Pay Any Price (33 page)

While he was chairman, King worked hard to make the Homeland Security Committee an advocate for an aggressive and unbending war against terrorism. In the process, he bestowed congressional legitimacy on the extreme views espoused by independent anti-Muslim pundits.

Through a series of five hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims while he was committee chairman in 2011 and 2012, King transformed the committee into the modern equivalent of the House Un-American Activities Committee of the McCarthy era. One repeat witness who testified at King's hearings was Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, the president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and the narrator of
The Third Jihad,
a right-wing documentary that was considered so biased against Muslims that the New York City Police Department was forced to stop using it in its counterterrorism training. Democrats on the Homeland Security Committee repeatedly objected to King's hearings, arguing that his decision to focus only on the potential threat from Islamic extremism, to the exclusion of other domestic radical groups, led to a perception that King and the committee were prejudiced against Muslim Americans. “The tone of these hearings, singling out the Muslim community, has undermined religious liberty, and has divided Muslim Americans from the rest of the country,” Rep. Hansen Clarke, a Michigan Democrat who is a Catholic of Bangladeshi descent, said during a 2012 hearing. “These hearings are an assault not only on Muslims, but all South Asians. There's not a week that goes by when I don't get stopped here at the Capitol and asked for my identification,” said Clarke. “Come on, let's stop attacking religion.”

King defended the hearings by arguing that his critics were asking him to ignore the growing threat from radicalized American Muslims. “This committee, along with the Department of Homeland Security, were set up in response to 9/11 and Islamic extremism, and that's our priority,” said King at a 2012 hearing. “There is a Judiciary Committee that can look at other domestic threats.”

Despite the criticism, King did not pay a political price for his handling of the hearings. As a senior member of Congress with access to top-secret information—and one of the most combative—he has remained a favorite of cable news, where breathless reports of new terrorist threats could always be counted on to help move the needle on ratings.

In fact, rather than dial back the anti-Muslim rhetoric in the wake of King's hearings, another polarizing House Republican, Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, tried to up the ante. Bachmann alleged that the Muslim Brotherhood had deeply penetrated the U.S. government and called for investigations throughout the national security community, echoing the accusations leveled by Brigitte Gabriel. In a June 2012 letter to the deputy inspector general of the State Department, Bachmann and four other conservative Republican House members wrote darkly that “information has recently come to light that raises serious questions about State Department policies and activities that appear to be a result of influence operations conducted by individuals and organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.”

 

The letter went on to warn that Huma Abedin, a close aide to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had three family members connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives or organizations. As evidence against Abedin's family, the letter cited the work of the Center for Security Policy, a Washington group run by Frank Gaffney, a conservative who has played a prominent role in state-level campaigns to pass anti-Sharia laws and block the construction of mosques.

It did not seem to matter to Bachmann that Abedin was married to Anthony Weiner, the former New York congressman and erstwhile candidate for mayor of New York who, in addition to disgracing himself through digital oversharing, was one of Israel's staunchest supporters while he was Bachmann's colleague in the House.

 

Fear sustains the multibillion-dollar homeland security industry through both Republican and Democratic administrations. Michael Chertoff, the former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security who founded his own firm, the Chertoff Group, underlined the connection in early 2010, when he went on television news shows to discuss a failed airplane bombing plot and advocated for the installation of full-body scanners at U.S. airports to deter such plots—at the same time that his firm represented a company that made the scanners.

The relationship among terrorist threats, fear, and cash was on full display at the Counter Terror Expo of 2012. At this gaudy two-day trade show for the war on terror, a hundred companies, large and small, paid for booths to display their wares in the Washington Convention Center, conveniently located close to their potential customers at the FBI, the Pentagon, or Homeland Security.

Southwest Microwave was there, with the Intrepid MicroTrack II, a buried cable detection system—“terrain-following volumetric smart sensors that pinpoint intrusion attempts to within three meters.” Garrett was there, with the PD 6500i metal detector—“the walk-through of choice for security professionals worldwide.” Vertx was there, selling a rugged line of clothing “for the operational athlete,” including “OA Duty Wear Pants” and the “Combat Smock,” a kind of camouflage jacket complete with “deceptively large concealed chest pockets” and compartments that “fit an M-4 mag or phone.” And Flir was there, with the Griffin 460, bringing “chemical analysis out of the laboratory and into the field,” and offering “on-site analysis” of “chemicals of interest,” thus “giving users the actionable intelligence necessary to get the job done.”

“The heightened sense of security absolutely helped our product lines grow,” said one company official at the booth for Ameristar Fence, a Tulsa, Oklahoma-based firm that sells sophisticated, high-security fencing. “Prior to 9/11, people were just going with chain-link fences.”

Just to make certain that no one missed the connection between terrorist threats and product sales, the Counter Terror Expo featured a series of speeches and seminars on terrorism and homeland security. In addition to a keynote speech by Michael Leiter, the former director of the National Counter Terrorism Center, there was a series of panel discussions that brought together government officials, outside experts, and contractors. During one, a top official from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) spoke in glowing terms about its first decade: “It's fun to look back at ten years of TSA and see where we've come and our evolution. . . . We have 50,000 people who truly care about aviation security.” Considering that many listening were either with companies selling products to TSA or from companies that hoped to sell to TSA, this was probably the most sympathetic forum any TSA official could ever expect. “The next time you go through security at the airport, take a moment to thank the security screener for what they do, they don't hear that often enough,” said the panel's moderator.

