U.S. Fascism - Chapter Two
Expansion
The fascist state expanded rapidly after the 9-11 attacks. Legal expertise and law enforcement continued to protect the structure.
Unrestrained Growth
Washington eagerly showered money upon military and intelligence—money raised via taxes and the sale of Treasury marketable securities—following the 9-11 attacks. Investigative journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin contextualize the bloat: “Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force.” Two to three dozen new organizations working on highly-classified matters—counterterrorism, support of overseas espionage, monitoring financial flows, and tracking sundry populations—sprouted up each year between 2001 and 2010. CIA spilled out of its headquarters and into dozens of buildings in the greater Washington area.1 The facilities of all seventeen major U.S. intelligence units in the U.S.—from the Defense Intelligence Agency at Bolling Air Force Base to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence at Liberty Crossing—were renovated or built anew during the two decades following 2001.
Annual funding for the military command in charge of special operations grew from $3.1 billion to $13.1 billion in those same years, its 43,000 personnel expanding to roughly 74,000. The military command in charge of warfare in cyberspace grew from a few hundred personnel at its 2010 founding to more than 6,000 a decade later. The unit in charge of guiding military adoption of artificial intelligence was enjoying a $1.3 billion annual budget two years into its 2018 establishment.2 The budget for the military branch in charge of operations in space, which had been established at the end of 2019, grew every year by the billions. Growing units need more physical space and demand bigger budgets—factors that, along with the corporate need to increase profits, push for even more growth of the military-industrial complex.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) expanded fascism’s inward focus. Created to be an organization focused on domestic counterterrorism, DHS became operational in 2003. Its mission soon covered cyber security, election security, and domestic intelligence, and its annual budget topped $50 billion. Aside from the fearful context of DHS’ establishment and its role widening the federal government’s surveillance of the public, the fascist nature of the department was evident in the overwhelming presence of big business: corporate goods and services swarm and swamp DHS and its subsidiary units.
Many of the war industry’s goods and services—drones, piloted aircraft, information technology, force protection, cyber—are applicable to the “homeland,” and thus DHS’ top contractors are military contractors.3 They include the famous (Boeing, General Dynamics, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman); IT and intel behemoths (Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI, SAIC); large engineering and project management corporations (AECOM, Fluor, Jacobs); corporations the public wouldn’t traditionally view as involved in war (Amazon, Motorola, IBM); corporations in the hands of private equity (Amentum, ManTech, Peraton); and British firms with a sizeable presence in the U.S. (BAE Systems, Serco).
This massive bureaucracy, propelled by the war industry, looked inward for targets. DHS helped states establish fusion centers after 9-11. Fusion centers compile information from public and classified sources and share this information across local, state, and federal law enforcement. These centers are now funded through state and local taxes (68% of funding in 2021), federal grants (19%), federal taxes (11%), and tribal, territorial, private, and other funds (2%). Fusion centers cost roughly $337 million in 2018, over $403 million in 2021. Ambiguous lines of authority create an environment ripe for officials to “manipulate differences in federal, state and local laws to maximize information collection while evading accountability and oversight,” the ACLU notes. The Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the Executive Branch from utilizing the Armed Forces for domestic law enforcement, was not designed to apply to fusion centers. Indeed, fusion centers did not exist when the Act was passed in 1878.
Given a broad mandate and no genuine sustained Muslim terrorist threat to the United States,4 fusion centers dive deep into public life. Journalist Ken Klippenstein gathered the titles of hundreds of intel reports compiled by fusion centers, offering a glimpse into what they were up to during 2019-2020: the humdrum and the idiotic. One in Florida investigated “Criminal and Violent Extremist Use of Emojis” as well as musical collaboration among “Subscribers of Black Extremism,” one near the nation’s capital dug into viral social media challenges, and one in Washington state covered such suburban hell as a man working on cars in his driveway and letting the motor oil run into a creek. A fusion center in Austin, Texas, reportedly monitored peaceful cultural events, including a meditation gathering, a music festival, and a candlelight vigil.
Fusion centers exhibit fascist traits: group belief in the need to defend against an ever-changing threat, militant government mindset, corporate saturation, nationalist justification, and mass monitoring of innocents. Staffed by mediocrity and emitting plenty of redundant and privacy-invading information, fusion centers have yet to reach their full potential. If the state is able to access competent personnel (difficult given the consumer mindset of U.S. society—a mindset largely created by Corporate America itself), fusion centers could pose an even greater threat to the public.
Fascism turns public services against the people. The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is an independent agency of the Executive Branch, authorized in the Constitution to serve the public. USPS scans the metadata of all snail mail—address, return address, names, time—and puts this information into government databases, accessible by federal agencies for an undisclosed amount of time, the New York Times reported in 2013. The Times quoted a former FBI agent who said, “Looking at just the outside of letters and other mail, I can see who you bank with, who you communicate with — all kinds of useful information that gives investigators leads that they can then follow up on with a subpoena… It can be easily abused because it’s so easy to use and you don’t have to go through a judge to get the information. You just fill out a form.”5
The Postal Service even surveils the public’s online activity: Likely established as early as 2018, its Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) has gathered images off public websites and created a database of billions of images then used for investigations. Corporate software allows the unit to “run keyword searches on social media event pages,” investigative reporter Jana Winter reported based on USPS documents. Authorities justify these searches as helping to guard against potential threats. iCOP personnel also create and manage social media bots. The program reportedly feeds its information into a digital portal shared with DHS, which can then distribute the information wherever it sees fit, including to law enforcement and NSA.
Legal Foundations
Opaque practices inherent to classified military- and civilian-intelligence budgets violate the Constitution’s requirement that U.S. Congress publish an accounting of the receipts and expenditures of all public money: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time,” reads Article I, Section 9, Clause 7. The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, to which the U.S. government is a party, bans using war as a way to solve international disagreements. Since the military-industrial complex’s entire existence is predicated on secrecy and profitable war, it just ignores these laws.
It also uses laws and legal instruments adeptly.
A waiver is a legal instrument that bureaucrats within the fascist structure issue in order to dodge what few restrictions remain. The U.S. government regularly invokes “national security” and “extraordinary circumstance” when implementing a blanket waiver permitting the war industry to sell to foreign governments that violate human rights.6 In the same vein, to provide hundreds of millions of dollars to allied governments in the name of “security assistance,” the White House frequently waives legal restrictions set forth in the Child Soldiers Prevention Acts.7 President Barack Obama reportedly approved a classified waiver allowing CIA to kill people via drone strikes in Pakistan based on their “pattern of life” instead of concrete information that they were planning an imminent attack. The White House and DHS invoke “national security,” including legal code set forth in the Real ID Act of 2005, to issue waivers (e.g., A, B) expediting construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall, devastating wilderness and wildlife. These are just some of the waiver’s greatest hits.
Congress sooths the public while refining government espionage. President Jimmy Carter signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978 after the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House revealed that U.S. intelligence agencies were engaged in systematic surveillance of trade union leaders, civil rights leaders, peaceful dissidents, and political activists. FISA did not impede the fascist state. It codified how the federal government could leverage the technological superiority of the U.S. war industry for espionage purposes. It also created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to facilitate government use of warrants for surveilling the public. The court’s proceedings are classified, and it only hears from one side: government. Its judges are appointed by the fortress of capitalist law, the chief justice of the Supreme Court.8
U.S. Congress passed the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing the Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act—the USA PATRIOT Act—in bipartisan unity following the 9-11 attacks. This act allowed greater government surveillance of the public while reducing judicial oversight and the ability to challenge the federal government’s searches in court. It shredded the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Privacy was no more,9 just as Corporate America began placing surveillance software in everything from home appliances to automobiles.
