Wednesday, July 31, 2013

True Tales of False Memories





True Tales of False Memories

Melody Gavigan runs a newsletter to free her readers from the effects of something that never existed. It's called The Retractor, and it traffics in manufactured memories of childhood sexual abuse.

Awareness of actual childhood sexual abuse has brought with it an avalanche of allegations by adult women that they were violated decades ago. And a whole new breed of helper--the "traumatist"--has invented itself just in time to dredge "hidden" memories by hypnosis and "narcoanalysis."

In professional publications, symposia, and of course the courtroom, bona fide psychologists battle over the beginnings of memory, particularly autobiographical memory, and its nature. "As behavioral scientists, we have great appreciation for the fact that memories can be distorted," declared 17 noted psychologists, all university affiliated, in a letter to the APS Observer (Vol. 6, No. 2).

However, "few cases of childhood sexual abuse remembered in adulthood are verifiable. In the vast majority of cases, we will never know."

Untouched by professional skepticism and undeterred by the damage to families caused by manufactured memories, the traumatists dig on. Melody Gavigan's story is standard fare.

At 35, reeling from a childhood in an alcoholic family, two divorces, the birth of a daughter, difficulty adjusting to a new (happy) marriage, hating the Los Angeles smog, unemployed, and thoroughly depressed, she checked herself into a treatment center. There she was put on a regimen of psychotropic drugs that "clouded my mind."

"We started these intensive therapy sessions, but I was always left feeling abandoned because the therapist never asked me about my husbands, my job difficulties, or about when I started to get depressed."

Instead, he insisted one of her parents had sexually abused her. "I knew this was not true," Gavigan admits, but she yielded to pressure and made up stories about her father abusing her. "Above all, I wanted to get well. I thought this was the way." Eventually, dissatisfaction got the best of her. She quit the treatment center, had a brief brush with hypnotherapy, and wound up with a credentialed clinical psychologist who specialized in inducing trances with prolonged eye contact. He insisted that Melody--and her brother--had been sodomized by their father.

"All the therapists I consulted only wanted to work on my childhood," she said. "None of the things bothering me had anything to do with my childhood."
She discarded the therapist, the drugs, and the trances. "When my mind cleared, I was able to see what had happened. I had been duped! I felt so stupid. It took a lot of guts to admit this to myself-and even more to restore dignity to my parents for past accusations."

She started The Retractor with four other women soon after and found an audience through the False Memory Syndrome (FMS) Foundation a young organization composed largely of parents stung by what they believe are false allegations of abuse.

Gavigan, a computer specialist now living in Nevada, is only too happy to help others who might be in the same boat. In addition to The Retractor (P.O. Box 5012, Reno, NV 89513), she can be reached via computer bulletin boards dedicated to psychological support, under FMS.

Gleanings from The Retractor.

"The people who get false memory syndrome are usually highly intelligent and sensitive women" with "vulnerabilities such as dependency, low tolerance of ambiguity, and naive idealism."

"We became stuck in our childhood... because of our belief that we missed out on our childhood."

"I read books that told me if I had trouble sleeping, depression, vague aches and pains, that I was probably abused and hadn't remembered it yet. I was told that the memories would come when I was ready."

"What happened to us? Were we brainwashed? How did we fall so easily to the temptation of one global 'answer' to all our symptoms? Where did all that anger and rage really come from if we weren't really abused like we were led to believe?"

The Era of Memory Engineering Has Arrived



Science News


The Era of Memory Engineering Has Arrived

How neuroscientists can call up and change a memory

cyborg, robot, memory, erasing memories, face with computer circuits, computer circuits

 
The work raises futuristic ethical questions Image: iStock / TonisPan
It’s the premise of every third sci-fi thriller. Man wakes up to his normal seeming life, but of course it isn’t. At first, just the little things are off – the dog won’t eat and the TV keeps looping some strange video – but whatever. A few cuts later, with only his granddad’s rusty brass knuckles and a steely-eyed contempt for authority, our hero reveals a conspiracy that kicks up straight to the top. There were deals. Some blackmailing. A probe or two. But in the end, what’s most important is that everything he thought he knew was wrong. Because the scientists (Noooo!!) got to him with one of those electrode caps and rewrote his memory. Everything – the job, the daughter, the free parking – is a lie.

The dramatic ploy works on us because memory seems inviolable, or at least, we desperately hope that it is. We allow that our memories may fade and fail a bit, but otherwise, we go on the sanity-preserving assumption that there is one reason why we remember a particular thing: because we were there, and it actually happened.

Now, a new set of experiments, led by MIT neuroscientists Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu in Susumu Tonegawa’s lab, shows that this needn’t be the case. Using a stunning set of molecular neuroscience techniques (no electrode caps involved), these scientists have captured specific memories in mice, altered them, and shown that the mice behave in accord with these new, false, implanted memories. The era of memory engineering is upon us, and naturally, there are big implications for basic science and, perhaps someday, human health and society.

Although the techniques these investigators used to manipulate memory involved a jaw-dropping sampling from modern neuroscience’s bag of tricks, the essential strategy is easy to understand. Basically, you need a way of labeling neurons that were active during a specific experience, and a switch to operate them.

Enter designer mice. The mice in Ramirez and Liu’s experiments had been genetically modified so that when their neurons were highly active (and therefore presumably encoding ongoing experiences) those same neurons would produce a molecular label, as well as a molecular ‘ON’ switch. The label caused the neurons to glow red, and the switch was the now famous, and likely-future-Nobel-landing molecule Channelrhodopsin, which renders neurons light-activated. In these mice, then, the scientists could quite literally see recent experiences that had been written to specific brain cells. Even more impressively, they could activate those very same neurons in behaving mice by shining light on them, re-awakening whatever fragments of experience those cells had presumably encoded.

A final, and key feature of Ramirez et al’s labeling system was that it could itself be switched on or off, under control of the common antibiotic doxycycline. If doxycyline was given to the mice in their diet, the labeling process was snuffed out. If doxycycline was removed though, labeling was unimpeded. This was critical for labeling memories formed only during specific, experimenter-defined time windows.

