Wayne MADSEN | 29.01.2013 | 00:00
While budgets are being slashed by governments around the world,
national intelligence agencies are not only flush with money but they
are increasingly networking their resources against the «threat». What
is the threat? It is whatever national leaders and their governments
deem it to be. One day it is «Al Qaeda», the next day it is Iran, then
North Korea, then global narco-terrorists, and so on and so on…
Just as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is becoming a
global military past without a distinct enemy, the Central Intelligence
Agency, Britain’s MI-6, and other intelligence agencies are increasingly
pooling their intelligence and networking their information-sharing
networks. To what purpose would such citadels of secrecy wish to
cooperate? The answer is simple. In a world of the tiny minority «haves»
and the super-majority «have nots», the intelligence agencies, like
national armed forces, believe there is safety in numbers. In a conflict
between the minority super-wealthy and the rest of society,
intelligence agencies are increasingly protecting the interests of
corporations and not countries. Intelligence agencies, therefore, have
decided to become a global «Panopticon» where no one can hide and no
secrets are held.
For many years, attempts to create a worldwide database of personal
data, beginning with basic criminal information, were forestalled by the
fact that the chief promoter of such a combined on-line repository of
information, the United States, lacked a government department akin to
other nations’ Interior Ministries that would be natural partners of the
Americans. The American Interior Department had nothing to do with
internal security because it had jurisdiction over such areas as federal
lands and national parks. The aftermath of the 9/11 attack on the
United States created the impetus for the creation of global
communication networks and data warehouses for use by intelligence
agencies in the new Department of Homeland Security, America’s version
of the Interior Ministry.
The Homeland Security Department, National Security Agency, Central
Intelligence Agency, and Federal Bureau of Investigation now represent a
massive governmental data gathering behemoth that is building on
traditional and new relationships with foreign intelligence and national
security agencies to build a network of shared databases. However, the
network is a one-way street. The Americans want to draw the world’s
intelligence into its own databases while only allowing its partners,
including longtime intelligence allies like Britain and Canada to have
access to only a small portion of what America is amassing in terms of
surveillance and stored personal data.
In 2012, the European Union and United States agreed to allow the
Americans to store for up to fifteen years Passenger Name Records (PNRs)
on every European Union citizen who flies. Although there are supposed
«safeguards» to prevent the exploitation of the data, attempts by some
member so the European Parliament to take the agreement before the
European Court of Justice were scuttled by the Eurocrats in Brussels.
PNR data, like national identification numbers, are keys that unlock
countless files on individuals. PNR data on a passenger’s religious
dietary choices identifies a person’s religious beliefs. That
information may open up additional links to databases containing details
of an individual’s ethic group, health condition, and sexual
orientation. Further refinement of personally-identifiable information
can open up an individual’s phone and e-mail records.
Currently, the National Security Agency is building the Utah Data
Center on a National Guard base in Bluffdale, Utah a massive data
storage center that is the size of 17 football fields. The center will
contain stored communications records as well as transactional data,
including financial, travel, and medical information, on perhaps
billions of people around the world. The center is designed to store a
yottabyte of data – equivalent to 500 quintillion
(500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.
The data will range from that derived from relatively open sources to
«deep data». Deep data is that which is obtained through sophisticated
computer espionage programs, including those that crack passwords,
encryption schemes, and data hidden by pixel steganography and other
sophisticated methods. Microsoft is a «silent partner» of NSA in
collecting massive amounts of stored data from clouds and from
interactive networks like Skype. Microsoft took over control of Skype in
2011 and it is believed by many privacy experts that the firm routinely
shares customer data with the NSA and other intelligence and security
agencies.
The location of the NSA data center in the heavily Mormon state of Utah
is also problematic. The Mormons, or Church of Jesus Christ of Latter
Day Saints, maintains the world’s largest genealogical databases owing
to their affectation for baptizing the dead, even non-Mormons. The
records are maintained in a granite mountain 20 miles southeast of Salt
Lake City. Five billion documents on microfiche and in computer
databases are held in the nuclear blast-proof mountain facility.
Combine the Mormon geological records collected from every nation on
the planet with the transactional data maintained by the NSA in nearby
Bluffdale, and the world’s «all seeing eye» or computerized Panopticon
not only knows every detail about living individuals but an immense
amount of information about their deceased ancestors. That is the sort
of information craved by despotic leaders.
The Dutch rapporteur for the EU-US PNR agreement, which has also been
expanded to include Australia and Canada, was Sophie in’t Veld of the
Democrats 66 Party. She withdrew her sponsorship of the PNR agreement
because of misgivings over the privacy controls afforded the data. Ms.
in’t Veld has been subjected to extra security screening every time she
visits the United States and U.S. authorities have refused to tell her
why.
In the future, the massive international connected spy grid will make
similar decisions with or without the intervention of a human being.
Individuals will find themselves under arrest based on artificial
intelligence analysis of databases. In some jurisdictions, people have
been targeted for surveillance and arrest based on a belief by law
enforcement that they may commit a crime. The storage of massive amounts
of personal data will make such «pre-crime» enforcement a common
occurrence.
And, if the past is any indication, the collection of data by the
United States will be a one-way street with «second party» intelligence
allies like Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand; «third party»
friends like Germany, Denmark, Norway, Japan, South Korea, Thailand,
Greece, and the Netherlands; and «fourth party» partners like Sweden,
Switzerland, Austria, Singapore, France, Finland, India, Taiwan,
Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Hungary receiving smaller amounts of the
intelligence «take» from the huge data repositories. In the 1980s, an
internal NSA document likened the sharing of small amounts of signals
intelligence intercepts with Third Party partners, in return for base
rights, to the European colonialists giving Native American tribes
«wampum», usually cheap beads, as gifts in return for plundering tribal
lands.
In addition to Microsoft, it is believed that the NSA will be fed data
from massive commercial data centers, including the Apple iDataCenter in
North Carolina, the EBay data center also in Utah, as well as
Microsoft’s massive data center in San Antonio, Texas, which is located
close to another NSA intelligence-gathering facility called NSA Texas.
Geo-spatial analysis programs linked to NSA databases will ensure that
the location of individuals who leave an electronic fingerprint through
the use of a mobile phone, a credit card, a chipped passport, or any
item with a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip will be
immediately known to intelligence and police agencies. There will be
nowhere in the world to hide indefinitely.
Source: Strategic Culture Foundation
