Citizen

Revised

by Dagwood Engelberg
 Citizen
Revised

An Analysis
by
Dagwood Engelberg

Albuquerque Office
Spring Equinox, 2018

Applied Chaos Dynamics Control Association

 Document E22413-G-5
Typeset in Kinnari
with Debian Linux and LibreOffice
 I. Introduction

In the second decade of the 21 st Century, as “Twitter

Revolutions” spread across the Arab World, Western journalists sang
a new verse in an old song about “the democratizing power of the
Internet.” As Middle Eastern demonstrators posted details of their
activities to commercial social media, Western observers enthralled by
the first-person, minute-by-minute updates (in English, no less)
frequently credited Western technology with the protesters’ ability to
organize mass demonstrations effectively. 1
After the 24-hour news cycle moved on, subsequent retaliatory
government crackdowns received far less attention than the pro-
democracy demonstrations. 2 The rosy rhetoric about political
empowerment through social media, however, still shapes the
perceptions of many Westerners. 3
In March 2018, Tunisian authorities extended emergency police
powers in force since the 2010 self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi
prompted mass demonstrations. Iranian protests beginning with a
contested 2009 election led to arrests, purges of reform-minded
officials, and disappearances of journalists. As of January 2018,
political unrest continues to periodically erupt in Iranian cities.
After protests in Tahrir Square, the 2009 Egyptian “Twitter
Revolution” resulted in theocratic rule by the Muslim Brotherhood,
followed by a military coup in 2013. Since 2015, an anti-terrorism
law threatens stiff fines for journalists who publish stories
contradicting official government positions. In Syria, protests bled
into a civil war, and the country’s autocratic president used social
media to identify and round up dissidents who had organized on
commercial social media.
In the United States, the Twitter-branded #Occupy movement
organized popular enthusiasm around a keyword, but failed to produce
much by way of a coherent critique, social agenda, or a mission-
driven political organization. Elsewhere in the Greatest Democracy
on Earth, the increased use of social media for political organizing
has led to increased amounts of soft money in politics, foreign
influence peddling among the global oligarchy, vigilante online

1 Jared Keller, “Evaluating Iran’s Twitter Revolution.” The Atlantic (18 June 2010).
2 Ivan Krastev, “Why Did the ‘Twitter Revolutions’ Fail?” New York Times (11
November 2015).
3 Maeve Shearlaw, “Egypt five years on: was it ever a ‘social media revolution’?” The
Guardian (25 January 2016).

3
disinformation campaigns of “fake news,” and an unpopular, erratic,
and potentially dangerous presidency characterized by some type of
undiagnosed personality disorder.
Bound up with the distinctly anti-social character of so much
commercial social media, a largely unregulated electronic surveillance
apparatus gleans valuable behavior science data from fact and lie
alike. Built and maintained by industry in collusion with government,
every year this active monitoring system penetrates deeper into
millions of homes, hearts, minds, jobs, medical records, travel
patterns, dating behaviors, and political perceptions.
To dismiss these concerns because one “has nothing to hide”
misses one key aspect of the risks this attitude involves: since nobody
knows exactly what different organizations collect, how they analyze
it, or how long they store it, one can’t really know whether one ought
to have something to hide. Put another way: if you believe laws
exist for a reason, then when the government shows a pattern of
disregarding the law, you have sufficient grounds to be concerned
whether or not you consider yourself a criminal.
It would seem that in many cases, “the democratizing power of
the Internet” encourages copious personal expression, but ultimately
renders greater benefit to those distant television personalities who
service a pathological attraction to the exercise of raw power. To
explain the persistence of the Internet’s “democratizing” rhetoric, one
might point to the social media echo chamber as easily as the vast
resources available to industrial media corporations to push this
perspective. Whatever the cause, there remain largely unexamined
consequences for Western cultures and participatory political
institutions, which appear under duress both in Europe and the US.

II. Rhetoric and Reality

Interviewed by Gary Wolf in a February 1996 Wired feature,

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs opined that “the web is an incredible
democratizer.”4 As the Internet began to permeate daily life in the
West, Jobs predicted that “once you’re in this web-augmented space,
you’re going to see that democratization takes place.” His use of the
word “democratization” reflects a populist mix of techno-evangelism

4 Gary Wolf, “Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing.” Wired, vol. 4.02, p. 102
(February 1996).

4
promising liberation from traditional capitalist hierarchies, 5 combined
with an outdated image of 19 th Century entrepreneurship long since
eradicated by industrial cartels and mass management techniques. 6
Steve Jobs was hardly alone in his optimism. After The Wall
came down and the Cold War ended, the interests of industrial
monopolists like Bill Gates and corporate behemoths like IBM
converged upon a consensus with the changing political order. By
the time Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, his team had already
developed a fairly detailed policy framework to encourage the
widespread adoption of networked computing devices.
A 1992 New York Times column by William Broad, for example,
included a much-parodied turn of phrase attributed to Vice President
Elect Al Gore. Mr. Gore promised to create an “information
superhighway” that would function as a “catalyst to cultural and
industrial progress” by linking “computers in Government,
universities, industry and libraries.” 7 After the election, Vice
President Gore took the lead with the Clinton Administration’s
technology policy team and began working on measures relating to
intellectual property, data storage, cryptography, government
partnerships with industry, and public network infrastructure.

5 For example: Kevin Kelly, “Wealth If You Want It.” Wired, vol. 4.11, p. 193
(November 1996). An interview with Dallas Federal Reserve Bank economist W.
Michael Cox makes a variety of “evangelizing” claims about computer technology and
its implications. The introduction contains: “Cox’s America is a land rich in
opportunity. Work hard, get an education, settle down, learn something about computers
... and good things will follow.” From the interview: “We’re always having some kind
of technological progress. Right now it’s the computer chip, which, I think, is the
second most revolutionary invention of mankind. The first would be electricity.” Or:
“you have to pay more attention to the development of your human capital. And part of
that is really learning how to operate a computer... I’m trying to provide a formula that
works for everyone. Anything could work for those who make 800 on the math portion
of their SATs.” Or: “That’s the most dangerous myth of all – that the rich are getting
richer, the poor are getting poorer, and most of us are going nowhere. This suggests
that society should turn against the rich ... the people most of us aspire to be.”
6 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956), ch. 11, sec. 4: “Nineteenth-century America
was a middle-class society, in which numerous small and relatively equally empowered
organizations flourished. Within this balancing society there was an economy in which
the small entrepreneur was central, a policy in which formal division of authority was an
operative fact, and a political economy in which political and economic orders were
quite autonomous... But the society in which we now live consists of an economy in
which the small entrepreneurs have been replaced in key areas by a handful of
centralized corporations, of a polity in which the division of authority has become
imbalanced... and, finally, the new society is clearly a political economy in which
political and economic affairs are intricately and deeply joined together.”
7 William J. Broad, “Clinton to Promote High Technology, With Gore in Charge.” New
York Times (10 November, 1992).

