U.S. Fascism – Chapter Six
Fortification
Advanced technology is applied to inward fascist expressions (e.g., war on drugs, surveillance state, digital border) and outward fascist expressions (e.g., Cold War, “war on terror,” today’s “great power competition” against China and Russia). Having long viewed the public as suspects, insurgents, and even terrorists, the fascist state expanded this conceptualization as the pandemic wound down and civil unrest simmered.
Wars Home and Abroad
Tools and procedures refined abroad against the workers of the world, rebels, and armed resistance groups are later used at home. And refinement at home abets use abroad. After NSA, overseas, pioneered the use of technologies to pinpoint a person’s cellphone, local and state police used such technology daily against the U.S. public.1 As narcotics officers in cities across the United States had long planted evidence on suspects (the Baltimore Police Department reportedly exemplified this behavior), a U.S. military task force in the Middle East added evidence in order to justify deadly airstrikes after the fact.2 As U.S. banks took $12.4 billion from the poor (“overdraft fees”) during just one pandemic year, the International Monetary Fund collected (pdf) billions of dollars from heavily indebted countries (“surcharges”) during the pandemic.
Behavior and tactics travelled back and forth between the “homeland” and overseas warzones, as demonstrated during the summer 2020 protests. In both the “war on terror” overseas and the war against dissent at home, the fascist state created categories (e.g., franchise, affiliate, domestic violent extremist, violent extremist organization) and then stuffed people into these categories. U.S. intelligence and civil affairs personnel used counterinsurgency techniques overseas to quell populations whose countries the U.S. military occupied or bombed. At home, effective counterinsurgency techniques on display during summer 2020 included police joining protests, police taking a knee, and police dancing with protestors. As U.S. special operations forces rode around in nondescript vehicles in Iraq and Libya, snatching people off the street and out of cars,3 so then did federal special operations units ride around U.S. cities in nondescript vehicles and snatch civilians off the street.4
Law enforcement budgets did not go down in the wake of the 2020 protests. There was no “defund.” Budget expert Stephen Semler calculated that the U.S. ended up spending at least $277 billion on policing and prisons in fiscal year 2021. For perspective, that was “about $25 billion higher than China’s entire military budget.” The NYPD budget for 2021 ($6 billion) was larger than the military budget of many European countries. At $2 billion, the LAPD budget for 2021 was comparable to the military budget of dreaded North Korea. The White House’s fiscal 2022 request for federal law enforcement was roughly equal to Russia’s entire military budget.5
And the number of black people killed by U.S. law enforcement each year actually increased in the wake of the 2020 protests.6
“Public trust, as any cop will tell you, is the foundation of public safety. If they’re not trusted, the population doesn’t contribute, doesn’t cooperate,” President Joe Biden affirmed on the second anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, signing an executive order on police reform. By banning chokeholds, establishing a national database for police misconduct, limiting the use of no-knock warrants, and revising use-of-force policies in federal agencies,7 the order polished the image and role of law enforcement in the core capitalist country. It did not touch the fascist nature of the military-industrial complex or address the role that law enforcement plays in U.S. society. The Democratic faction again boosted the structure it serves. (And DHS didn’t even fully comply! While DHS updated its use-of-force policy to align with the executive order, the Government Accountability Office soon determined that DHS was regularly undercounting the times it used force.)
Social Media Exploitation
Corporations specializing in surveillance of publicly available information (“open source intelligence”) proliferated after 9-11, marketing products aggressively to law enforcement as helping to reduce the time it takes to complete an investigation. The products sift through social media, online fora, and public chat platforms. What do you write or like? What photos do you post? Who are your friends and acquaintances? It is all up for grabs. And grab they do. Law enforcement across the country can now search for personal identifiers (known address, name, phone number, email address) when investigating the public. Pricy products display search results clearly, including webs that illustrate the public’s personal and professional networks. Washington does not actively regulate this business sector of war. Capitalist legalese, including nondisclosure agreements and the proprietary nature of corporate products, shields the invasive racket.
