Law – Page 26 – a sibilant intake of breath

Taking one action

Talking with my friend Meaghan, the question arose: what is the single most useful thing individuals can do easily to help address climate change? Almost certainly, it is taking some action to influence the politics in their country. For those living in democracies, there is probably nothing more useful they can do than nudging their elected representatives a bit toward understanding climate change, wanting to curb it, and being aware of how to do so.

As BuryCoal argues, the key to dealing with climate change is to stop burning fossil fuels. The more coal, oil, and gas stay underground, the less the climate will change. At the moment, I think that is probably the most important message people can convey to their representatives.

Of course, anyone who you tell that to is likely to come back at you with various objections. Fossil fuels power the world economy, for instance. It may be unrealistic to expect the average citizen to prepare counter-arguments for the major objections they will hear – which range from the realistic to the completely deluded. This major counter-argument, however, seems to have two responses. First, we do have alternatives. The total amount of renewable energy out there is huge, and we have many different ways to capture it. Second, nothing about the universe guarantees our current level of energy use. It may well be that future generations experience leaner times. That is far preferable to a world where they are trying to deal with catastrophic or runaway climate change.

The degree to which members of the general public need to understand climate change and its solutions is debatable. It may well be that the problem can be solved by stealth, without much input from the average individual. My fantasy climate change policy doesn’t call for much in the way of voluntary action. For those individuals who are concerned, I would say that first and foremost they should be expressing their deep concern to their elected representatives, highlighting how climate change is the challenge facing humanity and the most important current force that will determine how future generations live.

Once you have done that, you can go on to take actions that reduce your personal contribution to the problem, like improving the efficiency of your home, going vegetarian, reducing travel, etc. Ultimately, the emergence of society-wide mandatory solutions seems to have a much greater chance of addressing the problem than hoping for bottom-up voluntary actions to do the job.

One North American group focused on encouraging ordinary citizens to lobby their representatives for action on climate change is the Citizens Climate Lobby.

Sovereign debt crises in the EU

I find all the economic anxiety in the European Union (EU) to be rather worrisome, from a long-term historical perspective. I think the last 500 years of history demonstrate pretty convincingly that the most benign possible way for European states to spend their time is arguing over agricultural subsidies and cheese standards. It’s definitely a lot more congenial than building tanks and smashing through Poland and Belgium over and over.

As such, I rather hope the EU is able to sort things out and set up systems that prevent these problems in the future. There definitely need to be ways in which the actions of less responsible governments can be prevented from requiring frequent bailouts from more responsible governments, but I don’t think the risk of that happening from time to time is so severe that it is worth derailing the whole European project over.

Ethics and weapons of mass destruction

Unsurprisingly, my review of Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb generated a discussion on the ethics of the United States using such bombs on Japan in 1945.

In the same book, a moral question with some similar characteristics comes up. Describing the American attack on Iwo Jima, Rhodes explains:

Washington secretly considered sanitizing the island with artillery shells loaded with poison gas lobbed in by ships standing well offshore; the proposal reached the White House by Roosevelt curtly vetoed it. It might have saved thousands of lives and hastened the surrender – arguments used to justify most of the mass slaughters of the Second Worlld War, and neither the United States nor Japan had signed the Geneva Convention prohibiting such use – but Roosevelt presumably remembered the world outcry that followed German introduction of poison gas in the First World War and decided to leave the sanitizing of Iwo Jima to the U.S. Marines.

In the end, 6,821 American marines were killed and 21,865 were injured. 20,000 Japanese troops died, with 1,083 ultimately surrendering.

I presume most readers think the use of poison gas would have been more immoral than attacking with Marines, despite how similar numbers of Japanese troops would likely have been killed in either case. What I am curious about is the reasoning. Is the use of certain kinds of weapons fundamentally unacceptable, regardless of the consequences of their use or non-use? Or would using poison gas on Iwo Jima have established a harmful precedent that would have caused greater suffering later? Or is there some other justification?

Spying on the U.N.

In addition to describing many situations of allies spying on allies, Richard Aldrich’s GCHQ: The Uncensored Story Of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency also describes a number of alleged incidents of the United States and United Kingdom spying on the United Nations, particularly during the led-up to the Iraq War.

