Australian police monitoring journalists’ travel and Internet data

Mike Head

Revelations this week point to intensive Australian Federal Police (AFP) surveillance of journalists, aimed at prosecuting journalists, as well as their sources, to stop the publication of leaks about abuses committed by the military-intelligence apparatus.

First came a report that the AFP obtained an Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) journalist’s flight records from Qantas. This was part of a government-ordered investigation of the leak of documents revealing illegal killings and other abuses by Australian Special Forces as part of the US-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

By all indications, this is just the tip of the iceberg, involving vague and sweeping police powers. The revelation came just weeks after AFP raids on the Sydney headquarters of the ABC and the Canberra home of a News Corp political editor, Annika Smethurst. At both locations, police spent hours poring through and seizing material.

This is part of escalating efforts to criminalise exposures about key military and intelligence operations. Significantly, the Special Forces are on the frontline of all Australian military interventions, while Smethhurt reported plans to legalise domestic surveillance by the Australian Signals Directorate, the country’s US-linked electronic spy agency.

Qantas handed over to the AFP the 2016 travel records of ABC reporter Dan Oakes, one of the two journalists involved in the exposure of the Afghanistan war crimes. An AFP statement dated April 1 this year, obtained by Nine Media outlets, was titled “Statement in the matter of R v Daniel Michael Oakes.”

That points to the police pursuing a prosecution of Oakes, contradicting earlier comments by Attorney-General Christian Porter. In an attempt to quell the public outrage over the two police raids, Porter had told the media there was “absolutely no suggestion that any journalist is the subject of the present investigations.”

In response to the AFP request on March 15, a Qantas legal officer accessed the airline’s internal booking system three days later in search of two flights, in June and September 2016.

The AFP request came roughly six months after former military lawyer David McBride was arrested for allegedly leaking the war crimes information to the ABC. That further indicates that Oakes faces prosecution, not just McBride, whose trial is already in its preliminary stages.

By what power the AFP demands access to airline records, apparently frequently, is entirely unclear. A Qantas spokesman said on Sunday: “Like all airlines, Qantas receives numerous requests for information from law enforcement agencies and we comply with these requests in accordance with our legal obligations and privacy legislation.”

Qantas’s privacy policy statement declares it can disclose a customer’s private information to “law enforcement agencies, regulatory authorities and governments around the world and their service providers in connection with their investigations, screening or other functions.”

Nine Media outlets last week revealed that Smethurst also could be prosecuted. In an internal document, the AFP’s “sensitive investigations” unit sent a thank you note to staff after the raid on Smethurst’s home. One staff member wrote back: “Reporting hasn’t caught up on the publishing offence.”

The “publishing offence” refers to legislation, which was expanded by the Liberal-National government last year with the Labor Party’s backing, that means journalists can be jailed for “dealing with” leaked information that might “harm Australia’s interests.”

The AFP documents also revealed that police were armed when they conducted the two raids, and that the AFP had planned a similar raid on News Corp’s Sydney headquarters, then decided not to proceed.

Separately, the AFP released documents showing it obtained two secret “journalist information warrants” in the 2017-18 financial year, and then accessed journalists’ on-line metadata on 58 occasions.

The AFP used 2015 metadata retention laws that force telecommunications companies to store their customers’ phone and internet records for two years. The entire process is shrouded in secrecy. Government agencies can obtain warrants to access journalists’ data without their knowledge. Anyone who even reports the existence of a warrant faces two years in jail.

Significantly, throughout the corporate media coverage of these revelations, there has been no mention of the case that set the global precedent for such assaults on journalists, free speech and basic democratic rights. That is the April 11 arrest of WikiLeaks founder and journalist Julian Assange, who faces extradition to the United States.

By authorising police raids against journalists, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government followed the lead of the Trump administration in charging Assange, an Australian citizen, with 17 counts under the US Espionage Act.

Nor has there been a word in the media about why the police raids were conducted. At a media conference, AFP acting commissioner Neil Gaughan declared the raids were necessary to protect the information that the Australian police and intelligence agencies receive from their “Five Eyes” counterparts. This network of surveillance agencies, from the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, is central to US-led war planning and operations.

These silences are not accidental. The media proprietors are just as committed as the government to supporting the US military alliance, which underpins the predatory operations of Australian imperialism throughout the Asia-Pacific.

A delegation of six media chiefs made another attempt last week to defuse the public anger over the police raids. Led by ABC managing director David Anderson, Nine chief executive Hugh Marks and News Corp corporate affairs chief Campbell Reid, they met Attorney-General Porter and Communications Minister Paul Fletcher to push their case for minor “reforms” to media laws.

They came away empty handed. Porter and Fletcher refused to guarantee there would be no prosecutions of journalists, and rejected the “reform” plea. Instead, they referred the complaints to the government-controlled joint parliamentary intelligence and security committee. This same committee, headed by former Special Forces officer Andrew Hastie, rubber-stamped all the government’s metadata, “security” and “foreign interference” legislation.

Nevertheless, the media executives agreed to meet with the two ministers again in three months’ time, hoping to wear down the public outrage, including that of media workers.

Both Prime Minister Morrison and Labor Leader Anthony Albanese are closely involved in these efforts to suppress public opposition. In a sign of their mutual concern, they met to discuss the affair last week, during the first week of parliament since the May 18 election. After initially expressing reservations about the credibility of the parliamentary committee inquiry, Albanese accepted it, in keeping with Labor’s long record of bipartisan backing for the US alliance and the ramping up of “security” laws.

Washington approves large arms package to Taiwan

Ben McGrath 

The Pentagon has announced that the US State Department approved an arms sale to Taiwan on Monday worth over $2.2 billion. The deal is broken up into two packages with additional sales likely to come. It is also one of the largest between Washington and Taipei and serves to deepen US preparations for war with China.

The first part of the deal is worth an estimated $2 billion and includes 108 M1A2T Abrams tanks, machine guns, and heavy transport vehicles. The second part includes 250 Block I-92 Stinger missiles valued at an estimated $223.56 million. Taiwan confirmed on June 6 that it had submitted a request for the weaponry. Taiwan’s Defense Ministry also stated at the time that it sought to purchase 1,240 TOW missiles and 409 Javelin anti-tank missiles, which would increase the value of the deal to $2.6 billion.

