Surveillance

(1) Possibly Irrelevant Image:

I've Got My Eye on You

(2) Top Secret America: The series of articles by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin in the Washington Post about the growth of the national security sector, and especially of private contractors doing surveillance work for the government, has made a splash. (I like how WashPo has given the series its own dedicated multimedia website–very cool.)

Our feature article by Tom Barry, Synergy in Security, in our March/April 2010 issue, covers some of the same ground, though without the investigative resources.  Both tell about the vast growth of the security sector, overlap between military contractors and security contractors, unaccountability, and how contractors have become so intertwined with the military and government departments that the latter are dependent on the former, and the former end up performing “inherently government functions” (which they aren’t supposed to).  (I don’t like the way that phrase is constructed–shouldn’t it be “inherently governmental functions”? But that’s the phrase they use, according to the series’ second article National Security Inc.)

Here’s an interesting tidbit from the third article in the series, The Secrets Next Door, whose subtitle reads: “In suburbs across the nation, the intelligence community goes about its anonymous business. Its work isn’t seen, but its impact is surely felt.” The counties where security contractors are concentrated are among the wealthiest in the country:

“These are some of the most brilliant people in the world,” said Ken Ulman, executive of Howard County, one of six counties in NSA’s geographic sphere of influence. “They demand good schools and a high quality of life.”

The schools, indeed, are among the best, and some are adopting a curriculum this fall that will teach students as young as 10 what kind of lifestyle it takes to get a security clearance and what kind of behavior would disqualify them.

Outside one school is the jarring sight of yellow school buses lined up across from a building where personnel from the “Five Eye” allies – the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – share top-secret information about the entire world.

****The buses deliver children to neighborhoods that are among the wealthiest in the country; affluence is another attribute of Top Secret America. Six of the 10 richest counties in the United States, according to Census Bureau data, are in these clusters.****

Loudoun County, ranked as the wealthiest county in the country, helps supply the workforce of the nearby National Reconnaissance Office headquarters, which manages spy satellites. Fairfax County, the second-wealthiest, is home to the NRO, the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Arlington County, ranked ninth, hosts the Pentagon and major intelligence agencies. Montgomery County, ranked 10th, is home to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. And Howard County, ranked third, is home to 8,000 NSA employees.”

Hat tip to our intern Elizabeth Murphy for finding this passage. Read the whole series.  Read our article, Synergy in Security.

(3) Gleen Greenwald on Project Vigilant:  Hat-tip to Aslam K. for pointing us to Glenn Greenwald’s piece at Salon.com about a “highly secretive group called Project Vigilant”;  the group played a role in the discovery of the source of the Wikileaks leaks about Afghanistan:

Forbes‘ technology writer Andy Greenberg reports that at the Defcon Security Conference yesterday, an individual named Chet Uber appeared with revelations about the case of accused WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning and government informant Adrian Lamo.  These revelations are both remarkable in their own right and, more important, highlight some extremely significant, under-examined developments unrelated to that case.  This is a somewhat complex story and it raises even more complex issues, but it is extremely worthwhile to examine.

Uber is the Executive Director of a highly secretive group called Project Vigilant, which, as Greenberg writes, “monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers” and “hands much of that information to federal agencies.” More on that in a minute.  Uber revealed yesterday that Lamo, the hacker who turned in Manning to the federal government for allegedly confessing to being the WikiLeaks leaker, was a “volunteer analyst” for Project Vigilant; that it was Uber who directed Lamo to federal authorities to inform on Manning by using his contacts to put Lamo in touch with the “highest level people in the government” at “three letter agencies”; and, according to a Wired report this morning, it was Uber who strongly pressured Lamo to inform by telling him (falsely) that he’d likely be arrested if he failed to turn over to federal agents everything he received from Manning.

So, while Lamo has repeatedly denied (including in his interview with me) that he ever worked with federal authorities, it turns out that he was a “volunteer analyst” for an entity which collects private Internet data in order to process it and turn it over to the Federal Government.  That makes the whole Manning case all the more strange:  Manning not only abruptly contacted a disreputable hacker out of the blue and confessed to major crimes over the Interent, but the hacker he arbitrarily chose just happened to be an “analyst” for a group that monitors on a massive scale the private Internet activities of American citizens in order to inform on them to U.S. law enforcement agencies (on a side note, if you want to judge what Adrian Lamo is, watch him in this amazing BBC interview; I’ve never seen someone behave quite like him on television before).

(I love that this guy’s name is “Uber.”) Someone should crosscheck to see whether Project Uber, I mean Project Vigilant, is mentioned in the WashPo series. Elizabeth?

Read the whole post.

–Chris Sturr