Just how many people hanging out in Second Life are intelligence operatives, anyway?

Revelations about some of the NSA's mind-numbingly massive surveillance operations have been trickling out for months now. We've learned of cell phone tracking and collection of cellphone metadata, tracking of internet usage, of back doors inserted into programs holding confidential details, thus putting both commercial and private users at risk, not to mention the agency's avowal that its mission is to collect "everything" about everybody. Today's revelation, though, is a real head-scratcher, though I suppose it falls under the collect everything about everybody rubric: the NSA and other intelligence agencies has been spending who knows how much on infiltrating Xbox games and Second Life. Here's a bit of The Guardian's introduction to the revelation:

To the National Security Agency analyst writing a briefing to his superiors, the situation was clear: their current surveillance efforts were lacking something. The agency's impressive arsenal of cable taps and sophisticated hacking attacks was not enough. What it really needed was a horde of undercover Orcs.

That vision of spycraft sparked a concerted drive by the NSA and its UK sister agency GCHQ to infiltrate the massive communities playing online games, according to secret documents disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The files were obtained by the Guardian and are being published on Monday in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica.

The agencies, the documents show, have built mass-collection capabilities against the Xbox Live console network, which has more than 48 million players. Real-life agents have been deployed into virtual realms, from those Orc hordes in World of Warcraft to the human avatars of Second Life. There were attempts, too, to recruit potential informants from the games' tech-friendly users.

Online gaming is big business, attracting tens of millions of users worldwide who inhabit their digital worlds as make-believe characters, living and competing with the avatars of other players. What the intelligence agencies feared, however, was that among these clans of elves and goblins, terrorists were lurking.

The NSA document, written in 2008 and titled Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments, stressed the risk of leaving games communities under-monitored, describing them as a "target-rich communications network" where intelligence targets could "hide in plain sight".

The New York Times dryly noted:

The documents do not cite any counterterrorism successes from the effort, and former American intelligence officials, current and former gaming company employees and outside experts said in interviews that they knew of little evidence that terrorist groups viewed the games as havens to communicate and plot operations.

Games “are built and operated by companies looking to make money, so the players’ identity and activity is tracked,” said Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, an author of “Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know.” “For terror groups looking to keep their communications secret, there are far more effective and easier ways to do so than putting on a troll avatar.”

The surveillance, which also included Microsoft’s Xbox Live, could raise privacy concerns. It is not clear exactly how the agencies got access to gamers’ data or communications, how many players may have been monitored or whether Americans’ communications or activities were captured.

One American company, the maker of World of Warcraft, said that neither the N.S.A. nor its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters, had gotten permission to gather intelligence in its game. Many players are Americans, who can be targeted for surveillance only with approval from the nation’s secret intelligence court. The spy agencies, though, face far fewer restrictions on collecting certain data or communications overseas.

The whole thing sounds like a scheme generated by employees who brainstormed a way to get paid for spending all the working hours playing games, don't you think? I mean, consider this passage in the  Guardian article:

One problem the paper's unnamed author and others in the agency faced in making their case – and avoiding suspicion that their goal was merely to play computer games at work without getting fired – was the difficulty of proving terrorists were even thinking about using games to communicate.

A 2007 invitation to a secret internal briefing noted "terrorists use online games – but perhaps not for their amusement. They are suspected of using them to communicate secretly and to transfer funds." But the agencies had no evidence to support their suspicions.

The same still seemed to hold true a year later, albeit with a measure of progress: games data that had been found in connection with internet protocol addresses, email addresses and similar information linked to terrorist groups.

"Al-Qaida terrorist target selectors and … have been found associated with Xbox Live, Second Life, World of Warcraft, and other GVEs [games and virtual environments]," the document notes. "Other targets include Chinese hackers, an Iranian nuclear scientist, Hizballah, and Hamas members."
However, that information was not enough to show terrorists are hiding out as pixels to discuss their next plot. Such data could merely mean someone else in an internet cafe was gaming, or a shared computer had previously been used to play games.

 Despite the lack of evidence that terrorists were using gaming for nefarious ends, it turns out that so many intelligence agencies were involved in infiltrating virtual environments that they actually had to hold meetings to reveal to one another which avatars belonged to infiltrators:

Meanwhile, the FBI, CIA, and the Defense Humint Service were all running human intelligence operations – undercover agents – within Second Life. In fact, so crowded were the virtual worlds with staff from the different agencies, that there was a need to try to "deconflict" their efforts – or, in other words, to make sure each agency wasn't just duplicating what the others were doing.

