Background to Domestic Espionage: Constructing Public Opinion: How Politicians and the Media Deliberately Misrepresent the Public

CSU (California State University)

Constructing Public Opinion: How Politicians and the Media Misrepresent the Public

Featuring Justin Lewis

SYNOPSIS

Constructing Public Opinion explodes the myth that politicians too often cave into polling numbers, that too little leadership and too much knee-jerk democracy is at the root of Americans’ disillusionment with politics. Professor Justin Lewis argues instead that public opinion is in effect manufactured and distorted in ways that undermine true democratic participation. He also maintains that the reasons for this are less conspiratorial than institutional: a reflection of the mandate of political, corporate and media elites to maintain the status quo in order to satisfy their interdependent interests.

The film takes a sustained and critical look at the rise and influence of public opinion polls in American politics, and examines the relationship between politics, media and the public. It demonstrates that public opinion data used by politicians and reported by media do not so much reflect what Americans think as construct public opinion itself. Lewis investigates, against conventional wisdom, a central paradox: that the very opinion polling that appears to wield such influence over politicians, and media coverage of politics, has in actuality distorted and limited the voice of the public.

The film explores this paradox by showing how the potential power of polling to give people a voice in the political process is undermined by the nature of the political system itself. While the public is now surveyed with greater frequency and sophistication than ever before, Lewis demonstrates how people’s desires often carry less urgency with political elites than the need of elites to manage people’s desires. His argument is not an indictment of a few powerful individuals conspiring against the public, but of a political culture so infused with money, so confined by mainstream corporate media coverage, and therefore so beholden to elite moneyed interests, that it fails to respond to the real opinions of ordinary people. The chief casualty in all of this is the truth, the real things that real people say they want from their government and representatives – and the effect is cyclical: true public opinion continues to be misrepresented, and these misrepresentations in turn continue to shape and severely limit the public’s sense of political reality and their place in it.

The film shows how this ongoing misrepresentation of public opinion:

• constructs, rather than reflects, true public opinion by failing to reflect the specific and accurate opinions of the public on specific issues;

• constructs by misrepresentation the public itself;

• excludes real and mainstream public sentiment that has been shown repeatedly in surveys to lie outside, and to the left, of what mainstream reporting of opinion allows;

• reflects the interests of politicians who must first satisfy the interests of those who fund them, interests that are by definition conservative because wedded to the status quo;

• reflects the interests of the mass media whose job it is to report what the public says it wants: the media’s institutional interests as corporations themselves, and the related pressure on them to trade in labels, image and oversimplification – rather than specifics, nuance and substance – in order to maintain ratings and market share;

• reflects media bias toward the elite interests who have the greatest access to media;

• does not so much measure public feeling about the direction or shape of policy as it does direct and shape public feeling about predetermined policies that often work against what the public says it wants.

• creates a climate of misinformation which in turn affects public opinion by affecting people’s understanding of major issues.

THE FILM: KEY POINTS

1. Introduction:

In his introduction, Lewis challenges the myth of the "poll-pandering" politician. He cites data that show the American people to be far more "liberal" than their representatives on a broad range of issues. The section ends with these questions: If, as we so often hear, politicians do only what the polls tell them to do, then how is this mismatch between popular sentiment and mainstream policy possible? And what does this mismatch say about the democratic process?

Key Points:

• It is a myth that politicians, in quest of popularity, do what polls tell them to do.

• This myth creates the impression that the political system may have problems, and that politicians may not be strong leaders, but that on the whole both are responsive to the public.

• A detailed look at public opinion reveals broad support for a range of liberal or left-wing policies, including increased government spending on inner cities, the environment, education, health care, a minimum wage increase, more gun control, and campaign finance reform.

• Despite the popular support of ordinary people for liberal policy on a range of economic issues, their representatives – whether Republican or Democrat – are generally far more conservative.

• This discrepancy raises questions about the true influence and use of public opinion, and in a democracy forces us to ask how it’s possible that there could be such a mismatch between what the people want and the actual policies pursued by their representatives.

2. Political Perceptions:

This section begins to explore reasons for the discrepancy between popular support for liberal policies and the more conservative policies pursued by representatives. After defining what is meant, broadly speaking, by the terms "liberal" and "conservative," Lewis shows how people often support vague conservative themes – like individual liberty and wariness of big government – while at the same time supporting specific policies that favor government spending and intervention. The section ends by considering one possible reason why people support conservative ideas and liberal policy: the negative connotations in the public mind of extreme labels like left-wing or right-wing, liberal or conservative.

Key points:

• In terms of the role of government in the economy, the term "liberal" or "left wing" refers to a belief in high government intervention, high spending on social programs.

• "Conservative" or "right wing" refers to a belief in low government intervention, low spending on social programs.

• Public opinion enters here: people often support vague conservative "themes" – abstract notions like "individual freedom." But when given specific options, they tend to support policies that favor government spending and intervention.

