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“Top Secret America” is a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked – with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it.

The articles in this series and an online database at topsecretamerica.com depict the scope and complexity of the government’s national security program through interactive maps and other graphics. Every data point on the Web site is substantiated by at least two public records.

Because of the nature of this project, we allowed government officials to see the Web site several months ago and asked them to tell us of any specific concerns. They offered none at that time. As the project evolved, we shared the Web site’s revised capabilities. Again, we asked for specific concerns. One government body objected to certain data points on the site and explained why; we removed those items. Another agency objected that the entire Web site could pose a national security risk but declined to offer specific comments.
We made other public safety judgments about how much information to show on the Web site. For instance, we used the addresses of company headquarters buildings, information which, in most cases, is available on companies’ own Web sites, but we limited the degree to which readers can use the zoom function on maps to pinpoint those or other locations.

Our maps show the headquarters buildings of the largest government agencies involved in top-secret work. A user can also see the cities and towns where the government conducts top-secret work in the United States, but not the specific locations, companies or agencies involved.

Within a responsible framework, our objective is to provide as much information as possible, so readers gain a real, granular understanding of the scale and breadth of the top-secret world we are describing.

Source: Telegraph UK

President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said here today.

It’s “the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government” to centralize efforts toward creating an “identity ecosystem” for the Internet, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said.

That news, first reported by CNET, effectively pushes the department to the forefront of the issue, beating out other potential candidates including the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. The move also is likely to please privacy and civil liberties groups that have raised concerns in the past over the dual roles of police and intelligence agencies.

The announcement came at an event today at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, where U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Schmidt spoke.

The Obama administration is currently drafting what it’s calling the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, which Locke said will be released by the president in the next few months. (An early version was publicly released last summer.)

“We are not talking about a national ID card,” Locke said at the Stanford event. “We are not talking about a government-controlled system. What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities.”

The Commerce Department will be setting up a national program office to work on this project, Locke said.

Details about the “trusted identity” project are unusually scarce. Last year’s announcement referenced a possible forthcoming smart card or digital certificate that would prove that online users are who they say they are. These digital IDs would be offered to consumers by online vendors for financial transactions.

Schmidt stressed today that anonymity and pseudonymity will remain possible on the Internet. “I don’t have to get a credential if I don’t want to,” he said. There’s no chance that “a centralized database will emerge,” and “we need the private sector to lead the implementation of this,” he said.

Inter-agency rivalries to claim authority over cybersecurity have exited ever since many responsibilities were centralized in the Department of Homeland Security as part of its creation nine years ago. Three years ago, proposals were were circulating in Washington to transfer authority to the secretive NSA, which is part of the U.S. Defense Department.

In March 2009, Rod Beckstrom, director of Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity Center, resigned through a letter that gave a rare public glimpse into the competition for budgetary dollars and cybersecurity authority. Beckstrom said at the time that the NSA “effectively controls DHS cyber efforts through detailees, technology insertions,” and has proposed moving some functions to the agency’s Fort Meade, Md., headquarters.

Source: CBS News

A new piece of technology may soon be coming to South Florida, but is already raising concerns from residents.

The Miami-Dade Police Department recently finalized a deal to buy a drone, which is an unmanned plane equipped with cameras. Drones have been used for years in Iraq and Afghanistan in the war against terror.

Many residents are concerned that the new technology will violate their privacy.

MDPD purchased a drone named T-hawk from defense firm Honeywell to assist with the department’s Special Response Team’s operations. The 20-pound drone can fly for 40 minutes, reach heights of 10,500 feet and cruise in the air at 46 miles an hour. “It gives us a good opportunity to have an eye up there. Not a surveilling eye, not a spying eye. Let’s make the distinction. A surveilling eye to help us to do the things we need to do, honestly, to keep people safe,” said Miami-Dade Police Director James Loftus.

The ACLU is one of the organizations that is concerned about the drone that may soon be coming to Miami-Dade County. Howard Simon, the executive director of the ACLU of Florida approves of the drones but also advocates strict regulation of the drones. “Technology: there’s no reason not to embrace technology if it makes the streets safer, if it helps the police. The concern is, though, that every new technology also has within it the capacity to threaten people’s privacy,” he said.

