Journalists need to tool up

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Annie Machon
Copy permalink to clipboard

Over the last week more sound, fury and indignation has cascaded forth from the US media, spilling into the European news, about the American government and the Associated Press spying scandal.

Last week it emerged that the US Department of Justice monitored the telephones of, gasp, journalists working at AP. Apparently this was done to try to investigate who might have been the source for a story about a foiled terrorist plot in Yemen. However, the dragnet seems to have widened to cover almost 100 journalists and potentially threatened governmental leakers and whistleblowers who, in these days of systematic security crackdowns in the US, are fast becoming Public Enemy No 1.

Now it appears that the US DoJ has been reading the emails of a senior Fox News reporter. And this has got the US hacks into a frightful tizz. What about the First Amendment?

Well, what about the fact that the Patriot Act shredded most of the US Constitution a decade ago?

Also, who is actually facing the security crackdown here? The US journalists are bleating that their sources are drying up in the face of a systematic witch hunt by the US administration. That must be hard for the journalists — hard at least to get the stories and by-lines that ensure their continued employment and the ability to pay the mortgage. This adds up to the phrase du jour: a “chilling effect” on free speech.

Er, yes, but how much harder for the potential whistleblowers? They are the people facing not only a loss of professional reputation and career if caught, but also all that goes with it. Plus, now, they are increasingly facing draconian prison sentences under the recently reanimated and currently much-deployed US 1917 Espionage Act for exposing issues in the public interest. Ex-NSA Thomas Drake faced decades in prison for exposing corruption and waste, while ex-CIA John Kiriakou is currently languishing in prison for exposing the use of torture.

The US government has learned well from the example of the UK’s Official Secrets Acts — laws that never actually seem to be wielded against real establishment traitors, who always seem to be allowed to slip away, but which have been used frequently and effectively to stifle dissent, cover up spy crimes, and to spare the blushes of the Establishment.

So, two points:

Firstly, the old media could and should have learned from the new model that is Wikileaks and its ilk. Rather than asset stripping the organisation for information, while abandoning the alleged source, Bradley Manning, and the founder, Julian Assange, to their fates, Wikileaks’s erstwhile allies could and morally should campaign for them. The issue of the free flow of information, democracy and justice is bigger than petty arguments about personality traits.

Plus, the old media appear to have a death wish: to quote the words of the former New York Times editor and Wikileaks collaborator Bill Keller, Wikileaks is not a publisher — it is a source, pure and simple. But surely, if Wikileaks is “only” a source, it must be protected at all costs — that it the media’s prime directive. Journalists have historically gone to prison rather than give away their sources.

However, if Wikileaks is indeed deemed to be a publisher and can be persecuted this way, then all the old media are equally vulnerable. And indeed that is what we are witnessing now with these spying scandals.

Secondly, these so-called investigative journalists are surprised that their phones were tapped? Really?

If they are doing proper, worthwhile journalism, of course their comms will be tapped in a post-Patriot Act, surveillance-state world. Why on earth are they not taking their own and their sources’ security seriously? Is it amateur night?

In this day and age, any serious journalist (and there are still a few honourable examples) will be taking steps to protect the security of their sources. They will be tooled up, tech-savvy, and they will have attended Crypto-parties to learn security skills. They will also be painfully aware that a whistleblower is a person potentially facing prison, rather than just the source of a career-making story.

If mainstream journalists are serious about exposing corruption, holding power to account, and fighting for justice they need to get serious about source protection too and get teched-up. Help is widely available to those who are interested. Indeed, this summer the Centre for Investigative Journalism is hosting talks in London on this subject, and many other international journalism conferences have done the same over the last few years.

Sadly, the level of interest and awareness remains relatively low — many journalists retain a naïve trust in the general legality of their government’s actions: the authorities may bend the rules a little for “terrorists”, but of course they will abide by the rules when it comes to the media.….

.…or not. Watergate now looks rather quaint in comparison.

As for me: well, I have had some help and have indeed been teched-up. My laptop runs the free Ubuntu Linux (the 64 bit version for grown-ups) from an encrypted solid state hard drive. I have long and different passwords for every online service I use. My mail and web server are in Switzerland and I encrypt as much of my email as possible. It’s at least a start.

And here’s what I have to say about why journalists should think about these issues and how they can protect both themselves and their sources: Opening keynote “The Big Dig Conference” from Annie Machon on Vimeo.

The Value of Whistleblowers

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Annie Machon
Copy permalink to clipboard

I was recently invited to write an article for the Nat West Business Sense online magazine about the potential value and benefits of whistleblowers. Here’s the link, and here’s the article:

The controversial issue of whistleblowing has been firmly thrust into the public consciousness over the last few years with the ongoing saga of Wikileaks.

Often whistleblowers can get a bad rap in the media, deemed to be traitors, grasses or snitches. However, rather than a phenomenon to be feared, if handled correctly whistleblowers can often be beneficial to their organisations. Allow me to explain.

I have a nodding acquaintance with the process. In the 1990s I worked as an intelligence officer for the UK domestic Security Service, generally known as MI5, before resigning to help my former partner and colleague David Shayler blow the whistle on a catalogue of incompetence and crime. As a result we had to go on the run around Europe, lived in hiding and exile in France for 3 years, and saw our friends, family and journalists arrested around us. I was also arrested, although never charged, and David went to prison twice for exposing the crimes of the spies. It was a heavy price to pay.

However, it could all have been so different if the UK government had agreed to take his evidence of spy crimes, undertake to investigate them thoroughly, and apply the necessary reforms. This would have saved us a lot of heartache, and could potentially have improved the work of the spies. But the government’s instinctive response is always to protect the spies and prosecute the whistleblower, while the mistakes and crimes go uninvestigated and unresolved. Or even, it often appears, to reward the malefactors with promotions and gongs.

The draconian Official Secrets Act (1989) imposes a blanket ban on any disclosure whatsoever. As a result, we the citizens have to take it on trust that our spies work with integrity. There is no meaningful oversight and no accountability.

Many good people do indeed sign up to MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, as they want a job that can make a difference and potentially save lives. However, once on the inside they are told to keep quiet about any ethical concerns: “don’t rock the boat, and just follow orders”.

In such an environment there is no ventilation, no accountability and no staff federation, and this inevitably leads to a general consensus – a bullying “group think” mentality. This in turn can lead to mistakes being covered up rather than lessons learned, and then potentially down a dangerous moral slide.

As a result, over the last decade we have seen scandal heaped upon intelligence scandal, as the spies allowed their fake and politicised information to be used make a false case for an illegal war in Iraq; we have seen them descend into a spiral of extraordinary rendition (is kidnapping) and torture, for which they are now being sued if not prosecuted; and we have seen that they facilitate dodgy deals in the desert with dictators.

But it is not all bleak. Recently, Dr Tom Fingar received The Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence in Oxford for his work on compiling the US National Intelligence Estimate of 2007. In this he summarised the conclusions of all 16 US intelligence agencies by saying that Iran had ceased trying to develop a nuclear weapons capability in 2003.

There was immense political pressure on him to suppress this evidence, but he went ahead with the report and thereby single-handedly halted the US government’s rush to war with Iran. By having the courage to do his job with integrity, Dr Fingar is responsible for saving countless lives across Iran.

In the world of intelligence, where secrecy is paramount, where crimes can hushed up, and where there is no avenue for voicing concern and dissent, it is perhaps inevitable that whistleblowers will continue to emerge.

But in other sectors of work mistakes can be just as life threatening and the need for exposure just as great. In the UK over the last few years many senior medical whistleblowers have emerged from the NHS, detailing mistakes and incompetence that have put the public at risk. Alas, rather than learn from mistakes made, all too often NHS bosses have either victimised the whistleblowers by suspending them or ruining their reputation, or they have insisted that they sign gagging orders and then covered up the mistakes. Neither option is a good outcome either for staff morale or for patient safety.

While the culture of cover-up exists, so too will whistleblowers. How could this be resolved, and what would be the potential benefits?

If employers institute a culture of trust and accountability, where employees with concerns can be fairly heard, the appropriate action taken, and justice done, the needs and imperatives behind whistleblowing would disappear. Potential problems could be nipped in the bud, improving public trust and confidence in the probity of the organisation and avoiding all the bad publicity following a whistleblowing case.

Plus, of course, the potential whistleblowers would have a legitimate avenue to go down, rather than having to turn their lives inside out – they would no longer need to jeopardise their professional reputation and all that goes with it such as career, income, social standing and even, potentially their freedom.

Having a sound procedure in place to address staff concerns strikes me as a win-win scenario – for staff efficiency and morale, the organisation’s operational capability and reputation, and potentially the wider public, too.

Security and liberty — the aftermath of the Boston bombings

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Annie Machon
Copy permalink to clipboard

An abbreviated version of this article was published by RT Op-Edge yesterday.

News of the two bombs in Boston, in which 3 people have so far died and more than 100 have been injured, has ricocheted around the world. Beyond the grim statistics, there is little concrete evidence about the who and the why, and nor will there be possibly for days or even weeks. This confusion is inevitable in the wake of such an attack, as the intelligence agencies and police play frantic catch-up to identify the perpetrators and, we hope, bring them to justice — although of course in post-Patriot Act, post–NDAA America, the perpetrators are more likely to find their names on the CIA’s presidentially-approved kill list.

In the absence of facts, the media fills its airwaves with speculation and repetition, thereby inadvertently whipping up yet more fear and uncertainty. The fall-out from this is an eruption of prejudice in the social media, with desk bound heroes jumping to conclusions and advocating violent reprisals against whole swathes of the Middle East. And this fear and hate plays straight into the hands of the “enemy-industrial complex” so aptly described by Tom Engelhardt recently.

With that in mind, let’s take a moment to pay our respects to those who died in terrorist attacks on Monday. Even a quick surf through the internet produces a grim and no doubt incomplete tally: Iraq (55); Afghanistan (7); Somalia (30); Syria (18); Pakistan (4); USA (3). All these numbers represent someone’s child, mother, friend, brother, loved one, and all will be mourned.

Alas, not all of these victims will receive as much air-time as the unfortunates caught up in the Boston attacks. And this is especially the case where attacks are carried out by the American military against suspected “insurgents” across the Middle East.

Indeed, on the same day The Telegraph reported that the UN special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, famous British barrister Ben Emmerson (Queen’s Counsel), had stated that drone strikes across the Middle East were illegal under international law. Their continued use only served to legitimise Al Qaeda attacks against the US military and its infrastructure in the region.

As we saw in 2010 when Wikileaks released the video, “Collateral Murder”, such atrocities are covered up for years, denied by the government, nor will the perpetrators be held to account — they are probably still serving in the military. Instead the whistleblower who exposed this crime, Bradley Manning, languishes in prison facing a court martial, and the publisher of the material, Wikileaks, faces global repression and a secret federal grand jury indictment.

With its endless, speculative scaremongering about the Boston attacks, the US media plays a diabolical role in furthering the work of the attackers — ie terrorising the population, inducing them to live in a state of abject fear. Of course, once suitably terrorised, the US people will be even more willing to give away what remains of their historic freedoms, all in the name of increasing their security. Well, we know the views of one late, great American on this subject, Benjamin Franklin: “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”.

Indeed, the abrogation of liberty in the USA has patently not resulted in greater security, as Boston has so brutally demonstrated. No society can protect itself absolutely against terrorism.

In a democracy, just as rights come with responsibilities, so freedoms come with risk. And we need to remember that those freedoms were hard-won by our ancestors and will be equally difficult to win back if we heedlessly throw them away now, while the risks remain statistically negligible.

Successive US governments have already decimated the basic rights of the US people in the post-9/11 security panic. At the sharp end, people, both globally and now also in America, can be extraordinarily rendered (kidnapped) to black prison sites and tortured for years on the word of anonymous intelligence officers, they can be denied due legal process, and they can be killed on presidential decree by drone strikes — a real-world version of the snuff video.

Additionally, the US has descended into a panoptican surveillance state, with endemic data-mining of communications, airborne drone spying, and the categorisation of protesters as “domestic extremists” or even “terrorists” who are then beaten up by militarised police forces. This otiose security theatre constantly reminds US citizens to be afraid, be very afraid, of the enemy within.

Terrorist atrocities are criminal acts, they are not a separate form of “eviltude”, to use George Bush-era terminology. As such, the criminals behind such attacks should be investigated, evidence gathered, and they should be tried in front of a jury of their peers, where justice can be done and be seen to be done. So it is troubling that the Boston FBI bureau chief, Richard DesLauriers, is today quoted in the New York Times as saying he is working on “a criminal investigation that is a potential terrorist investigation”. The precise difference being?

Likewise, terrorist attacks are not an existential threat to the fabric of the nation, even events on the scale of 9/11. However, I would suggest that the response of the security-industrial complex poses a greater existential threat to the future well-being of the USA. The post-9/11 security crackdown in the USA has eroded core democratic values, while the military response across the Middle East has bankrupted America and created a generation of potential enemies.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Compare and contrast the response of the Norwegian people in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks and murder of 77 people by Anders Breivik. As a country, there was a need to see justice done, but not to allow such an appalling attack to compromise the values of the society and destroy a cherished way of life for all. And this the Norwegian people achieved.

Similarly between the late 1980s and the late 1990s the UK endured Lockerbie, Omagh, Bishopsgate, Canary Wharf, and Manchester, to name but a few major atrocities. A good summary of the terrorist attacks against London alone over the last 150 years can be found here, with the first Tube bombing occurring in 1885. A pilot, Patrick Smith, also recently wrote a great article about aircraft security and the sheer scale of the terrorist threat to the West in the 1980s — and asks a very pertinent question: just how would we collectively react to such a stream of atrocities now?