• This apparent inconsistency is due, in part, to people’s reactions to political labels – specifically their ambivalence about extreme labels.

• People prefer the label "moderate" to either conservative or liberal.

• The way media construct narratives in political coverage plays a role in this: In political stories, "moderate" is constructed again and again in positive ways, extremists in negative ways.

• This reaction to labels is supported by surveys that show that many people favor liberal approaches on a range of policy issues, but reject the term liberal.

• In addition to media narratives that create negative associations with the term "liberal," the composition of government itself tilts mainstream political discourse to the right.

• Conservative views and opinions on issues such as the death penalty and abortion are represented in government, whereas liberal responses to public opinion surveys reveal that people are very much to the left of most Democrats in Congress and the White House.

• On economic issues in particular, the public are actually further to the left than those elected to represent them.

3. Economic Forces:

This section focuses on why the actual liberal or left opinions of many Americans are excluded from mainstream political discourse. Lewis shows that while there are real differences between Democrats and Republicans on so-called civil liberty or social issues, there is little difference between the two dominant parties on economic issues. He argues that Democrats can afford – literally – to adopt liberal stances on social issues, but cannot afford to adopt the public’s often liberal stance on economic issues. This leads to a discussion of the role money plays in politics. While money is not central to how we think of such issues as the death penalty and abortion – where we see real differences between the two parties – it is central to issues such as health care, wages and corporate taxes – issues on which the two major parties tend to agree. Lewis argues at the close of this section that Democrats and Republicans are so close on economic issues because both parties rely primarily on money from corporate and business interests that are, by definition, economically conservative because they are concerned primarily with maximizing profit.

Key Points:

• The real difference between mainstream politicians can be found mainly on so-called civil liberty or social issues.

• What defines these issues – for example the death penalty, gay rights, women’s equality, abortion – is that money isn’t central to how we think about them.

• In contrast, Democrats and Republicans tend to share a similar stance on those issues that do involve money, issues such as health care, wages, trade agreements, and the environment.

• Money in politics enters here: the massive amount of money raised by politicians undermines liberal policy solutions. The reason for this is that both parties get most of their money from corporate and business interests, and must therefore heed these economically conservative interests or risk losing the money that sustains them as politicians.

• In this political environment, it is logical that community concerns that threaten business interests are not given priority.

• Surveys show clearly that the public is interested in community concerns such as health care, homelessness and the environment, but politicians tend to ignore radical solutions to these concerns because they need money to run effectively.

4. Media Coverage

This section, and the two that follow, examine more closely the role media play in shaping what counts for "public opinion." Having established that the more liberal views of Americans fail to be represented within the political spectrum, Lewis shows in this section how media feed, and feed off of, the artificial perception that public opinion is more moderate or conservative than it actually is. Key to his argument is that media do not simply report survey data, do not simply reflect what the public says it wants, but actually play a central role in constructing public opinion.

Key Points:

• Mainstream media don’t cover public opinion so much as they construct narratives about public opinion.

• When media cover polls, they tell a story about what public opinion is, shaping the very way we understand it in their choice of questions, what they exclude, their lack-of follow-up and specificity, and their reliance on mainstream political stereotypes and labels to tell a good story.

• Media coverage of public opinion does not recognize the gap between a public that tends to be more liberal than mainstream politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike.

• Media reports on public opinion exclude the possibility of left-wing approaches to economic issues, making the public appear more conservative than it actually is.

• The reasons for these exclusions, distortions and misrepresentations are systemic, caught up with the elite-oriented nature of reporting.

• Media have an "elite" orientation – a built-in bias toward the views of those in positions of power – because elites have the greatest access to media. In this way, politicians, who tend to have power, control and money, set the media stage for what we talk about and how.

• Because politicians are more conservative than the public, their power and access alter and shape the media narrative in more conservative directions.

• Polling and the interpretation of poll results therefore tend to steer away from nuance and specific measures of ordinary people’s views on issues, focusing instead on so-called "horse-race," candidate-centered polls.

• Candidate-centered polls and coverage reduce politics to image, steer people in one predetermined direction or the other, and in this way set up a narrow range of artificial choices while excluding alternative views about policy.

• At the same time that media coverage narrows the ideological spectrum on economic issues, it also creates the impression that real debate is happening by focusing on the differences between parties and candidates on civil libertarian and social issues like gay rights and abortion.

• The excessive coverage of differences on social issues and not the similarities on economic issues "masks the degree of elite consensus."

5. The Phantom Liberal

Continuing his look at media’s pivotal role in shaping public opinion by seeming simply to report it, Lewis looks more closely at how mainstream media skew political discourse to the right. This section demonstrates how media narratives create the illusion that a real battle of ideas between left and right exists in the mainstream, while in reality excluding left-wing ideas altogether. One of the effects of this narrowing of the spectrum is that what mainstream media characterize as moderate is in actuality conservative, and that what’s characterized as liberal is actually closer to moderate. The section concludes by illustrating the influence on the public mind of this elimination of liberal opinion, showing that most people believe former President Clinton, a self-described conservative New Democrat "moderate," was a liberal.

