American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [112]
So it’s no surprise that the Bush Administration soon embarked on an illegal wiretapping program, a story that the New York Times sat on for a year before finally publishing it. The National Security Agency (NSA) set up a secret room in downtown San Francisco under the auspices of AT&T, where the NSA could tap into the telcom giant’s fiber-optic cables. These weren’t just part of AT&T, but connected their network to Sprint, Global Crossing, and other companies (including Qwest, which had refused to play ball). According to former AT&T technician Mark Klein, the result was “a complete copy of the data stream.” It all went through NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, ten miles outside D.C., where the agency has a “colossal Cray supercomputer, code-named the ‘Black Widow.’” (Don’t you love all these “black” designations?) This supercomputer is capable of scanning “millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails per hour . . . performing hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, [it] searches through and reassembles keywords and patterns, across many languages.”20 They targeted certain journalists and basically vacuumed in all the domestic communications of Americans, including faxes, phone calls, and Internet traffic.21 Code-named Pinwale, the NSA’s secret database even scooped up the private e-mails of former President Clinton.22
What’s truly outrageous is that all this was legalized when Bush signed into law the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FISA stands for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act). That’s right, Congress gave the NSA still more power to ferret out supposed terrorist patterns in our private communications. “This gives AT&T, Verizon, and the rest a hearty signal to go on pimping for the government.” After writing that column, Nat Hentoff, who’d been with the Village Voice since it started in the mid-1950s, got laid off.
Snooping through our telecoms was only the beginning. Even after Congress held back funding for the “Suspicionless Surveillance” program developed by a new Total Information Awareness department (don’t you just love the labels?), Bush apparently kept it going anyway. This was broader than the warrantless wiretaps, giving law enforcement the right to inspect our credit cards and bank transactions on the off-chance we might be tied in to terrorists.23
In shooting an episode called “Big Brother” for my TV series, my son Ty and I came to Minneapolis to film a little B-roll. We went downtown to First and Washington Avenue. There wasn’t one camera, there were four—on every single street corner! A middle-aged guy came by on a bike and I stopped him to ask if he’d ever noticed this. He said, “No, what are they filming?” I told him, “I don’t know, but obviously they’re watching us, they’ve got every direction covered.”
I found out that private corporations provide the money to buy the cameras. The city says, “Great, it doesn’t cost us a thing,” and the taxpayers say, “Great, my taxes don’t go up.” But are the corporations doing this out of the goodness of their heart, to make a safer America? The cameras are all run by computer. One thing that automatically triggers them is when four or more people are together: “Must be up to something, let’s film them.” We were all outraged and stunned when we read George Orwell’s 1984 in school. But I’m afraid he was a prophet. Big Brother is watching, and it’s happening in subtle ways.
I imagine few of you have heard of InfraGard. A year ago, I was happily ignorant that it existed. Their brochure describes a “collaborative effort” between government and private industry to protect our “critical infrastructures” like banking and finance, agriculture and food, telecommunications, transportation systems, and the like. “An InfraGard member is a private-sector volunteer with an inherent concern for national security,” says the brochure. Their members connect to a national network of Subject Matter Experts, SMEs for short, and communicate