ce399 | research archive

Them! 1954 (Video)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1956 (Video)

Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis (Spectral View)

Metastasis or Metastaseis ("dialectic transformations"), is an orchestral work by Iannis Xenakis, a Greek composer-architect and a major figure in the postwar development of musical modernism worldwide. He is particularly remembered for the pioneering use of stochastic mathematical techniques in his compositions, including probability (Maxwell-Boltzmann kinetic theory of gases, aleatory distribution of points on a plane, minimal constraints, Gaussian distribution, Markov chains), game theory, group theory, Boolean algebra and Brownian motion. Metastasis was inspired by Einstein's view of time (a function of matter & energy) and structured on mathematical ideas by Xenakis's colleague Le Corbusier. The 1st and 3rd movements don't have a melodic theme to hold them together, but rather depend on the strength of this conceptualization of time. The 2nd movement does have some sort of melodic element. A fragment of a 12-tone row is used, with durations based on the Fibonacci sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34...) The preliminary sketch for Metastasis was in graphic notation looking more like a blueprint than a musical score, showing graphs of mass motion and glissandi like structural beams of the piece, with sound frequencies on one axis and time on the other. In this video I tried to display this by presenting the frequency spectrum (0-20.000Hz) of the piece and how Xenakis actually "drew" music. SWF Symphony Orchestra Hans Rosbaud, conductor October 1955

iReagan for iPhone-(y)

You've loaded up your iPhone with Yelp for restaurants and Shazam for music. Now get ready to download a dose of "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" from a popular political figure of the past: the Gipper.

The Ronald Reagan iPhone app, introduced this week, promises to "deliver Ronald Reagan right to your fingertips," offering the speeches, sayings and photos of the "Great Communicator" to a potentially wider and younger audience, thanks to the popular mobile technology.

The efforts of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley (Ventura County) mean that five years after his death, Reagan's appearance on the iPhone may break new ground, political insiders say.

"What's smart about it - and why you'll see it happen more and more - is that people are just living on their mobile devices," says Wade Randlett, a Silicon Valley Democratic activist and major fundraiser for President Obama. "They're giving up on laptops because the mobile device does everything you need."
Who's next?

With the late 40th president of the United States in the vanguard in the ranks of politicians' apps, it may be only a matter of time before a Clinton app, a Nixon app - even a Schwarzenegger or Palin app - are available, too.

That's because the trailblazing app starring Reagan, who was also the trailblazing former star of "Death Valley Days," could be a model for politicians seeking new ways to fire up and reach supporters, potential donors and build a political base.
Like-minded people

Just as the Obama campaign broke new ground in the 2008 election with a huge Internet presence and text messaging, the Reagan app has found a way to deliver the goods politicians love: like-minded people who want to hear your message.

"It lives on your phone, so you have it anytime and anywhere ... and it gives people an opportunity to participate when they're ready," said Randlett. Besides, the free app provides the Reagan Library with "a lot of information" about followers and supporters and a Rolodex of contacts - political gold, he says.

Still, Randlett says the idea of an iPhone app with a political bent "makes more sense for other politicians, as opposed to dead politicians."
It's educational

But Duke Blackwood, who heads the Reagan Library, says he approached iPhone maker Apple Computer of Cupertino more than a year ago to explore the idea of a Reagan iPhone and iPod Touch application - one that would be "as an educational thing, not a political thing."

They came up with the first-ever app for a presidential library and for the National Archives, where subscribers can now get their daily Reagan fix:

Images and detailed descriptions of the Reagan Library's spectacular annual "Christmas Around the World" exhibit, messages from former first lady Nancy Reagan, iconic photos of President Reagan, inspirational quotes, even full-length speeches including Reagan's famous "tear down this wall" speech and his "Evil Empire" address.

"This is really only the first step in many technological outreaches," Blackwood said. "What we hope to do is education, which is very challenged today, particularly in California with budget constraints. So we're working on the next step - to have a classroom on the iPod."

With some voters who weren't even born when Reagan was president now able to access his words at the touch of a finger, Andrew Rasiej, publisher of political blog TechPresident.com, says that it's a trend to watch.

"This development shows that even deceased politicians are learning the difference between a server and a waiter."
iReagan

Download the official iReagan app - with pictures, video and quotes relating to the 40th president - at www.apple.com/iphone/apps-for-iphone.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/03/MNPU1ATSB9.DTL&type=printable

Everyone to the Streets: Texts and Communiques from the Greek Uprising (pdf file)

For 18 days the occupied Polytechnic became a stable point of the revolt that expanded, and it was a continuous call of insubordination to the people resisting all over the world, and a permanent sign of solidarity to the hostages taken by the state from within this struggle. It became the territory we used in order to spread the message of solidarity between the oppressed, of self-organisation and of a social and class counter-attack against the world of Authority, its mechanisms and its symbols. These elements and values of the struggle created the ground for the oppressed to meet in rebellion, armed our consciences and, for the first time maybe, became so widely appropriated by so many people of different ages and different nationalities; people with whom anarchists and anti-authoritarians shared the same slogans against the police, the same words, the same practices of struggle, the same rage against those who are looting our lives, and, often, the same vision for a world of freedom, equality and solidarity.

...

