The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State

by Shane Harris

Overview

Using exclusive access to key insiders, Shane Harris charts the rise of America's surveillance state over the past twenty-five years and highlights a dangerous paradox: Our government's strategy has made it harder to catch terrorists and easier to spy on the rest of us.

Our surveillance state was born in the brain of Admiral John Poindexter in 1983. Poindexter, Reagan's National Security Advisor, realized that the United States might have prevented the terrorist massacre of 241 Marines in Beirut if only intelligence agencies had been able to analyze in real time data they had on the attackers. Poindexter poured government know-how and funds into his dream-a system that would sift reams of data for signs of terrorist activity. Decades later, that elusive dream still captivates Washington. After the 2001 attacks, Poindexter returned to government with a controversial program, called Total Information Awareness, to detect the next attack. Today it is a secretly funded operation that can gather personal information on every American and millions of others worldwide.

But Poindexter's dream has also become America's nightmare. Despite billions of dollars spent on this digital quest since the Reagan era, we still can't discern future threats in the vast data cloud that surrounds us all. But the government can now spy on its citizens with an ease that was impossible-and illegal-just a few years ago. Drawing on unprecedented access to the people who pioneered this high-tech spycraft, Harris shows how it has shifted from the province of right- wing technocrats to a cornerstone of the Obama administration's war on terror.

Harris puts us behind the scenes and in front of the screens where twenty-first-century spycraft was born. We witness Poindexter quietly working from the private sector to get government to buy in to his programs in the early nineties. We see an army major agonize as he carries out an order to delete the vast database he's gathered on possible terror cells-and on thousands of innocent Americans-months before 9/11. We follow General Mike Hayden as he persuades the Bush administration to secretly monitor Americans based on a flawed interpretation of the law. After Congress publicly bans the Total Information Awareness program in 2003, we watch as it is covertly shifted to a "black op," which protects it from public scrutiny. When the next crisis comes, our government will inevitably crack down on civil liberties, but it will be no better able to identify new dangers. This is the outcome of a dream first hatched almost three decades ago, and The Watchers is an engrossing, unnerving wake-up call.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101195741
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/18/2010
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	649 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Shane Harris writes about electronic surveillance, intelligence, and counterterrorism for National Journal.

Read an Excerpt

This is a mistake, Erik Kleinsmithtold himself as he stared at his computerscreen. He’d been agonizing over hisorders. He considered disobeying them.He could make copies of all the data,send them off in the mail before anyoneknew what had happened. He could stilldelete all the copies on his hard drive,but the backups would be safe. No onecould say they hadn’t tried, that theyhadn’t warned people.

The earnest thirty-five-year-oldarmy major had drawn attention tohimself as the leader of an innovative,some said renegade, band of intelligenceanalysts. Working under the code nameAble Danger, Kleinsmith’s team hadcompiled an enormous digital dossier ona terrorist outfit called Al Qaeda. By thespring of 2000, it totaled two and a halfterabytes, equal to about one tenth of allprinted pages in the Library of Congress.This was priceless information, but alsoan alarm—the intelligence showed thatAl Qaeda had established a presenceinside the United States, and signspointed to an imminent attack.

While the graybeards of intelligenceat the CIA and in the Pentagon had comeup empty handed, the army wanted tofind Al Qaeda’s leaders, to capture orkill them. Kleinsmith believed he couldshow them how. That’s where he raninto his present troubles. Rather thanrely on classified intelligence databases,which were often scant on details andhopelessly fragmentary, Kleinsmithcreated his Al Qaeda map with datadrawn from the Internet, home to abounty of chatter and observations aboutterrorists and holy war. Few outsideKleinsmith’s chain of command knewwhat he had discovered about terroristsin America, what secrets he and hisanalysts had stored in their data banks.They also didn’t know that the team hadcollected information on thousands ofAmerican citizens—including prominentgovernment officials and politicians—during their massive data sweeps. Onthe Internet, intelligence about enemiesmingled with the names of innocents.Good guys and bad were all in the samemix, and there was as yet no good wayto sort it all out.

Army lawyers had put him onnotice: Under military regulations,Kleinsmith could store his intelligenceonly for ninety days. It containedreferences to U.S. persons, and so allof it had to go. Even the inadvertentcapture of such information amountedto domestic spying. Kleinsmith couldgo to jail.

