Figures du naturalisme - dichotomie entre nature et culture

Peut-on se passer de la dichotomie entre nature et culture ? Traversant les siècles, de Platon à Descola, un ouvrage collectif montre que le naturalisme, quelque forme qu’il prenne, est toujours renaissant.

Pour citer cet article :

Charlotte Murgier, « Figures du naturalisme », La Vie des idées, 13 juin 2013. ISSN : 2105-3030. URL : http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Figures-du-naturalisme-2324.html

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  Figures du naturalisme (PDF - 160.2 ko)

  par Charlotte Murgier

Recensé : S. Haber et A. Macé (dir.), Anciens et Modernes par-delà nature et société, Annales Littéraires de l’Université de Franche-Comté, n° 898, Besançon, Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2012, 10 €.

Le collectif dirigé par S. Haber et A. Macé, Anciens et Modernes par-delà nature et société, poursuit un double objectif. Placé sous le patronage de Philippe Descola, comme l’indique la référence contenue en filigrane dans son titre, il présente et discute les thèses de celui-ci en s’ouvrant sur la retranscription d’un entretien avec l’anthropologue, pour se clore sur l’examen critique par S. Haber de Par-delà nature et culture, paru en 2005. En même temps il entend mettre ces thèses en perspective en parcourant diverses élaborations du partage entre nature et société depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’aux réflexions les plus contemporaines. Ce croisement des perspectives historique et anthropologique est l’occasion d’examiner sous divers angles la notion de naturalisme. L’ouvrage est organisé autour de quatre études sur la nature et le naturalisme antiques, suivies de quatre contributions portant sur les constructions modernes et contemporaines.

Généalogie antique du concept de nature

L’étude d’A. Macé, examinant « la naissance de la nature en Grèce ancienne » à travers un large corpus — poétique, historique, médical et philosophique — révèle que le sens de nature qui est pour nous le plus évident, à savoir l’ensemble des choses ne relevant ni de l’institution ni de l’artefact, n’est pourtant nullement premier. Renvoyant originellement au trait distinctif permettant d’identifier une chose qui peut appartenir indifféremment à l’ordre naturel ou social Désignant originellement le trait distinctif qui permet d’identifier une chose (qu’elle appartienne à l’ordre naturel ou social), le termephusis ne rejoint qu’au terme d’une progressive construction le sens contenu dans les verbes phuein (faire pousser) et phuesthai (pousser), celui d’un mode de croissance et de reproduction immanent. Les étapes de cette concrétion (Pindare, Antiphon, Hippocrate) sont autant de jalons dans la naissance d’une opposition entre le naturel et ce qui est le produit de l’initiative humaine, que cette dernière ait pour nom enseignement, art ou convention. La médiation supplémentaire du naturalisme sous-jacent aux « enquêtes sur la nature » recherchant les propriétés des êtres dans les principes matériels présidant à leur genèse finit par aboutir à la coalescence, chez Platon, de ces deux ensembles de significations, puisqu’au livre X des Lois, la nature se voit investie de sa double dimension, collective et causale, désignant tout à la fois un ensemble de choses et le principe de leur constitution.

Inclure sans réduire l’action humaine dans la nature

Les deux études suivantes, centrées sur deux corpus philosophiques éminemment représentatifs du naturalisme antique, viennent en corriger les représentations simplificatrices.

P.-M. Morel dégage ainsi trois « voies du naturalisme aristotélicien » qui sont autant de manières d’envisager l’action humaine. La première voie, génétique, s’intéresse à la réduction, opérée par les traités de philosophie naturelle, de l’action à ses conditions naturelles, à savoir les processus physiologiques sous-jacents à la mise en mouvement de l’animal (y compris humain). La deuxième voie, qualifiée d’analogique, semble justifier en partie une telle reconduction, puisqu’elle se fonde sur l’ « identité structurelle » entre l’activité humaine et l’ensemble des conduites finalisées qu’Aristote, dans le corpus biologique, n’hésite pas à qualifier d’actions (praxeis). Cet usage non restrictif du terme s’explique par le caractère autotélique (l’auteur définit l’autotélisme comme le « processus qui possède, en lui-même et immédiatement, son propre accomplissement ») des deux types d’action (morale ou simplement naturelle) que ne contredit ni la multiplicité interne des mouvements qui les constituent (la complétude n’interdisant pas la complexité) ni leur commune dépendance à des conditions externes (l’autotélie n’impliquant pas l’autonomie). Le « dépassement », troisième et dernière modalité du naturalisme aristotélicien, engage une interprétation de la philosophie pratique du Stagirite qui se révèle échapper au réductionnisme et au déterminisme sans tomber pour autant dans l’illusion d’une « autonomie absolue » de l’agent. La nature y circonscrit un espace de possibilités qu’il appartient à l’agent de réaliser, c’est-à-dire d’accomplir et de déterminer. Le développement par l’agent de ses vertus et l’exercice, dans la délibération, de sa rationalité, viennent ainsi insérer dans l’action humaine une distance vis-à-vis de ses conditions naturelles qui, comme le montre finement P.-M. Morel, n’est jamais détachement.

T. Bénatouïl se propose d’exempter le stoïcisme, l’une des formes les plus radicales du naturalisme antique, du soupçon de « naturalisation » des conduites humaines, dont l’autonomie se verrait par là remise en cause. Après avoir recontextualisé ce débat en rappelant la diversité des visions et fonctions de la nature dans les projets philosophiques des différentes écoles hellénistiques, l’auteur s’interroge sur les répercussions éthiques possibles de la naturalisation intégrale du réel opérée par la physique stoïcienne. L’analyse détaillée du traitement stoïcien de la notion de « convenable » (kathékon) lui permet de montrer que l’originalité du « naturalisme éthique » des Stoïciens réside justement dans le fait d’avoir su excepter les pratiques humaines de cette naturalisation inconditionnelle. En effet, ce n’est pas a priori mais en situation, autrement dit à l’aune de la justification rationnelle que le sage est en dernière instance capable de produire, qu’une action sera jugée « convenable », c’est-à-dire en cohérence avec la nature de l’être qui en est à l’origine. Les naturalisations « toujours relatives » qu’autorise ce conceptsont ainsi repérables dans les deux types de « stratégie » à l’œuvre dans le stoïcisme : si la première, d’inspiration cynique, n’hésite pas à utiliser la nature comme instance critique pour délégitimer un certain nombre d’interdits sociaux (inceste, anthropophagie ...), la seconde, plus tardive et plus soucieuse de respectabilité, opte pour une démarche casuistique en distinguant « convenables circonstanciels » et « convenables usuels ». Dans les deux cas, c’est la raison qui demeure l’ultime arbitre de la convenance, transcendant « l’opposition entre naturalisme et conventionalisme ».