Building upon this baseline surveillance, Social Media Exploitation (SOMEX) teams use fake social media accounts to find information and informants. The Chicago Police Department’s SOMEX teams, for example, have investigated the public by using fake social media accounts furnished by the FBI, internal documents and emails indicate. Recall how legalese is one of the main advantages of U.S. fascism. The FBI and the Chicago Police Department have defined social media so broadly (they include dating sites, delivery apps, e-commerce sites, and “any and all online communication sites known and unknown which collect user data”) as to have nearly unlimited digital range. Additionally, the FBI has its own SOMEX team operating within its National Threat Operations Center in Clarksburg, West Virginia, focused nationwide.8
Dataminr, a corporation that had received early investment from the CIA venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, reportedly helped law enforcement keep tabs on the 2020 protests. Twitter gave Dataminr access to its full content stream, so Dataminr could scan all public tweets immediately after they were sent. Dataminr personnel sorted, bundled, and briefly described Twitter content, and then forwarded this information to law enforcement via email. Content could include protest locations, allegations of property damage, and understanding or misunderstanding of public grievance. Corporate surveillance of the public was merely newsgathering, not espionage or surveillance, public relations personnel explained. The corporation was just relaying information, keeping people safe via its “information discovery platform.”9 Dataminr employees, speaking with investigative journalist Sam Biddle on condition of anonymity, pointed to a pattern of racial profiling in the corporation’s monitoring of the 2020 protests.
Silicon Valley juggles its role as a key part of the military-industrial complex and its desire, for public relations purposes, to appear as an independent entity. Google made a big deal about no longer helping the U.S. military analyze drone imagery and then continued to work with the military and intelligence on other projects.10 Facebook states that the creation of fake profiles violates company policy, though it has yet to kick off FBI units that use fake profiles to monitor the public. Some Microsoft employees publicly dissented when the corporation got to work on augmented reality headsets for the U.S. Army, though Microsoft was and still is a top military contractor.11 Twitter in 2016 reportedly cut off U.S. federal intelligence agencies and fusion centers from Dataminr’s Twitter-related output, but the corporation continued to provide alerts to the U.S. military.12
Free Speech
Algorithms written by humans do most of the monitoring and censoring on social media. Capitalist media and ideologues (funded by Washington and its allies) position themselves as fact-checking organizations to help tech firms decide what speech is permissible. Some firms also use oversight boards—comprised of academics, activists, and specialists amenable to U.S. foreign policy—to oversee content moderation. Big Tech firms even accept censorship “requests” from the U.S. government, including from FBI, DHS, DOD, and CIA.13
Former intelligence personnel move to Silicon Valley, where they work directly for tech firms on everything from content moderation to “trust and safety” to policy,14 as DHS works with these firms to eliminate what it deems to be “inaccurate information” and “disinformation,” focusing on speech and writing about U.S. wars abroad and civil rights at home.15 In parallel, other portions of the fascist state manipulate social media and spread propaganda, targeting overseas audiences.16
Capitalism is a Right-wing economic system, and tech firms are among the top capitalists. Independent Left media challenge this authority, so they are censored regularly. These media face demonetization, suppression, removal of reportage, or account suspension, often without prior warning. This has happened in recent years to reporting from BreakThrough News, Status Coup, Grayzone, Consortium News, Redacted Tonight, Chris Hedges’ On Contact, MintPress News, the World Socialist Website, journalist Patrick Lawrence, theAnalysis.news, Second Thought, Black Power Media, multiple anarchist accounts, and more. The Right, meanwhile, is organized and funded well across all media—social, radio, and television.
The Democratic faction had pushed to censor speech. After losing the 2016 presidential election, this faction—instead of engaging in an honest internal critique regarding the numerous ways it was demonstrably failing the public—spread claims of Russian “meddling” in the election and fingered Moscow as the one who leaked the sordid emails of a Democratic official, which were published by Wikileaks. Prominent U.S. intelligence officials supported these claims blaming the Russian government but provided no evidence or proof. Tech firms stepped up censorship in the name of targeting the state’s enemies. It is now commonplace for Democratic partisans to portray Left voices, long unwelcomed on U.S. corporate media and/or relegated to broadcasting on foreign media, as foes: “puppets” of foreign governments, Russian “influence operations,” and Chinese “disinformation.” Immense Democratic establishment resources have gone toward stifling and corralling any party member who leans leftward on matters of war and peace.
With the Democratic faction structurally incapable of addressing the many crises facing the U.S. working class, far-Right politicians utilize social media to position themselves as anti-establishment, using “anti-woke” campaigns and populist rhetoric. Many alienated and confused workers are pulled rightward. Charismatic bullies, themselves the product of an ill society, attract big audiences. There certainly are racists among the supporters of a top bully, Donald Trump, though painting all of his voters as mere racists sidelines some of his supporters who are themselves people of color and ignores others who had voted previously for Democratic candidates, including black ones, before casting a vote his way.
The billions of people worldwide who today use large U.S. tech platforms are subject to rules—Terms of Service and “Community Standards”—narrowly defined by capitalist ideology, U.S. government policy, and a Western understanding of history. As life slowly “returned to normal” in North America, 2022, tech firms held onto the authority they had obtained during the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 protests, and pursuit of the 6 January 2021 mob.
