Her speech to the assembled arms makers was yet another sign that the military-industrial complex (MIC) President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about more than 60 years ago is still alive, all too well, and taking a new turn. Call it the MIC for the digital age.

Hicks described the goal of the Replicator Initiative this way:

“To stay ahead [of China], we’re going to create a new state of the art… leveraging attritable, autonomous systems in all domains which are less expensive, put fewer people at risk, and can be changed, upgraded, or improved with substantially shorter lead times… We’ll counter the PLA’s [People’s Liberation Army’s] with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, and harder to beat.”

Think of it as artificial intelligence (AI) goes to war — and oh, that word “attritable,” a term that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue or mean much of anything to the average taxpayer, is pure Pentagonese for the ready and rapid replaceability of systems lost in combat. Let’s explore later whether the Pentagon and the arms industry are even capable of producing the kinds of cheap, effective, easily replicable techno-war systems Hicks touted in her speech. First, though, let me focus on the goal of such an effort: confronting China.

Target: China

However one gauges China’s appetite for military conflict — as opposed to relying more heavily on its increasingly powerful political and economic tools of influence — the Pentagon is clearly proposing a military-industrial fix for the challenge posed by Beijing. As Hicks’s speech to those arms makers suggests, that new strategy is going to be grounded in a crucial premise: that any future technological arms race will rely heavily on the dream of building ever cheaper, ever more capable weapons systems based on the rapid development of near-instant communications, artificial intelligence, and the ability to deploy such systems on short notice.

The vision Hicks put forward to the NDIA is, you might already have noticed, untethered from the slightest urge to respond diplomatically or politically to the challenge of Beijing as a rising great power. It matters little that those would undoubtedly be the most effective ways to head off a future conflict with China.

Such a non-military approach would be grounded in a clearly articulated return to this country’s longstanding “One China” policy. Under it, the U.S. would forgo any hint of the formal political recognition of the island of Taiwan as a separate state, while Beijing would commit itself to limiting to peaceful means its efforts to absorb that island.

There are numerous other issues where collaboration between the two nations could move the U.S. and China from a policy of confrontation to one of cooperation, as noted in a new paper by my colleague Jake Werner of the Quincy Institute: “1) development in the Global South; 2) addressing climate change; 3) renegotiating global trade and economic rules; and 4) reforming international institutions to create a more open and inclusive world order.” Achieving such goals on this planet now might seem like a tall order, but the alternative — bellicose rhetoric and aggressive forms of competition that increase the risk of war — should be considered both dangerous and unacceptable.

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On the other side of the equation, proponents of increasing Pentagon spending to address the purported dangers of the rise of China are masters of threat inflation. They find it easy and satisfying to exaggerate both Beijing’s military capabilities and its global intentions in order to justify keeping the military-industrial complex amply funded into the distant future.

As Dan Grazier of the Project on Government Oversight noted in a December 2022 report, while China has made significant strides militarily in the past few decades, its strategy is “inherently defensive” and poses no direct threat to the United States. At present, in fact, Beijing lags behind Washington strikingly when it comes to both military spending and key capabilities, including having a far smaller (though still undoubtedly devastating) nuclear arsenal, a less capable Navy, and fewer major combat aircraft. None of this would, however, be faintly obvious if you only listened to the doomsayers on Capitol Hill and in the halls of the Pentagon.

But as Grazier points out, this should surprise no one since “threat inflation has been the go-to tool for defense spending hawks for decades.” That was, for instance, notably the case at the end of the Cold War of the last century, after the Soviet Union had disintegrated, when then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell so classically said: “Think hard about it. I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to [Cuba’s Fidel] Castro and Kim Il-sung [the late North Korean dictator].”

Needless to say, that posed a grave threat to the Pentagon’s financial fortunes and Congress did indeed insist then on significant reductions in the size of the armed forces, offering less funds to spend on new weaponry in the first few post-Cold War years. But the Pentagon was quick to highlight a new set of supposed threats to American power to justify putting military spending back on the upswing. With no great power in sight, it began focusing instead on the supposed dangers of regional powers like Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. It also greatly overstated their military strength in its drive to be funded to win not one but two major regional conflicts at the same time. This process of switching to new alleged threats to justify a larger military establishment was captured strikingly in Michael Klare’s 1995 book Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws.

After the 9/11 attacks, that “rogue states” rationale was, for a time, superseded by the disastrous “Global War on Terror,” a distinctly misguided response to those terrorist acts. It would spawn trillions of dollars of spending on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a global counter-terror presence that included U.S. operations in 85 — yes, 85! — countries, as strikingly documented by the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

All of that blood and treasure, including hundreds of thousands of direct civilian deaths (and many more indirect ones), as well as thousands of American deaths and painful numbers of devastating physical and psychological injuries to U.S. military personnel, resulted in the installation of unstable or repressive regimes whose conduct — in the case of Iraq — helped set the stage for the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) terror organization. As it turned out, those interventions proved to be anything but either the “cakewalk” or the flowering of democracy predicted by the advocates of America’s post-9/11 wars. Give them full credit, though! They proved to be a remarkably efficient money machine for the denizens of the military-industrial complex.

Constructing “the China Threat”

As for China, its status as the threat du jour gained momentum during the Trump years. In fact, for the first time since the twentieth century, the Pentagon’s 2018 defense strategy document targeted “great power competition” as the wave of the future.

One particularly influential document from that period was the report of the congressionally mandated National Defense Strategy Commission. That body critiqued the Pentagon’s strategy of the moment, boldly claiming (without significant backup information) that the Defense Department was not planning to spend enough to address the military challenge posed by great power rivals, with a primary focus on China.

The commission proposed increasing the Pentagon’s budget by 3% to 5% above inflation for years to come — a move that would have pushed it to an unprecedented $1 trillion or more within a few years. Its report would then be extensively cited by Pentagon spending boosters in Congress, most notably former Senate Armed Services Committee Chair James Inhofe (R-OK), who used to literally wave it at witnesses in hearings and ask them to pledge allegiance to its dubious findings.

That 3% to 5% real growth figure caught on with prominent hawks in Congress and, until the recent chaos in the House of Representatives, spending did indeed fit just that pattern. What has not been much discussed is research by the Project on Government Oversight showing that the commission that penned the report and fueled those spending increases was heavily weighted toward individuals with ties to the arms industry. Its co-chair, for instance, served on the board of the giant weapons maker Northrop Grumman, and most of the other members had been or were advisers or consultants to the industry, or worked in think tanks heavily funded by just such corporations. So, we were never talking about a faintly objective assessment of U.S. “defense” needs.

