A wilderness of mirrors

I'm going to be upfront with you and tell you that this entire article is mostly me indulging myself in some good old Schizo-posting, but hey sometimes that's the only way to make sense of things. In particular I'm trying to outline some things I've been thinking about as I consume some media related to US Intelligence operations, notably those of the CIA, as well as the PROMIS system, which I will get to in due time. I don't have a ton of sources for this, and this is hardly a rigorous academic investigation, more some thoughts on the outline of an idea that I think is at least interesting. My thesis here is that the internet as we understand it has some very deep connections to the intelligence projects of what we might refer to as a "deep state" in the US, and that this is unavoidably baked in to the way the internet works.

Intelligence doesn't really mean just collecting information about people. It also involves violence, torture, assassination, drug trafficking, and money laundering in order to set in place systems of control and discipline. It is an arm of imperialism, of the particular flavour that the American empire has deployed. It's rare to find clear examples of it's presence, though a few exist, we are mostly limited to its outlines, in the form of things like Gladio.

The US government before and after the Vietnam War, and its conceptions of power and the projection of that power are radically different. They learned a lot of things during that war, such as the development of Special Forces units in the form of Long Range Patrols, as well as the many lessons of Operation Phoenix. Operation Phoenix, in which the US sought to undermine the Viet Cong by infiltrating and sabotaging their political infrastructure, and resulted in tens of thousands of deaths using methods like torture and assassination, was also largely focused on information collection. It was during the Vietnam War that US forces began to heavily emphasize the use of computers in developing real time assessments of events occurring on the ground in Vietnam, things like the movements of individuals or population numbers. This wasn't terribly accurate during this time, and mostly resulted in things like the My Lai Massacre, but it is indicative of the perspective that US intelligence was beginning to take, one where they emphasized collection of information, and labyrinthine complexity as an operational doctrine. Now, instead of secrecy through censorship and strict control of information, secrecy was achieved through a deluge of information. Notorious CIA spook James Jesus Angleton referred to Soviet deception methods as a "wilderness of mirrors", though perhaps this is better suited to describe what the CIA was creating in the Vietnam years and onwards. Now the CIA and it's leaders see themselves as the sort of network of networks, organizing small networks of informants and actors, who think themselves autonomous. Complexity and massive data collection will define the CIA of the future, particularly the one re-forged under George H. W. Bush.

This is then connected to the US domestically through the PROMIS software, developed by the Washington DC technology firm Inslaw. It was a case management software, created by Inslaw for use by the US Department of Justice, which would allow them to collect information on cases throughout the United States in a central database, which could then be searched. There are more than a few odd wrinkles that would develop here, as documented by the Netflix series *American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders*, but we're most interested in the software and what became of it. The DOJ and Inslaw found themselves in a contract dispute, namely over proprietary rights to the software. They also wanted the complete documentation behind the PROMIS software, as part of a dispute that would eventually lead to Inslaw's bankruptcy, and a long history of court disputes. What makes this particularly interesting is the question of why the DOJ would be so willing to fight this legal battle over this software, why not simply pay them and move on? In the years since, numerous authors have claimed that US associated intelligence forces, particularly Mossad, had created their own version of PROMIS, with a backdoor for them to access these databases, to be sold to other countries. This would explain the DOJ's desire for proprietary rights over the software, as well as complete documentation in order to spread this method of data collection, with a convenient access point for US espionage built in. This is the same DOJ that employed characters like Daryl Gates, head of the LAPD who was previously involved in Operation Phoenix, and supposedly had weekly meetings with a CIA handler. Whether or not a Trojan PROMIS was sold to other countries, a certain structure is beginning to take shape. A doctrine of massive data collection and the ability to parse that information is being embraced by non-elected actors within the US government apparatus. Furthermore, it is being used as a method to police, control and repress recalcitrant populations, as in the case of Operation Phoenix, or Daryl Gates' LAPD, which created SWAT, conducted Operation Hammer, and presided over the Rodney King Riots. Data and information collection is becoming more and more important to US infrastructure, and will explode in the years following 9/11.

In their excellent book Investigative Aesthetics authors Fuller and Weizman make the salient point that "aesthetic power" or power instantiated by increased ability to detect and make sense of by authorities owes its dominance to the war on terror, and modern digital media. I think we can take this a little further, and say that social media today has taken the form it does in large part due to the war on terror. In the wake of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, the western public was ready and willing to accept a new level of surveillance as a result of their insecurity in the face of terrorism. The Patriot Act and expansion of things like the NSA were the most obvious instances of this, but social media companies that relied on the collection and sale of your data were more than happy to slide in behind them. It is during this time that the fearful or even apathetic westerner welcomes the introduction of things like Facebook or Twitter, and the platform begins its ascendancy as the defining media of our time. They rely on massive collection of data, and the ability to parse information into patterns, and the sale of this to corporate entities who want to know more about you.

If this reminds you a lot of things like PROMIS, or Operation Phoenix it should. The War on Terror has its own roots in US intelligence operations, particularly things like the invovlement of the Bin Laden family in the BCCI, or the Safari Club. Furthermore, the Iraq War was greenlit by the "Team B" within the Pentagon, including Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz, which was put in place by CIA spook/puppetmaster George H.W. Bush. I'll drop the facade here, I think there is an unsettling way in which things like social media function similarly to systems of information collection and counter-insurgency used by US intelligence operations in the interest of imperialism. It shares the same doctrine of labyrinthine complexity and overwhelming data, and exists in part because of world events that US intelligence was involved in.

What should we make of this? I'm not totally sure, and again here I reiterate that I don't have sources or concrete proof because this is a Vibes-Based Research Post. This mostly came together out of some interviews and podcasts I listened to, along with a lot of reading I’ve done for my Masters. I think in part it should spur us to be more hostile towards social media, rather than viewing it as a technology gone astray. Perhaps nothing progressive or useful can be made of something created in such harmony with the things done by the absolute ghouls who ran the CIA and the US' secret wars throughout the second half of the 20th century. Furthermore, I think we should recognize the role of counter-insurgency in our institutions, obviously in the case of police which have taken on the role of occupying army in the US, but also in media like the aforementioned platforms. In this framework, we're all up for scrutiny by the same inhuman algorithm, and we've effectively been giving them the keys to our house for the past 10 years because we want to see more horrible posts like this.