TECH
drone strike. As Washington withdrew from
CYBER-SURVEILLANCE
RAMPS UP
After ongoing allegations of Russian interference in
America’s presidential elections, it’s worth remembering
that the US has long acquired, used and misused
information on enemies and allies. Indeed, many
countries dabble in a bit of cyber-surveillance – and
it looks set to continue in 2019
WORDS: ALFRED W MCCOY
S
ince President Trump’s inauguration in
January 2017, there has been a steady
stream of media coverage highlighting
Russia’s use of disinformation and scandal
in influencing the US presidential elections
and the Brexit referendum in the UK. Yet,
for well over a century, Washington used
surprisingly similar clandestine tactics in its
exercise of global power, from pacification
of the Philippines in 1898 to recent cyber-
surveillance of European allies.
The Philippines was just one of the sprawling
empire of tropical islands that Washington
took f rom Spain in 1898 – but it was t he
only one to challenge t he US a rmy, wit h
guerrilla resistance and messianic revolts. Using
America’s advanced information systems of
telephone, telegraph and automated tabulating
(using a kind of proto-super-
computer), the army formed
the first field intelligence
unit in its 100-year history.
Under Captain Ralph Van
Deman, dubbed the ‘father
of US military intelligence’,
the unit compiled detailed
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data on the appearance, finances and loyalties
of every influential Filipino. Simultaneously,
t he America n colonial regime created a
constabulary that ruled through a total control
over information, releasing scurrilous titbits to
discredit dissidents and suppressing scandal
to protect collaborators.
When the US entered the First World War
in 1917 it had no intelligence service, so Van
Deman was assigned to establish one. With a
staff of 1,700 and 350,000 citizen operatives,
his Military Intelligence Division launched
intensive surveillance of domestic subversives –
arguably the world’s most extensive programme
of the kind up to that time.
After retiring in 1929, Van Deman made
his San Diego bungalow the epicentre of an
intelligence exchange among military, police
and private security, compiling
dossiers on 250,000 dissidents
a nd cha nnelling classified
information to citizen groups
for public blacklisting. During
the 1950 race for the US senate,
Richard Nixon reportedly used
Van Deman’s files to smear his
Iranian
rival for the California seat, launching his
path to the presidency.
intelligence
During the early years of the Cold War
in the 1950s, Washington carried out 170
hacked into a
clandestine operations in 48 nations. Over
the next 50 years, the CIA would covertly
CIA drone and
manipulate 80 elections worldwide and,
when such efforts failed, promote many
forced it to
of the military coups that roiled more
than 30 nations between 1958 and 1975.
land in public
Under a secret treaty signed in 1946, the
National Security Agency (NSA) and
its British counterpart GCHQ built a
worldwide signals surveillance through
the Five Eyes coalition of the US, the UK,
Australia, New Zealand and Canada, with its
Echelon surveillance programme, established
in the 1960s.
WAR ON TERROR
With the launch of the so-called ‘Global War
on Terror’ in 2001, Washington merged new
tech such as electronic surveillance, biometric
ID and aerospace innovation into a digital
information regime. By 2008, the US army
had collected more than one million Iraqi
fingerprints and iris scans that its combat
patrols accessed by satellite link to the US.
GETTY, US ARMY
Captain Ralph Van At the same time, the Joint Special Operations
Deman, known as
the ‘father of US
Command’s integrated database identified
military intelligence’ alleged Al-Qaeda operatives for elimination by
TECH
Iraq, this tech migrated to Afghanistan, where
US patrols regularly scanned Afghani eyes
into an upgraded biometric automated toolset.
By the time Obama took office in 2009, the
NSA had assembled the requisite technological
toolkit of supercomputers and data farms to
sweep up billions of communications worldwide
while targeting specific individuals. In 2013,
the New York Times reported that there were
“more than 1,000 targets of American and
British surveillance in recent years”, including
leaders of dozens of nations including France
and Germany. Seeking diplomatic advantage
over its allies, the US conducted “widespread
surveillance” of world leaders during the G20
summit in Toronto in 2010. Three years later,
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden charged
that “they even keep track of who is having
an affair or looking at pornography, in
case they need to damage their target’s
reputation”.
In the marketplace of military ideas,
even a crushing technological advantage
is quickly lost. Washington was fast
to weaponise the internet, forming its
Cyber Command in 2009 and deploying
computer viruses against Iran’s nuclear
facilities. Russia was not far behind,
using cyberstrikes to cripple Georgia’s
computers in 2008 and later to disable
Ukraine’s electrical grid, leading NATO’s
2016 summit to make t he web a new
domain for military operations.
Not only did a St Petersburg “troll factory”
try to influence the 2016 US elections, but
Russian hackers also stole some of the NSA’s
top-secret cyber tools. Showing the accessibility
of cyberwar even to secondary powers, in 2011
Iranian intelligence hacked into the navigation
of a super-secret CIA drone and forced it to land
for public display in northern Iran.
The digital surveillance and cyberwarfare
that seemed, just a few years ago, to provide
wonder weapons for extending US global
dominion have quickly become just another
dangerous arena for military conflict, accessible
to powers large and small. It’s inevitable that
in 2019, and years to come, cyber-surveillance
will continue to be commonplace.
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