Britain is sliding
towards an entirely new kind of surveillance society
By John Lanchester
In August, the editor of
the Guardian rang me up and asked if I would spend a week in New York, reading
the GCHQ files whose UK copy the
Guardian was forced to destroy. His suggestion was that it might be worthwhile
to look at the material not from a perspective of making news but from that of
a novelist with an interest in the way we live now.
I took Alan Rusbridger up
on his invitation, after an initial reluctance that was based on two main
reasons. The first of them was that I don't share the instinctive sense felt by
many on the left that it is always wrong for states to have secrets. I'd put it
more strongly than that: democratic states need spies.
The philosopher Karl
Popper, observing the second world war from his academic post in New Zealand,
came up with a great title for his major work of political thought: The Open
Society and Its Enemies. It is, in its way, a shocking phrase – why would the
open society have enemies? (But then, the title of Charles Repington's The
First World War, published in 1920, was shocking too, because it implied that
there would be another one.)
We do have enemies,
though, enemies who are in deadly earnest; enemies who wish you reading this
dead, whoever you are, for no other reason than that you belong to a society
like this one. We have enemies who are seeking to break into our governments'
computers, with the potential to destroy our infrastructure and, literally,
make the lights go out; we have enemies who want to kill as many of us, the
more innocent the better, as possible, by any means possible, as a deliberate
strategy; we have enemies who want to develop nuclear weapons, and thereby
vastly raise the stakes for international diplomacy and the threat of
terrorism; and we have common-or-garden serious criminals, who also need
watching and catching.
I get all that. It
doesn't thrill me to bits that the state has to use the tools of electronic surveillance to keep us safe, but it
seems clear to me that it does, and that our right to privacy needs to be
qualified, just as our other rights are qualified, in the interest of general
security and the common good.
Reassuring read
My week spent reading
things that were never meant to be read by outsiders was, from this point of
view, largely reassuring. Most of what GCHQ does
is exactly the kind of thing we all want it to do. It takes an interest in
places such as the Horn of Africa, Iran, and North Korea; it takes an interest
in energy security, nuclear proliferation, and in state-sponsored computer
hacking.
There doesn't seem to be
much in the documents about serious crime, for which GCHQ has a surveillance mandate, but it
seems that much of this activity is covered by warrants that belong to other
branches of the security apparatus. Most of this surveillance is individually
targeted: it concerns specific individuals and specific acts (or intentions to
act), and as such, it is not the threat.
Even Julian Assange
thinks that, and said as much in his alarming and perceptive book Cypherpunks:
"Individual targeting is not the threat." When the state has specific
enemies and knows who they are and the kind of harm they intend, it is welcome
to target them to make the rest of our polity safe. I say again, on the
evidence I've seen, this is mainly whatGCHQ does. I would add that the
Guardian and its partners have gone to a lot of trouble to prevent any
unnecessarily damaging detail about this work being published.
Problems and risks
The problems with GCHQ are
to be found in the margins of the material – though they are at the centre of
the revelations that have been extracted from the Snowden disclosures, and with
good reason. The problem and the risk comes in the area of mass capture of
data, or strategic surveillance. This is the kind of intelligence gathering
that sucks in data from everyone, everywhere: from phones, internet use from
email to website visits, social networking, instant messaging and video calls,
and even areas such as video gaming; in short, everything digital.
In the US, the Prism programme may have given the NSA access to the servers of
companies such as Google and Facebook; in the UK,GCHQ has gained a similar
degree of access via its Tempora programme,
and the two of them together have a cable- and network-tapping capabilities
collectively called Upstream, which have the ability to intercept anything that
travels over the internet. This data is fed into a database called XKeyscore,
which allows analysts to extract information "in real time", ie
immediately, from a gigantic amount of hoovered-up data.
In addition, the NSA has encouraged technology companies
to install secret weaknesses or "backdoors" into their commercially
available, supposedly secure products. They have spent a very great deal of
money ($250m a year alone on weakening encryption), on breaking commercially
available security products. Other revelations have been published in Der
Spiegel, and concern the NSA exploitation of technology such as the iPhone.
Access all areas
What this adds up to is
a new thing in human history: with a couple of clicks of a mouse, an agent of
the state can target your home phone, or your mobile, or your email, or your
passport number, or any of your credit card numbers, or your address, or any of
your log-ins to a web service.