Amidst this ludicrous climate of shallow analyses the salaried officials of the psychological warfare point at the revolted, howling: “That’s not democratic, that ignores the rules under which our democracy functions”. We cannot help but momentarily stand speechless in the face of what we would until recently have considered impossible. Even if they intended to deceive, the bosses of this country have said something true: We despise democracy more than anything else in this decadent world. For what is democracy other than a system of discriminations and coercions in the service of property and privacy? And what are its rules, other than rules of negotiation 93 of the right to own – the invisible rules of alienation? Freedom, rights, equality, egalitarianism: all these dead ideological masks together cannot cover their mission: the generalisation and preservation of the social as an economic sphere, as a sphere where not only what you have produced but also what you are and what you can do are already alienated. The bourgeois, with a voice trembling with piety, promise: rights, justice, equality. And the revolted hear: repression, exploitation, looting. Democracy is the political system where everyone is equal in front of the guillotine of the spectacle-product. The only problem that concerned democrats, from Cromwell to Montesquieu, is what form of property is sufficient in order for someone to be recognised as a citizen, what kind of rights and obligations guarantee that they will never understand themselves as something beyond a private citizen. Everything else is no more than adjusting details of a regime at the service of capital.

http://zinelibrary.info/everyone-streets-communiques-and-texts-streets-and-occupations-greece-2008-0

Related Archives:

Daily Overview of Social Uprising in Greece

Ubu Roi's Belly Revisited

COINTELPRO: "Prevent the Rise of the Messiah" (1968)

On March 4, 1968, the program was expanded from twenty-three to forty-one field offices. 93 The letter expanding the program lists five long-range goals for the program:

(1) to prevent the "coalition of militant black nationalist groups," which might be the first step toward a real "Mau Mau" in America;

(2) to prevent the rise of a "messiah" who could "unify, and electrify," the movement, naming specifically Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammed;

(3) to prevent violence on the part of black nationalist groups, by pinpointing "potential troublemakers" and neutralizing them "before they exercise their potential for violence;"

(4) to prevent groups and leaders from gaining "respectability" by discrediting them to the "responsible" Negro community, to the white community (both the responsible community and the "liberals" -- the distinction is the Bureau's), and to Negro radicals; and

(5) to prevent the long range growth of these organizations, especially among youth, by developing specific tactics to "prevent these groups from recruiting young people." 94 

http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/churchfinalreportIIIa.htm

--

McCarthy-type tactics were used in the following decades in COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program.) The Program was initially aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States. The COINTELPRO operations were broadly targeted against organizations that were at the time considered to have politically radical elements, ranging from those whose stated goal was the violent overthrow of the U.S. government to non-violent civil rights groups such as Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The three main goals driving the program were to : 1) prevent a coalition of nationalist groups 2) prevent the rise of a “messiah” type charismatic leader who could unify and electrify the nationalist movement such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King; and 3) prevent these groups and their leaders from gaining respectability by discrediting them in three fronts: their own community, the larger community, and among their supporters and close allies.

Once again, history seems to be repeating itself.

But today it is the Muslim and Arab communities in the United states that are suffering under McCarthy-like political fear-mongering and scare tactics.

These groups in America today, both as individuals and as institutions, are relentlessly demonized and harassed by fear-mongers who employ the all too familiar McCarthy-like tactics and borrow the worst out of the playbook of the infamous COINTELPRO.

In his recent Washington Post OpEd, Zbigniew Brzezinski stated that “the "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America.” He adds that “such fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepreneurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry, generates its own momentum.” “The atmosphere generated by the "war on terror" has encouraged legal and political harassment of Arab Americans (generally loyal Americans) for conduct that has not been unique to them.”

Likewise, Hans Kung, in his book Islam addresses the “hostile image” of this religion as not only the sum of consciously constructed perceptions, notions, and feelings aimed to demonize an individual or a group but of prejudices.

The hostile image, according to Kung, creates a dichotomous condition of “us” against “them.”- The latter is taken as a dangerous monster that never deserves to tell his side of the story; that is why it is necessary for the first to be the definer and the sole conveyer of the incriminating narrative and as such is always described by the first. And this, needless to say, would not only intensify Islamophobia but also Anti-Americanism.

http://www.globalpolitician.com/23202-islam

The Sensual Jewish Features of Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler: Founder of Israel by Kardel (pdf file)

Gaga Kabbalah Chakra

Modern medical research has discovered that after certain physical portions of the brain have been removed the body can still commission functions related to the removed section. The theory of morphogenetic fields can account for situations like this, but as profound as that theory appears to modern consciousness, it lags far behind basic esoteric knowledge of the interior “wiring” of the body. In the west we have been exposed to books, such as Charles Leadbeater’s Chakras6, which describes specific energy centers of the body. A standardized, easily workable science of activating the chakras has not readily been available, however, many systems teach physical and mental techniques to stimulate these etheric vortices into action. Merely focusing on the chakras, while expanding awareness, does not constitute a thorough system for developing and integrating the higher bodies, though it is a step in the proper direction.

