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Article Summaries…………………………………………………………………………….4-14

Beyond the NSA, Other Agencies Spy on You Too…………………………………….4Want to Predict The Future of Surveillance: Ask Poor Communities…………………..4The New FBI: COINTELPRO on Steroids………………………………………………5Race, Surveillance, & Empire……………………………………………………………6Black State of Surveillance………………………………………………………………6Political Life of Fungability……………………………………………………………...7Senators Push Amendments to Bar Encryption Backdoors……………………………...7NSA’s Secret Campaign to Crack Internet Security……………………………………..8Stop The Hysteria Over Apple Encryption………………………………………………8Major Cyber Attack Could Cause Significant Loss of Life By 2025……………………9Beyond the USA Freedom Act………………………………………………………......9NSA Spying Harms Companies, Silicon Valley, & The Entire US Economy…………..10Bipartisan Secure Data Act Has Votes to Pass House, Lawmakers Drag Their Feet……10The Secure Data Act Could Help Law Enforcement…………………………………….11The Harm of Surveillance………………………………………………………………..11Snowden Deserves An Immediate Presidential Pardon………………………………….12Afterward of Homeland………………………………………………………………….12Protest In New Terror……………………………………………………………………13Why “I Have To Hide” Is Wrong Way to Think About Terrorism……………………...13Turnkey Tyranny: Surveillance & The Terror State……………………………………..14

Full ArticlesBeyond the NSA, Other Agencies Spy on You Too……………………………………………15

By Shahid ButtarSubmitted By Skinner WestKeywords: NSA, FBI, USA Freedom Act, PATRIOT Act, Surveillance State Repeal Act

Want to Predict The Future of Surveillance: Ask Poor Communities………………………….17By Virginia EubanksSubmitted By Skinner WestKeywords: Poor and marginalized communities, welfare, social services, civil rights

The New FBI: COINTELPRO on Steroids……………………………………………………...23By John WhiteheadSubmitted By Skinner WestKeywords: FBI surveillance tactics, COINTELPRO, intensive surveillance

Race, Surveillance, & Empire……………………………………………………………………28By Arun Kundani & Deepa KumarSubmitted By Skinner West & King ArtsKeywords: Racism, racial security, Arab Americans, mass surveillance of Muslims

Black State of Surveillance………………………………………………………………………47By Malkia Cyril

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Submitted By Skinner WestKeywords: Jim Crow, black communities, racial surveillance, racism greater problem than privacy

Political Life of Fungability……………………………………………………………………..52By Stephen MarshallSubmitted By Skinner WestKeywords: criminalization of black youth

Senators Push Amendments to Bar Encryption Backdoors……………………………………..54By Bennett CorySubmitted By Bessie RhodesKeywords: encryption backdoors, privacy amendments to USA Freedom Act, Secure Data Act

NSA’s Secret Campaign to Crack Internet Security……………………………………………56By Jeff LarsonSubmitted By Bessie RhodesKeywords: Corporate reactions to NSA hacking, government investments in hacking technology, internet security

Stop The Hysteria Over Apple Encryption…………………………………………………….64By Bruce SchneierSubmitted By Bessie Rhodes Keywords: Encryption backdoors in Apple products, FBI reaction to closing backdoors, computer hacking

Major Cyber Attack Could Cause Significant Loss of Life By 2025……………………….....67By Patrick TuckerSubmitted By Bessie RhodesKeywords: Overhyped cyber threats, cyber vulnerabilities, electronic infrastructure failure

Beyond the USA Freedom Act…………………………………………………………………73By Daniel Castro & Alan McQuinnSubmitted By Bessie RhodesKeywords: US technology company competitiveness, foreign technology investments

NSA Spying Harms Companies, Silicon Valley, & The Entire US Economy…………………75By Washington’s BlogSubmitted By Bessie RhodesKeywords: Foreign privacy laws, protecting foreign investors, surveillance and internet companies

Bipartisan Secure Data Act Has Votes to Pass House, But Will Lawmakers Drag Their Feet....83

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By Carl WicklanderSubmitted By Bessie RhodesKeywords: Secure Data Act, congressional oversight of surveillance, watered down legislation

The Secure Data Act Could Help Law Enforcement……………………………………………85By Alan McQuinnSubmitted By Bessie RhodesKeywords: Cybercrime, Secure Data Act, stopping encryption backdoors

The Harm of Surveillance………………………………………………………………………..87By Glenn GreenwaldSubmitted By King ArtsKeywords: Surveillance of government dissenters, democracy, how surveillance changes people’s behavior

Snowden Deserves An Immediate Presidential Pardon………………………………………….89By Stephen WaltSubmitted By King ArtsKeywords: Edward Snowden, NSA bulk data collection, classified surveillance data

Afterward of Homeland…………………………………………………………………………92By Jacob ApplebaumSubmitted By King ArtsKeyword: Free speech is important, tyranny, protest

Protest In New Terror……………………………………………………………………………95By Derek RoydenSubmitted By King ArtsKeywords: Using surveillance to infiltrate activist organizations, growing surveillance budgets, civil rights, Black Lives Matter, COINTELPRO

Why “I Have To Hide” Is Wrong Way to Think About Terrorism……………………………..97By Moxie MarlinspikeSubmitted By King ArtsKeywords: United States Code is complex, too many federal laws to count

Turnkey Tyranny: Surveillance & The Terror State…………………………………………....99By Trevor PaglenSubmitted By King Arts

Keywords: Terrorism, terror state, fear of terrorism

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Beyond the NSA, Other Agencies Spy on You Too

Citation: Buttar, Shahid. (2014). Beyond the NSA, Other Agencies Spy on You Too. Truthout. Retrieved 12/22/15. http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/20670-beyond-the-nsa-other-agencies-spy-on-you-too

Buttar Article Summary: People mistakenly believe that the NSA (National Security Agency) is the cornerstone of government surveillance. However, other organizations like the FBI are carrying out most surveillance operations. Also, efforts that curtail these organizations like the FREEDOM Act have not been successful.

Buttar Article Strategic Points: This article can be used as a Solvency answer to Affirmatives that curtail the NSA. You

can make the argument that the Aff fails, because it focusing on only a single government organization.

This article can also be used to show that efforts to curtail surveillance historically fail.

Want To Predict the Future of Surveillance, Ask Poor Communities

Citation: Eubanks, Virginia. (2014). Want To Predict the Future of Surveillance, Ask Poor Communities. The American Prospect. Retrieved 12/22/2015. http://prospect.org/article/want-predict-future-surveillance-ask-poor-communities

Eubanks Article Summary: In the article Eubanks explains that many of the ways we are spying on people is extending to poor people. For example, the government tracks welfare recipients with their social service records. Often times welfare programs are used to spy on people of gender and racial minorities.

Lastly Eubanks makes the argument that the problem with surveillance is not privacy, but rather a lack of human rights. We should resist surveillance to protect rights, not privacy.

Eubanks Article Strategic Points: This article could be used to cut cards about how surveillance is more problematic to

poor people and racial minorities. This article could be used to explain the diversity of ways the government surveils

people, which includes government records and online tracking. This article could be used to answer claims that privacy protection is important, Eubanks

criticizes that kind of thinking as ignoring rights.

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The New FBI Powers: COINTELPRO on Steroids

Citation: Whitehead, John. (2011). The New FBI Powers: COINTELPRO on Steroids. The

Rutherford Institute. Retrieved 12/22/15.

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/

the_new_fbi_powers_cointelpro_on_steroids

Whitehead Article Summary: The author makes the argument that the FBI surveillance programs

are actually worse than COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), which is a program that

the FBI used to illegally spy on and infiltrate anti-Vietnam, communist, and civil rights

organizations.

Whitehead Article Strategic Points:

This article can be used as inherency evidence to show the growth of government

surveillance.

This article can be used as part of a privacy advantage because it details how surveillance

programs often bypass due process and warrant requirements.

This article can be used to answer surveillance good arguments, because the author

explains how the same unsavory, and in some case illegal, tactics used by COINTELPRO

are still in use.

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Race, Surveillance, & Empire

Citation: Kundani, Arun & Kumar, Deepa. (2015). Race, Surveillance, & Empire. International Socialist Review. Retrieved 12/28/15. http://isreview.org/issue/96/race-surveillance-and-empire

Kundani & Kumar Article Summary: The authors of this article are making an argument that government surveillance, and law enforcement in general, has been used to reproduce racial oppression. Secondly, the authors argue that the same surveillance programs used to target racial minorities, especially Arab Muslims, were also implemented to spy on anti-neoliberal movements like Occupy Wall Street.

Kundani & Kumar Strategic Points:

This article can be a key piece to a racism advantage for an affirmative case. This article can be used to show that Arabs and Muslims are disproportionately targets of

surveillance for no other reason than apparent racism. This article can be used to make arguments stating that discussion of racism and

imperialism should be the focus of debates on surveillance. This article can be used as impact evidence with racism or imperialism as the impact.

Black State of Surveillance

Citation: Cyril, Malkia Amala. (2015). Black State of Surveillance. The Progressive. Retrieved 12/28/15 http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-state-surveillance

Cyril Article Summary: There has been a long history of using surveillance specifically against racial minorities including slave laws and Jim Crow, which both had significant surveillance components. However, this kind of racial surveillance has gone largely unnoticed. It was not until Edward Snowden released information that privileged classes were being surveilled that America began to take action on this issue.

Cyril Article Strategic Points:

The most obvious argument this article could be used to make is describing the racist character of surveillance programs. It can also be used as part of a racism advantage.

This article can also be used to argue that discussions of surveillance are too focused on privileged classes, because racialized surveillance happened for decades with largely no attention.

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Excerpt: The Political Life of Fungibility

Citation: Marshall, Stephen. (2012). Excerpt: The Political Life of Fungibility. Theory & Event, Volume 15, Issue 3, 2012. Project Muse.

Marshall Article Summary: Black Americans are often deemed criminal for no reason. Trayvon Martin’s death is a clear example of how a Black youth was automatically thought of as a criminal, and such thinking led to his death. So, our justice system always approach minorities as criminals with presumed guilt, such an action is dehumanizing.

Marshall Article Strategic Points:

This article can be used as impact evidence for dehumanization of minorities. This article can be used as part of a racial profiling advantage for an affirmative case. This article can make the argument that minorities, especially Black people in the context

of this article, will always be the primary targets for surveillance programs.

Senators Push Amendments to Bar Encryption Backdoors

Citation: Bennett, Cory. (2015). Senators Push Amendments to Bar Encryption Backdoors. The Hill. Retrieved 12/29/15. http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/243725-senators-push-for-amendment-to-bar-encryption-backdoors

Bennett Article Summary: Two Senators attempted to pass an amendment to the USA Freedom Act, which was enacted in June of 2015. The amendment would have prevented the government from making companies install encryption backdoors in their software. An encryption backdoor is a part of a computer program that allows law enforcement to access information from that program.

Bennett Article Strategic Points:

This article can be used as inherency evidence for an affirmative dealing with encryption backdoors.

It can also be used in Politics Disadvantages to show that there is some Senate support for blocking encryption backdoors.

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The NSA’s Secret Campaign to Crack Internet Security

Citation: Larson, Jeff. (2013). Revealed: The NSA’s Secret Campaign to Crack Internet Security. The New York Times & ProPublica. Retrieved 12/29/15. http://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-encryption

Larson Article Summary: The NSA has been engaging in secret computer and program hacking for the last few decades. Having invested billions of dollars to preserve its dominance in hacking technology. The NSA can also easily overcome most privacy and encryption technology.

Larson Article Strategic Points:

This article can be used as inherency evidence for an affirmative dealing with NSA hacking.

This article can be used to demonstrate the extent the NSA hacking. This article can be used as part of a privacy advantage in an affirmative case.

Stop the Hysteria Over Apple Encryption

Citation: Schneier, Bruce. (2014). Stop the Hysteria Over Apple Encryption. CNN. Retrieved 12/29/15. https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2014/10/stop_the_hysteria_ov.html

Schneier Article Summary: Apple products, especially the iPhone, had an “encryption backdoor.” This backdoor allowed the government to access people’s data stored in an iPhone. When Apple finally decided to close the “backdoor” the government warned that doing so what hurt their ability to catch criminals and monitor criminal behavior. The author argues that this line of reasoning makes no sense because the same “backdoors” used by government agencies can also be used by criminals. So, allowing encryption backdoors to exist in the iPhone makes the iPhone a target for criminal activity and hacking.

Schneier Article Strategic Points:

This article can be used to answer arguments like the Crime Disadvantage and Terrorism Disadvantage, because allowing backdoors to remain open means they can be exploited by criminals and terrorist organizations.

This article can be used as part of an affirmative advantage that says curbing surveillance may actually curb crime as well.

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Major Cyber Attack Will Cause Significant Loss of Life by 2025

Citation: Tucker, Patrick. (2014). Major Cyber Attack Will Cause Significant Loss of Life by 2025, Experts Predict. Defense One. Retrieved 12/29/15. http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2014/10/cyber-attack-will-cause-significant-loss-life-2025-experts-predict/97688/

Tucker Article Summary: Threats of cyber-attacks on the United States are often overly hyped. However, we do have very real vulnerabilities in our electronic infrastructure such as sewage, electricity, and city street lights. Attacks on our infrastructure can cause significant property damage. Some of our biggest issues is the growing number of cyber vulnerabilities not being fixed, and the fact that the country lacks a coordinated comprehensive cyber security policy. Nonetheless the threat of cyber-attacks may be larger than the actual risk.

Tucker Article Strategic Points:

This article is interesting in that in can be used as both impact evidence because of our cyber vulnerabilities, but also an answer to impact arguments because threat of cyber-attacks are overhyped.

This article can be used as part of an affirmative solvency to show how better and more coordinated policies are needed for safety.

Beyond the USA Freedom Act: How Surveillance Still Subverts US Competitiveness

Citation: Castro, Daniel & McQuinn, Alan. (2015). Beyond the USA Freedom Act: How Surveillance Still Subverts US Competitiveness. Informative Technology & Innovation Foundation. Retrieved 12/29/15. https://itif.org/publications/2015/06/09/beyond-usa-freedom-act-how-us-surveillance-still-subverts-us-competitiveness

Castro & McQuinn Article Summary: Foreign investors are currently discouraged from investing in American technology businesses because of concerns about government surveillance. Foreign investors, in order to protect tier own privacy, will chose to invest in companies elsewhere. This could lead to more than $35 Billion leaving the American technology industry by as early as 2016.

Castro & McQuinn Article Strategic Points:

This article can be used to answer to Spending Disadvantages or any generic spending bad arguments.

This article could be an important piece of a competitiveness, hegemony, and/or economic advantage for an affirmative case.

This article can be used to show that there is a tradeoff effect between the technology economy and security threats.

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NSA Spying Directly Harms Internet Companies, Silicon Valley, California…And the Entire US Economy

Citation: Washington’s Blog. (2013). NSA Spying Directly Harms Internet Companies, Silicon Valley, California…And the Entire US Economy. Retrieved 1/1/16. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/07/nsa-spying-directly-harms-internet-companies-silicon-valley-california-and-the-entire-national-economy.html

Washington’s Blog Article Summary: American technology companies are being forced to turn over information to the NSA for purposes of surveillance. However, shareholders and foreign investors are not being told that private information is being given to the NSA. This could place investors at risks and even violate privacy laws in other countries.

Washington’s Blog Strategic Points:

This article can be used to show that the global market is losing confidence in American technology companies, which can answer negative economy and hegemony arguments.

This article could be an important piece of competitiveness, hegemony, and/or economic advantage for an affirmative case.

This article can be used to show how surveillance can possibly damage relations with other countries, because their citizens are also being inadvertently surveilled by the NSA. So, this article can be used against many negative relations good arguments.

Bipartisan Secure Data Act Has Votes to Pass House, But Will Lawmakers Drag Their Feet?

Citation: Wicklander, Carl. (2015). Bipartisan Secure Data Act Has Votes to Pass House, But Will Lawmakers Drag Their Feet? Independent Voter Network. Retrieved 1/1/16. http://ivn.us/2015/02/09/bipartisan-secure-data-act-votes-pass-house-will-lawmakers-drag-feet/

Wicklander Article Summary: In the House of Representatives there has been some adequate support to pass the Secure Data Act. The Secure Data Act would give Congress more power to oversee on-line bulk data collection carried out by federal intelligence agencies. However, despite bipartisan support the act has still not been enacted, and the final version has been watered down.

Wicklander Article Strategic Points:

This article could be used as part of a solvency contention to explain how the Secure Data Act or similar legislation needs to be passed.

This article can also be used to answer solvency contentions by explaining how an ineffective Congress does not pass needed legislation. Furthermore, this article argues that this kind of legislation is always watered down to such an extent that I would not be useful.

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The Secure Data Act Could Help Law Enforcement Protect Against Cybercrime

Citation: McQuinn, Alan. (2014). The Secure Data Act Could Help Law Enforcement Protect Against Cybercrime. The Hill. Retrieved 1/2/16. http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/227594-the-secure-data-act-could-help-law-enforcement-protect-against

McQuinn Article Summary: The Secure Data Act would protect the on-line/internet privacy of Americans in addition to elimination of “backdoors.” Currently, organizations like the FBI and NSA use encryption backdoors to access private data to track criminals. However, those backdoors weaken electronic security because they can also be accessed by hackers.

McQuinn Article Strategic Points:

This article could be used to create a solvency contention for an affirmative that wanted to pass the Secure Data Act or similar legislation.

This article can be used as an answer to the Crime Disadvantage because closing encryption backdoors would decrease, not increase, crime rates.

This article explains how passing the Secure Data Act would benefit the technology industry because they would no longer be required to introduce vulnerabilities into their technology.

The Harm of Surveillance

Citation: Greenwald, Glenn. (2014). The Harm of Surveillance, No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, Published by Metropolitan Books, ISBN 9781627790734, p. 173-174

Greenwald Article Summary: When individuals are being watched they typically change their behavior to fit the expectations of whoever is watching them. Greenwald argues that government surveillance forces people to act in a certain way. Surveillance, would therefore curtail a person’s ability to choice and personal freedom. If you are always behavior the way another entity expects to behave you will never be able to forge your own path. Furthermore, surveillance may also curtail meaningful dissent and genuine challenges to power, which is negative because dissent is a part of a functioning democracy. Notable examples used against government dissenters include how civil rights activist like Martin Luther King were heavily surveilled by the FBI.

Greenwald Article Strategic Points:

This article can be used as part of a privacy and/or democracy advantage for an affirmative case.

This article can be used to generically argue that surveillance is bad, which could be used to answer any negative arguments that defend the status quo.

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Snowden Deserves An Immediate Presidential Pardon

Citation: Walt, Stephen. (2013). Snowden Deserves An Immediate Presidential Pardon. Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs. Retrieved 1/2/16. http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/23229/snowden_deserves_an_immediate_presidential_pardon.html

Walt Article Summary: Charges are possibly being brought against Edward Snowden for leaking classified data that revealed the extent of NSA bulk data collection. Walt argues that Snowden should be pardoned since he never revealed information about the NSA for his own personal gain. Due to Snowden’s leaks we now know the full scope of the NSA’s surveillance. We also know that a large number of non-criminal individuals were also being surveilled.

Walt Article Strategic Points:

This article can be used as part of an affirmative case that details the extent of NSA bulk data collection.

This article can also be used as a solvency argument for affirmatives that deal directly with Edward Snowden, such as a Pardon Snowden Affirmative or End Surveillance Against Whistleblowers Affirmative.

This article can be used to answer claims that surveillance is predominantly used against criminals and suspected terrorists, because Snowden’s revealed that surveillance was far larger in scope.

“Afterword,” Homeland

Citation: Applebaum, Jacob. (2013). “Afterword,” Homeland — by Cory Doctorow. Retrieved 1/2/16. http://pastebin.com/VHBx3imj

Applebaum Article Summary: This article is more of a narrative dramatic speak about the need to move forward and disrupt injustices we see in society now. It mentions that free and open systems that help society view governments as a whole and better able to criticize, which is the key to ending over securitization and suppression of free speech.

Applebaum Article Strategic Points: This article can be used as impact or internal link evidence to say it’s important to

protect open spaces that question the government. This article can be used as impact evidence to say surveillance is tyranny.

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Protest in New Terror

Citation: Royden, Derek. (2015). Protest in New Terror. Axis of Logic. Retrieved 1/2/16. http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_70908.shtml

Royden Article Summary: Historically the government has always targeted, infiltrated, and attack activist movements I found threatening. This includes surveillance against the civil rights movement and COINTELPRO operations against the Black Panthers. Today technology and surveillance overreach has made these tactics worst. There is evidence that the Black Lives Matter Movement is being targeted. The main reason for this is intelligence agencies like the NSA and FBI must constantly find new terror threats to justify their growing budgets and technology.

Royden Article Strategic Points: This article can be used to argue that intelligence agencies invent new reason to surveil

activist organizations in order to justify their existence. This article can be used as part of a democracy advantage, because government

surveillance programs have a long history of dismantling activist movements. This article can be used to make arguments about why the continued growth of

intelligence agencies is harmful.

Why “I Have to Hide” Is The Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance

Citation: Marlinspike, Moxie. (2013). Why “I Have to Hide” Is The Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance. Wired. Retrieved 1/2/16. http://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-i-have-nothing-to-hide-is-the-wrong-way-to-think-about-surveillance/

Marlinspike Article Summary: Marlinspike argues that there are so many laws and sections of the United States Code that government itself can’t even count them all. So, as private citizens we can never be sure that we are not breaking a crime. If the government only surveils “criminals” that could technically include every person in the country.

Marlinspike Article Strategic Points:This article demonstrates how surveillance programs could technically target every person in the country.

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Turnkey Tyranny: Surveillance and the Terror State

Citation: Paglen, Trevor. (2013). Turnkey Tyranny: Surveillance and the Terror State. Creative Time Reports. 1/2/16. http://creativetimereports.org/2013/06/25/surveillance-and-the-construction-of-a-terror-state/

Paglen Article Summary: Terrorism does not pose a threat to the United States. However, a country that is in a state of terror can be a threat. Terrorism work by instilling so much fear in a society that the society begins to collapse itself. Surveillance is an example. Surveillance primarily targets religious and political minorities by scaring people away from non-mainstream thought.

Paglen Article Strategic Points: This article can be used as impact evidence This article can be used to answer and/or clarify terrorism impacts by explaining that

terrorism is a threat because of the widespread fear it causes, but not the actual damage. This article can be used as part of Terrorism Advantage

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Beyond the NSA, Other Agencies Spy on You Too

Citation: Buttar, Shahid. (2014). Beyond the NSA, Other Agencies Spy on You Too. Truthout.

Retrieved 12/22/15. http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/20670-beyond-the-nsa-other-

agencies-spy-on-you-too

Buttar Article Summary: People mistakenly believe that the NSA (National Security Agency) is

the cornerstone of government surveillance. However, other organizations like the FBI are

carrying out most surveillance operations. Also, efforts that curtail these organizations like the

FREEDOM Act have not been successful.

Buttar Article Strategic Points:

This article can be used as a Solvency answer to Affirmatives that curtail the NSA. You

can make the argument that the Aff fails, because it focusing on only a single government

organization.

This article can also be used to show that efforts to curtail surveillance historically fail.

Buttar Full Article:

The latest discoveries about NSA spying revealed that the agency has collected 27 terrabytes of information about cellphone locations to track its targets not only in cyberspace, but also real space. It siphons billions of dollars each year from a federal budget in crisis. And it is watching you and your children.

Lost in the debate about NSA spying, however, have been the dozens of other federal agencies also complicit in Fourth Amendment abuses.

