Eyes in the sky

By Libby

Once again, while everyone is busy handicapping the horserace primaries, the dull rumble of the Iran war drums begin to sound and the Bush regime continues its assault on democracy almost unnoticed.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his department will activate his department's new domestic satellite surveillance office in stages, starting as soon as possible with traditional scientific and homeland security activities -- such as tracking hurricane damage, monitoring climate change and creating terrain maps.

Sophisticated overhead sensor data will be used for law enforcement once privacy and civil rights concerns are resolved, he said. The department has previously said the program will not intercept communications.

"There is no basis to suggest that this process is in any way insufficient to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans," Chertoff wrote to Reps. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and Jane Harman (D-Calif.), chairmen of the House Homeland Security Committee and its intelligence subcommittee, respectively, in letters released yesterday.

What all this Bushspeak means is they are most definitely going to use the satellites to intercept domestic communications, which is probably why they suddenly stopped fighting over telecom immunity. That they already co-opted the telecom industry is made clear in this Democracy Now interview. This really can't be repeated enough.

Babak Pasdar is a computer security expert who was hired in 2003 to help restructure the tech infrastructure at a major wireless telecommunications company. What he found shocked him. The company had set up a system that gave a third party, presumably a governmental entity, access to every communication coming through that company’s infrastructure. This means every email, internet use, document transmission, video, text message, as well as the ability to listen to and record any phone call.

Via Avedon, Charles has more details on the interview.

I used to laugh at conspiracy theorists who thought the government was watching their every move once. Twenty years ago, it was a laughable concept, but the technology has now caught up to the paranoia. Now they can do it and I see no reason to believe they won't, if it serves their purposes.

Comments

[Kat]

From http://phoenixwoman.wordpress.com/2008/04/10/calea/>CALEA:

BABAK PASDAR: ...what the Quantico Circuit was was a high-speed circuit, a pipeline into a third party that provided this third party unfettered access into the heart of the carrier’s network. It had access to the billing system, fraud detection system, all the internet access systems, text messaging—I mean, just everything you can think of. So, in essence, somebody could identify billing records, find out behavioral information about various customers, tap into both data and voice conversations, just have total access.

'Total access'? Sounds remarkably like Total Information Awareness to me.

>> Now they can do it and I see no reason to believe they won't, if it serves their purposes.

May as well admit the obvious -- now that they can do it, there's no reason to believe they aren't doing it, since they've already said it would serve their purposes.

K

[Libby]

Indeed Kat. I never believed they killed TIA. They just keep renaming it.