L3 Communications:
L3 Communications is everywhere. Those night-vision goggles the JSOC team in Zero Dark Thirty uses? That's L3. The new machines that are replacing the naked scanners at the airport? That's L3. Torture at Abu Ghraib? A former subsidiary of L3 was recently ordered to pay $ 5.28 million to 71 Iraqis who had been held in the awful prison. Oh, and drones? L3 is on it. Reprieve, a UK-based human rights organization, earlier this month wrote on its Web site:
Unsurprisingly, L3 Communications is well connected beyond the national security community. Its chief financial officer recently spoke at Goldman Sachs, at what the financial titan hilariously refers to as a “fireside chat.”“L-3 Communications is one of the main subcontractors involved with production of the US’s lethal Predator since the inception of the programme. Predators are used by the CIA to kill ‘suspected militants’ and terrorise entire populations in Pakistan and Yemen. Drone strikes have escalated under the Obama administration and 2013 has already seen six strikes in the two countries.”
L3 also supplies local law enforcement with its night-vision products and makes a license-plate recognition (LPR) device, a machine with disturbing implications. LPR can be mounted on cop cruisers or statically positioned at busy intersections and can run potentially thousands of license plates through law enforcement databases in a matter of hours. In some parts of the country LPR readers can track your location for miles. As the Wall Street Journal noted, surveillance of even “mundane” activities of people not accused of any crime is now “the default rather than the exception.”
L3 Communications embodies the totality of the national
security and surveillance state. There is only minimal distinction
between its military products and police products. Its night-vision line
is sold to both military and law enforcement. Its participation in the
drone program is now, as far as we know, limited to countries in the
Middle East and North Africa. But in the words of the New York Times editorial board, “[i]t
is not a question of whether drones will appear in the skies above the
United States but how soon.” The NYT estimates the domestic drone market
at $5 billion, likely a conservative estimate, and contractors will vie
for that money in the public and private sphere. L3's venture into
airports, the border of where domestic policy meets foreign policy in
the name of national security, is therefore significant both
symbolically and materially.
Harris Corporation:
Harris Corporation is a huge provider of
national security and communications technology to federal and
local law enforcement agencies. Though many people have never heard of
it, Harris is a major player in the beltway National Security community.
President and CEO William M. Brown was recently appointed to the
National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, and in 2009 the Secret Service offered Harris a contract to train its agents in the use of Harris' Stingray line. The Secret Service awarded the company additional contracts in 2012.
If you've heard of Harris at all, it's likely been because its controversial Stingray product has been getting attention as
an information-gathering tool with major privacy implications. The
Stingray allows law enforcement to cast a kilometers' wide digital net
over an area to determine the location of a single cell phone signal –
and in the process collect cell data on potentially hundreds of people
who aren't suspected of any crimes. EFF claims the device is a modern
version of British soldiers canvassing the pre-Revolutionary colonies,
searching people's homes without probable cause – exactly what the
Fourth Amendment was created to prevent. EFF describes the process this way:
“A Stingray works by masquerading as a cell phone tower—to which your mobile phone sends signals to every 7 to 15 seconds whether you are on a call or not— and tricks your phone into connecting to it. As a result, the government can figure out who, when and to where you are calling, the precise location of every device within the range, and with some devices, even capture the content of your conversations.”BI2 Technologies:
BI2 Technologies makes a fine pitch. Its iris-scanning technology can be made to sound
very appealing. Iris scans are relatively non-invasive, there's no
touching involved so the likelihood of spreading disease is reduced, and
as B12 states on its Web site,
"there are no lasers, strong lights or any kind of harmful beams.” It
also claims that iris scanning is "strictly opt-in," and that a “user"
(who in most cases would be better described as an “arrestee”) “must
consciously elect to participate” in the scanning. (When I was arrested
by the NYPD while covering a protest, the scan was voluntary -- though
the NYPD didn't tell me that, a protester did. But if I refused to
submit to it I could have been punished with an extra night in jail.)
Reuters reported
that BI2's iPhone-based iris scanner -- called MORIS -- is capable of
taking an accurate scan from four feet away, “potentially without the
person being aware of it.” MORIS has drawn harsh condemnation from the
ACLU. The primary concern from privacy advocates is that law enforcement
will deploy this technology in an overly broad way. ACLU senior policy
analyst Jay Stanley told Reuters that he didn't want the police “using
them routinely on the general public, collecting biometric information
on innocent people.”
MORIS isn't just for irises; it also scans faces. In 2011, the Wall Street Journalreported that
the sheriff's office in Pinellas County, Florida, “uses digital cameras
to take pictures of people, download the pictures to laptops, then use
facial-recognition technologies to search for matching faces.” New
database technology like Trapwire, a data mining system that analyzes
“suspicious behavior” in purported attempts to predict terrorist
behavior, makes face scanning potentially more worrisome. Trapwire uses at least “CCTV,
license-plate readers, and open-source databases” as input sources, and
although it doesn't employ facial-recognition software, the incentives
to combine these types of technology is clear.
Beginning in 2014, BI2 will manage a national iris-scan database for the FBI, called Next-Generation Identification (NGI). Lockheed Martin is also involved in building the database. Much of BI2's iris data comes from inmates in 47 states, and despite BI2's claims that iris scanning can't be gamed, that is not the case. Experts showed last
summer that the iris can be “reverse-engineered” to fool the scanners,
which are generally thought to be more accurate than fingerprinting.
The story of BI2 is important because the initial technology is
superficially appealing. The company's first projects were called the
Child Project, designed to help locate missing children; and Senior
Safety Net, developed to identify missing seniors suffering from
Alzheimer's. According to B12's Web site, sheriffs' departments in 47
states use the BI2 iris-scanning device and database, which makes it easy to mobilize support to facilitate the safe return of children and seniors.
http://www.alternet.org/meet-contractors-turning-americas-police-paramilitary-force