Leading the Charge: The FBI

The FBI is among the federal agencies leading the assault on the Constitution. The FBI runs its own intelligence databases, has long abused the very same sections of the PATRIOT Act for which the NSA has recently come under fire and has the further distinction of having infiltrated First Amendment-protected activist groups and religious institutions all over the country.

Nor are these new issues. Unfortunately, the FBI's abuses are well established: For at least a quarter century, the bureau deployed a series of domestic "counterintelligence programs" that were discovered by activists in the 1970s and then investigated by Congressional oversight committees. Summarized as a "sophisticated vigilante operation" in 1976 by the Senate,

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CoIntelPro presaged the recurrence of similar abuses under the Bush administration and continuing into the Obama administration.

In 2008, I sued the FBI to seek public disclosure of its secret policy authorizing undercover infiltration. Our FOIA case did force the bureau to disclose the document, but the FBI redacted the entire chapter on what it calls "undisclosed participation."

A bizarre - and widely overlooked - exchange in a 2010 Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing revealed what little we know. When asked by Senators under what legal standard the FBI Infiltrates activist groups, the then-director of the FBI assured them that “reasonable suspicion of criminal activity” was first required, only to repudiate his statement before the sun had set.

As it turns out, even reasonable suspicion of criminal activity is not required, as the FBI admitted in a letter sent to the Hill that evening, after the cameras and microphones were off. According to the FBI, any "proper purpose" can justify infiltrating an activist group, however untethered the means toward that purpose might become.

Congress: Years Late and Billions Short

After a decade of sitting on its hands and enabling the dangerous entrenchment of executive power at nearly every opportunity, Congress is finally beginning to pay attention. But even measures that purport to restrain the NSA’s dragnet spying settle for scratching at the surface.

The USA FREEDOM act was thoughtfully engineered by the authors of the PATRIOT act to restrain executive agencies including the NSA and FBI from abusing their approval of expanding powers over the past decade. Even their bill, however, fails to address most of the FBI’s recurring problems.

One measure, introduced by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), would do more. Holt is not your average member of Congress. Having taught physics at Princeton (making him the only rocket scientist among his four hundred colleagues), he’s arguably the smartest member of the chamber. He’s also the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, the successor to the Pike committee that in the 1970s famously investigated decades of FBI crimes.

Rep. Holt’s bill, the Surveillance State Repeal Act, would rescind the PATRIOT Act entirely, as well as the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It is the only pending bill that would force the intelligence agencies to justify their powers from a pre-9/11 baseline, as they should.

Unfortunately, most members of Congress who talk about privacy have yet to walk their talk. And with leading Democrats carrying the Bush administration’s water now that President Obama is holding the glass, it will take continued collaboration across the aisle, along with creative public displays of dissent to rein in the surveillance state.

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Want To Predict the Future of Surveillance, Ask Poor Communities

Citation: Eubanks, Virginia. (2014). Want To Predict the Future of Surveillance, Ask Poor

Communities. The American Prospect. Retrieved 12/22/2015. http://prospect.org/article/want-

predict-future-surveillance-ask-poor-communities

Eubanks Article Summary: In the article Eubanks explains that many of the ways we are spying

on people is extending to poor people. For example, the government tracks welfare recipients

with their social service records. Often times welfare programs are used to spy on people of

gender and racial minorities.

Lastly Eubanks makes the argument that the problem with surveillance is not privacy, but rather

a lack of human rights. We should resist surveillance to protect rights, not privacy.

Eubanks Article Strategic Points:

This article could be used to cut cards about how surveillance is more problematic to

poor people and racial minorities.

This article could be used to explain the diversity of ways the government surveils

people, which includes government records and online tracking.

This article could be used to answer claims that privacy protection is important, Eubanks

criticizes that kind of thinking as ignoring rights.

Eubanks Full Article:

Since Edward Snowden started disclosing millions of classified NSA documents in June,

terms like metadata, software backdoors, and cyber vulnerability have appeared regularly in

headlines and sound bites. Many Americans were astonished when these stories broke. In blogs,

comment sections, and op-ed pages, they expressed disbelief and outrage.

But I wasn’t surprised. A decade ago, I sat talking to a young mother on welfare about her

experiences with technology. When our conversation turned to Electronic Benefit Transfer cards

(EBT), Dorothy* said, “They’re great. Except [Social Services] uses them as a tracking device.”

I must have looked shocked, because she explained that her caseworker routinely looked at her

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EBT purchase records. Poor women are the test subjects for surveillance technology, Dorothy

told me ruefully, and you should pay attention to what happens to us. You’re next.

Poor and working-class Americans already live in the surveillance future. The revelations that

are so scandalous to the middle-class data profiling, PRISM, tapped cellphones–are old news to

millions of low-income Americans, immigrants, and communities of color. To be smart about

surveillance in the New Year, we must learn from the experiences of marginalized people in the

U.S. and in developing countries the world over. Here are four lessons we might learn if we do.

 

Lesson #1: Surveillance is a civil rights issue.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, we are targeted for digital surveillance as groups and

communities, not as individuals. Big Brother is watching us, not you. The NSA looks for what

they call a “pattern of life,” homing in on networks of people associated with a target. But

networks of association are not random, and who we know online is affected by offline forms of

residential, educational, and occupational segregation. This year, for example, UC San Diego

sociologist Kevin Lewis found that online dating leads to fewer interracial connections,

compared to offline ways of meeting. Pepper Miller has reported that sometimes, African

Americans will temporarily block white Facebook friends so that they can have “open, honest

discussions” about race with black friends. Because of the persistence of segregation in our

offline and online lives, algorithms and search strings that filter big data looking for patterns, that

begin as neutral code, nevertheless end up producing race, class, and gender-specific results.

Groups of “like” subjects are then targeted for different, and often unequal, forms of supervision,

discipline and surveillance, with marginalized communities singled out for more aggressive

scrutiny. Welfare recipients like Dorothy are more vulnerable to surveillance because they are

members of a group that is seen as an appropriate target for intrusive programs. Persistent

stereotypes of poor women, especially women of color, as inherently suspicious, fraudulent, and

wasteful provide ideological support for invasive welfare programs that track their financial and

social behavior. Immigrant communities are more likely to be the site of biometric data

collection than native-born communities because they have less political power to resist it. As

panicked as mainstream America is about the government collecting cellphone meta-data,

imagine the hue and cry if police officers scanned the fingerprints of white, middle-class

20

Americans on the street, as has happened to day laborers in Los Angeles, according to the

Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Marginalized people are in the dubious position of being both on the cutting edge of surveillance,

and stuck in its backwaters. Some forms of surveillance, like filmed police interrogations, are

undoubtedly positive for poor and working-class communities and racial minorities. But

marginalized people are subject to some of the most technologically sophisticated and

comprehensive forms of scrutiny and observation in law enforcement, the welfare system, and

the low-wage workplace. They also endure higher levels of direct forms of surveillance, such as

stop-and-frisk in New York City.

The practice of surveillance is both separate and unequal. Acknowledging this reality allows us

to challenge mass surveillance based on the 14th Amendment, which provides for equal

protection under the law, not just on the 4th Amendment, which protects citizens against

unwarranted search and seizure. Surveillance should be seen as a collective issue, a civil rights

issue, not just an invasion of privacy.

 

Lesson #2: To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

We can intuit the shape of surveillance-to-come by keeping an eye on developing countries, as

well as exploring its impacts on marginalized communities here in the United States. The most

sweeping digital surveillance technologies are designed and tested in what could be called “low

rights environments”—poor communities, repressive social programs, dictatorial regimes, and

military and intelligence operations—where there are low expectations of political accountability

and transparency. Drones that deliver Hellfire missiles, Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs)

that send pain-inducing tones over long distances, and stun cuffs that deliver 80,000 volts to

detainees via remote control allow users to avoid direct responsibility for the human suffering

they cause.

Many of these technologies are first developed for the U.S. military to deploy in the global south,

and later tested for civilian purposes on marginal communities in the United States. LRADs, for

example, were developed by San Diego-based military contractor American Technology

21

Corporation in response to the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, and then famously

used to disburse G20 protestors in Pittsburgh in 2009. Technologies designed for the military

carry expectations about the dangerousness of the public, and can be used over-aggressively in

community policing and crowd control. To a technology designed for counter-terrorism,

everyone looks like a bad guy.

Then there is the digital side of things. “Law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies, and

militaries invest in Trojans, bad software, malicious network attacks and other things that we

normally associate with heavy criminality,” says Amelia Andersdotter, member of the

European Parliament and the Swedish Pirate Party, which is dedicated to reforming copyright

and patent laws. “No one is obliged to inform users of security flaws or to fix vulnerabilities.” In

fact, as the Guardian and The New York Times  reported in September, the NSA spends $250

million a year to work with technology companies to make commercial software—including

encryption software—more “exploitable.” Insecure by design, this software is passed on to

business and the public sector to hold software producers accountable. Presently, we mandate

penalties for vendors that fail to security test their software in the airline and shipping industries,

but not in other crucial areas: healthcare, nuclear plants, electricity grids. Andersdotter suggests

that design liability regulations could hold software companies liable for not disclosing security

flaws, responsible for damages they cause, and obliged to help users fix problems. But this

solution may pose more questions than it settles: Who will administer the standards if software

vendors and national governments are already subverting data-security requirements? How much

transparency is possible when data holdings are centralized by commercial entities like Google,

or by state entities, as in Brazil’s proposed national data centers?

 

Lesson #3: Everyone resists surveillance, not just the bad guys.

Resistance to surveillance is as common as surveillance itself. “There is always a cross-section

of the population working to trick the system,” explains John Gilliom, co-author of SuperVision:

An Introduction to the Surveillance. “Whether it's a college kid getting a fake ID, or the middle

class family hiding a little bit of cash income to lower its tax bill, or the food-stamp recipient

hiding an extra roommate. We often call this fraud or cheating, but something this widespread is

more than misbehavior. It is resistance.”

22

“Data is the new oil. Beyond collecting information, it also means gathering power,” argues

Joana Varon Ferraz, researcher from the Center of Technology and Society at Fundação

Getúlio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, “Every government has become dataholic.” Dataholic

political and commercial systems foster defiance. We don’t necessarily resist because we’ve

done something wrong. We resist because surveillance is not just about privacy; it is about

power, control, self-determination and autonomy.

If people remain concerned about the impact of surveillance on their lives they may voluntarily

withdraw from the digital world. Gilliom suggests we might even see “a hipster social trend

where disengagement becomes a form of cache.” But digital disconnection can simply be an

excuse for maintaining ignorance; many people don’t have the option to disengage. For example,

public assistance applicants must sign a personal information disclosure statement to permit

social services to share their social security number, criminal history, personal, financial, medical

and family information with other public agencies and private companies. Technically, you can

refuse to sign and withhold your social security number. But if you do not sign, you cannot

access food stamps, transportation vouchers, cash assistance, childcare, emergency housing

assistance, and other basic necessities for survival, or even talk to a caseworker about available

community resources.

There are alternatives to disengagement. Brazil and Germany introduced a joint resolution to

the UN condemning the member countries of what is unofficially known as the Five Eyes

Alliance—the U.S., U.K., New Zealand, Canada, and Australia—for massive electronic

surveillance and infringement of human rights. The EU is developing a General Data

Protection Regulation that would unify data protection under a single European law. The

BRICS cable, a 21,000 mile, 12.8 Terabyte per second fiber system connecting Brazil, Russia,

India, China, South Africa, and Miami—is creating an alternative data pipeline to lower the cost

of communication among major economies of the global south and provide non-U.S. routes for

world communications.

Answers to the dilemmas we face in the surveillance society are not likely to come from Silicon

Valley or Washington. This year, the Obama administration was put in the position of defending

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the National Security Administration’s snooping while stumping for a Consumer Privacy Bill

of Rights that boosts security for online shoppers. It is still unclear how President Obama will

respond to his Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies’ report calling

to terminate the storage of bulk data collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

 

Lesson #4: Privacy is not the problem.

In his Christmas Day address on the U.K.’s Channel 4, Edward Snowden trotted out the hoary

old clichés about George Orwell, Big Brother, and the end of privacy. But for most people,

privacy is a pipedream. Living in dense urban neighborhoods, public housing, favellas, prisons,

or subject to home visits by caseworkers, poor and working people might wish for more personal

space, but they don’t make Snowden’s mistake of assuming that privacy is “what allows us to

determine who we are and who we want to be.”

We need to move away our fixation on privacy and towards a future based on digital human

rights. We can take some cues from Brazil, which is currently creating a collaborative, multi-

stakeholder “Internet Constitution,” the Marco Civil da Internet. The Marco connects digital

communication to deeply held democratic values: internationalism, active citizenship, access to

information, freedom of expression, democratic governance, civic participation, multilateralism,

inclusivity and non-discrimination, plurality, cultural diversity, freedom of speech. The Marco

also addresses network neutrality, personal data protection, and, yes, even privacy. But it is not

the central issue. Seeing privacy as the cornerstone for democracy is a kind of naiveté we can no

longer excuse nor afford.

We should care when national governments engage in surveillance of any kind, not just when

they spy on us. Shock and outrage are callow luxuries, and the Snowden leaks eliminated our last

justification for ignorance. Software designed for authoritarian political aims spawns repressive

political environments wherever it is used. Systems tested in low rights environments will, as

Dorothy informed me a decade ago, eventually be used on everyone.

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The New FBI Powers: COINTELPRO on Steroids

Citation: Whitehead, John. (2011). The New FBI Powers: COINTELPRO on Steroids. The

Rutherford Institute. Retrieved 12/22/15.

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/

the_new_fbi_powers_cointelpro_on_steroids

Whitehead Article Summary: The author makes the argument that the FBI surveillance programs

are actually worse than COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), which is a program that

the FBI used to illegally spy on and infiltrate anti-Vietnam, communist, and civil rights

organizations.

Whitehead Article Strategic Points:

This article can be used as inherency evidence to show the growth of government

surveillance.

This article can be used as part of a privacy advantage because it details how surveillance

programs often bypass due process and warrant requirements.

This article can be used to answer surveillance good arguments, because the author

explains how the same unsavory, and in some case illegal, tactics used by COINTELPRO

are still in use.

Full Article :

Listen closely and what you will hear, beneath the babble of political chatter and other mindless political noises distracting you from what’s really going on, are the dying squeals of the Fourth Amendment. It dies a little more with every no-knock raid that is carried out by a SWAT team, every phone call eavesdropped on by FBI agents, and every piece of legislation passed that further undermines the right of every American to be free from governmental intrusions into their private affairs.

Meanwhile, President Obama and John Boehner are exchanging political niceties on the golf course, Congress is doing their utmost to be as ineffective as possible, and the Tea Party—once thought to be an alternative to politics as usual—is clowning around with candidates who, upon election, have proven to be no better than their predecessors and just as untrustworthy when it comes to protecting our rights and our interests. Yet no matter how hard Americans work to

25

insulate themselves from the harsh realities of life today—endless wars, crippling debt, sustained unemployment, a growing homeless population, rising food and gas prices, morally bankrupt and corrupt politicians, plummeting literacy rates, and on and on—there can be no ignoring the steady drumbeat of the police state marching in lockstep with our government.

Incredibly, with little outcry from the populace, the lengths to which the government will go in its quest for total control have become more extreme with every passing day. Now comes the news that the FBI intends to grant to its 14,000 agents expansive additional powers that include relaxing restrictions on a low-level category of investigations termed “assessments.” This allows FBI agents to investigate individuals using highly intrusive monitoring techniques, including infiltrating suspect organizations with confidential informants and photographing and tailing suspect individuals, without having any factual basis for suspecting them of wrongdoing. (Incredibly, during the four-month period running from December 2008 to March 2009, the FBI initiated close to 12,000 assessments of individuals and organizations, and that was before the rules were further relaxed.)

This latest relaxing of the rules, justified as a way to cut down on cumbersome record-keeping, will allow the FBI significant new powers to search law enforcement and private databases, go through household trash, and deploy surveillance teams, with even fewer checks against abuse. The point, of course, is that if agents aren’t required to maintain a paper trail documenting their activities, there can be no way to hold the government accountable for subsequent abuses.

These new powers, detailed in a forthcoming edition of the FBI’s operations manual, extend the agency’s reach into the lives of average Americans and effectively transform the citizenry into a nation of suspects, reversing the burden of proof so that we are now all guilty until proven innocent. Thus, no longer do agents need evidence of possible criminal or terrorist activity in order to launch an investigation. Now, they can “proactively” look into people and groups, searching databases without making a record about it, conducting lie detector tests and searching people’s trash.

Moreover, as FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni revealed, agents want to be able to use the information found in a subject’s trash to pressure that person to assist in a government investigation. Under the new guidelines, surveillance squads can also be deployed repeatedly to follow “targets,” agents can infiltrate organizations for longer periods of time before certain undisclosed “rules” kick in, and public officials, members of the news media or academic scholars can be investigated without the need for extra supervision.

All of this has been sanctioned by the Obama administration, which, as the New York Times aptly notes, “has long been bumbling along in the footsteps of its predecessor when it comes to sacrificing Americans’ basic rights and liberties under the false flag of fighting terrorism” and now “seems ready to lurch even farther down that dismal road than George W. Bush did.” In fact, this steady erosion of our rights started long before Bush came into office. Indeed, it has little to do with political affiliation and everything to do with an entrenched bureaucratic mindset—call it the “Establishment,” if you like—that, in its quest to amass and retain power, seeks to function autonomously and independent of the Constitution.

26

What we are witnessing is a coup d’etat that is aimed at overthrowing our representative government and replacing it with one that outwardly may appear to embrace democratic ideals but inwardly is nothing more than an authoritarian regime. And the Establishment is counting on the fact that Americans will gullibly continue to trust the government and turn a blind eye to its power grabs and abuses.

The relationship between the American people and their government was once defined by a social contract (the U.S. Constitution) that was predicated on a mutual respect for the rule of law and a clear understanding that government exists to serve the people and not the other way around. That is no longer the case. Having ceded to the government all manner of control over our lives, renouncing our claims to such things as privacy in exchange for the phantom promise of security, we now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being trapped in a prison of our own making.

It is a phenomenon that Abraham Kaplan referred to as the law of the instrument: “Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.” Or to put it another way: to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Unfortunately, in the scenario that has been playing out in recent years, we have become the nails to the government’s hammer. After all, having equipped government agents with an arsenal of tools, weapons and powers with which to vanquish the so-called forces of terror, it was inevitable that that same arsenal would eventually be turned on us. As Michael German, a former FBI agent, recently observed, “You have a bunch of guys and women all over the country sent out to find terrorism. Fortunately, there isn’t a lot of terrorism in many communities. So they end up pursuing people who are critical of the government.”

One such person is Scott Crow, a relatively obscure political activist who has been the object of intense surveillance by FBI counterterrorism agents. Other targets of bureau surveillance, according to the New York Times, have included antiwar activists in Pittsburgh, animal rights advocates in Virginia and liberal Roman Catholics in Nebraska. “When such investigations produce no criminal charges,” notes the Times, “their methods rarely come to light publicly.”

In the case of Scott Crow, those methods were revealed as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request to see the FBI file on him. At a massive 440 pages, Crow’s file speaks volumes about the way in which the government views the American people as a whole—as potential threats to national security, not to mention what it says about the leeway given to the FBI to completely disregard the Fourth Amendment’s protections against searches and seizures of our property and persons. Over the course of at least three years, Crow had agents staking out his house, tracking the comings and goings of visitors, monitoring his phone calls, mail and email, sifting through his trash, infiltrating his circle of friends, and even monitoring him round the clock with a video camera attached to a phone pole across the street from his house.

Given that no criminal charges whatsoever were ever levied against Crow, it might appear that the agency went overboard in its efforts to monitor his activities, but as the FBI’s new manual reveals, such surveillance—even in the absence of credible evidence suggesting wrongdoing—is par for the course. For the federal government to go to such expense (taxpayer expense, that is) and trouble over a political activist, in particular, might seem rather paranoid. However, that is

27

exactly what we are dealing with—a government that is increasingly paranoid about having its authority challenged and determined to discourage such challenges by inciting fear in people.

Then again, this is nothing new. Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI conducted an intensive domestic intelligence program, termed Cointelpro, intended to neutralize domestic political dissidents. According to the Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating Cointelpro abuses, “Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone ‘bugs,’ surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens.” The report continued:

Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed—including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.

Commenting on the methods employed by the FBI in the implementation of Cointelpro, the Church Committee noted, “The unexpressed major premise of the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order.” The Committee added, “While the declared purposes of these programs were to protect the ‘national security’ or prevent violence, Bureau witnesses admit that many of the targets were nonviolent and most had no connections with a foreign power. Indeed, nonviolent organizations and individuals were targeted because the Bureau believed they represented a ‘potential’ for violence—and nonviolent citizens who were against the war in Vietnam were targeted because they gave ‘aid and comfort’ to violent demonstrators by lending respectability to their cause.”

Following the Church Committee’s report, then-Attorney General Edward Levi implemented a set of guidelines designed to preclude FBI abuse regarding domestic investigations. These guidelines were tweaked by subsequent Attorneys General, substantially relaxed by Attorney General John Ashcroft following the September 11 attacks, further weakened by AG Michael Mukasey in 2008, and now under Eric Holder, any such restrictions are just about nonexistent.

Thus, it would seem we’re back to where we started, only this time we’re facing Cointelpro on steroids—pumped up on the government’s self-righteous quest to ferret out peace activists and dissidents and energized by an arsenal of invasive technologies that make the phone tapping equipment of the 1960s look like Tinker Toys. In fact, this modern period of FBI lawlessness resembles Cointelpro operations in a variety of ways. In both instances, the FBI singled out outspoken critics of the Establishment for scrutiny, attempted to assign them terrorist ties (none were found), and continued the investigations long past the point at which they were found not

28

guilty of having committed any crimes. For example, an attorney for those targeted in a September 2011 FBI raid—including an activist-minded couple that sells silkscreened baby outfits and other clothes with phrases like “Help Wanted: Revolutionaries”—describes his clients as “public non-violent activists with long, distinguished careers in public service, including teachers, union organizers and antiwar and community leaders.”

With all of the so-called threats coming from outside the country, why is the government expending so much energy on a relatively small group of peace and anti-war activists whose First Amendment activities comprise the totality of their “suspicious” behavior? It’s the hammer and nail analogy again. Having acquired all of these new tools and powers post-9/11, of course the government wants to hold onto them and what better way to do so than by using them to ferret out “potential” threats. A prime example occurred in 2002, when the FBI dispatched a special agent, armed with a camera, to a peace rally to search for terrorism suspects who might happen to be there, just to “see what they are doing.” The protest was sponsored by the Thomas Merton Center, an organization dedicated to advocating peaceful solutions to international conflicts, and composed primarily of individuals distributing leaflets. The Office of Inspector General, in its report on FBI surveillance of domestic organizations, characterized the task provided to the special agent assigned to the Merton protest as a “make-work” project.

Mark my words: we’re going to find, as time goes on and we come under greater and greater surveillance, that we have all become part of the government’s “make-work” project. What this means is that in order to justify their existence and earn their pay, they’ll be investigating perfectly harmless, innocent citizens.

So what’s to be done?

First, the American people need to get their heads out of the sand and their butts off the couches and act like rea Americans for a change. And by that I mean taking to the streets and truly protesting this deplorable state of our nation. March on Washington, march on your town hall—but whatever you do, make your voices heard. If they can do it in Europe and China and the Middle East, there’s absolutely no reason we can’t do it here.

