Abstract
This article considers how technological revolution in digital technologies is effecting scholarship, activism, and privacy in the United States. Examining the revelations of Edward Snowden about National Security Agency domestic programs, it considers the status of the security ‘file’ and the role of anthropology in engaging a world without privacy.
During the escalating counterterror panic in the fall of 2002, just two weeks after I published an article on politics inside Los Alamos National Laboratory, an ethnographic account of spy allegations, missing computer hard drives containing nuclear weapons design codes, and the politics of government secrecy inside the US nuclear complex (see Masco, 2002), my apartment was burglarized. While a theft of this kind is not an uncommon experience in Chicago, the details remain interesting. Exactly two items were taken, one of them a laptop computer. The Chicago police took the case seriously and mounted a quick and professional response. But, as I sat in my walk-up apartment conversing with fingerprint experts who were explaining to me how the powder they were laying carefully along the door frames would not stick to the highly varnished dark wood finish, preventing them from pulling a viable print, the lead detective arrived. He took one step into my apartment, and without further inquiry, looked directly at me and said: ‘A missing laptop – I hope there weren’t any nuclear secrets on it’ – and then laughed. I hope there weren’t any nuclear secrets on it. What is one to do with this statement, let alone the laughter? Of course, at that very moment I was wondering, panicking more honestly, about what loose information was on the laptop, which bits of research data, personal communications, and financial records were now out of my control and circulating in the world. He may even have been referring to the very case I had written about in Los Alamos which had been a national news story. But in the charged political atmosphere of post-9/11 nuclear fears, his comment also raised a crypto-possibility – could it possibly be that the security state was somehow involved in the theft and just went out of its way to let me know it (as a few colleagues speculated at the time)? Or was I just being paranoid, making the detective’s comments simply an example of the over-determined national security culture of our times in the United States, in which a random joke concerning weapons of mass destruction could trigger an avalanche of unanticipated associations and relevance?
The computer was lost, but the other item, surprisingly, was quickly returned via the good work of the police. Thus, the question of the laptop computer remains lively more than a decade later: it appears in retrospect as if the computer containing my draft manuscript on nuclear weapons science and culture in the United States was the specific target of the burglary. Paranoia is a necessary effect of engaging the security state, a structuring principle for those inhabiting the expert worlds and spaces of compartmentalized secrecy as well as for members of the public who pause to consider this vast set of American institutions. But at the same time Americans identify with the covert state in complex ways, assuming a kind of intimacy with covert governance that is directly at odds with democratic principles. For example, a common retort from new acquaintances learning about my now longtime research on national security sciences and culture in the US is to inquire about ‘the file’ – that is, the modes of surveillance devoted to anyone seeking to understand anything about the secret state. I have always found this a telling moment – a revelation of American sensibilities – as it registers a widespread understanding of state surveillance inside the United States but also suggests those activities are only addressed to those who provoke it somehow. It creates a knowing subject position that is untouched by the security state, while imaginatively directing those energies only at suspicious others. The evocation of the security file in this manner often reveals belief in a global US security apparatus capable of sublime forms of access, intuition, and action but one that is also directly linked to a public state that is more often experienced locally as deeply unengaged, frequently gridlocked, and incompetent. Such folk beliefs suggest that Americans know their government has plenty of agency but increasingly can only imagine that agency deployed on covert terms, a fantastic distortion of a democratic public sphere.
