Tagged: GCHQ

Hiding in plain sight: the ISC report on GCHQ surveillance

Yesterday the UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee published its report into the security services.  The thrust of this investigation was to look at the whole issue of the bulk interception of data – an issue dragged into the limelight by Edward Snowden – and determine whether this constitutes mass surveillance. (See this post for more detail on the difference, or not, between bulk interception of data and mass surveillance).

What the report has really done is both flush out some important issues, but then allow these to remain hidden in plain sight, because the Committee has failed to grasp the implications of what they have uncovered.

The BBC summarises the key point thus: (The Committee) said the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) agency requires access to internet traffic through “bulk interception” primarily in order to uncover threats by finding “patterns and associations, in order to generate initial leads”, which the report described as an “essential first step.”

And here is what is hiding in plain sight.  The acknowledgment that GCHQ is using bulk data to “find patterns and associations in order to generate initial leads.”  What is wrong with that, you might say?  Here is what is wrong with that.   This means that information gained by swallowing (intercepting) large chunks of humanity’s collective digital activity is being used to predict the possibility that each and everyone of us (not just those whose data might have been swallowed) is a … fill in the gap (potential terrorist, criminal, undesirable).  We all now wear a badge, or can have such a badge put upon us, which labels us with this probability.  Now it may well be that only those of us that have a badge with a high probability then go on to become ‘initial leads’ (whose emails will then be read).  But we all still wear the badge and we can all go on to become an initial lead at some point in the future, dependant on what specific area of investigation an algorithm is charged with investigating.

Algorithmic surveillance is not about reading emails, as the Committee (and many privacy campaigners) seem to believe.   This is an old fashioned ‘needles in haystacks’ view of surveillance.  Algorithmic surveillance is not about looking for needles in haystacks, it is about using data from the hay in order to predict where the needles are going to be.  In this world the hay becomes the asset.  Just because GCHQ is not ‘reading’ all our emails doesn’t legitimise the bulk interception of data or provide assurance that a form of mass surveillance is not happening.  As I said in the previous post: until we understand what algorithmic surveillance really means, until this is made transparent, society is not in a position to give its consent to this activity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is the bulk interception of data actually worse than mass surveillance?

Where does bulk interception of data stop and mass surveillance start and in the world of Big Data and algorithmic surveillance is it even relevant to make such a distinction?

It emerged last week that these are important questions, following a ruling by the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal and subsequent response by the UK government and its electronic spying outfit, GCHQ (see the details in this Guardian report).  This response proposes that mass surveillance doesn’t really happen (even if it may look a bit like it does), because all that is really going on is bulk interception of data and this is OK (and thus can be allowed to happen).

One of the most disturbing revelations flowing from Edward Snowden’s exposure of the Prism and Upstream digital surveillance operations is the extent to which the US and UK governments have been capturing and storing vast amounts of information, not just on possible terrorists or criminals, but on everyone. This happened in secret and its exposure has eventually prompted a response from government and this response has been to assert that this collection and storage doesn’t constitute mass surveillance, instead it is “the bulk interception of data which is necessary to carry out targeted searches of data in pursuit of terrorist or criminal activity.”

This is the needle in the haystack argument – i.e. we need to process a certain amount of everyone’s hay in order to find the terrorist needles that are hidden within it. This seems like a reasonable justification because it implies that the hay (i.e. the information about all of us) is a disposable asset, something to be got rid of in order to expose the needles. This is basically the way that surveillance has always operated. To introduce another analogy, it is a trawling operation that is not interested in the water that passes through the net only the fish that it contains.

However, this justification falls down because this is not the way that algorithmic surveillance works. Algorithmic surveillance works by Continue reading