Obama’s informants
Wed Jun 26, 2013
President
Eisenhower’s Farewell Address more than 50 years ago is famous for its warning
about the military-industrial complex, but he also warned that permanent war
and a “permanent arms industry” would do great harm to American rights and
liberties. Over the past decade, we have
experienced a Bush administration that deputized the Pentagon to spy on
law-abiding citizens, with military officers attending antiwar rallies and
staff sergeants engaged in the National Security Agency’s warrantless
eavesdropping. And now we have an Obama
administration that has encouraged the creation of its own informant network
among millions of federal employees and contractors to watch for “high-risk
persons or behaviors” among co-workers.
The use of
informant networks dates at least as far back as the Roman Empire. Delatores (informants) were recruited from
all classes of society, including slaves, lawyers, and philosophers. Prior to the death of Joseph Stalin, the
Soviet Union used pervasive informant networks in the Communist Party’s efforts
to eradicate so-called “crimes” against state property.
Massive
citizen informant networks were used throughout the Soviet Bloc in Eastern
Europe to destroy perceived opposition to dictatorial rule, particularly in
Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary. The
best example of an informant network in the communist world, of course, was in
East Germany where the Ministry of State Security (or Stasi) controlled one
informant for every 60 citizens. These
informants were told that they were their country’s first line of defense
against threats to national security.
The informant
network of the Obama administration is similarly insidious, with federal
employees required to keep close tabs on co-workers, and managers facing
penalties, including criminal charges, for failing to report their
suspicions. According to Marisa Taylor
and Jonathan Landay, reporting in McClatchyDC.com on June 20, there are
government documents that equate leaks with espionage. A defense Department
paper issued in 2012 exhorts its employees to “hammer this fact home…leaking is
tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States.”
The Obama
administration’s initiative is called the Insider Threat Program and it is not
restricted to the national security bureaucracy. The Department of Education has informed its
employees that co-workers going through “certain life experiences,” such as
divorce or “frustrations with co-workers,” could turn a trusted employee into
“an insider threat.” According to Taylor
and Landay, the Department of Agriculture and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration have produced online tutorials titled “Treason 101”
to teach employees to recognize the psychological profile of spies. They say that the Peace Corps is implementing
such a program.
The Bush
administration initiated similar programs to conduct surveillance against
American citizens, not merely federal workers.
Vice President Dick Cheney encouraged the Pentagon to create the Counter
Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA) in 2003 to conduct surveillance against
American citizens near U.S. military facilities, particularly against those
Americans who attended antiwar meetings.
In the summer of 2004, CIFA monitored a small protest in Houston, Texas
against Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Cheney. At the same time, Undersecretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz created a fact-gathering operation called TALON (Threat and
Local Observation Notice) to collect “raw information” about “suspicious
incidents.” The unauthorized spying of
CIFA and the computer collection on innocent people and organizations for TALON
were illegal; both organizations were eventually shut down.
In addition
to instituting the Insider Threat Program, the Obama administration has
expanded the domestic reach of the intelligence community, perpetuated the
culture of secrecy, and instituted a pervasive lack of transparency. Although President Obama has stated that
American citizens are not the targets of the NSA’s sweeping electronic
collection system, it is possible that Britain’s G.C.H.Q., London’s counterpart
to NSA, is collecting intelligence on Americans and sharing the information
with Washington. Under a program called
Tempora, the British communications intelligence agency has an unequalled
capacity to tap high-capacity fiber cables.
Britain, moreover, has a weak oversight regime, and G.C.H.Q. has a
unique and storied collaboration with NSA and CIA.
Our
congressional intelligence committees have failed in their primary
task-providing oversight over this pervasive and secret surveillance system.
Oversight and accountability must be part of government, particularly the
secret agencies within government, and congressional oversight is needed to
correct the collective harm that has been done to the United States and its
reputation at home and abroad because of the zealous actions of the past
decade.
Vice
President Cheney defended the Iraq War in 2003 on the basis of the infamous
“one percent doctrine,” which justified the invasion on the grounds that if
there was a one percent chance that something is a threat, it requires that the
United States responds as if the threat was 100 percent certain. This logic has been applied in many ways to
the problem of terrorism with the Department of Homeland Security and the 16
agencies of the intelligence community assuming that “Today’s terrorists can
strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon.” As a result, the War on Terror has become a
permanent fixture in our national security architecture, and an economic
cornucopia for private contractors.
Last month,
President Obama told a high-ranking military audience at the National Defense
University that our torture and detention policies “ran counter to the rule of
law;” that our use of drones will “define the type of nation that we leave to
our children;” that even legal military tactics are not necessarily “wise or
moral in every instance;” and that we must repeal the mandate of the
Authorization to Use Military Force to fight terrorism. Referring to Guantanamo, he argued that
holding “people who have been charged with no crime on a piece of land that is
not part of our country” is not “who we are.”
And that “leak investigations [that] may chill investigative journalism
that holds government accountable” is not “who we are.”
If so, then
massive surveillance programs at home and abroad as well as massive informant
networks within the entire federal bureaucracy should also not be who we
are. It is long past time for President
Obama to address these issues with operational policies and not mere
rhetoric. The audacity of hope requires
that he do so.
AHT/ARA
1 comment:
Only the inner party members can turn off the telescreen.
[For NSA filter only]
Remember thought is a crime.
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