In anti-nuclear and peace activist worlds, it is not uncommon for individuals considering national security policy to conjure an invisible mode of state attention to their activities. Some speak directly to the state when on the telephone, imagining an official eavesdropper carefully taking notes; others assume their everyday activities are being minutely tracked and monitored, developing elaborate rituals of evasion or theatrical modes of self-presentation for an assumed state security presence. I once had a longtime peace activist invite me to listen to the clicks on the telephone line in his office and then show me the electrical grid in his office compound – a giant snarl of multicolored wires, far too complicated and improvised to troubleshoot – to show me how a wiretap could be hidden in plain sight. Others have calculated how they could be hurt by the covert state, reviewing their financial, employment, and everyday activities for weaknesses that could be exploited, thereby conjuring and producing a specific vision of state power. I know more than a few people today who have created email signatures directed at an unknown security state reader, and some who now stack key words – ‘WMD,’ ‘terrorist,’ ‘Jihadist,’ etc. – in their signoff as a general mode of protest of the counterterror state. This attitude towards the security state reveals a real assessment of power (for example, Americans know today that their government assassinates people with and without drones, imprisons others without trial, and places activists as well as specific racial and ethnic populations under both overt and covert forms of surveillance). But national security paranoias can also foment a special kind of narcissism, suggesting that simply by recognizing the existence of the military state with its vast range of covert activities one becomes ‘of interest’ to that state apparatus. It is very hard to not engage in this mode of thinking at times or to fully resist the conspiratorial impulse in the age of counterterror where fundamental aspects of the democratic social contract have been suspended. The prevalence of these assumptions, however, is also diagnostic of a larger psychosocial process in the United States, one that assumes a radical break between state activities and public accountability even as forms of ubiquitous surveillance are increasingly positioned as the foundational basis for collective ‘defense.’ The counterterror state relies on this combination of affective, imaginative, and material infrastructures to ‘produce’ (Glück and Low, 2017) a vision of global space as both American and increasingly at risk (Masco, 2014).
The USA PATRIOT Act, signed into law with little congressional debate a few weeks after the suicide-hijacker attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001, fundamentally rewrote domestic surveillance laws – and with them, the American social contract. Matched by a series of secret executive orders, a wide-ranging overhaul of intelligence agencies and covert action programs was conducted by the George W. Bush Administration to increase the global power of the American security state. These changes were designed to break down the barriers between intelligence and law enforcement agencies constructed in the 1970s after revelations of wide-spread surveillance of citizens and domestic covert actions (including official programs to read mail and telegrams, and to infiltrate and disrupt activist organizations, see Prados, 2013, as well as Parenti, 2003). After 2001, security agencies were once again authorized to conduct ‘sneak and peak’ operations inside the homes and intimate spaces of citizens (what were once known as ‘black bag jobs’ in the FBI, see Donner, 1981), to covertly infiltrate activist, political, and religious groups, and to conduct unprecedented forms of domestic surveillance on raced and classed subjects (see Browne, 2015). The first decade of the 21st century would soon be universally recognized as a new golden age for state surveillance within the US intelligence community, with a vast array of new laws, technologies, and ambitions restructuring the everyday spaces of an American form of life increasingly embedded in counterterror logics and policies. In the age of pre-emption, counterterror makes everyone a potential suspect, and the search for clues to the next attack energizes a vast array of government agencies, contractors, and police departments to scrutinize the lives of citizens and try to predict their ambitions, capabilities, and future actions. Surveillance in the era of counterterror both assumes a continual technological revolution in capacities and recognizes no borders, striving to achieve a system of informational collection and social control that can function on a planetary scale (see Masco, 2014).
A few years after the break-in, I filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests with the FBI about the incident in my apartment, as well as my own standing as a writer on American national security science and culture, an effort to finally see if ‘the file’ actually existed. In sequence, each FOIA request produced a ‘no records were found’ response. 1 While this would seem to settle the matter, this kind of a notification often means simply that the request was not specific enough in its language to direct FOIA agents to the precise location where a file might be stored (thus triggering a legal responsibility to consider its release), or it could mean a file is protected for national security or other reasons. Thus, it can register an actual absence or represent another state of affairs entirely. In the hard recession years following the dot.com crash of 2000 and the September 11 attacks of 2001, I continue to assume my experience was an unexceptional theft in a neighborhood feeling the bust of boom and bust capital. But then I remember the detective’s laughter, and his ‘I hope there weren’t any nuclear secrets on it’ comment undermines my confidence, offering an invitation to think otherwise. The crucial point here is that connecting the dots one way leads to an irritating but common nonpolitical event, connecting them another way raises questions about how one is positioned in relation to the security state and to the forms of recognition and control that structure the counterterror apparatus inside the United States.
