Espionnage? Nous?

President George W Bush is supposed to have confided in Tony Blair that “The problem with the French is they don’t have a word for entrepreneur”, but reportedly Alastair Campbell told the Washington Post that Blair never heard Bush say it. However, the French, it seems, do have a word for espionnage, so a post for Bastille Day.

Edward Snowden is the computer technician who used to work for a contractor to the US National Security Agency (NSA). After handing out NSA’s secrets he is currently in the transit area of Moscow airport looking for a country to take him in. I gave my simplistic view of such people when posting about Wikileaks over two years ago:

Listening to some of his [Assange’s] former associates the expression attributed to Lenin, ‘useful idiots’, came to mind. While it seems unlikely that the Wikileaks cables initiated the unrest which is spreading through the Middle East, we may well not yet appreciate all the damage that Assange’s activities could cause. The whole underlying principle seems dubious. A bank clerk who steals his employer’s money, even if to give to worthy causes, is a thief and goes to prison. Is that different from an employee who takes his employer’s confidential information and places it in the public domain?

Just how revelatory has the Snowden material been?  During the last few decades the role of Bletchley Park in handling signals intelligence has been woven into the UK’s mythological tapestry of World War 2 alongside the Battle of Britain and D-Day. It’s also widely understood that GCHQ is Bletchley’s successor, for example in the Mail on Sunday on 14 July:

Many of Britain’s top code-breakers and analysts are able to crack complex problems because they suffer from dyslexia, GCHQ has revealed. A spokesman for the Government’s top-secret electronic eavesdropping station in Cheltenham said last night that some of their most talented code-breakers have difficulty in learning to read or interpreting words. But this can actually help them crack codes, as they ‘see’ things those without the disorder do not.

So for many Britons it has been more reassuring than startling to learn that instead of intercepting radio transmissions, attention is nowadays being given to the information hurtling around the internet. The minority of people with a particular interest in this kind of thing will have come across, for example, Richard Aldrich’s GCHQ, James Bamford’s Body of Secrets and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Chatter, not to mention Bamford’s article last year for Wired about the NSA’s Utah Data Center, and won’t have been much surprised in principle about the technical capabilities apparent in the Snowden material. The legality of such data being acquired by states as far as the rights of citizens and international relations are concerned, I will leave to others.

In technical terms what do Snowden’s purloined PowerPoint slides, those which the Guardian first started to reveal on 7 June, actually add? Primarily the names and structure of programmes, the sort of voyeuristic detail which might fascinate because it is intended to be concealed but is now on display for all to see, a sort of NOFORN porn. The fact that large American corporations cooperate with the US government is surely no surprise. And although corporate logos are sprinkled across them, the slides are pretty dull. Only employees who need to master the detail could be expected to sit through such presentations.

The governments of many countries other than the US and UK are well-informed about the activities of NSA, with whom not just the British have links. More informed than they would be solely from the open literature, and more involved than they might want to reveal in public. So many initial overseas reactions to the Snowden leaks were probably calculated to soothe any domestic concerns being stirred up by privacy advocates rather than intended to be rebukes to the US. Triggered by an interview Snowden gave Der Spiegel, France demanded explanations from the US (Espionnage: la France demande des explications aux États-Unis, according to Le Point on 30 June). This met with some cynical responses, including a choice comment from Blogs of War which proposed 10 Short Outrage-Busting Reads on French Spying for President Hollande.

The French then seem to have decided that if their public needed reassurance, it should be that France was up with the hunt. Le Monde on 4 July (Gallic humour) ran an informative article, Révélations sur le Big Brother français:

Si les révélations sur le programme d'espionnage américain Prism ont provoqué un concert d'indignation en Europe, la France, elle, n'a que faiblement protesté. Pour deux excellentes raisons : Paris était déjà au courant. Et fait la même chose.*

which made all of us more au courant by providing graphics (below) and announcing the existence of a crack team of crypto-mathématiciens within the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE, an organisation which seems to cover the ground of the UK’s SIS and GCHQ).

The clear message from Le Monde was:

La France est dans le top 5 en matière de capacité informatique, derrière les Etats-Unis, la Grande-Bretagne, Israël et la Chine.**

So the French certainly have a word for it.

*If the revelations about the U.S. spying program Prism led a chorus of indignation in Europe, France only raised minor quibbles. For two good reasons: Paris already knew. And does the same thing.

** France is in the top 5 in terms of computing power [for NSA-type activities] behind the United States, Britain, Israel and China.


