How unsurprising:
At a Center for Strategic & International Studies talk today, CIA Director John Brennan renewed one of the government’s favorite lies about spying: that mass surveillance has been successful in stopping a bunch of mysterious threats while it is simultaneously too ineffective to stop real attacks, because of privacy advocates and whistleblowers.
Meanwhile, in the UK, Cameron is using the Paris attacks to further his totalitarian agenda of mass state surveillance in the UK:
Some politicians in the UK are calling for the government to hurry new surveillance laws into power following deadly terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday. Lord Carlile, a former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said that the Investigatory Powers Bill – which was unveiled in draft form two weeks ago – should be “expedited” and put into action “as soon as possible,” rather than by the end of 2016.
The UK prime minister David Cameron expressed similar concerns on BBC radio this morning, saying that the government should “look at the timetable” of the legislation. He also announced that the UK would hire 1,900 new security and intelligence staff at MI5, MI6, and GCHQ (an increase of 15 percent) in order to “respond to the increasing international terrorist threat.” Cameron added that the attacks in France, which killed 129 people and wounded more than 300, “could happen here.”
France already has these draconian mass surveillance laws. Sadly, they didn’t prevent the attack.
FTFY:
Surveillance is not really meant to prevent attacks by fanatics. It is designed to collect evidence to capture and convict perpetrators after the event. It does that extremely well.
So the lowered chance of getting away with your crimes should discourage criminals from committing those crimes, right? I’m afraid that doesn’t work so well if the criminal isn’t intending to flee afterwards.
Edited 2015-11-17 12:54 UTC
Every suicide bomber requires a network of dozens (or even hundreds) of supporters. Those connections are always exposed after an attack.
Merely making inflammatory comments about the danger of government surveillance powers is easy but this a very complex and difficult topic with no really clear cut right and wrong positions.
If you think of government surveillance powers as a sort of slider then its almost certainly true the more you slide towards strong surveillance powers the more chance there will be of thwarting future attacks. Even total surveillance powers won’t stop all all attacks, because if these people are willing to die in order to kill random groups of people then they will probably sometimes succeed in their ambition. But its also true that the more surveillance powers the state has the more attacks will be stopped. That may be an inconvenient truth but its still true. So the calculation becomes how many extra acts of terrorism are we willing to endure in order to not live under strong state surveillance. That’s a very, very hard question.
The other aspect of this is that the terrorists want to provoke a response, they want more religious and ethnic divisions, they want more islamophobia, they want more polarisation. They hate democracy and freedom so if they can provoke the state into weakening democracy and human rights that’s a victory for them. If we can endure their terrorism, and thwart a lot of their attacks, whilst retaining a strong democratic and human rights system then thats a victory for us.
Where to draw the line is damn hard. I think the investigative and security apparatus needs more resources, more people, bigger budgets. I don’t see anything wrong with that given the that our enemies have such limitless and awful ambitions. I am not convinced that we need extensive new legal powers, or significantly reduced legal protections for our rights, or much more surveillance (am open to persuasion on those things – just not convinced right now).
Mostly I would like to see a focus on improving the quality of the security and intelligence systems, I suspect those systems probably have about enough data and the real choke point is being able to sort, sift and analyse that data in a way that leads to practical intelligence results that increases the possibility of detecting plots before attacks.
I am very, very glad I don’t have any responsibility for trying to stop attacks, because the weight of responsibility and the fear of making a mistake must be awful.
I remember leftist terrorism in the 1970s, I was part of the radical political movement from which it grew. That leftist terrorism took a couple of decades to peter out in Europe. In the end there was not a lot the state or society could do to stop leftist terrorism back then, it just had to run its course. I think that’s probably the same depressing situation with Islamist terror, we will probably just have to endure it, and maybe endure it for decades, until it has run its course and it peters out. What a sad prospect.
Edited 2015-11-17 00:37 UTC
If that is true, and I’m inclined to agree, then it answers the question of “does it work” with an emphatic no.
The fact that people are reacting with more surveillance means the terrorists are succeeding. People keep confusing terrorism with war. It’s not the body count – it’s the reactions. Terrorists will always lose the body count, but they will win in changing society.
The problem is that it is not a yes or no answer, I think that’s the point the original poster was trying to make. The answer is more along the lines of (just an example): We’re 20% effective using current capabilities. If we were to increase our capabilities by 50%, we would be 30% effective.
And there lies the problem, 20% is not nothing, so they are efficient to a certain degree and increasing current capabilities would also increase effectiveness. So question now becomes, are the increased capabilities, including their inherit drawbacks, acceptable?
Just to give you an example, all US Navy ships are equipped with a CIWS (close-in weapon system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-in_weapon_system), however, these weapons are only 5% effective. The reason the Navy still chose to equip ships with them, despite such low effectiveness, is because 5% is not nothing and when you’re talking about a $500M dollar ship, the additional $100k for the weapon is cheap insurance.
Exactly. If there were no surveillance at all (nobody being watched, or followed, no phones being tapped, no rooms bugged, no emails intercepted, no search histories being recorded) I am fairly sure that there would be more terrorist attacks, probably a lot more. Terrorist plots are being thwarted all the time, plotters arrested, convicted and imprisoned, and surveillance plays an important part in thwarting those attacks.
On the other hand even draconian surveillance that seriously damaged our privacy and human rights would probably not stop all terrorist attacks.
So the really, really tricky question is where to draw the line. Particularly as we are faced with a terrorist enemy with almost limitless ambitions to murder innocent and random groups of people. If ISIS could murder 10,000 people in London, Paris, Madrid or Berlin tomorrow they would.
Social engineering is responsible for those thwarted attempts. Surveillance, in the sense of unwarranted snooping, had nothing to do with them.
Social engineering works. It works for phishermen and Nigerian princes.
You don’t know that. In several recent cases in the UK where very significant terrorist plots were thwarted and the plotters arrested, actions which saved hundreds if not thousands of lives, the entire panoply of surveillance was deployed. This included following people, photographing them, tapping phones, hacking and reading email account, audio bugs, etc, etc.
For every actual plot revealed and thwarted by such intense surveillance, there are countless examples of lighter surveillance used to identify people and groups that deserve greater attention.
The idea that terrorist conspiracies, which at their beginnings may be indistinguishable from countless episodes of boasting and bravado, can be safely dealt with without surveillance is childish and silly. The issue is not whether surveillance of some sort of some people is necessary, the question is how much surveillance and of how many people.
Should, for example, the security services be able to scan all emails for certain words or cluster of words, in order to narrow down the list of people they should be looking at a bit more closely? I don’t know but the idea does not seem outrageous in principle and I would personally be willing to consider it possibly legitimate.
The idea is outrageous in principle and practice. No AI right now is good enough to do this. Not even Watson. Watson still needs to be trained with curated data.
It’s like bomb detectors and sniffer dogs. To the naive it may seem sound, but evidence show they don’t actually work.
This is like dowsing. Combing through data and only focusing on the matches that already confirms what they thought with other investigative work.
Tony Swash,
IMHO the ethical line is pretty simple, limit surveillance to targeted suspects. Someone who’s not suspected of anything should not have their privacy invaded as a matter of policy.
Mind you, my opinion is based on more than just protecting civil rights. It’s also because mass surveillance won’t stop determined criminals. Crypto can not be stopped. Even if the governments went to the hypothetical extreme of 100% surveillance and banning crypto everywhere, then monitoring all public networks for compliance… even then after having eroded all our privacy, the determined criminals will just compensate by exploiting stenography, which has worked for millennia.
http://www.wired.com/2010/06/alleged-spies-hid-secret-messages-on-p…
It’s an arms race that cannot be won. The breaches on public privacy are all for nothing if mass surveillance can’t catch our most dangerous criminals, and it won’t.
Edited 2015-11-17 16:51 UTC
I am actually completely schizophrenic about all this stuff. On the one hand I support Apple’s instance on keeping unbreakable (or as near to unbreakable as is practically possible) encryption on their device. And on the other hand I really don’t want anyone to get murdered by these ridiculous vicious fools.
I just think its too easy to take a ‘principled’ stand against this surveillance power or that one whilst not actually carrying the horrifying burden of actually being responsible for stopping attacks and catching the perpetuators before they succeed in carrying out mass murder.
I fear there are no good choices.
Tony Swash,
Regardless of if we want to be for surveillance powers or not, we have to acknowledge that we can’t stop criminals from using strong cryptography – I doubt it matters much to them whether apple’s a part of that or not.
Nice example and all, but it is missing the negative impact to be even somewhat comparable.
I doubt the US Navy would install that system if it were constantly firing at anything, damaging other ships in the fleet.
What you are comparing to is doing legal and targetted surveillance with slightly better equipment than before.
Maybe there are examples that would carry aspects of mass surveillance or illegal surveillance, but that’s not one of them
Actually, there are multiple examples of where the CIWS did exactly that, causing sizable damage. Check Wikipedia for a few: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS#Incidents
Like any other weapon, it can also cause damage to your own side.
Edited 2015-11-17 12:43 UTC
Indeed, how to cope with dissatisfaction and violence is really hard and there is no easy methods to handle the urging and terrible situation we have right now.
