My interview on 29 April 2011 for RTTV about the pre-emptive arrests of UK political activists in the run-up to the royal wedding.
Thoughtcrime appears to have arrived in the UK — and I accidentally became a royal wedding commentator (sort of).
Well, never say never in life.…
What a difference a mere month makes in the UK media. At the end of March The Independent newspaper produced this article in the wake of the huge TUC anti-cuts protest in London, where the British Home Secretary was castigated for considering greater police powers to prevent such “trouble” again, with particular reference to the forthcoming royal wedding.
At the time former assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, Andy Hayman, who had served as the head of the Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism squad and was, umm, reportedly a much-esteemed officer before his early resignation, adopted a muscular tone by calling for “snatch squads” and “dawn raids” to be carried out by police against suspected troublemakers. How terribly un-British.
Perhaps I’m starting at shadows, but with the above in mind two interesting aricles appeared in that very same newspaper today.
The first article that caught my eye confirmed there was indeed just such a security crackdown against suspected dissidents in the UK on the eve of the royal wedding. Lynne Owens, the Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner in charge of the royal policing operation, is quoted as saying:
““We have to be absolutely clear. If anyone comes to London intending to commit criminal acts, we will act quickly, robustly and decisively.” She said the Met was working with forces across the country and would use “spotters” to identify those causing trouble.”
The article goes on to say:
“As police teams step up their process of “pre-event investigation” and “intelligence gathering”, reports have come in from protesters that plain-clothed police are turning up at their homes to warn them against attending Friday’s event.”
It seems that the poor old Met is having conniptions about potentially embarrassing protesters sullying the pageantry of the royal wedding and is putting our money where its mouth is. Last week The Telegraph also reported that counter-intelligence operations were being conducted against “anarchists” to prevent trouble on 29th April.
Interesting use of language, but I suppose that one newspaper’s “protester” will always be another’s “anarchist”.…
So what of the second article that concerned me? This described the brutal security crackdown in Syria, where the secret police were pre-emptively hunting down and arresting suspected dissidents:
“Syria’s feared secret police raided hundreds of homes yesterday as authorities stepped up attempts to crush the pro-reform movement.….”
UK Foreign Secretary, William Hague is quoted as saying that:
“Syria is now at a fork in the road… it can choose ever-more violent repression which can only ever bring short-term security for the authorities there.”
How much more need I say? Putting aside the fact that Hague seems to have acquired his very own fork(ed tongue), the only discernable difference at this stage is in the sheer scale of the brutality and repression, not the mind-set or intent.
It’s a slippery slope.….
Unsuccessfully resisting the temptation to say that the obvious ones (MI5, MI6 and GCHQ) are still pretty unaccountable, I was intrigued by a few recent articles in The Guardian.
George Monbiot, someone I have enormous respect for but don’t always see eye-to-swivelling-eye with, wrote an excellent piece about the aftershocks of the Mark Kennedy/undercover cop scandal earlier this year.
Monbiot calls for the abolition of that democratically unaccountable senior plod organisation and PLC, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO). This was the organisation under whose aegis the undercover cops spied on hapless environment protestors — the very people who are now being encouraged to appeal against their convictions by Director of Public Prosecutions, no less.
Monbiot quotes a couple of acronyms covering this shady world of police spying: NPOIU and NECTU. But in another Guardian article today — about the police taking pre-emptive steps against so-called anarchists in the run-up to the royal wedding — I saw this:
“The Met is also getting intelligence from the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre, a police unit set up in 2006 together with mental health agencies to identify individuals who are obsessed with members of the royal family, politicians or celebrities.”
Que? When was this unit set up, and who runs it? What about data protection and privacy of medical records? Or are these notions already just quaint anachronisms, and a de facto Big Brother database is already in place?
Perhaps it is time for ACPO to make a clean breast of all the little groupings it has set up over the last decade.….
Here’s a link to my article in The Guardian today, exploring the confused roles of modern British spies, and looking at some ways to sort out the mess. Both the police and the spooks seem to be having a bit of an identity crisis at the moment…
Are environmental activists really a spying priority?
Revelations about policemen spying on environmental activists suggest we need a sense of perspective on threats to the nation.