In their main experiment, the researchers removed doxycycline for a short spell as mice explored a novel arena, allowing the neurons representing that arena –especially those neurons in a brain area called the hippocampus – to become labeled and light-activatable. The mice were then given doxycycline again to stop the labeling process. In this way, the experimenters had given themselves a literal biological handle on something that seems hopelessly subjective: a mental representation of a particular experience, at a particular time.

Impressive as it is to label a mental representation like this, this was still only the first half of Ramirez and Liu’s experiment. What they were really interested in is memory engineering – whether this specific representation could be brought on line again artificially and modified. In other words, could they make mice recall something that had in fact never occurred?
Their hunch was that the specific but otherwise unremarkable memory of the arena could be re-tooled and loaded with novel emotional content. To do this, the experimenters moved the mice to a new setting, shone light onto the rodents’ brains to re-awaken the memory of the previous arena, and paired this with a series of electrical shocks to induce fear.

Later, when the mice were returned to the original arena, they showed a much higher rate of behavioral freezing – the innate, ‘paralyzed with fear’ reaction that most mammals show in response to frightening situations. In other words, their brains had been tricked into thinking that the arena was a frightening place associated with shocks, even though no shocks had ever been given there. To rule out the more mundane possibility that the mice were just generally more fearful after the shocks, the researchers showed that fear reactions were specific to the original arena, and absent when mice were tested in new arenas.

As their final act of memory manhandling, the experimenters asked whether they could not only lay down a new false memory, but also if these memories would guide overt behaviors. This involved a slight variation on the previous experiment. Mice were placed in a two-room arena, and the mental representation of one of these rooms was selectively labeled using the same technique as above – that is, restricting doxycycline when present in one of the rooms, but not the other. As before, the memory for this room was awakened in a new context by light stimulation, and simultaneously paired with an electrical shock. Finally, the mice were placed back in the two-room arena, and allowed to spontaneously explore it. The mice showed a strong preference for the non fear-conditioned room, indicating that falsely implanted memories can bias ongoing behaviors.  These memories are folded into a mouse’s way of looking at the world.

Naturally, one wonders whether these techniques might someday find human applications. Perhaps it would be possible to rebuild particularly cherished and important memories that have deteriorated with age or disease? Or perhaps, more provocatively, some might even embrace the idea of falsified memory – artificially adding in happiness where there is only remembered pain, or subtracting out enduring despair that’s long outlived its usefulness. These are some ethically tricky situations, to be sure. At the same time, though, it’s hard to not sympathize with someone, say a war veteran or a rape victim, who might want the emotional content of a specific, life-destroying memory modified.
For now, these are all hypotheticals, given that memory engineering at the cellular level is currently only possible in highly engineered strains of mice who are tricked out with molecular beacons and switches, and whose memories are established in highly stylized ways. Nevertheless, these experiments should certainly give us pause. This is still a very long way off, but we’ve gotten a glimpse of how you might eventually modify the brain to modify more complex, narrative-like memories. It probably won’t be with electrode caps.

Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and regular contributor to NewYorker.com. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Jason Castro is an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Bates College, in Lewiston, Maine.

The Secrets of MKULTRA

SKEPTOID

 

The Secrets of MKULTRA

How true is it that the CIA conducted unethical mind control experiments on unwitting human subjects?

Skeptoid #373
July 30, 2013

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CIA MKULTRA
CIA Logo
US Government image



It's one of the most ominous terms in the history of modern governments and intelligence, nearly on a par with the names of Josef Mengele and Pol Pot. For 20 years from 1953 to 1973, the American Central Intelligence Agency funded and conducted tests on human subjects, both with and without their knowledge, in an effort to control minds and personalities for the purpose of espionage. Most notorious for administering the psychedelic drug LSD to people without their knowledge or consent, MKULTRA has since become a cornerstone of conspiracy theorists flaunting it almost gleefully as proof of the government's misdeeds against its own private citizens. And the scary part is that it's completely true.

The short version of the MKULTRA story is that the CIA spent a long time trying to control minds. After performing all kinds of dastardly and unethical testing, they found they couldn't reliably achieve their goals, and terminated the program. That's it. It's important to keep it in context, both what it was and what it wasn't. It's evidence that the government tried something that didn't work. It's also evidence that the government has been proven willing to bend the rules; and by "bending the rules" I mean breaking laws and violating both civil rights and ethics at every level. But with this said, MKULTRA does not constitute evidence that similar projects continue today. Maybe they do, but logically, MKULTRA is not that proof.

So let's look at how this all came about and what exactly happened. The cold war started basically as soon as the smoke cleared from World War II, and the Western bloc and the Communist bloc immediately became suspicious of one another. In 1949, the highest ranking Catholic archbishop in Communist Hungary, Cardinal József Mindszenty, was marched into court where he had been charged with treason for trying to undermine the Communist government. Mindszenty, who was innocent, mechanically confessed in court to a long list of crimes including stealing Hungary's crown jewels, planning to depose the government, start World War III, and then seize power himself. The CIA watched this, noted his strange behavior while making the confessions, and concluded that he must have been brainwashed. They saw American prisoners of war in North Korea make anti-Amerian statements on camera. Clearly, some response was needed to this apparent Communist ability. They contrived to develop mind control techniques.

One such project was called MKULTRA. MK meant the project was run by the CIA's Technical Services Staff, and Ultra was a reference to the highest level of security. But although MKULTRA is the poster child, there were other similar projects. It had spawned from project ARTICHOKE, founded in 1951 to study hypnosis and morphine addiction. There was also MKSEARCH, MKOFTEN, project BLUEBIRD, a whole raft of related programs. The US military, separate from the CIA, also conducted its own research. Project CHATTER, part of the US Navy, ran from 1947 to 1953, when MKULTRA took over.

At the time, both psychology and psychopharmacology were in their infancies. We didn't really know whether the CIA's goals were achievable or not; whether it was or was not possible to exert a finely tuned influence on people's minds. During the cold war's golden era of espionage, this was a major national security question. The CIA had to know whether this was something they could do; because if it was, it was something the KGB could do right back at them. While nuclear physicists on both sides were building bigger and bigger hydrogen bombs, psychologists and chemists were working to fight the cold war on a much subtler front.