The fascist state claims self-defense when attacking. Military-industrial aggression worldwide from 1945 through 1990 was justified as defense against communism. The Authorization for Use of Military Force passed on 18 September 2001, which all U.S. Presidents have since used to deploy the troops worldwide, including in the Middle East, the Philippines, and East Africa, states, “Whereas, such acts [as the attacks of 11 September 2001] render it both necessary and appropriate that the United States exercise its rights to self-defense and to protect United States citizens both at home and abroad…” The U.S. government has also justified its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001 by citing Article 51 of the United Nations’ Charter, which states, “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations…” The U.S. government justified its invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 as a preemptive attack, defending against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. government kills people overseas via airstrikes, claiming self-defense: the victims pose an “imminent threat.”10 The ordnance killing people in post-9-11 wars is made in such locations as Garland, Texas (General Dynamics), Holston, Tennessee (BAE Systems), Orlando, Florida (Lockheed Martin), Radford, Virginia (BAE Systems), St. Charles, Missouri (Boeing), and Tucson, Arizona (RTX).
Legal manipulation harms those who’ve been kidnapped. The military tribunal procedures aboard U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, allow prosecutors to determine what classified evidence from CIA black sites the defense needs in trial preparation, even though the defense lawyers have the clearance—Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI)—needed to determine for themselves. Classification even prevents a torture victim languishing there from discussing whether he remembers the CIA official who oversaw his torture at black sites overseas.11 Most people imprisoned aboard Naval Station Guantánamo Bay were captured by U.S. allies, not U.S. forces.
You see, fascist institutions ignore human rights in certain cases, particularly when it comes to “national security” and protecting the country from a murky enemy. Select application of human rights allows the state to engage in assassination (drone strikes, cruise-missile strikes, high-altitude bombing, house raids), torture (CIA and JSOC overseas, solitary confinement at home in U.S.), and lengthy imprisonment without charge or trial (Guantánamo, black sites, the U.S. prison system, asylum applicants at the border). Some politicians claim to support human rights, but those rights apply neither to the overseas victims of the wars nor to the working class in the U.S., which lacks democracy in the workplace and whose labor the ruling class exploits in order to become fantastically rich.
Legal Secrecy
Fascist regimes are obsessed with secrecy. Early in the Cold War, the United States’ top nuclear physicists signed a report arguing against attacking Japan with nuclear weapons. The Pentagon seized this Franck Report of 1945, classified it, and only declassified it after using those weapons against Japan. Later in the Truman administration, the Association of Los Alamos Scientists, an organization of hundreds of civilian experts, composed a forceful warning about the dangers of a nuclear arms race and the need for international control of nuclear weaponry. The White House quickly classified the document.12 Toward the end of the Cold War, Congress tasked former nuclear launch control officer Bruce Blair with studying U.S. nuclear plans and networks. Blair concluded that the government’s complicated command system might actually increase the risk of nuclear war. The Pentagon seized the study, classified it at the highest level, and destroyed all but a few copies.13
Fascist regimes conceal information as naturally as the human heart beats. “Turns out that everything that’s bad news has been classified over the last few years,” the top government watchdog overseeing U.S.-led “reconstruction” of Afghanistan testified regarding routine U.S. government deceit. The Pentagon even buried an internal study that had identified a potential $125 billion in savings (achievable over five years through early retirements, personnel attrition, trimming some high-priced corporate activity, and shrewder use of information technology), fearing some in Congress might use the report to cut the military budget. Evidence (sitting on government servers) of U.S. airstrikes that killed civilians in the Middle East remains classified.
The White House can use “state secrets privilege” to invoke national security as a way of thwarting public requests for information. After corporate contractors from RCA died in a Boeing aircraft crash in the southern U.S. early in the Cold War, their widows filed a wrongful death action and requested the relevant accident reports. The Executive Branch argued that it couldn’t disclose the reports because they contained state secrets—information regarding classified technology aboard the aircraft. When the accident reports were finally declassified in 2004, they didn’t contain any details about classified equipment.
Law demanding silence facilitates federal investigation of the public. Armed federal bureaucracies can use classified administrative subpoenas, such as National Security Letters, to obtain the public’s metadata (location, duration, sender, recipient, time). The recipient of these Letters, typically a technology corporation—most with long histories of contracting with the federal government and/or utilizing technology originally developed through federal funding—is not allowed to inform the person being monitored that it is cooperating with the federal government. Elsewhere in the fascist state, classified rules govern the latest watchlist (authorized through classified Attorney General order)—the watchlist was developed during the Obama administration and implemented during the Trump administration—that allows the U.S. government to track and monitor members of the public without a warrant.
Separately, law enforcement, after receiving a discrete tip from a unit within the federal government, works backwards to arrange normal investigative procedures that create a path to the suspect. The federal unit that tipped off law enforcement is nowhere to be seen—not in affidavits, disclosure, courtroom testimony. This procedure, known as “parallel construction,” is used frequently. Reuters summarized the situation in 2013: “A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.” Most cases have nothing to do with terrorism or potential armed attack from individuals or states. Tips are disseminated in the name of combating informal gangs, organized crime, and drug traffickers.14
In 2008, U.S. Congress gave immunity to fascism’s corporate component: the telecoms helping the U.S. government carry out electronic espionage. This FISA Amendments Act also formally codified the federal government’s ability to search and track the U.S. public’s online communications without a warrant. Under Section 702 of the Act, NSA cannot deliberately collect the communications of U.S. persons (i.e. residents or citizens). It can, however, collect on foreigners overseas who are in communication with U.S. persons. Without needing a warrant, federal employees, including corporate contractors, can then search the databases that contain these communications (e.g., emails, texts, messages). Citing national security and counterterrorism, CIA and the FBI may query the data. The FBI may also search the data for evidence of a crime. In 2021, the FBI reportedly conducted at least 3.4 million warrantless searches of the U.S. public’s private electronic data.15
In the USA FREEDOM Act in 2015, Congress switched the responsibility for collecting the public’s metadata from government to corporation.
U.S. Congress leads the way in crafting the legal code for militant purposes when it teams up with corporate lobbyists and D.C. law firms to draft combative foreign policy, as exemplified in the various sections of the annual National Defense Authorization Act. Offices of legal counsel in the White House, the Justice Department, and the Pentagon, and general counsel in CIA and NSA issue further legal foundations (opinion, memorandum, and/or directive), which are often classified, before making a move home or abroad. Privacy Officers within these bureaucracies do not protect the public’s privacy; they find ways to skirt or exploit what little privacy protections exist. In the event of rare public inquiry, leadership cites their legal foundation, their armor.
Everyone a Suspect
In both outward expressions of the fascist state (e.g., the first Cold War, the global “war on terrorism,” today’s aggression against Beijing and Moscow) and inward expressions (e.g., war on drugs, the surveillance state), the working class is viewed as a threat. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden describes this everyone-is-a-suspect logic with respect to domestic surveillance: “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge or even a president.” He continued, “Even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with.”
The FBI can separately use assessments to monitor the public. An FBI assessment differs from an FBI investigation in that the Bureau does not need evidence of criminality or a verified threat to the state in order to conduct it. In the words of investigative journalist Alice Speri, assessments need “only to be authorized for a specific purpose, such as recruiting new informants.” Conducting open assessments, FBI agents can tail people, deploy informants into one’s circle of friends, lie in order to prompt incriminating statements in interviews, and monitor social media. This is nothing new. Often, as Nelson Blackstock pointed out in his seminal book about the FBI’s war against political freedom, no “specific illegal acts were charged against those ‘targeted’ by the FBI” during broad monitoring and suppression of worker organizing and Left political activity in the mid-twentieth century, “though a vague ‘propensity for violence’ and unspecified violent acts” were alleged (p. 35).
Circumventing due process and ignoring the freedom of association, a watchlist indicates to personnel in law enforcement or intelligence that a given human, X, is of interest. Seeing that X is on a watchlist, federal personnel can limit their travel, confiscate their possessions during travel, and further monitor them and their associates in person and online. Only reasonable suspicion, not evidence, is required to add someone’s name to the primary watchlist established after 9-11, the Terrorist Screening Database. The fascist state then devised (during the Obama administration) and launched (during the Trump administration) a new watchlist: Transnational Organized Crime (TOC), which authorizes government agencies to gather information on the public even when there is no evidence of a crime (or intent to commit a crime!), as journalists E.D. Cauchi and William M. Arkin reported in 2020. Any human in law enforcement—local, tribal, state, federal—can nominate someone to be on TOC. One can be put on the list if suspected of affiliation with gangs, cartels, syndicates; political dissent and activism; unapproved weapons dealing; human trafficking; visiting certain foreign websites; or contacting family living overseas.
