The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy (41 page)

The issue of leveling penalties against persons who reveal how the government intrudes on private life was a central point of controversy when Congress renewed the PATRIOT Act in late 2005. The PATRIOT Act’s Section 215 contains a “gag order” clause that was retained by Congress only after legislators reached a compromise on the wording. The gag order clause makes permissible the following scenario: if someone’s small business is searched by the FBI, that person is gagged from telling anyone that the feds were there. The compromise made gag orders effective only for a year after a secret search was conducted of a person’s property. But even then, one year seems too long for Americans to wait to learn that their government is spying on them.

It is no surprise that this compromise wasn’t sufficient for journalists covering the PATRIOT Act. According to a
New York Times
editorialist, “The compromise also fails to address another problem with Section 215: it lets the government go on fishing expeditions, spying on Americans with no connection to terrorism or foreign powers. The act should require the government, in order to get a subpoena, to show that there is a connection between the information it is seeking and a terrorist or a spy.”

Given that the United States had been attacked on 9/11 and was fighting in Iraq, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales publicly argued that spying on the American public was within the legal rights of a wartime president. Yet when members of the Senate Judiciary Committee asked to see why Bush was within legal rights to spy on the public, the White House denied requests for classified legal documents that were behind Gonzales’s defense.

Opponents to the NSA’s warrantless spying claimed it not only was intrusive and a violation of constitutional safeguards on privacy, but also ineffective because it overloaded law enforcement agencies with bad leads. They also saw the surveillance program as a serious step to consolidating power in the executive branch. “The history of power teaches us one thing,” said former Reagan administration attorney Bruce Fein, “if it’s unchecked, it will be abused.”

Nadine Strossen, a professor of law at New York University and president of the American Civil Liberties Union, was also appalled after reading the provisions of the PATRIOT Act. According to Strossen, many of the act’s provisions have little or nothing to do with fighting terrorism.

“There is no connection between the September 11 attacks and what is in this legislation,” Strossen argued. “Most of the provisions related not just to terrorist crimes but to criminal activity generally. This happened too, with the 1996 antiterrorism legislation where most of the surveillance laws have been used for drug enforcement, gambling and prostitution.”

Strossen was right. By 2005, the PATRIOT Act provisions were often being used for cases other than terrorism. According to
New Jersey Star-Ledger
writer Mark Mueller, “While the Justice Department says it does not uniformly track the PATRIOT Act’s use in such cases, a reading of government reports and congressional testimony shows it has been used hundreds of times against the likes of drug dealers, computer hackers, child pornographers, armed robbers and kidnappers. In Washington State, investigators invoked the law to surreptitiously bug a tunnel that had been bored beneath the US-Canadian border by drug runners. In Las Vegas, prosecutors used it to seize the financial records of a strip-club owner suspected of bribing local government officials.”

Investigative reporter Kelly O’Meara noted that a similar antiterrorist act in England allows government investigators to obtain information from Internet service providers about their subscribers without a warrant. The British law is now being applied to minor crimes, tax collection, and public health measures so it probably won’t be long before this insidious bypassing of former rights takes place in America.

Obama’s opinions on electronic surveillance have been a lightning rod since he shifted positions during the 2008 presidential campaign. Early in his campaign, Obama had opposed granting immunity to telecommunications companies from lawsuits by Americans who believed their privacy had been violated in government electronic data collection programs. Yet in July 2008, then senator Obama, over the objections of liberals, voted to support expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which grants immunity to the telecommunications firms.

This flip-flopping by Obama prompted Tucker Bounds, a spokesman at the time for the John McCain campaign, to say, “He’s willing to change positions, break campaign commitments and undermine his own words in his quest for higher office.” It might be noted that McCain, campaigning in Pittsburgh, was absent for the vote.

Many liberals on the House Judiciary Committee had wanted the Bush administration’s surveillance excesses corrected. Yet Deputy Assistant Attorney General Todd Hinnen told the committee that although the Obama administration was willing to negotiate stronger privacy protection for the public, it insisted on keeping in place current authority to track suspects and obtain records.

Committee chairman John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, groused, “You sound like a lot of people who came over from DOJ [the Department of Justice] before.” What Conyers did not clarify was that the people from the DOJ were from the Bush administration.

In early 2009, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a U.S.-based international nonprofit advocacy and legal organization dedicated to defending civil rights in the digital world, challenged government electronic surveillance by suing the NSA over the eavesdropping on millions of ordinary Americans. In April that same year, the Obama administration filed a motion to dismiss the suit. Obama defended his decision by adopting the Bush administration’s argument—the courts cannot judge the legality of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program. Furthermore, a court case would disclose “state secrets.”

“President Obama promised the American people a new era of transparency, accountability, and respect for civil liberties,” commented EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston. “But with the Obama Justice Department continuing the Bush administration’s cover-up of the National Security Agency’s dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans, and insisting that the much-publicized warrantless wiretapping program is still a ‘secret’ that cannot be reviewed by the courts, it feels like deja vu all over again.”

When asked what the Founding Fathers might say about the use of the PATRIOT Act, Congressman Ron Paul laughed and said, “Our forefathers would think it’s time for a revolution. This is why they revolted in the first place. They revolted against much more mild oppression.”

MAGIC LANTERN, FLUENT, DTECTIVE, AND ENCASE

T
HE GLOBALISTS HAVE NOT
limited themselves to merely subverting and neutralizing the flow of information on the Internet. Law enforcement possesses a device called a “key logger,” which can be secretly installed into computers using a viruslike program. The device, code-named Magic Lantern, allows authorities to capture passwords by recording every key stroke on the computer. Authorities can then use the passwords to access encrypted data files. The FBI has acknowledged using such a device in a recent gambling investigation.

