[...]
a draconian
imperial power has taken one of its own dissidents, who wanted to reveal the
truth about its cruel war practices and global diplomatic maneuverings, thrown
him in prison without charges, abused and mistreated him, brought him before a
drumhead military court and, on essentially trumped up charges of “espionage,” convicted him of just what its leaders wanted to
convict him of. That power, of course, must be Russia and all’s right
with the world... oops, I mean, that’s U.S. Army Private First Class Bradley Manning and the “evil empire” that mistreated
him is... gulp... the United States.
[...]
Welcome to Post-Constitution America
What If Your Country Begins to Change and No One Notices?
What If Your Country Begins to Change and No One Notices?
On July 30, 1778, the Continental Congress created the first whistleblowerprotection law, stating “that it is the duty
of all persons in the service of the United States to give the earliest
information to Congress or other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds, or
misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these
states.”
Two hundred thirty-five years later, on July 30, 2013,
Bradley Manning was found guilty on
20 of the 22 charges for which he was prosecuted, specifically for “espionage”
and for videos of war atrocities he released, but not for “aiding the
enemy.”
Days after the verdict, with sentencing hearings in which
Manning could receive 136 years of prison time ongoing, the pundits have had
their say. The problem is that they missed the most chilling aspect of the
Manning case: the way it ushered us, almost unnoticed, into post-Constitutional
America.
Even before the Manning trial began, the emerging look of
that new America was coming into view. In recent years, weapons, tactics,
and techniques developed in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as in the war on
terror have begun arriving in “the homeland.”
Consider, for instance, the rise of the warrior cop, of increasingly up-armored police departments
across the country often filled with former military personnel encouraged to
use the sort of rough tactics they once wielded in combat zones. Supporting
them are the kinds of weaponry that once would have been inconceivable in
police departments, including armored vehicles, typically bought with
Department of Homeland Security grants. Recently, the director of the FBI informed a Senate
committee that the Bureau was deploying its first drones over the United
States. Meanwhile, Customs and Border Protection, part of the Department
of Homeland Security and already flying an expanding fleet of Predator drones,
the very ones used in America’s war zones, is eager to arm them with “non-lethal” weaponry to “immobilize
targets of interest.”
Above all, surveillance technology has been coming home from
our distant war zones. The National Security Agency (NSA), for instance,
pioneered the use of cell phones to track potential enemy movements in Iraq and
Afghanistan. The NSA did this in one of several ways. With the aim of remotely
turning on cell phones as audio monitoring or GPS devices, rogue signals could
be sent out through an existing network, or NSA software could be implanted on
phones disguised as downloads of porn or games.
Using fake cell phone towers that actually intercept phone
signals en route to real towers, the U.S. could harvest hardware information in
Iraq and Afghanistan that would forever label a phone and allow the NSA to
always uniquely identify it, even if the SIM
card was changed. The fake cell towers also allowed the NSA to gather
precise location data for the phone, vacuum up metadata, and monitor what was
being said.
At one point, more than 100 NSA teams had been scouring Iraq for snippets of electronic data that might be
useful to military planners. The agency’s director, General Keith Alexander,
changed that: he devised a strategy called Real Time Regional Gateway to grab every Iraqi text,
phone call, email, and social media interaction. “Rather than look for a single
needle in the haystack, his approach was, ‘Let’s collect the whole
haystack,’” said one former senior U.S. intelligence official.
“Collect it all, tag it, store it, and whatever it is you want, you go
searching for it.”
Sound familiar, Mr. Snowden?
Welcome Home, Soldier (Part I)
Thanks to Edward
Snowden, we now know that the “collect it all” technique employed by the
NSA in Iraq would soon enough be used to collect American metadata and other
electronically available information, including credit card transactions, air
ticket purchases, and financial records. At the vast new $2 billiondata center it is building in Bluffdale, Utah, and at
other locations, the NSA is following its Iraq script of saving everything, so
that once an American became a target, his or her whole history can be combed
through.
Such searches do not require approval by a court, or even an NSA supervisor. As it
happened, however, the job was easier to accomplish in the U.S. than in Iraq,
as internet companies and telephone service providers are required by secret law
to hand over the required data, neatly formatted, with no messy spying
required.
When the U.S. wanted something in Iraq or Afghanistan, they
sent guys to kick down doors and take it. This, too, may be beginning to happen
here at home. Recently, despite other valuable and easily portable objects
lying nearby,computers, and only computers, were stolen from the law
offices representing State Department whistleblower Aurelia Fedenisn.
Similarly, a Washington law firm representing NSA whistleblower Tom Drake had computers, and only computers, stolen from its office.
In these years, the FBI has brought two other NSA wartime
tools home. The Bureau now uses a device called Stingray to
recreate those battlefield fake cell phone towers and track people in the U.S.
without their knowledge. Stingray offers some unique advantages: it bypasses
the phone company entirely, which is, of course, handy in a war zone in which a
phone company may be controlled by less than cooperative types, or if phone
companies no longer cooperate with the government, or simply if you don't want
the phone company or anyone else to know you're snooping. American phone
companies seem to have been quite cooperative. Verizon, for instance, admits hacking its own cellular
modems (“air cards”) to facilitate FBI intrusion.
The FBI is also following NSA's lead implanting spyware and other hacker software developed
for our war zones secretly and remotely in American computers and cell phones.
The Bureau can then remotely turn on phone and laptop microphones, even
webcams, to monitor citizens, while files can be pulled from a computer or
implanted onto a computer.
Among the latest examples of war technology making the trip
back to the homeland is the aerostat,
a tethered medium-sized blimp. Anyone who served in Iraq or Afghanistan will recognize the thing, as one or more of them flew over
nearly every military base of any size or importance. The Army recently
announced plans to operate two such blimps over Washington, D.C., starting in 2014. Allegedly they are
only to serve as anti-missile defenses, though in our war zones they were used
as massive surveillance platforms. As a taste of the sorts of surveillance
systems the aerostats were equipped with abroad but the Army says they won’t
have here at home, consider Gorgon Stare, a system that can transmit live images of an entire town. And unlike drones, an aerostat never
needs to land. Ever.
[...]
During the months of the trial, the U.S. military refused to
release official transcripts of the proceedings. Even a private courtroom
sketch artist was barred from the room. Independent journalist and
activist Alexa O’Brien then took it upon herself to attend the
trial daily, defy the Army, and make an unofficial record of the proceedings by hand. Later in the trial,
armed military police were stationed behind reporters listening to testimony. Above all, the
feeling that Manning’s fate was predetermined could hardly be avoided. After
all, President Obama, the former Constitutional law professor, essentially
proclaimed him guilty back in 2011 and the Department of Defense
didn’t hesitate to state more generally that “leaking is tantamount to
aiding the enemies of the United States.”
As at Guantanamo, rules of evidence reaching back to early
English common law were turned upside down. In Manning’s case, he was convicted
of espionage, even though the prosecution did not have to prove either his
intent to help another government or that harm was caused; a civilian court had
already paved the wayfor such a ruling in another whistleblower
case. In addition, the government was allowed to label Manning a “traitor” and an “anarchist” in open court, though he was
on trial for neither treason nor anarchy.
His Army supervisor in the U.S. and Iraq was allowed to testify against him despite having made biased and
homophobic statements about him in a movie built
around portraying Manning as a sad, sexually-confused, attention-seeking young
man mesmerized by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Finally, the same judge who
essentially harassed the press throughout Manning’s trial issued a 24-hour advance notice of her verdict to
ensure maximum coverage only of the denouement, not the process.
[...]
No comments:
Post a Comment