Do you say “mob”?
Blues
The military-industrial complex is not just a fascist structure. It also contributes to the creation of a population that welcomes fascism.
In directing over a trillion tax dollars every year—away from programs of social uplift and into programs of militarism and war—the military-industrial complex creates a desperate public, harmed economically by such policies of neglect (in addition to being harmed by living in the core capitalist country wherein every necessity of life, from shelter to water, costs a lot of money).
In manufacturing public support for nonstop war (the first Cold War, the “war on terror,” and today’s new Cold War), the military-industrial complex damages the public’s mental state. People are led to believe that the humans on the receiving end of the wars are bad and deserving of what they get. The public is unable to recognize friend (a worker of the world) or foe (the fascist structure at home and the humans who ascend to its top).
The public becomes restive and disgruntled when politicians repeatedly break their promises. U.S. politicians lie the big lie. Broadly, they claim democracy and American exceptionalism while rejecting democracy (anti-democratic behavior includes embracing corporate lobbyists and campaign financing and, crucially, sustaining a profit-over-people economic model wherein executives, not workers, make the decisions) and treating the working class as disposable, replaceable.
What could prevent the Right from capitalizing upon disillusion? An economic system that values the working class, allows democracy in the workplace, and is free from nonstop war. But the U.S. government cannot permit that, as doing so would mean the end of the fascist structure as well as the removal of top officials in government and industry who profit professionally and financially from this structure.
The nationalist combination of big business and government authority prefers the profitable status quo over instability. When it came to the contentious 2020 U.S. presidential election, the military-industrial complex was fairly unified in its preference for a peaceful transfer of presidential authority. All ten living former Secretaries of Defense took to the Washington Post on 3 January 2021 to formally remind the U.S. military establishment that staying out of election disputes is an institutional practice and the best way to ensure continuity of government. The country’s top lawyer, the U.S. Attorney General, deployed federal commandoes to Washington, D.C., to posture against a large-scale foreign attack. Then, when a violent mob, revved up by an unstable outgoing president, stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, some top capitalists recommended that Vice President Mike Pence invoke the 25th Amendment,17 which would have allowed Vice President and Cabinet to assume the presidency and get on with the transfer of power.
Those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th—an “insurrection,” many media stated—were made out to be a unique threat to democracy. Basic questions were not asked:
How did the most powerful structures within federal authority view the matter?
How did the insurrection compare to the U.S. government’s own actions abroad and at home? Low estimates indicate that recent U.S. wars have killed hundreds of thousands of humans and caused millions of people to flee their homes. How many tens of thousands of humans die each year in the U.S. because they lack healthcare? How many die because they lack shelter? How many die from corporate pollution? Why was there forceful, steady outrage at the events of January 6th and not at these federal policies that causes mass death?
What democracy? The ballot one casts in elections for U.S. Congress and/or President does not rival the influence of massive corporations and the superrich who fund and lobby the two political parties and funnel dark money through nonprofits.
The political analyst Caitlin Johnstone summarized the situation: The U.S. government “is doing literally hundreds of things right now as you read this that are more harmful and concerning than a pretend ‘insurrection’ that never at any time had a higher than zero percent chance of succeeding…”
Swimming in disgust for President Donald Trump’s harmful policies and actions, many people Left of center completely misunderstood that U.S. fascism prefers profitable stability over potential instability (even if the political instability comes from a Right-wing mob, whose precarious economic situation and militant mindset the fascist structure had helped create and boost).
As it does with pandemics and civil rights protests, the military-industrial complex used the January 6th mob attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to expand its power and authorities. The nearsighted aims of the Democratic political faction (leverage the January 6th events to harm the Republican faction politically) overlapped with the aims of the broader fascist structure (crack down further on a restless public) when inflating the mob as a major threat and then picking apart that threat. Many factors (e.g., standardized public education system, state propaganda, partisan bickering, and the conformity inherent to consumer society) had weakened the public’s ability to recognize and resist this reality.
Counterinsurgency
The former director of CIA’s Counterterrorism Center took to the New York Times’ Opinion page to position Donald Trump’s broad base as a domestic insurgency. Leaning heavily on his CIA credentials, Robert Grenier’s plan for counterinsurgency involved tracking and investigating the insurgents. Isolate and “alienate the committed insurgents from the population,” he advised. Regarding insurgency leadership, it “is far too late for appeasement.” Invoking visions of Saddam Hussein’s military defeat and Osama bin Laden’s years in hiding, Grenier affirmed: Trump’s veneer of invincibility “must similarly be crushed.” Grenier recommended convicting Trump in Congress and barring him from holding elective office—a “national security imperative.”
