Global Information Society Watch 2014 – Communications surveillance in the digital age. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Author: Association for Progressive Communications (APC
by Alice LoCicero
Why do so many resources go into counter-terrorism programs that are bound to fail? Here it’s important to distinguish between research programs and community programs that are implemented to identify potential homegrown terrorists. While I think it’s unlikely, for many reasons, that researchers will be able to identify future terrorists anytime soon, well-intentioned people can reasonably disagree on that point. Research done ethically and openly (without deceit) may be justifiably funded.
But when it comes to implementing programs, such as the DHS sponsored Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programs funded throughout the US and overseas, they
are not only based on deceit and junk science, they are also apt to be harmful
in several ways:
They increase bias.
They cause disruption
and harm in communities.
They blatantly
encourage providers such as teachers, doctors, and mental health professionals
to violate their professional ethics by spying on
their students, patients, and/or clients.
They target specific
communities based on demographic factors.
They encourage a
colonialist attitude, assuming that communities cannot help themselves, but
need mainstream professionals and authorities to design ways to assist them.
After reflecting on the deadly events in
Charlottesville, Christchurch, El Paso, Pittsburgh, and other places, many
Americans are starting to wonder why the government is spending so much of its
resources on spying on Muslim communities. They wonder if it would be better to
apply these funds to counter the rise of alt-right extremists. The answer is a
loud, “No” for all the reasons above.
The CVE type programs are in violation of
science, human rights, understanding of adolescent development, and the right
to explore thoughts and conversation without being criminalized.
Global Information Society Watch 2014 – Communications surveillance in the digital age. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Author: Association for Progressive Communications (APC)
by Alice LoCicero
It may come as unexpected bad news to many readers, but even “the experts” who propose what seem like logical programs to predict who will engage in violence against civilians for a political cause cannot do that. The idea has its appeal–predict who will become violent and intervene to prevent it before they get too close to acting. But, in fact, no one can predict, on an individual level, who will become violent in the future.
That is not to say that we don’t know anything—we know, for example, that men are more likely to engage in physical violence than women. But nothing we know can be relied upon to predict whether a specific individual—male or female—will act violently in the future.
There are multiple articles advocating programs (almost all of which reflect implicit or explicit bias against Muslim youth) intended to identify youth who are apt to become terrorists. Appropriately, these articles generally include a disclaimer saying there’s no consistent pattern to help us actually predict who might become a terrorist. That is, no one knows what the path to terrorism might look like; it’s impossible to predict, for any individuals, whether they will engage in violence against civilians for political purposes.
Telling it like it is, here’s a quote from a 2017 article in the American Psychologist, by terrorism researcher John Horgan: “Though terrorist profiles exist in a broad sense, no meaningful (i.e., having predictive validity) psychological profile has been found either within or across groups.”
Given the lack of a solid scientific foundation for predicting the development of terrorists, many scientific and professional articles on the “terrorist threat” suggest that more research is needed–a reasonable suggestion. However, terrifyingly, others recommend programs and interventions based on conjectures, hypotheses, and theories about 1) who in the community might be helpful in predicting potential terrorists, and 2) how we might get them to inform the authorities of their suspicions about their friends, neighbors, and/or family members.
Just think about this: Here we have “professionals” making the outrageous assertion that, since neither researchers nor clinicians know who will become violent, we should get members of the community to inform on other members of the community, and assume that they’re correct.*
Ask yourself: What are the implications of getting family, friends, and community members to inform police if they think someone may be on the path to committing terrorist acts? Some authors even suggest that teachers and/or care providers should report if they have some reason to think someone is at risk for developing into a terrorist. Some even have lists of risk factors. But the lists do not stand up to scientific inquiry.
It’s a House of Cards, and an expensive one at that.
