Webstock, New Zealand, 2016

Now, I speak all over the world at con­fer­ences and uni­ver­sit­ies about a whole vari­ety of inter­con­nec­ted issues, but I do want to high­light this con­fer­ence from earli­er this year and give a shout out for next year’s. Plus I’ve finally got my hands on the video of my talk.

Web­stock cel­eb­rated its tenth anniversary in New Zea­l­and last Feb­ru­ary, and I was for­tu­nate enough to be asked to speak there.  The hosts prom­ised a unique exper­i­ence, and the event lived up to its reputation.

Webstock_2016They wanted a fairly clas­sic talk from me — the whis­tleblow­ing years, the les­sons learnt and cur­rent polit­ic­al implic­a­tions, but also what we can to do fight back, so I called my talk “The Pan­op­ticon: Res­ist­ance is Not Futile”, with a nod to my sci-fi fandom.

So why does this par­tic­u­lar event glow like a jew­el in my memory? After expun­ging from my mind, with a shud­der of hor­ror, the 39 hour travel time each way, it was the whole exper­i­ence. New Zea­l­and com­bines the friend­li­ness of the Amer­ic­ans — without the polit­ic­al mad­ness and the guns, and the egal­it­ari­an­ism of the Nor­we­gi­ans — with almost equi­val­ent scenery. Add to that the warmth of the audi­ence, the eclecticism of the speak­ers, and the pre­ci­sion plan­ning and aes­thet­ics of the con­fer­ence organ­isers and you have a win­ning combination.

Our hosts organ­ised ver­tigo-indu­cing events for the speak­ers on the top of mile-high cliffs, as well as a sur­pris­ingly fun vis­it to a tra­di­tion­al Brit­ish bowl­ing green. Plus I had the excite­ment of exper­i­en­cing my very first earth­quake — 5.9 on the Richter scale appar­ently. I shall make no cheap jokes about the earth mov­ing, espe­cially in light of the latest quakes to hit NZ this week, but the hotel did indeed sway around me and it was­n’t the loc­al wine, excel­lent as it is.

I men­tioned eclecticism — the qual­ity of the speak­ers was fero­ciously high, and I would like to give a shout out to Debbie Mill­man and her “joy of fail­ure” talk, Harry Roberts, a ser­i­ous geek who crowd-sourced his talk and ended up talk­ing ser­i­ously about cock­tails, moths, Chum­bawamba and more, advert­ising guru Cindy Gal­lop who is inspir­ing women around the world and pro­mot­ing Make Love Not Porn, and Casey Ger­ald, with his evan­gel­ic­ally-inspired but won­der­fully human­ist­ic talk to end the event.

All the talks can be found here.

It was a fab­ulous week.  All I can say is thank you to Tash, Mike, and the oth­er organisers.

If you ever have the chance to attend or speak at the event in the future, I ser­i­ously recom­mend it.

And here’s the video of my talk:

Parliamentary Evidence on the UK Investigatory Powers Bill

My writ­ten evid­ence to the Scru­tiny Com­mit­tee in the UK Houses of Par­lia­ment that is cur­rently examin­ing the much-dis­puted Invest­ig­at­ory Powers Bill (IP):

1. My name is Annie Machon and I worked as an intel­li­gence officer for the UK’s domest­ic Secur­ity Ser­vice, com­monly referred to as MI5, from early 1991 until late 1996. I resigned to help my part­ner at the time, fel­low intel­li­gence officer Dav­id Shayler, expose a num­ber of instances of crime and incom­pet­ence we had wit­nessed dur­ing our time in the service.

2. I note that the draft IP Bill repeatedly emphas­ises the import­ance of demo­crat­ic and judi­cial over­sight of the vari­ous cat­egor­ies of intrus­ive intel­li­gence gath­er­ing by estab­lish­ing an Invest­ig­at­ory Powers Com­mis­sion­er as well as sup­port­ing Judi­cial Com­mis­sion­ers. How­ever, I am con­cerned about the real and mean­ing­ful applic­a­tion of this oversight.

3. While in the Ser­vice in the 1990s we were gov­erned by the terms of the Inter­cep­tion of Com­mu­nic­a­tions Act 1985 (IOCA), the pre­curs­or to RIPA, which provided for a sim­il­ar sys­tem of applic­a­tions for a war­rant and min­is­teri­al oversight.

4. I would like to sub­mit evid­ence that the sys­tem did not work and could be manip­u­lated from the inside.

5. I am aware of at least two instances of this dur­ing my time in the ser­vice, which were cleared for pub­lic­a­tion by MI5 in my 2005 book about the Shayler case, “Spies Lies, and Whis­tleblowers”, so my dis­cuss­ing them now is not in breach of the Offi­cial Secrets Act. I would be happy to provide fur­ther evid­ence, either writ­ten or in per­son, about these abuses.

6. My con­cern about this draft Bill is that while the over­sight pro­vi­sions seem to be strengthened, with approv­al neces­sary from both the Sec­ret­ary of State and a Judi­cial Com­mis­sion­er, the interi­or pro­cess of applic­a­tion for war­rants will still remain opaque and open to manip­u­la­tion with­in the intel­li­gence agencies.

7. The applic­a­tion pro­cess for a war­rant gov­ern­ing inter­cep­tion or inter­fer­ence involved a case being made in writ­ing by the intel­li­gence officer in charge of an invest­ig­a­tion. This then went through four lay­ers of man­age­ment, with all the usu­al redac­tions and fin­ess­ing, before a final sum­mary was draf­ted by H Branch, signed by the DDG, and then dis­patched to the Sec­ret­ary of State. So the min­is­ter was only ever presen­ted with was a sum­mary of a sum­mary of a sum­mary of a sum­mary of the ori­gin­al intel­li­gence case.

8. Addi­tion­ally, the ori­gin­al intel­li­gence case could be erro­neous and mis­lead­ing. The pro­cess of writ­ing the war­rant applic­a­tion was merely a tick box exer­cise, and officers would routinely note that such intel­li­gence could only be obtained by such intrus­ive meth­ods, rather than explor­ing all open source options first. The reval­id­a­tion pro­cess could be even more cavalier.

9. When prob­lems with this sys­tem were voiced, officers were told to not rock the boat and just fol­low orders. Dur­ing the annu­al vis­it by the Intel­li­gence Inter­cept Com­mis­sion­er, those with con­cerns were banned from meet­ing him.

10. Thus I have con­cerns about the real­ist­ic power of the over­sight pro­vi­sions writ­ten into this Bill and would urge an addi­tion­al pro­vi­sion. This would estab­lish an effect­ive chan­nel whereby officers with con­cerns can give evid­ence dir­ectly and in con­fid­ence to the Invest­ig­at­ory Powers Com­mis­sion­er in the expect­a­tion that a prop­er invest­ig­a­tion will be con­duc­ted and with no reper­cus­sions to their careers inside the agen­cies. Here is a link to a short video I did for Oxford Uni­ver­sity three years ago out­lining these proposals:

11. This, in my view, would be a win-win scen­ario for all con­cerned. The agen­cies would have a chance to improve their work prac­tices, learn from mis­takes, and bet­ter pro­tect nation­al secur­ity, as well as avoid­ing the scan­dal and embar­rass­ment of any future whis­tleblow­ing scan­dals; the officers with eth­ic­al con­cerns would not be placed in the invi­di­ous pos­i­tion of either becom­ing com­pli­cit in poten­tially illeg­al acts by “just fol­low­ing orders” or risk­ing the loss of their careers and liberty by going pub­lic about their concerns.

12. I would also like to raise the pro­por­tion­al­ity issue. It strikes me that bulk inter­cept must surely be dis­pro­por­tion­ate with­in a func­tion­ing and free demo­cracy, and indeed can actu­ally harm nation­al secur­ity. Why? Because the use­ful, indeed cru­cial, intel­li­gence on tar­gets and their asso­ci­ates is lost in the tsunami of avail­able inform­a­tion. Indeed this seems to have been the con­clu­sion of every inquiry about the recent spate of “lone wolf” and ISIS-inspired attacks across the West – the tar­gets were all vaguely known to the author­it­ies but resources were spread too thinly.

13. In fact all that bulk col­lec­tion seems to provide is con­firm­a­tion after the fact of a sus­pect’s involve­ment in a spe­cif­ic incid­ent, which is surely spe­cific­ally police evid­en­tial work. Yet the jus­ti­fic­a­tion for the invas­ive inter­cept and inter­fer­ence meas­ures laid out in the Bill itself is to gath­er vital inform­a­tion ahead of an attack in order to pre­vent it – the very defin­i­tion of intel­li­gence. How is this pos­sible if the sheer scale of bulk col­lec­tion drowns out the vital nug­gets of intelligence?

14. Finally, I would like to raise the point that the phrase “nation­al secur­ity” has nev­er been defined for leg­al pur­poses in the UK. Surely this should be the very first step neces­sary before for­mu­lat­ing the pro­posed IP Bill? Until we have such a leg­al defin­i­tion, how can we for­mu­late new and intrus­ive laws in the name of pro­tect­ing an undefined and neb­u­lous concept, and how can we judge that the new law will thereby be pro­por­tion­ate with­in a democracy?

Freedom Equals Surveillance

Here’s an inter­view I did for RT a while ago about the USA’s Orwellian NewS­peak about surveillance:

US_Freedom_Act_surveillance_act_in_disguise from Annie Machon on Vimeo.

Swedish SVT TV Interview, November 2014

Here’s an inter­view I did while at the excel­lent Inter­net­dagarna con­fer­ence in Stock­holm last month.  It cov­ers all things whis­tleblower, going on the run, and spy accountability:

Inter­view on Swedish SVT TV, Novem­ber 2014 from Annie Machon on Vimeo.

German politician wants return to typewriters to evade US surveillance

A com­ment piece from last week on RT about Ger­man politi­cians want­ing to go back to paper-based com­mu­nic­a­tions to evade the US spy panopticon:

de_govt_touts_typewriters

And here is the full text of the inter­view I gave on RT Op Edge:

Both type­writer and strong encryp­tion is going to slow down com­mu­nic­a­tion, but uphold­ing a basic demo­crat­ic right of pri­vacy seems to be more import­ant, former MI5 agent Annie Machon told RT.

Amid the Amer­ic­an-Ger­man espi­on­age scan­dal, Ger­man politi­cians are con­sid­er­ing going back to old-fash­ioned manu­al type­writers for con­fid­en­tial doc­u­ments in order to pro­tect nation­al secrets from Amer­ic­an NSA surveillance.

RT: Why would Ger­many think of using type­writers as a secur­ity measure?