One researcher who has experienced the chakras subjectively through yogic practices, as well as through scientific measurement utilizing instruments of his own development is Hiroshi Motayama. He developed two instruments, the AMI (Apparatus for Measuring the Functional Conditions of Meridians and their Corresponding Internal Organs), and the Chakra Instrument. The AMI was “designed to measure the initial skin current, as well as the steady state current, in response to DC voltage externally applied at special acupuncture points ... these special points are ostensibly the terminal points of meridians where the Ki energy either enters or exits the body.” The Chakra Instrument was “designed to detect  the energy generated in the body and then emitted from it in terms of various physical variables ... it is designed to detect minute energy changes (electric, magnetic, optical) in the immediate environment of the subject.” The Chakra Instrument is used in a room shielded from light and electrical fields. Research with these instruments has indicated the reality of the meridians and chakras.6 Besides measuring energies in the electromagnetic and optical bands, the human body also emits minute vibrations in the 6-12 cycles per second range, and there are vital energies which have not yet been measured with scientific equipment. Our bodies are dynamos of activity on a broad spectrum of wavelengths.7

The chakras can be understood as specific nexus points along the subtle wiring system of the body, and have also been related to the ductless glands. They are energy connecting points, but also much more. They can be stimulated through concentration and through certain tones—seed syllables—which must be pronounced correctly in order to be activated. The throat chakra contains sixteen ‘petals’, the first seven are a musical scale, the eighth is called the venom of mortality—these eight relate to our sound relationship with the world through speech and music. The ninth through the fifteenth are the seed syllables relating to the seven chakras which can only be pronounced after proper training. The sixteenth is called the nectar of immortality. In Taoism it is said that the thyroid gland in the throat controls speech, and when there is tension in that gland one has trouble speaking, though the tongue itself is connected to the heart. 

http://thomasbrown.org/awaken_eternal.html

--

According to C. W. Leadbeater

"The fifth centre, the laryngeal (see above illustration), at the throat, has sixteen spokes, and therefore sixteen apparent divisions. There is a good deal of blue in it, but its general effect is silvery and gleaming, with a kind of suggestion as of moonlight upon rippling water. Blue and green predominate alternately in its sections."

The Chakras, Quest Books, Theosophical Publishing House, Wheaton, Ill. p.13

The Throat chakra would seem to rule the faculty of speech, being midway between the heart and the tongue.  It is also associated with clairaudience (hearing spiritual voices), and with hearing sounds, words, and music, and with taste, smell.  Another function associated with this chakra is taking in and assimilating of physical and emotional nourishment.  On the gross level this manifests as sensuous desire and enjoyment for food.  This chakra could be associated with the astrological sign of Taurus, which in current astrology is said to ruled by the planet Venus.

In Tibetan Buddhism, this chakra is associated with the dream state of consciousness.  Both Tibetans and Taoists use this chakra to access the dream state and develop the faculty of lucid dreaming.

In the Heschyastic system though, the buccolaryngeal centre: "the commonest thought, that of the intelligence, expressed in conversation, correspondence, and the first stages of prayer." [Eliade, Yoga, Immortality, and Freedom, p.410]

When this chakra is open and functioning well, with a strong flow of Chi, one finds it easy to express oneself, and one's speech is clear and smooth.  When it is blocked, not only does one find speaking or getting the right words out difficult, but one also feels an unwillingness to change.

When there is an insufficent flow of love or emotional nourishment to the Heart-chakra, the person may try to compensate by desire for physical nourishment through the Throat Chakra.  Problems with gluttony or compulsive eating would then result.  When there is also a negative functioning in the base-of-the-neck chakra (negative self-image) the result could be bullimia and anorexia.

Correspondences:

Spokes/Petals: Leadbeater - 16

Colours: Leadbeater - Blue, Silvery, gleaming; Hills - Blue.

Associated Psychological states:
Open and Balanced: You are able to accept things as they are, and organise ways of working with situations. You have the power to make changes [Paulson, p.73], and you are able to take responsibility for your personal needs [Brennan, p.77].

Overactive: You are always trying to take control of things, and especially of other people's lives [Paulson, p.73].

Weak or Blocked: You have an inability to accept things, and an inability to work with situations. You may have execessive egotism and prejudices [Paulson, p.73]. You tend to see the world as a hostile place, and expect hostility, violence, and humiliation rather than love and nourishment [Brennan, p.77].

http://www.kheper.net/topics/chakras/Throat.htm

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Creating the "Domestic Surveillance State" by Alfred W. McCoy

In his approach to National Security Agency surveillance, as well as CIA renditions, drone assassinations, and military detention, President Obama has to a surprising extent embraced the expanded executive powers championed by his conservative predecessor, George W. Bush. This bipartisan affirmation of the imperial executive could "reverberate for generations," warns Jack Balkin, a specialist on First Amendment freedoms at Yale Law School. And consider these but some of the early fruits from the hybrid seeds that the Global War on Terror has planted on American soil. Yet surprisingly few Americans seem aware of the toll that this already endless war has taken on our civil liberties.

Don't be too surprised, then, when, in the midst of some future crisis, advanced surveillance methods and other techniques developed in our recent counterinsurgency wars migrate from Baghdad, Falluja, and Kandahar to your hometown or urban neighborhood. And don't ever claim that nobody told you this could happen -- at least not if you care to read on.

Think of our counterinsurgency wars abroad as so many living laboratories for the undermining of a democratic society at home, a process historians of such American wars can tell you has been going on for a long, long time. Counterintelligence innovations like centralized data, covert penetration, and disinformation developed during the Army's first protracted pacification campaignin a foreign land -- the Philippines from 1898 to 1913 -- were repatriated to the United States during World War I, becoming the blueprint for an invasive internal security apparatus that persisted for the next half century.

Almost 90 years later, George W. Bush's Global War on Terror plunged the U.S. military into four simultaneous counterinsurgency campaigns, large and small -- in Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and (once again) the Philippines -- transforming a vast swath of the planet into an ad hoc"counterterrorism" laboratory. The result? Cutting-edge high-tech security and counterterror techniques that are now slowly migrating homeward.

