AGENT ELLI AND THAT TRICKY LANGUAGE THAT IS RUSSIAN (PART 1)

Agent Elli and the Tricky Language that is Russian

(Part 1)

‘Faktion’, my alternate-history story set in a very different world of 1947, went out to publishers last week. It uses as a backstory the search by MI5 for the various ‘moles’ that the Soviets had infiltrated into the British establishment and it was while I was doing my background research I became fascinated by the mysterious Soviet agent, Agent Elli whose information was of such importance that his messages were hand-delivered to Stalin immediately they were received in Moscow. To add to the intrigue the identity of Agent Elli has never been definitively established, the two leading candidates being Leo Long (proposed by Professor Christopher Andrew) and Roger Hollis (proposed by journalist Chapman Pincher). Despite the efforts of various historians and journalists the question, ‘who was Agent Elli’ remains hotly debated to this day.

‘Faktion’ delivers my own, somewhat left-field, verdict on who was Agent Elli much of my surmising turning, as does the plot of ‘Faktion’, on the difficulties faced when information is translated/interpreted from Russian into English. This is based on my own experiences living and working in Russia: really good translators are rare as hen’s teeth and most have a real reluctance to raise their hand when they don’t understand what they were being asked to translate. This caused no end of muddles though I was lucky to always have Nelli by my side who is a fanatic for accuracy (and a highly qualified linguistic to boot).

Virtually all our knowledge regarding Agent Elli comes from the testimony of Igor Gouzenko, a 26-year old cipher clerk who was posted to Canada in June 1943 to work in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa. In September 1945 Gouzenko gave himself up to the Canadians rather than be shipped back to the USSR bringing with him a collection of files and code books and an insider’s knowledge of the extent of the Soviet Union’s espionage efforts in Canada, the USA and in Britain. Such was the brouhaha caused by Gouzenko’s revelations (especially regarding Soviet Intelligence’s penetration of the Manhattan Project) that he is often cited as the man responsible for initiating the Cold War.

Given how important he is to the story of Agent Elli it is perhaps worth spending a moment considering just what sort of a man Gouzenko was (for this I mostly reference Gouzenko’s biography This Was My Choice). He was born in the village of Rogachov, ‘not far distant from Moscow’. His father was killed soon after his birth (in 1919) fighting in the civil war raging in Russia at that time (for which side he was fighting remains tantalisingly unclear). His mother, a teacher, seems to have been a woman of some influence because she managed to move herself and her family to Moscow (moving towns in the Soviet Union was a considerable feat which would have required the pulling of any number of strings), Gouzenko entering the prestigious school named in honour of Maxim Gorky and from there going to study at the Moscow Architectural Institute. Whilst Gouzenko claims that his family had no blat – influence – I doubt this is the case: his mother’s move to Moscow and the quality of the schools where Gouzenko studied give the lie to that. This is confirmed by his being transferred to the Kuibyshev Military Engineering Academy in Moscow where he trained as a cipher clerk in Intelligence Administration run by the GRU, a very cushy, a very safe and a very well-paid job. Although ranked merely as a lieutenant his salary was an astonishingly high 1,200 roubles (in 1940 the average salary of an engineer was R696 and a worker R324).

By his own account Gouzenko was a dedicated student, a diligent officer, a loyal Communist and a devoted husband to his wife, Anna. He does, though, seem partial to a drink noting in his book that ‘I never allowed an opportunity for obtaining vodka or wine to pass’ though whether he was the alcoholic claimed by John Cairncross I couldn’t confirm. As a cipher clerk most of his work seems to have been on telegrams from and to Germany and Switzerland (again, given that Germany was invading Russia at that time, this was a prestigious appointment).

In June 1943 (the pivotal time in the fighting on the Eastern Front) he was transferred to the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, Canada. That Gouzenko had precious little English (he describes himself as having only a ‘fair foundation in the language’) this seems an unusual appointment, and being such a plumb (and very safe!) posting again smacks of prodigious amounts of blat.

