{"id":11799,"date":"2012-04-08T06:18:41","date_gmt":"2012-04-08T10:18:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theredphoenixapl.org\/?p=11799"},"modified":"2026-04-22T09:38:02","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T14:38:02","slug":"data-mining-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/2012\/04\/data-mining-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Data Mining You"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

by Tom Engelhardt<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

I was out of the country only nine days, hardly a blink in time, but time enough, as it happened, for another small, airless room to be added to the American national security labyrinth. On<\/span> March 22<\/a>, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Jr.<\/span> signed off<\/span><\/a><\/span> on new guidelines allowing the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a post-9\/11 creation, to hold on to information about Americans in no way known to be connected to terrorism \u2014 about you and me, that is \u2014 for up to five years. (Its previous outer limit was 180 days.) This, Clapper claimed<\/span><\/a>, \u201cwill enable NCTC to accomplish its mission more practically and effectively.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Joseph K., that icon of single-lettered anonymity from Franz Kafka\u2019s novel The Trial, would undoubtedly have felt right at home in Clapper\u2019s Washington. George Orwell would surely have had a few pungent words to say about those anodyne words \u201cpractically and effectively,\u201d not to speak of \u201cmission.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

For most Americans, though, it was just life as we\u2019ve known it since Sept. 11, 2001, since we scared ourselves to death and accepted that just about anything goes, as long as it supposedly involves protecting us from terrorists. Basic information or misinformation, possibly about you, is to be stored away for five years \u2014 or until some other attorney general and director of national intelligence think it\u2019s even more practical and effective to keep you on file for 10 years, 20 years, or until death do us part \u2014 and it hardly made a ripple.<\/span><\/p>\n

If Americans were to hoist a flag designed for this moment, it might read \u201cTread on Me\u201d and use that classic illustration of the boa constrictor<\/span> swallowing<\/span><\/a><\/span> an elephant from Saint-Exup\u00e9ry\u2019s The Little Prince<\/em>. That, at least, would catch something of the absurdity of what the National Security Complex has decided to swallow of our American world.<\/span><\/p>\n

Oh, and in those nine days abroad, a new word surfaced on my horizon, one just eerie and ugly enough for our new reality: yottabyte<\/em>. Thank National Security Agency (NSA) expert James Bamford for that. He wrote a piece<\/span><\/a> for Wired<\/em> magazine on a super-secret, $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center the NSA is building in Bluffdale, Utah. Focused on data mining and code-breaking and five times the size of the U.S. Capitol, it is expected to house information beyond compare, \u201cincluding the complete contents of private emails, cellphone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails \u2014 parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital \u2018pocket litter.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The NSA, adds Bamford, \u201chas established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Which brings us to yottabyte \u2014 which is, Bamford assures us, equivalent to septillion bytes, a number \u201cso large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.\u201d The Utah center will be capable of storing a yottabyte or more<\/span><\/a> of information (on your tax dollar).<\/span><\/p>\n

Large as it is, that mega-project in Utah is just one of many sprouting like mushrooms in the sunless forest of the U.S. intelligence world. In cost, for example, it barely tops the $1.7 billion headquarters complex in Virginia that the<\/span> National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency<\/span><\/a><\/span>, with an<\/span> estimated<\/span><\/a><\/span> annual black budget of at least $5 billion, built for its 16,000 employees. Opened in 2011, it\u2019s the<\/span> third-largest<\/span><\/a><\/span> federal building in the Washington area. (And I\u2019ll bet you didn\u2019t even know that your tax dollars paid for such<\/span> an agency<\/span><\/a><\/span>, no less its gleaming new headquarters.) Or what about the 33 post-9\/11 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work that were under construction or had already been built when Washington Post<\/em> reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin wrote their \u201c<\/span>Top Secret America<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u201d series back in 2010?<\/span><\/p>\n

In these last years, while so many Americans were foreclosed upon or had their homes go \u201cunderwater\u201d and the construction industry went to hell, the intelligence housing bubble just continued to grow. And there\u2019s no sign that any of this seems abidingly strange to most Americans.<\/span><\/p>\n

A System That Creates Its Own Reality<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

To leave the country, of course, I had to briefly surrender my shoes, hat, belt, computer \u2014 you know the routine \u2014 and even then, stripped to the basics, I had to pass through a scanner of a sort that not so long ago caused<\/span> protest and upset<\/span><\/a><\/span> but now is evidently as American as apple pie. Then I spent those nine days touring some of Spain\u2019s architectural wonders, including the Alhambra in Granada, the Mezquita or Great Mosque of Cordoba, and that city\u2019s ancient synagogue (the only one to survive the expulsion of the Jews in 1492), as well as Antonio Gaud\u00ed\u2019s Sagrada Fam\u00edlia, his vast Barcelona basilica, without once \u2014 in a country with its own grim history of terror attacks<\/span><\/a> \u2014 being wanded or patted down or questioned or even passing through a metal detector. Afterwards, I took a flight back to a country whose national security architecture had again expanded subtly in the name of \u201cmy\u201d safety.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, I don\u2019t want to overdo it. In truth, those new guidelines were no big deal. The information on \u2014 as far as anyone knows \u2014 innocent Americans that the NCTC wanted to keep for those extra 4\u00bd years was already being held ad infinitum by one or another of our 17 major intelligence agencies and organizations. So the latest announcement seems to represent little more than bureaucratic housecleaning, just a bit of extra scaffolding added to the Great Mosque or basilica of the new American intelligence labyrinth. It certainly was nothing to write home about, no less trap a fictional character in.<\/span><\/p>\n