Annie Machon: What I find inter­est­ing is that we have a situ­ation where even our demo­crat­ic­ally elec­ted rep­res­ent­at­ives have to think deeply and ser­i­ously about how to pro­tect the pri­vacy of their com­mu­nic­a­tions, par­tic­u­larly when the invest­ig­a­tion of the very sub­ject of inva­sion of the pri­vacy of the cit­izens, which is what the Bundestag at the moment is doing in Ger­many, try­ing to hold hear­ings to work out what exactly the NSA has been doing, which might be con­tra­ven­ing the con­sti­tu­tion of Ger­many. It is very dif­fi­cult now but it is still pos­sible to pro­tect your elec­tron­ic com­mu­nic­a­tions, but I think this announce­ment, this sort of state­ment by the Bundestag rep­res­ent­at­ive about going back to type­writers is inter­est­ing. It just makes a very strong point that we all need to be aware of the fact that we can be spied on at any time.

RT: Do you think every­one would fol­low Germany’s example?

AM: I think more and more people are con­cerned about their pri­vacy because of the Edward Snowden dis­clos­ures. He has done the world a huge ser­vice with great per­son­al cost, expos­ing the pred­a­tions of the US Intel­li­gence agen­cies and the NSA par­tic­u­larly, as well as a num­ber of European agen­cies. In the past all coun­tries spied on each oth­er because they wanted to gain advant­age over oth­er coun­tries, not neces­sar­ily their enemies, just an advant­age eco­nom­ic­ally or polit­ic­ally. How­ever, what we are see­ing at the moment is the res­ult of what was the per­fect storm for the USA in the 1990s, it was a per­fect oppor­tun­ity for them, because at that point the Cold War had ended, they were the sole remain­ing super­power on the plan­et, and pre­cisely at that moment we had the evol­u­tion of the inter­net, a huge tech explo­sion of com­mu­nic­a­tions. They saw the oppor­tun­ity and they went for it. Of course they did because that meant that they could embed whatever they wanted into the infra­struc­ture that the whole world now uses for com­mu­nic­a­tion. Of course they were not going to turn this oppor­tun­ity down, and they haven’t. That is what Edward Snowden disclosed.

So we have the situ­ation now when everything can con­ceiv­ably be hoovered up by the NSA and its vas­sal states in Europe, everything can con­ceiv­ably be stored for ever and be used against cit­izens in the future if the laws change. And everything can con­ceiv­ably be known amongst the private delib­er­a­tions of our parliament’s demo­crat­ic­ally elec­ted rep­res­ent­at­ives. It’s worse than Orwellian.

It would be naïve to think that the US would not take up this oppor­tun­ity, but of course they did, and these are the res­ults we are liv­ing in. It would be lovely to think that we could go back to the era of hav­ing pri­vacy in our lives that our gov­ern­ments would have power to ensure we had it, but in this glob­al­ized world it is very dif­fi­cult to ensure that. One of the things that is little known out of all Snowden’s dis­clos­ures is the fact that it is not just what we send over the inter­net, it is also hard­ware, the com­puters, the tech­no­logy we actu­ally use that can already be com­prom­ised by the NSA. This is one of the things that came out just after Christ­mas last year. So we are liv­ing in a very com­plex world but there are very simple steps we can take, both the gov­ern­ments and the cit­izens, to pro­tect our demo­crat­ic and our basic right to privacy.

RT:Wouldn’t using type­writers slow things down in terms of com­mu­nic­a­tion? Why not use oth­er, more mod­ern ways of pro­tect­ing communication?

AM: Either going back to using pen paper or type­writer or using very strong encryp­tion is going to slow down one’s com­mu­nic­a­tion, there is no doubt about it. The point is though, what is more import­ant, is it access to the latest celebrity gos­sip on the inter­net or is it actu­ally uphold­ing a basic demo­crat­ic right of pri­vacy. Because if we don’t have pri­vacy, then we lose our free­dom to com­mu­nic­ate eas­ily and in private, we lose our free­dom to ingest inform­a­tion via video, audio or from read­ing, we can­not plan, we can­not con­duct private per­son­al rela­tion­ships over the inter­net. So what is the price of a little bit of incon­veni­ence when it comes to pro­tect­ing our basic rights? I think that how­ever light-heartedly the Ger­man politi­cian men­tioned using type­writers, when it comes to prop­er secur­ity issues with­in gov­ern­ment, he is prob­ably abso­lutely right. Last year there was a report as well, say­ing that some of the Rus­si­an secur­ity oper­at­ors were now using type­writers too. We will all have to think about that, and it’s just a jolt­ing wake up call to make us all think about that by stat­ing that the Ger­man gov­ern­ment is now going back to type­writers for cer­tain things.

RT: What kind of solu­tion do you see? Should people rely on their gov­ern­ments for pro­tec­tion of their privacy?

AM: There is a danger that people and the gov­ern­ment will become very para­noid about try­ing to pro­tect against the pred­a­tions of the NSA and its vas­sals in Europe. How­ever, I’m not sure as we as cit­izens can rely on gov­ern­ments to pro­tect our pri­vacy because all gov­ern­ments would want to know what is going on on the inter­net for legit­im­ate reas­ons as well, to try to track down the ille­git­im­ate crim­in­als and ter­ror­ists. But it can be easy for them to hoover up all the per­son­al inform­a­tion and we, as cit­izens, need that have that guar­an­tee of pri­vacy. So one of the things we can do as cit­izens is to take respons­ib­il­ity in our own hands. We can indeed source all tech­no­lo­gies, source com­puters pre-2008 that have not built-in hard­ware back­doors. We can use decent PGP encryp­tion, we can use Tor to hide what we are look­ing at in the inter­net, we can use oth­er encryp­tion meth­od­o­lo­gies to pro­tect our pri­vacy, and we need to. I think it’s a very inter­est­ing cross­roads in our his­tory, both as civil­iz­a­tions, as demo­cracy and as indi­vidu­als, but also how we view the tech­no­logy, how we use it, how we can bet­ter use it to pro­tect our life, so that is going it be an ongo­ing debate. I’m very pleased to see this in Ger­many par­tic­u­larly. The politi­cians seem to be wak­ing up around these issues and want­ing debate these issues because the USA has got away with it for long enough across the West.