Aldrich describes how the NSA and GCHQ used the UNSCOM weapons inspectors in Iraq as “short-range collectors” of signals intelligence (SIGINT). He also describes the bugging of the U.N. headquarters in Iraq during that period, the bugging of the U.N. Secretariat (including Secretary General Annan’s office), and espionage conducted against non-permanent members of the Security Council before the vote that would have authorized the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Aldrich claims that “listening in on the UN was routine” and that “in 1945 the United States had pressed for the UN headquarters to be in New York precisely in order to make eavesdropping easier”.

GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency

Richard Aldrich’s excellent GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency contributes significantly to the public understanding of the role secret intelligence agencies have played in world affairs and the domestic politics of Britain and elsewhere. From the codebreaking of the second world war to the frightening mass surveillance and data mining of the modern era, Aldrich provides a consistently interesting and informative account. Technical details on signals intelligence (SIGINT) techniques are relatively few, but the book contains a lot of new and interesting information running quite close to the present day.

GCHQ’s history

The Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) is Britain’s version of America’s National Security Agency (NSA) or Canada’s Communication Security Establishment (CSE). They are primarily the governments interceptors and decrypters of communications: from the telemetry data from the missile tests of foreign powers to (increasingly) the electronic records tracking the communication and behaviour of all ordinary citizens. Aldrich covers the history of GCHQ from the second world war virtually up to the present day: with long sections on the U.S.-U.K. intelligence alliance; the Cold War; progressing intelligence technologies; overseas listening stations and decolonization; terrorism; secrecy, the media, and oversight by politicians and the public; the post-Cold War era; and the modern day.

Aldrich describes an extraordinary number of cases of allies spying on one another: from the United States and United Kingdom during the interwar and WWII periods to India bugging Tony Blair’s hotel room during a Prime Ministerial visit to the considerable espionage conducted by the U.S. and U.K. against the United Nations Security Council and Secretariat in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War. It is safe to assume that everybody is spying on everybody all the time. Indeed, in the later chapters, GCHQ describes how private organizations and organized crime groups are increasingly getting into the game. For instance, he alleges that British banks have paid out billions of Pounds to hackers who have gotten into their systems and blackmailed them.

GCHQ also documents the collusion between private companies and espionage organizations, going back at least to the telegraph and earliest submarine cables. Right from the beginning, the owners and operators of these communication links secretly passed along data to intelligence organizations, which was used for purposes of diplomatic and military espionage, as well as to gain economic advantage through industrial espionage. Aldrich also describes how private companies have been made to build back doors into their products so that organizations like GCHQ and the NSA can crack the communications of people using them. This applied to manufacturers of cryptographic equipment in neutral countries like Switzerland during the Cold War.

Aldrich also argues that the Data Encryption Standard (DES) was intentionally weakened to allow NSA snooping, though I have read elsewhere that the NSA actually used its expertise to strengthen the algorithm. Aldrich does a good job of describing one deep tension in the current mandate of GCHQ: on one hand, it is increasingly encouraged to help private British companies like banks secure their computer and communication systems. At the same time, it tries to preserve back doors and insecure communication methods in products used by others, so as not to undermine its own espionage mandate. Similarly, Aldrich talks on a number of occasions about the tension between using intelligence information and protecting the sources and methods used to acquire it. While it may be especially damning to condemn the dubious actions of a foreign power using their own intercepted and decrypted communication, doing so inevitably informs them that you are reading their traffic. Something similar is true when it comes to using surreptitiously acquired information to prosecute criminal trials.

GCHQ contains lots of information on the spotty record of the world’s intelligence services, when it comes to predicting major events. He describes many situations where policy-makers were caught by surprise, because their spy services didn’t pass along warning. These include the Yom Kippur War, the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and others. Aldrich also describes the Iraq-WMD fiasco, what it shows about the analysis of intelligence services, and what some of its broader political ramifications were.

At many points, Aldrich identifies how GCHQ and the NSA are by far the most costly intelligence services of the U.K. and U.S. respectively. The NSA dwarfs the CIA, just as GCHQ dwarfs MI5 and MI6 in staffing and resources. This is reflective of the special importance placed on intercepted communications by policy-makers. It is arguably also demonstrative of how GCHQ has been able to use the deep secrecy of its work to evade government scrutiny and secure considerable material support.

