PBS is starting a 5 episode series tonight "The Last Enemy" It's a BBC production which among other things shows Britain being transformed into a surveillance state. Described as a "techno thriller" there's also a certain amount of sex, drama, conspiracy and other goings on which have left some reviewers less than impressed.
Nonetheless, it may be worth a look because it does show how easy it is for a society to slide into a police state mentality, where everyone is suspect, everyone is watched - and accountability is lacking.
I haven't seen the show, have no idea if it is going to live up to its billing, but think it worth noting that someone is at least trying to get the idea out that our liberties and our privacy are slipping away while we seem oblivious. (much more below the fold)
Here's some data from the BBC you may find noteworthy:
The Truth behind The Last Enemy...
• Britain has about five million CCTV cameras, one for every 12 people. More cameras than any other country. (The Times, 27 March 2007)
• "ID cards will link your basic personal information to something uniquely yours - like the pattern of your iris, your face shape or your fingerprint. It will protect your identity from people fraudulently claiming to be you and make it easier for you to prove your identity when you need to - like opening a bank account, moving house, applying for benefits or starting a job." (Identity & Passport Service Website)
• Millions of children as young as 11 are to have their fingerprints taken and stored on a Government database, according to leaked Whitehall plans. The Home Office wants to include children in its biometric passport scheme in three years' time, and automatically transfer their details and fingerprints to the controversial new national identity database when they turn 16. (This is London Website, 4 March 2007)
• 21 of the 25 EU Member States have already introduced ID cards. (Home Office Website)
• The costs of the identity cards project were revealed to have risen by £840m in the last six months to £5.75 billion. (The Guardian, May 2007)
• British citizens will be quizzed on up to 200 different pieces of personal information in a 30 minute grilling if they want a passport... Those who fail to convince the bureaucrats they are who they say will be denied a travel document or face a full investigation by anti-fraud experts. There is no formal appeal process. (Daily Mail, 21 March 2007)
• Advances in surveillance technology could seriously damage individual privacy unless drastic measures are taken to protect personal data, scientists have said. The report by the Royal Academy of Engineering said that travel passes, supermarket loyalty cards and mobile phones could be used to track individuals' every move. They also predicted that CCTV footage could available for public consumption and that terrorists could hijack the biometric chips in passports and rig them up as a trigger for explosives. (The Times, 27 March 2007)
If anyone thinks this is not happening in the U.S. guess again. My own state is offering an 'enhanced' drivers license for proof of identity. It's an option now - but how long before it becomes required? There are already reports of voter registration problems as people find it impossible to establish proof of identity. Part of this is Homeland Security paranoia, but part of it is also for political advantage. Non-persons can't vote, demand government services, or expect to have their rights observed.
The F.B.I. is getting new guidelines for what kind of investigations it should undertake and how; considering they are being promulgated by an administration which has repeatedly trashed the constitution, this should be cause for alarm.
The N.Y. Times:
In 2002, John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, allowed F.B.I. agents to visit public sites like mosques or monitor Web sites in the course of national security investigations. The next year, Mr. Bush issued guidelines allowing officials to use ethnicity or race in “narrow” circumstances to detect a terrorist threat.
The Democratic senators said the draft plan appeared to allow the F.B.I. to go even further in collecting information on Americans connected to “foreign intelligence” without any factual predicate. They also said there appeared to be few constraints on how the information would be shared with other agencies.
Michael German, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union and a former F.B.I. agent, said the plan appeared to open the door still further to the use of data-mining profiles in tracking terrorism.
“This seems to be based on the idea that the government can take a bunch of data and create a profile that can be used to identify future bad guys,” he said. “But that has not been demonstrated to be true anywhere else.”
The Washington Post:
The changes would give the FBI's more than 12,000 agents the ability at a much earlier stage to conduct physical surveillance, solicit informants and interview friends of people they are investigating without the approval of a bureau supervisor. Such techniques are currently available only after FBI agents have opened an investigation and developed a reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed or that a threat to national security is developing.
snip
The move comes a year after the Justice Department's inspector general documented widespread lapses involving one of the bureau's most potent investigative tools, secret "national security letters" that FBI agents send to banks and phone companies to demand sensitive information in terrorism probes.
(It should be noted the Post fails to give details of the abuses and attempts to put the new guidelines in a postive light.)
The Boston Globe:
Agents would be permitted to use tactics that are now allowed only in criminal cases: physical surveillance, recruitment of sources, and "pretext interviews," in which the real purpose would not be revealed.
Justice Department and FBI senior officials briefed reporters on the draft guidelines, but would not be quoted by name because they were discussing proposals that are still likely to be changed.
Some Democratic senators and civil liberties groups have said the proposals would allow Americans to be targeted in part because of their race, ethnicity, or religion, and would allow them to be spied on without any other basis for suspicion.