New German spy scandal — RT interview

As a second Ger­man intel­li­gence officer was arres­ted for spy­ing for the Amer­ic­ans, here’s my recent RT inter­view on the sub­ject, plus much more:

RT_Interview_09_07_14

The Year of Edward Snowden

First pub­lished on RT OP-Edge. Also on Con­sor­ti­um News, Huff­ing­ton Post, and the Sam Adams Award web­site.

A year ago I stumbled  across a story about a wor­ry­ing new sur­veil­lance pro­gramme developed by the NSA: Prism. While nobody was iden­ti­fied as the source of the dis­clos­ure, I was awe­struck by the bravery of this unknown person.

At that time the Obama admin­is­tra­tion had been waging an aggress­ive war on whis­tleblowers: ex-CIA officer, John Kiriakou, who exposed the CIA’s tor­ture pro­gramme, was lan­guish­ing in pris­on while the tor­tur­ers went free; Kirk Wiebe, Wil­li­am Bin­ney and Thomas Drake of the NSA had nar­rowly escaped pro­sec­u­tion for expos­ing NSA mal­feas­ance — indeed, des­pite hav­ing gone through all the approved chan­nels, Drake had faced a 35-year pris­on sen­tence; and of course the kangaroo court had just star­ted to try Chelsea Man­ning for her expos­ure of US war crimes. Inev­it­ably, it is the whis­tleblower Man­ning who is now serving a 35 year stretch in pris­on, not the war criminals.

Pres­id­ent Obama has used and abused the 1917 US Espi­on­age Act against whis­tleblowers dur­ing his years in the White House more times than all his pre­de­cessors put togeth­er, while at the same time allow­ing a bone fide spy ring — the Rus­si­an illeg­als exposed in 2010 — to return home. This para­noid hunt for the “insider threat” has been going on since at least 2008, as we know from doc­u­ments leaked to Wikileaks in 2010.

Against this back­ground, fully aware of the hideous risks he was tak­ing and the pro­spect of the rest of his life behind bars, a young man stepped for­ward. Four days after the ini­tial Prism dis­clos­ure, Edward Snowden announced to the world that he was the source of the story and many more to come. He was clear then about his motiv­a­tion and he remains clear now in the few inter­views he has done since: what he had seen on the inside of the NSA caused him huge con­cern. The Amer­ic­an intel­li­gence infra­struc­ture, along with its equi­val­ent agen­cies across the world, was con­struct­ing a glob­al sur­veil­lance net­work that not only threatened  the con­sti­tu­tion of the United States, but also eroded the pri­vacy of all the world’s citizens.

The glob­al sur­veil­lance state wanted to “mas­ter the inter­net”, as anoth­er dis­clos­ure proved, and the UK’s GCHQ stepped up to the plate. As increas­ing num­bers of us con­duct aspects of our lives over the inter­net (be it bank­ing, health, social lives, organ­isa­tions, act­iv­ism, rela­tion­ships) this grow­ing lack of pri­vacy strikes at the very root of demo­cracy. Pri­vacy was enshrined as a basic human right in the UN Declar­a­tion in 1948 pre­cisely because without it we are vul­ner­able to the encroach­ments and abuses of the state. What Snowden has dis­closed would the the Stas­i’s wet dream and goes far bey­ond the dystop­ic hor­rors of George Orwell’s nov­el “1984”.

So what did Snowden dis­close?  Prism was only the start, and that was bad enough — a pro­gramme to scoop up all our metadata: whom we’re in con­tact with, for how long, what we’re read­ing, what we’re view­ing. NSA apo­lo­gists say that this is not invas­ive, it is not look­ing at the con­tents of com­mu­nic­a­tions. I can assure your that metadata is intel­li­gence gold dust. It can provide a far more detailed over­view of a per­son’s life than any indi­vidu­al com­mu­nic­a­tion often can.

But it gets worse. Then came Tem­pora and asso­ci­ated doc­u­ments that dis­closed that the UK’s GCHQ was main­lin­ing inform­a­tion from the transat­lantic fibre optic cables, which affected all European cit­izens, as well as dis­play­ing how GCHQ was pros­ti­tut­ing itself to the NSA for money and put­ting NSA object­ives above the pri­or­it­ies of the UK government.

And then XKey­score, enthu­si­ast­ic­ally used by Ger­many’s BND, pre­sum­ably without the know­ledge of its polit­ic­al mas­ters.  There have been many more: Brazil’s Pet­ro­bras oil com­pany, the French tele­phone net­work, char­it­ies, the Mus­cu­lar access point and the massive Fas­cia data­base, which con­tains tril­lions of device-loc­a­tion records.…. Where to stop?