Naturally, Grenier did not mention the capitalists’ war against the working class or how the fascist state had created the conditions wherein people are desperate, open to illusion and delusion, and easily duped by authoritarian billionaires.
U.S. Congress held several narrow public hearings, some broadcast in primetime, investigating the January 6th mob attack and former President Donald Trump’s role as instigator. Led by neoconservative Liz Cheney (R-WY) and chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the hearings positioned law enforcement as the good guys and President Donald Trump as an aberration, instead of the inevitable outcome of a society built upon greed. Pretending the United States is a democracy, Representative Thompson was forceful in his deceit: “January 6 and the lies that led to insurrection have put two and a half centuries of constitutional democracy at risk.” He cited devotion to the Constitution, allegiance to the rule of law, and a shared journey to build a more perfect union as examples of what “makes America great.” U.S. fascism—the military-industrial complex—was never mentioned in the hearings.
In the wake of the mob attack, authorities took steps to further separate U.S. Congress from the public it pretends to serve. The Capitol Police’s budget increased. (D.C. already contained more law enforcement personnel per capita than any other large U.S. city.) The Metropolitan Police Department’s Joint Operations Command Center, an intelligence unit in D.C., now collects constantly on the public. It ramps up activity (intel gathering, photographing of protestors, coordination with undercover police) when protests are expected and in progress, internal emails indicated. A top military contractor, Microsoft, has sold the broader Metropolitan Police Department a product that uses artificial intelligence—artificial intelligence (AI) involves feeding a computer program enormous amounts of data so the program can look for patterns—to compile data and connect regional and federal law enforcement databases, displaying information in user-friendly format. An intel unit with the Capitol Police now studies the backgrounds of people who are scheduled to meet with lawmakers. The FBI and other government units have doubled down on monitoring social media, allocating millions of dollars to purchase or license surveillance technology from the war industry.
The U.S. government began charging people with seditious conspiracy over their roles in the mob attack. Set forth in 18 U.S. Code Section 2384, seditious conspiracy happens when
“two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof…”
Punishment for seditious conspiracy is a fine and/or up to twenty years behind bars. Charging members of a mob with seditious conspiracy is precedent: The U.S. working class will be similarly charged the next time it rises up to challenge the capitalist ruling class.
U.S. government acquisition, storage, and utilization of biometrics—a person’s measurable features—skyrocketed during the post-9-11 wars, particularly in Afghanistan and the United States. One particular biometric, facial recognition involves scanning a human’s face and comparing that scan to a library of digital images. The Real ID Act of 2005 required U.S. state license photographs to be digital, facilitating data sharing and analysis across government agencies. Biometrics of most U.S. citizens and residents are now in government databases.18
Across the country, law enforcement used biometrics, particularly facial recognition, to find the summer 2020 protesters, even arresting them months after their alleged crime.19
Capitalists apply artificial intelligence to many different priorities, including imprisonment, espionage, and military operations.
Artificial intelligence, biometrics, and other modern tools were used to identify and round up some members of the January 6th mob.20
Weaponized Data
Capitalists are constantly looking for new ways to profit: Health, land, air, space, and now data—information about your life—are excellent ways to make money. The products we interact with every day include audio recorders, automobiles, cameras, laptop computers, household voice command devices, license plate readers, point-of-sale payment tools, payment websites, and smartphone apps. Smartphone apps, for example, can track your physical movement, day-to-day—where you go, what you do, who you visit, what floor you’re on—and your smartphone activity. Cookies, files that websites place on your computer, monitor movement online. Data brokers are corporations that gather information from these sources and publicly available information and then bundle and sell that information.
The U.S. government has not regulated data brokers. It is actually a major customer of these brokers and user of the data they gather. The Fourth Amendment, the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” doesn’t apply because the government isn’t searching the person; it is acquiring data from a third party. Government legal teams further argue—successfully—that citizens and residents do not get privacy, because use of devices, apps, and websites requires consent, typically via Terms of Service or download, to provide data to third parties.
The activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are illustrative. Journalist McKenzie Funk summarized in 2019, “ICE, like other federal agencies, sucks up terabytes of information from hundreds of disparate computer systems, from state and local governments, from private data brokers and from social networks.” The government agency “piggybacks on software and sharing agreements originally meant for criminal and counterterrorism investigators, fusing little bits of stray information together into dossiers.” Corporate America can play a more direct role, like when a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters refined public and commercial data into lists (name, current address, driver’s license information, rap sheet, phone number) for ICE to then use to investigate and pursue humans for deportation.21
In its daily operations, ICE can access datasets containing the detailed personal information of most people living in the United States, the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology has concluded.
Government and industry offer assurances. A given person’s identity can be anonymized using an alphanumeric code, they say. But large datasets clearly betray one’s identity, and even small datasets indicate sleep and work locations. Drawing from corporate brokers and federal databases, the fascist state has bountiful information to analyze: car registration and insurance, cell phone movement, date of birth, facial recognition, medical bills, web browsing and social media, taxes filed with a social security number or an individual taxpayer identification number, utility bills, email address, license number and plates, and more.
U.S. government utilization of data brokers continued with respect to the summer 2020 protests and beyond.22
The Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA, and other U.S. intelligence units regularly search the public’s data.23
Counterterrorism
The fascist state’s domestic counterterrorism strategy (pdf), issued under the Biden administration one year after the summer 2020 protests and five months after the 6 January 2021 Capitol mob, claims to make “no distinction based on political views,” though it notes that potential domestic terrorists might be motivated by anarchist doctrine, anti-capitalism, environmental worry, and concern for animals. Positioning domestic counterterrorism as a matter of confronting “white supremacy” brought on board some from the progressive wing of the Democratic faction, though the state has no incentive to actually combat white supremacy, as white supremacy doesn’t threaten the fascist state. Indeed, as seen in Chapter Five, racism is a core feature of permanent warfare.
As 2022 began, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it was forming a new unit focused on domestic terrorism. Making the announcement in front of Congress on 11 January 2022, the assistant attorney general for national security pointed out that the Justice Department’s domestic terrorism caseload had doubled since March 2020, the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and shortly before the summer civil rights protests. Though the Department of Justice already had a counterterrorism unit perfectly capable of handling terrorism cases, foreign or domestic, and the U.S. government already operated the most invasive domestic surveillance apparatus in human history, the Democratic faction eagerly supported establishment of this new unit focused on domestic terrorism.
Leaving plenty of room for future prosecution of the Left, the assistant attorney general noted, “We've seen a growing threat from those who are motivated by racial animus as well as those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies” (emphasis mine). Jill Sanborn, executive assistant director of the FBI’s national security branch, testified to Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that the FBI had opened over 800 cases related to the 2020 protests. The biggest threats—climate change, ecocide, nuclear weaponry, the fascist state itself—were never on the agenda.
A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruling declassified in spring 2023 showed repeated widespread use of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act—this section allows the U.S. government to collect and search without a warrant the online communications of innocent U.S. citizens and residents who are in communication with foreigners living outside the United States—to search for information about U.S. persons: those who participated in the summer 2020 protests as well as those who participated in the January 6th mob attack on the Capitol.
Counterterrorism units under a Democratic White House stand ready to pursue Left forces while making bureaucratic moves to tackle some white gunmen or violent Right militia members. Counterterrorism units under a Republican White House will openly pursue the Left, including strong labor movements, socialists, anarchists, civil rights activists, and antifascists of any stripe.
Conclusion
The internet is the species’ first chance to communicate, learn, and exchange ideas rapidly on a global scale. Unrestricted public communication threatens fascism, as it allows a gradual collective understanding of the oppressor’s nature. This is why the nationalist intersection of U.S. government and industry has worked so hard to dominate and monitor the internet, regulate thought, and sow advertisements, lies, and propaganda.
Today, one U.S. political faction is defined by hubris; billionaire donors; full funding of the military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies; and organizing against and empty gestures toward the Left. The other political faction is defined by reactionary grievance; billionaire donors; full funding of military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies; and concrete organizing against the Left. Both factions are unresponsive to the public’s needs.
First, they came for the anarchists, but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t an anarchist. Then they came for the communists, but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the socialists, but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a socialist. Then they came for the Arabs, but I didn’t speak up because “terrorism!” Then they came for some black activists, but I didn’t speak up because I was taught to fear them. Then they came for the labor unions, but I didn’t speak up because I lived in a “right-to-work” state. Then—wait a second!—the system is fascist!
Which local law enforcement reportedly have IMSI catchers and/or cell-site simulators? Most major and many minor cities. Everywhere from Yuma, AZ, to Atlanta, GA, to Worcester, MA. Police in Annapolis, MD, used a cell-site simulator when investigating a robbery of chicken wings and sandwiches. Nationwide, the federal government, including the U.S. Marshals, has reportedly used such technology to pursue drug dealers and fugitives. Michigan State Police justified using cell-site simulators in hundreds of investigations as “vital to the war on terrorism,” even though they hadn’t actually used the technology in a single terrorism case.
