GCHQ and Me
August 20, 2015 4:47 AM Subscribe
My Life Unmasking British Eavesdroppers.
In my 40 years of reporting on mass surveillance, I have been raided three times; jailed once; had television programs I made or assisted making banned from airing under government pressure five times; seen tapes seized; faced being shoved out of a helicopter; had my phone tapped for at least a decade; and — with this arrest — been lined up to face up to 30 years imprisonment for alleged violations of secrecy laws. And why do I keep going? Because from the beginning, my investigations revealed a once-unimaginable scope of governmental surveillance, collusion, and concealment by the British and U.S. governments — practices that were always as much about domestic spying during times of peace as they were about keeping citizens safe from supposed foreign enemies, thus giving the British government the potential power to become, as our source that night had put it, a virtual “police state.”
OTOH, if you habitually read MetaFilter but conspicuously avoided opening this particular thread, that will have been logged as well as a sign that you have something to hide and/or are susceptible to control by implicit threats.
posted by acb at 5:46 AM on August 20, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by acb at 5:46 AM on August 20, 2015 [2 favorites]
*rips off clothes and hobbles across lawn pushing walker as fast as it will go singing the theme song of Rawhide*
posted by infini at 6:36 AM on August 20, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by infini at 6:36 AM on August 20, 2015 [2 favorites]
*rips off clothes and hobbles across lawn pushing walker as fast as it will go singing the theme song of Rawhide*
Nope, sorry, we've got a list for that, too, and now you're on it.
posted by Inkoate at 7:07 AM on August 20, 2015 [2 favorites]
Nope, sorry, we've got a list for that, too, and now you're on it.
posted by Inkoate at 7:07 AM on August 20, 2015 [2 favorites]
Seem familiar?
I watched as Johnstone slumped in the witness box. He then descended into “gloomy confusion,” according to a watching reporter. He condemned articles published in his own army unit’s magazine as illegal, and finally confessed, “To be frank, I am not certain what is a secret and what isn’t.”
We walked free. The judge ruled that we should face no punishment for technically breaking the discredited secrecy law, which was repealed 11 years later.
The snark here is TIRESOME. RTFA. An amazing article. The seeds for so many of today's woes were sown in the cold war.
The postwar advantage and surplus that the west had over the rest of the world allowed the millitary industrial complex to have vast programs like this, while still having a (non-corporate) welfare state as crumbs for the populace. Now those advantages are gone from the west, the MIC's juggernaut resource-sucking inertia still rolls on, but most other things require "austerity".
posted by lalochezia at 9:11 AM on August 20, 2015 [7 favorites]
Interesting article. Thanks.
posted by benito.strauss at 10:18 AM on August 20, 2015
posted by benito.strauss at 10:18 AM on August 20, 2015
Remember if you post here on this topic it will be recorded. Actually if you've clicked this far you're probably screwed. (smiley? no, no smiley today)
Yeah, you're being recorded as a matter of course regardless of what you are or aren't doing. If you're the type of person who would find a MetaFilter post about GCHQ remotely interesting you've been algorithmically sorted higher up on the priority list ages ago.
posted by 3urypteris at 10:52 AM on August 20, 2015 [1 favorite]
Yeah, you're being recorded as a matter of course regardless of what you are or aren't doing. If you're the type of person who would find a MetaFilter post about GCHQ remotely interesting you've been algorithmically sorted higher up on the priority list ages ago.
posted by 3urypteris at 10:52 AM on August 20, 2015 [1 favorite]
Interesting article! It's always interesting to see what can be learned about secret organizations by doing good analysis of open information.
Note that the Jim Bamford mentioned in the article is the author of The Puzzle Palace, the first major popular description of the NSA, who recently wrote an interesting article for The Intercept: "The NSA and Me"
posted by jjwiseman at 11:05 AM on August 20, 2015
Note that the Jim Bamford mentioned in the article is the author of The Puzzle Palace, the first major popular description of the NSA, who recently wrote an interesting article for The Intercept: "The NSA and Me"
posted by jjwiseman at 11:05 AM on August 20, 2015
Can I subscribe to a "Surveillance +" model, where for only $5/month, I get the spooks to remind me of stuff I'm supposed to do, and what I said in that meeting yesterday? Sure, it'd be tiresome at times, but if I'm paying extra for this, surely their customer success teams would be on this concept like a shot?
posted by scruss at 11:08 AM on August 20, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by scruss at 11:08 AM on August 20, 2015 [1 favorite]
"algorithmically sorted higher up on the priority list ages ago."