Key Points:

• Media create the sense that politics is generally responsive to the people: that they present a broad range of issues, and that politicians listen to the people through polls.

• In reality, the range of opinion is skewed to the right in ways that marginalize liberal opinion.

• Bill Clinton was covered by mainstream media as a liberal, when in fact his stand on most issues – Nafta, the Telecommunications Act -- was conservative, as indicated by his corporate support and left-wing opposition.

• Polls show that people incorrectly believe that Bill Clinton voted on the liberal side of a number of key issues.

• While there was significant media coverage of Clinton’s positions on these issues, the general framework and tenor of media coverage overwhelmed the specifics.

6. Military Omissions

This section develops the idea that media not only cover public opinion, but also influence it. Lewis argues that media play an "agenda-setting" role, that what they choose to cover is in turn considered by the public to be important – rather than the other way around. As an example, he examines media coverage of military spending in the United States, showing how the exclusion of specific detail inspires consensus from people who would otherwise question military spending.

Key Points:

• Media play an agenda setting roll, with public concern about issues tending to follow media coverage of those issues – rather than any changes in the real world.

• Shifts measured in so-called "public concern" about problems such as drugs and violence have nothing to do with the scale of these problems, and everything to do with the amount the media cover them.

• The power of media to define what issues are important has to do with what they report, and what they don’t.

• Polls measure public response to issues that are often incompletely reported.

• People’s responses to polls about the specific details involved in such issues as military spending are often wrong, but at the same time represent a rational response to the information they’re given.

• The overall effect of media omissions is "to suppress active public support for changing the current course."

7. Democratic Ideals

This concluding section points out that polling was viewed originally as a tool capable of enhancing democratic participation. In the beginning, innovations in the measuring of public opinion had the potential to make elites more responsive to the concerns of ordinary people. Instead, Lewis concludes, polls are now used primarily as market research – not to make government and media more responsive to the public interest, but to help make elite interests more palatable to the public.

A Brief History of Domestic Espionage in the United States: The Beginning...

A History of Domestic

 Espionage in the 

United States

By Sam Prince 

In lieu of the recent scandal surrounding the National Security Agency after whistleblower Edward Snowden released classified information regarding the federal government’s involvement in domestic espionage, we started to wonder when exactly the government became so interested in our lives.

Edward Snowden, NSA Whistleblower: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

Edward Snowden is at the epicenter of the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA's history. Here's what you should know about him.

Click here to read more

Turns out, it’s not a new revelation.

No terrorism, no communism, no Nazism…

Just the feds abusing power and ignoring the Constitution.

Here are five milestones in the history of the federal government domestic espionage — starting with the long-lost ancestors of the “NSA.”

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1. 1850: Pinkerton Government Services

Originally called the “Pinkerton National Detective Agency,” it was started by Scottish-born American Allan Pinkerton. Credited with helping foil the Baltimore Plot, which was an assassination plot on President Elect Abraham Lincoln while he would be en route to his 1861 inauguration, Pinkerton gained notoriety for this and became a confidant of President Lincoln as the Civil War loomed.

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In the wake of the Civil War, Pinkerton’s popularity continued to spread in all facets.

One of the more infamous federal uses of the Pinkerton Agency was union-busting during the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Homestead Strike is one such example. Citing Wikipedia:

During the labor unrest of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, businessmen hired the Pinkerton Agency to infiltrate unions, supply guards, keep strikers and suspected unionists out of factories, as well as recruiting goon squads to intimidate workers. One such confrontation was the Homestead Strike of 1892, in which Pinkerton agents were called in to reinforce the strikebreaking measures of industrialist…Andrew Carnegie.

Pinkerton Government Services continues to operate to this day as a private security contractor.

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2. 1919: The Cipher Bureau, or “The Black Chamber”

Proving to be just as mysterious it sounds, the Cipher Bureau was the United States’ first peacetime federal intelligence agency and is the direct precursor to the modern NSA.

According to a Federation of American Scientists article:

In June of 1917, the first U.S. signals intelligence agency was formed within the Army. Known as “MI-8,” the agency was charged with decoding military communications and providing codes for use by the U.S. military. In 1919, at the end of the war, the agency was transferred to the State Department. Known as the “Black Chamber,” it focused on diplomatic rather than military communications.

Wikipedia delves further:

Jointly funded by the Army and the State Department, the Cipher Bureau was disguised as a New York City commercial code company; it actually produced and sold such codes for business use. Its true mission, however, was to break the communications (chiefly diplomatic) of other nations. Its most notable known success was during the Washington Naval Conference during which it aided American negotiators considerably by providing them with the decrypted traffic of many of the Conference delegations, most notably the Japanese.

After the Black Chamber was shut down in 1929, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson was quoted as saying: “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

With current allegations, it might not be so presumptuous to say now that Mr. Stimson was alluding to a more domestic abuse of power.

