WASHINGTON, DC -- Recent moves to beef up intelligence gathering in the
wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks have civil libertarians
concerned that law enforcement agencies will entangle many law abiding
citizens and social justice groups in their surveillance missions.
Intelligence networks are setting their sights on the Internet, which up to
now has had no clear privacy guidelines. Under the provisions of the
inaptly named anti-terrorism act, "USA-PATRIOT," the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI), National Security Agency (NSA), Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), and a number of other smaller law enforcement agencies are
looking for ways to monitor the Internet and mine useful intelligence from
it. And new technology makes it easier than ever to spy on the Internet.
Although law enforcement and intelligence agencies claim they are merely
looking for information to counter future acts of terrorism, the definition
of "terrorism" is being expanded to cover non-violent groups that have
traditionally used the Internet to marshal resistance to corporate-inspired
globalization. Politicians are already painting dissent as "unpatriotic"
and therefore somehow linked to terrorism.
Meanwhile, a phalanx of software companies, consultants, and defense
contractors stand to reap billions of dollars over the next few years by
selling surveillance and information-gathering systems to government
agencies and the private sector.
Technology Already in the Hands of Law Enforcement
Law enforcement agencies like the FBI already have at their disposal a
massive information sharing network through which federal, state, local,
and foreign police forces can exchange information on groups felt to pose a
threat. The system, RISSNET, or Regional Information Sharing System
Network, which existed before the September 11th attacks, recently got a
boost when Congress authorized additional money for it in the USA PATRIOT Act.
RISSNET is a secure intranet that connects 5,700 law enforcement agencies
in all 50 states, as well as agencies in Ontario and Quebec, the District
of Columbia, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and Australia.
According to sources close to the Washington Metropolitan Police, data on
targeted local groups such as the Alliance for Global Justice, the
anti-World Bank/International Monetary Fund activist organization, has been
shared with other jurisdictions through RISSNET.
RISSNET has also been used to coordinate the monitoring of the activities
of anti-globalization protestors in Seattle, Quebec City, Philadelphia, Los
Angeles, Washington DC and Genoa. For example, when the FBI seized network
server logs from Independent Media Center (IMC) in Seattle during the April
2001 anti-free trade protests in Quebec City, RISSNET was used to
coordinate activities across jurisdictional boundaries. The IMC, founded
during the 1999 WTO protests, allows activists and independent journalists
to post directly to its site.(anon with no logs kept,needs mirrors.pr)
State and metropolitan police intelligence units also monitor the web sites
of activist organizations in their jurisdictions. All RISS intelligence is
archived by an Orwellian-sounding entity called MAGLOCLEN or "Middle
Atlantic-Great Lakes Organized Crime Law Enforcement Network." There are
other regional RISS intelligence centers around the country with equally
mysterious acronyms. MAGLOCLEN, a nerve center headquartered in Newtown,
Pennsylvania, distributes political intelligence to all police departments
hooked up to RISSNET.
MAGLOCLEN allows police investigators to link various activist groups and
members through the Link Association Analysis sub-system, a relational data
base that identifies the "friends and families" of groups and individuals.
The Telephone Record Analysis sub-system can call up records of phone calls
of targeted groups and individuals. A suspect group's banking and other
commercial data can be monitored by the Financial Analysis sub-system. And
through a system that would have been the envy of J. Edgar Hoover, police
and federal agents can also call up profiles that provide specific
information on the composition of organizations, including their membership
lists. The Justice Department has instituted a project called RISSNET II,
which directly links the individual databases contained within the various
RISS centers.
The FBI also runs its own intranet called Law Enforcement On-line or "LEO,"
which allows it to communicate intelligence with select other law
enforcement agencies. In the aftermath of September 11th , the FBI is under
pressure to open up LEO to more police agencies so they can have access to
more real-time intelligence. If Attorney General John Ashcroft lifts
restrictions placed on the FBI's collection of political intelligence,
undoubtedly information on the First Amendment activities of American
citizens will wind up in the Bureau's computer databases.
"There has been no indication that the FBI needs expanded spying powers,"
says Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Michael Ratner. "We should
learn from history; spying on dissent is not only unlawful but it is abusive."
This kind of surveillance is not new. In the 1960s and 70s, the FBI's
Counter Intelligence Program, known as COINTELPRO, was used to gather
personal details on the lives and habits of a wide array of activists
ranging from public figures like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., actress Jane
Fonda and noted pediatrician Benjamin Spock, to members of local anti-war
and civil rights groups. This information was often used to disrupt lawful
organizing and protest activities.
A modern-day FBI list might include any group deemed "terrorist" by any law
enforcement agencies, the military, or criminal prosecutors. That could
subject organizations as varied -- and unconnected to terrorism -- as Earth
First, Greenpeace, the American Indian Movement, the Zapatista National
Liberation Front, ACT UP, and their supporters to a wide array of high-tech
surveillance and eavesdropping tools.
Chief among spy agency tools is an e-mail sniffing program known as
Carnivore. Changes brought about by USA-PATRIOT allow federal law
enforcement officials to petition a secretive federal court called the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for warrants to tap phones, read
e-mail, or break and enter into homes or offices to conduct searches and
plant bugging devices. These spy activities can be carried out without
proof that an organization has links to terrorists or foreign intelligence
agencies.
To read e-mail the FBI can order an Internet Service Provider to place a
special monitoring computer called Carnivore (now renamed Data Collection
System 1000) on its network servers. The FBI can then select the e-mail of
surveillance targets for capture and storage. Not content with this device,
the FBI now seeks to expand its surveillance capability to the entire Internet.