L’idée de justice animale

La dernière étude ancrée dans le monde antique, celle de J.-F. Lhermitte, propose un point de vue inattendu sur le partage entre nature et société depuis la défense, par Plutarque et Elien de Préneste, de l’existence d’une justice animale. Allant à contre-courant de la thèse dominante qui, depuis Hésiode, fait de ladikè le privilège distinctif de l’humanité, Elien, en s’appuyant sur une interprétation des conduites animales (fourmis honorant leurs morts, palombes respectueuses de la fidélité conjugale), va jusqu’à repérer dans le monde animal l’existence d’une loi naturelle (qui n’est à confondre ni avec la loi naturelle stoïcienne ni avec la loi du plus fort défendue par Calliclès dans le Gorgias), ainsi que la présence de contrats conclus ponctuellement entre deux espèces en vue de leur bénéfice mutuel. Ce double fondement de la justice animale n’est pas sans engendrer une tension, dont l’auteur souligne qu’elle demeure chez Elien non résolue, entre deux conceptions du bien moral, l’une absolue, fondée sur l’idée de loi naturelle, l’autre relative, exprimée dans les contrats nés de la recherche pragmatique d’un intérêt bien compris.

Usages modernes du naturalisme

L’étude de L. Gerbier assure la transition entre mondes antique et moderne en introduisant la médiation de la pensée médiévale chrétienne et avec elle un troisième terme venant reconfigurer le partage entre le naturel et le civil : le spirituel. Le naturalisme machiavélien qui pense la vie civile sur le modèle et dans les cadres de la philosophie naturelle s’avère en réalité l’aboutissement d’une série de « déplacements de coupures entre le XIIIe et le XVIe siècles ». La résurgence du naturalisme aristotélicien sous l’influence des traducteurs et commentateurs d’Aristote à partir du milieu du XIIIe siècle vient en effet faire bouger la ligne de partage, héritée de saint Augustin et jusque-là dominante, qui venait séparer les ordres spirituel et temporel, reconduisant de ce fait à une commune imperfection et corruption le naturel et le civil. Le renouveau de l’aristotélisme permet de penser à nouveaux frais un ordre autonome et une perfection propre de la vie civile ; retraçant le chemin qui va de Thomas d’Aquin à Machiavel en passant par Dante et Marsile de Padoue, l’auteur montre de façon très convaincante comment l’ordre civil conquiert progressivement un « régime d’intelligibilité » émancipé de la référence théologique, qui passe par l’intégration des schèmes explicatifs venus du discours médical mis au service d’une « science de la cité » en train de naître.

C. Spector adopte une perspective comparative en confrontant deux points de vue, l’un moderne, l’autre contemporain, sur les causes de l’évolution différenciée des sociétés : celui de Montesquieu dans l’Esprit des Lois et celui de J. Diamond dans De l’inégalité parmi les sociétés, Essai sur l’homme et l’environnement dans l’histoire (1997). Si leur commun naturalisme, tenant dans le fait de chercher dans le « milieu de vie » la cause de telles différences entre les cultures, rapproche de façon frappante ces deux auteurs distants de deux siècles, la comparaison joue néanmoins en faveur du premier puisque la « théorie complexe de la causalité » offerte par Montesquieu permet d’articuler finement causes physiques et causes morales, en s’appuyant sur une anthropologie attentive au rôle des croyances et des passions humaines dans l’histoire des sociétés. Sans que les causes culturelles soient absentes des théories de Diamond, celui-ci tend, selon C. Spector, à en minorer les effets tandis que le naturalisme « multi-factoriel » de Montesquieu restitue à l’interaction des sociétés humaines avec leur environnement naturel toute sa subtilité et sa complexité.

Le naturalisme contemporain face à ses critiques 

L’évaluation, par C. Larrère, de la manière dont les éthiques environnementales contemporaines résistent aux objections classiques faites au naturalisme (le passage indu du descriptif au prescriptif investissant la nature d’une valeur normative, l’archaïsme d’une vision finaliste de la nature) nous plonge au cœur des enjeux éthiques et philosophiques du naturalisme contemporain. L’auteur met à l’épreuve deux formes de l’écologisme contemporain : l’éthique « biocentrique » qui confère à la nature une « valeur intrinsèque » ainsi que l’éthique « écocentrique » mettant en avant la communauté de vie liant l’homme à son environnement. Sans être exemptes de certaines difficultés théoriques internes relevées par l’auteur, ces deux éthiques environnementales proposent néanmoins des formes modernes et conséquentes de naturalisme, en mesure de faire face aux critiques traditionnellement élevées à son encontre. C. Larrère les confronte pour finir à la critique sociologique d’un Bruno Latour qui leur reproche de continuer à présupposer une « irréductibilité ontologique de la nature ». Cette critique d’un dualisme de moins en moins adéquat à un monde contemporain caractérisé par l’existence de réalités « hybrides », produits communs de la nature et de la société (par exemple le trou dans la couche d’ozone), n’échappe pourtant pas elle-même aux ambiguïtés d’un « monisme culturel », révélant la nécessaire mais difficile articulation mettant en jeu non pas deux mais trois termes : le naturel, l’artificiel et le social.

Le dernier article prolonge, sous la forme d’une lecture critique, l’entretien liminaire avec Philippe Descola où celui-ci, avant de répondre aux questions de son auditoire, restitue l’itinéraire intellectuel l’ayant conduit à mettre en cause le dispositif de « triage épistémologique », cristallisé à la fin du XIXe siècle, qu’est le partage entre nature et culture. Dans la description descolienne des « formes de vie viables » inventées par les sociétés archaïques, S. Haber voit une invitation à repenser le rapport que l’homme entretient avec l’environnement à la lumière de ces modes à la fois intelligents et attentifs d’insertion dans l’environnement que sont les pratiques, au delà des limites rencontrées par les écologismes classiques. Il lit aussi dans Par-delà nature et culture l’esquisse plus ambitieuse d’une « philosophie sociale de la nature », laquelle est néanmoins grevée par une tension inhérente à l’utilisation du concept de naturalisme, tantôt assumé méthodologiquement par l’anthropologue dans sa propre pratique, tantôt désigné voire dénoncé comme une ontologie particulière et périlleuse, propre à une modernité occidentale dont P. Descola offrirait un portrait trop unilatéral. Le dépassement de cette tension dans une « ontologie sociale naturaliste » dont S. Haber ébauche les contours possibles permettrait alors au savoir anthropologique de contribuer de façon éclairée à la prise de conscience écologique qui anime nos sociétés.

Si ce parcours nous fournit un spectre varié et nuancé des dialectiques antiques et modernes inhérentes au couple nature/société, on attend la suite, annoncée, de cette enquête pour voir précisé et historiquement constitué un concept de société que sa plasticité rend difficile à cerner.

par Charlotte Murgier , le 13 juin

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Pour citer cet article :

Charlotte Murgier, « Figures du naturalisme », La Vie des idées, 13 juin 2013. ISSN : 2105-3030. URL : http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Figures-du-naturalisme-2324.html

The Commons, Old and New From Land Use to Information Sharing

transcrito de: 

http://www.booksandideas.net/The-Commons-Old-and-New.html

The idea of the Commons prospers today as a powerful trope of twenty-first century sharing. To tell the story of how yesterday’s digging and grazing became today’s googling and sampling, we need to look more closely at the way the unique properties of the modern information landscape come into focus by reference to the old commons economy: through the concepts of user rights, openness and enclosure.

Openness and Enclosure

In her documentary Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), Agnès Varda revisits the traditional practice of gleaning within present-day France. Her cross-country travels searching for waste and miscellaneous discarded items begin appropriately with the land and tons of potatoes not uniform enough for the supermarket. Rummaging through the far-from-perfect heap, she quickly finds the first of the heart-shaped spuds that were to become a symbol of the successful film and her 2002 follow-up Les glaneurs et la glaneuse: deux ans après. From grapes and apples to art, collages, and installations, Varda seamlessly juxtaposed our use of tangible resources with more intangible ones – including that which ‘falls in-between language,’ as the viticulturist/psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche poetically described his own work. In this text, I want to use Varda’s film as a starting point to explore the two parallel processes of enclosure and openness.

During the past few years, ubiquitous digitization and globalization have made knowledge, culture, and information into major assets for the twenty-first century. How to ensure sustainable use of resources that are easily sampled as well as disseminated is one of the most crucial (and contentious) issues we grapple with in contemporary society. New forms of collaboration have emerged in Internet-based fan communities as well as in academia. Long-established notions of what it means to be a creator as well as a user are challenged by an increasing flora of initiatives that have the idea of sharing in common; from Facebook to YouTube, from Open Access to Open Source to Open Innovation, from Creative Commons to the Public Library of Science, digital access and openness is on everybody’s mind.

There is no doubt that many of these initiatives have come about as a reaction to an expansion of intellectual property rights, the legal regime used to protect intangibles. We can include three areas in this enlargement: subject matter (protection covers not only text, music, and film, but also databases, software, DNA-sequencing, and potentially also traditional knowledge); time (we have witnessed a gradual prolongation of the period for which protection is granted); and space (while still subjected to national legislation, from the Berne Convention in 1886 to the Trade Related Agreement on Intellectual Property Rights [TRIPS] in 1994, intellectual property policy increasingly functions within an elaborate matrix of international agreements and conventions). Think about the controversy around the Pirate Bay, to the demonstrations and boycotts surrounding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and you will have an idea of the stakes involved.

Some have described the way in which intellectual property rights increasingly seem to curtail and circumscribe creative activity as a ‘second enclosure movement’ or ‘a digital land grab.’ If digitization has brought about a movement appearing for the second time, then there must be a predecessor: a “first” enclosure movement. If we are to understand something of the tensions between enclosure and openness as they come to us today, we need to consider at least something of the underlying historical and theoretical principles that have shaped our understanding of and response to these developments. Although we perhaps like to think that we have done away with physical space, multiple representations of land permeate and structure the way we think about openness and the Internet. Inevitably, real and metaphorical land (a versatile trope used to argue for as well as against private property) will have a prominent place in that discussion.

The “First” Enclosure Movement

In 1700, England still consisted of large tracts of open fields, pastures and grazing lands, but by 1840 most of it had been fenced in and made into private property. Beginning in earnest with the statute of Merton in 1235, enclosure continued piecemeal during many centuries to reach its high point in the twenty-year period between 1765 and 1785. Enclosure was about fencing in what once were open fields, known as the commons. In the following, I want to make more distinct some of the reasons why the idea of the commons survives in the networked and knowledge-intensive present. To tell the story of how yesterday’s digging and grazing became today’s googling and sampling and how the commons prospers as a powerful trope of twenty-first century sharing, we need to look closer at the concept of use and use-rights.

The commons was never a space of absolute freedom before enclosure of the land. Vested in the lord of the manor, the de facto ownership of common lands was never in question: technically, they were the wastes of the manors in which they were situated. What prevented the immediate and wholesale enclosure of common land was a long-standing recognition of the right to specific, often highly regulated and customary uses of the land. Tenants of the manor privy to such uses included commoners who owned land, those occupying cottages, inns, and millhouses, and, on the lowest rung of the ladder, landless commoners. All were entitled to use parts of a commons themselves, for grazing or for gathering nuts. The common rights attached to each respective category were secured in a number of different ways. Profoundly local, the profile of these usages depended on an almost infinite number of variables.

‘Use’ in the context of enclosure/openness spans across a complex spectrum of activities and agents. One of the most well-known of such traditions was the right to glean, or to collect the uncut or fallen grain left in the field after harvest, famously depicted in Jean-François Millet’s painting Les Glaneuses from 1857, and, of course, in Varda’s film. Beyond post-harvest pickings, gleaning was frequently mentioned in Victorian publications, and titles such asChurchyard Gleanings and Gleanings from the Poets recognize the inherently collective and consumerist nature of creativity at a period when the concept of authorship, much like today, underwent dramatic changes. Indicative of a much larger restructuring of practices that passed down through generations until becoming a ubiquitous part of commoner’s lives, gleaning nonetheless went from custom-to-crime. It was a customary use that the logic of enclosure translated into trespassing or illegal incursion on private property.

Governed by lex loci, the local law of the manor, custom was used to invoke a usage so ancient as to take on the color of a right or privilege, one seldom, if ever, written down. Consequently, it is the concept of common right (the right to use the commons as symbolic or tangible land) that we talk about when we talk about the commons (whether it be in the ‘old’ meaning of territory or in the more modern metaphorical sense). Ostensibly, enclosure is about land. What it brought about on a much more profound level was a radical change in traditions and custom relating to the fabric of social life as a whole. A slow and contested process evolving over many centuries, we have witnessed agricultural and local economies being replaced by capitalism and industrialization, and industrialization being superseded by the information age. As we are confronted with a second enclosure movement—targeting the mind rather than the land—we should keep this history in mind and learn from it.

Openness

Even if we cannot reduce the call for openness to a simple cause-and-effect reaction to enclosure, it would be equally misleading not to see the two as intimately related. Many of the initiatives we have grown accustomed to as placeholders of the openness movement have developed around a critique of an over-bloated intellectual property rights regime. Vision statements such as that of the influential Creative Commons (CC) list a few recurring concerns: “Realizing the full potential of the Internet — universal access to research, education, full participation in culture, and driving a new era of development, growth, and productivity.” While born digital and hardly twenty years old, the openness movement may be contemporaneous with the breakthrough of the Internet, however in a conceptual sense it draws inspiration from a history going back many centuries. As digital movements go, it is not a homogenous unit but a distributed Net-network of loosely connected and sometimes even conflicting initiatives, initiatives that include activists as well as academics.

Rooted in the arrival of free software and open source, the openness movement emphasizes access to knowledge, the virtue of sharing, and the ethics of participation and collaboration. As part of the Web 2.0 phenomenon and now with the next generation Web 3.0 on the horizon, to date we have seen a proliferation of digital platforms bearing the label “open,” or drawing on the virtues of “the commons.” The potential of networked innovation, crowd sourcing, and collaboration are seen as key elements in the openness movement. As part of the much-touted Europe 2020 strategy, “openness” is one of the key action points of the European Commission Innovation Union. Movements such as A2K, platforms such as Open Science or Science Commons, and the proliferation and impact of OA journals that eclipse traditional channels – such as the successful Public Library of Science (PLOS) are indicative of the importance of openness in an information economy and the fact that it now competes with intellectual property rights as a prerequisite for innovative activity. Openness spans a continuum from hacker-ethics to global corporate governance. UNESCO (2011) considers openness a global public good, supporting Open Access “for the benefit of the global flow of knowledge, innovation and equitable socio-economic development.”

The Information Commons

Why then, has the idea of the commons gained such currency as a viable alternative to intellectual property expansionism in the networked and knowledge-intensive present?

The media-saturated, online, globalized information age depends on an information commons, a word familiar to any one who has ever used a well-stocked North American university library, where the clusters of computers servicing the needs of faculty and students alike usually is known by that very name. To talk of the commons within this present context is to speak of an environment on two parallel levels. One commons is still, despite evidence we might think we have to the contrary, highly tangible. However, there is also another one, which is intangible and informational, reducible to bits and zeros. The fact that both have spatial connotations allows us to include information, airwaves, and the Internet with centuries of elaborate irrigation management in Andalusia, and surfers sharing or excluding other surfers from the best waves on the beaches of Australia or California.

Decentered and deterritorialized, at first sight the concerns of this new commons appear very different from what was at stake many centuries ago. Rather than meadows, fish, or any other physical resource that may be subject to depletion or overuse, information, knowledge, symbols, and text make up the valuables we search for on never-ending digital grazing lands. The information commons represents therefore the ultimate disconnection from actual land; when using the term in the twenty-first century we picture a virtual and digital space, and not the verdant hills and fields of the English countryside. When did the commons begin to make sense within this contemporary framework? When did it become commonplace to add the word information in front, or map a predominately historical and material concept onto symbolic rather than tangible space? To pinpoint the beginning of such a change is extremely difficult, if not downright impossible. To suggest the information commons interdependency with the emergence of the World Wide Web would hardly be an exaggerated claim. Equally uncontroversial is assuming that the basic condition of globalization offers the surrounding structure within which we must conceptualize this particular development.

Primarily, the productiveness of the information commons as concept derives from a recognition of the specificity of the informational resource and its uses. The information commons is simply made of a very different raw material than soil, turf, and grass. Information-based resources are both non-rival (my use of information does not hinder yours; in fact, you and I can use the same resource simultaneously with no detrimental effect taking place), as well as non-excludable (initially, information can be costly to produce, but new technology makes it difficult to hinder an infinite number of users at zero marginal cost). The first criteria is essential for those who wish to disprove the applicability of Garrett Hardin’s infamous ‘tragedy of the commons’ in a situation where information is both the outcome of, and the prerequisite for, production. Indeed, the ‘tragedy of the commons’ is practically unavoidable in any study dealing with the management of the commons, regardless of epistemological inclinations. Hardin made one simple point: if you imagine a pasture open to all, each herdsman will not be altruistic, but instead he will try his utmost to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons, even when the end result will prove detrimental to himself. As long as there is a functioning balance between what the land can hold and the use of it, everything is just dandy. Unfortunately, this state of equilibrium is but a chimera, since ‘the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.’

Hardin describes is a situation where nobody has the power to deny anybody else’s right to use, and where self-interest always wins out. If there are no possible benefits to be had, the incentive to invest is nil. Resources left to their own devices in the commons will simply vanish. Since the commons cannot govern itself and the voice of reason is not heard, something must be done. Hardin saw several possibilities for governance of the commons: making it into private property, allocating access by means of a lottery or perhaps on a first-come, first-served basis – all were conceivable options. Nobel Prize recipient Elinor Ostrom has argued very differently, and shows in her research that there is a remarkable plethora of examples from a middle ground, where the answer to the problems of the commons is neither complete privatization, nor absolute statist intervention. One of the major dilemmas of these two basic solutions that tends to be called upon to solve the risk of overutilization is that both are imposed from outside or above on those who use the commons, be they farmers or surfers. Both represent top-down solutions to bottom-up practices.

As it turns out, farmers in Andalusia manage very well on their own, successfully allocating water through complex systems of irrigation and settling disputes through the formation of a self-governing tribunal in the town square. Surfers rely on certain norms and informal codes in order to ensure that their usage of waves is consistent with what the community of surfers would expect and consider moral. In the end, the number of examples that punch a hole be specific, local, and limited, but they are sufficiently numerous to repudiate absolutist claims of a preordained unhappy ending. As Carol Rose suggests, there might be another genre Hardin never considered, and that is when the commons in fact should be considered a Comedy.

It is by now a truism that a tragedy in Hardin’s terms is less likely to occur in the information commons. But fences proliferate in this new dominion too. Not made out of wood or barbed wire, they make it increasingly difficult to access information, knowledge, and cultural expressions. Locks need not be cast in iron to be effective; they do their job just as well when invisible and embedded in code. The accelerated use of licensing agreements adds to the complexities of what we think we can and cannot do as users. Temporal and spatial limitations for use in certain digital forms of materials that should reside safely in the public domain do exist. All such hindrances are omnipresent in the jungle that surrounds valuable informational resources.

As we surf the information commons some sections look, feel, and behave differently from the rural commons, while we can move about other parts almost blindfolded. The terminology is familiar enough; we speak of the Digital Commons movement, use the Creative Commons licenses, or support the work done by the Science Commons or the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It is hardly coincidental that prominent contemporary institutions and organizations are working against the further enclosure of the information commons. As brand new as the concerns of the Open Source movement might be, it is not in name only that they follow in the footsteps of historical precursors such as the Commons Preservation Society and their struggle for Open Spaces in nineteenth-century London. Likewise, the list of initiatives that attempt to regain some of already lost ground and recapture the information commons in science, higher education, and culture is impressive: The Public Library of Science, the Science Commons, the Public Knowledge Project, and Project Gutenberg, to mention but a few.

Commons old and new: an emphasis on use

If I have to choose one common denominator, one thread that weaves through all these various trajectories, then it would be the fact that the information commons, just like its earlier predecessors on terra firma, relates to custom and users rights first and land, second. There is something paradoxical, however, in the ease with which the unique properties of this new resource land- scape come into focus by reference to the old commons economy. Yochai Benkler describes global peer-to-peer production of today as an activity where information technology enables direct participation in a decentralized network outside the relationships of the market. The commons makes sense within the high-tech present because the basis of the networked economy is access to and continuous recirculation of information, something that must involve some sustainable form of use rights.

The key to the iconic role of the commons in the information-based environment is therefore its ability to turn consumers into producers. In the field of scholarly communication, passive appropriators become active providers. In the cultural sphere the consumer/record player/DJ turn into producers. Couch potatoes rise from their insipid consumer existence to a ‘life where one can individually and collectively participate in making something new.’ The Electronic Frontier Foundation open their mission statement by arguing that from the ‘Internet to the iPod, technologies of freedom are transforming our society and empowering us as speakers, citizens, creators, and consumers’; and the Creative Commons licenses are there to ‘offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them.’

The emphasis on use logically brings up the perspective of custom and whether the information commons has any traditions to speak of in this respect. ‘From time immemorial,’ the habitual measuring stick in defending customary rights, is a notion almost unfathomable to the modern file sharer or rights holder (who, let us not forget, can be one and the same). That we are indebted to an older generation for rights that we in turn hold in trust until they are passed on to the next generation, and that instant gratification must be suspended and even abandoned in favor of a long-term commitment are old-fashioned attitudes on the verge of becoming archaic, especially on the Internet, where custom sometimes appears to be a misnomer for regulation, and hence worthy of only negligible attention. The commons was never an unregulated space. Its use depended on forms of conduct and customary rites, in other words, on forms of regulation. The same can be said for any the rural as well as the informational commons. Exactly how we achieve such governance in our global and networked society is a hotly contested issue, but the fact remains that we have very few, if any, institutions dedicated to the protection of the commons and our common informational resources.

One cannot fail to note that an aura of utopia surrounds the information commons. Because of intellectual property expansionism, there is a tendency to posit the commons as a Lost Eden, happily devoid of the weaknesses associated with intellectual property. It is at present something of an idealized other, the unwavering defense against the missiles launched by the blitzkrieg-inclined copyright holders, a benevolent Dr. Jekyll warding off Mr. Hyde’s hyper-aggression. Invoking the virtues of the commons becomes the Pavlovian response to the current weighted intellectual property system: it is an affirmative place. That it has arrived at such a position is not surprising, considering the polarization of argument that propels the copyright wars, but it is not without certain problems of its own. The implicit presumption that although there is plenty of outside pressure on the commons, internally bliss and consensus is problematic. Not seeing the internal lacerations, rips, and conflicts of interest contained within the commons is more than counter-productive; it is dangerous. It is never a good idea to over-romanticize. To view the commons as a free space, without any rules, regulations, or clear specifications of uses is deeply misleading. Just as problematic is to assume that commoners are philanthropic by nature, inviting every Tom, Dick, and Harry who so wishes to come join them on their commons. Xenophobia, separating ‘us’ from ‘them,’ is an element of the commons economy that displays its fair share of the parochial. Disregarding the more unsavory geopolitical realities of the information commons is to underestimate the sophistication of the power relations that underpin the openness/enclosure matrix.

We make sense of today’s commons by comparing it with yesterday’s; we know more about the specificity of information-based resources by lessons learned about how tangible resources have been and are used; we recognize the same arguments of improvement and progress that were used throughout the history of enclosure in the fencing in of symbolic space today. We look to history to understand the present.

Les Glaneurs, c’est nous

Varda’s film makes a powerful case against the consumerism of modern society, made all the more conspicuous by advanced technology. Machines that have replaced manual labor may be both swift and economical, but they also leave perfectly fine fruits and vegetables on the ground following their automated maneuvers. Heart-shaped potatoes, apples that are somehow too small or too big, grapes that are left behind on the slopes of the vineyard – even though they fail to conform to the standard size or the quality of the appellation label they are as edible and drinkable as the cookie-cutter vegetables and grapes that do make it onto the supermarket shelves. If there is any sadness in Varda’s otherwise affirmative documentary, it is perhaps when she notes that gleaning is no longer the collective and social act depicted in the Millet painting or in the other, less famous works of art she uncovers during her road trip.

Gleaning was a social activity, where you were seen and recognized by others. And rules and regulations around gleaning recur in all the regions Varda visits. Sometimes – as in the case of the Atlantic Noirmoutier oyster beds – there are as many suggestions about the number of oysters one is allowed to pick and how far away from the beds one must remain when doing so as there are people she interviews. Disagreeing on the finer points, no one questions that the use of the resource depends on elaborate rules and on respectful conduct. Varda talks to those who glean and those who make their apple orchards or potato fields available for gleaners to use. She visits the kitchen of the renowned two-starGuide Rouge chef who was taught frugality by his grandparents and never throws anything away in his restaurant. As she documents the vagrants, the unemployed, and the homeless, she never shies away from the fact that the line between gleaning and poverty is sometimes extremely fine. A necessity for some, a tradition and pleasure for others, revolt against society’s consumerism for yet another – gleaning fills many functions.

In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Varda places Maître Dessaud in a cabbage field, as if, tongue-in-cheek, putting the law where it belongs. Clad in his formal black robe and clutching his red ‘Bible,’ the French Code Pénal, Maître Dessaud explains that once the harvest is over, one can glean the cabbages around him ‘with absolute impunity.’ Cabbages seem very different from cultural expressions, perhaps, but as Varda very perceptively notes as she moves from the cabbage field to the snippets of cultural expressions she picks up with the help of her small handheld camera: ‘La Glaneuse, c’est moi.’ How very true. Les glaneurs, c’est nous.

This article is a revised and abridged version of a chapter in the author’s book Terms of Use: Negotiating the Jungle of the Intellectual Commons. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

by Eva Hemmungs Wirtén , 17 June

The History of America’s Secret Wars: Corporate Espionage and the Outsourcing of National Security

This text is excerpted from Big Lies: How Our Corporate Overlords, Politicians and Media Establishment Warp Reality and Undermine Democracy

Pre-9/11 Flashback

When NATO’s US and British troops in Macedonia began evacuating Albanian rebels in June 2001, officials claimed that they were merely trying to help Europe avert a devastating civil war. Most media dutifully repeated this spin as fact. But the explanation only made sense if you ignored a troublesome contradiction; namely, US support for both the Macedonian Armed Forces and the Albanians fighting them. Beyond that, there was a decade of confused and manipulative Western policies, climaxing with NATO bombing and the imposition of “peace” through aggression in Kosovo. Together, these moves effectively destabilized the region.

In Macedonia, the main “cut out” – spook-speak for “intermediary” –was Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI), then a major private military company (PMC) whose Macedonian field commander was a former US general with strong ties to Kosovo Liberation Army Commander Agim Ceku and Macedonian General Jovan Andrejevski.

MPRI and other PMCs that have succeeded it receive much of their funding from the US State Department, Pentagon, and CIA. For example, MPRI trained and equipped the Bosnian Croat Muslim Federation Army with a large State Department contract. Over the years, the company claimed to have “helped” Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Macedonia – in effect, arming and training all parties. In 2000, it pulled in at least $70 million from its global operations.

Working closely with the Pentagon, MPRI also arranged for the Kosovo Liberation Army’s (KLA) training and weapons in the run up to the war on Yugoslavia. Later, the same firm channeled token military aid to the Macedonian army, new US weapons to the rebels, and military intelligence to both sides.

Actually, it was a standard procedure, applied with great success in the Middle East for decades: Keep warring parties from overwhelming one other and you strengthen the bargaining power of the puppeteer behind the scenes. Better yet, combine this with disinformation; that is, tell the public one thing while doing the opposite.

It’s not a question of allies and enemies. Those designations can change for any number of reasons. In 1999, ethnic Albanians were victims and freedom fighters. In 2001, they were “officially” a threat. Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden were just three of the friends-turned-pariahs who learned that lesson.

And what was the real objective in Macedonia? The country was in a financial straight jacket, its budget basically controlled by the IMF and the World Bank on behalf of international creditors. Since the IMF had placed a ceiling on military expenditures, the only funding option left was privatization. According to Jane’s Defense Weekly, the process started with the sale of the government’s stake in Macedonian Telekom.

Even more was at stake – things like strategic pipeline routes and transport corridors through the country. But that wouldn’t become obvious for years, if ever. This is another traditional tactic: Keep the true agenda under wraps for as long as possible.

Pretexts for War

Despite 24-hour news and talk about transparency, there’s much we don’t know about our past, much less current events. What’s worse, some of what we think we know isn’t true.

The point is that it’s no accident. Consider, for example, the proximate circumstances that led to open war in Vietnam. According to official history, two US destroyers patrolling in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam were victims of unprovoked attacks in August 1964, leading to a congressional resolution that gave President Johnson the power “to take all necessary measures.”

In fact, the destroyers were spy ships, part of a National Security Agency (NSA) eavesdropping program operating near the coast as a way to provoke the North Vietnamese into turning on their radar and other communications channels. The more provocative the maneuvers, the more signals that could be captured. Meanwhile, US raiding parties were shelling mainland targets. Documents revealed later indicated that the August 4 attack on the USS Maddox – the pretext for passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution – may not even have taken place.

But even if it did, the incident was still stage managed to build up congressional and public support for the war. Evidence suggests that the plan was based on Operation Northwoods, a scheme developed in 1962 to justify an invasion of Cuba. Among the tactics the Joint Chiefs of Staff considered then were blowing up a ship in Guantanamo Bay, a phony “communist Cuba terror campaign” in Florida and Washington, DC, and an elaborate plan to convince people that Cuba had shot down a civilian airliner filled with students. That operation wasn’t implemented, but two years later, desperate for a war, the administration’s military brass found a way to create the necessary conditions in Vietnam.

NSA and Echelon

For more than half a century, the eyes and ears of US power to monitor and manipulate information (and with it, mass perceptions) has been the NSA, initially designed to assist the CIA. Its original task was to collect raw information about threats to US security, cracking codes and using the latest technology to provide accurate intelligence on the intentions and activities of enemies. Emerging after World War II, its early focus was the Soviet Union. But it never did crack a high-level Soviet cipher system. On the other hand, it used every available means to eavesdrop on not only enemies but also allies and US citizens.

In Body of Secrets, James Bamford described a bureaucratic and secretive behemoth, based in an Orwellian Maryland complex known as Crypto City. From there, supercomputers linked it to spy satellites, subs, aircraft, and equally covert, strategically placed listening posts worldwide. By 2000, it had a $7 billion annual budget and directly employed at least 38,000 people, more than the CIA and FBI. It was also the leader of an international intelligence club, UKUSA, which includes Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Together, they monitored and recorded billions of encrypted communications, telephone calls, radio messages, faxes, and e-mails around the world.

Over the years, however, the line between enemies and friends blurred, and the intelligence gatherers often converted their control of information into unilateral power, influencing the course of history in ways that may never be known. No doubt the agency has had a hand in countless covert operations; yet, attempts to pull away the veil of secrecy have been largely unsuccessful.

In the mid-1970s, for example, just as Congress was attempting to reign in the CIA, the NSA was quietly creating a virtual state, a massive international computer network named Platform. Doing away with formal borders, it developed a software package that turned worldwide Sigint (short for “signal intelligence”: communication intelligence, eavesdropping, and electronic intelligence) into a unified whole. An early software package was code named Echelon, a name later connected with eavesdropping on commercial communication.

Of course, the NSA and its British sister, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), refused to admit Echelon existed, even though declassified documents appeared on the Internet and Congress conducted an investigation. A European Parliament report also confirmed Echelon’s activities, and encouraged Internet users and governments to adopt stronger privacy measures in response.

In March 2001, several ranking British politicians discussed Echelon’s potential impacts on civil liberties, and a European Parliament committee considered its legal, human rights, and privacy implications. The Dutch held similar hearings, and a French National Assembly inquiry urged the European Union to embrace new privacy enhancing technologies to protect against Echelon’s eavesdropping. France launched a formal investigation into possible abuses for industrial espionage.

When Allies Compete

A prime reason for Europe’s discontent was the suspicion that the NSA had used intercepted conversations to help US companies win contracts heading for European firms. The alleged losers included Airbus, a consortium including interests in France, Germany, Spain, and Britain, and Thomson CSF, a French electronics company. The French claimed they had lost a $1.4 billion deal to supply Brazil with a radar system because the NSA shared details of the negotiations with Raytheon. Airbus may have lost a contract worth $2 billion to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas because of information intercepted and passed on by the agency.

According to former NSA agent Wayne Madsen, the US used information gathered from its bases in Australia to win a half share in a significant Indonesian trade contract for AT&T. Communication intercepts showed the contract was initially going to a Japanese firm. A bit later a lawsuit against the US and Britain was launched in France, judicial and parliamentary investigations began in Italy, and German parliamentarians demanded an inquiry.

The rationale for turning the NSA loose on commercial activities, even those involving allies, was provided in the mid-90s by Sen. Frank DeConcini, then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I don’t think we should have a policy where we’re going to invade the Airbus inner sanctum and find out their secrets for the purpose of turning it over to Boeing or McDonnell Douglas,” he opined. “But if we find something, not to share it with our people seems to me to be not smart.” President Bill Clinton and other US officials buttressed this view by charging that European countries were unfairly subsidizing Airbus. In other words, competition with significant US interests can be a matter of national security, and private capitalism must be protected from state-run enterprises.

The US-Europe row about Airbus subsidies was also used as a “test case” for scientists developing new intelligence tools. At US Defense Department conferences on “text retrieval,” competitions were staged to find the best methods. A standard test featured extracting protected data about “Airbus subsidies.”

 Manipulating Democracy

In the end, influencing the outcome of huge commercial transactions is but the tip of this iceberg. The NSA’s ability to listen to virtually any transmitted communication has enhanced the power of unelected officials and private interests to set covert foreign policy in motion. In some cases, the objective is clear and arguably defensible: taking effective action against terrorism, for example. But in others, the grand plans of the intelligence community have led it to undermine democracies.

The 1975 removal of Australian Prime Minister Edward Whitlam is an instructive case. At the time of Whitlam’s election in 1972, Australian intelligence was working with the CIA against the Allende government in Chile. The new PM didn’t simply order a halt to Australia’s involvement, explained William Blum in Killing Hope, a masterful study of US interventions since World War II. Whitlam seized intelligence information withheld from him by the Australian Security and Intelligence Organization (ASIO), and disclosed the existence of a joint CIA-ASIO directorate that monitored radio traffic in Asia. He also openly disapproved of US plans to build up the Indian Ocean Island of Diego Garcia as a military-intelligence-nuclear outpost.

Both the CIA and NSA became concerned about the security and future of crucial intelligence facilities in and near Australia. The country was already key member of UKUSA. After launching its first space-based listening post-a microwave receiver with an antenna pointed at earth-NSA had picked an isolated desert area in central Australia as a ground station. Once completed, the base at Alice Springs was named Pine Gap, the first of many listening posts to be installed around the world. For the NSA and CIA, Whitlam posed a threat to the secrecy and security of such operations.

An early step was covert funding for the political opposition, in hopes of defeating Whitlam’s Labor Party in 1974. When that failed, meetings were held with the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, a figurehead representing the Queen of England who had worked for CIA front organizations since the 50s. Defense officials warned that intelligence links would be cut off unless someone stopped Whitlam. On November 11, 1975, Kerr responded, dismissing the prime minister, dissolving both houses of Parliament, and appointing an interim government until new elections were held.

According to Christopher Boyce (subject of The Falcon and the Snowman, a fictionalized account), who watched the process while working for TRW in a CIA-linked cryptographic communications center, the spooks also infiltrated Australian labor unions and contrived to suppress transportation strikes that were holding up deliveries to US intelligence installations. Not coincidentally, some unions were leading the opposition to development of those same facilities.

How often, and to what effect, such covert ops have succeeded is another of the mysteries that comprise an unwritten history of the last half century. Beyond that, systems like Echelon violate the human right to individual privacy, and give those who control the information the ability to act with impunity, sometimes destroying lives and negating the popular will in the process.

