Looking forward to speaking at this conference next weekend!
A timely and necessary debate about the vital, but increasingly fragile, state of our democracy and basic civil rights.
And what a great line up — well done to the organisers!
Some of the other speakers are old friends I’ve worked with before, some I look forward to meeting for the first time.
Here’s an interview I did for Russia Today TV on 8th July 2010 about the US/Russian spy swap:
I did a PR interview for the 2008 film “The Bank Job”, which was included in the extras on the DVD.
In the interview I discussed MI5 dirty tricks and spy influence over the media.
Last year I had the honour to meet Julian Assange, the founder of the brilliant whistleblower website, WikiLeaks, that has been causing such a stir recently with the release of the decrypted US military film, “Collateral Murder”, and recently with the Afghan War Logs.
I have nothing but respect for WikiLeaks — it shines a torch into the dark corners of corrupt government and big business, and is the way forward in holding these organisations, which largely believe themselves to be above the law, at least somewhat to account.
Julian was kind enough to invite me to take part in a panel discussion with him at the Hacking at Random festival in the Netherlands last year. The discussion focused on whistleblowing and government accountability. Here’s the video:
In July I was invited back to speak at the Secret Garden Party, a music, politics, and arts festival held annually somewhere, er, secret in the UK.
What a fab weekend. I have a well-known antipathy to sleeping under canvas, but this was an excellent festival — and even the compost loos were not too grim.
Listed as one of the “Star Acts” in the printed festival programme (I blush), I had the luxury of an hour and a half to speak in the première debate tent in the Rebels and Intellectuals section of the festival — The Forum — a concept that the organiser, Ben de Vere, promises to transplant to London sometime in the near future.
Anyway, I seriously recommend putting this festival in your diaries for next year, and keep an eye open for the spread of The Forum.….
Here’s the video:
So last week I was on holiday with my lovely Dutchman in Cologne on the Rhine in Germany, a city steeped in history and now chiefly famous for its Gothic cathedral, widely reputed to be pretty much the last building left standing in the city at the end of WW2. Easily resisting both this religious hotspot and, with slightly more difficulty, the siren calls of the brauerei, we decided on a bit of culture, some museums and a stroll along the river.
However, it turns out that not one but two buildings had survived WW2 in their entirety. Tucked away on a backstreet, we found the second survivor: the Gestapo HQ, which had been preserved as it was found at the end of the war to serve as a ghastly warning to history.
Well, as someone who regularly speaks at conferences across the world about human rights, totalitarianism and encroaching police states, I felt I had to have a look. The building is a nondescript office block that looks perfectly innocent from the outside. Three floors are open to the public. On the first is the museum, with the history of the rise to power of the Nazis. It was hideously fascinating to read how freedoms and rights were incrementally eroded as the state slipped ever more from democracy. The majority of the German people went sleep-walking into national socialism. As soon as Hitler had any sort of political power his attack-dogs, the SS, used disproportionate, sudden, and shocking violence against Germany’s own citizens to crush any nascent resistance. So from 1933 onwards the population was terrorised, as “undesirables” were routinely snatched from their homes for questioning, torture and imprisonment.
And the propaganda in the media that was on display.…. Shall I just say, even more unsubtle than that which is used against us today. I suppose these dark arts have developed over the intervening years.
But it was the lower floors that packed the strongest punch. The basement, just below street level, held the cells — tiny, dank spaces where as many as 30 people had been herded together. And the walls are covered in graffiti in all the languages of Europe — sad, desperate messages to the future from people who were “disappeared”. They seemed to want to leave a record of the fact simply that they had existed: they had loved, they missed their families, they were trying to hold their heads high despite the agonies inflicted daily, they were innocent, they were about to die.…..
There was one more level — the reinforced rat hole deep underground, which served both as the air-raid shelter for the Gestapo officers (the prisoners were left upstairs in their cells during the raids), and as the torture rooms. Considerately, the Gestapo carried out their most brutal interrogations underground, so that the screams could not be heard at street level.
As we emerged, somewhat silent, from this museum, I noticed that we, and many other visitors, all turned to stare at this building: it looked so bland and innocuous from the outside. But then people would inspect the basement windows that hid the cells. The smokers in the group all sparked up as soon as they were outside, dragging hard on their cigarettes. Others just stood silently.
So the museum does its job. It is a powerful warning from the grave. Homo homini lupus: man is wolf to man, ever has been and ever will be, absent adequate legal restraint. This is why the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was put in place in 1948, to prevent such atrocities from happening again.