5
 By the end of 1995, personal computers running Microsoft
Windows were becoming as common as microwave ovens. Almost
overnight, Windows 95 teleported computers from the world of nerds
and into offices and homes, giving millions of people their first taste
of interactive CD-ROM publishing and, soon, to Internet service
providers like America Online and CompuServe. After Netscape
(maker of the Navigator web browser that later became Mozilla
FireFox) became a publicly-traded company in 1995, “the dot-com
bubble” began to inflate, thrusting technology reporting into the pre-
blogger nightly news. Every night, familiar and trustworthy network
news anchors told America how computer technology was making the
world more wired, more democratic, more cool, and more money.
During all the excitement about stock markets, video games, free
speech and information superhighways, the Clinton Administration
advocated for both increasing electronic communications and
increasing the government’s ability to monitor electronic
communications. At the time, strong encryption software was
considered a munition subject to export controls, and the DES
national encryption standard may well have been deliberately
weakened by the National Institute of Standards and Technology
under pressure from the National Security Agency in the 1970’s. 8
Partly due to increasing electronic commerce and digital
communications use by people like lawyers, CEO’s, and bankers, the
Clinton Administration pushed for a technology called the Clipper
Chip in lieu of de-regulating encryption. The Clipper Chip would be
installed in digital telephones and computers to ensure private
communications, while keeping an extra set of password keys “in
escrow” so that any communication could still be monitored by
authorities. While the Clipper Chip proved overwhelmingly unpopular
and ultimately insecure, in 1994 President Clinton signed the
Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or, CALEA,
which required telecommunications carriers to provide digital
wiretapping capabilities for law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
During the first decade of the 21 st Century, the last remaining
telecommunications carriers were brought into CALEA compliance.
Somehow, the government policies bound up with the
technologies fueling “the democratizing power of the Internet” rapidly
begin to resemble something the East German Stasi might have
devised. Further, the “revolutionary” ability of individuals to
organize on social media has a poor track record when it comes to

8 Danielle Kehl, Andi Wilson, and Kevin Bankston, “Doomed to Repeat History? Lessons
fro the Crypto Wars of the 1990’s.” Open Technology Institute (June 2015).

6
actually changing the socio-political order. Beyond surveillance by
authorities, online commerce increasingly monitors and records the
speech and preferences of individuals as well, often with little
oversight or regulation – and sometimes in collusion with government
agencies. In the words of security researcher Bruce Schneier:
surveillance is the business model of the Internet. 9 There is a
disconnect between the rhetoric and reality of the Internet’s power,
and this in turn masks profound implications not just for commerce
and activism, but for the nature of citizenship itself.

III. Surveillance as a Philosophy of Control

While one may hear occasional jokes about getting put on “the
list” because of a Google search, in East Germany during the Cold
War, few individuals would have found much humor in such
sentiments. In addition to paid employees, the East German secret
police maintained power through the use of a network of nearly
175,000 “voluntary” informants. 10 Close to a third of East Germans
were closely monitored by subsequent ranks of state functionaries.
Combining intimate knowledge of the population with the application
of psychological pressure, the Stasi stifled political dissent while
minimizing the application of direct physical brutality.
Surveillance isn’t a “passive” phenomenon that amounts to a
potential threat if placed in the wrong hands: surveillance is control.
Surveillance as an active form of social control was the basis of
philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s 1787 treatise Panopticon. Describing
a novel prison design, the ideas in Panopticon were also described as
“applicable to any sort of establishment, in which persons of any
description are to be kept under inspection.” The idea was simple:
inmates would be kept in cells along the circumference of a circular
prison, while a central guard tower with small openings would both
conceal the guards and allow them to observe any cell at any time.
Bentham’s Panopticon model of surveillance and population
management, applied to an entire state, formed the basis of the
surveillance society depicted in George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984.
While attempting to hide from electronic surveillance by “Big
Brother,” Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith speculated about how

9 Fahmida Y. Rashid, “Surveillance is the Business Model of the Internet: Bruce

Schneier.” Security Week (9 April 2014).
10 Peter Wensierski, “East German Snitching Went Far Beyond Domestic Surveillance.”
Spiegel Online (10 July 2015).

7
the secret police worked: “There was ... no way of knowing whether
you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what
system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was
guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all
the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they
wanted to ... You had to live – did live, from habit that became
instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was
overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
French philosopher Michel Foucault addressed the psychological
consequences of this type of surveillance system in his 1975 book
Discipline and Punish: “Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to
induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that
assures the automatic functioning of power ... the surveillance is
permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that
the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise
unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for
creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person
who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a
power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.”
The East German police state used a vast network of terrified
informants to manage the citizenry: the American system encourages
individuals to volunteer information about themselves and their friends
to corporations like FaceBook, Twitter, Tinder, and therefore, to the
National Security Agency as well. With access to all content posted
to the public Internet, with access to communications metadata under
CALEA, with access to raw network traffic and sophisticated analytic
techniques like “deep packet inspection,” 11 and through the use of
warrants or administrative subpoenas under the USA PATRIOT Act,
records requests sent to FaceBook or Verizon can affect hundreds or
thousands of people at a time. Under these conditions, the American
public effectively volunteers to do the legwork required for its own
mass surveillance,12 with citizens “caught up in a power situation of
which they are themselves the bearers.”

