[[ to run and maintain an empire, there must be a communication system, pony express, shipping (to carry mail and messages) (goods), runner (Inca), postal system, telegraph, telephone, script, writing, a writing system, ... see NSA ...]]
Harold Innis
Harold Adams Innis FRSC (November 5, 1894 – November 8, 1952) was a Canadian professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and the author of seminal works on media, communication theory, and Canadian economic history. He helped develop the staples thesis, which holds that Canada's culture, political history, and economy have been decisively influenced by the exploitation and export of a series of "staples" such as fur, fish, lumber, wheat, mined metals, and coal. The staple thesis dominated economic history in Canada from the 1930s to 1960s, and continues to be a fundamental part of the Canadian political economic tradition.[7]
Innis's writings on communication explore the role of media in shaping the culture and development of civilizations.[8] He argued, for example, that a balance between oral and written forms of communication contributed to the flourishing of Greek civilization in the 5th century BC.[9] He warned, however, that Western civilization is now imperiled by powerful, advertising-driven media obsessed by "present-mindedness" and the "continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity."[10] His intellectual bond with Eric A. Havelock formed the foundations of the Toronto School of communication theory, which provided a source of inspiration for future members of the school Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Snow Carpenter.[11]
Innis laid the basis for scholarship that looked at the social sciences from a distinctly Canadian point of view. As the head of the University of Toronto's political economy department, he worked to build up a cadre of Canadian scholars so that universities would not continue to rely as heavily on British or American-trained professors unfamiliar with Canada's history and culture. He was successful in establishing sources of financing for Canadian scholarly research.[12]
As the Cold War grew hotter after 1947, Innis grew increasingly hostile to the United States. He warned repeatedly that Canada was becoming a subservient colony to its much more powerful southern neighbor. "We are indeed fighting for our lives", he warned, pointing especially to the "pernicious influence of American advertising.... We can only survive by taking persistent action at strategic points against American imperialism in all its attractive guises."[13] His views influenced some younger scholars, including Donald Creighton.[14]
Innis also tried to defend universities from political and economic pressures. He believed that independent universities, as centres of critical thought, were essential to the survival of Western civilization.[15] His intellectual disciple and university colleague, Marshall McLuhan, lamented Innis's premature death as a disastrous loss for human understanding. McLuhan wrote: "I am pleased to think of my own book The Gutenberg Galaxy as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing then of printing."[16]
"Dirt" research
In 1920, Innis joined the department of political economy at the University of Toronto. He was assigned to teach courses in commerce, economic history and economic theory. He decided to focus his scholarly research on Canadian economic history, a hugely neglected subject, and he settled on the fur trade as his first area of study. Furs had brought French and English traders to Canada, motivating them to travel west along the continent's interlocking lake and river systems to the Pacific coast. Innis realized that he had to search out archival documents to understand the history of the fur trade and also travel the country himself gathering masses of firsthand information and accumulating what he called "dirt" experience.[50]
Thus, Innis travelled extensively beginning in the summer of 1924 when he and a friend paddled an 18-foot (5.5 m) canvas-covered canoe hundreds of miles down the Peace River to Lake Athabasca; then down the Slave River to Great Slave Lake. They completed their journey down the Mackenzie, Canada's longest river, to the Arctic Ocean on a small Hudson's Bay Company tug.[51] During his travels, Innis supplemented his fur research by gathering information on other staple products such as lumber, pulp and paper, minerals, grain and fish. He travelled so extensively that by the early 1940s, he had visited every part of Canada except for the Western Arctic and the east side of Hudson Bay.[52]
Everywhere that Innis went, his methods were the same: he interviewed people connected with the production of staple products and listened to their stories.[53]
The Fur Trade in Canada concludes by arguing that Canadian economic history can best be understood by examining how one staple product gave way to another—furs to timber, for example, and the later importance of wheat and minerals.[58] Reliance on staples made Canada economically dependent on more industrially advanced countries and the "cyclonic" shifts from one staple to another caused frequent disruptions in the country's economic life.[48]
