Thursday, February 27, 2014 

The nerve of GCHQ.

It makes me look only slightly daft that the day after I wonder if the Graun and the rest of the media have been self-censoring over the latest Snowden document, the paper goes and exposes yet another massively invasive GCHQ programme. This time it turns out everyone's favourite Cheltenham based spooks were (and no doubt still are) tapping into Yahoo's webcam service, collecting a grabbed image from the streams of those targeted every 5 minutes.  Staggeringly, 1.8 million accounts were accessed during a six-month period in 2008, for what seems more than anything to have been an exercise in testing facial recognition software.  The program was, brazenly, it must be said, called Optic Nerve.

Just how many terrorist suspects or criminals who use Yahoo Webcam had their chats intercepted we can't know.  What anyone with even the slightest knowledge of the internet does know is while now used for Skype and so on, webcams were principally bought to begin with by teenagers who chatted online.  GCHQ though professes itself to be shocked, shocked that from a sample of 323 users whose streams were intercepted, each of which had just 1 image from those collected examined, 7.1% contained "undesirable nudity".  In what has to be an example of massive understatement, GCHQ considers this to be a surprise.  I mean, who knew people used webcams to do such things?

Don't worry though, GCHQ staff weren't using the Optic Nerve database to exchange amateur porn with each other.  Such "dissemination of offensive material" is a disciplinary offence, and bulk queries were later restricted to just the metadata, lest anyone start building their own personal collection of homegrown nudes.  It seems almost impolite to say, as Jamie has it, but if you're spying on people who aren't specific targets and what you're getting as a result is images of people naked, then images of people naked would seem to be what you're looking to get.  Even more delicate is the fact that as alluded to above, teenagers are likely to still be the main users of a service like Yahoo Webcam.  Let's hope there aren't more people like Geoffrey Prime with the organisation, eh?

According to the government, security services and the High Court, we shouldn't be allowed to know such things have been done in our name.  How do we know Optic Nerve didn't in fact result in the identification of a terrorist who otherwise would have killed people?  How do we know that the facial recognition software won't go on to be hugely important in stopping an attack?  By exposing it those who wish us harm will now know they've been watched and can be watched; as for the millions who had their privacy infringed and potentially their most intimate moments captured, surely it's a small sacrifice to make for security.  Or it could be the ultimate example of the security services doing something purely because they can, caring only for the sensitivities of their staff in having to look at such images, not for the people who had their streams intercepted in bulk.  If there hadn't been enough evidence already of the dubious benefits of mass interception, surely this ought to be the Milly Dowler moment.

P.S. Patricia Hewitt's apology for "getting it wrong" over the Paedophile Information Exchange's links with the National Council for Civil Liberties when she was general secretary back in the 70s looked inevitable after the Graun found a document suggesting that PIE's advice on the age of consent influenced NCCL's lobbying in 1976.  Whether it really did or not is another matter, but as the first real piece of evidence to imply it might have been the case it most definitely brought Hewitt's judgement into question.  Much else still remains murky, and no one has denied that by '76 after Jack Dromey's intervention, even if certain members remained on committees, PIE had mostly been sidelined.  Tom O'Carroll, the then chair of PIE, who doesn't seem to have any reason to lie, says the three never attended the gay rights sub-committee he was on during the late 70s, and that the impression he received was Hewitt, Dromey and Harman were hostile towards PIE even if they didn't make any major moves to expel the organisation.

P.P.S. Nice to see that along with the more obvious mistakes she made while editor of the Sun, Rebekah Brooks admitted she has regrets over her helming of the paper's campaigning on Baby Peter, something she had previously defended in her Hugh Cudlipp lecture.  "Balance went out the window," she said, while it was "cruel, harsh and over the top" to put a photographer outside Sharon Shoesmith's house.  Brooks might also want to privately apologise to Maria Ward, for how commenters were allowed on the Sun's website to tell her to kill herself.  Lastly, worth reflecting that had it not been for the Sun's vociferous campaign, with it demanding "a price to be paid for [Baby Peter's] little life", the taxpayer wouldn't have had to shell out hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation to Shoesmith after Ed Balls acted unlawfully to dismiss her.

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2/27/2014 08:32:00 pm | |

Wednesday, February 26, 2014 

Whither press freedom?

The Guardian is guilty of treachery, and Edward Snowden's disclosures have put lives at risk. Not the opinion of politicians or the security services themselves, although the latter has all but said as much and the odd MP has stuck their pennyworth in, but that of the Daily Mail and commentators in the Telegraph. As Peter Preston wrote in the Observer (although considering his giving into the government over the Sarah Tisdall affair some would say he's one to talk), despite some initial misgivings the press united in defiance over the Thatcher government's attempt to ban Spycatcher. That Tory supporting papers are this time siding with the judges when they say the media as a whole should not publish any intelligence material as they cannot know what potential damage it may cause ought to worry us.

What though if the Graun and the rest of the mainstream media for that matter have in fact abided by pleas from the government not to publish certain material from the Snowden files, despite the threats we know to have been made? It's a question worth asking as two days on from the publication of what seems on the surface to be one of the most sensational documents yet released from the Snowden cache, not a single UK newspaper has touched it.

On Monday Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept posted a PowerPoint presentation authored by the "Head of Human Science" at GCHQ's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group.  Following on from the reporting he carried out in partnership with NBC that revealed JTRIG had carried out DoS attacks against Anonymous "hacktivists", using the exact same tactics that some of those involved in the likes of Lulzec were jailed over, the presentation outlines exactly which "disruption" tactics could be used against the group's targets.  These include infiltration, stings and, in a term that will prick up the ears of everyone even vaguely aware of the rantings of the more out there conspiracy theorists, "false flag operations".  While the presentation itself does not outline exactly what this means, Greenwald explains it would involve posting material to the net that would then be attributed to either the target or someone associated with them.  Also acceptable would be honey traps, with the implication that once the target had succumbed they would then be smeared as either abusive or worse, with their friends and relatives informed of their supposed actions.

As Greenwald sums it up, "surveillance agencies have vested themselves with the power to deliberately ruin people’s reputations and disrupt their online political activity even though they’ve been charged with no crimes, and even though their actions have no conceivable connection to terrorism or even national security threats".  While the targets we know of so far have been the aforementioned "hacktivists", many of whom did engage in actions which were either illegal or at the very least were threatening towards those who attracted their ire, it's more than probable that those who were only involved at the margins and who did neither of these things could also have been swept up in the process.  It wouldn't be a great leap for such tactics to be used against online protesters who do operate entirely legally and peacefully, or indeed as we have seen with the exposure of the Met's Special Demonstration Squad, the insertion of agent provocateurs, with the authorisation to set up false long-term relationships.

Why then has no newspaper or even a UK-based site such as The Register covered it?  Why indeed.  The Graun's editor Alan Rusbridger retweeted a link to Greenwald's piece, quoting Edward Snowden as saying that GCHQ was in many respects worse than the NSA, yet hasn't found room in the paper itself to repeat what GCHQ has been getting up to.  While the Independent, Telegraph and Mail (no hypocrisy there then) reported on the previous NBC stories, neither has produced a follow-up on Greenwald's latest article and the presentation that accompanies it, despite it containing new detail on precisely which tactics are permissible.  Also of note is the Guardian did not directly respond to last week's High Court ruling on David Miranda in an editorial, leaving it to a comment piece from Helena Kennedy; perhaps explained by how Miranda intends to appeal, but still somewhat surprising considering what is clearly at stake.

By any measure, Greenwald's report is clearly in the public interest, such is the potential for abuse. There are also questions over whether the law as it stands allows GCHQ to carry out such actions, yet only those who have followed the story are likely to have found out.  If the silence is the result of the chilling effect of threats from the government or court rulings, then clearly we have an even bigger problem with freedom of the press in this country than was already obvious.

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2/26/2014 11:59:00 pm | |

Wednesday, February 19, 2014 

The closing ranks of the secret state.

