Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the Club of Amsterdam. The topic under discussion was “The future of digital identity”. Many thanks to Felix and the team. A lively evening.
Annie Machon at the Club of Amsterdam from Annie Machon on Vimeo.
First published in my newsletter last week, amongst much else. Do sign up!
A recent interview with James Corbett of the Corbett Report on Global Research TV discussing issues such as FISA, Echelon, and our cultural “grooming” by the burgeoning surveillance state:
I saw this chilling report in my Twitter feed today (thanks @Asher_Wolf): Telstra is implementing deep packet inspection technology to throttle peer to peer sharing over the internet.
Despite being a classicist not a geek by training, this sounds like I know what I’m talking about, right? Well somewhat to my own surprise, I do, after years of exposure to the “hacktivist” ethos and a growing awareness that geeks may our last line of defence against the corporatists. In fact, I recently did an interview on The Keiser Report about the “war on the internet”.
Officially, Telstra is implementing this capability to protect those fragile business flowers (surely “broken business models” — Ed) within the entertainment and copyright industries — you know, the companies who pimp out creative artists, pay most of them a pittance while keeping the bulk of the loot for themselves, and then whine about how P2P file sharing and the circulation and enjoyment of the artists’ work is theft?
But who, seriously, thinks that such technology, once developed, will not be used and abused by all and sundry, down to and including our burgeoning police state apparatus? If the security forces can use any tool, no matter how sordid, they will do so, as has been recently reported with the UK undercover cops assuming the identities of dead children in order to infiltrate peaceful protest groups.
Writer and activist, Cory Doctorow, summed this problem up best in an excellent talk at the CCC hackerfest in Berlin in 2011:
The shredding of any notion of privacy will also have a chilling effect not only on the privacy of our communications, but will also result in our beginning to self-censor the information we ingest for fear of surveillance (Nazi book burnings are so 20th Century). It will, inevitably, also lead us to self-censor what we say and what we write, which will slide us into an Orwellian dystopia faster than we could say “Aaron Swartz”.
As Columbian Professor of Law, Eben Moglen, said so eloquently last year at another event in Berlin — “freedom of thought requires free media”:
Two of my favourite talks, still freely available on the internet. Enjoy.
My recent interview on Max Keiser’s excellent RT show, The Keiser Report, apparently now the most watched English language news commentary show across the world.
We were discussing such happy subjects as the war on terror, the war on drugs, but predominantly the war on the internet:
Just a quickie, as this is some sort of holiday season apparently. However, this did annoy me. In the same way that President Obama signed the invidious NDAA on 31st December last year, despite his protestations about vetoing etc, it appears the US government has sneaked/snuck through (please delete as appropriate, depending on how you pronounce “tomato”) yet another draconian law during the festive season, which apparently further erodes the US constitution and the civil rights of all Americans.
Yet another problem for our benighted cousins across the pond, you might think. But as so often happens these days, bonkers American laws can affect us all.
Yesterday the Senate approved an expansion of the terms of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). This allows the US intelligence services to hoover up, if you’ll pardon the mild intelligence joke, the emails of god-fearing, law-abiding Americans if they are exchanging emails with pesky foreigners.
Well of course the whole world now knows, post 9/11, that all foreigners are potential terrorists and are now being watched/snatched/extraordinarily rendered/tortured/assassinated with impunity. In Europe we have had many people suffer this way and some have managed to achieve recognition and restitution. That appears to do little to stop the drone wars and blood-letting that the USA has unleashed across the Middle East.
But the NDAA and the extended FISA should at least rouse the ire of Americans themselves: US citizens on US soil can now potentially be targeted. This is new, this is dangerous, right?
Well, no, not quite, as least as far as the interception of communications goes.
The Echelon system, exposed in 1988 by British journalist Duncan Campbell and reinvestigated in 1999, put in place just such a (legally dubious) mechanism for watching domestic citizens. The surveillance state was already in place, even if through a back door, as you can see from this article I wrote 4 years ago, which included the following paragraph:
ECHELON was an agreement between the NSA and its British equivalent GCHQ (as well as the agencies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) whereby they shared information they gathered on each others’ citizens. GCHQ could legally eavesdrop on people outside the UK without a warrant, so they could target US citizens of interest, then pass the product over to the NSA. The NSA then did the same for GCHQ. Thus both agencies could evade any democratic oversight and accountability, and still get the intelligence they wanted.
The only difference now is that FISA has come blasting through the front door, and yet people remain quiescent.
Published in The Huffington Post UK, 2 October 2012
Only in the mad world of modern British politics could it be possible to connect MPs, drones and royal breasts. Is this sounding a little too bizarre? Let me explain.…
Way back in 2008 Conservative MP Damien Green, who was at the time the Shadow Minister for Immigration, was arrested on suspicion of eliciting leaks from a Home Office civil servant that appeared to confirm the then Labour government was covering up UK immigration figures.
When I say arrested, this was not the standard, civilised and pre-arranged appointment at the local nick, which the police traditionally allow their political “masters” or, for that matter, their buddies at News International.
Oh no, this was a full-on, Cold War-style arrest, carried out by the Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism command (known in the old days as Special Branch). Intriguingly, civil servants appeared to have misleadingly hyped up the need for a heavy-handed police response by stating that they were “in no doubt that there has been considerable damage to national security already as a result of some of these leaks”.
And indeed, the resulting arrests bore all the hall-marks of a national security case: secret police, dawn raids, and counter-terrorism style searches of the family home, the constituency office, and — shock — an invasion of Green’s office in parliament.
Yet Green was not arrested under the terms of the Official Secrets Act. Instead, both he and his hapless whistleblower, Christopher Galley, were only seized on suspicion of breaching some arcane Victorian law (“aiding and abetting misconduct in public office”). I suppose arresting a sitting MP for a breach of the OSA would have been just too politically tricky.
Leaving aside the understandable upset caused to Green’s wife and children by the raid on their home, plus the fact that the police violated not only their personal effects such as bed sheets and love letters but also confidential legal papers about child abuse cases that Mrs Green was working on, what really caused outrage in the media and political classes was the fact that Plod had dared to invade the hallowed ground of parliament.
There was an outcry from politicians about the “encroaching police state”. The case was duly dropped, the senior officer, Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick, had to resign (but only after committing yet another political gaffe), and other stories, such as the MP expenses scandal, grabbed the attention of the mainstream media.
Roll on four years, and Damien Green has now ascended to the giddy heights of Home Office Minister of State for Police and Criminal Justice. Well, meeting his new staff must have been an interesting experience for him.
But what is this man now doing in his eminent role, to stop the slide into the encroaching police state that is the UK? Of all people, one would expect him to be sensitive to such issues.
Sadly, he appears to have already gone native on the job. It was reported yesterday that he is proposing the use of police drones to spy on the UK population, but in an “appropriate and proportionate” manner of course.
The concept of small aerial drones being used by UK police has been mooted for a few years now — indeed some police forces and security agencies have already bought them. But whereas the initial, standard justification was that it would help in the “war on terror” (as it has so ably done in the Middle East, where innocent families are routinely slaughtered in the name of assassinating militants), mission-creep has already set in. Damien Green stated at the launch of the new National Police Air Service (NPAS) that drones could be useful monitoring protests and traffic violations. It has even been reported that the Home Office plans to use non-lethal weapons to do so.
Of course there are problems around the use of drones in UK airspace. Our skies are already very crowded and they could present a hazard to aircraft, although the BBC has reported that drones could be airborne in the next few years. This appears to be the only argument holding the use of drones in check — forget about civil liberties and privacy issues.
This is particularly pertinent as we look at the evolution of drone technology. Currently the UK police are discussing toy-sized drones, but it has already been reported that drones the size of birds or even insects, with autonomous intelligence or swarm capabilities are being developed. And don’t even get me started on the subject of potential militarisation.…
There is a whole debate to be had about what can be viewed and what cannot — where does the public sphere end and the private begin? A couple of years ago I suggested somewhat facetiously that our best hope of defeating the introduction of surveillance drones in the UK might be indignant celebs suing the paparazzi for using the technologies. But perhaps the ante has already been upped in the recent fall-out from the Duchess of Cambridge and her royally papped breasts.