This year Bri­tain’s Joint Threat Research Intel­li­gence Group was using Squeaky Dol­phin’s real-time mon­it­or­ing of social media net­works, and the bulk col­lec­tion of private web­cam images via the Optic Nerve programme.

This last most grimly does away with the “done noth­ing wrong, noth­ing to hide” argu­ment. In this era of fam­il­ies liv­ing in dif­fer­ent coun­tries and long dis­tance rela­tion­ships, video skype is increas­ingly used to stay in con­tact with loved ones.  And this con­tact can be some­what intim­ate at times between couples. On video. Any­one who has ever used skype for such pur­poses must surely be feel­ing violated?

Out of this mor­ass of spy­ing came moments of per­son­al annoy­ance for west­ern politi­cians, not least the inform­a­tion that Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone was also being tapped, as were those of numer­ous oth­er politi­cians. Which rather blows out of the water the much-abused argu­ment that all this sur­veil­lance is to stop ter­ror­ists. On what plan­et would the NSA spooks need to live to ser­i­ously think that Merkel could be deemed a terrorist?

All these dis­clos­ures are of the gravest pub­lic interest. Yet how have west­ern politi­cians reacted?  In the usu­al way — shoot the mes­sen­ger. All the stand­ard li(n)es have been trot­ted out by the spies: Snowden was too juni­or to know what he is talk­ing about, and was  “just” a con­trac­ted sys­tems admin­is­trat­or (this line says more the ignor­ance of the politi­cians about all things tech than any­thing about Snowden’s job); that Snowden is a trait­or for flee­ing to Rus­sia, when in fact he was trapped there by the USA with­draw­ing his pass­port while in trans­it to Lat­in Amer­ica; or that he should “man up” and return to the US to stand tri­al. There were even appar­ently calls from the spies for him to be extraju­di­cially murdered.

Des­pite this, his dis­clos­ures have res­ul­ted in con­gres­sion­al hear­ings in the US, where seni­or spooks have been caught out lying about the effic­acy of these spy pro­grammes.  A US fed­er­al judge has declared the NSA’s activ­it­ies uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, and minor reforms are under­way to pro­tect the rights of US cit­izens with­in their own country.

Which is a start.  How­ever, that still leaves the rest of us liv­ing under the bale­ful gaze of the NSA and its vassals.

The Brit­ish response has been largely muted, with politi­cians imme­di­ately assur­ing the grate­ful cit­izens of the UK that everything done by the spies is leg­al and pro­por­tion­ate, when in fact it was mani­festly not. Nor is this any con­sol­a­tion for the rest of Europe’s cit­izens — after all, why should the Brit­ish For­eign Sec­ret­ary be able to take it upon him­self to author­ise inter­cept pro­grammes such as Tem­pora that sweep up the com­mu­nic­a­tions of an entire continent?

Press dis­cus­sion of Snowden’s dis­clos­ures in the UK has been largely muted because of a cen­sor­ship notice slapped on the media, while the Guard­i­an news­pa­per that helped to break the story had its hard disks smashed up by GCHQ.

Oth­er coun­tries have dis­played a more robust response, with Brazil plan­ning to build its own transat­lantic cables to Europe to avoid the Tem­pora pro­gramme, and in Ger­many people have been demand­ing that the con­sti­tu­tion be upheld and pri­vacy ensured against the Amer­ic­an sur­veil­lance behemoth.

The European par­lia­ment­ary Civil Liber­ties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) com­mit­tee has held months-long hear­ings with evid­ence from tech experts, whis­tleblowers and cam­paign­ers about what it should do to pro­tect EU cit­izens from the pred­a­tions of the US.  Edward Snowden him­self gave a state­ment. This is all well and good, but it would be more help­ful if they could give Snowden asylum in Europe and also put in place some mean­ing­ful meas­ures to pro­tect our rights one year on — in fact, all they would need to do is enact the pro­vi­sions of the European par­lia­ment’s own July 2001 report into the Ech­el­on fiasco.

Ech­el­on, some of you may remem­ber, was a glob­al proto-sur­veil­lance net­work, where the intel­li­gence agen­cies of the US, UK, New Zea­l­and, Aus­tralia, and Canada (now called Five Eyes) could all share product and sub­vert over­sight meas­ures in each oth­ers’ coun­tries. In 2001 the EU recom­men­ded that Europe devel­op its own inter­net infra­struc­ture and move away from its depend­ency on US cor­por­ate pro­pri­et­ary soft­ware.  All good sug­ges­tions, but all too soon for­got­ten after 9/11 and the rush to the “war on terror”.

One year on from Snowden I would sug­gest that these meas­ures should indeed be imple­men­ted. The European Par­lia­ment needs to take action now and show its 500 mil­lion cit­izens that it is ser­i­ous about pro­tect­ing their rights rather than pan­der­ing to the demands of the US gov­ern­ment and its cor­por­ate sponsors.

So, on this anniversary, I want to salute the bravery of Edward Snowden. His con­scious cour­age has giv­en us all a fight­ing chance against a cor­por­ate-indus­tri­al-intel­li­gence com­plex that is run­ning amok across the world.   I hope that we can all find with­in us an answer­ing cour­age to do what is right and indeed take back our rights. His bravery and sac­ri­fice must not be in vain.

ZDF TV interview at EMAF

Here is an inter­view I did for Ger­man nation­al TV, ZDF, while speak­ing at the European Media Art Fest­iv­al in Osnab­rueck in April:

zdfkulturzeit

ZDF Kul­turzeit inter­view about EMAF from Annie Machon on Vimeo.