More ratings and tallies await the public. At the state and local level, police use software products that ingest numerous data (from social media, arrest records, property documents, commercial databases) to assign humans a “threat score,” the Washington Post has reported.16 The corporations that sell the software do not disclose how they calculate a threat score, citing legal grounds that enhance corporate greed (i.e., trade secrecy and intellectual property). At the same time, credit agencies—for-profit corporations that collect, monitor, compile, and maintain information about one’s lending and credit past—present their three-digit credit score as an indicator of how trustworthy one is financially.
Subject to surveillance, assessments, watchlists, and scores, everyone is considered a suspect.
Bars and Borders
Some workers in the U.S. turn to crime after corporate executives deindustrialize their town and send jobs overseas where labor is relatively cheaper. Some turn to crime when an executive automates their manufacturing job. Other workers turn to illegal activities after being rejected by or leaving big business for their unwillingness to engage in the sociopathic behavior (deceit, incapacity for remorse, manipulation of others, lack of empathy, self-importance, superficial charm) required to ascend the corporate ladder. With every single aspect of life in the United States commodified—that is, corporations putting a price, a steep price, on such human needs as food, water, and housing—still more people turn to degrading or illegal means to make ends meet.
Federal policy—racist sentencing discrepancies, the war on drugs, the defunding of mental healthcare—has pushed more of the poor and working class into prisons and funneled the public’s money into this infrastructure of confinement.17
Instead of investing in communities through education, public transportation, and a social safety net, and redistributing wealth as part of that investment, federal and state officials choose to imprison their fellow humans. Generally, jail is where suspects are temporarily confined, often awaiting the legal process, while prison is where convicts are placed. People with certain criminal convictions on their record cannot receive student loans or access certain social programs (food stamps, public housing, welfare), so they are again pushed toward illegal activity. Thanks to this two-fold attack on the poor and working class—neglecting programs of social uplift while building up a brutal prison system—the United States now leads the world in imprisonment per capita.18
Tens of thousands of people suffer in solitary confinement in the U.S. prison system. Communications management units are one type of solitary confinement. Established by the Justice Department in the name of counterterrorism following 9-11, these units monitor and restrict the snail mail, face-to-face visits, and electronic communications of the undesirables housed within. Undesirables have included members of the demonized group: Arab Muslims (many imprisoned via entrapment19), animal rights activists (such as Daniel McGowan), and whistleblowers (such as Daniel Hale, who allegedly leaked information to the press about the U.S. government’s assassination-by-drone program).
The state has yet to exercise its full authority: Section 1021 of the fiscal 2012 National Defense Authorization Act codified indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens and residents without charge or trial.
The millions of humans behind bars in the U.S. lack physical freedom and personal freedom. The millions outside of prison—everyone is only provisionally outside of prison in the practice of the fascist state—also lack freedom: A single medical emergency or the whim of a corporate executive could send the hardest worker into poverty. There is no freedom to obtain necessities (food, shelter) without capitalists profiting from them, to make economic decisions without being coerced, or to engage in sufficient rest and personal passion. Freedom is healthcare and humane treatment for all, protection of the natural world, and democracy in the workplace.
Corralled by corporate goods and penned in by an intricate prison system, the working class faces a larger cage: constricting borders.
Families from across Latin America flee their homes in order to get away from Washington’s wars, covert activity, and economic warfare and the devastation that comes from extractive industries (oil, logging, palm, coffee, biofuels, fruit, minerals). Prior to the 9-11 attacks, people living along the U.S.-Mexico border could cross back and forth with relative ease. Fort Bliss, USA, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, for example, had been one community, united through language, commerce, and family. U.S. fascism—that blend of corporate power and government authority, justified via nationalism—soon digitized the border, i.e. loaded it up with digital technology: fixed towers with radar and networked sensors to detect people miles away, day or night; license plate readers; terrain mapping programs; mobile video surveillance at staggered intervals and depths; and costly software and artificial intelligence products to identify and classify whatever crosses the field of view. Border patrol can compile and compare biometrics (face, iris, fingerprints, tattoos, scars and blemishes, even DNA) and other identifying information held in databases across federal, state, and local law enforcement. A massive new database, a Northrop Grumman and Amazon product known as Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART), is now up and running.20
The overlapping aims of government authority and corporate profit incentivize expansion of the fascist structure. Therefore, officials administering the fascist state guide the digital border inward. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers can search any vehicle within “a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States.” Government regulations define this distance as 100 miles, as the crow flies, from any boundary, including the ocean. Roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population fall within this 100-mile zone. A former chief privacy officer at DHS explains, “The Fourth Amendment, even for U.S. citizens, doesn’t apply at the border… That’s under case law that goes back 150 years.” Courtesy of DHS’ legal teams, CBP Directive #3340-049A permits DHS personnel to search devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops) without reason. If one does not surrender passwords, CBP can take the device(s) and use corporate hacking products (such as those sold by Israel’s Cellebrite, USA’s Grayshift, and Canada’s Magnet Forensics) to break in and copy the contents for later analysis. A federal appeals court ruled in 2021 that DHS does not need a warrant to search the public’s mobile devices at land, ocean, and air borders.
A No-Fly List, compiled by multiple government agencies, prohibits thousands of people from flying on commercial airlines. Federal authorities then use corporate software to track the air travel of those who are permitted to fly. On top of this, the state physically monitors passengers on domestic flights. Federal air marshals observe humans who are flagged by a corporate algorithm. These passengers are not on federal watchlists, accused of any crime, or told when they are being monitored. A TSA spokesperson explained to BBC News, “The purpose of this program is to ensure passengers and flight crew are protected during air travel… This program’s core design is no different than putting a police officer on a beat where intelligence and other information presents the need for watch and deterrence.”21
Fascist components then cite immigration as a fear-inducing pretext in order to allocate even more money toward warfare abroad and at home, including the constriction of digital borders. Stoking fear of immigrants, U.S. fascism divides the workers of the world, pitting desperate U.S. workers against desperate immigrant workers.
Militarized Law Enforcement
Law enforcement professionals (federal, state, and local) are recruited from the working class to enforce the laws of the ruling class. When the working class goes on strike or engages in other acts of disobedience, who does the ruling class call? Law enforcement. These police are strike breakers, defenders of property (corporate and super-rich), and protest dispersers. The ruling class does not hesitate to deploy law enforcement, even military force, to crush worker organizing, as happened during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Pullman Strike of 1894, the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, the Battle of Blair Mountain of 1921, the Minneapolis truckers’ strike of 1934, the Little Steel Strike of 1937, the postal workers’ strike of 1970, and beyond. Policing is a key part of an economic system that forces people (under threats of starvation, violence, and poverty) into labor from which the ruling class profits.
To militarize is to equip with military gear and an armed forces’ mentality. The militarization of U.S. police forces increased after the launch of the war on drugs during the Nixon administration. Through the 1033 Program (a.k.a. the Law Enforcement Support Office program), the U.S. military’s Defense Logistics Agency transfers surplus military equipment and technology (previously purchased from war corporations and used or stored by the U.S. military) to local and state law enforcement. The 1033 Program transferred more than $7.2 billion of military equipment and technology to more than 8,000 law enforcement agencies between 1997 and 2020. It requires that law enforcement “make[s] use of such equipment within a year of acquisition, effectively mandating that police put it into practice in the public space.” In other words, law enforcement is institutionally encouraged to equip itself with military gear and turn it against the public. The separate 1122 Program allows local and state law enforcement to use their own funds to purchase new military equipment at the same discount that the federal government gets. Other sources of money, such as federal grants and seizure of the public’s possessions (“asset forfeiture”), allow law enforcement to purchase more and more gear and weaponry and to develop new militant tactics with minimal federal oversight.
