New domestic surveillance details emerge, Daily Kos, August 2, 2010, by Deep Harm, used with permission, quoted verbatim:

In the past few days, details have emerged about two domestic surveillance programs tasked with creating dossiers on American internet users.  Project Vigilant is  an alliance of government, ISP providers and 600 volunteers.  Recorded Future, a Google and CIA “investment” “scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents,” purportedly for predicting the “future.”

About Recorded Future, Wired Magazine’s Danger Room reports:

Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.

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“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”

About Project Vigilant, Andy Greenberg at Forbes.com’s “The Firewall” reports:

According to Uber, one of Project Vigilant’s manifold methods for gathering intelligence includes collecting information from a dozen regional U.S. Internet service providers (ISPs). Uber declined to name those ISPs, but said that because the companies included a provision allowing them to share users’ Internet activities with third parties in their end user license agreements (EULAs), Vigilant was able to legally gather data from those Internet carriers and use it to craft reports for federal agencies. A Vigilant press release says that the organization tracks more than 250 million IP addresses a day and can “develop portfolios on any name, screen name or IP address.”

“Project Vigilant has been operating in near total secrecy for over a decade, monitoring potential domestic terrorist activity and tracking various criminal activities on the Web,” writes Mark Albertson, at the Baltimore Examiner.

SIDEBAR: In the comments, 8ackgr0und N015e responds:

They have been operating for over a decade, BUT
they missed 9/11.
they haven’t stemmed the tide of coke.
they haven’t prevented identity theft.
they missed the banking fraud.

remind me again… what are they doing?

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Reportedly, the information can be collected legally and, in the case of Recorded Future, the CIA expects to make a profit from it. And, these aren’t the only operations underway, either.

U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called “unstructured text” of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units. [Wired]

Many practices used to snare bad guys unfortunately could also be used by the government for nefarious purposes by the government; and without rigorous oversight, it’s practically guaranteed based on past secretive domestic surveillance programs.

Greenberg also describes how Uber and US intelligence agencies leaned on Adrian Lamo to target Bradley Manning and Wikileaks.  He reveals that Lamo later regretted his decision to inform on Manning. Adrian Lamo, it turns out, was a Project Vigilant “volunteer.”  Greenwald directs our attention to this videotaped interview of Adrian Lamo, whose speech is extremely slow and slurred as he provides a somewhat different story.

Implications

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I’ll be watching you.

- The Police

It is reasonable for government agencies to monitor the internet for “trends” that could improve their ability to interdict threats to the nation.  It is also reasonable to monitor the internet to intercept hackers trying to disrupt critical systems.  But, conducting these activities off-campus creates enormous potential for abuse, as this excerpt from an ACLU report (courtesy of Greewald) explains.

The use of private-sector data aggregators allows the government to insulate surveillance and information-handling practices from privacy laws or public scrutiny. That is sometimes an important motivation in outsourced surveillance.  Private companies are free not only from complying with the Privacy Act, but from other checks and balances, such as the Freedom of Information Act.  They are also insulated from oversight by Congress and are not subject to civil-service laws designed to ensure that government policymakers are not influenced by partisan politics. . . .

The government’s ability to add value to corporate information via other data collected by the NSA turns even benign information into a powerful weapon – for good or evil.  ”While advertisers really only care about your online profile (IP address) in order to assess what you do and who you are, the Government wants your online activities linked to your actual name and other identifying information,” writes Greenwald.  Where operations are kept secret, there is no oversight, there is no means to dispute the accuracy of records, no  limitation on how long the records can be kept, no control over their use.

This powers accumulating in government/corporate hands could be used one day to disrupt the election process, conduct political witch hunts, coerce elected officials, and much more.  Equally bad, in an world where retaliation is possible for even the smallest deviations from the mainstream, individuals will self-censor  themselves, becoming “a class of meek citizens who know they are being constantly watched.”  Then, who will be willing to speak up to prevent the next catastrophe?

