Event Recap: Shane Harris on America's Surveillance State at Powell's Books on Hawthorne

“Watching you is, in fact, what your government does best,” Shane Harris told an audience of about 45 at Powell’s Books on Hawthorne. Which is a pretty good crowd for a Monday night. Portlanders like to keep a close watch on their civil liberties.

A native Portlander, Harris lives in Washington, DC, where he writes for the National Journal. He was in town to promote The Watchers (Penguin Press HC), his new book about the rise of terrorism surveillance in the United States, told through the stories of five men who have been instrumental in this effort.

Well spoken and well groomed, Harris addressed the crowd confidently. He explained how writing about intelligence, homeland security and counterterrorism for the National Journal gives him access to all sorts of covert folks. Intelligence is a strange beat in journalism because it’s built around secrets and deceptions. “If there’s ever a story that lands in your lap,” he said, “be very careful.”

The idea for the book began sometime after Harris met John Poindexter at a 2004 symposium. Poindexter had been Reagan’s national security advisor and gained infamy for being the mastermind behind the Iran Contra scandal. Harris was a promising 26 year old liberal journalist. Poindexter agreed to let Harris interview him. The interviews wound up going on for years, chronicling Poindexter’s life history.

Poindexter began working on his data mining plans in 1983, after a suicide bomber killed 241 Marines in Lebanon. It turned out that there was intelligence warning about the attack. It just hadn’t got to the right people. Poindexter thought that if more information was gathered, maybe patterns could be identified that would predict and intercept future terrorist attacks. Eventually this plan was called Total Information Awareness.

Since then, more and more data has been gathered on the lives of private citizens, including emails, travel data, phone and credit card records. In fact, the National Security Agency collected so much data that their data processing tools crashed. Harris asserts that gathering all this data has not helped, because it is not being analyzed effectively, and security agencies still don’t like to share with each other. “This is exactly the conversation we were having on 9/12,” Harris said. “How do we share info and connect the dots?”

Harris said that analysts don’t have the equivalent of Google to help them sort through 80 different streams on 28 databases. He thinks they should narrow their searches down to the ten most important things to look at. “Put them on a data diet,” he said.

It doesn’t look like we’ll be getting our privacy back any time soon. Harris said there’s one point everyone in security agrees on. “If there’s another attack, the government will simply come down on the side of security.”

Nor does he see this changing with the Obama presidency. While Obama started out skeptical of surveillance, Harris said he is increasingly accepting it. “In a bureaucracy, information is power,” he said. “It’s not a Democratic tendency, it’s not a Republican tendency. It’s a presidential tendency.”

Image credit IndieBound.