Surveillance - I wrote about this a few months ago. Since then, things have got worse. In the UK, the government has announced that it intends massively to ‘ramp up’ the use of facial recognition across the country, describing the technology as the best crime-fighting innovation since DNA testing, and to put facial recognition on a clear and thus unassailable legal footing. As usual, this vast infringement on our privacy is justified with rhetoric about catching paedophiles, terrorists etc.. On a single afternoon in Oxford recently, two police vans scanned over 34,600 faces in a few hours, leading to three arrests (none were paedophiles or terrorists of course), illustrating the shift towards high-volume, routine street scanning rather than rare, exceptional use. Police forces around the country are now installing facial recognition cameras across towns and cities. It is estimated that many millions have already been surveilled.

Elsewhere in the courts, the British government continues to demand that Apple allow it unfettered access to the iCloud data of UK-based users (it originally asked for access to ALL Apple users’ data, ie worldwide). Meanwhile, we are belatedly learning more about the disgusting police practice of undercover agents forming romantic relationships, sometimes leading to marriage and children, with women belonging to groups which were surveillance ‘targets’. These ‘targets’ were not ISIS or the IRA, but ‘left-wing’ and ‘environmental’ groups. The women concerned were unaware of the real identities of the policemen, only learning of their extraordinary deceit many years later. (And ‘deceit’ arguably understates what could easily be construed as systematic state-sanctioned abuse and rape.) It has also been revealed that the police secretly and illegally monitored groups that were critical of the police as well as spying on members of the family of Stephen Lawrence, the young black man who was murdered in South London, who had criticised the police’s ineffective investigation into his killing.

We are told by the current police leadership that these practices are both regrettable and lie firmly in the past. I wish I could be so sure. The instinct to control and monitor comes with the territory of government and its enforcers. Indeed the more disordered things become, as many feel they now are, the more that tendency will assert itself. It’s not just about the utility of surveillance, it’s about how government justifies itself. As I commented in my piece, the tools are there in abundance. Once government picks them up, they never put them down.

I am not reassured by the separate case where the British government for many years ran an agent inside the IRA command who committed multiple and savage murders as part of a punishment squad that tortured and killed supposed informers. The government was aware of their agent’s murderous conduct but did nothing, secretly deciding instead to protect the agent on the dubious grounds that the intelligence he passed to them justified permitting the man’s bloody deeds, a judgement that a recent public inquiry has convincingly refuted.

In the cases of the ‘spycops’ and ‘Stakeknife’, the IRA informer, we learn of these details only thanks to public inquiries which take place many years, in this case decades, after the original crimes. And as usual the purpose of these public inquiries, led by those judged by the government to be worthy (ie aged white men and women, often themselves ex-government officials or judges), is to convince the public that government can be self-critical and learn its lessons. Needless to say, no one is prosecuted for the crimes uncovered. Working for the state is a get-out-of-jail-free card - as long as it is innocents and ‘ordinary people’ who are harmed, whether in the Iraq War or the Grenfell fire. If you harm the government however, expect a ton of bricks upon your head, as two parliamentary researchers are discovering after allegedly sending what sounds like rather paltry research of publicly available information to the Chinese.

In the US meanwhile, the government announced that all potential visitors to the country would have to surrender data about their social media, including from countries that have hitherto enjoyed ‘visa free’ access, like the UK. It can in any case be safely assumed that the US government is already tracking potential visitors’ social media, not by checking their phones on arrival in the US, but by the usual and unadmitted means of monitoring, aggregating and flagging data already out there. The technology to perform this task is provided of course by the ghastly Palantir, whose stock price continues to climb as investors ‘bet’ on the further tightening of government surveillance. Palantir’s technology, which aggregates data from multiple databases, is now being used in multiple agencies across the federal government, despite the earlier prohibitions on the IRS, for instance, sharing data which can be used, for example, by other agencies - such as the DHS or ICE - to target supposedly ‘undocumented’ immigrants. The countries whose nationals are now affected by these draconian new border controls have of course done nothing in response, not even a public whimper, let alone the reciprocal treatment that the US at a minimum deserves. They are totally intimidated by Trump or, like the Brits, desperate to retain what little influence they might still wield over him (evidence for which is scant).

In both countries, we are witnessing the emergence of comprehensive, all-seeing, 360-degree surveillance of all of us, pretty much all the time, at a minimum when we venture into public spaces and, undoubtedly, of our online presence. In China, such a system is already established and ubiquitous. We are seeing the very same thing emerge in our supposed democracies. We are told that if innocent we have nothing to worry about - apart from the historic, epic and doubtless now permanent loss of our privacy and freedoms.

We can also be confident that the tech giants are happily handing over all our emails, whatsapp, facebook messages etc to the government, without any public confession, all sanctioned by the Patriot Act of 20011, of course still unrepealed even though the circumstances that gave birth to it (namely al Qaeda) are long past. If you still use these technologies, just remember you are essentially sending a postcard to the government. I did permit myself a chuckle however upon learning that the tattoo-ed, moronic ‘Secretary of War’, Pete Hegseth, used the encrypted messaging app, Signal, to fecklessly share information about a forthcoming US air attack in Yemen. Signal was established by an anarchist ‘cypherpunk’ - Moxie Marlinspike - who is deeply steeped in anarchist thought and has written his own anarchist literature. My people! Given that Hegseth is doing everything he can to destroy trust in government’s competence and authority, I wonder if he might in fact be a secret anarchist. Perhaps Trump will give a donation to Signal, which relies on voluntary funding by users.

After writing that post, where I commented that governments were storing up communications data for the day when quantum computers can decrypt it, I looked into whether ‘post-quantum’ encryption (PQE) might be available to the likes of you and me. It is, in the form of a file storage platform based in Spain called Internxt. I installed it but found its performance in syncing files abominable. For email, there is a service called Tutamail (or Tutanota), a Germany based platform, which apparently uses PQE. Its UX is okay, comparable to another encrypted (but not PQ) service, Protonmail (Swiss based), but a few days after signing up they shut my account, explaining that my address had been flagged as abusive! I note the geographical locations of these services because if US or UK based, any platforms are forced to give access to the authorities without telling the users (as we know from the Lavabit scandal).

I’ve written a fair bit about genocide, and not only in Gaza, and also the clear complicity in that genocide of the British government. Attention has of course shifted from Gaza though Israeli bombing and Hamas’s violent domination of the territory continue. It appears likely that Trump’s 20-point plan will be a dead duck and that instead of complete Israeli withdrawal and Hamas disarmament, we will see continual air and land attacks and territorial occupation, sometimes enforced by client criminal gangs armed by Israel, and Hamas will not be disarmed, continuing its merciless and violent hold over the population of Gaza. Humanitarian aid is still restricted. Meanwhile, the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank has accelerated. Despite these blatant illegalities, there is no international discussion of how to stop Israel, for instance through sanctions, just the usual utterly ineffectual and pointless hand-wringing. The way that international ‘attention’ shifts from one crisis to another is striking. It is not just a phenomenon of the media, it is also a political phenomenon, where there seems to be only so much political energy to go round.

From my experience of watching several of them close up, both Labour and Tory, politicians only really care about what’s in the news i.e. news about them. So inevitably their attention will concentrate where the ‘news’ is. This is perhaps understandable given that they are all one screw-up away from the end of their political ‘careers’, their futures and ambitions hanging on the whim of one man, the Prime Minister, himself under grotesque pressure and information overload.

Structurally, a system which concentrates decision-making power in the hands of a tiny few also inevitably diminishes the amount of attention those decision-makers can devote to anything. It is also inevitable that information collected at the base of the pyramid, information which is already deeply imperfect, will be reduced and simplified so that the busy deciders at the summit are presented with the fewest and plainest choices possible. I have performed this process myself, indeed it is a skill much valued in the civil service (it is in fact tested in the entrance exams). So we have structurally created a system which is incapable of understanding and arbitrating heterogeneity and complexity. Politicians and officials put on their deepest, gravest voices when they tell you that this is not so, that in fact they truly understand the world or this crisis or that problem, and there is a whole array of officials and ministries that back up the lie. In questioning this, the critic is depicted as foolish and naive. Nevertheless, please take it from me, the king has no clothes.

Of course today, much of the UK’s political energy is devoted to the nightmare task of managing the lunatic in the White House as, one day, he offers a Russian-drafted ‘peace plan’ to end the war in Ukraine, and the next he’s bombing Venezuela. This is also sucking up a lot of other governments’ energy too of course. Other matters are thus neglected in the chaos. The genocide in Sudan is a notorious example, but so are climate change and nuclear weapons, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post. The risk from AI is another very pressing case, which should be top of the world’s ‘agenda’, but it is not. One conclusion: the international ‘system’ is basically incapable of managing the multitudinous and constantly-evolving challenges of the 21st century world. I believe it always was, but Trump has now demonstrated this eternal truth, as he has with other hitherto more subterranean and unadmitted verities, such as the ineradicable and structural corruption of the American political system or the deep-seated racism that has to this day shaped so much of American culture, institutions and policy. Trump puts it all out there, transforming the unadmitted truth into an unashamed one - indeed he trumpets it, a ghastly expression of America’s secret id.

The trampling of international law by Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, et al (which I wrote about in July) continues apace. As I commented on my piece about nuclear weapons, Trump has somewhat undermined his bid for the Nobel Peace Prize (an absurd bauble in any case, that should embarrass the Norwegians and Swedes) by mounting illegal and unprovoked bombing attacks on Syria, Iran, Yemen and Venezuela, just in the last few months, as well, of course, obliterating speedboats in the Caribbean or near Colombia’s coast as he hypes the entirely illusory threat to ‘national security’ of the import of fentanyl, a substance that can be manufactured anywhere in the minuscule amounts required to dose the godforsaken addicts. Needless to say, there is no administration effort to punish those actually responsible for the lethal opioid epidemic in America, which causes a shocking fifty thousand deaths a year, namely the pharmaceutical companies, led by the despicable Sackler family, who pumped highly addictive drugs onto the unwitting American population in order to make as much money for themselves as possible. The blatant illegality of US attacks of course passes without comment in ‘allied’ capitals.

The exaggeration of the fentanyl ‘threat’ suggests that Leo Strauss’s theory of the ‘Noble Lie’ may be at play, that the creation of an artificial external threat is necessary to maintain the cohesion and unity of the national population, which would otherwise disintegrate. The Trump crowd obviously cares not one hoot about the unity of the American nation, but they do care about maintaining power, and external threats are very useful to justify government authority and overbearing enforcement (I wrote about this in the case of the Iraq War twenty years ago in the Financial Times, where, after its failure on 9/11, the Bush administration needed to ‘re-legitimise’ itself by defeating an external threat, if necessary a manufactured one: step forward, the ‘threat’ from Iraq’s WMD). Trump’s tendency to conflate fentanyl with terrorism, drug cartels, the Maduro regime, etc. is a notable variant of this cynical technique.

The renowned author and international lawyer, Philippe Sands, was asked recently on the BBC whether he believed the decline of international law was irrevocable. He replied that it was possible that the rule of law would recover - these things occur in cycles, he commented. I have the greatest respect for Philippe but there are no grounds to believe in historical cycles of events of any kind, and no particular reason to believe that international law will once more be respected more widely. But equally, the more pessimistic view - that it will get worse - is no more plausible (though this is what I happen to believe). The truth is that we simply do not know. I will write shortly about the predictability of geopolitical events, but my conclusion will say that such are inherently totally unpredictable, a conclusion that should lead to certain changes in the way geopolitics, and its practitioners and analysts, are considered.

Finally, an update about my post on the mounting nuclear peril, yesterday. I saw a brief story last night that Putin has deployed several ‘Oreshnik’ hypersonic intermediate range nuclear-capable missiles to Belarus (officially confirmed by both Belarus and Russia). These missiles would have been covered and thus limited by the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement that has been allowed to collapse, thanks to Russian perfidy and US/NATO indifference. Their hypersonic capability makes them almost impossible to shoot down. This is brazen nuclear intimidation, perhaps to bully Ukraine’s allies into forcing Kiev to capitulate to Moscow’s demands (which Trump seems sympathetic towards). It is hopefully only a coincidence that the Russians are also at the same time claiming that Ukraine mounted a mass drone attack on Putin’s palace in Novgorod, for which no evidence has been presented. But connecting the dots, it is not implausible that the Russians might view this as an attack by a state with the support of a nuclear state - the explicit condition for Russian use of its nuclear weapons in its recently-announced revised nuclear doctrine. I presume they already know the very considerable extent of US and allied assistance to help Ukraine target its attacks, yesterday reported in extraordinary detail in the New York Times.

If the US, Trump and Rubio, started complaining that Russia had attacked Mar-a-Lago, we would worry that the US might retaliate violently. But I looked for mention of this rather concerning story in the BBC news website and the New York Times. Not one word.

I am meanwhile looking forward to a happy and peaceful new year.

As ever, I welcome comments, suggestions etc.

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