Well folks, it's finally come to this- Part 1

No Place to Hide: Award-Winning Journalist Robert O'Harrow Goes Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society


Transcript from www.democracynow.org - the war and peace report -
Thursday, February 10th, 2005


Investigative reporter Robert O'Harrow explores how the government is teaming up with private companies to collect massive amounts of data on citizens and how, he writes, "More than ever before, the details about our lives are no longer our own. They belong to the companies that collect them, and the government agencies that buy or demand them in the name of keeping us safe."

This week in New York, three members of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement were arrested in Brooklyn. At the time of their arrest, the three were monitoring police activities as part of the group"s Copwatch Program and were attempting to film a police beating. They were stopped and arrested on charges of assault and obstruction of governmental administration. The three deny the charges.

That's a case of citizens trying to monitor the state. But what happens when the state joins with private and powerful companies in monitoring you? When you go to work, stop at the store, fly in a plane, or surf the web, you are being watched. They know where you live, the value of your home, the names of your friends and family - even what you read. Where the data revolution meets national security, there is no place to hide.

That is the title of a new book that examines how the government is turning information technologies against its own citizens.
NoPlaceToHide.net


Today's transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: We're joined now by its author, Robert O’Harrow, Jr. He's the reporter for The Washington Post and associate with The Center for Investigative Reporting. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for articles on privacy and technology, and a recipient of the 2003 Carnegie Mellon Cyber Security Reporting Award. He joins us from Washington, DC. Welcome to Democracy Now!

ROBERT O’HARROW, JR.: Thanks for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: Well this is quite a frightening book, No Place to Hide. Why don't you start at the beginning? What exactly is happening today?

ROBERT O’HARROW, JR.: Well, we will start at the beginning. It starts, in a sense, in the early 1990's. It goes along with the explosion in computing power. Everybody knows how cheap and fast and powerful our home computers have become. The same thing happened probably at an even more accelerated rate in the information industry, so that in the 1990's, these private companies were able to collect literally billions of records. It's hard to believe, but it's a amount of information that few people can really reckon. And they did it supposedly -- well, actually -- primarily to target us for better marketing, to make services for efficient and convenient for us. And to jump forward a little bit, after 9/11 when the government was anxious to prevent another terror attack and we really didn't know what was going to happen next, the information services jumped into the fray, and offered their help and the government reached out to them. And so we had a marriage of the data revolution in which is what I call it, and the Homeland Security initiatives. The result was, in effect, the jump-starting of a national surveillance system, or a security industrial complex if you will.

AMY GOODMAN: Bob O’Harrow, talk about what the government and companies know when you use your cell phone?

ROBERT O’HARROW, JR.: Well, the way this works is that as we go through our lives, we leave more and more -- we're like comets in a way, we leave a long trail of data behind us. Most of us won't don't worry about it or think about it, because it's routine and the information seems banal because who cares about us, right? When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when you made the call, who you called, how long you were on the phone, and where roughly you were at the time. The location of the cell phone is becoming more and more precise. So, in some places, it might be up to a mile in some cities. It might be a few blocks. But there's a general location. When you use your ATM card, you're leaving a record of obviously where you were, when you used it, the fact that it was you. There's often a video camera shot of you at that location, which will get back to in a little bit. But more than that, the banks, as a result of the PATRIOT Act, have a legal mandate. They're required to watch that transaction, and so they are using artificial intelligence to check whether that's really you using it, to check whether you have ties to unsavory people, to look at the patterns of your financial activity to see if maybe you're trying to perpetuate money laundering, or if you have ties to terrorism finance. So if there are any suspicious signs at all, they're sending reports to a very little known branch of the Treasury Department, which is creating a data mine of all of the reports. There are many, many of them now. And they share them with law enforcement across the country, local, state, and federal law enforcement as well at intelligence agencies. When you go to the grocery store and use the discount card when you go through an automatic toll booth; when you call online to get a sweater or pair of jeans; or if you have an adventurous marriage and you buy something fun to use privately with your spouse or your mate, believe it or not, all of that stuff is swept up somewhere, and more and more is available to the information companies to get to know you better, so to speak, or to share or resell. Now, the government doesn't really care about all of that, but it is routinely tapping billions of records about where you have lived in your entire adult life. I mean, I'm talking every house and apartment, all of the phone numbers that you have had, the cars that you have owned. It can find links between you and me, for example. They can show, by looking into these billions of records, how we're related. If we know somebody who knew somebody that shared an apartment with somebody we have in common. And they're using these systems really, I believe, earnestly, to protect us. I have talked to -- I have spent time with Viet Dinh, the author of the PATRIOT Act, John Poindexter, lots of counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence guys, as well as with these private company officials. And I do honestly get the feeling that there's an earnest desire to tap all of this information to protect us. But we all know, we have either heard the great Brandice quote directly or we know this in our guts, which is that we shouldn't necessarily -- we all fear evil-minded ruler, but the real threat in many ways comes from people who are earnest or zealous, but not necessarily completely aware of the ramifications of what they're doing.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned John Poindexter, Total Information Awareness, that people pretty much beat back, or so people thought. There was such an open revolt across the political spectrum, the idea of John Ashcroft and John Poindexter recruiting 20 million Americans to spy on each other, the Fed Ex person, the person who delivers your mail take a sneak and peek, and if you see something funny, report back. But when did this actually start, and in fact, are they really doing it just by another name?