The Fur Trade in Canada also describes the cultural interactions among three groups of people: the Europeans in fashionable metropolitan centres who regarded beaver hats as luxury items; the European colonial settlers who saw beaver fur as a staple that could be exported to pay for essential manufactured goods from the home country, and First Nations peoples who traded furs for industrial goods such as metal pots, knives, guns and liquor.[59] Innis describes the central role First Nations peoples played in the development of the fur trade. Without their skilled hunting techniques, knowledge of the territory and advanced tools such as snowshoes, toboggans and birch-bark canoes, the fur trade would not have existed.[60] However, dependence on European technologies disrupted First Nations societies. "The new technology with its radical innovations," Innis writes, "brought about such a rapid shift in the prevailing Indian culture as to lead to wholesale destruction of the peoples concerned by warfare and disease."[61] Historian Carl Berger argues that by placing First Nations culture at the centre of his analysis of the fur trade, Innis "was the first to explain adequately the disintegration of native society under the thrust of European capitalism."[62]
The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy published in 1940, 10 years after the fur trade study. Innis tells the detailed history of competing empires in the exploitation of a teeming natural resource, a history that ranges over 500 years. While his study of the fur trade focused on the continental interior with its interlocking rivers and lakes, The Cod Fisheries looks outward at global trade and empire, showing the far-reaching effects of one staple product both on imperial centres and on marginal colonies such as Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and New England.
He divided media into time-binding and space-binding types. Time-binding media are durable and include clay or stone tablets. Space-binding media are more ephemeral and include modern media such as radio, television, and mass circulation newspapers.[65]
Innis examined the rise and fall of ancient empires as a way of tracing the effects of communications media. He looked at media that led to the growth of an empire; those that sustained it during its periods of success, and then, the communications changes that hastened an empire's collapse.
For Innis, the interplay between knowledge and power was always a crucial factor in understanding empire.[66] For Innis, the interplay between knowledge and power was always a crucial factor in understanding empire.[66]
The balance between the time-biased medium of speech and the space-biased medium of writing was eventually upset, Innis argued, as the oral tradition gave way to the dominance of writing. The torch of empire then passed from Greece to Rome.[68]
The era of the "Dirty Thirties" with its mass unemployment, poverty and despair gave rise to new Canadian political movements.
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From the end of WWII until his death in 1952, Innis worked steadily on an investigation of the social history of communication, studying the communication media of the last 4000 years. From the thousand page manuscript which he left at his death came his two pioneering communications works: Empire and Communications (1950), and The Bias of Communication (1951).
In his Introduction to The Bias of Commmunication, Marshall McLuhan suggests that reading Innis shows us a new way to read history:
Most writers are occupied in providing accounts of the content of philosophy, science, libraries, empires, and religions. Innis invites us instead to consider the formalities of power exerted by these structures in their mutual interaction. He approaches each of these forms of organized power as exercising a particular kind of force upon each of the other components in the complex. (ix)
These organized forms of power are in process, and defined by their interactions. "They explain themselves by their behaviour in a historic action." In this, Innis' method anticipates the historical archeology and documentation of Michel Foucault.
McLuhan appreciated the way Innis used the technological events of history to test the accuracy of both that history and the lessons we have learned from it. Readers discover that "Innis never repeats himself, but that he never ceases to test the action of oral forms of knowledge and social organization in different social contexts. Innis tests the oral form as it reacts in many different written cultures, just as he tests the effects of time-structured institutions in their varieties of contact with space-oriented societies" (x). Innis would, for example, be fascinated by the Nisga'a treaty negotiations in British Columbia, where a time-biased, marginalized and predominantly oral culture is attempting to communicate with a space-biased culture transfixed by the rule of written law.
THE BIAS OF COMMUNICATION
To begin our inquiry into this area, he suggests we ask three basic questions:
How do specific communication technologies operate?
What assumptions do they take from and contribute to society?
What forms of power do they encourage?
For Innis, a key to social change is found in the development of communication media. He claims that each medium embodies a bias in terms of the organization and control of information. Any empire or society is generally concerned with duration over time and extension in space.