Email Deep Harm: deep_harm AT yahoo.com

See Obama administration wants more warrantless surveillance of Americans, Daily Kos on Evans Liberal Politics, July 30, 2010, by Joan McCarter. News on privacy, the internet and warrentless surveilance.

See DOJ Pushing to Expand Warrantless Access to Internet Records, Electronic Frontier Foundation, July 29, 2010, by Tim Jones.

Read this collection of resources on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Read the Wikipedia article on the NSA electronic surveillance program.

Watch NSA spyroom at AT&T exposed, MSNBC video on YouTube — 5:11.

Read Ron Paul on “More Secrets, More Surveillance, Less Security”, Eurasia Review, July 30, 2010, by Ron Paul.

See also The Takeaway from 91,000 Leaked Secret Documents on Afghanistan: It’s Bad. Very Bad. Time to Go, AlterNet, August 3, 2010, by Will Durst.

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"Every Breath You Take,": The Police give a slightly different sound to their awesome hit, live from Rio in December, 2007. — 5:59.

"Zoo Staion:" U2 perfoms ‘Zoo Station,’ a song not so well known but sounding great, performed live on 08/16/1992 at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium – Washington, D.C. — 4:31

"Love And Peace Or Else," U2 performs this wonderful song, full of portent and warning, on their Vertigo Tour in 2005, from Brazil. — 4:36. Dedicated to my friends, Shannon and Wes.

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DC’s spy establishment in panic mode over Washington Post expose, The Raw Story, July 16, 2010, by Daniel Tencer, used with permission, quoted verbatim, with commentary:

Washington’s intelligence establishment appears to be in panic mode over an upcoming Washington Post series about runaway growth in defense and intelligence spending.

A State Department email has accused the Post of planning to make public “top secret” information about defense and intelligence contractors working for the US, despite an admission in the same email that the Post‘s information came from “open sources.”

The series, by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Dana Priest, will include a TV partnership with PBS’s Frontline and is expected to consist of three articles and an online database of military and intelligence contractors and their projects.It’s that database of contractors that seems to be worrying Washington the most. Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy reports that the State Department sent out an email Thursday warning all 14,574 Washington-area employees of the upcoming reports.

“On Monday July 19, the Washington Post plans to publish a website listing all agencies and contractors believed to conduct Top Secret work on behalf of the US Government,” the email stated. “The website provides a graphic representation pinpointing the location of firms conducting Top Secret work, describing the type of work they perform, and identifying many facilities where such work is done.”

However, the extent to which the Post‘s information will be “top secret” is debatable. The State Department email goes on to say that the information the Post has gathered came from “open sources,” suggesting the information published in the Post‘s database is already publicly available.

The email also tells employees they must “neither confirm nor deny” the claims made in the Post articles.

That line is echoed in a letter to “industry partners” from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In a blog posting entitled “Is Wash Post Harming Intelligence Work?”, the Washington Times reprints the letter from the ODNI, which asks contractors to “remind all cleared employees of their responsibility to protect classified information and relationships.”

Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic has obtained a memorandum from the ODNI’s communications chief, Art House, in which House lays out what he expects to see in the Post series, and his predictions paint a negative picture of defense and intelligence spending over the past decade. House said while he “can’t predict the content” of the piece, he expects it will draw several conclusions:

The intelligence enterprise has undergone exponential growth and has become unmanageable with overlapping authorities and a heavily outsourced contractor workforce.

The IC and the DoD have wasted significant time and resources, especially in the areas of counterterrorism and counterintelligence.

The intelligence enterprise has taken its eyes off its post-9/11 mission and is spending its energy on competitive and redundant programs.

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House also lays out a strategy for an expected public-relations battle after the series’ publication:

It might be helpful as you prepare for publication to draw up a list of accomplishments and examples of success to offer in response to inquiries to balance the coverage and add points that deserve to be mentioned. In media discussions, we will seek to garner support for the Intelligence Community and its members by offering examples of agile, integrated activity that has enhanced performance. We will want to minimize damage caused by unauthorized disclosure of sensitive and classified information.