Using that
"selector", the state can get access to all the content of your
communications, via any of those channels; can gather information about anyone
you communicate with, can get a full picture of all your internet use, can
track your location online and offline. It can, in essence, know everything
about you, including – thanks to the ability to look at your internet searches
– what's on your mind.
To get a rough version
of this knowledge, a state once had to bug phones manually, break into houses
and intercept letters, and deploy teams of trained watchers to follow your
whereabouts. Even then it was a rough and approximate process, vulnerable to
all sorts of human error and countermeasures. It can now have something much
better than that, a historically unprecedented panoply of surveillance, which
it can deploy in a matter of seconds.
This process is not
without supervision, of course. In order to target you via one of these
"selectors" – that's the technical term – the agent of the state will
have to type into a box on his or her computer screen a Miranda number, to show
that the process is taking place in response to a specific request for
information, and will also need to select a justification under the Human
Rights Act. That last isn't too arduous, because the agent can choose the
justification from a drop-down menu. This is the way we live now.
British reaction
And yet nobody, at least
in Britain, seems to care. In the UK there has been an extraordinary disconnect
between the scale and seriousness of what Snowden has revealed, and the scale
and seriousness of the response. One of the main reasons for that, I think, is
that while some countries are interested in rights, in Britain we are more
focused on wrongs.
In Europe and the US,
the lines between the citizen and the state are based on an abstract conception
of the individual's rights, which is then framed in terms of what the state
needs to do.
That's not the case in
Britain: although we do have rights, they were arrived at by specific
malfeasances and disasters on the part of the state.
Every right that limits
the behaviour of the police, from the need for search warrants to the (now
heavily qualified) right to silence to habeas corpus itself, comes from the
fact that the authorities abused their powers.
This helps to explain
why Snowden's revelations, perceived as explosive in American and Europe by
both the political right and left, have been greeted here with a weirdly
echoing non-response. In the rights-based tradition, the flagrant abuse of
individual privacy is self-evidently a bad thing, a (literally) warrantless
extension of the power of the state.
Here in the UK, because
we've been given no specific instances of specific wrongs having been
committed, the story has found it hard to gain traction. Even if there were
such instances – just as there were 2,776 rule violations by the NSA last year alone – we wouldn't know
anything about them, because the system of judicial inspections atGCHQ is
secret.
So it is a perfectly
sealed mechanism: we aren't interested in rights in the abstract, and we are
prevented by law from hearing about any of the specific abuses which might
start to focus our attention.
The documents make clear
that GCHQ's eavesdropping abilities are on a scale unmatched anywhere in
the free world, and they privately boast about the "more permissive legal
environment" in the UK – and yet, nobody seems to care. It's tragicomic
that the surveillance story which most gripped the public imagination concerned
Poole borough council's use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000
(Ripa) to spy on a family suspected of cheating in regard to school catchment
areas.
Helping the bad guys
It's worth taking a
moment to ask how helpful the publication of information about this is to the
bad guys. (Girls too. But mainly guys.)
The answer is evident, I
think, in the under-remarked fact that Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad
didn't even have a telephone line running into it. In other words he not only
didn't use the net, computers or phones in any way at all, ever, he was
suspicious of the actual physical apparatus itself.
This means that the bad
guys know very well that they have to be careful. (It should also be noted that
the absence of any electronic footprint at the Abbottabad compound was – as
depicted in the movie Zero Dark Thirty – a sign to the spies that something
fishy was afoot. Nobody innocent has no electronic footprint.)
Some of the jihadi
materials I read in the GCHQ documents make it clear that the
terrorists are very well aware of these issues. There is a stinging jeer in one
jihadi text, apropos a Swedish documentary that made clear certain bugging
capabilities in Ericsson's mobile phones: "It is customary in the
Scandinavian countries to publish such helpful materials."
While the broad details
of general strategic surveillance are shocking and need to be known, the thing
that would be helpful to the bad guys is the publication of the specific
technical details. These the Guardian and its partners have gone to great
lengths to keep secret.
The unkeepable secret
Bear in mind also that
these documents were widely circulated: out of the 4.9 million Americans with
access to classified information, 480,000 private contractors in the US had the
"top-secret" security clearance issued to Snowden.
If hundreds of thousands
of people had access to these secrets, how secure were they? The NSA andGCHQ had
no idea that Snowden had this material, and apparently still don't know exactly
what is in it – which is one reason they've been panicking and freaking out.