It was Innis’ conviction that stable societies were able to achieve a balance between time- and space-biased communications media. He also believed that change came from the margins of society, since people on the margins invariably developed their own media. The new media allow those on the periphery to develop and consolidate power, and ultimately to challenge the authority of the centre. Latin written on parchment, the medium of the Christian Church, was attacked through the secular medium of vernaculars written on paper.
MONOPOLIES OF KNOWLEDGE
When fascism comes to America, it will come in the form of democracy.
--Huey Long
https://www.media-studies.ca/articles/innis.htm
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Empire and Communications is a book published in 1950 by University of Toronto professor Harold Innis. It is based on six lectures Innis delivered at Oxford University in 1948.[1] The series, known as the Beit Lectures, was dedicated to exploring British imperial history. Innis, however, decided to undertake a sweeping historical survey of how communications media influence the rise and fall of empires. He traced the effects of media such as stone, clay, papyrus, parchment and paper from ancient to modern times.[2]
Innis argued that the "bias" of each medium toward space or toward time helps to determine the nature of the civilization in which that medium dominates. "Media that emphasize time are those that are durable in character such as parchment, clay and stone," he writes in his introduction.[3] These media tend to favour decentralization. "Media that emphasize space are apt to be less durable and light in character, such as papyrus and paper."[3] These media generally favour large, centralized administrations. Innis believed that to persist in time and to occupy space, empires needed to strike a balance between time-biased and space-biased media.[4] Such a balance is likely to be threatened, however, when monopolies of knowledge exist favouring some media over others.[5]
Empire and Communications examines the impact of media such as stone, clay, papyrus and the alphabet on the empires of Egypt and Babylonia. It also looks at the oral tradition in ancient Greece; the written tradition and the Roman Empire; the influence of parchment and paper in medieval Europe and the effects of paper and the printing press in modern times.
Empire and the one true god
Innis writes that the military organization that expelled the Hyksos enabled the Egyptians to establish and expand an empire that included Syria and Palestine, and that eventually reached the Euphrates. Egyptian administrators used papyrus and a postal service to run the empire, but adopted cuneiform as a more efficient script. The pharaoh Akhnaton tried to introduce Aten, the solar disk as the one true god, a system of worship that would provide a common ideal for the whole empire. But the priests and the people resisted "a single cult in which duty to the empire was the chief consideration."[21] Priestly power, Innis writes, resulted from religious control over the complex and difficult art of writing. The monarch's attempts to maintain an empire extended in space were defeated by a priestly monopoly over knowledge systems concerned with time --- systems that began with the need for accurate predictions about when the Nile would overflow its banks.[22] Innis argues that priestly theocracy gradually cost Egypt its empire. "Monopoly over writing supported an emphasis on religion and the time concept, which defeated efforts to solve the problem of space."[23]
Alphabet, empire and trade
Thus, the Phoenician alphabet, a radically simplified writing system, undermined the elaborate hieroglyphic and cuneiform scripts overseen by priestly elites in Egypt and Babylonia. "The Phoenicians had no monopoly of knowledge," Innis writes, "[which] might hamper the development of writing."[34] As a trading people, the Phoenicians needed "a swift and concise method of recording transactions."[34] The alphabet with its limited number of visual symbols to represent the primary elements of human speech was well suited to trade. "Commerce and the alphabet were inextricably interwoven, particularly when letters of the alphabet were used as numerals."[35] The alphabet, combined with the use of parchment and papyrus, Innis argues, had a decentralizing effect favouring cities and smaller nations over centralized empires.[36] He suggests that improved communication, made possible by the alphabet, enabled the Assyrians and the Persians to administer large empires in which trading cities helped offset concentrations of power in political and religious organizations.[37]
Chapter 4. Greece and the oral tradition
Socrates, Plato and the spoken word
The Greek alphabet
Chapter 5. Rome and the written tradition
Seleucid dynasty
The Seleucid rulers attempted to dominate Persian, Babylonian and Hebrew religions but failed to establish the concept of the Greek city-state. Their kingdom eventually collapsed. Innis concludes that monarchies that lack the binding powers of nationality and religion and that depend on force were inherently insecure, unable to resolve dynastic problems.[79]
