Edward Snowden’s leaks about the US government’s network of phone and internet spying through the Prism programme were immediately followed by a scandal for the British ruling class resembling scenes from a James Bond film. The British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was shown to have spied on the leaders of other capitalist powers at the 2009 G20 summit in London. GCHQ spies listened in on private meetings, tapped BlackBerry phones and even lured foreign officials into specially-bugged internet cafes. The leaks about the US government spying on its allies and rivals have sent European leaders into fits of outrage. But the real scandal is ignored. Millionaire elites are arming themselves with all the weapons they need to keep down the victims of their economic crisis, the working class people being hammered by intensifying cuts in welfare and state spending.
Snowden’s leaked documents show that the GCHQ’s Tempora programme taps 200 internet cables going in and out of Britain and monitors 600 million ‘telephone events’ a day. It also intercepts emails, reads Facebook posts and messages, Skype video conversations and information on what websites people visit. The GCHQ then shares intelligence with the NSA Prism spying programme in the US. As sections of the US establishment argue with each other over whether the rights of multinational companies like Google and Yahoo have been violated by the spy programme, Britain makes secret deals with such companies, which ban them from even admitting to taking part in GCHQ surveillance.
On 17 July a report by Members of Parliament decided that GCHQ did not break any laws when it collaborated with Prism, responsible for millions of incidents of spying and tapping. The Intelligence and Security Committee based this conclusion on a limited number of cases for which it had requested information from the US. All of these were carried out with a British warrant and a minister’s signature – despite most cases actually being passed from the NSA to GCHQ without warrants. The committee ignored vast amounts of data and tracking information and concluded that, while the system needs a ‘review’, the snoopers should carry on intercepting information, collecting data and reading billions of private emails and online conversations. Foreign Secretary William Hague said that these findings were ‘further testament’ to the GCHQ’s ‘professionalism and values’. No mention of course about Tempora’s mass surveillance of the whole population, just more of the ‘if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide’.
The British and US governments insist that no laws have been broken by their surveillance programmes. The little that exists in British law to regulate information gathering and state spying is interpreted by the impulses of a super-wealthy ruling class. They make the laws and they twist and bend them as they see fit. The Tempora programme gathers information and passes it to Prism, so the NSA can escape legal restrictions on what it can gather on US soil. Germany’s Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger has called Britain’s Tempora programme ‘a hollywood-style nightmare’.
The US government’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act courts give the illusion of a rigorous regime to protect the freedoms of US citizens, while allowing the NSA unlimited access to data held by internet companies. The British version, the Interception of Communications Commissioner Office (ICCO) puts even less restrictions on the spies and snoops. The ICCO was set up by the Blair Labour government in 2000 under the Regulation and Investigatory Powers Act, a legal tool used to justify the spying. The ICCO employs fewer than 10 members of staff to oversee the snooping activities of Britain’s spy agencies, as well as those of the Metropolitan Police, the Ministry of Defence, Revenue and Customs department, the Foreign Office and the Home Office. In a document seen by The Guardian, a GCHQ official told an NSA advisor that ‘We have a light oversight regime compared with the US’. They are above the law – and there is no law to restrict them.
Most of the liberal criticism of Britain’s spying regime focuses on its relationship with the US and how much the GCHQ collaborates with Prism. The embarrassment of Britain and the US for being caught spying on Russia has only heightened this concern and raised questions of legality. Any legal challenge to British collaboration with Prism or into any of the GCHQ’s surveillance operations will be held in a secret court. This is what passes for democracy in imperialist Britain.
But what about the working class? In an online article we pointed to the deep connections in the US between the surveillance and counter-intelligence operations used against the Black Panthers in the 1970s and the intensification of online spying today*. At a time of rising anti-working class austerity in Britain, the state is rapidly tooling itself up, using more repressive policing strategies, increased state powers and internet warfare to deal with any genuine opposition or resistance. Following the uprisings in Britain in August 2011, state surveillance of BlackBerry, Facebook and Twitter led to arrests and appalling sentences. Patrick Spence, a managing director of Research in Motion, which owns BlackBerry, admitted that police had approached the company and that it was complying with Home Office surveillance requests, saying, ‘We have engaged with the authorities to assist in any way we can’. A young man who set up a Facebook page called ‘Bring the riots to Cardiff’ was sentenced to four years in prison. So were others from Dundee, Northwich and Warrington. The ideological onslaught on the young people involved in the uprising was coupled with massive surveillance and legal repression.
GCHQ and Tempora represent one part of an elaborate system of spying in a country that has an estimated 1.85 million CCTV cameras. Successive governments have acted to make sure there are virtually no controls or buffers to this regime – and certainly none within our reach. The ruling class is arming itself and carrying out target practice on working class communities, including Muslims and asylum seekers. The only thing that can stand in the way of this totalitarian system is a movement of political resistance. It is more important than ever that we start to organise everyone with a reason to fight back.
Louis Brehony
Imperialism and wiretaps – a web of control. http://tinyurl.com/lrgpftb