Beware of Pentagon “Techno-Enthusiasm”

Just so no one would miss the point in her NDIA speech, Kathleen Hicks reiterated that the proposed transformation of weapons development with future techno-war in mind was squarely aimed at Beijing. “We must,” she said, “ensure the PRC leadership wakes up every day, considers the risks of aggression and concludes, ‘today is not the day’ — and not just today, but every day, between now and 2027, now and 2035, now and 2049, and beyond… Innovation is how we do that.”

The notion that advanced military technology could be the magic solution to complex security challenges runs directly against the actual record of the Pentagon and the arms industry over the past five decades. In those years, supposedly “revolutionary” new systems like the F-35 combat aircraft, the Army’s Future Combat System (FCS), and the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship have been notoriously plagued by cost overruns, schedule delays, performance problems, and maintenance challenges that have, at best, severely limited their combat capabilities. In fact, the Navy is already planning to retire a number of those Littoral Combat Ships early, while the whole FCS program was canceled outright.

In short, the Pentagon is now betting on a complete transformation of how it and the industry do business in the age of AI — a long shot, to put it mildly.

But you can count on one thing: the new approach is likely to be a gold mine for weapons contractors, even if the resulting weaponry doesn’t faintly perform as advertised. This quest will not be without political challenges, most notably finding the many billions of dollars needed to pursue the goals of the Replicator Initiative, while staving off lobbying by producers of existing big-ticket items like aircraft carriers, bombers, and fighter jets.

Members of Congress will defend such current-generation systems fiercely to keep weapons spending flowing to major corporate contractors and so into key congressional districts. One solution to the potential conflict between funding the new systems touted by Hicks and the costly existing programs that now feed the titans of the arms industry: jack up the Pentagon’s already massive budget and head for that trillion-dollar peak, which would be the highest level of such spending since World War II.

The Pentagon has long built its strategy around supposed technological marvels like the “electronic battlefield” in the Vietnam era; the “revolution in military affairs,” first touted in the early 1990s; and the precision-guided munitions praised since at least the 1991 Persian Gulf war. It matters little that such wonder weapons have never performed as advertised. For example, a detailed Government Accountability Office report on the bombing campaign in the Gulf War found that “the claim by DOD [Department of Defense] and contractors of a one-target, one-bomb capability for laser-guided munitions was not demonstrated in the air campaign where, on average, 11 tons of guided and 44 tons of unguided munitions were delivered on each successfully destroyed target.”

When such advanced weapons systems can be made to work, at enormous cost in time and money, they almost invariably prove of limited value, even against relatively poorly armed adversaries (as in Iraq and Afghanistan in this century). China, a great power rival with a modern industrial base and a growing arsenal of sophisticated weaponry, is another matter. The quest for decisive military superiority over Beijing and the ability to win a war against a nuclear-armed power should be (but isn’t) considered a fool’s errand, more likely to spur a war than deter it, with potentially disastrous consequences for all concerned.

Perhaps most dangerous of all, a drive for the full-scale production of AI-based weaponry will only increase the likelihood that future wars could be fought all too disastrously without human intervention. As Michael Klare pointed out in a report for the Arms Control Association, relying on such systems will also magnify the chances of technical failures, as well as misguided AI-driven targeting decisions that could spur unintended slaughter and decision-making without human intervention. The potentially disastrous malfunctioning of such autonomous systems might, in turn, only increase the possibility of nuclear conflict.

It would still be possible to rein in the Pentagon’s techno-enthusiasm by slowing the development of the kinds of systems highlighted in Hicks’s speech, while creating international rules of the road regarding their future development and deployment. But the time to start pushing back against yet another misguided “techno-revolution” is now, before automated warfare increases the risk of a global catastrophe. Emphasizing new weaponry over creative diplomacy and smart political decisions is a recipe for disaster in the decades to come. There has to be a better way.

Copyright 2023 William D. Hartung

Tomdispatch.com

( Electronic Frontier Foundation ) – In the wake of this year’s Supreme Court decision in Dobbs overruling Roe v. Wade, sheriffs and bounty hunters in anti-abortion states will try to investigate and punish abortion seekers based on their internet browsing, private messaging, and phone app location data. We can expect similar tactics from officials in states that have prohibited transgender youths from obtaining gender-affirming health care. Indeed, the Texas governor ordered state child welfare officials to investigate such care as child abuse.

Many states are stepping forward to serve as health care sanctuaries for people seeking abortion or gender-affirming care that is not legal at home. These states must also be data sanctuaries. To be the safest refuge, a state that has data about people who sought abortion or gender-affirming health care must lock down that data, and not disclose it to adversaries who would use it to punish them for seeking that health care.

So it is great news that California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed three bills that will help meet these data privacy threats: A.B. 1242, authored by Asm. Rebecca Bauer-Kahan; A.B. 2091, authored by Asm. Mia Bonta; and S.B. 107, authored by Sen. Scott Wiener.

EFF supported all three bills. And we encourage other states to pass similar bills. They create new reproductive and trans health data exemptions from old information disclosure mandates. These laws also place new limits on how courts, government agencies, and businesses handle this data. (You can read here a more detailed explanation of these three new California laws; this post is a summary.)

New exemptions from old mandates. Many states require in-state entities to share data with out-of-state entities. States that respect the rights to abortion and gender-affirming health care must create new exemptions from these old laws, for out-of-state investigations of such health care. The new California bills do this to three old California laws that (1) require certain California digital service providers to treat out-of-state warrants like in-state warrants, (2) require California courts to assist in enforcing out-of-state judicial orders, and (3) require California health care providers to disclose certain kinds of medical information to certain kinds of entities.

New limits on judges. Under the new California laws, state judges cannot authorize wiretaps, pen registers, or search warrants, if they are for the purpose of investigating abortions that are legal in California. Also, state judges now cannot compel someone to identify a person who had an abortion, or issue a subpoena, in connection with an out-of-state investigation of an abortion that is legal in California.

New limits on state agencies. California’s state and local government agencies, including but not limited to law enforcement and prisons, are now barred from disclosing information to an individual or out-of-state agency regarding a person’s abortion or gender-affirming health care.

New limits on communication services. There is a new rule for California corporations, and corporations with principal offices in California, that provide electronic communication services. They shall not, in California, provide information or assistance in response to out-of-state court orders concerning abortions that are legal in California. However, such a corporation is not subject to liability unless it knew or should have known that the court order in question related to such an abortion.

Three cheers for California! These new data sanctuary laws are strong protections for people seeking abortion and transgender health care. Other pro-choice and pro-trans states should enact similar laws.

But more work remains.

Anti-abortion and anti-trans sheriffs will continue to seek information located in the Golden State. California lawmakers must enact new laws as needed. For example, they may need to add new exemptions to an old law that authorizes state courts to command residents to travel out-of-state to testify in criminal proceedings. Eternal vigilance is the price of data sanctuary. States should also be data sanctuaries for immigrants.

