Disciplining

In his book Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault used the concept of Bentham’s original Panopticon prison design as a way to describe and explore ‘disciplinary power’.  According to Foucault’s work, disciplinary power had been successful due to its utilization of three technologies: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment and examinations.  “The major effect of the panopticon is to induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” In other words, the uncertainty of whether or not an individual is being constantly watched induces obedience in that individual, allowing only a few to control the many.

Investigative journalists Jeremy Loffredo and Whitney Webb recount the , which firmly placed the US national-security state on its current, tech-fueled Foucauldian path

Main Core is a US database developed during the Reagan administration as big data approach to the surveillance of perceived domestic dissidents.  It was expressly developed for use in “continuity of government” (COG) protocols by the key Iran-Contra figure Oliver North and was used to compile a list of US dissidents and “potential troublemakers” to be dealt with if the continuity of government protocol was ever invoked.  Main Core utilized PROMIS software; like PROMIS, Main Core involved both US and Israeli intelligence.

The Iran-Contra and PROMIS scandals were exposed, but they were subsequently covered up. Main Core persisted and continued to amass data. That data could not be fully tapped into and utilized by the intelligence community until after the events of September 11, 2001, which offered a golden opportunity for the use of such tools against the domestic US population, all under the guise of combating “terrorism.” For example, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 government officials reportedly saw Main Core being accessed by White House computers.

September 11 was also used as an excuse to remove information “firewalls” within the national-security state, expanding “information sharing” among agency databases and, by extension, also expanding the amount of data that could be accessed and analyzed by Main Core and its analogues. As Alan Wade, then serving as the CIA’s chief information officer, pointed out soon after 9/11: “One of the post-September 11 themes is collaboration and information sharing. We’re looking at tools that facilitate communication in ways that we don’t have today.”

In an attempt to build on these two post-9/11 objectives simultaneously, the US national-security state attempted to institute a “public-private” surveillance program so invasive that Congress defunded it just months after its creation due to concerns it would completely eliminate the right to privacy in the US. Called Total Information Awareness (TIA), the program sought to develop an “all-seeing” surveillance apparatus managed by the Pentagon’s DARPA. The official agreement was that invasive surveillance of the entire US population was necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, bioterrorism events, and even naturally occurring disease outbreaks before they could take place.

The architect of TIA, and the man who led it during its relatively brief existence, was John Poindexter, best known for being Reagan’s National Security Advisor during Iran-Contra and being convicted of five felonies in relation to that scandal. Poindexter, during the Iran-Contra hearings, had famously claimed that it was his duty to withhold information from Congress.

In regard to TIA, one of Poindexter’s key allies was at the time the chief information officer of the CIA, Alan Wade. Wade met with Poindexter in relation to TIA numerous times and managed the participation of not just the CIA but all US intelligence agencies that had signed on to add their data as “nodes” to TIA and, in exchange, gained access to its tools.