Again, this kind of law enforcement tactic is beneficial to the public good if it is used on criminals. However, William Newman, director of the ACLU in western Massachusetts, said Magic Lantern technology could easily be used to spy on all Americans. He pointed out that federal law enforcement agencies now are permitted “the same access to your Internet use and to your email use that they had to your telephone records.” Agencies could easily overstep their authority. “The history of the FBI is that they will do exactly that.”

In a 2007
Wired
magazine article, former hacker and senior editor Kevin Poulsen wrote about how the FBI used technology similar to Magic Lantern to catch a teenager making bomb threats. According to Poulsen, court papers offered “the first public glimpse into the bureau’s long-suspected spyware capability, in which the FBI adopts techniques more common to online criminals.” In an affidavit to the U.S. District Court in the Western District of Washington, FBI agent Norman Sanders described the software as a “computer and internet protocol address verifier (CIPAV).”

Poulsen explained that this software “was sent to the owner of an anonymous MySpace profile linked to bomb threats against Timberline High School near Seattle. The code led the FBI to 15-year-old Josh Glazebrook, a student at the school, who…pleaded guilty to making bomb threats, identity theft and felony harassment.”

In July 2007, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit supported the Washington court’s decision that this type of computer monitoring without a wiretap warrant is legally permissible because Internet users have no “reasonable expectation of privacy” when using the Internet.

Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are hard at work developing other types of technology that are purportedly necessary to fight terrorism. For example, the CIA is developing a program called “Fluent,” which searches foreign websites for terrorist activities and displays an English translation back to Langley. Fluent may be used in conjunction with “Oasis,” a technology that transcribes into English worldwide radio and TV broadcasts. The FBI and some police departments are now using a software program called “dTective” to record financial transactions with dramatically improved surveillance video feeds from banks and ATMs. The feds are even working on techniques for restoring videotapes and computer disks that have been destroyed, cut up, or tossed in water. One software program called “Encase” can recover deleted computer files and search for incriminating documents on any computer. This was used by the FBI to examine computers seized in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

In 2010, testing was being done on a device that emits an electromagnetic pulse capable of disabling the engine of any vehicle. The developers hoped to have a portable model ready in the near future for use by police. They said it would signal the end of dangerous car chases.

All this surveillance technology could hypothetically lead to scary scenarios such as the one envisioned by
Village Voice
editor Russ Kick: “You just got a call that your sister is in critical condition in the hospital. So you jump in your car and hit the gas. Trouble is, the speed limit is 30 miles per hour and your car won’t let you drive any faster. Or maybe you’re lucky enough to have a vehicle that still lets you drive at the speed you choose. A cop pulls you over and demands a saliva sample, so he can instantly match your DNA to a data bank of criminals’ genes. You refuse and are arrested. After booking you, the authorities force you to submit to ‘brain fingerprinting,’ a technology that can tell if memories of illegal events are in your mind.

“By this point, you’re thinking this is a worst-case scenario, a science-fiction dysphoria. Well, wake up and smell the police state, because all this technology—and more—is already being implemented.”

NATIONAL ID ACT

F
OR YEARS, PUNDITS HAVE
consistently brought up the idea of a national identification card while civil libertarians have consistently cooled the public’s receptivity to such a concept—until now.

Even as the terror following 9/11 began to subside in 2002, Representative Jim Moran of Virginia cited increased concern over terrorism and introduced legislation in Congress titled the Driver’s License Modernization Act of 2002 (H.R. 4633). The bill was styled as a law, which would set uniform standards for driver’s licenses in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. But what was most disturbing was that it also included provisions to establish a national database and identification system. Moran’s bill codified a plan developed by Congress that urged the Department of Transportation to develop electronic “smart” driver’s licenses. The licenses would contain embedded programmable computer chips that could be read by law enforcement authorities across the nation.

“It’s more of a national ID
system
[original emphasis], a linking of Department of Motor Vehicles—and the records they keep on you—across state lines, with some extra on-card security measures thrown in,” wrote Frank Pellegrini of Time.com. “The plan, Congress hopes, will be cheaper and easier to implement, and less likely to incur the talk-show ire of civil libertarians and states’ rights purists (the same type who squawked in 1908 when the FBI was born). But the approach is mere stealth—50 different state ID cards all linked together is pretty much the same as one national ID card, just as all those new quarters are still worth 25 cents each, no matter which state is on the back.”

The House bill also stated the new ID card must “conform to any other standards issued by the Secretary [of Transportation],” an open invitation for bureaucrat tinkering.

The Rearing and Empowering America for Longevity against acts of International Destruction (REAL ID) Act of 2005 was passed in an effort to set standards for all driver’s licenses, making them acceptable for “official purposes” as defined by the secretary of Homeland Security. These purposes included entering any federal building and boarding any commercial airliner. But the states balked at the plan, not due to privacy and control concerns but because of the cost of implementing it, and by 2008, an extension was given to all states. As concerns over REAL ID grew, by October 2009 at least twenty-five states had passed resolutions or legislation withdrawing from REAL ID.

In April 2009, without acknowledging the rebellion of the states over the REAL ID Act, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced she was working with governors to repeal the REAL ID Act. Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona, said she wanted to substitute the federal law with “something else that pivots off of the driver’s license but accomplishes some of the same goals.” She added, “And we hope to be able to announce something on that fairly soon.”