The CIA is not a scientific research organization, and so it needed to contract out the vast majority of this work. The CIA set up front groups, such as the Society for the Investigation for Human Ecology, to fund projects at universities and hospitals in such a way that nobody realized the CIA was involved. Some 86 such institutions are known to have received funding as part of MKULTRA. The vast majority of researchers were unaware that their programs were funded by the CIA, and accordingly, did their work as they normally would according to ethical standards of the day. Some researched forms of hypnosis, some did trials on a variety of drugs intended to work as truth serums, some did various psychiatric or psychological studies trying to learn what made people tick and how that tick might be manipulable. In fact, just about every bizarre experiment you might have read about probably was tried to some degree by some MKULTRA funded researcher. Granted the ethical standards of the 1950s and 1960s were not what they are today, but still there was very little intentional harm done by nearly all MKULTRA funded programs. Nevertheless, the exceptions were exceptional indeed.

Research done at McGill University by Dr. Donald Cameron took patients who came in with minor psychiatric complaints and subjected them to outrageous treatments. Some were given electroshock therapy at many times the normal voltage, some were given LSD, some were given other experimental or illegal drugs, all under the license granted by MKULTRA. Many reports state that some patients left with lifelong disabilities.

The Addiction Research Center at the Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, KY was also secretly on the CIA's payroll. Dr. Harris Isbell took patients who came in to seek treatment for drug addiction and gave them massive doses of LSD, heroin, methamphetamine, and psychedelic mushrooms. In one experiment he put seven patients on LSD for 77 days straight.

I could fill a month of episodes giving such brief examples of the MKULTRA projects that are known. The main thing we know is that it didn't work.

Nothing that came out of MKULTRA panned out as very useful from an espionage perspective; in short, the CIA was never able to achieve the type of mind control that it wanted, and so the program was eventually terminated (other related programs from other agencies continued for some time with similar results). Because of the secrecy and ethical violations, the CIA destroyed all the documents, with the exception of a few that have turned up here and there over the years from misplaced archives. What remains has all been declassified, and can now be freely downloaded. From a purely scientific perspective, there's nothing there that isn't old hat to modern psychiatry and psychopharmacology; MKULTRA never learned anything that we don't know now. From an ethical perspective, documents of some cases exist, and some don't. It's probable that we don't know the worst of the ethical violations, and possible that we never will.

So as you can easily imagine, conspiracy theories surrounding MKULTRA are nearly endless. One of the most common pertains to a village in France which experienced an epidemic in 1951. Seven people died and a few hundred were sickened, scores of whom were committed to insane asylums. Some conspiracy theorists insist that it was a test of both aerial spraying of LSD and a foodborne toxin, however the scientific finding — published as early as that same year in the British Medical Journal — is that it was a case of ergot fungus contaminating the food supply. Ergot contamination of rye wheat causes convulsions, insomnia, pain, hallucination, and delirium. These symptoms might last hours or months. Considering that this happened two years before MKULTRA was funded, and that the effects were identical to those expected from the known ergot contamination, no introduction of a conspiracy theory is needed to explain the event.

The other most popular claim concerns Dr. Frank Olson, a microbiologist who worked in MKULTRA and its predecessor programs. He fell from a 13th floor hotel window and died in 1953 after expressing misgivings about MKULTRA, prompting claims that he was murdered by the CIA. In 1975 the CIA revealed that they had indeed spiked Dr. Olson's drink with LSD nine days before his death, then sent him to New York for psychiatric treatment. What happened in that hotel room remains a mystery to this day. The Olson family accepted a settlement offer in 1975, but tried to have the case reopened following a 1993 exhumation and autopsy that revealed blunt force trauma alleged to be consistent with by-the-book CIA assassination techniques. In 2012 the family sued the CIA seeking additional damages, but the court dismissed the suit in 2013 as the family had already settled.

$2/mo $5/mo $10/mo One time

Most of the rest of the MKULTRA conspiracy theories consist of vague assertions that similar unethical research continues and that the CIA still experiments on innocent subjects. At some level, they almost certainly do. But logic dictates that one cannot take a specific conspiracy claim — for example, that Denver International Airport is secretly set up to be an extermination camp for American citizens — and cite MKULTRA as evidence. It is not evidence of that. I'll also hear from 9/11 conspiracy theorists who cite MKULTRA as evidence that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job. No, it's not evidence of that either. Such comparisons are logical non-sequiturs. Saying "MKULTRA happened, therefore Denver Airport is an extermination camp" is saying "A, therefore B," and this is logic that does not hold up. Real as MKULTRA was, and real as other still-unknown CIA projects might be, one does not prove the other.

It was 1948 when Communist Hungary banned the Church, and Cardinal Mindszenty — as an outspoken critic of Communism — feared that he was likely to be arrested. He wrote that he had not conspired against the government, and said that if he later made any confessions to the contrary, that they would be the result only of coercion. After his arrest and conviction, he spent about 8 years in prison until being freed as a result of the Hungarian Revolution, at which point he was finally able to reveal the details of how and why he had made his bogus confessions in court. His confessions were not the result of psychoactive drugs, hypnotism, or any other type of mind control. He'd simply been beaten with rubber truncheons until he agreed to confess.

The lesson learned from a skeptical study of MKULTRA is that this was experimental research done within the context of what we knew in the 1950s and 1960s. We have 50 years of knowledge built up since then, and we now know that just about everything they tried wouldn't have worked. The human brain is just a little too complex for the type of precise control the CIA had hoped for. The best type of mind control, as Cardinal Mindszenty discovered, is the good old rubber truncheon.

Follow me on Twitter @BrianDunning.