Gouzenko quickly became enamoured of life in Canada and when he was advised that he was to be transferred back to Moscow decided to defect which he and his family did on 5^th September, 1945, being taken into custody by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. (En passant, I have my suspicions regarding Gouzenko and his motives for defecting. This man wasn’t what he appeared. I just wonder …)

So the Gouzenko who defected was young, of junior rank (he was still just a lieutenant) and possessed of pretty shaky English (despite twenty years of living in Canada, during the CBC television interview of March, 1966 Gouzenko still answered questions in heavily accented English). The upshot is that all of Gouzenko’s interviews with the RCMP had to be made using an interpreter, which, I believe, accounts for some of the problems historians have had in recent years. The interpreter the RCMP used was Special Constable Mervyn Black and, as with Gouzenko, it's worth taking a closer look at Black. According to Gregory S. Kealey who has made a study of the RCMP's Security Bulletins Black was born on 31st May 1890 in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) to Scottish parents, his father being Managing Director of the D.N. Lebedeff jute mill. After being schooled in Belfast, Dundee and London, Black returned to Russia in 1914 as manager of the Riga Textile factory. He left Russia in 1921finally coming to rest in Canada where he farmed in Saskatchewan until 1932.

This doesn't seem to have been a successful endeavour because in 1933 he joined the RCMP as a civilian translator though his duties also included him working as an undercover agent spying on Communist agitators ... again not very successfully. As Black is reported to have said: 'My connections with the working class of various countries have been very close and intimate but always from the standpoint of the employer, not as a fellow worker on the same step of the social ladder'. Thus Black's background and feelings apparently deprived him of the ability to make a successful secret agent. Mervyn Black was obviously something of a snob who probably regarded his having to work as a translator (and as an agent rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi) as somewhat beneath him. He certainly railed about never being commissioned into the uniformed branch of the RCMP (apparently his age was against him) so I have the suspicion that Black was an embittered man.

So we have a translator who although )probably) fluent in Russian is not a native speaker nor a linguist and whose snobbishness might have prevented him admitting he didn't understand what Gouzenko was saying. This is especially the case given that Black must have recognised the opportunity Gouzenko presented him with to impress his superiors.

My suspicions regarding the difficulties Black faced in accurately interpreting what Gouzenko said when he was being debriefed by the RCMP are reinforced by a letter written by RCMP Inspector George McClellan and dated 11 October, 1945 which notes: ‘I would like to point out that under the living conditions in Rexall (Camp X) at the moment, Black (the interpreter) laboured under much difficulty in obtaining the statement already submitted herewith … this is due to the fact that Corby (Gouzenko’s codename) has somewhat of the dreamer mentality and it is extremely difficult to pin him down to the business at hand’ (Amy Knight: ‘How the Cold War Began’).

Amongst the revelations Gouzenko made during these somewhat tortuous debriefings was that there was a Soviet agent – codenamed Elli – operating in Britain. Gouzenko had learned of Elli’s existence when chatting with a fellow cipher clerk called Liubimov during the night-shift at GRU headquarters in Moscow in 1942. Apparently Liubimov even went so far as to show him deciphered messages relating to Elli.

(En passant, it should be noted that there has been some suggestion that Gouzenko fabricated the existence of Agent Elli simply to enhance his importance to the Canadians. I doubt this. On 24 November, 1945, the Soviet Commissar for State Security, Vsevolod Merkulov, sent a personal message to Stalin and Beria confirming that Gouzenko had betrayed the existence of the GRU agent inside British intelligence, Elli. The inescapable conclusion is that what Gouzenko said was fact.)

TO BE CONTINUED ...

THE MUTABLE NATURE OF WRONG

THE MUTABLE NATURE OF ‘WRONG’

In reading the ‘Comments’ made following the report of the BBC on the public interrogation of Britain’s three spy chiefs on 7 November (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24847399) I was struck by how many times the adage ‘you’ve nothing to worry about surveillance if you’re not doing anything wrong’ was brandished in defence of what the British Security Services are doing.

