Bombs and rockets – Page 27 – a sibilant intake of breath

GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency

Richard Aldrich’s excellent GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency contributes significantly to the public understanding of the role secret intelligence agencies have played in world affairs and the domestic politics of Britain and elsewhere. From the codebreaking of the second world war to the frightening mass surveillance and data mining of the modern era, Aldrich provides a consistently interesting and informative account. Technical details on signals intelligence (SIGINT) techniques are relatively few, but the book contains a lot of new and interesting information running quite close to the present day.

GCHQ’s history

The Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) is Britain’s version of America’s National Security Agency (NSA) or Canada’s Communication Security Establishment (CSE). They are primarily the governments interceptors and decrypters of communications: from the telemetry data from the missile tests of foreign powers to (increasingly) the electronic records tracking the communication and behaviour of all ordinary citizens. Aldrich covers the history of GCHQ from the second world war virtually up to the present day: with long sections on the U.S.-U.K. intelligence alliance; the Cold War; progressing intelligence technologies; overseas listening stations and decolonization; terrorism; secrecy, the media, and oversight by politicians and the public; the post-Cold War era; and the modern day.

Aldrich describes an extraordinary number of cases of allies spying on one another: from the United States and United Kingdom during the interwar and WWII periods to India bugging Tony Blair’s hotel room during a Prime Ministerial visit to the considerable espionage conducted by the U.S. and U.K. against the United Nations Security Council and Secretariat in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War. It is safe to assume that everybody is spying on everybody all the time. Indeed, in the later chapters, GCHQ describes how private organizations and organized crime groups are increasingly getting into the game. For instance, he alleges that British banks have paid out billions of Pounds to hackers who have gotten into their systems and blackmailed them.

GCHQ also documents the collusion between private companies and espionage organizations, going back at least to the telegraph and earliest submarine cables. Right from the beginning, the owners and operators of these communication links secretly passed along data to intelligence organizations, which was used for purposes of diplomatic and military espionage, as well as to gain economic advantage through industrial espionage. Aldrich also describes how private companies have been made to build back doors into their products so that organizations like GCHQ and the NSA can crack the communications of people using them. This applied to manufacturers of cryptographic equipment in neutral countries like Switzerland during the Cold War.

Aldrich also argues that the Data Encryption Standard (DES) was intentionally weakened to allow NSA snooping, though I have read elsewhere that the NSA actually used its expertise to strengthen the algorithm. Aldrich does a good job of describing one deep tension in the current mandate of GCHQ: on one hand, it is increasingly encouraged to help private British companies like banks secure their computer and communication systems. At the same time, it tries to preserve back doors and insecure communication methods in products used by others, so as not to undermine its own espionage mandate. Similarly, Aldrich talks on a number of occasions about the tension between using intelligence information and protecting the sources and methods used to acquire it. While it may be especially damning to condemn the dubious actions of a foreign power using their own intercepted and decrypted communication, doing so inevitably informs them that you are reading their traffic. Something similar is true when it comes to using surreptitiously acquired information to prosecute criminal trials.

GCHQ contains lots of information on the spotty record of the world’s intelligence services, when it comes to predicting major events. He describes many situations where policy-makers were caught by surprise, because their spy services didn’t pass along warning. These include the Yom Kippur War, the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and others. Aldrich also describes the Iraq-WMD fiasco, what it shows about the analysis of intelligence services, and what some of its broader political ramifications were.

At many points, Aldrich identifies how GCHQ and the NSA are by far the most costly intelligence services of the U.K. and U.S. respectively. The NSA dwarfs the CIA, just as GCHQ dwarfs MI5 and MI6 in staffing and resources. This is reflective of the special importance placed on intercepted communications by policy-makers. It is arguably also demonstrative of how GCHQ has been able to use the deep secrecy of its work to evade government scrutiny and secure considerable material support.

GCHQ’s present

The last section of Aldrich’s book is positively frightening. He describes how the fear of terrorism has driven a massive increase in technical surveillance – certainly within the U.K. but very likely elsewhere as well. He describes how a 2006 European law requires telephone and internet companies to retain comprehensive records of the communications of their customers for ten years, and how the government is planning to store their own copy of the information for data mining purposes. Aldrich explains:

The answer [to why the government wants its own copy of the data] is ‘data mining’, the use of computers to comb through unimaginable amounts of information looking for patterns and statistical relationships. This practice now constitutes the most insidious threat to personal liberty. What makes surveillance different in the age of ubiquitous computer and the mobile phone is that our data is never thrown away. Machines routinely store millions of details about our everyday lives, and at some point in the future it will be possible to bring these all together and search them.

Aldrich quotes a disturbing warning from the retiring Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald GC. Macdonald warns that powers are being irreversibly granted to the state, and that “we may end up living with something we can’t bear.”

Personally, I think all this is much more dangerous than terrorism. If the choice is between tolerating a few terrorist attacks per year and building up a gigantic secret alliance between government and private companies, designed to track all the details of the lives of individuals, I would prefer the terrorism. After all, terrorist groups are weak outlaw organizations with limited resources. The state, by contrast, is massive, potent, permanent, and not always subject to effective oversight. Our fear of a few bands of fanatics (collectively far less dangerous than smoking or car crashes) is driving us into giving the state unparalleled ability to monitor everybody.

The book is similar in purpose to Matthew Aid’s The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency, though I think Aldrich’s book is significantly better. I recommend the entire book to history buffs and those with an interest in intelligence or the Anglo-American alliance. The last section – on the growing power of the state in response to terrorism – I recommend to everybody.

The Warrior’s Honour

It is strange to read Michael Ignatieff’s The Warrior’s Honour now, when he is leader of the official opposition rather than a journalist. Back in 1998, Ignatieff described the purpose of the book:

I wanted to find out what mixture of moral solidarity and hubris led Western nations to embark on this brief adventure in putting the world right.

Ignatieff is making reference to the whole notion of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the ‘responsibility to protect’ which emerged strongly after the scale of both killing and western inaction in the 1994 Rwandan genocide became apparent. The book is certainly dated in some ways, which can be a liability. At the same time, it has value insofar as it does express one perspective of that time, and facilitates consideration of what has changed since.

The central concept of Ignatieff’s book is the ethics of warriors themselves – the internal moral forces that sometimes help to constrain behaviour within the most limited bounds of ethics, even in wartime. He explores the role of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as special representatives (‘enforcers’ is too strong a word) of the Geneva Conventions. He explains how Henry Dunant – founder of the organization – established a continuing tradition in which delegates of the ICRC have “made their pact with the devil of war” and “accept[ed] the inevitability, sometimes even the desirability of war” while “trying, if it is possible, to conduct it according to certain rules of honour.” Ignatieff also describes the consequences when warriors abandon honour, as he alleges took place during and after the breakup of Yugoslavia, when former neighbours destroyed their collective homeland driven by “the narcissism of minor difference.”

The Warrior’s Honour is not an especially practical book. The tone is more mournful and ambiguous than certain or persuasive. It doesn’t offer much guidance to those trying to decide how to respond to the humanitarian emergencies of today. Ignatieff’s book does more to describe the predicament than to suggest paths out of it, though that is a valuable undertaking in itself. In the conclusion, he explains:

The chief moral obstacle in the path of reconciliation is the desire for revenge. Now, revenge is commonly regarded as a low and unworthy emotion, and because it is regarded as such, its deep moral hold on people is rarely understood. But revenge – morally considered – is the desire to keep faith with the dead, to honour their memory by taking up their cause where they left of. Revenge keeps faith between generations; the violence it engenders is a ritual form of respect for the community’s dead – therein lies its legitimacy. Reconciliation is difficult precisely because it must compete with the powerful alternative morality of violence. Political terror is tenacious because it is an ethical practice. It is a cult of the dead, a dire and absolute expression of respect.

One has to wonder whether it wouldn’t be better for humanity to simply forget the outrages of the past, given the tragic way in which they perpetuate conflict into the present and future. Like feuding gangs, human beings feel this constant compulsion to respond to every slight with a larger slight, and pay back every rape and murder with two more.

Given the course of Michael Ignatieff’s life, the book also highlights the tragic theatrical character of government and opposition. As a journalist, Ignatieff could grapple with major political and ethical questions with a kind of integrity and with acceptance that the answers derived from history are usually imperfect and uncertain. As a politician, he must engage in a much less sophisticated slinging back-and-forth of accusations. One of many unfortunate facts about political life is that proximity to power tends to be accompanied by a cheapening of discourse.

Remember

Perhaps we honour the war dead better by declining to participate in nationalistic and militaristic state-sanctioned displays. Wars always involve at least some moral ambiguity; even if the cause for going to war was unambiguously just, innocents end up being victims during virtually all wars. Perhaps if we had really learned from the massive and numerous tragedies of the 20th century, we will feel more included to a solemn recognition of all those who have suffered from war, rather than a patriotic salute to those who participated in wars (willingly or not, justly or unjustly) while they happened to be wearing our flag (or the British ones we fought under before).

Governments have an interest in spreading the general belief that someone who takes up arms for their country, regardless of the cause, is making an honourable sacrifice and worthy of respect. Those reflexes help to keep a state alive across the centuries, by maintaining an ability to rally to their own defence when necessary. Countless people who carried that belief were sent out of the many trenches of the 20th century, straight at the barrels of the machine guns of those conflicts. Much of that was senseless, or served dubious ends. At best, war is a tragic undertaking, necessary when someone wants to impose the intolerable upon us. When collectively contemplating war, perhaps it would serve human ends most if we collectively accepted that war is almost the worst among all things, and should only be undertaken to eliminate a still-greater evil.

Intelligence claims

There have been a few passages from Richard Aldrich’s GCHQ: The Uncensored Story Of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency that have struck me as especially worthy of discussion, so far.

Spying as a stabilizer

Discussing the 1960s, Aldrich argues that improved intelligence from signals intelligence (SIGINT) and satellite sources “made the international system more stable” and “contributed to a collective calming of nerves”:

Indeed, during the 1960s the penetration of the NATO registries by Eastern Bloc spies was so complete that the Warsaw Pact had no choice but to conclude that the intentions of Western countries were genuinely defensive and benign.

Previously, we discussed some of the major problems with spies. In this book, Aldrich brings up a partial counterpoint. Countries tend to consider secretly intercepted communications to be a highly credible source of information. If a country tells you it is planning to do Thing X for Reason Y, there are all sorts of reasons why they could be deceiving you. If you secretly overhear the same plan within their internal discussions, you have more reason to think that it will go forward and that the reasons behind it are genuine.

Revolutionaries and symbolic violence

Discussing the actions of the Turkish People’s Liberation Army (TPLA) and Turkish People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) during the 1970s, Aldrich says:

Both consisted of middle-class intellectuals who regarded themselves as a revolutionary vanguard. Like many revolutionary leaders, they suffered from a ‘Che Guevara complex’, believing that symbolic acts of violence could trigger a wider social revolution. Che Guevara had come to grief in 1967 during a futile attempt to stir the revolutionary consciousness of Bolivia, and was captured and shot by a police team, advised by the CIA. Turkey’s would-be revolutionaries would soon suffer a similar fate.

The TPLA and TPLF figure into Aldrich’s story because of their targeting of intelligence facilities: initially accidentally, and later intentionally.

How far ahead are the spooks?

The codebreaking success of the Allies against the Germans and Japanese during the second world war was kept secret until the 1970s. Most of the documents about codebreaking being declassified now extend up to the 1970s. Because of such secrecy, it is impossible to know what technologies and capabilities organizations like America’s NSA, Britain’s CGHQ, and Canada’s CSE have today.

Describing the early 1970s, Aldrich explains how the microwave relays used by the telephone system beam signals into space accidentally, because of the curvature of the Earth. Forty years ago, the United States was already using satellites to intercept that spillover. Furthermore, they were already using computers to scan for keywords in phone, fax, and telex messages.

As early as 1969, the British and Americans had a system in place somewhat akin to what Google Alerts do today: tell it what keywords you are interested in, and it can pull related content out from the torrent of daily traffic. You can’t help but wonder what they are able to do now: whether the increased volume of communication has overwhelmed their capability to do such filtering effectively, or whether advances in secret techniques and technologies mean that they have even more potent methods for intercepting and processing the world’s commercial, diplomatic, and interpersonal communication.

Penetrating the secrecy

Aldrich also describes the investigative journalism of people like Duncan Campbell and James Bamford – people who used open sources to reveal the true function of GCHQ for the first time. Aldrich claims that their actions “confirmed a fundamental truth: that there are no secrets, only lazy researchers”.

Some recent journalistic undertakings – such as the excellent ‘Top Secret America’ – do lend credence to that view.

California’s Proposition 19

Tomorrow, the people of California will vote on Proposition 19: a measure that would make marijuana legal to grow, own, sell, and use in small quantities. The two major arguments being used are economic – since the measure would let counties and municipal governments levy taxes on the stuff – and security-focused – since marijuana is currently one of the sources of financial support for Mexico’s brutal drug gangs.

I have argued before that the best approach to drugs is to legalize, regulate, and provide treatment for addicts. Hopefully, California can set a progressive precedent for the rest of the United States (unlike other examples).

Spying between friends

Richard Alrich’s GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency describes a number of instances of longstanding allies conducting espionage against one another, including signals intelligence (SIGINT). Aldrich describes how the ‘Echelon’ system run by British and U.S. intelligence was used to “read the traffic of their minor allies, including France and West Germany”. This system is now estimated to process five billion intercepts per day, probably filtering them for suspicious words and phrases. Aldrich talks about how, after the second world war, Britain’s codebreakers were “doing extensive work on Britain’s European allies, regarding them as either insecure or untrustworthy, or both”.

Of course, more awkward allies have been a higher priority for codebreaking and other forms of covert activity. During the interwar period, Russian ciphers were the the “core business” of Britain’s codebreakers, and apparently work on them didn’t stop despite their subsequent alliance. The Soviets were also spying on the allies, though with more of an emphasis on human intelligence (HUMINT). For example, John Cairncross worked at GCHQ’s predecessor – Bletchley Park – and warned the KGB of the impending German armoured offensive at Kursk, one of the decisive battles of the war. He also saw some of Britain’s early thinking on atomic weapons while working at the Cabinet Office, while his fellow Russian spy Klaus Fuchs was virtually able to provide the blueprints of the devices built at Los Alamos. The Soviet Union achieved other notable HUMINT successes throughout the Cold War, such as the John Walker espionage within the navy. Surely, there are other examples that are still secret.

Allied SIGINT against Soviet targets continued after 1945, as GCHQ and others started to intercept messages between Moscow and the capitals of new client states.

The most subtle reference to inter-allied spying comes from a passage on the Diplomatic Wireless Service, developed in 1944 and 1945. Aldrich describes how the DWS was primarily a system of military SIGINT collection stations, but that it also “doubled as a secret monitoring service working from within British Embassies and High Commissions”. High Commissions are only located in Commonwealth countries, on whom Britain is presumably still spying. They seem to be returning the favour, as demonstrated by another anecdote from the book, in which Prime Minister Tony Blair discovered his hotel room in India to be laced with listening devices that would have had to be drilled out of the walls to disable.

Signals intelligence and historiography

In intelligence, the protection of sources and methods is vitally important to continued success. There are few pieces of evidence more convincing than an target’s own encrypted communication, but making it plain that it has been intercepted and decoded is likely to drive the target to tighten security and change up their systems. As such, there is always a balance to be struck between providing authoratative information in the present and retaining the capacity to do so in the future. For example, when Neville Chamberlain read out decrypted Russian telegrams in Parliament in 1927, it led to them switching up their cipher systems and making broader use of one time pads.

All this has consequences for the writing and understanding of history. Roughly, historiography refers to the history and methodology of history. Of particular importance is the history of the lessons drawn from historical events. For instance, the lessons drawn from the two world wars. Very frequently, politicians, historians, and members of the general public draw conclusions without the benefit of access to classified materials, such as intercepted and decrypted military and diplomatic communication.

An example is the Dieppe raid of 1942. In Richard Aldrich’s GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency, the author describes how poor cipher security on the part of the British meant that the Germans had five days warning before the supposed surprise attack. I don’t know when that information became publicly available, but it is a fair bet that it was not until well after many of those involved in the raid had made their private judgments about why it failed.

Arguably, all this is an important reason for continuing to study historical events that are fairly long-past. It might seem questionable what utility there is in studying the Russo-Japanese War in 2010, but one good answer might be how the decreased political sensitivity means that formerly closely-guarded documents are now accessible to scholars. We will probably be waiting many decades before some of the most important documents relating to contemporary international events become open to scrutiny.

Zero History

Zero History is the third novel in Vancouver author William Gibson’s latest trilogy of science fiction set in the present. It is the sequel to Spook Country, which came out in 2007.

Like all of his work, it is clever and well written. This trilogy succeeds in meshing together the trends and technologies of the past with those of the near-future. It also generates some intriguing characters – in this case, the recovering benzodiazapene addict Milgrim is the most interesting. Unfortunately – as is common in science fiction – Gibson does a better job of setting up a mystery than of resolving it. That and a few forgettable, interchangeable characters constitutes the biggest limitation of the work. Once again, Gibson hasn’t risen to the standard he set with his first novel, back in 1983. That said, while Gibson doesn’t display the same ability to tell a story that is compelling from end to end, in this case, Zero History does seem indicative of his maturation as a writer and a person. For instance, whereas the protagonist of Neuromancer was an unrepentent stimulant addict, Zero History explores the psychological processes of addiction recovery in an intriguing and authentic way.

Certainly, one of the interesting aspects of Gibson’s latest work is his exploration of what kind of societal changes may emerge from the most recent real technologies. As he famously remarked: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” In particular, he is concerned with the emergence of wholesale surveillance technologies in areas ranging from international communications to citywide networks of video cameras paired with facial recognition technologies. The ways in which such technologies intersect with the operating practices of governments, criminal syndicates, and special forces groups is certainly something that has cropped up in interesting ways in both reality and other recent fiction, ranging from the assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai to the fictional engagement of both police and drug gangs with communication technology on The Wire.

The climax of Zero History is probably the most disappointing part. Without revealing too much about the plot, it seems fair to say that it is a letdown after all the preparation the characters undertake beforehand, and the revelations that follow it do not seem to justify all the earlier intrigue. That said, Gibson’s latest work is a solid piece of fiction and an interesting exploration of some of the implications of emerging and existing technologies. It will also expose a lot of geeks who normally have nothing to do with the world of fashion to some of the elements thereof, in a way that suggests that the industry is not so very different from the high tech sector, with its secrets and large personalities.

Obama and just war

The concept of ‘just war’ is one with deep roots in philosophy and law – a recognition that while wars are inevitably terrible, sometimes they are less terrible than the alternatives available. While it may have been incongruous of Barack Obama to use his Nobel Peace Prize address to discuss the subject, it was probably the only reasonable thing he could do, given his commitment to a sustained (but shrinking) presence in Iraq and his re-commitment to the war in Afghanistan. Indeed, when I first heard about the decision of the Nobel committee, I thought Obama’s best choice would be to graciously decline the prize, saying that he had not yet accomplished anything worthy of it, and was involved in the prosecution of two wars, to boot.

Obama’s sketch of the philosophy of just war includes elements of both jus ad bellum – the question of when it is right to go to war – and jus in bello – the question of how to rightly conduct yourself during war:

The concept of a “just war” emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when certain conditions were met: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.

He also stresses how the elimination of violent conflict is not a plausible aim, for the decades ahead:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations – acting individually or in concert – will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

He discusses the ways in which contemporary conflicts differ from those in more distant history, describes how American military strength has helped to maintain international stability in recent decades, and argues that some enemies can only be effectively confronted with violence. He also expresses support for the concept of humanitarian intervention, arguing that in cases like the Balkans, it can be justified to use force to stop crimes against humanity, even when doing so is a violation of traditional notions of state sovereignty

At the same time as he argues for the occasional necessity of war, Obama recognizes that war always involves horror:

So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another – that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy. The soldier’s courage and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause, to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such.

Obama’s solution, for reducing the degree to which war is terrible and frequent, is to increase the strength of international institutions, though he doesn’t go so far as to say that the United States will never act unilaterally.

Obama brings up the issue of nuclear proliferation, but does not specify how far he would go to prevent it or roll it back:

One urgent example is the effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, and to seek a world without them. In the middle of the last century, nations agreed to be bound by a treaty whose bargain is clear: All will have access to peaceful nuclear power; those without nuclear weapons will forsake them; and those with nuclear weapons will work towards disarmament. I am committed to upholding this treaty. It is a centerpiece of my foreign policy. And I’m working with President Medvedev to reduce America and Russia’s nuclear stockpiles.

But it is also incumbent upon all of us to insist that nations like Iran and North Korea do not game the system. Those who claim to respect international law cannot avert their eyes when those laws are flouted. Those who care for their own security cannot ignore the danger of an arms race in the Middle East or East Asia. Those who seek peace cannot stand idly by as nations arm themselves for nuclear war.

Earlier, he talks about developing “alternatives to violence that are tough enough to actually change behavior”, but he does not follow through and explain at what point sanctions should be abandoned in favour of the use of force, though perhaps that question is always too complex to answer with a general formula applicable to all circumstances.

All told, the speech is a thoughtful and defensible one that tries to reconcile principle with pragmatism. At its best, the United States is a key force for stability in the world, as well as the promotion of democracy and human rights. At the same time, it is very plausible that the relative power of the United States will continue to fall, producing difficult new situations in which to make foreign policy.

Obama doesn’t mention the difficulties of domestic politics – one major factor that has hampered him in trying to close down Guantanamo Bay – but that is certainly one of the biggest factors constraining his freedom of movement. Obama has certainly disappointed a lot of people by not changing foreign policy as swiftly or dramatically as they would have liked. It is not entirely clear to what extent that is the product of him being president, rather than a candidate; to what extent it is the result of domestic constraints; and to what extent it is the result of other factors. He closes in saying: “Clear-eyed, we can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace.” It remains to be seen how that aspiration will stand beside the totality of his record as president.

The history of guns in America

Back in 1999, The Economist published an interesting historical account of the emergence of America’s current gun culture. It debunks a number of myths, such as that the American populace in general has always been widely armed, that militias were important defensive forces, and that the ‘Wild West’ involved a lot of gun violence. It also includes interesting passages on the marketing of guns and gun ownership, first by manufacturers and later by the National Rifle Association:

[Gun maker Samuel] Colt was a self-publicist of genius. When his brother, John, unfraternally chose a mere axe with which to commit murder in 1841, Samuel persuaded the court to let him stage a shooting display inside the courtroom to demonstrate the superiority of the new revolver over the axe as a murder weapon. Using these publicity skills, and displaying precocious evidence of lobbying ability (he gave President Andrew Jackson a handgun and pioneered the practice of wining and dining members of Congress), Colt aimed his campaign at the growing middle class. He devised advertising campaigns showing a heroic figure wearing nothing but a revolver defending his wife and children. His guns were given nicknames (Equalizer, Peacemaker and so forth). Since most of his customers did not know how to use a firearm, he printed instructions on the cleaning cloth of every gun. His initial success shows up in the probate records: the percentage of wills listing firearms among their legacies rose by half between 1830 and 1850.

The axe, it seems, was a surprisingly popular murder weapon at certain times in history. Between 1800 and 1845, it came fourth. Beating, strangling, and drowning were in the lead, followed by stabbing, then guns, then axes.

The article describes how the first federal gun control law (banning sales by post) was only enacted after the Kennedy assassination, and mentions the subsequent role of the NRA in preventing more ambitious legal control over firearms.

It certainly makes for interesting reading.