NSA Timeline

Below is a quick and dirty timeline of issues relating to NSA surveillance, with links to histories, individuals, subtexts, code names, and reports;  NYCLU also has a timeline. The timeline outlined here is a rough history to illustrate warrantless surveillance and whistleblowing are not recent issues of concern, nor is surveillance recently institutionalized via law, regulation, and so on.  I’m sure a few individual whistleblowers and codenames are missing, so apologies.

2015 ~  Falsehoods in the Sunday Times article | British spies ‘moved after Snowden files read’ | Snowden docs tally update

2014 ~  Citizenfour | Bill Binney explains the Snowden docs | Bill Binney testifies to the German Bundestag’s NSA inquiry committee | PCLOB Report: We Don’t Know How Many Americans’ Emails the NSA Collects Under Section 702 | “NSA is Targeting Users of Privacy Services” (TOR) | More revelations from the “Snowden files”

2013 ~ Edward Snowden | National Security Agency Data Collection Programs (June 18, House Select Committee on Intelligence, C-SPAN) | More from Russ Tice | Executive Order 13636 | National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2013 | 2009 NSA-FISA Court IG report released

2012 ~ Robert Greenwald | Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian | Markey letters to telecommunications carriers | Binney on record with STELLARWIND | Kurt Eichenwald

2011 ~ Ron Wyden – Mark Udall (letter & comments on NSA surveillance) | Jesselyn Radack | Barrett Brown, The Guardian (and here)

2010 ~ Thomas Drake | Aid, The Secret Sentry | Glenn Greenwald, Salon 2010

2008, 2009, ~ Eric Lichtblau @NYT |  Tim Shorrock  PROMIS Main Core connection |  Babak Pasdar | Thomas Tamm | James Bamford | Seamon NSA domestic surveillance | Executive Order 13475

2007 ~ FBI raid on Diane Roark’s residence | Simultaneous raids on Binney, Wiebe, and Loomis homes | Thomas Drake’s home raided November 28 | ACLU vs. NSA decision

2006 ~ Mark Klein | Russ Tice | James Risen | Lesley Cauley on “call detail records” |  Wartime Executive Power and the National Security Agency’s Surveillance Authority: Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, One Hundred Ninth Congress, second session, (February 6, February 28, and March 28) | EPIC NSA FOIA docs | ACLU vs. NSA

2005 ~ NSA “Terrorist Surveillance Program” | Fusion Center Guidelines

2004 ~ Waxman Report  | STELLARWIND (MAINWAY ~ phone metadata, MARINA ~ Net metadata, NUCLEON ~ phone content, PRISM ~ Net content)

2003 ~ CAPPS II

2002 ~ William Binney | Edward Loomis |  J. Kirke Wiebe | Diane Roark  | Homeland Security Act, P.L. 107-296  enacted | Information Awareness Office established (Total Information Awareness)

2001 ~ EU Final Report on Echelon  | Richard A. Best |  James Bamford | USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, P.L.107-56 enacted

2000 ~ Carnivore Diagnostic Tool

1996 ~ Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, P.L. 104-132 enacted | Hager, Secret Power

1994 ~ Current and Projected National Security Threats to the United States (includes material on NSA) | Interception of International Telecommunications by the National Security  | Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, P.L. 103-414 enacted

1984 ~ James Bamford discusses the NSA

1983 ~ Eggert on validity of warrantless searches

1982 ~ James Bamford

1981 ~ Executive Order 12333

1978 ~ Executive Order 12036  | FISA legislation enacted | FISA Court established

1975 ~ Church Committee (L. Britt Snider) | Operation Shamrock | The National Security Agency and Fourth Amendment Rights, Hearings, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (October 29 and November 6)

1973 ~ Ervin Committee

1971 – DoD Directive 5100.20 |  Perry Fellwock’s (Winslow Peck) Ramparts interview

1970 ~ Christopher Pyle

For additional historical information, see Jeffrey T. Richelson’s (Ed.; 2000)  The National Security Agency: Declassified.

Case Study on FOIA / Ivan Greenberg’s Talk

Dr. Ivan Greenberg’s presentation on the Freedom of Information Act or FOIA (5 U.S.C. § 552) at the Hope 9 conference is a must watch.

