Highly worth reading and watching, reporting about Edward Snowden’s recent interview for German television, courtesy of Jonathan Turley’s blog. This interview has received little coverage in the UK or US media.
Last Sunday, former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden was interviewed for the German television network ARD. The interview was big news in Germany and much of the world in both print and broadcast media. However, the interview appears to have been blocked intentionally by US government authorities. In fact, the media in the US appears to have gone to ‘radio silence’ about it. It has been posted on YouTube several times, but is taken down almost immediately. The video site Vimeo has it embedded, but as I write this, Vimeo is under a DDoS attack. LiveLeak also has it, and that video is embedded in this report by Jay Syrmopoulos for Ben Swann’s news page.
Mr. Snowden spoke candidly in a thirty-minute English language interview with the reporter from ARD.
There are currently two fronts to the assault on journalism, free speech and a free press in this country. One is the slow chipping away at media autonomy and the ratcheting up of regulation, ostensibly to protect the privacy of the ordinary citizen but really (and quite transparently) all about protecting the interests and the secrets of the wealthy or celebrity elites. The charge on this front is currently led by the likes of Lord Leveson and his report on press regulation.
But the other is much more daring and ambitious. It has nothing to do with tying the press up with legal obstacles to publishing the news, and everything to do with making a very public show of bullying and shaming newspapers who dare to expose illegal or secretive government activity into cowed silence as a warning to others. We now know precisely the extent to which this took place when The Guardian newspaper was forced – in the presence of observers from GCHQ – to destroy the computer equipment in its possession which held the leaked information from the American whistleblower Edward Snowden.
In two tense meetings last June and July the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, explicitly warned the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, to return the Snowden documents.
Heywood, sent personally by David Cameron, told the editor to stop publishing articles based on leaked material from American’s National Security Agency and GCHQ. At one point Heywood said: “We can do this nicely or we can go to law”. He added: “A lot of people in government think you should be closed down.”
This is the Prime Minister of our country dispatching the top civil servant in the land to personally threaten the editor of a major national newspaper with the forced closure of his publication unless they stop reporting and printing stories and revelations which might be embarrassing to the government.
And intimidation is the only remotely plausible reason for Jeremy Heywood’s visit, because the government was well aware that copies of all the leaked data was held by other news organisations and individuals in other geographic locations, and that destroying only one copy of the files would not prevent the damaging disclosures and news stories:
The government’s response to the leak was initially slow – then increasingly strident. Rusbridger told government officials that destruction of the Snowden files would not stop the flow of intelligence-related stories since the documents existed in several jurisdictions. He explained that Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian US columnist who met Snowden in Hong Kong, had leaked material in Rio de Janeiro. There were further copies in America, he said.
Days later Oliver Robbins, the prime minister’s deputy national security adviser, renewed the threat of legal action. “If you won’t return it [the Snowden material] we will have to talk to ‘other people’ this evening.” Asked if Downing Street really intended to close down the Guardian if it did not comply, Robbins confirmed: “I’m saying this.” He told the deputy editor, Paul Johnson, the government wanted the material in order to conduct “forensics”. This would establish how Snowden had carried out his leak, strengthening the legal case against the Guardian’s source. It would also reveal which reporters had examined which files.
Whether you agree with the actions of Edward Snowden or not, and whether you believe that the British government is justified in allowing the security services to access so much of our personal data at will or that doing so is a gross invasion of privacy and breach of the public trust, I would hope we can all agree that the way in which the Prime Minister’s deputy national security adviser and Cabinet Secretary spoke to a newspaper editor in this country, and the chilling message that they carried, is simply unacceptable in a modern liberal democracy.
In a further brazen move by the government, a hard-to-spot clause in the Deregulation Bill currently before Parliament would allow police to request the seizure and review of journalists’ files and documents in closed, secret court rather than in view of the public (where public disapproval currently stays the hand of any overzealous police chief):
The seizure of journalists’ notebooks, photographs and digital files could be conducted in secret hearings, owing to a little-publicised clause in a government bill aimed at cutting red tape, media organisations have warned.
Requests for notebooks, computer disks, photographs or videos must currently be made in open court and representatives of news groups can be present.
