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Q: What is global surveillance?

Global surveillance is really a shorthand way of describing an array of initiatives which have been planned or implemented by governments since 9-11. These include: the NSA domestic spying program; passports and national ID cards that are being introduced in the United States and other countries, which have individuals’ biometrics (unique biological identifiers, like fingerprints) embedded into them, along with RFID chips, or radio frequency identification chips that can be read at a distance and used for tracking location; the U.S. CAPPS II and other passenger screening systems which collect biometric and commercial information on travelers, in order to assess them as a green, red, or amber risks; and the monster data mining program, Total Information Awareness and its progeny, which are meant to vacuum up vast amounts of personal information about populations and use computer algorithms to determine which of us might pose a security risk. There are a host of others.

Q: In the West, we’ve had the 9-11 attacks, the Madrid bombing, the London bombings and the recent plot which almost blew up 10 planes with hundreds of people on them -- as well as other planned attacks, like those in Canada, which have been averted. Are you saying authorities don’t need better surveillance powers? Haven’t they been doing a good job recently with the new powers they have?

A: They don’t need many of the new powers they’ve been given and they don’t need the kind of globalized, mass surveillance programs that I write about in the book. Success in the recent alleged plot in the U.K. appears to have been made through good old ordinary police work -- a tip from the Muslim community sparked the investigation. The breakthrough came from human intelligence, not artificial intelligence.

I’ve mentioned the Bush Administration’s NSA program – you’re probably aware of revelations that it has been trolling through millions of telephone calls and emails made by Americans without warrants, and that this program was ruled illegal by a U.S. court in August. The Administration contends that the program has saved lives. Yet, both U.S. and British counterterrorism officials have questioned these assertions, saying they had already learned of the alleged plots in question through other means. And, U. S. agents said the torrent of so-called tips they were getting from the NSA was diverting them from more productive counterterrorism work.

There is, in fact, no known example of any terrorists being caught by the new mass, globalized surveillance initiatives that I describe in the book. On the contrary, many innocent people are being caught up in the dragnet they create: as of December 2005, 30,000 people had been wrongly matched to the U.S. “no fly” list.

Sifting through an ocean of information with a net of bias and faulty logic, these initiatives yield a tidal wave of false leads and useless information. You know, there is a widely held belief that the government should have known about and prevented the 9-11 attacks. In fact, the traditional systems of law enforcement and security intelligence that were in place at the time, under-funded and lacking in critical human resources as they were, did yield information about the likelihood and imminence of the attacks. U.S. agencies knew the nature of the attacks and some of the key players were under investigation. Authorities had all kinds of clues, but they weren’t communicating well and they couldn’t see the forest for the trees. How much better will they do if they have to continually sift through information on the lives of millions of people?

Q: Why are governments adopting these initiatives?

All of this is part of a larger and profound policy shift regarding security. Governments, with the United States in the lead, have embraced a new security model of “preemption.” It sounds fine, when you think of yourself and your family being protected from further terrorist attacks. But, in fact, it is a very dangerous model. It doesn’t provide real security and it justifies almost anything. In the preemptive model, which holds sway today, everyone is continually evaluated as a potential suspect in order to eliminate risk to the furthest degree possible. No degree of risk is viewed as tolerable. Criminal and due process protections, which have been developed over centuries in democratic societies, are viewed as intolerable risks. Democratic institutions, constitutional guarantees, basic human rights and the rule of law itself are viewed as intolerably risky. Preemptive war is advocated as a solution to risk!

Q: How did this preemption model take hold?

After the attacks of 9-11, “preemption” became the mantra of the Bush Administration. Though statistics showed the number of people killed in the U.S. in car crashes each year outnumbered, many times over, those killed globally by terrorist attacks, people felt vulnerable. And the mantra of preemption reassured people that something was being done. But it served other agendas as well.

It led to the profound policy shift I’ve described in law enforcement and security intelligence, allowing the Bush Administration to put into effect a wish list that these communities had been wanting for years. It served to keep the Administration in office and to consolidate power into the hands of the Executive. It was useful in outflanking opponents, manipulating the public, and putting pressure on dissenters. But it also served the foreign policy agenda of the neo-conservatives in the government, people like Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Richard Perle, and Elliot Abrams. Throughout the 90s, in a think tank called The Project for the New American Century, they’d been advocating preemptive war as a key component of an aggressive, unilateral foreign policy. After 9-11, and once the public had largely adapted to the idea of “preemption” as an essential strategy for security, it was a relatively easy thing for the Administration to take the anti-terrorism mantra of preemption and, like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, turn it into a new doctrine for the use of force: the doctrine of preemptive war.

Q: Is this a conspiracy theory?

A: No, it’s policy. In the case of the neo-conservatives and preemptive war, they had articulated their policy in the past, though they had never discussed it honestly with the American people during elections or after they came to power. Achieving their agenda came about through a lucky confluence of events and deft opportunism, giving rein to their immense hubris.

In the case of global surveillance and preemptive law enforcement, many of these initiatives have been floated before by governments. And governments, particularly the G8, are going along with the U.S. in these new initiatives for their own opportunistic reasons; reasons that go far beyond anti-terrorism. The preemptive model helps them introduce harsh immigration and refugee policies, to concentrate power into the hands of their executive branches of government, to beef up law enforcement powers, and to generally enhance the control they have over their populations. For repressive regimes, the preemption model provides a great opportunity to entrench their control, to bolster their security apparatuses, and to re-brand their dissidents or insurgents as terrorists who need to be put on an international list.

Q: In your book, you argue that this new kind of “preemptive,” or mass surveillance is bad for democracies and democratic values around the world.

A: Yes, it’s bad for democracy. In implementing these initiatives, governments are riding rough shod over our democratic institutions and rights: