Origins of the Modern Surveillance State

Pentagon wanted searchable database of people’s lives in 2003

Josh Peterson

Tech Editor

Ten years before the recent global panic over the U.S. government’s domestic spying program, the Pentagon solicited contractors for a searchable database of people’s lives.

In 2003, the Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) hoped to create a database that would amass everything about the life of a person participating in the project, ranging from GPS coordinates to every email and phone call sent and received.

The participant would wear a camera, microphone and sensors to record the minutia of everyday life. The program, called Lifelog, would act as a person’s digital diary.

Lifelog was a feature of DARPA’s Perceptive Assistant that Learns (PAL) program, which was meant to create intelligent digital personal assistants.

DARPA hoped the database would further research in artificial intelligence. It would take the data gathered from consenting participants and map out relationships and events found in the data.

After privacy advocates voiced concerns that effectively brought Lifelog to a halt in 2004, DARPA rebooted its attempt to create PAL technology several months later by tailoring the project with a military focus in order to assuage critics.

Private sector versions of PAL technology also emerged on the market in later years, Apple’s Siri being a direct descendant of DARPA’s PAL initiative.

DARPA would not confirm any connection between the National Security Agency’s surveillance database technology, such as PRISM, and DARPA’s PAL program.

The revelations about the U.S. government’s counter-terrorism surveillance apparatus, however, illuminate how both governments and corporations effectively collect data on the commercial and personal activities of everyday life.

Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Daily Caller that there are options for people, and they don’t have to accept the destruction of personal privacy as the new normal.

“There are economic and political incentives that are very hard to fight, no-one questions that,” Tien said.

“We didn’t want the Patriot Act after 9/11, but we couldn’t stop it,” he said, “but just because you couldn’t stop it then doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to fight it now.”

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Danger! Google Warns Drudge Report and Infowars.com are Malware

Danger! Google Warns Drudge Report and Infowars.com are Malware
An effort to scare folks away from alternative media?

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
May 7, 2013

Editor’s note: Infowars.com’s IT department has scanned our system and reports that we do not carry content from um.eqads.com as Google tells visitors to the site.

How best to scare people away from alternative media? Make them think Drudge Report and Infowars.com web pages contain malicious software.

In April, White House Senior Advisor Dan Pfeiffer tried to steer traffic away from the Drudge Report. His effort directed more traffic to the website.

During a news conference last year, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney instructed a reporter to “be mindful of your sources” when asked about the Drudge Report and a rumor about Mitt Romney.

More traffic flowed to Drudge.

Despite the best efforts of Obamaites and Democrats to diss Drudge and put a dent in the web site’s popularity, millions of folks peruse the site daily.

Back in March of 2010, the Senate’s Committee on Environment and Public Works sent out an email stating Drudge’s website was “responsible for the many viruses popping up throughout the Senate,” according to a CNet report.

No appreciable drop in viewership ensued.

Ditto Infowars.com. In recent weeks, a large number of critics led by spurious reports posted on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website and elsewhere have posted stories accusing Alex Jones and Infowars.com of fomenting some kind of rightwing terror campaign and distributing baseless conspiracy theories.

No matter. Following the attack, millions of people flocked to the website to get the other side of the story on everything from Sandy Hook to the Boston bombings.

Now Google Chrome tags Infowars.com as a malware distributor.

It is a tactic destined to failure.

The CNet article posted on March 9, 2010 reported that the malware allegedly distributed by the Drudge Report actually came from DoubleClick, a subsidiary of Google which develops and provides internet ad serving services. It serves customers like Microsoft, General Motors, Coca-Cola, Motorola, Apple Inc., Visa USA, Nike and dozen of others.

So, when are we going to hear that large transnational corporations are purveyors of malware?

Is it possible Google will advise web travelers to avoid their websites?

Google Engaged in Massive Data Theft

Google should take a look at its own track record before trying to frighten off visitors to Infowars.com and Drudge.

In 2012, a Federal Communications Commission document disclosed that Google’s Street View – an effort to photograph streets around the world – deliberately collected massive amounts of Wi-Fi payload data and the information was illegally stored at an Oregon Storage facility. Google attempted to hide the theft from the public.

The pilfered data includes telephone numbers, URLs, passwords, email, text messages, medical records, video and audio files, according to Wired.

The government then said the transnational communications corporation would not be criminally charged with wiretapping, in essence giving Google free reign to engage in additional theft.

Moreover, the government complied with a Google request to redact portions of the FCC document.

Google shares a cozy relationship with the intelligence community. In 2011, Consumer Watchdog, an advocacy group, asked the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa, to investigate Google’s relationship with the NSA and other government agencies.

“The group asked Issa to investigate contracts at several U.S. agencies for Google technology and services, the ‘secretive’ relationship between Google and the U.S. National Security Agency, and the company’s use of a U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration airfield in California,” writes Grant Gross for PCWorld.

“Federal agencies have also taken ‘insufficient’ action in response to revelations last year that Google Street View cars were collecting data from open Wi-Fi connections they passed, Consumer Watchdog said in the letter.”

In 2010, it was reported that Google and the CIA jointly backed a company engaged in real time surveillance of the web. The company, Recorded Future, “scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come,” writes Noah Shachtman.