Writing, empire and religion
Chapter 6. Middle Ages: Parchment and paper
Islam, images, and Christianity
Innis writes that Islam (which he sometimes refers to as Mohammedanism) gathered strength by emphasizing the sacredness of the written word. He notes that the Caliph Iezid II ordered the destruction of pictures in Christian churches within the Umayyad Empire.[106] The banning of icons within churches was also sanctioned by Byzantine Emperor Leo III in 730 while Emperor Constantine V issued a decree in 753–754 condemning image worship.[106] Innis writes that this proscription of images was designed to strengthen the empire partly by curbing the power of monks, who relied on images to sanction their authority. Monasteries, he notes, had amassed large properties through their exemption from taxation and competed with the state for labour. Byzantine emperors reacted by secularizing large monastic properties, restricting the number of monks, and causing persecution, which drove large numbers of them to Italy.[106]
The Western church, on the other hand, saw images as useful especially for reaching the illiterate. Innis adds that by 731, iconoclasts were excluded from the Church and Charles Martel's defeat of the Arabs in 732 ended Muslim expansion in western Europe. The Synod of Gentilly (767), the Lateran Council (769), and the Second Council of Nicea (787), sanctioned the use of images although Charlemagne prohibited image veneration or worship.[107]
Chapter 7. Mass media, from print to radio
Bibles and the print revolution
Innis's research findings, however dubiously achieved, put him far ahead of his time. Consider a paragraph written in 1948: "Formerly it required time to influence public opinion in favour of war. We have now reached the position in which opinion is systematically aroused and kept near boiling point.... [The] attitude [of the U.S.] reminds one of the stories of the fanatic fear of mice shown by elephants." Innis's was a dark vision because he saw the "mechanized" media as replacing ordinary face-to-face conversation. Such conversations since Socrates had helped equip free individuals to build free societies by examining many points of view. Instead we were to be increasingly dominated by a single point of view in print and electronic media: the view of the imperial centre. Would Innis have been cheered by the rise of the Internet and its millions of online conversations? Probably not. As Watson observes, the advent of the web is eradicating margins. The blogosphere simply multiplies the number of outlets for the same few messages. If we are to hope for new insights and criticism of the imperial centre, Watson says, we will have to turn to marginal groups: immigrants, women, gays, First Nations, francophones and Hispanics. They are as trapped in the imperial centre as the rest of us, but they still maintain a healthy alienation from the centre's self-referential follies. — Crawford Kilian[114]
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Title: Roman Law and the British Empire
Date of first publication: 1950
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook: University of New Brunswick, 1950 (First Edition)
Author: Harold Innis (1894-1952)
Date first posted: 31 October 2007
Date last updated: 31 October 2007
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #32
This ebook was produced by: Iona Vaughan and Mark Bear Akrigg
ROMAN LAW
AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE
by
HAROLD A. INNIS
Dean of Graduate Studies and
Professor of Political Economy
University of Toronto
One of a series of lectures commemorating
the 150th anniversary of the University
Delivered at
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK
MARCH 30, 1950
https://gutenbergcanada.ca/ebooks/ebooks/innis-roman/innis-roman-00-h.html
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Title: The Strategy of Culture
Date of first publication: 1952
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook: University of Toronto, 1952 (First Edition)
Author: Harold A. Innis (1894-1952)
Date first posted: 22 December 2007
Date last updated: 22 December 2007
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #49
This ebook was produced by: David T. Jones, Mark Akrigg & the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net
HAROLD A. INNIS
THE
STRATEGY
OF
CULTURE
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS: 1952
PREFACE
Top
These two essays assume a familiarity with a general thesis developed in The Bias of Communication (Toronto, 1951), in the Cust Foundation Lecture Great Britain, the United States and Canada (Nottingham, 1948), the Stamp Lecture, The Press, a Neglected Factor in the Economic History of the Twentieth Century (London, 1948) and a sesquicentennial lecture of the University of New Brunswick, Roman Law and the British Empire (1950).
