We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world.
This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.
These capabilities present an existential threat to our democratic freedoms. The potential damage that terrorist could do to us pales into insignificance.
In essence, GCHQ & NSA have constructed a giant totalitarian state, with almost unlimited power. The only reassurance that it's not to be used against us is "trust us". However much we might trust them for now, that's simply not a good enough guarantee. Like Checkov's gun, the very existence of this weapon means that it almost certainly will be fired, eventually.
The only way for us to ensure our safety is to make sure that the weapon is put beyond use, ASAP.
How to get there is a difficult question - particularly the political question of how to get better policies in place. It is effectively a test of democracy, whether the people in each country (the majority of whom, I assume, prefer not to be pervasively wiretapped) can actually influence government behavior.
As for what the policy would look like, well probably each national government will be unwilling to give up much of its interception capabilities, but maybe they would like to avoid interception by other governments. So as one possible reform, one can imagine an international arrangement where nations would monitor the undersea cables and remove any spy devices.
> this is just a new instance of an age old problem.
The issue of limiting state force is extremely old but it is entirely a solved problem. It was solved by warrants, given by judges, and policy scrutinized by the public and constitutional limitations on executive power. Aka civilian oversight. The issue is that these agencies are operating in total secrecy, with their own rubber-stamp courts for domestic surveillance and absolutely zero oversight if the targets are foreign.
People try to frame this as a technology problem. Technology creating new opportunities and everyone (even the state) was caught off guard and our legal/political system was ill prepared for it. But thats not true. The entire growth of SIGINT was on the basis of the government utilizing state secrecy laws more often than ever in history. Entirely bypassing any scrutiny or limitations.
As for the military, yes America should greatly reduce the strength of its standing army, in terms of manpower, equipment, funding, etc. It's been on a wartime footing for over 70 years, and it's time to stop.
Perhaps it's because the people of Oman deserve to know what secret endeavors their government allows in their name.
Perhaps it's because the people of the UK deserve to know what secret endeavors their government embarks on in their name.
Perhaps it's to prove a point about the free press after an episode of shameful intimidation by government.
Or perhaps it's, as El Reg wrote, because the UK government claims their adversaries, both nation-state and non-state actors, already have access to these documents and it's only 'we the people' who have been left out.
I'm a Brit and I'd rather not know what our government does to maintain our national security. At least not in situations like this when knowing about it means that it undermines the ability of that asset.
It's one thing for this American Snowden to assault his own country's practices, since they have a constitution that is arguably being violated. But it's entirely another for him to assault the UK and for which does not have a constitution that's being violated and even if it did he is not a British citizen anyway so it should not concern him.
> UK and for which does not have a constitution that's being violated
I'm a Brit too. The idea that we don't have a constitution to be violated is ignorant nonsense.
It's true, we don't have a nice convenient piece of paper with 'The UK Constitution' at the top. The UK constitution is mostly common law (recorded in caselaw -- decisions by judges) with common law principles such as the rule of law and access to justice (e.g. ex p Withham), together with a bunch of 'constitutional statutes' (in the Metric Martyrs sense - e.g. the Bill of Rights, Acts of Union, and more recently the ECA, Human Rights Act, etc), constitutional conventions (written and unwritten), and international treaties (the EU treaty, the ECHR, etc.).
The UK has been ruling actions of the executive illegal under our constitution since longer than the US has existed. E.g. Entick v Carrington [1765], which was cited as the inspiration behind the fourth amendment.
If you want to learn more, try Peter Leyland's "The constitution of the United Kingdom".
I'm not a Brit and I'd rather know what your government does to violate my human rights.
There are about 60 millon Brit and approx 7 billion non-Brits. Surely, if you believe that all humans share equal rights, the rights of the latter group outweigh, for simple quantitative reasons, those of the former, especially in the light of the dreadful record of UK secret services collaboration with imperialism, not to mention the recent collaboration in the assault on Irak which left, by conservative estimations, a six-figure of people dead.
"if you believe that all humans share equal rights". In practice it doesn't matter what he or most of the British citizens believe. It doesn't matter even what the British people in power believe or what they say publicly they believe. What matters is what those Brits in power do and especially what they REALLY do (in secret). If it's not already obvious, for British gov, ALL the humans don't share much rights. Same for US gov, no matter what they say. Not even their own citizens don't share many EQUAL rights. And judging only from what we know they did (declassification/archives), we can go on and say the same thing about almost any government. In secret you have no rights at all unless you have real means (position, influence, money, an army?) to defend them yourself. Therefore appealing to human rights and especially equal rights for non-citizens is quite naive in my opinion.
Well the Brits care way way more about Iraq and the Chilcot Inquiry than they do about invasions of their own privacy by their own government. What does that tell you? At least we have our priorities in order.
Firstly, burying your head in the sand will not make it go away.
Secondly, the article explains that by their own admission the UK government have said that "knowing about it" today means no undermining of anything at all. It's important to remember that the news story has been buried for some time by our newspapers though. The only people who don't know about it are the public.
Thirdly, in response to your last paragraph, I have no words...
If "maintain national security" means preventing terroristic attacks, then the appropriate way is first of all to stop invading foreign countries (or supporting their invasion).
The fact that "this" Snowden published Britain related documents should concern british citizens very much, because shows how tightly the contry is connected to USA, and how the wrongdoings of the latter will (and did) fall back on the former.
Accepting/supporting surveillance strategies today, both internal and foreign, has more to do with totalitarian and imperialistic objectives more than security itself.