Also, Congress and the states must enact comprehensive consumer data privacy legislation that limits how businesses collect, retain, use, and share our data. A great way to stop anti-choice and anti-trans sheriffs from seizing data from businesses is to stop these businesses from collecting and retaining this data in the first place. Legislators should start with Rep. Jacobs’ My Body, My Data bill.

Finally, Congress and the states must limit how law enforcement agencies obtain our data from businesses. For example, police across the country are using “reverse search warrants” to identify all people who used particular keywords in their web searches, and all people who were physically present at a particular geolocation. These schemes violate the Fourth Amendment. Legislators must ban them. New York State legislators tried to do so last year. Anti-abortion sheriffs might use them to identify all people who searched the web for “abortion pill,” or who visited an abortion clinic. Likewise, police across the country are buying detailed location data, often without a warrant, from data brokers who got it from our phone apps. This also violates the Fourth Amendment. Legislators should ban it, too.

Via Electronic Frontier Foundation

The hiding of information by the former president, repeatedly described as “unprecedented” behavior, is actually part of a continuum of withholding that’s been growing at a striking pace for decades. By the time Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, the stage had long been set for removing information from the public record in an alarmingly broad fashion, a pattern that he would take to new levels.

The “Secrecy President”

As recent history’s exhibit number one, this country’s global war on terror, launched soon after the 9/11 attacks, was largely defined and enabled by the withholding of information — including secret memos, hidden authorizations, and the use of covert methods. During President George W. Bush’s first term in office, government lawyers and officials regularly withheld information about their actions and documents related to them from public view, both at home and abroad.

Those officials, for instance, legalized the brutal interrogations of war-on-terror prisoners, while conveniently replacing the word “torture” with the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques” and so surreptitiously evading a longstanding legal ban on the practice. The CIA then secretly utilized those medieval techniques at “black sites” around the world where its agents held suspected terrorists. It later destroyed the tapes made of those interrogations, erasing the evidence of what its agents had done. On the home front, in a similarly secretive fashion, unknown to members of Congress as well as the general public, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to set up an elaborate and far-reaching program of warrantless surveillance on Americans and others inside the United States.

Consider that the launching of an era of enhanced secrecy techniques. No wonder Bush earned the moniker of the “secrecy president.” Only weeks after the 9/11 attacks, for instance, he put in place strict guidelines about who could brief Congress on classified matters, while instituting new, lower standards for transparency. He even issued a signing statement rebuking Congress for requiring reports “in written form” on “significant anticipated intelligence activities or significant intelligence failure.” To emphasize his sense of righteousness in defying calls for information, he insisted on the “president’s constitutional authority to… withhold information” in cases of foreign relations and national security. In a parallel fashion, his administration put new regulations in place limiting the release of information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

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President Obama also withheld information when it came to war-on-terror efforts. Notably, his administration shrouded in secrecy the use of armed drones to target and kill suspected terrorists (and civilians) in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Official reports omitted reliable data about who was killed, where the killings had taken place, or the number of civilian casualties. As the American Civil Liberties Union concluded, administration reporting on civilian harm fell “far short of the standards for transparency and accountability needed to ensure that the government’s targeted killing program is lawful under domestic and international law.”

And well beyond the war-on-terror context, the claim to secrecy has become a government default mechanism. Tellingly, the number of classified documents soared to unimaginable heights in those years. As the National Archives reports, in 2012, documents with classified markings — including “top secret,” “secret,” and “confidential” — reached a staggering 95 million. And while the overall numbers had declined by 2017, the extent of government classification then and now remains alarming.

Erasing the Record Before It’s Created

President Trump’s document theft should be understood, then, as just another piece of the secrecy matrix.

Despite his claim — outrageous, but perhaps no more than so many other claims he made — to being the “most transparent” president ever, he turned out to be a stickler for withholding information on numerous fronts. Taking the war-on-terror behavioral patterns of his predecessors to heart, he expanded the information vacuum well beyond the sphere of war and national security to the purely political and personal realms. As a start, he refused to testify in the Mueller investigation into the 2016 presidential election. On a more personal note, he also filed suit to keep his tax records secret from Congress.

In fact, during his time in office, Trump virtually transformed the very exercise of withholding information. In place of secrecy in the form of classification, he developed a strategy of preventing documents and records from even being created in the first place.

Three months into his presidency, Trump announced that the White House would cease to disclose its visitor logs, citing the supposed risk to both national security and presidential privacy. In addition to hiding the names of those with whom he met, specific high-level meetings took place in an unrecorded fashion so that even the members of his cabinet, no less the public, would never know about them.

As former National Security Advisor John Bolton and others have attested, when it came to meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump even prohibited note-taking. In at least five such meetings over the course of his first two years in office, he consistently excluded White House officials and members of the State Department. On at least one occasion, he even confiscated notes his interpreter took to ensure that there would be no record.

Congress, too, was forbidden access to information under Trump. Lawyers in the Department of Justice (DOJ) drafted memos hardening policies against complying with congressional requests for information in what former DOJ lawyer Annie Owens has described as “a policy that approached outright refusal” to share information. In addition, the Trump administration was lax or even dismissive when it came to compliance with the production of required reports on national security matters. Note as well the reversal of policies aimed at transparency, as in the decision to reverse an Obama era policy of making public the number of nuclear weapons the U.S. possessed.

But don’t just blame Donald Trump. Among the most recent examples of erasing evidence, it’s become clear that the Secret Service deleted the text messages of its agents around the president from the day before and the day of the January 6th insurrection. So, too, the phone records of several top Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials were wiped clean when they left office in accordance with directives established early in the Trump presidency. Similarly, the phone records of top Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security officials were scrapped. In other words, recent reports on the way Trump regularly shredded documents, flushed them down the White House toilet, and generally withheld presidential papers — even classified documents, as revealed during the Mar-a-Lago search — were of a piece with a larger disdain on the part of both the president and a number of his top officials for sharing information.

Erasing the record in one fashion or another became the Trump administration’s default setting, variations on a theme hammered out by his predecessors and taken to new levels on his watch.

A Perpetual Right to Secrecy?

Admittedly, before Trump arrived on the scene, there were some efforts to reverse this pattern, but in the long run they proved anemic. Barack Obama arrived at the White House in January 2009 acknowledging the harm caused by excessive government secrecy. Emphasizing transparency’s importance for accountability, informed public debate, and establishing trust in government, the new president issued an executive order on his first full day in office emphasizing the importance of “transparency and open government” and pledging to create “an unprecedented level of openness in government.”

