Mock the State? At your peril

We’re here to protect you, says the State. Mock us not.

Because if you do, boy will we get you and get you good.

Bradley Manning
An unforgivable crime. 35 years

It’s fascinating that what Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden have done is reveal to the world how cavalier an attitude the State takes towards our privacy. They reserve the right to read our e-mails, listen to our phone calls, track our internet usage. What’s private to us is public to them.

But turn that round, by making public what they want kept private and, as Manning has discovered, you’re facing a 35-year gaol sentence.

Or if they can’t lay their hands on you, they’ll start to make life tough for your nearest and dearest. That’s what happened to David Miranda when he made the mistake of trying to change planes at Heathrow. Nine hours detention, intensive interrogation and the confiscation of his electronic equipment, to teach him to be in a relationship with the man who spoke to the man who watched the men who were spying on us.

Now of course the State justifies its actions on the grounds that it’s there to protect us. And I’m sure it does: terrorists aren’t having much joy in their attempts to attack Western countries. But, as many children have learned from helicopter parents, certain forms of protection can become stifling in their excess. And 35 years really sounds like a little too much tough love.

Particularly when you compare it with the kind of sentence that gets handed down in other cases.

Lynddie England, American in spite of her name, was a US army reservist who had the misfortune to be sent to Iraq. Had she never been involved in that dismal adventure of her nation’s, she might have led an irreproachable life and died in respectable obscurity. Sadly, she was exposed to stresses beyond her moral frame to absorb, and broke. She compounded her misfortune by photographing the reprehensible behaviour that followed, with the result that she got herself caught.

Lynddie England poses
Regrettable misdeeds. Three years

And what was done to her for torturing and mistreating Iraqi prisoners? She was gaoled for three years.

Let me repeat: Manning’s been sentenced to 35.

The message from the US state? Mock Iraqi prisoners and abuse them, and we disapprove – we don’t like unsanctioned torture. But mock us and abuse our confidence, then you really rile us. Your penalty will be ten times worse. And then some.

Now that’s what I call protection. Tony Soprano would have been proud.

Miranda's rights are our rights

‘Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.’

Great words of Benjamin Franklin’s.

That’s not to say that safety’s not important. It decidedly is: if you’re not safe, you’re unable to enjoy any other freedom. 

On 7 July 2005, 52 innocent civilians were murdered in the streets of London by people claiming to speak for Islam (and who ignored the fact that several of their victims were Muslim). That’s not the kind of thing I want to see repeated, and it’s been impressive that it hasn’t happened since. I have little doubt that much of the success in preventing a repetition of ‘7/7’ has been excellent intelligence gathering and I’m deeply grateful to the security services for getting that right.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m happy for those shady, powerful figures Le Carré christened ‘espiocrats’, to run amok over our hard-won rights. And when David Miranda was detained for nine hours at Heathrow airport on Sunday under anti-terrorism legislation, with no suggestion he had been even remotely involved in terrorism, it struck me that espiocracy was reaching a great deal too far.

It struck me, indeed, that the security establishment was asking us to give up an essential liberty, too expensive a cost for a little temporary safety.

Because of course Miranda’s detention had nothing to do with terrorism. He’s the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who’s been working with Edward Snowden on his revelations of highly disturbing behaviour by the security services in the UK and US. Miranda was known to be carrying files between Greenwald and a film-maker in Berlin; it’s hard not to wonder whether the detention, followed by the confiscation of Miranda’s electronic equipment, was all to do with preventing further embarrassment to the two governments, and nothing to do with countering terrorism.

Greenwald (left) meets Miranda
on his return from detention in London

That makes the action against him merely a further demonstration, on top of the Snowden revelations, of how far out of hand the security services have gone. It was sad to hear the British Home Secretary today defending the actions of the police, showing where the Conservative Party stands on individual freedom. This is not, however, a partisan point: the legislation on which Miranda was held was passed under the previous, Labour government.

It seems that on either side of politics, power is far too easy with abusive authority.

There was another revelation of abuse today. Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian told the BBC that the security forces obliged him some time ago to destroy hard disks on which Snowden files had been held. If the action against Miranda sounds like the behaviour of a tinpot dictatorship, the action against the newspaper sounds like that of a banana republic: it’s as ludicrously funny as it is grotesque. Copies of all the files destroyed had already been sent to other jurisdictions. Rusbridger will keep publishing from them, but in the US where the Constitution prevents the kind of action taken against him over here.