Taiwanese presidential spokesman Chang Tun-han stated after the deal’s approval, “Taiwan will speed up investment on defence and continue to deepen security ties with the United States and countries with similar ideas.”

The Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) has also notified Congress of the deal, with US lawmakers able to raise objections within 30 days. None is likely to do so, indicating the broad support in US ruling circles for the increased militarization of the Asia-Pacific region and preparation for war with China.

In March, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen stated that her government hoped to secure tanks and fighter jets from the US, without giving details. A Bloomberg article citing sources in the White House stated that advisors to Trump urged Taipei to submit a request for 66 F-16 fighter jets. Tsai said, “We will keep on strengthening our self-defence capabilities (and we) will also keep on being a contributor to regional peace.”

The statements by Tsai make clear that Taiwan is lined up squarely behind the United States and is prepared to go to war against the Chinese mainland while painting Beijing as the aggressor.

China’s Foreign Ministry pointed to this as it denounced the latest deal and called on Washington to “immediately cancel” it. Spokesman Geng Shuang stated the deal “grossly interferes in China’s internal affairs and undermines China's sovereignty and security interests.”

The US is trying to offset its relative economic decline by encircling China militarily and attempting to force Beijing to accept a trade deal that subordinates it to US interests. Since Trump came to office, his administration has sharply increased pressure on Beijing, with White House sources telling the Wall Street Journal in June that Trump “sees the value in using Taiwan as a bargaining chip in his (trade) talks with China.”

In criticizing the proposed sale as insufficient, the online military magazine made revealing comments about the actual US military plans for the island. The magazine stated the weaponry “would be fine if Taiwan were preparing for a ground war, but the real conflict if China invades will be at sea and in the air. Taiwan should focus on acquiring the most cost-effective methods of stopping a Chinese invading force before it lands.”

In reality, the US is preparing not for a defensive war, but for an aggressive attack on the Chinese mainland, a short distance across the Taiwan Strait. Due to its strategic location, Taiwan would become a base of operations in any US war against China. In the 1950s, US General Douglas MacArthur referred to Taiwan as an unsinkable aircraft carrier—a key asset in any conflict with China.

Washington has tried to conceal this fact. The US Defense Department’s DSCA claimed that this latest weapons sale will not alter the military balance in the region. Even if that were true, the sale is part of a broader military buildup among US allies in the region.

This latest deal with Taiwan is the fourth significant military agreement under the Donald Trump administration. In June 2017, Washington sold Taiwan $1.42 billion worth of missiles and torpedoes. In September 2018, it sold $330 million worth of spare parts for fighter jets, and a deal involving pilot training was completed in April of this year for $500 million.

During a visit to Japan in May, Trump confirmed plans to sell 105 F-35 stealth fighter jets to Tokyo. Washington also intends to sell 70 F-35s to Australia and 40 to South Korea. Zhou Chenming, a Beijing analyst, stated at the time, “This is bound to upset the balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region, given the large quantity of warplanes ordered by Japan.”

These increased sales have been part of Trump’s agenda since coming to office, but they were codified in the Asia Reassurance Initiative Act, which Trump signed into law at the end of last year. It calls for increased transfers of military weaponry to Taiwan and other countries and high-level official visits between Washington and Taipei. The Taiwan Travel Act, also signed last year, similarly ratified high-level contact between the two.

As a result, Beijing is growing increasingly concerned that Washington is in effect violating its adherence to the One China policy, which states that Taiwan is a part of China. In the latest example, the US Defense Department provocatively referred to Taiwan as a “country” in its June 1 “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report.” Since the “1992 Consensus” Beijing and Taipei have agreed to the One China policy, though accept differing interpretations on which is the legitimate ruler of China.

The Trump administration’s stoking of tensions with Beijing is the intensification of the previous Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia.” Washington has enflamed tensions over long-simmering territorial disputes in the South and East China Sea and goaded Beijing by sending warships through the region, including increasingly sending warships through the Taiwan Strait. Beijing has repeatedly stated that it will use military force if Taiwan ever declares independence or if other military red lines are crossed, such as if a US warship were to dock at a Taiwanese port.

These reckless US moves run the risk of a catastrophic war breaking out in the Asia-Pacific, one that would involve two nuclear-armed powers.

FBI and ICE scanning driver’s license photos with facial recognition technology

Kevin Reed

A report in the Washington Post this week revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been using facial recognition software to secretly scan databases of millions of driver’s license photos—a violation of basic democratic rights. The federal agencies have been engaged in the program for at least eight years.

According to documents made available to the Post by the Georgetown Law Center for Privacy and Technology, the FBI alone has logged more than 390,000 facial recognition searches of federal and state databases since 2011, including the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) digital catalog of driver’s license photos in at least 21 states.

In Utah, according to the article, the “DMV database was the subject of nearly 2,000 facial-recognition searches from outside law enforcement agencies between 2015 and 2017—sometimes dozens of searches a day,” with dozens having returned a “possible match.”

The Post report says that many of the searches are part of the push to find and deport undocumented immigrants, and “that federal investigators have forged daily working relationships with DMV officials.” In states such as Utah, Vermont and Washington, where undocumented immigrants are permitted to obtain full driver’s licenses or limited driving privilege cards, “ICE agents have run facial-recognition searches on those DMV databases.”

According to Jake Laperruque, a senior counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, “People think this is something coming way off in the future, but these [facial recognition] searches are happening very frequently today. The FBI alone does 4,000 searches every month, and a lot of them go through state DMVs.”

The latest exposure of widespread use of facial recognition software by federal police agencies is further evidence that the state apparatus is systematically violating basic democratic rights with high-tech surveillance tools. Behind the backs of the public, integrated networks, databases and artificial intelligence technologies are being used to build up a mass of information in the form of digital profiles or dossiers on every citizen. Other recent examples of the increased use of biometric surveillance of the public include:

• A March 9 report by NBC 7 San Diego based on a leaked Customs and Border Protection document showed that dossiers on 59 individuals who were involved in political activity opposed to the Trump administration’s immigration policy were gathered from social media accounts and used by the Department of Homeland Security to put a travel ban on the passports of US citizens.

• A June 17 report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called “The Dawn of Robot Intelligence” said that the merger of the security camera infrastructure built up over decades with state surveillance “deep learning” and “neural networks” of artificial intelligence are being used to monitor the public 24/7 across the country.

