America's 'enemies within' number millions

“Imagine being among several hundred million people who wake up each day having to prove they are not a ‘terrorist’ by whatever arbitrary means the government has decided to both define the terms of such a crime.”

No, we’re not talking about a modern version of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, where it’s impossible to prove the main character’s innocence because the nature of the charges or the procedure are never made clear. This is how one free internet software facilitator, David Alexander Sugar of GNU Telephony, describes the US government’s latest efforts to snoop on Internet users.

US intelligence agencies feel increasingly frustrated in their snooping efforts by the mushrooming of new communication technologies, which operate on a peer-to-peer basis. This allows individuals to communicate directly with each other rather than through “official” Internet routes.

So the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Justice Department, the National Security Agency and the White House now want greater powers to intercept their citizens’ conversations and messaging. Charlie Savage of the New York Times reports that the US state is seeking new laws to force providers to build in “back doors” for state surveillance.

FBI counsel Valerie Caproni has told Savage that security officials want laws that would “require communications, including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Websites like Facebook and software that allows direct ‘peer to peer’ messaging like Skype – to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order.”

Therefore they are demanding that:
• Communications services that encrypt messages must be able to unscramble them
• Non-US providers must have domestic offices that can perform tapping
• Software developers that allow “peer to peer” communication must redesign their services to allow the state to listen in.

The threat of greater snooping is arousing a storm of opposition. James X. Dempsey, vice president of US Internet policy group, the Centre for Democracy and Technology, warns that “the proposal had ‘huge implications’ and challenged “fundamental elements of the Internet revolution” — including its decentralised design. “They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.”

Of course, it’s not the first time that the US state has introduced legislation to help it snoop on its citizens. The Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act was passed in 1994 to help its spooks make the transition from the fixed line copper wire phone system to digital networks and mobile phones. The FBI spent millions of dollars on its “Going Dark” programme in 2008-10 to allow it to intercept such communications.

In ancient Greek mythology, there was a poisonous serpent-like water beast called the Hydra, which had nine heads. If one of them was cut off, the Hydra grew another nine. Killing the Hydra was one of Hercules twelve tasks. Today’s communication revolutions present a million-headed hydra which state agencies are desperately seeking to control.

There can be no doubt that state forces internationally have a Herculean task in their efforts to spy on the multi-platform communications of the Internet age. But that does not mean we should treat the threat of new legislation, either in the United States or here in the UK lightly.

Renewed pressure on Internet providers and servers to give the state access to their customers is a sure sign of undemocratic surveillance states in crisis who consider their own citizens as the enemy within.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

In the state's firing line

Behind the turmoil of the economic and financial crisis, New Labour is stepping up its construction of a surveillance state that assumes that every citizen is an “enemy within”. The latest threat is contained within the innocuous sounding Data Communications Bill.

This will authorise the construction of a single massive database to hold the details of every phone call and email sent and received and every Internet site visited by the UK population. This is Big Brother writ very large indeed. It has alarmed even the government's own reviewer of anti-terrorist legislation, Lord Carlisle, who openly says such a database is too “awful” to contemplate.

Awful or not, it is full-steam ahead on all fronts. ID cards are being introduced for airport workers and no doubt pressure will mount for everyone to carry one. You can see it being a requirement when you open a bank account, transfer money or use your credit card. A sign of this is the requirement in the new bill for people to produce their passport when buying a mobile phone. In this way, the database state will build up details of everyone’s mobile.

As an article by Martyn Warwick on the TelecomTV site warns: “Currently, these can be bought, anonymously, for cash over the counter and there is no doubt that pre-pay phones are the communications devices of choice for terrorists and criminals. However, despite the hysteria the government, post 9/11 and 7/7, likes to whip-up and maintain to keep us fearful and biddable, terrorists and criminals form a minute part of British society. What's more, most of them are clever and can, and will, easily and quickly circumvent appearing on any Big Brother phone-ownership database while the rest of us will be ‘on The List’ and subject to God knows what disproportionate secret surveillance.”

Meanwhile, a conference of IT, security and finance executives has been warned that suppliers who collaborate with the government may be at risk of acts of violence, including the smashing of computer centres. Ian Pearson, a former BT "futurologist" and a chartered fellow of the British Computer Society, predicted that the government's crackdown on law-abiding people could lead to marches in the street, demonstrations outside some computer centres and targeted acts of violence.

