08.30.08
New Spy Software
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www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9983
New Spy Software Coming On-Line: “Surveillance in a Box” Makes its Debut
By Tom Burghardt
Global Research, August 29, 2008
Antifascist Calling… – 2008-08-28
You’ve heard of the FBI’s “Quantico Circuit” and were outraged by illegal
warrantless wiretapping by Bushist minions. To no avail, you flooded
Congress with emails and phone calls, angered by the bipartisan “FISA
Amendments Act of 2008″ and the swell party thrown by AT&T for “Blue Dog”
Democrats in Denver this week for the convention.
But just in time for a new administration (and the bundles of cash always
at the ready for the expanding homeland security market), comes a complete
“surveillance in a box” system called the Intelligence Platform!
According to New Scientist, German electronics giant Siemens has developed
software allegedly capable of integrating
…tasks typically done by separate surveillance teams or machines,
pooling data from sources such as telephone calls, email and internet
activity, bank transactions and insurance records. It then sorts through
this mountain of information using software that Siemens dubs
“intelligence modules”. (Laura Margottini, “Surveillance Made Easy,” New
Scientist, 23 August 2008)
New Scientist reports that the firm has sold the system to some 60
countries in Europe and Asia. Which countries? Well, Siemens won’t say.
However, privacy and human rights advocates say the system bears a
remarkable resemblance to China’s “Golden Shield,” a massive surveillance
network that integrates huge information databases, internet and email
monitoring, speech and facial recognition platforms in combination with
CCTV monitoring.
Designed specifically for “fusion centers” or their European/Asian
equivalents, the Intelligence Platform promises to provide “real-time”
high-tech tools to foil terrorist plots before they’re hatched (or keep
tabs on antiwar/antiglobalization activists).
The latest item in the emerging “intelligent” software niche market,
Intelligence Platform has been “trained” on a large number of sample
documents to zero in on names, phone numbers or places from generic text.
“This means it can spot names or numbers that crop up alongside anyone
already of interest to the authorities, and then catalogue any documents
that contain such associates,” New Scientist avers.
In the UK, the Home Office announced it plans to provide law enforcement,
local councils and other public agencies access to the details of text
messages, emails and internet browsing. This follows close on the heels of
an announcement last May that New Labour was considering building a
massive centralized database “as a tool to help the security services
tackle crime and terrorism.” According to The Guardian,
Local councils, health authorities and hundreds of other public bodies are
to be given the power to access details of everyone’s personal text,
emails and internet use under Home Office proposals published yesterday.
Ministers want to make it mandatory for telephone and internet companies
to keep details of all personal internet traffic for at least 12 months so
it can be accessed for investigations into crime or other threats to
public safety. …
Conservatives and Liberal Democrats last night branded the measure a
“snooper’s charter”. (Alan Travis, “‘Snooper’s charter’ to check texts and
email,” The Guardian, Wednesday, August 13, 2008)
A blurb posted on Siemens’ website claims that the “challenge” is “to
foster the well-being of law-abiding citizens” and therefore, “authorized
groups need to have direct access to communications between suspects,
whether it is individuals, groups or organizations. Only then can they
take appropriate action, detect, prevent and anticipate crimes and
guarantee peace and security.”
In other words, if you’ve got nothing to hide “trust us:” the shopworn
mantra of securocrats everywhere. And in today’s climate, this is an
especially burdensome challenge for state security and corporate spies who
demand “highly-sophisticated, multi-level voice and data recordings” in
order to destroy our rights while transforming our respective societies
into Orwellian police states. New Scientist reports,
Once a person is being monitored, pattern-recognition software first
identifies their typical behaviour, such as repeated calls to certain
numbers over a period of a few months. The software can then identify any
deviations from the norm and flag up unusual activities, such as
transactions with a foreign bank, or contact with someone who is also
under surveillance, so that analysts can take a closer look.
But if the experience of U.S. Fusion Centers are any indication of the
accuracy of the Siemens system, false positives will be endemic while
thousands, if not millions, of perfectly innocent individuals are forever
ensnared in the state’s data driftnet. According to the American Civil
Liberties Union,
The Justice Department’s 2006 Guidelines envision fusion centers doing
more than simply sharing legitimately acquired law enforcement information
across different branches of our burgeoning security establishment. The
Guidelines encourage compiling data “from nontraditional sources, such as
public safety entities and private sector organizations” and fusing it
with federal intelligence “to anticipate, identify, prevent, and/or
monitor criminal and terrorist activity.” This strongly implies the use of
statistical dragnets that have come to be called data-mining. The
inevitable result of a data-mining approach to fusion centers will be:
Many innocent individuals will be flagged, scrutinized, investigated,
placed on watch lists, interrogated or arrested, and possibly suffer
irreparable harm to their reputation, all because of a hidden machinery of
data brokers, information aggregators and computer algorithms.
Law enforcement agencies will waste time and resources investing in
high-tech computer boondoggles that leave them chasing false leads–while
real threats go unaddressed and limited resources are sucked away from the
basic, old-fashioned legwork that is the only way genuine terror plots
have ever been foiled. (Michael German and Jay Staley, “What’s Wrong with
Fusion Centers,” American Civil Liberties, December 2007)
But perhaps “high-tech computer boondoggles” are precisely the point!
After all, the Boeing Company and their sidekicks at SRI International
(which describes itself as “an independent, nonprofit research institute”)
were recently criticized by a House Science and Technology Subcommittee
for “irregularities” in the government’s Railhead program, a suite of
software “upgrades” to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment
(TIDE), “a vast database of names that feeds the nation’s terrorist watch
list,” the Associated Press reported.
Railhead was touted as a “fix” for a system built by Lockheed Martin in
the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. According to congressional
investigators, the system provides data to all federal terrorist watch
lists, including the “no-fly” list run by the Department of Homeland
Security’s Transportation Security Administration and the FBI’s Terrorist
Screening Center, a national clearinghouse for federal, state and local
fusion centers.
According to the House committee the program is months behind schedule,
millions over budget and “would actually be less capable than the U.S.
government terrorist tracking system it is meant to replace.” Last week,
The Wall Street Journal reported,
When tested, the new system failed to find matches for terrorist-suspect
names that were spelled slightly different from the name entered into the
system, a common challenge when translating names from Arabic to English.
It also could not perform basic searches of multiple words connected with
terms such as “and” and “or.” (Siobhan Gorman, “Flaws Found in Watch List
for Terrorists, The Wall Street Journal, August 22, 2008)
Leaving aside the racist presuppositions of the Journal, to wit, that Arab
= terrorist (no small matter when dealing with nativist yahoos here in the
“homeland” or elswehere), as Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) said in a
statement, “the program appears to be on the brink of collapse after an
estimated half-billion dollars in taxpayer funding has been spent on it.”
According to the committee,
The Railhead program had been undergoing an internal technical implosion
for more than one year. But public statements and sworn public testimony
to Congress from senior officials within the NCTC [National
Counterterrorist Center] and the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence (ODNI) never revealed the mounting technical troubles, poor
contractor management or lax government oversight that appears to have
been endemic throughout the program and has led to Railhead’s colossal
failure. Astoundingly, the Director of NCTC and the Director of National
Intelligence have both specifically pointed to TIDE and NCTC Online as
hallmarks of the government’s information sharing accomplishments.
(“Technical Flaws Hinder Terrorist Watch List; Congress Calls for
Investigation,” Committee on Science and Technology, Press Release, August
21, 2008)
In a technical sense, the NCTC and the ODNI may be correct in touting TIDE
and NCTC Online as “hallmarks of the government’s information sharing
accomplishments,” if by “sharing accomplishments” they meant handing over
unlimited bundles of taxpayer’s hard-earned cash to enterprising
contractors!
Gorman reports that in “recent weeks, the government has fired most of the
862 private contractors from dozens of companies working on the Railhead
project, and only a skeleton crew remains.” Boeing and SRI’s response?
According to the Journal, “calls to officials of Boeing and SRI were not
immediately returned.”
I bet they weren’t! Especially since the committee said “Railhead
insiders” allege that the government paid Boeing some $200 million to
retrofit the company’s Herndon, Virginia office with security upgrades so
that top secret software work could be performed there. The government
then leased the same office space from Boeing. How’s that for hitting the
old corporate “sweet spot.”
None of this of course, should surprise anyone, least of all defense lobby
dollar-addicted members of Congress who, like Captain Renault in
Casablanca are “shocked, shocked” to find their corporate “partners” have
failed to deliver–again.
According to Washington Technology’s list of “2008 Top 100 Government
Prime Contractors,” Boeing clocked-in at No. 2 with $9,706,621,413 in
taxpayer handouts. No slouches themselves, Siemens placed No. 79 with some
$186,292,146 in prime government contracts across an array of defense and
civilian agencies. With Railhead’s imminent demise, perhaps the German
electronics giant has a future in the U.S. “homeland security” market with
its Intelligent Platform?
Then again, perhaps not. Computer security expert Bruce Schneier told New
Scientist, “‘currently there are no good patterns available to recognise
terrorists,’ he says, and questions whether Siemens has got around this.”
But since the business of government is business, maybe they do after all.
Meanwhile, the PRISE consortium of security technology and human rights
experts funded by the European Union, called “for a moratorium on the
development of fusion technologies, referring explicitly to the Siemens
Intelligence Platform,” Margottini reported.
According to New Scientist, PRISE analysts told the EU, “The efficiency
and reliability of such tools is as yet unknown. More surveillance does
not necessarily lead to a higher level of societal security. Hence there
must be a thorough examination of whether the resulting massive
constraints on human rights are proportionate and justified.”
But here in the United States concern over trivial things such as “massive
constraints on human rights,” unlike state attacks against the “quaint”
rights of the average citizen are, like the impeachment of a regime
studded with war criminals, most definitely “off the table.”
While the Democrats celebrate Barack Obama’s coronation in Denver this
week and the Republicans are poised to do the same for John McCain in the
Twin Cities rest assured, administrations may change, but the corporate
grift is eternal.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay
Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly, Love & Rage
and Antifa Forum, he is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military
“Civil Disturbance” Planning, distributed by AK Press.