To be honest I think that is fantasy. Statistical techniques simply aren't good enough to predict behaviour with security implications -- think about how bad Facebook and Google are at the much simpler problem of predicting your consumption interests, even though they have vast resources for this and nothing could be more in their interests.
The reason they collect everything is not to make predictions. It is to have plenty of evidence on that can be reviewed when you do something wrong, or someone thinks you have done so.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:30 PM on August 20, 2015 [2 favorites]
To be honest I think that is fantasy. Statistical techniques simply aren't good enough to predict behaviour with security implications -- think about how bad Facebook and Google are at the much simpler problem of predicting your consumption interests, even though they have vast resources for this and nothing could be more in their interests.
The reason they collect everything is not to make predictions. It is to have plenty of evidence on that can be reviewed when you do something wrong, or someone thinks you have done so.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:30 PM on August 20, 2015 [2 favorites]
So yeah the nightmare scenario is not precrime. It is blackmail, and having your words and actions twisted and quoted out of context at your show trial.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:31 PM on August 20, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:31 PM on August 20, 2015 [1 favorite]
« Donnez-moi deux lignes de la main d'un homme, et j'y trouverai de quoi suffire à sa condamnation. » — Richelieu
posted by ormon nekas at 1:55 PM on August 20, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by ormon nekas at 1:55 PM on August 20, 2015 [3 favorites]
To be honest I think that is fantasy. Statistical techniques simply aren't good enough to predict behaviour with security implications -- think about how bad Facebook and Google are at the much simpler problem of predicting your consumption interests, even though they have vast resources for this and nothing could be more in their interests.
Given that China is already working on a “social credit system” which will algorithmically infer citizens' loyalty from their surveillance data, the US is using statistical algorithms to fill its no-fly list, and payday loan companies are experimenting with demanding access to customers' social network feeds to determine credit eligibility (i.e., if you're in the habit of hanging around with deadbeats or posting drunkfaced selfies at 3am, you're probably a higher credit risk), I wouldn't be so sure. I imagine that, given the sort of surveillance data GCHQ/NSA are said to have, one could build an algorithm which classifies people, in crude strokes, into “sheep” or “goats”, if not quite picking out statistically infrequent “wolves”.
If the pressure on individuals increases (due to toughened austerity, wartime privation, the consequences of runaway climate change, or the Invisible Hand Of The Free Market adjusting down how much non-oligarchs are entitled to), such a list could be useful in narrowing down the list of potential troublemakers. And social graph data could do the rest.
posted by acb at 5:32 PM on August 20, 2015 [1 favorite]
Given that China is already working on a “social credit system” which will algorithmically infer citizens' loyalty from their surveillance data, the US is using statistical algorithms to fill its no-fly list, and payday loan companies are experimenting with demanding access to customers' social network feeds to determine credit eligibility (i.e., if you're in the habit of hanging around with deadbeats or posting drunkfaced selfies at 3am, you're probably a higher credit risk), I wouldn't be so sure. I imagine that, given the sort of surveillance data GCHQ/NSA are said to have, one could build an algorithm which classifies people, in crude strokes, into “sheep” or “goats”, if not quite picking out statistically infrequent “wolves”.
If the pressure on individuals increases (due to toughened austerity, wartime privation, the consequences of runaway climate change, or the Invisible Hand Of The Free Market adjusting down how much non-oligarchs are entitled to), such a list could be useful in narrowing down the list of potential troublemakers. And social graph data could do the rest.
posted by acb at 5:32 PM on August 20, 2015 [1 favorite]
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posted by sammyo at 5:07 AM on August 20, 2015 [1 favorite]