11 Michael Kassner, “Deep Packet Inspection: What You Need to Know.” TechRepublic
(27 July 2008).
12 Dan Geer, “We Are All Intelligence Officers Now.” RSA Conference, San Francisco
(28 February 2014): “Even Julian Assange, in his book _Cypherpunks_, said ‘Individual
targeting is not the threat.’ It is about a culture where personal data is increasingly
public data, and assembled en masse... There are 3+ billion new photos online each
month, so even if you've never uploaded photos of yourself someone else has. And
tagged them. In other words, you can personally opt out, but that doesn't mean that
other folks around you haven't effectively countermanded your intent. In short, we are
becoming a society of informants. In short, I have nowhere to hide from you.”

8
 IV. Domestic Surveillance in the United States

One needn’t speculate about what politicized intelligence agencies

might do if they were to systematically target US citizens individually
because of who they associate with socially. In 1975, Senator Frank
Church headed up the United States Senate Select Committee to
Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence
Activities. In some 14 published volumes, the Church Committee
documented cooperation between intelligence agencies and
telecommunications carriers under a decades-old program called
Operation SHAMROCK. Clocking in at nearly one thousand pages,
Book III: Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence
Activities and the Rights of Americans, provides an extensive account
of how intelligence agencies worked to control the nation’s political
discourse by monitoring, intimidating, manipulating and harassing
citizens asserting political views opposing official policies.
Over the course of many years, the FBI used techniques that were
“adopted wholesale from wartime counterintelligence, and ranged from
the trivial (mailing reprints of Reader's Digest articles to college
administrators) to the degrading (sending anonymous poison-pen
letters intended to break up marriages) and the dangerous
(encouraging gang warfare and falsely labeling members of a violent
group as police informers).” To obtain detailed personal information
about targets, the FBI cooperated with the CIA through a mail-
opening program called HTLINGUAL. Using HTLINGUAL, the FBI
intercepted roughly 28 million letters both legally and by theft, the
exterior of nearly 3 million letters were photographed, and nearly a
quarter million were opened and inspected.
Abuses of intelligence capabilities documented in Book III
frequently concern operations carried out by the FBI under a program
called COINTELPRO, including: attempts to disrupt the Women’s
Liberation Movement; 13 attempts to destroy the Socialist Worker’s
Party and the Black Panther Party; attempts to discredit Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr.; breaking and entering; efforts to prevent speaking,
teaching, and publishing; disseminating derogatory information to
family, friends and associates; nuisance drug arrests; the creation of a
new Ku Klux Klan chapter; 14 surveillance of a serviceman’s

13 Church Committee, Book III, ch. II, sec. B contains a number of case studies covering
several political groups.
14 Church Committee, Book III, ch. II, sec. B, Case no. 11, Ku Klux Klan: “As part of its
COINTEL Program of using covert action against domestic groups, the FBI assisted an
informant in the Ku Klux Klan in his efforts to set-up a new state-wide Klan

9
counseling center, anti-war groups, and underground newspapers;
illegal mail openings; anonymous cartoons, photographs, and letters
meant to ridicule activists; cultivating “cooperative press contacts;”
collusion between the NSA, CIA, and FBI; 15 collaboration with
college campuses to identify dissidents and activists; 16 and
maintenance of files on Americans.
Following these and other disclosures about the scale and severity
of the abuses, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act of 1977 to provide intelligence agencies rapid approval for urgent
surveillance requests, while providing additional oversight and limiting
the ability of intelligence agencies to collect information on US
citizens. The law also created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court to issue rulings on surveillance law. 17
After the events of September 11, 2001, the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act was repeatedly amended, changing key parts of the
law. Along with amendments to FISA, laws like the USA PATRIOT
Act and the USA Freedom Act modified many basic legal
mechanisms separating intelligence agencies from domestic targets.
Additionally, PATRIOT introduced new legal mechanisms for
obtaining information through administrative subpoenas like national
security letters.18 National security letters allow authorities to compel
the disclosure of information without judicial oversight, while also

organization independent of the regular Klan... The Committee's investigation revealed

that this tactic risked increasing violence and racial tension... The FBI informant in the
rival Klan group also called for violence against blacks.”
15 Church Committee, Book III, “CIA Intelligence Collection About Americans: Chaos And
The Office Of Security,” pp. 679-783.
16 Church Committee, Book III, ch. II, sec. B, for example: “7. New Left” and “8. New
Left Directives.” Certain targeted groups like the US Communist Party became blanket
excuses for broad targeting: “The CPUSA program targeted not only Party members but
also sponsors of the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities
Committee and civil rights leaders allegedly under Communist influence or simply not
‘anti-Communist.’ The Socialist Workers Party program included non-SWP sponsors of
antiwar demonstrations which were cosponsored by the SWP or the Young Socialist
Alliance, its youth group. The Black Nationalist program targeted a range of
organizations from the Panthers to SNCC to the peaceful Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, and included most black student groups. New Left targets ranged from the
SDS to the Interuniversity Committee for Debate on Foreign Policy, from all of Antioch
College (‘vanguard of the New Left’) to the New Mexico Free University and other
‘alternate’ schools, and from underground newspapers to students protesting university
censorship of a student publication by carrying signs with four-letter words on them."
17 Elizabeth Goitein and Faiza Patel, “What Went Wrong with the FISA Court?” Brennan
Center for Justice at New York University School of Law (2015).
18 American Civil Liberties Union, “National Security Letters.” Retrived from
https://www.aclu.org/other/national-security-letters

10
sanctioning the recipient of the letter against disclosing the existence
of the letter. When an administrative subpoena is issued to an
Internet service provider seeking, for example, records on an IP
address used by multiple subscribers, the legal bar can be quite low
for obtaining certain types of non-content data like phone numbers or
email addresses, depending on the record requested.
A 2013 ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, for
example, legalized certain types of domestic dragnet surveillance that
were formerly prohibited. Some of the easier records to acquire
involve transactional data, or, “metadata,” which means information
about a communication: what numbers are pushed on a telephone pad,
what cell tower a phone communicates with, when an email was sent,
what its subject header was, who sent it and who received it.
While metadata doesn’t reveal the content of a communication, it
is in important ways more valuable. When two people speak on the
phone, the connection may be poor, the two people may speak in
slang or cant or jargon, in oblique reference to the offline world, in
personal idiosyncrasies or deceptively or unintelligibly. Metadata is
more valuable because it never lies and is always objective and
empirical. While metadata isn’t content, it may still “leak” content in
different ways: if one types one’s banking pin into a phone, those
digital “signals” are also metadata subject to disclosure under a “pen
register” request.
Metadata’s significance is evident in a secret 2013 FISA court
ruling, to the effect that “it is necessary to obtain the bulk collection
[sic] of a telephone company’s metadata to determine ... connections
between known and unknown international terrorist operatives.” 19 The
FISA court thereby authorized multiple intelligence agencies to
conduct the mass recording and analysis of domestic communications
that the court was in part established to prevent. The secret FISA
court laid the groundwork for this change in a 2006 ruling leaked by
Edward Snowden, essentially by redefining the meaning of the word
“relevant” used in the surveillance laws passed by Congress. 20

19 Goitein and Patel, ch. III, pt. B, sec. 1: “In its 2013 decision, the FISA Court ruled that
all Americans’ phone records were relevant to authorized international terrorism
investigations... It concluded, in short, that because collecting irrelevant data was
necessary to identify relevant data, the irrelevant data could thereby be deemed relevant.”
20 Goitein and Patel, ch. III, pt. B, sec. 1: “Snowden’s disclosures not only confirmed the
continuing existence of the bulk collection program; it revealed that the administration,
concerned about continuing its now public surveillance activities without statutory cover,
had enlisted the FISA Court’s help to operate this program under FISA. The FISA
Court’s decision in 2006 to allow mass collection of this data was based on an
expansive new interpretation of the concept of ‘relevance.’ This interpretation made its

11
 In June 2013, when former intelligence contractor Edward
Snowden leaked classified documents to journalists detailing American
surveillance programs, President Obama appeared on national
talkshows to clarify what intelligence agencies were and were not
doing. While President Obama told Americans that “nobody is
listening to your telephone calls,” the NSA was simultaneously
building a data center in Utah to the tune of roughly one million
square feet, or, about half the square footage of the Empire State
Building.
Today, programs like HTLINGUAL and SHAMROCK go by
names like PRISM, Stormbrew, Oakstar and Blarney. What the
intelligence agencies once did illegally is now mandated by laws like
the PATRIOT Act, modified by secret legal interpretations under the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. 21 An NSA program called
FOXACID automatically hacks computers targeted with XKeyScore,
and a number of subprograms under the moniker QUANTUM
manipulate DNS requests, impersonate host servers, manipulate data
in transit, redirect page requests, target TOR users, and control IRC
bots.22
A unit in England’s GCHQ called JTRIG has access to the NSA’s
QUANTUM network, 23 and leaked internal documents describe an
organization that, like an online global COINTELPRO, “targets a
range of individual, group and state actors across the globe who pose
criminal, security and defense threats. JTRIG staff use a range of
techniques to, for example, discredit, disrupt, delay, deny, degrade,
and deter.”24 Software tools like BURLESQUE were designed to
spoof text messages, SUNBLOCK can “deny functionality to
send/receive email or view material online,” the Sigint Forensics

first appearance in 2004, when the court approved the NSA’s bulk collection of Internet
metadata under a different statutory provision that also requires relevance.”
21 Charlie Savage, “Democratic Senators Issue Strong Warning About Use of the Patriot
Act.” New York Times (16 March, 2012).
22 Bruce Schneier, “How the NSA Attacks Tor/Firefox Users With QUANTUM and
FOXACID” (7 October 2013). Retrieved from:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/how_the_nsa_att.html
23 Glenn Greenwald, “How Covert Agents Infiltrate The Internet To Manipulate, Deceive,
And Destroy Reputations.” The Intercept (24 February 2014). Retrieved from:
https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation
24 Mandeep K. Dhami, PhD, “Behavioural Science Support for JTRIG’s (Joint Threat
Research and Intelligence Group’s) Effects and Online HUMINT Operations.” Human
Systems Group, Information Management Department, Dstl (10 March 2011), “Executive
Summary.” Marked TOP SECRET, partially redacted.

12
Laboratory “was developed within NSA,” and ANGRY PIRATE can
“permanently disable a target’s account on their computer.” 25
The long-standing intelligence sharing agreements between the US
and UK26 raise the possibility that the global surveillance system may
be used to circumvent domestic laws against foreign intelligence
agencies monitoring domestic targets. 27 In the 1960’s, when the FBI
was using intelligence from other agencies to target activists and
dissidents, the CIA was using a series of front organizations like the
Human Ecology Fund to provide cover by “crowdsourcing” behavior
science research, with a special emphasis on human stress responses. 28
The forms of psychological harassment characteristic of many
COINTELPRO operations resemble JTRIG tactics, and would appear
to have been put online, streamlined, and partially automated.
Senator Church expressed his personal concerns about electronic
surveillance in the 1970’s: “If this government ever became a
tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the
technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the
government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would
be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine
together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it
was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the
capability of this technology.” 29

25 Leaked document, partially redacted internal GCWiki entry titled “JTRIG tools and
techniques (Redirected from JTRIG CITD – Covert Internet Technical Development).”
Page marked “last modified on 5 July 2012” and “accessed 19,597 times.” Page is
taken from a system allowing classifications up to “TOP SECRET STRAP1 COMINT.”
26 Jason Hanna, “What is the Five Eyes intelligence pact?” CNN (26 May 2017).
Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/25/world/uk-us-five-eyes-intelligence-
explainer/index.html
27 Edward Snowden, testimony to European Parliament (2014). Retrieved from
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/201403/20140307ATT80674/201
40307ATT80674EN.pdf
28 David H. Price, "Buying a Piece of Anthropology, Part II: The CIA and Our Tortured
Past." Anthropology Today, vol. 23, no. 5 (October 2007): "Kubark’s reliance on
citations from HEF-funded research, and testimony at the 1977 Senate hearings stating
that MK-Ultra research was used to develop interrogation and resistance methods,
demonstrate that HEF research was incorporated (US Senate 1977)... With isolation and
stress having become the magic bullets for effective coercive interrogation, it was in the
context of this shift away from drugs and equipment that Human Ecology sponsored ...
stress research."
29 Quoted in James Bamford, “They Know Much More than You Think.” The New York
Review of Books (15 August 2013).

