Stratfor internal documents posted on Wikileaks reveal that Abraxas corporation — a security state contractor with close ties to the spooks at the US National Security Agency — has developed a software system networking countless public surveillance cameras with a facial recognition database.
Meanwhile, the NSA is building a gargantuan data-crunching facility — the Utah Data Center — that it expects to become operational in 2013: “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.'”
Civil libertarian reactions to this stuff consist mainly — and quite understandably — of horror at the newly augmented power of the automated police state. In terms of the state’s intent and its legal figleaves for justifying it, this is obviously yet another step in America’s slide into full-blown security state authoritarianism a la the movie “Brazil.”
We’re living in a high-tech form of bureaucratic Caesarism with about as much relation to the US Constitution it claims to observe as the Principate had to the institutional forms of the Roman Republic. But I’m less inclined to panic over the actual capabilities of that security state — precisely because it tends to operate like something out of “Brazil.”
The main reason the security state has never managed to thwart a real terror attack with all its electronic surveillance and data-crunching capabilities (they’ve all been stopped by a combo of stupid terrorists and smart fellow passengers) is that they’re already generating too much data for their bureaucracy to process. The system drowns in the false positives it generates, and in the face of this bureaucratic information overload actually ignores (say) direct warnings from the Underwear Bomber’s dad that his crazy kid is planning to blow up a plane. I’m guessing this will make the problem of false positives a hundred times worse, replacing the haystack the needle of usable info is buried in with an entire barn full of hay.
If this “Enemy of the State” monstrosity is good for anything at all, it’s keeping track of people the regime already knows it doesn’t like for political reasons. Imagine A. Mitchell Palmer with a facial recognition database of IWW and Socialist Party members, and you get the idea. “Eugene Debs spotted at the A&P — dispatch paddy wagon immediately!” But even for this application, the actual implementation would probably be more like Information Retrieval in “Brazil.” Some database error would result in Eugene Bebs being arrested instead.
That’s my second point. Consider the typical (very cozy) relationship between military contractors, the Pentagon’s procurement bureaucracies and congressmen from the districts where weapons systems will be built. The whole system is geared to massage weapons test results and grease the skids for approval. So you get extremely expensive weapons systems, with massive cost overruns, that — when tested in actual use — come down with all sorts of unforeseen bugs that were carefully concealed during the Potemkin Village “testing regime” and don’t perform at all as advertised in the contractors’ slick brochures.
The very fact that Abraxas has such incestuous ties with the security community should be a major source of reassurance in this regard.
Because the state is the state, it seeks unlimited power and attempts to acquire that power. But because the state is the state, the things it does to augment its power will mostly be stupid. The typical post-9/11 pattern has been for agile networks like Al Qaeda, Wikileaks and Anonymous to run circles around bureaucratic dinosaurs like Homeland Security and the TSA. The security state is trying to counter the threat by making the dinosaurs bigger. We’ll see how that works out.
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, The Security State: An Ever Bigger and Dumber Dinosaur, Hernando [Florida] Today, 08/24/12
- Kevin Carson, The Security State: An Ever Bigger and Dumber Dinosaur, Counterpunch, 08/21/12
“The main reason the main reason”
Trying to confuse Abraxas already, huh?
Good catch, fixed.
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There is a lot more to the "underwear bomber" story as summarized here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/in-case-you-missed…
The fact that democrats have acceeded to the construction of these facilities makes it pretty clear its time to emigrate from America.
The big dinosaur is funny until they throw you in ICE or NSA custody and you get sick and they don't give you medical attention while they're trying to figure out your case, and you DIE.
The fact that these people think their careers are legitimate proves that America is getting dangerously close to the nazis. However, the sheer size of the US makes a dictatorship unlikely, because mutiny and infighting is bound to start and dissolve the union. Hope the fascist clowns remember that in their asinine power fantasies.
yes, America is resembling former East Germany more and more every day !
The point of the article is exactly right: Leviathan Rube Goldberg machinery with software provided by a company with a comically imposing name — it's too grimly hilarious.
To take a very simple example: What is to stop a terrorist from simply writing a draft message in a dummy Hotmail account, and giving all his associates access to that account? The message, even if written "in the clear," would never transmit to another account, and thus never be intercepted. But what respectable terrorist would send a clear-worded text anyway? If they did, they would invest a phrase like "buy the red bandana" with significance known only to the associates. Even if we reach the Stasi state of one half the population employed to spy on the other half, how will they ever know that "buy the red bandana" means "put the ricin in the water supply on the 24th"?
In other words, just a few seconds thought will show that a data center as big as Utah itself, with real-time brute-force encryption cracking is brobdingnagian stupidity beyond belief. Well, almost beyond belief. One can imagine the technically illiterate Congress drooling with hushed stupidity as they listen to their CIA "liason" prattling in Tom Clancy dramatic monotone. Agh! Do you bray with laughter as a once-great nation goes marching over a cliff to a deafening toy march?
The purpose of the National Security State is not to thwart stateless terror aimed at the US or its subjects. Rather, the goal is to further control a populace that, to date, shows little sign of emerging from its medicated, consumption-fueled, brain dead state. But, at current course and speed, US Oligarchs and their political lackeys will drive Americans to the ramparts. That's what US elites fear, heavily armed Americans who will, before its over, cap their plutocratic asses.
The US has been a state of Israel since the mid '40's not the otherway around. Therefore the US is not a sovereign country even though CNN would like you to believe it. So what is happening on the security front is just that, a front for the Mosad.
Oh boy maybe I will be picked up tonight at my favorite 7/11. Or is it 9/11?
"The purpose of the National Security State is not to thwart stateless terror aimed at the US or its subjects." Precisely. Thus rendering moot most of the thrust of this article, and making this – "If this “Enemy of the State” monstrosity is good for anything at all, it’s keeping track of people the regime already knows it doesn’t like for political reasons" – flatout wrong.
I think we should all include vaguely, or ostensibly, terrorist content in all of our email and communication. That way, it will be even more annoying to sort through the noise. Now to go do some terrorist thing.
Kevin Carson is an unparalleled writer. His incisive, intricate and clear wordplay and clever historical allusions drive home the power of the underlying message like few others can. I've been reading Mutualist Political Economy, and it is indeed akin to an Anarchist Das Kapital (in the best sense). The only complaint I have is the formatting of the PDF file; the table of contents, font and general scarcity of topic headers lowers the aesthetic appeal of what is to go down as an absolutely monumental work. You might update the format of the PDF on the mutualist site. The formatting of Markets Not Capitalism is a good template. Keep up the great work!
"That's what US elites fear, heavily armed Americans who will, before its over, cap their plutocratic asses."
Heavily armed? How many bombers do you own? Attack helicopters? Missile silos? Face it, the US government will always have the capacity to inflict violence and terror far beyond what its citizens could ever hope to, and no amount of semi-automatic AR-15s is going to change that. If the US government wanted to, they could even plant operatives in your little guerilla organizations and incite you to kill each other.