Second, once we’ve gotten Congress’ attention, we need to push for a legislative response to these FBI abuses. It can be done, but it will take Americans coming together across party lines and calling for Congress to pass legislation restoring the Fourth Amendment and restricting what government agents can do, especially without a court order. Congress may be largely corrupt and incompetent, but with the right kind of citizen pressure, changes can be had. Whatever you do, however, beware of promises made on the campaign trail. As we have seen repeatedly, they never stick.

Third, act now before it’s too late. That dying squeal, the sound of the Fourth Amendment having been gutted and bleeding to death, is getting fainter and fainter. Once it goes silent, there’ll be no turning back.

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Race, Surveillance, & Empire

Citation: Kundani, Arun & Kumar, Deepa. (2015). Race, Surveillance, & Empire. International Socialist Review. Retrieved 12/28/15. http://isreview.org/issue/96/race-surveillance-and-empire

Kundani & Kumar Article Summary: The authors of this article are making an argument that government surveillance, and law enforcement in general, has been used to reproduce racial oppression. Secondly, the authors argue that the same surveillance programs used to target racial minorities, especially Arab Muslims, were also implemented to spy on anti-neoliberal movements like Occupy Wall Street.

Kundani & Kumar Strategic Points:

This article can be a key piece to a racism advantage for an affirmative case. This article can be used to show that Arabs and Muslims are disproportionately targets of

surveillance for no other reason than apparent racism. This article can be used to make arguments stating that discussion of racism and

imperialism should be the focus of debates on surveillance. This article can be used as impact evidence with racism or imperialism as the impact.

Full Article :

Beginning in June 2013, a series of news articles based on whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s collection of documents from the National Security Agency (NSA) took the world by storm. Over the course of a year, the Snowden material provided a detailed account of the massive extent of NSA’s warrantless data collection. What became clear was that the NSA was involved in the mass collection of online material. Less apparent was how this data was actually used by the NSA and other national security agencies. Part of the answer came in July 2014 when Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain published an article that identified specific targets of NSA surveillance and showed how individuals were being placed under surveillance despite there being no reasonable suspicion of their involvement in criminal activity.1 All of those named as targets were prominent Muslim Americans.

The following month, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux published another story for The Intercept, which revealed that under the Obama administration the number of people on the National Counterterrorism Center’s no-fly list had increased tenfold to 47,000. Leaked classified documents showed that the NCC maintains a database of terrorism suspects worldwide—the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment—which contained a million names by 2013, double the number four years earlier, and increasingly includes biometric data. This database includes 20,800 persons within the United States who are disproportionately concentrated in Dearborn, Michigan, with its significant Arab American population.2

By any objective standard, these were major news stories that ought to have attracted as much attention as the earlier revelations. Yet the stories barely registered in the corporate media landscape. The “tech community,” which had earlier expressed outrage at the NSA’s mass digital

30

surveillance, seemed to be indifferent when details emerged of the targeted surveillance of Muslims. The explanation for this reaction is not hard to find. While many object to the US government collecting private data on “ordinary” people, Muslims tend to be seen as reasonable targets of suspicion. A July 2014 poll for the Arab American Institute found that 42 percent of Americans think it is justifiable for law enforcement agencies to profile Arab Americans or American Muslims.3

In what follows, we argue that the debate on national security surveillance that has emerged in the United States since the summer of 2013 is woefully inadequate, due to its failure to place questions of race and empire at the center of its analysis. It is racist ideas that form the basis for the ways national security surveillance is organized and deployed, racist fears that are whipped up to legitimize this surveillance to the American public, and the disproportionately targeted racialized groups that have been most effective in making sense of it and organizing opposition. This is as true today as it has been historically: race and state surveillance are intertwined in the history of US capitalism. Likewise, we argue that the history of national security surveillance in the United States is inseparable from the history of US colonialism and empire. 

The argument is divided into two parts. The first identifies a number of moments in the history of national security surveillance in North America, tracing its imbrication with race, empire, and capital, from the settler-colonial period through to the neoliberal era. Our focus here is on how race as a sociopolitical category is produced and reproduced historically in the United States through systems of surveillance. We show how throughout the history of the United States the systematic collection of information has been interwoven with mechanisms of racial oppression. From Anglo settler-colonialism, the establishment of the plantation system, the post–Civil War reconstruction era, the US conquest of the Philippines, and the emergence of the national security state in the post-World War II era, to neoliberalism in the post-Civil Rights era, racialized surveillance has enabled the consolidation of capital and empire.  

It is, however, important to note that the production of the racial “other” at these various moments is conjunctural and heterogenous. That is, the racialization of Native Americans, for instance, during the settler-colonial period took different forms from the racialization of African Americans. Further, the dominant construction of Blackness under slavery is different from the construction of Blackness in the neoliberal era; these ideological shifts are the product of specific historic conditions. In short, empire and capital, at various moments, determine who will be targeted by state surveillance, in what ways, and for how long.

In the second part, we turn our attention to the current conjuncture in which the politics of the War on Terror shape national security surveillance practices. The intensive surveillance of Muslim Americans has been carried out by a vast security apparatus that has also been used against dissident movements such as Occupy Wall Street and environmental rights activists, who represent a threat to the neoliberal order. This is not new; the process of targeting dissenters has been a constant feature of American history. For instance, the Alien and Sedition Acts of the late 1790s were passed by the Federalist government against the Jeffersonian sympathizers of the French Revolution. The British hanged Nathan Hale because he spied for Washington’s army in the American Revolution. State surveillance regimes have always sought to monitor and penalize a wide range of dissenters, radicals, and revolutionaries. Race was a factor in some but by no

31

means all of these cases. Our focus here is on the production of racialized “others” as security threats and the ways this helps to stabilize capitalist social relations.

Further, the current system of mass surveillance of Muslims is analogous to and overlaps with other systems of racialized security surveillance that feed the mass deportation of immigrants under the Obama administration and that disproportionately target African Americans, contributing to their mass incarceration and what Michelle Alexander refers to as the New Jim Crow.4 We argue that racialized groupings are produced in the very act of collecting information about certain groups deemed as “threats” by the national security state—the Brown terrorist, the Black and Brown drug dealer and user, and the immigrant who threatens to steal jobs. We conclude that “security” has become one of the primary means through which racism is ideologically reproduced in the “post-racial,” neoliberal era. Drawing on W. E. B. Dubois’s notion of the “psychological wage,” we argue that neoliberalism has been legitimized in part through racialized notions of security that offer a new “psychological wage” as compensation for the decline of the social wage and its reallocation to “homeland security.”

Settler-colonialism and racial securityNational security surveillance is as old as the bourgeois nation state, which from its very inception sets out to define “the people” associated with a particular territory, and by extension the “non-peoples,” i.e., populations to be excluded from that territory and seen as threats to the nation. Race, in modern times, becomes the main way that such threats—both internal and external—are mediated; modern mechanisms of racial oppression and the modern state are born together. This is particularly true of settler-colonial projects, such as the United States, in which the goal was to territorially dispossess Indigenous nations and pacify the resistance that inevitably sprang up. In this section, we describe how the drive for territorial expansion and the formation of the early American state depended on an effective ideological erasure of those who peopled the land. Elaborate racial profiles, based on empirical “observation”—the precursor to more sophisticated surveillance mechanisms—were thus devised to justify the dispossession of native peoples and the obliteration of those who resisted. 

The idea of the American nation as the land of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants enabled and justified the colonial-settler mission.5 Thus, when the US state was formed after the Revolutionary War, white supremacy was codified in the Constitution; the logical outcome of earlier settler-colonial systems of racial discrimination against African slaves and Indigenous populations.6 But the leaders of the newly formed state were not satisfied with the thirteen original colonies and set their sights on further expansion. In 1811, John Quincy Adams gave expression to this goal in the following way: “The whole continent of North America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs.”7 This doctrine, which would later come to be known as “manifest destiny” animated the project of establishing the American nation across the continent. European settlers were the “chosen people” who would bring development through scientific knowledge, including state-organized ethnographic knowledge of the very people they were colonizing.8

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John Comaroff’s description of this process in southern Africa serves equally to summarize the colonial states of North America: “The ‘discovery’ of dark, unknown lands, which were conceptually emptied of their peoples and cultures so that their ‘wilderness’ might be brought properly to order—i.e., fixed and named and mapped—by an officializing white gaze.”9 Through, for example, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the United States sought to develop methods of identification, categorization, and enumeration that made the Indigenous population “visible” to the surveillance gaze as racial “others.” Surveillance that defined and demarcated according to officially constructed racial typologies enabled the colonial state to sort “tribes” according to whether they accepted the priorities of the settler-colonial mission (the “good” Indians) or resisted it (the “bad” Indians).10 In turn, an idea of the US nation itself was produced as a homeland of white, propertied men to be secured against racial others. No wonder, then, that the founding texts of the modern state invoke the Indigenous populations of America as bearers of the “state of nature,” to which the modern state is counterposed—witness Hobbes’s references to the “the Savage people of America.”11

The earliest process of gathering systematic knowledge about the “other” by colonizers often began with trade and religious missionary work. In the early seventeenth century, trade in furs with the Native population of Quebec was accompanied by the missionary project. Jesuit Paul Le Jeune worked extensively with the Montagnais-Naskapi and maintained a detailed record of the people he hoped to convert and “civilize.”12 By studying and documenting where and how the “savages” lived, the nature of their relationships, their child-rearing habits, and the like, Le Juene derived a four-point program to change the behaviors of the Naskapi in order to bring them into line with French Jesuit morality. In addition to sedentarization, the establishment of chiefly authority, and the training and punishment of children, Le Juene sought to curtail the independence of Naskapi women and to impose a European family structure based on male authority and female subservience.13 The net result of such missionary work was to pave the way for the racial projects of colonization and/or “integration” into a colonial settler nation.

By the nineteenth century, such informal techniques of surveillance began to be absorbed into government bureaucracy. In 1824, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun established the Office of Indian Affairs (later “Bureau”), which had as one of its tasks the mapping and counting of Native Americans. The key security question was whether to forcibly displace Native Americans beyond the colonial territory or incorporate them as colonized subjects; the former policy was implemented in 1830 when Congress passed the Indian Removal Act and President Jackson began to drive Indians to the west of the Mississippi River. Systematic surveillance became even more important after 1848, when Indian Affairs responsibility transferred from the Department of War to the Department of the Interior, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs sought to comprehensively map the Indigenous population as part of a “civilizing” project to change “the savage into a civilized man,” as a congressional committee put it. By the 1870s, Indians were “the quantified objects of governmental intervention”; resistance was subdued as much through “rational” techniques of racialized surveillance and a professional bureaucracy as through war.14 The assimilation of Indians became a comprehensive policy through the Code of Indian Offenses, which included bans on Indigenous cultural practices that had earlier been catalogued by ethnographic surveillance. Tim Rowse writes that

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For the U.S. government to extinguish Indian sovereignty, it had to be confident in its own. There is no doubting the strength of the sense of “manifest destiny” in the United States during the nineteenth-century, but as the new nation conquered and purchased, and filled the new territories with colonists, it had also to develop its administrative capacity to govern the added territories and peoples. U.S. sovereign power was not just a legal doctrine and a popular conviction; it was an administrative challenge and achievement that included acquiring, by the 1870s, the ability to conceive and measure an object called “the Indian population.”15

The use of surveillance to produce a census of a colonized population was the first step to controlling it. Mahmood Mamdani refers to this as “define and rule,” a process in which, before managing a heterogeneous population, a colonial power must first set about defining it; to do so, the colonial state “wielded the census not only as a way of acknowledging difference but also as a way of shaping, sometimes even creating, difference.”16 The “ethnic mapping” and “demographics unit” programs practiced by US law enforcement agencies today in the name of counterterrorism are the inheritors of these colonial practices. Both then and now, state agencies’ use of demographic information to identify “concentrations” of ethnically defined populations in order to target surveillance resources and to identify kinship networks can be utilized for the purposes of political policing. Likewise, today’s principles of counterinsurgency warfare—winning hearts and minds by dividing the insurgent from the nonresistant—echo similar techniques applied in the nineteenth century at the settler frontier.

Class, gender, and racial securityWhile racial security was central to the settler-colonial project in North America, territorial dispossession was only one aspect of the process of capital accumulation for the new state; the other was the discipline and management of labor. As Theodore Allen shows in The Invention of the White Race, the “white race” did not exist as a category in Virginia’s colonial records until the end of the seventeenth century. Whiteness as an explicit racial identity had to be cultivated over a period of decades before it could become the basis for an organized form of oppression.17 A key moment in the production of whiteness was the response of the ruling Anglo elite to Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. The rebellion was begun by colonial settlers who wanted a more aggressive approach to securing the territory against Indigenous peoples. But it also involved African and Anglo bond laborers joining together in a collective revolt against the system of indentured servitude. This threatened not only the profitability but also the very existence of the plantation system. 

Over the following three decades, the Virginia Assembly passed a series of acts that racialized workers as Black and white. Those who could now call themselves white were granted some benefits by law, whereas those designated Black were turned from bond laborers (who could therefore expect to be free after a period of time) into slaves—property with no rights whatsoever and no hope of freedom. To win them to the side of the plantation bourgeoisie, poor white men were given privileges—they had access to land and enjoyed common law protections such as trial by jury and habeas corpus that were denied to Black enslaved people.18 In practice this meant that white men, for instance, could rape Black women and not be charged with a crime (because Blacks were property and so only “damages” were to be paid to the slave owner). Further, property rights and the legal notion of settled land not only denied Native American property claims but even erased the existence of Indigenous people on the basis that, because

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white settlers had transformed the pristine North American wilderness into productive land, they were the real “natives.”19

Once the legal and ideological work had been done to naturalize race as a visible marker of inherent difference and to separate “us” from “them,” it could be made use of as a stable category of surveillance; the patrols set up to capture runaway slaves—arguably the first modern police forces in the United States20—needed only to “see” race in order to identify suspects. Moreover, the plantation system was stabilized by enabling non-elite whites to see security as a racial privilege and shared responsibility. W. E. B. Du Bois argued in Black Reconstruction that, in the slave plantations of the South, poor whites were brought into an identification with the planter elite by being given positions of authority over Blacks as overseers, slave drivers, and members of slave patrols. With the associated feeling of superiority, their hatred for the wider plantation economy that impoverished them was displaced onto Black enslaved people: class antagonism was racialized and turned into a pillar of stability for the system. Meanwhile, in the North, labor leaders had little appetite for abolition, fearing competition from a newly freed Black workforce.21 After abolition, the same racial anxieties were mobilized to disenfranchise the Black laborer in the South. Du Bois used the term “psychological wage” to describe this sense of superiority granted to non-elite whites in the South:

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent under their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness.… On the other hand, in the same way, the Negro was subject to public insult; was afraid of mobs; was liable to the jibes of children and the unreasoning fears of white women; and was compelled almost continuously to submit to various badges of inferiority. The result of this was that the wages of both classes could be kept low, the whites fearing to be supplanted by Negro labor, the Negroes always being threatened by the substitution of white labor.22 

We suggest below that, since the 1970s, neoliberalism has involved a similar kind of process, in which the social wage of the New Deal welfare state was progressively withdrawn and racialized notions of security offered in its place as a psychological compensation.

These racialized notions of security are also inflected by gender. As Du Bois notes in the above quote, free Black men were positioned as threats to white women in the post–Civil War era. Unlike during slavery, when Black men were not indiscriminately labeled as rapists and lynching was rare, the period between 1865 and 1895 saw the lynching of over ten thousand African Americans. Fredrick Douglass argued that, when all the other methods of demonizing Black people failed, the myth of the Black rapist was developed to justify lynchings and white terror.23 Vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan justified their brutality by claiming to keep white women safe from the Black rapist, as visualized, for instance, in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. Such constructions of white women in need of protection from predatory Black men were reminiscent of the “captivity scenarios” of the seventeenth century, in which Native Americans were accused of kidnapping white women, a charge that then justified genocide.24 Thus, from the early settler-

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colonial period onwards, “security” and “protection” were defined by elites in gendered and racial terms. In particular, the white, heterosexual family was positioned as the subject of a security narrative that cast racialized others as threats to the “homeland.”

The “homeland” so defined also needed to be secured from racialized immigrant threats, but which immigrants counted as white in this “homeland” was somewhat unstable. When Irish immigrants began to arrive in the United States in large numbers from the 1850s onwards, they were considered nonwhite because they were perceived to be of Celtic rather than Anglo Saxon background. More importantly, Irish Catholics faced the same exclusionary practices that Catholics did in previous centuries. Even though by the mid-eighteenth century, the need for “English colonies to be economically sustainable and militarily secure from indigenous threat,” opened up non-English immigration to North America, Catholics (along with Indian tribes) were denied basic rights on the grounds that they were religiously and culturally different from the WASP population.25 Over time, however, Irish and Italian immigrants were made white. 

From the late nineteenth century, the policing of the United States’s borders was another context where racial and imperial security was intertwined with practices of surveillance. Congress first sought to police borders as part of a strategy of regulating labor in 1882, when it excluded Chinese immigrants. In 1909, US immigration officials began excluding around half of all Asian Indians from entering. Following concern from the British government that anti-colonial nationalists from India were using the United States as a base to spread radical politics, US officials began to interrogate Indian migrants at West Coast ports, and a British agent arranged for the Justice Department to monitor all mail moving between India and the Berkeley and San Francisco post offices.26 

In 1917, legislation was introduced to create a “barred Asiatic zone,” stretching from Afghanistan to the Pacific, from which no one could be admitted to the United States.27 With the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, a comprehensive system of national quotas was introduced reflecting a global racial hierarchy. Through immigration policy, an idea of the US homeland as a Western European, white ethnoracial identity was institutionalized. To implement such a vision, appropriate systems of record keeping and surveillance of immigrants were required.28 Through these various means, Mae M. Ngai argues, Asian Americans and Mexican Americans were produced as “alien citizens,” formally US citizens but legally racialized and excluded. The surveillance of these groups made possible the repatriation of 400,000 persons of Mexican descent during the Great Depression (of whom half had been thought to be US citizens) and the internment of 120,000 of Japanese ancestry during World War II (two-thirds of whom were citizens).29

In the nineteenth century, the political surveillance of labor militancy had routinely been practiced by private agencies such as Pinkerton and Burns, who were directly contracted by capitalists rather than through the state. But toward the end of the century, such practices began to be absorbed into government agencies. Following the so-called Tompkins Square Riot of 1874—actually a demonstration in New York against unemployment that was attacked by the police—the New York Police Department began to assign detectives to spy on socialist and union meetings. By the mid-1890s, the department was tapping 350 phones.30 By 1900, a number of

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police departments in the United States had created “red squads” specifically to deploy informants to left-wing organizations and meetings.

Empire and the national security stateBy 1890, coast-to-coast colonization was effectively complete, with the surviving Native American population consigned to reservations. Thereafter, the priority became the projection of US power further afield, again justified through a racialized understanding of American exceptionalism. As Paul Kramer writes in the context of the US conquest of the Philippines:

[T]he war’s advocates subsumed US history within longer, racial trajectories of “Anglo-Saxon” history which folded together US and British imperial histories. The Philippine-American War, then, was a natural extension of Western conquest, and both taken together were the organic expression of the desires, capacities, and destinies of “Anglo-Saxon” peoples. Americans, as Anglo-Saxons, shared Britons’ racial genius for empire-building, a genius which they must exercise for the greater glory of the “race” and to advance “civilization” in general. Unlike other races, they “liberated” the peoples they conquered; indeed, their expressions of conquest as “freedom” proliferated as the terrors they unleashed became more visible.31

The resistance that Filipinos mounted to American benevolence could then only be seen as an atavistic barbarism to be countered through modern techniques of surveillance and repression. While local police departments within the United States had begun to develop techniques of political surveillance, it was under the US colonial regime in the Philippines that systematic and widespread surveillance of political opponents and the manipulation of personal information as a form of political control was first institutionalized. A unit within the police called the Constabulary Information Section was established in Manila in 1901, founded by Henry Allen, a former military attaché to Tsarist Russia.32 The Constabulary Information Section cultivated hundreds of paid Filipino agents across the country, making it “scarcely possible for seditionary measures of importance to be hatched without our knowledge,” as Allen wrote to President Theodore Roosevelt.33 The techniques of compiling dossiers on dissidents’ private lives, spreading disinformation in the media, and planting agents provocateurs among militants were applied to combating radical nationalist groupings in Manila. Control over information proved as effective a tool of colonial power as physical force. As historian Alfred W. McCoy notes, during World War I 

police methods that had been tested and perfected in the colonial Philippines migrated homeward to provide both precedents and personnel for the establishment of a US internal security apparatus.… After years of pacifying an overseas empire where race was the frame for perception and action, colonial veterans came home to turn the same lens on America, seeing its ethnic communities . . . as internal colonies requiring coercive controls.34

On this basis, a domestic national security apparatus emerged, with notions of race and empire at its core. From 1917, the FBI and police department red squads in US cities increasingly busied themselves with fears of subversion from communists, pacifists, anarchists, and the ten million German Americans who were suspected of harboring disloyalties. During World War I, thirty million letters were physically examined and 350,000 badge-carrying vigilantes snooped on immigrants, unions, and socialists.35

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Concerns over privacy set limits to such surveillance after the war, but with increasing left-wing and right-wing radicalization in the 1930s, President Roosevelt decided to issue a secret executive order that authorized a shift in the FBI’s role from a narrowly conceived law enforcement agency focused on gathering evidence for criminal prosecutions into an intelligence agency. Thereafter, it was dedicated to spying on “subversive” political movements (primarily communists, but also fascists) and countering their ability to influence public debate. This meant the FBI systematically identifying subversives based on “ideological and associational criteria.”36

It also opened the door to the burgeoning counter-subversion practices that the bureau would launch over the following decades. Already during World War II, the FBI was collecting detailed files on suspected communists while Black organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Nation of Islam were also surveillance targets.37

At the end of the Second World War, the United States emerged as one of two superpowers on the world stage. Pushing back against the isolationists, Cold War liberals made the case for the establishment of a permanent national security state. According to historian Paul Hogan, the national security mindset that emerged involved

a conviction that a new era of total war had dawned on the United States. In total war, the battle was not confined to the front lines but extended to the home front as well, as did the awesome destruction that modern weapons could inflict not only on military combatants but also on industry, urban centers, and civilian populations. Modern war was total war in this sense that modern armies depended on the output of citizen soldiers in farms and factories behind the battle line. In total war all of the nation’s resources and all of its energy and talent had to be mobilized on behalf of the war effort, thereby obliterating the old distinction between civilian and military, between citizen and soldier, between home front and the front line. When American leaders talked about total war they did so in these terms and also in terms that recognized that modern weapons could bring massive destruction from great distances with barely a moment’s notice. In the new age, American leaders would no longer have the time to debate the issue of war or peace or to prepare at a slow pace.38

This was an updating and reworking of the settler-colonial mentality, with the notion of Manifest Destiny being explicitly drawn on in making the case for an exceptional American empire. The notion of the “citizen-soldier” was built upon earlier settler-colonial racialized security narratives. However, American exceptionalism, as it emerged in this period, was based on the premise that the United States was not only unique among other nations and therefore destined to play a leading global role, but also a nation built upon liberal principles. This meant that the centrality of whiteness to the security narrative was muted and less prominent. Even though the white middle-class home was cast as the locus of a privatized notion of self-defense and military preparedness through government civil defense policies and programs,39 the image of the US empire was one of liberalism, inclusivity, and the “melting pot.” The United States sought quite consciously to differentiate itself from past empires as it positioned itself to be one of two hegemons on the global stage. In this context, the existence of Jim Crow segregation was an embarrassment for the ruling class. 