13
 In The Art of War, Sun Tzu advises: “Attack when they are
unprepared, make your move when they do not expect it.” 30 A later
commentary by Meng Shi further clarified the strategic purpose
behind Sun Tzu’s advice: “The most efficient of movements is the
one that is unexpected; the best of plans is the one that is unknown.”
If opposition activists in the United States or elsewhere plan to
organize on a wiretap, they begin their enterprise by surrendering
their most valuable strategic advantage: the element of surprise. In
this case, the convenience of organizing online carries distinct
disadvantages – and even risks.

V. Anonymity and Citizenship

Modern ideas of citizenship are in many ways rooted in the

concept of anonymity, and evolved alongside the historical
development of cities as legal entities. Before Europe’s Middle Ages,
cities were primarily centers of administration and defense, rather than
autonomous economic and political organizations with their own
distinct laws, courts, and political institutions. 31
European feudal society emerged out of the Roman Empire’s
collapse as rural populations coalesced around manorial estates for
security. The manor originated as a plot of land granted to a Roman
military commander. These estates developed legally sanctioned
customs controlled by a hereditary noble, who owned the land to
which serfs were tied by local law as well as for reasons of
subsistence, rent to the lord, and monarchical fiat. The peasantry
were the productive force of the land – fought over for centuries –
who in the Middle Ages lived in extended clan networks. Because
manorial custom kept these families tied to the same estate for
generations, outsiders were easy to identify and regarded suspiciously.
There was no social mobility, no life apart from the estate. 32
Centuries after the Roman Empire’s collapse disrupted trade
between northern Europe and the Mediterranean’s European, Asiatic,

30 Sun Tzu, Art of War, ch. I: “Strategic Assessments.”

31 Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities (1925), ch. III: “It is therefore a safe conclusion that the
period which opened the Carolingian era knew cities neither in the social sense, nor in
the economic sense, nor in the legal sense of that word.”
32 Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941), ch. II: “In having a distinct, unchangeable,
and unquestionable place in the social world from the moment of birth ... a person was
identical with his role in society; he was a peasant, an artisan, a knight, and not an
individual who happened to have this occupation. The social order was conceived as a
natural order...”

14
and Semitic cultures, trade eventually resumed. As fine textiles from
Flanders began to attract foreign buyers, the region began to see
increasing urbanization, industry, and division of labor. Along with
this, the emerging mercantile classes imported labor and attracted
entrepreneurs from elsewhere seeking opportunity. Just before the
Renaissance began to transform the artistic, scientific, philosophical,
religious, and political outlook of Europe, individuals began to leave
the feudal estates to which their families had been tied for
generations.33
Seeking labor in cities as emerging centers of trade, individuals
arrived at ramshackle developments surrounding fortified encampments
called burgs, on land controlled by overlapping jurisdictions of crown,
clergy, and nobility. 34 Terms like “burg” and “burgher” and “urban”
and “suburban” all derive from a common root. While the defensive
burg eventually diminished in importance, the sub-burg commercial
activity surrounding these fortifications attracted labor from
surrounding estates.35
As the areas surrounding these Medieval military encampments
developed into cities as semi-autonomous legal, social, and
commercial entities, individuals flooded in, seeking to liberate
themselves from the estates and manorial customs to which they had
been bound for so long. When enterprising serfs showed up in cities
claiming free status, there were no members of their extended clan or
manorial estates to deny their claim. After one year of residence,
these anonymous individuals from nowhere were granted the legal
status of citizen. 36

33 Pirenne, ch. VI: “the origins of city populations should be sought not in the older
population of the early fortresses, but in the immigrant population which trade brought to
them ... Evidently it was not composed exclusively of those wide-traveled merchants ... it
must have comprised, besides them, a more or less important number of men engaged in
the unloading and the transporting of merchandise, in the rigging and the equipping of
the boats, in the manufacture of carts, casks, chests or, in a word, all the necessary
accessories for carrying on business. As a result, men from the whole surrounding
territory were drawn to the nascent city in search of a profession...”
34 Pirenne, ch. VI: “the same man was dependent at the same time on several tribunals,
according to whether it was a question of debts, of crimes, or simply the possession of
land.”
35 Pirenne, ch. VI: “In the history of the development of cities, the commercial suburb was
considerably more important than the feudal burg. It was the suburb that was the active
element, and ... therein lies the explanation of that renewal of municipal life which was
merely the consequence of the economic revival.”
36 Pirenne, ch. VII: “The disturbances which followed the assassination of Count Charles
the Good, in 1127, permitted the burghers to realize in full their political program. The
charter granted to [the town of] St. Omer in 1127 may be considered as the point of
departure of the political program of the burghers of Flanders. It recognized the city as

15
 Where formal concepts of citizenship intersect with anonymity,
privacy, and surveillance, it is worth making some distinctions
frequently overlooked in the popular discourse. Although terms like
anonymity and privacy are often used interchangeably, each term
actually identifies a distinct concept. In this context, “anonymous”
means “impossible to identify” whereas “private” means “impossible
to observe.”
If somebody enters a café and pays for a cup of coffee in cash,
that interaction is anonymous insofar as there is nothing about either
the money exchanged or the coffee served that uniquely identifies
either individual involved in the transaction. At the same time, that
transaction is not private insofar as it occurs in a public place,
potentially in plain view of other patrons. Conversely, if somebody
goes to their regular physician for a checkup, there is little
anonymous about that interaction: the physician ideally knows the
patient in intimate detail. Yet, when one sees one’s regular physician,
that visit is hopefully kept private insofar as others should not be able
to observe or deduce the visit’s substantive content.
Just as anonymity became an important legal, political, and social
tool for serfs who sought freedom through citizenship, anonymity was
used tactically by colonial America’s politically organized
revolutionary bourgeoisie. In Revolutionary times, opposition to
British rule was famously galvanized by Thomas Paine with his
popular pamphlet Common Sense, originally published anonymously.
One of the most detailed records of the public debates surrounding
the ratification of the US Constitution can be found in the Federalist
Papers, a collection of essays anonymously co-authored by Alexander
Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison under the pen-name
“Publius.”
The way the Framers thought about anonymity and rule of law fit
within a distinct Western political tradition. John Locke, the political
philosopher who inspired Thomas Jefferson’s phrase “Life, Liberty,
and the Pursuit of Happiness,” held that the commonwealth is “to
govern by promulgated established laws, not to be varied in particular
cases, but to have one rule for rich and poor, for the favourite at

a distinct legal territory, provided with a special law common to all inhabitants ...
Freedom, of old, used to be the monopoly of a privileged class. By means of the cities
it again took its place in society as a natural attribute of every citizen. Hereafter, it was
enough to reside on city soil to acquire it. Every serf who had lived for a year on and
a day within the city limits had it by definite right: the stature of limitations abolished
all rights which his lord had exercised over his person and chattels. Birth meant little.”