But the clause – in the deregulation bill, which comes before the Commons on Monday – significantly alters the way courts consider so-called “production orders”, stripping out current safeguards.
Although the notebooks and records of journalists can already be seized by police under current law, an application to do so currently has to be made in open court, where the media can be present:
The underlying rules governing whether police can have access to material will remain the same but without media organisations being present it is feared that judges will be more easily persuaded to authorise police seizures of journalistic material. One of the less prominent recommendations of the Leveson inquiry into media standards was that it should be easier for police to obtain journalists’ information. Media organisations already face being charged with contempt of court if they do not comply.
This legislative move proves quite conclusively that the government’s PR / intimidation stunt of forcing The Guardian newspaper to destroy their laptop computers containing files leaked by Edward Snowden was not an isolated incident. Dispatching the Cabinet Secretary to threaten a major news outlet with summary closure unless they comply with government demands may have been the most high profile recent assault on a free press, but the battle is also being waged in more insidious, less headline-grabbing ways. And it must be resisted at all levels.
The government of a free society has no business making it easier for authorities to seize the notes and documents of journalists out of the glare of public scrutiny, just as they should not barge in to a newspaper’s editorial office and issue thinly-veiled ultimatums to comply-or-else.
David Cameron may laugh it off and Oliver Letwin may make some token gestures to soothe the ruffled feathers of those in the journalistic class over the course of the next few days, but this is a deadly serious business. The institutions of democracy, even in an ancient and historical country such as Britain, are ultimately very fragile and liable to being undermined by authoritarians, both well-intentioned and not. And it is deeply concerning when the government can so brazenly and egregiously step over the line delineating protecting the national interest and protecting its own interest, and receive so little censure for doing so.
I hope to see media outlets of all types and political leanings publicly rally to condemn the government and support The Guardian following these latest revelations of state bullying and intimidation. Because there but for the grace of God go us all.
Note – Complete footage of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s recent testimony to a Parliamentary committee is here:
And footage of the Guardian’s editors destroying their computer equipment under the supervision of GCHQ staff is viewable here.
Yesterday, David Cameron told the House of Commons Select Committee on National Security Strategy that he accepted that he and his government had thus far failed to make the case for the extraordinarily invasive government surveillance practices which have been secretly going on beyond the view of the public and our elected MPs, and that he and his ministers needed to do a better job selling the benefits of an intrusive, omniscient government to the British public.
So busy protecting us that he forgot to mention precisely what he was doing in the name of our security.
Discussing the communications legislation, Cameron said: “Over time we are going to have to modernise the legislative framework and practice when it comes to dealing with communications data. It is a politically contentious topic. I am not sure we are going to make progress on it in the coming months in terms of legislation, but there may be things short of legislation that we could do.
“I do think politicians, police chiefs, the intelligence services have got a role in explaining what this is all about. Snowden inevitably raises questions about ‘who has access to my data and why’.
“But I am absolutely convinced that proper rules for communication data collection are essential. I do not think we have got across to people yet the absolute basis of this.
“In most of the serious crimes, such as child abduction, comms data – who called who when and where was the phone at the time, not the content of the call – the comms data is absolutely vital.”
It may well be the case that the majority of the most serious crimes are indeed solved by the analysis of telephony metadata by law enforcement agencies. But David Cameron is making an entirely separate argument here. No one is proposing that the police and other law enforcement agencies should be denied access to telephone and other digital records (which are already maintained by the telecoms companies for the purposes of billing) when investigating these crimes, because in these scenarios there will almost always be a suspect in custody or at large who has created reasonable suspicion and is then the target of the search.
What GCHQ and the NSA have been doing, on the other hand, is nothing to do with this standard law enforcement practice of searching the possessions and digital footprints of an active suspect. Rather, they have been collecting reams of metadata (and more) on people who are under no suspicion of doing anything at all, in secret and without permission, to dip in and out of at their leisure. By equating these two entirely different practices, Cameron is trying to make it sound as though people who value and speak out in defence of civil liberties are somehow extremists or absolutists who want to deny basic crimefighting tools to the police. This is clearly not so.