Eventually the NSA started worrying about the content of the games they were monitoring. (Isn't that always the way?)  Here's The Guardian: "Much like the pressure groups that worry about the effect of computer games on the minds of children, the NSA expressed concerns that games could be used to "reinforce prejudices and cultural stereotypes", noting that Hezbollah had produced a game called Special Forces 2." Turns out that the US Army has done the same thing. What's next, do you think? An NSA-generated game in which an NSA agent saves the world because the NSA has vacuumed up everything about everybody? Anyway, I figure this particular revelation can only help recruitment efforts at the NSA's Gaming Monitoring Division. Aren't unlimited "black" budgets a wonderful thing? Why bother with funding the things that make a population strong and thriving (good education for all, decent housing for all, medical care for all, healthful food for all) when you have so much money to blow that you can even afford to allocate some of it to looking for terrorists spending their off-hours playing games? How I love living in the future!

It's Howard, everywhere you look

It seems it's Howard running things here in the US, wherever you look. You remember Howard Hunter, the guy on the 1980s television series Hill Street Blues? The guy who was a rabid advocate of militarizing the police and acquiring and using every gadget known to the surveillance state? Howard always got it wrong, of course, missing the forest for the trees, making sloppy mistakes (as real-life police constantly do, rushing to batter down doors and shoot up homes and sometimes their inhabitants because they got the wrong address or malicious information (kind of like the military so often do, too, for the same reasons), and incapable of figuring out the situation because common sense has gone out the door with hyped-up threats and stereotypes. And speaking of stereotypes, Howard, of course, would have applauded Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin.

Such sloppiness and carelessness with people's lives is only heightened, though, by the increasing disappearance of that little constitutional right that used to be known as "due process." Just the other day we learned of the horrific case of Daniel Chong, a UCSD engineering student who in April 2012 was locked into a 5x8-foot room without water or toilet much less food and "forgotten" for five days--only to be discovered near renal failure (and covered with his own feces). How does a law enforcement agency "forget" a human being they've locked up? Since this appears to have been genuinely unintentional, it signals a blatant disregard for procedure much less a total lack of a sense of responsibility for citizens taken into custody. (Which may actually be more dire in its implications than if he'd been deliberately tortured in this way.) This lack of a sense of responsibility is seen is continual, immoral force in the many, many prisons and jails in every corner of our country.

Why do I say Howard is in charge? I invite you to look at a few of the other such news stories of the last few days. We've had more revelations about what the NSA is able to do (and in fact does)--including the capability of tracking any internet user's every email and website visit. We've learned that Oakland's city government has decided to open a special surveillance center, "The Domain Awareness Center," which, according to the Oakland wiki,

will act as a “fusion center,” aggregating video feeds and real-time data from a number of sources around Oakland. Possible program components include integration of closed-circuit video feeds (CCTV) from all over Oakland, including 700 cameras at Oakland public schools and 135 cameras at the Oakland Coliseum complex. Video and data feeds from all over Oakland would be aggregated at the DAC, then analyzed with license plate recognition software, thermal imaging and body movement recognition software, possibly facial recognition software, and more, all with absolutely no privacy or data-retention policies in place, or substantive debate at the committee or council level about the program.

And then there's the case of the suburban Long Island family who have reported a visit from "the counterterrorism police" arriving at their home in three black SUVs, apparently because they decided that the searches the members of this family had collectively done made them a justifiable target for (further) investigation. See, Michele Catalano was researching pressure cookers (for preparing lentils and quinoa), her husband was shopping around for a backpack, and their son, a teenaged "news junky," had done searches on the Boston marathon bombing. These three series of searches coming from the same ISP endowed them with a suspicious profile--suspicious enough, that is, to warrant a visit from half a dozen armed officers. Here's Michele Catalano:

They mentioned that they do this about 100 times a week. And that 99 of those visits turn out to be nothing. I don’t know what happens on the other 1% of visits and I’m not sure I want to know what my neighbors are up to.

45 minutes later, they shook my husband’s hand and left. That’s when he called me and relayed the story. That’s when I felt a sense of creeping dread take over. What else had I looked up? What kind of searches did I do that alone seemed innocent enough but put together could make someone suspicious? Were they judging me because my house was a mess (Oh my god, the joint terrorism task force was in my house and there were dirty dishes in my sink!). Mostly I felt a great sense of anxiety. This is where we are at. Where you have no expectation of privacy. Where trying to learn how to cook some lentils could possibly land you on a watch list. Where you have to watch every little thing you do because someone else is watching every little thing you do.