In 1947, the National Security Act was passed which entrenched “security” as a key element of the postwar order. Every aspect of life—the social, political, intellectual, and economic—was

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conceived as playing a role in national defense, and a massive security establishment was built up. The 1947 act created the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council (NSC), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The National Security Agency (NSA) was formed in 1952, conceived as an organization to carry out the gathering of “signals intelligence.” During this period, there was also the integration of corporate America, of universities, of research institutions, and of the media into the machinery of the national security state. The earlier distinctions between the citizen and soldier and between the home front and the battle front were blurred to shore up an imperial system at home and abroad.

Surveillance was central to sustaining and reproducing this system. From the 1940s to the early 1970s, FBI wiretapping and bugging operations focused on a wide range of movements, activists, and public figures. The following list of targets compiled by historian Athan Theoharis gives a flavor of the surveillance and is worth quoting in full:

Radical activists (David Dallin, Charles Malamuth, C. B. Baldwin, Frank Oppenheimer, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Helene Weigel, Berthold Viertel, Anna Seghers, Bodo Uhse, Richard Criley, Frank Wilkinson), prominent liberal and radical attorneys (Bartley Crum, Martin Popper, Thomas Corcoran, David Wahl, Benjamin Margolis, Carol King, Robert Silberstein, National Lawyers Guild, Fred Black), 

Radical labor leaders and unions (Harry Bridges; United Auto Workers; National Maritime Union; National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards; United Public Workers; United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers; Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers; International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union; CIO Maritime Committee; Congress of Industrial Organizations Council), 

Journalists (I. F. Stone, Philip Jaffe, Kate Mitchell, Mark Gayn, Leonard Lyons, William Beecher, Marvin Kalb, Henry Brandon, Hedrick Smith, Lloyd Norman, Hanson Baldwin, Inga Arvad),

Civil-rights activists and organizations (Martin Luther King, Jr.; Malcolm X; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; March on Washington Movement; Gandhi Society for Human Rights; Elijah Muhammad; Nation of Islam; Stokely Carmichael; H. Rap Brown; Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee; Alabama Peoples Education Association; Committee to Aid the Monroe Defendants; Southern Conference for Human Welfare; Black Panther Party; Universal Negro Improvement Association; African Liberation Day Committee),

The Students for a Democratic Society, Ku Klux Klan, National Committee to Abolish HUAC, Socialist Workers Party, Washington Bookstore Association, Northern California Association of Scientists, Federation of American Scientists, American Association of Scientific Workers, pre–World War II isolationists (Henry Grunewald, Ethel Brigham, John O’Brien, Lillian Moorehead, Laura Ingalls, America First, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce), and even prominent personalities (Joe Namath, Harlow Shapley, Edward Condon, Edward Prichard, Muhammad Ali, Benjamin Spock).40

In a bid to shape public opinion, the FBI also launched a mass media campaign in 1946 that released “educational materials” to cooperative journalists and legislators.

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In the late 1950s, the FBI launched its secret counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), which used provocateurs and informants to infiltrate communist groups initially, but later widened to include Puerto Rican nationalists, the student movement, the civil rights movement, and Black liberation movements. About 1,500 of the 8,500 American Communist Party members were likely FBI informants in the early 1960s. By the end of the decade, agents who had previously worked in US foreign intelligence were transferring to the burgeoning field of domestic intelligence to spy on radical movements, whether employed by the bureau, military intelligence, or the expanding red squads in local police departments.41

A key part of the FBI’s countersubversion strategy was the manipulation of political activists into committing criminal acts so that they could be arrested and prosecuted. Agents provocateurs working for the FBI initiated disruptions of meetings and demonstrations, fights between rival groups, attacks on police, and bombings. FBI agents also secretly distributed derogatory and scurrilous material to police, Congress, elected officials, other federal agencies, and the mass media.42 In an attempt to “neutralize” Martin Luther King, Jr., who, the FBI worried, might abandon his “obedience to white liberal doctrines” (as indeed he did), he was placed under intense surveillance, and attempts were made to destroy his marriage and induce his suicide. In various cities, the FBI and local police used fake letters and informants to stir up violence between rival factions and gangs to disrupt the Black Panther Party.43 In a number of cases, police departments or federal agents carried out the direct assassination of Black Panthers.44

Since 1945, the government had been running a mass spying program known as Project Shamrock, which the NSA took over in 1952. The telecommunications companies at the time handed over to the NSA all telegrams sent out of and into the United States. By the early 1970s, NSA analysts were collecting and analyzing approximately 150,000 telegrams a month. In 1967, the FBI and CIA submitted lists of names to the National Security Agency of key activists in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, hoping that the NSA would be able to find evidence of the communist conspiracy that President Lyndon Johnson thought must be causing the new militancy of the 1960s. The list included politically active public figures such as actress Jane Fonda and singer Joan Baez, as well as Martin Luther King, Jr., Eldridge Cleaver, and Abbie Hoffman. NSA officers began surveillance of these activists’ communications, using special records procedures to prevent discovery of what they knew to be an illegal program. This “watch list” program was expanded under President Nixon and named Operation Minaret; in all, the international communications of more than a thousand US citizens and organizations and more than two thousand foreign citizens were intercepted.45 Such was the proliferation of government spying in the 1960s that even such a minor law enforcement agency as the Ohio Highway Patrol ran an intelligence unit claiming to have student informers on every campus in the state.46

The vast expansion of state surveillance in the 1960s was a response to the new militancy of the movements against the imperialist war in Vietnam and for civil rights and Black liberation. Initially, security officials assumed the Civil Rights movement in the South, the campus protests, and the Black insurrections in northern cities were the result of a communist conspiracy; informants and electronic monitoring were deployed to try to identify the hidden agitators thought to be manipulating events behind the scenes. But it soon became apparent that these movements were manifestations of a new kind of politics that could not be understood according

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to the conspiratorial calculus of “front groups” and “fellow travelers”; surveillance therefore had to be widened to monitor ordinary participants, particularly in Black communities, in what was increasingly seen as a popular insurgency. Even then, the hope was that new electronic technologies would be the answer. National security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski commented in 1970 that technology would make it “possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date files, containing even personal information about the . . . behavior of the citizen, in addition to the more customary data.”47

Neoliberalism and racial securityThe expansion of the surveillance state in the twentieth century was one aspect of a wider penetration of the state into the lives of Americans. Working class struggle had somewhat unexpectedly driven this expansion: the state responded by taking on a mediating role between labor and capital, offering a measure of protection from the ravages of a market economy through Keynesian economics and the creation of a welfare state after the New Deal—albeit one that was underdeveloped compared to Western Europe. State managers sought to stabilize capitalism by imposing a degree of “rationality” on the system through regulating the economy and providing social services, all of which required a greater penetration of the state into civil society.48 In the new era of neoliberal capitalism that began in the 1970s, ruling elites sought to break this social contract, which rested on the premise that, if the working class “played by the rules,” it could see increases in wages and living conditions. From the 1970s onwards, this arrangement was undone. Alongside, there were also the beginnings of a contraction of the social wage of welfare provisions, public housing, education, and healthcare. The end result was growing inequality and a new regime of the one percent.

The state responded to the permanent joblessness, ghettoization, and stigmatization that neoliberalism produced among the poor by turning to policies of mass criminalization and incarceration. Thus, the neoliberal onslaught went hand in hand with securitization. As Loïc Wacquant writes, since the civil rights era

America has launched into a social and political experiment without precedent or equivalent in the societies of the postwar West: the gradual replacement of a (semi-) welfare state by a police and penal state for which the criminalization of marginality and the punitive containment of dispossessed categories serve as social policy at the lower end of the class and ethnic order.49

The law and order rhetoric that was used to mobilize support for this project of securitization was racially coded, associating Black protest and rebellion with fears of street crime. The possibilities of such an approach had been demonstrated in the 1968 election, when both the Republican candidate Richard Nixon and the independent segregationist George Wallace had made law and order a central theme of their campaigns. It became apparent that Republicans could cleave Southern whites away from the Democratic Party through tough-on-crime rhetoric that played on racial fears. The Southern Strategy, as it would be called, tapped into anxieties among working-class whites that the civil rights reforms of the 1960s would lead to them competing with Blacks for jobs, housing, and schools.

With the transformation of the welfare state into a security state, its embedding in everyday life was not undone but diverted to different purposes. Social services were reorganized into

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instruments of surveillance. Public aid became increasingly conditional on upholding certain behavioral norms that were to be measured and supervised by the state, implying its increasing intrusion into the lives of the poor—culminating in the “workfare” regimes of the Clinton administration.50 In this context, a new model of crime control came into being. In earlier decades, criminologists had focused on the process of rehabilitation; those who committed crimes were to be helped to return to society. While the actual implementation of this policy was uneven, by the 1970s, this model went out of fashion. In its place, a new “preventive” model of crime control became the norm, which was based on gathering information about groups to assess the “risk” they posed. Rather than wait for the perpetrator to commit a crime, risk assessment methods called for new forms of “preventive surveillance,” in which whole groups of people seen as dangerous were subject to observation, identification, and classification.51

The War on Drugs—launched by President Reagan in 1982—dramatically accelerated the process of racial securitization. Michelle Alexander notes that

At the time he declared this new war, less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the nation. This fact was no deterrent to Reagan, for the drug war from the outset had little to do with public concern about drugs and much to do with public concern about race. By waging a war on drug users and dealers, Reagan made good on his promise to crack down on the racially defined “others”—the undeserving.52

Operation Hammer, carried out by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1988, illustrates how racialized surveillance was central to the War on Drugs. It involved hundreds of officers in combat gear sweeping through the South Central area of the city over a period of several weeks, making 1,453 arrests, mostly for teenage curfew violations, disorderly conduct, and minor traffic offenses. Ninety percent were released without charge but the thousands of young Black people who were stopped and processed in mobile booking centers had their names entered onto the “gang register” database, which soon contained the details of half of the Black youths of Los Angeles. Entry to the database rested on such supposed indicators of gang membership as high-five handshakes and wearing red shoelaces. Officials compared the Black gangs they were supposedly targeting to the National Liberation Front in Vietnam and the “murderous militias of Beirut,” signaling the blurring of boundaries between civilian policing and military force, and between domestic racism and overseas imperialism.53

In the twelve years leading up to 1993, the rate of incarceration of Black Americans tripled,54 establishing the system of mass incarceration that Michelle Alexander refers to as the new Jim Crow.55 And yet those in prison were only a quarter of those subject to supervision by the criminal justice system, with its attendant mechanisms of routine surveillance and “intermediate sanctions,” such as house arrests, boot camps, intensive supervision, day reporting, community service, and electronic tagging. Criminal records databases, which are easily accessible to potential employers, now hold files on around one-third of the adult male population.56 Alice Goffman has written of the ways that mass incarceration is not just a matter of imprisonment itself but also the systems of policing and surveillance that track young Black men and label them as would-be criminals before and after their time in prison. From stops on the street to probation meetings, these systems, she says, have transformed

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poor Black neighborhoods into communities of suspects and fugitives. A climate of fear and suspicion pervades everyday life, and many residents live with the daily concern that the authorities will seize them and take them away.57

A predictable outcome of such systems of classification and criminalization is the routine racist violence carried out by police forces and the regular occurrences of police killings of Black people, such as Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014.

The mass surveillance of Muslim AmericansDiscussions of the surveillance of Muslim Americans usually begin with 9/11 and make little attempt to locate them in the longer history of racial surveillance in the United States. Yet the continuities are striking, particularly for Black Muslims, who have been seen as extremists and subject to national security monitoring since the 1940s. Already in the late 1960s, Arab American student groups involved in supporting the Palestinian national movement had come under surveillance and, in 1972, the Nixon administration issued a set of directives known as Operation Boulder that enabled the CIA and FBI to coordinate with the pro-Israel lobby in monitoring Arab activists.

By the 1980s, but especially after 9/11, a process was under way in which “Muslimness” was racialized through surveillance—another scene of the state’s production of racial subjects. Since all racisms are socially and politically constructed rather than resting on the reality of any biological “race,” it is perfectly possible for cultural markers associated with Muslimness (forms of dress, rituals, languages, etc.) to be turned into racial signifiers.58 This signification then serves to indicate a people supposedly prone to violence and terrorism, which, under the War on Terror, justifies a whole panoply of surveillance and criminalization, from arbitrary arrests, to indefinite detention, deportation, torture, solitary confinement, the use of secret evidence, and sentencing for crimes that “we” would not be jailed for, such as speech, donations to charitable organizations, and other such acts considered material support for terrorism. 

Significantly, the racial underpinnings of the War on Terror sustain not just domestic repression but foreign abuses—the war’s vast death toll in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere could not be sustained without the dehumanization of its Muslim victims. As before, racism at home goes hand in hand with empire abroad. Counterinsurgency thinking that informed the strategies used in Iraq and Afghanistan in the face of popular insurrection are also brought home to be deployed in relation to Muslim American populations. Winning “hearts and minds,” the counterinsurgency slogan first introduced by British colonialists in Malaya, and then adopted by the US military in Vietnam, reappears as the phrase that state planners invoke to prevent “extremism” among young Muslims in the United States. 

Counterinsurgency in this context means total surveillance of Muslim populations, and building law enforcement agency partnerships with “good Muslims,” those who are willing to praise US policy and become sources of information on dissenters, making life very difficult for “bad Muslims” or those who refuse (in ways reminiscent of the “good” and “bad” Indians). It is a way of ensuring that the knowledge Muslims tend to have of how US foreign policy harms the Middle East, Africa, and Asia is not shared with others. The real fear of the national security

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state is not the stereotypical Muslim fanatic but the possibility that other groups within US society might build alliances with Muslims in opposition to empire.

The various measures that the US national security system has adopted in recent years flow from an analysis of Muslim “radicalization,” which assumes that certain law-abiding activities associated with religious ideology are indicators of extremism and potential violence. Following the preventive logic discussed above, the radicalization model claims to be able to predict which individuals are not terrorists now but might be at some later date. Behavioral, cultural, and ideological signals are assumed to reveal who is at risk of turning into a terrorist at some point in the future.59 For example, in the FBI’s radicalization model, such things as growing a beard, starting to wear traditional Islamic clothing, and becoming alienated from one’s former life are listed as indicators, as is “increased activity in a pro-Muslim social group or political cause.”60 Thus, signifiers of Muslimness such as facial hair, dress, and so on are turned into markers of suspicion for a surveillance gaze that is also a racial (and gendered) gaze; it is through such routine bureaucratic mechanisms that counterterrorism practices involve the social construction of racial others.

Official acceptance of the model of radicalization implies a need for mass surveillance of Muslim populations and collection of as much data as possible on every aspect of their lives in order to try to spot the supposed warning signs that the models list. And this is exactly the approach that law enforcement agencies introduced. At the New York Police Department, for instance, the instrumentalizing of radicalization models led to the mass, warrantless surveillance of every aspect of Muslim life.

Dozens of mosques in New York and New Jersey and hundreds more “hot spots,” such as restaurants, cafés, bookshops, community organizations, and student associations were listed as potential security risks. 

Undercover officers and informants eavesdropped at these “locations of interest” to listen for radical political and religious opinions.

A NYPD “Moroccan Initiative” compiled a list of every known Moroccan taxi driver.

Muslims who changed their names to sound more traditionally American or who adopted Arabic names were investigated and catalogued in secret NYPD intelligence files.

It is clear that none of this activity was based on investigating reasonable suspicions of criminal activity. This surveillance produced no criminal leads between 2006 and 2012, and probably did not before or after.61

As of 2008, the FBI had a roster of 15,000 paid informants62 and, according to Senator Dianne Feinstein of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the bureau had 10,000 counterterrorism intelligence analysts in 2013.63 The proportion of these informants and analysts who are assigned to Muslim populations in the United States is unknown but is likely to be substantial. The kinds of infiltration and provocation tactics that had been practiced against Black radicals in the 1960s are being repeated today. What has changed are the rationales used to justify them: it is no longer the threat of Black nationalist subversion, but the threat of Muslim radicalization that is invoked. With new provisions in the Clinton administration’s 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death

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Penalty Act, the FBI can launch investigations of a suspected individual or organization simply for providing “material support” to terrorism—a vague term that could include ideological activity unrelated to any actual plot to carry out violence. While COINTELPRO violated federal laws, today similar kinds of investigation and criminalization of political dissent can be carried out legitimately in the name of countering terrorism.

For Muslim populations on the receiving end of state surveillance programs designed to prevent “radicalization,” everyday life increasingly resembles the patterns described in classic accounts of authoritarianism. There is the same sense of not knowing whom to trust and choosing one’s words with special care when discussing politics, and of the arbitrariness and unpredictability of state power.64 With the 2011 leaking of some NYPD intelligence files, individual Muslims have had the disturbing experience of seeing their names mentioned in government files, along with details of their private lives. Numerous businesses, cafés, restaurants, and mosques in New York are aware that the NYPD considers them hotspots and deploys informants to monitor them. And the recent outing of a small number of NYPD informants has meant some Muslims in New York have found that relationships they thought of as genuine friendships were actually covert attempts to gather intelligence.65

Racial security in the “post-racial” eraThe election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 was said to have ushered in a new “post-racial” era, in which racial inequalities were meant to be a thing of the past. African Americans and Muslim Americans placed their hopes in Obama, voting for him in large numbers. But in the so-called post-racial era, the security narrative of hard-working families (coded white) under threat from dangerous racial others has been as powerful as ever.

The unprecedented mass deportation of more than two million people during the Obama presidency is one form taken by this post-racial racialized securitization. Over the last two decades, the progressive criminalization of undocumented immigrants has been achieved through the building of a militarized wall between Mexico and the United States, hugely expanding the US border patrol, and programs such as Secure Communities, which enables local police departments to access immigration databases. Secure Communities was introduced in 2008 and stepped up under Obama. It has resulted in migrants being increasingly likely to be profiled, arrested, and imprisoned by local police officers, before being passed to the federal authorities for deportation. Undocumented migrants can no longer have any contact with police officers without risking such outcomes. There is an irony in the way that fears of “illegal immigration” threatening jobs and the public purse have become stand-ins for real anxieties about the neoliberal collapse of the old social contract: the measures that such fears lead to—racialization and criminalization of migrants—themselves serve to strengthen the neoliberal status quo by encouraging a precarious labor market. Capital, after all, does not want to end immigration but to profit from “a vast exploitable labor pool that exists under precarious conditions, that does not enjoy the civil, political and labor rights of citizens and that is disposable through deportation.”66

What brings together these different systems of racial oppression—mass incarceration, mass surveillance, and mass deportation—is a security logic that holds the imperial state as necessary to keeping “American families” (coded white) safe from threats abroad and at home. The ideological work of the last few decades has cultivated not only racial security fears but also an

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assumption that the security state is necessary to keep “us” safe. In this sense, security has become the new psychological wage to aid the reallocation of the welfare state’s social wage toward homeland security and to win support for empire in the age of neoliberalism. Through the notion of security, social and economic anxieties generated by the unraveling of the Keynesian social compact have been channeled toward the Black or Brown street criminal, welfare recipient, or terrorist. In addition, as Susan Faludi has argued, since 9/11, this homeland in need of security has been symbolized, above all, by the white domestic hearth of the prefeminist fifties, once again threatened by mythical frontier enemies, hidden subversives, and racial aggressors. That this idea of the homeland coincides culturally with “the denigration of capable women, the magnification of manly men, the heightened call for domesticity, the search for and sanctification of helpless girls” points to the ways it is gendered as well as racialized.67

The post-Snowden debateThe mechanisms of surveillance outlined in this essay were responses to political struggles of various kinds—from anticolonial insurgencies to slave rebellions, labor militancy to anti-imperialist agitation. Surveillance practices themselves have also often been the target of organized opposition. In the 1920s and 1970s, the surveillance state was pressured to contract in the face of public disapproval. The antiwar activists who broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971 and stole classified documents managed to expose COINTELPRO, for instance, leading to its shut down. (But those responsible for this FBI program were never brought to justice for their activities and similar techniques continued to be used later against, for example in the 1980s, the American Indian Movement, and the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador.68) Public concern about state surveillance in the 1970s led to the Church committee report on government spying and the Handschu guidelines that regulated the New York Police Department’s spying on political activities. Those concerns began to be swept aside in the 1980s with the War on Drugs and, especially, later with the War on Terror. While significant sections of the public may have consented to the security state, those who have been among its greatest victims—the radical Left, antiwar activists, racial justice and Black liberation campaigners, and opponents of US foreign policy in Latin America and the Middle East—understand its workings.

Today, we are once again in a period of revelation, concern, and debate on national security surveillance. Yet if real change is to be brought about, the racial history of surveillance will need to be fully confronted—or opposition to surveillance will once again be easily defeated by racial security narratives. The significance of the Snowden leaks is that they have laid out the depth of the NSA’s mass surveillance with the kind of proof that only an insider can have. The result has been a generalized level of alarm as people have become aware of how intrusive surveillance is in our society, but that alarm remains constrained within a public debate that is highly abstract, legalistic, and centered on the privacy rights of the white middle class.

On the one hand, most civil liberties advocates are focused on the technical details of potential legal reforms and new oversight mechanisms to safeguard privacy. Such initiatives are likely to bring little change because they fail to confront the racist and imperialist core of the surveillance system. On the other hand, most technologists believe the problem of government surveillance can be fixed simply by using better encryption tools. While encryption tools are useful in increasing the resources that a government agency would need to monitor an individual, they do

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nothing to unravel the larger surveillance apparatus. Meanwhile, executives of US tech corporations express concerns about loss of sales to foreign customers concerned about the privacy of data. In Washington and Silicon Valley, what should be a debate about basic political freedoms is simply a question of corporate profits.69

Another and perhaps deeper problem is the use of images of state surveillance that do not adequately fit the current situation—such as George Orwell’s discussion of totalitarian surveillance. Edward Snowden himself remarked that Orwell warned us of the dangers of the type of government surveillance we face today.70 Reference to Orwell’s 1984 has been widespread in the current debate; indeed, sales of the book were said to have soared following Snowden’s revelations.71 The argument that digital surveillance is a new form of Big Brother is, on one level, supported by the evidence. For those in certain targeted groups—Muslims, left-wing campaigners, radical journalists—state surveillance certainly looks Orwellian. But this level of scrutiny is not faced by the general public. The picture of surveillance today is therefore quite different from the classic images of surveillance that we find in Orwell’s 1984, which assumes an undifferentiated mass population subject to government control. What we have instead today in the United States is total surveillance, not on everyone, but on very specific groups of people, defined by their race, religion, or political ideology: people that NSA officials refer to as the “bad guys.”

In March 2014, Rick Ledgett, deputy director of the NSA, told an audience: “Contrary to some of the stuff that’s been printed, we don’t sit there and grind out metadata profiles of average people. If you’re not connected to one of those valid intelligence targets, you are not of interest to us.”72 In the national security world, “connected to” can be the basis for targeting a whole racial or political community so, even assuming the accuracy of this comment, it points to the ways that national security surveillance can draw entire communities into its web, while reassuring “average people” (code for the normative white middle class) that they are not to be troubled. In the eyes of the national security state, this average person must also express no political views critical of the status quo.