This article considers the revolution in domestic surveillance after 2001, assessing the modes by which the intelligence agencies constitute their activities as opaque while seeking to render the lives of citizens transparent. ‘Data’ is now considered a military object, approached by a vast range of state institutions as a ‘space’ subject to dominance, vulnerability, and covert process. Digital data also rides on a vulnerable material infrastructure, one that enables global communications across military affairs, news, commerce, and social media, forming an increasingly networked globe (see Starosielski, 2015). This article is also, then, an effort to interrogate the implicit social contract emerging in the United States around digital ‘security’ and to assess the implications of technological revolution for citizen–state relations, as digital time and space are recoded for a counterterror world. For, what does it mean today – in light of recent revelations about the domestic surveillance activities of intelligence community – that citizens no longer need to fantasize their relation to the security state – they now know everyone is under expansive new forms of scrutiny? In other words, this article is an effort to consider ‘the file’ – long an object of concern for those anthropologists working in police states (see Ash, 1997; Verdery, 2014, and also Hull, 2012; Riles, 2006) – in the American context, and to interrogate the fears and ambitions that have rendered privacy increasingly moot in the name of both profit and security (see Pew Research Center, 2014).
The all-seeing eye
In 2003, The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) made headlines for announcing an ambitious project entitled ‘Total Information Awareness (TIA)’ – a commitment to collecting and analyzing all digital communication to create a prediction capability for counterterror, transforming bits of data from email, purchases, web searches, and phone calls into a new kind of predictive policing. The man behind TIA was John Poindexter (who was a key player in the Iran Contra scandal of the Reagan Administration). Poindexter proposed the TIA after the September 2001 terrorist attacks as a Manhattan Project for data collection and management, a way to claim the total information-domain for US interests. The project recognized the emerging revolutions in digital communication as a powerful new kind of surveillance resource and sought to build a national security infrastructure devoted to exploiting its future potential. Poindexter was forced to resign when the project, and particularly the logo he personally designed, became public (Figure 1), as images of a new kind of Orwellian Big Brother – an all-seeing eye – brought nearly universal condemnation.
2
Logo of the Total Information Awareness Project, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
But the TIA project recognized a fundamental change in global communication.
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With proliferating modes of information delivery and reception in a World Wide Web of communications, the TIA can be seen as a key moment in the development of ‘big data’ security (data sets so massive you need a set of computer tools to capture, store, visualize, and analyze their content; see Lyon, 2014, as well as Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier, 2014). The Total Information Awareness concept, while publicly condemned and formally abandoned, morphed quickly into an official counter-campaign for cybersecurity in the US, a public relations strategy transforming the offensive surveillance of the TIA into a ‘critical infrastructural’ vulnerability, requiring anticipatory defense. In 2009, the US created a new military organization to recognize the importance of ‘cyberspace,’ placing it alongside traditional spaces of military interest in air, sea, land, and outer space – a new terrain to be controlled and exploited (see Clark and Knake, 2010; see Figure 2). The U.S. Cyber Command is responsible for securing all DOD information infrastructures as well as fighting cyber warfare (and was probably involved in the 2010 cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear research facilities which involved releasing a software worm program known as ‘Stuxnet’ onto the World Wide Web specifically targeting Iranian centrifuges, see Harris, 2014b: 11). The most vocal public face for the Cybercommand has been its first director, General Keith Alexander, who until October 2013 was also the head of the National Security Agency, the organization charged with intercepting, and decrypting, and assessing global communications. An unprecedented dual directorship, this made the head of signals intelligence gathering also the top cyberwarrior in the United States.
Logo of the New U.S. Cyber Command.
