Driving Home, page 41
The seemingly bottomless capacity of the computer to store billions of unrelated bits of information, and the extraordinary facility of search engines to trawl through the stuff, have made this kind of warrantless intrusion into other people’s lives irresistible—to private individuals and to governments alike. We’re all dataminers now. Just ten or fifteen years ago, it would have taken days in libraries and record offices, along with the full-time services of a private detective, to get the kind of hard intelligence on my prospective dinner date that I can now retrieve in a few idle minutes; and if I can do that, I tremble to think of what governments, equipped with massive financial and technological resources, are capable of doing.
Last week, USA Today reported that the National Security Agency (the U.S. intelligence organization so secretive that it’s popularly known as the No Such Agency) is assembling “the world’s biggest database” of records of phone calls made within the United States since 2001. The NSA, it’s said, is not listening to those calls, but is using them for “social network analysis,” looking for cluster patterns that might betray a terrorist cell. Exactly how, on this basis, one distinguishes a terrorist cell from a bridge club hasn’t yet been properly explained, although “Connecting the Dots—Tracking Two Identified Terrorists,” by Valdis Krebs (www.orgnet.com/prevent.html), lays out the basic methodology of network analysis in a brief and readable way.
The news that the NSA is trying to log “every call ever made” in the United States comes five months after the New York Times reported that the agency was bugging Americans’ overseas calls. Like its predecessor, this new story has provoked a firestorm of indignant comment from politicians and journalists on the liberal left and the libertarian right, but has been greeted with indifference by the American public at large. A Washington Post–ABC News poll, conducted last Thursday, found that 63 percent of those interviewed said they thought the NSA program was an “acceptable” way to combat terrorism, including 44 percent who “strongly endorsed” it. Democrats looking for a popular casus belli in their fight against the Bush administration had better forget about surveillance as an issue: a clear majority of Americans, it appears, feel entirely comfortable about it.
This is hardly surprising. Since September 11, CCTV cameras, magnetometers, Bio Watch air sniffers, razor wire, concrete fortifications, and all the rest of the machinery of state security and surveillance have become so much a part of the furniture of life in the United States that we barely notice them. It has become automatic to remove one’s shoes and hat and deposit keys, change, and cell phone in the tray provided as one passes the No Joking sign at the airport checkpoint, or to flourish an ID when entering the lobby of a public building. We expect to be intimately investigated, to be ordered to prove our good intentions. Year by year the government grows more importunately parental, the citizenry more obediently childish. Of course they log our phone calls—who are we to contradict the grown-ups who wage their high-tech secret war on our behalf? They know best.
The ambitious NSA scheme finds its mirror image in another mighty surveillance effort, the Association of Chief Police Officers’ plan called Denying Criminals the Use of the Roads, which was published in Britain in March 2005. Again, a massive national database is involved, this time a log of every journey taken by every vehicle in the UK, with number-plate-reading (ANPR) cameras, already ubiquitous on Britain’s roads to my estranged eye, multiplying to the point where you won’t be able to nip out to Sainsbury’s without landing in the database, where your innocent trip will stay recorded for a minimum of two years (the Chief Police Officers want to make that five). Among the several aims of the project, besides the detection and reduction of crime, are two old friends: “Promote Public Reassurance” and “Deter Terrorism.”
It might be that I’ve been deaf to the roar of protest that has met this authoritarian and intrusive measure. Sixteen years of living in America, where ANPR cameras are legal in some states, outlawed in others, and nowhere used in anything like the numbers that they are in Britain, could have made me unduly surprised and angered by the covert flash of the speed camera in the hedge as it snaps my rental car. I simply haven’t grown accustomed to the things in the slow, steady, incremental way that enables one to accept strange innovations that would strike a foreigner as intolerable. I am now that foreigner, and I’m innocently baffled by the apparent absence of furious debate and thundering editorials on the subject of spycams at four-hundred-yard intervals all over England.
Yet I have only to remember my own first day with Google Earth to see the immense attraction the cameras hold for the chief constables of the land or the lure of the comprehensive national database, with which I could have hours of not-so-innocent amusement fishing for the recent movements of all my friends and enemies.
Lacking a written constitution, Britain has no adamantine standard against which to test individual cases of privacy violation, but deals with them on an ad hoc, hit-and-miss basis, which has earned it the scorn of many privacy advocates. In 2002, Simon Davies, the director of Privacy International, said: “The UK demonstrates a pathology of antagonism toward privacy.”
It is—or at least was—different in the United States, where the privacy of the citizen is supposedly guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment, which reads in full: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
A couple of months ago, the Weekly Standard, a neoconservative magazine in close touch with the Bush administration, published an arresting article titled “The Misunderstood Fourth Amendment,” by Stanley C. Brubaker, a professor of political science at Colgate University. Brubaker argued that since the 1960s (when the liberal-thinking Earl Warren was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) America has been unfortunately saddled with a reading of the amendment based on its second clause, with its emphasis on those pesky warrants and probable causes.