The problem with this argument is that ‘wrong’ is a very mutable concept which is apt to change – often quite radically – over a surprisingly short period of time. Considering that the last SUCCESSFUL prosecution for blasphemy was in 1977 (just thirty-six years ago!) tells me that the (relatively) liberal country we live in is a recent construct. Fifty years ago it was a crime to bad-mouth God or to be a practicing homosexual, and the law (and much of society) was unconcerned about those who penalised or persecuted others for being black or female.  Fifty years ago what was considered ‘wrong’ was profoundly different from what we consider ‘wrong’ today.

'Wrong' is an ever moving target. What is perceived to be ‘wrong’ today may not be ‘wrong’ tomorrow.

And how quickly the mood and sensibilities of a country can change is, I would suggest, illustrated by the growth of the ultra-conservative Tea Party movement in the USA and the emergent of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn in Greece. These exemplify how quickly the political and moral outlook of a country can alter (especially as a result of economic set-backs). To my mind this is what makes the collection and storage of so much information by our Security Services (and by other organisations) so worrying.

Let us say that for some unknown reason Britain in twenty years makes a sudden shift to the right or the left and a new, more draconian ethos takes hold when homosexuality is seen as a bad thing or that Jews were once again branded as untermenschen. Then it would be a relatively simple task for our Security Services to access their databases and identify those who had bought Gay Times or Diva, or to make a search for those who had attended a synagogue.

THAT is what makes the collection and storage of surveillance information so troubling: not how it IS being used but how it MIGHT be used. It is not the present we should be worrying about but the future and that is why the debate about what is collected by GCHQ, how long it is stored and how it is managed is so important.

SURROGATE SURVEILLANCE

THE RISE OF SURROGATE SURVEILLANCE

The recent appearance of the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ on television has centred everyone’s attention on the scope and the dangers of State surveillance, but what commentators have forgotten is that surveillance conducted by those not belonging to the Secret Service community is much more ubiquitous and, in many ways, much more disturbing.

And the reason for this is simple: we are willing participants in this Surrogate Surveillance.

Take, for instance, the loyalty card phenomenon. At first glance the reason why Tesco and all the other big stores provide loyalty cards is simply to reward those who shop regularly at their stores and by doing so to encourage them to keep coming back. But there is another reason why these stores are so keen on promoting their loyalty cards: the vast quantities of information they acquire about their customers enables them to profile them. A shopping cart reveals a great deal of information about you: whether you have children or live alone; whether you drink (and how much); whether you have a pet; how clean you are; whether you are environmentally conscious; and (from the papers you buy) what your political views are likely to be. All these data are stored (for how long?), analysed and used to develop a portrait of you useful in tailoring adverts directed at you. Bespoke promotion … you can see it on the side of your Facebook page.

Not that the stores are stopping there. The news that Tesco will be installing face-recognition equipment in its petrol stations (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10435521/Facial-recognition-inevitable-but-will-shoppers-approve.html) is just the next step: Tesco aims to put faces to data. I’m guessing that soon we’ll be in a ‘Minority Report’ type world where adverts are tailor-made for each potential customer passing them by. Of course, it will also enable Tesco to refuse entry to known shop-lifters and serial-complainers but that’s by-the-by (unless you happen to have the misfortune to look like a shop-lifter!).

What is important about this development is the vast amount of data that Tesco have to store and process in order to make their face-recognition initiative work. This is just a STORE when all said and done, not GCHQ or the NSA.

Which brings me back to my central point. Around the country (and on-line, Amazon must be awash with data) there are hundreds of stores doing pretty much the same thing as Tesco and warehousing copious amounts of data. And these databases are supplemented by those holding the information hoovered up by official surveillance devices operated by the police and local authorities, and the information held by the Inland Revenue, local GPs, the rating authorities, the police, by the Congestion Charging centre in London, by the DVLA in Swansea and, of course, by the banks. Moreover if Tesco is using facial recognition you can bet your bottom dollar that the police and GCHQ are way ahead of them. Even the Inland Revenue is using Google Earth (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2494152/Now-taxman-spying-home-using-Google-Earth-Satellite-images-clues-wealth-lifestyle-youre-paying-enough.html).

This is what I call Surrogate Surveillance.