Nearly a year later, he followed up with another executive order setting out a series of reforms aimed at widening the parameters for information-sharing. That order tightened guidelines around classification and broadened the possibilities for declassifying information. “Our democratic principles require that the American people be informed of the activities of their government,” it read. Six years later, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper produced a report on the “principles of Intelligence transparency for the intelligence community” and a “transparency implementation plan” that again aimed at clarifying the limits, as well as the purposes, of secrecy.

And Obama’s efforts did indeed make some headway. As Steven Aftergood, former director of the Federation of American Scientists, concluded, “The Obama administration broke down longstanding barriers to public access and opened up previously inaccessible records of enormous importance and value.” Among other things, Aftergood reported, Obama “declassified the current size of the U.S. nuclear arms arsenal for the first time ever,” as well as thousands of the president’s daily briefs, and established a National Declassification Center.

Still, in the end, the progress proved disappointing. As Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan put it, the Obama administration’s record on transparency was among “the most secretive” in our history. She also castigated the president’s team for “setting new records for stonewalling or rejecting Freedom of Information Requests.” As an Associated Press analysis of federal data verified, the Obama administration did indeed set records in some years when it came to not granting those FOIA requests.

Executive distaste for sharing information is certainly nothing new and has often been linked, as during the war on terror, to misrepresentations, misdeeds, and outright deceit. After all, half a century ago, the administration of President Richard Nixon (of Watergate fame) defended the right to withhold information from the public as an effective way of covering up the American role in Vietnam. Those withheld materials, eventually released by the New York Times, showed that, over the course of four administrations, the national security state had misled the public about what the U.S. was doing in Vietnam, including hiding the secret bombing of neighboring Cambodia and Laos.

Still, let’s recognize what Donald Trump has, in fact, done. Though no longer president, he’s now taken the withholding of government information well beyond the borders of the government itself and deep into his private realm. In doing so, he’s set a dangerous precedent, one that brought the FBI to his doorstep (after months of attempts to access the documents in less intrusive ways). The challenge now is to address not just Trump’s clumsy efforts to unilaterally privatize a government practice, but the systemic overreach officials have relied on for decades to withhold staggering amounts of information from the public.

The Biden administration is alert to this issue. Notably, President Biden reversed several of Trump’s classification decisions, including his policy of not reporting the number of American nuclear weapons. More systematically, the National Security Council recently launched an effort aimed at revising the nation’s unwieldy classification system, while Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has stated her intention to review the excessive classification of government documents.

In a 2022 letter to Congress, Haines pointed to the downside of a government that refuses to share information. “It is my view,” she wrote, “that deficiencies in the current classification system undermine our national security, as well as critical democratic objectives, by impeding our ability to share information in a timely manner, be that sharing with our intelligence partners, our oversight bodies, or, when appropriate, with the general public.”

True to her word, in the three months following that statement of allegiance to transparency, Haines has released a steady flow of material on controversial topics, including unclassified reports on everything from the origins of Covid to climate change to an assessment of the “Saudi government’s role in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.”

Still, despite such efforts, the powers that be are arguably being hoisted on their own petard. After all, Donald Trump followed in the wake of his predecessors in sanctioning expansive secrecy, then made it a be-all and end-all of his presidency, and now claims that it’s part of his rights as a former president and private citizen. As the head of a political movement, now out of office, he’s done the once unthinkable by claiming that the veil of secrecy, the right to decide what should be known and who should know it, is his in perpetuity.

The horror of his claim to untethered secret authority — no wonder some of his MAGA followers refer to him as their “god-emperor” — violates the very idea that a democracy is a pact between individual citizens and elected officials. The valid response to the holding of documents at Mar-a-Lago shouldn’t just be reclaiming them for the public record or even the clear demarcation of the law as it applies to a private citizen as opposed to a president (though both are essential). What’s needed is a full-throated demand that policies of secrecy, allowed to expand exponentially in this century without accountability or transparency, are destructive of democracy and should be ended.

Copyright 2022 Karen J. Greenberg

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Tomdispatch.com ) – The three men and three women stood with their right arms raised. Behind them the remains of the daylight hued the sky a bluish gray. As a fire danced at their feet, they gazed straight ahead at a camera recording their words. The square-jawed man in the middle, retired Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, spoke first. The others, including members of his family, repeated after him.

“I do solemnly swear…”

I…do solemnly swear…

“That I will support and defend…”

That I will support and defend…

“The Constitution of the United States…”

The Constitution of the United States…

The setting for this oath-taking ceremony wasn’t West Point or a U.S. military base. It looked like someone’s backyard, and instead of formal military uniforms, the six participants wore khaki shorts, hoodies, and, in the case of one woman, a white dress decorated with political catchphrases such as “crooked Hillary,” “sleepy Joe,” and “rocket man.” After they had finished reciting the Army’s oath of office, Flynn added a final line: “Where we go one, we go all.”

Where we go one, we go all!

On July 4, 2020, Flynn uploaded this video and the hashtag “#TakeTheOath” to his Twitter account and shared it with his 781,000 followers.

His video quickly went viral and triggered a wave of news coverage. Those seven words Flynn tacked onto the end of the officer’s oath — “Where we go one, we go all” — had first appeared in a mediocre 1990s movie, White Squall, starring Jeff Bridges. More recently, though, the phrase and its acronym, WWG1WGA, had become a rallying cry associated with QAnon, the bizarre conspiracy theory about a supposed cabal of pedophile elites in the Democratic Party and Hollywood who secretly run the world, while harvesting the adrenal glands of children in order to live forever. The Flynn family insisted that the oath was a family tradition having nothing to do with QAnon. (Flynn’s relatives even sued media outlets that claimed a connection.)

In the two years since that moment, what strikes me about that video isn’t the possibility of a QAnon connection, which, to be clear, the Flynn family has unequivocally denied. What stays with me is the pseudo-oath itself and what it catches about this moment in our history.

As you’ll undoubtedly recall, in 2017, Flynn briefly served as President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, a post he held until it emerged that he had misled the FBI and Vice President Mike Pence about conversations he’d had with the Russian ambassador during the 2016 election campaign. Before that, Flynn had served as a top intelligence officer in Iraq and then Afghanistan, where he worked closely with General Stanley McChrystal who commanded American forces there in 2009 and 2010.

After that perjury scandal drove him out of the Trump administration — don’t cry for Flynn; the president would later pardon him — Flynn returned to civilian life. And yet, to hear him tell it, he never left the battlefield. Where once he had led intelligence officers and trained soldiers in the Middle East, he began speaking about a different kind of battle space. Now, Flynn talks about armies of “digital soldiers” who’ve led an “insurgency” against the political establishment not abroad but right here in America. Flynn has even trademarked the phrase “digital soldiers” and has been listed as a speaker at a Digital Soldiers Conference.

