Customer Reviews

The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Soon after the man now variously known as the "underwear bomber," or even the "crotch bomber" attempted to blow up a Detriot-bound flight on Christmas Day, Americans became rapidly familiar with what Shane Harris' book outlines word-for-word: our intelligence system is very good at "collecting the dots," but not always very good at "connecting the dots."

In The Watchers, Harris goes on to take a very close look at the development of what the subtitle calls the American "surveillance state," particularly in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and through the lens afforded by his access to John Poindexter, a former Reagan administration national security advisor and a director of the Information Awareness Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) during the George W. Bush, post-9/11 years.

As someone who was working in intelligence in a Defense Department capacity during this time period, I have to start with kudos for the accuracy and vividness with which Harris captures the kaleidoscopic speed of the changes in regulation and standard operating procedure during this time. Those of us in the field were left in a constant state of uncertainty as to what we might collect, on whom, and what could be done with it, notwithstanding the questions of with whom it could be shared, for what purposes and on whose orders.

While Harris keeps a pretty even keel, I think it is difficult to walk away from the book with anything but a sense that he disapproves of the liberties that were taken by the Bush administration and "the Watchers" - in the NSA, DIA, CIA and elsewhere - in infringing on civil liberties in the name of national security. Indeed, his conclusory chapters on the course reversal by President Obama's administration after candidate Obama's declarations only strengthened that perception for me. He clearly viewed Obama's vote on FISA in spring 2008 as a harbinger of the administration's intentions to be much less proactive than many civil libertarians, Bush critics and Obama supporters would have liked.

Still, he never quite delivers on the promise of proving that "the surveillance state" has risen in the US. Certainly the level of scrutiny to which Americans are subject to at the hands of their own government does not rise to the level of constant video monitoring of citizens that is widely accepted in the UK. Harris notes the distinction with the UK, which seems to beg a different answer to the question of whether we are approaching a "surveillance state" in the US.

Harris is surely not responsible for the editor's choice of subtitle, but there is nothing here that demonstrates that the US - in any way - is approaching the kind of generally benevolent (if often insidious) creep of surveillance that came into Brits' lives after World War II, during the Troubles and since 9/11. Nor does he even address the kind of misguided and anti-democratic intelligence infrastructure that operated behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, and in places like Iran, North Korea and other oppressive regimes and true "surveillance states."

In other words, he has a wealth of information on how the US has made it possible to collect a lot more info on its citizens, but he does not have any evidence to prove that there is a strain of modern McCarthyism or other misguided or unethical or secret intention behind the plan -- something I would think is a strong indicator of the true rise of a surveillance state. People may disagree strongly on what's been done and they may think that John Woo and Dick Cheney have trounced the Constitution; but, Harris provides no information or inference to assert that they did so with some nefarious intention directed at American citizens. Rather, he thinks they have beenn terribly misguided in an earnest effort at improving national security.

Another of the book's weaknesses is in Harris' tendency to pursue tangents that are too remote to be enjoyable for anyone but the most obsessed intel junkies. One segment of the book on the actual computer software that was being tested and used in certain projects and the problems inherent in deploying it is so deep into the weeds it detracts from the larger narrative. Then again, I found a brief detour into the Achille Lauro hijacking - and even the footnotes on it - to be fascinating, so the criticism may be more a matter of taste.

That said, Harris has certainly produced as comprehensive an examination of these topics as could be expected while relying essentially on the information provided from his extensive interviews with Poindexter and the follow-ups and research that sprang from that central narrative. And, the work could not be more timely. Harris spends much of the book discussing Poindexter's (and others') efforts to develop a system of total information awareness (TIA) that might collect, assimilate and analyze information to provide predictive intelligence that could preempt attacks, in many ways the kind of discussion that has proceeded from the Christmas Day bombing attempt (although, in that case, the government had variously collected but not connected specific information about the perpetrator as opposed to casting a net and dragging for any general information to analyze and integrate as the TIA system would).

Harris' research notes demonstrate the exhaustive work he put in as a journalist throughout this period, and he derives great benefit for the book. His discussion of the political and bureaucratic wrangling over FISA and the question of domestic wiretapping provides a very realistic look at the nature of the back room and power broker discussions that were happening as the White House anointed the NSA with new powers and wrangled with Congress over the meaning of the existing law and the intent of the legislation as now viewed through the post-9/11 lens.

