Spies for Hire

by Tim Shorrock

  In recent years, military, intelligence, and police work have been combined in “fusion centers” being built around the country in a little-known program of the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. At present, there are forty-three current and planned fusion centers in the United States where data from intelligence agencies, the FBI, local police, private sector databases, and anonymous tipsters are combined and analyzed by counterterrorism analysts. DHS hopes to create a national network of such centers that would be tied into the agency’s day-to-day activities. According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the project “inculcates DHS with enormous domestic surveillance powers and evokes comparisons with the publicly condemned domestic surveillance program of COINTELPRO,” the 1960s program by the FBI to destroy the left. Still, none of these programs can compare to the incredible power of the spy satellites controlled by the NRO on behalf of U.S. imagery and signals intelligence agencies.

  The groundwork for linking those agencies with homeland security was first laid in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast in the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. Prior to Katrina, the NGA had been used sporadically during domestic crises. Its first baptism of fire came after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when the agency collected imagery to help in the recovery efforts at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A year later, during a two-week killing spree in the Washington, D.C., area by a pair of demented snipers, the CIA and the FBI used images provided by the NGA to search for places near highways where the two men might be hiding. But the storm of 2005 triggered NGA activity on a scale never before seen inside the borders of the United States. “Hurricane Katrina changed everything with what we do with disasters,” John Goolgasian, the director of the NGA’s Office of Americas, told me in a 2006 interview. In New York after 9/11, the NGA only had a handful of people on the ground, but “with Katrina, we put a lot of people down in the theater,” he said, using a term usually reserved for military battlegrounds overseas. The NGA’s sophisticated surveillance tools, which can create three-dimensional maps, helped first-responders identify hospitals, schools, and areas where hazardous materials were stored in the Gulf Coast region. And in an unprecedented move, the NGA distributed thousands of unclassified images of stricken areas, via the Internet, to the public.

  “People could actually see their houses,” General Clapper, who was the NGA director at the time of Katrina, told me a few months before his 2007 appointment as the chief intelligence adviser to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. The NGA’s work during the hurricane was “the most graphic example in my forty years of intelligence of coming to the direct aid of people in extreme circumstances,” Clapper, a former director of both the DIA and NGA, added. David Burpee, the NGA’s director of public affairs, said the NGA operates under strict oversight rules that ban the agency from collecting imagery over the United States without a formal request from a “lead” domestic agency coordinating efforts during a disaster. In the case of the California fires and Hurricane Katrina, that assistance was requested by FEMA.

  The Katrina effort also involved the first known domestic operations of a U-2, which was deployed to the Gulf Coast region in the days before the storm. The link between Pentagon-driven intelligence operations and the homeland was underscored by the NGA’s deployment to New Orleans of a special vehicle called a Mobile Integrated Geospatial-Intelligence System, which is loaded with equipment that allows NGA analysts to download intelligence from U-2s and U.S. military satellites. The vehicles, known as MIGS and manufactured by General Dynamics, were first deployed by the NGA to Iraq and Afghanistan, and later to the Gulf Coast. “They’re pretty much the NGA in a Humvee—very military,” said the NGA’s John Goolgasian. “But it kind of sticks out like a sore thumb if you’re driving into an urban area” in the United States (as a result, the NGA has painted the domestic vehicles blue, and renamed them Domestic MIGS, or DMIGS).

  The purpose and utility of such intelligence tools in a disaster area or in a war zone are clear. But it doesn’t take much imagination to see how powerful technologies, when combined with secretive, growing interagency collaboration, can be misused in a domestic context. In recent years many U.S. cities have deployed sophisticated video cameras throughout their downtown areas that track activity twenty-four hours a day. And U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies now have at their disposal facial recognition software that can identify one person among thousands in a large crowd. Moreover, as we’ve seen in previous chapters, the NSA has tremendous power at its disposal to listen in on the conversations of millions of Americans, both at home and abroad. But when collection agencies combine their technologies, as the NGA and the NSA have been doing for the past three years, the effect of such surveillance is increased exponentially.

  In 2004, as we have seen, the NSA and the NGA signed an agreement to share resources and staff and link their information infrastructure and exploitation techniques, thus allowing the two agencies to work together “using NGA’s ‘eyes’ and NSA’s ‘ears.’” The collaboration—which includes permanently stationing analysts at each other’s head-quarters as well as in war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan—has made it possible for the two agencies to create hybrid intelligence tools that combine intercepts of cell phone calls with overhead imagery gathered by unmanned aerial vehicles to significantly enhance the ability of U.S. forces in combat. In 2006, such tools allowed the U.S. military to locate and kill Abu Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

  Since then, according to the NGA’s director, Admiral Robert Murrett, the NGA’s collaboration with the NSA has deepened significantly, creating an “absolutely vital” partnership that is “making a big difference” in U.S. contingencies around the world. “When the NSA and NGA work together, one plus one equals five,” he told reporters at GEOINT 2007 in San Antonio. When I asked him for examples, Murrett told me that recent developments in full motion video and NSA/NGA collaboration have created “lots of successes” for U.S. forces in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the Horn of Africa and the Philippines.