Brian Dunning

© 2013 Skeptoid Media, Inc. Copyright information

References & Further Reading

CIA. Brainwashing from a Psychological Viewpoint. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1956. 45.
Gabbai, Lisbonne, Pourquier. "Ergot Poisoning at Pont St. Esprit." British Medical Journal. 15 Sep. 1951, Volume 2, Number 4732: 650-651.
Lux. "MKULTRA: Psychedelic Mind Control and Its Legacy." The Vaults of Erowid. Erowid.org, 1 Jun. 2007. Web. 25 Jul. 2013. <https://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/war/mkultra/mkultra_article1.shtml>
Marks, J. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. New York: Times Books, 1979. 203.
Select Committee on Intelligence, and Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources. Project MKULTRA: The CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1977.
Streatfeild, D. Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007.
Reference this article:
Dunning, B. "The Secrets of MKULTRA." Skeptoid Podcast. Skeptoid Media, Inc., 30 Jul 2013. Web. 31 Jul 2013. <http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4373>

Monday, July 15, 2013

Surveillance Blowback: The Making of the US Surveillance State, 1898-2020



Surveillance Blowback: The Making of the US Surveillance State, 1898-2020

Above: Surveillance: America’s pastime. (Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: naixn, Jason Smith / feastoffun.com)


The American surveillance state is now an omnipresent reality, but its deep history is little known and its future little grasped.  Edward Snowden’s leaked documents reveal that, in a post-9/11 state of war, the National Security Agency (NSA) was able to create a surveillance system that could secretly monitor the private communications of almost every American in the name of fighting foreign terrorists. The technology used is state of the art; the impulse, it turns out, is nothing new. For well over a century, what might be called “surveillance blowback” from America’s wars has ensured the creation of an ever more massive and omnipresent internal security and surveillance apparatus.  Its future (though not ours) looks bright indeed.

In 1898, Washington occupied the Philippines and in the years that followed pacified its rebellious people, in part by fashioning the world’s first full-scale “surveillance state” in a colonial land.  The illiberal lessons learned there then migrated homeward, providing the basis for constructing America’s earliest internal security and surveillance apparatus during World War I.  A half-century later, as protests mounted during the Vietnam War, the FBI, building on the foundations of that old security structure, launched large-scale illegal counterintelligence operations to harass antiwar activists, while President Richard Nixon’s White House created its own surveillance apparatus to target its domestic enemies.

In the aftermath of those wars, however, reformers pushed back against secret surveillance.  Republican privacy advocates abolished much of President Woodrow Wilson’s security apparatus during the 1920s, and Democratic liberals in Congress created the FISA courts in the 1970s in an attempt to prevent any recurrence of President Nixon’s illegal domestic wiretapping.
Today, as Washington withdraws troops from the Greater Middle East, a sophisticated intelligence apparatus built for the pacification of Afghanistan and Iraq has come home to help create a twenty-first century surveillance state of unprecedented scope. But the past pattern that once checked the rise of a U.S. surveillance state seems to be breaking down.  Despite talk about ending the war on terror one day, President Obama has left the historic pattern of partisan reforms far behind. In what has become a permanent state of “wartime” at home, the Obama administration is building upon the surveillance systems created in the Bush years to maintain U.S. global dominion in peace or war through a strategic, ever-widening edge in information control.  The White House shows no sign — nor does Congress — of cutting back on construction of a powerful, global Panopticon that can surveil domestic dissidents, track terrorists, manipulate allied nations, monitor rival powers, counter hostile cyber strikes, launch preemptive cyberattacks, and protect domestic communications.

Writing for TomDispatch four years ago during Obama’s first months in office, I suggested that the War on Terror has “proven remarkably effective in building a technological template that could be just a few tweaks away from creating a domestic surveillance state — with omnipresent cameras, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identification, and drone aircraft patrolling ‘the homeland.’”

That prediction has become our present reality — and with stunning speed. Americans now live under the Argus-eyed gaze of a digital surveillance state, while increasing numbers of surveillance drones fill American skies.  In addition, the NSA’s net now reaches far beyond our borders, sweeping up the personal messages of many millions of people worldwide and penetrating the confidential official communications of at least 30 allied nations. The past has indeed proven prologue. The future is now.

The Coming of the Information Revolution

The origins of this emerging global surveillance state date back over a century to “America’s first information revolution” for the management of textual, statistical, and analytical data — a set of innovations whose synergy created the technological capacity for mass surveillance.

Here’s a little litany of “progress” to ponder while on the road to today’s every-email-all-the-time version of surveillance.

Within just a few years, the union of Thomas A. Edison’s quadruplex telegraph with Philo Remington’s commercial typewriter, both inventions of 1874, allowed for the accurate transmission of textual data at the unequalled speed of 40 words per minute across America and around the world.

In the mid-1870s as well, librarian Melvil Dewey developed the “Dewey decimal system” to catalog the Amherst College Library, thereby inventing the “smart number” for the reliable encoding and rapid retrieval of limitless information.

The year after engineer Herman Hollerith patented the punch card (1889), the U.S. Census Bureau adopted his Electrical Tabulating machine to count 62,622,250 Americans within weeks — a triumph that later led to the founding of International Business Machines, better known by its acronym IBM.

By 1900, all American cities were wired via the Gamewell Corporation’s innovative telegraphic communications, with over 900 municipal police and fire systems sending 41 million messages in a single year.

A Colonial Laboratory for the Surveillance State

On the eve of empire in 1898, however, the U.S. government was still what scholar Stephen Skowronek has termed a “patchwork” state with a near-zero capacity for domestic security.  That, of course, left ample room for the surveillance version of modernization, and it came with surprising speed after Washington conquered and colonized the Philippines.

Facing a decade of determined Filipino resistance, the U.S. Army applied all those American information innovations — rapid telegraphy, photographic files, alpha-numeric coding, and Gamewell police communications — to the creation of a formidable, three-tier colonial security apparatus including the Manila Police, the Philippines Constabulary, and above all the Army’s Division of Military Information.

In early 1901, Captain Ralph Van Deman, later dubbed “the father of U.S. Military Intelligence,” assumed command of this still embryonic division, the Army’s first field intelligence unit in its 100-year history. With a voracious appetite for raw data, Van Deman’s division compiled phenomenally detailed information on thousands of Filipino leaders, including their physical appearance, personal finances, landed property, political loyalties, and kinship networks.

Starting in 1901, the first U.S. governor-general (and future president) William Howard Taft drafted draconian sedition legislation for the islands and established a 5,000-man strong Philippines Constabulary.  In the process, he created a colonial surveillance state that ruled, in part, thanks to the agile control of information, releasing damning data about enemies while suppressing scandals about allies.