European Media Art Festival (EMAF), Osnabrueck

The 27th European Media Art Fest­iv­al began this even­ing in Osnab­rueck, Ger­many. In the wake of all the glob­al intel­li­gence whis­tleblow­ing that has gone on over the last few years, the theme for the artists of 2014 is “We, the Enemy”.

Do vis­it if you can — a lot of inter­est­ing and polit­ic­al art install­a­tions are on dis­play, as well as films, music, and talks.  I shall be doing a talk on speak­ing on Fri­day afternoon.

I had the pleas­ure of mak­ing a short speech at the open­ing cere­mony this even­ing, and did an inter­view for nation­al Ger­man TV chan­nel ARD last night to pub­li­cise the festival.

ueberwachungskunst

Uber­wachungs kunst from Annie Machon on Vimeo.

Niemoeller Redux

Pub­lished on RT Op Edge and Con­sor­ti­um News.

I reg­u­larly revis­it the fam­ous Pas­tor Mar­tin Niemoeller poem from the Nazi era as his words remain res­on­ant in our post‑9/11, “war on ter­ror” world. Over the last week threads of vari­ous alarm­ing stor­ies have con­verged, so here is my latest update:

First they came for the Muslims, but I was not a Muslim so did not speak up.

Then they came for the whis­tleblowers, but I was not a whis­tleblower so did not speak up.

Then they came for the “domest­ic extrem­ists”, but I was not an act­iv­ist so did not speak up.

And when they came for me, there was nobody left to speak up for me.

Allow me to explain this cur­rent ver­sion. Reg­u­lar read­ers of this web­site will be well aware of my hor­ror at the glob­al rape of basic human rights in the West­’s fight against the “war on ter­ror” since 9/11: the kid­nap­pings, the tor­ture, the CIA pres­id­en­tially-approved weekly assas­sin­a­tion lists, the drone bomb­ings, the illeg­al wars.…

All these meas­ures have indeed tar­geted and ter­ror­ised the Muslim com­munity around the world. In the UK I have heard many stor­ies of Brit­ish Muslims wary of attend­ing a fam­ily event such as a wed­ding of their cous­ins in Pakistan or wherever, in case they get snatched, tor­tured or drone bombed.

Now it appears that even Brit­ish cit­izens who choose to donate to UK char­it­ies offer­ing human­it­ari­an relief in war zones such as Syr­ia can be arres­ted under counter-ter­ror­ism laws.

moazzam_beggMoazzam Begg, the dir­ect­or of Cage (the UK NGO cam­paign­ing about the com­munity impact of the war on ter­ror) was again seized last week. As I have writ­ten before, this is a man who has already exper­i­enced the hor­rors of Bagram air­base and Guantanamo. When he was released he became a cam­paign­er for oth­ers in the same plight and set up the Cage cam­paign which has gained quite some trac­tion over the last few years.

Over a year ago he vis­ited Syr­ia on a fact-find­ing mis­sion, invest­ig­at­ing those who had been sum­mar­ily detained and tor­tured in the con­flict. Last Decem­ber he had his pass­port seized on spuri­ous grounds He wrote about this trip quite openly, and yet now, a year on, has been arres­ted and charged with “train­ing ter­ror­ists and fund rais­ing” in Syr­ia. This is a high-pro­file cam­paign­er who oper­ates in the full glare of the media. How cred­u­lous does one have to be to believe that Begg, after all his exper­i­ences and run­ning this cam­paign, is now involved in “ter­ror­ism”?  Really, anyone?

Since then oth­er people involved in Brit­ish char­it­ies offer­ing aid to the dis­placed peoples of Syr­ia have also been scooped up. But this is just affect­ing the Brit­ish Muslim com­munity, right? There’s “no smoke without fire”, and it does not impinge the lives of most people in the UK, so there has been no wide­spread outcry.…

.…so nobody speaks up.

Then we have the ongo­ing “war on whis­tleblowers” that I have dis­cussed extens­ively. This affects every sec­tor of soci­ety in every coun­try, but most ser­i­ously affects whis­tleblowers emer­ging from cent­ral gov­ern­ment, the mil­it­ary and the intel­li­gence agen­cies. They are the ones most likely to wit­ness the most hein­ous crimes, and they are the ones auto­mat­ic­ally crim­in­al­ised by secrecy laws.

This is most appar­ent in the UK, where the Offi­cial Secrets Act (1989) spe­cific­ally crim­in­al­ises whis­tleblow­ing, and in the USA, where Pres­id­ent Obama has invoked the 1917 Espi­on­age Act against whis­tleblowers more times than all oth­er pres­id­ents com­bined over the last cen­tury. If that is not a “war on whis­tleblowers”, I don’t know what is.

This, of course, is a para­noid over-reac­tion to the work of Wikileaks, and the brave actions of Chelsea Man­ning and Edward Snowden. This is what Obama’s gov­ern­ment deems to be the “insider threat”.  Yet it is only through great­er trans­par­ency that we can oper­ate as informed cit­izens; it is only through great­er account­ab­il­ity that we can hope to obtain justice. And in this era, when we are routinely lied into illeg­al wars, what could be more import­ant?

But intel­li­gence and mil­it­ary whis­tleblowers are rare, spe­cial­ised and easy to stig­mat­ise as the “oth­er” and now, the insider threat — not quite of the nor­mal world. The issues they dis­close can seem a bit remote, not linked to most people’s daily experiences.…

.…so nobody speaks up.

