Homeland, p.48
Homeland, page 48
Here are some numbers to help flesh out what is meant by the term “mass surveillance.” As of 2013, the NSA was collecting metadata—meaning the numbers on either end of a phone call, along with their location and the call’s duration—on nearly five billion phone calls per day. Its databases also tracked the locations of “at least hundreds of millions of devices” in a sustained way, allowing the NSA to map the movement patterns and daily habits of all the people attached to those devices. The location data was thought by privacy advocates to be particularly sensitive because “the laws of physics don’t let you keep it private….The only way to hide your location is to disconnect from our modern communication system and live in a cave.” When asked how many Americans, as opposed to how many devices, were having their locations tracked, an NSA official said, “It’s awkward for us to try to provide any specific numbers,” which is easy to believe.[30]
In addition, the NSA captured an unknown number of emails, Facebook posts, and instant messages, which it handed over to federal and local law enforcement agencies upon receipt of a court order. To give some sense of the size of this component of the surveillance operation, the NSA requested the private data of between eighteen and nineteen thousand Facebook users over the last six months of 2012 alone, according to Facebook’s general counsel.[31] Further collection of raw internet traffic allowed the NSA to track who visited which websites and when.[32] The NSA was able to capture this data in real time, monitoring users from moment to moment as they clicked on links, chatted with friends, masturbated to porn, plugged in directions on Google Maps, filed their taxes, Facebook stalked a frenemy, and shopped for shoes or electronics or home goods or car parts. The NSA by no means tracked everyone in real time, but insofar as people lived their lives online, the NSA had the capability to reconstruct almost anyone’s day-to-day digital existence should it decide they merited attention. As Silicon Valley claimed an ever-widening sphere of human experience as its domain—from commerce and communication to romance and play—the reconstructions at the NSA’s fingertips grew in richness and detail.
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Like the invasion of Iraq and the detention of “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo, mass surveillance was first implemented on a nakedly illegal emergency basis by the ideologues who staffed the Bush administration. Then it was allowed to continue after Barack Obama helped to varnish it with a gloss of constitutional legitimacy that did nothing to alter the project’s core activities. In 2008, Congress passed and Senator Barack Obama voted for a series of amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a 1978 statute that originally imposed substantive restrictions on the intelligence services’ ability to conduct wiretaps and other forms of electronic surveillance on foreign and domestic targets. The FISA amendments gutted these restrictions while pretending merely to update them. They permitted the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to authorize, without congressional approval, the targeting of non-U.S. persons who intelligence agencies “reasonably believed” to be located outside the United States (the NSA said it interpreted “reasonable belief” to mean that 51 percent confidence in a target’s foreignness was sufficient). Targeting U.S. citizens was not permitted, but the amendments contained an enormous loophole: so long as the intelligence services’ intent was to collect information on a foreign target, any “incidental” collection of information on Americans that might occur in the course of pursuing the foreign target was allowed. The amendments’ other oversight provisions were similarly flimsy. The federal court tasked with approving government requests for surveillance was reduced to approving only the procedures the government planned to use in carrying out its surveillance, as opposed to the targets themselves, meaning that the FISA court was simply rubber-stamping the surveillance of targets whose identity, nationality, and location were unknown to it. In 2012, the government submitted 212 requests to conduct surveillance to the FISA court, and the court approved every one of them.[33] The court had no authority to track government compliance with its orders once a given operation was approved, and because its proceedings were entirely classified, individuals targeted by the government had no judicial recourse. The amendments, which Obama reauthorized twice as president, turned mass domestic surveillance into an established fact of American life, one that Americans had no direct way to legally challenge.