The war industry long ago mastered the marketing of goods and services to the U.S. military as “solutions,” “saving lives,” and “giving” those on the front lines “the tools they need.” It employs the same strategy when marketing to law enforcement. The militarization of law enforcement comprises roughly $5 billion of the annual $20 billion “homeland security market,” CNBC reported in 2020. The typical police kit can now feature armored vehicles, assault rifles, batons, tear gas, combat knives, tactical gloves, body armor, camouflage, grenade launchers, night-vision equipment, espionage software, helicopters, and small drones.
Corporations also sell training courses and products. Businesses have slick names featuring vogue words: dynamic, tactical, patriot, solutions, American.22 Course offerings are soldierly in nature: knife fighting, parachuting, sniper training, and advanced driving skills. Many have a “special operations” flair, tapping into wells of emotion among police who’ve steadily imbibed government and Hollywood glorification of special operations forces. The International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association (ILEETA), a major source of training materials for state and local police departments, is sponsored by a wide variety of corporations, including those that sell to the military, such as L3Harris and Day & Zimmermann. ILEETA training materials have stated that Black Lives Matter and anti-fascists are “revolutionary movements whose aims are to overthrow the US government” and planning “extreme violence.”
Corporations craft policy for law enforcement and the military.23
Those implementing ruling-class policy often buy the lies hook, line, and sinker: Domestic law enforcement professionals view themselves as the good guys holding the line, while many members of the U.S. military believe they “fight for freedom” and “spread democracy.” A commander of U.S. Africa Command said it best when telling the troops, “All of you have been steady professionals, holding the line, and that is exactly what has been needed.” Symbols—the goose-stepping and the swastika (back in the day), and the flyovers, pledges of allegiance, Old Glory, and blue-line flags (now)—are disseminated to the public for rational reasons: Symbols help to keep the wars going, destroy working-class movements, and expand big business.
Many police bureaucracies view military experience as an asset. Police who previously deployed overseas in the military, often disturbed by the wars in which they participated, could bring their trauma home and inflict it upon the civilian populations. Sometimes, troops-turned-police bask in the veteran-worship that permeates U.S. society, adding another layer that prevents personal reflection let alone institutional reform. (This mentality of “break shit and kill people”—a mantra I heard both non-commissioned officers and field-grade officers repeat when I was in the military—contrasts starkly with the gumshoe diligence needed to prevent or solve crime.) Police who never joined the military are afflicted differently: The glorification of the military on corporate media and in Hollywood film distorts the non-veteran police officer’s understanding of war. In addition to this distortion, the police officer can suffer from a quasi-guilt for not being a veteran, sometimes resulting in a more aggressive approach to policing than those with actual military experience. In policing, these non-veterans get to act out the adored roles that they see on TV and the big screen.
Though many jobs are more dangerous than state and local law enforcement (including farmer, fisherman, garbage collector, iron worker, landscaper, logger, roofer, and truck driver), police academies reportedly average 110 hours on learning how to shoot and defensive tactics and just eight on conflict management. The training process, in emphasizing violence over steady community interaction and conflict resolution, bakes aggression into recruits. Positioning the streets as a battlefield, training courses emphasize, “Make it home to your family at night” and “Do not become a statistic.” Eric Tang, professor at the University of Texas-Austin, explains, “If you are convinced that the people you keep safe are actually the enemy, then your work as a police officer will proceed with that in mind… You can’t have it both ways: On one hand you can’t talk about being an officer of the ‘peace,’ and on the other hand, describe yourself as someone who is at war.” The public’s experience can be summarized in the popular refrain: Imagine if you call the fire department and they just beat the shit out of you instead of putting out the fire.
The disconnect is real: In any given U.S. city, law enforcement personnel do not live in and are not a part of most neighborhoods that they police. Kitted up in military garb and emotionally conditioned to view the public as hostile, police often behave as troops confronting enemy combatants. Law enforcement in military kit are more likely to behave violently, research has shown. Militarized law enforcement personnel throw themselves into situations where a subtler approach would suffice. In an ACLU study of more than 800 local and state paramilitary raids using weapons of war, 80 percent were “for ordinary law enforcement purposes like serving search warrants on people’s homes,” with only seven percent used in genuine emergencies like hostage crises. According to Dr. Pete Kraska, military-style special weapons and tactics (SWAT) units carry out roughly 50,000 such raids across the United States each year. Police can raid a person’s home if they merely suspect criminal activity.
Occupy and Black Lives
“A democracy works best when the people know what their government is doing. They must have access to the policies and rules by which departments and agencies operate. Government officials should not be able to pull curtains of secrecy around decisions which can be revealed without injury to the public interest. Good government functions best in the full light of day.”
President Lyndon B. Johnson had his press secretary, Bill Moyers, trim this portion of the signing statement of the 1966 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The ensuing final draft was quite different: A “democracy works best when the people have all the information that the security of the nation permits. No one should be able to pull the curtains of secrecy around decisions which can be revealed without injury to the public interest” (emphasis mine). Most of the overall statement then ensured the withholding—not disclosure—of information. A master of ceremony, President Johnson signed the Act without one.
Invoking classification, statute, or trade secrets allows the federal government to stifle the release of documents when faced with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Some parts of the federal government are wilier. John Stockwell explains how his former employer, CIA, dodges a request: “Since the Freedom of Information Act, the agency increasingly uses a system of ‘soft,’ ‘unofficial,’ or ‘convenience’ files for sensitive subjects, especially any involving surveillance of Americans. Such files are not registered in the agency’s official records system, and hence can never be disclosed under the FOIA” (p. 228).
The distended bureaucracies of the fascist state nonetheless sometimes respond to FOIA requests with documentation, however meager. Occupy Wall Street, which sprang up in 2011, was a geographically distributed movement that rejected the financial industry’s domination of public life and the profit-over-people way that society is organized. In response to a FOIA request from a non-profit legal organization, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, DHS coughed up some documents, heavily redacted. Independent analysis of these documents revealed deep federal coordination aimed at suppressing and dismantling Occupy.
The state coordinated and centralized its activity against Occupy through the DHS National Operations Center, government documents indicated. DHS described this National Operations Center—the main “conduit for the White House Situation Room”—as the “primary national-level hub” for sharing and coordinating information (across industry and federal, state, tribal, and local government) related to terrorist attacks and “domestic incident management.”24 The Occupy movement endured for about one year nationwide, roughly autumn 2011 through 2012, before the coordinated federal effort won out and the movement fizzled.
The New York Police Department, utilizing compartmented units, premeditated “counterterrorism measures,” and weeks of planning, cleared Zuccotti Park of an Occupy encampment in November 2011. Of the NYPD’s broader daily fusion-center operations, the commanding general of U.S. Special Operations Command later stated approvingly, “They have gone to extraordinary pains to group and mass as much data as possible… for their police operators, their policemen on the watch” (14:00).
Law enforcement in the U.S. kills the public at rates far higher than law enforcement in any other country, and is far more likely to kill black than white people, even though black people constitute a far smaller percentage of the population. After a white Ferguson, Missouri, police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old unarmed black man, much of the city rose up in protest. These popular uprisings, which endured summer 2014 through summer 2015, saw federal monitoring and stifling of civil rights and black political activity. Demonstrators were met with a brutal crackdown from law enforcement, which included DHS vehicles, uniformed and plain-clothed federal officials, FBI agents and FBI police officers, and state and local police forces in head-to-toe military kit. Regarding this militarized response, Representative Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri famously remarked, “Ferguson resembles Fallujah more than it does Ferguson.” DHS planned to “plug” federal officers into Ferguson protests in order collect intelligence, investigative journalist Jason Leopold reported after piecing together hundreds of pages of government documents. Redacted heavily, the documents did not indicate whether DHS ever implemented the plan.