Better oversight of the sprawling national security apparatus and greater use of encryption in digital communication should be welcomed. But by themselves these are likely to do little more than reassure technologists, while racialized populations and political dissenters continue to experience massive surveillance. This is why the most effective challenges to the national security state have come not from legal reformers or technologists but from grassroots campaigning by the racialized groups most affected. In New York, the campaign against the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims has drawn its strength from building alliances with other groups affected by racial profiling: Latinos and Blacks who suffer from hugely disproportionate rates of stop and frisk. In California’s Bay Area, a campaign against a Department of Homeland Security-funded Domain Awareness Center was successful because various constituencies were able to unite on the issue, including homeless people, the poor, Muslims, and Blacks. Similarly, a demographics unit planned by the Los Angeles Police Department, which would have profiled communities on the basis of race and religion, was shut down after a campaign that united various groups defined by race and class. The lesson here is that, while the national security state aims to create fear and to divide people, activists can organize and build alliances across race lines to overcome that fear. To the extent that the national security state has targeted Occupy, the

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antiwar movement, environmental rights activists, radical journalists and campaigners, and whistleblowers, these groups have gravitated towards opposition to the national security state. But understanding the centrality of race and empire to national security surveillance means finding a basis for unity across different groups who experience similar kinds of policing: Muslim, Latino/a, Asian, Black, and white dissidents and radicals. It is on such a basis that we can see the beginnings of an effective multiracial opposition to the surveillance state and empire.

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Black State of Surveillance

Citation: Cyril, Malkia Amala. (2015). Black State of Surveillance. The Progressive. Retrieved 12/28/15 http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-state-surveillance

Cyril Article Summary: There has been a long history of using surveillance specifically against racial minorities including slave laws and Jim Crow, which both had significant surveillance components. However, this kind of racial surveillance has gone largely unnoticed. It was not until Edward Snowden released information that privileged classes were being surveilled that America began to take action on this issue.

Cyril Article Strategic Points:

The most obvious argument this article could be used to make is describing the racist character of surveillance programs. It can also be used as part of a racism advantage.

This article can also be used to argue that discussions of surveillance are too focused on privileged classes, because racialized surveillance happened for decades with largely no attention.

Full Article :

Ten years ago, on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, my mother, a former Black Panther, died from complications of sickle cell anemia. Weeks before she died, the FBI came knocking at our door, demanding that my mother testify in a secret trial proceeding against other former Panthers or face arrest. My mother, unable to walk, refused. The detectives told my mother as they left that they would be watching her. They didn’t get to do that. My mother died just two weeks later. 

My mother was not the only black person to come under the watchful eye of American law enforcement for perceived and actual dissidence. Nor is dissidence always a requirement for being subject to spying. Files obtained during a break-in at an FBI office in 1971 revealed that African Americans, J. Edger Hoover’s largest target group, didn’t have to be perceived as dissident to warrant surveillance. They just had to be black. As I write this, the same philosophy is driving the increasing adoption and use of surveillance technologies by local law enforcement agencies across the United States. 

Today, media reporting on government surveillance is laser-focused on the revelations by Edward Snowden that millions of Americans were being spied on by the NSA. Yet my mother’s visit from the FBI reminds me that, from the slave pass system to laws that deputized white civilians as enforcers of Jim Crow, black people and other people of color have lived for centuries with surveillance practices aimed at maintaining a racial hierarchy.  

It’s time for journalists to tell a new story that does not start the clock when privileged classes learn they are targets of surveillance. We need to understand that data has  historically

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been overused to repress dissidence, monitor perceived criminality, and perpetually maintain an impoverished underclass.

In an era of big data, the Internet has increased the speed and secrecy of data collection. Thanks to new surveillance technologies, law enforcement agencies are now able to collect massive amounts of indiscriminate data. Yet legal protections and policies have not caught up to this technological advance. 

Concerned advocates see mass surveillance as the problem and protecting privacy as the goal. Targeted surveillance is an obvious answer—it may be discriminatory, but it helps protect the privacy perceived as an earned privilege of the inherently innocent.

The trouble is, targeted surveillance frequently includes the indiscriminate collection of the private data of people targeted by race but not involved in any crime. 

For targeted communities, there is little to no expectation of privacy from government or corporate surveillance. 

Instead, we are watched, either as criminals or as consumers. We do not expect policies to protect us. Instead, we’ve birthed a complex and coded culture—from jazz to spoken dialects—in order to navigate a world in which spying, from AT&T and Walmart to public benefits programs and beat cops on the block, is as much a part of our built environment as the streets covered in our blood. 

In a recent address, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton made it clear: “2015 will be one of the most significant years in the history of this organization. It will be the year of technology, in which we literally will give to every member of this department technology that would’ve been unheard of even a few years ago.” 

Predictive policing, also known as “Total Information Awareness,” is described as using advanced technological tools and data analysis to “preempt” crime. It utilizes trends, patterns, sequences, and affinities found in data to make determinations about when and where crimes will occur.

This model is deceptive, however, because it presumes data inputs to be neutral. They aren’t. In a racially discriminatory criminal justice system, surveillance technologies reproduce injustice. Instead of reducing discrimination, predictive policing is a face of what author Michelle Alexander calls the “New Jim Crow”—a de facto system of separate and unequal application of laws, police practices, conviction rates, sentencing terms, and conditions of confinement that operate more as a system of social control by racial hierarchy than as crime prevention or punishment. 

In New York City, the predictive policing approach in use is “Broken Windows.” This approach to policing places an undue focus on quality of life crimes—like selling loose cigarettes, the kind of offense for which Eric Garner was choked to death. Without oversight, accountability, transparency, or rights, predictive policing is just high-tech racial profiling—indiscriminate data collection that drives discriminatory policing practices.

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As local law enforcement agencies increasingly adopt surveillance technologies, they use them in three primary ways: to listen in on specific conversations on and offline; to observe daily movements of individuals and groups; and to observe data trends. Police departments like Bratton’s aim to use sophisticated technologies to do all three.

They will use technologies like license plate readers, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation found to be disproportionately used in communities of color and communities in the process of being gentrified. 

They will use facial recognition, biometric scanning software, which the FBI has now rolled out as a national system, to be adopted by local police departments for any criminal justice purpose.

They intend to use body and dashboard cameras, which have been touted as an effective step toward accountability based on the results of one study, yet storage and archiving procedures, among many other issues, remain unclear.

They will use Stingray cellphone interceptors. According to the ACLU, Stingray technology is an invasive cellphone surveillance device that mimics cellphone towers and sends out signals to trick cellphones in the area into transmitting their locations and identifying information. When used to track a suspect’s cellphone, they also gather information about the phones of countless bystanders who happen to be nearby.

The same is true of domestic drones, which are in increasing use by U.S. law enforcement to conduct routine aerial surveillance. While drones are currently unarmed, drone manufacturers are considering arming these remote-controlled aircraft with weapons like rubber bullets, tasers, and tear gas.

They will use fusion centers. Originally designed to increase interagency collaboration for the purposes of counterterrorism, these have instead become the local arm of the intelligence community. According to Electronic Frontier Foundation, there are currently seventy-eight on record. They are the clearinghouse for increasingly used “suspicious activity reports”—described as “official documentation of observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity.” These reports and other collected data are often stored in massive databases like e-Verify and Prism. As anybody who’s ever dealt with gang databases knows, it’s almost impossible to get off a federal or state database, even when the data collected is incorrect or no longer true.

Predictive policing doesn’t just lead to racial and religious profiling—it relies on it. Just as stop and frisk legitimized an initial, unwarranted contact between police and people of color, almost 90 percent of whom turn out to be innocent of any crime, suspicious activities reporting and the dragnet approach of fusion centers target communities of color. One review of such reports collected in Los Angeles shows approximately 75 percent were of people of color.

This is the future of policing in America, and it should terrify you as much as it terrifies me. Unfortunately, it probably doesn’t, because my life is at far greater risk than the  lives of

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white Americans, especially those reporting on the issue in the media or advocating in the halls of power.

One of the most terrifying aspects of high-tech surveillance is the invisibility of those it disproportionately impacts.

The NSA and FBI have engaged local law enforcement agencies and electronic surveillance technologies to spy on Muslims living in the United States. According to FBI training materials uncovered by Wired in 2011, the bureau taught agents to treat “mainstream” Muslims as supporters of terrorism, to view charitable donations by Muslims as “a funding mechanism for combat,” and to view Islam itself as a “Death Star” that must be destroyed if terrorism is to be contained. From New York City to Chicago and beyond, local law enforcement agencies have expanded unlawful and covert racial and religious profiling against Muslims not suspected of any crime. There is no national security reason to profile all Muslims.

At the same time, almost 450,000 migrants are in detention facilities throughout the United States, including survivors of torture, asylum seekers, families with small children, and the elderly. Undocumented migrant communities enjoy few legal protections, and are therefore subject to brutal policing practices, including illegal surveillance practices. According to the Sentencing Project, of the more than 2 million people incarcerated  in the United States, more than 60 percent are racial and ethnic minorities.

But by far, the widest net is cast over black communities. Black people alone represent 40 percent of those incarcerated. More black men are incarcerated than were held in slavery in 1850, on the eve of the Civil War. Lest some misinterpret that statistic as evidence of greater criminality, a 2012 study confirms that black defendants are at least 30 percent more likely to be imprisoned than whites for the same crime.

This is not a broken system, it is a system working perfectly as intended, to the detriment of all. The NSA could not have spied on millions of cellphones if it were not already spying on black people, Muslims, and migrants.

As surveillance technologies are increasingly adopted and integrated by law enforcement agencies today, racial disparities are being made invisible by a media environment that has failed to tell the story of surveillance in the context of structural racism.

Reporters love to tell the technology story. For some, it’s a sexier read. To me, freedom from repression and racism is far sexier than the newest gadget used to reinforce racial hierarchy. As civil rights protections catch up with the technological terrain, reporting needs to catch up, too. Many journalists still focus their reporting on the technological trends and not the racial hierarchies that these trends are enforcing. 

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Everything we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.” Journalists have an obligation to tell the stories that are hidden from view.

We are living in an incredible time, when migrant activists have blocked deportation buses, and a movement for black lives has emerged, and when women, queer, and trans experiences

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have been placed right at the center. The decentralized power of the Internet makes that possible.

But the Internet also makes possible the high-tech surveillance that threatens to drive structural racism in the twenty-first century. 

We can help black lives matter by ensuring that technology is not used to cement a racial hierarchy that leaves too many people like me dead or in jail. Our communities need partners, not gatekeepers.

Together, we can change the cultural terrain that makes killing black people routine. We can counter inequality by ensuring that both the technology and the police departments that use it are democratized. We can change the story on surveillance to raise the voices of those who have been left out.

There are no voiceless people, only those that ain’t been heard yet. Let’s birth a new norm in which the technological tools of the twenty-first century create equity and justice for all—so all bodies enjoy full and equal protection, and the Jim Crow surveillance state exists no more. 

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Excerpt: The Political Life of Fungibility

Citation: Marshall, Stephen. (2012). Excerpt: The Political Life of Fungibility. Theory & Event, Volume 15, Issue 3, 2012. Project Muse.

Marshall Article Summary: Black Americans are often deemed criminal for no reason. Trayvon Martin’s death is a clear example of how a Black youth was automatically thought of as a criminal, and such thinking led to his death. So, our justice system always approach minorities as criminals with presumed guilt, such an action is dehumanizing.

Marshall Article Strategic Points:

This article can be used as impact evidence for dehumanization of minorities. This article can be used as part of a racial profiling advantage for an affirmative case. This article can make the argument that minorities, especially Black people in the context

of this article, will always be the primary targets for surveillance programs.

Full Article :

Paradigmatic of this ghastly transnational predicament is public sanction of or disinterest in black’s acute vulnerabilities to mass incarceration, homicide, police brutality, HIV infection, infant mortality, and under-education, among other things.5 The killing of Trayvon Martin bears particularly eloquent witness. Martin, an unarmed 17 year old was shot dead at intermediate range by a self-appointed neighborhood watch captain and dispatched without dignity to the morgue as a John Doe where he would lay for over 24 hours. Five hours after the shooting, Martin’s assailant would be released by the Sanford police department uncharged and under no suspicion. Presumed guilty by his shooter and the police, Martin would have been added to the staggering list of forgotten victims of violent death at the hands of law enforcement or their auxiliaries were it not for the heroic discipline, political savvy, and tireless efforts of his parents Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin and their supporters in print and electronic media. Presumed guilt constituted Martin’s peculiar vulnerability and this presumption has a political constitution.

When Zimmerman saw Martin he saw criminality, understood as the commission of crime, an intension to commit crime, an escape from prior crime, or some combination of the three. Tempting as it may be to look to the War on Drugs during the Reagan era as the seedbed for state practices of racialized surveillance, interdiction, and incarceration, both the Reagan era’s escalation of these practices and the presumption of Martin’s guilt are bound up with the criminalization of blackness that emerges in the context of US slavery. This is a history of racialization in which black agency is figured as criminality. Although the US Constitution artfully evades the word slavery and refuses express enumeration of the racial attributes of citizenship, it articulates the figure of black criminality as fundamental law and affirms practices of racialized surveillance and interdiction as civic virtue. Answering to lingering Jeffersonian questions about black humanity engendered by the 3/5 clause of Article I, Section II, Article IV defines national citizenship by setting it in an antagonistic relation to the crime of black fugitivity. Opposing the “immunities and privileges” of citizenship to the culpable derelictions of

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treason, felony, and escape from slavery, the framers yoke blackness to crime, legislate the intelligibility of black agency in the figure of the fugitive slave, and inscribe the “immunities and privileges” of citizenship as both a freedom from the presumption of criminal alterity and a duty to interdict the fugitive. Noting the fragility of constitutions and the indispensable constitutional scaffolding provided by criminal alterity and norms of interdiction, Alexis de Tocqueville writes, “the genuine sanction of political laws is to be found in the penal laws, and if the sanction is lacking, the law sooner or later loses its force.

Therefore, the man who judges the criminal is really the master of society.”6 By expressly granting blacks entitlement to “immunities and privileges” of citizenship, the 14th Amendment (1868) sought to abolish black fugitivity and dissipate the antagonism between it and US citizenship. Grand as was the effort, such a revolution proved impossible. With commercial exchange of black bodies prohibited except as punishment for crime, Historian Kali Gross notes how Northern white newspapers invent the figure of the “Colored Amazon” to allege the growing menace of black women’s criminality and “supply a new and growing commercial trade in blackness.”7 Concurrently, white southerners rehabilitate black fugitivity in the more menacing figure of the black rapist and re-found the old antagonism upon the violent hatred patriarchal societies cultivate against sexual predators who assail the women it values. At the turn of the century, southern intellectual’s leading role in propagating selective census data which reflected repressive criminalization of southern black life helped to give birth to modern crime statistics as well as make the case that northern blacks were also unfit for citizenship. As Kalil Muhammad notes, one of the crucial legacies of “race conscious laws, discriminatory punishments, and new forms of everyday surveillance” is its contribution to a “statistical rhetoric of black criminality” that operates as “a proxy for a national discourse on black inferiority.”8 When the figures of the welfare queen and drug warlord were vibrantly recirculated in the 1980s in connection with the southern strategy of the Republican Party, they neither inaugurated the criminalization of blackness nor simply revived a disreputable national tradition of racial animus. Recovering constitutional principle that posits an antagonism between the citizen and the fugitive slave, the party refashioned black fugitivity in order to restore American citizenship in the post-civil rights Era.

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Senators Push Amendments to Bar Encryption Backdoors

Citation: Bennett, Cory. (2015). Senators Push Amendments to Bar Encryption Backdoors. The Hill. Retrieved 12/29/15. http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/243725-senators-push-for-amendment-to-bar-encryption-backdoors

Bennett Article Summary: Two Senators attempted to pass an amendment to the USA Freedom Act, which was enacted in June of 2015. The amendment would have prevented the government from making companies install encryption backdoors in their software. An encryption backdoor is a part of a computer program that allows law enforcement to access information from that program.

Bennett Article Strategic Points:

This article can be used as inherency evidence for an affirmative dealing with encryption backdoors.

It can also be used in Politics Disadvantages to show that there is some Senate support for blocking encryption backdoors.

Full Article :

Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) want to amend the Senate’s surveillance reform bill so it would forbid the government from compelling companies to install access points into their encryption.  

As the Senate moves toward a final vote Tuesday on its reform bill, the USA Freedom Act, Paul and Wyden are pushing for their colleagues to vote on a slate of amendments they say would enhance the privacy provisions in the bill.

One of the main additions they want to see is a provision barring the government from requiring so-called “backdoors” in encryption — an access point known only to law enforcement.

But it appears the upper chamber will only vote on amendments offered by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Privacy groups have alleged that McConnell’s amendments will simply water down the reform bill, which the Republican leader initially opposed.

Paul has been leading the charge against extending any of the National Security Agency’s spying powers authorized under the Patriot Act. He blocked any short-term extension of the law and has repeatedly delayed votes on the reform bill, which he believes doesn’t go far enough.

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Wyden, also a vocal NSA critic, has joined Paul to press for votes on privacy-focused amendments to the USA Freedom Act.

A measure barring backdoors has been one of the most sought-after provisions among tech-savvy lawmakers and the privacy community in recent years.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers is fighting with the Obama administration over the concept.

Government officials argue that investigators need some way to legitimately access encrypted data on devices and social media platforms. Technologists and numerous lawmakers counter that any form of guaranteed access makes encryption inherently vulnerable.

Wyden and others have several times introduced the Secure Data Act, a stand-alone bill that would prohibit the government from mandating backdoors.

But the measure hasn’t seen any movement, causing lawmakers to try and tack it on to other surveillance and cyber bills.

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The NSA’s Secret Campaign to Crack Internet Security

Citation: Larson, Jeff. (2013). Revealed: The NSA’s Secret Campaign to Crack Internet Security. The New York Times & ProPublica. Retrieved 12/29/15. http://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-encryption

Larson Article Summary: The NSA has been engaging in secret computer and program hacking for the last few decades. Having invested billions of dollars to preserve its dominance in hacking technology. The NSA can also easily overcome most privacy and encryption technology.

Larson Article Strategic Points:

This article can be used as inherency evidence for an affirmative dealing with NSA hacking.

This article can be used to demonstrate the extent the NSA hacking. This article can be used as part of a privacy advantage in an affirmative case.

Full Article :

The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents.

The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.

Many users assume — or have been assured by Internet companies — that their data is safe from prying eyes, including those of the government, and the N.S.A. wants to keep it that way. The agency treats its recent successes in deciphering protected information as among its most closely guarded secrets, restricted to those cleared for a highly classified program code-named Bullrun, according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

Beginning in 2000, as encryption tools were gradually blanketing the Web, the N.S.A. invested billions of dollars in a clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop. Having lost a public battle in the 1990s to insert its own “back door” in all encryption, it set out to accomplish the same goal by stealth.

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The agency, according to the documents and interviews with industry officials, deployed custom-built, superfast computers to break codes, and began collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products. The documents do not identify which companies have participated.

The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted. And the agency used its influence as the world’s most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware and software developers around the world.

“For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies,” said a 2010 memo describing a briefing about N.S.A. accomplishments for employees of its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. “Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online. Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable.”

When the British analysts, who often work side by side with N.S.A. officers, were first told about the program, another memo said, “those not already briefed were gobsmacked!”

An intelligence budget document makes clear that the effort is still going strong. “We are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic,” the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., wrote in his budget request for the current year.

In recent months, the documents disclosed by Mr. Snowden have described the N.S.A.’s broad reach in scooping up vast amounts of communications around the world. The encryption documents now show, in striking detail, how the agency works to ensure that it is actually able to read the information it collects.

The agency’s success in defeating many of the privacy protections offered by encryption does not change the rules that prohibit the deliberate targeting of Americans’ e-mails or phone calls without a warrant. But it shows that the agency, which was sharply rebuked by a federal judge in 2011 for violating the rules and misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, cannot necessarily be restrained by privacy technology. N.S.A. rules permit the agency to store any encrypted communication, domestic or foreign, for as long as the agency is trying to decrypt it or analyze its technical features.

The N.S.A., which has specialized in code-breaking since its creation in 1952, sees that task as essential to its mission. If it cannot decipher the messages of terrorists, foreign spies and other adversaries, the United States will be at serious risk, agency officials say.

Just in recent weeks, the Obama administration has called on the intelligence agencies for details of communications by Qaeda leaders about a terrorist plot and of Syrian officials’ messages about the chemical weapons attack outside Damascus. If such communications can be hidden by unbreakable encryption, N.S.A. officials say, the agency cannot do its work.

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But some experts say the N.S.A.’s campaign to bypass and weaken communications security may have serious unintended consequences. They say the agency is working at cross-purposes with its other major mission, apart from eavesdropping: ensuring the security of American communications.

Some of the agency’s most intensive efforts have focused on the encryption in universal use in the United States, including Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, virtual private networks, or VPNs, and the protection used on fourth generation, or 4G, smartphones. Many Americans, often without realizing it, rely on such protection every time they send an e-mail, buy something online, consult with colleagues via their company’s computer network, or use a phone or a tablet on a 4G network.

For at least three years, one document says, GCHQ, almost certainly in close collaboration with the N.S.A., has been looking for ways into protected traffic of the most popular Internet companies: Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft’s Hotmail. By 2012, GCHQ had developed “new access opportunities” into Google’s systems, according to the document.

“The risk is that when you build a back door into systems, you’re not the only one to exploit it,” said Matthew D. Green, a cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University. “Those back doors could work against U.S. communications, too.”

Paul Kocher, a leading cryptographer who helped design the SSL protocol, recalled how the N.S.A. lost the heated national debate in the 1990s about inserting into all encryption a government back door called the Clipper Chip.

“And they went and did it anyway, without telling anyone,” Mr. Kocher said. He said he understood the agency’s mission but was concerned about the danger of allowing it unbridled access to private information.

“The intelligence community has worried about ‘going dark’ forever, but today they are conducting instant, total invasion of privacy with limited effort,” he said. “This is the golden age of spying.”

A Vital Capability

The documents are among more than 50,000 shared by The Guardian with The New York Times and ProPublica, the nonprofit news organization. They focus primarily on GCHQ but include thousands either from or about the N.S.A.

Intelligence officials asked The Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying that it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read. The news organizations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the article because of the value of a public debate about government actions that weaken the most powerful tools for protecting the privacy of Americans and others.

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The files show that the agency is still stymied by some encryption, as Mr. Snowden suggested in a question-and-answer session on The Guardian’s Web site in June.

“Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on,” he said, though cautioning that the N.S.A. often bypasses the encryption altogether by targeting the computers at one end or the other and grabbing text before it is encrypted or after it is decrypted.

The documents make clear that the N.S.A. considers its ability to decrypt information a vital capability, one in which it competes with China, Russia and other intelligence powers.

“In the future, superpowers will be made or broken based on the strength of their cryptanalytic programs,” a 2007 document said. “It is the price of admission for the U.S. to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace.”

The full extent of the N.S.A.’s decoding capabilities is known only to a limited group of top analysts from the so-called Five Eyes: the N.S.A. and its counterparts in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Only they are cleared for the Bullrun program, the successor to one called Manassas — both names of American Civil War battles. A parallel GCHQ counterencryption program is called Edgehill, named for the first battle of the English Civil War of the 17th century.

Unlike some classified information that can be parceled out on a strict “need to know” basis, one document makes clear that with Bullrun, “there will be NO ‘need to know.’ ”

Only a small cadre of trusted contractors were allowed to join Bullrun. It does not appear that Mr. Snowden was among them, but he nonetheless managed to obtain dozens of classified documents referring to the program’s capabilities, methods and sources.

Ties to Internet Companies

When the N.S.A. was founded, encryption was an obscure technology used mainly by diplomats and military officers. Over the last 20 years, with the rise of the Internet, it has become ubiquitous. Even novices can tell that their exchanges are being automatically encrypted when a tiny padlock appears next to the Web address on their computer screen.

Because strong encryption can be so effective, classified N.S.A. documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with Internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware.