If drone technology becomes widespread, then nobody will have any privacy anywhere. But who knows, before we get to that stage perhaps HM Queen will come out swinging on the side of privacy for her granddaughter-in-law, if not for the rest of her “subjects”. If that were to happen then no doubt Damien Green will abandon his new-found enthusiasm for these airborne surveillance pests; if not to stop the “encroaching police state” of which he must have such colourful recollections, then at least to safeguard any potential knighthood in his rosy ministerial future.
I have written over the years about the encroaching surveillance state, the spread of CCTV and the increasing use of drones in our skies. When the North East of England introduced talking CCTV cameras that could bark orders at passing pedestrians in 2008, I thought that we were fast approaching the reductio ad absurdum point — and indeed this subject has raised a wry laugh from audiences around the world ever since.
Recently I have been reading with dismay a slew of articles about the increasing corporatisation of the surveillance state. First I stumbled across a piece describing Facebook’s latest innovation, Facedeal: cameras planted in shops and bars that will use the facial recognition and tagging abilities of FB to recognise you as a valued customer and offer you a discount, simply because you have signed up to this Big Brother app on Facebook.
Add this to the fact that Facebook is probably, well, an open book for to the entire US security apparatus, and you can see the potential abuse of this system. We shall effectively be bribed to allow ourselves to be spied on.
Facedeal is being trialed in the US. Some European countries, most notably Germany, have already stated that data recognition technology used even just for photo “tagging” is or could be deemed illegal. Germany specifically has regulations that allow Internet users control over their data. They are not going to like Facedeal.
Secondly, it was reported today that Google had patented intelligent image recognition technology. Combine this capability with Googles Earth and Street, and we are potentially looking at a truly panopticon society. The Germans are really not going to like that. (Nor indeed will certain of the French, including the man who earlier this year tried to sue Google after being photographed having a pee in his own front garden).
Thirdly, Boeing has triumphantly launched the concept of the drone swarm, operating with a hive mentality and upping the capabilities of military surveillance exponentially, while taking much of the risk out of any operation.
And finally, the Wikileaks story about TrapWire. This first emerged as yet another bonkers American scheme, where the footage from CCTV street cameras was being mainlined into the security apparatus. Subsequently, it has emerged via Wikileaks that Trapwire is also being used in other western countries, including the UK.
Not only can the securocrats watch you, they too are installing face recognition software that can identify you. While this may not yet be as accurate as the spies might wish, TrapWire has also installed predictive software that apparently can assess whether you are acting, loitering or walking in a suspicious manner. So you could pre-emptively be assessed to be about to commit a crime or an act of terrorism and, no doubt, appropriately and pre-emptively “dealt with”.
All of which must be so reassuring to protest groups such as Occupy, which have been subject to massive CCTV surveillance in NYC and which have been labelled a “terrorist/extremist threat” in the City of London.
At the risk of sounding alarmist, we now all know what “being dealt with” in this era of anti-activist SWAT teams, drone strikes and kill lists can potentially entail.
So where does this leave us as concerned citizens? It strikes me that we are being catapulted into some sci-fi dystopia beyond even Orwell’s wildest imaginings. Any fan of modern thrillers and sci-fi will be familiar with the concept of integrated super-computers that can watch our every move via CCTV.
The latter is what TrapWire et al are working towards. These new technologies remind me of a story line from a wonderful series of books called the The Laundry Files by Charles Stross. These novels are a perfect of merging of Len Deighton’s laconic spy fiction, à la Harry Palmer, with the geek universe and beyond. And, at the risk of a spoiler, one of the story lines envisages a centralised and weaponised CCTV system, mainlining into the secret services, that can be turned on UK citizens if the balloon goes up. This system is codenamed the “Scorpion Stare”.
Sounds far-fetched? Well The Laundry Files are a rollicking good read, but do bear in mind not only that our CCTV systems may be centralised courtesy of TrapWire, but also that various law enforcement agencies in the UK are using micro-drones to spy on protesters, and that they have reportedly enquired if these drones could be weaponised.….
So it all depends on how you define the balloon, I suppose.
Published in The Huffington Post UK, 3 September 2012
Published in The Huffington Post UK, 27 July 2012
OK, I was really so not planning on ever writing anything, whatsoever, at any point while I continue to breathe, about the London Olympics. First of all I have absolutely zero interest in the circus that is modern competitive sport (panem et circenses), and secondly what more could I possibly add to the scandals around the security? All the information is out there if people choose to join the dots.