The false equivalence is made fully apparent in this next quote from Cameron:
He continued: “I love watching crime drama on the television, as I should probably stop telling people. There is hardly a crime drama that is not solved without using the data of a mobile communications device. If we don’t modernise the practice and the law over time we will have the communications data to solve these horrible crimes on a shrinking proportion of the total use of the devices.
The Prime Minister is basically saying that because telecoms companies and devices themselves only hold the most recent usage data, it is only through exercising powers of unlimited and total surveillance that the government can maintain a complete picture of a person’s communications, for use should they ever happen to become a suspect in a crime.
Note also that we are no longer even talking about terrorism, but just “horrible crimes”, among which the Prime Minister includes child abduction and a mysterious category of offence called “comms data”. It was bad enough when a government minister could mumble something inane involving the word “terrorism” to justify gaining complete access to a person’s communications and digital life, but through a couple of seemingly-innocuous turns of phrase it seems that David Cameron now wants to broaden the use of pre-emptive digital searches to stop any and all illegal activity. And since the government has no idea who may or may not be harbouring whims of child abduction or committing a ghastly act of “comms data”, the logical inference is that he believes that the security services are perfectly entitled to collect and monitor all of our telecommunications metadata now and forevermore, on the offchance that we do decide to commit one of these crimes.
Park your outrage for a moment, because the most incredible thing of all is not that all of this has apparently been occurring with regularity – that is, collection and use of the telephony metadata of British citizens, not just for counterterrorism and national security purposes but, in Cameron’s own words, also ostensibly to prevent child abduction and any number of other nominated crimes – but that in examining the actions and conduct of his government and himself, the only thing he can find to beat himself up about is the fact that he did not do a sufficiently vigorous job selling this flagrant intrusion of government into personal privacy to the British public.
The media has rightly devoted a lot of time and attention today to the fact that David Cameron’s authority was challenged by over 90 Conservative backbenchers who supported an amendment to the Immigration bill to make it harder for foreign criminals to avoid deportation by appealing to the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds that their right to a family life would be infringed.
Foreign criminals can stay; British citizens merely suspected of terror offences to lose their citizenship.
The BBC’s Nick Robinson does a good job of unpacking the ludicrous exercise in Game Theory that led the various Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat factions to adopt their particular stances:
The home secretary believes that a proposal to give her stronger powers to deport foreign criminals is illegal, unworkable and may, in fact, lead to fewer deportations.
So, Conservative ministers have been ordered by the prime minister not to oppose it.
Yes, you read that right.
Despite all of the above David Cameron has told his troops to abstain rather than face headlines about a massive Tory revolt. He is said to be sympathetic to the aims of the backbench rebels who have refused to back down.
I personally fail to see why the Home Secretary or any elected politician should be personally involved in deciding deportation cases, in much the same way that I find it bizarre that they can determine whether or not to release prisoners serving life sentences. These matters should be non-political and sit with the judiciary, and while I am in favour of deporting foreign criminals I would much rather achieve this end by empowering judges and allowing them to apply clear legislation stating that criminal conviction of a non-citizen would result in the rescinding of the right to reside in the UK than by conferring even more powers on the Home Secretary to make life-and-death decisions over individual cases. But this is by the by.
The chicanery and slapstick attempts by the Home Secretary Theresa May and the party leadership to first outmanoeuver and then placate the rebellious backbenchers, some of which I personally witnessed from the public gallery of the House of Commons, are certainly newsworthy. But there is a real danger that the story will be framed as being primarily about Cameron’s leadership, or the potential impact of intraparty fighting on the Conservatives’ prospects at the next election, when something much more fundamental is also taken place. Namely, the fact that the bill, as it stands, would give government the power to strip a naturalised British citizen of their citizenship on the mere suspicion of being engaged in terrorist conspiracy.
[Deputy Prime Minister Nick] Clegg said he supported the home secretary’s proposal to strip naturalised British citizens of their citizenship if they are judged to present a threat to national security. It would even apply to those who have no other citizenship, rendering them stateless.
He said the current laws had become a “passport for endless games in the courts to prevent people being deported that should be.
“We are tightening up the way the courts can interpret article 8, the right to a family life, so it cannot became an excuse for unjustified legal procrastination.”
