Edward Snowden’s not the story. The fate of the internet is

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This morning’s Observer column.

Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world’s mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for journalists was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.

In a way, it doesn’t matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far…

Miliband’s gamble: a modest proposal

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Ed Miliband — the only leader of a political party willing to condemn Rupert Murdoch — has now embarked on an epic political gamble. He seeks radical reform of the corrupt way we currently fund British political parties. But to be credible — and to counter Tory spin — he first has to get his own house in order, which means terminating the shady process by which trade unions supported Labour financially by pretending that their members were Labour supporters.

As Oona King points out in the New Statesman, there are laudable democratic aspirations behind this policy.

We are told Miliband risks the historic link between Labour and the trade unions, and that in financial terms, Labour may not survive. The main difference between now and 100 years ago (the House of Lords ruling was overturned in 1913) is that the call for reform comes from the Labour Party leader himself, something unimaginable even in Tony Blair’s day, never mind Keir Hardie’s. These proposals make Tony Blair’s reform of Clause IV look like timid toe-dipping. What began as a little (or a large) local difficulty in Falkirk has, on the leader’s say so, become nothing less than a debate around the nature of politics itself. 

At heart, this isn’t primarily an argument about Labour’s link with the trade unions; it is primarily about Labour’s link with democracy, and whether our internal governance is democratic.

Miliband’s gamble is a really bold one, because without union funding Labour is basically bankrupt, and will therefore not to be able to afford a serious election campaign in 2015. And at this point, even those of us who are not necessarily Labour supporters begin to sit up and take notice. Because if — like me — you have come to the conclusion that the Coalition is a disastrous government, then Labour is the only show in town for the 2015 election. The alternative is a government led by Cameron, Gove, Osborne & Co, without even the bleating restraint of the Liberal Democrats.

So here’s my modest proposal.

We know that the best way to eradicate the corruption that stems from our current method of funding political parties — in which cash-rich billionaires, corporations, lobbyists and unions provide campaign contributions in return for you-know-what — is to have a system where parties are funded entirely by small individual donations (maximum £100).

Until fairly recently, such a system would have been costly and difficult to build. But that was then and this is now. The infrastructure for doing it now exists: it’s called the Internet. Not only has it spawned a variety of ways of raising money for charitable purposes (e.g. Just Giving) but also for supporting commercial and non-commercial projects (e.g. KickStarter).

And we know that it works; the Obama campaign in the last two presidential elections in the US showed just how powerful the Net can be as a way of collecting small campaign contributions in huge volumes. As the Washington Post puts it:

Barack Obama raised half a billion dollars online in his 21-month campaign for the White House, dramatically ushering in a new digital era in presidential fundraising.

In an exclusive interview with The Post, members of the vaunted Triple O, Obama’s online operation, broke down the numbers: 3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than once.

“You looked at the money being raised online in the same way that you looked at the crowds who came to the rallies,” Joe Rospars, the 27-year-old director of Obama’s new-media department, told The Post. “You were constantly surprised at the number of people who were coming out to see him,” and, when it came to online donations, “people exceeded our expectations as to what they were willing to do.”

The final total raised by Obama online was $1.1 billion.

If Miliband really wants to revitalise British politics — and release us from the grip of the neoliberal lunatics now in charge of our polity — then imaginative use of the Net should become an absolute priority for him. Donations don’t have to come just from Labour supporters. There are lots of Britons who would never think of voting Labour in normal conditions but who also know that some way has to be found of unhorsing a government which won’t even contemplate banning security companies who are facing investigations for massive fraud from bidding for new government contracts.

Setting up an imaginative donation system is not rocket science. Most of the heavy lifting has already been done by the Obama crowd. The old adage –“where there’s a will, there’s a way” — applies: There is a way: Do Miliband & Co have the will?

Why (most) Brits don’t seem to be overly concerned about NSA snooping

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I had an inquiry yesterday from a German journalist asking whether it was true that British people are less concerned than Germans are about the Snowden revelations, and if so why.

Here’s my reply:

Dear [xxx]

1. I think it’s broadly true that, in general, the British public is less concerned about the NSA/Snowden revelations than is the case in Germany. That, at any rate, is the conclusion I draw from the only national opinion polling data I’ve seen — conducted by YouGov and published online.