A fascist state views the public as a threat. The Missouri National Guard, which was deployed to Ferguson, offhandedly referred to protestors as “adversaries” and even “enemy forces.” NSA documents referred to members of the public who oppose the federal government’s assassination-by-drone-strike program as “adversaries” and “threats.” In disseminating propaganda, the U.S. government views its citizens and residents as an opposition that must be manipulated.25
State and local law enforcement are now in the espionage game. In an analysis published by the Brennan Center, former FBI agent Michael German summarized law enforcement’s broader transformation into domestic intelligence units: Through constant contact and collaboration, the tactics, techniques, procedures, and attitudes of federal intelligence apparatuses permeate state and local law enforcement.
Law enforcement knows where to place surveillance technology for full coverage. Vehicles, buildings, and public structures (such as traffic lights) offer points of observation. Cameras on police bodies and vehicles—more for monitoring protestors than documenting police violence—provide mobile coverage. Cameras, license-plate readers, cell-phone exploitation devices stand at entrance and exit points, along anticipated protest routes, and at distant lots and alleys where protestors might park. The air offers total freedom to maneuver with fixed-wing piloted planes, large and small drones, and helicopters. Knowledge about the public that the state obtains from surveillance can be fed into law enforcement databases. Federal intelligence units regularly access one another’s databases.26
The federal government, including DHS, thoroughly monitors—online and in person—the civil rights movement known as Black Lives Matter. (This broad, decentralized movement is distinct from the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Many local civil rights organizers, affiliated or unaffiliated with the Foundation, haven’t seen a dime from the Foundation’s sizeable coffers.) Everything from vigils and music parades to breast cancer walks are reportedly surveilled. DHS “frequently collects information, including location data, on Black Lives Matter activities from public social media accounts,” journalist George Joseph concluded in 2015 after reviewing hundreds of government documents.
In November 2014, a grand jury declined to indict the law enforcement professional who had murdered Michael Brown. Roughly four months later, the Department of Justice also declined to prosecute the officer, even while simultaneously releasing a report (pdf) that found systematic, racist police activity in Ferguson.
“Two young men were found [shot] dead inside torched cars. Three others died in apparent suicides. Another collapsed on a bus, his death ruled an overdose,” the Associated Press later reported regarding the death of men tied to the Ferguson protests. Danye Jones, one of the alleged to have died by suicide, was found hanging from a tree in the front of his home. No arrests were made. Civil rights activists across the country were subjected to ongoing in-person and online monitoring, including FBI visits to their homes.
Stifling black-led progress has always been a fascist priority. The Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was a mid-century FBI-led program to eliminate political activity and popular movements that deviated strongly from political orthodoxy. Modeled upon earlier federal efforts to harm socialists, communists, anarchists, and robust trade-union activity, COINTELPRO achieved its goals through methodical disruption, agents provocateurs, intimidation, violence, and terror. The program targeted peace activists, the civil rights movement, black nationalists, students and academics, the Puerto Rico independence movement, and people assertively Left of center. The state ran COINTELPRO successfully across Democratic and Republican presidential administrations, crushing working-class political movements and shattering black political momentum.27
The fascist state claims it's fighting terrorism when it uses war-industry products to monitor, attack, and snuff out various groups overseas: independence movements, takfiri zealots once supported by CIA, people who want to control their own resources, and any other that dissents from Washington’s implementation of capitalist rule.28 Fighting terrorism is also a justification that the state uses domestically when monitoring the public and stifling movements that want to change the miserable system. The FBI runs Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which it describes as “our nation’s front line of defense against terrorism, both international and domestic. They are groups of highly trained, locally based, passionately committed investigators, analysts, linguists, and other specialists from dozens of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. When it comes to investigating terrorism, they do it all: chase down leads, gather evidence, make arrests, provide security for special events, collect and share intelligence, and respond to threats and incidents at a moment’s notice.” As these task forces are run by the FBI, journalist Alice Speri notes, they operate “under FBI guidelines, which provide fewer protections for speech, privacy, and civil liberties than the rules governing local police and other law enforcement.”
The federal government approached Black Lives as a counterterrorism matter, from coast to coast.29 Journalist and media critic Adam Johnson summarized his study of government documents: “Beyond a few PR tweaks, there doesn’t seem to be… an ounce of doubt or hesitation as to whether or not using systems set up ostensibly to combat al-Qaeda should be so quickly turned on domestic activism.” Citing one of the best descriptions of the fascist state—that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail—Johnson continued: “We’ve given our hyper-militarized police and the FBI the hammer of coordinated mass surveillance, infiltration, and monitoring in the name of fighting a phenomenon that kills fewer people a year than bee stings. It was only a matter of time, therefore, that mass protests would begin to look like a nail in the eyes” of the officials who have risen to the top of the state. One must remember, in the eyes of the U.S. ruling class, organized working-class movements that want to change the system must always be crushed.
In this environment, some personnel within the fascist structure have tried to tie dissidents of color living in the U.S. to overseas groups already successfully designated as terrorists. DHS officials wrote that the so-called Islamic State might “use the situation in Ferguson as a recruitment tool” or call upon the “rioters” of 2015 to join them, internal government documents obtained by the transparency group Property of the People indicated. In a July 2016 memo, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence warned that a foreign pro-Jihadist social media user looked to take advantage of the protests to encourage black Americans “to take up arms” and “start armed war against the U.S. government.” A CIA official, having reportedly misread information from a detainee, asked the alleged planner of the 9-11 attacks, who was being tortured overseas in a CIA black site, about his supposed plans to recruit black people in the United States to participate in terrorism.
Historian Jefferson Morley, in his biography of James Jesus Angleton, asserted that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had created COINTELPRO with Angleton’s assistance, and it had functioned as a joint FBI-CIA operation: “The Bureau took the lead in targeting dissident Americans inside the United States. The Agency took the lead outside the country” (p. 84). Former CIA case officer John Stockwell has referred to CIA’s spying on U.S. “black radicals” as they traveled abroad as “one of the Agency’s most explosively sensitive and closely held operations against Americans” (p. 75).30
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover regularly used the phrase “black extremists” in the 1960s to describe movements for black liberation and self-defense. The “Black Panther party, without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” he snookered. United Press International put it lightly: “Hoover said in his fiscal 1969 annual report the increased activity of ‘violence-prone black extremists group’ had put more investigative responsibilities on the FBI.” Members of the Black Panther party, Hoover asserted, “travel extensively all over the United States preaching their gospel of hate and violence not only to ghetto residents, but to students in colleges, universities and high schools as well.”
Chair of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton, meanwhile emphasized, “We’re gonna fight racism not with racism, but… with solidarity. We said we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism. We stood up and said we’re not gonna fight reactionary pigs and reactionary states attorneys… with any other reactions on our part. We’re gonna fight their reaction with all us people to get together and have an international proletarian revolution. And that’s saying all power to the people.” Such an emphasis on working-class unity frightens fascists. Chicago law enforcement under FBI direction assassinated Fred Hampton on 4 December 1969.
By late summer 2017, the FBI’s counterterrorism division had come up with a new designation: black identity extremists. To pursue black political activity and obtain the requisite legal authorities, the FBI framed the matter as defending against possible premeditated violence against police.31 Self-defense. In the wake of Jana Winter and Sharon Weinberger’s Foreign Policy reporting on the FBI’s view of “black identity extremism,” journalists, elected officials, and the members of the public filed lawsuits and records requests with the FBI in an attempt to understand the government’s rationale. Though the government withheld information and redacted much, the documents it released illustrated just how much time and effort it was dedicating to surveilling and assessing black activists and civil rights advocates during 2015-2018. One tranche of FBI documents obtained by MediaJustice and the ACLU indicated that the federal government held numerous strategy meetings with local and state law enforcement and encouraged local law enforcement to collect intelligence on “black separatist extremists,” with a hive of FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces coordinating the efforts.
Investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein meanwhile obtained portions of the FBI’s Consolidated Strategy Guide for fiscal years 2018-2020. The official document offered “threat guidance” to Bureau personnel and referenced a program, Iron Fist, designed to mitigate “black identity extremism” through enhanced intelligence collection and recruitment of informants. As the FBI’s designation “black identity extremists” conflated uncompromising civil rights activity with violence against law enforcement, the Strategy Guide stated that many black identity extremists “are convicted felons who are prohibited possessors [of guns], therefore the FBI will continue to use their prohibited possessor status as a tactic to assist in mitigating the threat for potential violence.”
