Other documents describe the government’s focus not only on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, but also on what the agency calls “the human network that supports WikiLeaks.” In August 2010 the Obama administration urged several allies to file criminal charges against Assange for the group’s publication of the Afghanistan war logs. The discussion around pressuring other nations to prosecute Assange appears in an NSA file that the agency calls its “Manhunting Timeline.” It details, on a country-by-country basis, the efforts by the United States and its allies to locate, prosecute, capture, and/or kill various individuals, among them alleged terrorists, drug traffickers, and Palestinian leaders. A timeline exists for each year between 2008 and 2012.
A separate document contains a summary of a July 2011 exchange regarding whether WikiLeaks, as well as the file-sharing website Pirate Bay, could be designated as “a ‘malicious foreign actor’ for the purposes of targeting.” The designation would allow extensive electronic surveillance of those websites, including US users. The discussion appears in a running list of “Q&As” in which officials from the NTOC Oversight and Compliance office (NOC) and NSA’s Office of General Counsel (OGC) provide answers to submitted questions.
One such exchange, from 2011, showed the NSA’s indifference to breaking the surveillance rules. In the document, an operator says, “I screwed up,” having targeted a US person instead of a foreigner. The response from the NSA’s oversight office and general counsel is, “it’s nothing to worry about.”
The treatment of Anonymous, as well as the vague category of people known as “hacktivists,” is especially troubling and extreme. That’s because Anonymous is not actually a structured group but a loosely organized affiliation of people around an idea: someone becomes affiliated with Anonymous by virtue of the positions they hold. Worse still, the category “hacktivists” has no fixed meaning: it can mean the use of programming skills to undermine the security and functioning of the Internet but can also refer to anyone who uses online tools to promote political ideals. That the NSA targets such broad categories of people is tantamount to allowing it to spy on anyone anywhere, including in the United States, whose ideas the government finds threatening.
Gabriella Coleman, a specialist on Anonymous at McGill University, said that the group “is not a defined” entity but rather “an idea that mobilizes activists to take collective action and voice political discontent. It is a broad-based global social movement with no centralized or official organized leadership structure. Some have rallied around the name to engage in digital civil disobedience, but nothing remotely resembling terrorism.” The majority who have embraced the idea have done so “primarily for ordinary political expression. Targeting Anonymous and hacktivists amounts to targeting citizens for expressing their political beliefs, resulting in the stifling of legitimate dissent,” Coleman explained.
Yet Anonymous has been targeted by a unit of the GCHQ that employs some of the most controversial and radical tactics known to spycraft: “false flag operations,” “honey-traps,” viruses and other attacks, strategies of deception, and “info ops to damage reputations.”
One PowerPoint slide presented by GCHQ surveillance officials at the 2012 SigDev conference describes two forms of attack: “information ops (influence or disruption)” and “technical disruption.” GCHQ refers to these measures as “Online Covert Action,” which is intended to achieve what the document calls “The 4 D’s: Deny/Disrupt/Degrade/Deceive.”
Another slide describes the tactics used to “discredit a target.” These include “set up a honey-trap,” “change their photos on social networking sites,” “write a blog purporting to be one of their victims,” and “email/text their colleagues, neighbors, friends, etc.”
In accompanying notes, the GCHQ explains that the “honey trap”—an old Cold War tactic involving using attractive women to lure male targets into compromising, discrediting situations—has been updated for the digital age: now a target is lured to a compromising site or online encounter. The comment added: “a great option. Very successful when it works.” Similarly, traditional methods of group infiltration are now accomplished online:
Another technique involves stopping “someone from communicating.” To do that, the agency will “bombard their phone with text messages,” “bombard their phone with calls,” “delete their online presence,” and “block up their fax machine.”
The GCHQ also likes to use “disruption” techniques in lieu of what it calls “traditional law enforcement” such as evidence-gathering, courts, and prosecutions. In a document entitled “Cyber Offensive Session: Pushing the Boundaries and Action Against Hacktivism,” the GCHQ discusses its targeting of “hacktivists” with, ironically, “denial of service” attacks, a tactic commonly associated with hackers:
The British surveillance agency also uses a team of social scientists, including psychologists, to develop techniques of “online HUMINT” (human intelligence) and “strategic influence disruption.” The document “The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations” is devoted to these tactics. Prepared by the agency’s HSOC (Human Science Operation Cell), the paper claims to draw on sociology, psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, and biology, among other fields, to maximize the GCHQ’s online deception skills.
One slide shows how to engage in “Dissimulation—Hide the Real,” while propagating “Simulation—Show the False.” It examines “the psychological building blocks of deception” and the “map of technologies” used to carry out the deceptions, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and “Web Pages.”
Emphasizing that “people make decisions for emotional reasons not rational ones,” the GCHQ contends that online behavior is driven by “mirroring” (“people copy each other while in social interaction with them”), “accommodation,” and “mimicry” (“adoption of specific social traits by the communicator from the other participant”).