GCHQ’s present

The last section of Aldrich’s book is positively frightening. He describes how the fear of terrorism has driven a massive increase in technical surveillance – certainly within the U.K. but very likely elsewhere as well. He describes how a 2006 European law requires telephone and internet companies to retain comprehensive records of the communications of their customers for ten years, and how the government is planning to store their own copy of the information for data mining purposes. Aldrich explains:

The answer [to why the government wants its own copy of the data] is ‘data mining’, the use of computers to comb through unimaginable amounts of information looking for patterns and statistical relationships. This practice now constitutes the most insidious threat to personal liberty. What makes surveillance different in the age of ubiquitous computer and the mobile phone is that our data is never thrown away. Machines routinely store millions of details about our everyday lives, and at some point in the future it will be possible to bring these all together and search them.

Aldrich quotes a disturbing warning from the retiring Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald GC. Macdonald warns that powers are being irreversibly granted to the state, and that “we may end up living with something we can’t bear.”

Personally, I think all this is much more dangerous than terrorism. If the choice is between tolerating a few terrorist attacks per year and building up a gigantic secret alliance between government and private companies, designed to track all the details of the lives of individuals, I would prefer the terrorism. After all, terrorist groups are weak outlaw organizations with limited resources. The state, by contrast, is massive, potent, permanent, and not always subject to effective oversight. Our fear of a few bands of fanatics (collectively far less dangerous than smoking or car crashes) is driving us into giving the state unparalleled ability to monitor everybody.

The book is similar in purpose to Matthew Aid’s The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency, though I think Aldrich’s book is significantly better. I recommend the entire book to history buffs and those with an interest in intelligence or the Anglo-American alliance. The last section – on the growing power of the state in response to terrorism – I recommend to everybody.

Finland’s nuclear waste dump

This is interesting: Finland is building a radioactive waste dump meant to store the stuff safely for at least 100,000 years. They are in the process of building a new nuclear reactor and – rather admirably – their law requires that the waste be dealt with domestically, rather than exported.

I have argued previously that I would feel more comfortable with the construction of new nuclear plants in Canada if the utilities building them also had to build adequate waste storage facilities before the power plants became operational.

The Warrior’s Honour

It is strange to read Michael Ignatieff’s The Warrior’s Honour now, when he is leader of the official opposition rather than a journalist. Back in 1998, Ignatieff described the purpose of the book:

I wanted to find out what mixture of moral solidarity and hubris led Western nations to embark on this brief adventure in putting the world right.

Ignatieff is making reference to the whole notion of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the ‘responsibility to protect’ which emerged strongly after the scale of both killing and western inaction in the 1994 Rwandan genocide became apparent. The book is certainly dated in some ways, which can be a liability. At the same time, it has value insofar as it does express one perspective of that time, and facilitates consideration of what has changed since.

The central concept of Ignatieff’s book is the ethics of warriors themselves – the internal moral forces that sometimes help to constrain behaviour within the most limited bounds of ethics, even in wartime. He explores the role of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as special representatives (‘enforcers’ is too strong a word) of the Geneva Conventions. He explains how Henry Dunant – founder of the organization – established a continuing tradition in which delegates of the ICRC have “made their pact with the devil of war” and “accept[ed] the inevitability, sometimes even the desirability of war” while “trying, if it is possible, to conduct it according to certain rules of honour.” Ignatieff also describes the consequences when warriors abandon honour, as he alleges took place during and after the breakup of Yugoslavia, when former neighbours destroyed their collective homeland driven by “the narcissism of minor difference.”

The Warrior’s Honour is not an especially practical book. The tone is more mournful and ambiguous than certain or persuasive. It doesn’t offer much guidance to those trying to decide how to respond to the humanitarian emergencies of today. Ignatieff’s book does more to describe the predicament than to suggest paths out of it, though that is a valuable undertaking in itself. In the conclusion, he explains:

The chief moral obstacle in the path of reconciliation is the desire for revenge. Now, revenge is commonly regarded as a low and unworthy emotion, and because it is regarded as such, its deep moral hold on people is rarely understood. But revenge – morally considered – is the desire to keep faith with the dead, to honour their memory by taking up their cause where they left of. Revenge keeps faith between generations; the violence it engenders is a ritual form of respect for the community’s dead – therein lies its legitimacy. Reconciliation is difficult precisely because it must compete with the powerful alternative morality of violence. Political terror is tenacious because it is an ethical practice. It is a cult of the dead, a dire and absolute expression of respect.