But if they didn't know
that Snowden had copied it, how could they possibly be sure that someone else
hasn't also taken a copy and slipped it to the Chinese or Russians or Iranians
or al-Qaida? It was cheeky of Oliver Robbins, deputy national security adviser
in the Cabinet Office, to harrumph about "very poor information security
practices" on the part of David Miranda, the partner of Guardian
journalist Glenn Greenwald who was detained at Heathrow under anti-terror laws.
Our spooks lost at least
58,000 pages of classified documents to a US civilian sitting at a workstation
in Hawaii, and did so without realising it had happened. In effect they're
saying, "your secrets are safe with us, except when we lose them".
There's one further
conclusion to draw from the fact that so many people had access to this
material. It means that this story would at some point have come out. A
programme of this scale in a modern democracy, involving hundreds of thousands
of people with access to the fact of total internet surveillance, was an
unkeepable secret. It may be no comfort to Snowden as he faces his future, but
someone somewhere would eventually have done what he did. Some dams are fated
to burst.
What's new
This brings me to my
second reservation about looking at the material: the question of whether it
contained anything that we didn't already know. In the Tony Scott movie Enemy
of the State, the paranoid formerNSA spook played by Gene Hackman lays it
out with complete clarity: "The government's been in bed with the entire
communications business since the 40s," he says. "They have infected
everything. They can get into your bank statement, computer files, email,
listen to your phone calls."
That movie came out in
1998, and was a hit, seen by many millions, so even then, in some sense,
everybody knew about the work of theNSA/GCHQ. People who kept informed on these
subjects have for decades been careful about using specific words over the
phone, especially over transatlantic phonelines.
I remember Christopher
Hitchens, at the time that concern about Salman Rushdie's welfare was at its
peak, wouldn't use his name over the phone but would instead refer to "our
mutual friend".
So in some sense,
perhaps it's true that everybody knew. This would be analogous to the manner in
which we all know surveillance is pervasive in police work, and yet police
methods are by law forbidden from being used in evidence, or indeed even
mentioned in court. The ban on mentioning police surveillance is there because
they don't want us to realise how much of it there is. We all know that, and
yet it doesn't seem to matter much. Perhaps the GCHQ stuff was the
same?
I've changed my mind
about that. It was changing anyway as I thought more about the meaning of
Snowden's exposures, and it has changed more still now that I've looked at them
first-hand.
Broad definitions
I've said that the
concerns over GCHQ are at the margins of what it does: but those
margins are very broad. They especially concern things that are referred to in
the documents as "SD", which means "sigint development".
"Sigint" is signal intelligence, which is what GCHQ does.
"Development" means – well, that's the crux of it. It means finding
out new things, exploring new technologies, and developing new ways of finding
"targets".
When you look at the
documents, it appears to be the case that SD provides the legal basis for mass
surveillance of the kind revealed in theTempora and Prism programmes. The mandate of GCHQ –
which by the way didn't have a legal basis of any kind until 1994 – is surveillance
for reasons of "national security, economic well being, and serious
crime".
The main law concerning
its activities is Ripa. If you read this 2000 act (which, by the way, I don't
recommend, since it's tortured and laborious even by the standards of
statute-speak), it's clear that the main focus of its provisions is targeted
surveillance. It's about what the spies and cops are allowed to do to catch
specific bad guys.
Ripa is pretty broad in
its drafting, and it seems apparent that the intention was to let the
authorities do anything they wanted with phones and email. And yet, it nowhere
explicitly allows the mass interception of communications by people about whom
the state has no reason for suspecting anything – which is what programmes such
as Tempora andPrism permit.
Behind the times
The law always lags
behind technology, that's inevitable. If you look at the first version of the
modern Official Secrets Act, which was made law in 1911 and is still the main
broad statement of government secrecy in effect today, its first provisions concern
the making of "maps and charts".
It is evident that the
kind of spying on the lawmakers' minds concerns a chap in plus-fours claiming
that he's making drawings of seabirds, only why has he accidentally made
accurate sketches of that nearby naval base, and why does he have a heavy
German accent … ?
The current spying laws
continue to lag behind reality, not only because the spies are less concerned
with mysterious birdwatchers, but because life itself has changed.
Formerly, the activities
for which the spies were on guard were visible acts of wrongdoing and
intelligence-gathering: enemies making maps of naval bases, or breaking into
offices, or bribing civil servants, or seducing and blackmailing other spies,
or any of the other ways in which they could try to steal secrets.
