Parliament is spooked by the spooks

A parliament that cannot defend civil liberties and human rights against the secret state is not fit for purpose and ought to be sent packing. That’s one conclusion you could draw from the pathetic performance of the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) yesterday.

Another is that members of the ISC have effectively been so integrated into the three-ringed spying circus of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ that their designated role to check on the work of the agencies is just for show, part of a great game played at our expense.

Each and every member of the ISC is a trusted member of the Commons or Lords, cleared in advance by the same security services they are supposed to be checking up on! No danger of them ever rocking the boat and so it turned out when the chiefs of the three agencies appeared in public together for the first time.

If anyone was waiting for the ISC to grill the three over the extent of mass surveillance revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, they would have been sorely disappointed. "They faced a grilling that wouldn't have scared a puppy," said Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty. "It was tame, predictable, and limp," said Privacy International about the 90-minute session.

They were not asked about issues do with mass surveillance and privacy. No one even mentioned Tempora, the  programme that allows GCHQ to access mountains of date from transatlantic cables that carry internet traffic.

Naturally, no one asked why international encryption standards had been compromised by the joint work of the National Security Agency in the US and GCHQ. Or the compromising of corporations like Google and the eavesdropping on the phones of leaders like Germany’s Angela Merkel.

Above all, no one on the ISC asked why these programmes had been kept secret from the public and possibly the government. It’s not hard to fathom why the spy chiefs got an easy ride. Hazel Blears, former New Labour counter-terrorism minister, admitted on BBC2’s Newsnight that she had been on “several visits” to GCHQ and was aware of the agency’s “broad capabilities”.

Presumably she was advised that to reveal this would constitute some kind of crime. Blears didn’t take much convincing. “We've had very, very confidential briefings about what the capabilities were and obviously we were satisfied that they were operating within our legal framework.” So that’s alright then.

As the gentle questioning proceeded, the spy chiefs took advantage to assert that articles based on the Snowden material published by the Guardian, the New York Times and the Washington Post had played into the hands of Al-Qaida. Why, the terrorists were even talking about what the leaks meant for their own security, said GCHQ head Sir Iain Lobban.

The head of MI6, Sir John Sawers added: "Our adversaries are rubbing their hands with glee. Al-Qaida is lapping this up." He went so far as to claim that the leaks could help dangerous criminals and even paedophiles evade the law.

Yes, the whole state is facing collapse as a result of articles showing how the US and Britain have access to just about every communication they want to intercept, with or without legal authority. This is a standard scare tactic  – blame the messenger and accuse them of playing into the hands of the country’s enemies when in fact the real threat comes from the secret spy agencies themselves who are beyond oversight.

The secret state within the state considers itself above parliament, above political control and above the rule of law. They don’t give a jot about the warning from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the scientist who created the world wide web, that weakening encryption had put at risk transactions made by ordinary people.

As for the ISC, if this is the best parliament can come up with, it shows how unrepresentative and undemocratic this present body is. One is reminded of the words used by Cromwell. When faced with a “Rump” parliament that was doing absolutely nothing useful, he told the sitting: “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately ... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Cameron and Obama: puppets of the state within the state

There are two “democracies” where the secret state within the state is pulling the strings of politicians so hard that their movements resemble those of puppets. The hidden apparatus is so powerful that to challenge it is to court accusations tantamount to treason.

We refer, of course, to the United States and Britain, where yesterday the prime minister issued a veiled threat against the Guardian for continuing to publish articles based on material supplied by whistleblower Edward Snowden.  

In Washington, meanwhile, Barack Obama’s spokesman convinced no one with his denial of the president’s prior knowledge of the National Security Agency’s bugging of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile for more than a decade. Somewhere, someone surely has a “smoking gun” email which says the opposite?

The reality is that neither the NSA nor GCHQ are dependent on political approval for their insidious activities. Quite the opposite, both are fiefdoms of the inner state, that part which is hidden below the waterline and which, like icebergs, can seriously damage your health.

That’s why prime minister Cameron is determined to keep a lid on GCHQ’s activities. Yesterday he warned MPS of the dangers of a "lah-di-dah, airy-fairy view" about the dangers of leaks,  and warned that if the Guardian didn’t “demonstrate some social responsibility it would be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act." Naturally, that other poodle, one Ed Miliband, rushed to praise the work of “our intelligence services”, adding: “It is vital, it keeps us safe and, by its very nature, it goes unrecognised.”