The general argument has been powerfully developed in Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound as outlined in E. A. Havelock, The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man (Boston, 1950). Intellectual man of the nineteenth century was the first to estimate absolute nullity in time. The present—real, insistent, complex, and treated as an independent system, the foreshortening of practical prevision in the field of human action—has penetrated the most vulnerable areas of public policy. War has become a result and a cause of the limitations placed on the forethinker. Power and its assistant force, the natural enemies of intelligence, have become more serious since "the mental processes activated in the pursuit and consolidating of power are essentially short range" (p. 99). But it will not do to join the great chorus of those who create a crisis by saying there is a crisis.
H. A. I.
Copyright, Canada, 1952
"the intellectual organization of political hatreds"
In the twentieth century the enormous development of industry accentuated by war has greatly enhanced the problems of the executive. Use of the blockade and the threat of blockade has increased dependence on domestic industries. "An all-round increase in armed forces" has been necessary "to mitigate unemployment." We must have "war to solve unemployment in order to ensure against internal anarchy, instead of war solely to protect employment (ordered life) against external aggression." "The dependence on war has become even more vital to our economic system than the dependence of war on industry." "Should an enemy not exist he will have to be created." [75] "A war cannot be carried on without atrocity stories for the home market." [76]
[75]Fuller, Armament and History, pp. 164-5.
[76]Bentley, Those Days, p. 184.
IV
These remarks have been made by one who does not pretend to understand the United States and who cannot appraise the significance of the party struggle as part of the domestic scene. But we are required in the interests of peace to make every effort to understand the effects not only of the actions of the United States but also of our own actions. We have never had the courage of Yugoslavia in relation to Russia and we have never produced a Tito. We have responded to the demands of the United States sometimes with enthusiasm and sometimes under protest. Members of the British Commonwealth struck back against the Hawley-Smoot tariff in the Ottawa Agreements. But we have been a part of the North American continent. The enormous increase in the production of wheat on this continent in the last century was directly related to the Russian revolution, the rise of agrarianism in Germany, of higher tariffs in France and of marked adjustments in England. Germany imposed a tariff on sugar to secure independence in supplies of sugar, drove down the prices of cane sugar, contributed to the outbreak of revolt in the Spanish American colonies, and enabled the United States to take full advantage of the break-up of the Spanish empire. [77] The immigration quota of American legislation in 1924 accentuated the population problems of Italy and contributed to fascism. The silver purchase agreement of 1934 and the consequent destruction of the Chinese monetary system were related to the revolution in China. The protectionist policy of North America and the difficulties of penetrating the American market compel the United States to export dollars and at the same time make it difficult for other countries to acquire dollars. As a result there is resort to enormous expenditure on armament. In the words of the late Carl Becker, what we didn't know hurt us a lot.
https://mail.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/innis-strategy/innis-strategy-00-h.html
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Title: Minerva's Owl
Author: Harold Innis (1894-1952)
Date of first publication: 1947
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook: Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948
Date first posted: 4 March 2007
Date last updated: 4 March 2007
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #92
This ebook was produced by: Iona Vaughan and Mark Akrigg
Presidential Address
Reprinted from the
Proceedings of the Royal
Society of Canada, 1947
Minerva's Owl
HAROLD A. INNIS
Ph.D., D.Ec.Sc., LL.D.
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS: 1948
Minerva's Owl
I have taken the title from that striking sentence of Hegel "Minerva's owl begins its flight only in the gathering dusk..."
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[[ the following section is not related to Harold Innis ]]
The Creepy, Long-Standing Practice of Undersea Cable Tapping
The newest NSA leaks reveal that governments are probing "the Internet's backbone." How does that work?
By Olga Khazan
In the early 1970's, the U.S. government learned that an undersea cable ran parallel to the Kuril Islands off the eastern coast of Russia, providing a vital communications link between two major Soviet naval bases. The problem? The Soviet Navy had completely blocked foreign ships from entering the region.
