The civilized response to Charlie Hebdo attacks: more surveillance

boing
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Even more astonishingly, they did have several ideas, and still failed. French intelligence had old knowledge of these lunatics while they were in France, US intelligence had fresh knowledge while they were in the Middle East. Alas, they both thought it was each other’s job, so neither managed to make a solid connection… France is not in Five Eyes, so the process of talking to US counterparts was probably too formal to repeat periodically.

So yeah, they don’t need any new power, they just need to suck it up and talk to each other a bit more.

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What if, just maybe, rather than hide all our capabilities and information, we openly discuss it? Like, totally wide open that we decoded messages about operations and targets, that we know where they are, and what they’re doing? Let the intelligence agencies of each country just openly share with each other and strategize? Yea, they’d be some short-term losses, but lets have a thought-experiment, what’s the long-term consequences of this?

Would we, as a human race sharing this same earth, be better off?

Would there be better/unbreakable encryption? Or better operational security? Or targets forced off the grid? Without falling into the trap of “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide”, since we all do have to have some privacy, what would the long-term prospects of just ditching all this intelligence agency secrecy? Would countries start to deceive each other with false intelligence? If all the cards were out on the table, then surely there’d be enough others to call bullshit on a cabal working for deception?

I dunno and I readily admit that I lack the geopolitical awareness to even begin to imagine how this would play out …

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You cannot spycraft in the open, it’s an oxymoron. Most information would make it very clear where the moles are and which channels have been tapped, and bad actors would simply monitor the information and change behaviour more often – something that technology makes way too easy already. It’s not a short-term problem, it’s a permanent problem and simply cannot work.

What “we” should have is a more honest debate about foreign policy objectives in the long run. It’s not a surprise that France is being targeted: with UK/US, it’s the country that most actively and openly laboured to unsettle African and Middle-Eastern equilibria in the last 5 years. A lot of what went down in Libya and Syria was their doing, they intervened directly in Mali and so on. If you stir shit, you should expect to get dirty. Them now turning around saying “we don’t have enough resources” or “we don’t know how to cooperate” is just poor: they should have thought about that before they turned two countries (on their doorstep!) into permanent training facilities for lunatics with a martyr complex… just so that a few energy companies could win extra contracts. Enough with power agendas already, folks; they have enough problems getting along as it is, in that part of the world. This is what we should talk about. The rest (clash of civilisations etc) is just theatre to justify even more ham-fisted actions.

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I’m fond of the idea; but have never reached an internally satisfactory solution to the fact that surveillance is just the first step in the exercise of power.

Sometimes(when the target may not have a well developed conscience; but still has a sense of shame, or at least a bunch of supporters who only support their public persona, rather than them, Right Or Wrong!) it is all you need.

Other times, not so much. A good surveillance apparatus draws much of its punch from the fact that, even if application of the power is relatively rare and somewhat idiosyncratic, your nagging fear that the results of the surveillance can, and may, be used to crush you is only just unreasonable enough that it makes you sound paranoid, but not unreasonable enough that it doesn’t reflect reality.

Sousveillance has a problem in this area. It certainly beats nothing at all (since it’s not as though, say, the assorted on-camera police kills would have received more justice had they been reported as ‘resisted arrest, our brave troops did what they had to do to ensure public safety’); but sometimes not by much.

Pure information only works in the narrow spectrum of wrongdoing where the malefactor must resort to subterfuge because he lacks the power to make legal, or the support to make legality irrelevant, his crimes. Against harder targets, it is a necessary first step(precisely as surveillance is a necessary first step to the exercise of coercive force); but it is deeply insufficient.

I wish I could be more optimistic; but, barring a substantial restructuring of what counts a ‘representative government’, or a potentially messy in risk-tolerance that sees routine violence against spooks and friends (I think that this would be a very bad plan and do not endorse it; but isn’t it odd how, in a country awash in guns and angry patriots who keep and bear arms to resist gummint tyranny, the risk of walking across the NSA’s gigantic open parking lot is still ~0%? Never mind the less dramatic; but also much more dispersed and necessarily less well secured, ‘fusion centers’ and assorted other surveillance apparatus. Given the sort of talk talked, and hardware available, the US is actually amazingly quiet.)

I’m open to suggestions, and I could use some good news these days; but my hopes are tempered until the gulf between ‘speaking truth to power’ and ‘turning truth to power’ is bridged.

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Yes and no: you can’t do stuff that depends explicitly on surprise, or that would go from ‘risky’ to suicidal’ (like infiltration/double agents) if exposed; but the “Yes, we have penetration of all phone systems, 100% legal, limited only by our ability to make sense of the noise, since CALEA in '94, and it’s a matter of public knowledge that we are snarfing down a (honestly, as a tech, pretty damn impressive, if displeasing) percentage of all internet traffic worldwide, including a substantial amount of the imperfectly encrypted stuff.” school of surveillance is entirely doable in the open. It may not be doable at 100% efficiency; but when team surveillance is the NSA and their TAO(and similar programs in other countries, plus private sector contractors), and team surveilled is using a mixture of commercial tools and goofy crap like ‘Muhajadeen Secrets’, it’s still somewhere between ‘fish in a barrel’ and ‘kicking a 3-legged puppy’ in terms of asymmetry.

If anything, team surveillance seems more hobbled by the sheer volume of stuff they have absolutely no problem Hoovering up; but can’t bodge into a coherent picture, than by the list of ‘high value communications we’d love to crack; but they’ve actually done everything right from end to end and we just can’t do it’.

When spying on your fellow nation states, secrecy is more important (partly because they might actually have the resources and competence to harden their systems; but often just because it’s embarrassing to be caught with your hands in the cookie jar and/or Merkel’s cell phone); but against private actors, especially ones doing something illegal enough that you can send in the jackboots at your discretion, it isn’t at all clear that secrecy is anything more than convenient.

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It’s not an oxymoron, it’s called “open-source intelligence”, aka OSINT.

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Ahh, the absolute cloaking power of the SEP field.

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The discussion was about strict spycraft, as in “decoded messages about operations and targets”, not generic intelligence you can gather from the Financial Times.

We were not talking about revealing capability, but about revealing the results of using such capability. If everyone could see that “yesterday we intercepted a message between Mr. Terrorist and Mr. SleepingCell that Jewish chocolate factories will be targeted with flamethrowers at 6PM on a Sunday morning”, the two subjects would swiftly hop the metaphorical channel and target Coptic toymakers instead.

I do agree that the intelligence problem today is not capability but rather data-mining, connecting the right dots in the sea of information getting constantly hoovered up. These people were so dumb that they were routinely intercepted on the damn phone, they appeared on all the most pointless lists, they were well known and well tracked, but somehow nobody figured out that they were going to flip, or nobody bothered to look too closely because there are thousands of nutters to track every single day. Hoovering even more data will just make spooks even more overworked and make it even easier for these lunatics to hide right in the open. What “good” intelligence actors need, is better internal management of existing resources, more data sharing and analysis, and a more honest mission stating what “our” real objectives are – are we fighting certain fights for our own security, or for the security of certain rich autocrats? Could we limit ourselves to doing the bare minimum we really need, but playing it really well? “We” simply can’t cover the entire field.

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You can gather an enormous amount of intel by monitoring open channels. So I maintain OSINT falls under even “strict spycraft”, even if it is too often underestimated by the spooks themselves.

See e.g. here:
http://www.policeoracle.com/news/Investigation/2014/Apr/25/OSINT-Tips-The-power-of-the-internet_81436.html/features

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