Oceanic enemy: A brief philosophical history of the NSA by Gregoire Chamayou
A brief
philosophical history of the NSA
by Gregoire Chamayou / RP 191 (May/Jun
2015)
6 July 1962, NAVFAC
base, Barbados.
A grey building stands
at the foot of a stone lighthouse overlooking the Caribbean Sea. Inside, a
military serviceman is examining the lines being recorded on an enormous roll
of paper by the stylus of a sort of gigantic electrocardiogram. We are in one
of the secret bases of the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) network,
established by the US Navy in the 1950s. Among the clutter of zigzags, from
which he has learnt to read the sound of the oceans, the man is looking for a
‘signature’. Today, for the first time, he spots the signal of a Soviet nuclear
submarine.
The problem with
submarine warfare was that enemy vessels were hidden from view. But what one
could not see, one could nonetheless hear: the water in which the submarines
hid carried the sound of their engines far into the distance. This is how the
sea was put under surveillance. The sound waves could be captured by
hydrophones and transmitted by cables to coastal stations where machines
transcribed them into graphs. The ‘ocean technicians’ who deciphered them were
able to ‘discern subtle nuances in sound signals via intensity, colour, shape,
and shade that often made the difference between seeing a school of fish or a
submarine on a Lofargram’. They
listened with their eyes. Typical patterns corresponding to known entities were
called ‘signatures’. The metaphor spoke for itself: there, like elsewhere, an
identity would be certified by some lines inscribed on a piece of paper.
Yet all this met with
a very unexpected fate. A model that had combined a global listening system,
the mass collection of signals, and remote sensing via signature recognition, a
few decades later would provide the conceptual basis for an altogether
different kind of surveillance apparatus.
At the end of the
1990s, the National Security Agency (NSA) understood that something new was in
the offing that promised, excepting the need to overcome certain obstacles, an
unheard-of extension of its empire. Historically, the agency had been charged
with the task of intercepting electromagnetic signals for external intelligence
– diplomatic cables, military communications, satellite beams, and so on. But
with the close of the millennium, civil populations were themselves becoming
signal transmitters. The whole world was becoming connected, and creating one
in which each of us would soon produce more data than any Soviet embassy of the
past.
Recalling the reigning
zeitgeist of this era, the ex-director of the NSA Michael Hayden today admits:
prior to 9/11, when we
were looking at modern telecommunications, … we said we had the problem of what
we would call … V cubed – volume, variety and velocity – that the modern
telecommunications were just exploding in variety and in size. … But also, we
knew that our species was putting more of its knowledge out there in ones and
zeroes than it ever had at any time in its existence. In other words, we were
putting human knowledge out there in a form that was susceptible to signals
intelligence. So to be very candid, I mean, our view even before 9/11 was if we
could be even half good at mastering this global telecommunications revolution,
this would be the golden age of signals intelligence. And candidly, that’s what
NSA set out to do.
The utopia of
anti-terrorist data mining: The logo depicts a
pyramid topped by an all-seeing eye, Illuminati-style, floating in space and
bombarding Earth with luminous rays. This was the emblem of a research
programme launched by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an
electronic surveillance project entitled Total Information Awareness. This
idiotic design, which seemed deliberately created to stoke crazy conspiracy
theories, was emblazoned with a Latin motto which, in a sense, rescued the
entire design: scientia est potentia, knowledge is power. That was,
effectively, what it was all about.
In August 2002, the
programme director John Poindexter presented it with great pomp at the
DARPATech conference that was being held at Anaheim in California. What is at
stake, he began, is ‘somewhat analogous to the anti-submarine warfare problem
of finding submarines in an ocean of noise – we must find the terrorists in a
world of noise.’ The oceanic analogy was not by accident. The admiral had begun
his career in the Navy at the end of the 1950s in a unit tasked with the
tracking of Soviet submarines. He added, referring to the ‘terrorists’, that
‘they will leave signatures in this information space.’
The parallel was
clear: what had once been done in the ocean was now going to be done in an
‘ocean of information’. Instead of the old lofargrams, computers would now be
used to sieve through an immense mass of heterogeneous data –
telecommunications, bank details, administrative files, and so on – searching
for ‘signatures of terrorist behaviour’. A ‘red team’ would be charged with the
task of enumerating potential scenarios of terrorist attack and coming up with
the necessary preparative measures: ‘These transactions would form a pattern
that may be discernible in certain databases.’
also see