ROBERT O’HARROW, JR.: I did spend a lot of time with John Poindexter, and in No Place to Hide, I think people will be surprised at my finding, and I like to think of myself as a pretty tough-minded guy, there's a human person here. He is very, very earnest about trying to help the United States, but of course, he is a deeply zealous patriot, and he has a view of the world that included thinking about privacy. But in any case, he's a human person, somebody that I think we need to take on as human, not sort of as the boogeyman that a lot of people made him out to be. What happened with the Information Awareness Office that he headed at the Defense Department was that people sort of recognized the scope of the ambition of the government, and as a consequence, congress undercut the funding because they didn't trust him because of his role in Iran contra in the Reagan administration. And I won't go into details about that, but I think people recognized the scandal. And they also didn't trust the idea that there was going to be this all-seeing office collecting information about people around the world with what they felt was very little oversight. Now, the thing that's really interesting here is that I have spoken to somebody that was working very closely with John Poindexter at a private company called SAIC. This guy was actually the fellow who invented the concept of Total Information Awareness, and it happened back in the Clinton administration in 1999. And this guy on the record in the book and on tape for that matter, said that in fact, after Poindexter left the post that interest in the intelligence community actually increased, and that he was giving more briefings than ever on the concepts and technology that lay behind their thinking of this system. That's one thing, and the other thing is that the program may be gone, as I say, but it's not forgotten. Components of it are very much alive in the black world, in the classified world. And there are components of it that were killed but continue in other agencies so that you see there's a program called HS-ARPA, Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency. They're pursuing exactly some of the same things that Poindexter was. There's a data mining operation at the FBI that very few people have paid attention to. The CIA has a program that's similar, and of course, the NSA is pursuing a program that involves massive amounts of data. So, I would say that the notion of Total Information Awareness being dead, a lot of people have talked about it, it’s still alive, but in fact, I think I have documented pretty clearly for the first time the extent of the research continuing.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Robert O’Harrow Jr., an award winning Washington Post reporter. His new book is called No Place to Hide. When we come back, we're going to play a clip of a film called Unconstitutional on this issue. And then talk with Bob O’Harrow about some of the companies that are doing this data mining, the private corporations that are working more and more closely with the state. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to go back now to the issue of the government monitoring its own citizens. We're talking with Robert O'Harrow, Jr. His book is called No Place to Hide, but before we go back to him, just a clip of a documentary produced by Robert Greenwald called Unconstitutional.

• 
  NARRATOR: The ACLU is not the only organization that has been silenced by the PATRIOT Act.
  
  ANNE TURNER: If librarians have been approached by the F.B.I., they, of course, can’t say that, because one of the rules in the PATRIOT Act is that you can’t tell, which is terrifying, really.
  
  RYAN COONERTY: What it allows the government to do is to come in and subpoena your customer records to find out what books have been checked out or what books they have bought. It doesn't allow the bookstore to contact a lawyer to fight it. It's all done through Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and doesn't give us an opportunity to stand up for our customers.
  
  ANNE TURNER: At least when you get a subpoena from a local court, because there's reasonable cause to suspect that someone has broken the law and their library records would contribute to the investigation, that's what the law used to be. At least you could tell anybody that you had responded to the subpoena.
  
  NARRATOR: They don't even need reasonable suspicion to obtain records on you. Employment records, medical records and even banking records
  
  DOUGLAS HELLER: The government has deputized the banking industry to spy on American consumers. What we see is the possibility that banks in their -- in doing their policing duty for the government are going to be looking at who we are, finding out more information than they ought to. It's a profitable place for them because they get to sell information about us. You just wonder, are you giving the wrong people too much authority?
  
  NARRATOR: Government agents can now check on who you are sending email to, who you are getting email from, and what websites you visit by claiming it is relevant to an investigation.
  
  DAVID COLE: It requires no showing that the individual whose records are being sought actually engaged in or had any connection to any kind of terrorist conduct. So, it basically makes all of us vulnerable.
  
  FORMER REP. ROBERT BARR: When you look at the PATRIOT Act you are truck struck by the fact that many of its provisions are not limited to fighting terrorism. They affect federal criminal law and procedure generally. ANTHONY ROMERO: Most Americans believe that the PATRIOT Act was focused on the war on terror. And yet they're surprised to find that there are portions of the PATRIOT Act that have nothing to do with the war on terror.

 

Woah. Scary. Really scary. thanks for posting it. it really is 1984 today!


peace & love