The FBI's Multi-Billion High-Tech Surveillance Program

(US: The Police State)

by Tom Burghardt

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's budget request for Fiscal Year 2010 reveals that America's political police intend to greatly expand their high tech surveillance capabilities.

According to ABC News, the FBI is seeking additional funds for the development of a new Advanced Electronic Surveillance program which is being funded at $233.9 million for 2010. The program has 133 employees, 15 of whom are agents.

Known as Going Dark, the program is designed to beef up the Bureau's already formidable electronic surveillance, intelligence collection and evidence gathering capabilities as well as those of the greater Intelligence Community, ABC reports. An FBI spokesperson told the network:

The term Going Dark does not refer to a specific capability, but is a program name for the part of the FBI, Operational Technology Division's(OTD) lawful interception program which is shared with other law enforcement agencies.

Led by Assistant Director Marcus C. Thomas, OTD describes the office as supporting the FBI's investigative and intelligence-gathering efforts and those of our federal, state, and local law enforcement/intelligence partners with a wide range of sophisticated technological equipment, examination tools and capabilities, training, and specialized experience. You won't hear about our work on the evening news because of its highly sensitive nature, but you will continue to hear about the fruits of our labor.

According to OTD's website, the Division possesses seven core capabilities: Digital Forensics; Electronic Surveillance; Physical Surveillance; Special Technology and Applications, Tactical Communications, Tactical Operations and finally, Technical Support/Coordination.

Under the heading Electronic Surveillance, OTD deploys tools and techniques for performing lawfully-authorized intercepts of wired and wireless telecommunications and data network communications technologies; enhancing unintelligible audio; and working with the communications industry as well as regulatory and legislative bodies to ensure that our continuing ability to conduct electronic surveillance will not be impaired as technology evolves.

In April, Wired obtained documents from the FBI under a Freedom of Information Act request. Those files demonstrate how the Bureau's geek squad routinely hack into wireless, cellular and computer networks.

Although the FBI released 152 heavily-redacted pages, they withheld another 623, claiming a full release would reveal a "sensitive investigative technique. Nevertheless, Wired discovered that the FBI is deploying spyware called a "computer internet protocol address verifier, or CIPAV, designed to infiltrate a target's computer and gather a wide range of information, which it sends to an FBI server in eastern Virginia. While the documents do not detail CIPAV's capabilities, an FBI affidavit from a 2007 case indicate it gathers and reports,

A computer's IP address; MAC address; open ports; a list of running programs; the operating system type, version and serial number; preferred internet browser and version; the computer's registered owner and registered company name; the current logged-in user name and the last-visited URL.

After sending the information to the FBI, the CIPAV settles into a silent pen register mode, in which it lurks on the target computer and monitors its internet use, logging the IP address of every server to which the machine connects. (Kevin Poulsen, FBI Spyware Has Been Snaring Extortionists, Hackers for Years, Wired, April 16, 2009)

The FBI also intends to continue their use of automated link and behavioral analysis derived from data mining as investigative tools. As a subset of applied mathematics, social network theory and its derivatives, link- and behavioral analysis, purport to uncover hidden relationships amongst social groups and networks. Over time, it has become an invasive tool deployed by private- and state intelligence agencies against political activists, most recently, as Antifascist Calling reported in February, against protest groups organizing against the Republican National Convention.

These methods raise very troubling civil liberties' and privacy concerns. The Electronic Privacy Information Coalition (EPIC) filed a Freedom of Information Act request, demanding that the General Services Administration (GSA) turn over agency records concerning agreements the GSA negotiated between federal agencies and social networking services, including Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, and Facebook.

With the proliferation of social networking sites, applications allow users to easily share information about themselves with others. But as EPIC points out, Many online services relay information about online associations as users create new relationships. While government agencies may use social networking, cloud computing, and Internet services to create greater transparency on their activities, it remains unclear if there are data collection, use, and sharing limitations.

Electronic Police State

An electronic police state is characterized by this:

State use of electronic technologies to record, organize, search and distribute forensic evidence against its citizens.

The two crucial facts about the information gathered under an electronic police state are these:

1. It is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial.

2. It is gathered universally and silently, and only later organized for use in prosecutions.

In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording, every email you send, every Internet site you surf, every post you make, every check you write, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping... are all criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long, long time. Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad whenever they care enough to do so. You can be prosecuted whenever they feel like it the evidence is already in their database. (The Electronic Police State, 2008 National Rankings, Cryptohippie, no date)

Unfortunately, this is not the stuff of paranoid fantasies, but American reality in the year 2009, one unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

In addition to Going Dark, the FBI is busily constructing what ABC News refers to as the development of the Biometric Technology Center, a Joint Justice, FBI and DoD program. At a cost of $97.6 million, the center will function as a research and development arm of the Bureau's Biometric Center of Excellence (BCOE), one which will eventually be a vast database of personal data including fingerprints, iris scans and DNA which the FBI calls the Next Generation Identification (NGI).

The program is closely tied with technology under development by West Virginia University's Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR).

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