To siblings: I don't think nbevans is burying his head in the sand. I think he means that the assets are more effective if they're secret, and he would prefer them to be effective.
As for the second paragraph, the more cooperation between intelligence systems, the more benefit for each system as well as the more risk to each when one is compromised. I imagine this is a demonstration of the violation of some rule of compartmentalization in intelligence theory. If you don't want to get any American damage on you, don't run with Americans.
I agree with your analysis of nbevans' post, but another valid reason not to know might be simple embarrassment at the incompetence of the secret state. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER for an eye-opening read, for example.
Of course, if the British secret state is in fact a highly competent totalitarian entity aiming at hiding their powers, that might be just exactly what they'd want you to read.. :)
Seriously for a moment though, I think the article, though well worth reading, kind of misses a significant point that protecting us from the Communist Threat (sorry, the Islamist Threat, nowadays) is not the be-all and end-all of MI5 &co's raison d'etre. I believe a significant part of their resources has, at least for the last 50 years or so, been aimed at suppressing non-criminal organised domestic dissent, and ensuring the continued dominance of the traditional rulers of our nation. For examples, tapping CND's telephones, involvement in smearing the Wilson government, infiltration of trade unions and the labour movement, etc. etc. none of which groups posed any serious criminal threat to "the establishment."
I suspect a detailed accounting might find a good deal more success in those activities than in the ones alluded to in Curtis' post.
I could not agree more. I'm staggered I've been down voted into oblivion for actually holding an opinion. I bet the down voters aren't even Brits so they don't even understand my point of view.
We suffered massively from American foreign policies in recent decades and we continue to suffer from, in this case, "renegade" NSA agents that defect to Russia and upload all British secrets to the internet.
I'm British and I don't think you have been downvoted for merely holding an opinion, but rather for supreme arrogance combined with a complete ignorance of the realities of the situation.
Again, my posts here are "lost" on the typical HN sheep. The average Brit doesn't really care about GCHQ or Snowden or the fact we're wire tapping everything in sight. They. Just. Don't. Care.
The absolute peak of the Snowden story in the UK was when it was disclosed that some GCHQ "Spooks" took an angle grinder and baseball bat to some computers in the basement The Guardian headquarters. Mainly because it reminded them of some sort of comedy sketch. After that blew over and nobody cared anymore. That's why it's only tech publications like The Register seemingly carrying this more recent story.
The reaction in the UK was lacklustre, I believe, because privacy in the UK was already eroded a long time ago. For example you can't even walk 10 meters in London without being recorded on some CCTV system somewhere. Or drive more than a couple streets without your car's registration being recorded on police cameras.
I'm one of the few that actually 1) has an opinion 2) it happens to be contrary to the typical expected American view of "this violates a tiny amount of my privacy therefore let's burn it at the stake".
Fucking hell, you aren't just digging yourself a hole here, you're using state of the art high speed tunneling equipment to do it with. Any other assorted nuggets you care to enlighten us with before you get too deep for signals to reach the surface anymore?
Firstly, burying my head in the sand implies that I would want it to go away. I don't really mind how much we snoop on terrorist hotbed countries, to be completely honest?
Secondly, yes the press has been gagged for some time but it was still Snowden that leaked it all in the first place. I don't think you have a point here.
My taxes fund things like this and it pisses me off, slightly, that some American has effectively limited the "return on investment" we are now going to get from it.
Lewis Page, the editor, noted in the comments section:
"The [UK] government have made it plain that in their view not only foreign powers (ie probably Russia and others) have full access to the Snowden leaks, but quite possibly 'non state actors' also. In other words the only people who don't know this are the general public.
"And given the colossal automated penetration that NSA/GCHQ are achieving worldwide without anybody being much the wiser, it seemed to us that the public should know - as there's no further intelligence hit for UK.gov to take, by its own analysis."
Ugh, the 'NSA sysadmin'. Snowden himself addressed this point that this is a framing move on the part of the US government to downplay his knowledge of what the NSA was really up to. He actually did participate in spying activities! Such a shame that this framing even persists in news of his leaks. (Yes I am aware of The Register's reputation.)
All of the UK national papers have had their hands on this for some time. The papers have obeyed the government into not publishing the story. The Register deemed that there is no harm that can be done to the state. As diodesign repeats in another comment (edited):
"The [UK] government have made it plain that in their view not only foreign powers (ie probably Russia and others) have full access to the Snowden leaks, but quite possibly 'non state actors' also. ..it seemed to us that the public should know - as there's no further intelligence hit for UK.gov to take, by its own analysis."
Because right now people have access to GPG and can send information reasonably securely to journalists.
But don't worry, a 3 [or 4] letter agency near you is working real hard on that.
The stuff about terrorists can wait as that's not quite as important as stopping you knowing about what the agency is up to. The supposed masters in charge of limiting them - government ministers - are willfully compliant in the manipulation and deceit.
[edit:spelling; I wish english was my first language.]
Those of us working with the UK government probably all just had to double-take then to work out which GPG you meant :P (There was a UK government security document series called GPG)
based on the first paragraph, I wonder how many outages because of damaged undersea cables are caused by intelligence agencies botching their cable taps?
Even a "correct" tap installation might cause an outage due to the particulars of optical-fiber manipulation. There have been occasional reports of cable breaks in the news - I've noticed since about the 1990s. They have been attributed, usually to ship anchors, or other accidental occurrences. (Supposedly also, sharks bite cables, attracted by current, but this may apply more to wire than fiber)
Here is the link to the article on one page "printer friendly" http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2014/06/03/revealed_beyon...