The Snowden brouhaha focussed attention on how the internet and cell phone service providers co-operated (or didn’t co-operate, depending on who you believe) with the GCHQ/NSA to facilitate their tapping into our e-communications but what was forgotten was that there is this mass of Surrogate Surveillance data collected quite openly that could provide very interesting information about us. Nobody seems interested in it.

Nobody, I suspect, apart from GCHQ.

Now with all this data lying around neatly warehoused I would have thought it beyond belief that GCHQ wouldn’t be accessing it. After all it has been acquired quite legally (and often with the surveillee’s co-operation) so no one can criticise GCHQ for using it. Now I’ve never made a bomb but I suspect that the ingredients are pretty standard and need to be bought by any would-be bomber. Analysing data held in a store’s databases would reveal who was buying this stuff (presumably terrorists have credit cards) and hence who was worth MI5 taking a closer interest in.

Forget Tempora and worry about Surrogate Surveillance ...

BREAKING NEWS: SPIES SAVAGED BY TOOTHLESS DOG

On Thursday  7th November I invested ninety minutes of my life watching the Intelligence and Security Committee grill (if that’s the word) the Heads of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 for the first time in public. Now I had no great hopes for this televised interrogation (any Committee that includes Hazel Blears has no right to use the word ‘Intelligence’ in its title) and it lived down to my low expectations. The three being interrogated (Andrew Parker of MI5; John Sawers of MI6 and Iain Lobban of GCHQ) were obviously well-rehearsed and had been provided with a selection of sound-bites to recite. Worse, the questions posed by the Committee were anodyne in the extreme.

The Independent 7th November, 2013

 

For example: there was no question as to why the existence of the Tempora system (which taps into the transatlantic fibre-optic cables) had been kept from the Committee; there was no question as to why GCHQ had to monitor e-communications in Germany; and there was no question regarding the extent of the monitoring of e-communications here in the UK. And there was most certainly no questioning of if (oh yeah) GCHQ co-operates with the NSA to circumvent UK law.

So pretty much a waste of time but there were some points of interest.

 

1. The body language of Iain Loggan (Head of GCHQ) was that of a man under EXTREME pressure. Not a poker player methinks: he was just one mass of twitches and tics.



The Times 8th November 2013

2.       Lobban used the analogy that GCHQ’s task was akin to finding a needle in a haystack. What he failed to mention was that to build the haystack ALL the hay (or e-communications in normal speak) has to be gathered. His claim that GDHQ does not spend its time listening to calls made by the majority of the British population is simultaneous accurate but evasive.

 

The Guardian 7th November 2013

 

3.       Andrew Parker’s admission that most of the terrorist threats MI5 have dealt with since 7/7 in 2005 had been domestically organised should have generated more interest from the Committee. Surely the corollary of this is that GCHQ’s would be directing more of their resources towards surveilling the UK and its citizens. None of the Committee seemed able to join up these dots.

4.       I can only hope the questioning during the Close-Door sessions  is more determined than what was seen today otherwise we’re in big trouble.

RUSSELL BRAND AND ACTIVE APATHY

RUSSELL BRAND  AND ACTIVE APATHY

I should begin with a confession: I loathe Russell Brand. Ever since his juvenile antics on Have I Got News For You a couple of years back I have made a point of avoiding him and anything in which he is involved.

However, by accident, I saw his Jeremy Paxman interview and had to admit to being impressed: he was articulate and, despite my natural antipathy towards the man, persuasive.  For those of you who missed the brouhaha caused by Brand’s comments check out the article he wrote for The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/05/russell-brand-democratic-system-newsnight), but in a nutshell what Brand is saying that the current political system in Britain has failed, that our politicians are no longer representative of the people, that the rich are becoming distanced from and contemptuous of the poor and that as a protest people should no longer bother to vote.

Now I haven’t voted for some considerable time and the reason for this is simple. I look at the political parties and there’s barely a cigarette paper’s thickness with regards policies between them. I look at the parties and see that they are each led by men (and they’re all men) who have the same backgrounds (public school/OxBridge) and who are bland, anodyne and devoid of passion. I look at the parties and I see they are all enthral to the Establishment and to big business.

I can’t be bothered with any of them. By many people’s lights I have become apathetic and it took a conversation on FaceBook yesterday to make me stand back and rationalise this apathy.