It comes as something of a relief that the land of Franklin still has legal frameworks in place that go some way towards protecting the freedoms he cherished so deeply. Only some way, though: the US espiocracy has its tentacles at least as widely spread and noxiously active as in the UK. The campaign by Greenwald and The Guardian is as vital on the other side of the Atlantic as on this.

It’s curious that Miranda rights in the US are those that protect an individual against the kind of highhanded action taken against Greenwald’s partner at Heathrow. Now we need to speak out for the rights of Miranda in Britain. Because they are, after all, our birthright.

And, though safety is vital, our birthright is far too high a price to pay for it.

Red Scares without Reds

‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.’ 

These are the opening words of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848. Like many such stirring words, they have little or no relation to the truth. Europe was indeed exploding in revolutions that year, but they were nationalist (against the Austrian Empire, for instance) or for extended political rights (for example, in France and Germany).

The international communist movement was basically Karl Marx working in the British Museum library in London, and a handful of his friends and supporters around the place.

When I was working myself in that same library, back in the eighties, a librarian told me an apocryphal story a colleague asked, on his retirement many years earlier, whether he’d known Karl Marx.

‘German gentleman?’ he’s said to have asked in reply, ‘came in here for quite a while and then we never heard much more about him?’

German gentleman who haunted the British Museum
for a while before fading into obscurity

Communism didn’t really come out of its obscurity until a party claiming to be communist in inspiration seized power in Russia in 1917. But, wow, did things change then. If the Nazis came to dominate Germany, it was in part because a great many people, and not just in Germany, saw them as a possible barrier to the apparently irresistible progress of Communism.

Nowhere was as haunted by the spectre of Communism as the United States. America fought an indecisive war in Korea to stem its advance and then, most disastrously, took the first defeat in its history in Vietnam, a glorious example of a self-fulfilling hypothesis: US justification for war in Vietnam was the domino effect, whereby Communist victory in one country would lead to several others going the same way. When US forces had to pull out of Saigon, Communist movements had taken over Laos and, most sickeningly, Cambodia.

Fear of Communism also led to what must be still today the most shameful period in US history: the McCarthy witch hunts against alleged Communists in the fifties. All the worst aspects of a police state were there, including anonymous denunciation, conviction on suspicion and assumption of guilt.

But then along came Nixon and showed that even a right-wing President could make common ground with regimes claiming allegiance to Communist thinking. Ping-pong diplomacy opened up China to US links and, even today, the US finds itself perfectly able to work with those particular Communists.

That left the Soviet Union as the whipping boy for the anti-Communists. Until 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then the satellite nations quickly slipped away both from Russia and Communism and the West claimed the Cold War won.

For a brief moment, we were treated to all sorts of panegyrics to the newborn Russian democracy. But then we discovered that what had replaced the Soviet regime wasn’t quite as democratic as had been claimed. An invasion of Georgia showed that the Russian republic was quite as ready to behave unpleasantly towards its neighbours as the Soviet Union had, though it was perhaps incapable of acting on quite the same scale.

Several murders of critics, and the imprisonment of many others, have shown that it’s happy to be just as nasty towards its internal adversaries as those from abroad. Nowhere has this been more clearly demonstrated as in the condemning to hard labour of two members of a punk group, Pussy Riot, for being offensive towards the lay and religious authorities.

But now Russia has gone one step further. It has offered temporary asylum to Edward Snowden, who got right up the noses of the US establishment by revealing evidence of its misbehaviour. Putin is clearly not acting out of democratic motives; his action has to be a calculated insult to the US, and it’s had exactly the desired effect. 

Senator John McCain is the man who won himself a reputation for clear judgement and faultless political instinct, by picking Sarah Palin as his running mate in his vain bid to win the presidency against Obama in 2008. This was the woman who amazed us with her farsightedness (literally) on matters Russian, by claiming that she could see the place from her home in Alaska.

McCain is now gracing us with his own views on the country in response to the Snowden affair:

‘Russia’s action today is a disgrace and a deliberate effort to embarrass the United States. It is a slap in the face of all Americans. [...] We cannot allow today’s action by Putin to stand without serious repercussions.’