But now to my third revamped line of the Pas­tor Niemoeller poem: the act­iv­ists or, to use cur­rent police ter­min­o­logy, the “domest­ic extrem­ists”. This, surely, does impinge on more people’s exper­i­ence of life. If you want to go out and demon­strate against a war, in sup­port of Occupy, for the envir­on­ment, whatever, you are surely exer­cising your demo­crat­ic rights as cit­izens, right?

Er, well no, not these days. I have writ­ten before about how act­iv­ists can be crim­in­al­ised and even deemed to be ter­ror­ists by the police (think Lon­don Occupy in 2011 here). I’m think­ing of the ongo­ing Brit­ish under­cov­er cop scan­dal which con­tin­ues to rumble on.

For those of you out­side the UK, this is a scan­dal that erup­ted in 2010. There is was a sec­tion of secret police who were infilt­rated into act­iv­ist groups under secret iden­tit­ies to live the life, report back, and even poten­tially work as ena­blers or agents pro­vocateurs. As the scan­dal has grown it appears that some of these cops fathered chil­dren with their tar­gets and spied on the griev­ing fam­il­ies of murder victims.

This sounds like the East Ger­man Stasi, but was hap­pen­ing in the UK in the last couple of dec­ades. A gov­ern­ment enquiry has just been announced and many old cases against act­iv­ists will be reviewed to see if tar­nished “evid­ence” was involved in the tri­als and sub­sequent convictions.

But again this does not affect most people bey­ond the act­iv­ist community.…

.…so nobody speaks up.

jesselyn_radackNow, people who have always assumed they have cer­tain pro­tec­tions because of their pro­fes­sions, such as law­yers and journ­al­ists, are also being caught in this drag­net. Juli­an Assange’s law­yer, Jen­nifer Robin­son, dis­covered she was on a flight watch list a few years ago. More recently Jes­selyn Radack, human rights dir­ect­or of the US Gov­ern­ment Account­ab­il­ity Pro­ject and leg­al advisor to Edward Snowden, was stopped and inter­rog­ated at the UK border.

And just this week a Dutch invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ist, Brenno de Winter, was unable to do his job since his name was placed on alert in all nation­al gov­ern­ment build­ings. The police accused him of hack­ing-related crimes and burg­lary. They had to retract this when the smear cam­paign came to light.

Brenno has made his name by free­dom of inform­a­tion requests from the Dutch pub­lic sec­tor and his sub­sequent invest­ig­a­tions, for which he was named Dutch Journ­al­ist of the Year in 2011. Hardly sub­ver­sion, red in tooth and claw, but obvi­ously now deemed to be an exist­en­tial, nation­al secur­ity threat to the Netherlands.

Nor is this a Dutch prob­lem — we have seen this in the US, where journ­al­ists such as James Ris­en and Bar­rett Brown have been houn­ded merely for doing their jobs, and the Glenn Gre­en­wald’s part­ner, Dav­id Mir­anda, was detained at Lon­don Heath­row air­port under counter-ter­ror­ism laws.

Journ­al­ists, who always some­what com­pla­cently thought they had spe­cial pro­tec­tions in West­ern coun­tries, are being increas­ingly tar­geted when try­ing to report on issues such as pri­vacy, sur­veil­lance, whis­tleblower dis­clos­ures and wars.

Only a few are being tar­geted now, but I hope these cases will be enough to wake the rest up, while there is still the chance for them to take action.…

.…before there is nobody left to speak up for us.

Week of the Whistleblower

So this com­ing week prom­ises to be inter­est­ing in the UK, with a num­ber of inter­na­tion­al whis­tleblowers gath­er­ing for a range of events and inter­views in Lon­don and Oxford.

SAA_logoThe primary reas­on for this gath­er­ing is the SAA award cere­mony for Chelsea Man­ning at the Oxford Uni­on Soci­ety on 19th Feb­ru­ary.  Every year an inter­na­tion­al group of former intel­li­gence per­son­nel vote on the Sam Adams Award for Integ­rity in Intel­li­gence and this year, inev­it­ably and resound­ingly, the award went to Chelsea.  She joins a dis­tin­guished list of laur­eates.

TheWhistlerlogoWe shall also be par­ti­cip­at­ing in the launch of the UK whis­tleblower sup­port net­work, The Whist­ler. This aims to provide prac­tic­al sup­port to whis­tleblowers com­ing out of every sec­tor: med­ic­al, fin­an­cial, gov­ern­ment… — whatever and wherever there are cov­er-ups and corruption.

There seems to be a grow­ing aware­ness of the role of the whis­tleblower and the safe­guards they can add to our soci­ety and demo­crat­ic way of life: the reg­u­lat­ors of last resort.  Please sup­port these campaigns.

Edward Snowden, Man of the Year

First pub­lished at RT Op-Edge.

When asked if Edward Snowden deserves to be the Man of the Year 2013, and I have been many times, my answer has to be a cat­egor­ic­al, resound­ing YES.

Sure, it has been an event­ful year and there are a lot of con­tenders. But Edward Snowden stands out for me for three key reas­ons:  his per­son­al and con­scious cour­age, the sheer scale of his dis­clos­ures and the con­tinu­ing, glob­al impact of what he did. Purely because of his actions we, the world’s cit­izens, are now able to have a dis­cus­sion about the nature of our civil­isa­tion and poten­tially call a halt to the fright­en­ing slide into a glob­al sur­veil­lance dystopia.