My reading of the survey results is that

  • the great British public isn’t very worked up about the issues.
  • British people are pretty resigned to being surveilled.

    • My reasons for thinking this:

  • When asked whether the law should be changed to give the security services easy access to phone and online activity, 51% thought that would be going too far, but 39% thought it would be a good idea.
  • When asked how much personal data people thought the security services already had access to, 44% replied “almost everything in practice” and 48% thought that the security services had “wide access to a lot” of personal information.
  • People seem to be slightly supportive of Snowden’s whistleblowing. Just over half (52%) said that he had done the right thing, while 37% thought he had been wrong to do it.
  • On the question of whether Snowden should be prosecuted, people are evenly divided (43% each way).
  • Finally, and perhaps most revealingly, when people were asked if they were surprised by the revelations that Britain’s government surveillance organisation GCHQ had also been monitoring Internet traffic, only 2% said that they had been “very surprised”, 14% were “somewhat surprised” but 83% said that they had been “not at all surprised”.

    • 2. The interesting question, of course, is why the British view differs from that of Germans. Here I can only offer a few speculations.

  • It is partly a reflection the conviction (some would call it a delusion?) that Britain enjoys a “special relationship” with the US, and that this means Britons tend to be more tolerant of US excesses than they are of the excesses of other nations (e.g. Russia or France).
  • There is undoubtedly a special relationship between the security agencies of the UK (GCHQ) and the US (NSA). Some people see this as a continuation of the World War II intelligence-sharing arrangements between the two countries. Cynics see it as an attempt by an economically-enfeebled country to maintain a seat at the “top table” by being useful to the Americans. (Some commentators interpret the British government’s determination to renew its submarine nuclear ‘deterrent’ as an analogous case of “imperial afterglow” — the reluctance to concede that Britain is now just a middle-rank power.) One of my academic colleagues who is an expert in computer security occasionally refers dismissively to GCHQ as “an overseas franchise of the NSA”.
  • The problem of the “Two Cultures” (science and technology). The British public — and particularly its mass media — seems remarkably ignorant about science and technology. Critically, this is also true of British legislators. Of the 600+ MPs in the House of Commons, for example, only three have research degrees. As a result, lay people — and legislators — think that anything connected with computer technology is essentially incomprehensible and best left to experts.
  • Britain has no recent historical experience of being invaded, and so the culture has no clear understanding of the consequences of intensive surveillance technology and records falling into the “wrong” hands.

    • Yours sincerely

    John

    So who are we “at war” with, exactly? Sorry: that’s classified information

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    From the “you-couldn’t-make-it-up-but-unfortunately-it’s-true” Department.

    In a major national security speech this spring, President Obama said again and again that the U.S. is at war with “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces.”

    So who exactly are those associated forces? It’s a secret.

    At a hearing in May, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked the Defense Department to provide him with a current list of Al Qaeda affiliates.

    The Pentagon responded – but Levin’s office told ProPublica they aren’t allowed to share it. Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for Levin, would say only that the department’s “answer included the information requested.”

    A Pentagon spokesman told ProPublica that revealing such a list could cause “serious damage to national security.”

    “Because elements that might be considered ‘associated forces’ can build credibility by being listed as such by the United States, we have classified the list,” said the spokesman, Lt. Col. Jim Gregory. “We cannot afford to inflate these organizations that rely on violent extremist ideology to strengthen their ranks.”

    Turing, the NSA and the decision problem

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    Interesting post by George Dyson on The Edge site. Excerpt:

    This is much bigger than the relative merits of national security vs. the fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, or any of the other debates by which the Snowden revelations have been framed. We are facing a fundamental decision (as Turing anticipated) between whether human intelligence or machine intelligence is given the upper hand. The NSA has defended wholesale data capture and analysis with the argument that the data (and metadata) are not being viewed by people, but by machines, and are therefore, legally, not being read. This alone should be cause for alarm.

    And what of the current obsession with cyberterrorism and cyberwar? We should deliberately (and unilaterally if need be) abandon the weaponization of codes and the development of autonomous weapons—two different approaches to the same result. They both lead us into battles that can never be won. A good example to follow is the use of chemical and biological weapons—yes, they remain freely available, but we have achieved an almost universal consensus not to return to the horrors of poison gas in World War I. Do we have to repeat the mistake? We are currently taking precisely the wrong approach: fast-tracking the development of secret (and expensive) offensive weapons instead of an open system of inexpensive civilian-based defense.

    Fourteen years ago, I spent an afternoon in La Jolla, California with Herbert York, the American physicist of Mohawk ancestry who became Eisenhower’s trusted advisor and one of the wisest and most effective administrators of the Cold War. York was appointed founding scientific director of ARPA and was instrumental both in the development of the hydrogen bomb and its deployment, in a few short years, by a working fleet of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs. He was sober enough to be trusted with the thermonuclear arsenal, yet relaxed enough about it that he had to be roused out of bed in the early morning of July 6, 1961, because he had driven someone else’s car home by mistake.

    York understood the workings of what Eisenhower termed the military-industrial complex better than anyone I ever met. “The Eisenhower farewell address is quite famous,” he explained to me over lunch. “Everyone remembers half of it, the half that says beware of the military-industrial complex. But they only remember a quarter of it. What he actually said was that we need a military-industrial complex, but precisely because we need it, beware of it. Now I,ve given you half of it. The other half: we need a scientific-technological elite. But precisely because we need a scientific-technological elite, beware of it. That’s the whole thing, all four parts: military-industrial complex; scientific-technological elite; we need it, but beware; we need it but beware. It’s a matrix of four.”

    We are much, much deeper in a far more complicated matrix now. And now, more than ever, we should heed Eisenhower’s parting advice. Yes, we need big data, and big algorithms—but beware.

    Nothing to hide so nothing to fear? Oh, yeah?

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    One of the most infuriating episodes of the NSA/Snowden/Tempora story was Foreign Secretary William Hague’s patronising little speech to the Commons, arguing that “if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear”. I had a go at this in a direct way, but felt that the Hague view (which is widespread, nay ubiquitous, among our ruling elites) needs a more considered, philosophically-informed riposte. And, lo and behold, up it comes on OpenDemocracy, in the form of a terrific interview with Quentin Skinner, the historian and political philosopher, in which he discusses various conceptions of liberty.

    When asked about surveillance, he said this:

    The idea that there is no problem with surveillance as long as you have nothing to hide simply points to the complacency of the liberal view of freedom by contrast with the republican one. The liberal thinks that you are free so long as you are not coerced. The republican agrees, of course, that if you are coerced then you are not free. But freedom for the republican consists not in being free from coercion in respect of some action, but rather in being free from the possibility of coercion in respect of it.

    When William Hague told the House of Commons that no one has anything to fear so long as they have done nothing wrong he was missing an absolutely crucial point about freedom. To be free we not only need to have no fear of interference but no fear that there could be interference. But that latter assurance is precisely what cannot be given if our actions are under surveillance. So long as surveillance is going on, we always could have our freedom of action limited if someone chose to limit it. The fact that they may not make that choice does not make us any less free, because we are not free from surveillance and the possible uses that can be made of it. Only when we are free from such possible invasions of our rights are we free; and this freedom can be guaranteed only where there is no surveillance.

    I think it very important that the mere fact of there being surveillance takes away liberty. The response of those who are worried about surveillance has so far been too much couched, it seems to me, in terms of the violation of the right to privacy. Of course it’s true that my privacy has been violated if someone is reading my emails without my knowledge. But my point is that my liberty is also being violated, and not merely by the fact that someone is reading my emails but also by the fact that someone has the power to do so should they choose. We have to insist that this in itself takes away liberty because it leaves us at the mercy of arbitrary power. It’s no use those who have possession of this power promising that they won’t necessarily use it, or will use it only for the common good. What is offensive to liberty is the very existence of such arbitrary power.

    The situation is made much worse once you come to know — as all of us now know — that we are in fact subject to surveillance. For now there is a danger that we may start to self-censor in the face of the known fact that we may be being scrutinised by powerful and potentially hostile forces. The problem is not that we know that something will happen to us if we say certain things. It’s that we don’t know what may happen to us. Perhaps nothing will happen. But we don’t know, and are therefore all too likely to keep quiet, or to self-censor. But these are infringements of liberty even according to the liberal account. Surely the liberal and the republican can agree that, if the structures of power are such that I feel obliged to limit my own freedom of expression, then my liberty has to that degree been undermined.

    On this day…

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    … in 1947, 1947, President Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.