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3. 1945: The AFSA / NSA & Project SHAMROCK

A covert operation begun by the NSA’s predecessor, the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), Project SHAMROCK was a government espionage exercise unauthorized by courts and without warrants.

It began in 1945 and continued operating for 30 years, falling under NSA protocol in 1952 after President Harry Truman dissolved the AFSA and secretly created the National Security Agency to allow the Defense Department to continue surveillance activities after World War II.

According to NDTV News, Project SHAMROCK is best described as:

…a large-scale spying operation designed to gather all telegraphic data going in and out of the United States. The project, which began without court authorization, is terminated after lawmakers begin investigating it in 1975.

Wikipedia expands:

The Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) and its successor NSA were given direct access to daily microfilm copies of all incoming, outgoing, and transiting telegrams via the Western Union and its associates RCA and ITT. NSA did the operational interception, and, if information that would be of interest to other intelligence agencies was found, the material was passed to them.

“Intercepted messages were disseminated to the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), and the Department of Defense.” No court authorized the operation and there were no warrants.

At the height of Project SHAMROCK, 150,000 messages a month were printed and analyzed by NSA personnel. In May 1975 however, Congressional critics began to investigate and expose the program. As a result, NSA director Lew Allen terminated it, on his own authority rather than that of other intelligence agencies.

Sound familiar?

At the 1975 court hearings following the revelation of Project SHAMROCK, Senator Frank Church(D-ID) was quoted as saying that Project SHAMROCK was “probably the largest government interception program affecting Americans ever undertaken.”

Somebody call Guinness, we have a new record.

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4. 1978: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)

On the heels of the Project SHAMROCK hearings, the ruling of the 1972 Supreme Court in the United States v. US District Court case, which established that the Fourth Amendment also included electronic surveillance, and the notorious Watergate scandal, Senator Frank Church decided enough was enough.

Quoting NDTV:

Senator Frank Church leads a select committee to investigate federal intelligence operations. Its report, released in 1976, detailed widespread spying at home and abroad, and concluded that “intelligence agencies have undermined the constitutional rights of citizens.” The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was created as a check on US surveillance activities.

Senator Church’s report also results in Congress passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA). It sets up the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to consider requests for secret warrants for domestic spying.

Regarding the FISC courts, Wikipedia states:

The Act created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and enabled it to oversee requests for surveillance warrants by federal police agencies (primarily the F.B.I.) against suspected foreign intelligence agents inside the U.S. The court is located within the Department of Justice headquarters building. The court is staffed by eleven judges appointed by the Chief Justice of the United States to serve seven year terms.

This was the way things operated until 2001, until September 11.

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5. 2001-Present: The PATRIOT Act

After nearly three decades of dormancy, FISA erupted back into the news.

According to the Daily Mail:

October 2001: Congress and Bush rush the USA Patriot Act into law. It gives the government unprecedented authority to search, seize, detain or eavesdrop in pursuit of suspected terrorists. Because of privacy concerns, lawmakers make the eavesdropping provisions and other controversial aspects temporary, requiring renewal by Congress.

December 2005: The New York Times reports that the National Security Agency is secretly eavesdropping on telephone calls and emails of Americans communicating with people outside the United States, without seeking warrants from the FISA court. What becomes known as ‘warrantless wiretapping’ began in 2002 under a presidential order. Critics call it unconstitutional, but the Bush administration says it’s legal.

March 2006: Congress votes to renew the Patriot Act, although lawmakers voice concerns about the government’s broad powers to conduct surveillance and collect data.

May 11, 2006: USA Today reports that the NSA is secretly collecting phone records of millions of Americans in a giant database. Some of the phone companies cited dispute the story.

August 2006: A federal judge in Detroit rules that the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program is unconstitutional because it infringes on free speech, privacy and the separation of powers. The program continues as the case is appealed.

January 2007: Responding to the court challenge and lawmakers’ concerns, Bush suddenly changes course. His administration announces it will begin seeking approval from the FISA court when eavesdropping on telephone calls between the U.S. and other countries in pursuit of terrorists.

August 2007: Congress approves changes sought by the Bush administration to the FISA Act, officially allowing NSA eavesdropping on communications between an American and a suspect foreigner, without a FISA judge’s approval.

May 2011: Congress passes and Obama signs a four-year extension of Patriot Act provisions on record searches and roving wiretaps. Some lawmakers complain that the law doesn’t do enough to protect Americans’ privacy and the disagreement forces the renewal to the last minute.

June 5, 2013: A British newspaper, The Guardian, reports that the NSA is collecting the telephone records of millions of American customers of Verizon under a top secret court order. Security experts say the records of other phone companies are also involved.