16
Court, and the countryman at plough.” 37 Formal equality before the
law means that the law regards citizens irrespective of their individual
qualities: neither wealth, status, social circle, sex nor race ought to
affect how the government applies the law with a given citizen.
The idea of formal equality before the law requires a sort of
anonymous, abstract, featureless individual. Economist Friedrich
Hayek noted the importance of political anonymity in his 1944 book
Road to Serfdom, in drawing a distinction between substantive
equality and equality of opportunity: “A necessary, and only
apparently paradoxical, result ... is that formal equality before the law
is in conflict, and in fact, incompatible with any activity of the
government deliberately aiming at material or substantive equality of
different people ... To produce the same result for different people, it
is necessary to treat them differently.” Hayek is the grandfather of
the modern libertarian movement, though his basic argument in favor
of freedom was not anti-government, but in favor of laws based on
general principles, rather than aimed at specific groups of people in
order to achieve specific outcomes.
In Hayek’s view, once the government acts with intent towards
specific groups of people, the government ceases to be a tool of “the
people” while individuals become an instrument of the government.
Hayek was willing to accept a degree of inequality so long as all
individuals were treated the same by the law. His argument favored
public communications infrastructure, public banking, and public
health care,38 and opposed coercion whether it came from the public
or the private sector.
To apply the same laws to different citizens in different ways
based on an individual’s personal qualities violates the principle of
formal equality before the law. Hayek elaborates on this

37 John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690), ch XI, paragraph 142.
38 Friedrich Hayek, Road to Serfdom (1944). Hayek believed in markets but opposed
“dogmatic” laissez-faire policies. See, for example, ch. III: “The function of a
competition not only requires adequate organization of certain institutions like money,
markets, and channels of information – some of which can never be adequately provided
by private enterprise – but it depends, above all, on the existence of an appropriate legal
system, a legal system designed both to preserve competition and to make it operate as
beneficially as possible. It is by no means sufficient that the law should recognize the
principle of private property and freedom of contract.” Also, ch. IX: “there can be no
doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and
the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody... Nor is there any reason why the
state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life
against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals make adequate provision ...
where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state’s helping
to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong.”

17
circumstance: “Where the precise effects of government policy on
particular people are known, where the government aims directly at
such particular effects, it cannot help knowing these effects, and
therefore it cannot be impartial.” To treat all people the same, formal
equality before the law requires that the government address its
policies towards people in their generic role as anonymous citizens,
rather than single out specific people in terms of their identities as
individuals or groups.

VI. Redefining Citizenship

When major media outlets cover surveillance issues, the threat of

“warrantless surveillance” is typically framed within the scope of the
4th Amendment to the US Constitution. While the 4 th Amendment
protections against arbitrary “search and seizure” may indeed present
a central problem posed by modern global surveillance, limiting the
discourse on surveillance to 4 th Amendment protections glosses over
the fact that the 4 th Amendment does not explicitly guarantee privacy,
and it sidelines some other very troubling ways that Constitutional
protections are undermined.
Violations of the 4 th Amendment may be easiest to apprehend
intuitively, but multiple legal mechanisms exist to justify a range of
rights violations. Each of these different legal mechanisms carries
implications for long-standing laws and traditions, with the cumulative
effect that many of the “privileges and immunities” 39 enjoyed by
citizens have been cast aside in favor of a new extra-legal regime.
In October 2001, President Bush issued a secret directive titled
“Presidential Authorization for Specified Electronic Surveillance
Activities During a Limited Period to Detect and Prevent Acts of
Terrorism within the United States,” 40 which directed the NSA to spy
on US soil under a program called Stellar Wind. The legal rationale

th
39 The 14 Amendment, ratified in 1870, promises that “No State shall make or enforce
any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States;
nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of
law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Some
of this language was carried over from the Articles of Confederation, and represents the
codification of intervening common law; for example, Article IV: “the free inhabitants of
each of these States, paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be
entitled to all the privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states...”
40 Offices of the Inspectors General, Report on the President’s Surveillance Program
(2009), “Authorization of The President’s Program,” p. 7. Between 2001 and 2006,
President Bush issued 43 authorizations, each slightly different and some still classified.

18
changed over time, and the first authorization was the only one to
rely on a 4th Amendment “probable cause” standard. 41
The second version of the authorization was signed just one
month later, changing “probable cause” to “reasonable grounds to
believe.” The fourth authorization was issued in March 2004, and it
redefined the term “acquire” to mean the querying of stored data,
rather than the actual recording of a private communication. The
fourth version also provided retroactive approval for previous
operations carried out under the new definition of “acquire.”
Along with the Presidential Authorizations, other key changes in
surveillance laws were enacted under PATRIOT. Specifically,
PATRIOT modified the criterion for FISA surveillance such that
foreign intelligence no longer need be “the purpose” of collection, but
rather, “a significant purpose.” 42 Alongside this change, Congress
authorized intelligence agencies to consult with law enforcement,
creating a situation where intelligence can be collected about
American citizens absent probable cause, provided foreign intelligence
collection is a secondary aim.
Congress amended FISA in 2008, enacting provisions which,
among other things, stripped states of the authority to investigate the
role of telecommunications carriers in federal surveillance programs.
Another provision granted telecommunications carriers retroactive
immunity for complicity in illegal surveillance. US District Chief
Judge Vaughn Walker, in dismissing the Hepting-Jewel case against
the NSA, described the FISA amendment as including “a provision
for the benefit of telecommunications companies that allowed the
United States to invoke a newly-created immunity and thus seek
dismissal of cases brought against telecommunications companies.” 43
While Congressional acts granting retroactive immunity seem to
violate Article I, Section 9 Constitutional prohibitions against ex post
facto44 legislation, most case law regarding ex post facto laws pertain
to making actions illegal retroactively, rather than retroactively legal,
providing courts little precedent to guide interpretations of these
provisions. Furthermore, ordinary citizens have little recourse to the
courts over this issue due to the doctrine of “sovereign immunity” 45