As the War on Terror enters its ninth year to become one of America's longest overseas conflicts, the time has come to ask an uncomfortable question: What impact have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- and the atmosphere they created domestically -- had on the quality of our democracy?

Every American knows that we are supposedly fighting elsewhere to defend democracy here at home. Yet the crusade for democracy abroad, largely unsuccessful in its own right, has proven remarkably effective in building a technological template that could be just a few tweaks away from creating a domestic surveillance state -- with omnipresent cameras, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identification, and drone aircraft patrolling "the homeland."

Even if its name is increasingly anathema in Washington, the ongoing Global War on Terror has helped bring about a massive expansion of domestic surveillance by the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA) whose combined data-mining systems have already swept up several billion private documents from U.S. citizens into classified data banks. Abroad, after years of failing counterinsurgency efforts in the Middle East, the Pentagon began applying biometrics -- the science of identification via facial shape, fingerprints, and retinal or iris patterns -- to the pacification of Iraqi cities, as well as the use of electronic intercepts for instant intelligence and the split-second application of satellite imagery to aid an assassination campaign by drone aircraft that reaches from Africa to South Asia.

In the panicky aftermath of some future terrorist attack, Washington could quickly fuse existing foreign and domestic surveillance techniques, as well as others now being developed on distant battlefields, to create an instant digital surveillance state.

The Crucible of Counterinsurgency

For the past six years, confronting a bloody insurgency, the U.S. occupation of Iraq has served as a white-hot crucible of counterinsurgency, forging a new system of biometric surveillance and digital warfare with potentially disturbing domestic implications. This new biometric identification system first appeared in the smoking aftermath of "Operation Phantom Fury," a brutal, nine-day battle that U.S. Marines fought in late 2004 to recapture the insurgent-controlled city of Falluja. Bombing, artillery, and mortars destroyed at least half of that city's buildings and sent most of its 250,000 residents fleeing into the surrounding countryside. Marines then forced returning residents to wait endless hours under a desert sun at checkpoints for fingerprints and iris scans. Once inside the city's blast-wall maze, residents had to wear identification tags for compulsory checks to catch infiltrating insurgents.

The first hint that biometrics were helping to pacify Baghdad's far larger population of seven million came in April 2007 when the New York Times published an eerie image of American soldiers studiously photographing an Iraqi's eyeball. With only a terse caption to go by, we can still infer the technology behind this single record of a retinal scan in Baghdad: digital cameras for U.S. patrols, wireless data transfer to a mainframe computer, and a database to record as many adult Iraqi eyes as could be gathered. Indeed, eight months later, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon had collected over a million Iraqi fingerprints and iris scans. By mid-2008, the U.S. Army had also confined Baghdad's population behind blast-wall cordons and was checking Iraqi identities by satellite link to a biometric database.

Pushing ever closer to the boundaries of what present-day technology can do, by early 2008, U.S. forces were also collecting facial images accessible by portable data labs called Joint Expeditionary Forensic Facilities, linked by satellite to a biometric database in West Virginia. "A war fighter needs to know one of three things," explained the inventor of this lab-in-a-box. "Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?"

A future is already imaginable in which a U.S. sniper could take a bead on the eyeball of a suspected terrorist, pause for a nanosecond to transmit the target's iris or retinal data via backpack-sized laboratory to a computer in West Virginia, and then, after instantaneous feedback, pull the trigger.

Lest such developments seem fanciful, recall that Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward claims the success of George W. Bush's 2007 troop surge in Iraq was due less to boots on the ground than to bullets in the head -- and these, in turn, were due to a top-secret fusion of electronic intercepts and satellite imagery. Starting in May 2006, American intelligence agencieslaunched a Special Action Program using "the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government" in a successful effort "to locate, target and kill key individuals in extremist groups such as al-Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias."

Under General Stanley McChrystal, now U.S. Afghan War commander, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) deployed "every tool available simultaneously, from signals intercepts to human intelligence" for "lightning quick" strikes. One intelligence officer reportedly claimed that the program was so effective it gave him "orgasms." President Bush called it "awesome." Although refusing to divulge details, Woodward himself compared it to the Manhattan Project in World War II. This Iraq-based assassination program relied on the authority Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld granted JSOC in early 2004 to "kill or capture al-Qaeda terrorists" in 20 countries across the Middle East, producing dozens of lethal strikes by airborne Special Operations forces.

Another crucial technological development in Washington's secret war of assassination has been the armed drone, or unmanned aerial vehicle, whose speedy development has been another by-product of Washington's global counterterrorism laboratory. Half a world away from Iraq in the southern Philippines, the CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces conducted an early experiment in the use of aerial surveillance for assassination. In June 2002, with a specially-equipped CIA aircraft circling overhead offering real-time video surveillance in the pitch dark of a tropical night, Philippine Marines executed a deadly high-seas ambush of Muslim terrorist Aldam Tilao (a.k.a. "Abu Sabaya").

In July 2008, the Pentagon proposed an expenditure of $1.2 billion for a fleet of 50 light aircraft loaded with advanced electronics to loiter over battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq, bringing "full motion video and electronic eavesdropping to the troops." By late 2008, night flights over Afghanistan from the deck of the USS Theodore Roosevelt were using sensors to give American ground forces real-time images of Taliban targets -- some so focused that they could catch just a few warm bodies huddled in darkness behind a wall.

