Good piece by Nick Davies on the Stockholm Syndrome that enslaves our politicians to the spooks whom they nominally control.

Ignore for a moment the vexing sight of journalists denouncing their own worth. Set aside too the question of why rival newspapers might want to attack the Guardian’s exclusives. Follow the argument. Who should make the judgment?

The official answer is that we should trust the security agencies themselves. Over the past 35 years, I’ve worked with a clutch of whistleblowers from those agencies, and they’ve all shared one underlying theme – that behind the screen of official secrecy, they had seen rules being bent and/or broken in a way which precisely suggested that the agencies should not be trusted. Cathy Massiter and Robin Robison, for example, described respectively MI5 and GCHQ pursuing politically motivated projects to spy on peace activists and trade unionists. Peter Wright told of MI5 illegally burgling its way across London “while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way”. David Shayler exposed a plot both lawless and reckless by MI5 and MI6 to recruit al-Qaida supporters to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi.

All of this was known to their bosses. None of it should have been happening. But the agencies in whom we are invited to place our trust not only concealed it but without exception then attacked the whistleblowers who revealed it.

Would we do better to trust the politicians who have oversight of the agencies? It’s instructive to look back from our vantage point, post-Snowden, to consider what was happening only two years ago when the government attempted to introduce new legislation which came to be known as the snooper’s charter. If the oversight politicians are as well-informed as they claim, they must have known that this was in part a cynical attempt to create retrospective legal cover for surveillance tools that were already secretly being used, but they said nothing. And when parliament refused to pass that law, clearly indicating that there was no democratic mandate for those tools, they still stayed silent…

Seb Schmoller (whom God Preserve) drew my attention to a fascinating essay in the New York Times in which the philosopher Peter Ludlow makes an insightful link between Establishment hysteria over Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing and the furore generated by Hannah Arendt’s reporting of the Eichmann trial in 1961 (currently being highlighted in the feature film about Arendt which is in cinemas as I write).

Hannah Arendt made an observation about what she called “the banality of evil.” One interpretation of this holds that it was not an observation about what a regular guy Adolf Eichmann seemed to be, but rather a statement about what happens when people play their “proper” roles within a system, following prescribed conduct with respect to that system, while remaining blind to the moral consequences of what the system was doing — or at least compartmentalizing and ignoring those consequences.

In his essay, Ludlow draws on Robert Jackall’s analysis (in his book Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers, a study of how membership of an organisation makes people adopt different moral codes from those they might hold as individuals. Jackall is a sociologist and his book is a study of the ethics of decision-making in corporations. Mostly, he argues, corporate employees are not evil people, but in their organisational roles they tend to follow five rules:

(1) You never go around your boss. (2) You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants dissenting views. (3) If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it. (4) You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as a boss. (5) Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do your job and you keep your mouth shut.

This was the code by which operatives like Ed Snowden (or Bradley Manning) were expected to live. In the end, the tension between obeying the codes and the imperatives of their consciences caused them to break ranks. The moral courage implicit in this seems admirable to many of us, but it’s also what infuriates those who regard them as traitors or worse. (Which includes most of the mass media btw, to their eternal shame.)

“Who do these people think they are, to put themselves in the position of passing moral judgement on matters that are way above their pay grades?” is the general tenor of the spluttering rage directed at Snowden and Manning. But the people who hold such views are generally the folks who either run or have risen in the organisations on which the whistleblowers blew the whistle. They are people, in other words, who signed up to Jackall’s Five Rules and checked their consciences in at the door when they signed on. Whenever I hear them ranting on about “betrayal” or “treason” I am reminded of Bertrand’s G.K. Chesterton’s* observation that the slogan “My Country Right or Wrong” is as daft as “My Mother, Drunk or Sober”.

* Thanks to Roger Whittaker for correction.

Frank Schirrmacher, publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung commenting on the attacks on the Guardian‘s reporting of the Snowden revelations.

The Snowden affair, one day, will be understood as a historic milestone at which democratic societies began to realize that the political cost of new technologies still needed to be negotiated. Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, one of Germany’s last great intellectuals and certainly not a leftist, sees it as a transition to a post-democratic society. And had the Snowden files not opened our eyes to this transition already, the way how the current debate about these documents unfolds, certainly did.These revelations are not only about secret services, but just as much about all the new social touchpoints of every citizen who is equipped with a smartphone and online access: Who controls and analyses these touchpoints and why? Is it so difficult to understand that in a world in which – according to Eric Schmidt’s concise formulation – the digital self not only mirrors but substitutes our true selves, all these issues become questions of human rights?

This is a really intriguing statement by ICANN. It’s couched in diplomatic language, so I have added my interpretations in less diplomatic language.

Montevideo Statement on the Future of Internet Cooperation

7 October 2013
Montevideo, Uruguay – The leaders of organizations responsible for coordination of the Internet technical infrastructure globally have met in Montevideo, Uruguay, to consider current issues affecting the future of the Internet.

The Internet and World Wide Web have brought major benefits in social and economic development worldwide. Both have been built and governed in the public interest through unique mechanisms for global multistakeholder Internet cooperation, which have been intrinsic to their success. The leaders discussed the clear need to continually strengthen and evolve these mechanisms, in truly substantial ways, to be able to address emerging issues faced by stakeholders in the Internet.

In this sense:

They reinforced the importance of globally coherent Internet operations, and warned against Internet fragmentation at a national level. They expressed strong concern over the undermining of the trust and confidence of Internet users globally due to recent revelations of pervasive monitoring and surveillance.

[Translation: We are concerned that one effect of the revelations about the NSA’s activities will be to hasten moves towards the ‘Balkanization’ of the Internet. We are also worried about the way trust and confidence in the Internet has been undermined by these revelations.]

They identified the need for ongoing effort to address Internet Governance challenges, and agreed to catalyze community-wide efforts towards the evolution of global multistakeholder Internet cooperation.

[Translation: the old system, by which the US exercised de-facto control over the central governance institutions of the Internet, has to be scrapped and replaced by something based on genuine global representation.]

They called for accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing.

[Translation: the days when the US was primus inter pares are over.]

They also called for the transition to IPv6 to remain a top priority globally. In particular Internet content providers must serve content with both IPv4 and IPv6 services, in order to be fully reachable on the global Internet.

Good blog post by Jonathan Freedland prompted by the paralysis in Washington. His conclusion:

Perhaps this doesn’t matter much to American voters. They might not realize how closely the rest of the world—their economies as well as their media and popular culture—follow, react to, and are affected by the ups and downs of US political life. But they do. And right now, they look at the stalemate in Washington the same way they look at the periodic gun massacres that afflict the United States: with a bafflement that America, mighty America, for so long the most innovative, creative, energetic society on the planet, cannot solve problems that smaller, poorer, feebler countries cracked long ago. Americans might not realize it, but this shutdown, like the gun epidemic, reduces US influence in the world. It makes nations, and individuals, who still want to regard America as a model see it instead as a basket case.

My Comment piece about news of Twitter’s impending IPO.

One of the most striking aspects of the epoch-making Commons debate on Syria was the way many MPs cited the emailed opposition of their constituents to armed intervention as a reason for voting against the proposed action.

In the United States, members of Congress told much the same story. It’s impossible to know whether MPs and congressmen were using constituents’ hostility as a way of legitimising their own, private, views, but their protestations gave a dramatic new twist to an old conundrum: are parliamentarians representatives (legislators who make up their own minds) or mere delegates (people who vote as instructed by their constituents)?

Edmund Burke famously raised the question in a speech to the electors of Bristol on 3 November 1774. “Government and legislation,” he said, “are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men deliberate, and another decide; and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?”

In Burke’s time, when Bristol was two days’ ride from London, the idea that constituents might determine the votes of their MP in Westminster in anything resembling real time was moot. So deliberative democracy was the only option available.

MPs’ recent rationalisations of their votes suggest that some of our politicians have embarked down a slippery slope. Technologies such as Twitter, which offer real-time tracking of public opinion, do make Burke’s nightmare realisable. Which means that a company that can regulate expressions of that opinion might be very powerful indeed. And that should make us nervous.

Terrific column by Jack Shafer.

The NSA’s techno-dodges give civil libertarians a choice of two large pitches on which to throw their fits. Should they be more angry about the national security bureaucracy first seeking the public’s consent to drink from the national information stream and then, when told “no,” ignoring the thumb down? Or is the greater outrage the fact that the vast and secret surveillance program was established at all, and not how it was established? As a fit-throwing civil libertarian, I intend to alternate from one field to the other. On even days I’ll scream about the basic outrage. On odd days, I’ll stamp my feet over the “you asked for permission, I said ‘No,’ and you went ahead and did it anyway” transgression.

Who made the U.S. government’s decision to bootleg its expansive surveillance system into place? To compromise the Internet and the devices we use to connect? To intentionally weaken the existing security systems by installing secret “back doors,” thereby making us all more vulnerable to a hostile cyber-attack by foreign powers or individuals who discover them? To reverse the popular will — or least the politically possible — without any further discussion? That last move would smack of totalitarianism, except that totalitarians make no pretext about needing the consent of their citizens to rule.

And there’s more…

Can somebody explain to the NSA that Snowden has merely done to the NSA what the NSA has been doing to U.S. citizens and business for decades? Snowden deceitfully ignored the legally binding promises he made to the NSA; the NSA similarly runs roughshod over both the letter and the spirit of surveillance legislation (and systematically lies about it, something Snowden doesn’t do). Snowden stole secrets; the NSA steals secrets (and encryption keys, according to yesterday’s reports), only at a more colossal level. Snowden took it upon himself that he, not the NSA or his government, knows best; the NSA and its governmental partners believe they know best; Snowden creatively exploited the technical weaknesses in the computer matrix to accomplish his goals; so does the NSA.

Neatly highlights the question that’s been bothering me for months. Is it possible to have the kind of comprehensive surveillance that the NSA and its overseas franchises operate and also have democracy. My answer: no.