By early 2019, the savvy FBI affirmed that it had stopped using the term “black identity extremists.” It then started to use the term “racially motivated violent extremists,” which placed the black-led movement for civil rights and white terrorism into the same category.
Conclusion
President Barack Obama’s successor would soon utilize the lessons learned from suppressing Occupy and Ferguson to further crack down on civil rights. In a leaked transcript of President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr conversing with state governors, Trump stated, “This is like Occupy Wall Street. It was a disaster until one day somebody said, ‘That’s enough.’ And they just went in and wiped them out. And it’s the last time I heard the name Occupy Wall Street.” Barr then outlined the government’s broad plan: Use existing infrastructure, which had been deployed so effectively against Occupy and Ferguson, to stifle the ongoing uprising: “The structure we’re going to use is the Joint Terrorist [sic] Task Force, which I know most of you are familiar with. Tried and true system. It’s worked for domestic and homegrown terrorists, and we’re going to employ that model.”
Ishmael Jones, The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture (New York: Encounter, 2010), p. 292. CIA’s Special Activities Division expanded from a paramilitary division to a global Special Activities Center, author and fan of espionage stardom Annie Jacobsen explained in 2019’s Surprise, Kill, Vanish (New York: Little, Brown & Co.), p. 439. In 2015, Director John Brennan reorganized CIA directorates and created the Directorate of Digital Innovation. In 2021, Director William Burns created a new mission center focused on China. For CIA’s office expansion during the earlier Cold War, see Andrew Friedman, Covert Capital (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), p. 77.
Special Operations Command figures cited in Nick Turse, “Will the Biden Administration Shine Light on Shadowy Special Ops Programs?” (Intercept, 20 Mar 2021). In Top Secret America, p. 227, Priest and Arkin explain that Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), an independent unit of SOCOM focused on drone strikes and killing people face-to-face overseas, grew from roughly 1,800 to roughly 25,000 in the ten years following the 9-11 attacks. Cyber Command statistics cited in Graff, “The Man Who Speaks Softly—and Commands a Big Cyber Army” (Wired, 13 Oct 2020). As of 2020, NSA hovered around 38,000 personnel, plus roughly 20,000 corporate contractors. Per JAIC’s first leader, Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan: “… [T]oday with 185 people with a $1.3 billion budget — we’ve grown so fast that we’ve exceeded our current spaces and we’re moving into a separate facility. All of that’s happened in 18 months” (quoted in Nathan Strout, C4ISRNet, 4 Jun 2020). Booz Allen Hamilton received JAIC’s first major contract: $800 million for five years of AI work. On 12 August 2020, Deloitte was tasked with designing and building the Joint Common Foundation AI development environment for JAIC.
List of DHS’ 54 prime contractors available in 2021 at <www.dhs.gov/prime-contractors>. Of the 54, thirty-six contract regularly with DOD. Four do not appear regularly in DOD contracting announcements: The GEO Group, Morpho Detection, Partnership for Temporary Housing (PATH), and Sirva Relocations. The remaining corporations on the list contract occasionally with DOD. Raytheon was a prime contractor for DHS’ Network Security Deployment Division (NSD), using hardware and software to protect the .gov domain. A rundown of the department’s $52.5B budget is in “FY 2022 Budget in Brief” (DHS.gov, accessed 2 Mar 2022). The war industry markets to DHS and other armed bureaucracies in the same manner it markets to the U.S. military. Industry’s regular displays (fairs, exhibitions, conferences, symposia, breakfasts, fora, expos) employ the same pitches and the same lies. Corporations sponsor the events. Two portions of DHS—CBP and ICE—issued 105,000 contracts worth roughly $55 billion during 2008-20, per Todd Miller and Nick Buxton, “Biden’s Border” (Transnational Institute, 17 Feb 2021): <www.tni.org/en/bidensborder>.
For the very small chance of being killed in a terrorist attack by a Muslim in the U.S., see <ourworldindata.org/terrorism> and <waronirrationalfear.com>. Fascist apparatuses can’t even find Muslim terrorists. A NYPD “Demographics Unit” that monitored Muslims in the northeast U.S. didn’t “generate a lead” or trigger a single terrorism investigation. Likewise, there was no evidence that DHS’ National Security Entry-Exit Registration System profiling of Arabs, Muslims, and Middle Easterners “led to the identification of anyone suspected of involvement in terrorism-related crimes.” An NSA program that aggregated and analyzed the metadata of U.S. citizens and residents—trillions of records—didn’t lead to a single arrest. Furthermore, after conducting a thirteen-month review (1 April 2009 – 30 April 2010), the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations determined that fusion centers had not uncovered a single terrorist threat. See Goldman and Apuzzo, “NYPD: Muslim spying led to no leads, terror cases” (AP, 21 Aug 2012); “The NSEERS Effect: A Decade of Racial Profiling, Fear, and Secrecy” (Rights Working Group and the Center for Immigrant Rights at Penn State Law, May 2012): <https://pennstatelaw.psu.edu>; Charlie Savage, “N.S.A. Phone Program Cost $100 Million, but Produced Only Two Unique Leads” (NYT, 25 Feb 2020); and R. Jeffrey Smith, “Senate report says national intelligence fusion centers have been useless” (Center for Public Integrity, published 3 Oct 2012, updated 19 May 2014): <publicintegrity.org>. CIA and FBI created fake personas to scour online video gaming for terrorists plotting attacks, the documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed. These armed bureaucracies came up empty handed. See Justin Elloitt, “World of Spycraft: NSA and CIA Spied in Online Games” (ProPublica, 9 Dec 2013).
The Washington Post reported in June 2024, “The U.S. Postal Service has shared information from thousands of Americans’ letters and packages with law enforcement every year for the past decade, conveying the names, addresses and other details from the outside of boxes and envelopes without requiring a court order… [A] decade’s worth of records… show Postal Service officials have received more than 60,000 requests from federal agents and police officers since 2015, and that they rarely say no. Each request can cover days or weeks of mail sent to or from a person or address, and 97 percent of the requests were approved, according to the data. Postal inspectors recorded more than 312,000 letters and packages between 2015 and 2023, the records show.”
See, inter alia, Col. Todd Royar, “The Leahy Law: Briefing to Military Attachés” (dami.army.pentagon.mil, accessed 27 Jul 2022): <www.dami.army.pentagon.mil/g2Docs/DAMI-FL/Leahy_Brief_7Mar14.pdf>, [slide 6 of 10]; Joseph Stephansky, “Egypt’s US envoy slams ‘deceived’ legislators’ bid to block aid” (Al Jazeera, 12 Aug 2021); and Robbie Gramer and Jack Detsch, “Congress, Biden Duke It Out Over Egypt Aid” (FP, 18 Aug 2022). Broad description in “U.S. Arms Sales and Human Rights: Legislative Basis and Frequently Asked Questions” (Congressional Research Service, 30 Apr 2021); “Global Human Rights: Security Forces Vetting (‘Leahy Laws’)” (Congressional Research Service, 5 Aug 2022).
The Child Soldiers Prevention Act of 2008 (title IV of public law 110-457) restricts certain security assistance to countries that recruit or use child soldiers. The Child Soldier Prevention Act of 2018 (title II, subtitle B of public law 115-425) later strengthened some CSPA provisions.
In 2012, the federal government presented to the FISC 1,856 applications for surveillance. FISC approved all 1,856. Dina Temple-Raston, “FISA Court Appears to Be Rubber Stamp for Government Requests” (NPR.org, 13 Jun 2013).