In the case of modern
signals intelligence, this is no longer true. Life has changed. It has changed
because of the centrality of computers and digital activity to every aspect of
modern living. Digital life is central to work: many of us, perhaps most of us,
spend most of our working day using a computer. Digital life is central to our
leisure: a huge portion of our discretionary activity has a digital component,
even things which look like they are irreducibly un-digital, from cycling to
cooking.
(I once happened to
visit Google's offices in Victoria, where there's a live stream of people's
queries on a huge flat screen. Most of them were in Japanese. My host, who
speaks Japanese, glanced at them and looked at her watch. "Recipes,"
she said. "It's 7pm in Japan, people have just got in from work and are
thinking about what to cook.")
As for our relationships
and family lives, that has, especially for younger people, become a
digital-first activity. Take away Facebook and Twitter, instant messaging and
Skype and YouTube, and then – it's hard to imagine, but try – take away the
mobile phone, and see the yawning gap where all human interaction used to take
place. About the only time we don't use computers is when we're asleep – that's
unless we have a gadget that tracks our sleep, or monitors our house
temperature, or our burglar alarm, or whatever.
This is the central
point about what our spies and security services can now do. They can, for the
first time, monitor everything about us, and they can do so with a few clicks
of a mouse and – to placate the lawyers – a drop-down menu of justifications.
Surveillance ambitions
Looking at the GCHQ papers,
it is clear that there is an ambition to get access to everything digital.
That's what engineers do: they seek new capabilities. When it applies to the
people who wish us harm, that's fair enough. Take a hypothetical, but maybe not
unthinkable, ability to eavesdrop on any room via an electrical socket. From the
GCHQ engineers' point of view, they would do that if they could. And there are
a few people out there on whom it would be useful to be able to eavesdrop via
an electrical socket. But the price of doing so would be a society that really
did have total surveillance. Would it be worth it? Is the risk worth the
intrusion?
That example might sound
far-fetched, but trust me, it isn't quite as far fetched as all that, and the
basic intention on the part of the GCHQengineers – to get everything – is
there.
Consider the direction
in which we're moving. Britain has more CCTV cameras than anywhere else in the
world, by a huge margin. Nobody knows how many CCTV cameras there are in the
country, but the most respectable estimate seems to be the one made by Cheshire
police in 2011, which came up with a number of 1.85m. Add to this the capacity
for facial recognition software, which already exists and is improving sharply.
Further add the capacity
for surveillance brought by the "internet of things", involving the
inclusion of internet-enabled computer chips in everything from cars (where
they already are, in high-end models) to fridges to plants (which will tweet
their minders when they need to be watered). This might sound like science
fiction, but the current estimate is that there will be 20bn such devices in
use worldwide by 2020.
Add to this the fact
that a lot of this electronic potential gives access not just to external
real-world data – our locations, our conversations, our contacts books – but to
the inside of our heads. I call this the "knowing you're gay" test.
Most of us know someone who has plucked up the courage to reveal their
homosexuality, only to be cheerfully told by friends and family, "oh,
we've known that for years".
Now, though, search
engines know facts about people's thoughts and fantasies long before anyone
else does. To put it crudely, Google doesn't just know you're gay before you
tell your mum; it knows you're gay before you do. And now GCHQ does
too.
New society
What this means is that
we're moving towards a new kind of society. Britain is already the most spied
on, monitored and surveilled democratic society there has ever been. This
doesn't seem to have been discussed or debated, and I don't remember ever being
asked to vote for it. As for how this trend appears in the GCHQ documents,
there is something of a gap between how the spies talk in public and how they
can occasionally be found to talk in private.
It is startling to see,
for instance, that the justification for the large-scale interception of
everybody's internet use seems to be a clause in Ripa allowing interception of
"at least one end foreign" communications. Whack on to this a general
purpose certificate from the secretary of state, and a general warrant, and
bingo, this allows full access to traffic via companies such as Google and
Facebook – because their servers are located overseas. I can't believe that
that was the intention of the people who drafted Ripa, who were surely thinking
more of people taking phone calls from moody bits of Waziristan, rather than
your nan searching for cheaper tights.
There is a revealing
moment in the most recent piece written for the Guardian by Sir David Omand,
former head of GCHQ. He said that "the real debate we should be
having … is about what privacy in a cyber-connected world can realistically
mean given the volumes of data we hand over to the private sector in return for
our everyday convenience, and the continued need for warranted access for
security and law enforcement".