For the actions of Snowden have indeed laid bare the fact that we are liv­ing glob­al crisis of civil­isa­tion .  To date it is estim­ated the we have only seen about 1% of the doc­u­ments he dis­closed —  the merest hint of the tip of a mon­strous ice­berg.  What fur­ther hor­rors await us in 2014 and beyond?

The Per­son­al Risk

First of all, there is the per­son­al aspect.  Snowden has said that he does not want to be the story, he wants the focus to remain on the inform­a­tion.  I respect that, but it is worth remind­ing ourselves of the scale of sac­ri­fice this young man has made.  He had a well-paid job in Hawaii, an appar­ently happy rela­tion­ship, and good career pro­spects. All this he threw away to alert the world to the secret, illeg­al and dysto­pi­an sur­veil­lance sys­tem that has stealth­ily been smoth­er­ing the world.

But Snowden faced far more than merely throw­ing away a com­fort­able pro­fes­sion­al life. Over the last few years the US gov­ern­ment, appar­ently learn­ing well from its former colo­ni­al mas­ter the UK about the art of crush­ing of whis­tleblowers, has been waging a war against what it now deems the “insider threat” — ie per­sons of con­science who speak out. Pres­id­ent Obama has used the Espi­on­age Act (1917) to per­se­cute and pro­sec­ute more whis­tleblowers than all pre­vi­ous pres­id­ents in total before him.

This is indeed a “war on whis­tleblowers”. John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who refused to par­ti­cip­ate in the tor­ture pro­gramme and then exposed, it is cur­rently lan­guish­ing in pris­on; Thomas Drake, an earli­er NSA whis­tleblower, was threatened with 35 years in pris­on; young Chelsea Man­ning was mal­treated in pris­on, faced a kangaroo court, and is cur­rently serving a sim­il­ar sen­tence for the expos­ure of hideous war crimes against civil­ians in the Middle East. And the list goes on.

So not only did Edward Snowden turn his back on his career, he knew exactly the sheer scale of the leg­al risk he was tak­ing when he went pub­lic, dis­play­ing bravery very much above and bey­ond the call of duty.

The intel­li­gence apo­lo­gists in the media have inev­it­ably  shouted “nar­ciss­ism” about his brave step to out him­self, rather than just leak the inform­a­tion anonym­ously.  How­ever, these estab­lish­ment wind­bags are the real nar­ciss­ists. Snowden cor­rectly assessed that, had he not put his name to the dis­clos­ures, there would have been a witch-hunt tar­get­ing his former col­leagues and he wanted to pro­tect them. Plus, as he said in his very first pub­lic inter­view, he wanted to explain why he had done what he had done and what the implic­a­tions were for the world.

The Dis­clos­ures

The sheer scale and nature of the dis­clos­ures so far has been breath­tak­ing, and they just keep com­ing. They show that a vast, sub­ter­ranean sur­veil­lance state that has crept across the whole world, unknown and unchecked by the very politi­cians who are sup­posed to hold it to account. Indeed, not only have we learned that we are all under con­stant elec­tron­ic sur­veil­lance, but these politi­cians are tar­geted too. This is a glob­al secret state run­ning amok and we are all now targets.

Only yes­ter­day, Der Spiegel repor­ted more egre­gious examples of how the spies bug us: hard­ware hacks, com­puter vir­uses and even microwave wavelengths attack­ing both our com­puters and us – tin foil hats might not be such a bad idea after all.…

The Implic­a­tions

Snowden’s dis­clos­ures have laid bare the fact that the inter­net has been thor­oughly hacked, sub­ver­ted and indeed mil­it­ar­ised against we the people.  The basic free­dom of pri­vacy,  enshrined in the UN Declar­a­tion of Human Rights in the imme­di­ate after­math of the Second World War, has been destroyed.

Without free media, where we can all read, write, listen and dis­cuss ideas freely and in pri­vacy, we are all liv­ing in an Orwellian dysto­pia, and we are all poten­tially at risk. These media must be based on tech­no­lo­gies that empower indi­vidu­al cit­izens, not cor­por­a­tions or for­eign gov­ern­ments, and cer­tainly not a shad­owy and unac­count­able secret state.

The cent­ral soci­et­al func­tion of pri­vacy is to cre­ate the space for cit­izens to res­ist the viol­a­tion of their rights by gov­ern­ments and cor­por­a­tions. Pri­vacy is the last line of defense his­tor­ic­ally against the most poten­tially dan­ger­ous organ­isa­tion that exists: the state.

By risk­ing his life, Edward Snowden has allowed us all to see exactly the scale of the threat now facing us and to allow us the oppor­tun­ity to res­ist.  We all owe him a debt of grat­it­ude, and it is our duty to ensure that his cour­age and sac­ri­fice has not been in vain.

The German BND does the bidding of USA spies

An inter­view on the Ger­man main­stream TV chan­nel ARD.  The pro­gramme is called FAKT Magazin:

BND will bei Spi­on­age mit­mis­chen from Annie Machon on Vimeo.

Edward Snowden Website

Just a short post to announce the new Edward Snowden web­site.  Away from all the spin and media hys­teria, here are the basic facts about the inform­a­tion dis­closed and the issues at stake.

Snowden_website
And here’s anoth­er aide mem­oire of the dis­clos­ures so far. The impact of these dis­clos­ures is glob­al. Edward Snowden is simply the most sig­ni­fic­ant whis­tleblower in mod­ern history.