Staff in a U.S. military operations center in Qatar smelled something fishy with the airstrikes that Task Force 9 was ordering when claiming self-defense. So, staff in the ops center reportedly compared the task force’s justifications for ordering an airstrike with other evidence, including drone footage. Evidence appeared to show that the task force was adding information that would justify a strike (e.g., seeing a military-aged male carrying a gun) even when such details were not visible in the footage. See the reporting of Phillipps and Schmitt. For allegations of CIA-allied Afghan death squads (“Zero Units”) planting weapons on suspects after killing them, see Chapter 8 of Lynzy Billing, “The Night Raids.”
Sean Naylor in Relentless Strike (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015) describes vehicles and targeting in Iraq and Libya (pp. 277, 430). For CIA kidnapping of innocents—Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr in Milan, Italy, and Khalid al-Masri in Macedonia—see Glenn Greenwald, “Italy's ex-intelligence chief given 10-year sentence for role in CIA kidnapping” (Guardian, 13 Feb 2013) and “U.S.-European Showdown Over CIA Operatives” (Newsweek, 28 Mar 2007).
Domestic units of varied caliber roaming the streets of Portland, OR, seen in Levinson and Wilson, “Federal Law Enforcement Use Unmarked Vehicles To Grab Protesters Off Portland Streets” (Oregon Public Broadcasting, 16 Jul 2020); Kyle Iboshi, “Who are these federal officers sent to Portland to deal with protesters?” (KGW 8, 13 Jul 2020, updated 17 Jul 2020); and “Federal agents 'abuse power' in Portland protester arrests” (BBC News, 18 Jul 2020).
Sullivan and Baranauckas in USA Today reported on budgets. See also analysis by Stephen Semler: “World military budgets vs. US expenditures on police” and “Where Biden’s federal law enforcement budget ranks among global military expenditures.”
See Curtis Bunn’s reporting for NBC News and the Washington Post police shootings database. 2022 was the deadliest year to date in terms of U.S. police violence, with state and local law enforcement killing at least 1,176 people across the country. Later in 2023, the Raza Database Project calculated that the number of black and brown people killed in the U.S. by law enforcement was far higher than government tallies and mainstream media estimates.
Joe Biden’s history supporting “tough on crime” legislation had included, the 1984 Comprehensive Control Act (expanding asset forfeiture and federal drug trafficking penalties), the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act (enhancing penalties for drug crime and creating sentencing disparities between crack cocaine and powder cocaine), and the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act (establishing the centralized Office of National Drug Control Policy and increasing prison sentences for drug possession and transportation).
FBI SOMEX information available at “CJIS Division: 2020 Year in Review” (FBI.gov, 2 Feb 2021): <www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/cjis-link/cjis-division-2020-year-in-review>.
At most, it was just providing situational awareness, reducing the time between “event and client action.” It was not tracking protestors’ locations. Oh, that alert that pinpointed the protestors? “Alerts on an intersection being blocked are news alerts, not monitoring protests or surveillance. A local news organization would also cover major intersections being blocked as a news story — this is not surveillance,” Twitter spokesperson Kerry McGee explained. Don’t worry! The corporations, Twitter and Dataminr, had policies against surveillance. See Sam Biddle’s July 2020 reporting.
For Google work with U.S. government, see <https://cloud.google.com/solutions/federal-government/defense>; Tom Simonite, “3 Years After the Project Maven Uproar, Google Cozies to the Pentagon,” Daisuke Wakabayashi and Kate Conger, “Google Wants to Work with the Pentagon Again, Despite Employee Concerns,” and Lauren Feiner, “Google’s cloud division lands deal with the Department of Defense.”
The U.S. military has grown inseparable from Microsoft goods and services. Microsoft sales to U.S. military and intelligence have included cloud computing, software, subscription renewals, and IT technical support. Relevant contracting announcements: 2014 (24 Sep, 25 Sep, 3 Dec), 2015 (9 Jun, 28 Aug), 2016 (22 Apr, 1 Dec, 20 Dec, 30 Dec), 25 Sep 2017, 2018 (28 Jun, 26 Sep), 2019 (11 Jan 25 Oct), 2020 (13 May, 4 Nov), 21 Jun 2021. Coast to coast—from Naval Information Warfare Systems Command in San Diego to the Pentagon in Arlington—and beyond—from Ramstein Air Base, Germany, to Kadena Air Base, Japan—U.S. military and intelligence units used Microsoft goods and services.