• A hack and subsequent publication on June 14 of the corporate data of DHS contractor Perceptics revealed that facial recognition technology is being utilized by the US government on roadways and border crossings to monitor the traveling public.

• A Georgetown Law Center for Privacy and Technology report called “America Under Watch” revealed that major US cities such as Detroit have secretly built up a facial recognition infrastructure that is monitoring the public in “parks, schools, immigration centers, gas stations, churches, abortion clinics, hotels, apartments, fast-food restaurants, and addiction treatment centers,” and is connected with “databases containing hundreds of thousands of photos, including mugshots, driver’s licenses, and images scraped from social media.”

Facial recognition technology is the marriage of high-resolution video and photographic images with artificial intelligence software. The images on photo IDs or those captured by security cameras in public places such as airports, parks, roadways or businesses—are scanned by the software to assemble a map of key facial geometric relationships.

Among these relationships are the distance between the eyes, the distance from the forehead to the chin or from the nose to the chin. These “facial landmarks”—some systems measure as many as 97 landmarks—are then assembled into a profile known as the “facial signature.” These facial signatures, which are being collected and stored by the millions in government databases, are unique to each individual and a form of biometric data comparable to fingerprints and human DNA.

However, fingerprints and DNA are ostensibly collected by law enforcement according to procedures based on long-established legal principles of “reasonable suspicion” and “probable cause.” In the mass processing and storage of facial signatures by the FBI and ICE derived from state-issued ID photo databases, all such formalities have been dropped. In many cases, requests for searches are made with nothing more than an email from the police agency to a DMV official. Among the providers of advanced facial recognition systems for the law enforcement agencies is Amazon. According to earlier media reports , Amazon’s Rekognition artificial intelligence software is used by the state of Oregon for the purpose of scanning photo databases and matching facial identities, including locating individuals through photos on their social media accounts.

Other reports said that Amazon met with ICE officials and promised to help “target or identify immigrants.” Also, in one of its facial recognition patent applications, Amazon proposed to develop a “database of suspicious persons” that could be integrated with home security technologies and create a “neighborhood-wide surveillance system.”

That these truly Orwellian biometric data gathering techniques are being developed by the tech giants and utilized increasingly by the state intelligence apparatus is a warning to the working class. These revelations represent an escalation of the surveillance of the public that was exposed in 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked documents showing that the US government is electronically storing every phone call and email of the entire population.

The response by congressional Democrats to the facial recognition revelations demonstrates their complicity in what has been going on for many years. Their main criticism is that the use of such methods requires federal government regulation. In fact, the release of the documents by the Georgetown Law center to the Washington Post is part of ongoing hearings in Washington, DC aimed at passing congressional legislation that will make such surveillance legal.

The Democratic chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Elijah Cummings, glossed over the implications of facial recognition scanning, saying merely, “Law enforcement’s access of state databases is often done in the shadows with no consent.” The same is true for DSA member and Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who responded to the exposure of mass video surveillance in Detroit by saying that she would support federal legislation to regulate its use.

Britain: Gang convicted of running “extensive and prolific” modern slavery network

Richard Tyler

Last week, the remaining members of a criminal gang were convicted for modern slavery, trafficking and money laundering following a three-year investigation. The eight gang members, five men and two women all of Polish origin, have received sentences of between 3 and 11 years. The court had heard traumatic evidence of nearly 100 victims, also all from Poland.

The gang’s activities were initially exposed by the charity Hope for Justice, whose co-founder and CEO Ben Cooley said, “This was a vast criminal conspiracy profiting from the misery and manipulation of vulnerable human beings.” The charity believes there could have been up to 400 victims who were exploited by the gang between June 2012 and October 2017, in what Judge Mary Stacey, who presided over the two trials, described as the “most ambitious, extensive and prolific” modern slavery network ever uncovered in Britain.

Victims, men and women from 17 to over 60 years old, were recruited in Poland from among the most vulnerable social layers—the homeless, alcoholics, recently released prisoners, the unemployed and destitute. Promised jobs and a better life, once they arrived in the UK they undertook mainly manual labour including house renovations, painting and decorating, gardening, working in poultry factories and in rubbish recycling centres.

According to an investigation conducted by the Times, fresh produce harvested by slaves was sold by Britain’s leading supermarket chains, including Tesco, Asda, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose. Others made garden sheds and fencing for a supplier to Homebase, Argos, Travis Perkins and Wickes.

One man told reporters he worked on a farm and was forced to wake at 5am to start working at 7am, “It was hard work. We were promised minimum wage—but I didn’t receive a penny.”

In some cases, victims were forced to work up to 13 hours a day. The gang took their pay packets and handed back a pittance—providing the barest minimum by way of food and drink, leading to some victims seeking support from soup kitchens. In other cases, victims were forcibly taken to ATMs and made to withdraw money under threats of violence. Crammed into filthy and unsanitary living conditions, often lacking the most basic amenities, one victim described having to wash in a canal. Another said that “homeless people here in the UK live better than I lived after I arrived.”

Another, recruited immediately after his release from prison, said being locked up in a Polish jail had been better than the conditions he was forced to endure at the hands of the traffickers.

Victims were told they had accrued large debts for accommodation and transport and would have to continue working till these were paid off. Gang members took their ID papers and used these to fraudulently claim welfare benefits, which they pocketed along with the wages. The total proceeds of the exploitation are thought to run into millions and were used to finance the gang’s opulent lifestyle. The court heard how the gang leader drove around in a Bentley and enjoyed using a fleet of other high-performance cars.

Following the verdicts at Birmingham Crown Court, Judge Mary Stacey said, “Any lingering complacency after the 2007 bicentenary celebrations of the abolition of the English Slave Trade Act was misplaced. The hard truth is that the practice continues, here in the UK, often hiding in plain sight.”

A recently published report by the European Union (EU) Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) underscores how widespread are such slave-like conditions. The evidence presented was based on accounts by 237 adult migrant workers, including third country nationals as well as from the EU, who were “severely exploited or worked in sectors at high risk of labour exploitation” in eight member states (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and the United Kingdom).

It is not just criminal gangs that benefit from human trafficking and the super-exploitation of the most defenceless. According to the report, “Unscrupulous employers use the weak position of migrant workers to force them to work for endless hours with no or little pay, often in dangerous settings, and without the minimum safety equipment required by law.”