But synchronicity plays its part. Firstly, this morning I read this excellent article by former UK ambassador-turned-whistleblower, Craig Murray, about how the UK is now under martial law in the run-up to the Olympics. Shortly afterwards I did an interview with the women’s glossy magazine, Grazia, about the security set-up around the games. I know, I know, sometimes the heavens align in a once-in-a-century configuration.…..
So on the back of this fortuitous alignment and while my angry-o-meter is still spiked at the “dangerous” level, I wanted to set some thoughts down.
Craig is correct — because of the Olympic Games, London has gone into full martial law lock-down. Never before in peace-time has the capital city of the formerly Great Britain seen such a military “defensive” presence: missile launchers on local tower blocks primed to blow straying commercial airliners out of the skies over London, regardless of “collateral damage”; anti-aircraft bunkers dug in on Greenwich common; and naval destroyers moored on the Thames.
Plus, absent the promised G4S publicly-funded work-experience slaves — sorry, security staff - the military has been drafted in. Soldiers just home from patrolling the streets in Afghanistan in daily fear of their lives have had all leave cancelled. Instead of the much-needed R & R, they shall be patrolling the Olympic crowds. Does anyone else see a potential problem here?
And all this follows a decade of erosion of basic freedoms and civil liberties — all stripped away in the name of protecting the UK from the ever-growing but nebulous terrorist threat.
But I would take it a step further than Craig Murray — this is not just martial law, this is fascist martial law.
(And being conscious of any potential copyright thought-crimes, I hereby give all due credit to a very famous UK TV advert campaign which appears to use the same cadence.)
Why do I say this is one step beyond?
The Italian World War II dictator, Benito Mussolini, is famously credited with defining fascism thus: “the merger of the corporate and the state”.
And this is precisely what we are seeing on the streets of London. Not only are Londoners subjected to an overwhelming military and police presence, the corporate commissars are also stalking the streets.
When Seb Coe and Tony Blair triumphantly announced that London had won the Olympics on 6th July 2005, one of their mantras was how London and the UK would benefit from the presence of the games. They painted a rosy picture of local businesses booming on the back of the influx of tourists.
But the cold reality of today’s Olympics is greyer. Commuters are being advised to work from home rather than use the overloaded transport networks; the civil service is effectively shutting down; and Zil lanes for the “great and the good” of the Olympics universe are choking already congested London streets.
Even worse, businesses across the UK, but particularly the local ones in the economically deprived environs of the Olympic Park in East London, are categorically NOT allowed to benefit from the games. Under the terms of the contracts drawn up by the corporate mega-sponsors, London small businesses are not allowed to capitalize in any conceivable, possible, miniscule way on the presence of the games in their own city.
And these terms and conditions are enshrined in the Olympics Act 2006; any infraction of the rules carries a criminal penalty. For more than a week, corporate police enforcers have been patrolling London looking for infractions of the Olympic trademark. And this goes way beyond “Olympics R US” or some such. As Nick Cohen wrote in an excellent recent article in The Spectator magazine:
“In the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act of 2006, the government granted the organisers remarkable concessions. Most glaringly, its Act is bespoke legislation that breaks the principle of equality before the law. Britain has not offered all businesses and organisations more powers to punish rivals who seek to trade on their reputation. It has given privileges to the Olympics alone. The government has told the courts they may wish to take particular account of anyone using two or more words from what it calls ‘List A’ — ‘Games’; ‘Two Thousand and Twelve’; ‘2012’; ‘twenty twelve’. The judges must also come down hard on a business or charity that takes a word from List A and conjoins it with one or more words from ‘List B’ — ‘Gold’; ‘Silver’; ‘Bronze’; ‘London’; ‘medals’; ‘sponsors’; ‘summer’. Common nouns are now private property.”
I heard recently that a well-established local café in Stratford, East London, that has for years been known as the Olympic Café, has been ordered to paint over its sign for the duration of the games. If I owned the café, I would be tempted to sue the Olympic Committee for breach of trademark.
It seems to me that this real-world trademark protectionism is an extension of the ongoing copyright wars in cyberspace — a blatant attempt to use state level power and legislation to protect the interests of the wealthy international mega-corps few. We saw early attempts at this during the South African Football World Cup in 2010, and the Vancouver Winter Olympics the same year.