The ruling by the High Court that the detention of David Miranda under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 was lawful is not surprising.  As we have seen so often in the past, spurious claims that national security will be endangered or that "lives are at risk" can cover a whole multitude of sins.  Schedule 7 is so broadly drafted even the government recognises it is open to abuse.  That MI5, who requested Miranda's detention, knew he was not a terrorist and also that he was not involved in espionage, despite their claim on the Port Circulation Sheet issued to the police, was also irrelevant.  The only real quandary was whether the judges would express any disquiet about the stop, perhaps even suggesting the legislation needs to be looked at again.  Not only have Lord Justice Laws, Mr Justice Ouseley and Mr Justice Openshaw done no such thing, their judgement effectively agrees entirely with the case made by the government and the security service, to the point that it seems remarkably incurious of the potential abuse of power such legislation provides the executive with.

That the justices make no mention of the fact MI5 failed to put suspected terrorism as the reason for stopping Miranda on the the first two PCSes, putting "not applicable" in the box, is indicative of itself. Only once informed by the Met that they could, err, only detain him if terrorism was indeed suspected did they do as told. The reason for stopping Miranda was two-fold: first, as now seems to be the case, neither the NSA nor our own intelligence agencies know exactly what Edward Snowden managed to take, with it being possible they will never know. Having failed to get back the files from the Guardian, with the paper opting instead to destroy the hard drives under GCHQ supervision, getting an insight from the files Miranda was transporting was the next best option. Second, just as the government had threatened the Guardian with being shut down if it continued to publish the Snowden documents, detaining Miranda doubled as a further act of harassment and intimidation against Glenn Greenwald (Miranda's partner) and the other journalists working on the stories, since detailed further by Luke Harding.

All of which makes it all the more perplexing why Justice Laws dismisses Greenwald and Miranda's witness statements out of hand and accepts those of the Met's D/Supt Stokley and D/Supt Caroline Goode, and that of Oliver Robbins, deputy national security officer at the Cabinet Office, as so compelling.  Robbins, after all, was the very individual threatening the Guardian with an injunction that would have prevented it from publishing, the government having decided the debate the revealing of the mass surveillance schemes operated by the NSA and GCHQ was over.  Neither of the statements from the police and government provide any further detail of the damage meant to have been caused by the release of the files other than the platitudes we've heard from the heads of the security services. Laws is critical of Miranda and Greenwald for not engaging with these claims, yet how are you meant to argue against such statements when either no evidence is provided to back them up, or indeed when other officials, such as the head of the D-Notice committee, are dismissive of the idea that the stories have threatened national security?

Laws in fact goes further.  He describes Greenwald's statement that "not to publish material simply because a government official has said such publication may be damaging to national security is antithetical to the most important traditions of responsible journalism" as true but trivial, due to how the defendants' evidence goes beyond mere assertions.  He then accepts completely the argument from the government and Robbins that journalists simply cannot know what will or will not damage national security when it comes to publishing such documents.  Quite apart from how the Guardian has only on one occasion not co-operated with the government in informing them of what they were set to publish, giving the security services the opportunity to object or otherwise if something was about to threaten an on-going operation, let alone lives, meaning that it is not just journalists but also lawyers and other officials involved in the decision-making, the ultimate conclusion of such an argument is that the media should never publish or reveal anything that the government says they shouldn't.  Freedom of the press it seems is entirely dispensable, regardless of the threat or lack thereof posed to the life of the nation by terrorism.  Adding insult to injury, Laws says there is no reason to doubt any of Robbins' statement.  To which you can only say: really?

This isn't just about the detention of Miranda, as Greenwald himself points out.  It also makes clear that the intelligence agencies were at the least following the movements of all those involved in the stories, if not bugging their communications.  Even if there was the belief that somehow the files they had in their possession might fall into the hands of other states or terrorists themselves, this in itself is another major step across the Rubicon.  Infiltrating protest groups, even peaceful ones, is controversial, but going after journalists is something else.

The reasoning behind this assault is clear: as the legal advice provided to MPs by Jemima Stratford QC set out, the entire system of regulation which enables Tempora and other GCHQ surveillance programmes is years out of date, and almost certainly in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.  This lack of oversight is however exactly what sells GCHQ to the Americans, and why they are prepared to pay millions for it on top of the billions in funding it receives from the UK taxpayer.  Rather than address the revelations, from the very beginning the government has attempted to close down what little debate there has been, and shamefully it's a process that much of the rest of the media has connived in.  Now we know the judiciary is also fully on side.  How ironic it will be if it it falls to the ECHR, the supposed friend of privacy and enemy of press freedom, to strike a blow against a secret state that uses anti-terrorism legislation to intimidate those acting in the public interest.

