surveillance

April 22, 2016

Our Borders, Our Selves

What makes a border in 2016? And how is it, on an earth supposedly flattened by free markets and liberal values, that the walls around us seem higher than ever before? From the big-data border of the EU to Donald Trump’s (proposed) Great Wall, the ...

FRANCESWhat makes a border in 2016? And how is it, on an earth supposedly flattened by free markets and liberal values, that the walls around us seem higher than ever before?

From the big-data border of the EU to Donald Trump’s (proposed) Great Wall, the fences of our world are increasingly patrolled, scanned, militarized, surveilled, droned, and fortified. It’s less neoliberalism than neofeudalism. “This medieval modernism is born of a fatal resolve to keep the outsider out,” our guest, Frances Stonor Saunders, writes in the London Review of Books.

In her borders essay, Saunders is meditating on the relationship between identity, migration, and political power. “We construct borders,” she writes, “to fortify our sense of who we are; and we cross them in search of who we might become. They are philosophies of space, credibility contests, latitudes of neurosis, signatures to the social contract, soothing containments, scars.”

This week we’re doing something a little new, in partnership with our friends at the LRB, presenting Saunders’s piece, “Where on Earth Are You?”, recorded in front of a live audience at the British Museum. You can subscribe to the excellent London Review Podcasts here.

This Week's Show •

Democracy’s Dark Side

This week, the third in a series on our democracy in 2016, we’re discussing what you can’t change with a vote — at least for now. Change is the electoral mood for now, with Bernie Sanders ...

This week, the third in a series on our democracy in 2016, we’re discussing what you can’t change with a vote — at least for now.

Change is the electoral mood for now, with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump’s victories in New Hampshire in the news. But change was the watchword of Barack Obama, too. What is an uneasy electorate asking for seven years later, and why aren’t they getting it?

Michael Glennon has a theory. He’s a former Senate lawyer who today teaches at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. In his book, National Security and Double Government, Glennon wants to explain the durability of national habits like the drone war, crackdowns on journalists, widespread surveillance, and secrecy by getting voters to see our government as split in two.

There’s the traditional front — “The Making of the President,” the State of the Union, the Capitol Hill roll call, the marble columns. But beneath that Madisonian world is a secret 20th-century establishment of bureaucrats, experts, contractors, and civil servants who do a lot of deciding themselves, on matters of national security and surveillance, diplomacy, trade, and regulation. And, in a dangerous and complex empire, their indispensable number and their power grows year after year.

Glennon insists that he isn’t speaking about a shadowy secret government, or the Freemasons. Rather, he’s talking about hypertalented, hard-working people who make their homes in the D.C. metro area, and who draft the memos, legal briefs, and war plans that end up deciding our common future.

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The dark-matter influence of this group becomes especially clear when it comes to the stubbornness of the security state: from Harry Truman begging the nation to rethink the privileges of the CIA — an agency he founded — one month after John Kennedy was killed in Dallas (above), to George W. Bush being repeatedly left (like his father) “out of the loop” by the intelligence services, and misled about the nature of the post-9/11 program of torturing America’s prisoners. Or finally Barack Obama, who is reported to have declared, on the subject of drones, “the CIA gets what it wants.” This is the long story of the Castro assassinations, the Church Committee (below), and the torture report.

There’s a chaotic, exciting feeling in the air in 2016 — but should we have to hold our applause for the spectacle and take a second look under the hood of the government itself?

Let us know what you think in the comments or on our Facebook page.

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By the Way • July 14, 2014

The Five NSA Programs You Should Know About

It’s been a little over a year since revelations from Edward Snowden’s historic NSA leak started appearing in newspapers around the world, and information about new surveillance programs is still surfacing every month. Last week, The Washington Post analyzed 160,000 NSA records and found that “ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted” by NSA surveillance programs. Four days later, Glenn Greenwald released the names of five distinguished Muslim-American men whose emails were being monitored by the NSA, none of whom are suspected of any wrongdoing.

By Kunal Jasty

“Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations.”
Barton Gellman in The Washington Post, December 23, 2013.

It’s been a little over a year since revelations from Edward Snowden’s historic NSA leak started appearing in newspapers around the world, and information about new surveillance programs is still surfacing every month. Last week, The Washington Post analyzed 160,000 NSA records and found that “ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted” by NSA surveillance programs. Four days later, Glenn Greenwald released the names of five distinguished Muslim-American men whose emails were being monitored by the NSA, none of whom are suspected of any wrongdoing.