Greenberg’s talk is essentially a case study on the ways FOIA contributed to a rebuilding of the history of surveillance in the United States (see his works Surveillance in America and The Dangers of Dissent). He also outlines how FOIA and historical understanding  are compromised through agency delay and irregular patterns of information release.

Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics & Research

Nixon’s Ghosts scanned from microfiche (SuDoc: Y 4.J 89/2:M 59/7) the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate report, Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics: A Report (93d Congress, 1st session, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973).

Students of 1960-70s surveillance history and politics will recognize the Subcommittee as the Ervin Committee, the same congressional body that produced Army Surveillance of Civilians: A Documentary Analysis, which represents”a painstaking analysis of documents obtained in its investigation” of U.S. Army surveillance of peace, anti-war, civil rights, and other activist groups  (Military Surveillance, p.3).

As an aside, I’ve meant to list a few suggestions as an adjunct to my original intro at The Memory Hole on researching this historically significant period :

• NARA has various findings aids available for the declassified records of the Army Staff (RG 319), including the finding aid for the CIC (Counterintelligence Corps) and Army Intelligence and Security Command (Records of the Investigative Records Repository, or IRR)
• Researchers may also search ARC (Archival Research Catalog) for materials in other records groups

And if you’re a diehard period researcher…

• Contact your local library to learn if they subscribe to the DDRS (the Declassified Documents Reference Service) or in microfiche, the Declassified Documents, Retrospective Collection (documents created from 1945  to 1975)
• Contact your local library to learn if they subscribe to The Sixties database, which I reviewed for the October 2009 issue of The Charleston Advisor
• Search presidential libraries,  many of which have declassified documents relating to surveillance of activists that can be requested or accessed online

Thanks to Nixon’s Ghosts to liberating Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics.

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Dr. Mary Lee Bundy on Secrecy

Shame on me, I recently discovered Mary Lee Bundy’s work. I’m incredulous I hadn’t previously read Bundy, not even while in library school in the late 1980s.

As evidenced by her publications (Secrecy and Medical Experimentation on Prisoners: A Case Study of the Role of Government Information Suppression in the Repression and Exploitation of People, Leslie Burger and Mary Lee Bundy,  University of Maryland, 1973?; The National Prison Directory: Organizational Profiles of Prison Reform Groups in the United States, Mary Lee Bundy and Kenneth R. Harmon, Urban Information Interpreters, 1975;  Helping People Take Control: The Public Library’s Mission in a Democracy, Urban Information Interpreters, 1980; Activism in American Librarianship, 1962-1973, Mary Lee Bundy and Frederick J. Stielow, eds., Greenwood Press, 1987), Bundy was deeply committed to freedom of information, the importance of libraries in the open society, and the osmotic role of information professionals in operating outside library walls in bridging the often bipolar worlds of access to information and information restriction.

It is two of her works – Secrecy and Medical Experimentation on Prisoners and Helping People Take Control: The Public Library’s Mission in a Democracy  – that inspired me to blog Bundy on secrecy.

Secrecy and Medical Experimentation on Prisoners reports an attempt to gather information on a “volunteer” experimental vaccine program conducted by University of Maryland, School of Medicine, funded by  NIH and U.S. Army at the Maryland House of Corrections, Jessup (” a seriously overcrowded, obsolete facility run in the old style penal tradition”). The study, “Accessibility of Information Available to the Public Concerning the Experimentation Taking Place in the Infectious Disease Unit, Maryland House of Correction, Jessup Maryland, December, 1973, was undertaken as part of a research methods class at the University of Maryland, conducted by Dr. Mary Lee Bundy” and  hoped to answer the following questions:

What experiments take place? How risky are they? Are inmates receiving adequate medical care? Have there been accidents, side effect etc. as a result of the experiments? Is informed consent obtained? Are inmates volunteering for a lack of other ways to earn money? Are doctors or others making profits from these experiments? How does participation effect work in prison, participation in educational and rehabilitative programs, and the prospects for parole? What legal and other protections do inmates have? (p.2)

Reading along, I wasn’t clear why a Freedom of Information Act /open records request wasn’t filed with various agencies to obtain info on the volunteer vaccine prisoner program; Bundy and her students used the following methods to gather data:

The results of this effort support the conclusion that with regard to this program, there exists a virtually closed government information system, for an estimated total of five letters, five interviews and twenty telephone calls to sixteen different government agencies, resulted in retrieving little of the most significant data. Important sources of information either refused or simply failed to supply information which should have been in their possession. (p.3)

At the conclusion of  the study, Burger and Bundy observe that

Secrecy shields the exploitation of paying inmates only a fraction of what “free world” volunteers get. Secrecy, if not in this situation, then in others, permits doctors, drug companies and others in their hire to make enormous profits from the exploitation of incarcerated people. In a closed information system deaths and other casualties resulting from experiments can be covered up. The real significance of government secrecy is the very role it plays in the systematized exploitation of people. (p.8)

I emphasize the last sentence simply because the statement is profound – and obvious. Of the vast philosophical, theoretical tomes on secrecy I’ve read over the last decade, no one has really made this connection. Burger and Bundy did it back in the early 1970s with little fanfare, and in one carefully crafted sentence.

~~~

In Helping People Take Control: The Public Library’s Mission in a Democracy, Bundy writes on a related complex of issues: national security,  surveillance, spying, government secrecy, “media manipulation,”  information advocacy, and library support of citizen research. Bundy also makes a plea for citizens to examine “the public library for its community responsiveness” (p.182).

Bundy (p.184) also calls for continued professional responsibility and vigilance in a grand way:

When middle-of-the-road organizations like the American Library Association speak out against police spying, government secrecy and discrimination in the media, we can expect they will be heard and carry weight. We would, therefore, propose that the library profession become actively involved in these information struggles.

Whether change emanates from citizens or librarians, whether from traditional libraries or new alternative libraries and information centers, whatever the line of development,the goal is an open information situation in the U. S.

The first, crucial step is to recognize the manipulation and censorship in the existing information system for what it is — a shocking, dangerous situation for all Americans, thwarting our effort at achieving a democratic society, and threatening our very future.

I urge both LIS students and  information professionals in the field to reconsider Dr. Bundy’s work in a contemporary sociopolitical context, for the role of librarian-information worker – at least the way I believe Bundy thought of the field – is part of a greater information system beyond four walls and beige metal shelving.  Bundy offers  permission for information workers to think of themselves as advocates in the truest sense of the word.

The Prisoner: I Am Not a Number, But a Secret

Actor Patrick McGoohan passed away January 14, 2009. Mr. McGoohan left us an eclectic body of work, including The Prisoner, which ran from 1967-68 for only seventeen episodes.

There are quite a few Web tributes that praise McGoohan’s Prisoner – I like Scott Thrill’s homage @ Wired, which emphasizes the show’s questions regarding privacy, surveillance, and technology.

Like most fans, I was intrigued by the show’s whimsical setting, The Village, Magrittean imagery, and fierce defense of personal freedom (“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own” exclaims  McGoohan’s character in the first episode, Arrival). But what has always fascinated me about The Prisoner – I’ve been a devoted fan since my local PBS station ran the series in the 1980s late on weekend nights – is secrecy.

McGoohan’s character, Number 6, not only holds deep secrets about his  life as a spy, but lives in the concealed, contrived world of The Village. One is always left wondering about origins in The Prisoner:  Is the show a commentary on the Cold War? Is Number 6 a Manchurian candidate? Why did Number 6 resign? Who is Number 1? Who is the secret society that operates The Village? Is there a conspiracy against Number 6 for his desire to leave spying? These are the big questions that come to mind as we are sucked into 6’s struggle to understand his circumstances. Until the last episode of the series, the quirky “Fall Out,” one wonders what Number 6 did to merit the MKULTRAesque experimentation and incarceration in The Village.  It is The Prisoner’s total, unapologetic focus on secrets, secrecy, the hidden, and power that pulls us in forty or so years after the show’s first release.

If we think of secrecy as power and control over information, if we consider sociologist Georg Simmel’s incredible insight that secrecy modifies relationships, then this is The Prisoner in all its wonderfully confusing glory. Like most Prisoner junkies, I always hoped Mr. McGoohan would resurrect the series to further give up secrets.  Sadly, this never occurred. But I remain  grateful for The Prisoner, not only for its commentary on our own technointrusive world, but for its uncanny (early) insights on the power of information in human relationships and its ties to oppression and personal autonomy.

Godspeed, Number 1.