“This was not an election,” he assured the attendees of a Young Americans for Freedom conference. “This was a revolution.”

It’s become common enough to talk about all the ways our wars have “come home.” By this, however, what’s usually meant is the way the veterans of this century’s all-American conflicts continue to grapple with physical disabilities or mental trauma; or perhaps the military-grade vehicles and weaponry the Pentagon has, in these years, handed out to police departments nationwide; or even the way Pentagon budgets continue to soar while lawmakers so often have trimmed federal funding for education, health care, and other safety-net activities.

But after spending the last five years writing a book about conspiracy theories, online cultures, and the real-world harm of digital disinformation, I’ve noticed another way our forever wars have come home. America’s war-making mindset now dominates basic aspects of our domestic political landscape, transforming what once were civil disagreements into a form of partisan or ideological combat. Michael Flynn and his digital soldiers are just symptoms of a country in which members of rival parties or tribes view each other as subhuman, as nothing short of the enemy. And the online spaces where those parties increasingly meet — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social-media platforms — feel ever less like the proverbial public square and ever more like so many war zones.

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In this online battlespace, victory is fleeting and defeat never final, but the casualties are all too real — of fact and truth, memory and reality. I know this because I’ve spent half a decade walking the trenches of those digital forever wars as I pieced together the story of one of their casualties. I was seeking to understand how we got here and whether there’s a way out.

His Name Was Seth Rich

In the early morning hours of July 10, 2016, 27-year-old Seth Rich was walking home from a bar in northwest Washington, D.C. He worked for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), that party’s central organizing hub, and was on the cusp of accepting a job with Hillary Clinton’s campaign and so fulfilling a childhood dream of working on a presidential run. Rich was two blocks from his house when he was shot and killed in what police believe was an attempted armed robbery.

In the months to come, however, his murder would reverberate all too eerily through Washington and across the country. It was hard not to feel grief upon learning that such a bright light had been extinguished so cruelly and suddenly. As it happened, Rich and I even had friends in common. We had played on the same weekend recreational soccer team. In fact, our biographies weren’t all that different — two Midwestern guys, him from Nebraska, me from Michigan, who had moved to Washington after college to try to leave our marks on the world, him in politics and me in journalism. When I learned about his murder, I felt a profound sadness. I also couldn’t shake a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-I feeling that it could’ve been me after a late night out with friends.

Once Rich’s family had laid him to rest in his native Omaha, I expected, like so many others, that the brief frenzy of attention his death had brought would simply vanish. The nosy reporters and TV cameramen would move on to their next story. Rich’s family would receive the space they needed to grieve. They and his friends would gather to remember him on the anniversary of his death or his birthday. They’d tell stories about the head-to-toe Stars-and-Stripes outfits he sometimes wore or his obsession with The West Wing TV show. Perhaps they’d even toast his memory with pints of his favorite beer, Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale.

But that isn’t what happened. Not faintly.

As the police search for Rich’s killer or killers dragged on, a howling mob began to fill the void. Wild speculation and fantastical theories about his death started to appear online with viral hashtags — #IAmSethRich, #HisNameWasSethRich, #SethRich — while memes surfaced on political message boards leading, eventually, to elaborate conspiracy theories that would spread globally. Those theories initially originated on the far left, with claims (lacking a shred of evidence) that Rich had been killed by the Clinton family for trying to blow the whistle on or expose wrongdoing by the DNC.

And then, like a virus jumping from host to host, a new version of that conspiracy theory took a firm hold on the far right, its promoters insisting — again, without a scintilla of evidence — that Rich, not Russian-affiliated hackers (as concluded by cybersecurity experts, federal law enforcement, and the U.S. intelligence community), had hacked the DNC and stolen tens of thousands of its emails and other records, later providing those pilfered documents to the radical transparency group WikiLeaks. After WikiLeaks published those stolen DNC documents at the height of the 2016 campaign, its founder Julian Assange, in an apparent attempt to obfuscate the source of those records, dangled Rich’s name in a way that suggested he, not Russia, might have been the source.

In the hands of online commenters, political operatives like Republican dirty trickster Roger Stone, crowdfunded MAGA influencers, and primetime Fox News hosts including Sean Hannity, the story of Seth Rich’s life and death would then be warped into something altogether different: a foundational conspiracy theory for the twenty-first century.

Casualty of a Culture War

My book about the Rich saga, A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, began when I asked myself a simple question: How could that young man’s death have grown into something so vast and hideous? And what did it say about this increasingly strange country, our ever more perverse politics, and what may lie in our future? Put another way, I wanted to know how a regular guy, someone not so different from me, could become the fixation of millions, his name and face strewn across the Internet, his life story exploited and contorted until it became unrecog­nizable to those who knew him.

With time, I came to see Rich’s life and death as a genuine, if grim, parable for twenty-first-century America — a “skeleton key” potentially capable of unlocking so many doors leading toward a clearer understanding of how we ended up here. By here, of course, I mean a nation millions of whose citizens believe that the last election was stolen or fraudulent, that Covid vaccines can’t be trusted, and that only Donald Trump can defeat the secret cabal of pedophile elites and “deep state” operatives who supposedly pull all the strings in America.

As I write in my new book, we now live in

“a time when it feels like truth is what­ever the loudest and most extreme voices say it is, not where the evi­dence leads, what the data show, or what the facts reveal. A moment when people can say whatever they want about anyone else, dead or alive, famous or obscure, and in the wrong hands, that information can take on a life of its own.”

But it wasn’t until I rewatched Michael Flynn’s 2020 #TakeTheOath video that I saw the connection between America’s disastrous forever wars and its fractured political system at home.

A vicious conspiracy theory such as QAnon or Pizzagate, a dark and disturbing fiction about a supposed child-trafficking operation run by Democratic Party leaders out of a D.C. pizzeria, does more than advance some fantastical and wildly implausible claim about a group of people. It dehumanizes them. By accusing someone of the most evil acts imaginable, you rob him or her of humanity and dignity. In the simplest yet most warlike terms imaginable, you cast them as the enemy, as someone to be defeated — if not with real weapons, then with cruel tweets and deceptive videos.

And of course, there’s no shortage of evidence that digital soldiering can lead to actual violence. In December 2016, a North Carolina man who had watched Pizzagate videos online drove to that D.C. pizza joint targeted by conspiracy theories, walked inside armed with an AR-15 rifle, and fired three shots into a closet. He believed himself on a mission to save the children. Instead, he received a four-year prison sentence. And it’s only gotten worse since. The January 6, 2021, insurrection might have been the starkest evidence that Internet-fueled fantasies — in that case, of a stolen presidential election — could have grave consequences in the actual world.

The casualties of such conspiracy theories are all too real. Four Trump supporters died on January 6th during the insurrection, while multiple police officers at the Capitol that day would die in the weeks that followed. And even though Seth Rich was killed by an unknown assailant — the investigation into his homicide remains ongoing — you could say that he, too, was a casualty of our online wars. His name and memory were twisted and weaponized into something wholly unrecognizable, then harnessed for causes he would never have endorsed by people he would have been unlikely to agree with. Seth’s mother, Mary, once described to an interviewer what all this felt like to her: “Your son is murdered again and this time it’s worse than the first time. We lost his body the first time and the second time we lost his soul.”

Lay Down Your Digital Arms

What, if anything, can be done to demobilize those armies of digital soldiers? What could convince people to lay down their “arms” and treat so many of the rest of us with humanity, even if they disagreed with us?

I’ve thought a lot about such questions in the past several years. The spread of online disinformation has been deemed a crisis by experts and watchdogs — in 2020, former president Barack Obama called it “the single biggest threat to our democracy” — but what to do about it is an especially thorny question in a country with strong protections for free speech.

There are any number of ideas floating around about how to combat disinformation and conspiracy theories, while putting facts and truth back at the heart of our political system. Those include forcing Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to rework their algorithms to deemphasize hyperbolic content and using “prebunks” before such deceptive information appears to inoculate people against it rather than having to debunk it later.

I have a few ideas of my own after spending five years on a book significantly about the conspiracy theories spreading ever more widely and wildly in our world. But let me here just offer a couple of modest suggestions for each of us in our daily lives.

The first is simple enough: Think before you post. (Or tweet, or TikTok, or whatever.) Disinformation spreads because people — and occasionally bots — spread it, sometimes on purpose, but often enough remarkably unwittingly. Before you retweet that spicy takedown tweet or share a friend’s fiery Facebook post, read it again and think twice. Check that it’s real. And take a moment to ponder whether adding your voice to a growing din of outrage is really what this world of ours needs right now.

The second suggestion is something of a throwback: Put down your devices. Talk to a neighbor. Talk to a stranger. In person. It’s a lot harder to demonize or dehumanize someone you disagree with if you meet them face to face. It’s an old-school solution to a decidedly postmodern problem. Still, it may, in the end, be the only reasonable way to defuse this fraught political moment — one where, in a distinctly over-armed country, all too many Americans are dreaming about a future civil war — and find our way back to something approaching common ground.

Copyright 2022 Andy Kroll

Andy Kroll is an investigative journalist with ProPublica based in Washington, D.C. His just-published book is A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy. Follow him on Twitter at @AndyKroll and on Facebook.

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Middle East Monitor) – It has forever been the dream of almost every state, intelligence agency, empire and totalitarian regime to oversee the doings of all of their subjects, to detect any hint of dissent, to control their movements, to influence their thinking and even to peer into their minds. That dream has hardly ever been achieved, no matter their efforts and determination, not because of any moral qualms or principles holding them back, but simply because they lacked the tools to do so.

In this decade leading up to 2030, however, things have changed.

When the vision of ‘The Line’ – that revolutionary, green, eco-friendly, and technologically-advanced, 75-mile-long vertical city in the Arabian desert – was presented to the world in June, it was met with a variety of reactions. Many were shocked at its likeness to a futuristic urban environment seen in a science fiction book or movie, while others praised its ingenuity and breadth of vision, especially in terms of its planned full use of green and renewable energy.

There are others, though, who see it differently and have criticised the potential that such a city can have for expanding authoritarian control, whether that be under states or tech corporations. As a ‘smart city’, the Line and the broader NEOM megacity project will not only adopt renewable energy and flying drone cars, but will also be a key adopter of systems built upon the data of residents, systems which will know one’s every move based on geolocation data.

Even the design of the city itself – despite the shiny reflective surface of the exterior walls and the gardens within – has been likened to a luxury prison, with a journey from one end to the other set to take 20 minutes, and with every amenity, necessity and service within five minutes’ walking distance from each resident’s living accomodation. The purported goal of such a vision is to save space and practically utilise it, but critics worry that it could directly impede freedom of movement.

The question, then, is whether that limit of space and distance will be voluntary or imposed. Will residents be subject to a curfew on the distance they can travel, as took place in many countries throughout the COVID-19 pandemic? Or will it be down to the personal choice and judgement of individuals? Personal vehicle ownership may well even be banned, as there would be no need for one’s own mode of transportation in a pedestrian-friendly environment. Everyone would be equally limited.

There are currently other major smart city or area projects being set up across the world, from Telosa in the United States to the Tristate city in north-western Europe, all of which contain a number of the same characteristics as that in Saudi Arabia. Others include major cities which already exist but are currently having smart technology integrated into their infrastructure.

There have also emerged reports on the development of these cities – an example being the Melbourne Experiment Report – which serve as a framework upon which future sites are planned and built.

Outside of smart cities though, there are a variety of other developments promoted by international organisations which will contribute to entirely transforming the way people in most countries live, spend money, conduct their daily activities and travel. To concisely outline these developments and to avoid explicitly detailing each step, those developments can be summed up in the concept of the ‘digital ID’.

Essentially the digitalisation of identity, the digital ID aims to compile all of one’s documents – from birth to death, with every step of life and every achievement in between – placed into a single online wallet. In the form of an app on one’s smartphone, or through a chip implanted into one’s body or hand, the digital ID will enable its user to purchase things, travel through border control points internationally, and to display their medical records and requirements such as vaccines – all in ways that will make such processes easier, quicker and more efficient.

If this is sounding convenient so far, then perhaps it is and will be once it is fully deployed throughout societies and national and international infrastructures. Above all, it will undoubtedly make it easier for governments and state actors to track and monitor their citizens, that is certain.

An example can already be seen in a few countries which are early adopters of similar systems, such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where citizens and residents are required to hold identity cards which are trackable through their chips. Microchips have also been introduced and offered to be inserted into people’s hands, a technology which is predicted to replace mobile phones by 2050 and record our every move.

In his 2017 book, ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution‘, the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab wrote that just like products or packages are able to be tracked through the supply chain with a chip or tracking system, so will humans. “In the near future, similar monitoring systems will also be applied to the movement and tracking of people,” he wrote.

That is part of the dark side of such convenience, the sacrifice of privacy and self-determination for greater efficiency and centralisation. According to some, that is a necessary sacrifice for the greater good and overall security.

After the Saudi mother and PhD student, Salma Al-Shehab , was sentenced to 34 years in prison by the kingdom’s authorities last month, it was revealed that a security or “snitching” app – Kollna Amn (we are all security) – was potentially behind her initial arrest, as it enabled other social media users to report her to the government over her apparently critical Twitter posts.