In the early 1970's, the U.S. government learned that an undersea cable ran parallel to the Kuril Islands off the eastern coast of Russia, providing a vital communications link between two major Soviet naval bases. The problem? The Soviet Navy had completely blocked foreign ships from entering the region.
Not to be deterred, the National Security Agency launched Operation Ivy Bells, deploying fast-attack submarines and combat divers to drop waterproof recording pods on the lines. Every few weeks, the divers would return to gather the tapes and deliver them to the NSA, which would then binge-listen to their juicy disclosures.
The project ended in 1981, when NSA employee Ronald Pelton sold information about the program to the KGB for $35,000. He's still serving his life prison term.
The operation might have ended, but for the NSA, this underwater strategy clearly stuck around.
In addition to gaining access to web companies' servers and asking for phone metadata, we've now learned that both the U.S. and the U.K. spy agencies are tapping directly into the Internet's backbone -- the undersea fiber optic cables that shuttle online communications between countries and servers. For some privacy activists, this process is even more worrisome than monitoring call metadata because it allows governments to make copies of everything that transverses these cables, if they wanted to.
The British surveillance programs have fittingly sinister titles: "Mastering the Internet" and "Global Telecoms Exploitation," according to The Guardian.
A subsidiary program for these operations -- Tempora -- sucks up around 21 million gigabytes per day and stores the data for a month. The data is shared with NSA, and there are reportedly 550 NSA and GCHQ analysts poring over the information they've gathered from at least 200 fiber optic cables so far.
The scale of the resulting data harvest is tremendous. From The Guardian:
This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user's access to websites -- all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets.
In an interview with online security analyst Jacob Appelbaum, NSA leaker Edward Snowden called the British spy agency GCHQ "worse than" the NSA, saying it represents the first "full take" system, in which surveillance networks catch all Internet traffic regardless of its content. Appelbaum asked Snowden if "anyone could escape" Tempora:
"Well, if you had the choice, you should never send information over British lines or British servers," Snowden said. "Even the Queen's selfies with her lifeguards would be recorded, if they existed."
The U.S.'s own cable-tapping program, known by the names OAKSTAR, STORMBREW, BLARNEY and FAIRVIEW, as revealed in an NSA PowerPoint slide, apparently functions similarly to Tempora, accessing "communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past," according to The Washington Post. The slide indicates that Prism and these so-called "upstream" programs work together somehow, with an arrow saying "You Should Use Both" pointing to the two operations.
So how does one tap into an underwater cable?
The process is extremely secretive, but it seems similar to tapping an old-fashioned, pre-digital telephone line -- the eavesdropper gathers up all the data that flows past, then deciphers it later.
A map of undersea cables. (TeleGeography)
https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegeography.com%2F
https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/mt/international/Screen%20Shot%202013-07-16%20at%2011.17.56%20AM.png
More than 550,000 miles of flexible undersea cables about the size of garden watering hoses carry all the world's emails, searches, and tweets. Together, they shoot the equivalent of several hundred Libraries of Congress worth of information back and forth every day.
In 2005, the Associated Press reported that a submarine called the USS Jimmy Carter had been repurposed to carry crews of technicians to the bottom of the sea so they could tap fiber optic lines. The easiest place to get into the cables is at the regeneration points -- spots where their signals are amplified and pushed forward on their long, circuitous journeys. "At these spots, the fiber optics can be more easily tapped, because they are no longer bundled together, rather laid out individually," Deutsche Welle reported.
But such aquatic endeavors may no longer even be necessary. The cables make landfall at coastal stations in various countries, where their data is sent on to domestic networks, and it's easier to tap them on land than underwater. Britain is, geographically, in an ideal position to access to cables as they emerge from the Atlantic, so the cooperation between the NSA and GCHQ has been key. Beyond that partnership, there are the other members of the "Five Eyes" -- the Australians, the New Zealanders, and the Canadians -- that also collaborate with the U.S., Snowden said.