He told the invited audience : "By 2012 to 2013 tops you will see a technology backlash in the major population. Why is it relevant to you? Because if your firm is providing services to government authorities, which help the government to crack down on law-abiding people, you are in the firing line." He added: "Be careful how you market new products. Make sure people do not understand the link between you and the government which is trying to crack down on their everyday lives. That will make you on the wrong side of the firing line." Pearson listed what he called examples of “The Stepford Society”:

• Road tolls via satellite-tracking
• Speed cameras
• DNA databases
• Identity cards
• 25% of the world's CCTVs
• Face recognition systems
• Tax enforcement via integrated databases
• Speed limits built in car management system
• Government knows everywhere you go
• Extensive and permanent police records
• One stop shop for all government data
• Monitoring of e-cash
• Number-plate recognition
• Abuse of millimetre wave cameras (which measure waves naturally emitted by the human body, exposing "cold" objects under clothing)
• Extensive monitoring of all electronic activity.

While Pearson is warning suppliers to get out of the firing line, ordinary people remain right in the government’s sights. The proposals made in Unmasking the State for a new, democratic system in place of the authoritarian, surveillance, database capitalist state are more relevant than ever.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

The surveillance Olympics

If gold medals were awarded for surveillance, then Britain will win a hatful at the 2012 Games. The Metropolitan Police hopes to use no fewer than 500,000 CCTV cameras to police the 2012 Olympics Games in London. All of its own cameras, numbering a mere 10,000, will be pooled with traffic, congestion and other cameras across the city to create a network, the BBC reports. This network “would be operated from a command centre, in London, by military, police and intelligence services … It is understood the command centre would remain in place after the Olympics”. Just like that!

And the plan does not stop with the cameras. The Met’s head of special operations Tarique Ghaffur, has outlined a number of other measures: the division of London into three security zones to make the arrangements more effective; the use of three helicopters for close surveillance during the games; an automatic number plate recognition system; and the issuing of tickets that are linked to the identity of buyers, whereby a spectator “will be tracked from the venue to his or her home with these tickets”. Ghaffur also promised a conference in Abu Dhabi that there would be stringent checks, including biometric fingerprinting for the 40,000 workers building the venues.

All this represents another big lurch towards the police state that even some respectable commentators are warning about in the capitalist press. The London Olympics, for the police, the military and the spooks is an irresistible opportunity to test out new ways of monitoring and controlling a population. The state, in a period of crisis and uncertainty, like that of today, constantly seeks to re-arm and strengthen itself. Led by New Labour, the forces of the state try to turn every event or feared event into an excuse for taking away the freedoms of people and raising their own powers. The so-called,“terrorist threat” becomes the pretext for new restrictive laws and mass surveillance that actually leaves aside the real causes and issues around terrorism.


All these measures are preparation for something other than terrorism, however. The ruling and political classes understand very well that as mortgages, fuel bills and food prices rise and as the financial crisis intensifies and workers lose their jobs, there will be upheavals. The history of this country shows time and again that the masses will defend their rights and their liberties and that is why the state is tooling up with cameras on every corner and database-driven ID cards.


The Games themselves over the last 30 years or so have become more and more an arena for the big corporations to advertise themselves and to market their products and less and less of a genuine sporting spectacle. The media companies, who broadcast to 3.9 billion people at the last games in Athens, also make a killing.

Athletics, the main sport at the Olympics, is hopelessly compromised by drug-taking, leading to scandals, lawsuits and phoney results. The 2012 games will cost at least £10bn (rising all the time), apart from the security bill. Many people and small businesses in East London have been forced out of the area, and arts and community projects have been starved of funds, as lottery money is channelled to the Olympics.

And yet a different scenario, a not-for profit Olympic Games without corporate sponsorship, is not hard to imagine. Sport, released from the orbit of the profit-hungry mammoths, would re-discover some of its old values and sportspeople, free from the pressures of winning at all costs, and in a different cultural environment, would soon learn to eschew drugs.

The games would ultimately be owned, controlled and organised by the athletes, the fans and the local community. Their organising committee could of course call on the same experts, planners, designers, architects and others who are doing the work now, but, freed from the agenda of the globalised sports industry and governments that support big business, the games would soon become a different - and uplifting – event, without the sinister and pervasive security that is going to be a feature of the London games.

Peter Arkell

The lives of others

The bugging of MP Sadiq Khan’s conversations with a constituent in prison shows once more that Britain is a fully-fledged surveillance state and also that the New Labour government has a created a monster it has no effective control over. The secret state within the state has its own agenda about how to protect “national interests” – and the government will always be at least one step behind.

For Justice secretary Jack Straw was clearly at a loss yesterday to explain how a member of the government was secretly recorded and why he knew nothing about it, even though his civil servants did. The truth is that New Labour has started where the notorious Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, left off when the Berlin Wall came down, which was the subject of the brilliant film “The Lives of Others”. One of the government’s first priorities after its 1997 election victory was to prepare legislation giving a range of agencies widespread surveillance powers. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 included arbitrary powers to intercept and seize emails from internet companies’ servers.