But the London Olympics take it to the next level: there is a long list of what you are not allowed to take into the stadia. Spectators will be subjected to airport-style security theatre. This will ensure that no liquids of more than 100ml can be carried, although empty bottles will be allowed if people want to fill them up with tap water on site. This, of course, means that more spectators will be buying their sponsor-approved liquids in situ and at no-doubt over-inflated prices, to the benefit of one of the key Olympic sponsors.
The London games seem to be the first time that the global corporate community is demonstrating its full spectrum dominance — where the legal, police, and military resources of the state are put at the disposal of the giant, bloated, money-sucking leech that is the International Olympic Committee.
Every city that has hosted the Olympics over the last four decades has been financially bled white; many are still paying back the initial investment in the infrastructure, even if it is now decaying and useless. Greece, anybody?
But do the IOC or its regional pimps care? Hell, no. Like all good parasites, once the original host has been drained dry, the Games move on to a new food source every four years.
What really, deeply puzzles me is why the hell are the people of London not out there protesting against this corporatist putsch? Perhaps they fear being shot?
How can it be a crime to take a full bottle of water into a stadium when you want to watch a sport? How can it be a crime to tweet a picture? How can it be criminal to celebrate the occasion in your local pub with Olympic flags draped around your bar, drinking a beer and eating a burger marketed cheesily as “fit for champions” or some such?
The original ideals behind the reconstitution of the modern Olympics in 1896 were a highly romanticised and distorted vision of the values of the ancient games. But even that naïve ideal has been lost in the crapulous corporatism that is the modern event.
We have even gone way beyond the Roman view of bread and circuses placating the masses. Now we are into the hardcore realpolitik of international corporations and national governments using the games as a perfect pretext to tighten the “security” screws even more.
And so the UK is proud to present full-blown Corporate Fascism Version 2.0.
Vae victis.
Here we go again. In this heartwarming article in today’s Guardian newspaper, British MPs on the Home Affairs Committee have decided that the internet is the most significant factor in the radicalisation of violent extremists and conclude that Something Must Be Done.
One paragraph leapt out at me:
“The Commons home affairs committee says internet service providers need to be as effective at removing material that promotes violent extremism as they are in removing content that is sexual or breaches copyright.” (My emphasis.)
Most of us are aware of the recent dogfight in the US about the proposed SOPA and PIPA laws to crack down on copyright infringement and, as a result, there is a somewhat belated but steadily increasing outcry in Europe about the imminent imposition of ACTA across the continent.
I have written before about how such laws provide the military-intelligence complex with the perfect stalking horse for a panoptic surveillance state, and the campaigning writer, Cory Doctorow, summed it up beautifully when he wrote that “you can’t make a system that prevents spying by secret police and allows spying by media giants”.
And, lo, it is now apparently coming to pass. The Parliamentary half-wits are now proposing to use commercial legislation such as the utterly undemocratic ACTA as a benchmark for countering potential terrorists and extremists. Might they have failed to notice the plethora of existing counter-terrorism and eavesdropping legislation, put in place for this very purpose and already much used and abused by a wide range of public bodies in the UK?
This yet again highlights the mission-creepy Big Brother corporatist group-think. Rather than having to spell it out in boring old linear text, here is some useful linkage — what I like to think of as 3-D writing:
Protester = activist = domestic extremist = violent extremist = terrorist
I’m sure you can see where I am heading. To name but a few notorious abuses, we already live in a world where western governments and spy agencies collude in the kidnapping, torture and assassination of alleged terrorist suspects; the NDAA now endorses these practices within the US; British police spy on innocent protest groups for years; legitimate protesters can be “kettled”, beaten up and maced; activists can be pre-emptively arrested as easily in the UK as in Syria; and where American politicians want to designate the high-tech publishing organisation Wikileaks as a terrorist group.
There is an old aphorism that one man’s terrorist was another man’s freedom fighter. I think the time has come for an update:
One man’s terrorist is another man’s activist.
And we are all increasingly at risk.
Here is a recent article I wrote for The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, about our slide into a surveillance state.
TBIJ supported Wikileaks during the release of the SpyFiles. The issue is of such crucial importance for our democracy, I was disappointed that more of the mainstream media did not follow up on the stories provided.