From an operational standpoint, Harris does a nice job of outlining some of the administrative hurdles that frustrate effective intelligence: from information sharing and useful aggregation for analysis to logistical challenges (what to do about variable spellings of transliterated names) and legal questions. The book is strictly an analysis of signal intelligence and intel analysis and does not really touch on the incredible difficulty inherent collecting human intelligence in this particular conflict, because of the marked and insurmountable cultural differences between the West and the radicalized Islamist groups that are training and mobilizing many of the attackers.

In that sense I think that the book gives short shrift to the true meaning of the term "surveillance," and tends to overstate the ascendancy of it in practice. After all, surveillance has been happening since ancient times as the etymology of the term "eavesdropping" indicates, and clandestine gathering and strategic analysis of information gleaned was a part of the rise of the American state as a fitful colony, a divided republic and a Cold War empire -- all long before satellites came to circle in space and send signals back to Ft Mead.

It will be interesting to see where Harris' book winds up in posterity and only the continuing development of the story of American intelligence and the War on Terror can really dictate that, but - for now - he has produced a well-researched and insightful analysis of a government system that is under much scrutiny and has garnered much publicity in the weeks leading up to the book's release.

I had expected this book to be an overview of the mechanisms by which the United States has become a surveillance state, and had even hoped that it would provide historical insights into how surveillance states inevitably become police states.

That was not this book. It seemed to be written mostly from the perspective of Admiral John Poindexter (USN Ret.), and did not get too much into the details of how the government monitors us. (There was NO mention of misuse of information by government agencies.)

It was worth my time, but I am still waiting for someone to write the book that I had hoped this would be.

Several things leapt out at me as I read this book. The first is how well the book is written. Unlike many books about national security and intelligence, this is actually readable without having to be an expert in the field. Most are so technical and dry that it is nearly impossible to sit down and read them enjoyably, while this reads in a manner that reminds me of a novel.

The second thing that is that, despite spending tens of billions of dollars, breaking the law by collecting data illegally and increasing the amount of intelligence information by an alarming magnitude, we are no closer to actually being able to use computers to analyze this data than we were 30 years ago. The computers in use today can siphon of incredible amounts of data, and are doing just that, but the ability to analyze that data still takes numerous human technicians and days of research. So, despite all the research and breaches of privacy of American citizens, we really are no safer than we were in the days and weeks before 9/11.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the national security picture, as well as anyone who is concerned about the civil liberties of all Americans.

It is unfortunate that the publisher chose the sensational "The Rise of America's Surveillance State" as the subtitle for Shane Harris' fine book, for this is hardly the red meat for privacy activists that the title would imply. Instead, Harris has compiled a fascinating chronicle of America's war on terror using electronic technology going back to the 1983 bombing of the US Marines barrack in Lebanon through the early months of the Obama administration. It is also an arms-length biography of retired US Navy Admiral John Poindexter, Ronald Reagan's National Security Advisor who is best remembered for his role and conviction in the Iran-Contra affair and his loyalty to his boss.

When it comes to the age-old debate between security and privacy, author Harris clearly leans to the latter. But give him credit for spinning a well-balanced book that focuses on the facts, avoiding obvious temptations to allow politics - on either side of the aisle - while laying out the challenges, obstacles, personalities, and stakes involved as the convoluted maze of US agencies and bureaus run over themselves in trying to prevent another 9/11 - or worse. I don't think I was reading too much between the lines to guess that Harris started out wanting to dislike Poindexter, but ended up respecting and even liking the man - the tragically flawed hero who has dedicated his life, in private and public endeavors, to keeping America safe - a mission he continues today. Along with Poindexter, the wide supporting cast is well drawn and unvarnished in their accomplishments and foibles while trying to find the bad guys and keep US citizens' privacy mostly intact.

Despite the bits and bytes of subject matter that could lead to a sleep-inducing yawner of a book, Harris tells a dramatic - even suspenseful - tale, spinning his narrative with rare insight into infamous events including the Achille Lauro hijacking, the Kobar Towers bombing, and of course 9/11. Going back to 1983 and Beruit, the theme is constant: lots of ability to collect "data," but when it comes to recognizing patterns and connecting the dots, technology deployed by the alphabet soup of supposed defense agencies is widely inadequate. Making matters worse, maddening bureaucracies of influential people - of both noble and ignoble intent - continually hamper serious attempts to upgrade our nation's defenses to state-of-the-art electronic surveillance, detection, and analysis.

