Untitled Document
It is now obvious Total Information Awareness, renamed Terrorism Information
Awareness, didn’t go away, as reported
in September, 2003, but lived on in the murky depths of the intelligence and
military community, in particular at the offices of the Advanced Research and
Development Activity, or ARDA, run out of the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland.
“The whole congressional action looks like a shell game,” Steve
Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists told the Associated
Press on February 23, 2004. “There may be enough of a difference for
them to claim TIA was terminated while for all practical purposes the identical
work is continuing.” It was, even with the lukewarm protestation of Congress
and civil libertarians, an idea too good to simply chuck by the wayside.
Now we learn that the “Air Force Office of Scientific Research has begun
funding a new research area that includes a study of blogs,” reports Air
Force Link, billed as the official website of the United States Air Force.
“Blog research may provide information analysts and warfighters with invaluable
help in fighting the war on terrorism.” In other words, many blogs are
suspect, although it is absurd to assume these blogs are infested with “al-Qaeda”
terrorists. Of course, the Pentagon is not interested in ferreting out bloggers
in turbans, but rather more traditional enemies, now well ensconced in the blogosphere.
“Drs. Brian Ulicny, senior scientist, and Mieczyslaw Kokar, president,
Versatile Information Systems Inc., Framingham, Mass., will receive approximately
$450,000 in funding for the three-year project titled, ‘Automated Ontologically-Based
Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant
and Credible Information’…. ‘It can be challenging (for information
analysts) to tell what’s important in blogs unless you analyze patterns,’
Dr. Ulicny said…. Two key concepts to remember about the program are ‘actionable
information’ and the ‘network effect,’ said Maj. (Dr.) Amy
Magnus of AFOSR’s Mathematics and Information Sciences Directorate and
the Information Forensics and Process Integration program manager…. Actionable
information is information associated with consequence such as evidence of a
crime or an enemy’s attack plan discovered before its execution. Information
forensics is both the identification and authoritative communication of actionable
information.”
In her book, Army Surveillance in America, historian Joan
M. Jensen notes how the War Department (since doublespeak renamed the Department
of Defense) used the cover of World War I and the threat of German saboteurs
to snoop antiwar opponents. “What began as a system to protect the government
from enemy agents became a vast surveillance system to watch civilians who violated
no law but who objected to wartime policies or to the war itself,” writes
Jensen.
Gene Healy, writing for the Cato Institute, comments (see previous link): “The
Army’s domestic surveillance activities were substantially curtailed after
the end of World War I. But throughout the 20th Century, in periods of domestic
unrest and foreign conflict, army surveillance ratcheted up again, most notably
in the 1960s. During that tumultuous decade, President Johnson repeatedly called
on federal troops to quell riots and restore order. To better perform that task,
Army intelligence operatives began compiling thousands of dossiers on citizens,
many of whom had committed no offense beyond protesting government policy. Reviewing
the files, the Senate Judiciary Committee noted that ‘comments about the
financial affairs, sex lives and psychiatric histories of persons unaffiliated
with the armed forces appear throughout the various records systems.’
Justice William O. Douglas called army surveillance ‘a cancer in our body
politic,’” a cancer revisited, as we are now told “homegrown
terrorists” are in our midst and we must remain vigilant, that is to say
allow the government to snoop every crevice of our personal lives.
As reported by Reuters
this past April, the Pentagon is not interested in ferreting out phantom “al-Qaeda”
sleeper cells in Des Moines, but rather the “homegrown” threat posed
by those of us opposed to the neocon master plan for total and unremitting war.
“Some critics have noted similarities in the Pentagon’s activities
during the Iraq War and those of the Vietnam War period, when it spied on antiwar
activists…. NBC News and defense analyst William Arkin disclosed at the
time a sample of the database containing reports of 1,519 ’suspicious
incidents’ between July 2004 and May 2005, including activities by antiwar
and anti-military protesters…. This included a military intelligence unit
monitoring a Quaker meeting in Lake Worth, Florida, on plans to protest military
recruiting in high schools.”
For the Pentagon, such behavior is “actionable,” that is to say
worthy of investigation, or snooping, and possibly worthy of subversion and
elimination.
As Robert
Dreyfuss notes for Rolling Stone, the NSA’s snoop program pales in
comparison to the broader efforts of the neocon-controlled Pentagon. According
to Dreyfuss, the “Pentagon has already assembled a nationwide domestic
spying machine that goes far beyond the National Security Agency’s warrantless
surveillance of telephone and e-mail traffic. Operating in secret, the Defense
Department is systematically gathering and analyzing intelligence on American
citizens at home—and a new Pentagon agency called Counterintelligence
Field Activity (CIFA) is helping to coordinate the military’s covert efforts
with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies,” a direct and
obvious violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, now effectively a dead letter.
So far, the military’s efforts at domestic spying have caught few,
if any, terrorists. But the Pentagon has tracked the activities of anti-war
activists across the country who have staged peaceful demonstrations against
military bases and defense contractors such as Halliburton. Traditionally
restricted to action overseas, America’s armed forces—including
the National Guard—are now linked in a growing domestic spying apparatus
which, thanks to technology, has far greater power than the Army units that
conducted a massive operation to infiltrate, disrupt and destabilize Vietnam
and civil rights protests during the 1960s and ’70s. “We are deputizing
the military to spy on law-abiding Americans in America,” said (Sen.
Ron Wyden). “This is a huge leap without even a congressional hearing”….
The broader threat is that military spies will gradually expand their anti-terrorist
mission to include more and more ordinary citizens.
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research effort to troll and datamine the
blogosphere is but another component of this massive undertaking, as blogs represent
the cutting edge of the information effort to resist the neocon plan for total
war, both abroad and at home. Indeed, we need to be concerned when the Air Force
declares it is searching for “actionable information,” that is to
say information requiring a military response.
It should be obvious to all but the most stepfordized Bush supporter
that this colossal militarized snoop and subversion effort, completely at odds
with American tradition and the Constitution, is nothing less than modern, high-tech
fascism in action. It is the manifestation of the “total state,”
a characteristic of totalitarian fascism, working to control and direct the
citizenry in paternalistic fashion. In order to accomplish this, all opposition
must be stigmatized as terrorist and systematically rooted out and destroyed.
In the past, the effort to squash opposition was accomplished by the likes
of Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (East German Stasi collaborators), but today, with
nearly all aspects of life plugged into computer networks, the process is far
less obvious.
Information gleaned from trolling the blogosphere will be married with other
electronic records, from financial data to library and medical records—including
massive petabytes of data grabbed from telephone and email communication—thus
producing an “actionable” dossier for the fascist warmongers now
in control of the government.
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