  Transfer that to a domestic context, and the possibilities are ominous. Using the same technologies the NGA and NSA have deployed in Iraq and in the global war on terror, the government could conceivably follow the movements of certain individuals minute by minute. It could watch a person depart from a mosque in, say, Lodi, California, drive a car from Chicago to Detroit, or move around through a city like New York and Los Angeles. And as the intelligence infrastructure, including the kinds of local camera surveillance systems that proved so useful in identifying the perpetrators of the London subway bombings, expands in the United States, it raises the specter of a nationwide surveillance web. “These networks are going to get denser and going to cover more area over time,” says John Pike. “At some point in time somebody’s going to drop in an automated face-print recognizer, and then they’re off to the races. Anybody who is currently wanted by the authorities, well, there’s just going to be parts of the country where such a person could not enter.”79 Those scenarios, under proposals currently under discussion in Congress, are now becoming reality.

  The Bush administration’s intelligence sharing plan originally called for the National Applications Office to be set up by October 1, 2007.80 But after reports of the plan leaked to the press, Congress demanded and received a promise to delay the opening of the office until further studies were conducted on its legal basis and questions about civil liberties were answered. “The enormity of the NAO’s capabilities and the intended use of the imagery received through these satellites for domestic homeland security purposes, and the unintended consequences that may arise, have heightened concerns among the general public, including reputable civil rights and civil liberties organizations,” Mississippi Democrat Bennie G. Thompson, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, wrote in an August 22, 2007, letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.* Thompson demanded biweekly updates on the activities and progress of
the new organization.

  During a Homeland Security hearing in September 2007 called by Thompson, Charles Allen of DHS said the civil liberties concerns were misplaced. “We are not going to be penetrating buildings, bunkers or people’s homes with this,” he said. “I view that as absurd. My view is that no American should be concerned.”81 But his comments did little to mollify critics and civil libertarians. The formation of the NAO “potentially marks a transformation of American political culture toward a surveillance state in which the entire public domain is subject to official monitoring,” said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists.82 In the debate that followed, few observers noted that the plan to expand the reach of spy satellites into the homeland had been drafted by a company that had much to gain from its implementation: Booz Allen Hamilton.

  The domestic intelligence study group was commissioned in May 2005 by the Office of the DNI and the director of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Specifically, they asked Booz Allen to analyze how satellite sensing data could be used for applications “that are civil and/or domestic in nature and involve the use of Intelligence Community capabilities and products.” In addition to Booz Allen’s Hall and seven other Booz Allen employees, the Independent Study Group included retired Army Lieutenant General Patrick M. Hughes, the former director of the DIA and vice president of homeland security for L-3 Communications; Thomas W. Conroy, the vice president of national security programs for Northrop Grumman; Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, the independent consultant for Northrop Grumman, SAIC, and several government agencies; three other former officials employed by private sector companies, law firms, and research institutes; and one official from the ODNI and two from the U.S. Geological Survey.

  From the beginning, therefore, the group was heavily weighted toward people and companies with a major stake in the intelligence business. We’ve seen throughout this book how extensively Booz Allen is involved in both intelligence and homeland security; so, too, are Northrop Grumman and L-3. It’s difficult to believe that Hall’s group, dominated by companies prominent in the area of integrating classified and unclassified intelligence networks, would have reached any other conclusion than it did: that the rapid merging of foreign and domestic intelligence was desirable and necessary.

  The original purpose of the study group was to recommend ways to update regulations that had been in place since the 1970s governing the domestic use of satellite signals and imagery. Previously, the use of such data had been governed by the Civil Applications Committee, chartered in 1975 and managed by the USGS, which, with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), was one of a handful of agencies cleared to use spy satellites for civil and domestic purposes. But in the intervening years and particularly after 9/11, the Booz Allen study team said, the “threats to the nation have changed and there is a growing interest in making available the special capabilities of the Intelligence Community to all parts of the government, to include homeland security and law enforcement entities and on a higher priority basis.” The capabilities studied by the team encompassed practically every collection vehicle, including satellite and airborne sensors, “NSA worldwide assets,” military and other MASINT sensors that can detect traces left behind by chemical weapons or heat emanating from people inside a building, and “sophisticated exploitation/analytic capabilities.”