June 6, 2013: The Guardian and The Washington Post report that the NSA and the FBI are tapping into U.S. Internet companies, including Google and Facebook, scooping out emails, photos and videos to track foreign nationals who are suspected of terrorism or espionage.
That night, in a rare disclosure, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper reveals some information about the programs to counter what he says is the ‘misleading impression’ created by news coverage.
Clapper says the government is prohibited from ‘indiscriminately sifting’ through the data and can only review it when the query involves a reasonable suspicion that a foreign terrorist organization is involved. Clapper says articles about the Internet program ‘contain numerous inaccuracies’ but does not specify what those might be.

June 7, 2013: Obama defends the programs, saying he came into office with ‘healthy skepticism’ about them and has increased some safeguards to protect privacy. But he offers assurances that ‘nobody is listening to your telephone calls’ or reading citizens’ emails. Obama says privacy must be balanced with security: ‘We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.’

June 8, 2013: For the second time in three days, Clapper takes the unusual step of declassifying some details of an intelligence program in response to media reports. He says the government program for tapping into Internet usage is authorized by Congress, falls under strict supervision of a secret court and cannot intentionally target a U.S. citizen.
Clapper says the data collection had the approval of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court and was done with the knowledge of Internet service providers. He says media revelations of government intelligence-gathering programs are reckless and give America’s enemies a ‘playbook’ on how to avoid detection.

June 9, 2013: Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old contractor who claims to have worked at the National Security Agency and the CIA allows himself to be revealed as the source of disclosures about the U.S. government’s secret surveillance programs. Snowden tells The Guardian newspaper his ‘sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.’

So now that you know a general history of government espionage, what’s to become of our newest whistleblower Edward Snowden?

Read more here:

The Hunt For Edward Snowden: What is Government’s Next Move?

NSA Leaker Edward Snowden was seen most recently in Hong Kong but is now on the run. Republican Peter King is calling for his arrest but where is he and what are the charges?

Click here to read more

Sam Prince is a New York-based actor/writer/producer. Follow him on Twitter @thesamprince or check out his real-time news novel A Quiet War at aquietwar.com. 

Secret Surveillance Agency More Powerful Than the NSA

TWO ARTICLES ARE INCLUDED IN THIS POST

Thursday, 04 June 2015

Secret Surveillance Agency More Powerful Than the NSA

Written by  Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.

The National Security Agency (NSA) may have been forced to take a stutter step in its surveillance program (or resort to methods not made public) earlier this week regarding the collecton of metadata under the PATRIOT Act, but there is another agency that is more secretive, more invasive, and  has more information on you than could be gathered from your metadata.

Gawker’s Phase Zero reports on the scope of this shadow agency’s surveillance:

If you have a telephone number that has ever been called by an inmate in a federal prison, registered a change of address with the Postal Service, rented a car from Avis, used a corporate or Sears credit card, applied for nonprofit status with the IRS, or obtained non-driver’s legal identification from a private company, they have you on file.

The agency is the National Security Analysis Center (NSAC), a shadow branch of the U.S. Justice Department that employees over 400 people (including nearly 300 analysts) and boasts an annual budget of over $150 million.

As with so many other departments designed to seize our liberty and exchange it for “safety” from “terrorists,” the NSAC was created in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and was tasked with identifying any other similar threats that may have sneaked into the United States with similar purposes.

Post-9/11, however, the bureau’s mission shifted to include scanning the country for “domestic terrorists,” too. Phase Zero reports:

NSAC was created to focus scrutiny on new threat, specifically on Americans, particularly Muslims, who might pose a hidden threat (the [Foreign Terrorist Tracking] Task Force became a unit within NSAC’s bureaucratic umbrella). As Americans began traveling abroad to join al-Shabaab and then ISIS, the Center’s dragnet expanded to catch the vast pool of “youth” who also might fit a profile of either radicalism or law-breaking. Its mission runs the full gamut of “national security threats...to the United States and its interests,” according to a partially declassified Justice Department Inspector General report. That includes everything from terrorism to counter-narcotics, nuclear proliferation, and espionage.

How is the mission accomplished? Phase Zero reports that “in partnership with the military,” the NSAC conducts:

deep background investigations of foreign-born and foreign-connected soldiers, civilians, and contractors working for the government. Its investigations go far beyond traditional security “vetting”; NSAC scours certain select government employees, contractors and their affiliates, examining multiple layers of connected relatives and associates. And the Center hosts dozens of additional “liaison” officers from other government agencies, providing those agencies with frictionless access to private information about U.S. residents that they would otherwise not have.

Using access to databases of information available only to its analysts, the NSAC drills deep into the Internet to collect and collate data on anyone who happens to fit a profile programmed into its surveillance software. In other words: data mining. Phase Zero lays out the when and how of the program:

Homeland Security Presidential Directive-2 (HSPD-2), signed by George W. Bush in October 2001, established FTTTF and directed it to use “advanced data mining software” to find and prevent “aliens who engage in or support terrorist activity” from entering the United States. Though data mining was at the center of its mission, other agencies—particularly the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) and the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA)—funded the development of many of the techniques.

