Big Brother Gets a Brain

Big Brother Gets a Brain

by Noah Shachtman -Village Voice July 9 - 15, 2003

The Pentagon's Plan for Tracking Everything That Moves

The cameras are already in place. The computer code is being developed at a dozen or more major companies and universities. And the trial runs have already been planned.

Everything is set for a new Pentagon program to become perhaps the federal government's widest reaching, most invasive mechanism yet for keeping us all under watch. Not in the far-off, dystopian future. But here, and soon. The military is scheduled to issue contracts for Combat Zones That See, or CTS, as early as September. The first demonstration should take place before next summer, according to a spokesperson.

Approach a checkpoint at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, during the test and CTS will spot you. Turn the wheel on this sprawling, 8,656-acre army encampment, and CTS will record your action. Your face and license plate will likely be matched to those on terrorist watch lists. Make a move considered suspicious, and CTS will instantly report you to the authorities.

Fort Belvoir is only the beginning for CTS. Its architects at the Pentagon say it will help protect our troops in cities like Baghdad, where for the past few weeks fleeting attackers have been picking off American fighters in ones and twos. But defense experts believe the surveillance effort has a second, more sinister, purpose: to keep entire cities under an omnipresent, unblinking eye.

This isn't some science fiction nightmare. Far from it. CTS depends on parts you could get, in a pinch, at Kmart.

"There's almost a 100 percent chance that it will work," said Jim Lewis, who heads the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "because it's just connecting things that already exist."

As currently configured, the old-line cameras speckled throughout every major city aren't that much of a privacy concern. Yes, there are lenses everywhere—several thousand just in Manhattan. But they see so much, it's almost impossible for snoops to sift through all the footage and find what's important.

CTS would coordinate the cameras, gathering their views in a single information storehouse. The goal, according to a recent Pentagon presentation to defense contractors, is to "track everything that moves."

"This gives the U.S. government capabilities Big Brother only pretended to have," said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a defense think tank. "Before, we said Big Brother's watching. But he really wasn't, because there was too much to watch."

CTS could help soldiers spot dangers as they navigate perilous urban areas, Pentagon researchers insist. That's not how defense analysts like Pike see it. The program "seems to have more to do with domestic surveillance than a foreign battlefield," he said, "and more to do with the Department of Homeland Security than the Department of Defense."

"Right now, this may be a military program," added Lewis. "But when it gets up and running, there's going to be a huge temptation to apply it to policing at home"—to keep tabs on ordinary citizens, whether or not they've done something wrong.

Traditionally, the authorities have collected information only on people who might be connected to a crime. If there was a murder in the East Village, the cops didn't bring in all of St. Mark's Place; they interrogated only the people who might have information about the killer. Even the most extreme abuses of law enforcement power—like J. Edgar Hoover's domestic spying on political activists—homed in on very specific individuals, or groups, that he imagined as threats to the state. He didn't put the whole state under watch.

September 11 changed that. Now, the idea is to find out as much as possible about as many people as possible. After all, the logic goes, the country can't afford to sit back and wait to be attacked. Almost anyone could play a part in a terrorist plot. So the government has to keep tabs on almost everyone.

CTS, a $12 million, three-year program, is emerging as a potential centerpiece of that initiative.

"Before, it was 'let's catch the bad guys and bring them to trial after stuff happens,' " Lewis said. "Now it's 'let's look for patterns and stop [an attack] before it happens.' "

That's why Attorney General John Ashcroft pushed for a program to turn a million civilians into citizen-spies, snooping on their neighbors. That's why the USA Patriot Act now allows for wiretaps without warrants. And it's why the Pentagon has begun researching an array of high-tech tools to pry into average people's lives.

CTS is the brainchild of DARPA, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. That's the group of minds behind the notoriously invasive Total (sorry, "Terrorism") Information Awareness über-database. TIA's backers say the project will be carefully targeted, but privacy advocates say it could compile in a single place an unprecedented amount of information about you—your school transcripts, medical records, credit card bills, e-mail, and so much more.

"LifeLog," currently in the early planning stage at DARPA, would twist all these bits into narrative "threads," giving officials a chance to watch events develop. Along the way, LifeLog's developers would like to capture the name of every TV show you watch, every magazine you read.

Still, watching your data trail just isn't the same as actually watching your physical tail. You can change your e-mail address, and start paying cash. But you can't run away from yourself. And that's the missing piece CTS could provide—an almost instant ability to track, moment by moment, where you are and what you're doing.

"Before, there was a reasonable expectation of privacy when you were walking down the street," Lewis said. "Now that's something that will have to be adjusted."

That's not all that will change. As everybody who's ever mugged for the camera knows, people act differently when they're being watched.

Sometimes, that's not such a bad thing. Web-surfing habits are monitored on the job, so you wait until you're home to download porn. On the street, you can be a little less skittish, knowing your neighbors, your beat cops, your corner store owners are keeping an eye on you.

But being watched by a faceless, inaccessible government minder, that's something altogether different.

In 1791, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed a jail, circular in shape. The warden would sit in a dark observation booth in the middle; the prisoners would sit in well-lit, inward-facing cells along the circumference. Under the constant threat of being watched, the jailed would change their behavior, Bentham theorized, bending their activities to the warden's rules.

Two centuries later, England has 2.5 million security cameras spread throughout the country, by some estimates. Several cities, like the port town of King's Lynn, are covered by the lenses.

"It's exactly what Bentham predicted," said Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, a British civil liberties group. "The kids there are giving up going onto the street. They say it's almost like being in a glass-paneled room, with their parents on the other side. They're forced into smaller and smaller areas so they can be kids in private."

Putting people under electronic watch induces a kind of split personality, said Bill Brown, who leads tours of Manhattan's spy cams as part of his duties with the Surveillance Camera Players. The authorities want people to obey the law, to behave rationally. But video surveillance does the exact opposite. It makes people feel—correctly—like they're constantly being watched, like they're paranoid.

"And that's not a rational state at all," Brown said. "It's a mental condition."

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