Surveillance of citizens is often used to crush political dissent

Many who defend the government (and corporate) spying argue that the right to privacy and anonymous free speech must be balanced against safety and security.

Many of these defenders are comfortable with government surveillance as long as the government doesn’t abuse its ability to spy and collect citizens’ data. If it will help catch terrorists before they attack, the argument goes, then it’s worth it, even if the idea of total surveillance is kind of creepy and we all wish this wasn’t the trade off we have to make. I agree with this commenter, responding to David Simon’s June 7th blog post in which the former Baltimore Sun journalist and Wire creator defended the NSA near-total surveillance, primarily because, Simon claims, there has been no evidence that the government has abused its surveillance power:

I’m not sure that actually having lived in a totalitarian society, like I have in communist Bulgaria, is a prerequisite to grasping that total surveillance, or the fear of it, kills free expression, and at some point even thinking. Self-censorship becomes way of life. And the power of the secret police that hears and knows everything and can pressure anyone into submission is huge. The Stasi strongmen could have only dreamt of the richness of detail Google and Facebook are providing to the NSA. Not to mention the automated analytical tools that are already available it are currently being developed.

The possibilities of power misuse are just too big to ignore.

True enough in theory, and even scarier when we consider the overwhelming evidence that at least one goal the corporate-state surveillance apparatus is fulfilling is the political repression of activists on both the left and the right who advocate fundamental, democratic change to a badly broken system.

A series of legislative developments since 9/11 have expanded the executive branch’s surveillance and intelligence-gathering functions drastically, under the umbrella of the U.S. Intelligence Community, as it calls itself. These policy changes have loosened restrictions on intelligence gathering, expanded the definition of terrorism, inflated the role of corporations in catching so-called terrorists and protecting “critical infrastructure and key resources,” and created fusion centers(regional information sharing centers) under the direction of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The seventeen agencies that make up the Intelligence Community reported a combined budget of $80 billion in 2010, a figure three times higher than when it was previously disclosed twelve years earlier.

Advocates of the surveillance program argue that government abuse of our data is prevented by its exposure to judicial oversight. The vehicle for such oversight is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was initially set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. It was a liberal piece of legislation (introduced by Ted Kennedy and signed into law by Jimmy Carter), and a direct response to the Church Committee findings that Richard Nixon had been spying on political and activist groups in violation of the Constitution and the civil liberties it protects. The original act tightened restrictions on the gathering of the communications of U.S. citizens.

Since 1978, and especially since 2001, however, FISA has been amended many times, each time loosening the protections afforded by the original law, including the Lone Wolf Amendment of 2004 and the Protect America Act of 2007.

The FISA court is notoriously secret and its processes opaque (despite Obama’s recent assertion on Charlie Rose that FISA proceedings are transparent). Located within the Department of Justice building, the eleven judges hear evidence solely from the government lawyers at the Department of Justice about the requisite terrorist or enemy threat, and then the court either accepts or denies the request. The only information ever made public is how many requests were accepted and how many were denied at the end of each year. In the last three years alone, the FISA court rubber stamped a whopping 4,976 government requests, and denied none. (See this Bill Quigley column for more staggering statistics about the FISA court’s deference to the government.

Of course, these figures might not mean anything at all, given that we know the Bush administration was wiretapping without warrants and without the knowledge of the FISA court in 2005—resulting in the resignation of one of the FISA court judges, apparently in protest of the secret surveillance.)

What very few people are acknowledging, amidst all the discussion about the Snowden leak and what it reveals, is that a very real purpose of the surveillance programs—and perhaps the entire war on terror—is to target and repress political dissent. “Terrorism” is the new “Communism,” and the war on terror and all its shiny new surveillance technology is the new Cold War and McCarthyism.

Given the close partnership between government agencies and the private sector, it should come as no surprise that those in power were quick to spy on Occupy encampments and identify anti-Wall Street protestors as terrorist threats.

There are three primary public-private intelligence partnerships at work on the federal level: The Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), InfraGard, and the DHS Private Sector Information-Sharing Working Group. All three are vehicles for intelligence sharing between all levels of government and the private sector. Through these groups, often housed in fusion centers, financial institutions and other corporations warn DHS of terrorism threats. These so-called threats are often peaceful dissenters and activists, although the member corporations and their communications with the government are kept secret.

The ACLU has accused InfraGard of “turning private-sector corporations—some of which maybe in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers—into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI.”

