[D66] Obama administration expands illegal surveillance of Americans

[Antid Oto]

Obama administration expands illegal surveillance of Americans
By Tom Carter
26 March 2012

Last Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder enacted guidelines that further
expand the US government’s asserted powers to collect and store private
information, without a warrant, concerning individuals who are not suspected of
any crime.

The guidelines constitute a further step by the Obama administration to expand
and entrench unconstitutional spying operations on the American people by all
levels of government that were spearheaded by the Bush administration.

In the period since September 11, 2001, the US government has secretly compiled
vast databases containing private information on the American public. These
databases include telephone conversations, the contents of personal emails,
visited web sites, Google searches, text messages, credit card transactions,
mobile phone GPS location data, travel itineraries, Facebook activity, medical
records, traffic tickets, surveillance camera footage and online purchases. The
vast quantities of information that are being collected and stored by the US
government far exceed what was gathered by the most infamous police states of
the last century.

Holder’s guidelines permit intelligence officials to secretly use these
databases to profile and track Americans who have no connection to
terrorism—alleged or otherwise—for up to five years. The previous guidelines,
issued in 2008 by Bush administration Attorney General Michael Mukasey, were
understood to limit the retention of such information to 180 days.

According to an article Friday in the New York Times, the new guidelines are
expected to result in increased collection and “data mining” of information on
ordinary Americans by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).

The Electronic Privacy Information Center issued a brief statement denouncing
the guidelines: “The change represents a dramatic expansion of government
surveillance and appears to violate the Privacy Act of 1974, which limits data
exchanges across federal agencies and establishes legal rights for US citizens.”

The guidelines, which are couched in military, legal and intelligence jargon,
were drafted in secret and not made available for public comment before they
were enacted. In addition to Holder, National Counterterrorism Center Director
Matthew G. Olsen and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, Jr.
signed the guidelines.

The new guidelines must be understood as part of a vast escalation of domestic
surveillance being undertaken by the Obama administration. According to a report
last week in Wired magazine, the Obama administration is constructing a secret
facility of unprecedented size in Bluffdale, Utah to store and process all of
the information it is presently gathering about Americans. The new data center
is conceived as a central hub that will link to National Security Agency (NSA)
electronic eavesdropping facilities that are already operating around the
country. “The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in
September 2013,” the report stated.

“Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases
will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private
emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal
data trails―parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other
digital ‘pocket litter,’” the article reported.

The Wired report, titled “The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center
(Watch What You Say),” confirms that among the major sources for the
surveillance databases are “secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US
telecom facilities.” The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 retroactively legalized the
collusion, illegal when it was initiated under the Bush administration, between
private telecommunications companies and government intelligence agencies in the
warrantless government compilation of private information.

The magazine reported one unnamed former intelligence official as saying,
“Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

The secret compilation of these databases by the Bush and Obama administrations
is entirely unconstitutional. The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution
provides: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,
papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be
violated.” It requires the police to obtain a warrant before conducting a search
or seizure.

“They violated the Constitution setting it up,” William Binney, a senior NSA
mathematician-turned-whistleblower, told Wired, referring to the warrantless
surveillance initiated by the Bush administration and now being expanded by the
Obama administration. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway,
and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way.”

The pretext for this massive escalation of domestic spying is the so-called “war
on terror.” However, the US ruling class is primarily targeting not terrorism in
the Middle East, but mounting opposition to its policies within the United
States. This is the real reason for its attacks on the democratic rights of the
population. They are the preparation for large-scale repression of political and
social opposition.

A report last week by AP journalist Frank Franklin II confirmed that
“counterterrorism” units in the New York Police Department’s Intelligence
Division have been carrying out extensive undercover monitoring of the meetings
of liberal and protest groups. Detailed reports on meetings, including the
identities of those present and future planned activities, have been generated
and transmitted regularly to an “intelligence collection coordinator.”

According to one such briefing, an NYPD undercover agent traveled as far as New
Orleans in April 2008 to spy on the activities of left-wing groups. The briefing
the agent sent back included the names and backgrounds of speakers at meetings,
the names of the organizations involved, the political issues discussed, and all
of the sites of future rallies.

Another NYPD undercover agent attended a white-water rafting Muslim religious
retreat to spy on those in attendance. The informant, identified as OP#237,
reported the details: “The group prayed at least four times a day, and much of
the conversation was spent discussing Islam and was religious in nature.”

The designation “OP#237” suggests that hundreds of such undercover informants
and spies are attending political meetings and gatherings from the NYPD alone.

Also revealed last week were Department of Homeland Security (DHS) internal
manuals for agents in the department’s Media Monitoring Capability program. The
manuals were ordered released pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request.
These manuals make clear that the agency has been closely monitoring political
discussions and activity on social media sites such as Facebook. The manual
identifies as “items of interest” warranting investigation any activity on
social media sites concerning “policy directives, debates and implementations
related to DHS.”

The escalation of domestic surveillance by the Obama administration is one
aspect of the disintegration of American democracy. On December 31 of last year,
Obama signed the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which gives
intelligence agencies and the military the power to abduct any person, anywhere
in the world, including US citizens, and imprison him or her indefinitely in a
facility such as the one located at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The NDAA was followed
by Holder’s speech earlier this month asserting the power of the president to
unilaterally assassinate US citizens without any kind of judicial process
whatsoever. The pseudo-legal arguments advanced by the Obama administration in
support of these measures exceed the most authoritarian presumptions of the Bush
administration.

These unprecedented attacks on democratic rights, in which the entire political
establishment and both Democrats and Republicans are participating, must be
understood as preemptive preparations by the political establishment to meet the
coming social upheavals with police state measures.

http://wsws.org/articles/2012/mar2012/surv-m26.shtml