In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, western
governments are moving fast to legitimize expanded powers of mass surveillance
and controls on the internet, all in the name of fighting terrorism.
US and
European politicians have
called to protect NSA-style snooping, and to advance the capacity to intrude on
internet privacy by outlawing encryption. One idea is to establish a telecoms
partnership that would unilaterally delete content deemed to “fuel hatred and
violence” in situations considered “appropriate.” Heated discussions are going
on at government and parliamentary level to explore cracking down on lawyer-clientconfidentiality.
What any
of this would have done to prevent the Charlie Hebdo attacks remains a mystery, especially given
that we already know the terrorists were on the radar of French intelligence
for up to a decade.
There is little new in this story. The 9/11 atrocity was the
first of many terrorist attacks, each succeeded by the dramatic extension of draconian
state powers at the expense of civil liberties, backed up with the projection
of military force in regions identified as hotspots harbouring terrorists. Yet
there is little indication that this tried and tested formula has done anything
to reduce the danger. If anything, we appear to be locked into a deepening
cycle of violence with no clear end in sight.
As our
governments push to increase their powers, INSURGE INTELLIGENCE can
now reveal the vast extent to which the US intelligence community is implicated
in nurturing the web platforms we know today, for the precise purpose of
utilizing the technology as a mechanism to fight global ‘information war’ — a
war to legitimize the power of the few over the rest of us. The lynchpin of
this story is the corporation that in many ways defines the 21st century with
its unobtrusive omnipresence: Google.
Google styles itself as a friendly, funky, user-friendly tech
firm that rose to prominence through a combination of skill, luck, and genuine
innovation. This is true. But it is a mere fragment of the story. In reality,
Google is a smokescreen behind which lurks the US military-industrial complex.
The inside story of Google’s rise, revealed here for the first
time, opens a can of worms that goes far beyond Google, unexpectedly shining a
light on the existence of a parasitical network driving the evolution of the US
national security apparatus, and profiting obscenely from its operation.
The
shadow network
For the last two decades, US foreign and intelligence strategies
have resulted in a global ‘war on terror’ consisting of prolonged military
invasions in the Muslim world and comprehensive surveillance of civilian
populations. These strategies have been incubated, if not dictated, by a secret
network inside and beyond the Pentagon.
Established under the Clinton administration, consolidated under
Bush, and firmly entrenched under Obama, this bipartisan network of mostly
neoconservative ideologues sealed its dominion inside the US Department of
Defense (DoD) by the dawn of 2015, through the operation of an obscure
corporate entity outside the Pentagon, but run by the Pentagon.
In 1999, the CIA created its own venture capital investment
firm, In-Q-Tel, to fund promising start-ups that might create technologies
useful for intelligence agencies. But the inspiration for In-Q-Tel came
earlier, when the Pentagon set up its own private sector outfit.
Known as the ‘Highlands Forum,’ this private network has
operated as a bridge between the Pentagon and powerful American elites outside
the military since the mid-1990s. Despite changes in civilian administrations,
the network around the Highlands Forum has become increasingly successful in
dominating US defense policy.
Giant defense contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton and Science
Applications International Corporation are sometimes referred to as the ‘shadow
intelligence community’ due to the revolving doors between them and government,
and their capacity to simultaneously influence and profit from defense policy.
But while these contractors compete for power and money, they also collaborate
where it counts. The Highlands Forum has for 20 years provided an off the
record space for some of the most prominent members of the shadow intelligence
community to convene with senior US government officials, alongside other
leaders in relevant industries.
I first
stumbled upon the existence of this network in November 2014, when I reported
for VICE’s Motherboard that US defense
secretary Chuck Hagel’s newly announced ‘Defense Innovation Initiative’ was
really about building Skynet — or
something like it, essentially to dominate an emerging era of automated robotic
warfare.
That story was based on a little-known Pentagon-funded ‘white
paper’ published two months earlier by the National Defense University (NDU) in
Washington DC, a leading US military-run institution that, among other things,
generates research to develop US defense policy at the highest levels. The
white paper clarified the thinking behind the new initiative, and the
revolutionary scientific and technological developments it hoped to capitalize
on.
The
Highlands Forum
The
co-author of that NDU white paper is Linton Wells, a 51-year veteran US defense
official who served in the Bush administration as the Pentagon’s chief
information officer, overseeing the National Security Agency (NSA) and other
spy agencies. He still holds active top-secret security
clearances, and according to a report by Government Executive magazine
in 2006 he chaired the ‘Highlands Forum’,
founded by the Pentagon in 1994.
New Scientist magazine (paywall) has compared the Highlands
Forum to elite meetings like “Davos, Ditchley and Aspen,” describing it as “far
less well known, yet… arguably just as influential a talking shop.” Regular
Forum meetings bring together “innovative people to consider interactions
between policy and technology. Its biggest successes have been in the
development of high-tech network-based warfare.”
Given Wells’ role in such a Forum, perhaps it was not surprising
that his defense transformation white paper was able to have such a profound
impact on actual Pentagon policy. But if that was the case, why had no one
noticed?
Despite being sponsored by the Pentagon, I could find no
official page on the DoD website about the Forum. Active and former US military
and intelligence sources had never heard of it, and neither did national
security journalists. I was baffled.
The
Pentagon’s intellectual capital venture firm
In the
prologue to his 2007 book, A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual
Identity, John Clippinger, an MIT scientist of the Media Lab Human
Dynamics Group, described how he participated in a “Highlands Forum” gathering,
an “invitation-only meeting funded by the Department of Defense and chaired by
the assistant for networks and information integration.” This was a senior DoD
post overseeing operations and policies for the Pentagon’s most powerful spy
agencies including the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), among
others. Starting from 2003, the position was transitioned into what is now the
undersecretary of defense for intelligence. The Highlands Forum, Clippinger
wrote, was founded by a retired US Navy captain named Dick O’Neill. Delegates
include senior US military officials across numerous agencies and divisions —
“captains, rear admirals, generals, colonels, majors and commanders” as well as
“members of the DoD leadership.”
What at
first appeared to be the Forum’s main website describes
Highlands as “an informal cross-disciplinary network sponsored by Federal
Government,” focusing on “information, science and technology.” Explanation is
sparse, beyond a single ‘Department of Defense’ logo.
But
Highlands also has another website
describing itself as an “intellectual capital venture firm” with “extensive
experience assisting corporations, organizations, and government leaders.” The
firm provides a “wide range of services, including: strategic planning,
scenario creation and gaming for expanding global markets,” as well as “working
with clients to build strategies for execution.” ‘The Highlands Group Inc.,’
the website says, organizes a whole range of Forums on these issue.
For instance,
in addition to the Highlands Forum, since 9/11 the Group runs the ‘Island
Forum,’ an international event held in association with Singapore’s Ministry of
Defense, which O’Neill oversees as “lead consultant.” The Singapore Ministry of
Defense website describes the Island Forum as “patterned after the
Highlands Forum organized for the US Department of Defense.” Documents leaked
by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden confirmed that Singapore played a key role
in permitting the US and Australia to tap undersea cables to
spy on Asian powers like Indonesia and Malaysia.
The Highlands Group website also reveals that Highlands is
partnered with one of the most powerful defense contractors in the United
States. Highlands is “supported by a network of companies and independent
researchers,” including “our Highlands Forum partners for the past ten years at
SAIC; and the vast Highlands network of participants in the Highlands Forum.”
SAIC
stands for the US defense firm, Science Applications International Corporation,
which changed its name to Leidos in 2013, operating SAIC as a subsidiary.
SAIC/Leidos is among the top 10 largest defense
contractors in the US, and works closely with the US intelligence community,
especially the NSA. According to investigative journalist Tim Shorrock, the
first to disclose the vast extent of the privatization of US intelligence with
his seminal book Spies for Hire, SAIC has a
“symbiotic relationship with the NSA: the agency is the company’s largest
single customer and SAIC is the NSA’s largest contractor.”
The full name of Captain “Dick” O’Neill, the founding president
of the Highlands Forum, is Richard Patrick O’Neill, who after his work in the
Navy joined the DoD. He served his last post as deputy for strategy and policy
in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Defense for Command, Control,
Communications and Intelligence, before setting up Highlands.