One has to wonder whether it wouldn’t be better for humanity to simply forget the outrages of the past, given the tragic way in which they perpetuate conflict into the present and future. Like feuding gangs, human beings feel this constant compulsion to respond to every slight with a larger slight, and pay back every rape and murder with two more.

Given the course of Michael Ignatieff’s life, the book also highlights the tragic theatrical character of government and opposition. As a journalist, Ignatieff could grapple with major political and ethical questions with a kind of integrity and with acceptance that the answers derived from history are usually imperfect and uncertain. As a politician, he must engage in a much less sophisticated slinging back-and-forth of accusations. One of many unfortunate facts about political life is that proximity to power tends to be accompanied by a cheapening of discourse.

Midterm day

Despite all the complaints from both left and right, I think Barack Obama is a promising president, whose tenure has largely been wasted on the financial crisis so far. Nonetheless, he does have some decent achievements to point to, most notably on health care, and there is a lot more he could accomplish with adequate Congressional support.

Hopefully, today’s elections will be less dire for the Democrats than many have been expecting.

While some of the complaints about Obama from the right have been non-sensical (all that secret Muslim / socialist stuff), what really seems to endanger him is a loss of enthusiam from his core supporters. Certainly, he could have done more on issues like gay rights and climate change. Nonetheless, it doesn’t make sense to punish him for inadequate action by rewarding those who will do even less on those issues, or even try to roll back the modest progress that has been made.

The Republicans seem to understand the value of unity and pulling together far better than Democrats do. That may be a big part of why they seem to be so much more effective at driving their agenda, despite how it tends to serve the needs of a powerful minority more than those of the population at large.

California’s Proposition 19

Tomorrow, the people of California will vote on Proposition 19: a measure that would make marijuana legal to grow, own, sell, and use in small quantities. The two major arguments being used are economic – since the measure would let counties and municipal governments levy taxes on the stuff – and security-focused – since marijuana is currently one of the sources of financial support for Mexico’s brutal drug gangs.

I have argued before that the best approach to drugs is to legalize, regulate, and provide treatment for addicts. Hopefully, California can set a progressive precedent for the rest of the United States (unlike other examples).

Spying between friends

Richard Alrich’s GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency describes a number of instances of longstanding allies conducting espionage against one another, including signals intelligence (SIGINT). Aldrich describes how the ‘Echelon’ system run by British and U.S. intelligence was used to “read the traffic of their minor allies, including France and West Germany”. This system is now estimated to process five billion intercepts per day, probably filtering them for suspicious words and phrases. Aldrich talks about how, after the second world war, Britain’s codebreakers were “doing extensive work on Britain’s European allies, regarding them as either insecure or untrustworthy, or both”.

Of course, more awkward allies have been a higher priority for codebreaking and other forms of covert activity. During the interwar period, Russian ciphers were the the “core business” of Britain’s codebreakers, and apparently work on them didn’t stop despite their subsequent alliance. The Soviets were also spying on the allies, though with more of an emphasis on human intelligence (HUMINT). For example, John Cairncross worked at GCHQ’s predecessor – Bletchley Park – and warned the KGB of the impending German armoured offensive at Kursk, one of the decisive battles of the war. He also saw some of Britain’s early thinking on atomic weapons while working at the Cabinet Office, while his fellow Russian spy Klaus Fuchs was virtually able to provide the blueprints of the devices built at Los Alamos. The Soviet Union achieved other notable HUMINT successes throughout the Cold War, such as the John Walker espionage within the navy. Surely, there are other examples that are still secret.

Allied SIGINT against Soviet targets continued after 1945, as GCHQ and others started to intercept messages between Moscow and the capitals of new client states.

The most subtle reference to inter-allied spying comes from a passage on the Diplomatic Wireless Service, developed in 1944 and 1945. Aldrich describes how the DWS was primarily a system of military SIGINT collection stations, but that it also “doubled as a secret monitoring service working from within British Embassies and High Commissions”. High Commissions are only located in Commonwealth countries, on whom Britain is presumably still spying. They seem to be returning the favour, as demonstrated by another anecdote from the book, in which Prime Minister Tony Blair discovered his hotel room in India to be laced with listening devices that would have had to be drilled out of the walls to disable.