Hiding the Agenda in Peru

In May 1960, when a U-2 spy plane was shot down over Soviet territory, President Dwight Eisenhower took great pains to deny direct knowledge or authorization of the provocative mission. In reality, he personally oversaw every U-2 mission, and had even riskier and more provocative bomber overflights in mind.

It’s a basic rule of thumb for covert ops: When exposed, keep denying and deflect the blame. More important, never, never let on that the mission itself may be a pretext, or a diversion from some other, larger agenda.

Considering that, the April 20, 2001, shoot down of a plane carrying missionaries across the Brazilian border into Peru becomes highly suspicious. At first, the official story fed to the press was that Peruvian authorities ordered the attack on their own, over the pleas of the CIA “contract pilots” who initially spotted the plane. But Peruvian pilots involved in that program, supposedly designed to intercept drug flights, insist that nothing was shot down without US approval.

Innocent planes were sometimes attacked, but most were small, low flying aircraft that didn’t file flight plans and had no radios. This plane maintained regular contact and did file a plan. Still, even after it crash-landed, the Peruvians continued to strafe it, perhaps in an attempt to ignite the plane’s fuel and eliminate the evidence.

“I think it has to do with Plan Colombia and the coming war,” said Celerino Castillo, who had previously worked in Peru for Drug Enforcement Agency. “The CIA was sending a clear message to all non-combatants to clear out of the area, and to get favorable press.” The flight was heading to Iquitos, which “is at the heart of everything the CIA is doing right now,” he added. “They don’t want any witnesses.”

Timing also may have played a part. The shoot down occurred on the opening day of the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. Uruguay’s President Jorge Ibanez, who had proposed the worldwide legalization of drugs just weeks before, was expected to make a high-profile speech on his proposal at the gathering. The downing of a drug smuggling plane at this moment, near territory held by Colombia’s FARC rebels, would help to defuse Uruguay’s message and reinforce the image of the insurgents as drug smugglers.

If you doubt that the US would condone such an operation or cover it up, consider this: In 1967, Israel torpedoed the USS Liberty, a large floating listening post, as it was eavesdropping on the Arab-Israeli war off the Sinai Peninsula. Hundreds of US sailors were wounded and killed, probably because Israel feared that its massacre of Egyptian prisoners at El Arish might be overheard. How did the Pentagon respond? By imposing a total news ban, and covering up the facts for decades.

Will we ever find out what really happened in Peru, specifically why a missionary and her daughter were killed? Not likely, since it involves a private military contractor that is basically beyond the reach of congressional accountability.

In 2009, when the Peru shoot down became one of five cases of intelligence operation cover up being investigated by the US House Intelligence Committee, the CIA inspector general concluded that the CIA had improperly concealed information about the incident. Intelligence Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairwoman Jan Schakowsky, who led the investigation, didn’t rule out referrals to the Justice Department for criminal prosecutions if evidence surfaced that intelligence officials broke the law. But she couldn’t guarantee that the facts would ever come to light, since the Committee’s report of its investigation would be classified.

The most crucial wrinkle in the Peruvian incident is the involvement of DynCorp, which was active in Colombia and Bolivia under large contracts with various US agencies. The day after the incident, ABC news reported that, according to “senior administration officials,” the crew of the surveillance plane that first identified the doomed aircraft “was hired by the CIA from DynCorp.” Within two days, however, all references to DynCorp were scrubbed from ABC’s Website. A week later, the New York Post claimed the crew actually worked for Aviation Development Corp., allegedly a CIA proprietary company.

Whatever the truth, State Department officials refused to talk on the record about DynCorp’s activities in South America. Yet, according to DynCorp’s State Department contract, the firm had received at least $600 million over the previous few years for training, drug interdiction, search and rescue (which included combat), air transport of equipment and people, and reconnaissance in the region. And that was only what they put on paper. It also operated government aircraft and provided all manner of personnel, particularly for Plan Colombia.

 Outsourcing Defense

DynCorp began in 1946 as the employee-owned air cargo business California Eastern Airways, flying in supplies for the Korean War. This and later government work led to charges that it was a CIA front company. Whatever the truth, it ultimately became a leading PMC, hiring former soldiers and police officers to implement US foreign policy without having to report to Congress.

The push to privatize war gained traction during the first Bush administration. After the first Gulf War, the Pentagon, then headed by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, paid a Halliburton subsidiary nearly $9 million to study how PMCs could support US soldiers in combat zones, according to a Mother Jones investigation. Cheney subsequently became CEO of Halliburton, and Brown & Root, later known as Halliburton KBR, won billions to construct and run military bases, some in secret locations.

One of DynCorp’s earliest “police” contracts involved the protection of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and, after he was ousted, providing the “technical advice” that brought military officers involved in that coup into Haiti’s National Police. Despite this dodgy record, in 2002 it won the contract to protect another new president, Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai. By then, it was a top IT federal contractor specializing in computer systems development, and also providing the government with aviation services, general military management, and security expertise.

Like other private military outfits, the main danger it has faced is the risk of public exposure. Under one contract, for example, DynCorp sprayed vast quantities of herbicides over Colombia to kill the cocaine crop. In September 2001, Ecuadorian Indians filed a class action lawsuit, charging that DynCorp recklessly sprayed their homes and farms, causing illnesses and deaths and destroying crops. In Bosnia, private police provided by DynCorp for the UN were accused of buying and selling prostitutes, including a 12-year-old girl. Others were charged with videotaping a rape.

In the first years of the 21st century, DynCorp’s day-to-day operations in South America were overseen by State Department officials, including the Narcotic Affairs Section and the Air Wing, the latter a clique of unreformed cold warriors and leftovers from 80s operations in Central America. It was essentially the State Department’s private air force in the Andes, with access to satellite-based recording and mapping systems. In the 1960s, a similar role was played by the Vinnell Corp., which the CIA called “our own private mercenary army in Vietnam.” Vinnell later became a subsidiary of TRW, a major NSA contractor, and employed US Special Forces vets to train Saudi Arabia’s National Guard. In the late 1990s, TRW hired former NSA director William Studeman to help with its intelligence program.

DynCorp avoided the kind of public scandal that surrounded the activities of Blackwater. In Ecuador, where it developed military logistics centers and coordinated “anti-terror” police training, the exposure of a secret covenant signed with the Aeronautics Industries Directorate of the Ecuadorian Air Force briefly threatened to make waves. According to a November 2003 exposé in Quito’s El Comercio, the arrangement, hidden from the National Defense Council, made DynCorp’s people part of the US diplomatic mission.

In Colombia, DynCorp’s coca eradication and search-and-rescue missions led to controversial pitched battles with rebels. US contract pilots flew Black Hawk helicopters carrying Colombian police officers who raked the countryside with machine gun fire to protect the missions against attacks. According to investigative reporter Jason Vest, DynCorp employees were also implicated in narcotics trafficking. But such stories didn’t get far, and, in any case, DynCorp’s “trainers” simply ignored congressional rules, including those that restrict the US from aiding military units linked to human rights abuses.

In 2003, DynCorp won a multimillion-dollar contract to build a private police force in post-Saddam Iraq, with some of the funding diverted from an anti-drug program for Afghanistan. In 2004, the State Department further expanded DynCorp’s role as a global US surrogate with a $1.75 billion, five year contract to provide law enforcement personnel for civilian policing operations in “post-conflict areas” around the world. That March, the company also got an Army contract to support helicopters sold to foreign countries. The work, described as “turnkey” services, includes program management, logistics support, maintenance and aircrew training, aircraft maintenance and refurbishment, repair and overhaul of aircraft components and engines, airframe and engine upgrades, and the production of technical publications.

In short, DynCorp was a trusted partner in the military-intelligence-industrial complex. “Are we outsourcing order to avoid public scrutiny, controversy or embarrassment?” asked Rep. Schakowsky upon submitting legislation to prohibit US funding for private military firms in the Andean region. “If there is a potential for a privatized Gulf of Tonkin incident, then the American people deserve to have a full and open debate before this policy goes any further.”

If and when that ever happens, the discussion will have to cover a lot of ground. Private firms, working in concert with various intelligence agencies, constitute a vast foreign policy apparatus that is largely invisible, rarely covered by the corporate press, and not currently subject to congressional oversight. The Freedom of Information Act simply doesn’t apply. Any information on whom they arm or how they operate is private, proprietary information.

The US government downplays its use of mercenaries, a state of affairs that could undermine any efforts to find out about CIA activities that are concealed from Congress. Yet private contractors perform almost every function essential to military operations, a situation that has been called the “creeping privatization of the business of war.” By 2004, the Pentagon was employing more than 700,000 private contractors.

The companies are staffed by former generals, admirals, and highly trained officers. Name a hot spot and some PMC has people there. DynCorp has worked on the Defense Message System Transition Hub and done long-range planning for the Air Force. MPRI had a similar contract with the Army, and for a time coordinated the Pentagon’s military and leadership training in at least seven African nations.

How did this outsourcing of defense evolve? In 1969, the US Army had about 1.5 million active duty soldiers. By 1992, the figure had been cut by half. Since the mid-1990s, however, the US has mobilized militarily to intervene in several significant conflicts, and a corporate “foreign legion” has filled the gap between foreign policy imperatives and what a downsized, increasingly over-stretched military can provide.

Use of high technology equipment feeds the process. Private companies have technical capabilities that the military needs, but doesn’t always possess. Contractors have maintained stealth bombers and Predator unmanned drones used in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some military equipment is specifically designed to be operated and maintained by private companies.

In Britain, the debate over military privatization has been public, since the activities of the UK company Sandline in Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea embarrassed the government in the late 1990s. But no country has clear policies to regulate PMCs, and the limited oversight that does exist rarely works. In the US, they have largely escaped notice, except when US contract workers in conflict zones are killed or go way over the line, as in the case of Blackwater.

According to Guy Copeland, who began developing public-private IT policy in the Reagan years, “The private sector must play an integral role in improving our national cybersecurity.” After all, he has noted, private interests own and operate 85 percent of the nation’s critical IT infrastructure. He should know. After all, Copeland drafted much of the language in the Bush Administration’s 2002 National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace as co-chair of the Information Security Committee of the Information Technology Association of America.

Nevertheless, when the federal government becomes dependent on unaccountable, private companies like DynCorp and Blackwater (later renamed Xe Services) for so many key security services, as well as for military logistics, management, strategy, expertise and “training,” fundamental elements of US defense have been outsourced. And the details of that relationship are matters that the intelligence community will fight long and hard to keep out of public view.

Corporate Connections and “Soft Landings”

Although the various departments and private contractors within the military-intelligence-industrial complex occasionally have turf battles and don’t always share information or coordinate strategy as effectively as they might, close and ongoing contact has long been considered essential. And it has expanded as a result of the information revolution. The entire intelligence community has its own secret Intranet, which pulls together FBI reports, NSA intercepts, analysis from the DIA and CIA, and other deeply covert sources.

Private firms are connected to this information web through staff, location, shared technology, and assorted contracts. Working primarily for the Pentagon, for example, L-3 Communications, a spinoff from major defense contractor Lockheed Martin, has manufactured hardware like control systems for satellites and flight recorders. MPRI, which was bought by L-3, provided services like its operations in Macedonia. L-3 also built the NSA’s Secure Terminal Equipment, which instantly encrypts phone conversations.

Another private contractor active in the Balkans was Science Applications, staffed by former NSA and CIA personnel, and specializing in police training. When Janice Stromsem, a Justice Department employee, complained that its program gave the CIA unfettered access to recruiting agents in foreign police forces, she was relieved of her duties. Her concern was that the sovereignty of nations receiving aid from the US was being compromised.

In 1999, faced with personnel cuts, the NSA offered over 4000 employees “soft landing” buy outs to help them secure jobs with defense firms that have major NSA contracts. NSA offered to pay the first year’s salary, in hopes the contractor would then pick up the tab. Sometimes the employee didn’t even have to move away from Crypto City. Companies taking part in the program included TRW and MPRI’s parent company, Lockheed Martin.

Lockheed was also a winner in the long-term effort to privatize government services. In 2000, it won a $43.8 million contract to run the Defense Civilian Personnel Data System, one of the largest human resources systems in the world. As a result, a major defense contractor took charge of consolidating all Department of Defense personnel systems, covering hiring and firing for about 750,000 civilian employees. This put the contractor at the cutting edge of Defense Department planning, and made it a key gatekeeper at the revolving door between the US military and private interests.

Invisible Threats

Shortly after his appointment as NSA director in 1999, Michael Hayden went to see the film Enemy of the State, in which Will Smith is pursued by an all-seeing, all hearing NSA and former operative Gene Hackman decries the agency’s dangerous power. In Body of Secrets, author Bamford says Hayden found the film entertaining, yet offensive and highly inaccurate. Still, the NSA chief was comforted by “a society that makes its bogeymen secrecy and power. That’s really what the movie’s about.”

 Unlike Hayden, most people don’t know where the fiction ends and NSA reality begins. Supposedly, the agency rarely spies on US citizens at home. On the other hand, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows a secret federal court to waive that limitation. The rest of the world doesn’t have that protection. Designating thousands of keywords, names, phrases, and phone numbers, NSA computers can pick them out of millions of messages, passing anything of interest on to analysts. One can only speculate about what happens next.

After 9/11 the plan was to go further with a project code named Tempest. The goal was to capture computer signals such as keystrokes or monitor images through walls or from other buildings, even if the computers weren’t linked to a network. An NSA document, “Compromising Emanations Laboratory Test Requirements, Electromagnetics,” described procedures for capturing the radiation emitted from a computer-through radio waves and the telephone, serial, network, or power cables attached to it.

Other NSA programs have included Oasis, designed to reduce audiovisual images into machine-readable text for easier filtering, and Fluent, which expanded Echelon’s multilingual capabilities. And let’s not forget the government’s Carnivore Internet surveillance program, capable of collecting all communications over any segment of the network being watched.

Put such elements together, combine them with business imperatives and covert foreign policy objectives, then throw PMCS into the mix, and you get a glimpse of the extent to which information can be translated into raw power and secretly used to shape events. Although most pieces of the puzzle remain obscure, enough is visible to justify suspicion, outrage, and a campaign to pull away the curtain on this Wizard of Oz. But fighting a force that is largely invisible and unaccountable – and able to eavesdrop on the most private exchanges, that is a daunting task, perhaps even more difficult than confronting the mechanisms of corporate globalization that it protects and promotes.