McCain: didn't do his reputation for judgement any good
by his selection of a running mate. But he's mad now...

Those of us who lived through the Cold War may recognise the tone of this pronouncement. And yet the Communists are gone. So here’s my question: was the animosity ever really about Communism? Or actually just about Russia? Did the Red Scare have anything to do with Reds?

I only ask because this kind of talk isn’t new. Here’s a rising star from the British Parliamentary Opposition demanding to know whether the best means had ‘been employed by the Government to establish the equilibrium, and put an end to the preponderance of Russia in the Black Sea’.

You can picture John McCain asking that kind of question. But in fact the speaker was Benjamin Disraeli, later to be British Prime Minister. He was speaking in a debate on 4 June 1855, when Britain, along with France, was actually at war with Russia in its Black Sea territory of the Crimea.

An actual shooting war, not a cold one.

Charge of the light brigade in the Crimean War
Good subject matter for poetry, not such smart politics

Seems the West’s had problems with Russia for quite a while now, certainly since long before Communism. 

With Communism way behind us, are we stoking them all up again?

Friends spying on friends: as Obama says, we all do it

John Le Carré is the outstanding writer of spy novels of the Cold War, and one of his best came unbidden to my mind in the middle of the febrile, spook-filled atmosphere of the Edward Snowden scandal this week.

Peter Egan as Magnus Pym
in the excellent BBC adaptation of the Le Carré masterpiece

Do you know A Perfect Spy? If not, I can’t recommend it too warmly. To give you a small taster, it contains what must be about the most upfront pickup line you’ll ever read. A Czech interpreter, who we later discover has more to her than meets the eye – and she has plenty to meet the eye – asks the protagonist Magnus Pym:

‘You want I give you Czech lesson on Saturday?’

When he tells her that he would like that very much, she continues, severely:

‘I think we make love this time. We shall see.’

The driver of the car they are travelling in nearly takes it into a ditch.

The novel charts the progress of Pym from his childhood with his father, a professional embezzler, into a series of betrayals of increasing severity, until he gravitates into British intelligence and the greatest treason of them all.

At one point, the CIA are closing in on him and Grant Lederer, the man leading the hunt, attends a meeting with senior agency operatives at the US Embassy in London. He announces with pride that he has just had a phone call, in the Embassy, from his wife in Vienna, where she has spotted Pym’s wife being contacted by a known Czech spy.

Sadly, Lederer does not receive the congratulations he expects for this dramatic news. In the first place, involving his wife was a breach of his orders for the operation against Pym. But there's a second reason for the dissatisfaction of his superiors, which emerges at the end of the discussion. One of them asks:

‘Next question, what the hell do we tell the Brits and when and how?’

And another replies:

‘Looks like we told them already. That’s unless the Brits have given up tapping US Embassy telephone lines these days, which I tend to doubt.’

That last line came back to me as I followed the row over the latest stage in Snowden’s revelations. It seems that the US has its agents gathering intelligence on many of its ostensible allies. They spy on the French. They spy on the European Union, a dear old institution which surely has barely a secret that can’t be found out in a Brussels bar or that’s worth knowing anyway. Worst of all, they spy on the holy of holies in Europe today, the Germans. 

Everyone’s scandalised.

Obama’s response has been highly instructive. 

‘Every intelligence service, not just ours, but every European intelligence service, every Asian intelligence service, wherever there’s an intelligence service, here’s one thing they’re going to be doing: they’re going to be trying to understand the world better and what’s going on in world capitals around the world from sources that aren’t available through the New York Times or NBC News.

‘If that weren’t the case, then there would be no use for an intelligence service. And I guarantee you that in European capitals, there are people who are interested in, if not what I had for breakfast, at least what my talking points might be should I end up meeting with their leaders. That's how intelligence services operate.’

Yep. Spy agencies exist to spy. Obviously, first and foremost on their enemies but, hey, why not on their friends too? After all, a country may well be an ally, but it’s a competitor as well, and it’s always worth knowing what the competition’s up to.

So I’m sure Le Carré’s right. British intelligence must routinely bug the US Embassy – I really can’t believe they’d pass up such an opportunity.

So why all the anger? 

Some of it’s synthetic, no doubt. Some of it’s routine: you have to protest if someone’s found to have been spying on you. But I wonder if some of it’s not just plain envy. The US has such technology, and such a well-resourced intelligence community, they’re much better at spying than the others. 

Isn’t the problem that the Germans, the EU and above all the French, are just annoyed as hell to discover that US spies on them far more effectively than they can spy on the US?

Shades of 1984?

It’s wonderful when two items in the news reinforce the insights each provides. Synchronicity, one might call it, or does that imply that the events described are gratifying? Because these ones certainly aren’t.

First, there’s the furore over the revelations by Edward Snowden. It seems our esteemed British institution, GCHQ or the Government Communications Headquarters, has been tapping fibreoptic cables and gaining access to colossal volumes of internet and telephone communications – as many as 600 million phone calls a day. Mind-blowing stuff.

GCHQ. A building as impressive as the Pentagon.
And an organisation just as troubling.

I didn’t know there were enough people to say that much to each other on a daily basis. Perhaps it’s just proof that we always find things to talk about even when we don’t have much to say.

Now I have mixed feelings about GCHQ’s activities.

In the first place, it reassures me that nobody can do anything with 600 million phone conversations. At least, not with all of them. It seems there are nearly 6000 employees at GCHQ, so it’s pretty easy to do the arithmetic: if none of them did anything else, each would have to listen to 100,000 messages a day. Since there are fewer seconds than that in 24 hours, they clearly aren’t listening to the lot.

More positively, I actually favour intelligent intelligence work. It’s what has kept the terrorist attacks in the West down over the last few years. And as well as being more effective, it strikes me as infinitely preferable, morally, than invading another country, killing a lot of civilians, and then clearing off again with our tails between our legs with nothing resolved.

On the other hand, even if our governments are making good use of this intelligence right now, there’s no guarantee they always will. That’s where the other news item becomes so interesting.

A second scandal that has been running and running, and has erupted again int he last few days, concerns the police penetration of various environmental groups, such as Greenpeace, for several years from the mid-nineties. Some of the undercover cops took their James Bond fantasies a long way, forming relationships with a several women and then abandoning them, some with kids they’d fathered. All a little upsetting, if I can indulge in a little British understatement, particularly as the organisations targeted were often no more threatening to society than groups of tree-huggers.

What makes things worse is that allegations have now emerged, from one of those cops turned whistle blower, that some of the undercover operations were directed against the family and friends of Stephen Lawrence. He was the black teenager murdered by a racist white gang while he was waiting for a bus home, twenty years ago. It’s clear the spying wasn’t designed to uncover crime, but to try, by discrediting their targets, to protect the reputation of the Metropolitan police which was making a complete hash of its investigation of the murder.

Stephen Lawrence, victim of a racist murder
The police apparently ran an operation against his family

One of the friends targeted was Duwayne Brooks, a witness to the murder, who found himself facing charges of criminal damage. They were thrown out by the judge as an abuse of the legal process, which to a layman like me, sounds about as close as legal discretion will get to an accusation that the police tried to frame him.

So at the time that the Lawrence family, and Brooks as an eye witness, were depending on the police to help them obtain justice for an appalling crime, they were themselves targets for covert police action designed to discredit or even jail them. No wonder justice was for so long denied them (just two of the perpetrators have been convicted so far, and only last year, though it is well known who carried out the killing). We should probably just be grateful they escaped being made victims of even greater injustice themselves.

Now set that second story alongside the first. I bet you that somewhere among those 600 million phone calls a day, it will always be possible to find a few by some new victim of police harassment. And by selecting odd sentences out of context from some of them, and stringing them together, to present a damning picture of that victim. That could then be leaked to some open gutter masquerading as a newspaper, to turn the victim’s life into a living hell.

The Lawrence case shows what the police are capable of when they lash out in self-defence. Why not other parts of the security state? Why not ill-intentioned groups on the extreme fringes of our political life? Why not some of the deeply unhealthy elements in those fringes that now look poised to make a bid for a share of power in the future?

I’m keen on seeing intelligence intelligently used. But far less keen on the indiscriminate collection of information, with no clear security goal defined. Particularly as we know how easily secretive organisations can be tempted to abuse the power this gives them.