Speaking on LBC’s Call Clegg, he added he knew the plan to make some naturalised British citizens stateless was controversial, but justifiable in a very small number of cases. He said the revocation of British citizenship “would apply in cases where individuals pose a real threat to the security of this country”.
“Judged” to present a threat to national security, but not convicted of any crime by a jury to back up the allegation. Perhaps this is just the inevitable next step given the fact that the British government for a long time also advocated control orders to keep terrorism suspects in a state of legal and personal limbo without giving them full legal due process.
Of course, Nick Clegg is eager to assure us that any cases of citizenship revocation will be extremely rare and only conducted in the gravest of circumstances – but since those circumstances would always be opaque to the general public, any words that he utters in support of this draconian and inhumane measure can be distilled into the much shorter phrase “just trust me”. He has given the British public no good reason to do so. And if the number of cases is really so small, what exactly is the compelling reason that they cannot have their day in court to determine their guilt or innocence of conspiring to commit terrorist acts? By Clegg’s own admission it certainly can’t be concern for the workload of the courts.
Fortunately the ever-watchful eye of Liberty, the National Council for Civil Liberties, picked up on what is happening and issued a stern public rebuke to the government, for what little good it will do:
Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said: “Liberty always said that terror suspects should be charged and tried. First politicians avoided trials for foreign nationals; now they seek the same for their own citizens.
“This move is as irresponsible as it is unjust. It would allow British governments to dump dangerous people on the international community, but equally to punish potential innocent political dissenters without charge or trial. There is the edge of populist madness and then the abyss.”
It is tragically ironic that, if the bill passes in its current form, the law will grant a convicted foreign criminal the right to remain in the UK and avoid deportation because of a fictitious invented “human right” to remain with their family in a country not their own, while a legal, naturalised British citizen merely suspected of a terrorism offence stands to have their British citizenship revoked, potentially rendering them stateless.
Surely this is one civil liberty infringement and constitutional idiosyncrasy too far, even for our increasingly draconian, secretive national security State?
Note – The BBC’s Mark D’Arcy has an excellent explanation of the parliamentary rules and procedures which influenced the outcome of today’s parliamentary antics. The bill is currently at Report stage, the only opportunity for the entire House of Commons to debate the bill in detail and propose amendments, and at this stage it is essentially left to the whim of the Speaker, John Bercow, to determine which amendments are debated and vote on in the limited time available. If this doesn’t seem to you like quite the best way to scrutinise and amend new legislation, you are not alone in your thinking.
Coming soon to a British town square near you: trigger-happy and power-corrupted police officers, newly armed with water cannon, ready to hose you down with a cooling blast of high powered icy water if the authorities do not approve of the cause or tone of your protest.
The Association of Chief Police Officers, or ACPO, is submitting a request to the Home Secretary, Theresa May, to authorise the use of water cannon in any town or city across England and Wales. They are doing this, they insist, to bolster their ability to control anticipated protests from what they call “ongoing and potential future austerity measures”.
The Association of Chief Police Officers says that the need to control continued protests “from ongoing and potential future austerity measures” justifies the introduction of water cannon across Britain for the first time.
The London mayor, Boris Johnson, has already announced a consultation on the introduction of water cannon on to the streets of London ready for use by this summer.
A new Acpo/College of Policing briefing paper makes clear that chief constables across England and Wales have also been asked to discuss water cannon with their police and crime commissioners and “it is anticipated that the home secretary will be approached in early 2014 in respect of water cannon authorisation”.
This attempt by ACPO to raise the spectre of an implausible large-scale breakdown in public order is complete and utter nonsense, a risible and transparent excuse to bring draconian tools of crowd control to the streets of a generally calm and peaceful liberal democracy.
This is not Ukraine or Greece. And even if we were, like Ukraine, in the grip of large-scale civil disturbances, there is every chance that the fault would rest primarily with the fictitious government and not the fictitious protesters; so why further tilt the odds even further in favour of government power to suppress dissent by arming the police with water cannon?
But the really chilling disclosure comes next:
The police envisage using their water cannon to “exert control from a distance and critically to provide a graduated and flexible application of force ranging from spray to forceful water jets. The mere presence of water cannon can have a deterrent effect and experience from Northern Ireland demonstrates that water cannon are often deployed without being employed.”
