Top Ten American Steps Toward a Police State

Guest article

by Juan Cole

The police state, a term first coined in the mid-19th century in German (Polizeistaat), is characterized by a standing political police, by intense domestic surveillance and by restrictions on the movements of citizens.  Police states are on a spectrum, and unfortunately in the past

decade the Unite States has moved toward police-stateness in small but key ways.  Here are the signs:

1. The United States National Security Administration recently requisitioned all Verizon phone records in the US for a period of 3 months.  Your telephone records (who you called and for how long) say a great deal about you.  This is a form of mass surveillance.  

2. The US has assigned 250 NSA agents to sift through a massive further British database of US telecommunications and email, derived from attaching packet analyzers to transatlantic fiber optic cables.  

3. The Federal government claims the right to examine the contents of the laptops of US citizens whenever they enter the United States, in contravention of the Fourth Amendment.  Some 60 million Americans travel abroad annually.  

4. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world.  Those in prison have grown from 220 per 100,000 population to over 700 per 100,000 population since 1980.  The US holds over two million inmates, and has 6 million people at any one time under carceral supervision– more than were in Stalin’s Gulag.  State spending on prisons has risen at 6 times the rate of spending on higher education.  

5. Some 6 million persons convicted of felonies have been disenfranchised and cannot vote.  Most are not in prison.  Because of the ‘war on drugs,’ many of these persons are not actually guilty of serious crimes.  The practice hits the poor and minorities.  Some 7 percent of African-Americans is ineligible to vote, but less than 2 percent of whites is.  

6. Police can take DNA samples of all arrestees on serious crimes, whether they are proven guilty or not.  Even Justice Scalia believes the ruling opens the door for DNA sample collection for all arrests.  Some 13 million Americans are arrested annually, 1.6 million on drugs charges and half of those on marijuana charges.

7. American police are becoming militarized, with SWAT teams proliferating, and use of drones, GPS tracking devices, and military equipment, as well as participation of National Guards in the ‘war on drugs.’  

8. Legislators are increasingly attempting to criminalize public protest, as with a current bill that would make it a crime knowingly to ‘trespass’ in security zones where persons are found who are under secret service protection.  Authorities have sometimes also attempted to restrict public protesters to “protest zones”, thus keeping them out of the view of news cameras.  

9. The USA PATRIOT Act institutes gag orders that are a violation of the 1st Amendment,forbidding persons and companies from revealing that the government has secretly asked for surveillance records.

10. The same act allows government agencies (including the Pentagon) to issue “National Security Letters” without any warrant, making broad and unspecific demands for records on large numbers of persons.  

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Defense Firm's Spy Software Tracking You on Social Media

Software tracking people on social media created by defense firm  

by Ryan Gallagher of The Guardian 

A multinational security firm has secretly developed software capable of tracking people's movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.  

A video obtained by the Guardian [see below] reveals how an "extreme-scale analytics" system created by Raytheon, the world's fifth largest defence contractor, can gather vast amounts of information about people from websites including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.  

Raytheon says it has not sold the software – named Riot, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology – to any clients.  

But the Massachusetts-based company has acknowledged the technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analysing "trillions of entities" from cyberspace.  

The power of Riot to harness popular websites for surveillance offers a rare insight into controversial techniques that have attracted interest from intelligence and national security agencies, at the same time prompting civil liberties and online privacy concerns.  

The sophisticated technology demonstrates how the same social networks that helped propel the Arab Spring revolutions can be transformed into a "Google for spies" and tapped as a means of monitoring and control.  

Using Riot it is possible to gain an entire snapshot of a person's life – their friends, the places they visit charted on a map – in little more than a few clicks of a button.  

In the video obtained by the Guardian, it is explained by Raytheon's "principal investigator" Brian Urch that photographs users post on social networks sometimes contain latitude and longitude details – automatically embedded by smartphones within "exif header data."  

Riot pulls out this information, showing not only the photographs posted onto social networks by individuals, but also the location at which the photographs were taken.  

"We're going to track one of our own employees," Urch says in the video, before bringing up pictures of "Nick," a Raytheon staff member used as an example target.  With information gathered from social networks, Riot quickly reveals Nick frequently visits Washington Nationals Park, where on one occasion he snapped a photograph of himself posing with a blonde haired woman.  

"We know where Nick's going, we know what Nick looks like," Urch explains, "now we want to try to predict where he may be in the future."  

Riot can display on a spider diagram the associations and relationships between individuals online by looking at who they have communicated with over Twitter.  It can also mine data from Facebook and sift GPS location information from Foursquare, a mobile phone app used by more than 25 million people to alert friends of their whereabouts.  The Foursquare data can be used to display, in graph form, the top 10 places visited by tracked individuals and the times at which they visited them.  

The video shows that Nick, who posts his location regularly on Foursquare, visits a gym frequently at 6am early each week.  Urch quips: "So if you ever did want to try to get hold of Nick, or maybe get hold of his laptop, you might want to visit the gym at 6am on a Monday."  

Mining from public websites for law enforcement is considered legal in most countries.  In February last year, for instance, the FBI requested help to develop a social-media mining application for monitoring "bad actors or groups".  

However, Ginger McCall, an attorney at the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Centre, said the Raytheon technology raised concerns about how troves of user data could be covertly collected without oversight or regulation.  

"Social networking sites are often not transparent about what information is shared and how it is shared," McCall said.  "Users may be posting information that they believe will be viewed only by their friends, but instead, it is being viewed by government officials or pulled in by data collection services like the Riot search."  

Raytheon, which made sales worth an estimated $25bn (£16bn) in 2012, did not want its Riot demonstration video to be revealed on the grounds that it says it shows a "proof of concept" product that has not been sold to any clients.  

Jared Adams, a spokesman for Raytheon's intelligence and information systems department, said in an email:  "Riot is a big data analytics system design we are working on with industry, national labs and commercial partners to help turn massive amounts of data into useable information to help meet our nation's rapidly changing security needs.  

"Its innovative privacy features are the most robust that we're aware of, enabling the sharing and analysis of data without personally identifiable information [such as social security numbers, bank or other financial account information] being disclosed."  

In December, Riot was featured in a newly published patent Raytheon is pursuing for a system designed to gather data on people from social networks, blogs and other sources to identify whether they should be judged a security risk.  

In April, Riot was scheduled to be showcased at a US government and industry national security conference for secretive, classified innovations, where it was listed under the category "big data – analytics, algorithms."  

According to records published by the US government's trade controls department, the technology has been designated an "EAR99" item under export regulations, which means it "can be shipped without a licence to most destinations under most circumstances".  

How Raytheon software tracks you online

In this video obtained by the Guardian, Raytheon's 'principal investigator' Brian Urch explains how the Rapid Information Overlay Technology (Riot) software uses photographs on social networks.  These images sometimes contain latitude and longitude details – automatically embedded by smartphones within so-called 'exif header data'.  Riot pulls out this information, analysing not only the photographs posted by individuals, but also the location where these images were taken.