Here’s a roundup of the five (previously) top-secret NSA surveillance programs that you should know about.

1. XKeyscore

Speaking from Hong Kong last June to journalist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden made his most famous statement about the extent of NSA mass-surveillance programs: “I, sitting at my desk, had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email.”

Journalists had already known about NSA efforts to collect internet and phone data for nearly a decade. By 2007, the NSA was adding one to two billion internet records to its databases daily. In 2010, The Washington Post reported that “every day, collection systems at the [NSA] intercept and store 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other types of communications.” What we didn’t know was whose communications were being stored, and what ability NSA analysts had to access them.

When Snowden revealed the stunning power he had as a contractor for the NSA, he was referring to the NSA’s XKeyscore program — a program previously unknown to the public — which gives analysts the ability to easily search through the staggering amount of internet data collected and stored by the NSA every day.

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Using XKeyscore, an NSA analyst can simply type in an email address or IP address of a “target” and access their emails, search history, visited websites, and even Facebook chats. The program’s leaked slides boast that XKeyscore’s ability to analyze HTTP data allows it to see “nearly everything a typical user does on the Internet.”

Want to know who searched for Pakistani President Musharraf on the BBC’s website?

How about “everyone in Sweden that visits a particular web forum”?

“The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and emails in their databases that they’ve collected over the last several years. And what these programs are, are very simple screens, like the ones that supermarket clerks or shipping and receiving clerks use, where all an analyst has to do is enter an email address or an IP address, and it does two things. It searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you’ve entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future.”
Glenn Greenwald to ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, July 27, 2013

Original Report: “XKeyscore: NSA tool collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet,’” The Guardian, July 31, 2013

 

2. FASCIA

FASCIA is the NSA’s real-life Marauder’s Map. In December 2013, Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani of The Washington Post reported that FASCIA was collecting nearly 5 billion pieces of location data from hundreds of millions of cellphones worldwide every day.

For your cell phone to work, your service provider needs to know its approximate location. Your phone transmits this information to the nearest cell towers, which the network can then use to triangulate your location. According to leaked NSA documents, FASCIA works by storing this location data when it is passed along the cables that connect different mobile networks. An NSA analyst sitting at a desk in Maryland can then search through this stored data to track the location of a specific phone user.

Perhaps the most interesting (and scariest) functionality of FASCIA is its “Co-Traveler Analytics.” By comparing a known target’s cell phone location with the location of other cell phones during an hour-long time window, the NSA can isolate groups of cell phones traveling together to find associates of the known target.

The Washington Post made an excellent graphic that explains the FASCIA program:
cell phone

Original Report: “NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show,” The Washington Post, December 4, 2013

 

3. Optic Nerve

Think TSA full-body scanners are intrusive? The UK’s surveillance agency GCHQ collaborated with the NSA to create Optic Nerve, a program that automatically stores webcam images of users chatting on Yahoo Messenger.

During one six-month period in 2008, Optic Nerve collected images from 1.8 million Yahoo accounts. It inserts each image, even those without a known target, into NSA databases, which can then be searched by analysts using XKeyscore. Again, all this happens without a court warrant.
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Surprising to no one besides the NSA, an estimated 3.4%-10.8% of the images taken were sexually explicit:
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Yahoo denied any knowledge of Optic Nerve, calling it “a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy,” and promised to start to encrypt all Yahoo services by April 2014. As of today, Yahoo Messenger remains unencrypted.

Original Report: “Optic Nerve: millions of Yahoo webcam images intercepted by GCHQ,” The Guardian, February 27, 2014

4. Boundless Informant

Boundless Informant, besides having a unenviably unsubtle name for NSA officials to have to explain front of Congress, is perhaps the most damning evidence so far that the NSA is conducting mass surveillance inside the United States.

Boundless Informant helps the NSA analyze and visualize the, well, boundless amounts of metadata information it collects around the world. (Metadata, or “data about data”, is all the information about a piece of data besides the actual content of the data. For example, metadata about telephone calls includes the phone numbers of the caller and recipient, as well as the location and duration of the call, but not the words in the call itself.)

The top surveilled countries in 2013 were Iran, Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and India. Image from The Guardian.

The map above shows that in March 2013 alone, the NSA collected over 73 billion metadata records worldwide. Despite the NSA’s assurance that it does not intentionally collect data on Americans, nearly 3 billion pieces of metadata were collected from the United States alone.

If you want to see what your own metadata looks like, engineers at the MIT media lab developed a program called Immersion that analyzes your email metadata to create a cluster chart of your social connections.

Original Report: “Boundless Informant: the NSA’s secret tool to track global surveillance data,” The Guardian, June 11, 2013

5. Dishfire

Like FASCIA, Dishfire targets cell phones. More specifically, it collects nearly 200 million text messages daily around the world, using them to view financial transactions, monitor border crossings, and meetings between unsavory characters.

According to The Guardian, each day the NSA stores:


• More than 5 million missed-call alerts, for use in contact-chaining analysis (working out someone’s social network from who they contact and when)

• Details of 1.6 million border crossings a day, from network roaming alerts

• More than 110,000 names, from electronic business cards, which also included the ability to extract and save images.

• Over 800,000 financial transactions, either through text-to-text payments or linking credit cards to phone users

Using Dishfire, the NSA can extract names, geocoordinates, missed calls, SIM card changes, roaming information, travel, financial transactions, and passwords from a user’s cell phone.

According to The Guardian, the NSA “has made extensive use of its vast text message database to extract information on people’s travel plans, contact books, financial transactions and more — including of individuals under no suspicion of illegal activity.”

The NSA has stated that they removes all text messages involving U.S. citizens from their databases, and that “privacy protections for U.S. persons exist across the entire process concerning the use, handling, retention, and dissemination of SMS data in Dishfire.” Based on this week’s Washington Post report that nearly half of NSA surveillance files involve Americans, it’s hard to take their word for it.

Original Report: “NSA collects millions of text messages daily in ‘untargeted’ global sweep,” The Washington Post, January 16, 2014

July 10, 2014

One Nation Under Surveillance

It’s the artists — from Orwell of Nineteen Eighty-Four, to Philip Dick and Margaret Atwood, to Trevor Paglen and Banksy — who raise the big questions: about voyeurism, about safety and risk, and the essence of our public and private selves. Is there a book or a movie that tells us what kind of world are we living in, or where the surveillance state begins and ends? What impact does mass surveillance have on our selves, on our national psyche, on the way we interact with each other, on the art we make and the way we live?
The Five NSA Programs You Should Know About

Guest List

What do we envision when we envision the surveillance state?

The latest item in the Snowden surveillance files comes from  Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, who tells us that the messages of law-abiding Americans outnumber ‘legitimate’ targets of NSA surveillance nine to one. We’re talking about love stories now, trysts, hook-ups, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial nightmares. They have no ‘intelligence value’, but the NSA is saving them all the same.

Still, there doesn’t seen to be any real outrage. We the People under surveillance seem to be confused about how much our liberty and our privacy are worth in exchange for convenience  and connectedness. We beg to be followed on Twitter and stalked on Facebook, even as we’re wonder, in an abstract way, how bad it would be to pop up on a government watch list.

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It’s the artists — from Orwell of Nineteen Eighty-Four, to Philip Dick and Margaret Atwood, to Trevor Paglen and Banksy — who raise the big questions: about voyeurism, about safety and risk, and the essence of our public and private selves. Is there a book or a movie that tells us what kind of world are we living in, or where the surveillance state begins and ends? What impact does mass surveillance have on our selves, on our national psyche, on the way we interact with each other, on the art we make and the way we live?

Here’s a short excerpt with the surveillance artist Trevor Paglen:

For a lot of moviegoers the thought of the surveillance state conjures the entirely sinister images of East Germany under totalitarian Communist control after World War II – all of it made vivid in the film “The Lives of Others” from 2006 about an eavesdropper for the security police known as the Stasi. Fritz Pleitgen was a celebrated correspondent for German TV during the Cold War, and warns us about giving up our privacy.

Read More

  • Our friends at the Boston Review convened a forum on privacy and surveillance, with the former FCC chairman Reed Hundt at the center, and comments from Rebecca MacKinnon, Evgeny Morozov, and Richard Stallman.
  • Glenn Greenwald has argued that we’re closer to Nineteen Eighty-Four than we’re willing to admit, while our other guest Benjamen Walker sees it differently on his Theory of Everything podcast;
  • Judith Donath traces the line between public and private space in this lecture;
  • The photographer Trevor Paglen told a conference this winter that secrecy doesn’t describe all the things we’re not allowed to know, but rather a behavior of powerful people — a whole world, with a look and a feel, if you care to seek it out.
  • Facebook has been manipulating your mood, and you can read about it at The Atlantic.
  • Michael P. Lynch on privacy and the threat to the self on the New York Times philosophy blog.

March 13, 2014

Will We Ever Get Over 9/11?

Are we getting over 9.11? What is it doing to our character, our culture, our Constitution? We’ve been through the flags-everywhere stage, the foreign invasion response, the big build-up of surveillance and eavesdropping, interrogation, with torture – all in the name of security, but do we have a word for the fear we sense inside the new Security State?
The Armor You Have
Pico Iyer: An Empire in Isolation

 

Guest List

Here’s an awkward question that may be urgent: Are we getting over 9.11?  Will we ever? Do we want to?  Is it a scar by now, or a wound still bleeding? Is it a post-traumatic-stress disorder?  What is it doing to our character, our culture, our Constitution?  After a monstrous attack on the American superpower, is there anything like those five stages of individual grief — some version of the famous Kubler-Ross steps: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance?  We’ve been through the flags-everywhere stage, the foreign invasion response, the big build-up of surveillance and eavesdropping, interrogation, with torture – all in the name of security, but do we have a word for the fear we sense inside the new Security State?  Do we have a word for the anxiety that a War on Terror can feed on itself forever? A decade and a half out, are we a different country?

We’re imagining this as an ongoing series, with conversations and podcasts to be added as we go. Have you any suggestions for people we should speak with? Writers? Historians? Critics? Your next-door neighbor?

Reading List

Osama expected to die by violence, as he did.  Sadly, he probably died a satisfied man.  In addition to alienating Muslims and the West from each other, as was his aim, he achieved so many other transformations of the order he sought to overthrow… He catalyzed two wars.  He bears responsibility for the death of thousands in the West and hundreds of thousands in this region.  The unfunded financial burden of the conflicts he ignited has come close to bankrupting the United States.  Indirectly, it is upending the international monetary system.  It has produced recession in the West.  Osama will have been pleased.

Podcast • March 11, 2010

Thomas Y. Levin: "surveillent narcissism" and other digital doubts

Click to listen to Chris’s classroom conversation with Thomas Y. Levin (32 min, 19 mb mp3) Advertising confirms Thomas Levin‘s observation that, strange to tell, we have come to embrace Orwell’s worst nightmare in 1984, ...

Click to listen to Chris’s classroom conversation with Thomas Y. Levin (32 min, 19 mb mp3)

Advertising confirms Thomas Levin‘s observation that, strange to tell, we have come to embrace Orwell’s worst nightmare in 1984, universal electronic surveillance. A Kenneth Cole billboard in Manhattan makes the unembarrassed point that “On an average day you will be captured on closed-circuit television camers at least a dozen times. Are you dressed for it?” Another print ad proclaims: “Only one out of every 10 New Yorkers who owns a telescope is interested in Astronomy.”

Bob Herbert in the New York Times revealed last week (“Watching Certain People”) that the New York Police Department has stopped, frisked and catalogued just under 3-million people in the city over five recent years — the vast majority of them black or Hispanic and innocent of the slightest offense. “It’s a gruesome, racist practice that should offend all New Yorkers, and it should cease,” the columnist avers, but the people’s outrage seems slow in building.

With Tom Levin, a media theorist at Princeton, we are catching up with not just the everyday “fabulousness” of “surveillent narcissism,” but a wider wave of misgivings about the digital information revoluton — questions, complaints and reassessments being raised by, for example, Jaron Lanier, Daniel Gelernter and Jonathan Zittrain, among others. “The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view,” Lanier writes, “is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable.”

So we are getting a broad-brush review here in James Der Derian’s Watson Institute classroom at Brown of the “data shadows” — the electronic profiles of all of us that can now be bought and sold; of the “surveil me, please” mentality that builds our Facebook files; of the outsourcing of knowledge and memory to Google — and Nicholas Carr‘s question whether Google is making us stupid.

Tom Levin is an intrepid activist who refuses to give up an electronic signature at any cash register and who likes to give phony email addresses when the wrong people ask for his. And still he deplores most of the “technodystopic whining” in the air. His mission is bringing up the abysmal level of digital literacy, recalling Walter Benjamin’s line in the Thirties that people who cannot “read” a photograph are “the new illiterates.” The people Tom Levin worries about today are those of us who forget that the data we’re giving up these days will be in somebody else’s hands forever.