In short, put this one on my "must read" list - the rare non-fiction book that takes a complex and difficult subject and makes it understandable and, despite the serious content, entertaining. It is a great primer in the utter inefficiencies and intolerable rivalries between competing federal bureaucracies, a terrific character study, and a highly illuminating history of spies and spy craft in the era beyond James Bond. A well written and timely book - highly recommended.

"The Watchers" by Shane Harris is a ground-level report of America's modern surveillance system over the past three decades. Mr. Harris chronicles the influential people, incidents and ideas that have shaped the government's controversial data collection strategies as we understand them today. Written with the depth and precision of a journalist who has spent years on the beat, Mr. Harris' book should interest anyone desiring an insider's account of national security issues.

Mr. Harris centers his narrative around John Poindexter whose influence over information technology strategies has been much greater than generally appreciated before. Far from a screed against Big Brother, the reader gains an almost sympathetic perspective on Poindexter's contining project to protect America from harm. We learn about those within and without government who have picked up the lessons from Poindexter's successes and setbacks, including those within the Obama administration who have quietly acquiesced to the status quo ante (despite the Obama campaign's previous stated opposition to covert surveillance programs).

Yet, Mr. Harris points out that Poindexter's vision of aggregating massive amounts of data in order to find clues that might lead us to preemptively quash impending attacks remains elusive. Rather than critiquing the wastefulness or the futility of this strategy, Mr. Harris seems to believe that, like former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy once said, American citizens should "get over" the idea that anonymity exists in their lives. After all, the security state does not believe in privacy, so why should we? Indeed, Mr. Harris contends that we should build upon Poindexter's ideas so that we can get the information we need to catch the bad guys before they strike (and never mind that other methods might achieve better results).

Whether one agrees or disagrees with the author on this point, the book's narrative is fascinating, inasmuch as it sheds light on a frequently emotionally-charged and poorly understood issue. Of course the government would like to gather as much information as possible in order to make decisions; and of course the public would like as little imformation to be gathered as necessary. These are the contentious day to day realities that Mr. Harris documents exceptionally well as he profiles the actions of the protagonists in this story.

The great contribution of this book is how we come to appreciate just how much of the government's security apparatus is positioned well beyond the people's control. The public is conspicuously absent from much of Mr. Harris' book, with the bureaucracy practically oblivious to public concerns except in rare circumstances when things go terribly wrong; and then only for a short while (of which Poindexter's dramatic comeback from the Iran-Contra affair makes abundantly clear). In this sense, Mr. Harris' book stands alongside Eugene Jarecki's The American Way of War in its depiction of an America that has practically shed its democratic past in favor of an imperious national security state that, it seems, will do whatever it wants to do and ask for our collective forgiveness later.

I recommend this book to everyone.

James Bond is so twentieth century. Intelligence and spying is largely focused on electronic data collection in the early twenty-first century, and the U.S. for good and ill leads the world. This book is a discussion of the process whereby electronic spying became the norm and what it portends for personal privacy and national security. Journalist Shane Harris takes as his protagonist Admiral John Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's national security advisor, who worried over how more effective intelligence might have prevented the 1983 terrorist attack on the military barracks in Beirut that led to the deaths of 241 Marines. The problem, in Poindexter's mind, was not the failure to collect information but in the inadequacy of the collation and analysis of data in real time from diverse sources. He dedicated his efforts thereafter toward building a system, along with the technology, that could sift terabytes of data from all sources for signs of terrorist activity. He called it Total Information Awareness, and its success in Poindexter's mind ensured that traditional rights of personal privacy ensconced in law in the United States had to be curtailed.

The system as put into place essentially plays the "six degrees of separation" game in analyzing seemingly unrelated data. This idea--if someone is one step away from each person they know then everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth--suggests that there may be connections that may be analyzed connecting a known terrorist to others who are unknown but are planning acts of terrorism. To make this connection required the sweeping up of massive amount of electronic data and then analyzing it using sophisticated technologies. As Shane Harris commented, "to find signals in the noise one had to collect information from far and wide" (p. 357). The National Security Agency (NSA) had the beginnings of this capability, and developed greater capability over time, but other intelligence organizations played key roles as well.

But the Total Information Awareness program that Adm. Poindexter envisioned tread ruthlessly over the laws in place to ensure personal privacy. Telephone calls for Americans, for instance, are viewed as sacrosanct and may not be listened in on legally except by explicit court order. But to find the few signals in all of the noise the NSA demanded the overturning of this longstanding right so it could collect this data without explicit warrants. The result was the explicit allowing by Congress of warrantless wiretapping in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and a host of other actions systematically overturning civil liberties. Even when part of these efforts were rolled back after being exposed, some became covert activities and continued without legal cover.