All I know is if I’m going to buy a pressure cooker in the near future, I’m not doing it online.

I’m scared. And not of the right things.

99 times out of a hundred? I bet it's a lot less than that, considering that they're bothering people who have the temerity to google pressure cookers, backpacks, and bombings. Anyone who's a writer has got to find this worrisome-- just think of all the things we're constantly running online searches on. Just think of the sort of scenarios we write about. I'm amazed they haven't shown up at my home yet. Am I to take it that it's only a matter of time?

There are many more news items I could mention--we're constantly reading of the consequences of the apparently indissoluble union of technology with surveillance and military applications. When I read a week or so ago about the program used in many US cities to track license plates, I realized that if you write mysteries or thrillers you're probably always out of date. The potential for blackmail, for instance, must have been raised tremendously in the last five years, given the number of secrets most people try to keep from those around them--secrets we used to think the government had no business uncovering. Maybe we should be calling this particular historical era the Age of Surveillance. In any case, writers haven't a chance in the world of keeping ahead of this technology curve.

ETA: Josh Lukin has pointed me to another version of this story, namely that the family's online searches at home didn't trigger the visit, but a "tip" from a former employer: see http://gawker.com/how-a-paranoid-blogger-made-everyone-scared-to-google-p-992804224. This article quotes a statement from the police: "Suffolk County Criminal Intelligence Detectives received a tip from a Bay Shore based computer company regarding suspicious computer searches conducted by a recently released employee. The former employee’s computer searches took place on this employee’s workplace computer. On that computer, the employee searched the terms “pressure cooker bombs” and “backpacks.”" That may not be as scary, but it doesn't make me feel better. I'm a writer, after all. I explore all kinds of menace and doom. Should that make me a target for suspicion?

Quote of the day

On or around June 6, 2013, it became impossible to consider writing about harnessing the power of Big Data for the humanistic enterprise without contemplating its power for more distinctly inhuman enterprises. Of course, the two have gotten conflated — suddenly people who'd never before heard of metadata are frightened by it, without knowing much about the more useful and benevolent purposes to which metadata can be put — but what the PRISM leaks have made clear is that computational approaches to understanding vast quantities of information have the potential to disrupt and transform our understanding of the culture in which we live.---Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Ends of Big Data

So what is a police state, anyway?

Last spring, at a convivial luncheon here in Seattle with several other science fiction writers, a disagreement arose about the term "police state." One of my colleagues took an authoritarian state in the Middle East as an example of a "real" police state and advanced the argument that because here in the US we don't feel fearful, in our day-to-day lives, of arbitrary violence from the police, it's absurd to say we live in a police state. When someone (perhaps me) brought up the fact that many people in the US do feel fearful in their day-to-day lives of such violence, she wasn't shaken from her position in the least: they are exceptions, she said, not the rule. As I recall, she said that "ordinary" people need to feel daily fearfulness. Since then, I've several times mused about just what a police state is, and also about whether it needs to touch everyone with fear. Long after the conversation was past it occurred to me that probably "Aryan" middle-class Germans were not touched with such fear under Hitler, or most Italians under fascism. Yet who would argue that Hitler and Mussolini presided over police states? 

The question arose freshly for me when reading the Guardian's article on the recent beating, jailing, and belated intensive-care hospitalization of Kayvan Sabehgi, an Iraqi-war vet (and small business owner) in Oakland-- off the site of the Occupy Oakland action. The question didn't arise so much for the pre-arrest part of the story (which can be written off with the bad-apples narrative that is so often trotted out to explain the arbitrary police violence that is endemic across the country) as the part that happened after Sabehgi's arrest. Though of course what happened before the arrest is bad enough:

On Wednesday night, police used teargas and non-lethal projectiles to drive back protesters following an attempt by the Occupy supporters to shut down the city of Oakland.

Sabehgi told the Guardian from hospital he was walking alone along 14th Street in central Oakland – away from the main area of clashes – when he was injured.

"There was a group of police in front of me," he told the Guardian from his hospital bed. "They told me to move, but I was like: 'Move to where?' There was nowhere to move.

"Then they lined up in front of me. I was talking to one of them, saying 'Why are you doing this?' when one moved forward and hit me in my arm and legs and back with his baton. Then three or four cops tackled me and arrested me."