The cascade of revelations about secret policemen, starting with PC Mark Kennedy/environmental activist “Mark Stone”, has highlighted the identity crisis afflicting the British security establishment. Private undercover police units are having their James Bond moment – cider shaken, not stirred – while MI5 has become ever more plod-like, yet without the accompanying oversight. How has this happened to our democracy without any public debate?
From the late 19th century the Metropolitan Police Special Branch investigated terrorism while MI5, established in 1909, was a counter-intelligence unit focusing on espionage and political “subversion”. The switch began in 1992 when Dame Stella Rimington, then head of MI5, effected a Whitehall coup and stole primacy for investigating Irish terrorism from the Met. As a result MI5 magically discovered that subversion was not such a threat after all – this revelation only three years after the Berlin Wall came down – and transferred all its staff over to the new, sexy counter-terrorism sections. Since then, MI5 has been eagerly building its counter-terrorism empire, despite this being more obviously evidential police work.
Special Branch was relegated to a supporting role, dabbling in organised crime and animal rights activists, but not terribly excited about either. Its prestige had been seriously tarnished. It also had a group of experienced undercover cops – known then as the Special Duties Section – with time on their hands.
It should therefore come as little surprise that Acpo, the private limited company comprising senior police officers across the country, came up with the brilliant idea of using this skill-set against UK “domestic extremists”. Acpo set up the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). This first focused primarily on animal rights activists, but mission creep rapidly set in and the unit’s role expanded into peaceful protest groups. When this unaccountable, Stasi-like unit was revealed it rightly caused an outcry, especially as the term “domestic extremist” is not recognised under UK law, and cannot legally be used as justification to aggressively invade an individual’s privacy because of their legitimate political beliefs and activism. So, plod has become increasingly spooky. What of the spooks?
As I mentioned, they have been aggressively hoovering up the prestigious counter-terrorism work. But, despite what the Americans have hysterically asserted since 9/11, terrorism is not some unique form of “eviltude”. It is a crime – a hideous, shocking one, but still a crime that should be investigated, with evidence gathered, due process applied and the suspects on trial in front of a jury.
A mature democracy that respects human rights and the rule of law should not intern suspects or render them to secret prisons and torture them for years. And yet this is precisely what our spooks are now allegedly doing – particularly when colluding with their US counterparts.
Also, MI5 and MI6 operate outside any realistic democratic oversight and control. The remit of the intelligence and security committee in parliament only covers the policy, administration and finance of the spies. Since the committee’s inception in 1994 it has repeatedly failed to meaningfully address more serious questions about the spies’ role. The spooks are effectively above the law, while at the same time protected by the draconian Official Secrets Act. This makes the abuses of the NPOIU seem almost quaint. So what to do? A good first step might be to have an informed discussion about the realistic threats to the UK. The police and spies huddle behind the protective phrase “national security”. But what does this mean?
The core idea should be safeguarding the nation’s integrity. A group of well-meaning environmental protesters should not even be on the radar. And, no matter how awful, the occasional terrorist attack is not an existential threat to the fabric of the nation in the way of, say, the planned Nazi invasion in 1940. Nor is it even close to the sustained bombing of government, infrastructure and military targets by the Provisional IRA in the 70s-90s.
Once we understand the real threats, we as a nation can discuss the steps to take to protect ourselves; what measures should be taken and what liberties occasionally and legally compromised, and what democratic accountability exists to ensure that the security forces do not exceed their remit and work within the law.
“Well, if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide. Why object to increasing state surveillance powers?”
I speak regularly at international events about basic freedoms, civil liberties and encroaching police states, and this is one of the most frequently asked questions.
This question is usually posed in the context of the ubiquitous CCTV cameras that infest the streets of Britain, where it is estimated that you can be photographed hundreds of times a day going about your daily business in London.
Not to mention the talking CCTV cameras in the North of England, nor the increasing use of spy drones (as yet, reportedly, unweaponised — at least lethally) over the skies of Britain. Nor the fact that the police officers in charge of CCTV units admit that the technology is only useful as evidence in 3% of cases, and that violent crime has actually gone up since the spread of CCTV, so we’re certainly no safer on our streets.
Nor do the well-meaning people asking this question (who, one presumes, have never-ever done anything wrong in their lives, even to the extent of not dropping litter) seem to grasp the historical evidence: they retain an optimistic faith in the long-term benign intentions of our governments.
Yet as we’ve seen time and time again in history, more dubious, totalitarian and malignant governments can indeed gain power, and will abuse and extend the surveillance laws and available technology against their own peoples. And I’m not just talking about Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s or the East German Stasi, although I’m in agreement with UK Education Secretary Michael Gove at the moment in saying that history lessons are never a waste.…
But we also need to learn more recent lessons: the UK in the 1970s-1990s, where the Irish community as a whole was targeted because of fringe Republican terrorism; or the Muslim community post‑9/11, which lives with the real fear of of being arrested, extraordinarily rendered, tortured, or even assassinated on the say-so of unaccountable intelligence agencies; or even peaceful protest groups in the USA and UK who are infiltrated and aggressively investigated by Stasi-like police officers.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was put in place for a very good reason in 1948: to prevent the horrors of state terrorism, violence and genocide from ever happening again. Amongst the essential, internationally-agreed core principles are the right to life, the right not to be tortured, freedom of expression, and the right to individual privacy.
Which brings me neatly back to the start of this article. This is precisely why increasing state surveillance is a problem. Because of the post‑9/11, over-inflated, hyped-up threat from soi-disant terrorist groups, we are all being penalised. The balance of power is shifting overwhelmingly in favour of the Big Brother state.
Well, almost. The Wikileaks model is helping to level the playing field, and whatever happens to this trail-blazing organisation, the principles and technology are out there and will be replicated. The genie cannot be put back in the bottle.
So, why not pose the very question in the title of this piece back on those who want to turn back the clock and eradicate Wikileaks — the governments, mega-corporations, and intelligence agencies which have been outed, shamed and embarrassed, and which are now trying to suppress its work?
If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.….
I recently stumbled across this excellent article in the Trinidad Express, of all places. It appears that the state of Trinidad and Tobago is in the throes of debating the legitimate role of intelligence agencies within a democracy.
Alana Wheeler, a Fulbright Scholar with a Masters degree in National Security Studies, contributes a clear and well-argued article that gets to the heart of these issues; what is “national security” and what is the best way to protect a nation’s integrity within a legal, proportionate and democratic framework?
If the democratic movements within countries like Tunisia, Egypt and Libya are allowed to coalesce organically and unhindered, no doubt this also be a key issue for their new constitutions — especially after decades of repression and fear meted out by brutal securocrats.
So why the hell can’t we have such an informed debate about these issues in the “mature democracies” of UK or the USA?
OK, so I’m not sure if my concept of Bleats (half blog, half tweet) is being grasped wholeheartedly. But so what — it makes me laugh and the Black Sheep shall perservere with a short blog post.….
So I’m a bit puzzled here. UK Prime Minister Dave Cameron is quoted in today’s Daily Telegraph as saying that:
“It is not acceptable to have a situation where Colonel Gaddafi can be murdering his own people using aeroplanes and helicopter gunships and the like and we have to plan now to make sure if that happens we can do something to stop it.”
But do his American best buddies share that, umm, humane view? First of all they have the CIA assassination list which includes the names of US citizens (ie its own people); then those same “best buddies” may well resort to assassinating Wikileaks’s Julian Assange, probably the most high profile dissident in international and diplomatic circles at the moment; plus they are already waging remote drone warfare on many hapless Middle Eastern countries — Yeman, Afghanistan, Pakistan.….
Oh, and now the UK government seems poised to launch covert spy drones into the skies of Britain. Even the UK’s most right-wing mainstream newspapers, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, expressed concern about this today. Apparently these drones have yet to be weaponised.….
It’s a slippery slope down to an Orwellian nightmare.
George Orwell is just so old-world, retro and quaintly British. Gone are the days of simple DoubleThink. The Americans inevitably had to supersize the concept.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was last week speaking at the George Washington University about political activism and freedom of expression:
Now we appear to have entered the realm of TrebleThink.
At the meeting Ray McGovern, army veteran, long-term CIA analyst, and now internationally-renowned peace activist chose to exercise his right to freedom of expression by standing up and silently turning his back on Clinton during her speech.
