In this dispatch from Bizarro World, a former spy chief claims that improved privacy will lead to loss of privacy:
My conclusion: Sir David needs to inquire as to whether National Health Service coverage and/or any extra civil service benefits from his career provides coverage for his severe case of impacted rectocranial inversion. To those of us who can see the world outside our own colons, it is obvious that taking away techniques that facilitate broad fishing-expedition surveillance (e.g. mass scanning of phone and Internet communications) and forcing a shift to techniques that must be targeted at specific suspects (e.g. the listed “close access” options) will induce ethical reform and cleanup in the intelligence agencies.
Or it will turn intelligence agencies into modern day Stassis that hire half the population to spy on the other half. Or if not hire them, frighten or intimidate them into spying on their neighbors. I’m not suggesting this is what the guy meant, but it is one possibility.
You need to think of the various security agencies like any other addict. Just as the drug addict will do contortions to justify and rationalize any behavior to get his fix, these fellows will do likewise to justify collecting any and all information.
Just as I roll my eyes as the junkie tells me how none of this is his fault, so I do when an NSA/CIA/GHQ spokesman tells me this is for my own good.
His point’s not that outlandish. He’s saying that by not allowing organizations like the NSA to spy on us one way, they’re not going to just go “Oh well, time to stop spying, guys” - they’ll go to even more extreme and invasive measures to get information. However, it seems like hos solution is to not increase security, rather than addressing the rather serious underlying problem that this NSA is completely nuts.
If you don’t give us a hundred virgins every year, we will have to kidnap a thousand forcefully. It will be your fault for not reasonably giving in to our overwhelming strength.
Also, and perhaps more importantly, intrusive spying is better because it does not scale as electronic fishing expeditions do. Once the infrastructure is in place, electronic snooping on the 1,000,000th person is trivially cheap, so the tendency is to snoop on everyone. The “close access” techniques don’t work that way – the 1,000,000th physical observation, direct hack, etc don’t cost any less than the 1,000th (and given that every one in between also costs the same, the numbers can’t really get as high as the former to begin with). This forces a careful selection of targets, which is what these guys were supposed to be doing anyway.
Spy agencies aren’t going to stop or cut back their spying if something gets in their way, they are only going to try harder. To induce reform, there would have to be massive prosecutions and cultural shifts and I just don’t see that happening. These are people who have bought into the line that if the government knows everything, it makes people the most safe.
They have to hire people like me, who don’t care about what you’re doing, and wouldn’t take a missed opportunity as a sign that massive change is needed.
That’s the advantage or relying on the laws of economics (i.e. the above noted linear-scaling cost of “direct access” methods) rather than statutory laws – the former are far less susceptible to evasion.
But then even if NSA and MI5 do have massive amounts of metadata, all indexed and cross referenced, someone still has to make the decision to investigate a particular person or transaction, IOW that the person concerned is a suspect. Undeniably, this arrangement presents the possibility of abuse, but I’m not opposed to the collection of metadata in principle. I consider that far less an affront to my rights than it would be if I somehow got on the limited suspect list erroneously, given that such an error would imply that I am a suspect.
Not necessarily, they can define the targets along the lines of “if [set of checks], those people are guilty.”
Actual case, not from spying but involving a bad set of checks definition:
Spain’s Treasury “prefiles” taxes for people. They prep your taxes, so you can either accept them or send them back with corrections - since most of the data will be there, this is generally viewed as a good thing. This is for the yearly income tax: actual data is used. It may be incomplete but it’s actual, it’s both current and real.
At one point my local Treasury decided to prefile for the self-employed’s quarterlies, based on data from two years before. Cue every local self-employed: :eek:. The rejection was so wide that they haven’t done it again. But!
Each of those prefiled withdrawals got tagged as “canceled”. Not “paid”.
Two years later, some genius ran a “select any tax withdrawals which are not labeled ‘paid’ and send to forced collections.”
Is there a link for the full article? The excerpts as they stand don’t seem to be anything outrageous. It seems a perfectly reasonable assumption that surveillance will be driven in the direction stated.
The author may be saying that is a good thing or a bad thing or he may be simply stating a neutral opinion but without then full context we can’t say.
Interesting dichotomy, though. Can you detect more potential terrorist activity by looking at ten million people superficially or ten thousand people intensely?
And you can be more social, buy the guy tailing you 24/7 a cup of coffee once in a while, go over your weekly schedule together to see if there are ways you could be more accomodating of his own priorities, convene on the times when it might not be too disruptive for his team to ransack your entire house, maybe CC him your bank statements to spare him the hassle of breaking through your emails… it’s just a more humane way of doing things all around.
It was clear to me when I wrote it, not so much now.
I think my point was that (from the excerpt alone) he isn’t necessarily suggesting that the intelligence services should behave in an ethically worse way, but that…leopards and spots and whatnot…they probably will, and that the increase in encryption technology will push them down that track, but again he doesn’t seem to be making a value judgement on that. Of course once a spook always a spook.
Thanks for the article BTW, interestingly, reading to the bottom I can see this addition.
Which suggests that I’m not alone in my ambiguous reading of his comments.
My point is that “direct access” methods are not ethically worse, and in fact are ethically better, because their non-scaling labor-intensive resource requirements make it necessary for the police and intelligence agencies to pick and choose individual suspects rather than snoop on the entire population.
Of course, if Sir David’s “ethics” do not include a work ethic, then I suppose he would see a protocol that forces agents to get off their butts and do legwork to be “worse” than one that allows them to sit at keyboards all day.
FWIW I’d agree. Greater specific intrusion into carefully selected targets seems like a preferable position to the general trawling operation we currently have.