Yet, at the risk of sounding sententious, such abuse is going on around the world right now, particularly in the cause of the endless, nebulous “war on terror”. We have been lazy, blind and foolish, letting our basic rights slide away. People are disappeared, extraordinarily rendered, to foreign prisons and tortured for years. Assassination lists have been drawn up by US intelligence agencies; suspects face kangaroo, military-style courtrooms, where they face the death penalty but are not allowed to know the full case against them; our governments aggressively, illegally, invade other countries, and yet the politicians who lie to take us into these wars, thereby causing the needless death, poisoning, maiming and displacement of millions of people, are not called to account for their crimes, as they should be under the Nuremberg Principles, the Rome Statute, and the International Criminal Court.
We, the citizens of still just-about-functioning democracies, should be ashamed. We need to re-remember our history and take a stand — before it’s too late.
I had the pleasure recently of working with a talented film maker called Ryan JW Smith, and his partner/producer, Brianna.
Brianna is an artist by training, and also a mean hand at producing. Ryan seems a bit of a renaissance man — film maker, poet, writer, actor. In fact, he wrote a play called “New World Order” in, I believe, iambic pentameter, and performed it to packed audiences at the Edinburgh Fringe a couple of years ago, and recently had a short film called “Army Strong” screened at a Polish film festival.
Anyway, they are in the middle of making a feature-length film about the post-apocalyptic, post‑9/11 world we all share — the lies of intelligence and government, the illegal wars, the erosion of our democratic rights. Just the sort of light material that I like to work with — and certainly what I think is of vital importance.
I’m working on helping to promote the film later this year, and organise some screening tours for them across Europe and North America.
I think it’s going to be a very powerful wake-up call to us all. Watch this space for more news.
Here’s a trailer Ryan and Brianna cut from my interviews with them called “Using Her Intelligence”. I like:
And here’s an interview I did yesterday for Russia Today TV about the the spy story:
I’ve been following with interest the retro, Cold War spy saga currently unfolding in the USA. The headlines being that 10 alleged Russian sleepers (“illegals” in spy lingo) have been arrested by the FBI and are now charged with “working as agents of a foreign power”, which carries a sentence of five years in prison.
These Russian “illegals”, some of whom reportedly have been living openly as Russian immigrants, some as other foreign nationals, have allegedly been infiltrating the US since the mid-1990s, and were tasked to get friendly with American power-brokers, to glean what information they could about the thoughts of the US great and the good about Russia, Iran, defence plans etc.
Whatever the truth of this case, and the charges are detailed, I find the timing and media attention given to this story interesting for three key reasons:
From what has been reported of the court papers, the FBI investigation has been going on for years. Apparently they have known about the spy ring since 2000, and have included communications intercept material in the indictment dating from 2004 and 2008, as well as sting operations from the beginning of this year. So it’s curious that the FBI decided to swoop now, in the immediate aftermath of a successful and, by all accounts friendly, meeting between the Russian and American presidents in Washington DC.
Many people are commenting on this aspect of the timing. And, indeed, one might speculate about wheels within wheels — it appears that there are still hardline factions within the US administration that want to ensure that a warmer working relationship cannot develop between Russia and the USA. A strategy of tension is good for business – especially companies like Halliburton and Xe (formerly Blackwater) which profit from building vast US military bases in Central Asia.
But what also intrigues me is the possible behind-the-scenes action.
This story is getting blanket media coverage. It’s a good, old-fashioned, Cold War-style coup, hitting all the jingoistic spy buttons, just at a time when the US spooks are under pressure about their performance in the nebulous and ever-shifting “war on terror”, the shredding of constitutional rights, the illegal surveillance of domestic political activists, and complicity in extraordinary rendition and torture. It’s a useful “reminder” that the bloated US security infrastructure is worth all the money it costs, despite the dire state of US national finances. Pure propaganda.
I’m also willing to bet that there is a more covert aspect to this story too — some behind-the-scenes power play. There are, at the last count, 17 acknowledged intelligence agencies in the US, all competing for prestige, power and resources. By making these arrests, the FBI will see this as a step up in the spy pecking order. It reminds me inevitably (and perhaps flippantly) of the classic spy novel by former intelligence officer Graham Greene, “Our Man in Havana”. In this no doubt entirely fictional work, a British MI6 asset invents a spy ring to increase his standing and funding from London HQ.
