Some Sketches on Vertical Geographies - Superhumanity - Superhumanity - e-flux 05.10.16 17:35 Eileen Myles on getting a poem in the Newe-flux York Architecture… 22 hours - Trevor ago Paglen @e_flux - Some Sketches on VerticalClients GeographiesAbout Subscribe Contact SuperhumanityOctober 5, 2016 Trevor Paglen Some Sketches on Vertical Geographies Trevor Paglen, NSA-Tapped Undersea Cables, North Pacific Ocean, 2016 I’ve long thought that conventional understandings of geography were a little too “horizontal”. That geographical concepts such as production, uneven development, territory, scale, geopolitics and the like tended to be theorized on an assumed horizontal plane of human existence makes sense, Related Conversations Notes 1 Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land http://www.e-flux.com/architecture/superhumanity/68726/some-sketches-on-vertical-geographies/ Stránka 1 z 11 Some Sketches on Vertical Geographies - Superhumanity - Superhumanity - e-flux 05.10.16 17:35 because the vast majority of human activity does more-or-less 1 Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land Share (London: Verso, 2007); Stephen conform to the relatively narrow vertical band on the earth’s Graham and Lucy Hewitt, 'Getting off the ground: On the politics of surface that can support human life. But human urban verticality', Progress in Human infrastructures and activities also inhabit a vertical axis, from Geography, 37(1), 2012, pp 72–92. →; Benjamin Bratton, ‘The Black Stack’, deep sea mining and undersea cables to outer, and even e-flux, 53, 2014. → arguably interstellar, space. As others have observed, different Go to Text topologies of development, politics, urbanism, and the 2 Arthur C. Clarke, How the World was production of space emerge when we begin to consider the One (New York: Bantam, 1992). vertical dimensions of human world-making.1 Go to Text 3 Jeffrey Richelson, The U.S. What follows are some sketches of case-studies from my own Intelligence Community – Seventh work that have been personally helpful in considering what a Edition (Boulder: Westview Press, 2016); Shelly Sontag and theory of vertical geography might encompass. There is Christopher Drew with Annette nothing comprehensive here, nor anything actually theorized Lawrence Drew, Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American at all. These are simply some examples of things I think about. Submarine Espionage (New York: Public Affairs, 1998). Go to Text 4 See → From left to right: NSA-Tapped Undersea Cables, North Pacific Ocean, 2016; Author's Field Note: Undersea Work; Early sketch of NR-1 Reconnaissance Submarine; Poster for early Transatlantic Cable -20,000ft (Undersea Cables) More than 99% of the world’s data travels through fiberoptic cables draped across the ocean floor. Undersea cable encircle the globe at depths of 20,000ft (6,000m), connecting continents and providing the backbone of the world’s telecommunications infrastructure. After an aborted attempt in 1857, the first undersea cable connecting North America to the UK was laid in 1858 when the warships Niagra and Agamemnon met in the middle of the Atlantic to splice the two ends of the telegraph cable they had lain from their respective ports. The first transcontinental conversation (which took a day to conduct) was the following: Repeat, please. Please send slower for the present. How? How do you receive? Send slower. Please send slower. How do you receive? Please say if you can read this. Can you read this? Yes. http://www.e-flux.com/architecture/superhumanity/68726/some-sketches-on-vertical-geographies/ Stránka 2 z 11 Some Sketches on Vertical Geographies - Superhumanity - Superhumanity - e-flux 05.10.16 17:35 How are signals? Do you receive? Pease send something. Please send V’s and B’s. How are signals? Within a month, the cable was dead. Other attempts between 1857 and 1866 either failed outright or after short amounts of time. The first reliable cable came online in 1866.2 As of 2016, there are more than 300 active undersea cables. The undersea world of cables and communications is studied and acted upon by an American intelligence agency called the National Underwater Reconnaissance Office (NURO), jointly staffed by the CIA and the Navy.3 A sister agency to the National Reconnaissance Office (charged with the operations of reconnaissance satellites), the NURO conducts undersea surveying, search operations, oceanographic research, and the installation of undersea infrastructure, including taps on undersea cables. Since its inception in 1969, the NURO has deployed a handful of specialized ships and submarines to conduct its operations, including the USS Parche, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, the USS Halibut, the NR-1, and the more recent USS Jimmy Carter. The National Underwater Reconnaissance Office is a so-called “black” agency, meaning its existence is classified. The deep-sea geographies of internet cables and telecommunication are, quite literally, a submerged infrastructure that exists far below the altitudes that can support human bodies. On a vertical axis, the depth of undersea communications and reconnaissance activities is only superseded by specialized oil-drilling activities; the ill- fated Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico drilled the deepest oil well in history at a vertical depth of 35,055ft (10,685m). http://www.e-flux.com/architecture/superhumanity/68726/some-sketches-on-vertical-geographies/ Stránka 3 z 11 Some Sketches on Vertical Geographies - Superhumanity - Superhumanity - e-flux 05.10.16 17:35 Left: Internal NSA Document, “FAIRVIEW”; Right: Author's field note: NSA Utah Data Center. 0 (Backbone) Cable landing points are the places where undersea cables come onshore, usually connecting to a building called a cable landing station. The cable landing station is typically a windowless building that supplies power to an undersea cable’s amplifiers and repeaters (a typical undersea cable has between three and four thousand volts applied to it). In many cases, the cable landing station also connects the undersea cable to terrestrial “backhaul” cables, which lead to the common internet backbone, with switches, core routers and other equipment, effectively connecting the undersea cable to the terrestrial internet infrastructure. Cable landing stations serve as natural “choke points” of the internet, and are therefore of great interest to intelligence agencies like the NSA. Numerous internal NSA documents describe the importance of cable landing stations as surreptitious data-collection sites, often in collaboration with local telecommunications companies, including AT&T (“FAIRVIEW” in internal NSA documents), Verizon (“STORMBREW”), British Telecom (“REMEDY”), Vodafone Cable (“GERONTIC”), etc. Left to right: Persistent Surveillance Solutions demo image; Author's field note: Experimental Aerostat over Utah; Author's field note: Experimental Aerostat over Utah (detail). 2,500ft (Persistent Surveillance) Modern aerostats began to see widespread use in the 1980s when the US Customs Service installed the Tethered Aerostat Radar System (TARS) at High Rock, Grand Bahamas and Fort Huachuca, Arizona as part of the Reagan-Era “War on Drugs.”4 These airships were designed to provide radar-surveillance of border regions, and have been subsequently deployed throughout the Caribbean and Southwest at: Cudjoe Key, Florida; Deming, New Mexico; Eagle Pass, Texas; Fort Huachuca, Arizona; Lajas, Puerto Rico; Marfa, Texas; Rio Grande City, Texas; and Yuma, Arizona. http://www.e-flux.com/architecture/superhumanity/68726/some-sketches-on-vertical-geographies/ Stránka 4 z 11 Some Sketches on Vertical Geographies - Superhumanity - Superhumanity - e-flux 05.10.16 17:35 In the aftermath of the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the US Army contracted Lockheed Martin to develop aerostats that could be used to conduct persistent surveillance over occupied cities. The first Army aerostat was deployed in 2004. In the ensuing years, the Army has ordered and installed dozens of other aerostats over urban centers and war zones. Military aerostats utilize surveillance and sensor payloads such as Gorgon Stare, Kestral, and ARGUS-IS (Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System, which uses 368 cell phone cameras to provide a 1.8 gigapixel video imaging system). ARGUS can continuously monitor a thirty-six square mile area and uses automated tracking software to algorithmically track vehicles, pedestrians, and other objects and to conduct automated “pattern-of-life” analyses. Other sensor packages are designed to track cell phone and geo-location metadata, conduct multispectral analysis, synthetic aperture radar imaging, and more. Inspired by the military’s use of persistent surveillance systems over war zones, companies in the US have developed variations intended for domestic law enforcement. The most widely known of these, Persistent Surveillance Systems of Dayton, Ohio, uses modified lightweight aircraft to provide law enforcement with continuous 0.5m resolution video over a sixty-four square kilometer area. An export-authorized variation on the military’s Kestral system, developed by a company named Logos, is scheduled to be deployed on four aerostats over the Rio de Janiero Olympics. "We create a Google Earth view of the city and update it every second," John Marion, President of Logos, told Popular Mechanics, "And we store everything, so we can go through it like TiVo."5 25,000ft (Predators, Reapers, Sentinels) Left to right: Trevor Paglen, Untitled (Sentinel Drone) 2014, C-print, 20 x 25 in.; Detail of Untitled