In the first months of Barack Obama's presidency, CIA Predator drone strikes have escalated in the Pakistani tribal borderlands with a macabre efficiency, using a top-secret mix of electronic intercepts, satellite transmission, and digital imaging to kill half of the Agency's 20 top-priority al-Qaeda targets in the region. Just three days before Obama visited Canada last February, Homeland Security launched its first Predator-B drones to patrol the vast, empty North Dakota-Manitoba borderlands that one U.S. senator has called America's "weakest link."

Homeland Security

While those running U.S. combat operations overseas were experimenting with intercepts, satellites, drones, and biometrics, inside Washington the plodding civil servants of internal security at the FBI and the NSA initially began expanding domestic surveillance through thoroughly conventional data sweeps, legal and extra-legal, and -- with White House help -- several abortive attempts to revive a tradition that dates back to World War I of citizens spying on suspected subversives.

"If people see anything suspicious, utility workers, you ought to report it," said President George Bush in his April 2002 call for nationwide citizen vigilance. Within weeks, his Justice Department had launched Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System), with plans for "millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees and others" to aid the government by spying on their fellow Americans. Such citizen surveillancesparked strong protests, however, forcing the Justice Department to quietly bury the president's program.

Simultaneously, inside the Pentagon, Admiral John Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's former national security advisor (swept up in the Iran-Contra scandal of that era), was developing a Total Information Awareness program which was to contain "detailed electronic dossiers" on millions of Americans. When news leaked about this secret Pentagon office with its eerie, all-seeing eye logo, Congress banned the program, and the admiral resigned in 2003. But the key data extraction technology, the Information Awareness Prototype System, migrated quietly to the NSA.

Soon enough, however, the CIA, FBI, and NSA turned to monitoring citizens electronically without the need for human tipsters, rendering the administration's grudging retreats from conventional surveillance at best an ambiguous political victory for civil liberties advocates. Sometime in 2002, President Bushgave the NSA secret, illegal orders to monitor private communications through the nation's telephone companies and its private financial transactions through SWIFT, an international bank clearinghouse.

After the New York Times exposed these wiretaps in 2005, Congress quickly capitulated, first legalizing this illegal executive program and then granting cooperating phone companies immunity from civil suits. Such intelligence excess was, however, intentional. Even after Congress widened the legal parameters for future intercepts in 2008, the NSA continued to push the boundaries of its activities, engaging in what the New York Times politely termed the systematic "overcollection" of electronic communications among American citizens. Now, for example, thanks to a top-secret NSA database called "Pinwale," analysts routinely scan countless "millions" of domestic electronic communications without much regard for whether they came from foreign or domestic sources.

Starting in 2004, the FBI launched an Investigative Data Warehouse as a "centralized repository for... counterterrorism." Within two years, it contained 659 million individual records. This digital archive of intelligence, social security files, drivers' licenses, and records of private finances could be accessed by 13,000 Bureau agents and analysts making a million queries monthly. By 2009, when digital rights advocates sued for full disclosure, the database had already grown to over a billion documents.

And did this sacrifice of civil liberties make the United States a safer place? In July 2009, after a careful review of the electronic surveillance in these years, the inspectors general of the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the CIA, the NSA, and the Office of National Intelligenceissued a report sharply critical of these secret efforts. Despite George W. Bush's claims that massive electronic surveillance had "helped prevent attacks," these auditors could not find any "specific instances" of this, concluding such surveillance had "generally played a limited role in the F.B.I.'s overall counterterrorism efforts."

Amid the pressures of a generational global war, Congress proved all too ready to offer up civil liberties as a bipartisan burnt offering on the altar of national security. In April 2007, for instance, in a bid to legalize the Bush administration's warrantless wiretaps, Congressional representative Jane Harman (Dem., California) offered a particularly extreme example of this urge. Sheintroduced the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, proposing a powerful national commission, functionally a standing "star chamber," to "combat the threat posed by homegrown terrorists based and operating within the United States." The bill passed the House by an overwhelming 404 to 6 vote before stalling, and then dying, in a Senate somewhat more mindful of civil liberties.

Only weeks after Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, Harman's life itself became a cautionary tale about expanding electronic surveillance. According to information leaked to theCongressional Quarterly, in early 2005 an NSA wiretap caught Harman offering to press the Bush Justice Department for reduced charges against two pro-Israel lobbyists accused of espionage. In exchange, an Israeli agent offered to help Harman gain the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee by threatening House Democratic majority leader Nancy Pelosi with the loss of a major campaign donor. As Harman put down the phone, she said, "This conversation doesn't exist."

How wrong she was. An NSA transcript of Harman's every word soon crossed the desk of CIA Director Porter Goss, prompting an FBI investigation that, in turn, was blocked by then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. As it happened, the White House knew that the New York Times was about to publish its sensational revelation of the NSA's warrantless wiretaps, and felt it desperately needed Harman for damage control among her fellow Democrats. In this commingling of intrigue and irony, an influential legislator's defense of the NSA's illegal wiretapping exempted her from prosecution for a security breach discovered by an NSA wiretap.

Since the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House, the auto-pilot expansion of digital domestic surveillance has in no way been interfered with. As a result, for example, the FBI's "Terrorist Watchlist," with 400,000 names and a million entries, continues to grow at the rate of 1,600 new names daily.