Even before many Occupy encampments were in place, banks and private companies in cities across America partnered with federal, state, and local law enforcement to infiltrate, collect intelligence about, and eventually stop the protests. The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF), after retrieving FBI documents demonstrating the public and private surveillance of Occupy protestors, reported that such infiltration had been taking place in Virginia, Milwaukee, Memphis, Birmingham, Jackson, Denver, and San Francisco, to name only a few.

The Guardian’s Naomi Wolf, in her reporting on the unclassified documents showing the FBI surveillance of Occupiers, wrote: “Why the huge push for counterterrorism ‘fusion centers,’ the DHS militarizing of police departments, and so on? It was never really about ‘the terrorists.’ It was not even about civil unrest. It was always about this moment, when vast crimes might be uncovered by citizens—it was always, that is to say, meant to be about you.”

A groundbreaking new report from the Center for Media and Democracy and DBA Press painstakingly details the web of financial, corporate, municipal, state, and federal interests that collaborated to bring down Occupy Phoenix.

You can read that report, and see the documents uncovered through their yearlong investigation, here.
http://crooksandliars.com/kate-epstein/remember-surveillance-also-used-crush

Is mass spying being used to make some people rich?
Article first appeared in washingtonsblog,com:

A 2008 paper (which was subsequently published in the prestigious Oxford Quarterly Journal of Economics) found evidence that the CIA and/or members of the Executive branch either disclosed or acted on information about top-secret authorizations of coups. Stocks in “highly exposed” firms rose more in the pre-coup authorization phase than they did when the coup was actually launched.

Here’s how the dataset was developed:

We selected our sample of coups on the following basis: (1.) a CIA timeline of events or a secondary timeline based upon an original CIA document existed, (2.) the coup contained secret planning events including at least one covert authorization of a coup attempt by a national intelligence agency and/or a head of state, and (3.) the coup authorization was against a government which nationalized property of at least one sufficiently exposed multinational firm with publicly traded shares.

Out of this, the authors found four coup attempts that met their criteria: the ouster of Muhammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, two programs in Guatemala in 1952 and 1954 that eventually removed Jacobo Arbenz Guzman; the unsuccessful effort to topple Castro in 1961, and an operation that began in Chile in 1970 and culminated in overthrow of Salvador Allende. Then they chose companies:

We apply 3 criteria to select our sample of companies. First, a company must be publicly traded, so that we can observe a stock price. Secondly, the company must be “well-connected”, in terms of being linked to the CIA. Finally, the company should be highly exposed to political changes in the affected country, in the sense that a large fraction of a company’s assets are in that country.

They used these criteria to devise two samples (based on different definitions of “highly exposed”) and tested both.

Their conclusions:

Covert operations organized and abetted by foreign governments have played a sub- stantial role in the political and economic development of poorer countries around the world. We look at CIA-backed coups against governments which had nationalized a considerable amount of foreign investment. Using an event-study methodology, we find that private information regarding coup authorizations and planning by the U.S. government increased the stock prices of expropriated multinationals that stood to benefit from the regime change. The presence of these abnormal returns suggests that there were leaks from the CIA or others in the executive branch of government to asset traders or that government officials with access to this information themselves traded upon it.

Consistent with theories of asset price determination under private information, this information took some time to be fully reflected in the stock price. Moreover, the evidence we find suggests that coup authorization information was only present in large, politically connected companies which were also highly exposed.

We find that coup authorizations, on net, contributed more to stock price rises of highly exposed and well connected companies than the coup events themselves. These price changes reflect sizeable shifts in beliefs about the probability of coup occurrence.

Our results are robust across countries, except Cuba, as well as to a variety of controls for alternate sources of information, including public events and newspaper articles. The anomalous results for Cuba are consistent with the information leaks and inad- equate organization that surrounded that particular coup attempt.

Given what has already been revealed about the NSA’s data gathering, if you were a clever trader and had access to this information, how would you mine it? How would you go about finding patterns or events to exploit?

Companies will pay a lot of money to get financial data early, information gleaned through spying could be very valuable.

Large companies spend huge sums of money to conduct industrial espionage on their rivals, information gained through spying could be invaluable. Especially since the NSA closely spies on  the European Union, the European Parliament, Germany,  the G20 summit and Chinese universities.

And several financial and economic experts – such as Jim Rickards, Max Keiser, German central bank president Ernst Welteke, Swiss economists Remo Crameri, Marc Chesney, Loriano Mancini and Bill Bergman (senior financial markets policy analyst for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago for 13 years) – also say that there were insider trades right before 9/11 by people who knew the attacks were coming … people  with “no conceivable ties to al-Qaeda” according to the 9/11 Commission.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/07/mass-spying-being-used-to-make-some-people-rich.html