The document then lays out what it calls the “Disruption Operational Playbook.” This includes “infiltration operation,” “ruse operation,” “false flag operation,” and “sting operation.” It vows a “full roll out” of the disruption program “by early 2013” as “150+ staff [are] fully trained.”
Under the title “Magic Techniques & Experiment,” the document references “Legitimisation of violence,” “Constructing experience in mind of targets which should be accepted so they don’t realize,” and “Optimising deception channels.”
Such government plans to monitor and influence Internet communications and disseminate false information online have long been a source of speculation. Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, a close Obama adviser, the White House’s former head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and an appointee to the White House panel to review NSA activities, wrote a controversial paper in 2008 proposing that the US government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-“independent” advocates for “cognitive infiltration” of online groups, chat rooms, social networks, and websites, as well as off-line activist groups.
These GCHQ documents show for the first time that these controversial techniques to deceive and harm reputations have moved from the proposal stage to implementation.
* * *
All of the evidence highlights the implicit bargain that is offered to citizens: pose no challenge and you have nothing to worry about. Mind your own business, and support or at least tolerate what we do, and you’ll be fine. Put differently, you must refrain from provoking the authority that wields surveillance powers if you wish to be deemed free of wrongdoing. This is a deal that invites passivity, obedience, and conformity. The safest course, the way to ensure being “left alone,” is to remain quiet, unthreatening, and compliant.
For many, the deal is an attractive one, persuading the majority that surveillance is benign or even beneficial. They are too boring to attract the government’s attention, they reason. “I seriously doubt that the NSA is interested in me” is the sort
of thing I’ve often heard. “If they want to listen to my boring life, then they’re welcome.” Or “the NSA isn’t interested in your grandmother talking about her recipes or your dad planning his golf game.”
These are people who have become convinced that they themselves are not going to be personally targeted—because they are unthreatening and compliant—and therefore either deny that it’s happening, do not care, or are willing to support it outright.
Interviewing me soon after the NSA story broke, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell mocked the notion of the NSA as “a big, scary surveillance monster.” Summing up his view, he concluded:
My feeling so far is … I’m not scared … the fact that the government is collecting [data] at such a gigantic, massive level means that it’s even harder for the government to find me … and they have absolutely no incentive to find me. And so I, at this stage, feel completely unthreatened by this.
The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg also asserted similarly dismissive views of the dangers of surveillance. Conceding that there “are reasons to be concerned about intelligence-agency overreach, excessive secrecy, and lack of transparency,” he wrote that “there are also reasons to remain calm,” in particular, that the threat posed “to civil liberties, such as it is, is abstract, conjectural, unspecified.” And the Washington Post’s columnist Ruth Marcus, belittling concern over NSA powers, announced—absurdly—“my metadata almost certainly hasn’t been scrutinized.”
In one important sense, O’Donnell, Hertzberg, and Marcus are right. It is the case that the US government “has absolutely no incentive” to target people like them, for whom the threat from a surveillance state is little more than “abstract, conjectural, unspecified.” That’s because journalists who devote their careers to venerating the country’s most powerful official—the president, who is the NSA’s commander-in-chief—and defending his political party rarely, if ever, risk alienating those in power.
Of course, dutiful, loyal supporters of the president and his policies, good citizens who do nothing to attract negative attention from the powerful, have no reason to fear the surveillance state. This is the case in every society: those who pose no challenge are rarely targeted by oppressive measures, and from their perspective, they can then convince themselves that oppression does not really exist. But the true measure of a society’s freedom is how it treats its dissidents and other marginalized groups, not how it treats good loyalists. Even in the world’s worst tyrannies, dutiful supporters are immunized from abuses of state power. In Mubarak’s Egypt, it was those who took to the street to agitate for his overthrow who were arrested, tortured, gunned down; Mubarak’s supporters and people who quietly stayed at home were not. In the United States, it was NAACP leaders, Communists, and civil rights and anti-war activists who were targeted with Hoover’s surveillance, not well-behaved citizens who stayed mute about social injustice.
We shouldn’t have to be faithful loyalists of the powerful to feel safe from state surveillance. Nor should the price of immunity be refraining from controversial or provocative dissent. We shouldn’t want a society where the message is conveyed that you will be left alone only if you mimic the accommodating behavior and conventional wisdom of an establishment columnist.
Beyond that, the sense of immunity felt by a particular group currently in power is bound to be illusory. That is made clear when we look at how partisan affiliation shapes people’s sense of the dangers of state surveillance. What emerges is that yesterday’s cheerleaders can quickly become today’s dissenters.