Employers used “a number of strategies with varying degrees of coercion to create a fearful and intimidating environment and increase employers’ control of the worker, ultimately preventing workers from exiting labour exploitation.”

Unscrupulous employers went to great lengths to avoid their illegal practices being uncovered, “including requesting workers to hide or not show up during [labour] inspections, to lie about real work conditions or to pretend not to understand the local language.”

Coercive measures included “physical violence, threats of violence, and establishing an inhuman and degrading environment for the workers, including sleep deprivation and poor nutrition/denutrition” and “in a few, extreme, cases” workers were “completely deprived of their freedom of movement.”

The authors were particularly critical of the UK, where they found that “legislative gaps” facilitated the exploitation of migrant labour.

While the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street was lit up in red last year, supposedly to show support for Anti-Slavery Day, the Home Office was detaining over 500 victims of modern slavery in immigration detention centres, rather than placing them in safe accommodation with specialist support and counselling. Using Freedom of Information requests, data mapping project After Exploitation has exposed that almost one fifth of the 2,726 suspected victims of modern slavery identified through the government’s own reporting system were held in centres used to detain immigrants prior to deportation.

The director of After Exploitation, Maya Esslemont, told the press, “The unjustifiable detention of potential trafficking victims shows disturbing failings by the government to protect vulnerable people from prison or prison-like settings under immigration powers.”

In June, the Independent published the result of its investigation into the treatment of victims of trafficking at the hands of Britain’s Home Office, the government department responsible for immigration. The paper found that there were numerous cases where such victims were being sent “back to the address where they were enslaved” following their release from immigration detention.

“In one case,” the investigation found, “a Chinese woman who was exploited as a sex slave for five years in London, was released from Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre last month and told to make her way to the address in Barking where she had previously been discovered being forced to work in the sex trade.”

Case workers from the Salvation Army, which holds the government contract for providing support to those identified as victims of modern slavery, reported numerous instances where the charity had not had information about such individuals passed on to them.

Shalini Patel from Duncan Lewis Solicitors, who have represented several victims of modern slavery, said that for the Home Office, the safeguarding of detainees “was not a priority.”

“There is clear incompetence and sheer disregard for the safety of these women who have already been subjected to such horrendous sexual abuse and exploitation,” she told the newspaper.

The latest convictions in Britain are part of a global trade in human misery and exploitation.

According to the International Labour Office (ILO), there are 40.3 million people in conditions of modern slavery across the world, including 10 million children. This equates to 5.4 victims of modern slavery for every 1,000 people in the world. While the majority (30.4 million) are found in the Asia-Pacific region, mainly in bonded labour, the ILO records 9.1 million in Africa and 1.5 million in “developed economies.” These barbaric practices generate for 21st century capitalism $150 billion in illegal profits.

Australian retail giant to cut jobs, wages

Eric Ludlow

Woolworths, one of Australia’s two major supermarket chains, announced last month the largest restructure to its store layout and staffing since 2011.

The move will affect thousands of managerial staff at the company’s 1,000 stores across the country. While some stores in the state of New South Wales have adopted the new structure already, the roll-out is expected to be completed by September.

The announcement came amid a protracted slump in retail, reflecting a broader downturn in the Australian economy. In June, the National Australia Bank declared that the sector was “clearly in recession,” and that sales figures were worse than during the 2008-09 global financial crisis.

Citigroup last month warned that Woolworths’ modest earnings forecasts could be downgraded in August, stating that “store profits may fall because store-based sales growth is running below underlying store-based cost growth.” The retail chain is in a cutthroat competition with its rivals such as Coles for markets and profits.

The company has responded to growing pressures by offloading its alcohol and gaming divisions this year, and expanding its focus to online sales. At the same time, it is pressing ahead with the restructure of its supermarket operations.

The main retail, fast food and warehousing trade union in Australia, the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA) and the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (RAFFWU) are seeking to suppress widespread opposition to the job destruction.

The restructure will condense delicatessen, butchery and seafood counters; and dairy, eggs, pre-packaged meat, branded bread and meal solutions into only two departments.

Woolworths has claimed that staff numbers across its stores will not be reduced. It has allocated $10 million to retrain staff for “redeployment” into other roles.

They will likely be moved into part-time or casual employment, however, with significantly lower wages. Workers who do not accept the new roles or cannot be trained for redeployment will be forced into redundancy.

Workers were given just weeks to apply for new roles or for redundancy. In some cases, they were given less than seven days.

The SDA has said that the restructure will force thousands of department managers—who earn $60,000-70,000 a year—to move into an assistant team manager role, resulting in a pay cut of up to $30,000.

Josh Cullinan, secretary of the RAFFWU, says an average of 10 managerial roles will be made redundant in each Woolworths store (or about 10,000 nationally), with about seven or eight new manager roles available for which workers can apply.

Cullinan stated that this will result in “about 2,000 to 3,000” current managers “being only offered effectively a store team member role.”

The unions are doing nothing to oppose the job losses.

The SDA lodged a dispute against Woolworths with the Fair Work Commission (FWC), the federal government’s pro-business industrial tribunal, over the restructure.

At the same time, the SDA has signalled its support for the overhaul, issuing a statement that “encourages all members to apply for a new role. Our priority is to secure ongoing employment for SDA members.”

In an email sent to Victorian members, SDA state secretary Michael Donovan claimed that the backroom dealings of the union with the FWC and Woolworths were aimed at giving workers more time to consider new roles, ensuring that redundancies are voluntary, and wage rates are maintained.

However, in a later email, Donovan revealed that workers would only be given an extra few days to make decisions about taking new roles or redundancies.

The attempts by the unions to force through the restructure are in line with their role as the industrial policemen of company management. The SDA, like its counterparts in other industries, has a lengthy record of slashing wages, conditions and jobs.

In 2012, an enterprise agreement between Woolworths and the SDA resulted in up to 60,000 supermarket employees being underpaid tens of millions of dollars. It has imposed similar sweetheart deals at major fast food outlets and throughout the retail sector.

For its efforts, the union officialdom has been handsomely rewarded by the major corporations. In 2015-16, Woolworths transferred almost $5 million to the Queensland branch of the SDA, to cover union dues.

The unions are also seeking to impose 450 job cuts at the Melbourne head office of Coles, Woolworths’ largest competitor.