The shock of the 2001 terrorist attacks was immediately constituted by national security professionals as a problem of information management, of connecting the dots of international terrorist networks, of distilling out of a global sea of data individual pieces of information critical to pre-empting attacks. This led to a significant expansion in all aspects of intelligence gathering, and via the USA PATRIOT Act a massive new investment in both domestic and global surveillance. The NSA operated under an immediate new presidential mandate after the September 2001 attacks, one that overturned the long-standing legal requirement to restrict their intelligence-gathering to foreign sources. The NSA operated for years in clear violation of federal law, leading to retroactive legislation by the U.S. Congress in 2007 to protect both the NSA and the telecommunication companies that gave NSA access to their networks. It is also clear that various intelligence agencies – NSA, CIA, FBI – had information on the 9/11 suicide-hijackers but did not – they would say, were legally prohibited from – share those pieces of information with each other (see U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, 2002). Consequently, one of the most profound counterterror projects has been a reorganization of the intelligence services (famously competitive with each other) under a new overarching position, the Director of National Intelligence, created in 2005 to simply coordinate the information gathered by the 16 intelligence agencies.
The answer to counterterror in the information age has been a commitment, led by the National Security Agency (NSA), to expanding surveillance infrastructure, and empowering the world’s largest collection of mathematicians, linguists, and computer scientists to ‘own’ digital communications at a global scale. By focusing on the nodes of global communication traffic – for example, at the AT&T switching facility in San Francisco and perhaps 30 similar sites – the NSA has sought to build a data capturing capability into the physical infrastructure of the World Wide Web. This example also shows how producing a digital security infrastructure at a global scale also entails highly localized interventions (at switching facilities and data centers) grounded in particular regional economies and technology centers like that of the Bay Area (cf. Maharawal, 2017). These taps can, in principle, capture and copy all digital traffic flowing through those nodes. Thus, if the Total Information Awareness project with its promise of predictive policing through a comprehensive digital dragnet is ‘disavowed’ – the NSA has nonetheless long passed a threshold moment in terms of how it conceives of controlling digital data at the global scale. Listen to the public statements of NSA officials for the distinction between ‘collecting’ and ‘reading’: reading US citizen email is frequently disavowed, while collection is not even discussed. The key here is a shift in the definitional meaning of these terms. The Defense Intelligence Agency’s Intelligence Law Handbook, for example, begins its entry on ‘collection’ this way (Defense Intelligence Agency, 2004: 3–5): To begin this journey, it is necessary to stop first and adjust your vocabulary. The terms and words used in DoD 5240.1-R have very specific meanings, and it is often the case that one can be led astray by relying on the generic or commonly understood definition of a particular word. For example, ‘collection of information’ is defined in the Dictionary of the United States Army Terms (AR 310- 25) as: ‘The process of gathering information for all available sources and agencies.’ But, for the purposes of DoD 5240.1-R, information is ‘collected’ – … only when it has been received for use by an employee of a DoD intelligence component in the course of his official duties … (and) an employee takes some affirmative action that demonstrates an intent to use or retain the information … So, we see that ‘collection’ of information for DoD 5240.1-R purposes is more than ‘gathering’ – it could be described as ‘gather, plus …’ For example, information received from a cooperating source (e.g., the FBI) about a terrorist group is not ‘collected’ unless and until that information is included in a report, entered into a data base, or used in some other manner which constitutes an affirmative intent to use or retain that information.
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Greenpeace protest of NSA facility in Utah.
In other words, the War on Terror has ridden on top of and even accelerated a technological revolution, one in which the increasingly connected modes of digital communication are remaking sociability, commerce, law, and security in rather fundamental ways. Consider for example, this statement by David Petraeus, who moved from running the US counter-insurgency programs in Iraq and Afghanistan to become CIA director (until his abrupt resignation in November 2012 for sexual infidelities revealed by his use of insecure email and for sharing classified information). In one of his last official speeches to an audience of security contractors he speculated on the implications of the ‘smart home’ for global spying. He noted that humanity is on the verge of an ‘internet of things,’ and predicted that by 2020 as many as 100 billion devices of all kinds could be connected via Wifi. This internet of things, he noted, will enable nothing less than a new era of surveillance in which (Petraeus, 2012): Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters – all connected to the next-generation Internet using abundant, low cost, and high-power computing – the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and ultimately, heading to quantum computing. In practice, these technologies could lead to rapid integration of data from closed societies and provide near-continuous, persistent monitoring of virtually anywhere we choose. ‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies, particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft. Taken together, these developments change our notions of secrecy and create innumerable challenges – as well as opportunities. The CIA and our Intelligence Community partners must be able to swim in the ocean of ‘Big Data.’ Indeed, we must be world class swimmers – the best, in fact.