According to an intelligence budget document leaked by Mr. Snowden, the N.S.A. spends more than $250 million a year on its Sigint Enabling Project, which “actively engages the U.S. and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs” to make them “exploitable.” Sigint is the abbreviation for signals intelligence, the technical term for electronic eavesdropping.

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By this year, the Sigint Enabling Project had found ways inside some of the encryption chips that scramble information for businesses and governments, either by working with chipmakers to insert back doors or by surreptitiously exploiting existing security flaws, according to the documents. The agency also expected to gain full unencrypted access to an unnamed major Internet phone call and text service; to a Middle Eastern Internet service; and to the communications of three foreign governments.

In one case, after the government learned that a foreign intelligence target had ordered new computer hardware, the American manufacturer agreed to insert a back door into the product before it was shipped, someone familiar with the request told The Times.

The 2013 N.S.A. budget request highlights “partnerships with major telecommunications carriers to shape the global network to benefit other collection accesses” — that is, to allow more eavesdropping.

At Microsoft, as The Guardian has reported, the N.S.A. worked with company officials to get pre-encryption access to Microsoft’s most popular services, including Outlook e-mail, Skype Internet phone calls and chats, and SkyDrive, the company’s cloud storage service.

Microsoft asserted that it had merely complied with “lawful demands” of the government, and in some cases, the collaboration was clearly coerced. Executives who refuse to comply with secret court orders can face fines or jail time.

N.S.A. documents show that the agency maintains an internal database of encryption keys for specific commercial products, called a Key Provisioning Service, which can automatically decode many messages. If the necessary key is not in the collection, a request goes to the separate Key Recovery Service, which tries to obtain it.

How keys are acquired is shrouded in secrecy, but independent cryptographers say many are probably collected by hacking into companies’ computer servers, where they are stored. To keep such methods secret, the N.S.A. shares decrypted messages with other agencies only if the keys could have been acquired through legal means. “Approval to release to non-Sigint agencies,” a GCHQ document says, “will depend on there being a proven non-Sigint method of acquiring keys.”

Simultaneously, the N.S.A. has been deliberately weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers. One goal in the agency’s 2013 budget request was to “influence policies, standards and specifications for commercial public key technologies,” the most common encryption method.

Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the United States’ encryption standards body, and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members.

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Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”

“Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor,” the memo says.

Even agency programs ostensibly intended to guard American communications are sometimes used to weaken protections. The N.S.A.’s Commercial Solutions Center, for instance, invites the makers of encryption technologies to present their products and services to the agency with the goal of improving American cybersecurity. But a top-secret N.S.A. document suggests that the agency’s hacking division uses that same program to develop and “leverage sensitive, cooperative relationships with specific industry partners” to insert vulnerabilities into Internet security products.

A Way Around

By introducing such back doors, the N.S.A. has surreptitiously accomplished what it had failed to do in the open. Two decades ago, officials grew concerned about the spread of strong encryption software like Pretty Good Privacy, or P.G.P., designed by a programmer named Phil Zimmermann. The Clinton administration fought back by proposing the Clipper Chip, which would have effectively neutered digital encryption by ensuring that the N.S.A. always had the key.

That proposal met a broad backlash from an unlikely coalition that included political opposites like Senator John Ashcroft, the Missouri Republican, and Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, as well as the televangelist Pat Robertson, Silicon Valley executives and the American Civil Liberties Union. All argued that the Clipper would kill not only the Fourth Amendment, but also America’s global edge in technology.

By 1996, the White House backed down. But soon the N.S.A. began trying to anticipate and thwart encryption tools before they became mainstream.

“Every new technology required new expertise in exploiting it, as soon as possible,” one classified document says.

Each novel encryption effort generated anxiety. When Mr. Zimmermann introduced the Zfone, an encrypted phone technology, N.S.A. analysts circulated the announcement in an e-mail titled “This can’t be good.”

But by 2006, an N.S.A. document notes, the agency had broken into communications for three foreign airlines, one travel reservation system, one foreign government’s nuclear department and another’s Internet service by cracking the virtual private networks that protected them.

By 2010, the Edgehill program, the British counterencryption effort, was unscrambling VPN traffic for 30 targets and had set a goal of an additional 300.

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But the agencies’ goal was to move away from decrypting targets’ tools one by one and instead decode, in real time, all of the information flying over the world’s fiber optic cables and through its Internet hubs, only afterward searching the decrypted material for valuable intelligence.

A 2010 document calls for “a new approach for opportunistic decryption, rather than targeted.” By that year, a Bullrun briefing document claims that the agency had developed “groundbreaking capabilities” against encrypted Web chats and phone calls. Its successes against Secure Sockets Layer and virtual private networks were gaining momentum.

But the agency was concerned that it could lose the advantage it had worked so long to gain, if the mere “fact of” decryption became widely known. “These capabilities are among the Sigint community’s most fragile, and the inadvertent disclosure of the simple ‘fact of’ could alert the adversary and result in immediate loss of the capability,” a GCHQ document outlining the Bullrun program warned.

Corporate Pushback

Since Mr. Snowden’s disclosures ignited criticism of overreach and privacy infringements by the N.S.A., American technology companies have faced scrutiny from customers and the public over what some see as too cozy a relationship with the government. In response, some companies have begun to push back against what they describe as government bullying.

Google, Yahoo and Facebook have pressed for permission to reveal more about the government’s secret requests for cooperation. One small e-mail encryption company, Lavabit, shut down rather than comply with the agency’s demands for what it considered confidential customer information; another, Silent Circle, ended its e-mail service rather than face similar demands.

In effect, facing the N.S.A.’s relentless advance, the companies surrendered.

Ladar Levison, the founder of Lavabit, wrote a public letter to his disappointed customers, offering an ominous warning. “Without Congressional action or a strong judicial precedent,” he wrote, “I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.”

Update (9/6): Statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence:

It should hardly be surprising that our intelligence agencies seek ways to counteract our adversaries’ use of encryption. Throughout history, nations have used encryption to protect their secrets, and today, terrorists, cybercriminals, human traffickers and others also use code to hide their activities. Our intelligence community would not be doing its job if we did not try to counter that.

While the specifics of how our intelligence agencies carry out this cryptanalytic mission have been kept secret, the fact that NSA’s mission includes deciphering enciphered communications is not a secret, and is not news. Indeed, NSA’s public website states that its mission includes

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leading “the U.S. Government in cryptology … in order to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies.”

The stories published yesterday, however, reveal specific and classified details about how we conduct this critical intelligence activity. Anything that yesterday’s disclosures add to the ongoing public debate is outweighed by the road map they give to our adversaries about the specific techniques we are using to try to intercept their communications in our attempts to keep America and our allies safe and to provide our leaders with the information they need to make difficult and critical national security decisions.

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Stop the Hysteria Over Apple Encryption

Citation: Schneier, Bruce. (2014). Stop the Hysteria Over Apple Encryption. CNN. Retrieved 12/29/15. https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2014/10/stop_the_hysteria_ov.html

Schneier Article Summary: Apple products, especially the iPhone, had an “encryption backdoor.” This backdoor allowed the government to access people’s data stored in an iPhone. When Apple finally decided to close the “backdoor” the government warned that doing so what hurt their ability to catch criminals and monitor criminal behavior. The author argues that this line of reasoning makes no sense because the same “backdoors” used by government agencies can also be used by criminals. So, allowing encryption backdoors to exist in the iPhone makes the iPhone a target for criminal activity and hacking.

Schneier Article Strategic Points:

This article can be used to answer arguments like the Crime Disadvantage and Terrorism Disadvantage, because allowing backdoors to remain open means they can be exploited by criminals and terrorist organizations.

This article can be used as part of an affirmative advantage that says curbing surveillance may actually curb crime as well.

Full Article :

Last week Apple announced that it is closing a serious security vulnerability in the iPhone. It used to be that the phone's encryption only protected a small amount of the data, and Apple had the ability to bypass security on the rest of it.

From now on, all the phone's data is protected. It can no longer be accessed by criminals, governments, or rogue employees. Access to it can no longer be demanded by totalitarian governments. A user's iPhone data is now more secure .

To hear U.S. law enforcement respond, you'd think Apple's move heralded an unstoppable crime wave. See, the FBI had been using that vulnerability to get into peoples' iPhones. In the words of cyberlaw professor Orin Kerr, "How is the public interest served by a policy that only thwarts lawful search warrants?"

Ah, but that's the thing: You can't build a "back door" that only the good guys can walk through. Encryption protects against cybercriminals, industrial competitors, the Chinese secret police and the FBI. You're either vulnerable to eavesdropping by any of them, or you're secure from eavesdropping from all of them.

Back-door access built for the good guys is routinely used by the bad guys. In 2005, some unknown group surreptitiously used the lawful-intercept capabilities built into the Greek cell phone system. The same thing happened in Italy in 2006.

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In 2010, Chinese hackers subverted an intercept system Google had put into Gmail to comply with U.S. government surveillance requests. Back doors in our cell phone system are currently being exploited by the FBI and unknown others.

This doesn't stop the FBI and Justice Department from pumping up the fear. Attorney General Eric Holder threatened us with kidnappers and sexual predators .

The former head of the FBI's criminal investigative division went even further, conjuring up kidnappers who are also sexual predators. And, of course, terrorists.

FBI Director James Comey claimed that Apple's move allows people to "place themselves beyond the law" and also invoked that now overworked "child kidnapper." John J. Escalante, chief of detectives for the Chicago police department now holds the title of most hysterical: "Apple will become the phone of choice for the pedophile."

It's all bluster. Of the 3,576 major offenses for which warrants were granted for communications interception in 2013, exactly one involved kidnapping. And, more importantly, there's no evidence that encryption hampers criminal investigations in any serious way. In 2013, encryption foiled the police nine times, up from four in 2012—and the investigations proceeded in some other way.

This is why the FBI's scare stories tend to wither after public scrutiny. A former FBI assistant director wrote about a kidnapped man who would never have been found without the ability of the FBI to decrypt an iPhone, only to retract the point hours later because it wasn't true.

We've seen this game before. During the crypto wars of the 1990s, FBI Director Louis Freeh and others would repeatedly use the example of mobster John Gotti to illustrate why the ability to tap telephones was so vital. But the Gotti evidence was collected using a room bug, not a telephone tap. And those same scary criminal tropes were trotted out then, too. Back then we called them the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse : pedophiles, kidnappers, drug dealers, and terrorists. Nothing has changed.

Strong encryption has been around for years. Both Apple's FileVault and Microsoft's BitLocker encrypt the data on computer hard drives. PGP encrypts email. Off-the-Record encrypts chat sessions. HTTPS Everywhere encrypts your browsing. Android phones already come with encryption built-in. There are literally thousands of encryption products without back doors for sale, and some have been around for decades. Even if the U.S. bans the stuff, foreign companies will corner the market because many of us have legitimate needs for security.

Law enforcement has been complaining about "going dark" for decades now. In the 1990s, they convinced Congress to pass a law requiring phone companies to ensure that phone calls would remain tappable even as they became digital. They tried and failed to ban strong encryption and mandate back doors for their use. The FBI tried and failed again to ban strong encryption in 2010. Now, in the post-Snowden era, they're about to try again.

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We need to fight this. Strong encryption protects us from a panoply of threats. It protects us from hackers and criminals. It protects our businesses from competitors and foreign spies. It protects people in totalitarian governments from arrest and detention. This isn't just me talking: The FBI also recommends you encrypt your data for security.

As for law enforcement? The recent decades have given them an unprecedented ability to put us under surveillance and access our data. Our cell phones provide them with a detailed history of our movements. Our call records, email history, buddy lists, and Facebook pages tell them who we associate with. The hundreds of companies that track us on the Internet tell them what we're thinking about. Ubiquitous cameras capture our faces everywhere. And most of us back up our iPhone data on iCloud, which the FBI can still get a warrant for. It truly is the golden age of surveillance.

After considering the issue, Orin Kerr rethought his position, looking at this in terms of a technological-legal trade-off. I think he's right.

Given everything that has made it easier for governments and others to intrude on our private lives, we need both technological security and legal restrictions to restore the traditional balance between government access and our security/privacy. More companies should follow Apple's lead and make encryption the easy-to-use default. And let's wait for some actual evidence of harm before we acquiesce to police demands for reduced security.

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Major Cyber Attack Will Cause Significant Loss of Life by 2025

Citation: Tucker, Patrick. (2014). Major Cyber Attack Will Cause Significant Loss of Life by 2025, Experts Predict. Defense One. Retrieved 12/29/15. http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2014/10/cyber-attack-will-cause-significant-loss-life-2025-experts-predict/97688/

Tucker Article Summary: Threats of cyber-attacks on the United States are often overly hyped. However, we do have very real vulnerabilities in our electronic infrastructure such as sewage, electricity, and city street lights. Attacks on our infrastructure can cause significant property damage. Some of our biggest issues is the growing number of cyber vulnerabilities not being fixed, and the fact that the country lacks a coordinated comprehensive cyber security policy. Nonetheless the threat of cyber-attacks may be larger than the actual risk.

Tucker Article Strategic Points:

This article is interesting in that in can be used as both impact evidence because of our cyber vulnerabilities, but also an answer to impact arguments because threat of cyber-attacks are overhyped.

This article can be used as part of an affirmative solvency to show how better and more coordinated policies are needed for safety.

Full Article :

A major cyber attack will happen between now and 2025 and it will be large enough to cause “significant loss of life or property losses/damage/theft at the levels of tens of billions of dollars,” according to more than 60 percent of technology experts interviewed by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

But other experts interviewed for the project “Digital Life in 2015,” released Wednesday, said the current preoccupation with cyber conflict is product of software merchants looking to hype public anxiety against an eternally unconquerable threat.

It’s the old phantom of the “cyber Pearl Harbor,” a concept commonly credited to former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta but that is actually as old as the world wide web. It dates back to security expert Winn Schwartau’s testimony to Congress in 1991, when he warned of an “electronic Pearl Harbor” and said it was “waiting to occur.” More than two decades later, we’re still waiting. The Pew report offers, if nothing else, an opportunity to look at how the cyber landscape has changed and how it will continue to evolve between now and 2025.

Potential Infrastructure Vulnerabilities

A key concern for many of the experts Pew interviewed is infrastructure, where very real cyber vulnerabilities do exist and are growing. Stewart Baker, former general counsel for the National Security Agency and a partner at Washington, D.C.-based law firm Steptoe & Johnson told Pew,

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“Cyberwar just plain makes sense. Attacking the power grid or other industrial control systems is asymmetrical and deniable and devilishly effective. Plus, it gets easier every year. We used to worry about Russia and China taking down our infrastructure. Now we have to worry about Iran and Syria and North Korea. Next up: Hezbollah and Anonymous.”

Jeremy Epstein, a senior computer scientist working with the National Science Foundation as program director for Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace, said, “Damages in the billions will occur to manufacturing and/or utilities but because it ramps up slowly, it will be accepted as just another cost  (probably passed on to taxpayers through government rebuilding subsidies and/or environmental damage), and there will be little motivation for the private sector to defend itself.”

Today, cities around the world use supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems to manage water, sewage, electricity, and even traffic lights. Last October, researchers Chris Sistrunk and Adam Crain found that these systems suffer from 25 different security vulnerabilities. And it’s not unusual for them to have the same security passwords that came direct from the manufacturer. As writers Indu B. Singh and Joseph N. Pelton pointed out in The Futurist magazine , the failure to take even the most basic security precautions leaves these systems open to remote hacking.

Its one reason why many security watchers were hopeful that the Obama administration’s Cybersecurity Framework, released earlier this year, would force companies that preside over infrastructure components to take these precautions, but many in the technology community were disappointed that the guidelines did not include hard mandates for major operators to fix potential security flaws.

We used to worry about Russia and China taking down our infrastructure. Now we have to worry about Iran and Syria and North Korea. Next up: Hezbollah and Anonymous.

But some political leaders say that the response from industry to cyber threats has outpaced that of government. Just ask Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who said that private businesses were increasingly asking government to defend them from cyber attacks from other nation state actors, and even launch first strikes against those nations. “Most of the offensive talk is from the private sector, they say we’ve had enough,” Rogers said at a recent Washington Post cyber security summit.

It’s worth noting that the Pew survey was made public one day after the group FireEye released a major report stating that a Russian-government affiliated group was responsible for hacking into the servers of a firm keeping classified U.S. military data. In his remarks at the summit, Rogers singled out Russia as a prime target for future, U.S.-lead cyber operations.

But SCADA vulnerabilities look quaint compared to the exploitable security gaps that will persist across the Internet of Things as more infrastructure components are linked together. “Current threats include economic transactions, power grid, and air traffic control. This will expand to include others such as self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, and building infrastructure,” said Mark Nall, a program manager for NASA [emphasis added].

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Other experts told Pew that military contractors, facing declining business for missiles and tanks, have purposefully overblown the threats posed by cyber attacks to scare up an enemy for the nation to arm against.

“…This concern seems exaggerated by the political and commercial interests that benefit from us directing massive resources to those who offer themselves as our protectors. It is also exaggerated by the media because it is a dramatic story,” said Joseph Guardin, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. “It is clear our leaders are powerless to rein in the military-industrial-intelligence complex, whose interests are served by having us fearful of cyber attacks. Obviously there will be some theft and perhaps someone can exaggerate it to claim tens of billions in losses, but I don’t expect anything dramatic and certainly don’t want to live in fear of it.”

Guardin, (remember, he does work for Microsoft) is joined by other experts who agree that future cyber attacks will resemble those of today: big headlines to little real effect. Data and intellectual property theft will happen, possibly causing inconvenience for consumers and revenue loss for corporations, but the digital apocalypse is not nigh.

“There will have been major cyber attacks, but they are less likely to have caused widespread harm. They will be stealth attacks to extract information and exploit it for commercial and political gain. Harm to an enemy is only a desire of less sophisticated individuals. Anyone who amasses the ability to mount a major cyber attack, better than their opponent, also doesn’t want to lose their position of advantage. They are likely to shift to strategies of gain for their own position, rather than explicit harm to their victim, which would alert their victim and close off their channels of attack, and set back their advantageous position,” said Bob Briscoe, chief researcher in networking and infrastructure for British Telecom.

Still others, such as lead researcher for GigaOM Research Stowe Boyd, said that the growing cyber capabilities of states like China almost promise bigger cyber attacks of growing international importance. 

“A bellicose China might ‘cyber invade’ the military capabilities of Japan and South Korea as part of the conflict around the China sea, leading to the need to reconfigure their electronics, at huge cost. Israel and the United States have already created the Stuxnet computer worm to damage Iran’s nuclear refinement centrifuges, for example. Imagine a world dependent on robotic farm vehicles, delivery drones, and AI-managed transport, and how one country might opt to disrupt the spring harvest as a means to damage a neighboring opponent,” Boyd said.

There will have been major cyber attacks, but they are less likely to have caused widespread harm.Bob Briscoe,Chief researcher in networking and infrastructure, British Telecom

However real or overblown the threat, the military is rapidly ramping up protective measures. Many of which are also in line with what experts in the Pew report predicted.

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Cyber-Security’s Future: Battle of the Botnets

What are some of the tools we will use to defend networks and individuals from future cyber boogie men? Nall looks to ever-smarter, more self-directed cyber defense software systems. “In addition to current methods for thwarting opponents, growing use of strong artificial intelligence to monitor and diagnose itself, and other systems will help as well.”

Vint Cerf, a research pioneer who was instrumental in the creation of the Internet, notes that “systems that observe their own behavior and the behavior of users may be able to detect anomalies and attacks. There may well be some serious damage in the financial sector especially.”

Roboticized cyber-defense is a project that the military is already pursuing through the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency’s Cyber Grand Challenge, a capture-the-flag style competition to develop “automated security systems,” to defend core cyber assets, in other words— programs that detect and respond to threats with minimal human intervention.

“I hope you start to see automated cyber-defense systems that become commercial,” DARPA director Arati Prabhakar told the crowd at the Post summit. “A lot more work has to happen before we can show that it’s possible.”

The Lack of a Red Line on Cyber-Threats

Regardless of what sorts of good botnets protect us from evil botnets, cyber attacks could have growing geopolitical implications. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, lamented what he perceives as a formal doctrine on when and how to launch offensive cyber operations. Inhofe, at a Senate hearing in March said:

“…I am concerned by the lack of progress by the administration in developing a policy for deterring the growing number of adversaries in cyberspace. This lack of a cyber deterrence policy and the failure to establish meaningful norms that punish bad behavior, have left us more vulnerable and at greater risk of continued cyber aggression.”

Rep. Rogers reiterated the concern that in terms of U.S. policy regarding cyber attacks, there is no firm red line. “You would be surprised at how far we are from a sound policy” to conduct offensive cyber warfare, he said recently while calling for the United States to ramp up its efforts to launch offensive cyber operations.

The next questions become what might those look like and what rules govern their scope?

The Pentagon recently made public a formerly secret, 2013 Joint Chiefs document, (JP 3-12) explaining its doctrinal approach to launching major cyber attacks against nation-state enemies. It limits potential targets to “military” but then goes on to define that broadly as “those objects whose total or partial destruction, capture, or neutralization offers a direct and concrete military advantage.”

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In theory, that designation could include corporations or even U.S. corporations, individuals that aren’t on anyone else’s target list, as well as computers or systems hijacked to launch cyber attacks by unseen third parties.

Predicting What Future Cyberwar Will Look Like

Speaking to Pentagon reporters in June, Adm. Michael Rogers, commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the NSA, offered his own projection for the future of cyberwar in the year 2025, which would look a lot like regular war with more cyber activities thrown in. Soldiers on the front lines would use cyber-weapons as readily as they use live ammunition.

“In the year 2025, I believe … Army commanders will maneuver offensive and defensive [cyber] capability much today as they maneuver ground forces,” Rogers said. “The ability to integrate cyber into a broader operational concept is going to be key. Treating cyber as something so specialized, … so unique — something that resides outside the broader operational framework — I think that is a very flawed concept.”

For evidence of that, look to the integrated Field Manual for Cyber Electromagnetic Activities, a first of its kind how-to guide that combined cyber operations with jamming and other electromagnetic activities associated more traditionally with combat operations.

Signals Intelligence, CyberWar and You

You may believe that a major cyber attack is likely to occur between now and 2025, or you may view the entire cyber menace as a scheme by security software companies. (The truth may be a mixture of both.) However, one thing that the threat of cyberwar will certainly do is increase the amount of computer, and particularly network government, surveillance to detect “anomalous behaviors,” possibly related to cyber attacks. The same recently released Pentagon paper on offensive cyber operations made a pointed mention of networks and the cloud as a potential source of signals intelligence of relevance to cyber-operators. Networks were “a primary target for signals intelligence (SIGINT), including computer network exploitation (CNE), measurement and signature intelligence, open source intelligence, and human intelligence.”

Make no mistake, signals intelligence collection means watching how individuals behave online.

As for the Pew’s 2025 date, Jason Healey, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative of the Atlantic Council, told Defense One that he considered it to be arbitrary. “We just don’t have a clue when it’s going to happen,” he said, adding that a single cyber attack on the scale of Pearl Harbor frightened him less than the prospect of a massive cyber failure, absent of malice but with real-time market implications.

“I’m less concerned about attacks and more about a shock” of the size of a major market collapse, he said and argued that pre-occupation with a “cyber  Pearl Harbor” ignores the “larger complexity” of the issue. “What do we do if one of these IT companies that’s too big to fail has a Lehman Brother’s moment? The data was there on Monday and is gone on Friday? If a major cloud provider fails, how do we get our data back?”

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While Healey was incredulous that a country like Russia would launch a cyber attack resulting in loss of life, he acknowledged that much has changed between today and 1991 when the electronic Pearl Harbor concept first emerged. And the changes are coming only more rapidly, as are potential vulnerabilities.

“The more that we plug things to the Internet, things of concrete and steel and connect them to the Internet, the more likely we are to get ourselves into the state where this will happen in 2025. The dynamic that will make that more and more true is the Internet of Things,” he said.

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Beyond the USA Freedom Act: How Surveillance Still Subverts US Competitiveness

Citation: Castro, Daniel & McQuinn, Alan. (2015). Beyond the USA Freedom Act: How Surveillance Still Subverts US Competitiveness. Informative Technology & Innovation Foundation. Retrieved 12/29/15. https://itif.org/publications/2015/06/09/beyond-usa-freedom-act-how-us-surveillance-still-subverts-us-competitiveness

Castro & McQuinn Article Summary: Foreign investors are currently discouraged from investing in American technology businesses because of concerns about government surveillance. Foreign investors, in order to protect tier own privacy, will chose to invest in companies elsewhere. This could lead to more than $35 Billion leaving the American technology industry by as early as 2016.

Castro & McQuinn Article Strategic Points:

This article can be used to answer to Spending Disadvantages or any generic spending bad arguments.

This article could be an important piece of a competitiveness, hegemony, and/or economic advantage for an affirmative case.

This article can be used to show that there is a tradeoff effect between the technology economy and security threats.

Full Article :

Almost two years ago, ITIF described how revelations about pervasive digital surveillance by the U.S. intelligence community could severely harm the competitiveness of the United States if foreign customers turned away from U.S.-made technology and services.  Since then, U.S. policymakers have failed to take sufficient action to address these surveillance concerns; in some cases, they have even fanned the flames of discontent by championing weak information security practices.  In addition, other countries have used anger over U.S. government surveillance as a cover for implementing a new wave of protectionist policies specifically targeting information technology. The combined result is a set of policies both at home and abroad that sacrifices robust competitiveness of the U.S. tech sector for vague and unconvincing promises of improved national security.

ITIF estimated in 2013 that even a modest drop in the expected foreign market share for cloud computing stemming from concerns about U.S. surveillance could cost the United States between $21.5 billion and $35 billion by 2016.  Since then, it has become clear that the U.S. tech industry as a whole, not just the cloud computing sector, has under-performed as a result of the Snowden revelations. Therefore, the economic impact of U.S. surveillance practices will likely far exceed ITIF’s initial $35 billion estimate. This report catalogues a wide range of specific examples of the economic harm that has been done to U.S. businesses. In short, foreign customers are shunning U.S. companies. The policy implication of this is clear: Now that Congress has reformed how the National Security Agency (NSA) collects bulk domestic phone

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records and allowed private firms—rather than the government—to collect and store approved data, it is time to address other controversial digital surveillance activities by the U.S. intelligence community.  

The U.S. government’s failure to reform many of the NSA’s surveillance programs has damaged the competitiveness of the U.S. tech sector and cost it a portion of the global market share.  This includes programs such as PRISM—the controversial program authorized by the FISA Amendments Act, which allows for warrantless access to private-user data on popular online services both in the United States and abroad—and Bullrun—the NSA’s program to undermine encryption standards both at home and abroad. Foreign companies have seized on these controversial policies to convince their customers that keeping data at home is safer than sending it abroad, and foreign governments have pointed to U.S. surveillance as justification for protectionist policies that require data to be kept within their national borders. In the most extreme cases, such as in China, foreign governments are using fear of digital surveillance to force companies to surrender valuable intellectual property, such as source code. 

In the short term, U.S. companies lose out on contracts, and over the long term, other countries create protectionist policies that lock U.S. businesses out of foreign markets. This not only hurts U.S. technology companies, but costs American jobs and weakens the U.S. trade balance. To reverse this trend, ITIF recommends that policymakers:

Increase transparency about U.S. surveillance activities both at home and abroad. Strengthen information security by opposing any government efforts to introduce backdoors

in software or weaken encryption. Strengthen U.S. mutual legal assistance treaties (MLATs). Work to establish international legal standards for government access to data. Complete trade agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership that ban digital protectionism,

and pressure nations that seek to erect protectionist barriers to abandon those efforts.

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NSA Spying Directly Harms Internet Companies, Silicon Valley, California…And the Entire US Economy

Citation: Washington’s Blog. (2013). NSA Spying Directly Harms Internet Companies, Silicon Valley, California…And the Entire US Economy. Retrieved 1/1/16. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/07/nsa-spying-directly-harms-internet-companies-silicon-valley-california-and-the-entire-national-economy.html

Washington’s Blog Article Summary: American technology companies are being forced to turn over information to the NSA for purposes of surveillance. However, shareholders and foreign investors are not being told that private information is being given to the NSA. This could place investors at risks and even violate privacy laws in other countries.

Washington’s Blog Strategic Points:

This article can be used to show that the global market is losing confidence in American technology companies, which can answer negative economy and hegemony arguments.

This article could be an important piece of competitiveness, hegemony, and/or economic advantage for an affirmative case.

This article can be used to show how surveillance can possibly damage relations with other countries, because their citizens are also being inadvertently surveilled by the NSA. So, this article can be used against many negative relations good arguments.

Full Article :

Mass surveillance by the NSA may directly harm the bottom of line of Internet companies, Silicon Valley, California … and the entire national economy.

Money News points out:

The company whose shares you own may be lying to you — while Uncle Sam looks the other way.

Let’s step through this. I think you will see the problem.

Fact 1: U.S. financial markets are the envy of the world because we have fair disclosure requirements, accounting standards and impartial courts. This is the foundation of shareholder value. The company may lose money, but they at least told you the truth.

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Fact 2: We now know multiple public companies, including Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG), Facebook (FB) and other, gave their user information to NSA. Forget the privacy implications for a minute. Assume for the sake of argument that everything complies with U.S. law. Even if true, the businesses may still be at risk.

Fact 3: All these companies operate globally. They get revenue from China, Japan, Russia, Germany, France and everywhere else. Did those governments consent to have their citizens monitored by the NSA? I think we can safely say no.

Politicians in Europe are especially outraged. Citizens are angry with the United States and losing faith in American brand names. Foreign companies are already using their non-American status as a competitive advantage. Some plan to redesign networks specifically to bypass U.S. companies.

By yielding to the NSA, U.S. companies likely broke laws elsewhere. They could face penalties and lose significant revenue. Right or wrong, their decisions could well have damaged the business.

Securities lawyers call this “materially adverse information” and companies are required to disclose it. But they are not. Only chief executives and a handful of technical people know when companies cooperate with the NSA. If the CEO can’t even tell his own board members he has placed the company at risk, you can bet it won’t be in the annual report.

The government also gives some executives immunity documents, according to Bloomberg. Immunity is unnecessary unless someone thinks they are breaking the law. So apparently, the regulators who ostensibly protect the public are actively helping the violators.

This is a new and different investment landscape. Public companies are hiding important facts that place their investors at risk. If you somehow find out, you will have no recourse because regulators gave the offender a “get out of jail free” card. The regulatory structure that theoretically protects you knowingly facilitates deception that may hurt you, and then silences any witnesses.

This strikes to the very heart of the U.S. financial system. Our markets have lost any legitimate claim to “full and fair disclosure.” Every prospectus, quarterly report and news

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release now includes an unwritten NSA asterisk. Whenever a CEO speaks, we must assume his fingers are crossed.

Every individual investor or money manager now has a new risk factor to consider. Every disclosure by every company is in doubt. The rule of law that gave us the most-trusted markets in the world may be just an illusion.

In a subsequent article, Money News wrote:

Executives at publicly traded companies are lying to shareholders and probably their own boards of directors. They are exposing your investments to real, material, hard-dollar losses and not telling you.

The government that allegedly protects you, Mr. Small Investor, knows all this and actually encourages more of it.

Who lies? Ah, there’s the problem. We don’t know. Some people high in the government know. The CEOs themselves and a few of their tech people know. You and I don’t get to know. We just provide the money.

Since we don’t know which CEOs are government-approved liars, the prudent course is to assume all CEOs are government-approved liars. We can no longer give anyone the benefit of the doubt.

If you are a money manager with a fiduciary responsibility to your investors, you are hereby on notice. A CEO may sign those Securities and Exchange Commission filings where you get corporate information with his fingers crossed. Your clients pay you to know the facts and make good decisions. You’re losing that ability.

For example, consider a certain U.S. telecommunications giant with worldwide operations. It connects American businesses with customers everywhere. Fast-growing emerging markets like Brazil are very important to its future growth.

Thanks to data-sharing agreements with various phone providers in Brazil, this company has deep access to local phone calls. One day someone from NSA calls up the CEO and asks to tap into that stream. He says OK, tells his engineers to do it and moves on.

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A few years later, Edward Snowden informs Brazilian media that U.S. intelligence is capturing these data. They tell the Brazilian public. It is not happy. Nor are its politicians, who are already on edge for entirely unrelated reasons.

What would you say are this company’s prospects for future business in Brazil? Your choices are “slim” and “none.” They won’t be the only ones hurt. If the U.S. government won’t identify which American company cheated its Brazilian partners, Brazil will just blame all of them. The company can kiss those growth plans good-bye.

This isn’t a fantasy. It is happening right now. The legality of cooperating with the NSA within the United States is irrelevant. Immunity letters in the United States do not protect the company from liability elsewhere.

Shouldn’t shareholders get to know when their company’s CEO takes these risks? Shouldn’t the directors who hire the CEO have a say in the matter? Yes, they should. We now know that they don’t.

The trust that forms the bedrock under U.S. financial markets is crumbling. [A theme we frequently explore. ] If we cannot believe CEOs when they swear to tell the truth, if companies can hide material risks, if boards cannot know what the executives they hire are actually doing, any pretense of “fair markets” is gone.

When nothing is private, people and businesses soon cease to trust each other. Without trust, modern financial markets cannot function properly.

If U.S. disclosure standards are no better than those in the third world, then every domestic stock is overvalued. Our “rule of law” premium is gone.

This means a change for stock valuations — and it won’t be bullish.

CNN reports:

Officials throughout Europe, most notably French President Francois Hollande, said that NSA spying threatens trade talks.

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For the Internet companies named in reports on NSA surveillance, their bottom line is at risk because European markets are crucial for them. It is too early assess the impact on them, but the stakes are clearly huge. For example, Facebook has about 261 million active monthly European users, compared with about 195 million in the U.S. and Canada, and 22% of Apple’s net income came from Europe in the first quarter of 2013.

In June 2011, Microsoft admitted that the United States could bypass EU privacy regulations to get vast amounts of cloud data from their European customers. Six months later, BAE Systems, based in the United Kingdom, stopped using the company’s cloud services because of this issue.

The NSA scandal has brought tensions over spying to a boil. German prosecutors may open a criminal investigation into NSA spying. On July 3, Germany’s interior minister said that people should stop using companies like Google and Facebook if they fear the U.S. is intercepting their data. On July 4, the European Parliament condemned spying on Europeans and ordered an investigation into mass surveillance. The same day, Neelie Kroes, the EU’s chief telecom and Internet official, warned of “multi-billion euro consequences for American companies” because of U.S. spying in the cloud.

Transparency is an important first step. Its absence only exacerbates a trust deficit that companies already had in Europe. And trust is crucial. Google’s chief legal officer recognized this on June 19 when he said, “Our business depends on the trust of our users,” during a Web chat about the NSA scandal. Some companies have been aggressive in trying to disclose more, and others have not. But unless the U.S. government loosens strictures and allows greater disclosure, all U.S. companies are likely to suffer the backlash.

The Obama administration needs to recognize and mitigate the serious economic risks of spying while trying to rebuild its credibility on Internet freedom. The July 9 hearing of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is a start, but much more is needed. More disclosure about the surveillance programs, more oversight, better laws, and a process to work with allied governments to increase privacy protections would be a start.

The European customers of Internet companies are not all al Qaeda or criminals, but that is essentially how U.S. surveillance efforts treat them. If this isn’t fixed, this may be the beginning of a very costly battle pitting U.S. surveillance against European business, trade, and human rights.

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The Atlantic notes:

Most communications flow over the Internet and a very large percentage of key Internet infrastructure is in the United States. Thus, foreigners’ communications are much more likely to pass through U.S. facilities even when no U.S. person is a party to a particular message. Think about a foreigner using Gmail, or Facebook, or Twitter — billions of these communications originate elsewhere in the world but pass through, and are stored on, servers located in the U.S.

Foreigners … comprise a growing majority of any global company’s customers.

From the perspective of many foreign individuals and governments, global Internet companies headquartered in the U.S. are a security and privacy risk. And that means foreign governments offended by U.S. snooping are already looking for ways to make sure their citizens’ data never reaches the U.S. without privacy concessions. We can see the beginnings of this effort in the statement by the vice president of the European Commission, Viviane Reding, who called in her June 20 op-ed in the New York Times for new EU data protection rules to “ensure that E.U. citizens’ data are transferred to non-European law enforcement authorities only in situations that are well defined, exceptional and subject to judicial review.” While we cheer these limits on government access, the spying scandal also puts the U.S. government and American companies at a disadvantage in ongoing discussions with the EU about upcoming changes to its law enforcement and consumer-privacy-focused data directives, negotiations critical to the Internet industry’s ongoing operations in Europe.

Even more troubling, some European activists are calling for data-storage rules to thwart the U.S. government’s surveillance advantage. The best way to keep the American government from snooping is to have foreigners’ data stored locally so that local governments – and not U.S. spy agencies — get to say when and how that data may be used. And that means nations will force U.S.-based Internet giants like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, to store their user data in-country, or will redirect users to domestic businesses that are not so easily bent to the American government’s wishes.

So the first unintended consequence of mass NSA surveillance may be to diminish the power and profitability of the U.S. Internet economy. America invented the Internet, and our Internet companies are dominant around the world. The U.S. government, in its rush to spy on everybody, may end up killing our most productive golden goose.

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(Internet companies comprise the most vibrant sector of our economy.)

San Diego Union-Tribune writes:

California and its businesses have a problem. It’s called the National Security Agency.

The problem for California is not that the feds are collecting all of our communications. It is that the feds are (totally unapologetically) doing the same to foreigners, especially in communications with the U.S. California depends for its livelihood on people overseas — as customers, trade partners, as sources of talent. Our leading industries — shipping, tourism, technology, and entertainment — could not survive, much less prosper, without the trust and goodwill of foreigners. We are home to two of the world’s busiest container ports, and we are a leading exporter of engineering, architectural, design, financial, insurance, legal, and educational services. All of our signature companies — Apple, Google, Facebook, Oracle, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Chevron, Disney — rely on sales and growth overseas. And our families and workplaces are full of foreigners; more than one in four of us were born abroad, and more than 50 countries have diaspora populations in California of more than 10,000.

News that our government is collecting our foreign friends’ phone records, emails, video chats, online conversations, photos, and even stored data, tarnishes the California and American brands.

Will tourists balk at visiting us because they fear U.S. monitoring? Will overseas business owners think twice about trading with us because they fear that their communications might be intercepted and used for commercial gain by American competitors? Most chilling of all: Will foreigners stop using the products and services of California technology and media companies — Facebook, Google, Skype, and Apple among them — that have been accomplices (they say unwillingly) to the federal surveillance?

The answer to that last question: Yes. It’s already happening. Asian governments and businesses are now moving their employees and systems off Google’s Gmail and other U.S.-based systems, according to Asian news reports. German prosecutors are investigating some of the American surveillance. The issue is becoming a stumbling block in negotiations with the European Union over a new trade agreement. Technology experts are warning of a big loss of foreign business.

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John Dvorak, the PCMag.com columnist, wrote recently, “Our companies have billions and billions of dollars in overseas sales and none of the American companies can guarantee security from American spies. Does anyone but me think this is a problem for commerce?”

It doesn’t help when our own U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is backing the surveillance without acknowledgment of the huge potential costs to her state.

It’s time for her and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who has been nearly as tone-deaf on this issue, to be forcefully reminded that protecting California industry, and the culture of openness and trust that is so vital to it, is at least as important as protecting massive government data-mining. Such reminders should take the force not merely of public statements but of law.

California has a robust history of going its own way — on vehicle standards, energy efficiency, immigration, marijuana. Now is the time for another departure — this one on the privacy of communications.

We need laws, perhaps even a state constitutional amendment, to make plain that California considers the personal data and communications of all people, be they American or foreign, to be private and worthy of protection.

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Bipartisan Secure Data Act Has Votes to Pass House, But Will Lawmakers Drag Their Feet?

Citation: Wicklander, Carl. (2015). Bipartisan Secure Data Act Has Votes to Pass House, But Will Lawmakers Drag Their Feet? Independent Voter Network. Retrieved 1/1/16. http://ivn.us/2015/02/09/bipartisan-secure-data-act-votes-pass-house-will-lawmakers-drag-feet/

Wicklander Article Summary: In the House of Representatives there has been some adequate support to pass the Secure Data Act. The Secure Data Act would give Congress more power to oversee on-line bulk data collection carried out by federal intelligence agencies. However, despite bipartisan support the act has still not been enacted, and the final version has been watered down.

Wicklander Article Strategic Points:

This article could be used as part of a solvency contention to explain how the Secure Data Act or similar legislation needs to be passed.

This article can also be used to answer solvency contentions by explaining how an ineffective Congress does not pass needed legislation. Furthermore, this article argues that this kind of legislation is always watered down to such an extent that I would not be useful.

Full Article:

Last week, a bipartisan group of legislators introduced a bill intended to protect Americans’ privacy and online data.

In a press release, U.S. Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) announced that the purpose of the Secure Data Act of 2015 is not to restrict the ability of intelligence agencies to collect data in general. However, they do intend to re-assert the role of Congress in regulating these activities:

“Congress has allowed the Administration’s surveillance authorities to go unchecked by failing to enact adequate reform. . . . With threats to our homeland ever prevalent, we should not tie the hands of the intelligence community. But unwarranted, backdoor surveillance is indefensible. The Secure Data Act is an important step in rebuilding public trust in our intelligence agencies and striking the appropriate balance between national security and civil liberty.”

The bill is an attempt to specifically guard against backdoor searches, including those where “identifiers” such as phone numbers and e-mail addresses known to belong to Americans are employed to conduct the searches. For years, privacy advocates have denounced these types of searches as a way to skirt the law.

According to the Register, a UK-based tech site, “Under the proposed Secure Data Act, developers cannot be forced to insert security holes into devices and code.” An ACLU lawyer quoted in the story said that the previous bill’s success might indicate “that at least in the House they know how important it is to secure encryption efforts.”

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Massie, Lofgren, and Sensenbrenner tried to pass a similar version of the Secure Data Act near the end of the 113th Congress. The legislation passed with broad support, 293-123, but was not included in the omnibus bill that passed at the end of the session.

A Senate version of the Secure Data Act was introduced by Oregon U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D) in January. His bill is still waiting to move through the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

Regaining the people’s trust may be one of the harder obstacles when it comes to regulations on spying and surveillance. Polls have consistently shown that Americans do not approve of the current methods of surveillance and data collection.

Previous bills have passed Congress seeking to limit the power and authority of agencies like the National Security Agency. However, the final products were severely watered down versions of the initial legislation. Even extensively supported bills such as the previous Secure Data Act failed to get anywhere in both chambers of Congress.

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The Secure Data Act Could Help Law Enforcement Protect Against Cybercrime

Citation: McQuinn, Alan. (2014). The Secure Data Act Could Help Law Enforcement Protect Against Cybercrime. The Hill. Retrieved 1/2/16. http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/227594-the-secure-data-act-could-help-law-enforcement-protect-against

McQuinn Article Summary: The Secure Data Act would protect the on-line/internet privacy of Americans in addition to elimination of “backdoors.” Currently, organizations like the FBI and NSA use encryption backdoors to access private data to track criminals. However, those backdoors weaken electronic security because they can also be accessed by hackers.

McQuinn Article Strategic Points:

This article could be used to create a solvency contention for an affirmative that wanted to pass the Secure Data Act or similar legislation.

This article can be used as an answer to the Crime Disadvantage because closing encryption backdoors would decrease, not increase, crime rates.

This article explains how passing the Secure Data Act would benefit the technology industry because they would no longer be required to introduce vulnerabilities into their technology.

Full Article:

Last Sunday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote an op-ed describing the role that U.S. law enforcement should play in fostering stronger data encryption to make information technology (IT) systems more secure.  This op-ed explains Wyden’s introduction of the Secure Data Act, which would prohibit the government from mandating that U.S. companies build “backdoors” in their products for the purpose of surveillance. This legislation responds directly to recent comments by U.S. officials, most notably the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey, chastising Apple and Google for creating encrypted devices to which law enforcement cannot gain access. Comey and others have argued that U.S. tech companies should design a way for law enforcement officials to access consumer data stored on those devices. In this environment, the Secure Data Act is a homerun for security and privacy and is a good step towards reasserting U.S. competitiveness in building secure systems for a global market. 

By adopting its position on the issue the FBI is working against its own goal of preventing cybercrime as well as broader government efforts to improve cybersecurity. Just a few years ago, the Bureau was counseling people to better encrypt their data to safeguard it from hackers. Creating backdoor access for law enforcement fundamentally weakens IT systems because it creates a new pathway for malicious hackers, foreign governments, and other unauthorized

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parties to gain illicit access. Requiring backdoors is a step backwards for companies actively working to eliminate security vulnerabilities in their products. In this way, security is a lot like a ship at sea, the more holes you put in the system—government mandated or not—the faster it will sink. The better solution is to patch up all the holes in the system and work to prevent any new ones. Rather than decreasing security to suit its appetite for surveillance, the FBI should recognize that better security is needed to bolster U.S. defenses against online threats. 

The Secure Data Act is an important step in that direction because it will stop U.S. law enforcement agencies from requiring companies to introduce vulnerabilities in their products. If this bill is enacted, law enforcement will be forced to use other means to solve crimes, such as by using metadata from cellular providers, call records, text messages, and even old-fashioned detective work. This will also allow U.S. tech companies, with the help of law enforcement, to continue to strengthen their systems, better detect intrusions, and identify emerging threats. Law enforcement, such as the recently announced U.S. Department of Justice Cybersecurity Unit—a unit designed solely to “deter, investigate, and prosecute cyber criminals,” should work in cooperation with the private sector to create a safer environment online. A change of course is also necessary to restore the ability of U.S. tech companies to compete globally, where mistrust has run rampant following the revelations of mass government surveillance. 

With the 113th Congress at an end, Wyden has promised to reintroduce the Data Secure Act again in the next Congress. Congress should move expediently to advance Senator Wyden’s bill to promote security and privacy in U.S. devices and software. Furthermore, as Congress marks up the legislation and considers amendments, it should restrict not just government access to devices, but also government control of those devices. These efforts will move the efforts of our law enforcement agencies away from creating cyber vulnerabilities and allow electronics manufacturers to produce the most secure devices imaginable. 

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The Harm of Surveillance

Citation: Greenwald, Glenn. (2014). The Harm of Surveillance, No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, Published by Metropolitan Books, ISBN 9781627790734, p. 173-174

Greenwald Article Summary: When individuals are being watched they typically change their behavior to fit the expectations of whoever is watching them. Greenwald argues that government surveillance forces people to act in a certain way. Surveillance, would therefore curtail a person’s ability to choice and personal freedom. If you are always behavior the way another entity expects to behave you will never be able to forge your own path. Furthermore, surveillance may also curtail meaningful dissent and genuine challenges to power, which is negative because dissent is a part of a functioning democracy. Notable examples used against government dissenters include how civil rights activist like Martin Luther King were heavily surveilled by the FBI.