Worst, we have been mishandling the whole issue for a very long period of time (perhaps since the beginning of human societies), usually presenting the state of things as <quote>“They hate democracy and freedom ..”</quote>. I don’t thing that those are the central questions, they are more like “I know I’m right”, “The possible only way is my way” and “My prejudices are greatly a result of someone else faults”.
The only effective way to counter those reinforcing vicious ways of thinking is to promote debate, to expose the flaws of hate preachers.
We had great success (not absolute) doing this on XIX and XX centuries when debating science vs religion, why not use the same methods now? Some preacher incites violence? Make a debate between him and moderates about the topic and broadcast the thing to the max. It will, possibly, spread doubt and invite people to think a little bit more.
Radicalization of instances is not working now and really never did.
I think that it is perfectly right to say that radical Islamists hate democracy and freedom because that’s what they themselves say and it is supported by their actions. Having debates are great but if you are confronted by people who not only do not want to debate but actively seek to kill you then something more than debate is required in response. Many of those young men lost in the radical Islamist delirium may never recover their senses and and many are immune to argument, challenge or debate.
It is precisely the fact that in western countries Islam is evolving tentatively into a tolerant private sort of religion that can live happily alongside many faiths and cultures, all within a tolerant, democratic and secular political, and legal, framework that is the very thing the Islamists fear and hate.
I recommend a book called Terror and Liberalism” by Paul Berman which very clearly and succinctly explains what Islamism is, where it came from (its a modern political movement founded in the 1920s) and what implications that has for liberal society. Berman is a 1960s Berkeley radical so he is no knee jerk reactionary but he (correctly) views Islamism as an implacable enemy of everything progressive, a political movement that must be defeated. That defeat will be primarily political and cultural and will take a long time. and in the meantime it will be necessary to have a military and security response.
Another great book is Giles Kepel’s “The War for the Muslim Minds: Islam and the West”
I will look at references you provided with a open mind but I have a suspect that things are not going to change that much.
My views about the whole conflict extend not to 1920 but way before that and the fact that a lot of people offset their prejudices to someone else faults. You see it everywhere: religion, racism, economics, discrimination, you name it.
Young minds are convoluted and prone, or an easy prey, to radicalism and the only way I know to fix this is by debate, exposition, questioning. We need to plant the doubt, to demolish the certainty. For that we need some real luminaries handling it, like was done in past. And I am sure there are some out there.
Also, I have a huge distaste for concentration of power. It never served well society on past and was the main motor behind all deplorable experiences human societies had. Every thing that can be explored by power mongers end been used.
Also, I am not saying that nothing should be done, we are at a point where we can not have this luxury, but branding maces and screaming for vengeance is not the proper response, nor is empowering even more the groups that can abuse their power.
“I think that it is perfectly right to say that radical Islamists hate democracy and freedom because that’s what they themselves say and it is supported by their actions.â€
Actually it’s far more simple than that, they hate anything that doesn’t give them total allegiance (and obedience) . The attacks on mosques by Daesh in Saudi Arabia last month were not an attack on freedom or democracy. Same goes for all their attacks in Iraq and Syria.
Edited 2015-11-18 12:37 UTC
As sad as it is, current lawmaking are more reactionary than preventive. There was a lot of people suspected to be linked to terrorism, and imprisoning them would be seen as an abuse of power from the police, which already have a bad reputation enough for checking based on ethnicity of the suspect.
As of if it works or not, I would not be judge, as debating the police efficiency would be as pointless as judging the efficiency of education system.
I would like to say that in the case of police and intelligence service you would have to prove that the bad guys would act ( preemptively arresting them would have been seen as abuse, but in the current situation it looks like preventive measure), whereas the bad guys only need to act.
More sadly, I think the terrorist are accomplishing a more insidious goal of giving the Muslim population a bad name in the west, pushing them toward extremist as the west is becoming more prejudiced toward them. A whole religion if not a whole ethnicity would be judge on the action of a few extremists.
And unfortunately the right-wing people in France were right on that point, some of the terrorists did use the refugees inflow to get into France.
Disclaimer, I used to live quite near the place, and was mugged in the area for my phone ( ~ 10 years ago ), by french people of north African ethnicity, unfortunately they never gave me name to individualize them.
And then again, Thom how would you have felt if it would have happened in your home country ( which I never hope it would ), I remember you being quite vocal against another country ( for an incident which I still offer my sympathies for ).
fluctuat nec mergitur
The real reason for surveillance is:
a) to identify, capture and convict perpetrators after the event and;
b) act as a general deterrent for most illegal activities.
The existing system does these two things extremely well.
Edited 2015-11-17 06:45 UTC
Several of the terrorists involved had been flagged by Turkey to France and nothing was done with that information.