Microsoft has also sold directly to corporations, training aircrew to handle Lockheed Martin’s new presidential helicopter, supporting Northrop Grumman radar programs and test equipment for nuclear missiles, and enabling L3Harris to train personnel for the Lockheed Martin F-16 aircraft.
Microsoft cooperation with NSA is detailed in Glenn Greenwald, et al., “Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages” (Guardian, 12 Jul 2013); Dan Goodin, “NSA backdoor detected on >55,000 Windows boxes can now be remotely removed” (Ars Technica, 25 Apr 2017); Kim Zetter, “How a crypto ‘backdoor’ pitted the tech world against the NSA” (Wired, 24 Sep 2013). For a pseudo-denial from Microsoft’s VP of Trustworthy Computing Group, see Iain Thomson, “Microsoft: NSA snooping? Code backdoors? Our hands are clean!” (The Register, 25 Feb 2014).
For Microsoft sales to and partnership with law enforcement and institutions that imprison people and control movement, see Michael Kwet, “The Microsoft police state: mass surveillance, facial recognition, and the Azure cloud” (Intercept, 14 Jul 2020) and “Microsoft’s iron cage: Prison surveillance and e-carceration” (Al Jazeera, 21 Dec 2020).
A Microsoft vice president testified to the House Judiciary Committee in 2021 that federal law enforcement agencies present the corporation with anywhere between 2,400 to 3,500 secrecy orders per year. “Most shocking is just how routine secrecy orders have become when law enforcement targets an American’s email, text messages or other sensitive data stored in the cloud,” the executive conceded. See Eric Tucker and Matt O’Brien (AP, 30 Jun 2021).
Dataminr’s work for DOD included leveraging “a variety of publicly available information sources,” evaluating “content to detect emerging events as they are developing and push alerts to users… in near real-time via email, web-based application and mobile platforms…” Dataminr focused on “breaking news based on global sources of publically [sic] available information… with 24/7/365 access to alerting,” maintaining “compliance with the terms of service and data use policies of all third party… data sources that are used to create news alerts.” Relevant contracting announcements: 2019 (27 Jun), 2020 (23 Apr, 20 May, 18 Aug).
Matt Taibbi, “Capsule Summaries of all Twitter Files Threads to Date, With Links and a Glossary” (Racket News, 4 Jan 2023). Censorship overview at Susan Schmidt, Andrew Lowenthal, Tom Wyatt, Techno Fog, et al., “Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Top 50 Organizations to Know” (Racket News, 10 May 2023).
After studying employment websites, public databases, and corporate reports, investigative journalist Alan Macleod of MintPress News chronicled how numerous professionals from CIA, FBI, DOD, and other U.S. government departments and agencies have gone on to work at large Silicon Valley tech firms, including but not limited to Meta, Twitter, and Google. See “Meet the Ex-CIA Agents Deciding Facebook’s Content Policy,” “The Federal Bureau of Tweets: Twitter Is Hiring an Alarming Number of FBI Agents,” and “National Security Search Engine: Google’s Ranks Are Filled with CIA Agents”.
Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang, “Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation” and Ken Klippenstein, “The Government Created a New Disinformation Office to Oversee All the Other Ones.”
Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain, “Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media”; Tim Gill and Christian Lewelling, “Documents Show How the US Government Used Social Media to Intervene in Venezuela”; Kevin Collier, “Researchers discover sprawling pro-U.S. social media influence campaign”; Lee Fang, “Twitter Aided the Pentagon in Its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign”.
Separately, government employees and corporate contractors collect public information online and manipulate social media as part of a massive effort to help U.S. intelligence personnel maintain their cover in today’s digital world. See William Arkin, “Exclusive: Inside the Military's Secret Undercover Army.”
The press release from the largest grouping of corporate manufacturers, the National Association of Manufacturers, is available at “Manufacturers Call on Armed Thugs to Cease Violence at Capitol” (NAM.org, 6 Jan 2021).
As of 2016, roughly half of all U.S. Americans were in facial-recognition databases accessible to law enforcement, per Clare Garvie, et al., “The Perpetual Line-Up”. DHS expected in 2019 to have biometrics (face, fingerprint, and iris) of at least 259 million people in its databases within three years, per Justin Rohrlich, “Homeland Security will soon have biometric data on nearly 260 million people.” DHS’ Office of Biometric Identity Management and the Defense Forensics and Biometrics Agency (DFBA) oversee federal use of biometric technologies at home and overseas.