During the 1990s, at the height of the Provisional IRA’s bombing campaign on mainland Britain, I lived in central London and worked as an intelligence officer for the UK’s domestic Security Service (MI5). Putting aside my professional life, I have personal memories of what it was like to live under the shadow of terrorism. I remember making my way to work in 1991 and commuting through Victoria train station in London 10 minutes before a bomb, planted in a rubbish bin, exploded on the station concourse. One person was killed, and many sustained severe injuries. One person had their foot blown off — the image haunted me for a long time.

I also vividly remember, two years later, sitting at my desk in MI5’s Mayfair office, and hearing a dull thud in the background — this turned out to be a bomb exploding outside Harrods department store in Knightsbridge. And let’s not forget the almost daily disruption to the tube and rail networks during the 1990s because of security alerts. Every Londoner was exhorted to watch out for, and report, any suspicious packages left at stations or on streets.

Londoners grew used to such inconvenience; they grumbled a bit about the disruption and then got on with their lives — echoes of the “keep calm and carry on” mentality that evolved during the Blitz years. In the 1990s the only noticeable change to London’s diurnal rhythm was that there were fewer US tourists clogging up the streets — an early indication of the disproportionate, paranoid US reaction to a perceived terrorist threat.

In contrast to the post-9/11 years, the UK did not then react by shredding the basic freedoms of its people. There were certainly controversial cases and heated debates about how long you could hold a terrorist suspect without charge, but the way of life continued much as before. Now, twelve years after 9/11 — an attack on a different continent — the UK has all the laws in place to enact a de facto police state within days.

Life and liberty are both precious. It is always tragic when lives are be lost in the name of some twisted or arcane political cause; it is even more tragic when the liberty of all is also lost as a result.

My heart goes out to those who were injured and to the friends and families who have lost loved ones in the Boston attacks, in the same way it goes out to all those who were killed and maimed across the Middle East yesterday.

However, I do urge caution in the US response; evidence needs to be gathered and justice seen to be done. Another security crackdown on a fearful US population will hurt Americans much more than two bombs in Boston ever could, while yet more remotely-controlled revenge killings across the Middle East will kill, maim and displace many more thousands.

I shall leave you with a quote from another great American, Thomas Jefferson:

“Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers too plainly proves a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery.”

RT Interview about the Bradley Manning Hearing

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Annie Machon
Copy permalink to clipboard

Today’s RT interview about the Bradley Manning hearing:

And here’s the transcript of the full interview I did.

Silfur Egils Interview, Iceland

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Annie Machon
Copy permalink to clipboard

My recent interview on Iceland’s premier news discussion show, Silfur Egils, hosted by the excellent Egill Helgason.

The name refers to an old Norse saga about a hero, an earlier Egill, throwing handfuls of silver to the ground so he could make the Viking politicos of the day scrabble around in the dirt trying to pick up the coins.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Talk at the Icelandic Centre for Investigative Journalism

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Annie Machon
Copy permalink to clipboard

Wikileaks spokesman, Kristinn Hrafnsson, invited me to speak at the Icelandic Centre for Investigative Journalism while I was in Iceland in February.

While focusing on the intersection and control between intelligence and the media, my talk also explores many of my other current areas of interest.

Iceland Journalists talk 2013 from Annie Machon on Vimeo.

UK Anonymous Radio Interview

Posted on February 18, 2013 by Annie Machon
Copy permalink to clipboard

Here’s the link to my interview tonight on UK Anonymous Radio — I had a great time and found it a fun, wide-ranging, and stimulating hour. I hope you do too. So, thank you Anonymous.

And also thank you to Kim Dotcom setting up the new file-sharing site, Mega, which replaces his illegally-taken-down global site, MegaUpload. I have somewhere safe, I think, to store my interviews!

What a shambolic disgrace that MegaUpload raid was, and what a classic example of the global corporatist agenda that I discuss in the interview.

I do love geeks.

Lies, damned lies, and newspaper reporting…

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Annie Machon
Copy permalink to clipboard

Also on the Huffington Post UK, RT, The Real News Network, nsnbc, and Information Clearing House:

Where to start with this tangled skein of media spin, misrepresentation and outright hypocrisy?

Last week the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence presented this year’s award to Dr Tom Fingar at a ceremony jointly hosted by the prestigious Oxford Union Society.

Dr Fingar, currently a visiting lecturer at Oxford, had in 2007 co-ordinated the production of the US National Intelligence Estimate — the combined analysis of all 16 of America’s intelligence agencies — which assessed that the Iranian nuclear weaponisation programme had ceased in 2003. This considered and authoritative Estimate directly thwarted the 2008 US drive towards war against Iran, and has been reaffirmed every year since then.

By the very fact of doing his job of providing dispassionate and objective assessments and resisting any pressure to politicise the intelligence (à la Downing Street Memo), Dr Fingar’s work is outstanding and he is the winner of Sam Adams Award, 2012. This may say something about the parlous state of our intelligence agencies generally, but don’t get me started on that…

Anyway, as I said, the award ceremony was co-hosted by the Oxford Union Society last week, and many Sam Adams Associates attended, often travelling long distances to do so. Former winners were asked to speak at the ceremony, such as FBI Coleen Rowley, GCHQ Katherine Gun, NSA Thomas Drake, and former UK Ambassador Craig Murray. Other associates, including CIA Ray McGovern, diplomats Ann Wright and Brady Kiesling and myself also said a few words. As former insiders and whistleblowers, we recognised the vitally important work that Dr Fingar had done and all spoke about the importance of integrity in intelligence.

One other previous winner of the Sam Adams Award was also invited to speak — Julian Assange of Wikileaks. He spoke eloquently about the need for integrity and was gracious in praising the work of Dr Fingar.

All the national and international media were invited to attend what was an historic gathering of international whislteblowers and cover an award given to someone who, by doing their job with integrity, prevented yet further ruinous war and bloodshed in the Middle East.

Few attended, still fewer reported on the event, and the promised live streaming on Youtube was blocked by shadowy powers at the very last minute — an irony considering the Oxford Union is renowned as a free speech society.

But worse was to come. The next day The Guardian newspaper, which historically fell out with Wikileaks, published a myopic hit-piece about the event. No mention of all the whistleblowers who attended and what they said, no mention of the award to Dr Fingar, no mention of the fact that his work saved the Iranian people from needless war.

Oh no, the entire piece focused on the tawdry allegations emanating from Sweden about Julian Assange’s extradition case. Discounting the 450 students who applauded all the speeches, discounting all the serious points raised by Julian Assange during his presentation, and discounting the speeches of all the other internationally renowned whistleblowers present that evening, The Guardian’s reporter, Amelia Hill, focused on the small demo outside the event and the only three attendees she could apparently find to criticise the fact that a platform, any platform, had been given to Assange from his political asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy.

So this is where we arrive at the deep, really deep, hypocrisy of the evening. Amelia Hill is, I’m assuming, the same Guardian journalist who was threatened in 2011 with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. She had allegedly been receiving leaks from the Metropolitan Police about the on-going investigation into the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.

At the time Fleet Street was up in arms — how dare the police threaten one of their own with prosecution under the OSA for exposing institutional corruption? Shades of the Shayler case were used in her defence. As I wrote at the time, it’s a shame the UK media could not have been more consistently robust in condemning the chilling effects of the OSA on the free-flow of information and protect all the Poor Bloody Whistleblowers, and not just come out fighting when it is one of their own being threatened. Such is the way of the world.…

But really, Ms Hill — if you are indeed the same reporter who was threatened with prosecution in 2011 under the OSA — examine your conscience.

How can you write a hit-piece focusing purely on Assange — a man who has designed a publishing system to protect potential whistleblowers from precisely such draconian secrecy laws as you were hyperbolically threatened with? And how could you, at the same time, airbrush out of history the testimony of so many whistleblowers gathered together, many of whom have indeed been arrested and have faced prosecution under the terms of the OSA or US secrecy legislation?

Have you no shame? You know how frightening it is to be faced with such a prosecution.

Your hypocrisy is breath-taking.

The offence was compounded when the Sam Adams Associates all wrote a letter to The Guardian to set the record straight. The original letter is reproduced below, and this is what was published. Of course, The Guardian has a perfect right under its Terms and Conditions to edit the letter, but I would like everyone to see how this can be used and abused.

And the old media wonders why they are in decline?

Letter to The Guardian, 29 January 2013:

Dear Sir

With regard to the 24 January article in The Guardian entitled “Julian Assange Finds No Allies and Tough Queries in Oxford University Talk,” we question whether the newspaper’s reporter was actually present at the event, since the account contains so many false and misleading statements.

If The Guardian could “find no allies” of Mr. Assange, it did not look very hard! They could be found among the appreciative audience of the packed Oxford Union Debate Hall, and — in case you missed us — in the group seated right at the front of the Hall: the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.

