World's Biggest Liars Wage War On "Russian Disinformation"
Russian "fake news" hysteria helps fuel massive funding hike to the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Canada's gateway to the Five Eyes. Savor the bitter irony.
In the late 1960’s, the US Army and the American people became increasingly oppositional. The peace movement opposed the Army’s efforts in Vietnam, and major race riots repeatedly culminated in the deployment of soldiers to American streets. The Army National Guard, which had helped contain a total of just 88 civil “disturbances” between the Second World War and 1965, was then deployed against civilians 260 times in just six years following 1965.
It was in this context that, in January, 1970, the people learned that the Army was spying on political activists, and that it was compiling information about these activists on computers (CONUS).
Not long after this, in 1971, the people then learned that the Army had also been spying on newspaper reporters, religious figures, lawyers, and even prominent government officials, including a Congressman, a Senator, and a federal judge.
This news, it is worth emphasizing to a modern audience, was greeted with widespread horror at the time. Indeed, at the time, the problematic nature of such a spying program seemed obvious. It was considered not just an invasion of privacy but also a threat to freedom and democracy itself. Newspaper reporters had to be able to protect the identity of their sources; lawyers had to be able to keep their client’s information confidential; and — for God’s sake — civilian politicians had to keep tabs on the Army, not vice versa. Even the surveillance of law-abiding activists was considered scandalous, especially considering the involvement of computers. Facing indiscriminate high-tech mass surveillance for the first time, Americans quickly decided that the Army’s mission had crept in an unacceptable direction, and that it had to be rolled back.
But then, before the year was even out, evidence emerged that the Army had actually not been alone on its creepy road trip. This became clear when antiwar protesters stole documents proving that the FBI was also spying on civilian activists (COINTELPRO).
Then, in 1974, legendary journalist Seymour Hersh broke news that the CIA was spying civilian activists, too (Operation CHAOS).
And after these allegations led the US government to launch a series of major investigations into the intelligence community in 1975 (the so-called “Year of Intelligence”), the people caught a glimpse of the full scale of the iceberg that the great Army Spy Scandal of 1970-71 had been but the tip of. As these investigations revealed, in fact, not only had the Army, FBI, and CIA been spying on civilians, but also the CIA had been performing horrific mind-control experiments on unwitting subjects (Project MKUltra), and was almost certainly manipulating the news agenda to boot (Operation Mockingbird).
And this is also when the people were told for the very first time about this other thing called the “National Security Agency” (NSA).
Virtually in the same breath, they were informed that this obscure, top-secret military intelligence organization had actually been placing them under the most indiscriminate high-tech mass surveillance of all (Projects SHAMROCK and MINARET).
The SIGINTs come home to roost
Media reports about the NSA had only begun to surface a few years earlier, after a former analyst named Perry Fellwock — the first NSA whistle-blower — gave an interview to the left-wing magazine Ramparts in August, 1972.
Under the pseudonym “Winslow Peck”, Fellwock introduced the NSA to the world as a “powerful” and “completely technological” part of the US intelligence community. Its primary mission, he said, was the interception and analysis of what he called “Signals Intelligence”, or “SIGINT”, mostly concerning Soviet Russia. But, to this end, Fellwock said, the NSA collects SIGINT from “almost every conceivable source”;
“[o]f course all trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific telephone calls to or from the U.S. are tapped”. [ECHELON]
Fellwock then went on to explain that the NSA was also part of an international community. This community, he said, was defined by a secret agreement, called the “UKUSA Treaty”, that had been signed by the US, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and various so-called “Third Parties” like West Germany and Japan. Each of these countries had their own SIGINT operations going, too, Fellwock said casually; and under the UKUSA Treaty, they basically all shared information with each other. But it was not a relationship of equals, he was quick to make clear: more like a pyramid scheme — with the United States, of course (the treaty’s “First Party”), sitting at the very top. According to Fellwock,
“[a]mong the First and Second Parties there is supposed to be a general agreement not to restrict data. Of course it doesn't work out this way in practice. The Third Party countries receive absolutely no material from us, while we get anything they have . . . As it works out, the treaty is a one-way street. We violate it even with our Second Party allies by monitoring their communications constantly.”
Although Fellwock himself does not appear to have used the term in the 1972, this was, at the time, probably the most detailed public description of what would come to be widely-known as the “Five Eyes”. And although the Ramparts article contained a number of major revelations — the NSA had broken all the Soviet codes; NSA personnel were involved in smuggling and even the “white slave trade” — Fellwock later indicated that the simple existence of this international SIGINT community should probably have been its lede. After all, he said (in 2013),
“[m]ost people in those days thought that the NSA and CIA worked for the US government. But they don't. They're an entity unto itself, a global entity that is comprised of the Five Eyes. This community operates outside of the Constitution, and from everything I've seen, it still does.”
Despite its shortcomings, however, the impact of the Ramparts article had a ripple effect that slowly but steadily spread out across the world.
This shock wave hit Canada in 1974, when a CBC documentary team followed up on Fellwock’s interview and thus exposed Canada’s “Eye”, now called the “Communications Security Establishment” (CSE) — breaking news of its existence, not only members of the general public, but apparently also to most members of parliament.
Soon afterwards, in 1976, the British journalist Duncan Campbell then exposed the UK’s “GCHQ” with help from Fellwock, leading to legal charges against Campbell that, in effect, stood as a dire warning to other overly-enthusiastic journalists (Campbell’s co-author, an American, was promptly deported).
Ultimately, these SIGINT organizations that Fellwock had helped expose were a manifestation of a long-standing Anglo-American partnership that was hardly secret. Indeed, it went back to at least the 19th century, with roots in the “common Anglo Saxon culture” of the US, the UK, and the UK’s former Dominions — and also in their common genocidal settler colonial history.
But a more immediate origin story came to light after the secret history of Allied code-breakers in the Second World War, widely-known as “Ultra”, was finally declassified in 1974. In fact, it turned out that the NSA, CSE, and GCHQ were the direct descendants of the wartime organizations that had cooperated to intercept, decipher, and analyze the communications of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. These joint efforts were quickly recognized for their crucial role in the Allied victory — highlighting the invaluable nature of SIGINT — and now it was apparent that they had also laid the basis for future cooperation in this domain between the victors.
This dark industry then went on to find new life in the Cold War, and the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, and in quietly taking advantage of Third World countries who had purchased Axis cipher machines unaware that they were compromised. And it found new life on the home front, too, as the dogs of war are wont to do; and under a veil of secrecy it had evolved, and expanded.
Swallowing lies to catch a fly
Today, the public image of the Five Eyes has changed dramatically. Since its existence was finally officially acknowledged in 2010 — reluctantly, in response to freedom of information requests, after about sixty years of secrecy — it has emerged from the shadows and taken its rightful place alongside NATO as a major pillar of the US-led “democratic” and “free world”. Journalists can now fearlessly publish abbreviations like NSA or CSE or GCHQ; indeed, these organizations now have their own official Twitter accounts. And the people, apparently, are now largely receptive to the idea that this traditionally White Anglo-Saxon Protestant military intelligence cabal will actually protect them from “hackers” and “disinformation”.
Canadians illustrated this earlier in the month, when their government publicly announced a dramatic funding increase to the CSE amid public hysteria over “Russian disinformation” and the country failed to burst collectively into laughter and tears.
In reality, however, these is little reason to believe that the Five Eyes today is substantively different than it was fifty years ago when Perry Fellwock first exposed it. Indeed:
It continues to evade public scrutiny, and those who reveal its secrets — however much in the public interest — continue to face punitive persecution (see Edward Snowden [still trapped in Russia], Chelsea Manning [still barred from Canada], and of course Julian Assange).
Its powers of mass surveillance are more omnipotent than ever, as Snowden demonstrated in 2013 (ECHELON, Tempora, PRISM, XKeyscore, and so on); and the once-sacred distinction between a “law-abiding citizen” and a “foreign actor”, blurred by the focus of the Five Eyes’ mandate, and mocked by its transnational character, has yet to be resurrected — ensuring that no one is protected from it.
Its function as a coercive arm of American imperialist foreign policy has changed little, as evidenced by New Zealand’s persistent complaints about the “myth” of its independence, and the fact that even the Europeans are still being traumatized by Snowden’s revelations.
Paradoxically, it is still also considered by many “a potential existential threat to the health and wellbeing of the United States” — and not in a good way.
It almost certainly continues to influence the news agenda, whether directly (ie., funding journalists, media organizations, or think tanks) or indirectly.
And it continues, above all, to extend its eternal life, finding new purpose in the “War on Drugs”, and the “War on Terror”, and, now, the war on “Russian hackers” and “Russian disinformation”.
Let us hope that, this time, the threat is actually proportional to this enormous price.