Phase III – Stealth Is.

The panicked superintendent dialed 911, sending police and the FBI rushing to the building near Rutgers University on the afternoon of June 2, 2009. What they found in that first-floor apartment, however, was not a terrorist hideout but a command center set up by a secret team of New York Police Department intelligence officers.

From that apartment, about an hour outside the department’s jurisdiction, the NYPD had been staging undercover operations and conducting surveillance throughout New Jersey. Neither the FBI nor the local police had any idea.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the NYPD has become one of the country’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies. A months-long investigation by The Associated Press has revealed that the NYPD operates far outside its borders and targets ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government. And it does so with unprecedented help from the CIA in a partnership that has blurred the bright line between foreign and domestic spying.

Neither the city council, which finances the department, nor the federal government, which contributes hundreds of millions of dollars each year, is told exactly what’s going on.

The department has dispatched teams of undercover officers, known as “rakers,” into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They’ve monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as “mosque crawlers,” to monitor sermons, even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing. NYPD officials have scrutinized imams and gathered intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs often done by Muslims.

But because it’s disguised as the “Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act,” the House Judiciary Committee approved it last week by a wide margin — even though it’s got little to do with child porn and won’t do much to protect kids.

The centerpiece of this ill-conceived law is a sweeping requirement that commercial Internet providers retain a one-year log of all the temporary Internet Protocol addresses they assign to their users, along with customer-identification information. The Justice Department says this will help track down child-porn peddlers by linking online activity and real-world identities. But the government would be able to access that sensitive data for all kinds of investigations, most of which would have nothing to do with child porn.

Traditionally, citizens in a free society are presumed innocent. If the police want to look through your computer files, the Fourth Amendment requires them to show a judge that there’s “probable cause” to suspect wrongdoing. The PCIPA turns that assumption on its head, treating every Internet user as a presumptive criminal and exploiting a serious Fourth Amendment loophole.

The Constitution protects privacy against government intrusion, but it doesn’t stop the government from forcing private companies to do its dirty work. Records held by a corporation don’t enjoy the same Fourth Amendment protection as does the data on your personal computer — so a search warrant isn’t necessary.

That data includes transcripts of phone calls and in-house discussions, video and audio surveillance, and a massive amount of photography. “The volume of data they’re pulling in is huge,” said John V. Parachini, director of the Intelligence Policy Center at RAND. “One criticism we might make of our [intelligence] community is that we’re collection-obsessed — we pull in everything — and we don’t spend enough time or money to try and understand what do we have and how can we act upon it.”

Judging by the failed Iranian uprising of 2009, social media in particular provides dictators with all the information they need for an effective crackdown. Monitoring a revolutionary movement has never been easier – the secret police just need to collect enough tweets and pokes. Thus, while it’s important to recognise the positive contribution that social media can and does make to popular uprisings, it’s equally important to recognise its shortcomings and vulnerabilities.

Many authoritarian regimes have already established a very active presence online. They are constantly designing new tools and learning new tactics that range from producing suave online propaganda to cultivating their own easily controllable alternatives to services like Facebook or Twitter.

Why should we bother studying how dictators exploit the web? There are two main reasons. First, it may help us get a better grasp on how to promote “internet freedom”, a cause that western governments are championing.

Promoters of internet freedom clearly need to understand what is going on. For example, it used to be that authoritarian regimes could tame the web simply by filtering or blocking “harmful” websites. Anyone who wanted to gain access to them would then need to use proxies and tools to get round censorship.

How things have changed. Now authoritarian governments rely on a rapidly expanding panoply of tools and tactics that range from distributed denial-of-service attacks to make websites temporarily unavailable, to spreading malware that helps them to spy on dissidents remotely. Merely funding censorship circumvention tools as a means of weakening authoritarian control no longer seems sufficient and may actually encourage dictators to replace technological controls with social ones, such as pressuring internet companies to remove political comments from their sites.

Another reason why those of us living in democracies should pay more attention to how dictators control the web is because it is the only way to identify and put pressure on western corporations that make such control possible by selling them the equipment.

The Egyptian government had the ability to monitor and intercept traffic passing through their networks thanks to “deep packet inspection” technology sold to state-owned Telecom Egypt by the American firm Narus (owned by Boeing). The Iranian government appears to have used similar equipment sold to them by western companies to spy on its opponents: last year the European parliament condemned Nokia Siemens for providing Iran’s authorities with “censorship and surveillance technology”. Some fear that the oppressive regime in Belarus used technology supplied by Ericsson to suppress political dissent.

Thanks to radical improvements in technologies such as face recognition, it may become even easier for the secret police to track their opponents. Here, too, there is a cut-throat competition among western firms, who rightly smell lucrative commercial opportunities – wouldn’t it be wonderful if all those online photos of your friends could be tagged automatically? And yet you can almost guarantee that such technologies would be abused by authoritarian states. The way in which we choose to regulate such technologies in the west can really define – and perhaps, even limit – their contribution to political oppression.

Sadly, the likes of Facebook and Twitter do not have a spotless record on digital activism. For all the celebration of their role in facilitating democratic change, neither company has so far joined the Global Network Initiative, a group of companies, civil organisations and academics committed to upholding human rights and freedom of expression in telecommunications (Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have all joined). Many dissidents around the globe are unhappy that Facebook systematically deletes their accounts because their profiles bear pseudonyms, not their real names.

Realising the democratising potential of the internet won’t be easy and, on the whole, it’s perhaps a good sign that the US government is so keen on internet freedom. However, as activists in authoritarian states have told me, the biggest contribution that Washington can make to this fight is to first solve numerous problems in its own backyard. Getting US companies to stop selling technology to authoritarian states that are likely to abuse it would be a good first step; having Facebook, Twitter and others commit to some shared set of democratic norms would be a good second.

Companies aside, the biggest challenge to internet freedom lies in western democracies themselves, where law enforcement and intelligence agencies want to assert greater control over our networks. The rapid securitisation of cyberspace is particularly severe in the US, where the government, spooked by the WikiLeaks saga, is opting for a more aggressive watch over the internet.

A House panel chaired by Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin is scheduled to hold a hearing tomorrow morning to discuss forcing Internet providers, and perhaps Web companies as well, to store records of their users’ activities for later review by police.

One focus will be on reviving a dormant proposal for data retention that would require companies to store Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for two years, CNET has learned.

Tomorrow’s data retention hearing is juxtaposed against the recent trend to protect Internet users’ privacy by storing less data. Last month, the Federal Trade Commission called for “limited retention” of user data on privacy grounds, and in the last 24 hours, both Mozilla and Google have announced do-not-track technology.

This winter, the Air Force is set to deploy to Afghanistan what it says is a revolutionary airborne surveillance system called Gorgon Stare, which will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town.

The system, made up of nine video cameras mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft, can transmit live images to soldiers on the ground or to analysts tracking enemy movements. It can send up to 65 different images to different users; by contrast, Air Force drones today shoot video from a single camera over a “soda straw” area the size of a building or two.

With the new tool, analysts will no longer have to guess where to point the camera, said Maj. Gen. James O. Poss, the Air Force’s assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. “Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything.”

Questions persist, however, about whether the military has the capability to sift through huge quantities of imagery quickly enough to convey useful data to troops in the field.

The state’s “Subversive Activities Registration Act,” passed last year and now officially on the books, states that “every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States … shall register with the Secretary of State.”