And:

The American people have repeatedly rejected the notion of a domestic intelligence agency operating within our borders. Yet NSAC has become the real-world equivalent. Along the way in its development though, the Center has rarely been discussed in the federal budget or in congressional oversight hearings available to the public. And being neither solely a part of the intelligence community (IC) nor solely a law enforcement agency (and yet both), it skirts limitations that exist in each community, allowing it to collect and examine information on people who are not otherwise accused of or suspected of any crime.

Thus making every American a suspect and turning the Constitution into nothing more than the easily pierced parchment barrier that the Founders feared it would become in the custody of the corrupt.

Due process is the bane of this type of data mining and despite the recent rapid growth of the latter, the former has been a reliable protection against despotism for nearly a millennium.

Turning its focus away from potential overseas dangers to those growing in its own backyard, as part of Project Scarecrow, the NSAC began monitoring those affiliated with the so-called “sovereign citizen” movement and others it deemed “domestic threats.”

The scope of the surveillance extended beyond Americans, however. NSAC, in partnership with police, "batch-matched dates of birth with licensed drivers to isolate a set of Pakistani men thought to be potentially connected to a terrorist group. The identities of foreign-born or connected hazardous materials (HAZMAT) drivers in the U.S. were added to a group of 'special interest individuals' constantly run against suspect datasets."

Phase Zero obtained a cache of incriminating documents that revealed that the NSAC and the Task Force uses "data from many divergent public, government and international sources for the purpose of monitoring the electronic footprints of terrorists and their supporters, identifying their behaviors, and providing actionable intelligence to appropriate law enforcement, government agencies, and the intelligence community."

Constitutionalists should catch several problematic phrases in that ostensibly “patriotic” purpose.

First, what is a terrorist? Isn’t a terrorist a person convicted of committing terror, the same as a murderer is a person convicted of murder? Not in the United States of 2015. 

Since the signing of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA), the United States has become a battlefield and every American is a potential “covered person,” meaning a person covered by the provisions of that act that would permit the president to apprehend (kidnap, in less euphemistic language) anyone he alone suspects of having some sort of association with terrorists.

That brings us to the second problem: What does the NSAC mean when it targets those suspected of beings “supporters” of terrorists?

Fearing that this type of language potentially could be applied to journalists and that the specter of such a scenario would have a chilling effect on free speech and freedom of the press in violation of the First Amendment, award-winning journalist Chris Hedges filed a lawsuit on January 12, 2012 challenging the constitutionality of the NDAA.

Hedges claims that his extensive work overseas, particularly in the Middle East, could qualify him as a “covered person” who, by way of such writings, interviews and/or communications, had “substantially supported” or “directly supported” “al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces. 

Similar concerns exist in the equally vague language of the NSAC’s internal memo published by Phase Zero. It is nearly indisputable in the contemporary climate of near-constant surveillance that the NSAC would use its terrorist tracking mandate to gather and store personal information on millions of Americans who’ve done nothing remotely connected to anything that could be construed as a threat to national security.

Thanks to the Phase Zero report it is now known that, regarding the scope of the surveillance:

An average of 6,000 target packages a month are prepared by the Center, many resulting in leads to law enforcement authorities, but the majority just human metadata living in perpetual link analysis limbo. The volume of data open to Center, and the complex queries made have resulted in the Task Force building four unique software systems to manage analyst access and data management.

Tax money is being taken from Americans and used to build the walls of the Panopticon higher and higher, making each of us a prisoner within walls we work to pay for.

So, while the NSA servers are temporarily shut down, the computers at the super-secret NSAC continue monitoring and mining personal data of millions of unsuspecting Americans.

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ARTICLE 2 BEGINS BELOW:

This Shadow Government Agency Is Scarier Than the NSA

William M. Arkin

If you have a telephone number that has ever been called by an inmate in a federal prison, registered a change of address with the Postal Service, rented a car from Avis, used a corporate or Sears credit card, applied for nonprofit status with the IRS, or obtained non-driver’s legal identification from a private company, they have you on file.

They are not who you think they are. They are not the NSA or the CIA. They are the National Security Analysis Center (NSAC), an obscure element of the Justice Department that has grown from its creation in 2008 into a sprawling 400-person, $150 million-a-year multi-agency organization employing almost 300 analysts, the majority of whom are corporate contractors. [A list of contractors known to be associated with NSAC can be viewed here.]

Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force Contractors

Since October 2001, the following companies have done contract work for the Foreign Terrorist…Read more sultanakhan.​kinja.​com

The Center has its roots in the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force (FTTTF), a small cell established in October 2001 to look for additional 9/11-like terrorists who might have entered the United States. But with the emergence of significant “homegrown” threats in the late aughts, the Task Force’s focus was thought to be too narrow. NSAC was created to focus scrutiny on new threat, specifically on Americans, particularly Muslims, who might pose a hidden threat (the Task Force became a unit within NSAC’s bureaucratic umbrella). As Americans began traveling abroad to join al-Shabaab and then ISIS, the Center’s dragnet expanded to catch the vast pool of “youth” who also might fit a profile of either radicalism or law-breaking. Its mission runs the full gamut of “national security threats...to the United States and its interests,” according to a partially declassified Justice Department Inspector General report. That includes everything from terrorism to counter-narcotics, nuclear proliferation, and espionage.