Sabeghi, who left the army in 2007 and now part-owns a small bar-restaurant in El Cerrito, about 10 miles north of Oakland, said he was handcuffed and placed in a police van for three hours before being taken to jail. By the time he got there he was in "unbelievable pain".

It's the next part of Sabeghi's account that for me points to profoundly serious problems at the institutional level-- not just in the Oakland PD (which would be the rotten-apple narrative), since we know damned well that this instance reveals a set of assumptions and attitudes that are the standard throughout our entire law enforcement system, at every level, and that those small portions of the institution that don't hold those assumptions and attitudes are the exceptions rather than the rule. To continue with the Guardian's report:

He said: "My stomach was really hurting, and it got worse to the point where I couldn't stand up.

"I was on my hands and knees and crawled over the cell door to call for help."

A nurse was called and recommended Sabehgi take a suppository, but he said he "didn't want to take it".

He was allowed to "crawl" to another cell to use the toilet, but said it was clogged.

"I was vomiting and had diarrhoea," Sabehgi said. "I just lay there in pain for hours."

Sabehgi's bail was posted in the mid-afternoon, but he said he was unable to leave his cell because of the pain. The cell door was closed, and he remained on the floor until 6pm, when an ambulance was called.

He was taken to Highland hospital – the same hospital where Olsen was originally taken after being hit in the head by a projectile apparently fired by police.

Sabehgi was due to undergo surgery on Friday afternoon to repair his spleen, which would involve using a clot or patch to prevent internal bleeding.

I wonder, if Sabehgi had accepted the suppository, he would now have grounds for suing for medical malpractice. In any case, being forced to lie in a cell in a pool of vomit and liquid feces ought to be considered a level of police abuse that is unthinkable. In fact, of course, it's not at all unthinkable. This is where we are now, in 2011, in the US.  Sabehgi's experience holds up a mirror of our society. There's nothing unfamiliar about the ugly sight that greets us in that mirror.

We all know that such treatment of a convicted felon in any prison in the US would not raise so much as an eyebrow.  (And do please remember that no country in the world incarcerates as big a proportion of its population as the US does.) Even for those who think that such conditions for convicted felons are as it should be (regular readers of this blog and readers of my Marq'ssan Cycle know that I myself do not), the problem for our polis-- if we can actually, at this point, claim to have one-- is that once it becomes ordinary to treat convicted felons in such a way, it then becomes ordinary to treat any detainees in the same way, without distinction. At any given time quite a few detainees in the US are people who have not been convicted in a court of law-- and a growing number of detainees are people (and children) who have not been charged with crimes at all. (Whole classes of people now have no "right" to the due process of the law.)

And then, of course, there is a perhaps more obvious point: in city after city, the response of civil authorities to dissent is to wield violence and detention against the dissenters. This, too, is routine. But ask yourself this: what does it mean that the response to any visible dissent (as opposed to that of the polite letters to the politicians who couldn't care less what their "constituents" since what really matters is pleasing the people who hold the purse strings [aka "the 1%]), dissent that might actually mean something, is repression by any and all means available? Can we speak honestly of "democracy" that cannot accommodate (much less respect) dissent?

I won't even go into the level of surveillance we live with in the US. Or the fact that the US intelligence establishment is bigger and more far-reaching than any of its people at the top even knows.  Or the fact that the US Supreme Court has in effect ruled that the US is a plutocracy in which political speech is to be treated as a commodity.

Perhaps the US is as not as terrible a police state as certain Middle-Eastern autocracies are, but surely we can agree that there can be degrees of being a police state, and that sadly, so sadly, we are if not there already, heading there fast.

Living in the future means thinking like an sf writer, pt. 4

As sf writer has already been there, of course (Philip K. Dick), only he posited psychics rather than software as the technological provider. Declan McCullagh, in Homeland Security Moves Forward with Pre-Crime "Detection," writes

An internal U.S. Department of Homeland Security document indicates that a controversial program designed to predict whether a person will commit a crime is already being tested on some members of the public voluntarily, CNET has learned.

If this sounds a bit like the Tom Cruise movie called "Minority Report," or the CBS drama "Person of Interest," it is. But where "Minority Report" author Philip K. Dick enlisted psychics to predict crimes, DHS is betting on algorithms: it's building a "prototype screening facility" that it hopes will use factors such as ethnicity, gender, breathing, and heart rate to "detect cues indicative of mal-intent."