Terrorism expert Douglas Haas, however, believes that the drones will help in many ways, including fighting crime. “This has unlimited capabilities,” said Haas. “Not only is it good tactically for a SWAT call out or any tactical situation, there’s numerous search and rescue applications for it after a hurricane. They could send one of these up fast and assess damage.”

Residents have also questioned whether or not Miami-Dade Police can afford to purchase the drone, especially since the department has recently made a lot of budget cuts. “Nothing happens quickly in the purchasing process, and that’s something that really was in place, the funds for that, a couple of years ago,” Loftus said.

The purchase of the drone may have been made possible through a federal grant; however, this has not been confirmed.

Honeywell has applied to the FAA for clearance to fly the drone in urban areas. This has never been allowed before, but if it does happen, the Miami-Dade Police Department will be the first police agency in the US to use the technology.

Source: WSVN TV

Mayor In London, Meets With Police Chief And Examine City’s Security System Consisting Of 500,000 Cameras

Fact: Average Londoner  Can Be Filmed 300 Times In A Single Day

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has his eye on more security against terror attacks. He went to London Tuesday to check out their surveillance camera system, one of the largest in the world.

Ever since the Times Square car bomb scare on May 1, the mayor’s been looking to build up New York’s camera network.

That means adding to the ring of steel in Times Square, similar to central London’s. The mayor said more NYPD surveillance cameras may prevent another terror scare.

London has 500,000 surveillance cameras, more than any other city in the world.

Bloomberg visited London’s mayor to see how these help Britain fight terror.

“We live in a world of suicide bombers. We live in a world of international terrorism,” Bloomberg said.

And a world where both cities have been targets. Bloomberg came to take a closer look at the sprawling security network throughout London — known as the “Ring of Steel.” The mayor’s hoping to beef up New York’s own surveillance system in the wake of the failed car bomb attack in Times Square.

“It’s not clear that they would have helped in Times Square. Other than if the perpetrator knew there were cameras, he might not have tried to come into Times Square,” Bloomberg said.

London’s about the same size as New York and its transit systems handle roughly the same number of people every day.

Nearly everywhere you look in London, there’s someone or some “thing” looking right back at you. In fact, you could be caught on camera as many as 300 times in the course of one day.

Cameras record the license plate of every single car that enters the capital. Yet it didn’t stop terrorists from planting a car bomb outside this downtown nightclub three years ago. It failed to go off.

“Nobody’s going to make the world perfectly safe, but wouldn’t you rather be somewhat safer?” Bloomberg said.

He’s banking on it as he plans to take “Big Brother Britain” back to New York City.

London’s “Ring of Steel” was the inspiration for the 3,000-camera network being installed in lower Manhattan and Midtown. The NYPD hopes all the cameras are installed by the end of 2011.

Source: WCBS TV

A new type of speed cameras which can use satellites to measure average speed over long distances are being tested in Britain.

The cameras, which combine number plate reading technology with a global positioning satellite receiver, are similar to those used in roadworks.

The AA said it believed the new system could cover a network of streets as opposed to a straight line, and was “probably geared up to zones in residential areas.”

The Home Office is testing the cameras at two sites, one in Southwark, London, and the other A374 between Antony and Torpoint in Cornwall.

The `SpeedSpike’ system, which calculates average speed between any two points in the network, has been developed by PIPS Technology Ltd, an American-owned company with a base in Hampshire.

Details of the trials are contained in a House of Commons report. The company said in its evidence that the cameras enabled “number plate capture in all weather conditions, 24 hours a day”. It also referred to the system’s “low cost” and ease of installation.

The system could be used for “main road enforcement for congestion reduction and speed enforcement”, and could help to “eliminate rat-runs” and cut speeds outside schools, it added. It could also reduce the need for speed humps.

The development of speed cameras has raised concerns about expanding state surveillance.

The Home Office said it was unable to comment on the trials because of “commercial confidentiality”.

The AA said it would watch the system “carefully” but it did not believe there was anything sinister. “It is a natural evolution of the technology that is out there,” a spokesman said.

