More Flim-Flam From Security State

On Friday (10th July 2009) it was announced by the British Home Office that the law against sedition would be repealed. What? Is this real? How have we come from a situation in the 1970’s where the security services we’re ‘bugging and burgling across London’ in order to control political subversion to a point where in 2009 the State is struggling to maintain the illusion of centralised control against terrorism (and non-violent challenges to the State) and needs more than ever to fight political subversion. What is going on?

In yesterday’s Guardian (11th July 2009) several former MI5 bosses were quoted as having been against the use of the intelligence services for protection of the state against left-wing political and industrial ’subversion’ during the ’70s and ’80s. Really?

Since the security services have always aimed to gain Total Information Awareness (TIA) for the benefit of the state why would they say the opposite. Why would the law against sedition be removed at the same time as this article about three heads of MI5 and their opposition to targetting political subversion.

The Long Emergency ahead presents the State with a very clear need for TIA and an understanding of subversion to the current structure of the state I simply don’t believe that security services have changed their spots. These announcements have all the hallmarks of disinformation covering a stepping up in surveillance and target profile analysis processes.

Main Core: This is Happening Everywhere

The abuse of social network analysis and artificial intelligence for predicting and tracking the behaviour of citizens who challenge the state. This is the stuff of Minority Report but it is happening in the US and UK and probably in other industrialised countries too.

Main Core is a fascists dream come true. Hitler’s use of IBM pales into insignificance compared with the power of these informational systems to classify people’s behaviour and pull them out of the crowd as ’suspect’ and ‘unpatriotic’.

These systems seem to be designed to control elements of the population during times of trouble, based on prejudice, based on political affiliation, based on pure fascism. In the troubled times ahead it will be just those people who try to self-organise communities out of the trouble who will be targeted by states who simply do not want the population to reorganise and find solutions that are non-centrist, non-statist, non-national. The state wants to protect itself from the fragmentation that will be necessary in a post peak oil, post industrialised era.

And there is no guarantee that these systems are not being used now for undemocratic political reasons.

… a number of former government employees and intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic surveillance operations claim the program that caused the flap between Comey and the White House was related to a database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the program say that the government’s data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, “There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

…

Another well-informed source—a former military operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence community—says this particular program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets’ behavior and tracks their circle of associations with “social network analysis” and artificial intelligence modeling tools.

See the Democracy Now article on this issue here

Building Big Brother

This is what we have been trying to explain to the public over the past decade: The US and British governments, and perhaps many others, are in the process of building an artificial intelligence system that will be able to predict our behaviour:

The NSA is “developing an artificial intelligence system designed to know what people are thinking.”

There is no basis in any of our constitutions for the State to have such a power over its own people. The spirit of the law is that in Western democracies we are supposed to be free. Our elected assemblies are the place where the public and the private are supposed to interface in a way which governs society.

Intelligence agencies have more than enough tools to do their job of protecting the process of democracy from subversion and threats such as terrorism. However, if they feel that such activities are getting out of hand then the correct recourse is to provide this information to government so that the causes can be debated in the elected assembly and an appropriate course of action can then be taken.

That appropriate course of action would most probably be to engage with and solve the social problems and minority concerns which give rise to subversion and terrorism. The wrong course of action – if you read many of my blog entries – is to fight against threats to democracy.

If we fight subversion and terrorism, particulalrly by trying to subvert it by using the intelligence and security services we are simply ignoring the real problem which will then keep coming back to bite us. Many more will flock to the side of those who have real grievances and injustices if the State simply clamps down on what many believe to be legitimate resistance in defence of their human, economic and environmental rights.

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UK Police Admit Database of Political Activists

We’ve all known that this was coming but little did we know that it would be admitted publicly. When the Police monitor political activities we really do have a Police State.

There appears to be no independent oversight of this database and the uses it is being put to. Are those on it fully representative of the political spectrum – or only from certain sections of society? If there is a bias then we have a problem of the Police interfering with some political activities and not others. That is a Police State. How this will pan out when the Government forces the ID card scheme on us is a question that fills me with trepidation.

