in the Greater Middle East, another hurtling disastrously to its end, and the threat of al-Qaida so diminished that it should hardly move the needle on the national worry meter. You might think, in fact, that the moment had arrived to turn the American gaze back to first principles: the Constitution and its protections of rights and liberties.
Yet warning signs abound that 2012 will be another year in which, in the name of national security, those rights and liberties are only further Guantanamo-ized and abridged. Most notably, for example, despite the fact that genuinely dangerous enemies continue to exist abroad, there is now a new enemy in our sights: namely, American oppositional types and whistleblowers who are charged as little short of traitors for revealing the workings of our government to journalists and others.
Here and elsewhere, it looks like we can expect the Obama administration to continue to barrel down the path that has already taken us far from the country we used to be. And by next year, if a different president is in the Oval Office, expect him to lead us even further astray. With that in mind, here are five categories in the sphere of national security where 2012 is likely to prove even grimmer than 2011.
1. Ever More Punitive(Ever Less Fair-minded).
2. Ever More Legal Limbo (Ever Less Confidence in the Constitution).
3. Ever More Secrecy(Ever Less Transparency)
4. Ever More Distrust (Ever Less Privacy)
5. Ever More Killing(Ever Less Peace)
Karen J. Greenberg is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University Law School and author of “The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days.”More Karen Greenberg
Petraeus says that the treasure trove of data connected appliances and devices will be able to gather on a “person of interest” will make it much easier to see what potential terrorists and others are doing inside home and to intercept communications. He also noted that connected household devices with the potential to be turned in the spy tools “change our notions of secrecy.” While the CIA has numerous regulations and laws preventing it from spying on American citizens, it’s apparently a much grayer area when it comes to collecting geolocation data that many devices
broadcast.
Earlier this month, Petraeus mused about the emergence of an “Internet of Things” — that is, wired devices — at a summit for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm. “‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies,” Petraeus enthused, “particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft.”
CIA director David Petraeus (seen here playing Wii golf) is really excited about the idea behind the Internet of things. The thing is most excited about isn’t his refrigerator being able to order milk, but the effect that connected appliances and devices will have on “clandestine tradecraft.” In other words, he’s excited about being able to use these devices to spy on people.
Phi Beta Iota: Patraeus was “musing” at an In-Q-Tel conference, so he can reasonably be forgiven for being taken out of context. However, this is just one more stronger signal that the $80 billion a year US Intelligence Community, within which CIA provides armed drones, foreign liaison hand-outs, and very little else, is money wasted. Clandestine tradecraft is about humans. All-source analysis is about integrating a strategic analytic model with history and forecasting to deliver decision-support. It is not about technology except in so far as it supports human cognition. It's a pity the Director of the CIA has not learned that. Technology is not a substitute for thinking, and administration is not a substitute for leadership.
On September 11, 2001, within hours of the murderous 9/11 attacks, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney had committed America to what they later called the “War on Terror.” It should more properly, I believe, be called the “Terror War,” one in which terror has been directed repeatedly against civilians by all participants, both states and non-state actors. It should also be seen as part of a larger, indeed global, process in which terror has been used against civilians in interrelated campaigns by all major powers, including China in Xinjiang and Russia in Chechnya, as well as the United States.2 Terror war in its global context should perhaps be seen as the latest stage of the age-long secular spread of transurban civilization into areas of mostly rural resistance — areas where conventional forms of warfare, for either geographic or cultural reasons, prove inconclusive.
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In 2011 an important book by Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, demonstrated conclusively that the withholding was purposive, and sustained over a period of eighteen months.8 This interference and manipulation became particularly blatant and controversial in the days before 9/11; it led one FBI agent, Steve Bongardt, to predict accurately on August 29, less than two weeks before 9/11, that “someday someone will die.”9
When I lived in New York 20 years ago, the United States was beginning a 20-year war on Iraq. We protested at the United Nations. The Miami Herald depicted Saddam Hussein as a giant fanged spider attacking the United States. Hussein was frequently compared to Adolf Hitler. On October 9, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl told a U.S. congressional committee that she’d seen Iraqi soldiers take 15 babies out of an incubator in a Kuwaiti hospital and leave them on the cold floor to die. Some congress members, including the late Tom Lantos (D., Calif.), knew but did not tell the U.S. public that the girl was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, that she’d been coached by a major U.S. public relations company paid by the Kuwaiti government, and that there was no other evidence for the story. President George H. W. Bush used the dead babies story 10 times in the next 40 days, and seven senators used it in the Senate debate on whether to approve military action. The Kuwaiti disinformation campaign for the Gulf War would be successfully reprised by Iraqi groups favoring the overthrow of the Iraqi government twelve years later.
I think two opposing trends have been at work in U.S. history. One is that of allowing more people to vote. This is an ongoing struggle, of course, but in some significant sense we've allowed poor people and women and non-white people and young people to vote. The other trend, which has really developed more recently, is that we've made voting less and less meaningful. Of course it was never as meaningful as many people imagine. But we've legalized bribery, we've banished third parties and independents, we've gerrymandered most Congressional districts into meaningless general elections and left one party or the other to exercise great influence over any primary. Rarely does any incumbent lose, and rarely does a candidate without the most money win. Extremely rare is a winning candidate who lacks some major financial backing. Rarer still is a candidate who even promises to pursue majority positions on most major issues, or who convincingly commits to following the will of the public over the will of the party. Most Congress members are pawns in a government with two partisan voices, not the voices of 535 individual representatives and senators. Rare, as well, is any possibility in a close primary or general election of verifying the accuracy of a vote count.
There appears to many observers little, sometimes even nothing, to be gained by voting. A lack of decent education and news media, combined with negative campaign ads that make the whole process seem filthy are probably a turn off. Yet roughly 55% of voting age people in the U.S. continue to vote in presidential elections and roughly 35% in off-year elections. And those numbers would probably go up if we didn't take people's right to vote away when we convict them of crimes, if we didn't deny citizenship to so many immigrants, or if we made voter registration automatic, stopped trying to intimidate people out of voting or forcing them to vote on second-class provisional ballots, made election day a holiday, etc.
We've also created a dominant media cartel that can — without any exaggeration — instruct large numbers of people whom to vote for — a situation that outrages some of us, but by definition is deemed acceptable by many others. Or, rather, it's not deemed acceptable, but it's either unnoticed or it's viewed as a tragedy of the commons that cannot be countered by any individual alone. On the Kucinich 04 presidential campaign, he would win the most applause, but then people would say “I'd vote for him if he were serious,” because their televisions had told them he wasn't one of the real, serious, viable choices, and either they believed that or they believed that everyone else believed it which left them powerless to single-handedly do anything about it.