Also curious is the role played by one Christopher Metsos, allegedly the 11th man, not initially arrested, who is reported to have passed money to the spy ring. He was caught yesterday in Cyprus trying to board a plane to Hungary, and inexplicably granted bail — inexplicable at least to the Greek police, who always worry that their suspect will flee over the border into the Turkish segment of the island, never to be seen again. And this has indeed happened, according to The Guardian newspaper this evening. Perhaps he has some urgent appointments to sell vacuum cleaners north of the border.….
Finally the video of my talk at the CCC-SigInt in Cologne, discussing the whistleblowing, privacy, the crimes of spy agencies and what hackers can do about it.
Das Leben Der Anderen, talk at CCC SigInt 2010 from Annie Machon on Vimeo.
In January I had the pleasure of speaking in The Netherlands at the excellent geekfest known as ETH‑0. Rather than just banging on about the spooks, I thought it was time to take a step back and examine what exactly we mean when we talk about totalitarianism, police states, and how far down the road our countries have gone.
I also wanted to drive home to an audience, many of whom are too young to remember the Cold War, what exactly it would be like to live under a police state with its endemic surveillance.
And here’s the talk:
An interesting example of press manipulation appeared today in the UK media. Britain is in the throes of a general election and many pundits are saying that the result is too close to call — the feeling being that the UK’s third party, the Liberal Democrats, may hold the balance of power in a hung parliament. The Daily Mail, one of the most rabidly right-wing of the national newspapers, chose today to print a story about the arrest and subsequent rescue of two UK soldiers in Iraq in 2005.
The general thrust of the piece was that the Labour government was willing to sacrifice our soldiers by refusing to authorise their rescue, in order to avoid political embarrassment. This story appears to be a fairly obvious attempt by The Daily Wail to encourage military personnel and their families to vote against the incumbent government, which was willing to sacrifice our boys’ lives for political expediency.
However,I would suggest that there is another level to this story. Many remember when the news first broke: how two SAS soldiers, working under cover and disguised as Arabs, failed to stop their car at a checkpoint and engaged in a shoot-out that killed one Iraqi and injured three more. The SAS operatives were arrested and taken to a police station where the authorities discovered that their car contained weapons and explosives. The SAS launched a rescue, ploughing into the police station with tanks, and then tracking their targets to a local militia house nearby, fighting their way in and saving their comrades. All heroic stuff. However, the obvious follow-up questions are:
1) What the hell were these two soldiers doing in disguise, and with a car-load of weaponry?
2) Precisely why was the government so embarrassed about the potential political fall-out?
I think these two questions are inter-dependent. Dirty tricks and collusion are a standard methodology for the SAS and the intelligence community — a well-documented tactic they used in the war in Northern Ireland over three decades. So just what was the intended destination of the weaponry? Would they have been used for an attack subsequently blamed on “insurgents” or “Al Qaeda”?
As for the potential political embarrassment, the Daily Mail’s excuse — that the British government didn’t want to undermine the perceived sovereignty of the Iraqis at that time — is just too feeble to stand up. The issue of political embarrassment makes far more sense if seen in terms of UK government awareness of the use by the British military of dirty tricks, collusion or false flag terrorism in Iraq.
Of course, this is a perfectly standard tactic used by many countries’ military and intelligence infrastructures. It would be naïve to think it does not happen, but it is a retrograde, risky and counter-productive tactic.
In the 21st century it is more naïve to think that such activity is either effective or acceptable in a world where the spread of democracy and the application of international law and human rights are the way forward.
The US government has apparently been getting its knickers in a twist about the excellent Wikileaks website. A report written in 2008 by US army counter-intelligence analysing the threat posed by this haven for whistleblowers has been leaked to, you’ve guessed it, the very subject of the report.
Wikileaks was set up three years ago to provide a secure space for principled whistleblowers around the world to expose corruption and crimes committed by our governments, intelligence agencies and mega-corporations. The site takes great care to verify the information it publishes, adheres to the principle of exposing information very much in the public interest, and vigorously protects the identify of its sources.
By doing so, Wikileaks plays a vital part in informing citizens of what is being done (often illegally) in their name. This free flow of information is vital in a democracy.
Well, no government likes a clued-up and critical citizenry, nor does it like to have transparency and accountability imposed on it. Which led to the report in question.
As I have written before ad nauseam, whistleblowers provide an essential function to the healthy working of a democracy. The simplistic approach would be to say that if governments, spies and big corporations obeyed the law, there would be no need for whistleblowers. However, back in the real, post‑9/11 world, with its endless, nebulous “war on terror”, illegal wars, torture, extraordinary rendition and Big Brother surveillance, we have never had greater need of them.
Rather than ensuring the highest standards of legality and probity in public life, it is far simpler for the powers that be to demonise the whistleblower — a figure who is now (according to the Executive Summary of the report) apparently seen as the “insider threat”. We are looking at a nascent McCarthyism here. It echoes the increasing use by our governments of the term “domestic extremists” when they are talking about activists and protesters.
There are laws to protect whistleblowers in most areas of work now. In the UK we have the Public Interest Disclosure Act (1998). However, government, military, and especially intelligence professionals are denied this protection, despite the fact that they are most often the very people to witness the most heinous state abuses, crimes and corruption. If they try to do something about this, they are also the people most likely to be prosecuted and persecuted for following their consciences, as I described in a talk at the CCC in Berlin a couple of years ago.
Ideally, such whistleblowers need a protected legal channel through which to report crimes, with the confidence that these will be properly investigated and the perpetrators held to account. Failing that, sites like Wikileaks offer an invaluable resource. As I said last summer at the Hacking at Random festival in NL, when I had the pleasure of sharing a stage with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, I just wish that the organisation had existed a decade earlier to help with my own whistleblowing exploits.
The Official Secrets Act (1989) in the UK, is drafted to stifle whistleblowers rather than protect real secrets. Such laws are routinely used to cover up the mistakes, embarrassment and crimes of spies and governments, rather than to protect national security. After all, even the spooks acknowledge that there are only three categories of intelligence that absolutely require protection: sensitive operational techniques, agent identities and ongoing operations.
This US counter-intelligence report is already 2 years old, and its strategy for discrediting Wikileaks (by exposing one of their sources pour encourager les autres) has, to date, manifestly failed. Credit is due to the Wikileaks team in out-thinking and technologically outpacing the intelligence community, and is a ringing endorsement for the whole open source philosophy.
I’ve said this before, and I shall say it again: as our countries evolve ever more into surveillance societies, with big brother databases, CCTV, biometric data, police drones, voting computers et al, geeks may be our best (and last?) defence against emerging Big Brother states.
The Xmas Day “Al Qaeda” terror attack on a transatlantic flight bound for Detroit is an interesting one. Awful for those on the flight, of course, and my heart goes out to them for the fear they must have experienced.
But which are the governments most staunch in their prosecution of the war on terror? Let’s call them the “Axis of Good”.….
The USA, the UK, and the Netherlands.
So it must be just nuts to them that the immediately identifiable Al Qaeda terrorist is reported to be a Nigerian-born UK engineering student who is flying via Schiphol airport in NL to the USA. Even better, he acquired his “bomb” in Yemen — interestingly, a country that is under increasing assault by the US military at the moment.
This ticks a number of useful national security boxes, reminding us what a threat our nations face.
The alleged terrorist is reported to have been on the watch list of the US security apparatus, but not on the “no fly” list — which is unverifiable anyway, but reportedly contains the names of over a million people. So yet another break-down in this unwieldy security system.
We already have a situation where all citizens of the US, UK and NL are effectively treated like criminals every time they take a plane, as well as everyone else attempting to fly into these countries. However, this incident has demonstrated that the security around flying is not just a slow irritant — a “Big Brother Lite” with its stupid restrictions around liquids, maquillage, shoes, belts and laptops — it has been dramatically shown not to work.
Identifying potential terrorists is like looking for a needle in a haystack. This has become an establishment cliché these days: the terrorists have to be lucky only once, and the security services have to be constantly lucky to stop an attack. The odds are acknowledged to be impossible.
What used to be agreed within British and other European spook circles is the view that the best intelligence comes from tricky-to-run human sources. They may have their flaws, but they can occasionally provide precise and lifesaving intelligence. The US approach has long been diametrically opposed to this approach — instead they sit back and hoover up every scrap of information via data mining and hope to sieve something out of it. They then tend to respond with whizz-bang, hands-off gadgetry, much like a deadly video game.
So, that said, let’s make two guesses how this new attack will be interpreted and used by our governments and security forces:
1) They admit that they need to reassess their approach to the “war on terror”.
2) Focus on ever more draconian data mining measures at the point of travel — whether they work or not, whether they slide us ever nearer a police-state or not — until we are effectively prisoners in our own countries.
A difficult prediction for 2010.
The final annoyance will, at least from a personal perspective, be that they now ban the carrying of powders as well as liquids on board a flight. If they stop me travelling with my Max Factor, that’s it. Trains only in the future.
Happy New Year!