CITIZENFOUR (the Edward Snowden story) screened in Sydney this evening, ahead of its release in Australian cinemas on February 12th. What an amazing film. Yeah, it’s a documentary, but it felt more like a spy-thriller from the edge of my seat. As the film unfolds, the (real-life) revelations about global surveillance are of red-pill proportions – both on and off-screen – and change forever your perceptions of the world we live in, even when you’ve been interested in this area for some time. Take Glenn Greenwald’s reaction, for example. No spoilers, except to say that Big Data is watching you.

The avant premiere and Q&A was presented by Senator Scott Ludlam, our strongest parliamentary voice in Australia against the Surveillance State. He was questioned at length by the Aussie audience, about recent plans by our right-wing government to introduce mandatory data retention for all Australians. Of course we suspect that the reason for doing this is more about business than security, and after seeing CITIZENFOUR, it’s clear that the NSA, a partner of our spooks in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, has got us all under their eye already. Our boys can tap into that dragnet, for genuine National Security reasons. But the NSA too collects a lot of information that doesn’t assist national security.

Australian Greens Senator Scott Ludlam presents CITIZENFOUR by Laura Poitras

Senator Ludlam’s remarks this week in parliament, suggested that the government’s version of Mandatory Data Retention is a pretty ineffective tool of surveillance, since it doesn’t capture data from offshore mail services, like Gmail. Nor does it retain online chat, on platforms such as Facebook. But it is good for driving us away from Australian ISPs (Internet Server Providers), and catching people who illegally download copyright material.

The package is stamped ‘National Security’, but the contents monitor consumers; not terrorists. And this tool serves to police legislation that relates to the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). There is a clause that more or less obliges the governments of member States to protect each other’s corporate interests. In fact governments can be sued by overseas business entities, if they are seen to legislate in a way that harms trade.

We must see of great significance, concurrent moves to make copyright violation no longer a civil, but criminal matter. That would mean that our government would have to pursue breaches, rather than an individual plainiff, as has always been the case. In the longer term, metadata retention may be used to monitor and restrict what we buy online, especially if a foreign corporation in a member state claims that our choice – of pharmaceuticals, for example – harms their business. Word is, that US business entities actually write the legislation you need to join the TPP, and USG rubber stamps that, before passing it on to applicants.

Scott Ludlam will be talking in more detail about these issues on Thursday evening at another Sydney event, Politics in the Pub, in a session entitled ‘The Meaning of Metadata’. Joining him for an explosive expose and one-hour Q&A, will be National Security journalist and ex foreign affairs policy advisor, Dr Philip Dorling; as well as Samantha Castro, former spokesperson and National Council member of the Wikileaks Party and co-founder of WACA (the Whistleblowers, Activists and Citizens Alliance). The event will be viewable on the Politics in the Pub website on February 7th.

That may sound unreliable… but it sells! Welcome to Big Brother meets Big Data!

Palantir Technologies, is a premium Silicon Valley start-up, whose business it’s been to write clever software to track digital footprints, then ‘join the dots’ to predict who you are and what you might do next. Its directors are Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal and first outside investor in Facebook, and Alex Karp, an “eccentric philosopher” (with a PhD in neoclassical social theory) who turned their Palo Alto* headquarters into a replica of The Shire from ‘Lord of the Rings’. If it sounds like a fairy story, it is not. Palantir’s software has been labelled the Killer App. It was allegedly used to hunt down and kill Osama Bin Laden.

* In 2020 Palantir moved its headquarters to Denver.

Palantir is ‘well in’. Its advisors are Condoleezza Rice and George Tenet (ex CIA). It was funded by the CIA, which became a client of Palantir back in 2004. Other government clients are the NSA, the FBI, the NYPD, and a number of counter terrorism and military agencies.

This baby has been valued at five to eight billion dollars and is predicting another billion in private sector deals in 2014. Forbes Magazine reports:

“Palantir is emerging from the shadow world of spies and special ops to take corporate America by storm. Private-sector deals now account for close to 60% of the company’s revenue.”

The identities of corporate clients are usually kept secret, but they include J.P. Morgan, various hedge funds, News Corp and Bank of America – as some will recall from Palantir’s dealings with H.B Gary Federal in a thwarted plan to destroy Wikileaks and its media partner Glenn Greenwald, who instead went on to report on the disclosures of Edward Snowden. The plan may have succeeded, had not Aaron Barr, an employee of H.B. Gary bragged about and published a list of alleged members of Anonymous, which in reality was a list of artists, writers and musicians who had taken an interest in the movement. The injustice of this blunder unsurprisingly triggered a revenge attack on H.B. Gary’s servers from real hackers, who uncovered a Powerpoint file outlining the steps the partners would take to discredit Wikileaks and its associates.

When Anonymous gained access to thousands of emails on H.B Gary’s servers, they found that Palantir had worked with HB Gary Federal to develop proposals for attacking WikiLeaks’ infrastructure, blackmailing its supporters and identifying donors. One idea was to submit false information to the organisation’s drop box, which would later be exposed as such. When the plot was exposed, Palantir put an engineer on leave, apologised for his role in the plan, and cut ties with HB Gary. After that they installed a “Batphone” in Karp’s office, allegedly to receive reports about “unethical clients”, and reinstated their engineer.

One might ask at this stage if these people are elves or the Black Riders.

Palantir Technologies is a perhaps a pioneer in an upcoming consumer industry of selling private information for profit, and they are cheap as chips compared to Booz Allen, IBM and Lockheed Martin. But Forbes Magazine suggests Palantir restrict their services to the top end because some people won’t be happy if they go totally public. Quote: “It helps its customers see too much”.

Really? Alex Karp claims his “turn-key” service (as he calls it) helps the Government go after bad guys. Who those bad guys are he often doesn’t know or succeed in finding out.

“It’s tough”, he says, because his targets don’t leave behind any tangible evidence such as fingerprints or DNA.

Whether they actually are bad guys he takes on faith from his Government or whichever client he is working for, and of course the Batphone. According to former employees, Palantir has sought work in Saudi Arabia despite the staff’s misgivings about human rights abuses in the kingdom, but Karp doesn’t seemed to have picked up on any calls about that issue.

In an interview on the Palantir website, Karp assures us that Palantir are the good guys and he showcases a high profile project where they chased the infiltrators of the Dalai Lama’s computer. He stumbles however when asked who it was and has to admit that it wasn’t really clear in the end whether it was a foreign government or teenagers. That’s a pretty wide margin of error.

Palantir’s so-called predictions hinge on assumptions and probabilities – no light, just shadow – and as it turns out, the “bad guys” are not always bad guys. Sometimes they’re activists; sometimes journalists. Karp loves to drop in the word “turn-key” when he’s selling his crystal ball kit. The irony he doesn’t see is that it is the perfect tool for turn-key totalitarianism. You put all of this surveillance into place and then someone, a new President or Prime Minister, flips the switch to tyranny.

Click. Suddenly the technology is not being used as intended. Click. Anti-war activists are raided by the FBI. Click. Refugee activists are threatened by the Department of Immigration and Border ‘Protection’.

Alex Karp claims to be an advocate for civil liberties. He assured a talk-show host that innocent people would not be “swept into the dragnet”; that the “patterns” his software detects only relate to the activities of terrorists. He says that the data Palantir supplies is “tagged” for one use only, giving the impression that his company has control over who sees what, or how the information will be used.

The US Justice Department’s Inspector General, in a series of reports on FBI practices found systematic disregard for the required procedures for demanding records. False statements in affidavits to telecommunications companies and the FISA Court; improper acquisition of journalists’ phone records; use of national security authorities in cases unrelated to national security; and attempts by superiors to retroactively conceal these improprieties. Speaking of patterns, a pattern of failure to report potential violations to the proper oversight board was also “noted”.

William Binney, a former NSA official, who led a team to develop ThinThread, the agency’s selective and effective pre-911 surveillance tool, resigned because he saw the whole thing spin out of control and his country turn into a police state. Binney baulked when he saw that NSA data was being used to prosecute petty crime, and not many terrorists. Not many at all. Palantir’s director admits that real terrorists are apt to change their patterns and cut their ties as soon as anyone in their circle is arrested. Going after ordinary citizens, on the other hand, is a much more fruitful, easy and lucrative process.

FBI Director Robert Mueller argued that the entire body of phone records is “relevant to an investigation” because it plausibly contains records that will be relevant to some investigation at some point in time. Since these investigations were not only being used to pursue petty criminals but dissidents too, Binney realised that his Government’s actual use of data gathered through spying had become “a Totalitarian Process”. The American Civil Liberties Union describes Palantir as “a true totalitarian nightmare”.

Julian Sanchez from the CATO Institute articulates a problem that possibly none of the hobbits from The Shire had foreseen:

“Such an architecture of surveillance, once established, would be difficult to dismantle and prove too potent a tool of control if it ever fell into the hands of people who — whether through panic, malice, or a misguided confidence in their own ability to secretly judge the public good — would seek to use it against us.”

Unscathed by the plot to destroy his career, Glenn Greenwald worked with Edward Snowden to reveal that this architecture is in place. Mass surveillance of all citizens, an unprecedented level of eavesdropping, with all the dirt ready if your name comes up, to prosecute you for any kind of crime or misdemeanour. And if you happen to be living in ‘The Lucky Country’ of Australia you might already be getting into strife for criticising your Government, even if you use a pseudonym because you happen to work for it.

The more innocent citizens are spied upon and intimidated, if they get lippy, the more secretive Governments must become to get away with it. Besides an erosion of civil liberties that inevitably becomes unconstitutional, there’s another ‘technical’ issue that makes the whole process dubious:

Evidence stops being ‘forensic’ when it’s only a digital footprint.

Alex Karp admits that and one can only conclude that his company sells nothing but hunches, and that around these hunches his clients have cultivated a devout belief in the stoned philosopher’s Palantiri – and word has it he often is. A cloud of secrecy then prevents sceptics, lawyers and moralists from reality-checking the ‘vision’, and inducing them to assume that a well-paid, well-protected job is being well done. Copies of NSA documents are not even allowed to be passed on for analysis by another Palantir client, the NYPD. And thus, the circle of trust is hermetically sealed, around an irrational, self-serving seat of power that is frightened of our own shadows.

Peter Jackson should make a film about that!

Sydney PRISM-BREAK protest - Photo Jarek Gasiorek

Why is it important to have a Wikileaks Party in Australia? Perhaps, no more important than to have one in the US, New Zealand, Canada or the UK, since these countries form the “5 EYES” alliance which surveilles every citizen in the world. When Wikileaks released the “Spy Files” in 2011, it claimed the existence of a global spying network, a secret new industry spanning 25 countries. Edward Snowden has now given us proof, and reveals that Australia houses four facilities which contribute to a key American intelligence collection program.

Journalist Phillip Dorling tells us where…

“The US Australian Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap near Alice Springs and three Australian Signals Directorate facilities: the Shoal Bay Receiving Station near Darwin, the Australian Defence Satellite Communications Facility at Geraldton and the naval communications station HMAS Harman outside Canberra are among contributors to the NSA’s collection program codenamed X-Keyscore.”

Sydney held a PRISM-BREAK meeting 2 days ago, in response to Edward Snowden’s revelations. Wikileaks Party National Council Member Cassie FINDLAY pledged to uncover the extent to which Australian citizens have been spied upon by foreign intelligence agencies, on the behest of our own government.

This however is not just a Wikileaks party… Rachel Evans from the Australian Socialist Alliance paid passionate tribute to Venezuela, Honduras and Ecuador for their support of the whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

David Campbell from the Australian Pirate Party explained how PRISM surveillance violates the UN’s international declaration of human rights. He cites:

“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence.”

IT specialist and member of the Support Assange and Wikileaks Coalition Matt Watt talks about the extent of PRISM surveillance.

And in Melbourne, international speaker for the PRISM-BREAK event was Vince Emanuele, who is a former US Marine of two tours to Iraq. Vince refused to go to Iraq again by laying down his weapon. He is now organiser for the Michigan chapter of Veterans for Peace and serves of the national Board of Directors of Iraq Veterans Against the War. He also hosts the Veterans Unplugged radio program on Radio WIMS, Michigan.

Vince is currently on a speaking tour of Australia. He had this to say in Melbourne, and his general message is… don’t go there Australia!

“We might think that the Internet is a place where we are all equals and we all communicate. It is a new civilian world, a new world where we can develop our ideas and understandings about how planet earth actually works. Where in some sense we are all equal because we can all communicate to everyone. They may not want to listen… but if they do they can send it to anyone. But it is not an equal place. This week’s revelations have proved that it is very far from an equal place, and it is very far from a civilian place.

The Internet has been transformed into a militarily occupied state. When all of our private communications, heart felt, the inner core of our life, communications between boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives, sons and daughters, between business partners, even between bureaucracies and states; when all those communications are swept up, hovered up into a vast collection apparatus, indexed and stored for all time available only to a select few… then we are in the situation where we have a tank on the street of the inner core of our lives, where we have a soldier under our bed, listening to everything that a husband and wife says to one another when they are communicating by email or sms. The penetration of the digital on civilian life is also the penetration of the military and intelligence agencies of civilian life.”
Julian Assange (full transcript)

Wikileaks Party National Council Member Cassie Findlay spoke out in July 6th 2013, at the Sydney PRISM-BREAK rally, in response to the revelations of Edward Snowden. She pledges to uncover the extent to which Australian citizens have been spied upon by foreign intelligence agencies, at the behest of our own government.

“The Wikileaks Party in the Australian Senate will demand that security agencies and the rest of government come clean on what they’ve signed up to with PRISM and other surveillance programs. An Abbott or a Rudd led government will inevitably steer us into ever more secretive arrangements with foreign intelligence bodies, with our own telecommunications providers and with our own internet service providers. Rather than going with a rubber stamp for a sweeping surveillance by these foreign powers and providers, our Party will ins ist on knowing the full story of surveillance and data collection, and fight to give the power back to the Australian people, to decide what rights to privacy and liberty we deserve.”

The Australian Wikileaks salute... a double peace sign