Greenwald Article Strategic Points:

This article can be used as part of a privacy and/or democracy advantage for an affirmative case.

This article can be used to generically argue that surveillance is bad, which could be used to answer any negative arguments that defend the status quo.

Full Article:

Privacy is essential to human freedom and happiness for reasons that are rarely discussed but instinctively understood by most people, as evidenced by the lengths to which they go to protect their own. To begin with, people radically change their behavior when they know they are being watched. They will strive to do that which is expected of them. They want to avoid shame and condemnation. They do so by adhering tightly to accepted social practices, by staying within imposed boundaries, avoiding action that might be seen as deviant or abnormal. The range of choices people consider when they believe that others are watching is therefore far more limited than what they might do when acting in a private realm. A denial of privacy operates to severely restrict one’s freedom of choice.

Several years ago, I attended the bat mitzvah of my best friend’s daughter. During the ceremony, the rabbi emphasized that “the central lesson” for the girl to learn was that she was “always being watched and judged.” He told her that God always knew what she was doing, every choice, every action, and even every thought, no matter how private. “You are never alone,” he said, which meant that she should always adhere to God’s will. The rabbi’s point was clear: if you can never evade the watchful eyes of a supreme authority, there is no choice but to follow the dictates that authority imposes. You cannot even consider forging your own path beyond those rules: if you believe you are always being watched and judged, you are not really a free individual. All oppressive authorities — political, religious, societal, parental — rely on this vital truth, using it as a principal tool to enforce orthodoxies, compel adherence, and quash dissent. It is in their interest to convey that nothing their subjects do will escape the knowledge of the authorities.

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A prime justification for surveillance—that it’s for the benefit of the population—relies on projecting a view of the world that divides citizens into categories of good people and bad people. In that view, the authorities use their surveillance powers only against bad people, those who are “doing something wrong,” and only they have anything to fear from the invasion of their privacy. This is an old tactic. In a 1969 Time magazine article about Americans’ growing concerns over the US government’s surveillance powers, Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, assured readers that “any citizen of the United States who is not involved in some illegal activity has nothing to fear whatsoever.” The point was made again by a White House spokesman, responding to the 2005 controversy over Bush’s illegal eavesdropping program: “This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner. These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people.” And when President Obama appeared on The Tonight Show in August 2013 and was asked by Jay Leno about NSA revelations, he said: “We don’t have a domestic spying program. What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack.” For many, the argument works. The perception that invasive surveillance is confined only to a marginalized and deserving group of those “doing wrong”—the bad people—ensures that the majority acquiesces to the abuse of power or even cheers it on. But that view radically misunderstands what goals drive all institutions of authority. “Doing something wrong,” in the eyes of such institutions, encompasses far more than illegal acts, violent behavior, and terrorist plots. It typically extends to meaningful dissent and any genuine challenge. It is the nature of authority to equate dissent with wrongdoing, or at least with a threat. The record is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and activism—Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, antiwar activists, and environmentalists. In the eyes of the government and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, they were all “doing something wrong”: political activity that threatened the prevailing order.

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Snowden Deserves An Immediate Presidential Pardon

Citation: Walt, Stephen. (2013). Snowden Deserves An Immediate Presidential Pardon. Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs. Retrieved 1/2/16. http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/23229/snowden_deserves_an_immediate_presidential_pardon.html

Walt Article Summary: Charges are possibly being brought against Edward Snowden for leaking classified data that revealed the extent of NSA bulk data collection. Walt argues that Snowden should be pardoned since he never revealed information about the NSA for his own personal gain. Due to Snowden’s leaks we now know the full scope of the NSA’s surveillance. We also know that a large number of non-criminal individuals were also being surveilled.

Walt Article Strategic Points:

This article can be used as part of an affirmative case that details the extent of NSA bulk data collection.

This article can also be used as a solvency argument for affirmatives that deal directly with Edward Snowden, such as a Pardon Snowden Affirmative or End Surveillance Against Whistleblowers Affirmative.

This article can be used to answer claims that surveillance is predominantly used against criminals and suspected terrorists, because Snowden’s revealed that surveillance was far larger in scope.

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In his second inaugural address, President Barack Obama called upon "We, the People" to preserve America's ideals of individual freedom and equality. When Edward Snowden disclosed the National Security Agency's secret surveillance programs, he was rising to this challenge. Like the nation's "founding fathers", he was also defying the usurpations of an increasingly intrusive government. Mr. Obama should therefore call off the campaign to apprehend him and offer Mr. Snowden a pardon instead.

Mr. Snowden stands accused of stealing government property and unauthorized dissemination of classified information. But he did not pass valuable secrets to a foreign government or sell them for personal gain — as convicted spies such as Aldrich Ames or Jonathan Pollard did. On the contrary, he gave up a well-paid job and put his own freedom in jeopardy for a principle.Mr. Snowden’s motives were laudable: he believed fellow citizens should know their government was conducting a secret surveillance program enormous in scope, poorly supervised and possibly unconstitutional. He was right. Thanks to Mr. Snowden, we now know that officials and private contractors have been collecting vast amounts of information about ordinary

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Americans and conducting unprecedented levels of spying on US allies. We know key officials lied on Capitol Hill about what the NSA was doing, casting doubt on the quality of Congressional oversight. By going public, Mr. Snowden reminded us that secret programs undertaken in the name of national security are extremely difficult to control. NSA defenders argue that these programs only target individuals who might pose a threat. They maintain ordinary citizens whose digital records might be incriminating or embarrassing need not be concerned, because government officials will never examine their data without probable cause and judicial approval.

How naive. Under the veneer of "national security", government officials can use these vast troves of data to go after anyone, questioning what they were doing, including whistleblowers, investigative journalists or ordinary citizens posting comments on news websites. Once a secret surveillance system exists, it is only a matter of time before someone abuses it for selfish ends. Richard Nixon kept his own "enemies list" and used the Central Intelligence Agency to spy on American citizens. Former Federal Bureau of Investigation director J Edgar Hoover helped keep himself in office by collecting dirt on officials. Fear of exposure threatens to stifle the dissent and debate that is essential to healthy democracy. Governments already classify much of what officialdom is doing and selectively leak information to influence public opinion, so citizens must rely on journalists, academics and principled individuals such as Mr. Snowden to find out what our "public servants" aren't telling us. But if critical voices are cowed by the possibility that their personal lives will be revealed, those in power will be harder to monitor and policy errors will go uncorrected.

Pardoning Mr. Snowden would surely provoke howls of protest from the intelligence community, which hopes to deter future leakers by making an example of him. But a pardon for him is unlikely to trigger a wave of imitators; how many other insiders would sacrifice their jobs and risk their freedom because Mr. Snowden got a reprieve? And if a few did follow suit and exposed government wrongdoing, society as a whole would benefit. History will probably be kinder to Mr. Snowden than to his pursuers, and his name may one day be linked to the other brave men and women — Daniel Ellsberg, Martin Luther King Jr, Mark Felt, Karen Silkwood and so on — whose acts of principled defiance are now widely admired. Ironically, less august company awaits Mr. Snowden should he join the ranks of those whom presidents have spared. Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, George HW Bush pardoned the officials who conducted the illegal Iran-Contra affair, and Mr. Obama has already pardoned several convicted embezzlers and drug dealers. Surely Mr. Snowden is as deserving of mercy as these miscreants. Pardoning

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him would also show that Mr. Obama's rhetorical commitment to "We, the People", and to open and transparent government, is not just empty words.

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“Afterword,” Homeland

Citation: Applebaum, Jacob. (2013). “Afterword,” Homeland — by Cory Doctorow. Retrieved 1/2/16. http://pastebin.com/VHBx3imj

Applebaum Article Summary: This article is more of a narrative dramatic speak about the need to move forward and disrupt injustices we see in society now. It mentions that free and open systems that help society view governments as a whole and better able to criticize, which is the key to ending over securitization and suppression of free speech.

Applebaum Article Strategic Points: This article can be used as impact or internal link evidence to say it’s important to

protect open spaces that question the government. This article can be used as impact evidence to say surveillance is tyranny.

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Everything good in the world comes from the efforts of people who came before us. Every minute that we are able to enjoy in a society that is not ruled by senseless violence is a minute given to us by the hard work of people who dedicated their lives for something better. Every person we meet is carrying his own burdens. Each person is the center of her own universe. There is so much left to be done, so many injustices to right, so much suffering to relieve, and so many beautiful moments to be lived, an endless amount of knowledge to uncover. Many secrets of the universe wait to be uncovered.

The deck from which our hands are dealt need not be stacked against us; it is possible to create societal structures that are just and capable of reasoned compassion for everyone. It is possible to change the very nature of our lives. It is possible to redesign the entire deck, to change the very face and count of the cards, to rewrite the rules and to create different outcomes. We live in the golden era of surveillance; every phone is designed to be tapped, the Internet passes through snooping equipment of agencies that are so vast and unaccountable that we hardly know their bounds. Corporations are forced (though some are willing enough!) to hand over our data and data of those whom we love. Our lives are ruled by networks and yet those networks are not ruled by our consent. These networks keep us hooked up but it is not without costs that they keep us hooked together. The businesses, the governments, and the individuals that power those networks are incentivized to spy, to betray and to do it silently. The architecture of the very systems produces these outcomes. This is tyranny.

The architecture of our systems and of our networks is not the product of nature but rather the product of imperfect humans, some with the best of intentions. There is no one naturally fit to survive in these unnatural systems, there are some who are lucky, others who have adapted. This

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letter to you, from your perhaps recent past, was written with Free Software written as a labor of love by someone who wished to help the children of Uganda while flying over an expansive ocean at difficult to understand heights, it was composed while running under a kernel written by scores of people across every national line, across every racial, sexual and gender line by a socially and politically agnostic engineer, it was sent through multiple anonymity networks built by countless volunteers acting in solidarity through mutual aid and it was received by an author who published it for a purpose. What is the common purpose of all of these people? It is for the whole of our efforts to be more than the sum of our parts -- this creates a surplus for you - to give breathing room to others, so that they may take the torch of knowledge, of reason, of justice, of truth telling, of sunlight -- to the next step, wherever it may lead us.

There was a time when there were no drone killings, societies have existed without armed policemen, where peace is not only possible but actually a steady state, where mass surveillance was technically and socially infeasible, where fair and evenhanded trials by impartial juries were available for everyone, where fear of identification and arrest was not the norm but the exception. That time was less than a generation ago and much more has been lost in the transition from one generation to the next. It's up to you to bring those things back to our planet. You can do this with little more than cooperation, the Internet, cryptography, and willingness. You might do this alone or you might do it in a group; you might contribute as a solitary person or as one of many. Writing Free Software empowers every person, without exception, to control the machines that fill our lives. Building free and open hardware empowers every person, without exception, to construct new machines to free us from being slaves to machines that control us. Using free and open systems allows us to construct a new basis by which we may once again understand as a whole, the systems by which we govern ourselves. We are on the edge of regaining our autonomy, of ending total state surveillance, of uncovering and holding accountable those who commit crimes in our names without our informed consent, of resuming free travel without arbitrary or unfair restriction. We're on the verge of ensuring that every person, not one human excluded, has the right to read and the right to speak. Without exception.

It's easy to feel hopeless in the face of the difficult issues that we face everyday -- how might one person effectively resist anything so much larger than herself? Once we stop acting alone, we have a chance for positive change. To protest is to stop and say that you object, to resist is to stop others from going along without thinking and to build alternatives is to give everyone new choices. Omission and commission are the yin and yang of personal agency.

What if you could travel back through time and help Daniel Ellsberg leak the Pentagon papers? Would you take the actions required, would you risk your life to end the war? For many it is easy to answer positively and then think nothing of the actual struggles, the real risk or the uncertainty provided without historical hindsight. For others, it's easy to say no and to think of nothing beyond oneself. But what if you didn't need to travel back through time? There are new Pentagon Papers just waiting to be leaked; there are new wars to end, new injustices to make right, fresh uncertainty that seems daunting where success seems impossible, new alternatives need to be constructed, old values and concepts of justice need to be preserved in the face of powerful people who pervert the rule of law for their own benefit. Be the trouble you want to see in the world, above nationalism, above so-called patriotism, above and beyond fear and make it count for the betterment of the planet. Legal and illegal are not the same as right and wrong -- do what

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is right and never give up the fight.

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Protest in New Terror

Citation: Royden, Derek. (2015). Protest in New Terror. Axis of Logic. Retrieved 1/2/16. http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_70908.shtml

Royden Article Summary: Historically the government has always targeted, infiltrated, and attack activist movements I found threatening. This includes surveillance against the civil rights movement and COINTELPRO operations against the Black Panthers. Today technology and surveillance overreach has made these tactics worst. There is evidence that the Black Lives Matter Movement is being targeted. The main reason for this is intelligence agencies like the NSA and FBI must constantly find new terror threats to justify their growing budgets and technology.

Royden Article Strategic Points: This article can be used to argue that intelligence agencies invent new reason to surveil

activist organizations in order to justify their existence. This article can be used as part of a democracy advantage, because government

surveillance programs have a long history of dismantling activist movements. This article can be used to make arguments about why the continued growth of

intelligence agencies is harmful.

Full Article:

It’s well established that the FBI surveilled civil rights and other activists from Martin Luther King Jr. to leaders of the National Lawyers Guild as part of its wide ranging COINTELPRO (counter intelligence program) during the 1960s and early 70s. The use of planted news stories, faked communications to create dissension within activist groups, informants to make dubious cases and even assassinations was revealed by a group of activists called the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, who broke into a bureau office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971 and found ample evidence of the agency’s misdeeds. This is generally seen as an era of terrible government overreach in the name of fighting “communism.” The problem is that the use of similar tactics has been discovered again and again in the years since.

Following the anti-globalization protests of 1999, the 9/11 attacks, and the Occupy protests of 2011, similar strategies, enhanced by modern technology, have been ratcheted up and deployed against an ever-increasing number of activists and political groups of all ideological stripes as part of the even more dubious “wars” on drugs and terrorism. Part of this is due to the fact that there simply aren't enough real threats of terrorism to justify all the money and toys that have

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been given to U.S. law enforcement. Add to this the fact that police at all levels seem eager to see potential terrorism in even the mildest forms of dissent and you have a recipe for disaster. In one of the most recent instances, it was revealed that the FBI has been coordinating with local law enforcement to target the Black Lives Matter movement. Another story, unrelated to current anti-racist organizing, is a bizarre case out of Minneapolis in the lead up to the Republican national convention in 2008. According to the City Pages, a Univ. of Minnesota police officer who was the department’s only officer on the local Joint Counter Terrorism Task Force worked with an FBI Special Agent to recruit college students who acted as paid informants at “vegan potlucks” hoping they’d discover activist plans to disrupt the city's upcoming convention. Extending the Long Arm of the Law Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), of which there are currently 104 located in cities and towns across the United States, were created in the 1980s and greatly expanded in the aftermath of 9/11.

They were set up to coordinate between diverse federal agencies and local law enforcement, and often work in tandem with “Fusion Centers” that are supposed to collect and analyze data related to potential terrorism. To see how these task forces can overstep their bounds, take the case of Eric Linsker, who police tried to arrest for allegedly trying to throw a trash can over the side of a walkway on the Brooklyn Bridge during the large, mostly peaceful protests that erupted in New York City following the failure to indict the officer whose choke-hold led to the death of Eric Garner. Other protesters intervened to stop the arrest but Linkser left his bag behind which, according to authorities, contained “his passport, three hammers, and a small amount of marijuana.” While police may have been well within their rights to track down Linsker and charge him if the vandalism allegations were true, it's who did the arresting that is problematic: rather than the NYPD, it was the New York JTTF that brought Linkser in, perhaps believing that the hammers were potential instruments of terror. This should be a cause for worry, since it means either law enforcement's definition of terrorism has become far too broad, or they are targeting more than just terrorism. Stingrays and the Dangers of Technology Activists with Occupy Wall Street, and later Black Lives Matter, have relied on social networks and technology to organize their efforts. Ubiquitous phones with video recording capacity have revealed abuses of power by law enforcement and discredited

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Why “I Have to Hide” Is The Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance

Citation: Marlinspike, Moxie. (2013). Why “I Have to Hide” Is The Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance. Wired. Retrieved 1/2/16. http://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-i-have-nothing-to-hide-is-the-wrong-way-to-think-about-surveillance/

Marlinspike Article Summary: Marlinspike argues that there are so many laws and sections of the United States Code that government itself can’t even count them all. So, as private citizens we can never be sure that we are not breaking a crime. If the government only surveils “criminals” that could technically include every person in the country.

Marlinspike Article Strategic Points:This article demonstrates how surveillance programs could technically target every person in the country.

Full Article:

Estimates of the current size of the body of federal criminal law vary. It has been reported that the Congressional Research Service cannot even count the current number of federal crimes. These laws are scattered in over 50 titles of the United States Code, encompassing roughly 27,000 pages. Worse yet, the statutory code sections often incorporate, by reference, the provisions and sanctions of administrative regulations promulgated by various regulatory agencies under congressional authorization. Estimates of how many such regulations exist are even less well settled, but the ABA thinks there are nearly 10,000. If the federal government can’t even count how many laws there are, what chance does an individual have of being certain that they are not acting in violation of one of them?

As Supreme Court Justice Breyer elaborates: The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just when a particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation. For instance, did you know that it is a federal crime to be in possession of a lobster under a certain size? It doesn’t matter if you bought it at a grocery store, if someone else gave it to you, if it’s dead or alive, if you found it after it died of natural causes, or even if you killed it while acting in self-defense. You can go to jail because of a lobster. If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or

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10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don’t know it yet.

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Turnkey Tyranny: Surveillance and the Terror State

Citation: Paglen, Trevor. (2013). Turnkey Tyranny: Surveillance and the Terror State. Creative Time Reports. 1/2/16. http://creativetimereports.org/2013/06/25/surveillance-and-the-construction-of-a-terror-state/

Paglen Article Summary: Terrorism does not pose a threat to the United States. However, a country that is in a state of terror can be a threat. Terrorism work by instilling so much fear in a society that the society begins to collapse itself. Surveillance is an example. Surveillance primarily targets religious and political minorities by scaring people away from non-mainstream thought.

Paglen Article Strategic Points: This article can be used as impact evidence This article can be used to answer and/or clarify terrorism impacts by explaining that

terrorism is a threat because of the widespread fear it causes, but not the actual damage. This article can be used as part of Terrorism Advantage

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Politicians claim that the Terror State is necessary to defend democratic institutions from the threat of terrorism. But there is a deep irony to this rhetoric. Terrorism does not pose, has never posed and never will pose an existential threat to the United States. Terrorists will never have the capacity to “take away our freedom.” Terrorist outfits have no armies with which to invade, and no means to impose martial law. They do not have their hands on supra-national power levers like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. They cannot force nations into brutal austerity programs and other forms of economic subjugation. But while terrorism cannot pose an existential threat to the United States, the institutions of a Terror State absolutely can. Indeed, their continued expansion poses a serious threat to principles of democracy and equality. At its most spectacular, terrorism works by instilling so much fear in a society that the society begins to collapse on itself. The effects of persistent mass surveillance provide one example of such disintegration. Most obviously, surveillance represents a searing breach of personal privacy, as became clear when NSA analysts passed around phone-sex recordings of overseas troops and their stateside spouses. And while surveillance inhibits the exercise of civil liberties for all, it inevitably targets racial, religious and political minorities. Witness the Department of Homeland Security’s surveillance of Occupy activists, the NYPD’s monitoring of Muslim Americans, the FBI’s ruthless entrapment of young Muslim men and the use of anti-terror statutes against environmental activists. Moreover, mass surveillance also has a deep effect on culture, encouraging conformity to a narrow range of “acceptable” ideas by frightening people away from non-mainstream thought. If the government keeps a record of every library book you read,

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you might be disinclined to check out The Anarchist Cookbook today; tomorrow you might think twice before borrowing Lenin’s Imperialism.

Looking past whatever threats may or may not exist from overseas terrorists, the next few decades will be decades of crisis. Left unchecked, systemic instability caused by growing economic inequality and impending environmental disaster will produce widespread insecurity. On the economic side, we are facing an increasingly acute crisis of capitalism and a growing disparity between the “haves” and “have-nots,” both nationally and globally. For several decades, the vast majority of economic gains have gone to the wealthiest segments of society, while the middle and working classes have seen incomes stagnate and decline. Paul Krugman has dubbed this phenomenon the “Great Divergence.”A few statistics are telling: between 1992 and 2007, the income of the 400 wealthiest people in the United States rose by 392 percent. Their tax rate fell by 37 percent. Since 1979, productivity has risen by more than 80 percent, but the median worker’s wage has only gone up by 10 percent. This is not an accident. The evisceration of the American middle and working class has everything to do with an all-out assault on unions; the rewriting of the laws governing bankruptcy, student loans, credit card debt, predatory lending and financial trading; and the transfer of public wealth to private hands through deregulation, privatization and reduced taxes on the wealthy. The Great Divergence is, to put it bluntly, the effect of a class war waged by the rich against the rest of society, and there are no signs of it letting up. All the while, we are on a collision course with nature. Mega-storms, tornadoes, wildfires, floods and erratic weather patterns are gradually becoming the rule rather than the exception. There are no signs of any serious efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions at levels anywhere near those required to avert the worst climate-change scenarios. According to the most robust climate models, global carbon emissions between now and mid-century must be kept below 565 gigatons to meet the Copenhagen Accord’s target of limiting global warming to a two-degree Celsius increase. Meanwhile, as Bill McKibben has noted, the world’s energy companies currently hold in reserve 2,795 gigatons of carbon, which they plan to release in the coming decades. Clearly, they have bet that world governments will fail to significantly regulate greenhouse emissions. The plan is to keep burning fossil fuels, no matter the environmental consequences.

While right-wing politicians write off climate change as a global conspiracy among scientists, the Pentagon has identified it as a significant threat to national security. After a decade of studies and war games involving climate-change scenarios, the Department of Defense’s 2010 Quadrennial Review (the main public document outlining American military doctrine) explains that “climate-related changes are already being observed in every region of the world,” and that they “could have significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to poverty, environmental degradation, and the further weakening of fragile governments. Climate change will contribute to food and water scarcity, will increase the spread of disease, and may spur or exacerbate mass migration.” Nationally and internationally, the effects of climate change will be felt unevenly. Whether it’s rising water levels or skyrocketing prices for foods due to irregular

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weather, the effects of a tumultuous climate will disproportionately impact society’s most precarious populations.

Thus, the effects of climate change will exacerbate already existing trends toward greater economic inequality, leading to widespread humanitarian crises and social unrest. The coming decades will bring Occupy-like protests on ever-larger scales as high unemployment and economic strife, particularly among youth, becomes a “new normal.” Moreover, the effects of climate change will produce new populations of displaced people and refugees. Economic and environmental insecurity represent the future for vast swaths of the world’s population. One way or another, governments will be forced to respond.As future governments face these intensifying crises, the decline of the state’s civic capacities virtually guarantees that they will meet any unrest with the authoritarian levers of the Terror State. It won’t matter whether a “liberal” or “conservative” government is in place; faced with an immediate crisis, the state will use whatever means are available to end said crisis. When the most robust levers available are tools of mass surveillance and coercion, then those tools will be used. What’s more, laws like the National Defense Authorization Act, which provides for the indefinite detention of American citizens, indicate that military and intelligence programs originally crafted for combating overseas terrorists will be applied domestically. The larger, longer-term scandal of Snowden’s revelations is that, together with other political trends, the NSA’s programs do not merely provide the capacity for “turnkey tyranny”—they render any other future all but impossible.