And in another panel discussion, this one on Iran and Hezbollah, in a side room just off the main Counter Terror Expo showroom floor, Steven Emerson held forth.

By 2014, three years after Osama bin Laden's death, there was still no sign that the business of fear was slowing down. One research and consulting firm predicted that the global market for homeland security and public safety would continue to undergo dramatic growth for years to come, and would reach $546 billion by 2022.

9

Of all the abuses America has suffered at the hands of the government in its endless war on terror, possibly the worst has been the war on truth. On the one hand, the executive branch has vastly expanded what it wants to know: something of a vast gathering of previously private truths. On the other hand, it has ruined lives to stop the public from gaining any insight into its dark arts, waging a war on truth. It all began at the NSA.

 

It was early October 2001, just weeks after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. Bill Binney was a senior official at the National Security Agency's skunk works, an experimental lab at Fort Meade, Maryland, where the NSA's best and brightest were trying to find ways to cope with the new digital age. He had been working at the NSA for more than thirty years and was just one month from retirement.

Binney says that he was in his lab when Randy Jacobson, a contractor who worked with him on some of the lab's most important projects, walked up and quietly revealed the secret new orders he had just received from the NSA's top management. Jacobson was appalled by the orders and had to tell Binney about them, Binney recalled. (Jacobson did not respond to a request for comment.)

Jacobson had been told to remove the Fourth Amendment protections from an experimental surveillance system, one of the most powerful spying programs the NSA had ever developed. The advanced system was still just a pilot project, but top NSA officials wanted to make it operational immediately—and use it to collect data on Americans. They had ordered Jacobson to strip away the carefully calibrated restrictions built into the system, which were designed to prevent it from illegally collecting information on U.S. citizens.

Jacobson had come to Binney because the experimental surveillance system had been developed by Binney and his team, yet Binney had been cut out of the loop by his superiors about the decision to start using the system to target Americans. Jacobson told Binney that his surveillance software was being teamed up with phone lines from the AT&T network, allowing the surveillance system to spy on the phone calls of American citizens.

“I was in the situation room of the lab, looking at papers, and Randy came in, and said, do you know what they are doing?” recalls Binney. “He said that AT&T is now feeding U.S. data into the system, and they are taking the protections for Americans off.”

That is how America's post-9/11 Big Brother got its start.

This is the story of the people who tried to stop the NSA's domestic spying program when it first began, in the face of money, power, and greed. It is also the story of how government secrecy—and a crackdown on whistleblowers—has enabled the worst excesses of the post-9/11 era to go unchecked, from torture to data mining on a massive scale. Secrecy has enabled a new class of national security entrepreneurs and wild freebooters. Secrecy breeds corruption.

Dennis Montgomery, Mike Asimos, and others—like Blackwater's founder, Erik Prince—would never have gotten as far as they did without the protection of the government's high walls of classification. James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen could never have so easily reverse-engineered SERE so the CIA could torture prisoners if the CIA did not keep it all secret. And Michael Hayden, the director of the NSA at the time of 9/11, would never have dared to launch the agency's warrantless wiretapping program if he didn't think the White House would do everything in its power to shield the NSA from the law and crush any whistleblowers who tried to get in the way. That same secrecy has surrounded NSA's operations ever since, even as the NSA has continued to push for greater access to the domestic communications of American citizens.

Secrecy continues to shield the NSA from uncomfortable questions about the growing role of the agency and its contractors in data mining and the burgeoning field of cybersecurity. The only way the American public ever learns what the NSA is doing to them is from whistleblowers, including, most recently, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked documents about the rise of the NSA's massive data-mining operations during the Obama administration. To keep the war on terror going, the government has tried to make sure that whistleblowers are isolated and ostracized.

People like Diane Roark. She was perhaps the most courageous whistleblower of the post-9/11 era, and yet her story has never been fully told. She fought a lonely battle against the most powerful forces unleashed in Washington in the global war on terror. She has never received the recognition she deserves.

Roark's story also explains why, years later, Snowden felt that he had to go outside the system to let the American people know just how much the NSA's domestic surveillance programs had grown since the early days after 9/11, when the Bush administration first launched the NSA's warrantless wiretapping operation. Roark tried to work within the system, tried to go through the right channels. She was persecuted as a result.

Roark's story offers the most in-depth and personal look at the rise of the NSA's domestic spying program ever provided, and explains how America allowed its most powerful foreign intelligence service to turn its tools on the United States. It is a lesson to remember as the government cracks down on people like Edward Snowden at the same time that the NSA continues to expand its spying on the digital lives of American citizens.

 

When Randy Jacobson came to warn Bill Binney about the new orders he had just received, directing him to alter the surveillance system that Binney had designed so that it could be used to target Americans, Binney knew exactly how significant—and how dangerous—those orders really were. When he built the system, Binney had gone out of his way to create strong protections to prevent its use on Americans. He knew that he had created something so powerful that, if it were ever turned on the United States, it could become the cornerstone of an American Big Brother. So he had made certain that the system would automatically block data about U.S. citizens in order to comply with the laws against domestic spying that governed the NSA's intelligence operations.

Before the 9/11 attacks, in fact, the NSA's own lawyers had told Binney that they were afraid of his new system. They told him that they believed it was too dangerous to deploy, because it was too powerful. The lawyers were concerned because the speed and efficiency with which the new system collected and analyzed digital information meant that it was likely to illegally collect vast amounts of American data, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other laws and regulations that limited NSA to spying on foreigners.