Members of my (baby-boomer) generation will remember the grotesque logic sometimes used by the United States in the Vietnam war when US and South Vietnamese troops declared that they had “to burn villages in order to save them” from the Viet Cong. There’s an element of that kind of logic in the wilder justifications for comprehensive surveillance we’ve laboured under ever since 9/11: we have to undermine democracy in order to save it. In that context, Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute has a very informative blog post on “Lawful Interception Capability Requirements” which concludes with this observation:

The European Court of Human Rights has not previously shied away from dealing with intelligence issues, commenting in Leander v Sweden on ‘the risk that a system of secret surveillance for the protection of national security poses of undermining or even destroying democracy on the ground of defending it’ [Application no. 9248/81]. It is not inconceivable that the UK’s sweeping Internet surveillance activities will be found, as the Court did in S. and Marper with the UK’s National DNA Database, to ‘constitute… a disproportionate interference’ with privacy that ‘cannot be regarded as necessary in a democratic society’. 

The big question, to my mind, is whether the kind of comprehensive surveillance deemed essential by the national security state is compatible with democracy.

The answer I’m heading towards is “No”.

Jay Rosen nudged me further along this path last night with a wonderful post on “Conspiracy to Commit Journalism” which highlights what’s at stake now. “The battle”, Jay writes,

is not a simple matter of the state vs. civilians. It’s not government vs. the press, either. It’s the surveillance-over-everything forces within governments (plus the politicians and journalists who identify with them) vs. everyone who opposes their overreach: investigative journalists and sources, especially, but also couriers (like David Miranda), cryptographers and technologists, free speech lawyers, funders, brave advertisers, online activists, sympathetic actors inside a given government, civil society groups like Amnesty International, bloggers to amplify the signal and, of course, readers. Lots of readers, the noisy kind, who share and help distribute the work.

Which brings me back to Alan Rusbridger’s chilling account of what led, in the end, to the pointless destruction, under the supervision of British spooks, of a MacBook in the basement of the Guardian newspaper. In the course of his account, Rusbridger writes this:

A little over two months ago I was contacted by a very senior government official claiming to represent the views of the prime minister. There followed two meetings in which he demanded the return or destruction of all the material we were working on. The tone was steely, if cordial, but there was an implicit threat that others within government and Whitehall favoured a far more draconian approach.

The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.” There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. “You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more.”

Rosen translates this thus:

That’s the government telling the editor of a national newspaper: Time’s up, no more of that journalism stuff! We’ll decide when there’s been enough debate. Stop now or we’ll make you stop.

(Rusbridger’s response: We will continue our careful reporting of the Snowden material. “We just won’t do it from London.”)

When I first read the Rusbridger article, with its coded references to “a very senior government official” and “the centre of government” I assumed that his interlocutors were spooks in the Cabinet Office, the standard-issue hard men who see rendition and waterboarding either as necessary evils or as tools of their trade. These are people who see journalism and public debate as a pain in the ass, something that they have to put up with while they get on with the real work of protecting (running?) the State. The sentiments are chilling, of course, but only to expected from people like that. My journalistic colleagues who reported the Troubles in Northern Ireland often knew British security officials like that.

The tone of the reported conversations is, for me, the key factor. What it suggests is a worldview which says that free media, whistleblowing, the exposure of questionable and/or illegal behaviour by government, and public debate about same are, somehow, frivolous activities. Just look at the words used: “You’ve had your fun“. And: “You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more.” [Emphasis added.]

But, as I said, this kind of Weltanschauung is only to be expected from certain classes of spook. This morning, however, we learned something new. A report in the Independent reveals that

David Cameron instructed the Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood to contact The Guardian to spell out the serious consequences that could follow if it failed to hand over classified material received from Edward Snowden, it can be revealed.

Senior Whitehall sources confirmed to The Independent the Prime Minister’s central role in trying to limit revelations about UK and US intelligence operations contained in information the whistleblower received from the National Security Agency.

So here’s my question.

Were any of the phrases quoted by Rusbridger used by the Cabinet Secretary? He is the most senior civil servant in the United Kingdom, who acts as the senior policy adviser to the Prime Minister and Cabinet and is the Secretary to the Cabinet, and is responsible to all Ministers for the running of the government. Is this really how the most powerful mandarin in the government thinks about the role and responsibilities of the media — and, given that free media are essential for democracy, about democracy itself? Does the Cabinet Secretary, in other words, see all this as a kind of game in which journalists have “fun” exposing the dirty linen of security services and embarrassing those in charge of the United States’s overseas security franchise?

Everywhere I look at the moment, I see the consequences of the extent of NSA/GCHQ surveillance. (See here, here and here for examples.)

But this post from Pamela Jones, founder of one of the best and most enlightening sites on the Web, makes me really depressed because it demonstrates the damage that surveillance is doing to the public sphere. Here’s what she says:

The owner of Lavabit tells us that he’s stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we’d stop too.
There is no way to do Groklaw without email. Therein lies the conundrum.

What to do?

What to do? I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to figure it out. And the conclusion I’ve reached is that there is no way to continue doing Groklaw, not long term, which is incredibly sad. But it’s good to be realistic. And the simple truth is, no matter how good the motives might be for collecting and screening everything we say to one another, and no matter how “clean” we all are ourselves from the standpoint of the screeners, I don’t know how to function in such an atmosphere. I don’t know how to do Groklaw like this.

Years ago, when I was first on my own, I arrived in New York City, and being naive about the ways of evil doers in big cities, I rented a cheap apartment on the top floor of a six-floor walkup, in the back of the building. That of course, as all seasoned New Yorkers could have told me, meant that a burglar could climb the fire escape or get to the roof by going to the top floor via the stairs inside and then through the door to the roof and climb down to the open window of my apartment.

That is exactly what happened. I wasn’t there when it happened, so I wasn’t hurt in any way physically. And I didn’t then own much of any worth, so only a few things were taken. But everything had been pawed through and thrown about. I can’t tell how deeply disturbing it is to know that someone, some stranger, has gone through and touched all your underwear, looked at all your photographs of your family, and taken some small piece of jewelry that’s been in your family for generations.

If it’s ever happened to you, you know I couldn’t live there any more, not one night more. It turned out, by the way, according to my neighbors, that it was almost certainly the janitor’s son, which stunned me at the time but didn’t seem to surprise any of my more-seasoned neighbors. The police just told me not to expect to get anything back. I felt assaulted. The underwear was perfectly normal underwear. Nothing kinky or shameful, but it was the idea of them being touched by someone I didn’t know or want touching them. I threw them away, unused ever again.

I feel like that now, knowing that persons I don’t know can paw through all my thoughts and hopes and plans in my emails with you.

They tell us that if you send or receive an email from outside the US, it will be read. If it’s encrypted, they keep it for five years, presumably in the hopes of tech advancing to be able to decrypt it against your will and without your knowledge. Groklaw has readers all over the world.

I understand perfectly how she feels. We used to think that spammers and trolls were the main vandals in Cyberspace — polluting the public sphere with their noxious activities and their contempt for the public good. Now it turns out that they’ve been joined by governments and their agencies.

Great comment by Simon Jenkins.

Greenwald himself is not known to have committed any offence, unless journalism is now a “terrorist” occupation in the eyes of British and American politicians. As for Miranda, his only offence seems to have been to be part of his family. Harassing the family of those who have upset authority is the most obscene form of state terrorism.

Last month, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, airily excused the apparently illegal hoovering of internet traffic by British and American spies on the grounds that “the innocent have nothing to fear,” the motto of police states down the ages. Hague’s apologists explained that he was a nice chap really, but that relations with America trumped every libertarian card.

The hysteria of the “war on terror” is now corrupting every area of democratic government. It extends from the arbitrary selection of drone targets to the quasi-torture of suspects, the intrusion on personal data and the harassing of journalists’ families. The disregard of statutory oversight – in Britain’s case pathetically inadequate – is giving western governments many of the characteristics of the enemies they profess to oppose. How Putin must be rubbing his hands with glee.

The innocent have nothing to fear? They do if they embarrass America and happen to visit British soil. The only land of the free today in this matter is Brazil.

Terrific blog post by Nick Cohen.

Always remember mornings like these, the next time police officers and politicians demand more powers to protect us from terrorism. They always sound so reasonable and so concerned for our welfare when they do. For who wants to be blown apart?

But the state said its new powers to intercept communications would be used against terrorists. They ended up using them against fly tippers. Now the police are using the Terrorism Act against the partner of a journalist who is publishing stories the British and American governments would rather keep quiet.

The detention of David Miranda at Heathrow is a clarifying moment that reveals how far Britain has changed for the worse. Nearly everyone suspects the Met held Miranda on trumped up charges because the police, at the behest of the Americans, wanted to intimidate Miranda’s partner Glenn Greenwald, the conduit of Edward Snowden’s revelations, and find out whether more embarrassing information is on Greenwald’s laptop.

The harassment of David Miranda beggars belief. But, as Andrew Sullivan says, at least it shows us where Cameron & Co stand.

David was detained for nine hours – the maximum time under the law, to the minute. He therefore falls into the 3 percent of interviewees particularly, one assumes, likely to be linked to terrorist organizations. My obvious question is: what could possibly lead the British security services to suspect David of such ties to terror groups?

I have seen nothing anywhere that could even connect his spouse to such nefarious contacts. Unless Glenn is some kind of super-al-Qaeda mole, he has none to my knowledge and to suspect him of any is so close to unreasonable it qualifies as absurd. The idea that David may fomenting terrorism is even more ludicrous.

And yet they held him for three hours before informing his spouse and another six hours thereafter. I can see no reason for those extra six hours (or for that matter the entire nine hours) than brute psychological intimidation of the press, by attacking their families.

More to the point, although David was released, his entire digital library was confiscated – including his laptop and phone. So any journalist passing through London’s Heathrow has now been warned: do not take any documents with you. Britain is now a police state when it comes to journalists, just like Russia is.

In this respect, I can say this to David Cameron. Thank you for clearing the air on these matters of surveillance. You have now demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that these anti-terror provisions are capable of rank abuse. Unless some other facts emerge, there is really no difference in kind between you and Vladimir Putin. You have used police powers granted for anti-terrorism and deployed them to target and intimidate journalists deemed enemies of the state.

You have proven that these laws can be hideously abused.

Not in particular the advice to foreign journalists in transit. Leave your laptops, phones and USB sticks at home.