The Fourth Amendment granted people the right to “be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” and this “shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” USA PATRIOT Act Section 213 allowed the government greater leeway to search private property. Section 214 allowed greater metadata searches. Section 215 allowed greater search of personal records (“any tangible things”) that were in the possession of third parties (not you and not the government). By redefining one’s records as “the entirety” of a telecom’s “call database,” the government used Section 215 to collect bulk metadata of U.S. citizens and residents, as whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013. Section 215 has since lapsed, though intel agencies can continue citing it for surveillance that was ongoing at the time of lapse or initiated prior to lapse. Agencies can also launch new investigations of the public into events that happened prior to lapse. See Charlie Savage, “House Departs Without Vote to Extend Expired F.B.I. Spy Tools” (NYT, 27 Mar 2020). Section 218 expanded, under the guise of foreign intelligence collection, the ability of the federal government to wiretap or physically search property in order to obtain evidence of a crime, without initially having probable cause of one being involved in a crime. More at “Surveillance Under the USA/PATRIOT Act” (ACLU.org, accessed 20 Nov 2021). NSA defeated known encryption that guards the public’s privacy when surfing the internet, per James Ball, et al., “NSA and GCHQ target Tor network that protects anonymity of web users” (Guardian, 4 Oct 2013).
Investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill explained, “The president gives the military a sixty-day window to hunt down and kill these individuals… If the standard is that the people who are being targeted for assassination represent an imminent threat… then why do they have sixty days to do it? Why don’t they need to do it now if it’s imminent? Well, that’s because they’ve redefined the term ‘imminent’ to be so vague as to not even resemble its actual, commonly-understood definition” (13:36).
State Department legal adviser Harold Koh stated, “… in this ongoing armed conflict, the United States has the authority under international law, and the responsibility to its citizens, to use force, including lethal force, to defend itself, including by targeting persons such as high-level al Qaeda leaders who are planning attacks.”
“Under domestic law, and international law, the United States is at war with al-Qaida, the Taliban, and their associated forces,” President Barack Obama affirmed. “We are at war with an organization that right now would kill as many Americans as they could if we did not stop them first. So, this is a just war—a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defense”
More claims of self-defense noted in “U.S. Self-Defense Strike in Somalia” (U.S. Africa Command, 30 Aug 2016), “US self-defense airstrikes in Somalia kill 11 al-Shabab” (AP, 20 Dec 2018), Ona Hathaway and Luke Hartig, “Still at War: The United States in Somalia” (Just Security, 31 Mar 2022); Dan De Luce, et al., “Biden Orders Airstrikes in Syria, retaliating against Iran-backed militias” (NBC News, 25 Feb 2021). On 24 Aug 2022, U.S. military spokesperson Col. Joe Buccino again invoked self-defense regarding more U.S. attacks in Syria against Iranian targets: “Today’s strikes were necessary to protect and defend U.S. personnel.” The Biden administration’s presidential policy memorandum, issued in autumn 2022, allowed “self-defense” strikes to continue without White House approval.
Carol Rosenberg, “Judge Rules Prosecutors Misrepresented Evidence From C.I.A. Sites” (NYT, 8 Nov 2019); Carol Rosenberg, et al., Dysfunctional Prison and Court Pose Guantánamo Headaches for Biden” (NYT, 15 Dec 2020); Aram Roston, “Exclusive: Ex-CIA analyst says she ‘got bloodied’ in tangled U.S. war on Al Qaeda” (Reuters, 20 Apr 2022).
Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, American Prometheus (New York: Random House, 2005), pp. 297, 325-6.
Andrew Cockburn, The Spoils of War (Verso: New York, 2021), p. 25; Tim Weiner, Blank Check (New York, Warner, 1991), pp. 63-64.
For another instance of federal government instructing local law enforcement to recreate evidence originally obtained through federal use of cell-phone tracking equipment and telecom records, see Jenna McLaughlin, “FBI Told Cops to Recreate Evidence from Secret Cell-Phone Trackers” (Intercept, 5 May 2016). For DEA’s Hemisphere program, which reportedly uses parallel construction, see “Los Angeles Hemisphere” (ONDCP, accessed 23 Feb 2022): <https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/782287/database.pdf>.
For more examples of FBI personnel unlawfully searching raw FISA data on numerous occasions (including an instance involving a data of a U.S. lawmaker), see Dell Cameron, “The FBI’s Most Controversial Surveillance Tool Is Under Threat” (Wired, 18 Feb 2023). Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen spoke at Brookings Institution on 28 Feb 2023 about the need to reauthorize Section 702. His speech, available at www.justice.gov, offers an excellent case study regarding threat inflation, the positioning of government surveillance as necessary for public protection, and assurances that the government has taken steps to avoid “mistakes” and toward “reform.”
One such software product assigning threat scores, Beware, is produced by a corporation called Intrado, owned by—wait for it!—the financial firm Apollo Global Management. Apollo’s investments include credit funds, real estate, and military contractors, per the firm’s disclosures and press releases. Detroit resident Nakia Wallace summarizes a different portion of the surveillance state known as Project Green Light: It “pre-criminalizes” people and “gives the police the right to keep tabs on you if they think you are guilty” and harass black and brown communities. Quoted in Michael Kwet, “The Microsoft police state: mass surveillance, facial recognition, and the Azure cloud” (Intercept, 14 Jul 2020). For other pre-criminalization on the ground, see the award-winning report by Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi, “Targeted” (Tampa Bay Times, 3 Sep 2020).
Fearmongering has underpinned bipartisan legislation harming the poor and working class: President Nixon’s law and order campaign and 1971 launch of the drug war; President Reagan’s gutting of the Mental Health Systems Act and passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which implemented mandatory prison-sentencing minimums; the vast expansion of three-strike laws at the state level in the 1990s; and President Clinton’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 and creation of DEA’s Special Operations Division. White people moving to the suburbs further deprived cities and public institutions of funding. For a thorough summary of the poverty-to-prison pipeline, see “Why America Throws the Poor in Prison” (Gravel Institute, 12 Feb 2021).
Corporations sell products for prison function (transportation, phone plans, medical care, surveillance, innutritious food, money transfer). Such expenses force prisoners into even more debt while increasing corporate profit. Some prisons themselves are profit-making corporations. These private prisons held 115,428 people in 2019, 8% of the total state and federal prison population, per “Private Prisons in the United States” (SentencingProject.org, 3 Mar 2021). Portions of the U.S. legal system now use algorithms (sold by corporations) to determine, often erroneously, the likelihood a defendant might commit more crime or skip bail, per Julia Angwin, et al., “Machine Bias” (ProPublica, 23 May 2016).
Entrapment happens when law enforcement encourages or facilitates a person to break the law. For prevalence, see Paul Harris, “Fake terror plots, paid informants: the tactics of FBI 'entrapment' questioned” (Guardian, 16 Nov 2011); “Illusions of Justice” (HRW.org, 21 Jul 2014); and Trevor Aaronson and Paul Abowd, “FBI Terrorism Stings: Two Decades of National Security Theater” (Intercept, 11 Sep 2021). Recent reporting includes Murtaza Hussain, “The FBI Groomed a 16-Year-Old With ‘Brain Development Issues’ to Become a Terrorist” (Intercept, 15 Jun 2023) and “After His Mother Asked for Help, FBI Terrorism Sting Targets Mentally Ill Teen” (Intercept, 31 Jul 2023); and “‘FBI-Orchestrated Conspiracy’: Judge Orders Release of 3 of Newburgh 4 Tied to Fake NY Bomb Plot” (DemocracyNow.org, 31 Jul 2023).
Immigration policies and border militarization in Douglas Massey, “Do We Really Need a Border Wall?” (Gravel Institute, 4 Dec 2020). For a thorough 2021 report on the digital border, see The Deadly Digital Border Wall (pdf). HART is now the primary DHS “system for storage and processing of biometric and associated biographic information for national security; law enforcement; immigration and border management; intelligence; background investigations for national security positions and certain positions of public trust; and associated testing, training, management reporting, planning and analysis, development of new technologies, and other administrative uses.” See “Privacy Impact Assessment for the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology System (HART) Increment 1 PIA” (DHS.gov, 24 Feb 2020).