A shop floor worker at Woolworths spoke with the WSWS about the restructure. “I am not affected yet. At the moment it seems as if they need us workers on the shop floor,” she said.

“But the issue is that they are setting a precedent—they haven’t said that we won’t be targeted with the same redundancies and wage cuts. Big businesses have the power, the money. They can just get away with it.

“They say it’s about ‘freshness’ and the ‘customer experience.’ It’s just a nice way of saying ‘we want more money.’

“Some managers aren’t very good, but some are really great at what they do. Woolworths are not targeting ones that are performing badly or treat staff badly. They are saying that, no matter who you are or how many years’ experience you have, your job doesn’t exist anymore.

“The union said that they were not told about it. We all know that the unions are in bed with Woolworths and Coles, so we expect that they will make some noise, but then just agree to disagree with Woolworths and it will be business as usual for the corporations. They say that they’re worried about it, but the unions are always saying that.

The worker spoke about the impact of the sackings, stating: “It’s done in such a way that it is thrown at us. It’s not a process. You can’t just dump it on people and expect them to have a new job in one week. I know managers with mortgages, babies, families.”

The role of the unions makes clear that a struggle against Woolworths’ restructure can only proceed through a rebellion against these thoroughly corporatised organisations.

New organisations of struggle, including rank-and-file committees, are required to break the isolation imposed by the unions and to coordinate a political and industrial offensive of all warehouse and retail workers.

Above all, the assault on workers’ jobs and conditions underscores the need for a new political program to fight for a workers’ government and socialist policies that would place the banks and major corporations, including Woolworths and Coles, under public ownership and democratic workers’ control.

Global conflict situations, poverty lead to rise in mental health crises

Alex Johnson

Last month, the World Health Organization (WHO) released an article detailing the prevalence of mental health distress and psychological suffering among people in conflict situations, such as in war-torn countries or regions with high levels of civilian violence. It found the prevalence of mental disorders in conflict zones to be higher than previously thought.

The WHO published their new estimates in the British medical journal the Lancet. It sought to update its previous estimates, which were over a decade old and did not reflect modern data-gathering procedures.

The WHO derived its estimates through a systematic review and meta-analysis of journal articles on the topic between 2000 and 2017 in PubMed and other scholarly databases and supplemented this with data from the “grey literature,” such as government reports, conference proceedings and dissertations.

The study found that one in five people in conflict situations suffer from mental disorders, such as depression, anxiety or bipolar disorder. Nearly 9 percent of these individuals had mental disorders that were moderate or severe.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs estimates that nearly 132 million people around the world will need humanitarian assistance in 2019. Moreover, 68.5 million people were forcibly displaced by conflict in 2017, an increase above the 59.5 million displaced in 2014.

According to the UN’s 2018 Syria Arab Republic Humanitarian Response Plan, one in five Syrians were at risk for developing moderate mental health problems, while one in three were at risk of developing severe or acute problems.

In Israel, the war crimes committed by the Israel Defense Forces have also led to widespread manifestations of psychological trauma. Following the last major military assault on the Gaza Strip in 2014, the WHO found that 20 percent of Gaza’s population developed mental health problems. A study conducted by Palestinian psychologist Abdelaziz Thabet in 2017 discovered that nearly a third of Gaza’s population suffered from some degree of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Psychological disorders also go hand in hand with poverty. This can be seen in Latin America, the most unequal region in the world, where residents have very limited access to health care. Five percent of the adult population suffers from depression there, according to another WHO study.

“There is a clear relationship between standard of living and common mental disorders,” said Paulo Rossi Menezes, a professor of medicine at the University of Sao Paulo, in an article published by the World Bank in 2015.

However, less than 2 percent of the governments’ healthcare budgets are dedicated to mental health, according to the WHO.

Similarly, few resources are allocated to mental health services in other poverty-afflicted regions, such as in parts of Africa.

In Kenya, one of the more economically stable countries on the continent, health experts found that approximately one-fourth of the Kenyan population, some 11 million people, suffer from mental disorders. Despite the large population, only 80 psychiatrists and 30 clinical psychologists operate in the country. According to the WHO, the country spends only about 0.05 percent of its health budget on mental health, while 70 percent of its mental health facilities are concentrated in the capital, Nairobi.

In Nigeria, less than 10 percent of the population has access to a psychiatrist (there are only 130 in the entire country) or health worker. The WHO estimates that 40 to 60 million Nigerians suffer from mental health issues out of a total population of 174 million.

Although the WHO’s Lancet study identifies some of the countries experiencing major conflict-induced humanitarian crises—such as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen—it fails to note that it is US imperialism and its allies that bear principal responsibility for these crises.

The US has launched numerous wars in the Middle East and North Africa since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Millions have been displaced by US military interventions and aerial bombardments, starting with the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1992 and continuing with the wars launched against Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s, all the way up to the recent violent confrontations in Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen. These wars have laid waste to entire societies, led to the deaths of millions and have created the greatest refugee crisis since World War II.

Giant US healthcare corporations fear hostile takeover by high-tech companies

Benjamin Mateus 

UnitedHealth Group Inc. brought a lawsuit earlier this year against a former information technology executive, David Smith, accusing him of stealing trade secrets and taking them to his new employer. This was the still unnamed joint venture known as ABC, a healthcare initiative that was launched in 2018 by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase that supposedly intends to address the bloated health industry’s inefficiencies and high costs.

In a brief presented in a Boston federal courtroom by attorneys representing United’s Optum unit, they stated, “On the same day that he [David Smith] talked with ABC, and just one minute before printing his resume, Smith printed an Optum document marked ‘confidential’ that contains, among other things, Optum’s highly confidential information including an in-depth market analysis of the healthcare industry.”

Smith denied these charges and argued that he and ABC are not competing with UnitedHealth and are partnering in a not for profit with the intent to reduce healthcare costs among the three companies’ employees. Presently, Optum is providing healthcare services for Berkshire and JPMorgan. In his new position at ABC, Mr. David Smith will be director of Product Strategy and Research.

US District Judge Mark Wolf rejected UnitedHealth Group’s effort to block their former employees from joining ABC and ordered the case to be moved to arbitration as requested by ABC and Smith’s legal team.

That UnitedHealth Group, the largest healthcare company in the world by revenue (earning $226.2 billion in 2018) and ranked sixth in the 2019 Fortune 500, views this initiative by ABC with trepidation suggests a major shift is taking place in the healthcare market, in which high-tech companies are considered direct hostile competitors.

Given the rapid developments in digital technology over the last two decades these fears are warranted as capital seeks to channel financial transactions through more efficiently exploitive channels. These unfolding legal maneuvers are the initiation of volleys in a rapidly developing turf war.

American businesses and Wall Street corporations remain quite attentive to developments in the three corporate giants’ venture into the health industry. Approximately 46 percent of all Americans get their health insurance through an employer. Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase have nearly 1.2 million employees combined.

To comprehend what’s gnawing at the psyche of these corporate conglomerates, it helps to appreciate the enormous crisis facing the healthcare industry.

Soaring healthcare costs

A Kaiser Family Foundation 2017 employer survey found annual premiums for employer-sponsored family health coverage reached an average of $18,764, up 3 percent from the previous year, with workers contributing $5,714 towards the cost of their coverage. Though wages have barely kept up with inflation, with a paltry 26 percent rise since 2008, annual deductibles are rising eight times faster, with a 212 percent increase in the same period.

Startling statistics indicate that though the US population has expanded by 75 percent since 1960 to approximately 325 million people, healthcare expenditures, in constant dollars, have risen approximately 2000 percent.

US healthcare spending grew 3.9 percent in 2017, reaching $3.5 trillion, or $10,739 per person. As a share of the gross domestic product (GDP), health spending accounted for 17.9 percent, up from 6.9 percent in 1970. Spending is projected to grow at an average rate of 5.5 percent annually, reaching over $6 trillion by 2027 (19.4 percent of GDP). Healthcare expenditures continue to outpace GDP.

This spike in spending is not being driven by demand but by price hikes, despite evidence that these expenditures are not leading to improvements in health outcome measures. Since 2000, drug prices have risen 69 percent, hospital costs 60 percent, and physician/clinical services 23 percent.

The US population is facing a serious health calamity which is fueling these dire economic statistics. Though healthcare spending had historically been skewed toward the eldest in the population, recent analysis finds health spending has become less concentrated among the elderly, with healthcare dollars shifting across a broader swath of the population.

Whereas 56 percent of spending was concentrated among the top 5 percent in 1987, this group accounted for just under half of spending in 2009. Similarly, the spending share for the top 1 percent fell from 28 percent in 1987 to about 22 percent in 2009.

Credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The explanation for this flattening is primarily driven by the obesity epidemic. Younger age groups which used to be healthier are now experiencing rising prevalence of chronic diseases like high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol. These, in turn, contribute to increased risks of heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, immobility from joint ailments, and even malignancies.

Incredulously, one-third of healthcare spending isn’t helping anyone. The administrative burden in the US health markets is unique in creating glaring inefficiencies. There are hundreds of health insurance plans all charging different prices for the same surgeries and diagnostic studies. For every three doctors there are two administrative staffers to handle the paperwork. Over $765 billion is wasted each year, with $210 billion being charged in unnecessary services, $190 billion in high administrative costs, $130 billion in inefficiently delivered services, $105 billion in exorbitantly high prices, $75 billion in fraud and $55 billion in missed prevention opportunities.

The profit potential in health dollars has not been missed on high-tech companies. A JPMorgan Chase Institute study from 2015 cited that the number of people who earn income through online platforms has increased 47-fold in three years. In 2014, 24.9 million individuals filed tax returns indicating that they were the owners of a sole proprietorship. This represented a 34 percent increase in self-employment since 2001.

According to John Boitnott writing for Inc., when the Affordable Care Act went into effect in 2014, 1.4 million or 1 in 5 purchasing coverage were considered self-employed or small business proprietors. By 2020, independently employed persons are expected to comprise 40 percent of the economy. Initiatives and coalitions by these high-tech companies to capture these “clients” have been underway.

What the ABC health initiative may demonstrate is that, by selling their own workers marginally less costly “comprehensive health insurance,” companies could potentially redirect billions back into their own pockets. Rather than providing their workers with the healthcare they deserve, they would shift the burden further on the backs of workers by garnering their wages for healthcare services promised. These developments are reminiscent of the exploitation workers faced in traditional company towns. Current experiences by Amazon workers and the outcomes of their on-the-job injuries should be a stark lesson.

Since the 2018 health initiative, Amazon has gone on to purchase the online pharmacy startup PillPack for $1 billion while also planning to develop and sell software that will read medical records. PillPack is a full-service ePharmacy that fills prescriptions and ships drugs packaged in pre-sorted doses. Stock prices for traditional drugstore operators like CVS, Rite Aid and Walgreens fell on news of this deal.

Tech companies’ forays into healthcare

Apple updated its Apple Health app in 2018, allowing it access to medical records from 39 hospitals. It also has received clearance from the FDA for various cardiac rhythm monitor apps that allows users to track their heart status. They have also opened an on-site clinic for their employees and are delving into online medical records initiatives.

Uber, the ride-sharing company, has ventured into the $3 billion medical transit market, offering non-medical-emergency transportation to the sick and elderly who often can’t drive. Most of the money comes through Medicare and Medicaid providers who foot the bill for their patients. It is estimated that 3.6 million people miss their healthcare appointments every year due to unreliable transportation, with an estimated $150 billion impact on healthcare expenditure.

Alphabet is the parent company of Google and is focusing on health research by incorporating technology in assisting physicians to take notes, assisting the elderly in nursing homes, and creating algorithms for predicting heart disease by looking into the patient’s eyes. They are also partnering with Walgreens to create technology addressing medical noncompliance and misuse of medications.

Last month, during President Trump’s State Visit to London, he included in his remarks that access to British public health system’s data should be part of trade talks after Brexit had taken effect. The UK National Health System has been a “free to use” entity for seven decades and attempts to monetize and privatize its massive data banks has been deeply unpopular. Despite the public’s deep opposition to any privatization of their national healthcare, Prime Minister Theresa May could only feebly add that “the point of making trade deals is both sides negotiate.” Under developing circumstances, the UK will be hard pressed as the much smaller and disadvantaged negotiating partner.