When the Associated Press’s Manila bureau chief reported critically on these policies, Taft’s allies dug up dirt on this would-be critic and dished it out to the New York press.  On the other hand, the Division of Military Information compiled a scandalous report about the rising Filipino politician Manuel Quezon, alleging a premarital abortion by his future first lady.  Quezon, however, served the Constabulary as a spy, so this document remained buried in U.S. files, assuring his unchecked ascent to become the first president of the Philippines in 1935.

American Blueprint

During the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, Mark Twain wrote an imagined history of twentieth-century America.  In it, he predicted that a “lust for conquest” had already destroyed “the Great [American] Republic,” because  “trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.” Indeed, just a decade after Twain wrote those prophetic words, colonial police methods came home to serve as a template for the creation of an American internal security apparatus in wartime.

After the U.S. entered World War I in 1917 without an intelligence service of any sort, Colonel Van Deman brought his Philippine experience to bear, creating the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) and so laying the institutional foundations for a future internal security state.

In collaboration with the FBI, he also expanded the MID’s reach through a civilian auxiliary organization, the American Protective League, whose 350,000 citizen-operatives amassed more than a million pages of surveillance reports on German-Americans in just 14 months, arguably the world’s most intensive feat of domestic surveillance ever.

After the Armistice in 1918, Military Intelligence joined the FBI in two years of violent repression of the American left marked by the notorious Luster raids in New York City, J. Edgar Hoover’s “Palmer Raids” in cities across the northeast and the suppression of union strikes from New York City to Seattle.

When President Wilson left office in 1921, incoming Republican privacy advocates condemned his internal security regime as intrusive and abusive, forcing the Army and the FBI to cut their ties to patriotic vigilantes. In 1924, Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone, worrying that “a secret police may become a menace to free government,” announced “the Bureau of Investigation is not concerned with political or other opinions of individuals.” Epitomizing the nation’s retreat from surveillance, Secretary of War Henry Stimson closed the Military Intelligence cipher section in 1929, saying famously, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

After retiring at the rank of major general that same year, Van Deman and his wife continued from their home in San Diego to coordinate an informal intelligence exchange system, compiling files on 250,000 suspected “subversives.”  They also took reports from classified government files and slipped them to citizen anti-communist groups for blacklisting. In the 1950 elections, for instance, Representative Richard Nixon reportedly used Van Deman’s files to circulate “pink sheets” at rallies denouncing California Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, his opponent in a campaign for a Senate seat, launching a victorious Nixon on the path to the presidency.

From retirement, Van Deman, in league with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, also proved crucial at a 1940 closed-door conference that awarded the FBI control over domestic counterintelligence.  The Army’s Military Intelligence, and its successors, the CIA and NSA, were restricted to foreign espionage, a division of tasks that would hold, at least in principle, until the post-9/11 years. So armed, during World War II the FBI used warrantless wiretaps, “black bag” break-ins, and surreptitious mail opening to track suspects, while mobilizing more than 300,000 informers to secure defense plants against wartime threats that ultimately proved “negligible.”

The Vietnam Years

In response to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s, the FBI deployed its COINTELPRO operation, using what Senator Frank Church’s famous investigative committee later called “unsavory and vicious tactics… including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths.”

In assessing COINTELPRO’s 2,370 actions from 1960 to 1974, the Church Committee branded them a “sophisticated vigilante operation” that “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity.” Significantly, even this aggressive Senate investigation did not probe Director Hoover’s notorious “private files” on the peccadilloes of leading politicians that had insulated his Bureau from any oversight for more than 30 years.

After New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh exposed illegal CIA surveillance of American antiwar activists in 1974, Senator Church’s committee and a presidential commission under Nelson Rockefeller investigated the Agency’s “Operation Chaos,” a program to conduct massive illegal surveillance of the antiwar protest movement, discovering a database with 300,000 names.  These investigations also exposed the excesses of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, forcing the Bureau to reform.

To prevent future abuses, President Jimmy Carter signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, creating a special court to approve all national security wiretaps.  In a bitter irony, Carter’s supposed reform ended up plunging the judiciary into the secret world of the surveillance managers where, after 9/11, it became a rubberstamp institution for every kind of state intrusion on domestic privacy.

How the Global War on Terror Came Home

As its pacification wars in Afghanistan and Iraq sank into bloody quagmires, Washington brought electronic surveillance, biometric identification, and unmanned aerial vehicles to the battlefields.  This trio, which failed to decisively turn the tide in those lands, nonetheless now undergirds a global U.S. surveillance apparatus of unequalled scope and unprecedented power.
After confining the populations of Baghdad and the rebellious Sunni city of Falluja behind blast-wall cordons, the U.S. Army attempted to bring the Iraqi resistance under control in part by collecting, as of 2011, three million Iraqi fingerprints,iris, and retinal scans.  These were deposited in a biometric database in West Virginia that American soldiers at checkpoints and elsewhere on distant battlefields could at any moment access by satellite link. Simultaneously, the Joint Special Operations Command under General Stanley McChrystal centralized all electronic and satellite surveillance in the Greater Middle East to identify possible al-Qaeda operatives for assassination by Predator drones or hunter-killer raids by Special Operations commandos from Somalia to Pakistan.

Domestically, post-9/11, the White House tried to create a modern version of the old state-citizen alliance for domestic surveillance. In May 2002, President Bush’s Justice Department launched Operation TIPS with “millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others” spying on fellow citizens. But there was vocal opposition from members of Congress, civil libertarians, and the media, which soon forced Justice to quietly kill the program.

In a digital iteration of the same effort, retired admiral John Poindexter began toset up an ominously titled Pentagon program called Total Information Awareness to amass a “detailed electronic dossier on millions of Americans.” Again the nation recoiled, Congress banned the program, and the admiral was forced to resign.

Defeated in the public arena, the Bush administration retreated into the shadows, where it launched secret FBI and NSA domestic surveillance programs. Here, Congress proved far more amenable and pliable.  In 2002, Congress erased the bright line that had long barred the CIA from domestic spying, granting the agency the power to access U.S. financial records and audit electronic communications routed through the country.

Defying the FISA law, in October 2001 President Bush ordered the NSA to commence covert monitoring of private communications through the nation’s telephone companies without the requisite warrants. According to the Associated Press, he also “secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United States” carrying the world’s “emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions, and more.” Since his administration had already conveniently decided that “metadata was not constitutionally protected,” the NSA began an open-ended program, Operation Stellar Wind, “to collect bulk telephony and Internet metadata.”
By 2004, the Bush White House was so wedded to Internet metadata collection that top aides barged into Attorney General John Ashcroft’s hospital room to extract a reauthorization signature for the program.  They were blocked by Justice Department officials led by Deputy Attorney General James Comey, forcing a two-month suspension until that FISA court, brought into existence in the Carter years, put its first rubber-stamp on this mass surveillance regime.
Armed with expansive FISA court orders allowing the collection of data sets rather than information from specific targets, the FBI’s “Investigative Data Warehouse” acquired more than a billion documents within five years, including intelligence reports, social security files, drivers’ licenses, and private financial information.  All of this was accessible to 13,000 analysts making a million queries monthly. In 2006, as the flood of data surging through fiber optic cables strained NSA computers, the Bush administration  launched  the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity to develop supercomputing searches powerful enough to process this torrent of Internet information.

In 2005, a New York Times investigative report exposed the administration’s illegal surveillance for the first time. A year later, USA Todayreported that the NSA was “secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon, and Bell South.” One expert called it  “the largest database ever assembled in the world,” adding presciently that the Agency’s goal was “to create a database of every call ever made.”

In August 2007, in response to these revelations, Congress capitulated.  It passed a new law, the Protect America Act, which retrospectively legalized this illegal White House-inspired set of programs by requiring greater oversight by the FISA court.  This secret tribunal — acting almost as a “parallel Supreme Court” that rules on fundamental constitutional rights without adversarial proceedings or higher review — has removed any real restraint on the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Internet metadata and regularly rubberstamps almost 100% of the government’s thousands of surveillance requests. Armed with expanded powers, the National Security Agency promptly launched its PRISM program (recently revealed by Edward Snowden).  To feed its hungry search engines, the NSA has compelled nine Internet giants, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, and Skype, to transfer what became billions of emails to its massive data farms.

Obama’s Expanding Surveillance Universe

Instead of curtailing his predecessor’s wartime surveillance, as Republicans did in the 1920s and Democrats in the 1970s, President Obama has overseen the expansion of the NSA’s wartime digital operations into a permanent weapon for the exercise of U.S. global power.

The Obama administration continued a Bush-era NSA program of “bulk email records collection” until 2011 when two senators protested that the agency’s “statements to both Congress and the Court… significantly exaggerated this program’s effectiveness.”  Eventually, the administration was forced to curtail this particular operation. Nonetheless, the NSA has continued to collect the personal communications of Americans by the billions under its PRISM and other programs.

In the Obama years as well, the NSA began cooperating with its long-time British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), to tap into the dense cluster of Trans-Atlantic Telecommunication fiber optic cables that transit the United Kingdom. During a visit to a GCHQ facility for high-altitude intercepts at Menwith Hill in June 2008, NSA Director General Keith Alexander asked, “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith.”

In the process, GCHQ’s Operation Tempora achieved the “biggest Internet access” of any partner in a “Five Eyes” signals-intercept coalition that, in addition to Great Britain and the U.S., includes Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. When the project went online in 2011, the GCHQ sank probes into 200 Internet cables and was soon collecting 600 million telephone messages daily, which were, in turn, made accessible to 850,000 NSA employees.

The historic alliance between the NSA and GCHQ dates back to the dawn of the Cold War.  In deference to it, the NSA has, since 2007, exempted its “2nd party” Five Eyes allies from surveillance under its “Boundless Informant” operation. According to another recently leaked NSA document, however, “we can, and often do, target the signals of most 3rd party foreign partners.”  This is clearly a reference to close allies like Germany, France, and Italy.

On a busy day in January 2013, for instance, the NSA collected 60 million phone calls and emails from Germany — some 500 million German messages are reportedly collected annually — with lesser but still hefty numbers from France, Italy, and non-European allies like Brazil. To gain operational intelligence on such allies, the NSA taps phones at the European Council headquarters in Brussels, bugs the European Union (EU) delegation at the U.N., has planted a “Dropmire” monitor “on the Cryptofax at the EU embassy DC,” and eavesdrops on 38 allied embassies worldwide.

Such secret intelligence about its allies gives Washington an immense diplomatic advantage, says NSA expert James Bamford. “It’s the equivalent of going to a poker game and wanting to know what everyone’s hand is before you place your bet.” And who knows what scurrilous bits of scandal about world leaders American surveillance systems might scoop up to strengthen Washington’s hand in that global poker game called diplomacy.

This sort of digital surveillance was soon supplemented by actual Internet warfare.  Between 2006 and 2010, Washington launched the planet’s first cyberwar, with Obama ordering devastating cyberattacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities. In 2009, the Pentagon formed the U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), with a cybercombat center at Lackland Air Base initiallystaffed by 7,000 Air Force employees. Over the next two years, by appointingNSA chief Alexander as CYBERCOM’s concurrent commander, it created an enormous concentration of power in the digital shadows.  The Pentagon has also declared cyberspace an “operational domain” for both offensive and defensive warfare.

Controlling the Future

By leaking a handful of NSA documents, Edward Snowden has given us a glimpse of future U.S. global policy and the changing architecture of power on this planet. At the broadest level, this digital shift complements Obama’s new defense strategy, announced in 2012, of reducing costs (cutting, for example, infantry troops by 14%), while conserving Washington’s overall power by developing a capacity for “a combined arms campaign across all domains — land, air, maritime, space, and cyberspace.”

While cutting conventional armaments, Obama is investing billions in constructing a new architecture for global information control. To store and process the billions of messages sucked up by its worldwide surveillance network (totaling 97 billion items for March alone), the NSA is employing11,000 workers to build a $1.6 billion data center in Bluffdale, Utah, whosestorage capacity is measured in “yottabytes,” each the equivalent of a trillion terabytes.  That’s almost unimaginable once you realize that just 15 terabytes could store every publication in the Library of Congress.

From its new $1.8 billion headquarters, the third-biggest building in the Washington area, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency deploys 16,000 employees and a $5 billion budget to coordinate a rising torrent of surveillance data from Predators, Reapers, U-2 spy planes, Global Hawks, X-37B space drones, Google Earth, Space Surveillance Telescopes, and orbiting satellites.
To protect those critical orbiting satellites, which transmit most U.S. military communications, the Pentagon is building an aerospace shield of pilotless drones. In the exosphere, the Air Force has since April 2010 been successfully testing the X-37B space drone that can carry missiles to strike rival satellite networks such as the one the Chinese are currently creating.

For more extensive and precise surveillance from space, the Pentagon has beenreplacing its costly, school-bus-sized spy satellites with a new generation of light, low cost models such as the ATK-A200. Successfully launched in May 2011, this module is orbiting 250 miles above the Earth with remote-controlled, U-2 quality cameras that now provide the “U.S. Central Command an assured ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) capability.”

In the stratosphere, close enough to Earth for audiovisual surveillance, the Pentagon is planning to launch an armada of 99 Global Hawk drones — each equipped with high-resolution cameras to surveil all terrain within a 100-mile radius, electronic sensors to intercept communications, and efficient engines for continuous 24-hour flight.

Within a decade, the U.S. will likely deploy this aerospace shield, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and even vaster, more omnipresent digital surveillance networks that will envelop the Earth in an electronic grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield, atomizing a single suspected terrorist, or monitoring millions of private lives at home and abroad.

Sadly, Mark Twain was right when he warned us just over 100 years ago that America could not have both empire abroad and democracy at home.  To paraphrase his prescient words, by “trampling upon the helpless abroad” with unchecked surveillance, Americans have learned, “by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.”


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Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a TomDispatch regular, and author most recently of the award-winning book, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State. He has also convened the “Empires in Transition” project, a global working group of 140 historians from universities on four continents. The results of their first meetings were published as Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, and the findings from their latest conference, at Barcelona last June, will appear next year as Endless Empires: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, and America’s Decline.

Friday, July 5, 2013

Your Metadata Is Your Electronic Fingerprint

 

YAHOO  NEWS
 

Why Your Metadata Is Your Every Move

 The Atlantic Wire




 The metadata that the National Security Agency collects on all calls in the U.S. is not just what's on a phone bill, as the program's supporters have claimed. Your phone bill lists some of the same things the NSA's collecting — numbers dialed, length of all — but does not list the geolocation of each of your calls. It is that final piece of data — where you made your calls — that tells the government everything about your life. "Nobody's listening to the content of people's phone calls," President Obama said last week. "The only thing taken, as has been correctly expressed, is not content of a conversation, but the information that is generally on your telephone bill," Sen. Dianne Feinstein said on Sunday. But it doesn't matter. The government doesn't need to listen to your calls. Because it already knows where you are, and that does matter.The metadata that the National Security Agency collects on all calls in the U.S. is not just what's on a phone bill, as the program's supporters have claimed. Your phone bill lists some of the same things the NSA's collecting — numbers dialed, length of all — but does not list the geolocation of each of your calls. It is that final piece of data — where you made your calls — that tells the government everything about your life. "Nobody's listening to the content of people's phone calls," President Obama said last week. "The only thing taken, as has been correctly expressed, is not content of a conversation, but the information that is generally on your telephone bill," Sen. Dianne Feinstein said on Sunday. But it doesn't matter. The government doesn't need to listen to your calls. Because it already knows where you are, and that does matter.The metadata that the National Security Agency collects on all calls in the U.S. is not just what's on a phone bill, as the program's supporters have claimed. Your phone bill lists some of the same things the NSA's collecting — numbers dialed, length of all — but does not list the geolocation of each of your calls. It is that final piece of data — where you made your calls — that tells the government everything about your life. "Nobody's listening to the content of people's phone calls," President Obama said last week. "The only thing taken, as has been correctly expressed, is not content of a conversation, but the information that is generally on your telephone bill," Sen. Dianne Feinstein said on Sunday. But it doesn't matter. The government doesn't need to listen to your calls. Because it already knows where you are, and that does matter.


In a paper published in Nature's Scientific Reports last year, MIT researchers found that with cell phone call metadata from 1.5 million anonymous people, they could identify a person easily with just four phone calls. As Foreign Policy's Joshua Keating explains, they didn't need names, addresses, or phone numbers. They only used time of the call and the closest cell tower.

"We use the analogy of the fingerprint," said [MIT professor

And it's not just that metadata easily identifies us. Where we go and who we talk to tells a story. Mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau explained to The New Yorker's Jane Mayer. "If you can track [metadata], you know exactly what is happening—you don’t need the content." As a New York Times editorial explains, metadata can reveal "political leanings and associations, medical issues, sexual orientation, habits of religious worship, and even marital infidelities." Have you ever called in sick — from the beach? The NSA would know. Just check your daily metadata.

Or think, for example, of cell phone metadata showing a senator and her intern were both in the same hotel in the middle of the night. That is exactly how a rogue NSA agent used it once, according to former NSA director Michael Hayen. As The Daily Beast's Eli Lake reports, "Hayden said he remembered a collector who was fired for trying to snoop on his ex-wife overseas." So when Fox News' Brit Hume says, "I don't think there have been any abuses, frankly," he is wrong. The former head of the NSA says so.

In the cancelled sci-fi Fox show Fringe, evil genetically-modified humans from the year 2609 travel back to our time to oppress normal humans and rule our not-yet-polluted-beyond-all-hope Earth. In one episode, the bad guys eavesdrop on human rebels' cell phone calls with an elaborate device that measures the imprint sound waves left on glass. This was dumb. The bad guys did not need technology from 600 years in the future to figure out who or where the rebels were. They did not even need to eavesdrop. They just needed the metadata collected on all of us by the NSA.

It goes without saying that the NSA is not staffed by cruel humanoids who time-traveled from the future. However, the agency's surveillance power is so amazing that writers on a cheesy sci-fi shows failed to anticipate it. And, a week after The Guardian revealed the program, some politicians who are supposed to be in charge of oversight of the program still fail to grasp it. As one of the other NSA whistleblowers, Thomas Drake, writes in The Guardian today: "The problem is that in the digital space, metadata becomes the index for content. And content is gold for determining intent.."