At the time of the 2005 NSA warrantless eavesdropping controversy, liberals and Democrats overwhelmingly viewed the agency’s surveillance program as menacing. Part of this, of course, was typical partisan hackery: George W. Bush was president and Democrats saw an opportunity to inflict political harm on him and his party. But a significant part of their fear was genuine: because they considered Bush malicious and dangerous, they perceived that state surveillance under his control was therefore threatening and that they in particular were endangered as political opponents. Accordingly, Republicans had a more benign or supportive view of the NSA’s actions. In December 2013, by contrast, Democrats and progressives had converted to the leading NSA defenders.
Ample polling data reflected this shift. At the end of July 2013, the Pew Research Center released a poll showing that the majority of Americans disbelieved the defenses offered for the NSA’s actions. In particular, “a majority of Americans—56%—say that federal courts fail to provide adequate limits on the telephone and Internet data the government is collecting as part of its anti-terrorism efforts.” And “an even larger percentage (70%) believes that the government uses this data for purposes other than investigating terrorism.” Moreover, “63% think the government is also gathering information about the content of communications.”
Most remarkably, Americans now considered the danger of surveillance of greater concern than the danger of terrorism:
Overall, 47% say their greater concern about government anti-terrorism policies is that they have gone too far in restricting the average person’s civil liberties, while 35% say they are more concerned that policies have not gone far enough to protect the country. This is the first time in Pew Research polling that more have expressed concern over civil liberties than protection from terrorism since the question was first asked in 2004.
That polling data was good news for anyone alarmed by use of excessive government power and the chronic exaggeration of the threat of terrorism. But it highlighted a telling inversion: Republicans, who had been defenders of the NSA under Bush, had been supplanted by Democrats once the surveillance system had come under the control of President Obama, one of their own. “Nationwide, there is more support for the government’s data-collection program among Democrats (57% approve) than among Republicans (44%).”
Similar polling data from the Washington Post revealed that conservatives were far more concerned about NSA spying than liberals. When asked, “How concerned are you, if at all, about the collection and use of your personal information by the National Security Agency?” 48 percent of conservatives were “very concerned” compared to only 26 percent of liberals. As law professor Orin Kerr noted, this represented a fundamental change: “It’s an interesting reversal from 2006, when the President was a Republican instead of a Democrat. Back then, a Pew poll found 75% of Republicans approved of NSA surveillance but only 37% of Democrats approved.”
A Pew chart makes the shift clear:
The arguments for and against surveillance brazenly rotate, based on which party in power. The NSA’s collection of bulk metadata was vehemently denounced by one senator on The Early Show in 2006 in this way:
I don’t have to listen to your phone calls to know what you’re doing. If I know every single phone call that you made, I am able to determine every single person you talked to. I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive.… And the real question here is: What do they do with this information that they collect that does not have anything to do with Al Qaeda?… And we’re going to trust the president and the vice president of the United States that they’re doing the right thing? Don’t count me in on that.
The senator so harshly attacking metadata collection was Joe Biden, who subsequently, as vice president, became part of a Democratic administration that advanced precisely the same arguments he once derided.
The relevant point here is not merely that many partisan loyalists are unprincipled hypocrites with no real convictions other than a quest for power, although that is certainly true. More important is what such statements reveal about the nature of how one regards state surveillance. As with so many injustices, people are willing to dismiss fear of government overreach when they believe that those who happen to be in control are benevolent and trustworthy. They consider surveillance dangerous or worth caring about only when they perceive that they themselves are threatened by it.
Radical expansions of power are o
ften introduced in this way, by persuading people that they affect just a specific, discrete group. Governments have long convinced populations to turn a blind eye to oppressive conduct by leading citizens to believe, rightly or wrongly, that only certain marginalized people are targeted, and everyone else can acquiesce to or even support that oppression without fear that it will be applied to them. Leaving aside the obvious moral shortcomings of this position—we do not dismiss racism because it is directed at a minority, or shrug off hunger on the grounds that we enjoy a plentiful supply of food—it is almost always misguided on pragmatic grounds.
The indifference or support of those who think themselves exempt invariably allows for the misuse of power to spread far beyond its original application, until the abuse becomes impossible to control—as it inevitably will. There are too many examples to count, but perhaps the most recent and potent one is the exploitation of the Patriot Act. A near-unanimous Congress approved a massive increase in surveillance and detention powers after 9/11, convinced by the argument that doing so would detect and prevent future attacks.
The implicit assumption was that the powers would be used principally against Muslims in relation to terrorism—a classic expansion of power confined to a particular group engaged in a particular kind of act—which is one reason why the measure received overwhelming backing. But what happened was very different: the Patriot Act has been applied well beyond its ostensible purpose. In fact, since its enactment, it has been used overwhelmingly in cases having nothing at all to do with terrorism or national security. New York magazine revealed that from 2006 to 2009, the “sneak and peek” provision of the act (license to execute a search warrant without immediately informing the target) was used in 1,618 drug-related cases, 122 cases connected with fraud, and just 15 that involved terrorism.
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