Polls indicate that three-quarters of the British public is in favor of the use of artificial intelligence to develop and improve diagnostic tools for treatment and prevention of illness. But there is healthy mistrust of big tech companies and multinationals that stand to amass fortunes should they be given access to the national database that has detailed information on 65 million lives.

According to the Guardian, “While other countries’ datasets are more fragmented, the NHS database has comprehensive patient records that go back decades. This treasure trove is priceless to technology giants such as Google’s parent Alphabet as well as smaller healthcare firms, which are vying to develop health mobile phone apps that perform a host of tasks from monitoring vital organs to carrying out an initial diagnosis.”

These maneuvers by Amazon and high-tech companies are intended to wedge themselves, through monopoly practices, into these traditional industries where inefficiencies mean lucrative opportunities at the cost of improvements in real health measures for working people. The working class must wrest these technological developments created by their own hands out of the clutches of the financial sector and redirect them for the real benefit of mankind.

Massive forest fire in Germany exposes deadly legacy of World War II

Marianne Arens

More than one week after the outbreak of a massive forest fire in the north-eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania the danger is still not over. Munition remains and unexploded ordnance from World War II have severely hampered the fire fighting and made it almost impossible in large areas.

The fire on a former military training base near Lübtheen has spread to 1,300 hectares (3,200 acres), making it the largest forest fire in the country's history. Clouds of smoke can still be seen from space, and the smell of burning was at times perceptible in Berlin. The cause of the fire is still unclear; there is talk of arson. But the unusually high temperatures and drought have also likely played a role.

The fire has brought the deadly consequences and long-term effects of militarism and war into the public consciousness once more. Just last week, two Bundeswehr (armed forces) fighter jets crashed over the Mecklenburg lake district. The region only barely evaded a disaster.

A disaster alert was proclaimed last week in the district of Ludwigslust-Parchim. Five villages were evacuated within minutes. Their inhabitants, almost a thousand people in all, had to move to the surrounding villages and the nearby town of Lübtheen. In many cases, they hardly had time to take the bare necessities. Most were able to return by Friday morning, but the village of Alt Jabel, which is closest to the forest fire, remains closed.

Up to 3,000 members of the fire brigade, the THW disaster relief organization, the Federal Police and the Bundeswehr were on duty around the clock for five days. They fought the fire from the air with helicopters, and on the ground from a safe distance. First, they had to secure the villages and with the help of specialised clearance vehicles drive miles of tracks through the forest which had to be freed from munitions before the fire department could approach the flames.

No one could approach the fire closer than 1,000 meters since there was an acute danger to life. The unexploded ordnance and ammunition in the forest floor could be ignited at any time by the fire’s heat and explode. According to the statement of the state Environment Minister Till Backhaus (Social Democratic Party, SPD), trial excavations in this area found up to 45.5 tonnes of munition remains per hectare of forest.

The entire site, which belongs to the Federal Republic, is full of unexploded ordnance and sites contaminated with explosive. But where does this all come from? Who has contaminated this area with such deadly scrap?

First, there is the Nazi regime. From 1936 to 1945, the Wehrmacht (Nazi Armed Forces) maintained the Navy's largest ammunition depot in the area. The artillery arsenal consisted of 300 buildings and bunkers. After the war, they were blown up under the supervision of the Red Army, but not all ammunition was destroyed.

Second, the unexploded ordnance still lying here comes from Allied offensives in World War Two. “The area around Berlin was once the main battleground in the Second World War,” Claus Rüdiger Seliger, chief forester of the Spree-Neisse region, told the Tagesspiegel. “We also find a lot of unexploded ordnance in the towns and cities.”

Third, after the war, the National People's Army (NVA) used the area for military exercises in the former East Germany (GDR). And fourth, after 1989, the Bundeswehr used the forest area as a military training ground. In 2013, when military exercises were halted on the site, it left whole areas contaminated with tons of explosives. Since then, the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania munitions clearance service has been tasked with clearing these areas.

In the Nazis naval ordnance depot there were still “really massive shells” left, said the chief of the ordnance clearance operation, Robert Mollitor and there are still “a lot of ammunition in the ground.”

When asked how long it will take for everything to be cleared, Mollitor confirmed that this would not be done in any time soon: “When you talk about a hundred years, that's a time span you could say we would manage it in. Or 200 years,” he added.

The forest area near Lübtheen is not the only forest littered with old munitions: in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania alone, according to official estimates, 38,000 hectares are contaminated with munitions, which is four percent of the state’s total area. In the other federal states too, the ground is still full of munitions.

In Hesse, the extremely hot weather last weekend led to a forest fire south of Frankfurt near the former munition depot at Münster-Breitefeld (Darmstadt-Dieburg). There, too, firefighters had to work under life-threatening conditions.

At the same time, unexploded ordnance from the Second World War are being discovered again and again in cities and towns. These explosives must be defused under great danger, and then be cleared from housing estates and entire neighbourhoods. On July 4, another 500-kilo unexploded bomb from the war was found in Bielefeld, leading to over 700 residents being evacuated. In Frankfurt in September 2017, over 60,000 inhabitants had to be evacuated from their apartments for the evacuation of a bombshell.

The flames of the latest forest fire illuminate the general insanity of the policies currently being pursued by the current imperialist governments. In Berlin, where the grand coalition of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats is doubling defence spending, at NATO, which conducts exercises for a World War III just off the Russian border, and the Trump administration in the US, which recently came within ten minutes of launching a war against Iran.

Nearly three-quarters of a century have passed since the end of World War II, but its deadly legacy still breaks out anew with deadly force. Thus, this terrible experience of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania adds another strong argument for the fight against militarism and war.

Hack of Department of Homeland Security contractor exposes government surveillance of drivers on US roads and border crossings

Kevin Reed 

On July 2 the Washington Post reported that US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) suspended the license of a long-standing contractor of surveillance technology on the grounds that the firm exhibited “evidence of conduct indicating a lack of business honesty or integrity.”

CBP made the suspension more than a month after an anonymous hack of internal corporate data of Perceptics, a 35-year-old company based in Farragut, Tennessee. Perceptics is a supplier of license plate readers, facial recognition and artificial intelligence technologies to CBP and other government agencies at US border crossings, military facilities, electronic toll collection terminals and highway and city security systems.

