The legislation was rushed through to protect what had long been in place now that it was exposed. Politicians, constantly worried about risk exposure, love surveillance. It's cheap and probably effective, as much as we like to argue that it isn't. If someone hurts a bunch of people then a whole lot of bullshit has to take place: inquiries, increases in resources to bullshit cause X, better police funding etc. They're down with having their kid's selfies, wife's neurotic texts, dick pics, GPS data etc sucked into a great spy apparatus because they care about their careers more than the great digital kaiju that privacy advocates have worried about since George Orwell summed up what was to come in his book 1984.
The real conspiracy: we're governed by emotionally unsophisticated, intellectually misshapen prunes who value money and prestige over progress, and surveillance is a tool that helps them get what they value with minimal effort.
down with having their kid's selfies, wife's neurotic texts, dick pics, GPS data etc sucked into a great spy apparatus
I don't think they are, really, it's just that they haven't thought about it and don't really understand that mass surveillance means everybody, not just the bad guys.
(Consider my favourite bit of narrowly-drafted legislation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act : rather than address privacy in any general way, go after the particular leak that embarrased a particular candidate)
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
it's just that they haven't thought about it and don't really understand that mass surveillance means everybody, not just the bad guys
You make a good point which I think applies to most of them, though I'd say the politicians in higher places are more self-aware and accept that surveillance offers more benefits than downsides, career-wise.
Well, the people with "permanent secretary" in their job titles aren't literally permanent, but they're more persistent than the ministers they serve.
Generally the system is referred to as the "permanent state". The oral and written tradition of various parts of the civil services has a very large influence on what policy can actually get made. Certain ideas keep popping up in a way that suggests the same briefing paper is simply being presented as a new idea to each new minister.
The secret part of the permanent state is even more persistent, as it keeps all information relating to its operations secret. This can include even quite large chunks of the budget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zircon_affair
Pullquote from the end of that page: "We saw the spectacle of police being sent to raid the BBC headquarters in Glasgow in the middle of the night.... We saw the Zircon tapes seized as an elaborate blind." Darling said that the cabinet episode concerned "... the election campaign of 1983, and the fact that the Government sought to undermine and spy on the citizens of this country."
Another Secret Society episode "In Time Of Crisis: Government Emergency Powers" is quite remarkable - I wonder how many of those powers are still there waiting to be invoked?
We got a hint of this during the London riots of a few years ago. It only took 3 nights of public order breakdown for the the government to talk of shutting down Twitter and Blackberry messenger, and for Boris to buy his watercannon for the next event.
We know what a state of emergency in the UK looks like, it looks like Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
Charles Dickens perfectly described it in Little Dorrit when he described the Circumlocution Office[1].
Having worked with such people, I can confirm they still exist in the UK public sector and have only increased their power. They have an amazing ability to see a cloud in every silver lining. They detest any simple solution to anything.
When you come to work at a government agency, you learn the tasks and procedures. For the most part, those tasks and procedures carry on regardless of who's in the legislature. Sometimes things do change because of legislation, but mostly policies and practices that were developed inside the bureaucrat's building continue on. Employees come and go, but the manual lives on.
In the case of spy agencies it's even worse, because the legislators have almost no idea what the tasks, policies and procedures are, other than the top veneer that spies choose to share with their overseers. They were truly developed in a vacuum of oversite.
That's a really interesting perspective. Like an algorythm with a relative threat detection system as opposed to a fixed threat level. So when a major threat disappears, the next largest threat is in its sights. What happens when the next relative threat is a guy buying some drugs from a dealer? The manual is SkyNet for wetware.
You could look at the Constitution and Bill of Rights of the USA as an attempt at getting the manual right once and for all. Unfortunately it seems the manual that survives is the one that best guarantees its own survival. Fancy how that works.
I think they probably do understand these principles or at least the very basis of them as I do with animal rights but I put it aside as it gets in the way of my meat agenda.