Admittedly, since 9\/11 the<\/span> U.S. Intelligence Community<\/span><\/a><\/span>, as it likes to call itself, has expanded to staggering proportions. With those 17 outfits having a combined annual intelligence budget of more than<\/span>$80 billion<\/span><\/a><\/span> (a figure that<\/span> doesn\u2019t even include<\/span><\/a><\/span> all intelligence expenditures), you could think of that community as having carried out a statistical coup d\u2019\u00e9tat<\/em>. [….]<\/span><\/p>\n

Of classic American checks and balances, we, the taxpayers, now write the checks and they, the officials of the National Security Complex, are free to be as unbalanced as they want in their actions. Whatever you do, though, don\u2019t mistake Clapper, Holder, and similar figures for the Gaud\u00eds of the new intelligence world. Don\u2019t think of them as the architects of the structure they are building. What they preside over is visibly a competitive bureaucratic mess of overlapping principalities whose \u201cmission\u201d might be summed up in one word: more.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a sense \u2014 though they would undoubtedly never think of themselves this way \u2014 I suspect they are bureaucratic versions of Kafka\u2019s Joseph K., trapped in a labyrinthine structure they are continually, blindly, adding to. And because their \u201cmission\u201d has no end point, their edifice has neither windows nor exits, and for all anyone knows is being erected on a foundation of quicksand.<\/span><\/p>\n

Keep calling it \u201cintelligence\u201d if you want, but the monstrosity they are building is neither intelligent nor architecturally elegant. It is nonetheless a system elaborating itself with undeniable energy. Whatever the changing cast of characters, the structure only grows. It no longer seems to matter whether the figure who officially sits atop it is a former part-owner of a baseball team and former governor, a former constitutional law professor, or \u2014 looking to possible futures \u2014 a former corporate raider.<\/span><\/p>\n

A Basilica of Chaos<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Evidently, it\u2019s our fate \u2014 increasing numbers of us anyway \u2014 to be transformed into intelligence data (just as we are being eternally transformed into commercial data<\/span><\/a>), our identities sliced, diced, and passed around the labyrinth, our bytes stored up to be \u201cmined\u201d at their convenience.<\/span><\/p>\n

You might wonder: What is this basilica of chaos that calls itself the U.S. Intelligence Community? Bamford describes<\/span> whistleblower<\/span><\/a><\/span> William Binney, a former senior NSA crypto-mathematician \u201clargely responsible for automating the agency\u2019s worldwide eavesdropping network,\u201d as holding \u201chis thumb and forefinger close together\u201d and saying, \u201cWe are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s an understandable description for someone who has emerged from the labyrinth, but I doubt it\u2019s on target. Ours is unlikely to ever be a Soviet-style system, even if it exhibits a striking urge toward totality; toward, that is, engulfing everything, including every trace you\u2019ve left anywhere in the world. It\u2019s probably not a Soviet-style state in the making, even if traditional legal boundaries and prohibitions against spying upon and surveilling Americans are of remarkably little interest to it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Its urge is to data mine and decode the planet in an eternal search for enemies who are imagined to lurk everywhere, ready to strike at any moment. Anyone might be a terrorist or, wittingly or not, in touch with one, even perfectly innocent-seeming Americans whose data must be held until the moment when the true pattern of eneminess comes into view and everything is revealed.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the new world of the National Security Complex, no one can be trusted \u2014 except the officials working within it, who in their eternal bureaucratic vigilance clearly consider themselves<\/span> above any law<\/span><\/a><\/span>. […] Think of it as a phenomenon for which we have no name. Like the yottabyte, it\u2019s something new under the sun, still awaiting its own strange and ugly moniker.<\/span><\/p>\n

For now, it remains as anonymous as Joseph K. and so, conveniently enough, continues to expand right before our eyes, strangely unseen.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you don\u2019t believe me, leave the country for nine days and just see if, in that brief span of time, something else isn\u2019t drawn within its orbit. After all, it\u2019s inexorable, this rough beast slouching through Washington to be born.<\/span><\/p>\n

Welcome, in the meantime, to our nameless new world. One thing is guaranteed: it has a byte.<\/span>
\n
\nCopyright 2012 Tom Engelhardt<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Source<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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