Here’s the text:
Analysis: the slide into a surveillance state
Fifty years ago, President Eisenhower warned of the ‘disastrous rise’ of the military-industrial complex. His fears proved all too accurate.
Now in the post-9/11 world, the threat goes even further: the military-industrial complex is evolving into the military-intelligence complex. It is a world, I fear, that is propelling us into a dystopian surveillance nightmare.
I have seen this nightmare unfold from close quarters. In the mid-90s I was an intelligence officer for MI5, the UK domestic security service. That is, until I resigned to help my former partner and colleague David Shayler blow the whistle on a catalogue of incompetence, cover-ups and crimes committed by spies. We naively hoped that this would lead to an inquiry, and a review of intelligence work and accountability within the notoriously secretive British system.
The blunders and illegal operations that we witnessed in our six years at MI5 took place at what is probably the most ethical and accountable decade in the British spying service’s 100-year history.
Even then, they were getting away with pretty much whatever they wanted.
Since the attacks of 9/11, I have watched with increasing dismay as more powers, money and resources have been pumped into the international intelligence community to combat the nebulous ‘war on terror’. As a result, civil liberties have been eroded in our own countries, and countless innocent people have been killed, maimed and displaced across the Middle East.
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which was designed to allow our spy agencies to lawfully intercept our communications to counter terrorism and organised crime, has been routinely used and abused by almost 800 public bodies. MI5 admitted to making 1,061 mistakes or ‘administrative errors’ this year alone in its application of RIPA, according to the Interception of Communications Commissioner, Sir Paul Kennedy.
Intelligence creep extends to the police, as we saw with the undercover police scandal earlier this year, where the unaccountable National Public Order Intelligence Unit was discovered to be infiltrating harmless and legitimate protest groups for years on end.
It is a world, I fear, that is propelling us into a dystopian surveillance nightmare.
Even beyond the undercover cops, we have seen an explosion in corporate spying. This involves mercenary spy companies such as Xe (formerly Blackwater), Kroll, Aegis and Diligence offering not just security muscle in hotspots around the world, but also bespoke operations enabling big corporations to check out staff or to infiltrate and investigate protest groups that may embarrass the companies.
The mercenary spy operates without any oversight whatsoever, and can even be granted immunity from prosecution, as Xe enjoyed when operating in Iraq.
The last decade has also been a boom time for companies providing high-tech surveillance capabilities. One aspect of this in the UK – the endemic CCTV coverage – is notorious. Local councils have invested in mobile CCTV smart spy cars, while cameras that bark orders to you on the street have been trialled in Middlesbrough.
Drones are increasingly used for aerial surveillance – and the potential for militarisation of these tools is clear.
All this despite the fact that the head of the Metropolitan Police department that is responsible for processing all this surveillance information stated publicly that CCTV evidence is useless in helping to solve all but 3% of street robberies in London. In fact, since CCTV has been rolled out nationally, violent crime on the streets of Britain has increased.
But, hey, who cares about facts when security is Big Business? Someone, somewhere, is getting very rich by rolling out ever more Orwellian surveillance technology. And while the technology might not be used against the wider UK citizenry in a particularly malignant manner – yet – the same companies are certainly allowing their technologies to find their way to the more violent and repressive Middle Eastern states.
That would never happen in Britain – would it? We retain an optimistic faith in the long-term benign intentions of our government, while tut-tutting over Syrian police snatch squads pre-emptively arresting suspected dissidents. Yet this has already happened in the UK: before the royal wedding in April, protesters were pre-emptively arrested to ensure that they would not cause embarrassment. The intent is the same in Syria and Britain. Only the scale and brutality differs – at the moment.
When I worked for MI5 in the 1990s I was appalled how easily telephone interception could be used illegally, and how easily the spies could hide their incompetence and crimes from the government. In the last decade it has become much worse, with senior spies and police officers repeatedly being caught out lying to the toothless Intelligence and Security Committee in Parliament. And this is only the official intelligence sector.
How much worse is the endemic surveillance carried out by the corporate spy industry?
The balance of power, bolstered by new technologies, is shifting overwhelmingly in favour of the Big Brother state – well, almost. The WikiLeaks model is helping level the playing field, and whatever happens to this trailblazing organisation, the principles and technology are out there and will be replicated. This genie cannot be put back in the bottle. This – combined with the work of informed MPs, investigative journalists and potentially the occasional whistleblower – gives me hope that we can halt this slide into a Stasi state.
Annie Machon is a former spy with MI5, the British intelligence agency working to protect the UK’s national security against threats such as terrorism and espionage.
You can read Annie Machon’s blog ‘Using Our Intelligence’ here.
I’m gradually coming to after a knock-out blow last October — the unexpected death of my beloved and only brother, Rich. Words cannot describe.
But looking forward to the delights that 2012 will no doubt offer: Julian Assange remains trapped in a legal spider’s web, but all credit to Wikileaks — it keeps on providing the goods.
The recent publication of the SpyFiles should have been a massive wake-up call, as it it highlighted the increasing use and abuse of mercenary spy tech — all without any effective oversight, as I recently wrote in my article for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Needless to say, the issue of massive commercial surveillance capabilities usually remains confined to a niche media market, although the Daily Mail did rouse itself to report that shoppers were being tracked via mobile phones as they consumed their way around malls. Well, I suppose it’s a start.
With the growth of mercenary spy companies in our minds, we should be even more concerned about the accelerated shredding of our civil liberties, particularly in the US and UK. Despite earlier promises that he would veto any such legislation, President Obama signed into law the invidious NDAA on 31st December. This means that the US military is now empowered to seize and indefinitely detain, with no recourse to traditional due process, not only potentially all non-Americans across the planet à la the Guantanamo/extraordinary rendition model, but can now also do this to US citizens within their own country.
Despite the passionate internet debate, the issue has unsurprisingly been largely ignored by most of the mainstream corporate media. But the predominantly US-based internet commentary displays a breathtaking hypocrisy: yes, the NDAA is a terrible law with awful implications for American citizens. However, people around the world have been living with just this fear for a decade, with whole communities afraid of being snatched and disappeared into black CIA torture facilities. Where was the US outrage then? The Pastor Martin Niemoeller poem remains as relevant today as when it was written 70 years ago.
That said a couple of brave voices have spoken out: Naomi Wolf recently described how the US legislators could ironically find themselves on the receiving end of this law, if we go by all historic precedents. Paul Craig Roberts was on frothing good form too, inveighing against the war crimes of the US military, the persecution of Wikileaks for exposing those very crimes, and the evolving totalitarianism of our countries.
In a digital mirror of the NDAA, the entertainment industry and their pet lobbyists are successfully ramming through the invidious SOPA law. As acclaimed digital rights activist and author, Cory Doctorow, described in his keynote at the recent CCC geekfest in Berlin, these ostensibly commercial laws are in effect a stalking horse for governments to seize control of the internet. As he wrote in the Guardian “you can’t make a system that prevents spying by secret police and allows spying by media giants”.
With this in the back of our minds, the Wikileaks SpyFiles revelations about the increasing globalisation and commercialisation of corporate spy technology are even more alarming. The government spy agencies work with little effective oversight, but the mercenaries have a completely free legal rein. Intriguingly, it appears that unlike our own governments Afghanistan is alive to this problem and is reportedly booting out foreign contractors.
Yet the balance of power in certain western countries is sliding overwhelmingly towards police states - or, indeed, fascism, if you take into consideration Benito Mussolini’s definition: “the merger of state and corporate power”.
Our line of defence is slender — organisations like Wikileaks, one or two politicians of conscience, a few remaining real investigative journalists and perhaps the odd whistleblower. Beyond that, we must individually get to grips with the threat, get informed, teched up, and protect ourselves, as we can no longer rely on our governments to uphold our basic rights — you know, privacy, freedom of expression, habeas corpus, and all those other delightfully old-fashioned ideas.
If we do not act soon, we may no longer be able to act at all in the near future.… So I wish everyone an informed, productive and active 2012!
Off to do a keynote at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Kiev. Should be interesting — watch this space.
Well, it made me laugh:
Of course, I’ve never done this myself.….
More of these excellent cartoons can be found at xkcd.org.
My recent talk at the excellent How the Light Gets In philosophy festival at Hay-on-Wye. With credit and thanks to IAI TV and the staff of the Institute of Art and Ideas, the organisers the event.