Even as capabilities for analysis have expanded, according to Shane Harris, the results of that analysis have not yielded significant results. Mostly what this has uncovered are half-baked plots to attack Fort Dix or some other presumed act of terror while failing to detect the "shoe-bomber" plot or other attempted terrorism. And when curbs to the system to ensure greater personal privacy were proposed, the NSA has found them more expensive and restrictive to its actions so it opposed them.

Where does this leave the United States? The story that Shane Harris tells is one of technology development that outstrips political thinking. He notes that the U.S. government can do quite a lot to collect data and engage in real time analysis. He added that there is less certainty about the quality of what is found through this data mining. He concluded that there is disappointment, even from such individuals as Adm. Poindexter, in the risk this process subjects personal privacy to in the modern era. In the end, as Harris commented, "John Poindexter envisioned a world. Mike Hayden made it a reality. Mike McConnell enshrined it in law. And Barack Obama inherited it. In broad strokes, that's how we got where we are now" (p. 357). What the U.S. does next is within the power of its citizenry. Will the nation allow further erosion of civil liberties or will it seek to erect structures to preserve civil liberties and personal privacy? The final question may be, "Who's watching the watchers?"

The freighted wording of Harris' subtitle "The Rise of America's Surveillance State" would lead you to believe that he is an ardent liberal or libertarian ready to denounce intrusions on our civil liberties. Not at all. The source he quotes most often is John Poindexter, the man who saw the need for data mining to ferret out suspicious connections among billions and trillions of pieces of public data and use them to identify terrorists.

The book begins with events in the Reagan Administration such as the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut. These represented failings of both intelligence and policy. Although the various intelligence gathering agencies such as the CIA, NSA, and military agencies had acquired the raw intelligence that would be adequate to explain in retrospect how the authorities should have known about the impending disaster, they lacked the ability to coordinate their intelligence to put together a comprehensive picture and, most important, to act on what they knew.

Harris alludes only briefly to the history before Reagan. Briefly, Richard Nixon used government agencies to gather information to use against his enemies. These included the IRS, the FBI, and the CIA. There is a permanent interest group, centered on the political left and anchored by the ACLU, which believes that every citizen has the right to privacy, at best perfect anonymity, and the right to a lawyer under every circumstance. This group was led in the Senate by Frank Church of Idaho, not named in the book. Nixon's excesses provided them the opportunity to enact the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 which confined the CIA to gathering intelligence only overseas, and only on noncitizens. This same leftish sentiment led the Senate to curtail funding for CIA operations in support of anti-Communist factions throughout the world, including those who fought against the USSR backed Sandinistas in Nicaragua. In brief, the majority in the U.S. Congress believe that right-wing oppressors such as the generals in Argentina, Chile, Brazil and elsewhere were more of a threat and less to be loved than left-wing oppressors such as the Sandinistas. The Cold War gave us our paradigm for assessing foreign threats, and within that paradigm the Senate majority felt comfortable reducing our capabilities.

The terrorist threat is of a different nature than the Cold War threat. Terrorism is a matter of small cells of people using conventional materials to wreak havoc on Western targets, often within Western societies. It required different techniques, especially data mining, to discern suspicious patterns among millions of transactions such as telephone calls, money transfers, credit card transactions and the like. It also required a generational change in outlook on privacy. Any reader of this review knows that a Google search is likely to reveal a vast amount of personal information. As "The Watchers" documents, before 9/11, collecting any such data gathered on a citizen, even though it came from public sources, was taboo unless surveillance of that person had been authorized by a judge under something like a wiretap order. In one specific instance in this book, in the year before 9/11 the Army was ordered to destroy a huge database on Al Qaeda because it might compromise the privacy of American citizens. Harris' interviews wonder often if they might have connected the dots to prevent 9/11.

The book does a good job of chronicling the evolution of the surveillance and analysis technology since 9/11 as well as our attitude toward surveillance. The conclusion is that we have moved toward the British position, which is that surveillance is a necessary evil, preferable to being blindsided by terrorist attacks. The book gives the British credit for quickly deducing who was responsible for the London subway bombings, and primary credit for identifying the group of terrorists who intended to bring down tens of airliners simultaneously over the Atlantic with bombs fashioned from carry-on liquids. British immigrants, rather than universally appreciating their adopted country, often feel it to be oppressive sometimes loathe it enough that they are willing to blow it up. In a similar fashion, the Irish Republican Army used terror over the decades to make their points. The British citizen does not terribly mind being watched so long as the troublemakers are being equally watched. Americans are adopting this attitude.

Poindexter, Harris' hero, advocated composing a database in which personal data were encrypted in such a way that they would remain invisible until needed. In other words, you could ask a vast computer system to identify suspicious patterns of transactions, and only then, and only under some supervision, possibly even a court order, identify the individuals associated with those transactions. Harris is willing to leave this as an open question. Granted the need for widespread surveillance, why don't we impose a blind over it in order to protect individual privacy? Harris appears to think this is a good idea. I will offer an opinion as a database guy that doing something like this would primarily result in an unmanageable tangle. It would make it difficult to make associations that only people can intuitively make, such as between the Russian and Ukrainian or Arabic and Persian rendering of a name, or the knowledge that my telephone prefix 279 puts me in central Kiev. If the NSA were to attempt such a privacy filter, it would add to their data processing load, detract from their efficiency, and result in a large bureaucracy to administer the many exceptions. It is better to be honest and say that it can't be done, which brings up the second point, watching the watchers.

It is possible and desirable to watch the watchers. To use the same sort of intelligence gathering to determine how every person authorized to use the system is in fact using the system. The same sort of analytical tools can be used to determine whether an analyst is stalking a woman, showing inordinate interest in somebody's bank account, or doing something else untoward. What Harris suggests, though not in those words, is a kind of auditability. It is impossible for a stockholder or any federal agency to audit every transaction in a business. Audits are what keeps them honest. An auditor looks for suspicious patterns and tracks them, but also chooses totally unsuspicious transactions at random and investigates them thoroughly to make sure that they are legitimate. The government already has such an agency: the Government Accountability Office, or GAO. It would make sense to establish a similar sort of accounting office, with all the levels of security and compartmentalization required by this mission, to prevent Nixonian style abuses of power and freelance abuses by authorized users even as our intelligence organizations do the necessary work of keeping us safe.

Harris' conclusion does not leave much suspense. Both Bush and Obama come out looking pretty good. His take is that once they understood the issues, they did not have much choice but to leave the professionals to do their job. Bush took a lot of criticism from the old left for allowing the expansion of the surveillance state, but Obama has disappointed those who expected a change in policy. Harris' conclusion would be that the old views of privacy and anonymity are simply no longer tenable.

I will conclude in saying that this is a delightfully readable book. It is set in the form of a story, John Poindexter story, against the backdrop of the rising terrorist threat since the 1980s. Harris is certainly aware of the topics I raise here in the review, but probably chose to limit the material in his book in order that it might follow a storyline narrative. It does that well. It is both highly informative and easy to read. I look forward very much to his next book.

This title suggests that common sense and intelligence gathering don't always fall in line. Or, is it laziness. Stupidity.

By now, Congressmen and Women, should all realize that the violent Muslim is out to destroy this country. With help from Russia and China, we are doomed unless we get a get-smart attitude. Will we? Or, will we perish under our own liberalities?

What Harris is telling us is that we have spent a lot of time and money developing a great intelligence system, but we don't put it to practical use. Are we focusing on catching terrorists or are we worried about the American born tourist and his nail clippers going through airport checkpoints?

A well written approach to the events leading up to, and the formation of, the newest age of electronic surveillance and intelligence. I appreciate the straightforward treatment of the players involved and their respective histories and personalities. Recommended for those interested in the high to mid-level details of the Total Information Awareness program, NSA wiretapping and the legalities thereof, etc.

Harris, who has covered counterterrorism and electronic surveillance for National Journal since the 90's, has composed a book that is thorough, well-written, informative and non-partisan. It offers a discussion of the rise of wiretapping in the post-9/11 era from the perspective of those inside the intelligence community, or "the watchers." In following figures such as Admiral John Poindexter and NSA director Mike Hayden, Harris's narrative traces the origins of the war on terror to the suicide bombing of a U.S. embassy in Lebanon in 1983, and it discusses all the significant developments in the government's efforts to create a surveillance apparatus in response, from the 1994 Communications for Law Assistance Act, which required phone companies to build products with equipment that enables the government to install wiretaps, to the Protect America Act of 2007, which legalized most of the practices initiated in secret by Bush years earlier.

Along the way are many fascinating revelations, such as a chapter-long explanation of Obama's shift in favor of immunizing communications companies from legal retribution shortly before the 2008 election...

For full article check out my blog:

[...].