An “originalist” reading, true to the intentions of the founders, would, said Brubaker, be “first-clause dominant”—in other words, all the provisions of the second clause apply only as a check to “unreasonable” searches and seizures. “Reasonable” searches, therefore—and Brubaker instanced the security procedures at airports—require neither warrant nor probable cause, and any search or seizure occasioned by the needs of national security and the war on terrorism is, de facto, “reasonable.”
This has been the implicit logic of the Bush administration since September 2001. Every kind of promiscuous surveillance is justified so long as it can be said to further the hunt for terrorists. And most Americans seem to agree. In the Washington Post–ABC News poll on the NSA’s latest exploit, 65 percent of those interviewed said it was more important for the federal government “to investigate possible terrorist threats, even if that intrudes on personal privacy.”
The key word there is “possible,” which could so easily supply a license for speculative trawling through the databases. There’s obvious reason for alarm at these developments, in Britain as in the United States. But people cannot fairly expect their governments to observe higher standards of delicacy and restraint than they demand of themselves. We’re all in this together. Almost overnight we’ve mutated into a surveillance society, largely thanks to the Internet and its search engines. Trawling through cyberspace in search of the lowdown on a stranger, one should perhaps spare a sympathetic thought for the government agency as it trawls through cyberspace in search of us.
Some weeks ago, I read in the New York Times that the western headquarters of the No Such Agency is located somewhere to the northeast of Yakima, Washington. I couldn’t resist launching Google Earth and visiting Yakima. Moving the cursor, clicking the mouse, I moved steadily northeastward into land marked “Military Reservation.” There in the desolate acres of sagebrush I came across what looked like an ailing mushroom farm of scattered dome and dish antennae, and zoomed in, descending from 1,000 feet to 50. I found no secrets, but the action supplied a neat image for these peculiar times: the surveilled surveilling the surveiller who’s surveilling him.
Guardian, May 2006
September 11: The Price We’ve Paid
WOKEN BY the jarring peal of the phone at 5:58 a.m., Pacific time, I heard a friend’s voice say, “Turn on your TV! Turn on your TV!” Then she hung up. Groggy with sleep, I clicked the remote, and the screen bloomed into a scene of aghast confusion. I was still dopily figuring out the what and where when, at 6:03, the second plane, arrowing at a tilt through a sky of flawless blue, penetrated the strangely pliant flesh of the South Tower like a whaler’s barbed harpoon. At the very moment of impact, one could see the plane’s nose cone simultaneously protruding slightly from the far side of the skyscraper. Was it a bystander or the cameraman who shouted “Ho-ly shit!”?—words, inadequate as they were, that now seem so inseparably glued to that astounding instant that I’ve never been able to speak them since.
For the next few hours, with the BBC on the computer screen, CNN on the TV, and the phone ringing off the hook, I felt the world shrinking around me. By midafternoon, New York, London, Honolulu, Paris, and Seattle had contracted into one neighborhood, and when, next morning, Le Monde ran its famous banner headline, WE ARE ALL AMERICANS NOW, the sentiment seemed so obvious as to be hardly worth stating. Now, of course, that headline is remembered only because it is a bitterly sarcastic marker of the enormous distance we’ve all traveled in the five years since that day.
“Since September 11 …” we say, as if the attacks were what changed everything. The month is right but the day wrong, because the real metamorphosis has arisen not so much from what Mohamed Atta and his co-conspirators did to us on September 11 as what we’ve subsequently done to ourselves—and continue to do, today, tomorrow, and in the foreseeable future (incredibly foreshortened though that has become). On September 12, still in shock at the extraordinary injury inflicted on the United States, we woke to essentially the same world we’d been living in before the phones began to ring. The death toll—then estimated at ten-thousand-plus—was horrifying, on the scale of a major earthquake or tsunami, but the globe continued to revolve on its accustomed axis, as it does after even the most devastating seismic killers.
On the evening of the eleventh, the president of the United States—last seen in a second-grade class at a Florida elementary school, staring numbly at The Pet Goat in Reading Mastery II: Storybook I—read haltingly to camera from a script: “These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat, but they have failed. Our country is strong. A great people has been moved to defend a great nation.” On the fourteenth, he found a voice and a persona when, dressed in a clerical-gray anorak, he visited the firefighters and rescue workers at the ruins of the World Trade Center. As the Dallas Morning News reported the next day: “When he climbed onto the wreckage of a fire truck to speak through the bullhorn, the workers began complaining: ‘George, we can’t hear you!’ ”
“ ‘I can hear you,’ Bush responded. ‘I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!’ The crowd whooped and then the chant began: ‘U-S-A, U-S-A.’ Bush grabbed a small American flag and waved it high.”
On the sixteenth, when Bush spoke of “this crusade, this war on terrorism,” the alarming and foolishly inflated language chilled much of the listening world even as, perhaps, it stirred his electoral base of fundamentalist Christians to heroic thoughts of sword and cross, liberating the holy places from Muslim occupation. Presumably unintentionally (unless a Swiftian ironist was at work in some back room in the White House), the phrase echoed Osama bin Laden, who since 1998 had been calling Americans “Crusaders” in repeated fatwas and speeches.