What did Americans think about this new facet of their lives? How did they feel knowing that their phone calls and text chats and shopping habits and love affairs and mundane frustrations were likely being stored away on a server farm and indexed so that some government contractor could comb through it all? Public opinion on mass surveillance was divided, although not in the strong way that people talk about when they use the word “polarization,” which suggests an issue on which the public is split into two deeply held and mutually irreconcilable sets of belief. A better word for how people felt about mass surveillance is “ambivalent.” On the specific issue of Snowden’s whistleblowing, Americans were evenly divided, with 44 percent believing Snowden had done the right thing in taking his concerns to the press and 42 percent believing he had not. Views on Snowden’s actions were split somewhat along party lines; with Obama in power at the time, Democrats were the only group that disapproved of the leaks, whereas a plurality of Republicans and independents approved of them. Given that one might reasonably expect conservatives to be more enthusiastic about expansive state police powers for the purpose of fighting terrorism, those numbers suggest that people’s views on Snowden had more to do with their established political allegiances than any principled stance on the issue. Polls that asked broader questions about mass surveillance reinforce this impression. In 2006, with Bush in office, Republicans approved of the federal government obtaining phone records “in order to create a database of billions of telephone numbers dialed by Americans” by a margin of 72 percent to 22 percent, while Democrats disapproved by a margin of 76 percent to 20 percent.[34] By 2013, those numbers had flipped: Republicans now disapproved, 63 percent to 32 percent, and Democrats approved, 49 percent to 40 percent.[35] Even as partisan views shifted over this period, the overall national picture of public opinion on surveillance remained the same, with roughly equal numbers of people for and against it. The twenty-first-century polarization of America is usually said to indicate an era during which things are more political than usual, but here polarization seems to indicate something more like a frustrated antipolitics: Unable to take a view on the issue on its own terms, people shrugged their shoulders and threw in their lot with whatever political label happened to be close at hand.
In a certain light, this ambivalence regarding mass surveillance isn’t so difficult to understand. It is hard to know what to think about an issue when it is impossible to know what kind of effect it might have on your life. For the first twelve years of the war, Americans hovered in a state of uncertainty. Given the Bush administration’s aggressive rhetoric, it seemed like a safe bet that some kind of broad domestic surveillance was under way, but the details remained hazy, and the sheer scale of the program remained hidden. The government wasn’t setting up any kind of hotline you could call to ask who was looking at your emails, and Congress was more focused on how the war was going overseas than the status of privacy rights back home. For most Americans, surveillance was not an immediate, pressing concern. Migrants, Muslim and Arab Americans, and antiwar activists understood the material consequences of surveillance very well; they were the ones experiencing early-morning raids, detention, deportation, and the persistent worry that the FBI’s agents provocateurs were secretly undermining their communities from the inside. But with migrants excluded from any larger sphere of civic belonging, Muslim Americans constituting a tiny minority of the population (less than 1 percent), and activists carrying out a strategic retreat during the politically quietist interregnum between the invasion of Iraq and the beginning of Occupy Wall Street, most Americans had little trouble convincing themselves that surveillance didn’t really have anything to do with them even if it did sound creepy. Government agents weren’t coming to their homes and confiscating their hard drives. People weren’t hearing clicking sounds in the background when they talked on their phones. Their emails didn’t arrive with disclaimers attached reading, “For your protection, this communication has been reviewed by the National Security Agency.” Surveillance was unobtrusive, discreet, largely invisible, and seamlessly integrated into people’s normal routines.