For his pains 71-year-old McGovern sustained painfully injuries while being forcibly removed by nameless “security personnel”, before ending up in a tiny police cell. On his eventual release he had to take a taxi to hospital for treatment.
Hillary Clinton did not even stumble over her words during McGovern’s arrest.
The startling hypocrisy of Clinton’s speech is clear on three different fronts:
1) She is defending the rights of activists in the Middle East to speak out against corrupt governments, while ignoring the brutalisation of a fellow citizen for silently using those very rights in America.
2) She’s doing so while speaking out about the vital role of internet freedoms — indeed standing behind a podium with the words “Internet Freedom” written on it — in informing citizens and spreading democracy. Yet at the same time a secretly-convened US Grand Jury is frantically scrabbling around for any pretext whatsoever to prosecute Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks. And yet another is investigating attacks against the collaborating US corporations that pulled the plug on Wikileaks support last year. Ironically, on the same day as Clinton’s speech, Twitter was in court fighting US government attempts to obtain personal information of alleged Wikileaks supporters. No doubt Clinton would condemn the former Egyptian government if it had done the same thing.
3) And let’s not forget that the USA is hosting the UNESCO World Press Freedom Day this year too. This was announced on the very day Julian Assange was arrested in the UK.
The hypocrisy is flagrant. As I said, welcome to the world of TrebleThink. You read it here first.…
Paradigm Shift TV (Sky 201 and 203) produced this film of my talk at the Cambridge Union Society in January 2011:
With thanks to Keith and Steve!
It’s a busy couple of months for talks, and I have the pleasure of speaking at the Durham Union Society tomorrow night (16th February).
My talk will be focusing on the modern role of intelligence agencies, the war on terror, what it’s like to be recruited to work as a spook, whistleblowing, Wikileaks, police states and civil liberties. An eclectic mix.
The talk is open to all students, not just members of the Union, so if you’re in the area and have the time, do come along!
Well I had a fab time revisiting the old place last week to do a talk at the Union Society — somewhere I spent many happy hours, oh, aeons ago!
Many thanks to Rebecca and the rest of the team for organising and hosting the event, and to Silkie for setting the whole ball rolling.
It was a busy weekend. The Friday evening began with an all-too-brief appearance at the first meeting of a new group, MI7 — can I say that, or is it a state secret? — organised by Silkie and Charlie Veitch of the Love Police.
It was strange to go back to the Union as a speaker after so long and so many unusual experiences. The audience seemed to stay wide awake for my hour-long talk, and the questions afterwards were interesting, lively and varied. I was also encouraged to see that ideas deemed to be “radical” only a few years ago are now going mainstream.
The next day was taken up with interviews for The Cambridge Student and Varsity student newspapers, Sky 203 Channel, and a photo shoot with QH Photography for a gallery exhibition in London later this year.
The Cambridge Student journalists gamely allowed the interview to be film by Sky 203 — not the easiest of scenarios.
“Varsity” newspaper did a colourful and intelligent interview — thanks Olivia! — which was rapidly followed on the newspaper website today with this puff piece about MI6.
I can only assume that this is merely balanced news reporting, especially as the Master of Pembroke College, Chair of the Trustee Board of the Union Society, and former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, will be speaking at the Union in a couple of weeks.….
Certainly an interesting juxtaposition!
The photo shoot was fun, and the results will be appearing in London at the end of this year. As you can see from the photo on the left, Huy takes a mean picture.
I also ran into Ryan J‑W Smith, who is in the process of completing his intriguing film, 2Plus2Makes4. Limited private and festival screenings are expected this summer.
The film synopsis asks some fundamental questions:
“How close are we to sliding into Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare, ‘1984’? Controversial, shocking, powerful and honest — starring Tony Benn, Gore Vidal, former MI5, CIA, FBI agents, Senators, Presidential Nominees, etc. A ‘Must-See’ feature documentary from award-winning filmmaker, Ryan J‑W Smith. Smith’s previous films have received 16 International Film Festival Selections, 5 ‘Best Film’ Nominations, and 4 ‘Best Film’ wins.”
I shall be returning to my alma mater next week to do a talk at the Cambridge Union Society on 28th January. I’ll be discussing spies, civil liberites, whistleblowers, Wikileaks and much more.….
I was invited to talk at a gathering of the (digital) civil liberties organisation, Bits of Freedom, in Amsterdam in September 2010. This international, Dutch-based organisation is doing a fantastic job highlighting concerns about internet privacy, security and free speech issues.
Many thanks to Ot and the team for inviting me, and thanks also to Jildou for filming the talk. I had such a fun time, I even feel moved to forgive BoF for their thoughtful gift at the end of the evening — Tony Blair’s riveting autobiography. Well, it makes a good door-stop.….
Moving swiftly past the prurient, thigh-rubbing glee that most of the old media seems to be exhibiting over the alleged details of Julian Assange’s love life, let’s re-focus on the heart of the Wikileaks disclosures, and most importantly the aims underpinning them: transparency, justice, and an informed citizenry living within fully-functioning democracies. Such quaint notions.
In the media maelstrom of the Cablegate disclosures, and the resulting infantile and thuggish threats of the American political class, is easy to lose sight of the fact that many of the leaked documents refer to scandals, corruption and cover-ups in a range of countries, not just the good old US of A.
One document that recently caught my attention related to the notorious murder twenty-one years ago of civil rights activist, Pat Finucane, in Northern Ireland. Finucane was a well-known lawyer who was shot and killed in front of his wife and three small children. There has long been speculation that he was targeted by Protestant terrorist groups, in collusion with the NI secret police, the army’s notorious and now-disbanded Forces Research Unit (FRU), and/or MI5.
Well, over a decade ago former top plod, Lord (John) Stevens, began an inquiry that did indeed establish such state collusion, despite having his inquiry offices burnt out in the process by person/s allegedly unknown half-way through the investigation. Stevens fought on, producing a damning report in 2003 confirming the notion of state collusion with Irish Loyalist terrorist activities, but never did clarify exactly what had happened to poor Pat Finucane.
However, Finucane’s traumatised family has never stopped demanding justice. The recent disclosure shines a light on some of the back-room deals around this scandal, and for that I’m sure many people thank Wikileaks.
The “Troubles” in Northern Ireland — such a quintessentially British understatement, in any other country it would have been called a civil war — were deceptive, murky and vicious on both sides. “Collusion” is an elastic word that stretches beyond the strict notion of the state. It is well-known that the US organistion, NORAID, supported by many Americans claiming Irish ancestry, was a major fundraising channel for, um, Sinn Féin, the political wing of the Provisional IRA, from the 1970s onwards.
Such networks provided even more support than Colonel Gaddafi of Libya with his arms shipments, and the cash well only dried up post‑9/11. As you can see in this recent article in the The Telegraph, even the incoming Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, New York Congressman Peter King (who ironically called for the designation of Wkileaks as a “foreign terrorist organisation”) appears to have been a life long supporter of Sinn Féin.
With this in the back of our minds, it appears that Dublin and Washington kept pushing for a full inquiry into Finucane’s murder — and in 2005 it looked like MI5 would finally co-operate.
However, the devil was in the detail. Coincidentally, 2005 was the year that the UK government rushed through a new law, the Inquiries Act, which scandalously allowed any department under investigation (in this case MI5) to dictate the terms and scope of the inquiry.
Collusion by any state in the unlawful arrest, torture, and extrajudicial murder of people — whether its own citizens or others — is state terrorism. Let’s not mince our words here. Amnesty International provides a clear definition of this concept.
As the The Guardian article about Finucane so succintly puts it:
“When a state sanctions the killing of citizens, in particular citizens who are lawyers, it puts the rule of law and democracy in jeopardy. And when a state enlists auxiliary assassins, it cedes its monopoly over state secrets: it may feel omnipotent, but it is also vulnerable to disclosure.”
Indeed. Northern Ireland was like a Petri dish of human rights abuses: torture, Diplock courts (aka military tribunals), kidnappings, curfews, shoot-to-kill, informers, and state collusion in assassinations.
The infection has now spread. These are precisely the tactics currently used by the US, the UK and their “auxiliary assassins” across great swathes of the Middle East. Perhaps this explains why our nation states have been outflanked and have ceded their monopoly over secrets.
Will justice ever be done? In the past I would have said, sadly, that would be highly unlikely. However, courageous organisations like Wikileaks and its ilk are improving the odds.