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Big Brother Coming to UK Soon

The UK ID card scheme is heading our way. Now, the next phase, discussed separately but a part of the same design for organs of the State to evolve into Big Brother, is being discussed in Parliament

Let’s talk about these two apparently loosely related components for what they really are. The databases of identity and communications are deeply interrelated from a Government perspective.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are now capable of fishing in this data pool and cross-referencing the most innocuous of details and then pulling you into a Police cell because your behaviour is suspect Winston Smith.

The film Minority Report is now barely science fiction due to the increasingly predictive capabilities of artificial intelligence and the ongoing development of computers on which it runs.

AI is fuzzy and error prone like the human brain, but nevertheless powerful in predicting behaviours in complex systems (society) in the same way that you get a hunch, an intuitive feeling that a person you are talking with is lying.

The State loves this kind of tool, it tells them which individuals to trust and which individuals to intern. Hitler’s IBM supplied card indexing system of the German population was such a tool but stone age in comparison with our information age technology.

Do you visit an ‘alternative’ bookstore or support Greenpeace, and go to demos? Watch your back. I predict this.

Surveillance Society – Final Warning

“The false security of a surveillance society threatens to turn our country into a place where individuals are constantly susceptible to being trapped by data errors or misinterpretations, illegal use of information by rogue government workers, abuses by political leaders – or perhaps most insidiously, expanded legal uses of information for all kinds of new purposes. It threatens to worsen the imbalance of power between the weak and the strong, and the government and the people, and have an enormous chilling effect on our open society where citizens have always lived secure in the knowledge that the government will leave them alone if they’re not involved in wrongdoing.” – ACLU: Even Bigger, Even Weaker report 2007.

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Social Network Analysis and Thought Crime

If you think that the ‘war on terror’ couldn’t get any worse then think again. The rise in the use of social network analysis will soon permit governments to predict everything about your behaviour. Social network analysis (combined with neural network artificial intelligence) is basically self-organising principles turned into a tool of the state. This means that the war on terror (i.e., the war on all dissent) will enable the state to control your every move.

The way it works is complex but in simple terms looks like this: Mining data about people’s habits and associations in the form of telecommunications data, financial transaction data, and demographics (among many other categories) allows a government to predict through Social Network Analysis (SNA) the behaviour of individuals which threaten it through terrorism or other subversion of state power. This technique is much more likely to be used against activists and dissenters because the state knows that these people are the real threat against it.

If that doesn’t sound alarming enough then the following example ought to get your attention: A self-organising cell-like network of activists are planning a campaign. Security services obtain the telephone call records for one of the members of the group due to earlier analysis of members of another group. These show connections with 100 others who are also politically affiliated with various causes. A few happen to be extremists and a potential conspiracy is asserted. A court is persuaded to serve a warrant to obtain other records. The agents then put the financial transactions and all other information held in official records, such as arrests at protests, into the analysis. From the aggregation of the most innocuous details (e.g. grocery bill this week combined with a visit to the library) SNA and AI makes an inference that this person’s behaviour is similar to that of known terrorists. Hence, an individual’s intentions can be predicted long before the person engages in any identifiable criminal act. This is a powerful tool against true terrorism – but it is also a powerful tool of state repression. Total Information Awareness can therefore be achieved in a way that not only supports defence applications but which also makes Big Brother a reality. When the state begins to argue for checking up on otherwise innocent people (clean skins) because their ‘profile is suspect’ in some way such as ‘indicates a strong propensity towards criminality’, then Big Brother will have come of age. This stuff is still in its infancy and it needs to be stopped now before we all become prisoners of the state.

However, things may already be worse than they seem. Using SNA and AI it is possible that security services have already uncovered otherwise highly private groups of activists and dissenters and inserted themselves into those organisations at key nodes. Thus it is entirely possible that dissenting movements are already being controlled and emasculated by governments.

In other words state control may have already started and in time it could become absolute; Total Information Awareness is a distinct likelihood. Thought crime could be predicted and corrected without the subject even knowing about it. If you are an activist or campaigner working against the state and the corporations that support it then you need to consider getting yourself off the records as much as possible – although, due to the insidious power of social network analysis you will never be entirely out of their gaze: They will know that there is someone with certain characteristics at certain locations and will focus resources on finding out who they are and what their intentions are. In time these processes will become very cheap so that the state will find it irresistible to use them ubiquitously. However, there are things you can do:

Use cash for any transactions related to your activism – travel costs and subsistence. Although even transactions not related to activism will have some predictive power. However, the fact that you withdraw cash will also provide predictive power so try to randomise your patterns. Better still work entirely in cash and don’t use a bank account – although this will also ring alarm bells for them.