Source: Telegraph UK

There are no naked pre-cogs inside glowing jacuzzis yet, but the Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice will use analysis software to predict crime by young delinquents, putting potential offenders under specific prevention and education programs. Goodbye, human rights!

They will use this software on juvenile delinquents, using a series of variables to determine the potential for these people to commit another crime. Depending on this probability, they will put them under specific re-education programs. Deepak Advani—vice president of predictive analytics at IBM—says the system gives “reliable projections” so governments can take “action in real time” to “prevent criminal activities?”

Really? “Reliable projections”? “Action in real time”? “Preventing criminal activities”? I don’t know about how reliable your system is, IBM, but have you ever heard of the 5th, the 6th, and the 14th Amendments to the United States Constitution? What about article 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? No? Let’s make this easy then: Didn’t you watch that scientology nutcase in Minority Report?

Sure. Some will argue that these juvenile delinquents were already convicted for other crimes, so hey, there’s no harm. This software will help prevent further crimes. It will make all of us safer? But would it? Where’s the guarantee of that? Why does the state have to assume that criminal behavior is a given? And why should the government decide who goes to an specific prevention program or who doesn’t based on what a computer says? The fact is that, even if the software was 99.99% accurate, there will be always an innocent person who will be fucked. And that is exactly why we have something called due process and the presumption of innocence. That’s why those things are not only in the United States Constitution, but in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights too.

Other people will say that government officials already makes these decisions based on reports and their own judgement. True. It seems that a computer program may be fairer than a human, right? Maybe. But at the end the interpretation of the data is always in the hands of humans (and the program itself is written by humans).

But what really worries me is that this is a first big step towards something larger and darker. Actually, it’s the second: IBM says that the Ministry of Justice in the United Kingdom—which has an impeccable record on not pre-judging its citizens—already uses this system to prevent criminal activities. Actually, it may be the third big step, because there’s already software in place to blacklist people as potential terrorist, although most probably not as sophisticated as this.

IBM clearly wants this to go big. They have spent a whooping $12 billion beefing up its analytics division. Again, here’s the full quote from Deepak Advani:

Predictive analytics gives government organizations worldwide a highly-sophisticated and intelligent source to create safer communities by identifying, predicting, responding to and preventing criminal activities. It gives the criminal justice system the ability to draw upon the wealth of data available to detect patterns, make reliable projections and then take the appropriate action in real time to combat crime and protect citizens.

If that sounds scary to you, that’s because it is. First it’s the convicted-but-potentially-recidivistic criminals. Then it’s the potential terrorists. Then it’s everyone of us, in a big database, getting flagged because some combination of factors—travel patterns, credit card activity, relationships, messaging, social activity and everything else—indicate that we may be thinking about doing something against the law. Potentially, a crime prediction system can avoid murder, robbery, or a terrorist act.

It actually sounds like a good idea. For example, there are certain patterns that can identify psychopaths and potential killers or child abusers or wife beaters. It only makes sense to put a future system in place that can prevent identify potential criminals, then put them under surveillance.

The reality is that it’s not such a good idea: While everything may seem driven by the desire to achieve better security, one single false positive would make the whole system unfair. And that’s not even getting into the potential abuse of such a system. Like the last time IBM got into a vaguely similar business for a good cause, during the 1930s. They shipped a lot of cataloguing machines to certain government in Europe, to put together an advanced census. That was good. Census can improve societies by identifying needs and problems that the government can solve. At the end, however, that didn’t end well for more than 11 million people.

And yes, this comparison is an extreme exaggeration. But one thing is clear: No matter how you look at it, cataloguing people—any kind of people—based on statistical predictive software, and then taking pre-empetive actions against them based on the results, is thewrong way to improve our society. Agreeing with this course of action will inevitably take us into a potentially fatal path.

Source: Gizmodo

While the country was embroiled in a national debate over excessive government surveillance in 1974, President Gerald Ford authorized the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct warrantless domestic surveillance, according to a classified memo recently obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting.

The memo, signed Dec. 19, 1974, was issued just one month before the Senate established an 11-member panel, known as the Church Committee, to investigate government surveillance programs. The Church Committee would ultimately uncover other unconstitutional spying activities, such as that conducted by the National Security Agency under the rubric of Operation Shamrock. Two days after the memo was signed, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, writing in The New York Times, disclosed a covert government spying program that focused on monitoring political activists in the U.S.