That's a total
non-sequitur: Omand seems to think that just because we hand data over to
Google and Facebook the government automatically has the right to access it.
It's as if, thanks to a global shortage of sticky gum, envelopes can no longer
be sealed, so as a result the government awards itself a new right to
mass-intercept and read everybody's letters.
Staying within the law
All through the GCHQ material
there is a tremendous emphasis on the legal basis of its operations,
particularly in respect of article 8 of the Human Rights Act, which grants:
"Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his
home and his correspondence."
It is repeatedly stated
that "GCHQ operates within the law" and that "GCHQ does it
legally" and that surveillance always has to be "justified, necessary
and proportionate". Good – it would be terrifying if that weren't the
case. But if GCHQ seldom breaks the law, it's because the law is so broadly
drafted and interpreted it's almost impossible to break.
Also, in the GCHQ papers
there are occasional glimpses of a different attitude, usually to be found in
slides which are marked as "hidden" in PowerPoint presentations, or
in the presenters' notes to other slides. (Many of the clearest documents are
internal GCHQ briefings laid out in the form of PowerPoint talks. I was
reminded of Malcolm Gladwell's great joke, in response to whether he needed
audio-visual aids for a lecture: "All power corrupts, but PowerPoint
corrupts absolutely.")
For instance, a legal
briefing on the Human Rights Act lists the instances in which it is legal for
the state to breach article 8: "In the interests of national security,
public safety or the economic wellbeing of the country, for the prevention of
disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the
protection of the rights and freedoms of others."
The notes make the point
that national security, public safety and serious crime are the three current
reasons for which GCHQ is allowed to eavesdrop, but there is a
chilling addition: "'Just' 3 at the moment. No reason why GCHQ's remit
would not be changed in the future but this is what we are allowed to do at the
moment."
It's usually only in
books that people's blood runs cold, but mine did when I read that.
"Just" three at the moment: in other words, there are
"just" three reasons why GCHQ can violate article 8, the
right to privacy. But that could change. It would be legal in human rights
terms for GCHQ's mandate to cover "the prevention of disorder", not
to mention "the protection of health or morals".
Extending state power
The totalitarian state
in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four would need no broader legal justification than
that: it really does allow a government to do anything it likes. It was at this
point that I became convinced that Snowden's revelations are not just
interesting or important but vital, because the state is about to get powers
that no state has ever had, and we need to have a public debate about those
powers and what their limits are to be.
At a moment of austerity
and with a general sense that our state's ability to guarantee prosperity for
its citizens is in retreat, that same state is about to make the biggest
advance ever in its security powers. In public, the state is shrinking; in
private, it is shrinking until it gets just small enough to fit into our
phones, our computers, our cars, our fridges, our bedrooms, our thoughts and
intentions.
Another secret slide is
headed SRA – a mysterious acronym that is not explained. The slide concerns 2P
intelligence, 2P meaning second party, ie other countries in the "five
eyes" alliance of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It says
that an SRA, whatever it is, "authorises receipt of 2P intelligence on UK
based targets where GCHQhas no authorisation".
Since GCHQ can
spy on any foreign national it wants, this can only mean the surveillance of
people on whom it isn't legal for GCHQ to spy. That looks to me an awful lot
like a means of obtaining permission to spy on people – British citizens? –
outside the law.
We've heard a lot of
talk about the distinction between content andmetadata –
content being the stuff inside communications, metadata the who and when and
where and how of the communication, but not the content. The idea is that the
spooks focus on the metadata and ignore the content – so they notice your nan
logging on to the net, where and when and for how long, but don't read the
actual content of the search.
This distinction is
written into the law in both the US and the UK. This would be reassuring, if
the notes didn't say this: "GCHQ policy is to treat it pretty much
all the same whether it's content or metadata."
Put all these together and it is no wonder the documents contain a boast about
the UK's "more permissive legal environment".
A new panopticon
The prospect this
presents is something like the "panopticon" which Enlightenment
philosophers advocated as a design for the ideal prison in the 18th century,
and about which the French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote in his book
Discipline and Punish. "He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and
who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes
them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power
relations in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle
of his own subjection."
When I first read
Foucault's account of the panopticon, where the individual at the centre can
simultaneously see and judge a whole multitude of other individuals, I thought
it was brilliant but overheated. Now, it actually seems like somebody's plan.
