A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State (19 page)

A
s George Orwell warned, you have to live with the assumption that everything you do, say and see is being tracked by those who run the corporate surveillance state. That has also become the assumption under which we, too, must live given that advanced technology provided by the corporate state now enables government agents and police officers with the ability to track our every move. The surveillance state is our new society. It is here, and it is spying on you, your family, and your friends every day.

The government has inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras, and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards and satellites. Speech recognition technology now makes it possible for the government to carry out massive eavesdropping by way of sophisticated computer systems. Phone calls can be monitored, the audio converted to text files and stored in computer databases indefinitely. And if any "threatening" words are detected–no matter how inane or silly–the record can be flagged and assigned to a government agent for further investigation. In recent years, federal and state governments, as well as private corporations, have been amassing tools aimed at allowing them to monitor content. Users are profiled and tracked in order to identify, target, and even prosecute them.

The resulting loss of privacy highlights very dramatically the growing problem of the large governmental bureaucracy working in tandem with the megacorporations to keep tabs on the American citizenry. As such, what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the
watched
(average Americans such as you and me) and the
watchers
(government bureaucrats, law enforcement agents, technicians, and private corporations). The growing need for technicians necessitates the bureaucracy. Thus, the massive bureaucracies—now technologically advanced—that administer governmental policy are a
permanent
form of government. Presidents come and go, but the nonelected bureaucrats remain.

Security-Industrial Matrix

The increasingly complex security demands of the massive federal governmental bureaucracy, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance, and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy. For example,
USA Today
reports that five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the homeland security "business" was booming to such an extent that it eclipsed mature enterprises like moviemaking and the music industry in annual revenue.
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This security spending by the government to private corporations is forecast to exceed $1 trillion in the near future.

Surveillance State Watchers (FBI Gallery)

Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of megacorporations and government. But who is paying the price? The American people, of course, and it's taking a toll on more than our pocketbooks. "You have government on a holy mission to ramp up information gathering and you have an information technology industry desperate for new markets," says Peter Swire, the nation's first privacy counselor, who served during the Clinton Administration. "Once this is done, you will have unprecedented snooping abilities. What will happen to our private lives if we're under constant surveillance?"
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We're at that point now. Americans are subtly being conditioned to accept routine incursions on their privacy rights. However, at one time, the idea of a total surveillance state tracking one's every move would have been abhorrent to most Americans. That all changed with the 9/11 attacks. As professor Jeffrey Rosen observes, "Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometrie surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity."
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We have been sold a bill of goods. A good example of this is the ubiquitous surveillance cameras that are popping up everywhere across the country, despite the fact that they have been shown not to reduce crime. Indeed, a 2005 study by the British government, which boasts the most extensive surveillance camera coverage in the world at approximately 4 million cameras (one for every 14 people), found that of all the areas studied, surveillance cameras generally failed to achieve a reduction in crime. Indeed, while these snooping devices were supposed to reduce premeditated or planned crimes such as burglary, vehicle crime, criminal damage, and theft, they failed to have an impact on more spontaneous crimes, such as violence against the person and public order offenses such as public drunkenness.

Surveillance cameras have also been found to have a "displacement" effect on crime. Thus, rather than getting rid of crime, surveillance cameras force criminal activity to move from the area being watched to other surrounding areas.
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And while a surveillance camera might help law enforcement identify a suicide bomber after the fact, as Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center notes, "Cameras are not an effective way to stop a person that is prepared to commit that kind of act." Rotenberg points to the 2005 terrorist subway bombings in London as an example. He explained that surveillance cameras "did help determine the identity of the suicide bombers and aided the police in subsequent investigations, but obviously they had no deterrent effect in preventing the act, because suicide bombers are not particularly concerned about being caught in the act."
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Electronic Footprints

Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched– especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. And, of course, we leave plenty of electronic footprints for the watchers to follow.

When you buy food at the supermarket, purchase a shirt online or through a toll-free number, these transactions are recorded by data collection and information companies. In this way, you are specifically targeted as a particular type of consumer by private corporations. As if that were not worrisome enough, government intelligence agencies routinely collect these records–billions of them–about what you have done and where you have lived your entire life: every house or apartment, all your telephone numbers, the cars you've owned, ad infinitum.

When you use your cell phone you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted, and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations. When you drive a car enabled with GPS you are tracked by satellite. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts, and your activities is now being fed to the U.S. government intelligence agencies.

Under the USA Patriot Act your bank is required to analyze your transactions for any patterns that raise suspicion and to see if you are connected to any "objectionable" people–ostensibly in the hunt for terrorists. If there are questions, your bank alerts the government, which shares such information with intelligence and law enforcement agencies across the country (local, county, state, and federal).

Fusion Centers

As if it weren't bad enough that the government is tracking individuals electronically, we're also being subjected to the peering, watchful eyes of Terrorism Liaison Officers (TLOs). TLOs are firefighters, police officers, and even corporate employees that are sprinkled across the country and have received training to spy on their fellow citizens and report back to government entities on their day-to-day activities. They are entrusted to report "suspicious activity," which includes taking pictures with no apparent aesthetic value, making measurements and drawings, taking notes, conversing in code, espousing radical beliefs, and buying items in bulk.
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Control Center

TLOs report back to "fusion centers" where information is aggregated into government computers and pieced together to create profiles of citizens. Then information analysts determine if there are any individuals worth tracking down. "Fusion centers," which integrate local police and federal intelligence agencies, are a driving force behind the government's quest to collect, analyze, and disseminate information on American citizens. Fusion centers grew dramatically between the fiscal years of 2004 and 2008 with the help of more than $327 million in taxpayer-provided funding.
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Virtually every state has a fusion center in operation or formation.
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More than seventy such data collecting agencies are already spread throughout the country,
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constantly monitoring our communications, everything from our Internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls, and emails. This data is then fed to government agencies, which are now interconnected: the CIA to the FBI, the FBI to local police.

Too often, the partnership between law enforcement officials and fusion centers gives rise to procedures lacking in transparency and which skate alarmingly close to the edge of constitutional prohibitions against unreasonable searches, when they're not flouting them altogether.
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Equally problematic is the fact that there is no nationally recognized structure for a fusion center, so each fusion center essentially establishes its own protocol, a shortcoming acknowledged by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
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The information gathered at these fusion centers travels not only up the chain of command, but down as well, and flows throughout the country
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All of this information-sharing from a vast number of sources means that a local police officer in Washington State can tap into the traveling or shopping habits of someone, innocent or not, in Florida.

On top of the extreme level of information-sharing among government entities, there has been a strong push to get private corporations to work with the government on information gathering. Boeing, the country's largest aircraft manufacturer and second-largest defense contractor, has pushed to take part in intelligence gathering, going so far as to try placing one of their representatives at the Washington Joint Analytical Center (WAJAC), a massive fusion center in Washington State.
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Starbucks, Alaska Airlines, and Amazon have also expressed interest in working with the WAJAC.

Pools of Ineptitude

Incredibly, despite the roughly $1.4 billion
³⁴²
in taxpayer dollars poured into these fusion centers, they have, in the words of investigative journalist Robert O'Harrow, proven to be little more than "pools of ineptitude, waste and civil liberties intrusions."
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This sorry impression is bolstered by a bipartisan report released in 2012 by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations alleging that DHS has done very little to aid counterterrorism efforts with its seventy-seven (and growing) fusion centers, which suffer from a lack of oversight
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and wasteful spending of "hundreds of millions of dollars."
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Among the high-dollar purchases attributed to the fusion centers' wasteful spending are flat-screen TVs, a $6,000 laptop, and a $45,000 SUV used for commuting.
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