As Petraeus’s career ironically demonstrates, digital surveillance is also a double-edged sword, one that can target official secrets and policymakers as much as citizens (see Coleman, 2014). Indeed, the NSA (National Security Agency, 2010) currently offers radical guidance to its employees on how to secure their own personal computers: in addition to a long list of specific user guidelines, the NSA recommends disabling Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and physically removing any camera or microphone capability from the computer. The pursuit of computer ‘security’ now requires employees to dismantle both hardware and software, and maintain heightened vigilance both online and off, disciplining security operatives against an unknown interested party. But this accelerating technological revolution – despite its multifaceted secrecy and new forms of vulnerability – is also producing new forms of social commentary on the shifting values supporting everyday American life.
Here, for example, we might pause to consider why the Total Information Awareness project at the proposal phase was an immediate scandal in 2003, capable of producing wide spread social condemnation, while the revelations about actual ongoing NSA surveillance of Americans since 2013 have yet to produce a substantial change in US policy (see Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, 2015). Let us turn to one of the most insightful US media sources for clarification, namely the parodic Onion News Network. In early 2011, The Onion News Network ran an exposé entitled ‘CIA’s Facebook Program Dramatically Cut Agency Costs.’ The fake newscaster reported: Congress today reauthorized the funding for Facebook, the online surveillance program run by the CIA. According to Homeland Security reports, Facebook has replaced almost every other information gathering program since it was launched in 2004. [Cutting to fake congressional testimony by a fake Deputy CIA Director, who reports] ‘After years of secretly monitoring the public we were astounded that so many people would willingly publish where they live, their religious and political views, an alphabetized list of all their friends, personal email addresses, phone numbers, hundreds of photos of themselves, and even status updates of what they are doing moment to moment. It is truly a dream come true for the CIA.’ [Cutting back to the fake news announcer, who concludes] Much of the credit belongs to Mark Zuckerberg who runs the program for the Agency. The agent codenamed ‘The Overlord’ was recently awarded the prestigious medal of intelligence for his work on Facebook Program. He has called it ‘the single most powerful tool for population control ever created’.
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Truth-telling in the age of ubiquitous surveillance
I responded in the most truthful, or least untruthful manner, by saying ‘no’.
James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence
In a Congressional hearing on 12 March 2013, Senator Ron Wyden asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper if the NSA ‘gathers any type of data at all on millions of Americans.’ In the hearing, Clapper replied ‘No sir. Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.’ But then in June 2013, The Guardian and Washington Post started to publish one blockbuster story after another detailing the specific programs run out of the NSA to collect not just information about American citizens but its efforts to ‘own the internet,’ that is, to capture and store all digital communications globally. Based on documents leaked from Edward Snowden, who worked for NSA contractor Booz Allen in Hawaii, the still emerging story of the scope of NSA surveillance caught Clapper in a classic Washington bind. 10 He is the director of 16 intelligence agencies involved in a wide range of covert activities but on occasion needs to report to Congress in public hearings. When confronted over his March claim that the NSA did not collect information on American citizens, he made a significant contribution to American politics, by saying, ‘I responded in the most truthful, or least untruthful manner, by saying no’. He then sought to define the technical logics of ‘collection.’ He noted that the NSA, for example, captures as much digital traffic as possible not to scrutinize Americans but rather to look for ‘terrorist connections’ – it is a distinction without a difference at the level of practice, as the agency is now deeply invested in storing decades of information and creating ever more sophisticated data mining tools for activating those records via automated processes. Clapper’s duplicitous statement illustrates that the intelligence agencies have developed an expert language that deploys common language in novel ways, creating a mode of speaking that is unaccountable to democratic process while seeming to be transparent and responsible. Put differently, the ‘least untruthful’ answer that can be spoken in a public setting to an official question about what might be considered the de facto elimination of American privacy and a violation of longstanding federal law is to deny that there is any such capability, or interest in such a capability, at all (see Gellman 2013).