But this deception won’t wash. The stories that the Guardian have extracted from Snowden’s files show the methods and scope of the NSA/GCHQ’s activities. It was long believed that these agencies were intercepting emails and phone, breaking into the back door of internet providers when necessary. Snowden provided chapter and verse rather than revealing names of any secret agents or stuff like that.

The truth is that a comprehensive surveillance state has been established behind our backs through agencies that act with impunity. At the weekend, the Guardian revealed how GCHQ feared a "damaging public debate" on the scale of its activities because it could lead to legal challenges.

Memos in the Snowden files, for example, showed how GCHQ and the other spy agencies have thwarted plans supported by the three main parties to make intercept evidence admissible as evidence in criminal trials. The report also revealed how GCHQ helped the Home Office to find “sympathetic” people to help with “press handling”.

Surprise, surprise they included Liberal Democrat peer and former intelligence services commissioner Lord Carlile. Last week, right on cue, he criticised the Guardian’s coverage of Snowden’s material.

Meanwhile, in the US, the Washington Post is sceptical of the claim that Obama did not know about the bugging of foreign leaders. Opinion writer Eugene Robinson says: “Either somebody’s lying or Obama needs to acknowledge that the NSA, in its quest for omniscience beyond anything Orwell could have imagined, is simply out of control.”

Either way, the revelations by Chelsea Manning, when he was as an army private known as Bradley Manning, and then Snowden, have angered millions in Europe and America and thrown governments into disarray. In a perceptive article for the US journal Foreign Affairs, Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore dismiss the so-called threat to national security and instead talk of the "collapse of hyprocisy" in the US. They add:   

This system needs the lubricating oil of hypocrisy to keep its gears turning. To ensure that the world order continues to be seen as legitimate, US officials must regularly promote and claim fealty to its core liberal principles; the United States cannot impose its hegemony through force alone. But as the recent leaks have shown, Washington is also unable to consistently abide by the values that it trumpets. This disconnect creates the risk that other states might decide that the US-led order is fundamentally illegitimate. 

Exactly! Calls for better “oversight” of GCQH and the NSA miss the point. The sponsoring states, as the authors point out, have a “dangerous dependence on doublespeak”. When that cover is blown, as it has been, the case for creating an alternative, democratic political system, where surveillance of the kind we have know, is banned can only grow.

   

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

US-UK security state strikes back

The outrageous detention of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner for nine hours at Heathrow airport yesterday gives a new meaning to the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States.

This was clearly a joint operation of overt intimidation by the burgeoning Anglo-US security state against the partner of a journalist who has helped expose the covert operations of GCHQ in Britain and the NSA in America.

David Miranda was held incommunicado for the maximum nine hours allowed under the Terrorism 2000 Act. His property – including his mobile phone – was taken from him and he was not allowed legal representation.

Under schedule seven of the Terrorism Act 2000, the police can detain people at British border points with or without probable cause. The detained person does not have the right to a lawyer and it is a criminal offence to refuse to answer questions, whether or not a lawyer is present.

Greenwald only knew of the arrest three hours into the interrogation when a “security official” – who only gave his number 203654 – called him at 5.30am on the east coast of the US.

His partner who is a Brazilian citizen was in transit from Berlin to Rio when seized. Neither Brazilian officials nor Guardian lawyers were allowed access to him.

It was a blatant act of revenge by the US and UK authorities to punish anyone associated with whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about Prism, the mass snooping programme on US, British citizens and others around the world.

Miranda did not represent any terrorist threat, and the authorities knew that. His arrest was purely to punish his partner Greenwald for analysing the data released by Snowden, who remains in Russia on temporary asylum to escape arrest by the US authorities.

In enacting the Terrorism Act in 2000, New Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett flouted human rights and deeply enshrined principles, including the right to remain silent. When Blunkett was warned that it was a catch-all law, he notoriously poured scorn on human rights’ organisations.

In 2001 New Labour’s attorney general Lord Goldsmith, who approved the legal cover for the attack on Iraq, used the terror laws to detain asylum seekers for 10 days, despite judicial opposition.

In 2008, financial crime experts were shocked at the use of anti-terror laws to seize the assets of Icelandic banks, when Reykjavik-based Landsbanki Islands bank got into trouble.

In 2010, the Equality and Human Rights Commission expressed its concerns about the introduction of body scanners at ports of entry, again under the pretext of terrorism threats. It was alarmed about the infringement of the right to privacy and access and use of intimate body images,

The repeated use and abuse of the anti-terror laws by state forces has been so blatant that eminent experts such as David Anderson QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, felt obliged to admonish the police.

In 2011 he cautioned the police over the arrest of six North African street cleaners, which had been prompted by a canteen joke. During the Olympics, in June 2012 Anderson stated that you were just as likely to die of a bee sting as of a terror attack.

Snowden’s revelations, like those of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, are doing serious damage to the Obama administration and, with the help of the compliant British authorities, they are seeking to intimidate, smear, frame and generally harass anyone involved.  

Greenwald has courageously said that he will not be cowed. He deserves total support. While anti-terror legislation remains on the statute books it will be used by the state in whatever way it sees fit. An argument if there ever was one that a new democratic constitution for the 21st century that enshrines basic rights is an urgent necessity.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Labour provides cover for state spies

Labour’s shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, will say today that she is “appalled” by revelations about the Metropolitan Police’s use of undercover agents.

But to what extent are her calls for “scrutiny” a justification for continued snooping on huge numbers of people, as well as a cover for what happened in 13 years of New Labour rule?

High ranking police chiefs are involved in what is no so much a scandal as fairly routine practice. For example, retired deputy assistant commissioner John Grieve has admitted to authorising the bugging of Stephen Lawrence’s friend Duwayne Brooks.

Sir Norman Bettison, former West Yorkshire chief constable, already tarnished over Hillsborough disaster inquiry, is now said to have tried to influence the Lawrence inquiry.

The Met’s image is now so bad that ConDems policing minister Damien Green is calling for the “stables to be cleaned”. He says that recent disclosures are “hugely damaging”.

These “historic scandals”, as Green calls them, come on top of the continuing saga of US whistleblower Edward Snowden who revealed that Britain’s very own spy agency, GCHQ, works hand-in-glove with the American National Security Agency and its internet snooping programme, Prism.

Yesterday Snowden said that GCHQ was even worse than the NSA. It is the only body to operate what he terms a “full take” system of information. That means it  monitors all data crossing its path for a total of 30 days.

Cooper continues to praise parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC). So what should we make of her call for more “oversight and scrutiny”? Cooper became a member of the ISC after New Labour won the 1997 election and remained on it until 1999.

So she can’t be unaware that under the Blair governments, there was, according to a new book about undercover police agents, an “unprecedented increase in the undercover infiltration of political activists”.

Authors Rob Evans and Paul Lewis document how in 1999, a new squad of police spies was brought into existence – the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. Its funding was supplied by the Home Office, then under secretary of state Jack Straw.

As the unit expanded, it received more than £30 million of public money. A new definition of who they were to spy on was created: “domestic extremism”. The authors say that the definition went beyond those engaged in criminal actions.

More significantly, it applied to those who “wanted to prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy”, possibly “outside the normal democratic process”. Such a catch-all phrase covers virtually any form of protest. And funding under New Labour doubled, with animal rights’ surveillance taking the largest amount.

Corporate lobbying by Big Pharma and the banks who wanted the state to protect their nefarious activities led to more funding and a huge growth of surveillance, agent placing and deliberate entrapment. Money was not a problem for police spies like Mark Kennedy who received some £250,000 out of the state’s coffers.

No activist group or organisation – no matter how benign and peace-loving – was (or is) exempt. Climate Camp, anti-G8, anti-roadbuilding and anti-McDonalds’ campaigners, animal rights activists – you name them, they were all in the frame.

As some activists became concerned about individuals who for one reason or another became suspect, they began to uncover some deeply-placed spies, much to their horror. Women victims of undercover spying are being backed by Occupy London to take legal action against the police.

In the recent new round of spending cuts, the secret state bodies were the only agencies whose budget has not been cut, with MI5, MI6 and GCHQ receiving a 3% real terms increase in their annual budget of £2.6 billion.

Protecting citizens’ from criminals and terrorists is not the primary aim of these agencies or their spies in political movements. They are to defend the interests of corporate power, happily lining their own pockets in the process. It’s high time to open all the secret files and disband these spy agencies.

Just don’t expect Yvette Cooper to join such a campaign. She and Labour are part of the problem, not the solution.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary