“With Little Fanfare, William Barr Formally Announces Orwellian Pre-Crime Program” by Whitney Webb
October 25, 2019
Last Wednesday, U.S. Attorney
General William Barr issued
a memorandum to all
U.S. attorneys, law enforcement agencies and top ranking Justice Department
officials announcing the imminent implementation of a new “national disruption
and early engagement program” aimed at detecting potential mass shooters before
they commit any crime.
Per the memorandum, Barr has
“directed the Department [of Justice] and the FBI to lead an effort to refine
our ability to identify, assess and engage potential mass shooters before they
strike.” The Attorney General further described the coming initiative, slated
to be implemented early next year, as “an efficient, effective and programmatic
strategy to disrupt individuals who are mobilizing towards violence, by all
lawful means.” More specific information about the program is set to follow the
recent memorandum, according to Barr, though it is unclear if that forthcoming
document will be made public.
Barr also requested that those
who received the memorandum send their “best and brightest” to a training
conference at FBI headquarters this coming December where the DOJ, FBI and
“private sector partners” will prepare for the full implementation of the new
policy and will also be able to provide “new ideas” for inclusion in the
program.
Perhaps the most
jarring aspect of the memorandum is Barr’s frank admission that many of the
“early engagement” tactics that the new program would utilize were “born of the
posture we adopted with respect to terrorist threats.” In other words, the
foundation for many of the policies utilized following the post-9/11 “war on
terror” are also the foundation for the “early engagement” tactics that Barr
seeks to use to identify potential criminals as part of this
new policy. Though those “war on terror” policies have largely targeted
individuals abroad, Barr’s memorandum makes it clear that some of those same
controversial tactics will soon be used domestically.
Barr’s memorandum also
alludes to current practices by the FBI and DOJ that will shape the new plan.
Though more specifics of the new policy will be provided in the forthcoming
notice, Barr notes that “newly developed tactics” used by the Joint Terrorist Task
Forces “include the use of clinical psychologists, threat assessment
professionals, intervention teams and community groups” to detect risk and
suggests that the new “early engagement program” will work along similar lines.
Barr also alludes to this “community” approach in a separate instance, when he
writes that “when the public ‘says something’ to alert us to a potential
threat, we must do something.”
However, the
memorandum differentiates suspected terrorists from the individuals this new
program is set to pursue. Barr states that, unlike many historical terrorism
cases, “many of today’s public safety threats appear abruptly and with
sometimes only ambiguous indications of intent” and that many of these
individuals “exhibit symptoms of mental illness and/or have substance abuse
problems.”
Thus, the goal of the
program is ostensibly to circumvent these issues by finding new and likely
controversial ways to determine intent. As will be shown later in this report,
Barr’s recent actions suggest that the way this will be accomplished is through
increased mass surveillance of everyday Americans and the use of algorithms to
analyze that bulk data for vaguely defined symptoms of “mental illness.”
Barr also suggested
the likely courses of action that would follow the identification of a given
individual as a “potential mass shooter.” The Attorney General notes that in
past cases individuals deemed a violent or terroristic threat before they
commit a crime are subject to “detention, court-ordered mental health treatment,
substance abuse counseling, electronic monitoring”, among other measures.
Ostensibly, the new program would then apply these same practices to
individuals in the U.S. that federal authorities believe are “mobilizing
towards violence,” as Barr put it.
Bill Barr’s been busy
The memorandum,
despite heralding a new era of Orwellian surveillance and “pre-crime” on a
national level, has been sparsely covered by the mainstream media. One of the
few reports that did cover the new Justice Department policy, published Wednesday by the Huffington Post,
framed the new Barr-led initiative as largely positive and asserted that the “anti-terror
tactics” to which Barr alluded could “help thwart mass shooters.” No mention
was made in the piece of the threat such a program is likely to pose to civil
liberties.
Furthermore, no
mention was made of Barr’s clear push over the past few months to lay the
groundwork for this recently announced program. Indeed, since becoming Attorney
General under President Trump, Barr has spearheaded numerous efforts to
this end, including pushing for a government backdoor into consumer apps or
devices that utilize encryption and for a dramatic increase of long-standing
yet controversial warrantless electronic surveillance programs.
On July 23rd, Barr
gave the keynote address at the 2019
International Conference on Cyber Security (ICCS) and mainly
focused on the need for consumer electronic products and applications that use
encryption to offer a “backdoor” for the government, specifically law
enforcement, in order to obtain access to encrypted communications as a matter
of public safety.
Barr went onto say
that “warrant-proof encryption is also seriously impairing our ability to
monitor and combat domestic and foreign terrorists.” Barr stated that “smaller
terrorist groups and ‘lone wolf’ actors” — such as those involved in the series
of mass shootings in California, Texas and Ohio that occurred in the weeks
after his speech — “have turned increasingly to encryption.” Barr later noted
that he was specifically referencing encryption used by “consumer products and
services such as messaging, smartphones, email, and voice and data
applications.”
To overcome the resistance by some private companies — who do not want to renege on their right to privacy by giving the government backdoor access to their devices — and American consumers, Barr tellingly anticipated “a major incident may occur at any time that will galvanize public opinion on these issues.” Shortly after this speech, several mass shootings, including one at an El Paso Walmart took place, which again brought the issue to the forefront of political discourse.
As MintPress reported at
the time, Barr’s uncanny prediction and a litany of other oddities related to
the El Paso shooting left many answered questions about the FBI’s foreknowledge
of the event. In addition, the tragedy did appear to serve as the very
“galvanizing” event that Barr had anticipated, as the solution offered by
President Trump in the wake of the shootings was the creation of a government
backdoor into encryption as well as calling for the very pre-crime system Barr formally announced just last
week.
The pre-crime dragnet
takes shape
More recently, Barr
and U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel signed a data access agreement on October 3rd that allows
both countries to demand electronic data on consumers from tech companies based
in the other country without legal restrictions. It is the first executive
agreement reached as part of the controversial Clarifying Overseas Use of Data
Act or CLOUD Act passed by the U.S. Congress last year.
The CLOUD Act has come
under fire from rights groups who have warned that the legislation gives “unlimited
jurisdiction to U.S. law enforcement over any data controlled by a service
provider, regardless of where the data is stored and who created it” and that
this also “applies to content, metadata, and subscriber information”, including
private messages.
Yet, Barr and
Patel claimed that the data access agreement will instead
“enhance” civil liberties and further asserted that the agreement would be used
to go after “pedophiles” and “organized crime”, even though both Barr and his
U.K. equivalent have shown minimal interest in pursuing the co-conspirators of
child sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, whose sex trafficking
network has been linked to
both organized crime and the intelligence agencies of both the U.S. and Israel.
Some have charged that the lack of interest on the part of William Barr is due
to the fact that Barr’s father once hired the now deceased pedophile.
Notably, Jeffrey
Epstein also had an apparent interest in pre-crime technologies, and was a key funder of
the controversial technology company Carbyne911, along with former Israeli
Prime Minister and close Epstein associate Ehud Barak. Carbyne911 is one of
several Israeli companies that market their software products to the U.S. as a
means of reducing mass shootings and improving the response times of emergency
service providers. These companies boast numerous and troubling connections to
the governments and intelligence communities of both the U.S. and Israel.
Epstein, himself linked to the intelligence apparatuses of both nations,
invested at least $1 million in Carbyne911 through a “data mining” company he
controlled.
As was detailed
in a recent MintPress exposé on
these companies, Carbyne911 and similar companies extract any and all data from
consumer smartphones for merely making emergency calls and then use it to
“analyze the past and present behavior of their callers, react accordingly, and
in time predict future patterns,” with the ultimate goal of smart devices
making emergency calls to the authorities, as opposed to human beings.
Data obtained from
these software products, already used by several U.S. counties and slated to be
adopted nationwide as part of a new national “next generation” 911 system, will
then be shared with the same law enforcement agencies who will soon be
implementing Barr’s “national disruption and early engagement program” to
target individuals flagged as potentially violent based on vague
criteria.
Notably, following the
El Paso shooting, President Trump has been mulling the
creation of a new federal agency known as HARPA that would work
with the Department of Justice to use “breakthrough technologies with high
specificity and sensitivity for early diagnosis of neuropsychiatric violence,”
specifically “advanced analytical tools based on artificial intelligence and
machine learning.” The data to be analyzed would be harvested from consumer
electronic devices as well as information provided by health-care providers to
identify who may be a threat.
It is important to
point out that such initiatives, whether HARPA or Barr’s newly announced
program, are likely to define “mental illness” to include some political
beliefs, given that the FBI recently stated in an internal memo that “conspiracy
theories” were motivating some domestic terror threats and a series of
questionable academic studies have sought to link“conspiracy theorists” to mental illnesses.
Thus, the Department of Justice and “mental health professionals” have
essentially already defined those who express disbelief in official government
narratives as both a terror threat and mentally ill — and thus worthy of
special attention from pre-crime programs.
Sleepwalking into a
nightmare
This widely overlooked
background is crucial to understanding William Barr’s recent memorandum and the
massive and greatly underreported shift in the policy it heralds. Over a period
of several months, Barr — aided by “private sector partners” as well as other
current and former government officials — has been laying the groundwork for
the system he has now formally announced.
Through the software
products offered by companies like Carbyne911 and through Barr’s personal
crusade to mandate government backdoors into encrypted software and products,
Barr’s new pre-crime program already has the tools for the mass extraction and
storage of consumer data by means of both private tech companies and public
services like emergency call centers.
Through the already
drafted plan for HARPA and its proposed solution to identifying “mental
illness” via artificial intelligence and machine learning, this newly announced
“pre-crime” program will have the means to analyze the mass of data harvested
from consumer electronic devices from Carbyne and other means using vague
“mental health criteria.”
While many of the
specifics of the program remain unknown, the actions of Barr and others in
government and private sectors show that this newly announced initiative is the
product of years of careful planning and many of the tactics and tools it is
poised to use have been in the works for months and even years.
In recent decades, and
especially after the September 11 attacks, Americans have quietly traded an
increasing number of civil liberties for increased government
“counter-terrorism” programs and wars purportedly waged to “keep us safe.” Now,
those same policies used to target “terrorists” are set to be used against
ordinary Americans, whose electronic lives and communications are now set to be
scoured for evidence of “mental illness.” If these untransparent algorithms
flag an individual, that could be enough lead to court-ordered “mental health
treatment” or even imprisonment regardless of whether or not a crime was
committed or even planned.
As a consequence,
William Barr’s coming “pre-crime” program is arguably worse than the stuff of
dystopian science fiction novels and films as it not only aims to detain
Americans who have committed no crime but will expressly target individuals
based on their use of electronic consumer products and the contents of their
communications with their friends, family, co-workers, and others.
Feature photo |
Graphic by Claudio Cabrera
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in
Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including
Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among
others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019
winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.
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