Many in our group — which, you might be interested to know co-sponsored the event with Oxford Union — had traveled considerable distances at our own expense to confer the 10^th annual Sam Adams award to Dr. Thomas Fingar for his work on overseeing the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that revealed the lack of an Iranian nuclear weaponization program.

Many of us spoke in turn about the need for integrity in intelligence, describing the terrible ethical dilemma that confronts government employees who witness illegal activity including serious threats to public safety and fraud, waste and abuse.

But none of this made it into what was supposed to pass for a news article; neither did any aspect of the acceptance speech delivered by Dr. Fingar. Also, why did The Guardian fail to provide even one salient quote from Mr Assange’s substantial twenty-minute address?

By censoring the contributions of the Sam Adams Associates and the speeches by Dr. Fingar and Mr. Assange, and by focusing exclusively on tawdry and unproven allegations against Mr. Assange, rather than on the importance of exposing war crimes and maintaining integrity in intelligence processes, The Guardian has succeeded in diminishing none but itself.

Sincerely,

The Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence:

Ann Wright (retired Army Colonel and Foreign Service Officer of US State Department), Ray McGovern (retired CIA analyst), Elizabeth Murray (retired CIA analyst), Coleen Rowley (retired FBI agent), Annie Machon (former MI5 intelligence officer), Thomas Drake (former NSA official), Craig Murray (former British Ambassador), David MacMichael (retired CIA analyst), Brady Kiesling (former Foreign Service Officer of US State Department), and Todd Pierce (retired U.S. Army Major, Judge Advocate, Guantanamo Defense Counsel).

The Real News Network Whistleblower Special

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Annie Machon
Copy permalink to clipboard

The Real News Network coverage of the recent Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence, with contributions from many of the whistleblowers involved:

SAAII Award at the Oxford Union Society

Posted on January 16, 2013 by Annie Machon
Copy permalink to clipboard

On 23 January the Oxford Union Society will be hosting the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence.

The SAAII is one of the few international recognitions for those within the intelligence community who follow their conscience, often at great professional and personal cost.

This year’s winner is Dr Tom Fingar, who headed up the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. He collated the official assessments of all 16 of America’s intelligence agencies, which unanimously assessed that Iran had ceased trying to build a nuclear weapon in 2003. This evidence-based analysis made it impossible for the Bush administration to push through its plans to launch a war against Iran in 2008. This excellent article by ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains Dr Fingar’s achievements far better than I could.

Former SAAII winners include FBI Coleen Rowley, GCHQ Katherine Gun, NSA Thomas Drake, and Wikileaks supremo Julian Assange.

Over the last few weeks I have had the pleasure of working with the Union officers and fellow SAAIIers, especially renowned peace activists Ray McGovern and Elizabeth Murray (formerly of the US National Intelligence Council), to organise this event. Many of us will be speaking that evening, and Julian Assange will be doing a live video link.

All this in recognition of Dr Fingar’s contribution to professional, ethical intelligence work. Even in this “gloves-off”, post-9/11 world, it is heartening to hear that is possible.

I hope that many people can support and report on this event.

The Free Speech Debate

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Annie Machon
Copy permalink to clipboard

My recent interview for the excellent Oxford University Free Speech Debate project, run by Professor Timothy Garton Ash. I discuss whistleblowing, the Official Secrets Act, Wikileaks and much more:

The Scorpion Stare

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Annie Machon
Copy permalink to clipboard

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

The Assange Witch Hunt

Posted on August 16, 2012 by Annie Machon
Copy permalink to clipboard

Published in The Huffington Post UK, 17 August 2012

A storm of diplomatic sound and fury has broken over Ecuador’s decision to grant political asylum to Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange. The UK government has threatened to breach all diplomatic protocol and international law and go into the embassy to arrest Assange.

The UK justifies this by citing the 1987 Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act, a law apparently put in place following the 1984 shooting of WPC Yvonne Fletcher from the Libyan Embassy in London. The murder resulted in an 11-day siege, and the embassy staff eventually being expelled from the country. Nobody has yet been brought to justice for this murder.

It is hard to equate the gravity of the crime that brought about the 1987 legislation — the murder of a policewoman — with Assange’s situation. Despite the screaming headlines, let us not forget that he is merely wanted for questioning in Sweden. Nevertheless, the UK is prepared to overturn all diplomatic protocol and create a dangerous international precedent to “get their man”, despite there being a clear lack of justification under the terms of the ’87 Act.

Many people in the western media remain puzzled about Assange’s fear of being held captive in the Swedish legal system. But can we really trust Swedish justice when it has been flagrantly politicised and manipulated in the Assange case, as has been repeatedly well documented. Indeed, the Swedish justice system has the highest rate per capita of cases taken to the ECtHR for flouting Article 6 — the right to a fair trial.

If Assange were extradited merely for questioning by police — he has yet to be even charged with any crime in Sweden — there is a strong risk that the Swedes will just shove him straight on the next plane to the US under the legal terms of a “temporary surrender”. And in the US, a secret Grand Jury has been convened in Virginia to find a law — any law — with which to prosecute Assange. Hell, if the Yanks can’t find an existing law, they will probably write a new one just for him.

So why all the sound and fury? What is this really all about?

Wikileaks is a ground-breaking new form of high-tech, award-winning journalism that has exposed corrupt practices across the world over the years. And crucially, in this war-torn, weary and financially broken world, it offers a secure conduit to whistleblowers who want to expose institutional crime and corruption for the public good.

Whistleblowers want to get their information out there, they want to make a difference, they want a fair hearing, and they don’t want to pay too high a personal price for doing so. Is that too much to ask?

By going public about serious concerns they have about their workplace, they are jeopardising their whole way of life: not just their professional reputation and career, but all that goes with it, such as the ability to pay the mortgage, their social circle, their family life, their relationship… Plus, the whistleblower can potentially risk prison or worse.

So, with these risks in mind, they are certainly looking for an avenue to blow the whistle that will offer a degree of protection and allow them to retain a degree of control over their own lives. In the old days, this meant trying to identify an honourable, campaigning journalist and a media organisation that had the clout to protect its source. While not impossible, that could certainly be difficult, and becomes increasingly so in this era of endemic electronic surveillance.

Today the other option is a secure, high-tech publishing conduit such as Wikileaks. This provides anonymity and a certain degree of control to the modern whistleblower, plus it allows their information to reach a wide audience without either being filtered by the media or blocked by government or corporate injunctions.

As someone who has a nodding acquaintance with the repercussions of blowing the whistle on a secret government agency, I have long seen the value of the Wikileaks model — and I also understand quite why governments feel so threatened by it. After all, no government or mega-corporation wants freedom of information and transparency forced upon it, nor an informed citizenry questioning its actions.

Our governments like to spout the phrase “if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide” as they roll out yet another intrusive surveillance measure.

Wikileaks has turned that right back at them — hence this modern-day witch-hunt.

What whistleblowers want

Posted on June 10, 2012 by Annie Machon
Copy permalink to clipboard

Whistleblowers want the sun and the moon — or at least they want to get their information out there, they want to make a difference, they want a fair hearing, and they don’t want to pay too high a personal price for doing so.

Is that too much to ask? The decision to expose criminality and bad practice for the public good has serious, life-changing implications.

Today the other option is the secure, high-tech publishing conduit, as trail-blazed by Wikileaks. While this does not provide the potential benefits of working with a campaigning journalist, it does provide anonymity and a certain degree of control to the modern whistleblower, plus it allows their information to reach a wide audience without either being filtered by the media or blocked by government or corporate injunctions.

As someone who has a nodding acquaintance with the repercussions of blowing the whistle on a secret government agency, I have liked the Wikileaks model since I first stumbled across it in 2009.

As with most truly revolutionary ideas, once posited it is blindingly obvious.

Never before has this been technically possible — the idea that a whistleblower’s information could be made freely available to the citizens of the world, in order to inform their democratic choices, with no blockage, not censorship, no filtering or “interpretation” by the corporate media.

This is particularly relevant in an age when the global media has been consolidated in the hands of a few multinationals, and when these multinationals have a certain, shall we say “cosy”, relationship with many of top our politicians and power elites.

The control of the mainstream media by the spooks and governments has been the focus of many of my recent talks. These corrupt inter-relationships have also been recently laid bare with the News International phone-hacking scandals.

The days of garnering news from one favoured paper or TV bulletin are long gone. Few people now trust just one media outlet — they skip across a variety of news sources, trying to evaluate the truth for themselves. But even that can be problematic when something big occurs, such as the “justification” for the invasion of Iraq or Libya, and the current beat of war drums against Iran, when the corporate media mysteriously achieves a consensus.

Hence the democratic disconnect, hence the distrust, and hence (in part) the plummeting profits of the old media.

Wikileaks is based on a simple concept - it allows the people to read the source material for themselves and make up their own minds based on real information. This led to exposure of all kinds of global nasties way before the massive 2010 US data-dump.

Despite this approach, the impact was initially subdued until Wikileaks collaborated with the old media. This, as we all know, did indeed produce the coverage and awareness of those issues deemed important as it was filtered through the MSM. This has also inevitably lead to tensions between the new model hacktivists and the old-school journalists.

No government, least of all the USA, likes to have demands for justice and transparency forced upon it, and the push back since 2010 has been massive across the world in terms of an apparently illegal financial blockade, opaque legal cases and a media backlash. Certain of Wikileaks’s erstwhile media partners have collaborated in this, turning on one of their richest sources of information in history.

However, Wikileaks is more than a media source. It is a whole new model — a high-tech publisher that offers a safe conduit for whistleblowers to cache and publicise their information without immediately having to overturn (and in some cases risk) their lives.

For this work, Wikileaks has over the years won a number of internationally prestigious journalism awards.

Inevitably, critics in the mainstream media seem to want to have their cake and eat it too: one early partner, the New York Times, has written that it doesn’t recognise Wikileaks as a journalist organisation or a publisher — it is a source, pure and simple.

Either way, by saying this the media are surely shooting themselves in the corporate feet with both barrels. If Wikileaks is indeed “just” a source (the NYT seems to be blithely forgetting that good journalism is entirely dependent on its sources), then the media are breaking their prime directive: protect a source at all costs.

However, if Wikileaks is a journalism or publishing organisation and as such is being targeted by the US government, then all other media are surely equally at risk in the future?

By not standing up for Wikileaks in either capacity, it appears that the old media have a death wish.

Over the years whistleblowers around the world have demonstrated their trust in Wikileaks, as it was set up by someone emerging from the original bona fide hacker community. And rightly so — let’s not forget that no source has been exposed through the failure of the organisation’s technology.

Many media organisations rushed to emulate its success by trying to set up their own “secure” whistleblowing repositories. What the media execs failed to understand was the hacker ethos, the open source mentality: they went to their techie department or commercial IT service providers and said “we want one”, but failed to understand both the ethos and the security concerns around closed, proprietary software systems, often channelled through the post–Patriot Act, post–CISPA USA.

Other, apparently well-meaning organisations, also tried to emulate the Wikileaks model, but most have died a quiet death over the last year. Perhaps, again, for want of real trust in their origin or tech security?

Why on earth would any security-conscious whistleblower, emerging out of a government, military or intelligence organisation, trust such a set-up? If someone comes out of such an environment they will know all-too-well the scale of the push-back, the possible entrapments, and the state-level resources that will be used to track them down. They either need an über-secure whistleblowing platform, or they need journalists and lawyers with fire in their belly to fight the fight, no matter what.

So now to OpenLeaks — apparently the brainchild of Wikileaks defector Daniel Domsheit-Berg. He and the shadowy “Architect” famously fell out with Julian Assange in late 2010, just when the political heat was ramping up on the organisation. They left, reportedly taking some of the crucial coding and a tranche of files with them, and Domsheit-Berg decided to set up a rival organisation called OpenLeaks. As a result of his actions, Domsheit-Berg was uniquely cast out of the international hacker group, the CCC in Berlin.

He now seems to have been welcomed back into the fold and OpenLeaks appears, finally, to be ready to receive whistleblower information.

However, there is a crucial difference between the two organisations. Where Wikileaks wants to lay the information out there for public evaluation, OpenLeaks will merely act as a repository for certain approved mainstream media organisations to access. We are back to the original blockage of the corporate media deciding what information we, the people, should be allowed to ingest.

I would not wish to comment on Domsheit-Berg’s motivation, but to me this seems to be an even worse option for a whistleblower than directly contacting a campaigning journalist with a proven track record of covering hard-core stories and fighting for the cause.

With OpenLeaks, the whistleblower loses not only the automatic widespread dissemination of their information, but also any semblance of control over which journalists will be working on their story. Their information will be parked on the website and anyone from pre-selected media organisations will be able to access, use and potentially abuse it.

One could say that OpenLeaks operates as a secure staging platform where a whistleblower can safely store sensitive documents and information.… but the founder allegedly removed and destroyed sensitive files from Wikileaks when he jumped ship in 2010. Could any whistleblower really trust that OpenLeaks would not similarly “disappear” shit-hot information in the future?

Plus, there is the added worry for any rightly-paranoid whistleblower that the founder of OpenLeaks so easily abandoned Wikileaks when under pressure. Who’s to say that this would not happen again, if the full might of the Pentagon were brought to bear on OpenLeaks?

OpenLeaks offers neither the personal support of working with a trusted journalist and a media organisation with the clout to fight back, nor does it provide full disclosure to the wider public to side-step potential media self-censorship and government law suits, as the original Wikileaks model does.

As such OpenLeaks seems, at least to this particular whistleblower, to be an evolutionary blip — a retrograde step — in the quest for justice and accountability.

RSS Feed

Using Our Intelligence

Annie Machon

Category Archives: Wikileaks