If those types of apps are terrifying in their capacity to encourage one to spy on and report fellow citizens, in some quasi-Stalinist attempt to turn the people against one another, then imagine the effects of a digital identity system implanted under one’s skin and obligated to be used for every facet of life.

As the famed Israeli intellectual and author Yuval Noah Harari stated in an interview with CBS‘ 60 Minutes, it will become possible in the near future to “hack” a human just like one would a device or operating system. Through that, it would be possible to “get to know that [hacked] person better than they know themselves. And based on that, to increasingly manipulate you.” He explained that that would be based on “data about what’s happening inside my body. What we have seen so far, it’s corporations and governments collecting data about where we go, who we meet, what movies we watch. The next phase is surveillance going under our skin.”

Harari also warned at the WEF’s Davos meeting almost three years ago that “humans should get used to the idea that we are no longer mysterious souls – we are now hackable animals.” While that hacking can be done for beneficial purposes such as better healthcare, he acknowledged that “if this power falls into the hands of a twenty-first-century Stalin, the result will be the worst totalitarian regime in human history. And we already have a number of applicants for the job of twenty-first-century Stalin.”

The author outlined the picture of North Korea in 20 years when “everybody has to wear a biometric bracelet which constantly monitors your blood pressure, your heart rate, your brain activity twenty-four hours a day. You listen to a speech on the radio by the great leader and they know what you actually feel. You can clap your hands and smile, but if you’re angry, they know, you’ll be in the gulag tomorrow.”

Putting aside such dark dystopian predictions on the future consequences of that technological adoption, there are a multitude of other major issues presented by the introduction of digital IDs. After privacy, the most prominent problem that we can already see today is the exclusion of certain classes of people from national databases and the system altogether.

That is the case in India and Pakistan, where millions are shut out from the digital ID systems, meaning they have no access to services, rights and even educational opportunities that those with a digital ID are granted.

Overall, the adoption of such systems by governments and intelligence agencies – albeit probably inevitable over time – presents the perfect tools for digital authoritarianism and state control with a greater reach than previously imagined.

The totalitarian dream may now be achievable, and with nations like the US, Canada, Australia, and EU member states setting into motion their own vision of those programmes, it is not limited to the Gulf or to Israel.

Muhammad Hussein is an International Politics graduate and political analyst on Middle Eastern affairs, primarily focusing on the regions of the Gulf, Iran, Syria and Turkey, as well as their relation to Western foreign policy.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

( Otherwords.org ) – Growing up in the Southern California suburbs, government surveillance never worried me. But my Syrian-American parents were more cautious. They would often warn me against talking about politics over the phone — in case Big Brother was snooping.

As a teenager, I dismissed their concerns. “Listen, we’re not in the Middle East,” I would counter.

My parents knew better though. I soon received a rude awakening in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

Almost 1,200 people, mostly Muslims, were rounded up and detained after the attacks, often for months without charges. Arabs and South Asians were racially profiled and deported for minor immigration violations. The FBI began surveilling mosques across America.

As part of the homeland security reforms following 9/11, Congress created the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in 2003 to ostensibly fight terrorism and enforce immigration law. But the truth is, ICE went on to use its newly established authority to spy on nearly everyone in the United States.

An independent, two-year investigation has now revealed that ICE collected data on hundreds of millions of Americans under a legally — and ethically — questionable surveillance system largely outside of public oversight.

Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology uncovered this dragnet after filing over 200 Freedom of Information Act requests and reviewing ICE’s contracting records from 2008 to 2021.

In its report, released May 10, the Center found that ICE has spied on most Americans without a warrant and circumvented many state privacy laws, such as those in California. The authors conclude: “ICE now operates as a domestic surveillance agency.”

ICE has carried out this surveillance by turning to third parties like state Departments of Motor Vehicles, large utility companies, and private data brokers like LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

From these sources, ICE gained access to driver’s license data for 3 in 4 adults living in the United States, and scanned a third of the license photos with facial recognition technology. ICE is also able to view over 218 million utility customers’ records across the country, including for over half of California’s residents.

This surveillance network has unsurprisingly hit immigrant communities hardest. The agency has targeted immigrants for deportation by cruelly exploiting their trust in public institutions, such as when undocumented people apply for a driver’s license or sign up for essential utilities like water and electricity.

These practices point to an agency that has clearly overstepped its boundaries. ICE does not have the congressional authority to do this kind of bulk data collection on the public. This overreach underscores the need to shift U.S. immigration law away from the deportation-driven status quo.

Unfortunately, this ICE program isn’t an isolated case. It’s part of a broader domestic surveillance apparatus that spans decades and multiple federal agencies — including the FBI, CIA, and NSA — and ultimately impacts all of us.

During the 1960s and ‘70s, federal agencies spied on anti-Vietnam War protesters and civil rights leaders. More recently, in 2013 whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency created a massive surveillance program that secretly gathered telephone records on millions of Americans, regardless of whether they were suspected of any wrongdoing.

And this February, newly declassified documents exposed the CIA’s own secret bulk data collection program to spy on Americans. The type of data remains classified, but Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM) have called for greater transparency on the agency’s surveillance of Americans.

We should all be alarmed by this growing domestic surveillance state. Left unchecked, it corrodes public trust in our democratic institutions and undermines our civil liberties, most notably the embattled right to privacy.

The history of government surveillance demonstrates that we can never take this right for granted.

Farrah Hassen, J.D., is a writer, policy analyst, and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona.

Via Otherwords.org

It turns out, however, that Netanyahu has himself been given the Pegasus treatment, with his downfall due in part to Israeli police deploying the software against a witness who turned state’s evidence in the disgraced politician’s corruption trial. The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports that last Friday, the Jerusalem central court issued an order to the prosecution, demanding an explanation after reports surfaced that police had extracted information from the smart phone of a witness in the corruption trial without the witness’s knowledge. The prosecution has until Tuesday to reply.

The judge rejected a request by Netanyahu’s attorney that the court take up the issue on Monday. The trial will continue as usual until the prosecutor clears up the question about phone surveillance. Prosecutor Yehudit Tirosh said Thursday that a thorough investigation was being carried out.

Netanyahu’s lawyers asked the court to order the prosecution to disclose all the material gathered by the police via the Pegasus program and any other spyware in the course of their investigation of Netanyahu. Despite making the request two weeks ago, the defense still has not received a response.

Natael Bandel at Haaretz explains that Netanyahu is being tried on three counts of corruption. One of the cases, #4000, alleges that when he was prime minister, Netanyahu offered regulatory concessions to Bezeq Communications if they would make sure to give the prime minister favorable coverage at their Walla news site, which Bezeq then owned. It is the second largest news site in Israel. It is in this case that the issue of cyber-spying on a prosecution witness arose.