*Readers might wonder about the “duty to warn”—i.e., clinicians’ legal duty to inform potential victims and law enforcement if a patient threatens imminent harm to an identifiable person or persons. The differences here are: duty to warn involves 1) Imminent harm and 2) patient report. That is, if a patient–or anyone– tells a clinician that they’re about to do harm, the obligation is to believe them. But the programs proposed for predicting future terrorists are not oriented to self-reported imminent actions, but to scrutinizing kids to guess which ones are likely to become terrorists in the future.
Reprinted, lightly edited, from an article
published Aug 30, 2019, on the Psychology Today website.
There have been many
suggestions about what is needed in response to the growing national security
state of the United States. Responses have come from around the world,
and many names are now familiar (e.g., Noam Chomsky, Mairead McGuire, Amy
Goodman, Johan Galtung, Chris Hedges). Here are some options for building a
more enduring and effective response:
Become informed: Become informed and educated about the scope and sources of the national security state threats to privacy and behavior control. This can only be done by reading credible sources, reading beyond popular media, and questioning sources with specific hidden agendas (i.e., corporate, military).
Engage in activism: Become as active as your circumstances permit in peaceful protests that may include opinion writing, letter writing, petition signing, phone calls to elected representatives, and joining discussion groups via the internet or in real time. Become as active as your circumstances permit with regards to supporting alternative information sources (e.g., Transcend Medial Service, Truthout, Guardian, Engaging Peace), and supporting pathways to prosecution for those violating Constitutional and civil rights.
Commit
to non-violence: Be committed to
non-violence and non-killing as viable pathways for bringing about change. This
may well make change a slow and arduous process, and it may never be completely
successful. Yet the course of violence, insurgency, and revolt can only lead to
destruction and death, as we are witnessing in the United States and around the
world.
The challenges are
many and complex; there is little reason to believe citizens can easily reduce
or eliminate the massive national and international surveillance network. If
change is to occur, it will be because hope as an essential enduring human
virtue can inform action and that non-violent action will be undertaken.
Footnote 1: The term “omnipresent surveillance” is taken
from John W. Whitehead’s recent article, “The Omnipresent Surveillance State:
Orwell’s 1984 Is No longer Fiction.” Information Clearing House. June 11, 2019.
See also Rutherford Institute, Virginia, USA
References:
Bacevich, A. (2012). The
short American century: A post-mortem. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Chumley, C. (2014). Police
State USA: How Orwell’s nightmare is
becoming our reality.
NY: WND.
Unger, D. (2012). The emergency state: America’s pursuit of absolute security at all costs. NY: Penguin Press
Anthony J. Marsella,
Ph.D., a member of the TRANSCEND Network for
Peace Development Environment, is a past president of Psychologists for Social
Responsibility, Emeritus Professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii’s
Manoa Campus in Honolulu, Hawaii, and past director of the World Health
Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu. He is known
internationally as a pioneer figure in the study of culture and psychopathology
who challenged the ethnocentrism and racial biases of many assumptions,
theories, and practices in psychology and psychiatry. In more recent years, he
has been writing and lecturing on peace and social justice. He has published 21
books and more than 300 articles, tech reports, and popular commentaries. His TMS articles may be acessedHERE and he can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.
Statement for the record by James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence [of the United States], to the Senate Armed Services Committee. In the public domain.
by Anthony J. Marsella, PhD
What
Government Agencies and Organizations are Involved?
There are, as documented in this Wikipedia excerpt, an extensive number of “intelligence” gathering and utilization organizations, involving thousands of employees and an unknown, but obviously considerable, amount of money. All of this in the name of domestic and national security. There are numerous issues regarding duplication, competition, communication, hierarchies, strengths and weaknesses, and costs among these known groups. There is reason to believe there are also unknown groups that function independently.
There is irony and paradox here! The approved protectors and guardians impose constraints and abuses on citizens in the name of national security; however, in doing so, they impose control and domination.
This is a bewildering anomaly, and one from which there may never be an escape, given the secrecy and depth of penetration of governance and private surveillance groups. Can we really expect military intelligence to give up its roles and its methods, and its ties to weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and others in the war industry? Of course not!