NSAC not only has a focus beyond foreign investigations or terrorists, but in the past year-and-a-half, according to documents obtained by Phase Zero and extensive interviews with contractors and government officials who have worked with the Center and the Task Force, it has also aggressively built up a partnership with the military, taking on deep background investigations of foreign-born and foreign-connected soldiers, civilians, and contractors working for the government. Its investigations go far beyond traditional security “vetting”; NSAC scours certain select government employees, contractors and their affiliates, examining multiple layers of connected relatives and associates. And the Center hosts dozens of additional “liaison” officers from other government agencies, providing those agencies with frictionless access to private information about U.S. residents that they would otherwise not have.

Today, through a series of high-level classified authorities and commercial relationships, the Center has access to over 130 databases and datasets of information comprising some two billion records, over half of which are unique and not contained in any other government information warehouse. The Center is, in fact, according to interviews with government officials, the sole organization in the U.S. government with the authority to delve deeply into the activities and associations of foreigners and Americans alike. From its unmarked office in the Crystal City neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia, the Center can not only gain access to the full gamut of intelligence databases of the U.S. government, but also query and retain information contained in law enforcement and commercial data. It also conducts live searches, and retains classified and open datasets of identity and transactional data for later examination. In some ways then, the data that the Center accesses and regularly trawls against its data mining protocols is the FBI’s equivalent of NSA’s bulk collection, the examination of databases with the hope of finding triggers or links to terrorists rather than the specific accessing of information to look at an individual or even group of individuals. [A partial list of some of the databases used by NSAC and FTTTF can be seen here.]

Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force Databases

From its unique perch, the National Security Analysis Center (NSAC) and the Foreign Terrorist…Read more sultanakhan.​kinja.​com

The Center’s powerful perch—and its virtually unlimited reach—brings the federal government closer than ever to the Holy Grail of connecting every dot, a dream that has been pursued by terrorist hunters since the failures that permitted the 9/11 attacks 14 years ago. The data access and analytic methods it uses grew out of a retrospective analysis of the vast reams of data about the 19 hijackers that law enforcement and intelligence agencies had indicators off, but never acted on. The Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force (originally called “F-tri-F” by insiders) meticulously reconstructed the actions of the 19 hijackers and other known law-breakers—how they lived their day-to-day lives and what they did to avoid intelligence detection—to find patterns and triggers of potential wrongdoing. They created thousands of pages of chronologies covering the 19 hijackers from the moment they entered the United States, trying to recreate what each did every day they were here.

Those patterns then became profiles that could be applied to vast amounts of disparate and unstructured data to sniff out similar attributes. Those attributes, once applied to individuals, became the legal predicate for collection and retention of data. If someone fit the profile, they were worthy of a second look. They were worthy of a second look if they might fit the profile.

Beyond public records and what appears on the internet, beyond news articles or what’s in law enforcement databases—but in addition to all of those things—the mere presence of a name becomes justification enough. NSAC’s methods turn the notion of legal predicate—a logical proposition or an earlier offense that justifies law enforcement action—on its head. Using big data analysis to discover non-obvious and even clandestine links, the Center looks not just for suspects, but for what the counter-terrorism world calls “clean skins”—people with no known affiliation to terrorism or crime, needles in a giant haystack that don’t necessarily look like needles. Or people who aren’t needles at all, but who might become needles in the future and thus warrant observation today.

The American people have repeatedly rejected the notion of a domestic intelligence agency operating within our borders. Yet NSAC has become the real-world equivalent. Along the way in its development though, the Center has rarely been discussed in the federal budget or in congressional oversight hearings available to the public. And being neither solely a part of the intelligence community (IC) nor solely a law enforcement agency (and yet both), it skirts limitations that exist in each community, allowing it to collect and examine information on people who are not otherwise accused of or suspected of any crime.

Homeland Security Presidential Directive-2 (HSPD-2), signed by George W. Bush in October 2001, established FTTTF and directed it to use “advanced data mining software” to find and prevent “aliens who engage in or support terrorist activity” from entering the United States. Though data mining was at the center of its mission, other agencies—particularly the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) and the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA)—funded the development of many of the techniques. These efforts, nevertheless, ran into public opposition because of legal and civil liberties overreach: the ominous-sounding Total Information Awareness program was abandoned in 2003 and CIFA was shut down in 2008. With the CIA restricted from collecting information and conducting operations that were purely domestic, a gap existed. And though the NSA, which has been promiscuously described as the successor to total information awareness, conducts extensive data mining and advanced analytics to crunch its bulk data collection, it is still restricted to only intercepting electronic communications. 

