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.

INVENT-10N: A FUNNY OLD WEEK FOR THE SURVEILLANCE DEBATE IN THE UK

Funny old week for the surveillance debate in the UK.

Sir Andrew Parker, the new Head of MI5, gave his first public speech and used it to rail against the nerve The Guardian newspaper had to release details contained in the US intelligence files pinched by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The nub of what The Guardian revealed was that GCHQ (the UK’s surveillance centre) was operating a system known as Tempora, a secret electronic surveillance program accessing data carried on transatlantic fibre-optic cables. Apparently the data collected is immense (21 petabytes a day) this being stored for three days (though related metadata is stored for thirty days). According to Snowden Tempora had made the UK into a ‘surveillance superpower’.

Now when I read this I can’t say I was particularly surprised. To my mind it is obvious that as computers become more powerful, e-storage becomes cheaper and cheaper and the algorithms manipulating said data increasingly sophisticated that security services would become more-and-more addicted to the acquisition, warehousing and analysis of the information flying around the e-universe. And this would be especially the case in the UK: you have only to look at how enthusiastically Britain has embraced the CCTV camera (there’s one for every 14 people!) to see that ours is an e-surveillance paradise. We love being watched!

Which makes it all the more amusing when the week began with Chris Huhne, the disgraced former Liberal-Democrat MP, claiming that during his time in cabinet he was told nothing about GCHQ’s Tempora or the NSA’s PRISM or about their ‘extraordinary capability to vacuum up and store personal emails, voice contact, social network activity and even internet searches’. And worse, the National Security Council (attended by ministers and the heads of the security services and GCHQ) of which Huhne was a member was never briefed regarding Tempora. The answer to the question ‘who watches the watchers’ is ‘not Chris Huhne’.

Anyway, back to Sir Andrew Parker. One of the points he made in his speech was that, ‘We only apply intrusive tools and capabilities against terrorists and others threatening national security. The law requires we only collect and access information that we really need to perform our functions, in this case tackling the threat of terrorism’.

The weasel-words here are ‘only apply intrusive tools’.

Sir Andrew went on: ‘In some quarters there seems to be a vague notion that we monitor everyone and all their communications, browsing at will through people’s private lives for anything that looks interesting’. This is, he added ‘utter nonsense’.

So while GCHQ doesn’t monitor and apply intrusive tools to everyone’s communication there is no denial that they COLLECT such data and run it through their algorithms checking for any correlations with known badniks. And to make such correlations GCHQ has to collect (or have access to) ALL the data and that includes the data held by the banks (including that relating to debit/credit card transactions), Inland Revenue files, CCTV cameras, medical records (if the DoH can ever get the thing to work!) etc. etc.

So I think it’s a fair assumption to make that:

1)      GCHQ e-intelligence gathering goes far beyond Tempora;

2)      GCHQ will continue to develop its e-intelligence gathering capability;

3)      There ain’t nothing we can do to stop this happening, MI5 having that wonderful get-out of jail-free card called ‘national security interests’.

Now the big threat of this isn’t, as The Guardian and others fret about, the erosion of civil liberties and of privacy, those are abandoned every time you sign up to FaceBook or begin Tweeting. No, the real threat is that governments and the digerati (the people with access to the information held by GCHQ) will use it to begin manipulating the people of Britain.

As Jenni-Fur says in Invent-10n:

YESTERDAY THEY WERE SERVING YOU …

TODAY THEY’RE WATCHING YOU …

TOMORROW THEY’LL BE CONTROLLING YOU!