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.

    NSA can search your emails but not its own employees’ messages

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    Who said satire was dead? The NSA Can’t search its employees’ emails.

    The NSA is a “supercomputing powerhouse” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture. 

    But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees’ email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology.

    “There’s no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately,” NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.

    The system is “a little antiquated and archaic,” she added.

    I filed a request last week for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period. The TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA and I want to better understand the agency’s public-relations efforts.

    A few days after filing the request, Blacker called, asking me to narrow my request since the FOIA office can search emails only “person by person,” rather than in bulk. The NSA has more than 30,000 employees.

    Now the question is: do you believe the NSA’s answer?