All governments have to be legitimised and as best I can make out there are three main ways this is achieved. There’s the Divine Right or the Ordained by God tactic which seems to be making something of a comeback lately especially in the Muslim world. There’s the Fear Strategy, which involves terrorising a population into doing what they’re told to do. And then there’s the Democratic Method where the government rules at the behest of the majority of the people.

What we have in Britain is democracy flavoured with fear. Back in 1920, H.L.Mencken noted that: The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. That is still the case today. We are deprived of having a meaningful debate about surveillance because of fear of terrorists and ‘National Security’ concerns (now that’s a threadbare blanket used to cover a multitude of sins!); we cannot effectively regulate the banks for fear they will transfer their operations to another company; we cannot control tax avoidance because those doing the avoiding have so much influence in government and our politicians are scared of them. The upshot is that our democracy is being distorted, skewed in favour of the rich and the powerful.

We need change … fundamental change. But because the political establishment is so entrenched causing such change is nigh-on impossible. Which is why Brand’s idea not to vote is such a good one. It isn’t apathy, it’s a BOYCOTT.

I’d call it Active Apathy. Its aim would be to de-legitimise the political status quo and by doing so provoke meaningful debate about political reform.

Now some of the comments I’ve read regarding Brand’s interview and opinions have been high-on hysterical (one guy in The Independent predicting fighting in the streets) whilst others have criticised Brand for failing to come up with an alternative to the present mess we’re in: both these are erroneous and both smack of the Establishment circling the wagons against change. Active Apathy wouldn’t involve violent revolution but rather stimulate a debate - an urgent and meaningful debate - about the sort of society Britain should be and what its priorities should be (my two-pennyworth:  scrap Trident and stop going to war for a start). We are in the Internet Age and surely it can be used to enfranchise everybody … and meaningful debate will provoke everybody into wanting to be enfranchised. We don’t need to know the answer to ‘what next’: that would evolve from the debate.

Sounds good to me. I endorse Active Apathy!

INVENT-10N: MAYBE ANGELA MERKEL SHOULD TAKE UP POKER

SURVEILLANCE: AGELA MERKEL DOESN’T PLAY POKER

John Rhys-Davies (who played Gimli in The Lord of the Rings trilogy) once opined that:

‘Spying is like chess: sometimes you have to withdraw, sometimes you have to sacrifice one of your pieces to win – preferably a knight rather than a king or a queen.’

Unfortunately Rhys-Davies was wrong on two counts. The first is mechanistic: you can’t sacrifice your king in chess. But the second is more philosophical.

When you sit down to play chess you can see ALL the pieces – those belonging to yourself and those controlled by your opponent – and, moreover, you both know the rules governing the playing of the game. This was not the case in the topsy-turvy world of espionage. Here each side does its damnedest to hide its pieces from the opposition and the breaking of rules was not only expected but positively encouraged. Further, in espionage there is never only one opponent: a nation’s  enemies are numerous and even those who evince friendship might, if push comes to shove, reveal themselves as in league with the bad guys.

Espionage is a game of bluff and counter-bluff.

Thus espionage is more akin to poker than to chess with every player desperately trying to keep his opponents from having a peek at the cards he or she is holding.

Of course, as in real-life  poker, everyone is trying to get an advantage (fair or otherwise) and religiously searches their opponents for ‘tells’,  the signals regarding the strength or weakness of a player’s hand that are sent by the player’s body language or by changes to their physiological condition. How a player holds himself, how he stacks and plays with his chips, the way his hands move, his facial expressions  …  all these and many, many others can give clues as to the player’s state of mind and what their intention is vis à vis their hand.

I suspect that the reason why in the last twenty years we’ve seen such a blanding out of our politicians (in Britain, post-Thatcher, all the leaders of our political parties have been youngish, white, sport a full head of hair but no beards or moustaches, have an athletic frame, are neatly if conservatively dressed, have a family life of yawning conventionality and speak in a neutered, indeterminate accent. Only one deviated from that template, Brown, and look what happened to him!). The reason isn’t wholly to do with this being the ‘image’ of a leader opinion polls tell the party gurus will best secure victory in an election but also because it is indicative of a person who is willing to sublimate his personality to the political process  … a person who can maintain an impassive poker face.

But there is another aspect of poker playing which has a wider relevance to the espionage world-at-large: card counting. Card counters in poker keep a mental record of all the high and low valued cards played and this allows them to assess the probability of a high or low value card being played next (for anyone interested I recommend Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich).  

Surveillance is card counting writ large, the means by which espionage agencies seek to tip the cards in their favour. The problem is that to do this surveillance must be directed at ALL the players, friendly and unfriendly alike, because their actions are intertwined and what one player does influences what other players do and so on. Thus it is no surprise that America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ have been eavesdropping on the German government. Germany is a powerful nation and what it does has major international political and economic repercussions, therefore for Angela Merkel to say (following the disclosure that the NSA had accessed her ‘phone records) ‘Spying on friends is not on at all’ is breathtakingly naïve.

For her to say she didn’t know what was  going on is pure bullshit. Back in 1998 the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee commissioned a report which advised ‘The European Parliament should reject proposals from the United States for making private messages via the global communications network assessable to US intelligence agencies’. The report urged the NSA’s activities in Europe be scaled back or be made more transparent. They did neither, so for Merkel to pronounce ignorance is hokum.

The report also castigated Britain’s involvement in this snooping. Just as NSA and GCHQ have circumvented domestic controls by indulging in reciprocal surveillance in order that they can monitor (all?) their country’s citizens (‘Hi there GCHQ!) so they have done the same thing in Germany (and Spain and Italy …).

Methinks that Merkel’s outrage wasn’t triggered by moral indignation but rather by the thought that she wasn’t one of the Watchers but one of the Watched.

Welcome to the club, Angela. Maybe you should take up poker?

INVENT-10N: THE 7 TRUISMS OF SURVEILLANCE

SURVEILLANCE IN BRITAIN: THE 7 TRUISMS

In researching my book Invent-10n it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t the surveillance side of State intervention in our lives – the employing of cameras and digital-communication intercepts to collect data about us – that we should be worried about but the use that is made of that data. And this, in turn, led me to the belief that there are now seven truisms regarding the surveillance-pervasive Britain of 2013.

Truism 1: We’re being watched.

Although statistics on the subject are difficult to pin down, the consensus seems to be that, by some margin, the British are the most watched people on the planet, with there being one CCTV camera for every fourteen of us (a conservative estimate, by the way). Now that’s an awful lot of surveillance and as none of these cameras are regulated, there is no information regarding the data they collect, for how long it’s held or who has access to it. The reality is that no matter where we are, we’re being watched.

What this also signals is how obsess the British authorities (be they police, security services or local councils) are with CCTV surveillance: they have become the most avaricious voyeurs in history. The British authorities like to watch.

Truism 2: Our e-communications are being monitored.

What commentators seem to have missed in the brouhaha following Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding GCHQ’s Tempora system – the hacking into the transatlantic fibre-optic cables by the British security services – was that Tempora is only one of the programs our spooks are developing to better access, store and analyse our e-communications. It seems to me naïve in the extreme to imagine that they – through some newly-discovered sense of fair-play and restraint – have been able to resist the temptation to create programs which are equally effective in tracking the calls you make on your cell-phone, in reading the e-mails you send and receive and in monitoring the social media comments you post. The assumption must be that all our e-communications have been (or soon will be) compromised.

The British authorities don’t just like to watch, they like to listen too.

Truism 3: Soon GCHQ will know us better than we know ourselves.

The aim of information gathering is prediction, to be able to identify the bad guys and to interdict them – Minority Report-style – before they create trouble. The only way to be able to do this is to have access to all personal data relating to everybody in the UK and to be able to manipulate it.

This nexus point – the time when the security services have the ability to collect, store, collate and analyse the tsunami of e-data produced on a daily basis – is fast approaching. The ever tumbling cost of data warehousing makes it financially and technically feasible to store the mass of information hoovered up daily by the plethora of cameras and e-survillance gizmos which GCHQ operates or to which it has access. This has been shadowed by the development of ever more sophisticated algorithms, the enormously complex decision trees used to solve breath-takingly difficult problems by breaking these problems down into a long string of binary choices. They operate much like the neurons powering our brain which is a good analogy given that they have become so damned sophisticated that they can now imitate thought processes.