--

Top photo by Fire At Will via Flickr. Bottom photo via Fox. Inset diagrams via Nature(A) Trace of an anonymized mobile phone user during a day. The dots represent the times and locations where the user made or received a call. Every time the user has such an interaction, the closest antenna that routes the call is recorded. (B) The same user's trace as recorded in a mobility database. The user's interaction times are here recorded with a precision of one hour. (C) The same individual's trace when we lower the resolution of our dataset through spatial and temporal aggregation. The user's interaction are recorded with a precision of two hours.

 

A Guardian guide to your

metadata

      
Metadata is information generated as you use technology, and its use has been the subject of controversy since NSA's secret surveillance program was revealed. Examples include the date and time you called somebody or the location from which you last accessed your email. The data collected generally does not contain personal or content-specific details, but rather transactional information about the user, the device and activities taking place. In some cases you can limit the information that is collected – by turning off location services on your cell phone for instance – but many times you cannot. Below, explore some of the data collected through activities you do every day. On Thursday, June 13 The Guardian's data editor James Ball will answer your questions about the NSA data collection program in the US from 3pm-4pm EST | 8pm-9pm BST
 

 

What metadata looks like

Below is a tweet from @GuardianUS (right) and a truncated version of its metadata (left). Accessing metadata is often possible through services offered by the provider and can be retrieved in a structured format that could include raw text, XML, or in this example, JSON. An easy way to see some of your own metadata is by looking at your browser's history which provides information about what websites you visited and when
 

What you can tell using metadata:


A case study of the Petraeus scandal

 
1. To communicate, Paula Broadwell and David Petraeus shared an anonymous email account
 
 
     
2. Instead of sending emails, both would login to the account, edit and save drafts
 
 
 
     
3. Broadwell logged in from various hotels' public Wi-Fi, leaving a trail of metadata that included times and locations
 
 
 
     
4. The FBI crossed-referenced hotel guests with login times and locations leading to the identification of Broadwell
 
 





THE NEW YORKER


News Desk


June 6, 2013

What’s the Matter with Metadata?

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NEW%20YORKER%20PRIVACY%20S#1FB8A3-580.jpg


Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from liberal Northern California and the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, assured the public earlier today that the government’s secret snooping into the phone records of Americans was perfectly fine, because the information it obtained was only “meta,” meaning it excluded the actual content of the phone conversations, providing merely records, from a Verizon subsidiary, of who called whom when and from where. In addition, she said in a prepared statement, the “names of subscribers” were not included automatically in the metadata (though the numbers, surely, could be used to identify them). “Our courts have consistently recognized that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in this type of metadata information and thus no search warrant is required to obtain it,” she said, adding that “any subsequent effort to obtain the content of an American’s communications would require a specific order from the FISA court.”
She said she understands privacy—“that’s why this is carefully done”—and noted that eleven special federal judges, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret, had authorized the vast intelligence collection. A White House official made the same points to reporters, saying, “The order reprinted overnight does not allow the government to listen in on anyone’s telephone calls” and was subject to “a robust legal regime.” The gist of the defense was that, in contrast to what took place under the Bush Administration, this form of secret domestic surveillance was legitimate because Congress had authorized it, and the judicial branch had ratified it, and the actual words spoken by one American to another were still private. So how bad could it be?

The answer, according to the mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau, whom I interviewed while reporting on the plight of the former N.S.A. whistleblower Thomas Drake and who is also the author of “Surveillance or Security?,” is that it’s worse than many might think.
“The public doesn’t understand,” she told me, speaking about so-called metadata. “It’s much more intrusive than content.” She explained that the government can learn immense amounts of proprietary information by studying “who you call, and who they call. If you can track that, you know exactly what is happening—you don’t need the content.”

For example, she said, in the world of business, a pattern of phone calls from key executives can reveal impending corporate takeovers. Personal phone calls can also reveal sensitive medical information: “You can see a call to a gynecologist, and then a call to an oncologist, and then a call to close family members.” And information from cell-phone towers can reveal the caller’s location. Metadata, she pointed out, can be so revelatory about whom reporters talk to in order to get sensitive stories that it can make more traditional tools in leak investigations, like search warrants and subpoenas, look quaint. “You can see the sources,” she said. When the F.B.I. obtains such records from news agencies, the Attorney General is required to sign off on each invasion of privacy. When the N.S.A. sweeps up millions of records a minute, it’s unclear if any such brakes are applied.
Metadata, Landau noted, can also reveal sensitive political information, showing, for instance, if opposition leaders are meeting, who is involved, where they gather, and for how long. Such data can reveal, too, who is romantically involved with whom, by tracking the locations of cell phones at night.

For the law-enforcement community, particularly the parts focussed on locating terrorists, metadata has led to breakthroughs. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the master planner of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, “got picked up by his cell phone,” Landau said. Many other criminal suspects have given themselves away through their metadata trails. In fact, Landau told me, metadata and other new surveillance tools have helped cut the average amount of time it takes the U.S. Marshals to capture a fugitive from forty-two days to two.

But with each technological breakthrough comes a break-in to realms previously thought private. “It’s really valuable for law enforcement, but we have to update the wiretap laws,” Landau said.
It was exactly these concerns that motivated the mathematician William Binney, a former N.S.A. official who spoke to me for the Drake story, to retire rather than keep working for an agency he suspected had begun to violate Americans’ fundamental privacy rights. After 9/11, Binney told me, as I reported in the piece, General Michael Hayden, who was then director of the N.S.A., “reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”

Binney, who considered himself a conservative, feared that the N.S.A.’s data-mining program was so extensive that it could help “create an Orwellian state.”

As he told me at the time, wiretap surveillance requires trained human operators, but data mining is an automated process, which means that the entire country can be watched. Conceivably, the government could “monitor the Tea Party, or reporters, whatever group or organization you want to target,” he said. “It’s exactly what the Founding Fathers never wanted.”
Illustration by Matthew Hollister.

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Read more of our coverage of government surveillance programs.