The 5 Eyes SIGINT Agencies And Their Desire to ‘Own’ The Internet

Jamie Bartlett

February 14, 2015

You can’t control the internet. GCHQ needs to grow up and accept it

The endless debate on security versus online privacy feels a little bit stuck of late. On one side, civil liberties groups demanding more privacy for the many and more transparency from the few.” On the other: securocrats and law-enforcement spokesmen insisting they need to monitor more of our internet behaviour to keep us safe. “It’s Orwellian, this internet spying!” shout the civil libertarians “But terrorists, and paedophiles!” shout the security people. And nothing is resolved.

More than ever, we will need a strong and capable intelligence agency to keep our society safe. But it has to rest on the support and trust of the public it serves. So something has to change, because the job of protecting society is about to get a lot harder.

Yes, it’s the Snowden effect. His revelations have stirred a citizen-led counter-surveillance movement which is going to change the net and how it’s monitored. Over the last couple of years, concerns about internet privacy have been increasing, and not only in relation to governments (people are just as worried about private companies snaffling up their data).

Big tech companies have responded to the Snowden leaks by adding extra layers of encryption to their systems, making it harder for the spooks to spy on them. Anonymous browsers like Tor, which allow you to browse the internet without giving away your location, are growing in popularity, with 2.5 million daily users at the last count. These are also used to access the ’hidden services’ - an encrypted network of sites using a non-standard internet protocol which makes it close to impossible for their users to be tracked.

Even more dramatic, hundreds of computers cientists and internet specialists, motivated by an honourable desire to protect online freedom and privacy, are beavering away at ingenious methods for keeping online secrets and fighting against centralised control. Soon there will be a new generation of easy-to-use encryption services. Within a decade or so you won’t need to be a computer specialist to figure out how they work; we’ll all be using them. As I argued here last month, the net will become more private and also more difficult to censor.

All this augurs well for freedom and privacy. But the sad truth is that serious criminals as well as journalists and whistleblowers will be among the earliest adopters. We’ve seen how adept Isil are at using technology, while a recent study from the University of Portsmouth found that child pornography sites accounted for nearly 83 per cent of traffic in the ‘dark web’. That data is disputed: the porn sites themselves only account for 2 per cent of the 45,000 sites available through Tor, and “traffic” also refers not only to individuals but to automated ‘bots’, DDOS attacks, and law enforcement officers who monitor the sites. Still, it is a very large proportion of activity - and, post-Snowden, it’s going to get worse.

This, and not because he hates freedom, is why David Cameron made his recent, slightly ill-judged suggestion of banning encryption. This is what our intelligence agencies have to deal with. Yet in a strange quirk of British manners, nobody ever seems to have a good word to say about them, despite their remarkable record. It is as if they, not bigoted murderous fundamentalists or powerful autocratic governments, are the real threat to liberty.

In fact, it’s almost tragic. We demand a perfect security which is getting ever harder to achieve. Civil liberties groups, for very honourable reasons, create technology for the good guys, and it gets abused by the bad guys. When our security services don’t succeed (and they can’t all the time), we consider them useless, because we imagine them to be monitoring everything. But if they do succeed, they are “Orwellian,” if we even see or hear what they’re doing. My owrry is that if we carry on as we are, we’ll end up with intelligence agencies which are seen as both omnipresent and incompetent - which lack broad public support, but also cannot do their jobs. This is the precise opposite of what we want.

So what’s the answer? It’s not easy. In my new e-book, Orwell versus the Terrorists, I make three suggestions about the future of surveillance. First, we need more James Bonds and fewer Edward Snowdens. That means a return to more ‘old-fashioned’ intelligence work - te stuff of the movies. They should ditch some of the bulk data collection -dragnet programmes like Tempora and Prism - in favour of more targeted and ‘human’ intelligence.

Second, we need to transform how we oversee spy work. Spying is by definition secretive, but we rightly want to know that these dangerous powers are used proportionately and within strictly defined legal limits. I don’t want there to be online places which are beyond the reach of the law, but I also don’t want that reach misused and abused. As it stands, the oversight and scrutiny systems are typically staffed by people drawn from the same establishment they are supposed to oversee. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a former Secretary of State for Defence, is the chair of Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC). I’m not denigrating their work, but they are hardly a reflection of society. We need to bring more ordinary people into the scrutiny apparatus, to make it more like the jury system (naturally with all the vetting that this would require).

Finally, we need to worry less about censoring online content - such as the pointless and unwinnable whack-a-mole war against ISIS - or chasing uncomfortable propaganda around the net. Instead we must focus our limited resources on actual murders and actual attacks. That also means striking up new alliances with groups like Anonymous – who showed this week they can be a vital ally in beating Isil online.

In the end - and maybe this is the biggest change of all - we all have to accept that perfect safety is illusory. Doing so would make society will be a little more open, a little more liberal, a little more scary, and perhaps a little more dangerous. But I think any democracy worthy of the name can live with that, because it’s the price of freedom.