The American Civil Liberties Union quickly criticized the proposed guidelines. The new rules would "give the FBI the ability to begin surveillance without factual evidence, stating that a generalized 'threat' is enough to use certain techniques," the group said.
"Also under the new guidelines, a person's race or ethnic background could be used as a factor in opening an investigation, a move the ACLU believes will institute racial profiling as a matter of policy."
The administration officials acknowledged that those factors could play a role in national security and foreign intelligence cases. But they said they can already be considered under 2003 rules that are not changing.
emphasis added
Remember the Minneapolis Police raids around the Republican National Convention? Glen Greenwald has been all over this and related stories. While the mainstream traditional media largely ignored the police actions in Minneapolis other than talking about violent rioters among largely peaceful demonstrators (AP story here), Greenwald and others (Firedoglake, et. al.) painted a picture that shows the raids were intentionally aimed at intimidating groups who were attempting to exercise their rights as citizens - and the press as well. As Greenwald noted at the time:
There is clearly an intent on the part of law enforcement authorities here to engage in extreme and highly intimidating raids against those who are planning to protest the Convention. The DNC in Denver was the site of several quite ugly incidents where law enforcement acted on behalf of Democratic Party officials and the corporate elite that funded the Convention to keep the media and protesters from doing anything remotely off-script. But the massive and plainly excessive preemptive police raids in Minnesota are of a different order altogether. Targeting people with automatic-weapons-carrying SWAT teams and mass raids in their homes, who are suspected of nothing more than planning dissident political protests at a political convention and who have engaged in no illegal activity whatsoever, is about as redolent of the worst tactics of a police state as can be imagined.
emphasis added
The actions of the police in Minneapolis demonstrate that they had been preparing for months, infiltrating groups and planning their actions. How far is this going to go? This report should alarm everyone and raise serious questions.
The decision this month to permanently deploy a U.S. Army brigade inside the U.S. for purely domestic law enforcement purposes is the fruit of the Congressional elimination of the long-standing prohibitions in Posse Comitatus (although there are credible signs that even before Congress acted, the Bush administration secretly decided it possessed the inherent power to violate the Act). It shouldn't take any efforts to explain why the permanent deployment of the U.S. military inside American cities, acting as the President's police force, is so disturbing. Bovard:
"Martial law" is a euphemism for military dictatorship. When foreign democracies are overthrown and a junta establishes martial law, Americans usually recognize that a fundamental change has occurred. . . . Section 1076 is Enabling Act-type legislation—something that purports to preserve law-and-order while formally empowering the president to rule by decree.
That America is becoming a country where personal liberties are being curtailed every day, where privacy can no longer be assumed to be a right, where the presumption of guilt ahead of evidence is now a guiding principle - all of this seems to be happening on some other planet while people obsess over Wall Street and Vice Presidential airheads.
The intent is simple. Under the reasonable guise of seeking to protect America against external threats, the government has been quietly assembling a security apparatus that watches everyone. The ACLU is fighting to get the word out.
"Year after year, we have warned that our great nation is turning into a surveillance society where our every move is tracked and monitored," said Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Project. "Now we have before us a program that appears to do that very thing. It brings together numerous programs that we and many others have fought for years, and it confirms what the ACLU has been saying the NSA is up to: mass surveillance of Americans."
Last year, the ACLU created its Surveillance Clock (www.aclu.org/clock) as a way to symbolize the nation’s rapid descent toward a surveillance society. Initially set to six minutes before midnight, the ACLU today moved it up to five minutes before midnight to highlight the greater threat to privacy Americans face in light of the NSA’s activities.
According to the new Journal report, the NSA was engaging in broad domestic spying operations that involve collecting and analyzing the personal information of Americans in ways that are "essentially the same" as TIA. The elements that reportedly make up the new spying encompass a variety of mass surveillance and data mining programs about which the ACLU has previously warned, including:
TIA and other data mining programs.
The NSA’s illegal wiretapping program, the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP).
The Patriot Act’s broadening of FBI power to collect third-party personal information without a subpoena through Section 215 searches and National Security Letters.
The Treasury Department’s expanded surveillance of financial transactions through Cash Transaction Reporting and Suspicious Activity Reporting.
The CIA’s illegitimate access to the SWIFT database to monitor international financial transactions.
DHS’s efforts to increase collection and monitoring of airline passenger data.
Partnerships between these government agencies and private sector entities to collect and monitor customers’ data and transactions.
The erosion of privacy through the judicial creation of a distinction between content and "transactional data" (such as the recipients of e-mails or phone calls and the times and dates of each communication) through the Patriot Act and prior developments.
Whether or not the Last Enemy has any redeeming entertainment value, if it can get what's happening into the general conversation and the political debate (small chance at best), then it will have been worth watching.