Behold the power of the deterrent effect on freedom of speech and assembly. The ACPO will make it widely known that they are purchasing some new, state-of-the-art water cannon, weapons capable of blasting 9000 litres of water into a crowd in just five minutes at potentially deadly force, and sit back and watch the anticipated protests about this or that suddenly fail to materialise – or so the theory goes. But here the enemies of civil liberties may have underestimated the level of public opposition to their scheme.
We may rarely give a second thought to the scenes of plucky, unfortunate foreign demonstrators being blasted off their feet by high power jets of water often shown in television news reports from overseas, but if such a thing were to begin happening in Trafalgar Square or in the shadow of Parliament it would be another matter entirely. The British people will not abide a bully.
Scraping the barrel for recent examples of civil disorder to justify their unprecedented request, the chief police constables produced three very weak cases:
[David Shaw, West Mercia Chief Constable] cites three occasions in the past 10 years when police commanders would have considered using water cannon on the streets of London had they been available.
He names them as the Countryside Alliance demonstration in Parliament Square in 2010, the Gaza demonstrations against the Israeli embassy in 2008-09 and “potentially” the student protests of 2010, when specific locations were targeted.
They would also have been considered during the August riots of 2011 but he concedes they would have had only limited impact on the “fast, agile disorder” seen then.
So apparently farmers and bolshy students number among the most grave threats to law and order currently on the radar of the British police. How heartening it is to know that police chiefs up and down the country are so in tune with the fears and concerns of the communities that they purportedly serve.
More ridiculous still, ACPO themselves admit that water cannon would have been entirely useless in confronting the most recent case of serious civil disturbance in Britain, the August 2011 riots, because the looting and damaging was too fleet-footed and agile. It turns out that people intent on smashing and grabbing merchandise from the windows of electronic goods stores tend not to stand still at the scene of their crime, link arms and form orderly ranks so as to be efficiently mowed down by a hastily-scrambled water cannon.
So what is this really all about? One explanation could be that ACPO are politically agitating, and trying to send a message of their disapproval of coalition austerity policies to the public and their elected representatives, essentially saying “we told you that cutting government spending would lead to chaos and disorder and we were right; now we have to take the draconian step of procuring water cannon to prevent the country from sliding into anarchy”.
This is one plausible possibility – as we have seen only too recently with the Andrew Mitchell “plebgate”scandal, there are those in the police force with very hardened agendas who would stop at nothing to discredit or cast doubt on the performance of Conservative ministers.
But in truth, a more convincing explanation is that the police just really fancy having these new toys to scare and intimidate people, that they have decided that building good community relations with the public and doing the hard work of policing large scale events just isn’t worth the effort when they can just bully the public into cowed obedience much more easily.
They likely pursued this strategy in the belief that vague and nebulous references to potential future instances of moderate civil disorder would be sufficient prompting for Theresa May to roll over and grant their wish in her desire to appear tough on the issue of law and order. The British public can only hope that she has the political courage and commitment to civil liberties to tell ACPO to back off – but based on her record, the signs are not encouraging.
Unwarranted plans to bully and intimidate by the ACPO.
The saving grace of this worrying affair will be the newly-created police and crime commissioners, now in place throughout many parts of the country – officials whose primary job it is to advocate for the local population, highlight their concerns and see them addressed by the police forces.
This brazen move by ACPO will be a good early test of the new commissioners. Do they have real teeth, and the strength to dig in their heels and make the police chiefs focus on local priorities rather than their own private Orwellian ambitions, or will they merely act as a fawning rubber stamp to power?
Last Sunday, former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden was interviewed for the German television network ARD. The interview was big news in Germany and much of the world in both print and broadcast media. However, the interview appears to have been blocked intentionally by US government authorities. In fact, the media in the US appears to have gone to ‘radio silence’ about it. It has been posted on YouTube several times, but is taken down almost immediately. The video site Vimeo has it embedded, but as I write this, Vimeo is under a DDoS attack. LiveLeak also has it, and that video is embedded in this report by Jay Syrmopoulos for Ben Swann’s news page.
Semi-Partisan Politics 