41 Offices of the Inspectors General, Appendix B, “The Presidential Authorizations.”

42 Goitein and Patel, ch. II, pt. B, sec. 2.
43 Jewel-Hepting dismissal, Judge Vaughn Walker presiding. Case M:06-cv-01791-VRW,
Document 703, Filed 01/21/10.
44 “Affecting things past.”

19
and the judicially-created “states secrets” privilege 46 protecting
surveillance-related documents.
A partially-declassified 2009 report by the Inspectors General of
several federal agencies found that: “in stages between 2004 and
2007, NSA ceased ... collection activities under Presidential
authorization and resumed them under four separate court orders
issued in accordance with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of
1978 as amended (FISA).” The FISA court – created after Frank
Church investigated surveillance abuses – has the ability to issue
secret rulings, meets in secret, and does not require an attorney to
present an opposing view when the government seeks action.
This is not governing “by promulgated established laws,” but
rather, by secret decree. The changes to laws, regulations, and legal
frameworks that enable the modern system of surveillance threaten to
change how we regard citizenship itself – if we understand
citizenship to be the product of Constitutional protections constraining
the actions of Congress and the Executive. The NSA, at the
operational core of these changes, was itself created by a secret
executive order signed by President Truman in 1952.
Other than the National Security Act of 1959 – which mostly
outlines recruitment incentives 47 – Congress has passed no laws
specifically regulating the agency or explicitly defining its mission,
even though the agency’s budget surpasses that of the FBI or CIA. 48
Increasingly, the most basic rights of Americans are defined and re-
defined at will by extra-legal intelligence agencies, appointees to
secret courts, and wage-earning bureaucrats following secret executive
orders, rather than the actions of democratically elected
representatives in Congress.

45 Seegers v. Gonzales, 396 F3d 1248, 1253 (DC Cir 2005): “injuries that are shared and
generalized – such as the right to have the government act in accordance with the law
– are not sufficient to support standing.” Cited in Jewel-Hepting dismissal.
46 The “States Secrets Privilege” was given formal recognition by the US Supreme Court in
the case of United States v. Reynolds (1953), 351 U.S. 1. The case involved the
widows of three Air Force contractors killed in the crash of a B-29 Superfortress while
testing classified electronics equipment. Subsequently declassified documents showed the
crash was likely caused by a known design flaw leading to an engine fire. See
http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/reynoldspetapp.pdf
47 Public Law 86–36; 73 Stat. 63; approved May 29, 1959 (As Amended Through P.L.
113–126, Enacted July 7, 2014). See sec. 6: “nothing in this Act or any other law ...
shall be construed to require the disclosure of the organization or any function of the
National Security Agency, of any information with respect to the activities thereof.”
48 David Burnham, “The Silent Power of the N.S.A.” New York Times (27 March 1983).

20
 One striking consequence of ubiquitous surveillance combined
with long-term data storage is that social media maintains dossier-
style records of an individual’s activities, preferences, and social
network over time. Because postings to social media services like
FaceBook or Twitter reside on the public Internet, these platforms can
be used to effectively place somebody under retroactive surveillance.
Should somebody at some point arouse suspicion for whatever reason,
that individual’s personal history can be examined in great detail, and
analyzed by sophisticated pattern-detection algorithms as if that
individual had been actively monitored for years.
The possibility of retroactive surveillance raises complex issues
with 5th Amendment protections against self-incrimination. These 5 th
Amendment protections are the basis of the Miranda Rights, or, “the
right to remain silent” upon arrest. The basis of this right is that,
upon arrest, one has not been charged with anything, nor evidence
collected, nor witnesses called to testify; for the sake of informed
consent, therefore, one is made aware that one is better off saying
nothing, rather than run the risk that making some seemingly
innocuous statement may later become incriminating.
In the case of “open source intelligence” gleaned from services
like FaceBook or Twitter, without access to legal counsel friends may
testify without being made aware of it. Incriminating photographic or
video evidence may be just another click away. Should some legal
activity be made illegal at a later date, the possibility that an
investigation into the details of somebody’s personal history may
reveal incriminating statements could complicate prohibitions against
retroactive ex post facto legislation. If, rather than a law, an
Executive procedure or policy position should change, the
Constitution’s Article I ex post facto prohibition may not even be
relevant.
As the legal rationale for recording electronic communications
changed throughout the first decade of the 21 st Century, the changing
circumstances whereby intelligence was passed to law enforcement
created problems for cases brought to trial. Specifically, during the
pre-trial discovery process, one party may compel another to produce
documents, evidence, or testimony. Government lawyers – and DEA
lawyers in particular49 – needed to find ways to avoid disclosing
“sources and methods” in discovery.

49 Mark Cooke, “Mission Creep: The PATRIOT Act and the War on Drugs.” ACLU (28
October 2011): “The Patriot Act itself has been highly controversial and is much in need
of re-examination. Patriot Act powers intended to combat terrorism should not be used to
wage the nation's misguided war on drugs.”

21
 Rather than risk a judge ruling key evidence inadmissible because
it was produced by unclear means, government lawyers began using a
technique called “parallel construction” to evade discovery obligations
at trial, and, specifically to avoid disclosing certain sources of
information like FISA.50 Effectively a form of “intelligence
laundering,” the technique involves government lawyers “making up a
fake story and an alternative investigatory trail” for trial. 51 This has
unclear implications for the 6 th Amendment right to a “speedy and
public trial” and for the right for one “to be confronted with the
witnesses against” oneself.
The 4th Amendment protections against search and seizure absent
a warrant issued on probable cause are undoubtedly a vital part of the
US Bill of Rights. Yet its undermining by intelligence agencies,
executive orders, Congressional acts, and private telecommunications
carriers are only one way in which the legal strictures outlining
citizenship are being invisibly revised.