But September 18 is the real date to circle. That day, Congress rushed through its Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), entitling the president, as the nation’s commander in chief, to “use all necessary and appropriate force” against “those nations, organizations, or persons” that “he determines” were responsible for the September 11 atrocities, “… in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons.” It’s the “such” that’s the key, the inclusion of nations, organizations, or persons “of that sort,” which nicely covers, for instance, the invasion of Iraq, the arrest and detention of most of the prisoners now languishing in Guantánamo Bay, possible future military action against Iran, or Syria, or both, and heaven knows what else, since “such” is a term of potentially limitless capacity to make hitherto unguessed-at likenesses and connections.
The sloppily worded AUMF endowed the administration with unique and wide-ranging powers. It has become the license for the executive branch to wave at Congress and the judiciary whenever its actions are questioned or censured. On September 18, 2001, the delicate balance between the three branches of government, as laid out in the American Constitution, was thrown severely out of whack; since that day, one branch, the presidency, has enjoyed an unprecedented primacy over the others, and we’ve been living with the consequences of the AUMF ever since.
On the same day that Bush talked of the coming “crusade,” Vice President Dick Cheney told the host of Meet the Press how the new war was going to function. “We … have to work sort of the dark side … We’re going to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussions … It is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena.” So it was to be cloak-and-dagger stuff, top secret, with the administration “working the dark side,” out of view of the people. Secrecy has its own romantic allure, and in the shaken and frightened mood of America that September, there was reassurance in the idea of the White House going undercover, stealthily prowling on our behalf in Cheney’s arena of shadows. Barely a voice was raised to suggest that a secret presidency might not be entirely compatible with the basic principles of American democracy. On the “You’re either with us or against us” principle, enunciated by Bush in November 2001, the few liberals who spoke out against the new-style covert administration were condemned out of hand as siding with terrorists.
The threat of terrorism yet to come gave the White House an unimpeded freedom to act on its own discretion that most U.S. presidents have probably dreamed of, but is more often exercised by dictators, benevolent and otherwise. Such extravagant presidential liberty can only be maintained in a democracy so long as the threat is not just real, but immediately palpable to the electorate. The enormous quantity of ugly hardware that has shown up on the streets of American cities in the last five years serves a dual purpose: it supposedly protects us from acts of terrorism and daily reminds us of the danger we are in.
Sometime in early 2002, a nondescript rectangular gray box, with a tall vented pipe and a radio antenna, appeared on a telephone pole in my neighborhood in Seattle, and I drove past it several times before I figured out what it was—a device for sniffing pathogens in the air, like anthrax or ricin, and reporting back to headquarters, wherever they might be. The conspicuous presence of the box alarmed me a lot more than any of my previous thoughts of chemical and biological attack, and I was glad to see it gone a few days later—no doubt moved to another neighborhood to put a small shiver down their spines (apparently these boxes cost $25,000 apiece and are consequently in rather short supply). So it is with all the blast shields and concrete barriers, security checkpoints, metal detectors, X-ray machines, and the new generation of “smart” video surveillance cameras described, in rather too wide-eyed prose, by a reporter for the New York Times a couple of years ago: “Sophisticated new computer programs will immediately alert the police whenever anyone viewed by any of the cameras placed at buildings and other structures considered terrorist targets wanders aimlessly in circles, lingers outside a public building, pulls a car onto the shoulder of a highway, or leaves a package and walks away from it. Images of those people will be highlighted in color at the city’s central monitoring station, allowing dispatchers to send police officers to the scene immediately.”
So, too, the TopOff (short for “top officials”) exercises, which are mounted by the Department of Homeland Security in order to prepare “first responders” to deal with a terrorist attack. These multimillion-dollar pieces of experimental street theatre travel from city to city and involve actors dripping stage blood and stumbling around among overturned vehicles, corpses wearing “Role Player” sashes, blazing tires, broken glass, severed water mains, and the rest of the horror-show scenery.
Such measures are here, we’re told, to keep us safe—and also to scare our socks off. For the unique power of this administration depends on Americans staying frightened of another September 11—or worse. Every actual terrorist event—the Bali bombing, the Madrid train bombings, the London Tube and bus bombings, the Mumbai train bombings, the August 10 revelation of the alleged London-and-High-Wycombe plot to down transatlantic airliners—strengthens the presidency’s hand against the other two government branches. The first American consequence of the news from London last month was the announcement by Alberto Gonzales, the U.S. attorney general, that the administration would stand firm on military tribunals—otherwise, kangaroo courts—at Guantánamo, in the face of the latest Supreme Court ruling in its disfavor.
The reality of terrorism and the manufactured illusion of terrorism now bleed seamlessly together. The sporadic attacks launched by real terrorists have so far been insufficient to keep the attention-deficit-prone electorate in lockstep with the presidency, so phantoms have to be continually summoned from the deep in order to juice up the fear level and justify administration policies. When facts fail, fiction is always at hand to fill the breach, and White House speechwriters appear to believe that no story is as good as an old story retold, however slender its basis. Just last week President Bush, speaking to a captive audience of veterans at an American Legion convention in Salt Lake City, said once again that Iraq “is the central front in our fight against terrorism … If we give up the fight in the streets of Baghdad, we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities.”