The hack and subsequent publication of the data trove—including Department of Homeland Security handbooks, company PowerPoint presentations, equipment schematics, confidential agreements, technology lists, budget spreadsheets, internal photos and hardware blueprints of security systems—by a group of transparency advocates has exposed to the public the extensive infrastructure of government surveillance of drivers on roadways and at border crossings.

On June 10, CBP voluntarily reported to the Post that it had discovered the hack on May 31. At that time, CBP wrote that a subcontractor had transferred “copies of license plate images and traveler images” to its own network “in violation of CBP policies and without CBP’s authorization or knowledge.” The statement said the subcontractor’s network “was subsequently compromised by a malicious cyber-attack” and that “none of the image data had been identified on the dark web or internet.”

Without naming the subcontractor, CPB was clearly attempting to cover up the incident and the extent of the breach. However, weeks prior to the CBP admission, reports had already surfaced that the contents of the Perceptics server had been published on the dark web. On May 23, The Register —an independent news and commentary site serving the IT industry—reported that it had been contacted by an individual using the pseudonym “Boris Bullet-Dodger” who provided a list of the filenames of the Perceptics data as proof of the hack.

Beginning on June 14, the transparency advocate collective called Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDOS) announced via their Twitter account the publication of the first tranche of Perceptics data onto a public internet server. While DDOS said they had published the Perceptics data “without redaction,” they explained that “a small number of documents related to medical insurance had been removed from the browsable version of the HR files.” As of July 2, DDOS said it had published six tranches of data and were planning to post more, including corporate email communications.

Based on preliminary analyses of the Perceptics data, the CBP’s initial report was false and tens of thousands of license plate images and individual driver’s faces were in fact part of the hacked data. The contents of the Perceptics business information have opened a window into the relationship between the private surveillance industry and the US government. It has exposed details of the advanced technologies in use today for state monitoring of the traveling public.

CNN reported on June 17, based on its analysis of the Perceptics data, that 50,000 American license plate numbers are among the hacked data. When asked about this, a CBP representative did not deny that the plate numbers had been compromised but told CNN the agency “does not authorize contractors to hold license plate data on non-CBP systems.”

A slide from Perceptics' PA Turnpike presentation

A Motherboard report on June 13 said that many of the license plate images are not “from CPB or a border crossing” but appear to be part of a “Perceptics demo conducted for toll collection on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which is operated by the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission.” The Motherboard report goes on to say, “In some of the Pennsylvania Turnpike images, drivers’ faces are clearly visible; in many of them, license plate and car make-and-model information is easy to see.”

The Motherboard report went on, “The images also show that automated toll collection on highways around the country has resulted in passive surveillance of drivers, which are in some cases added to databases that can be stored for years.” Motherboard said these images were collected over a two-month period in 2017.

One Perceptics document analyzed by Motherboard showed a satellite image of the World Trade Bridge in Laredo, Texas, and another showed “zoomed-in black-and-white photos of drivers whose faces are easily visible.”

According to a Perceptics document that accompanied the turnpike demo, “The purpose of this project is to install the latest Perceptics license plate reader technology at an operational site to demonstrate the high accuracy of the Perceptics Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and high attach/yield rates that can be expected utilizing this solution.”

The reference to “high attach/yield rates” is concerning the ability of Perceptics’ automated technology to accurately read license plate data without human involvement. An earlier Motherboard report said that a Perceptics slide presentation from 2016 claimed that readers and cameras are designed to be combined with federal “biographic/passport data” of travelers.

Perceptics—previously a subsidiary of the defense contractor and maker of the B2 bomber Northrop Grumman—has contracts with the US, Canada and Mexico for license plate readers, under-vehicle cameras and driver cameras. The company has been a contractor for the US Customs Service (predecessor to CBP) since 1982 and, according to a DDOS representative, also has a relationship with the US Drug Enforcement Administration, Pentagon and other governments including the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Malaysia.

The information made available by DDOS is further confirmation that the various domestic police agencies that operate under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security are expanding the surveillance of the traveling public at airports, border crossings and roadways using high definition cameras and artificial intelligence technologies. These practices represent an intensification of public spying operations by the US intelligence state beyond those revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013, which exposed National Security Agency monitoring of all electronic communications, such as phone calls and email messages.

Criticism of the latest revelations has focused on the carelessness of data handling and the threat it poses to national security with passing references to the attack on democratic rights. For example, Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington think tank, told the Washington Post, “This is a pretty stark view into one of the cogs of the U.S. surveillance state,” adding that the agencies “may have to change some of that operational stuff pretty quickly before people take advantage.”

When CNN interviewed the senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, Neema Singh Guliani, she said that the gathering of traveler information is not just a concern from a “privacy and civil liberties standpoint, but also from a security standpoint, given that they’ve not demonstrated they can safeguard that information.” In all of the concerns over the data breach and its security implications, it never occurs to these critics that the worst of the “bad actors” who will use this information to harm the public are the police agencies of the local and federal US government.

Democratic Party officials expressed concerns about the impact of the breach on state surveillance operations. Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, complained, “Government use of biometric and personal identifiable information can be valuable tools only if utilized properly. Unfortunately, this is the second major privacy breach at DHS this year.” Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, who presents himself as one of the few Congressmen concerned with civil liberties, told the Washington Post, “If the government collects sensitive information about Americans, it is responsible for protecting it—and that’s just as true if it contracts with a private company.”

As more details emerge about the content of the Perceptics data trove, it will become increasingly clear that the contractor—which had an exclusive contractual relationship with multiple federal agencies for decades—has been engaged with the US surveillance apparatus in a massive violation of basic constitutional rights.

With the development of end-to-end encryption technologies that prevent access to the private communications of individuals and organizations, the state is becoming increasingly dependent on video and physical biometric data such as facial recognition—along with social media activity—to gather a database of information on everyone.

That such things are going on in America should by now come as no surprise to anyone. The assault on basic rights—including the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution that prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures—is an aspect of the breakdown of American democracy that has been accelerating since 2000, when the US presidential election was stolen by the Republican Party with the backing of the US Supreme Court.

Additionally, the expansion of the dragnet of government surveillance is a byproduct of the response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, which accompanied the drive by US imperialism to assert its military hegemony over the oil resources and strategic lands of the Middle East through wars and regime change campaigns. Ultimately, the buildup of domestic surveillance is part of the repressive apparatus erected by the ruling elite to suppress the coming revolutionary struggles of the working class.