Kate Cox, “Cops in Miami, NYC arrest protesters from facial recognition matches”; “Facial Recognition Technology: Federal Law Enforcement Agencies Should Better Assess Privacy and Other Risks” (Government Accountability Office, June 2021); Radhamely De Leon, “Six Federal Agencies Used Facial Recognition On George Floyd Protestors”; Justin Jouvenal and Spencer S. Hsu, “Facial recognition used to identify Lafayette Square protester accused of assault”; Rachel Sandler, “Students Accuse The University Of Miami Of Using Facial Recognition To Identify Student Protesters. The University Denies It”; Joshua Ceballos, “University of Miami Won't Commit to Ban on Facial Recognition Tech”.
For independent examination of how the FBI can utilized the digital space to round up the public, see Nisha and John Whitehead, “Digital Trails: How the FBI Identifies, Tracks and Rounds Up Dissidents.”
Darrell M. West, “Digital fingerprints are identifying Capitol rioters”; Jared Council, “Local Police Force Uses Facial Recognition to Identify Capitol Riot Suspects”; Steven Zeitchik, “The battle to prevent another Jan. 6 features a new weapon: The algorithm”.
ICE also contracted with the data broker LexisNexis in order to receive real-time information from sheriff offices in Colorado regarding people booked in jails. This effectively circumvented the state legislation meant to restrict local and state law enforcement from working with ICE. See “Sabotaging Sanctuary: How Data Brokers Give ICE Backdoor Access to Colorado’s Data and Jails” and CBS News’ “LexisNexis illegally collected and sold people's personal data, lawsuit alleges”.
Tau and Hackman, “Federal Agencies Use Cellphone Location Data for Immigration Enforcement”; Aleaziz and Haskins, “DHS Authorities Are Buying Moment-By-Moment Geolocation Cellphone Data To Track People”; and Sara Morrison, “A surprising number of government agencies buy cellphone location data. Lawmakers want to know why”.
For analysis of unregulated corporate use of location data, see the New York Times.
A handful of large corporations, most based in the U.S., host or control most data and data flows.
Joseph Cox of VICE News has reported on military/intel use of data in “Lawmakers Demand Answers from Military on Muslim App Data”; “Military Unit That Conducts Drone Strikes Bought Location Data from Ordinary Apps”; and “Revealed: US Military Bought Mass Monitoring Tool That Includes Internet Browsing, Email Data”.
See also Charlie Savage, “Intelligence Analysts Use U.S. Smartphone Location Data Without Warrants, Memo Says”; Michael Kelley, “CONFIRMED: US Counterterrorism Agency Can Amass Data On Any Citizen”; Julia Angwin, “U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens”; and Chris Calabrese, “The Biggest New Spying Program You’ve Probably Never Heard Of”.
CIA, operating under Executive Order 12333, has collected, stored, and searched through the public’s data, according to a letter written in 2021 by U.S. Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich that was declassified in early 2022. The senators characterized CIA’s mass surveillance program as “entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes from Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act collection.” See William Vaillancourt, “Senators Say CIA Secretly Collected Data in ‘Warrantless Backdoor Searches of Americans’” and David Smith, “Declassified documents reveal CIA has been sweeping up information on Americans”.
For the senators’ comments and documentation, see “Wyden and Heinrich: Newly Declassified Documents Reveal Previously Secret CIA Bulk Collection, Problems with CIA Handling of Americans’ Information” (Wyden.Senate.gov, 10 Feb 2022).
See also this report (pdf) from the ODNI Senior Advisory Group Panel on Commercially Available Information, approved for release on 5 June 2023. Regarding the report’s acknowledgement of widespread U.S. intel use of data brokers to snoop on the U.S. public, Sen. Wyden stated, “If the government can buy its way around Fourth Amendment due process, there will be few meaningful limits on government surveillance.
Separately, the Joint Special Operations Task Force—National Capital Region (JSOTF-NCR) in Arlington, Virginia, consists of representatives from JSOC, FBI, CIA, and NSA. With its own supercomputer mining data, the task force has reportedly helped DHS and CIA operate in Mexico against drug traffickers and helped ICE refine its targeting inside the U.S., per Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America, pp. 253-255.
Many corporations that contract regularly with the U.S. military for computer technology or consulting services, such as Accenture, Deloitte, Oracle, and PwC, have data brokerage divisions, though the full extent to which these divisions sell to the U.S. military is unclear.
The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, which administers background investigations for much of the federal government, has contacted with RELX Inc., a London-based corporate entity specializing in analytics and data mining that owns LexisNexis. Contract issued 30 Mar 2022 for ongoing access to the LexisNexis Continuous Evaluation / ProMonitor product for “public records holdings that include third party data, data analytics, risk scoring, and alerting.”