Infinitely large data storage coupled with the use of unfeasibly powerful algorithms means that soon (a couple of years?) our security services will have a real-time 360⁰ portrait of each and every one of us. They will know what we did, who we interacted with, what we said, what we wrote: in short, they will know everything. All of these data will be poured over looking for patterns that might suggest we’re thinking of doing something of which the government doesn’t approve.

Truism 4: There’s nothing we can do to prevent the spread of surveillance.

Scott McNealy’s famous maxim ‘Privacy is dead; get over it’ becomes more pertinent by the day. The demands from the liberal press that ‘something must be done’ to curb the inclination of the security services to dig and delve into our lives are, ultimately, futile. Knowledge is power and politicians (the putative masters of the security services) are in the business of acquiring and wielding power. The upshot is that any ‘controls’ imposed will have only a temporary effect: as soon as the next 9/11 comes along that great get-out-of-jail-free card ‘National Security’ will be played and off we’ll go again. We will NEVER be able to put the surveillance genie back in the lamp.

The recent revelation that the Foreign Office is withholding over one million files which should have been made public under the Public Records Act demonstrates the arrogance of the powers-that-be when it comes to complying with the law.

Truism 5: It isn’t surveillance that is the problem, it’s the use made of the information collected by surveillance.

Okay, so trying to limit or curtail surveillance is a fatuous endeavour and one which is destined to fail. The problem is that the availability of this surveillance-collected information puts democracy at risk. This is what I call the ‘J. Edgar Hoover Syndrome’, where the power derived from having access to so much (often very sensitive) information has a corrupting effect on those accessing it. In an information-driven society it will be oh-so-easy to follow the declension that reads.

Yesterday the Government was serving you ...…

Today the Government is surveilling you ...

Tomorrow the Government will be controlling you.

As Paul Valéry said, ‘politics is the art of preventing people taking part in affairs which properly concern them’.

Truism 6: Forget about controlling surveillance, control the fruits of that surveillance.

So what is to be done?

We are told constantly that GCHQ’s surveillance systems are necessary to protect the British people from terrorists and others who wish to do us harm. The danger is, of course, that this purpose becomes blurred and that surveillance becomes a means of control and of social engineering. The total automation of surveillance will protect us from this sort of function creep.

We must remember that it is not the computers that threaten our freedoms, but the use made of that computer-harvested information by their human masters. Therefore, to protect ourselves, we must take the human element out of the surveillance matrix: we must use the computer to protect us from ourselves. The danger of surveillance is that the information it gathers can be used by an authoritarian-minded regime to subvert/subjugate a population. So it would be better, in my opinion, not only to automate the collection and storage of surveillance derived information – which is, broadly, where we are today – but also its analysis. The computers that drive the algorithms analysing this data must be divorced from the direction of the security services: the hunt for the bad guys must be made totally automatic.

Not as far-fetched as it might sound. Algorithms can be written which screen all the information collected by surveillance looking for connections and trends and then the system would act – automatically and independently of human intervention – to thwart any identified threats. Any attempt to use the information for a purpose other than protection of the British people from a terrorist threat would be rejected.

The J.Edgar Hoover Syndrome would be cured simply by ensuring that any would-be J.Edgars would be refused access to the information collected by surveillance by the computers controlling it.

Truism 7: Only when the human element is taken out of surveillance will we be safe from surveillance.

 

Back in 1977 Lord Denning upheld the deportation of Mark Hosenball who disclosed the existence of GCHQ – then a state secret, saying:

‘There is a conflict here between the interests of national security on the one hand and the freedom of the individual on the other. The balance between these two is not for a court of law. It is for the Home Secretary. He is the person entrusted by Parliament with the task. In some parts of the world national security has on occasions been used as an excuse for all sorts of infringements of individual liberty. But not in England.’

We need to change things such that Denning’s assertion is as valid today as it was forty-six years ago.