National Security

A New Argument Against Defence Cuts

Samuel HooperLeave a comment
troopingthecolour
Maybe they can fill out the ranks with some extra CGI characters.

 

When even this Conservative-led government is willing to degrade the military capacity of our nation, it has been understandable to despair of anyone in British politics other than Defence Secretary Philip Hammond continuing the argument for a strong, fully-capable armed forces.

Arguments against making experienced veteran soldiers redundant while flashy recruitment drives for new recruits clog the airwaves have fallen on deaf ears, as did the arguments against leaving Britain without full aircraft carrier capability until the new Queen Elizabeth class ships are commissioned. But now a new argument against further cuts to the military may succeed – and it is, of course, the least important or relevant of them all.

The Telegraph reports that additional cuts to the armed forces could impair their ability to carry out ceremonial functions such as Trooping the Colour or participating in state funerals:

Cuts to the armed forces are threatening to undermine the pageantry and pomp of Britain’s biggest ceremonial events, one of the Army’s most senior officers has warned.

Garrison Sergeant Bill Mott, who oversees all major ceremonial events, says he is now struggling to produce the “same spectacle” as the armed forces have shrunk.

His comments are likely to prove especially sensitive as Prince Harry is now a staff officer in the same district as Mr Mott, with a responsibility for helping to organise ceremonial events.

The Telegraph’s source is highly experienced and not prone to hyperbole:

Over the past 12 years Garrison Sergeant Major Bill Mott has overseen every major ceremonial event in London including the royal wedding, Baroness Thatcher’s funeral and the tradition of Trooping the Colour.

However, Mr Mott told Defence Focus, an internal Ministry of defence magazine, that soldiers are “gritting their teeth and getting on with it” in the face of the cuts.

I wonder if this approach might actually work. Since the memory of the Falklands conflict seems to have evaporated from the minds of most people, and a large segment of the population equates maintaining a strong national defence with a desire to embark upon new neo-conservative inspired nation-building jaunts abroad (when in fact there is no reason for the two to be linked), there has been no real attention-grabbing or compelling argument to make in favour of ring-fencing defence spending. Until now.

If this is what it takes to wrestle back the momentum and initiative in favour of protecting military spending, then I’ll take it. But it will not speak highly of the British people if we prove to be more concerned about our future ability to stage a Princess Diana-style funeral than we are our ability to protect ourselves and defend our interests.

Press Intimidation Must Not Go Unanswered In Britain

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

guardiancomputers

 

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.

The Guardian reveals:

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.

 

Britain’s Surveillance State Expands, Unnoticed

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

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, he forgot to tell us precisely what he was doing in our name.
So busy protecting us that he forgot to mention precisely what he was doing in the name of our security.

The Guardian reported at the time:

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.

Where is the oversight? Where is the outrage?

British Citizenship Now A Perk, Not A Right

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

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.
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.

The Guardian reports:

[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.

Treading Water On NSA Surveillance

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

It appears from early reports that President Obama intends to punt on the only recommendations made by his surveillance review group that contained any real meat or hope of unpicking the harms done to the fourth amendment.

The New York Times reports:

Mr. Obama plans to increase limits on access to bulk telephone data, call for privacy safeguards for foreigners and propose the creation of a public advocate to represent privacy concerns at a secret intelligence court. But he will not endorse leaving bulk data in the custody of telecommunications firms, nor will he require court permission for all so-called national security letters seeking business records.

In short, the president is determined to continue bulk collection of communications data undeterred, but is willing to play around with the details of who stores the data (the government, the telecoms companies or some kind of shadowy third party consortium), and in a grand gesture to civil libertarians he is willing to promise to actively monitor the communications of acquaintances of acquaintances of a potential suspect, rather than the current acquaintances of acquaintances of acquaintances. This gesture slightly reduces the chance of Kevin Bacon’s communications being flagged as in some way being linked by the NSA to every terrorist in the world, but is otherwise entirely meaningless.

Amen.
Amen.

Foot-dragging, empty gestures and a continued lack of transparency or accountability from anyone involved. So far, so predictable, perhaps.

But what I find slightly more concerning is the way in which the judiciary (at the behest of Chief Justice John Roberts) is seeking to weigh in on what ultimately is a matter of policy, as the New York Times notes:

The developments came as the nation’s judiciary waded into the highly charged debate. In a letter made public on Tuesday, a judge designated by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to express the views of the judicial branch warned that some changes under consideration would have a negative “operational impact” on a secret foreign intelligence court.

Judge John D. Bates, a former chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, urged Mr. Obama and Congress not to alter the way the court is appointed or to create an independent public advocate to argue against the Justice Department in secret proceedings. Any such advocate, he wrote, should instead be appointed only when the court decided one was needed.

Of course, there need not necessarily be anything sinister about this intervention – apparently made on the grounds that it would eat up too much of the court’s time and create excessive workload if they were required to approve all FBI requests for stored bulk records – but it does seem rather odd to me, at face value, that the judiciary is more eager to weigh in on policy proposals when there is a threat to the smooth running of their working day than they are when there is a plausible argument to be made that the government is acting beyond its constitutional authority. The Times also picks up on this:

It is highly unusual for judges to weigh in on public policy debates involving the other two branches of government, but Judge Bates, the director of the Administrative Office of the United States Court, said that Chief Justice Roberts had designated him to “act as a liaison” and that he had consulted other judges.

But again, this is early reporting with the full details of Obama’s upcoming speech and the work behind it not yet made public.

One begins to wonder why President Obama sets up these review boards or commissions, other than as a cosmetic exercise to give the appearance of open-mindedness and willingness to change course. The Bowles-Simpson debt commission forged a tough but real consensus on reforms to American taxation and spending, and was high-handedly dismissed by the administration, and now it appears that the same is about to happen when another of President Obama’s talking shops is due to report back.

Just enough to annoy the Patriot Act manics and those in the national security complex, and far too little to placate civil libertarians rightly concerned about government overreach that we would never have even been made aware of were it not for the actions of Edward Snowden.

The Obama administration’s lack of anything approaching humility or transparency, even after having been caught in the act, is depressing indeed.