Q: Who let this happen? A: We did.

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This morning’s Observer column.

The relevant extract from the [FISA] court transcript reads:

Justice Arnold: “Well, if this order is enforced, and it’s secret, how can you be hurt? The people don’t know that – that they’re being monitored in some way. How can you be harmed by it? I mean, what’s… what’s your… what’s the damage to your consumer?”

Ponder that for a moment. It’s extraordinarily revealing because it captures the essence of the mindset of the people who now rule our democracies. It’s a variant on the “if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear” mantra. And it begs the question: who gave these people the right to think and act like this?

The long answer goes back a long way – to Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and maybe Rousseau. The short answer is that we did. We elected these holders of high office – the home and foreign secretaries who ostensibly control MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, the MPs who cluelessly voted through laws such as Ripa (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act), Drip (Data Retention and Investigatory Powers) and will do likewise for whatever loose statutes will be proposed after the next terrorist/paedophilia/cyber crime panic arrives…

Read on

GCHQ launches new code-making app

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Well, well. This from the new, cuddly GCHQ.

Cryptoy is a fun, free, educational app about cryptography, designed by GCHQ for use by secondary school students and their teachers.

The app enables users to understand basic encryption techniques, learn about their history and then have a go at creating their own encoded messages. These can then be shared with friends via social media or more traditional means and the recipients can use the app to try to decipher the messages.

Cryptoy is mainly directed at Key Stage 4 students but can be used by anyone with an interest in learning about or teaching cryptography.

The app was designed by students on an industrial year placement at GCHQ. It was created as part of a project to demonstrate encryption techniques at the Cheltenham Science Festival, and has since been used at several other outreach events. The app was a hit, and GCHQ received interest from teachers who wanted to use it as a teaching aid. Therefore it was decided to make it publicly available.

GCHQ is committed to helping to increase the uptake of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects at schools through its outreach programme and its work with industry and academia. It is also critical that the UK builds a knowledge base of cyber security skills. Learning about encryption and the associated academic disciplines are key parts of both of these.

Android only (for now anyway). Presumably not available to Belgians and officials of the European Commission.

A Thieves’ Thanksgiving

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This is a great time to be a crook. Not a small-time crook of course — for example, a cat-burglar or a pickpocket, or someone who fiddles his expenses: these knaves invariably get caught and spend time in the slammer. I’m talking about bankers, ‘defence’ contractors, executives of ‘security’ companies (the kind that charge the taxpayer for electronic tagging of people who are deceased or in prison, for example), and the like. They are not only doing just fine, but are apparently untouchable. As Charles Simic explains in a lovely NYRB blog post:

What makes a career in white-collar crime so attractive is that there are so few risks anymore. Everyone knows about Wall Street bankers having their losses from various scams they concocted over the years covered by taxpayers. But now, even when bankers lose billions for their bank by making bad or reckless deals, or have to pay regulatory penalties, as Jamie Dimon, the current chairman, president, and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase did earlier this year, they are more likely to get a 74 percent raise, as he did, than to lose their jobs. As for the federal agencies that are supposed to watch over them and the Justice Department that is supposed to haul these hucksters into court, if they so much as bestir themselves to confront the banks, they simply ask them to pay fines, thereby avoiding a judge or a jury and making sure that the details of their swindles can remain secret from the public.

As dishonest as Wall Street is, it doesn’t compare to the kind of thievery that went on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Once upon a time, war profiteers were looked at as the lowest of the low and condemned by presidents. “Worse than traitors in arms are the men who pretend loyalty to the flag, feast and fatten on the misfortunes of the Nation while patriotic blood is crimsoning the plains of the South and their countrymen mouldering in the dust,” warned Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. “I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster,” declared Franklin Roosevelt as the United States entered World War II.

Yet today, according to the Commission on Wartime Contracting, an independent, bipartisan legislative commission established to study wartime contracting, somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion of US government money has been lost through contract waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is now common knowledge that contractors were paid millions of dollars for projects that were never built, that the Defense Department gave more than $400 billion to companies that had previously been sanctioned in cases involving fraud, and that the beneficiaries of such past largesse have not only gotten fabulously wealthy, but continue to be invited to pursue lucrative business opportunities in the new homeland security–industrial complex.

The Torture Report

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Very good roundup on Quartz by Gideon Lichfield.

From outside the US, the Senate intelligence committee’s 528-page report on CIA torture techniques—merely the abridged, non-secret version of the 6,700-page original—seems like America at its best. Harshly critical of an agency that did evil things to produce dubious intelligence while lying to its overlords, it seems to embody the country’s best traditions of transparency and honest self-examination.

But inside the US, the report is a sullied, discredited thing. This was no grave, bipartisan effort like the report of the 9/11 Commission, but—as critics would have it, and not entirely wrongly—a labor of ass-covering spite, produced solely by the committee’s majority Democrats and crafted to shield their own complicity. Republicans have attacked it; former CIA chiefs have risen up (paywall) to defend themselves. And Democrats are worrying about what will happen when, a few years hence, their rivals expose the current administration’s enthusiastic use of drone strikes to the same merciless sunlight.

That is a shame, for the report, though flawed, is truly damning. But, one might shrug, so what? If partisan politics is what it takes to have a national debate about the ethics of warfare, so be it; democracy is messy, and it should take what transparency it can get.

However, this national debate is not like those about race, guns, or the banking system. There, the winners and losers from a policy all have votes or campaign funds with which to sway the outcome. In warfare, the losers—the tortured suspects, the people with relatives blown to bits by drones—are foreigners, with no say. However indignantly liberals may protest the bad things done in their name, when the call comes to “keep America safe,” how many of them will dare challenge it?

For neoliberalism, poverty and inequality are features, not bugs

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The thing about neoliberalism is that the poverty and inequality that it produces are not regrettable side-effects of a basically sound engine, but the whole purpose of the exercise. In programming terms, they are features, not bugs. This point is nicely made by Benjamin Selwyn in a blog post in Le Monde diplomatique – English edition.

In his film Inequality for All, Robert Reich, who was Bill Clinton’s labour secretary between 1993 and 1997, documents the collapse of US wages over the last four decades. In the late 1970s the typical male US worker was earning $48,000 a year (inflation adjusted). By 2010, the average wage had fallen to $33,000 a year. Over the same period the average annual income of someone in the top 1% of US society rose from $390,000 to $1,100,000.
Neoliberal policies aim to reduce wages to the bare minimum and to maximize the returns to capital and management. They also aim to demobilise workers’ organisations and reduce workers to carriers of labour power — a commodity to be bought and sold on the market for its lowest price. Neoliberalism is about re-shaping society so that there is no input by workers’ organisations into democratic or economic decision-making. Crises and austerity may not be intentionally sought by most state leaders and central bank governors, but they do contribute significantly towards pursuing such ends. Consequently, these politicians and leaders of the economy do not strive to put in place new structures or policies that will reduce the recurrence of crisis.

HT to Julia Powles for spotting it.

US Congress quietly bolsters NSA surveillance

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No changes there, then.

December 11, 2014 Congress this week quietly passed a bill that may give unprecedented legal authority to the government’s warrantless surveillance powers, despite a last-minute effort by Rep. Justin Amash to kill the bill.

Amash staged an aggressive eleventh-hour rally Wednesday night to block passage of the Intelligence Authorization Act, which will fund intelligence agencies for the next fiscal year. The Michigan Republican sounded alarms over recently amended language in the package that he said will for the first time give congressional backing to a controversial Reagan-era decree granting broad surveillance authority to the president.

The 47-page intelligence bill was headed toward a voice vote when Amash rose to the House floor to ask for a roll call. Despite his efforts—which included a “Dear Colleague” letter sent to all members of the House urging a no vote—the bill passed 325-100, with 55 Democrats and 45 Republicans opposing.

The provision in question is “one of the most egregious sections of law I’ve encountered during my time as a representative,” Amash wrote on his Facebook page. The tea-party libertarian, who teamed up with Rep. John Conyers in an almost-successful bid to defund the National Security Agency in the wake of the Snowden revelations, warned that the provision “grants the executive branch virtually unlimited access to the communications of every American.”

Source.

The hegemony of marketisation

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Technically hegemony is “is the political, economic, or military predominance or control of one state over others” and in the world of realpolitik (e.g. Ukraine at the moment; or the cringe-making UK-US ‘special relationship’) it’s a grim reality. But it’s also a phenomenon in intellectual life, where it signifies that a particular ideology has become so pervasive and dominant that it renders alternative viewpoints/ideologies literally unthinkable. Since the 1970s, neoliberalism (aka “capitalism with the gloves off”) has increasingly acquired that hegemonic status, to the point where it now infects every aspect of public policy.

I came up against this yesterday when I had a conversation with someone who described the BBC as an “intervention in media markets”. I balked at this: the BBC, it seems to me, is a public service which existed long before there were media markets of any recognisable kind, and it was therefore not designed to be an “intervention” in anything other than the public sphere. And even now, when there are global media markets with which the BBC co-exists, it’s misleading — even for those who approve of the BBC and public service broadcasting services generally — to view it as an “intervention” to remedy market ‘failure’. The fact that the commercial media market doesn’t provide publicly-valuable services isn’t a ‘failure’ of that market. Commercial markets exist to make profits, and media markets are doing just fine at that. Any societal benefits they happen to provide — unbiased current affairs coverage, employment — are side effects of the core business.

But after the conversation I fell to brooding on the dominance of market ideology in the thinking of the policy-makers I meet — which is where the idea of hegemony came from. Since the 1970s we have all become like one-club golfers: whenever a policy issue arises we tend to think about it in terms of markets. We’ve seen that in the National Health Service in the UK; and in the 1980s and 1990s we saw it in the way the Birt regime that ran the BBC conceptualised the corporation’s alleged inefficiencies in terms of the absence of an “internal market”, which it then implemented under the banner of “Producer Choice”. (Which in turn led to celebrated absurdities, like the “£100 black tie” — of which more later.)

The truth is that markets are good at some things and hopeless at others. If you think about them in functional terms, they are self-organising systems which operate by transmitting price signals to their participants. These signals tell participants whether their strategy/tactics are working or not, and indicate the direction of change needed to rectify things. But when policy-makers reach for marketised solutions to operational or administrative malfunction in non-market institutions they have to distort the institution so that they ape market affordances. And since the only signals that markets send are prices, marketised non-market institutions have to invent pseudo-prices in order to function. Which often leads to absurd outcomes, and usually means that organisations that need to harness the synergies that come from departments working together become less than the sum of their parts, because the parts are now ‘trading’ with or against one another.

Just to take the BBC as an example. Pre-Birt, the BBC had a fabulous research library which was available — free — to every employee of the corporation. Similarly, it had a wonderful Wardrobe department, also available free to every producer. After the introduction of ‘producer choice’, these services were no longer free, so producers and researchers had to make a decision about whether the budget could afford a lot of library research, or whether to experiment with a range of costumes. As told to me by a BBC insider, the legendary £100 black tie episode arose as follows. The News and Current Affairs department used to periodically rehearse plans for covering the death of the then Queen Mother. To be realistic, these rehearsals had obviously to be unannounced in advance: staff would have to drop what they were doing and go into Queen-Mother-dead routine. This required the (all-male) News anchors to wear black ties. On one such occasion, none of them had a black tie, so a request was sent to Wardrobe. Wardrobe quoted an internal price that the producer regarded as exorbitant. So a production assistant was dispatched to M&S in a taxi in order to procure said ties. The cost, including taxi fares, came to £100 per tie.

I’ve no idea if this story is true or not. It does, however, illustrate something that I believe to be true, namely that phoney internal markets are an absurdly inefficient way of organising the feedback signals needed to make departments responsive to failure or inefficient performance. But a signalling system is essential to avoid the kind of stasis, complacency and conservatism that often characterises non-market institutions. The good news is that with computing and networking technology we now have lots of ways of signalling satisfaction/dissatisfaction — e.g. by means of online and instantaneous rating systems. They’re not magic bullets (witness the ways in which customer ratings of Uber drivers can be dysfunctional), but compared with the absurdities implicit in distorting non-market institutions to make them mimic markets, they’re likely to be much less damaging.

So what will it take to wake people up?

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At dinner last night I had a long talk with one of my Masters students who is as baffled as I am about why people seem to be so complacent about online surveillance. This morning a colleague sent me a link to this TEDx talk by Mikko Hypponen, a well known Finnish security expert. It’s a terrific lecture, but one part of it stood out especially for me in the context of last night’s conversation. It concerned an experiment Hypponen and his colleagues ran in London, where they set up a free wi-fi hot-spot that anyone could use after they had clicked to accept the terms & conditions under which the service was offered. One of the terms was this:

First_born_child_EULA

Every user — every user! — clicked ‘Accept’.