From the protests in Bangkok (courtesy of Benedict Evans).
Interesting for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that human-piloted surveillance choppers cost £1700/hour to run.
Category Archives: Politics
And the French for “hypocrisy” is…?
You may recall how outraged Europeans are about the NSA’s violation of their human right to privacy? Well, guess what?
For all their indignation last summer, when the scope of the United States’ mass data collection began to be made public, the French are hardly innocents in the realm of electronic surveillance. Within days of the reports about the National Security Agency’s activities, it was revealed that French intelligence services operated a similar system, with similarly minimal oversight.
And last week, with little public debate, the legislature approved a law that critics feared would markedly expand electronic surveillance of French residents and businesses.
The provision, quietly passed as part of a routine military spending bill, defines the conditions under which intelligence agencies may gain access to or record telephone conversations, emails, Internet activity, personal location data and other electronic communications.
The law provides for no judicial oversight and allows electronic surveillance for a broad range of purposes, including “national security,” the protection of France’s “scientific and economic potential” and prevention of “terrorism” or “criminality.”
The government argues that the law, which does not take effect until 2015, does little to expand intelligence powers. “Rather, officials say, those powers have been in place for years, and the law creates rules where there had been none, notably with regard to real-time location tracking”.
C’est magnifique!
The astuteness of Mr Snowden
Well, well. This from the New York Times
American intelligence and law enforcement investigators have concluded that they may never know the entirety of what the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden extracted from classified government computers before leaving the United States, according to senior government officials.
Investigators remain in the dark about the extent of the data breach partly because the N.S.A. facility in Hawaii where Mr. Snowden worked — unlike other N.S.A. facilities — was not equipped with up-to-date software that allows the spy agency to monitor which corners of its vast computer landscape its employees are navigating at any given time.
Six months since the investigation began, officials said Mr. Snowden had further covered his tracks by logging into classified systems using the passwords of other security agency employees, as well as by hacking firewalls installed to limit access to certain parts of the system.
“They’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of man-hours trying to reconstruct everything he has gotten, and they still don’t know all of what he took,” a senior administration official said. “I know that seems crazy, but everything with this is crazy.”
That Mr. Snowden was so expertly able to exploit blind spots in the systems of America’s most secretive spy agency illustrates how far computer security still lagged years after President Obama ordered standards tightened after the WikiLeaks revelations of 2010.
This confirms a hunch I’ve had from the outset, namely that Edward Snowden has been very astute, both in his choice of NSA abuses to be highlighted (and his subsequent selection of documents to illustrate each particular abuse). What we are now also beginning to appreciate is the extent of his technical versatility.
LATER: James Ball emails tweets to say that, while not disputing the astuteness of Snowden, the choice of illustrative documents was done by journalists working with him.
Why do governments screw up IT projects?
This morning’s Observer column:
This is a tale of two cities – Washington and London – and of the governments that rule from them. What links the pair is the puzzling failure of said governments to manage two vital IT projects. In both cases, the projects are critically important for the political credibility of their respective administrations. And yet they are both in trouble for reasons that most engineering and computer science undergraduates could have spotted.
So here’s the puzzle: how is it that governments stuffed with able and conscientious civil servants screw up so spectacularly whenever IT is involved?
Let us start with Obamacare, the US president’s landmark reform of his country’s dysfunctional healthcare system…
News Corpse
Emily Bell has a terrific review of David Folkenflik’s book, Rupert Murdoch: The Last of the Old Media Empires
Murdoch and his properties are forever booing and hissing at the public sector; he is a lusty advocate of the free market, he is frequently at odds with communications regulators, and he loathes publicly funded media. His personal Twitter feed is full of pithy aphorisms urging the dropping of regulation and the lowering of taxes.
However, Murdoch’s expedience in dealing with government is a defining feature that distinguishes him from his less successful peers. His engagement with the political process in every country he operates in is intense. Whether being readily received by Margaret Thatcher, his great political ally in breaking UK print unions in the 1970s, meeting with Russian oligarchs on his yacht, or consulting with Chinese party officials, Murdoch maintains close ties to regional power. He leans on the door of regulation so often and because of his facility with establishments, it gives way. Is that something we should blame Murdoch for? No. He is only doing what all business people would do—he is just more efficient and persistent and strategic than most.
Too close, indeed, in the UK, where subsequent governments of opposing parties demonstrated obeisance toward him, his family, and his executives in a startling inversion of the normal patterns of patronage and lobbying. Rebekah Brooks, the former Sun and News of the World editor who is now indicted on hacking charges, rode horses with British Prime Minister David Cameron, who, despite repeated warnings not to, also employed former Murdoch editor Andy Coulson as his head of communications. That was before Coulson also faced charges similar to Brooks. The hacking scandal at the News of the World, once uncovered, did not reveal an organization at odds with the establishment, but one that was indistinguishable from the establishment.
So where are the Telcos? In the government’s pocket, as usual.
So the Internet companies have finally realised that the damage done to their interests by the NSA is serious enough to flush them out into open opposition. Jeff Jarvis has an astute Guardian comment post which points out that some important companies are missing from the lost if potential refusniks.
Please note who is missing from the list – the signators are Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Microsoft, Aol, Apple, LinkedIn. I see no telecom company there — Verizon, AT&T, Level 3, the companies allegedly in a position to hand over our communications data and enable governments to tap straight into internet traffic. Where is Amazon, another leader in the cloud whose founder, Jeff Bezos, now owns the Washington Post? Where are Cisco and other companies whose equipment is used to connect the net and by some governments to disconnect it? Where are the finance companies — eBay, Visa, American Express — that also know much about what we do?
The reason the Telcos are not in the list is that they have always been part of the national security system, so they’re unlikely to discover civil liberties anytime soon. In Britain, for example, I remember a time when anyone who worked for British Telecom — even in lowly capacities — had to sign the Official Secrets Act. Why? Because they might be instructed to tap someone’s (analog) phone. For all I know, it may still be a requirement for employment by BT.
Why the NSA has landed us all in another nice mess
This morning’s Observer column.
Fans of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy will fondly remember Oliver’s complaint to Stanley: “Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into!” In a future remake, Hardy will be played by Barack Obama, suitably enhanced with a toothbrush moustache, while Keith Alexander, currently head of the NSA, will star as Laurel. The scene in which this particular bit of dialogue occurs is the Oval Office, which for the purposes of the scene is littered with flip charts summarising the various unintended consequences of the NSA’s recent activities, as relayed by Edward Snowden.
One chart, supplied by the Department of Commerce, lists the collateral damage inflicted by the revelations on major US internet companies…
The issue-a-day men
There was an interesting conversation this morning on the Today programme between Evan Davis and the chancellor, George Osborne. The peg for the conversation was the government’s announcement that it was going to intervene in the so-called “pay-day loans” market – by capping interest rates, among other things. Davis made the point that the government had already set up a new banking regulator – the Financial Conduct Authority – to oversee the financial services and asked the perfectly reasonable question: why was the government suddenly doing the job that the FCA had been set up to do?
Osborne did not have a satisfactory answer, but I do: it’s a headline-grabbing piece of pseudo-activism aimed at persuading the public that the government is on the job. They’re concerned because Ed Miliband appears to have captured the initiative with his proposal to cap energy prices, and generally to take the cost-of-living crisis (that’s the crisis that ordinary people are experiencing) seriously.
And then I was reminded of something perceptive that Alistair Campbell said last week during his sojourn in Cambridge. He pointed out the way in which, in recent months especially, David Cameron appears on TV on an almost daily basis, expostulating on an issue or problem about which he feels absolutely passionately and about which he is determined (clenched fist, emphatic gesture) to do something. But every day it’s a different issue. Campbell sees this as a symptom of a leader who is now devoid of strategy and so is driven to following the day-to-day vagaries of public opinion and tabloid obsession, like a kitten chasing a moving patch of light.
Snowden and the Future: what’s really at stake
An excerpt from Eben Moglen’s extraordinary second lecture on “Snowden and the Future”.
The fastening of the procedures of totalitarianism on the human race is the political subject about which Mr. Snowden has summoned us to an urgent inquiry. And it is that inquiry which it has been the goal of pretty much everybody responding on behalf of any Government or State not just to ignore but to obscure.
We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world.
This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.
For almost everyone who lived through the 20th century—at least its middle half—the idea that freedom was consistent with the procedures of totalitarianism was self-evidently false.
Those who fought against it, those who sacrificed their lives to it and had to begin again as displaced persons and refugees around the world, and those who suffered under the harrow of it were all perfectly clear that a society that listens to every telephone call, spies on every meetings, keeps track of everybody’s movements is incompatible with a scheme of ordered liberty, as Justice Benjamin Cardozo defined American constitutional freedom.
But at the beginning of the 21st century, what seemed clear and absolutely unnecessary to inquire into in the 20th is now, apparently, a question.
So we had better address it directly.
NSA: Neat hacks vs democratic control
This morning’s Observer column.
Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy. And then there’s Edward Snowden, who was a spy and then became something else. Nobody’s neutral about him. The other day I heard a senior military officer describe him unambiguously as “a thief”. In Washington he seems to be universally regarded as a traitor. Many people in Europe regard him as, at worst, a principled whistleblower and, at best, a hero in the Daniel Ellsberg mould.
Whatever you think about him, though, one thing is clear: Snowden is a pretty astute geek. The evidence for this is in the way he approached his whistleblowing task. Having concluded (as several other distinguished National Security Agency employees before him had) that the NSA had misinterpreted or overstepped its brief, he then identified prominent instances of agency overreach and for each category downloaded evidence that supported his conjecture.
We’re now getting to the point where we can begin to assess the bigger picture. What do the Snowden revelations tell us about what’s wrong with the NSA – and its leading overseas franchise, our own dear GCHQ?