That's what we risk becoming: a society which is in crucial respects a giant
panopticon, where the people with access to our secrets can see, hear,
intercept and monitor everything.
Members of the security
establishment always want more abilities, more tools, more powers for
themselves and fewer rights for us. They never say "thanks a lot, we're
good from here, we have everything we need".
Public enemies
From their point of view
– the point of view of wanting ever more invasive secret powers – al-Qaida and
its affiliates are the perfect enemy. Because al-Qaida combines the
characteristics of an ideology and a network, it is everywhere, it is
invisible, it is never more dangerous than when you can't see it.
The new emphasis on
anticipating the actions of "lone wolf" terrorists raises this danger
even higher: the risk of terrorism from people who have never been caught
committing a crime, who have no known terrorist affiliations, who are
invisible, who could be anywhere … It is the ultimate version of the scare
story that used to be called "reds under the bed". How can the state
every hope to protect us against people like that, if not by permanent,
omnipresent, ever-increasing surveillance?
If we are going to remake
society in the image of the fight against terrorism, and put that secret fight
at the heart of our democratic order – which is the way we're heading – we need
to discuss it, and in public.
Exaggerated risks
When we do so, it might
be helpful to consider something called the banana equivalent dose (BED). This
is a term used in physics to measure the amount of radiation emitted by a
banana. It is a number popular with people who think the dangers of radiation
are exaggerated, and who use it to make the point that almost everything is
radioactive. A dental x-ray has a BED of 50; serious radiation poisoning takes
a BED of 20m; sleeping next to someone for one night has a BED of 0.5 and
living within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant for a year has a BED of 0.9.
Since 9/11, 53 people
have been killed by terrorists in the UK. Every one of those deaths is tragic.
So is every one of the 26,805 deaths to have occurred on Britain's roads
between 2002 and 2012 inclusive, an average of 6.67 deaths a day. Let's call
that the SDRD, standard daily road deaths. The terrorist toll for 12 years
comes to 0.0121 SDRD. This means that 12 years of terrorism has killed as many
people in the UK as eight days on our roads.
The security
establishment will immediately reply that this figure leaves out deaths of
terrorism victims abroad and the lives saved by its secret actions, none of
which can be made known without jeopardising current and future operations.
Is that enough of a
justification for the scale and extent of what is happening to our privacy? Is
the current supervisory regime – which involves senior judges inspectingGCHQ's
actions, "within the circle of secrecy", and issuing a secret report
– adequate to the scale of the state's powers?
I'd repeat the point
that as digital technology, and the ability to enact surveillance through
technology, expands its remit, those powers are increasing almost by the day.
In the UK we have a
strange sleepy indifference to questions of surveillance and privacy. "The
innocent have nothing to fear," says William Hague. But who gets to define
who is innocent? Who gets to say what is contradictory to the "economic
wellbeing" of the UK? If the innocent have nothing to fear, why is the
state reading so many of our emails, and sucking up so much metadata from
our phones and computers, under the umbrella of "sigint development"?
Police state
People misunderstand
what a police state is. It isn't a country where the police strut around in
jackboots; it's a country where the police can do anything they like.
Similarly, a security state is one in which the security establishment can do
anything it likes.
We are right on the
verge of being an entirely new kind of human society, one involving an
unprecedented penetration by the state into areas which have always been
regarded as private. Do we agree to that? If we don't, this is the last chance
to stop it happening. Our rulers will say what all rulers everywhere have
always said: that their intentions are good, and we can trust them. They want
that to be a sufficient guarantee.
My proposals
There's no need for us
to advance any further down this dark road. Here are two specific proposals.
The first is that the commissioners who supervise GCHQ include,
alongside the senior judges who currently do the work, at least one or two
public figures who are publicly known for their advocacy of human rights and
government openness. The "circle of secrecy" needs to include some
people who are known for not being all that keen on the idea of secrecy.
My second proposal is
for a digital bill of rights. The most important proviso on the bill would be
that digital surveillance must meet the same degree of explicit targeting as
that used in interception of mail and landlines. No more "one end
overseas" and "sigint development" loopholes to allow the mass
interception of communications. There can be no default assumption that the
state is allowed access to our digital life.
As the second most
senior judge in the country, Lord Hoffmann, said in 2004 about a previous
version of our anti-terrorism laws: "The real threat to the life of the
nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws
and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws like these. That
is the true measure of what terrorism may achieve."
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