McCullagh notes that "DHS calls its "pre-crime" system Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST." DHS is apparently thinking that once they finish testing it they'll be using it for airport screening, at border crossings, at sporting events and conventions.

(Link thanks to Liz Henry)

Sounds to me like profiling to the nth degree, no? But that's what technology sans civil rights and liberties will inevitably get you in a place like the US. Seems appropriate, their calling it "FAST," given that we seem to be stuck in a train on a really fast, greased track run by a gaggle of engineers who thinks brakes are a security threat (and are, anyway, for losers and sissies).

Drone technology and "the social norm"

Whenever the US deploys new technology abroad, against foreign populations, you can be sure it will eventually (sometimes very soon) be adopted for domestic uses. The latest such technology is the drone. The CIA has been using drone technology in Pakistan to do the work of a death squad by remote control. (Death squads, of course, are evil entities, and so it's probably controversial to note that extrajudicial assassinations of persons are what death squads do.) Constantly and scandalously the CIA's drones have killed bystanders there, thus inciting public outrage and the outing and recall of the CIA's chief of station in Pakistan (to prevent his being hauled into a court of law on charges of murder, since he was present in Pakistan on a business rather than a diplomatic visa). We can easily imagine the scenario: the operative seated comfortably in an ergonomic chair at a console in the embassy, perhaps munching a snack or sipping a cup of coffee, killing real people with the ease of someone playing a video game, all the muss and fuss safely distanced and the resulting adrenalin surge utterly guilt-free, even when small children are their victims.

That is in Pakistan. (And Iraq and Afghanistan. And maybe even other places, for all we know, since the US is conducting military operations in dozens of countries abroad.) But now, if you live in the US, the drone will likely be coming in all sizes and shapes and purposes, to a city near you. So far the uses being proposed are that of surveillance, but we all know where taking that road typically ends. If US law enforcement can do something with the equipment they're given, they will.

Here's the Washington Post's Peter Finn:

For now, the use of drones for high-risk operations is exceedingly rare. The Federal Aviation Administration - which controls the national airspace - requires the few police departments with drones to seek emergency authorization if they want to deploy one in an actual operation. Because of concerns about safety, it only occasionally grants permission.

But by 2013, the FAA expects to have formulated new rules that would allow police across the country to routinely fly lightweight, unarmed drones up to 400 feet above the ground - high enough for them to be largely invisible eyes in the sky.

Such technology could allow police to record the activities of the public below with high-resolution, infrared and thermal-imaging cameras.

One manufacturer already advertises one of its small systems as ideal for "urban monitoring." The military, often a first user of technologies that migrate to civilian life, is about to deploy a system in Afghanistan that will be able to scan an area the size of a small town. And the most sophisticated robotics use artificial intelligence to seek out and record certain kinds of suspicious activity.

But when drones come to perch in numbers over American communities, they will drive fresh debates about the boundaries of privacy. The sheer power of some of the cameras that can be mounted on them is likely to bring fresh search-and-seizure cases before the courts, and concern about the technology's potential misuse could unsettle the public.

And the best thing about this, for police departments? It's relatively cheap. As Finn notes, the real question is whether citizens will stand for it:

Still, Joseph J. Vacek, a professor in the Aviation Department at the University of North Dakota who has studied the potential use of drones in law enforcement, said the main objections to the use of domestic drones will probably have little to do with the Constitution.

"Where I see the challenge is the social norm," Vacek said. "Most people are not okay with constant watching. That hover-and-stare capability used to its maximum potential will probably ruffle a lot of civic feathers."

The article notes that there was apparently a revolt in Houston in 2007 against a pilot program for using drones. (Finn couldn't discover the reason for the program's being "aborted," but suspects it had to do with traffic tickets.) My guess is that most people will stand for it. The post 9/11 routine is well established. Some prominent politician receiving campaign funds from a company that makes drone technology will loudly and repreatedly claim that domestic use of the technology will make everyone safer, and then no elected official anywhere will be willing to oppose it. (That's how the boondoggle of the body scanner became standard TSA technology.) After all, for ten years we've been putting up with the security theater we all sacrifice our dignity to at airports, though it's degrading and is purely cosmetic. The politicians know it-- and also know they can't advocate dispensing with any particular component of it, no matter how absurd and ineffective it can be shown to be. As for the "social norm": no one seems to mind that citizens who videotape the police making arrests in public places (particularly when police misconduct is involved) are likely to go to jail for doing so. (Naturally the police can videotape anything they like.)

So tell me. Are we living in a police state yet?