There are powerful connections among Silicon Valley corporations, military weapons manufacturers, and the Defense Department. They support one another in a “silent” conspiracy of financial relations and ties. Numerous retired military officials and officers go to work for Silicon Valley and weapon industry corporations as consultants and executives. The fix is on! Will this system harvest what it sows? The fabled Military-Industrial-Congressional-Academic Complex lives . . . at least for now; too many on the take, too few guided by an essential conscience!
Foundations
of the National Security State
The USA’s national “security state”
and its impositions are possible for a number of reasons:
Technological developments (e.g., big data) permit mass
surveillance, monitoring, and archiving of information on all citizens;
Suppression and condemnation of protests, including
harassment, persecution, and prosecution of those speaking out against the
national security state;
Collaboration and cooperation of a biased and
compromised media, which is, arguably, the most important societal check
and balance against the abuses, violations, and identification of
government and private criminal actions;
Location and control of power within a small group of
individuals (oligarchy) who by stain of temperament, disposition,
position, and financial interests seek to increase, sustain, and protect
USA state terrorism policies, actions, and organizational structures;
Development of a vast complex of “escape” clauses
within our executive, judicial, and congressional systems permitting
individuals to lie, distort, misrepresent, and speak with impunity without
fear of prosecution. In brief, a privileged and oligarchic “group” is
“free” to engage in illegal actions without accountability, transparency,
or risk;
Lust for power, wealth, position and the domination and
control accompanying these impulses. Selfish motives from troubled minds.
Use of Congressional acts and secret agreements to
justify and protect abuses, including The Patriot Act, The Department
of Homeland Security and Fusion Center authorizations, the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and Authorization to Use
Military Force (AUMF).
Marc Slavo (2019) points out the
nefarious cooperatives among countries with mass surveillance systems. He
writes:
“Many countries have surveillance systems, but the countries in the Five Eyes, Nine Eyes and 14 Eyes alliances work together to share data on a massive scale, according to a report by Cloud Wards. Innocent people are spied on every day. The Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, and 14 Eyes groups are big players in the global surveillance game. Each country involved can carry out surveillance in particular regions and share it with others in the alliance.
The Five Eyes are the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The Five Eyes alliance, also known as FVEY, was founded on Aug. 14, 1941, and can be traced back to the WWII period. During the second world war, the exchange of intelligence information between the UK and the U.S. was important, and the partnership continued afterward.
The Nine Eyes alliance consists of the Five Eyes countries, plus Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway. Though there’s evidence that the Nine Eyes and 14 Eyes exist, little is known about what they can and can’t do.
The 14 Eyes alliance is made up of the Nine Eyes countries, plus Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden. It’s an extension of the Five Eyes and Nine Eyes alliances, but its actual name is SIGINT.
A recent CIA sponsored Bill, the “Intelligence Authorization Act” (SB: 3153; HB 3194) garnering Congressional support would criminalize whistle blowers and reporters. Imagine, citizens are to be criminalized and punished for engaging in citizen expected responsibilities of complaint.”
Daniel Schuman (July
25, 2019), policy director of DEMAND PROGRESS, writes:
“House Intelligence Committee Chair expansion of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act beyond all reason will effectively muzzle reporting on torture, mass surveillance, and other crimes against the American people — all at the request of the CIA.”
Dagny Taggart (a pseudonym for a seasoned reporter fearful of retaliation), based on Pew Survey, results, writes (2019): “Americans Don’t Trust the Govt, the Media, or Each Other: Fading Trust is “Sign of Cultural Sickness and National Decline.”
Is this any wonder?
Years of corruption, cronyism, and crime by government, private corporations,
military, and other societal institutions make “trust” a foolish and
unwarranted action. This is nothing new!
[Note from Kathie MM:The conclusion of this series will be published on EP Friday August 16, with some recommendations for addressing the problems described here. Don’t miss it!]