As data mining research and applications moved forward, and as the NSA built up its cyber empire, the FBI also transformed. FTTTF, which was administratively placed within the FBI in 2002, helped the Bureau evolve into what is now referred to as an “intelligence driven” law enforcement agency. In other words, stop crimes (in this case terrorist attacks) before they occur through the use of proactive and predictive intelligence. TheNational Counterterrorism Center is responsible for the foreign threat, while the FBI is responsible for the domestic. In 2004, the White House also mandated that FTTTF be provided “full access” to homeland security and intelligence databases.

To “satisfy unmet analytical and technical needs,” in 2006, the FBI established the National Security Analysis Center (NSAC). According to NSAC’s first budget:

The NSAC will provide subject-based “link analysis” through the utilization of the FBI’s collection data sets, combined with public records on predicated subjects. “Link analysis” uses data sets to find links between subjects, suspects, and addresses or other pieces of relevant information, and other persons, places, and things… the NSAC will provide improved processes and greater access to this technique to all [National Security Branch] components. The NSAC will also pursue “pattern analysis” as part of its service to the NSB. “Pattern analysis” queries take a predictive model or pattern of behavior and search for that pattern in data sets. The FBI’s efforts to define predictive models and patterns of behavior will improve efforts to identify “sleeper cells.” Information produced through data exploitation will be processed by analysts who are experts in the use of this information and used to produce products that comply with requirements for the proper handling of the information.

NSAC formally expanded the focus of the Task Force beyond just foreign terrorists. The internal data mart expanded in 2008 to support proactive work to identify potential counterintelligence and nuclear-proliferation threats via advanced analysis of financial, communication, and travel records. Both the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have conducted investigations and obtained documents on FTTTF and the FBI’s data-collection efforts. That work, and additional documents obtained by Phase Zero, paint a picture of a massive, overlooked domestic intelligence operation with a mission that goes far beyond catching foreign terrorists.

One joint project between NSAC and the Department of Energy Office of Intelligence/Counterintelligence began to seek out foreign spies or businesspeople who were trying to infiltrate U.S. laboratories and entities. The Center has also provided assistance to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an inter-agency effort that vets foreign corporations investing in U.S. businesses. Under the Amon Project, in 2009, the Center started a program to look at foreign-connected scientists working in or with U.S. industry for potential counterintelligence markers. It analyzed data to identify potential targets and other threats through telephone and Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) pattern/link analysis, constantly monitoring a set of communications feeds between Known Intelligence Officers (KIOs) and Suspected Intelligence Officers (SIOs) of foreign governments residing in the United States, as well as unknown targets.

But the targets weren’t just foreign. Under Project Scarecrow, the Center has done data mining on sovereign citizens and other domestic threats. After receiving intelligence that helicopters might be used in future terrorist attacks, the Center data-mined 165 American-based pilots with helicopter licenses who were from “designated countries of interest.” Working with the Philadelphia police, the Center batch-matched dates of birth with licensed drivers to isolate a set of Pakistani men thought to be potentially connected to a terrorist group. The identities of foreign-born or connected hazardous materials (HAZMAT) drivers in the U.S. were added to a group of “special interest individuals” constantly run against suspect datasets. Under the Finding Terrorists in the United States (FINDUS) project, data-mining was used to find unlocated and even unknown individuals. A Syria Screening Cell was set up to support the screening of candidates for the manning of the Free Syrian Army in the fight against ISIS. By virtue of their presence in NSAC, Pentagon investigators now also have access to highly restricted datasets of known and suspected terrorists and their potential links to the United States, including two called Bedrock and Shoebox.

In many cases, according to individuals who have worked for FTTTF and Center contractors, target groups of thousands of individuals are checked and rechecked every month in a “batched” data processing search. As part of the Amon project, for instance, thousands of Chinese and Taiwanese nationals working in or with U.S. industry are constantly under investigation, their names thrown into the computers monthly looking for derogatory or suspicious information. According to an FTTTF document obtained by Phase Zero, an average of 6,000 target packages a month are prepared by the Center, many resulting in leads to law enforcement authorities, but the majority just human metadata living in perpetual link analysis limbo. The volume of data open to Center, and the complex queries made have resulted in the Task Force building four unique software systems to manage analyst access and data management.

The Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force was always meant to be aproactive lookout, using data mining and the full gamut of public and private information to identify hidden operatives based upon their associations, movements or transactions. An internal document provided to Phase Zero describes the Task Force as organizing “data from many divergent public, government and international sources for the purpose of monitoring the electronic footprints of terrorists and their supporters, identifying their behaviors, and providing actionable intelligence to appropriate law enforcement, government agencies, and the intelligence community.” And their supporters. And their supporters. And their supporters. How many mouseclicks away is your name?

[Art by Jim Cooke. All other documents from the FBI.]

You can contact me at william.arkin@gawker.com, and follow us on Twitter at@gawkerphasezero. If you are into the theater of being underground, you can anonymously deliver tips through the Gawker Media SecureDrop. I’m open to your input and your questions, tough questions.