  The unclassified Booz Allen report was released in September 2005.83 It recommended the establishment of a Domestic Applications Program to be funded by the DNI and run jointly by the ODNI and the DHS. The program would house a Domestic Applications Office “to provide a focal point and act as a facilitator to the IC on behalf of civil, homeland security and law enforcement users.” It also recommended that domestic users of intelligence be given a “seat at the table” to “influence policy, R&D and acquisition decisions.” In addition, the report criticized the legal infrastructure guiding intelligence activities today as “risk-averse.” The effect of this approach, the study group said, “causes delay, uncertainty and may result in missed opportunities to collect, exploit and disseminate information critical to the anti-terrorism, homeland security and law enforcement missions.”

  In one of its most significant passages, the study group zeroed in on what it called the “strong, and often uninformed public reaction” to the Intelligence Community’s misdeeds during the 1970s and the homeland security initiatives, such as the Patriot Act, put in place by the government after 9/11. These events, it said, have sparked a backlash in the public and created a narrow, “hyper-conservative view of what can be done” in the domestic arena. The debate that has taken place, the group argued, “often appears to be a debate with only one voice, often ill-informed and sometimes completely uninformed.”

  In response to this public reaction, the Booz Allen group urged the Bush administration, Congress, and the Intelligence Community to “inform this debate, credibly, on the challenges of intelligence support in the war on terror, and especially on the methods taken to protect the legitimate rights of American citizens.” To “optimize support” among the public and ease fears about the “perceived impact” of its actions “on the legitimate rights of American citizens,” the group urged the IC to gradually introduce the idea of using SIGINT, GEOINT, and MASINT for domestic security with “a period of considerable experimentation and discovery.” That language closely matched what McConnell would propose for the study of domestic intelligence while he was the president of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance and, later, when he testified to the Senate during his confirmation hearings as director of national intelligence. Foreign and domestic intelligence have now merged into a single discipline—the ultimate aim of Booz Allen and its fellow intelligence contractors after September 11.

  Despite the complaints from Congress and civil libertarians, the integration of foreign intelligence with homeland security is moving ahead at full steam. The DHS’s Allen, who will manage the new National Applications Office, told a conference of geospatial intelligence contractors in October 2007 that the ODNI is working with DHS and the Departments of Justice and the Interior to draft the charter for the organization, which he said will face “layers of review” once it is established by the beginning of 2008.

  As he did before Congress, Allen cautioned that public concerns about civil liberties are off the mark. There has “never been one case where the NGA was used domestically” for espionage purposes, he said. The fruits of the IC’s collaboration with homeland security agencies, he argued, were exemplified by the NGA’s sharing of imagery about the California wildfires: “We’re saving lives.” Other officials downplayed the dangers as well. What the NGA is doing domestically “is really benign,” says NGA director Murrett. “The aspects dealing with rights are transparent.”84

  Congress, however, wasn’t buying it. In December 2007, the House and Senate passed an amendment to a defense spending bill that prohibited funding for the new program until Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security, can show the NAO will adhere to civil liberties and the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, has certified the program as constitutional. “We still haven’t seen the legal framework we requested or the standard operation procedures on how the NAO will actually be run,” Representative Thompson told the Wall Street Journal.85 But the nation’s intelligence leadership seemed nonplussed.

  In October 2007, after delivering his first public speech as principal deputy director of national intelligence, Donald Kerr, the former director of the NRO, was asked about the DNI’s plans to share remote-sensing imagery with homeland security and law enforcement. Did the plan reflect the dangers about state intrusion in private lives as depicted in Enemy of the State? (that 1998 film tells the story of a lawyer hounded by the NSA after he learns the details of a crime committed by a politician with close ties to the surveillance agency). Absolutely not, replied Kerr. “The point that everybody should take away is that the rules under which GEOINT is used do
mestically will not change,” he said. “They are still in place. Admiral Murrett will continue to be the release authority under appropriate legislation for all such data acquired domestically. And this proposal does not change that in any way.” As far as the movies go, Kerr blasted Hollywood for producing films like Enemy of the State and 2007’s The Good Shepherd, about the CIA. Those films, he said, “have poisoned the well of public opinion in some ways, and make people think we focus on safety mainly for governmental activities to the exclusion of all else.” But that’s untrue, he claimed: “We have always been a free people who can defend ourselves without giving up the liberties that animate us to action.”86

  That, of course, remains to be seen. But there is no doubt about who will benefit from the new policy: intelligence contractors. As a result of the commercialization and privatization of intelligence operations, particularly in geospatial intelligence, the tools that allow agencies to share information between themselves and with domestic intelligence and law enforcement agencies are owned and operated by private sector companies. As we’ve seen, three of the leading NGA and NSA contractors—Booz Allen Hamilton, Northrop Grumman, and L-3 Communications—were the primary authors of the “independent” study. ChoicePoint and other companies represented by former attorney general John Ashcroft provide much of the financial and personal data on U.S. citizens used by the government to identify and analyze “communities of interest” for intelligence agencies.