The NSA revelations of Edward Snowden, however, depict an agency that is aggressively exploiting new technologies across digital platforms, and building an ever-emerging infrastructure for storing and analyzing digital traffic, as well as fighting new forms of cyberwar (see Appelbaum et al., 2015). Since the central corporate infrastructure of the internet resides in the United States – Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Verizon, AT&T, to name but a few – the boundaries established in the 1970s to try to delineate foreign from domestic surveillance have been overturned by technological innovation. The NSA is now working to break all forms of commercial encryption and also to manipulate encryption standards to enable easier access to corporate platforms (see Appelbaum et al., 2014). Allied heads of state as well as US citizens are finding themselves at the center of the NSA project: German Chancellor Angela Merkel was revealed to be a specific target of NSA activities, leading some German officials to suggest returning to typewriters for official business to regain national security in the digital era (Poitras et al., 2014). In light of the Snowden revelations, no less than Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared the internet ‘a CIA creation’ (unintentionally echoing The Onion News Network) and suggested that national security around the world now requires many separate internets, not one world wide web. Similarly, the collaboration between major US Information Technology companies and the counterterror state has produced a global reappraisal of American technology, leading to efforts in Brazil to build new undersea fiber optic cable to avoid routing through US infrastructures, as well as a wide-spread reduction in the uses of cloud computing (because its digital storage is located within the US and thus subject to NSA programs under US law). At the scale of everyday consumer devices, Apple, along with a host of social media companies, has responded to the Snowden revelations by updating its smart phone to new levels of encryption, promising digital security to consumers as a new advertising strategy.
The breadth and specificity of the Snowden leaks to the Washington Post, The Guardian and The Intercept newspapers is, I think, a singular event in national security reporting in the United States and its impact is ongoing. Since the first article in the Washington Post, on 6 June 2013, attentive readers have learned of programs code-named (see Figure 4): PRISM (which captures information by working directly with IT companies), UPSTREAM (which captures data by tapping directly into fiber optic cables, digital hubs, and routers), XKEYSCORE (a program for capturing email), COTRAVELER (a program to mine the XKEYSCORE archive and find associations between specific people); BOUNDLESS INFORMANT (which captures global metadata on communications of all kinds); MYSTIC (a system to capture 100 percent of the telephone calls in a country for a 30-day period and store them for later analysis); DISHFIRE (a program that collects 200 million text messages per day); TURBINE (a program to covertly install software on computers allowing access to video chats); and OPTIC NERVE (which captured Yahoo webcam footage to the tune 1.8 million user accounts in a one month period). Other unnamed programs capture email contacts and buddy lists (over 500,000 per day), have developed tools for hacking gaming platforms (from Xbox to the popular Angry Birds program on cell phones), and designed specific programs to gain access to the major smart phones. Der Spiegel has also reported on an NSA program located in Texas that captures computer purchases at the shipping stage, installs software and technology allowing the NSA covert access to the machine, and then repackages the altered machine with original wrapping for normal delivery (Appelbaum et al., 2013).