I think the bigger challenge is the rhetoric that "there are no absolute rights" and its pervasive use in furthering the erosion of civil liberties.
While I'm inclined to agree with the rhetoric, it's important to understand that "not absolute" !== "not protected", and are constantly using tropes like fire in a theater as an excuse for banning insensitive speech and such.
A lot of it is willful, but if we keep believing the idea that our rights are fungible, then our rights will indeed become fungible. Every generation's erosion of civil liberties compounds to the new normal, which makes the next generation's erosion of civil liberties more possible, and in too many cases, even welcomed.
There can't ever be absolute rights in this context, because at some level, even the most widely accepted and well-regarded rights that we want to protect will inevitably come into conflict. For example, you can't have absolute free speech and protect people's privacy against malicious disclosures, even though as general principles we might agree with both ideals. A balance must be found, and navigating that middle ground is always hard when any decision you make will necessarily be flawed.
I think the problem with the current politics of fear is that it does seek to promote one absolute right -- the right to be safe from attack by bad people -- as more important than all the others. Of course, it is impossible to truly achieve that goal no matter what you sacrifice. But in the quest to do so, more balanced "greater good" philosophies developed over centuries of human civilisation, like preferring to die on your feet than live on your knees, or preferring to risk letting a guilty man go free rather than risk imprisoning an innocent one, or refusing to negotiate in the face of threats, can be cast aside all too easily. That's what is happening today.
| There can't ever be absolute rights in this context, because at some level, even the most widely accepted and well-regarded rights that we want to protect will inevitably come into conflict. |
And people wonder why Americans love guns so much...
Yes they do. Do you really believe you're going to use your personal arsenal against the Federal Government if it decides to take some other right they agree with?
Guns aside I think the idea of personal sovereignty is an interesting one. It a concept that is almost completely lacking in the UK. We wrongly believe that people bodies and property are policed by social values and politeness. The greatest crime is not attacking someone's rights but breaking a taboo. This is very different to the American concept of individual liberty where people are actually allowed to be rude!
Guns no, but encryption yes. The right to "arms" includes encryption. Too bad the NRA sucks up the 2nd amendment discussion and casts it as only pertaining to guns.
Hoarding guns makes it easier for some people to sleep at night because they think that the government is going to come for them, or they are preparing for the fall of civilization.
>The real conspiracy: we're governed by emotionally unsophisticated, intellectually misshapen prunes who value money and prestige over progress, and surveillance is a tool that helps them get what they value with minimal effort.
The electorate wished to be ruled by these people, and they pretty accurately represent the majority view on data collection in the face of risk. MPs are a symptom, not a cause.
> The electorate wished to be ruled by these people, and they pretty accurately represent the majority view on data collection in the face of risk. MPs are a symptom, not a cause.
Patently false. The people chose these sad sacks as being the least pathetically awful option out of a torrent of etonian nonsense mongers.
The electorate wished to be ruled by these people [...] MPs are a symptom, not a cause.
In that case, would you say the general public are emotionally unsophisticated, intellectually misshapen prunes who value money and prestige over progress?
MPs are totally fine with being in the public eye because, guess what, they've chosen to lose privacy to become MPs. When it comes to privacy MPs are atypical and cannot reflect the general populace.
When did the Guardian become the big bad? Just because someone disagrees with you does not mean they are naive, credulous, and open to manipulation. Most people are just trying to get through the day and you should give them the benefit of the doubt. Or at least except that you are as dumb as the rest of us.
The term "emergency legislation" always makes me nervous. Laws are the nation's source code; precise wide-scoped constraints that need careful design. I'm happy this legal equivalent of technical debt is being combated, but how did this happen in the first place? Who decides a piece of legislation must be "fast-tracked"?
Not really. Laws are the nation's monitoring server's source code. Further more, the monitoring server is running on a notoriously buggy, laggy and leaky interpreter, and most of the systems interfacing with the monitoring server uses arcane, often proprietary, and always poorly documented protocols.
Amazingly, most of the time it pretty much just works, although the interesting (and severe!) bugs are all surfaced through user reports, never from a monitoring alert.
But yeah, not the sort of thing you'd want to emergency patch a lot. Unfortunately, no staging environment exists.
To follow the analogy. This is why changes usually undergo serious code review prior to being pushed to production. This bill underwent none of that - in fact it reimplemented with bug compatibility a broken module that had been removed from production previously.
I think a lot of civil liberties advocates would argue that mass surveillance has been implemented before, and we do know what kind of society can develop as a result, and that is one of the reasons why those people campaign for civil liberties today.
If you've nothing to fear you've nothing to hide. Why would you not want the government to be able to check what you do in the bedroom? Are you doing illegal things in there?
Can't help but feel we are incredibly lucky to have a free press in the UK. A free (and very aggressive) press means that snooped-upon data about MPs themselves will become valuable enough, and considered public interest enough, that it'll get purchased and published, which in turn motivates MPs to vote against its collection in the first place.
I agree that many politicians wouldn't care about privacy unless they themselves were threatened, but I also think David Davis and Tom Watson genuinely care about everyone's right to privacy as an ethical matter.
Depends on which bits of the press and how free you think it is. The large rightwing sections are quite happy to argue for more government surveillance against the usual suspects, and the press is still very much subject to the Official Secrets Act, D-Notices, libel considerations, etc.
I would much prefer that the press focussed on bills being proposed and those in the initial stages of the process, rather than pretend to be apoplectic when terrible legislation gets royal assent (i.e. too late).
We absolutely need to be more worried and indignant over legislation in the very initial stages, regardless of the risk of 'crying wolf'.
One of the problems with the DRIP bill was that because normal parliamentary process was not followed the press and public did not have time to get into the meat of the bill prior to it being passed. With for example the snoopers charter (version 1.0) there was time for the implications to be discussed in public.
This is terrific news! Coming so soon after the Anderson Report[1], this will add to the case for a comprehensive review and redrafting of surveillance legislation, and an open debate about how we preserve privacy while providing the intelligence services and police with the tools they need to investigate and prevent terrorism and organised crime.
Thanks for the link - it was long but very readable.
Here is the summary of why the courts decided against the government:
----
a) [s1 of DRIPA] does not lay down clear and precise rules providing for access to and use of
communications data retained pursuant to a retention notice to be strictly
restricted to the purpose of preventing and detecting precisely defined serious
offences or of conducting criminal prosecutions relating to such offences; and
b) access to the data is not made dependent on a prior review by a court or an
independent administrative body whose decision limits access to and use of the
data to what is strictly necessary for the purpose of attaining the objective
pursued.
----
My personal interpretation of the reasoning in the ruling is that while a more broad data _retention_ framework is OK for practicality reasons (i.e. it is not practical to know in advance that a person is suspected of a serious crime, nor is it practical to restrict retention to only such persons as it may be necessary to look at data of other people as part of an investigation targeted at a person suspected of committing the serious crime), it must be accompanied by protections at the _access_ level (i.e. such access must be tightly restricted and judged to be necessary by a qualified independent body based on the facts of the specific case).
This comes at the right time, as the Tories are also trying to pass much worse surveillance legislation where they want to bypass the judges and only have the Home Secretary sign the "warrants" for mass surveillance (so even worse than the rubber-stamping secret FISA Court in the US).
This ruling specifically says that it's illegal because the investigations aren't vetted by judges or independent third party bodies, among other reasons.
Good news, but it still can be appealed, isn't applied immediately, etc. In the meantime, the spy agencies have complete unfettered access to everything, as I understand it.
Didn't they have complete, unfettered access before this legislation? Wasn't it just a law that made legal what they were doing anyway, and will do regardless?
The real conspiracy: we're governed by emotionally unsophisticated, intellectually misshapen prunes who value money and prestige over progress, and surveillance is a tool that helps them get what they value with minimal effort.