Originally posted at Golem XIV blog,
In a democracy rule is by consent. In a dictatorship it is by control.
Which do we have in the West? It seems to me, it is no longer clear.
We certainly still have the rituals of rule by consent. But behind the
elected front men and women is a shadow state. It’s people ritually
swear allegiance to those we elect. They declare themselves there to
serve and protect. But when it is us they spend their time spying
on, whose interests are they protecting?
Can you really serve those you do not trust?
In 2008 we discovered that behind the banking system we knew about,
there was a vast shadow banking system whose size most of us never
suspected.
In 2013 we have glimpsed not only the scale of the
shadow state but the degree to which it, like the shadow banking system,
is out of control and not working for us at all.
Of course Mr Obama and the ‘security chiefs’, brought blinking into
the unwelcome light, justify themselves by telling us that all those
things they never saw fit to mention to us, or even to the people we
spend so much time electing, have been saving us from un-named terrors.
Are
we to take such unverifiable assurances at face value from people who
we know do not trust us and who make a profession of lying to us?
I remember when Treasury Secretary Paulson told the US Congress that
unless they stopped asking questions and simply handed him $600 billion
to bail out the shadow banking system, there would be anarchy and tanks
on the streets. Am I wrong to see a parallel?
Before I go on I would like, for the sake of clarity, to make it
clear that I am not a Libertarian and therefore my criticisms of the
State do not spring from a prior antipathy. I do not consider the State
to be an intrinsically bad or untrustworthy thing. I do think the State,
like any organization can be, and I think has been, corrupted and
perverted. I think some people within the ‘State as we know it’ – the
elected part and its attendant civil service – have colluded with the
rise of what I am calling the Shadow State. Libertarians may feel the
idea of a Shadow State is superfluous. To them I would say, they might, a
few years ago, have thought the idea of a shadow banking system was
similarly superflous. But it exists nevertheless.
The New Praetorians
The problem with giving people and institutions power over
us, even when those people are supposed to be there to protect us, is
that power begets the desire for more power. The Praetorians
began as an elite corp of body guards, sworn to protect Rome’s military
commanders and later the Emperors. But in less than 50 years between the
Emperor Augustus and Claudius, the Praetorians changed from protectors
of the Emperor, to the force who chose him. The Praetorians put Claudius
on the throne, not the people not the Senate. They did not protect,
they chose.
I am not suggesting that the shadow state is already in charge but I am saying
they are in position already to wield huge and carefully hidden, almost unchallengeable power.
They are already operating without oversight and outside of the laws
which we thought were there to protect us from the state. Ask yourself,
when the heat has gone from the embarrassing headlines, will the shadow
state of the NSA, GCHQ and allied military, do any different? Will they
stop spying on us ? Of course not.
The ugliest truth is not how much America has spied on its
own citizens or those of its ‘allies’, but how complicit so many other
governments have been. The UK has long been America’s fluffer.
But I think it is slowly sinking in, in Germany, that the shadow German
state knew what was going on and cooperated. I suggest that the New Cold
war isn’t between Nations, it is between the machinery of the Shadow
State, in every State, and the citizens of every state.
The New Cold War
Of course
European governments want to be seen by their people, to be outraged on their behalf.
And some of them genuinely are outraged – those who hadn’t been told.
But at the top of our governments and key people in various departments,
they were told and they did know.
I recently had a conversation with a former British foreign secretary
and asked him if he had been aware of some of the MI6 operations that I
happen to know about that had gone on in the 70?s. He told me he was
not aware of them and frankly didn’t believe they had gone on. Now of
course, if those operations were still classified – and they are – he
would hardly have blurted out, “Oh yes, I remember that one.” So saying
he didn’t know about them is not proof he didn’t. He could very well
have been lying to me.
All I can say is I don’t think he was lying. From how the
conversation continued I think he really didn’t know and didn’t believe .
What he did tell me, quite frankly (or so it seemed to me) was that the
security and intelligence services make a point, for security
reasons, of not telling the Foreign Secretary about missions. Which on
one level seems reasonable. IF, that is, you trust that the operations
being kept from you were in the interests of the people you are there to
serve. It is easy, I imagine, for a Foreign Secretary to tell himself
that a mission should be kept from him, so long as he convinces himself
that it is still going to be congruent with the government’s over all
policy. But what underpins this comforting idea?
If a mission is secret why not a whole series of missions, a whole policy?
Who says the New Praetorians will limit themselves to protecting and
serving the interests and policies of an elected parliament or Congress.
What is to stop them having their own policy? After all, the shadow
state and its directors remain while Congressmen come and Ministers go.
There will be, as I mentioned, those in our governments who are
genuinely shocked, because they were not privy to the shadow state and
its secrets. I believe the French government genuinely is outraged.
France’s secret state is not part of the Anglo/American axis, never has
been and does not want to be. Their security service is arranged in a
very different manner to ours. But the upper levels of Britain’s and
Germany’s State are playing a game for public consumption. In the UK the
public formula is ‘questions will be asked’. Which we all know is UK
government speak for the exact opposite.
In Germany the outrage of being spied upon and being referred
to as a ‘target’ by the Americans is real and feeds in to the already
long running rivalry between Washington and Berlin. Washington
did not and does not not like the new assertiveness of the German state
that surfaced at the G20 a few years ago. Washington arrived at the
meeting with a plan and found Europe led by Berlin simply refused to
comply. The German state had its own plan and as paymasters of Europe it
was in a position, with French support, to tell Washington to run
along.
I believe it is clear that there is an old-cold-war rivalry between
Europe/Germany and Washington. With the UK playing its habitual role of
Perfidious Albion. Nominally in Europe but acting as agent for America’s
interests at the same time. No one in Europe is ever sure whose
interest the UK is aligned with. All they are sure of is that the UK
cannot be trusted. And they are right.
The problem, I think, is that this old cold war national
rivalry is so familiar and easy to see, that it distracts us from the
much more insidious new cold war which is not nation against nation ,
but shadow state, in every state, against the people of every state. The battle lines in the new cold war are very different from the old cold war, and we must get used to them.
While some in Germany are outraged because they were not aware of
American spying, Merkel and a few others, I feel quite sure, are only
shocked that the truth came out. They are angry with the Americans more
for letting Snowden reveal the truth more than they are with spying
itself.
Some in the German state (and not necessarily those you might imagine
– remember the British foreign secretary I spoke to) and some in the
BND or perhaps some other part of German Security did know. I think we
will find they were collaborating and cooperating with Anglo/American
spying. Of course I cannot know this for sure, though I think it will
become evident in the coming weeks. The question is, why would they
cooperate with a foreign intelligence network spying on German citizens,
diplomats and politicians? Especially when they are all telling us how
outraged they are.
But beyond the posturing and mock shock, the truth is none of
our governments, neither those doing the spying nor those spied upon –
none of our governments – trust any of us. None of them are
content any longer with rule by consent. They all now want control. And
given the endless financial and economic situation, the ratcheting of
austerity, embedded and growing inequality, and the likelihood of
another financial crisis within 5 years, they all feel they must have
control and they are right – they will need it.
The Americans with the help of the British are the ones who
have created the vast, off-balance sheet, unnaccountable machine for
keeping records of everything we say to each other, but Germany and
other governments are, I strongly suspect, keen to enjoy its fruits. So
while many in Germany will focus upon and be genuinely angry at the
American state spying upon German people and their representatives, the
danger is they will be so focused on this familiar old cold war picture,
they will not see the more insidious new cold war, of the shadow state
in their own country, spying on them.
Which brings me to the last point I want to make about spying on and collecting data on citizens.
Intelligence Arbitrage
If you want to collect and collate data, and spy upon your citizens why do it yourself and risk being caught?
Much like torturing people, it is far better to have other people, in
other countries do it. That way, when asked you are able to say, “We do
not torture and we do not spy on our own citizens’.
In the intelligence world what they want to be able to say, as
reassurance to the politicians not in the inner circle and to the rest
of us targets – what they want to say is, ‘We are not allowed to spy on
you willy-nilly without judicial and political oversight and without
permission. A thin lie but they would like to be able to point to some
tissue of oversight and control. They are, after all, servants and
protectors of democracy are they not?
So
the answer is to have other people do the bit of spying
and intercepting that might be embarrassing if it was known about. All
that other foreign organization has to do, is freely offer to ‘share’
their intelligence with you and bingo, you have what you were after but
did not spy to get it nor even collude with those who did spy. They
offered to share, that’s all.
So who could be of help in this effort? Well
Canada , Italy and India are ready and, I suspect, quite willing to arrange an informal, off the books, hush hush, no oversight, reciprocal agreement
Canada is obviously well placed to help the US – if
they needed help – with a particularly sensitive target. Italy can help
Europe, and India can help anyone who off-shores sensitive data handling
to Indian companies.