As he stared at his computerterminal, Kleinsmith’s stomach flipfloppedat the thought of what he wasabout to do. This is terrible.He pulled up the relevant files onhis hard drive and hit the delete key. Theblueprint of global terrorism vanishedinto the ether.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Heyborne captures the tone of this book perfectly while describing a fascinating chronicle of America's war on terror using electronic technology." —-AudioFile

Editorial Reviews

While Mr. Harris's examination covers a fair amount of ground that has already been well plowed, it uses smart technical analysis and crisp writing to put the reader inside the room with the watchers and to help better understand the mind-set that gave rise to the modern surveillance state…At its best The Watchers provides an insightful glimpse into how Washington works and how ideas are marketed and sold in the back rooms of power, whether the product being peddled is widgets or a radical model for intelligence gathering.
—The New York Times

Eric Lichtblau

Harris, a reporter for National Journal, details the rise of a “band of mavericks” in national security and intelligence organizations that has erected “an American surveillance state.” In this timely and admirably balanced account, Harris focuses on the role of a handful of key figures, including Reagan-era National Security Adviser John Poindexter, as they campaigned for information technology to identify terrorists. The controversial Poindexter started the campaign after the 1983 bombing of Marine barracks in Lebanon; the mission was imbued with greater urgency after September 11; with the support of the Bush administration, the National Security Agency (NSA) acquired a research project that Poindexter had developed called Total Information Awareness that uses advanced data-mining techniques to collect mountains of data—and has trapped countless innocent citizens in the NSA’s “electronic nets.” After the NSA’s warrantless surveillance was exposed in 2005, Congress passed largely cosmetic reforms that left the surveillance state intact. Harris carefully examines how the nexus between terrorism and technology has complicated the age-old “conflict between security and liberty” and calls for a national debate on the issue. This informative and dramatic narrative is an excellent place to start. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

National Journal Intelligence and Homeland Security correspondent Harris investigates how the American government has acquired unprecedented surveillance power. When the details of the Total Information Awareness system that John Poindexter was building for the Pentagon became public in 2002, civil-liberties advocates indignantly objected to what they saw as a vast, creepy surveillance program that spied on Americans, notwithstanding any protection it provided against terrorist attack. The fallout forced Poindexter to leave government for the second time-the first followed his involvement in the Iran Contra Scandal-but his dream of an electronic surveillance system that could detect security threats, digest information and convert it into a useful picture to preempt terrorism survived, albeit without the attendant privacy protections Poindexter had envisioned. Those safeguards were rejected ultimately as too costly and technologically demanding by the "watchers" who inherited the program and later enshrined many of its practices in law. Their names and deeds loom large in Harris's story about the emergence of the surveillance state, but the author rightly centers on Poindexter, whose high-level, hands-on experience with terrorism dates back to the '80s attack on the Beirut Marine barracks and the Achille Lauro hijacking. Despite his past, the government desperately needed his expertise in the wake of 9/11. Whether discussing the relationships among various intelligence agencies, the political component of any strategy, the trade-offs between security and privacy, or recounting the riveting story of the Army's aborted Able Danger program, Harris displays an exquisite understanding of theintricacies of his topic and a remarkable sensitivity to the genuine concerns of the watchers and their critics. Although he's skeptical about whether pattern analysis of data really catches terrorists, the author acknowledges the new administration's disinclination to dismantle what's been assembled and their fear of the endless recriminations that would follow another attack on the order of 9/11. A sharply written, wise analysis of the complex mashup of electronic sleuthing, law, policy and culture. Agent: Tina Bennett/Janklow & Nesbit

Kirkus Reviews

"An absorbing look at modern spying technology and how it impacts average Americans."
-Booklist

"Harris displays an exquisite understanding of the intricacies of his topic and a remarkable sensitivity to the genuine concerns of the watchers and their critics.... A sharply written, wise analysis of the complex mashup of electronic sleuthing, law, policy and culture."
-Kirkus Reviews

"The Watchers reads like a thriller, and the story is sadly on the mark in describing our limited oversight of the government's surveillance powers. The nation needs to do better, and Harris' book is rich background to that task."
-Gregory F. Treverton, Director, Center for Global Risk and Security, RAND Corporation

"This is an astonishingly detailed, well-researched narrative. It tells the story of how, over the past two decades, U.S. officials developed the capability to put together massive amounts of information about any individual they choose to watch."
-James Mann, author of Rise of the Vulcans

From the Publisher

08/01/2015
Explores the history of attacks against U.S. interests; terrorism and the American response to it; and the debate between freedom and security in the networked era, as well as the lack of provable results from the increase of dragnet web traffic tracking. (LJ 2/15/10)

Library Journal