At the same time, there were signs, hints, and both physical and digital traces of the country’s expanding surveillance apparatus. Someone trying to navigate the clover-leaf intersection of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and the Patuxent Freeway in Fort Meade, Maryland, might find their GPS suddenly on the glitch, trapping them in a frustrating tangle of U-turns and missed exits. That’s because NSA headquarters sits just southeast of the interchange, and the signals it emits to confound hackers and spies didn’t distinguish between personal navigation devices and the enemy’s surveillance tech.[36] Two years before the Snowden leaks, the Washington Post journalists Dana Priest and William M. Arkin published a remarkable investigation into the country’s post-9/11 surveillance programs. Titled Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, the book was in part an effort to catalog these physical traces, to find out just how close someone without a top secret clearance could get to the research facilities and office buildings where people spent their working days spying on their countrymen. Hollywood likes to depict America’s spies and covert operators as working entirely outside the awareness of regular people, but most classified programs basically operate like normal white-collar jobs. The people who run them work in office buildings that have to be staffed and maintained by receptionists, security guards, repairmen, and janitors. They hire people by posting job listings online. They have conventions and other junkets where people spend their days networking in a windowless hall and their nights getting drunk with one another. And as with workers in any industry, they congregate in particular cities and neighborhoods, send their children to similar schools, and maintain their own rules of etiquette (for instance, not asking for too much detail about work when meeting people at a barbecue or a kid’s birthday party). If America were being surveilled by just eight guys, or even eighty, it might be possible for them to set up shop in some rural warehouse and effectively disappear from public view. But when the Defense Department delivered its list of classified “special access programs” (SAPs) to congressional leadership each year—a list containing only the programs’ names—it was reliably three hundred pages long, and it doesn’t even include “two other categories of deep secrets: ‘waived SAPs’ and ‘unacknowledged SAPs,’ neither of which the full committees have to be briefed on.”[37] That’s too many workers, office parks, and LinkedIn profiles for anyone to hide, no matter what level of classification is slapped on top (the levels, in ascending order of secrecy, are confidential, secret, and top secret).
So Priest and Arkin went and found some of them. Arkin spent several years combing through online job listings for positions that required a top secret clearance, with “top secret” legally defined as “information, the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.”[38] A given search might reveal up to 15,000 such listings, and between 2006 and 2010 Arkin tallied up 182,000 of them. Looking through reams of government documents—“budgets, contracts, military directives, program descriptions, hearing transcripts,” etc.—he began to encounter phrases that he realized were code words. Then he realized to his delight that the code words often appeared in the job listings, such as one from the intelligence consulting firm Windermere Group that sought applicants to work on “at least two of the following: ANCHORY, OCTAVE, SKYWRITER, SEMESTER, JAGUAR, ARCVIEW, e-WorkSpace, PINWALE, or HOMEBASE.”[39] These programs were proliferating like crazy after September 11, but Priest and Arkin realized that the congressional oversight apparatus tasked with supervising the country’s spy activities was not even beginning to keep up. At the House and Senate Permanent Select Committees on Intelligence and the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Defense, “the number of staffers [had] not grown much at all in the decade since the 9/11 attacks,” and the number of staffers who were well informed on the NSA in particular had actually declined to just four. Similarly, Priest and Arkin found at the National Archives that the staff size of the agency in charge of ensuring proper classification practices had barely grown during the first decade of the twenty-first century, whereas the number of newly classified documents had “tripled to over 23 million.”[40] At the heart of America’s spy machine was the equivalent of an understaffed and overwhelmed office mail room.