Canada has its own programme for spying on its citizens
run by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), which
is part of the Department of National Defence. The programme was first
set up in 2005. In 2011 its license was renewed by the Canadian Defense
Secretary, Mr Peter MacKay. The renewed programme is, according to
an article in the Globe and Mail, now run under,
…a regime of ministerial directives – decrees not scrutinized by Parliament ….
So it was set up without bothering with parliamentary scrutiny. What
do you bet it is felt – by the agency itself and the in-crowd of vetted
ministers and officials, that there is no need for parliamentary
oversight of its running either?
Of course its only metadata. So don’t you worry yourselves.
In
Italy, Mario Monti ‘s out-going, unelected government of
technocrats also decided to skip any sort of partlimentary scrutiny and
pesky court orders, and issued
a Presidential decree, (24th Jan. 2013), outlining new guidelines for
…the protection of national cyber security .
According to Italian Lawyer Fulvio Sazrana
in this article,
It basically gives Italian security services almost unlimited access
to data and with hardly any oversight at all by parliament or even the
courts. Mr Sazrana quotes part of the decree which I ran through a
translate programme ( I don’t read Italian)
Article. 11 of Decree obliges operators of telecommunications and
internet service provider, but not only, for example, who also manages
the airports, dams, energy services, transport, to give access to
security services to their databases, for purposes unspecified
“security.”
So in Italy it’s not just emails and phone calls, its going to be
whole data bases as well. That opens up a whole new lot of data about
you.
And then there is India. According an article in the Indian National Newspaper,
The Hindu,
the Indian state is about to set up a new agency the NCCC (National
Cyber Coordination Centre) in which all India’s other security and
communications agencies will have a role. According to a government
note,
“The NCCC will collect, integrate and scan [Internet] traffic data
from different gateway routers of major ISPs at a centralised location
for analysis, international gateway traffic and domestic traffic will be
aggregated separately … The NCCC will facilitate real-time assessment
of cyber security threats in the country and generate actionable
reports/alerts for proactive actions by the concerned agencies,”
The Indian agency, it is made quite clear, will spy on its own
citizens as well as international traffic. It will be real time, so
content, not just metadata. Given that Indian citizens log on to Google
in America, and UK citizens read articles in the Indian press let’s not
fall in to the trap of thinking that what Italy or Canada or India does
will not effect us in our own country. Data and those who handle it are
not bound by national boundaries, rules and laws. You only have to look
at corporate tax avoidance and evasion to see that.
Now here is my speculation - unfounded as yet – that another tranche
of your supposedly privatec and personal data may yet be opened and
read. The British state, like many other western nations off-shores its
public data handling. NHS records and some tax records are now handled
in other countries – the US and India so far.
In Britain such records are protected. But once
abroad they are private corporate data. How bound by the laws of a
distant State will global companies feel? If they broke UK law who would
arrrest them? Undercover British reporters have already found
they could buy the health data of British patients from Indian data companies, including,
Databases of information including names, addresses, and NHS
numbers are being sent overseas along with private health notes as
managers come under increasing pressure to cut costs.
It is illegal but they did it. How open would such
data be for a very powerful, lightly overseen Indian intelligence
organization? And might the Indian cyber snooper be very willing to
share such information if asked by a curious sister intelligence
organization in Britain or America?
Just speculation at the moment.
But what I want to emphasize is that there is a New Cold War but it is not like the old one.
It is not country against country. It is the shadow state in every
nation against its own people, with the collusion of an inner core
within the regular State. If this is correct, and I believe Mr Snowden
has made it very difficult to believe otherwise, then we must not allow
ourselves to be distracted by politicians and media barons telling us
stories in the familiar mold of the old cold war, of one whole country
against another, America against Germany, Britain against France, or
Greece against Europe. There are, of course, still real rivalries
between nations and they do compete with each other and do try to
destabilize each other – but this is not our most pressing problem as
citizens, as free men and women. I believe our real problem is what I
have called the New Cold War. Because our enemy in that war is here
among us.
Nominally we live in democracies but the trust which makes government by consent work is eroding fast.
Distrust, fear and control are replacing it. And it is not you and me
pushing that change. It is the shadow state allied, as I believe it is,
with the shadow financial world, which is pushing it.
As I have said before, we are at war – a frighteningly cold
war – of austerity and spying, poverty and trial without jury – but the
lines are not between nations any more. They are between you
and me on one side and an elite who style themselves as technocrat
experts and cyber praetorians, here to help, but in reality here to
control us and do away with democracy wherever they can.