Making a Buck off of Government Spying
companies that are positioning themselves to help the government surveill
the web came out in force at a recent Homeland Security Conference in
Washington. They included Oracle, Microsoft, Information Builders, Choice
Point, Man Tech, AMS, and Booz Allen & Hamilton. Government speakers from
civilian and military agencies all stressed that they urgently need the
technology to store surveillance-derived intelligence and exchange it with
other agencies. If these corporations step up to the plate on developing
new surveillance, monitoring, and biometric ID systems, they stand to make
billions.
Companies like Top Layer Networks, Inc. of Westboro, Massachusetts, are
developing ways for FBI to install surveillance systems at a few key
Internet hubs which would allow federal agents to remotely flip a switch
and pound a few keys to begin monitoring the e-mail or web-based mail of
any targeted group or individual. According to chief Top Layer engineer Ken
Georgiades, the firm is working with a number of partners to develop new
standards for the legal interception of communications at the Internet
Service Provider level and at higher gigabit speeds.
The higher gigabit intercept equipment would be placed at major Internet
backbone hubs in strategic locations like Washington, DC, the San Francisco
Bay Area, Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles. Georgiades said that the1994
Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) does not currently
extend to the Internet and only applies to telecommunications companies.
However, the fact that Top Layer and its unspecified partners are ramping
up to deliver CALEA-like wiretapping services for the Internet indicates
the FBI sees the power of CALEA growing beyond phone lines to the web. And
Georgiades pointed out that foreign governments are under no such
constraints and can use Internet snooping equipment under existing current
wiretapping laws.
David Banisar, Research Fellow at Harvard's Information Infrastructure
Project, said such systems "set a dangerous precedent to allow law
enforcement and intelligence agencies to run the communications system." He
added, "these agencies take an over-inclusive view of who they think are
the enemies and its likely that civil and human rights groups will, again,
be monitored for no legitimate reason."
The large defense and intelligence consulting and engineering firm Booz,
Allen & Hamilton has not only developed the FBI's Carnivore capability but
it has assisted the bureau in ensuring that all telecommunications
companies engineer their systems to ensure they are "wiretap friendly." The
companies are required by the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement
Act to ensure the FBI has access to all forms of telecommunications,
including cellular calls.
What if a target decides to use encryption to protect their e-mail from
interception? That is not a problem for the FBI. Booz Allen & Hamilton has
helped develop a system code-named Magic Lantern, which permits a virus
containing a key logging program to be secretly transmitted to a recipient.
After installing itself on the target's computer, any time the target types
in a password to decrypt a message, that same password is immediately
picked up by Magic Lantern and transmitted to the FBI. Essentially, the FBI
has a virtual master key to break any encryption program used by a
surveillance target.
A companion program to Magic Lantern, code named Cyber Knight, is a
relational database system that compares and matches information from
e-mail, Internet relay chats, instant messages, and Internet voice
communications.
Not to be outdone by the FBI, the CIA has also been extremely active in
developing software than can dig deep within the Internet to harvest
information. The CIA has relied heavily on its wholly-owned and operated
proprietary Silicon Valley company, IN-Q-TEL, to fund research and
development for Internet snooping software. IN-Q-TEL's President and Chief
Executive Officer Gilman Louie is to keynote a January 2002 Las Vegas
seminar on the use of emerging intelligence technology to search and
analyze the web. He is to be joined by Joan Dempsey, the Deputy Director of
the CIA for Intelligence Community Management. IN-Q-TEL's web page
describes the aggressive attitude the CIA is taking toward ensuring new
technologies come complete with the spy agency's seal of approval,
"IN-Q-TEL strives to extend the Agency's access to new IT companies,
solutions, and approaches to address their priority problems."
Assisting the government in its goals to gather massive amounts of personal
information on citizens and non-citizens, is a company that owes its very
existence to the CIA. Oracle, Inc. Chairman Larry Ellison has offered to
provide to the government free of charge the database software required to
establish an interactive national ID card system. Oracle got its start when
the CIA gave Ellison a contract in the 1970s to design a system to enable
the agency to store and retrieve massive amounts if information in
databases. Not coincidentally, the code name of that CIA project was "Oracle."
The rush by the government to monitor the Internet has the backing of a
group of federal contract research facilities that have pounded out report
after report warning about the threat of cyberspace to national security.
These "think tanks" include Rand Corporation and Analytical Services
Corporation (ANSER). They are assisted in this policy laundering effort by
the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the K Street rest home
for former Pentagon, intelligence, and State Department political appointees.
But all the technology in the world will not protect citizens from
terrorist attacks, unless the government knows how to use the information
effectively. As the government and a few selected companies and think tanks
push for new surveillance laws and more monitoring of the Internet and
telecommunications in general, the words of Mary Schiavo, the
Transportation Department's former Inspector General and outspoken critic
of lax airline security, are particularly poignant. Speaking in Washington
on December 18, Schiavo pointed out that the "United States already had
laws to prevent what happened on September 11th . . . they weren't being
enforced."
Wayne Madsen is a Washington-based journalist who covers intelligence,
national security, and foreign affairs. He is also a Senior Fellow of the
Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, DC and author
of "Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999" (Mellen Press).Kill
the President.
USAma struck in self defence,I propose all APsters do the same and select
all federal employee's as legitimate targets.