Just so you know...

This now in from Agence France Presse:

The US Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out a bid by journalists and professors to challenge the legality of the US administration's wire-tapping program.

The program, brought in after the September 11, 2001 attacks, allows US national security agencies to monitor suspect telephone calls and emails between the United States and overseas without first obtaining a judge's order.

In 2006 journalists and teachers filed a suit against the program maintaining it violated their right to privacy, saying because they had regular contacts with the Middle East, their freedom of expression would be restrained.

They specifically targetted the National Security Agency in the case which has now come before the country's highest court.

Read the rest of the article here.

Better Watch Those Radical Thoughts, Folks

If you thought the Patriot Act was bad, just consider how much worse it could get with the “Patriot Act Lite,” which would give the government the right to crack down on thought. It’s called “The Violent Radicalisation and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act,” and it’s already passed in the US House of Representatives with a 400-6 vote (kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?). The Senate version was written by Joe Lieberman and Jane Harmon and is being pushed by Susan Collins. William Fisher in an article for the Inter Press Service,
Civil Libertarians Warn of ‘Patriot Act Lite,’ writes:

Civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), say the measure could herald a new government crackdown on dissident activity and infiltration of universities under the guise of fighting terrorism.

The CCR’s Kamau Franklin, a Racial Justice Fellow, told IPS, ‘This measure looks benign enough, but we should be concerned about where it will lead. It may well result in recommendations for new laws that criminalise radical thought and peaceful dissent, posing as academic study.’

Franklin added, ‘Crimes such as conspiracy or incitement to violence are already covered by both state and federal statute. There is no need for additional criminal laws.’

He speculated that Congress ‘may want to get this measure passed and signed into law to head off peaceful demonstrations’ at the upcoming Republican and Democratic Party conventions. ‘And no Congressperson of either political party wants to vote against this bill and get labeled as being soft on terrorism.’

Harman’s bill would convene a 10-member national commission to study ‘violent radicalisation’ (defined as ‘the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically-based violence to advance political, religious, or social change’) and ‘homegrown terrorism’ (defined as ‘the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States […] to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives’).

Although the politicians are claiming the bill is “benign,”

the bill’s purpose goes beyond academic inquiry. In a Nov. 7 press release, Harman said, ‘the National Commission [will] propose to both Congress and Chertoff initiatives to intercede before radicalised individuals turn violent.’

According to the Centre for Constitutional Rights, the commission ‘will focus in on passing additional federal criminal penalties that are sweeping and inclusive in criminalising dissent and protest work more surveillance on thought rather than on actions. Further, this bi-partisan attempt can set the ground for an even more acquiescent Congress to presidential power, never wanting to look weak on terrorism.’

The commission would be tasked with compiling information about what leads up to violent radicalisation, and how to prevent or combat it with the intent to issue a final report with recommendations for both preventative and countermeasures.

If the bill isn’t about policing thought itself, it’s a mystery why it’s being proposed, since

critics point out that the bill would duplicate work already being done in and out of government.

For example, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) already has a domestic terrorism unit; the U.S. intelligence community monitors the homegrown terrorists and overseas networks that might be reaching out to U.S. residents; and many universities and think-tanks are already specialising in studying the subject.

So naturally,

groups like the CCR are wondering what exactly is meant by ‘an extremist belief system’.

‘The term is left undefined and open to many interpretations — socialism, anarchism, communism, nationalism, liberalism, etc. — that would serve to undermine expressions that don’t fit within the allowable areas of debate. A direct action led by any group that blocks traffic can be looked upon as being coercive,’ CCR says.

The bill says the Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalisation, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the U.S. by providing access to ‘broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to U.S. citizens.’

Gah. So what is it that happens to people after they're sworn into federal office? Do you suppose that on election to Congress every new freshman (excepting he or she who refuse and then gets locked out of The Clubhouse) undergoes a secret initiation ceremony that includes a lobotomy? Or are they immediately replaced with Stepford Senators and Stepford Representatives? Sounds bizarre, but it would explain their absolutely brainless acquiescence to the sacking and looting of the citizenry and the destruction of the constitution that they've supposedly taken an oath to uphold.

Living in the Future

A few months back, Gwyneth Jones published
“We have the technology” in the Guardian. She concluded:

Our gadgets are just like our children. They have the potential to be marvellous, to surpass all expectations. But children (and robots) don't grow up intelligent, affectionate, helpful and good-willed all by themselves. They need to be nurtured. The technology, however fantastic, is neutral. It's up to us to decide whether that dazzling new robot brain powers a caring hand, or a speedy fist highly accurate at throwing grenades.