FOOTNOTE

Back in May, before anyone had heard of Edward Snowden, a post appeared here about the impracticality of London turning itself into a city state. Quite by coincidence, among the assets it identified London having to leave in the rump England were GCHQ and the cables coming ashore in the UK, particularly in SW England. The latter were illustrated with a map obtained using an interactive graphic on the Guardian Datablog. It’s interesting to go back to the same graphic and take a look at the Pacific:

Not too hard to see why Snowden was in Hawaii. On the original, clicking on the green cable to the SSE of Hawaii, apparently going nowhere, reveals it to be Honotua which serves French Polynesia.

UPDATE 14 SEPTEMBER

An article, Ex-MI6 deputy chief plays down damage caused by Snowden leaks, by Richard Norton-Taylor and Dominic Rushe which appeared in the Guardian on 12 September is worth reading in full; extracts:

A former senior British secret intelligence officer on Thursday played down any potential damage done by the leaks to the Guardian of the spying activities of GCHQ and America's National Security Agency, apparently contradicting claims made by UK security chiefs.  

The leaks, by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were "very embarrassing, uncomfortable, and unfortunate", Nigel Inkster, former deputy chief of MI6, said. While Inkster said it was too early to draw any definite conclusions about the impact of the leaks, he added: "I sense that those most interested in the activities of the NSA and GCHQ have not been told very much they didn't know already or could have inferred."  

... As for the impact of the revelations about the capabilities of the NSA and GCHQ on allies, Inkster said the reality was any government with a national communications system also had a national signal intelligence capability.  

"The tears that have been shed internationally have been of the crocodile variety," he said in an apparent reference to US allies, notably Germany, which have expressed concern about the activities of the NSA and GCHQ and the extent of their ability to intercept communications.  

Inkster was speaking at a press conference at the launch of the latest annual Strategic Survey published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He left MI6 after the invasion of Iraq and subsequently criticised how Britain "got dragged into a war". He is currently director of transnational threats and political risk at the institute.  

He added that "the degree and scope" of surveillance and eavesdropping by the NSA and GCHQ was a surprising. "I must say that in the space of five years, the technical ability of what the NSA and GCHQ can do is remarkable in getting their arms around a massive surge in communications data."

Bojoburg

Two members of the commentariat fixated on the same idea last week. The London Evening Standard on 14 May ran a piece by Simon Jenkins, London should quit the EU and ditch the UK too, and, the next day in The Times (£), David Aaronovitch explained why it was necessary to Unshackle London from the backward shires.

According to Jenkins:

There is an easy solution to Britain in Europe. Let the rest of Britain stay but let London leave.  

… Its future is global. Its two great industries, finance and leisure, are peculiar to itself. They depend on self-government, on regulatory discipline and on the value of the pound. Financial services are worldwide in application. They are clearly threatened by what Lord Lawson called “jealous European banking officials”, by regulations designed to underpin German bankers and clip London’s wings.  

The new city state would have a physical boundary, roughly that of the M25. Digital mapping would police the circumference, though open borders are no great problem. They exist like those between Gulf states, between Ireland and Ulster, Monaco and France. London already has its own government under its elected “monarch”, Boris Johnson.  

The rest of Britain may have reasons for wanting to “stay in Europe”. It is time for London to “get out”, of both the EU and the UK.

Goodness knows what Jenkins thinks digital mapping is. Aaronovitch saw the problem as being one of culture, typified in PMQs the day before:

… of the six Conservative MPs who stood to ask questions, no less than five were talking about when to have a referendum on Europe. They might as well have been in Caracas.  

… Where they sit for in Essex, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire or Wiltshire, the EU may indeed be more important than it is to me in London. On questions such as immigration, perhaps my metropolitan attitude seems as peculiar to them as their parochialism does to me.  

… Londoners differ from some of their compatriots in attitudes towards the outside world. The pollsters Ipsos/Mori sent me figures for the regional variations on immigration and the EU. Aggregated for January-December 2012, polling showed an average of 21 per cent of Britons naming race relations/ immigration/immigrants as “one of the most important issues facing the country”. The highest figures were the South East with 28 per cent, then the East Midlands, East of England and Yorkshire/Humberside all on 25 per cent. In London it was 13 per cent. This was less dramatically true for Europe/EU. In the South East 10 per cent had it as a vital issue, compared with 5 per cent in London and 6 per cent nationally.  