Since then, various state agencies – more than 600 in all - have literally been on the rampage. Councils, police and intelligence services are tapping and intercepting the phone calls, emails and letters of hundreds of thousands of people every year, an official report by Sir Paul Kennedy, the Interception of Communications Commissioner (!) has revealed. The report shows that in the last nine months of 2006, there were 253,557 applications to intercept private communications under surveillance laws. Most were approved. Those being bugged included people suspected of illegal fly-tipping. In some cases, the wrong phones were tapped simply because of administrative errors.

With all these powers, it is no surprise that the police were prepared to bug an MP’s conversations with a constituent who is fighting deportation on spurious terror charges. In the shadowy world of the secret state, any compromising information gleaned in this way is always useful as a bargaining chip and to add pressure on ministers when the police ask for more powers. Khan’s constituent, Babar Ahmad, has in fact not been charged with any offence in Britain. Instead, he has languished in jail since 2004, fighting deportation to the US. The US authorities are not required to produce any evidence to back up their demand, thanks to a New Labour deal struck with the White House.

In the Khan incident, Scotland Yard is said to have applied “significant” pressure on ex-policeman Mark Kearney, who was working at the prison in Milton Keyes when the MP visited Ahmad, to carry out the bugging operation. Kearney said that while he did record the visit he “never felt it was justified in these circumstances". He now says he fears for his safety following the leaking of the Khan incident. So someone high up in Scotland Yard decided that MP Khan was fair game, especially as he had apparently got up their noses when representing other people charged with terror offences and when he was chair of the human rights group Liberty. Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, won’t have to worry. He is, of course, New Labour’s favourite policeman, defended to the hilt in the wake of the reports criticising his force over the Menezes killing in 2005.

The Khan affair shows that the state within the state is becoming more and more arrogant, determining its own agenda and priorities. Having handed the state incredible, wide-ranging powers, the government itself naturally joins the list of targets. As the economic situation worsens and social unrest looms, state agencies will be redoubling their activities “in defence of the realm”, concocting provocations along the way. We have been warned.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

Midnight of a surveillance society

In the week that new laws requiring phone companies to keep records of ALL calls and make them available to a range of agencies came into force in Britain, a report from the United States gives a chilling account of the destruction of civil liberties in that other great “democracy”.

In 2003 and 2003, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) described in separate reports how new technology was feeding a surveillance “monster” and how the government and private sector were increasingly “mining” data about individuals. In a further report, the ACLU says the situation has worsened dramatically and warns: “We are far too close to the midnight of a genuine surveillance society, and the second hand has not stopped sweeping around the dial.”

The state is engaged in a series of illegal activities. The National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency have departed from their supposedly exclusive focus on overseas spying, and have “turned their eyes and ears inward upon the American people” in violation of existing laws and the Constitution. The ACLU report shows that:

• the NSA has gained direct access to the telecommunications infrastructure through some of America’s largest companies. It is using broad data mining techniques to evaluate the communications of millions of people within the United States


• some of the major telecom companies have granted the NSA direct, wholesale access to their customers’ calling records – once again, outside the law – and that the NSA is compiling a giant database of those records


• the Treasury Department and the CIA is secretly sifting through the records of the global financial cooperative SWIFT, without Congressional authorisation or judicial oversight


• The NSA is sifting through the sea of communications using keyword searches, link analysis or other techniques such as voice pattern analysis


• A system for tracking cargo, also generated terrorist ratings on tens of millions of travellers, including American citizens


• the FBI’s “Investigative Data Warehouse” appears to be soaking up a broad array of data on innocent individuals


• a national ID system scheduled for 2008 will take state-issued documents such as a driver’s licence and turning them into nationally controlled, full-fledged national identity papers


• a radical shift in the use of CCTV, in which private cameras are actually tapped into by centralised government systems is under construction. New York City police plan to link together thousands of police and private video cameras combined with licence plate readers and a central police monitoring centre


• in August 2007 it was reported that the Department of Homeland Security was planning to deploy the nation’s spy satellites for domestic security purposes


• the government is claiming sweeping new powers to check the results of people’s Internet searches.

The ACLU report concludes: “In August 2007, the Bush Administration pressured Congress into enacting a misnamed Protect America Act. While the NSA can already engage in mass untargeted eavesdropping overseas, this legislation for the first time allows the government to engage in mass, untargeted collection of Americans’ communications (specifically, any conversations between people in the United States and overseas)… It cuts the courts out of the process, and permits the U.S. Attorney General to unilaterally issue a new legal order… in which entire programmes of electronic surveillance would be authorised in one sweep.”

Many of the practices described in the ACLU report take place in Britain too. New Labour has spent a decade building its own version of the surveillance society. The Brown government is constructing an authoritarian, one-party state and should it win the forthcoming election, it will press ahead with the destruction of what remains of our basic rights and civil liberties. One more reason to withhold your vote whenever the election is called.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor