GCHQ: this is a pivotal moment

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My Comment piece about GCHQ’s cable-tapping.

What it comes down to, in the end, is: “Trust us.” And the trouble with that is that in recent decades our political elites have done precious little to deserve our trust. Now we’re being asked to suspend our disbelief as they eavesdrop on all of our online activities – to trust them, in a way, with the most intimate details of our social and private lives. And all on the basis of laws that they – or their security apparatuses – wrote in order to rationalise and legitimate their snooping.

What we’re witnessing is the metamorphosis of our democracies into national security states in which the prerogatives of security authorities trump every other consideration and in which critical or sceptical appraisal of them is ruled out of court.

In the UK, for example, we’ve watched GCHQ – the organisation that emerged from the huts of Bletchley Park, trailing clouds of Enigma glory – swell into a gigantic bureaucracy whose remit includes cyber-crime and cyber-espionage and, now, eavesdropping on its own citizens. In the world of organisational politics, there is a term for this: mission creep. And with it comes the kind of swaggering hubris implicit in the name chosen for the cable-tapping project: Mastering the Internet. Says it all, really.

It’s the metadata, stoopid

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This morning’s Observer column.

“To be remembered after we are dead,” wrote Hazlitt, “is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.” Cue President “George W” Obama in the matter of telephone surveillance by his National Security Agency. The fact that for the past seven years the agency has been collecting details of every telephone call placed in the United States without a warrant was, he intoned, no reason for Americans to be alarmed. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he cooed. The torch was then passed to Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, who was likewise on bromide-dispensing duty. “This is just metadata,” she burbled, “there is no content involved.”

At which point the thought uppermost in one’s mind is: what kind of idiots do they take us for? Of course there’s no content involved, for the simple reason that content is a pain in the butt from the point of view of modern surveillance. First, you have to listen to the damned recordings, and that requires people (because even today, computers are not great at understanding everyday conversation) and time. And although Senator Feinstein let slip that the FBI already employs 10,000 people “doing intelligence on counter-terrorism”, even that Stasi-scale mob isn’t a match for the torrent of voice recordings that Verizon and co could cough up daily for the spooks…

While we’re on the George W. Obama theme, John Perry Barlow claimed this morning that the Obama administration has now prosecuted seven officials under the Espionage Act and goes on to point out that the total for all his predecessors since 1917 is 3.

Quote of the Day

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From the 2011 Report of the Intelligence Services Commissioner:

The purpose of section 7 [of the Intelligence Services Act] is to ensure that certain SIS or GCHQ activity overseas, which might otherwise expose its officers or agents to liability for prosecution in the UK, is, where authorised by the Secretary of State, exempted from such liability. I would however emphasise that the Secretary of State, before granting each authorisation, must be satisfied of the necessity and reasonableness of the act authorised.

This is the Section that MPs used to call “the James Bond section” when it was going through Parliament in 1994.

Google fires its old hiring system

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Well, well. Google is famous for its demanding and wacky job interviews, in which candidates used to be asked questions like “How many golf balls can you fit in an airliner?” But apparently all that has been junked because, basically, it doesn’t tell you anything useful about how people will do when they work for the company.

How do we know this? Because Laszlo Bock, Google’s VP for HR (‘human resources’ as ‘personnel’ used to be called) says so. Here’s how The Register summarises his interview with the New York Times:

“After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different,” Bock told the NYT. “You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.”

In fact, Bock said, Google is increasingly hiring candidates who have no formal education, to the extent that you now see teams at the Chocolate Factory where 14 per cent of the team members have no college background.

The bottom line, he said, is that Google’s earlier hiring practices simply weren’t effective. When Google studied its employees’ performance and compared it to how the same employees scored in interviews, there was no correlation.

“We found zero relationship,” Bock said. “It’s a complete random mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading expert.”

So how does Google plan to handle hiring from now on? According to Bock, the online giant is leaning toward behavioral interviews that emphasize the candidate’s own experience, with questions such as, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.”

Example of “an analytically difficult problem”: how to square protecting your user’s privacy with co-operating with the NSA.

Caught in the trap

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This morning’s Observer column.

