Big Brother is watching, listening, and reading

The revelations discussed in the last issue regarding surveillance of internet and mobile phone traffic are proving to be just the tip of the iceberg. It is now clear that US and UK spy agencies have been combing fibre-optic cables for some time and have amassed vast amounts of intelligence.

According to The Guardian last week, 850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors were given access to the UK’s databases. Jaysus! How much information must there be, if that many people are involved in trawling through it? It’s not as if they’re using their hands. They use very sophisticated systems to pack and unpack the data. So there’s a lot of it…
According to the same report, the UK officials have claimed that their spy agency GCHQ produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA. Great news!
As The Guardian puts it “GCHQ and NSA are … able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects.”
That’s you and me, friend.
And don’t think that using an open-source programme is any defence against this appalling intrusion. It isn’t. They have attached intercept probes to transatlantic fibre-optic cables, where they land on British shores carrying data to western European countries from telephone exchanges and internet servers in north America.
The Stasi would marvel at such a rich vein of data, as would the old KGB. It’s very likely that the intelligence agencies will become players in the big data marketplace – but clearly they are already engaged in the most comprehensive invasion of personal space in human history.
Naturally, the spy agencies claim that their trawling has been done within legal parameters but clearly they have interpreted the law in a way that suits them. This is especially true of the UK where, again as reported in The Guardian, US agents from the National Security Agency were told by the Brits that “we have a light oversight regime compared with the US.”
Well, the other big revelations of the last fortnight, the Anglo tapes, show just how bad things can get when regulation is light.
Just transpose the worlds of spying and banking. Judging by the Anglo tapes, those individuals are without any moral compass or concern, wrapped up in their own boys’ club, entirely cynical and thoroughly amoral. If they were spies, they’d have no problem whatsoever misusing any information or data source if it was what they thought the organisation needed.
The right to dissent and protest is fundamental to democracy. However, it is not at all farfetched to foresee such surveillance rapidly becoming an instrument in tracking and suppressing legitimate protest.
If a political opponent needed to be silenced, a comprehensive trawl through texts, emails and internet browsing might turn up things they’d prefer were not known, handy little instruments of intimidation.
Then there’s the issue of just how much privacy any one of us is entitled to regarding, say, our financial affairs. Many people in Ireland were disturbed when Revenue revealed how much it knew about properties and their values and how they could pursue individuals for taxes owed. Okay, they’re in the halfpenny place compared with the UK and US spy agencies. But look again at the justifications given for the draconian invasive measures on property tax. It would take the merest blink to hook that imperative to the availability of very detailed information such as is now in the possession of the spies.
Or, to take yet another angle, look at the relationship between the security forces and the tabloid press. Imagine what foul brew they might concoct if the tabs decided that this GCHQ database warranted harvesting. Do you seriously think that each of those 860,000 operators in the US is clean as a whistle? No, nor do I.
Orwell’s 1984 dystopia is here.
Of course, there’s little we can do about it in Ireland. They’re trawling your emails as you read this. Our government couldn’t stop them even if it wanted to (which I doubt). But we can become part of a campaign of global resistance. Yes, I know that 99.99% of you you’re not actually doing anything even vaguely of interest to the security forces in the UK or the US, but you can still think, right?
Meanwhile, back to the Anglo tapes. Listen, if you ever wanted a primer in what’s wrong with capitalism, you have it in those tapes. Remember the late Brian Lenihan’s pursed-lip evocation of the then-hot buzz-phrase ‘reputational damage’? Well, he hadn’t seen nothin’. These few cowboys have potentially destroyed Ireland’s reputation for decades to come.
SOBs. It might just be time to bring back the stocks and hand out bags of rotten eggs and tomatoes. And after we’re done with them, let’s have a go at the spies!