In fact, the Obama administration has even announced plans for a new military cybercommandstaffed by 7,000 Air Force employees at Lackland Air Base in Texas. This command will be tasked with attacking enemy computers and repelling hostile cyber-attacks or counterattacks aimed at U.S. computer networks -- with scant respect for what the Pentagon calls "sovereignty in the cyberdomain." Despite the president's assurances that operations "will not -- I repeat -- will not include monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic," the Pentagon's top cyberwarrior, General James E. Cartwright, has conceded such intrusions are inevitable.

Sending the Future Home

While U.S. combat forces prepare to draw-down in Iraq (and ramp up in Afghanistan), military intelligence units are coming home to apply their combat-tempered surveillance skills to our expanding homeland security state, while preparing to counter any future domestic civil disturbances here.

Indeed, in September 2008, the Army's Northern Command announced that one of the Third Division's brigades in Iraq would be reassigned as a Consequence Management Response Force (CMRF) inside the U.S. Its new mission: planning for moments when civilian authorities may need help with "civil unrest and crowd control." According to Colonel Roger Cloutier, his unit's civil-control equipment featured "a new modular package of non-lethal capabilities" designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals -- including Taser guns, roadblocks, shields, batons, and beanbag bullets.

That same month, Army Chief of Staff General George Casey flew to Fort Stewart, Georgia, for the first full CMRF mission readiness exercise. There, he strode across a giant urban battle map filling a gymnasium floor like a conquering Gulliver looming over Lilliputian Americans. With 250 officers from all services participating, the military war-gamed its future coordination with the FBI, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and local authorities in the event of a domestic terrorist attack or threat. Within weeks, the American Civil Liberties Union filed an expedited freedom of information request for details of these deployments, arguing: "[It] is imperative that the American people know the truth about this new and unprecedented intrusion of the military in domestic affairs."

At the outset of the Global War on Terror in 2001, memories of early Cold War anti-communist witch-hunts blocked Bush administration plans to create a corps of civilian tipsters and potential vigilantes. However, far more sophisticated security methods, developed for counterinsurgency warfare overseas, are now coming home to far less public resistance. They promise, sooner or later, to further jeopardize the constitutional freedoms of Americans.

In these same years, under the pressure of War on Terror rhetoric, presidential power has grown relentlessly, opening the way to unchecked electronic surveillance, the endless detention of terror suspects, and a variety of inhumane forms of interrogation. Somewhat more slowly, innovative techniques of biometric identification, aerial surveillance, and civil control are now being repatriated as well.

In a future America, enhanced retinal recognition could be married to omnipresent security cameras as a part of the increasingly routine monitoring of public space. Military surveillance equipment, tempered to a technological cutting edge in counterinsurgency wars, might also one day be married to the swelling domestic databases of the NSA and FBI, sweeping the fiber-optic cables beneath our cities for any sign of subversion. And in the skies above, loitering aircraft and cruising drones could be checking our borders and peering down on American life.

If that day comes, our cities will be Argus-eyed with countless thousands of digital cameras scanning the faces of passengers at airports, pedestrians on city streets, drivers on highways, ATM customers, mall shoppers, and visitors to any federal facility. One day, hyper-speed software will be able to match those millions upon millions of facial or retinal scans to photos of suspect subversives inside a biometric database akin to England's current National Public Order Intelligence Unit, sending anti-subversion SWAT teams scrambling for an arrest or an armed assault.

By the time the Global War on Terror is declared over in 2020, if then, our American world may be unrecognizable -- or rather recognizable only as the stuff of dystopian science fiction. What we are proving today is that, however detached from the wars being fought in their name most Americans may seem, war itself never stays far from home for long. It's already returning in the form of new security technologies that could one day make a digital surveillance state a reality, changing fundamentally the character of American democracy.

Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of A Question of Torture, among other works. His most recent book is Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (University of Wisconsin Press) which explores the influence of overseas counterinsurgency operations throughout the twentieth century in spreading ever more draconian internal security measures here at home.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=16123

Related Archive:

IBM's Global Panopticon: "Safer Citizens of a Smarter Planet" (ce399 note)

PANs, Personal Area Networks: Intra-Body Communications by IBM (1996)

The Lottery in Babylon by Jorge Luis Borges (1941)

The Whore of Babylon. William Blake 1809

Incredibly, there was talk of favoritism, of corruption. With its customary discretion, the Company did not reply directly; instead, it scrawled its brief argument in the rubble of a mask factory. This apologia is now numbered among the sacred Scriptures. It pointed out, doctrinally, that the Lottery is an interpolation of chance into the order of the universe, and observed that to accept errors is to strengthen chance, not contravene it. It also noted that those lions, that sacred squatting-place, though not disavowed by the Company (which reserved the right to consult them), functioned with no official guarantee. 

..

The Company, with godlike modesty, shuns all publicity. Its agents, of course, are secret; the orders it constantly (perhaps continually) imparts are no different from those spread wholesale by impostors. Besides--who will boast of being a mere impostor? The drunken man who blurts out an absurd command, the sleeping man who suddenly awakes and turns and chokes to death the woman sleeping at his side--are they not, perhaps, implementing one of the Company's secret decisions? That silent functioning, like God's, inspires all manner of conjectures. One scurrilously suggests that the Company ceased to exist hundreds of years ago, and that the sacred disorder of our lives is purely hereditary, traditional; another believes that the Company is eternal, and teaches that it shall endure until the last night, when the last god shall annihilate the earth. Yet another declares that the Company is omnipotent, but affects only small things: the cry of a bird, the shades of rust and dust, the half dreams that come at dawn. Another, whispered by masked heresiarchs, says that the Company has never existed, and never will. Another, no less despicable, argues that it makes no difference whether one affirms or denies the reality of the shadowy corporation, because Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance.

http://www.class.uh.edu/mcl/faculty/armstrong/cityofdreams/texts/babylon.html

Just for the Hell of It - 1968 (Video)

GOP Approved Civil Rights Commisioner Foresees Future of Arab Internment Camps (TPM 6/09)

... the GOP has also called upon Peter Kirsanow--a Bush appointee who heads the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and testified on behalf of Samuel Alito four years ago--to question Sotomayor's fitness.