Arkin’s documents offered up addresses as well. While hunting for information on the Defense Policy Analysis Office (DPAO), a sub-operation of the Defense Logistics Agency, whose mission description he found to be suspiciously bland, Arkin came across a request for the installation of an encrypted line connecting the Pentagon, an office on the fifteenth floor of a building in the Crystal City neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia, and an Air Force organization in Rosslyn called XOIWS. Priest made the drive to Crystal City to see what she could find. The address housed a basement-level shopping mall with a food court, as well as dry cleaners and shoe-repair businesses that existed to serve the people who worked in the government-leased offices above them. Once your eyes adjusted to the fluorescent lighting and stopped being so distracted by all the signs, however, one also began to notice the people with identification lanyards draped over their business casual, the corridors that led to doors that could be opened only with a magnetic key card, the surveillance cameras tucked away in dim corners. Priest found a directory screen in the street-level lobby that listed a number of private companies known to do contracting work with the Defense Department, but the directory stopped at the fourteenth floor. When she stepped into the elevator, however, it turned out there was a fifteenth floor, and she pushed the button. She found a cardboard sign identifying the DPAO as the occupant of suite 1501, a door held shut by an electromagnetic lock, and another sign warning that “anyone without the proper clearance should leave.” Then Priest located the not-very-well-hidden offices of XOIWS, their entrance identical to that of the DPAO in Crystal City except for a sign reading, Force Protection Condition Bravo. “This was Defense Department dialect for ‘an increased or more predictable threat of terrorist threat,’ ” Priest wrote. “In reality, since the initial frenzy of September 11 had died out, the threat level had remained at bravo, much like Homeland Security’s permanent shade of yellow.” Following these discoveries, “secret doors seemed to be everywhere,” Priest wrote. She returned to Crystal City with “new eyes,” noticing all kinds of things she’d missed the first time around: armed guards, more corridors that required a badge for entry, more office directories with missing floors. “Some of the directories for twenty-story buildings,” she wrote, “were completely blank except for the name of one convenience store in the lobby.”[41]
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Priest and Arkin’s investigative work can help us begin to understand more about how post-9/11 surveillance degraded the country’s public spaces. I’ve already spent some time in this book talking about certain kinds of physical public space, including airports, parks, and government buildings and plazas. These are places where fencing, bollards, security cameras, and police officers made public spaces unwelcoming. The documents Arkin scoured for addresses and acronyms were largely public, but it is hard to imagine that any meaningful segment of the public would ever come into contact with them. Even for a trained reporter like Arkin, someone who knew both how to use the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and how to decipher the hundreds of obscure acronyms that fill government reports, finding what he was looking for required years of training and work. Maybe a more accurate term for the kinds of documents he was working with is “semipublic,” a word that also describes the buildings Priest visited. She didn’t need any special clearance to wander around the basement-level shopping mall or stroll into the lobby, nor did she need a magnetic key card to take the elevator up to the office of the DPAO on the fifteenth floor. Those spaces, like Arkin’s documents, were technically public. Unlike normal public places, however, the offices where different aspects of mass surveillance actually happened had no signs on the front doors and no entries in the lobby directories, nor could one type their names into Google Maps for directions. Truly public spaces are legible. Signs, labels, directories, and architectural styles help people to understand what goes on there, whether it is shopping for food, receiving an education, drinking, getting a haircut, borrowing a book, or anything else. But the unmarked buildings Priest visited create a dead zone in public life, taking up space without making any effort to let people know what goes on inside.
What mass surveillance did to a small set of public spaces in the Crystal City neighborhood of Arlington, it did on a much larger scale to a different kind of public space. Digital evangelists have long enjoyed describing the internet as a “digital town square,” a place where people can encounter strangers they would never meet in their private lives and where platforms are equally available to anyone with the desire to speak. Like the agora in ancient Athens, the internet would be a place where people could gather whenever they wanted and freely discuss whatever concerned them. In reality, of course, the internet has never been public in the full sense: In the United States, streets, libraries, schools, and public parks actually belong to citizens and the government that represents them, whereas the internet has always been in private hands. The chaotic landscape of the internet’s early days, however, allowed the dream of an online agora to flourish. Silicon Valley needed years to figure out how to monetize the time people spent online, and during that period people found that it really was pretty easy to build various kinds of communities, from message boards and forums that revolved around single topics such as music, video games, or parenting to group blogs, chat rooms, and online diaries. These communities worked best when their membership numbers were sufficiently low, and the amount of content they produced was sufficiently reasonable, that a regular but not obsessive user could keep up with the main personalities and primary threads of discussion without having to sacrifice too much of the time they spent offline. And because it was rare for a Google username or some other centralized identifier to follow you from site to site, people were able to explore a series of contained, independent spaces in which they could freely exercise different elements of their personalities and interests, as well as different ways of engaging with others, without the fear of seeming duplicitous. It’s not hard to understand why so many thought the internet would be a boon to public life.
