Note: This article is also available in Portuguese, translated by Anders Bateva.
Last week I read an article about the plan by the National Police of the Netherlands to connect all CCTV cameras to the national camera network which is operated by the police. The upper echelon of the Dutch police is currently secretly writing their policy document entitled Sensing, in which the definite plans will be written out in further detail. It would be interesting to know the contents of this secret report, since I’m pretty sure all the standard, same old arguments about why this should be implemented will be brought to the table again. They will probably say that it’ll prevent crime and deter hoodlums, etcetera. We’ve read the arguments for it again and again, but fact of the matter is that more cameras doesn’t mean less crime, CCTV cameras have never stopped criminals from committing a crime, they are ineffective, and it’s an invasion to our privacy, especially when it’s all connected into a single, nation-wide network, recording all our movements. It’s the Panopticon! This then gets stored indefinitely, because governments the world over only remember the ‘delete’ command (‘rm -rf’ if you will) when it’s in their interest to delete stuff. All other stuff (like these camera images, but also information stored by our various intelligence agencies, financial information, the sites you visit, your e-mail, call records, medical records, etcetera) never gets deleted. That’s why the NSA is building their new data-bunker in Bluffdale, Utah, to create more storage space so they get to keep storing all kinds of data about our lives that goes over a wire. And our intelligence agencies are all in on it. Dutch Home Office Minister Ronald Plasterk had a bit of a row with parliament, with MPs being angry about a tiny parliamentary technicality, namely that Plasterk lied to them, claiming the NSA collected metadata on 1.8 million phone calls in the Netherlands, while it was in fact our own intelligence service, the AIVD, doing it. The sad thing of our political system is that they put all the focus on this tiny parliamentary technicality, when they totally forget about the big picture, namely that 1.8 million phone calls were being tapped, and that we should do something about this. 1.8 million is an enormous number for a country of 17 million people. Even more scary is that the parliamentary commission which is supposed to provide oversight over the intelligence community, the Commisie van Toezicht op de Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdiensten (CTIVD), also known as Commissie Stiekem, had no knowledge about this, and didn’t know that this was even happening. So much for oversight. The problem with oversight over intelligence agencies is that because of the very nature of these agencies they keep their information a secret, and they can lie to our elected representatives with impunity, and there’s no way to check until someone brave enough to blow the whistle steps forward.
This House Would Call Edward Snowden A Hero: 212 yay, 171 nay
Meanwhile, at an Oxford Union debate last week in Oxford, United Kingdom, the Union passed a motion to call Edward Snowden a hero by 212 votes against 171. It was a lively debate, both from the members of the proposition and the members of the opposition, and I have to side with the proposition, because without people like Snowden, who has given up his previous comfortable life on Hawaii to blow the whistle, the world would have never known about the crimes of the spies. Eventually there comes a point where you’re asked to forget about it! so many times and about such egregious crimes that you can no longer look at yourself in the mirror any more, and something has to be done, the people need to be informed. During the debate I heard the opposition say that Snowden “violated his oath”. This is an argument that popped up again and again in various articles I’ve read in which people vilified Snowden. In fact, he didn’t swear an oath to secrecy, no-one does. He swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States; to uphold the Constitution. He hasn’t violated the Constitution; the U.S. government and the NSA in particular violated it. Yes spies spy, that’s not surprising, but they claim all is done in the name of national security, when it is in fact often corporate espionage that these intelligence agencies engage in. It’s about making sure the lucrative contract goes to Boeing instead of to Airbus; it has nothing to do with national security, but more with corporate profits. And there’s no meaningful oversight whatsoever: these people lie with impunity. That alone is already endangering our very democracies, having people with absolute power without any form of effective oversight is very detrimental and damaging to our very democracies and free societies. Snowden mentioned that whilst working at Booz Allen Hamilton, he had the power to tap everyone, including the President of the United States. And he wasn’t the only one with that kind of security clearance either. In the United States, almost 5 million people have a security clearance, with more than 1.4 million people having access to TOP SECRET documents. Imagine what kind of information the intelligence community has about the private life of the President and his family, and how a less honest person might use that. It would be easy to blackmail the President into doing the spooks’ bidding! And in the United States, more and more tasks that used to be done by government exclusively (like intelligence), is now being done by companies like Booz Allen Hamilton, or Academi (which I like to call: the company previously known as Blackwater USA). This is a very scary development because these companies have profit as their basic motivation. They do not have our best interests at heart. Lord Acton wrote in 1887:
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you super-add the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”
Chelsea Manning Receives Sam Adams Award 2014
Also at the Oxford Union last week, the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence awarded Chelsea Manning their award for the year 2014, meant for people who display extraordinary integrity in intelligence. The group and award was named after Sam Adams, a CIA intelligence analyst, who in 1967 discovered that there were far more Communist forces under arms in Vietnam, roughly twice the number U.S. command in Saigon would admit to. This intelligence revealed that the Pentagon was vastly under-reporting the number of enemy forces. But I digress.. Chelsea Manning revealed, by releasing the Collateral Murder video to WikiLeaks, that U.S. forces were committing war crimes. This showed the crew of a U.S. Apache attack helicopter firing away at unarmed civilians, Reuters journalists, and a father who was bringing his children to school and stopped his van to help one of the Reuters journalists who tried to drag himself onto the curb, heavily wounded. The U.S. forces were yelling like it was some sort of snuff video game, it’s absolutely horrific, and these people should be brought to trial and charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Because that’s what it is. Chelsea Manning displayed extraordinary courage in releasing these documents, and rightly deserves this award. Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to the day the U.S. government and the crew of the Apache helicopter in question, are indicted for multiple counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. At which point the United States will invoke the American Service-Members’ Protection Act (also known as the The Hague Invasion Act). But that’s another story.