Who is Kirsanow, you ask? According to a 2002 Knight-Ridder report, he's this guy: "A member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission said Friday that he could foresee a scenario in which the public would demand internment camps for Arab Americans if Arab terrorists strike again in this country."

If there's a future terrorist attack in America "and they come from the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade Center, you can forget about civil rights," commission member Peter Kirsanow said.

The reason, he said, is that "the public would be less concerned about any perceived erosion of civil liberties than they are about protecting their own lives."

Kirsanow, who was appointed to the commission last year by President Bush, said that he personally doesn't support internment camps and the government would never envision setting them up. He said he was merely saying public opinion would so strongly favor the idea that it would be difficult to prevent. There would be a "groundswell of opinion" for such detentions, he said.

(excerpts)

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/07/gop-approved-sotomayor-opponent-foresees-future-of-arab-internment-camps.php

http://www.usccr.gov/

History of FBI-FEMA "Custodial Detention Program" for Emergencies or War

November 1940-1943: FBI Maintains ‘Custodial Detention Program’ for Emergencies
 
The FBI maintains a list of individuals that are to be closely monitored and/or detained in the event of a national emergency or war. The index of names, known officially as the “Custodial Detention Program,” is spawned from a list established in 1939 by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (see November 1939). The updated list is composed of persons thought to have a “Communistic, Fascist, Nazi, or other nationalistic background.” The list includes individuals that distribute “literature and propaganda favorable to a foreign power and opposed to the American way of life,” as well as “agitators who are adherents of foreign ideologies.” The names on the list are divided into two categories: those who are to be immediately detained in the event of war and those who are to be subject to close surveillance in the event of war. The program will be criticized for being unreliable and potentially illegal (see 1943). [Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 5/1976, pp. 417]

Entity Tags: J. Edgar Hoover, Federal Bureau of Investigation

Early 1943-1971: FBI Maintains Detention List for National Emergency

The FBI maintains a “Security Index” of US citizens that are to be targeted for surveillance and/or detention in the event of a national emergency or war. The list is carried over from the FBI’s Custodial Detention Program, which was abolished by the attorney general in 1943 (see 1943 and November 1940-1943). A government source tells the New York Times that the purpose of the Security Index is to “assist in rounding up people who might commit sabotage or espionage” in the event of a disaster. The index is at first composed mostly of suspected communists, but is later expanded to include a wide range of political groups. By the 1960s, names on the list include professors, teachers, labor union organizers, authors, journalists, doctors, scientists, and clergymen. The names on the Security Index are broken down into three categories: leaders of “subversive” groups, supporters of such groups, and supporters of such groups considered to be violent. At its peak in the late 1960s, the FBI’s Security Index reportedly lists more than 26,000 citizens. FBI Special Agent M. Wesley Swearingen will later say the number is actually much higher, claiming 50,000 people are on the list in Chicago alone. Sources will later tell the New York Times that the list includes several people who pose “no genuine internal security threat.” The list is utilized by the FBI’s secret COINTELPRO program, which is used to discredit anti-war and other “New Left” groups. The Security Index will be transferred to the Administrative Index within the FBI in late 1971 (see Late 1971). [New York Times, 8/3/1975; New York Times, 10/23/1975; New York Times, 4/29/1976; Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 5/1976, pp. 420-421; Chicago Tribune, 3/2/1986]

Entity Tags: M. Wesley Swearingen, Federal Bureau of Investigation

April 27, 1951: FBI Ready to Detain 14,000 Suspected Communists in Event of War

J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), tells the House Appropriations Committee that the FBI is prepared to arrest 14,000 purported communists inside the US in the event of war with Russia. James M. McInerney, assistant attorney general, refuses to provide the committee with details regarding those on the list, but says they are “either out-and-out Communists” or are “sympathetic toward the Communist cause.” The officials are apparently referring to the FBI’s Security Index, which was established in 1943 (see 1943 and Early 1943-1971). [New York Times, 4/28/1951]

Entity Tags: Federal Bureau of Investigation, House Committee on Appropriations, J. Edgar Hoover, James M. McInerney, US Department of Justice

Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties
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1971: Congress Bans Emergency Detention List Held by FBI

Congress revokes emergency detention provisions within the 1950 Subversive Activity Control Act in an attempt to ban the FBI’s controversial “Security Index” program. The decades-old Security Index lists thousands of citizens that are to be targeted for surveillance and/or detention in the event of a national emergency or war (see Early 1943-1971 and 1943). The FBI will still maintain the list in anticipation of the program’s reactivation. The FBI and the Justice Department will evade the Congressional ban by allowing the FBI to reestablish the list under a new name in late 1971 (see Late 1971). [New York Times, 8/3/1975]