Slides from NSA program reports provided to the media by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
While the Snowden files promise future revelations about NSA activities, the trend is clear: there is a US counterterror state commitment to building access into, or finding a way to exploit, the global information technology infrastructure. If you use a computer, phone, or credit card you are likely interacting with the security state and your records are likely to be stored for many years. The NSA, of course, is also just one of 16 intelligence agencies, and much of what they are doing is also being done by corporations and contractors who are using meta data, consumer analytics, and data mining to create ever more specific portraits of consumers. The internet age has thus not set information free in the sense of fomenting a radically democratic public sphere as much as transformed the citizen-consumer into a radically open-ended interface for intelligence gathering across security state and corporate interests. The smart phone, in particular, is an unprecedented node for commercial and security state surveillance of individuals, creating the possibility of instant communication and commerce alongside multiple competing modes of meta data and informational capture.
‘The File’ today
Before the transformation of the security state into a counterterror formation in 2001, the kind of surveillance devoted to those interested in the activities of the state now seems somewhat comical. Through the post-Cold War period (1991–2001), I attended meetings across the United States on nuclear weapons issues sponsored by the Department of Energy as well as nongovernmental organizations and activist groups. It was not uncommon to have multiple screeners at the entrance, sign-in-sheets asking for detailed personal information (name, residence, phone, email, sometimes citizenship, social security number, driver’s license number). For meetings organized around dissent or to protest specific nuclear complex activities, one could expect to have plain-clothes security operatives in the crowd, and others with cameras videotaping the event. I made it a practice to find the fellow with the clipboard writing the license plate of each car in attendance, and also to try to track down after many meetings the voluminous hand-written notes theatrically taken as an official register of public concern (I once found a year’s worth of public comments stuffed in a closet in Los Alamos never to be read again). The linking thread here is the theatricality of the surveillance state itself, and the highly-limited space for the public to conceptually engage this state apparatus via a face-to-face encounter. But this post-Cold War world of the 1990s now seems ancient, an analog universe hopelessly outdated in the world of smart phones, Facebook, Google, and an unrestrained counterterror apparatus. Indeed, today there would be no need to stage a break-in to capture the laptop computer of a writer working on national security sciences and culture. That machine would already be a node in both corporate and security state surveillance systems, rendering one’s thoughts, actions, purchases, and entertainments as data for future analysis. The state might ‘own’ the internet company one uses through various techniques, or hack the router in one’s home directly, or it might have installed software to track keystrokes and record contacts, Skype sessions, and email (see Gallager and Greenwald, 2014). Or perhaps, operatives would simply remotely turn on the computer and download its contents, or fly a drone overhead to hack one’s network or mimic a major information company to retrieve information (see Angwin and Larson, 2014). Or alternatively, operatives might just remotely engage the camera and microphone on the laptop and just take live notes – perhaps watching with you as you pursue your daily activities or your latest online entertainments, or your work life (Greenwald, 2013). This does not, of course, mean that global surveillance is perfected, or fully automated, but it does underscore the ambitions and anticipations of an emergent counterterror state apparatus committed to preempting certain futures in a world without borders.
Thus, in our moment there is no longer one ‘file’ to fetishize as the emblem of national security attention but rather an unfolding set of automated relations within a multi-scalar and planetary archive of digital data, stored for increasing lengths of time, involving anyone that uses information technology. This set of institutions, capabilities, and attitudes is different from the Cold War-era surveillance work of agencies like the East German Stasi (who sought to intimidate populations through analog surveillance techniques, see Bruce, 2010; Masco 2005; Verdery, 2014) or even the FBI (who sought to disrupt Cold War activist groups from within via embedding double agents; Weiner, 2012). The NSA now desires both complete anonymity and a free hand in its total digital surveillance, striving for a full integration into global scale communications systems and ever evolving capacities. With an emergent ‘internet of things’ and the surveillance of one’s most intimate spaces, habits and activities, the security state is transforming the spaces of everyday life within its reordering of global security space. Big data surveillance is not only longitudinally powerful in grasping a current moment of collective activity but also is stored in ever-deeper orders of time, reordering the past, present, and future in accelerating new ways. The immediate social project is not then to recover an archaic notion of privacy increasingly jettisoned by consumers, corporations, and national security agents alike. It is to see the ownership and control of data as delineating the very terms of citizenship, commerce, and insecurity in the 21st century.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.