The witness whose phone was spied on is Shlomo Filber, whom Netanyahu had appointed director of the Ministry of Communications. He says that Netanyahu’s regulatory favors to Bezeq, which included fast-tracking a big merger, were worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Filber abruptly resigned last spring and agreed to testify against Netanyahu. It is not clear if the ability of the police to turn Filber and have him testify for the prosecution had anything to do with their surveillance of his phone, on which they could have found incriminating evidence they used to pressure him.

Some observers are wondering if the cyber-espionage against Filber could derail the trial of Netanyahu and get him off the hook. He had earlier been said to have accepted a plea deal that would ban him from politics for several years.

The Biden administration has banned Pegasus in the United States and Apple is suing NSO for hacking iPhones. The company may go bankrupt as a result of these measures.

Netanyahu had provided Saudi Arabia with the Pegasus program, which allowed the government of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman to hack the cell phone of Washington Post columnist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi, which led to his murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Business Insider reported this week that after a personal call from Bin Salman, Netanyahu reinstated the Saudi license to the software, after the Israeli Ministry of Defense had cut Riyadh off for using it on Khashoggi. So, murdering dissidents was no bar to Israel peddling the dangerous program to the most oppressive dictatorships.

Israeli intelligence used Pegasus against Palestinian human rights groups.

So after Netanyahu had deployed this nasty cyber-espionage tool against stateless Palestinians and used it to curry favor with Mr. Bone Saw in Riyadh, someone else used it to gather intelligence on his extensive corruption.

He who lives by spyware dies by spyware.

Governments Should Urgently Halt Trade in Surveillance Technology

Human Rights Watch – (New York) – The targeting of a Human Rights Watch staff member with Pegasus spyware underscores the urgent need to regulate the global trade in surveillance technology, Human Rights Watch said today. Governments should ban the sale, export, transfer, and use of surveillance technology until human rights safeguards are in place.

Lama Fakih, Crisis and Conflict director and head of the Beirut office at Human Rights Watch, was targeted with Pegasus spyware five times between April and August 2021. Pegasus is developed and sold by the Israel-based company NSO Group. The software is surreptitiously introduced on people’s mobile phones. Once Pegasus is on the device, the client is able to turn it into a powerful surveillance tool by gaining complete access to its camera, calls, media, microphone, email, text messages, and other functions, enabling surveillance of the person targeted and their contacts.

On November 24, 2021, Apple notified Fakih via email, iMessage, and an alert on the AppleID login screen that state-sponsored attackers may be targeting her personal iPhone. The Human Rights Watch information security team established that Fakih’s current and former iPhones had been infected with Pegasus after they performed forensic analysis on the devices. Amnesty International’s Security Lab peer reviewed the analysis and confirmed the findings.

Fakih’s phones were infected with a “zero-click” exploit, meaning that her devices were compromised without the need for any action by Fakih such as clicking on a link. This is an advanced and sophisticated attack technique that is effective at compromising devices, while also being very difficult for the target to detect or prevent.

The targeting of Human Rights Watch with Pegasus adds to the ever-growing list of human rights activists, journalists, politicians, diplomats, and others whose devices have been compromised by the spyware in violation of their rights. In July 2021, a consortium coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based media nonprofit, with the technical support of Amnesty International, exposed that Pegasus software had been used to infect the devices of dozens of activists, journalists, and opposition figures in multiple countries. The consortium identified potential NSO clients in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Togo, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Over the past three months alone, investigations have revealed that Pegasus spyware was used to infect the devices of six Palestinian human rights activists, four Kazakh civil society activists, eleven US Embassy officials in Uganda, two Polish opposition figures, a member of an independent UN human rights investigation team for Yemen, a human rights activist in Bahrain, a human rights activist in Jordan, and thirty-five journalists and members of civil society in El Salvador, among others.

In response to evidence that Pegasus has been used to target human rights defenders, journalists, and dissidents, NSO Group has said repeatedly that its technology is licensed for the sole use of providing governments and law enforcement agencies the ability to lawfully fight terrorism and crime, and that it does not operate the spyware it sells to government clients.

NSO Group responded to Human Rights Watch’s request for comment saying that it is “not aware of any active customer using [its] technology against a Human Rights Watch staff member” and that it would open an initial assessment into our allegation to determine if an investigation is warranted. The company said it takes “any allegation of the misuse of [its] system against a human rights defender most seriously,” and that such misuse would violate their policies and the terms of its contracts with customers. It referred us to its Whistleblower Policy and Transparency Report, which outline how they respond to such allegations.

Recent actions by governments and others against surveillance firms are positive steps, but coordinated and more ambitious government regulation is needed to rein in the burgeoning surveillance technology industry that includes NSO Group and others, Human Rights Watch said. Governments should implement a moratorium on the sale, export, transfer, and use of surveillance technology until human rights safeguards are in place.

“Governments need to act on the damning evidence of rights abuses that the unbridled sale of surveillance technology unleashes around the world,” Brown said. “Human rights defenders are calling for regulation, major companies are suing, while governments’ failure to take decisive action against the spyware industry constitutes a dangerous threat to fundamental human rights.”

For technical analysis of the targeting of Fakih, details of the development of surveillance technology, and recent actions by companies and governments against spyware companies, please see below.

Recent Actions Against Spyware Companies

In recent months, companies and governments have begun to take steps against spyware companies. On July 19, 2021, on the heels of the Pegasus Project reporting, Amazon Web Services announced it had disabled cloud accounts linked to NSO Group. On November 3, the US Commerce Department announced its decision to add NSO Group and Candiru, another Israel-based company that produces spyware, to its trade restriction list (Entity List), for “acting contrary to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.”

The decision prohibits the export from the US to NSO Group and Candiru of any type of hardware or software without a special license from the US Commerce Department. While the decision does not legally prohibit any material support (financial or technical), it effectively blacklists the two companies in the US.

On September 9, 2021, the European Union’s updated rules for the export of surveillance technology went into effect. The regulation does not go as far as human rights groups had wanted, for instance by banning the sale of surveillance technology to abusive governments. But it requires the EU Commission to publicly report the number of export license applications for each type of surveillance technology, for each member state, and the destination of the export. It also adds human rights risks as a criterion to be considered when granting an export license. The impact of the new regulation should be maximized through expansive interpretation and rigorous application, Human Rights Watch said.

In November, Apple began notifying users whom it suspects may have been targeted by a state-sponsored spyware attack, leading to the notification that Fakih received.

On November 23, 2021, Apple filed a lawsuit against NSO Group and its parent company for the surveillance and targeting of Apple users. This follows a lawsuit by WhatsApp over allegations that NSO Group spyware was used to hack 1,400 users of the app in 2019.

Continue reading at the Human Rights Watch site

Via Human Rights Watch