Entity Tags: Federal Bureau of Investigation

Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties
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Late 1971-1985: FBI Maintains Emergency Detention List

The FBI maintains a list of individuals to be closely monitored and possibly detained in the event of a national emergency. The list, known as the Administrative Index, or “ADEX,” is a continuation of the FBI’s Security Index, which was banned by Congress in 1971 (see 1971 and Late 1971). FBI Director Clarence M. Kelley says the index is a “readily available and up-to-date list of individuals deemed dangerous to the internal security and who would be afforded priority investigative coverage in the event of a national emergency.” The list is updated monthly and contains thousands of names of dissidents, anti-war protesters, and others considered to be potential risks in times of emergency. Sources tell the New York Times the index lists background information, history, and “nationalistic tendencies” of each subject. Kelley assures members of Congress that the list includes “only those individuals who pose a realistic, direct, and current danger to the national security.” The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reports in April 1976 that the FBI abolished the index, but reports will later claim that the list is kept by the FBI well into the 1980s and transferred to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 1985 (see 1985). [New York Times, 10/25/1975; Associated Press, 12/18/1975; Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 5/1976, pp. 542-548]

Entity Tags: Clarence M. Kelley, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Senate Intelligence Committee

Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties
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1985: FEMA Takes Over Emergency Detention List from FBI

The FBI Administrative Index, known as ADEX for short (see Late 1971-1985), is transferred to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The index contains the names and background information of approximately 12,000 individuals considered to be potential threats in times of crisis. Citizens on the list are to be closely monitored and/or detained in the event of a national emergency. Documents later obtained by the Austin American-Statesman will reveal an internal struggle between FBI Director William Webster, who recommends the FBI maintain control of the list, and Attorney General Edwin Meese, who, along with Reagan adviser Robert McFarlane, demands the list be handed over to FEMA. The list ultimately ends up under the control of FEMA. [Texas Observer, 5/15/1987]

Entity Tags: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Federal Emergency Management Agency

Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties
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http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=fbiadex71to85&scale=1#fbiadex71to85

FBI Placed Italian and German Americans Under "Emergency Detention" During WWII

Stalag 13

During World War Two, Japanese Americans living on the west coast were put in internment camps due to fears about their loyalty to America at a time when America was at war with Japan. There have been official apologies as well as token compensation to those who were interned.

What is less known is that there were Italian Americans and German Americans who were interned under similar circumstances. The site "Modern US History Suite 101 reports as follows on this troubling chapter in US history.

"Actions against Italian-Americans began prior to the Pearl Harbor attack as Roosevelt ordered the FBI to compile a custodial detention list. This list would contain the names of individuals to be arrested in the event of a national emergency. In the months immediately after Pearl Harbor, hundreds of Italian- Americans were arrested. As of June of the following year, 1521 Italian-Americans were arrested by the FBI. Military service was no barrier to being arrested. Many of those taken in to custody in San Francisco were veterans of World War I who had later joined the Federation of Italian War Veterans. gents would arrive at the intended detainee’s home during the night and search the residence. The target of the arrest would be taken to an immigration detention center. Their families were not told the reason for the arrest or where the person was being taken. Those in custody were transported to an internment camp where they faced a panel of military officers and private citizens. They had no legal representation and were not advised of the charges against them. Most people were in custody for two years, moving between camps every three to four months. Internment camps were located at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, Fort George Meade in Maryland and Fort Missoula in Montana. Italian-Americans were also interned at Tennessee’s Camp Forrest and Camp McAlester in Oklahoma. The Provost Marshal General and the Immigration and Naturalization Services had forty-five other locations where they could intern these individuals. Italy surrendered on September 8, 1943 and many detainees were released by the end of the year."

German Americans were similarly targeted. There were legitimate fears of groups such as the German American Bund posing a security risk in time of war. the concerns were remarkably similar to those that arise with Arab Americans today. Family ties to a country with which America is engaged in hostilities raises security questions.

(excerpt)

http://www.rantrave.com/Rant/Muslim-Soldiers-Threat-or-Resource-.aspx

Early Christians Lived by "Communist" Principles (FT 11/2009)

From Dr Hugh Goodacre.

Sir, Guy Priestly (Letters, November 19) concurs with the view that “neither the communist system nor the capitalist system acknowledged any God”. What about the early Christian community, which was itself communistic?

Indeed, Christian doctrine – whatever the case with Christian practice – retained its communist principles well into medieval times, drawing on the authority of St Luke’s Gospel, in which Christ calls for “that which remaineth” after the satisfaction of the believer’s bare necessities to be given to others as alms. For example, Bede, in the eighth century AD, still wrote, quite simply: “Give to the poor whatever is in excess of necessary food and clothing.”

Eventually, however, the church became more deeply integrated into the administrative structure of the medieval state, and the rise of scholasticism in the 13th century resulted in the elaboration of an alternative to Christ's communistic teachings. In particular, Aquinas taught that the wealthy could include in the category of “necessities” – and thereby exclude from what they were obliged to give in alms – a level of wealth adequate to the maintenance of their status in society.

From a Christian point of view, it is surely such scholastic doctrine that best deserves the stricture contained in Mr Priestley's comment that “a society that sets its morals according to the whim of the moment and to suit the needs of the most powerful can reasonably be described as amoral”.

Hugh Goodacre,
Teaching Fellow,
University College London,
London WC1, UK

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/137b1f60-d7d0-11de-b578-00144feabdc0.html