Ford became president after Richard Nixon’s resignation in the wake of the Watergate spying scandal, and he later supported passage of the pro-privacy Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which placed restrictions on wiretapping and required law enforcement to obtain permission from a special court to conduct domestic intelligence surveillance.

But according to the recently released top-secret memo, just two years earlier, Ford had secretly authorized Attorney General William B. Saxbe “to approve, without prior judicial warrants, specific electronic surveillance within the United States which may be requested by the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Ford wrote in the memo to Saxbe that he had “been advised by you [Saxbe] and by the Department of State that such surveillance is consistent with the Constitution, laws and treaties of the United States.”

“This could be Bush after 9/11 or Obama after becoming president, but it’s President Ford 35 years ago, coping with Cold War struggles,” John Laprise, a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern University, told the center. “It’s really a stunning document that raises all sorts of questions.”

Ford’s order authorized surveillance for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, and would have involved spying on Americans or foreigners in the U. S. who were suspected of spying for foreign countries or foreign-based political groups. The open-ended surveillance authority could only be revoked by Ford or by order of a future president.

It’s not known to what extent the surveillance might have involved U.S. citizens or whether there was a specific incident or investigation that prompted the memo. In the memo, Ford writes that he “carefully reviewed the issues raised in your request for confirmation of authority and delegation with respect to warrantless electronic surveillance within the United States.”

The surveillance had to be in service of several objectives — to protect the United States against attacks by a foreign power, to obtain foreign intelligence that was deemed to be essential to national security, or to obtain information that the secretary of state or the national security adviser deemed necessary to foreign affairs.

Ford wrote that the warrantless surveillance would only be authorized with the personal approval of the attorney general “upon submission of a written request by the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation providing complete justification for the conduct of such surveillance, including identification of the agency and presidential appointee initiating the request” and that only “the minimum physical intrusion necessary to obtain the information sought will be used.”

The National Archives obtained the memo, which it shared with the Center for Investigative Reporting, based in California. A previous, slightly redacted version of the memo was released in 2006.

A federal judge ruled last week that the George W. Bush administration violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when the NSA eavesdropped on the telephone conversations of two American lawyers who represented a now-defunct Saudi charity.

Source: Wired

As of last week, there is now a U.S. Government national security agency called the Biometrics Identity Management Agency (BIMA).  It supersedes a Biometrics Task Force that was established in 2000.

Though nominally a component of the Army, the biometrics agency has Defense Department-wide responsibilities.

“The Biometrics Identity Management Agency leads Department of Defense activities to prioritize, integrate, and synchronize biometrics technologies and capabilities and to manage the Department of Defense’s authoritative biometrics database to support the National Security Strategy,” according to a March 23 Order (pdf) issued by Army Secretary John M. McHugh that redesignated the previous Biometrics Task Force as the BIMA.

Biometrics is generally defined as “a measurable biological (anatomical and physiological) [or] behavioral characteristic that can be used for automated recognition.”

“Biometric data [are] normally unclassified,” according to a 2008 DoD directive (pdf).  “However, elements of the contextual data, information associated with biometric collection, and/or associated intelligence analysis may be classified.”

“Biometrics-enabled Intelligence [refers to] intelligence information associated with and or derived from biometrics data that matches a specific person or unknown identity to a place, activity, device, component, or weapon that supports terrorist / insurgent network and related pattern analysis, facilitates high value individual targeting, reveals movement patterns, and confirms claimed identity.”

“Biometrics is an important enabler that shall be fully integrated into the conduct of DoD activities to support the full range of military operations,” the 2008 directive stated.

“Every day thousands of [biometric] records are collected and sent to the Department of Defense (DOD) Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) to store and compare against existing records,” a 2009 DoD report (pdf) said. “The technology is improving such that a submission from theater [e.g., in Afghanistan] can be searched in the DOD ABIS and a response sent back to theater in less than two minutes.”

“Realtime positive identification of persons of interest enables Coalition forces to target, track, and prosecute known or potential adversaries,” the DoD report said.

Source: FAS