It is clear that London and the South East are in some ways two different countries and that is why Boris has to be Janus-faced. To become Tory leader he must somehow finesse the fact that he knows a lot of rural/ suburban Tory-Ukippery just doesn’t make sense in the big, competitive, changing world. Like Boris, I do not want to inhabit this parish of 1950s retro enthusiasts.  

… So we may need to secede from the hinterland. And the same is true of our other great cities and university towns which, together, could make an outward-looking, open-minded polity.

So not so much an island state as an archipelago one. Well pundits have to write about something – in 2011 Aaronovitch thought the UK should become part of the USA. And it might have been inhibiting if the position Mrs Thatcher found herself in in 1982 had been remembered:

On the morning of Wednesday 22 September I and my party took off from Tokyo, where I had been visiting, for Peking. Fifteen years remained of the lease to Britain of the New Territories which constitute over 90 per cent of the land of the Colony of Hong Kong. The island of Hong Kong itself is British sovereign territory, but, like the rest of the Colony, dependent on the mainland for water and other supplies. The People's Republic of China refused to recognize the Treaty of Nanking, signed in 1842, by which the island of Hong Kong had been acquired by Britain. Consequently, although my negotiating stance was founded on Britain's sovereign claim to at least part of the territory of Hong Kong, I knew that I could not ultimately rely on this as a means of ensuring the future prosperity and security of the Colony. (The Downing Street Years, page 259)

London, with its “boundary, roughly that of the M25” (see above and the surrounding regions), would be far worse-placed than British Hong Kong. Being on the coast (see below, right), the former colony could trade with the rest of the world without having to enter PRC airspace or territorial waters and at least produced its own electricity and gas.
 

Somehow I don’t see “monarch Boris” converting Tate Modern back into a power station. A secessionist London would have to import electricity and gas from the English grids, would be dependent for its water on the English Thames into which it would also have to discharge its sewage. No doubt the supply of all these things, and a few others (like the westward extension of Heathrow or its replacement) could be arranged amicably – at a price and in return for financial services from London. Until BNP Paribas arrives in Bristol and Crédit Agricole in Birmingham. Of course, London has virtually no armed forces apart from the ceremonial, so all defence capabilities including the nuclear deterrent would be in the hands of the Welsh-English-Scottish rump, as would GCHQ. London would be run out of the Mayor’s office because Jenkins thinks that:

The bulk of British government would have to relocate out of the present capital. Because no one would agree on where, departments would be fragmented around the provinces, to the benefit of all. Parliament could relocate, perhaps to Salford or to an Orwellian “Elizabethville” in south Yorkshire. Essex and Sussex would concentrate development around Stansted and Gatwick, relieving pressure on Heathrow.

All quite barking because London, unlike Singapore (above, left), is land-locked and geography dictates that it cannot become an island city-state. But perhaps there is an even deeper flaw in Jenkins’ concept that London’s

… two great industries, finance and leisure, are peculiar to itself. … Financial services are worldwide in application.

He should have read an article in the Financial Times (£) on 7 May, Cornwall beach buoys London’s financial status. It explained that a beach near Bude in north Cornwall in SW England:

… is one of the main landing points for thousands of miles of submarine cables that carry trading data from New York. Britain’s westerly location means data can reach traders in London several milliseconds quicker than competitors in Frankfurt and Paris – a key advantage in the era of high-frequency trading.  

… “The UK is an underwater cable hub for all the financial institutions in Europe,” says Jack Steven, asset manager at the Crown Estate. “The alternative is to go through somewhere like Portugal, which is closer to the US but which historically hasn’t developed capacity in the same way.”  

According to the Crown Estate, about 95 per cent of the UK’s communication, such as email, internet and telephone calls, is transmitted through submarine cables. They are cheaper and more reliable than satellites, which are expensive to get into orbit and vulnerable to collisions with space debris. The shorter the cables, the quicker data can be transferred. It takes about 65 milliseconds to trade between London and New York. From east London it takes a further five milliseconds to Frankfurt.

Anyone interested can learn more about the global undersea cable network (above) on the Guardian Data Blog.

Boris Johnson, to be fair, has not expressed any opinions, as far as I know, in favour of London’s independence, even though Aaronovitch seems to think he is a closet isolationist. A shame when London could so easily be renamed Bojoburg in his honour as its first head of state. I don’t think either Aaronovitch or Jenkins think for one minute that their proposals will ever happen but, as part of London’s media elite, they are expressing their exasperation with the rest of us.  But most people don't live on six-figure salaries, probably getting away with a day’s work a week writing a thousand words or so about whatever they chose, and having expenses-paid lunches in top restaurants with interesting people talking off the record.