Recently it was reported that GCHQ has formally abandoned the Wilson Doctrine preventing it from spying on our elected representatives, at least with respect to devolved administrations. Nicola Sturgeon has written to David Cameron demanding an explanation. It would seem the intelligence services no longer respect the democratic processes they are supposed to protect and can spy on our elected politicians (and any corespondence with constituents) without restraint, according to their own guidelines.
One is reminded of when Angela Merkel found out the NSA had tapped her mobile. There seems to be nowhere that the intelligence agencies and security services can't reach using initiatives with catchy acronyms like PRISM and JTRIG to sequester and manipulate all communications. This seems to be predicated on a concept of the national interest that involves saving us from ourselves at least as much as from any external threat. But if we can't be trusted, why should we trust them?
At the same time we see further unrelated revelations in the news about high-level collusion in paedophile networks, with prominent (although somehow always recently dead) politicians and public figures implicated as new documents come to light.
We also see organised criminal gangs able to engage freely in both inter- and intra-state people-trafficking, a trade whose victims from time to time end up in the clutches of well-connected and libidinous hedonists as sex slaves.
We see children drown in the Mediterranean trying to reach our shores as their families flee war, famine, and other consequences of climate stress, predated upon by criminal gangs with impunity, who then traffic them.
So, with all of the information acquired by the security services by means of universal surveillance, why does it seem to remain the case that nothing can be done about the purveyors of sex slaves. Theresa May recently was queried about why MI5 have not done more in this regard. Surely if Big Brother is watching the people and the politicians He is watching the perverts and smugglers too? How is it that despite the intelligence services' mountainous accumulation of data nevertheless they fail to push back the tide of human misery. If they have my cell phone records surely they must have the people traffickers'. What's going on?
First, let's consider the data gathering.
Bulk intercepts are not intelligible at the point of interception. Any significance an intercept may have to the security services is discovered during retrospective analysis. The most efficient methods of signals intelligence (SigInt) involve this kind of post-processing. So it does not make sense to target what interception to include at the risk of leaving something important out. So nothing is excluded.
Previously, intercepts were directed on the basis of leads that had been developed by other means, those involving a bit of legwork. But it is more economical to use methods that don't require this prior effort, and are scalable and can be automated and applied consistently.
When SigInt is chosen as the primary approach due to its efficiency and massive scalability, and human intelligence (HumInt - the legwork) is relegated to a subordinate, reactive role, rather than the other way round, then there is no basis for targeting surveillance, no lead to follow, and so everything must be monitored. If you have nothing else to go on, you don't know what you should have been monitoring until after you monitor it.
Therefore an inevitable logical consequence of the emphasis placed on SigInt is that we now live in an era of automated indiscriminate bulk interception of everything. Surveillance is omnivorous. There is no longer any privacy. There is no confidential information. Our activities are merely sensory input for a voracious and deranged artificial mind whose nightmares determine government policy.
So if all data is now intercepted, how can criminal networks continue to operate? If the intelligence services are routinely monitoring everything, couldn't they catch all the peadophiles as they collude online or inadvertently leave evidence of their activities on record in some way? As they piece together all the metadata from cellphone masts and email headers can't they catch them at it?
There are at least two possible reasons why they don't.
Of course, one possibility is that they themselves are implicated in the conspiracy, with high ranking officers choosing what to divulge and what to keep secret on the basis of more than just the national interest. We'll set that to one side for the moment, even though sections of the security and intelligence services are no doubt complicit in the cover-ups currently being revealed.
Another, more likely, more systemic possibility is that they simply aren't interested in paedophiles and slavetraders. This is because the intelligence community does not actually serve the national interest. It serves corporate interests. They simply don't care about child abuse as much as they care about commercial advantage.
Information destroys corporate interests. It is a commodity with no cost of production. No value is added to the mp3 of a song by making a copy of it. This means there is nothing for capitalists to appropriate. Information flows like dark matter permeating the visible universe the capitalists control and threatens to overthrow their cosmologies. They are in crisis as the ground beneath their feet tilts in response to Copernican shifts in the centre of gravity.
The intelligence services are the new Inquisition, re-establishing order. Bulk interception is the ultimate form of this, the logical conclusion of imposing a response to information along capitalist lines, modelling it as a commodity to be restricted and controlled, even if it cannot possibly conform to this model. As a result, intelligence will be actioned if the activities they reveal pose a threat to corporate interests. Otherwise, intelligence will be ignored. The intelligence gathering efforts revealed by Edward Snowden are secretly used to confer commercial advantages to American companies much more often than they are publically used to detect terrorist conspiracies, although a media agenda based on corporate expediency will suggest the opposite is true to misdirect and control you.
From a scientific point of view, data is processed through natural or artificial mechanisms and undergoes irreversible changes. It can be transformed as new meanings emerge, often in unpredictable ways, giving us science and art, or corrupted as all meaning is destroyed. In relation to the psychologies of artificial minds, this is the difference between sanity and madness. To consider information a commodity is madness. Apples take time to grow and cost money, but you can send a picture of an apple to all your friends instantaneously and for free.
And so the new Inquisition is doomed to fail.
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