The fact is no amount of surveillance can prevent a determined individual or even a small group from carrying out an attack.
The root cause of Daesh’s existence was the invasion of Iraq. They thrive in chaos and war, and the powers that be seem only to happy to provide that.
I don’t get why so many people here are saying that all the info needs to be collected to catch people after the fact. After the fact suicide bombers are dead!
It also hasn’t helped to stop Salah Abdeslam, who actually got stopped and QUESTIONED by French police at the border as he fled to Belgium.
It also hasn’t helped in catching him.
The problem with collecting all that data is that it becomes increasingly hard to look at all the data and get meaningful information from it. As mentioned before the Turkish government had warned multiple times about one of them. Similar things were known about 911.
What is needed is a lot better monitoring of the highest suspects, not better monitoring of everyone
The most dangerous terrorists are those that keep a low profile The high profile ones are often nothing more than harmless loudmouths.
Edited 2015-11-17 10:31 UTC
And this mass surveillance wasn’t there during 911, yet it didn’t make it more difficult to find out what happened and who did what (source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_for_the_September_11_at…):
The FBI investigation into the attacks, codenamed operation PENTTBOM, was able to identify the 19 hijackers within days, as they made little effort to conceal their names on flight, credit card, and other records.[6] By checking flight manifests and comparing them with other information, like watch lists, customs officials were able to find the names of all 19 hijackers quickly.
Various items of evidence were found in vehicles left behind at the airports, in luggage that did not make it onto the flights, and at the crash scenes. A rental car belonging to the hijackers was found at Boston’s Logan International Airport, which contained an Arabic language flight manual and documents from Huffman Aviation in Florida. There, investigators were able to find Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi’s previous address in Hamburg, Germany.[15] Nawaf al-Hazmi’s 1988 blue Toyota Corolla was found on September 12 in Dulles International Airport’s hourly parking lot. Inside the vehicle, authorities found a letter written by Mohamed Atta, maps of Washington, D.C., and New York City, a cashier’s check made out to a Phoenix flight school, four drawings of a Boeing 757 cockpit, a box cutter-type knife, and a page with notes and phone numbers.[16]
I could go on and on and on about this, but the bottom line is that criminals are caught with good-old-detective work and “follow-the-money” tactics, not with mass surveillance. Of course that good-old-detective work includes following digital tracks, but for that mass surveillance isn’t needed (big money transfers, travel documents, family relationships, etc are already kept)
TL:DR;
* Mass surveillance doesn’t help in preventing terrorism
* It isn’t needed in finding accomplishes after the fact
* It puts a huge burden on national security and law-enforcement agencies
* It makes free societies less free and more polarized
Complete and utter bullshit.
Australian authorities have already prevented three planned Paris style attacks by using mass surveillance. The instigators are currently serving prison sentences.
^^Interesting, but …. citation needed!
I tried searching for those cases but couldn’t find out any information like that. The best I could come up with was some information about the “Five Eyes” and this source: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/01/29/cse-levitation-mass-surveil… that doesn’t say anything about “Paris style attacks” and “prison sentences”.
(my search was https://www.google.nl/search?q=australia+prevented+terrorist+attack+…)
When I searched for https://www.google.nl/search?q=australia+prevented+terrorist+attack
I did find 2 other very interesting resources, but they don’t state anything about “prevented because of mass-surveillance or bulk-data collection”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Australia
http://www.nationalsecurity.gov.au/Securityandyourcommunity/Pages/F…
…and after some more searching I found several articles like this one: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/anzac-day-terro…. Basically the guy posted a lot of weird stuff on FaceBook/Instagram, got reported, police got notified, investigated, and found lots of evidence on the scene. No mass surveillance, just good-old-fashioned detective work
reminds me of the bugs in Starship Troopers, and part of the Middle East seem like the bug-infested planet in that movie. Whether ISIS’ pre-text is believing that the world should revert to the ‘glory’ of the 7th century, ignoring 1000+ years of Islamic history, really doesn’t matter any more than the intolerance and random brutality of their actions.
Their existence on the planet is incompatible with the rest of us, so governments will do whatever it takes to act and react to attempt to protect their citizens……not to mention that we can expect an increasing number of citizens (in the USA at least) to not leave home without packing their weapon of choice….the new normal, sadly.
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
“Don’t let a politician or a law enforcement official with an agenda make [up your mind] for you. Most of all, don’t allow someone who capitalizes on tragedy a mere hours after the first blood is spilled — an act so crass it disqualifies any argument such a person makes — to influence your thinking.”
– https://bobsullivan.net/cybercrime/anti-encryption-opportunists-seiz…