Watching William Hague doing his avuncular routine in the Commons on Monday, I was reminded of the way establishment figures in the 1950s used to reassure hoi polloi that they had nothing to worry about. Everything was in order. The Right Chaps were in charge. Citizens who had done nothing wrong, declared Uncle Hague, had nothing to fear from comprehensive surveillance.

Oh yeah? As Stephen Fry observed in an exasperated tweet: “William Hague’s view seems to be ‘we can hide a camera & bug in your room & if you’ve got nothing to hide, what’s the worry?’ Hell’s teeth!”

Hell’s teeth indeed. I can think of thousands of people who have nothing to hide, but who would have good reasons to worry about intrusive surveillance. Journalists seeking to protect their sources, for example; NHS whistleblowers; people seeking online help for personal psychological torments; frightened teenagers seeking advice on contraception or abortion; estranged wives of abusive husbands; asylum seekers and dissident refugees; and so on.

In a way, Hague’s smug, patronising tone was the least troubling aspect of the NSA/GCHQ story…

Happy Bloomsday

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Cricket_at_TCD_with Finns_Hotel

We were in Dublin a couple of weeks ago and on a glorious summer’s evening found ourselves in Trinity College, watching a desultory cricket match. Suddenly I noticed that the (redbrick) building that used to be Finn’s Hotel was visible in the background, and I was delighted to see that the sign painted on the gable end has survived. I didn’t have a zoom lens, so the enlargement of that part of the image will have to do.

Joyce fans will not need reminding that Nora Barnacle worked as a chambermaid in Finn’s, and the first time James laid eyes on her was when he was walking down Nassau Street and saw her emerging from the premises. On the evening of June 16, 1904, he picked her up from the hotel and they walked southwards together for what was to become the defining moment of his life. The rest, as they say, is history. And we celebrate the results of it today.

Finns_crop

Irrationality on stilts

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gun and terrorism graphic

When all else fails, the supposedly clinching argument of the National Security State is that infringements of our liberties is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to protect us from the awful prospect of terrorism. The same state, however, seems remarkably unconcerned about things that are much more dangerous than terrorism — as Conor Friedersdorf points out a in fine essay in The Atlantic.

In 2001, the year when America suffered an unprecedented terrorist attack — by far the biggest in its history — roughly 3,000 people died from terrorism in the U.S. 

Let’s put that in context. That same year in the United States:

71,372 died of diabetes.

29,573 were killed by guns.

13,290 were killed in drunk driving accidents.

That’s what things looked like at the all-time peak for deaths by terrorism. Now let’s take a longer view. We’ll choose an interval that still includes the biggest terrorist attack in American history: 1999 to 2010.

Again, terrorists killed roughly 3,000 people in the United States. And in that interval,

roughly 360,000 were killed by guns (actually, the figure the CDC gives is 364,483 — in other words, by rounding, I just elided more gun deaths than there were total terrorism deaths).

roughly 150,000 were killed in drunk-driving accidents.

Learning from history

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On Thursday, Professor Margaret Macmillan gave the 2013 Lee Seng Tee Lecture at Wolfson. Her topic: the origins of the First World War. One of the factors she identified was the weakness of political leaders unable to control or restrain their military establishments. In the Q&A afterwards she mentioned the Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK’s ability to resist the belligerent demands of his generals for military action against the Soviet Union and Cuba. Macmillan identified two factors which led Kennedy to resist. One was his bitter experience of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which had resulted from his willingness to accept military advice. The other was the fact that he happened to be reading Barbara’s Tuchman’s wonderful book, The Guns of August, about the outbreak of the 1914-18 war, and how the world slipped into catastrophe.

What is Facebook for?

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Answer: Facebook’s purpose is to perpetuate Facebook. Forget all the crap about connecting people, etc. It exists simply to perpetuate itself, like a malign organism.

This thought was triggered by a terrific essay by Paul Ford on the essence of Facebook, as revealed by its Android cuckoo, Facebook Home. Finishes with this memorable summary:

The moral vision of the Dynabook posited that people would use technology to manipulate code and data, to create models of the world—as many as they needed in order to understand it. In contrast, Facebook has a single model of the world, unapologetically monolithic: the canonical graph of the relationships between more than a billion human beings. If the company is to grow, it must insert itself between people and their smartphones; there are still simply too many moments spent watching things, or reading things, or making things, that it does not own.