VII. A Brave New World Order

When pervasive systems of surveillance strip citizens of their

anonymity, citizens are simultaneously estranged from a 700-year old
Western liberalizing tradition. Arbitrary changes to the substance of
citizenship conjure spectres of crown rule in the days before laborers
and merchants began extracting bills of rights from kings and queens.
The qualities of anonymity that inform modern notions of
citizenship are evaporating rapidly under the modern surveillance
regime. These virtues of anonymity range in their impact from the
social reforms initiated by modern cities and mercantilism, to 14 th
Amendment guarantees that “All persons born or naturalized in the
United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of
the United States.” Decades later, the importance of formal equality
was reaffirmed with the 19 th Amendment guarantee that “The rights of
the citizens of the United States to vote, shall not be denied or
abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex.”
Pervasive surveillance changes the meaning of citizenship itself, and
as such, amounts to nothing less than a form of social engineering.

50 Goitein and Patel, ch. V, pt. B, sec. 2.

51 Jennifer Granick, “The Surveillance State’s Legalism Isn’t About Morals, It’s About
Manipulating the Rules.” Just Security. Author served as Director of Civil Liberties at
the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (November 2014).

22
 The 1st Amendment right “to petition the government for a
redress of grievances” is of little comfort when anything one says
may be used against oneself. 52 Moreover, there are no technical
solutions to the problems posed by pervasive surveillance.
To organize political opposition on a wiretap is to implicitly trust
that one’s opponent won’t abuse their superior position. To opt out
means to stop placing oneself and others under surveillance for the
state for convenience or for fun, to avoid novelty personality surveys
that can be used to build psychological profiles. To opt out means to
organize opposition in person like the labor movement, the womens’
movement, and the civil rights movement. To opt out means
strategically using the Internet in public places where one can blend
in with strangers. To opt out is inconvenient and requires discipline.
To opt out means to understand how one is monitored: if three
people meet to discuss a demonstration and all turn their phones off
upon gathering to ensure privacy, they have already tipped their hat
by producing a correlated event that signals they don’t want to be
heard together. For an intelligence agency to determine this only
requires a statistical correlation with the behavior of others who also
wish to avoid being observed, which can be detected automatically.
Since mobile phones are in near constant communication with
multiple networks – and increasingly understand speech – a more
subtle way around this privacy problem would be to find a way to
obscure one’s activity. In the case of a private meeting, one person
may leave his or her phone at home, while the other two place their
still-powered-on telephones in the refrigerator (since refrigerators are
airtight and keep out sound waves, while still permitting radio signals
to “phone home” uninterrupted).
To opt out means to fly below the radar because there is no
getting off the grid. It may mean learning to rely on Linux operating
systems53 rather than commercial software that shares the
government’s passion for data collection. To preserve privacy and
anonymity under pervasive surveillance requires effort, and may mean
mis-representing oneself to the networked world at times.

52 Geer, RSA: “Demonstrating exactly the kind of good intentions with which the road to
Hell is paved, we have codified rules that permit our lawmakers zero privacy, we give
them zero ability to have a private moment or to speak to others without quotation,
without attribution, without their game face on. In the evolutionary sense of the word
‘select,’ we select for people who are without expectation of authentic privacy or who
jettisoned it long before they stood for office. Looking in their direction for salvation is
absurd. And delusional.”
53 For a good list of options see https://distrowatch.com

23
 Dan Geer, Chief Information Security Officer for the CIA’s
venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, spoke at the 2014 RSA conference:
“Misrepresentation is using disinformation to frustrate
data fusion on the part of whomever it is that is watching
you. Some of it can be low-tech, such as
misrepresentation by paying your therapist in cash under
an assumed name. Misrepresentation means arming
yourself not at Walmart but in living rooms.
Misrepresentation means swapping affinity cards at
random with like-minded folks. Misrepresentation means
keeping an inventory of misconfigured webservers to
proxy through. Misrepresentation means putting a motor-
generator between you and the Smart Grid.
Misrepresentation means using Tor for no reason at all.
Misrepresentation means hiding in plain sight when there
is nowhere else to hide. Misrepresentation means having
not one digital identity that you cherish, burnish, and
protect, but having as many as you can. Your identity is
not a question unless you work to make it be. Lest you
think that this is a problem statement for the random
paranoid individual alone, let me tell you that in the big-I
Intelligence trade, crafting good cover is getting harder
and harder and for the same reasons: misrepresentation is
getting harder and harder. If I was running field
operations, I would not try to fabricate a complete digital
identity, I'd ‘borrow’ the identity of someone who had the
characteristics that I needed for the case at hand.”
Writing around 1920, Czech author Franz Kafka wove cultural
memories of the old-world style of despotism into a short parable.
Called “The Problem with Our Laws,” the parable opens: “Our laws
are not generally known; they are kept secret by the small group of
nobles who rule us.” Secret laws undermine the principle of “consent
of the governed” and transform citizen-electors into subjects of naked
authority.
Whether or not one believes one has anything to hide, ubiquitous
surveillance changes the meaning of citizenship in dramatic ways,
leaving individuals with an increasingly tenuous relationship to those
“inalienable human rights” the US Constitution was drafted and
amended to guarantee to all citizens.
Once the sphere of citizenship expanded to be more inclusive and
participatory; now it is rapidly becoming unrecognizable.

24
 In the West, anonymity has for centuries been
used as an expedient for social, political, and
economic change.
The development of citizenship -- as the
concept is understood today -- is intimately
connected to anonymity, both in a historical
sense and in terms of political philosophy.

With the advent of modern global surveillance

systems, discussions of anonymity and
privacy have acquired renewed importance.

As individuals are increasingly denied

anonymity and privacy, individuals lose
their connection to the political traditions
that produced modern citizenship.

Citizenship in the United States and

elsewhere in the West is currently being re-
defined without democratic input.

As the importance of citizenship in the

political process diminishes, individuals
are increasingly made subject to impersonal
systems of control.

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