The acceptable face of paranoia

Spy

 Howls of anguish and anger have greeted the latest revelations in the unfolding internet surveillance scandal; Outraged (foreign) politicians and the chattering classes are up in arms that Britain's GCHQ is intercepting and holding internet traffic into and out of the country for up to 30 days in a way that is apparently legal. Even worse from their point of view is that GCHQ has boasted that they're doing better than the NSA in gathering data and one of the formers' legal advisers' is quoted as saying "They [the UK Parliamentary intelligence and security committee supposed to oversee GCHQ] have always been exceptionally good at understanding the need to keep our work secret". You don't say...

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 John Naughton, in the Guardian, daily organ of the middle classes, states, 'What we're witnessing is the metamorphosis of our democracies into national security states in which the prerogatives of security authorities trump every other consideration and in which critical or sceptical appraisal of them is ruled out of court'.

Of course, he's right to be angry and worried about the implications but the reality is that the security state has been here for a long time; It's just only now that it is beginning to affect the 'wrong' type of people. In the past, when the issue of state surveillance tactics

Spy

was brought up, those now working themselves up into righteous anger, would have been the first to say you're being paranoid. Now it appears, it's ok to be paranoid.

No serious history of the post war world should fail to include the impact of the world's various security and intelligence services on major, and often minor, events; but of course they do. The CIA, to use just one example, has changed the course of world history on dozens of occasions. Encouraged by the success of their intelligence operations during World War Two, the  USA, Britain and the Soviet Union, to mention just 3 countries, saw no reason to disband these organisations and in fact did the opposite. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and beyond, the CIA, SIS and KGB interfered around the globe in what they saw as their sphere's of influence. The CIA had a finger in every country's pie, Britain generally kept to its ex colonies  and the USSR, and the KGB devoted most of its energies to spying on and infilitrating its rivals' agencies.

The Soviet Union and its satellites (and of course, Nazi Germany) were security states long before the term, or the modern technologies were invented. They did it the old fashioned way by using secret police to suppress any dissent and to enforce an ideology outside of which you were immediately suspect.  This was backed up by a network of prisons and camps in which you would end up if you were deemed an enemy of the state. Prior to Stalin's death in 1953, you could quite easily have ended up dead. For the western states, the Soviet Union was very helpful as it provided a clear enemy and a warning of what might happen if the norms of capitalist society were tinkered with. It was also a justification for spending on both the military and the intelligence services

Whilst the West wasn't as free as its mythology claimed, it certainly wasn't like the Eastern bloc. For both the USA and Britain, the period of the 1940s to the 1960s was one of fighting the Cold War, both at home and abroad; this meant hunting subversives and communists, not necessarily the same thing. In Britain, the first seeds of the modern security state were laid not there itself but in the occupied six counties of Ireland. It was here that the techniques of surveillance, infiltration and the widespread use of touts were honed; not to mention the execution of the state's opponents. The 6 Counties was a war zone for decades in which every possible tactic was used against the enemy, the nationalist population. Over time, these techniques were used in Britain itself, for example, during the year long Miners' Strike 1984-1985 and 'normalised'. The recent revelations of the existence of long running undercover police operations against organisations that could barely be called radical is further confirmation of the priorities and nervousness of the state.



GCHQ listening in

In Britain, it wasn't just this strand that was part of the groundwork of the security state; two other elements needed to be added into the mix. The first of these was GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), the UK's surveillance organisation, which has been around since 1919 in various forms. Best known for its success in cracking German cyphers during WWII, it only grew in strength in the post war period as the Cold War hotted up and technology improved. Millions of pounds were poured into it for a new building in Cheltenham which is now at the core of its data trawling activities.

The second element is the incredible growth of CCTV surveillance since the 1970s to the situation today in Britain where it is very difficult to avoid being monitored by cameras or your car registration plate being captured on video. This constant surveillance hasn't led to any dramatic fall in crime or to a safer society and neither has the long term use of police informers which appear to be mainly used in political movements rather than amongst criminals.

The only thing that a state fears more than other states is its own people, especially its working classes; that is why surveillance and infiltration has been aimed at them not the offices of the Guardian.