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2/19/2014 11:59:00 pm | |

Tuesday, October 29, 2013 

Only the little people can be spied on.

Last week, the NSA/GCHQ spying on everyone and everything scandal finally achieved critical mass.  Not, you understand, due to the revelations that the NSA had been collating the metadata behind the phone calls and messages of millions of ordinary Europeans, but because they had also been monitoring the calls of Angela Merkel, as well as other major leaders.  Cue the summoning of US ambassadors, demands for such practices to end, and an agreed statement at Friday's EU summit that suggested such abuses damaged intelligence sharing.

As Juan Cole writes, it's only when friends and allies discover they've been subject to such practices that those who've previously defended the spies to the hilt decide their mates have gone too far.  Tapping into fibre optic cables in pursuit of mastering the internet, working behind the scenes with tech companies to monitor social networking sites, and operating a scheme where GCHQ spies on the US and the NSA spies on the UK to avoid breaching laws, that's all to be expected.  Intercepting Frau Merkel's "handy", though, that's beyond the pale.  Obama might have known about Prism and all the rest, but listening in to former president Sarkozy's chats with gorgeous pouting Carla Bruni?  He wasn't aware of anything like that, honest.

Luckily for our own prime minister, any manoeuvring around say, Andy Coulson or more prosaic discussions with Sam Cam over which box set to chillax with on any particular night won't have been saved for posterity in the NSA archives, as best friends don't listen in on each other's calls.  Or, if they do, they aren't admitting to it.  The so-called "Five Eyes" agreement where the intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, probably means there isn't much that isn't shared in any case, which was why it was always nonsensical for the last government to claim the release of the "seven paragraphs" would mean the turning off of the tap.

This meant dear old Dave could stand up in the Commons yesterday and maintain his previously taken position that everything the security services do is wonderful, completely legal and beyond reproach.  The real danger remains the continuing release of such secrets, rather than damage to long-standing relationships when embarrassing details are inadvertently made public.  Indeed, when we want to know the truth about how the Snowden files have affected the work of MI5 and co, you simply have to turn to the Sun, which has a long track record in holding power to account.  Keeping things subtle as always, the paper illustrated the whisper it received from a "security source" that the "terrorists have gone quiet" since the Guardian started printing its stories alongside a photo of the WTC ablaze.

Hugh Muir suggests this will be the line taken by the heads of 5, 6 and GCHQ when they have their first ever live chat in front of the cameras at the intelligence and security committee.  It can't be proved and it can't be disproved, like so much else when it comes to the spooks, and so is perfect for sages such as Malcolm Rifkind and Hazel Blears to pronounce upon.  One suspects the real reason behind the Sun story is the Graun at the weekend revealed how the spooks have previously kiboshed reforms not to their liking.  Apparently concerned that the introduction of intercept evidence into the courts could reveal their surveillance capabilities were far beyond what was known, irony of ironies, they worked with the Home Office to lobby against the proposals, including by putting forward trusted lieutenants such as Lord Carlile and Lord Stevens to speak to the media.  Lord Carlile it's worth remembering was the "independent" reviewer of terrorism legislation, who just last week said the Graun had committed "criminal acts".  Never has been there been so obvious an example of regulatory capture.

That very illusion of independent oversight is exactly what the government and the spooks are seeking to ensure carries on.  It doesn't matter Rifkind has already said newspapers can't make an informed decision on what will and won't affect national security, and so it follows should never publish anything without their permission, we must still go through the motions. The same was the case with Cameron's veiled threats yesterday: as Roy Greenslade says, he can't make the DA-Notice committee do anything, while any attempt to pursue an injunction would take press freedom back years, as well as possibly breaching the ECHR. Such has been the tenor of the debate though, it's understandable that no chances are being taken. And it's not even close to being over.

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10/29/2013 10:20:00 pm | |

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