Have an anonymous mobile phone to use in association with your activism and only use it in towns other than your home town. TURN IT OFF before travelling home. However, as above even your home telephone will give some useful data that too can be predictive of your behaviour.

Don’t use a car – number plate recognition is now ubiquitous. Don’t use your own computer – use an internet cafe (vary the location) and use a different alias and password for every site that you use or they’ll soon build up a picture of you as a person of interest.

Campaign against identity cards. Get off the electoral roll if you are on it. Don’t engage with the government – e.g. social security, health, etc etc. In other words, disconnect from the system as much as possible. All that data is very useful in predicting your behaviour and correcting it Winston Smith.

Political dissent is now a risky business

Several German academics have been held for suspect terrorism because they have used the same theory and texts as a banned organisation. The academics advised community groups and probably used the same theories as the terrorist organisation. That is not a conspiracy.

The concept of inchoate conspiracy, which was said to exist when two groups appear to agree on a course of action without having made any explicit communication or agreement, was rejected by the British Courts in the Green Anarchist case several years ago. Furthermore, an inchoate conspiracy is logically invalid. To conspire to carry out an act requires that communication occurs in both directions otherwise the ‘con’ part of conspire does not exist. Two parties may be seeking the same aim separately in different ways while using the same theories as each other and this is a long way from an inchoate conspiracy.

In this German case the fact that the group are academics who probably have well-founded empirical theory behind their work means that the government has a problem when it comes to the legitimacy of the terrorists’ campaign. That is the same problem that the British Government had with Green Anarchist which made comments about animal rights extremists alongside journalism which covered radical but valid theories and associated personalities and issues that are often associated with or related to animal rights. This could be why the academics are being held when normally academics are considered to be purely playing with theory.

Open letter to the Generalbundesanwaltschaft against the criminalization of critical academic research and political engagement.

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Minority Report 2

In an earlier post I pointed out the intention of UK government and Police to hold identity data on citizens. The Independent now reports the same concern that the Police DNA database ‘risks criminalising non-offenders’.

Why are Western governments becoming ever more authoritarian with the use of ID cards and controls on people’s freedoms and anonymities rather than solving the real problems that underlie our social ills? Is it because they sense that the epoch of Authority is drawing to a close and the only way the State can continue in existing form is by attempting to exert more control over an increasingly self-organising and fluid society?

Minority Report

The recent Home Office consultation document on ‘modernising policing’ (i.e., even more police powers) includes the statement that:

“The absence of the ability to take fingerprints etc in relation to all offences may be considered to undermine the value and purpose of having the ability to confirm or disprove identification and, importantly, to make checks on a searchable database aimed at detecting existing and future offending” (my italics)

The ‘absence of the ability to take fingerprints etc in relation to all offences’ clause shows that the Home Office knows full well what they are pushing for: to be able to treat everyone as a criminal. ‘In relation to all offences’ actually means the ability to take fingerprints, DNA, etc from anyone they come into contact with in relation to a suspected crime, whether arrested or not let alone charged with an offense.

Blair also intends to completely remove the double jeopardy rule despite the increase in miscarriages of justice and acquitals of guilty people that it will cause, in order to allow the police to pursue anyone for the rest of their life if they believe that person is guilty of a crime. The police however, are fallible as are the courts. We need the double jeopardy rule to prevent people from being persecuted because the police will use these new powers for that purpose if given half a chance. The persecution of one of their own officers Ali Dizaei, clearly shows that.

Blair also wants to vet all children for potential criminality. What is that going to do to the minds of future generations if they are all treated as criminals? Are we eventually going to put them on probation or lock them up if they seem dodgy – the door will be open for that if these proposals are accepted by parliament. If you have seen the film Minority Report you will probably be as worried as I am about this Orwellian prophecy coming true. Don’t forget that in the UK we have no constitution and no bill of rights, such that the state has far too much power over us already. If these proposals go through we will have permitted a police state and will have surrendered our hard won freedoms forever. The behaviour of ‘our’ Prime Minister, from his persitence in prosecuting a war on Iraq to increases in already excessive UK state powers leads me to suspect ulterior motives. It’s about time we got rid of him before he does any more damage.