The tapping process apparently involves using so-called "intercept probes." According to two analysts I spoke to, the intelligence agencies likely gain access to the landing stations, usually with the permission of the host countries or operating companies, and use these small devices to capture the light being sent across the cable. The probe bounces the light through a prism, makes a copy of it, and turns it into binary data without disrupting the flow of the original Internet traffic.
"We believe our 3D MEMS technology -- as used by governments and various agencies -- is involved in the collection of intelligence from ... undersea fibers," said a director of business development at Glimmerglass, a government contractor that appeared, at least according to a 2010 Aviation Week article, to conduct similar types of interceptions, though it's unclear whether they took part in the British Tempora or the U.S. upstream programs. In a PowerPoint presentation, Glimmerglass once boasted that it provided "optical cyber solutions" to the intelligence community, offering the ability to monitor everything from Gmail to Facebook. "We are deployed in several countries that are using it for lawful interception. They've passed laws, publicly known, that they will monitor all international traffic for interdiction of any kind of terrorist activity."
The British publication PC Pro presented another theory: that slightly bending the cables could allow a receiver to capture their contents.
One method is to bend the cable and extract enough light to sniff out the data. "You can get these little cylindrical devices off eBay for about $1,000. You run the cable around the cylinder, causing a slight bend in cable. It will emit a certain amount of light, one or two decibels. That goes into the receiver and all that data is stolen in one or two decibels of light. Without interrupting transfer flow, you can read everything going on on an optical network," said Everett.
The loss is so small, said Everett, that anyone who notices it might attribute it to a loose connection somewhere along the line. "They wouldn't even register someone's tapping into their network," he added.
Once it's gathered, the data gets sifted. Most of it is discarded, but the filters pull out material that touches on one of the 40,000 search terms chosen by the NSA and GCHQ -- that's the content the two agencies inspect more closely.
The British anti-surveillance group Privacy International has filed a lawsuit against the U.K. government, arguing that such practices amount to "blanket surveillance" and saying that British courts do "not provide sufficiently specific or clear authorization for such wide-ranging and universal interception of communications." Their argument is that the existing surveillance laws are from the phone-tapping days and can't be applied to modern, large-scale electronic data collection.
"If their motivation is to catch terrorists, then are there less intrusive methods than spying on everyone whose traffic happens to transverse the U.K.?" said Eric King, head of research at Privacy International.
Meanwhile, the British agency, the GCHQ, has defended their practices by saying that they are merely looking for a few suspicious "needles" in a giant haystack of data, and that the techniques have allowed them to uncover terrorist plots.
If groups like Privacy International are successful, it may put an end to the capture of domestic Internet data within the U.K., but as NSA expert Matthew Aid recently told me, since 80 percent of the fiber optic data flows through the U.S., it wouldn't stop the massive surveillance operations here or in other countries -- even if the person on the sending end was British.
It's also worth noting that this type of tapping has been going on for years -- it's just that we're now newly getting worked up about it. In 2007, the New York Times thus described President Bush's expansion of electronic surveillance: "the new law allows the government to eavesdrop on those conversations without warrants -- latching on to those giant switches -- as long as the target of the government's surveillance is 'reasonably believed' to be overseas."
Want to avoid being a "target" of this "switch-latching"? A site called "Prism-break" recently released a smorgasbord of encrypted browsing, chat, and email services that supposedly allow the user to evade government scrutiny.
The only platform for which there is no encrypted alternative is Apple's iOS, a proprietary software, for which the site had this warning:
"You should not entrust neither your communications nor your data to a closed source device."
Olga Khazan is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She is the author of Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World. She has also written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and other publications. She writes a Substack on personality change.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/the-creepy-long-standing-practice-of-undersea-cable-tapping/277855/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells
Operation Ivy Bells was a joint United States Navy, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and National Security Agency (NSA) mission whose objective was to place wire taps on Soviet underwater communication lines during the Cold War.[1]
Background
During the Cold War, the United States wanted to learn more about Soviet submarine and missile technology, specifically ICBM test and nuclear first strike capability.