And Foreign Policy‘s Rogin reports that the Obama administration is already refuting the Post series, even though it won’t launch until Monday.

“A lot of this is explainable,” an unnamed administration official told Rogin. “You want some redundancy in the intelligence community and you’re going to have some waste. These are things we’ve been aware of and in some instances we agree are troubling. However, it’s something we’ve been working on for a year and a half. It’s something we’ve been on top of.”

The official went on to say that “there will be examples of money being wasted in the series that seem egregious and we are just as offended as the readers by those examples.”

Commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: Is it time to once again say, “and God Bless the Washington Post,” as we did in the days of Woodward and Bernstein?

Officials, administrators and particularly intelligence officers, hate the sunny skies and truth which emerges when secrecy is lost. In this regard, let me quote Patrick Henry. And the Obama administration has a mixed-at-best record when it comes to their vaunted transparency. I received the following quote in an emailing from a local group I belong to, the Wayne County Progressive Network. Stop by our site and see all about progressives in Wayne County, Ohio. In getting at the truth, I also recommend the Yahoo! Group Progressive, which I recommend if you want to join a truly progressive worldwide group… they are rather radical, but one heck of a lot of truth emerges in their many daily postings:

Patrick Henry: "The Liberties of a people never were, nor never will be secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them."

Watch The President’s Weekly Address: Filibustering Recovery & Obstructing Progress, YouTube video — 5:07.

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Government attempts to keep torture case secret –Holding case taken by former Guantánamo detainees behind closed doors would set ‘very dangerous precedent’, says lawyer 08 Mar 2010 The government will attempt today to have a case about torture heard entirely behind closed doors in a move that some lawyers say would extend secrecy to a new area of hearings, overriding ancient principles of English law.

This morning a case will come before three appeal judges in London in which seven men are seeking damages against the government for mistreatment during what they say was their “extraordinary rendition” and torture facilitated by the British security services.

Alleged torture victims facing ‘secret and one-sided justice’ –Legal experts have warned the judgment threatens British principles of justice and have branded it a ‘constitutional outrage’. 08 Mar 2010 British intelligence services must be stopped from using secret evidence against former Guantanamo Bay detainees, the Appeal Court heard today. Alleged torture victims seeking to sue the Government over Britain’s complicity in their unlawful imprisonment are facing ‘secret and one-sided’ justice, their lawyer claimed. Six former detainees are hoping to win damages from the Government over allegations that Britain knew about their ill-treatment. Their lawyers have begun a challenge at the Court of Appeal against a ruling which would allow the security services and the Government to withhold evidence from the men during the civil case.

Commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: They said Obama was “soft on terrorism”: exCuse me, is anybody listening here? Do you think they might be trying for a conviction, here??? Republicans, are you really that stupid, or are you just lying about how tough Obama in fact IS on terrorism and trying desperately to score some big political points. McCain tried that on Obama in the campaign, too. (The fact is, the United States has decided to do basically the same thing Great Britain is doing here: secret trials with military tribunals. Right, and the Patriot Act renewal, too. The surge in Afghanistan, do you think that might be evidence Obama is going to always do the right thing, even if the left doesn’t like it? Oh, I know you’re going to try to claim credit for that, the incredible force of your protests at the still possible trials in New York, the force of your incredible patriotism, I know.) You Could try actually reading the news…. Oh, you do that? Well then you are a bunch of lying demagogues, who don’t really care about the facts of the matter at all. What’s Actually going on is that Obama is so tough on secrecy, the Patriot Act renewal, terrorism, the surge in Afghanistan, etc., that he has managed to alienate the whole left wing of the Democratic Party, isn’t that the case? Go away Republicans, you are annoying Obama and nobody’s impressed. Seriously, grow up!

UPDATE: See Experts Urge Keeping Two Options for Terror Trials, The New York Times, March 8, 2010, by Charlie Savage and Scott Shane.