Tomorrow at LVS School in Ascot I am giving a presentation to the public on the general subject of Spies.
Always a fascinating theme down the centuries. Plenty about the subject here on my website, including my piece for DIPLOMAT in 2010 that looked briefly at the differences between HUMINT, SIGINT and COMINT:
Machines can do amazing things. But not everything.
The main vulnerability in any system is people. Unreliable and unpredictable. They get tired and make mistakes. They may not be as clever as they think they are. Above all, someone working ‘for the other side’ is under huge pressure, as the penalties for treason are usually severe. But if one side can persuade someone on the other side to betray their organisation, colleagues and country, wonderful grazing opens up for spying.
And those dangerous ‘sleeper’ spies:
… Without looking carefully at the whole production chain of intelligence information, it makes no sense to snigger, as so many Western media outlets disgracefully did, at the significance of this excellent US power-play against this laboriously-established and valuable Russian network.
To make matters even worse for Moscow, it looks as if the Americans had been following this group for years, learning all sorts of new things about Russian top-end technique in the process. So why arrest the sleeper group now? Because the whole operation was maturing on schedule, ie they were getting too close to senior Americans?
All of which explains why Moscow was so keen to set up a rapid ‘spy swap’ and get these now wide-awake sleepers back to Mother Russia as fast as possible, to minimise the embarrassment but much more importantly to find out just what damage had been done.
Before my LVS presentation I gave an interview this morning to BBC Radio Berkshire where in three segments over some 30 minutes I had the chance to answer some very basic questions about spying and its pitfalls and dangers. The link is here: you have several weeks to listen before the BBC takes it down.
LVS Ascot is a good, lively school with an interesting history. It was originally set up in Kennington in London in 1803 as a charity to help educate the children of people who worked in pubs and the drinks trades. It has sister schools in West Sussex and Oxfordshire for special needs children.
Anyway, tomorrow night at LVS Ascot is where I appear, armed with all sorts of vivid examples of spying triumphs and calamities. Open to the public.
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It was mentioned in your Spies! Lies! lecture that some countries around the world do not follow the same rules as we in the UK have to, such as obtaining legal "permissions" for intrusive surveillance and the like. These other countries have their own intelligence gathering services that can look at whatever they want, where ever they want, whenever they want and their citizens have no choice or freedom to protest. This puts us at a disadvantage because obtaining warrants takes time and dealing with the "Human Rights complaints" about privacy hinders and weakens the efforts of our own agencies, not to mention the extra money that has to be thrown at this must be immense.
Intelligence can be split in two categories: let's call it intelligence for prosecution and intelligence for operations. The intel needed for prosecution must be squeaky clean and legal in all respects as we cannot expect to win a legal case using illegal means. But intel for operations, be it tactical or strategic and where legal prosecution in the courts is not the intention (at least not at this stage), is different. Surely our intelligence services need access to everything they can get and if that includes secret intrusive surveillance then why not?
We can all think of hypothetical situation where this is really bad but they can all be countered with an equal opposite situation where the end justifies the means. With some checks and balances in place; with this level of access to our privacy being restricted to a few; with some sort of filtering in place to maybe discard the immoral from the illegal, then why not?
It is a bit lazy to just say "if you have done nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide" which is why the phrase gets used so often. I do nothing wrong in my living room but I still draw the curtains because I don't want people looking in and watching me do nothing wrong. It's the same for my mail and email and Facebook and everything else. But would I be willing to let our own agencies eavesdrop? I guess my answer is Yes. And I guess that is because they will be doing it without their faces pressed up against my living room window where I can see that they are doing it. But mostly because I truly believe it is for the greater good and the security of the streets where we live and the corners of the globe where we have assets and interests.
In short, let 'em look. And give 'em a load more money to help them look. Consider it an investment and not a cost.
Excellent. Thanks.
Try this earlier posting about the 'lawfare' being wagwed against our intelligence services over their alleged 'complicity' in torture – the House of Lords ruling is very interesting
http://charlescrawford.biz/2012/04/19/lawfare-aga…