A couple of months after Gwyneth’s article appeared, I read that California State Senator Joe Simitian had introduced a measure in an Assembly committee “that would prohibit an employer from implanting tiny ID chips in workers, block RFID technology from being embedded in driver's licenses, prohibit schools from issuing ID cards to track student attendance, and make it a misdemeanour to skim identification cards.” Despite Simitian’s efforts, likely, the fairly recent technology of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), used to track packages and shipments, will become yet another nail in the coffin of individual privacy in the United States.

A few years ago, Maureen McHugh actually wrote a story, "In the Air," in which a woman, anxious for her loved ones’ safety and with the best intentions, implants tracking chips in her teen-aged daughter as well as her mother (who has Alzheimer’s); the story confronts the personal consequences of the use of such technology.

Living as we do in a society governed by the marketplace without reference to ethical questions or the general welfare, we know all too well that the applications of new technologies will never be limited to the benign and practical. One doesn’t have to be a Luddite to believe that every technology invented will be abused. If a technology can be used to control and exploit people (on both a small and a large scale), businesses will happily pursue the resulting profit and thus Make It So.

Still, until recently, certain uses of surveillance technology were considered impermissible in the US and thus were politically unfeasible. Very few politicians have shown any interest in challenging the NSA’s access to every email sent and phone call made by US citizens, nor to secretly accessing citizens’ computers and tracking their book purchasing an library records at will. In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Demian Bulwa writes that the ACLU’s 19-page report “Under the Watchful Eye,”

argues that the cameras have proven ineffective in decreasing violent crime and recommends that cities replace them with less invasive measures. Short of that, the report calls for “intense public scrutiny” of surveillance systems…. The report comes after a week of renewed debate over cameras in San Francisco. Since 2005, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office has spent about $500,000 on 70 cameras placed at 25 high-crime hot spots, and the Housing Authority has spent $200,000 on 178 cameras for its sites.

Police have defended the 70 city cameras, saying they deterred crime, while acknowledging they have contributed to just one arrest in two years. City cameras are not monitored in real time due to privacy concerns. Investigators have ordered copies of footage about once every three weeks, police said.

Although the US Government is unwilling to help the many impoverished people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast rebuild in the wake of Katrina, it is happy to dole out funds for to keep streets and parks under surveillance. In a Boston Globe article last week, “US Doles Out Millions for Street Cameras: Local Efforts Raise Privacy Alarms,” Charlie Savage writes:

The department will not say how much of its taxpayer-funded grants have gone to cameras. But a Globe search of local newspapers and congressional press releases shows that a large number of new surveillance systems, costing at least tens and probably hundreds of millions of dollars, are being simultaneously installed around the country as part of homeland security grants.

In the last month, cities that have moved forward on plans for surveillance networks financed by the Homeland Security Department include St. Paul, which got a $1.2 million grant for 60 cameras for downtown; Madison, Wis., which is buying a 32-camera network with a $388,000 grant; and Pittsburgh, which is adding 83 cameras to its downtown with a $2.58 million grant.

Small towns are also getting their share of the federal money for surveillance to thwart crime and terrorism.

Recent examples include Liberty, Kan. (population 95), which accepted a federal grant to install a $5,000 G2 Sentinel camera in its park, and Scottsbluff, Neb. (population 14,000), where police used a $180,000 Homeland Security Department grant to purchase four closed-circuit digital cameras and two monitors, a system originally designed for Times Square in New York City.

Why in the world would a town with a population of 95 would want a camera in its park? Savage notes that

[Pr]ivacy rights advocates say that the technology is putting at risk something that is hard to define but is core to personal autonomy. The proliferation of cameras could mean that Americans will feel less free because legal public behavior — attending a political rally, entering a doctor’s office, or even joking with friends in a park — will leave a permanent record, retrievable by authorities at any time.

Businesses and government buildings have used closed-circuit cameras for decades, so it is nothing new to be videotaped at an ATM machine. But technology specialists say the growing surveillance networks are potentially more powerful than anything the public has experienced.

Until recently, most surveillance cameras produced only grainy analog feeds and had to be stored on bulky videotape cassettes. But the new, cutting-edge cameras produce clearer, more detailed images. Moreover, because these videos are digital, they can be easily transmitted, copied, and stored indefinitely on ever-cheaper hard-drive space.

In addition, police officers cannot be everywhere at once, and in the past someone had to watch a monitor, limiting how large or powerful a surveillance network could be.

But technicians are developing ways to use computers to process real-time and stored digital video, including license-plate readers, face-recognition scanners, and software that detects “anomalous behavior.” Although still primitive, these technologies are improving, some with help from research grants by the Homeland Security Department’s Science and Technology Directorate.

“Being able to collect this much data on people is going to be very powerful, and it opens people up for abuses of power,” said Jennifer King, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies privacy and technology. “The problem with explaining this scenario is that today it’s a little futuristic. [A major loss of privacy] is a low risk today, but five years from now it will present a higher risk.”

As this technological capacity evolves, it will be far easier for individuals to attract police suspicion simply for acting differently and far easier for police to track that person’s movement closely, including retracing their steps backwards in time. It will also create a greater risk that the officials who control the cameras could use them for personal or political gain, specialists said.

Yesterday’s Baltimore Sun has an editorial about the US Government’s plan to use satellites to spy on its citizens:

Once the federal government had rationalized its authority to violate the privacy of Americans by tapping their phones, reading their e-mail, surveying their library selections and poking through their bank records, it was only a matter of time before the Department of Homeland Security would point spy satellite cameras intended for foreign enemies into the private lives of Americans as well.

Indeed, the country is becoming so inured to the Big Brother tactics of the Bush administration, news of this intrusive new eye in domestic skies has provoked little outrage. Congress has apparently given the plan its blessing, totally abdicating its oversight role.

The Bush Administration has repeatedly used the al-Qaeda threat to make the case that a population under surveillance is Safe (though obviously in no way a “Safe Space” for anyone). I’m wondering how much my response of visceral horror is a legacy of growing up during the Cold War. Propaganda in the US took a two-pronged approach: celebrating materialism (availability of consumer goods) on the one hand and fear of police-state culture stripping individuals of the right to privacy and due process on the other. Perhaps if I hadn’t been so inculcated with a horror of the Stasi way of life, I wouldn’t now find the politicians’ foisting a police state on us so intolerable.

On the panel “Thinking About the World” at the Locus Awards weekend last June, Charles Brown, Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge, and Greg Bear discussed, among other things, changing attitudes about surveillance. Mark Kelly noted on his blog, Views from Medina Road:

The discussion veered into the virtual realm; Brown noted how much people want to be watched these days, in an inversion to 1984; Vinge sensed a sea change about what young people are willing to give away; and Stephenson cited the guy on a government watch-list who's put his entire life on the web, as a defense. Most people don't have anything to lose, he said; for most, it's a net gain to put their personal stories out there for everyone to see.

I took a few notes myself:

CB: Orwell’s 1984 was one of the most important sf books of the 20^th century. Some of his predictions came true. But Orwell never imagined the webcam—the idea of wanting to be watched 24 hours a day. Predictions can never be strange enough.

VV: One of the strengths of sf is that we talk about possiblities—particularly “scenario planning”—think about extreme versions of what could happen and hen play them out. SF is performing a sociological function that dreaming has for human beings. I wonder about people who are 13-23 years old. Maybe young people don’t understand that there will be consequences in the future [for sacrificing their privacy].

CB: We’re heading toward Chinese attitudes toward privacy—what happens on the outside doesn’t matter.

NS: I’m horrified by what people are willing to put up on their blogs. The downtrodden value getting their stories out (unlike people at the top, who value their privacy). [NS cites the case of a guy who uses a 24-hour-a-day webcam to let the world know about his persecution by US authorities; when he’s stopped at airports, he tells TSA to look at his webcam as proof that he hasn’t committed any acts of terrorsm.]

Unidentified Audience Member: Children have been conditioned to be watched all the time—so that they don’t feel safe unless they are always being watched.

Jay Lake: Indirect surveillance is really total—most people are unaware of that [Sprint records, credit card slips, etc]

GB: In the past, we had judicial safeguards.

I’m not sure that the men on that panel are correct about the generational difference. But I’ll give the last word to Gwyneth:

It's hardly surprising if the children of the 21st century find it difficult to distinguish between a scientific discovery, this year's new gadget, and utterly fantastic concepts such as the man with the 50s 'do, who wears his pants over his tights and flies faster than a speeding bullet. After decades of stalling, it seems that science fiction is finally, rapidly, becoming fact - just as the first pulp writers and movie-makers were convinced it would, back in the 1920s.