For CBP’s Automated Targeting System and DHS’ TECS, see <www.dhs.gov/publication/automated-targeting-system-ats-update> and <www.dhs.gov/publication/dhscbppia-021-tecs-system-platform>.
Capitalists establishing or rebranding war corporations regularly opt for names comprised of such words as consulting, defense, enterprise, federal, integration, mission, services, solutions, and systems. For corporations selling training products, courseware, and instruction to the U.S. military, see <www.warindustrymuster.com/corporate-summaries>.
For corporation crafting law enforcement policy, see Alice Speri, “Private company moves to profit from New York’s police reforms” (Intercept, 9 Aug 2020) and Greg Moran, “A little known private company has an outsize role writing policies for police departments” (San Diego Tribune, 8 Nov 2020). Police unions and active-duty officers in the biggest U.S. cities also spent millions of dollars to influence state and local policy and prevent police reform, the Guardian reported (Perkins, 23 Jun 2020). A few examples, among many, of corporations involved in DOD policymaking include SAIC being involved in strategic plans and policy support for Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration; Deloitte being involved in strategic assessment and planning for Deputy Chief of Naval Operations; and CACI developing and managing policies and practices for acquisition within part of the Navy. Relevant contracting announcements: 17 Dec 2020, 28 May 2021, 24 Aug 2021.
PCJF National Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard put the documents in context: These documents only “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with ‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement.” Documents obtained via FOIA showed the following: (1) The National Operations Center (NOC) collecting and distributing names and contact information of Occupy protesters arrested in Dallas, TX, demonstrating against Bank of America. (2) Shortly after a large Occupy Chicago demonstration against cuts to the social safety net, the NOC disseminated a Chicago PD request that asked other law enforcement—which were suppressing, often brutally, their own respective Occupy protests (e.g. Atlanta, Boston, D.C., New York, Seattle)—what tactics they were using. Journalist Dave Lindorff: “Realizing that it would look bad if it assisted in such coordination overtly,” DHS officials of higher rank “ordered the recall of the request but then simply rerouted it through ‘law enforcement channels,’ where presumably it would be harder for anyone to spot a federal role in the coordination of local police responses” (Counterpunch, 14 May 2012). Documents show the NOC duty director indicating he would “reach out” to FBI liaisons for assistance. (3) DHS kept the U.S. military’s Northern Command in the loop prior to a planned Occupy demonstration at a port in Oakland, CA. (4) The White House gave DHS direct prior approval regarding public statements DHS could make conveying official denial of DHS involvement in countering Occupy. Pre-approved Executive background information included: “DHS is not actively coordinating with local law enforcement agencies and/or city governments concerning the evictions of Occupy encampments writ large.” For an early infiltrator of Occupy who gave information to the FBI, NYPD, and corporations, see Adrian Chen (Gawker, 15 Oct 2011). For analysis of government documents, see Jason Leopold, et al., “Latest Batch of DHS Occupy Documents Reveals Surveillance” (Truthout, 8 May 2012). For surveillance of Occupy Atlanta and coordination across FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces, DHS, the Federal Reserve, and financial institutions, see Cherkis and Carter, “FBI Surveillance of Occupy Wall Street Detailed” (Huffington Post, updated 23 Jan 2014).
Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall, Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror, pp. xiii-xiv, 16-17, 24.
The National Counterterrorism Center can consult the databases of other intelligence units in order to examine whether any U.S. citizen or resident might be engaging in criminal activity, per Michael Kelley, “Confirmed: US Counterterrorism Agency Can Amass Data On Any Citizen” (Business Insider, 13 Dec 2012); Julia Angwin, “U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens” (WSJ, updated 13 Dec 2012); and Chris Calabrese, “The Biggest New Spying Program You’ve Probably Never Heard Of” (ACLU.org, 30 Jul 2012). A unit within Customs and Border Protection, the National Targeting Center Counter Network Division (CND), regularly accesses databases from Treasury, State, and elsewhere in U.S. government, per Jana Winter, “Operation Whistle Pig: Inside the secret CBP unit with no rules that investigates Americans” (Yahoo News, 11 Dec 2021). Corporate contractors, including Deloitte, run much of CBP’s National Targeting Center Counter Network Division.
Nelson Blackstock, COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom (New York: Pathfinder, 1988), pp. 11-12, 14, 21. See also Ashley D. Farmer, “Tracking Activists: The FBI’s Surveillance of Black Women Activists Then and Now” (Organization of American Historians, 2020).
Such “fighting terrorism” was seen across the history of the fascist state, including but not limited to the destruction of Vietnam (1955-1975), occupation or bombing of Afghanistan (2001-21), Iraq (2003-ongoing), Somalia (2006-ongoing), Pakistan (2004-18), Yemen (2002-ongoing), the Philippines (2002-present), the establishment of U.S. Africa Command and the militarization of U.S. diplomacy on the continent, and implementing unilateral coercive financial measures (“sanctions”). The U.S. State Department places nonconforming governments such as Havana and Pyongyang on its State Sponsors of Terrorism list.
Massachusetts state police conceded that the state’s Commonwealth Fusion Center, originally established to stop terrorism, had monitored peaceful domestic dissent, per Kade Crockford, “So-called ‘counterterror’ fusion center in Massachusetts monitored Black Lives Matter protesters” (Privacy SOS, 27 Nov 2014) and Antonio Planas, “As Evans lauds Boston cops, some protesters cry foul” (Boston Herald, 27 Nov 2014). Referring to Black Lives protestors, one counterterrorism official, part of teamwork between the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and NYPD, griped, “They wore me out… Their ability to strategize on the fly is something we haven’t dealt with before to this degree,” per Messing, Schram, and Goldin, “Protesters using tech to run rings around cops” (NY Post, 1 Dec 2014). Elsewhere in New York City, the Joint Terrorism Task Force apprehended CUNY professor, Eric Linsker, who was accused of attacking two NYPD officers, as reported in Sauchelli, et al., “Poet accused of assaulting cops during ‘peaceful’ protest” (NY Post, 14 Dec 2014). The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force surveilled the Black Lives in Bloomington, MN, according to emails exchanged among federal, state, and local officials, per Lee Fang, “Why Was an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force Tracking a Black Lives Matter Protest?” (Intercept, 12 Mar 2015). Counterterrorism officials in fusion centers on the west coast monitored protests and communicated with local and state law enforcement, including sheriff offices, Oakland police, and California Highway Patrol. See Darwin BondGraham, “Counter-Terrorism Officials Helped Track Black Lives Matter Protesters” (East Bay Express, 15 Apr 2015).
Relevant reporting in Sy Hersh, “C.I.A. Reportedly Recruited Blacks for Surveillance of Panther Party” (NYT, 17 Mar 1978). The New York Times earlier described revelations regarding CIA’s broader Operation CHAOS: “What emerges… is the picture of an embryonic police state” (11 Jun 1975).
Journalists Jana Winter and Sharon Weinberger documented an FBI report dated 3 August 2017. The report read in part, “The FBI assesses it is very likely Black Identity Extremist (BIE) perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as justification for such violence.” It continued, “The FBI assesses it is very likely incidents of alleged police abuse against African Americans since then have continued to feed the resurgence in ideologically motivated, violent criminal activity within the BIE movement.” The FBI further assessed that it was “very likely additional controversial police shootings of African Americans and the associated legal proceedings” would “continue to serve as drivers for violence against law enforcement.” See “The FBI’s New U.S. Terrorist Threat: ‘Black Identity Extremists’” (Foreign Policy, 6 Oct 2017). In a statement to Foreign Policy, the FBI asserted, “Domestic terrorism groups differ from traditional criminal groups in that they take action for a different purpose, to bring attention to a social or political cause. Therefore, their existence as a group has a legitimate purpose, at least in part. Their legitimate activity may include acts of protest, advocacy, and civil disobedience.” FBI identified nine “persistent extremist movements” in the U.S., including “white supremacy, black identities, militia, sovereign citizens, anarchists, abortion, animal rights, environmental rights, and Puerto Rican Nationalism.”