In the early 1970s the U.S. government learned of the existence of an undersea communications cable in the Sea of Okhotsk, which connected the major Soviet Pacific Fleet naval base at Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula to the Soviet Pacific Fleet's mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.[2]: 172 At the time, the Sea of Okhotsk was claimed by the Soviet Union as territorial waters, and was strictly off limits to foreign vessels, and the Soviet Navy had installed a network of sound detection devices along the seabed to detect intruders. The area also saw numerous surface and subsurface naval exercises.
Installation
Despite these obstacles, the potential for an intelligence coup was considered too great to ignore, and in October 1971, the United States sent the purpose-modified submarine USS Halibut deep into the Sea of Okhotsk. Funds for the project were diverted secretly from the deep-submergence rescue vehicle (DSRV) program, and the modified submarines were shown with fake DSRV simulators attached to them. These were early diver lockouts. US Navy Divers working from Halibut found the cable in 400 feet (120 m) of water and installed a 20-foot (6.1 m) long device, which wrapped around the cable without piercing its casing and recorded all communications made over it. The large recording device was designed to detach if the cable was raised for repair.
The tapping of the Soviet naval cable was so secret that most sailors involved did not have the security clearance needed to know about it. A cover story was thus created to disguise the actual mission: it was claimed that the spy submarines were sent to the Soviet naval range in the Sea of Okhotsk to recover the Soviet SS-N-12 Sandbox supersonic anti-ship missile (AShM) debris so that countermeasures could be developed.
Although created as a cover story, this mission was actually carried out with great success: U.S. Navy divers recovered all[citation needed] of the SS-N-12 debris, with the largest debris no larger than six inches (150 mm), and a total of more than two million pieces. The debris was taken to the U.S. and reconstructed at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. Based on these pieces, at least one sample was reverse engineered. It was discovered that the SS-N-12 AShM was guided by radar only, and the infrared guidance previously suspected did not exist.[3]
Use
Each month, divers retrieved the recordings and installed a new set of tapes. The recordings were then delivered to the NSA for processing and dissemination to other U.S. intelligence agencies. The first tapes recorded revealed that the Soviets were so sure of the cable's security that the majority of the conversations made over it were unencrypted. The eavesdropping on the traffic between senior Soviet officers provided invaluable information on naval operations at Petropavlovsk, the Pacific Fleet's primary nuclear submarine base, home to Yankee and Delta class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines.[2]: 188
Eventually, more taps were installed on Soviet lines in other parts of the world, with more advanced instruments built by AT&T's Bell Laboratories that were radioisotope thermoelectric generator-powered and could store a year's worth of data.[2]: 189 Other submarines were used for this role, including USS Parche (SSN-683), USS Richard B. Russell (SSN-687), and USS Seawolf (SSN-575). Seawolf was almost lost during one of these missions—she was stranded on the bottom after a storm and almost had to use her self-destruct charges to scuttle the ship with her crew.[4]
Compromise
[[ how did the us know it was Pelton and not other additional sources ]]
This operation was compromised by Ronald Pelton, a 44-year-old veteran of the NSA, who was fluent in Russian. At the time, Pelton was $65,000 ($240,000 today) in debt, and had filed for personal bankruptcy just three months before he resigned. With only a few hundred dollars in the bank, Pelton walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. in January 1980, and offered to sell what he knew to the KGB for money.
No documents were passed from Pelton to the Soviets, as he had an extremely good memory: he reportedly received $35,000 from the KGB for the intelligence he provided from 1980 to 1983, and for the intelligence on the Operation Ivy Bells, the KGB gave him $5,000. The Soviets did not immediately take any action on this information; however, in 1981, surveillance satellites showed Soviet warships, including a salvage vessel, anchored over the site of the tap in the Sea of Okhotsk. The USS Parche (SSN-683) was dispatched to recover the device, but the American divers were unable to find it and it was concluded that the Soviets had taken it. In July 1985, Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB colonel who was Pelton's initial contact in Washington, D.C., defected to the United States and provided the information that eventually led to Pelton's arrest.[1]
As of 1999, the recording device captured by the Soviets was on public display at the Great Patriotic War museum in Moscow.[5]
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