Beria Had His Good Points

We're The Good Guys 

The latest revelations about the UK spying programme are worrying indeed.  They demonstrate just how quickly a so-called Western liberal state can morph into a institution of sinister countenance.

To be sure, both the Left and the Right in Western liberal democracies have had their respective versions of conspiracy.  The Left version has plutocratic capitalists perverting good and just government for pecuniary advantage.  The Right version has secret societies of Marxist bent infiltrating government agencies to work their poison.  Both versions have been pretty whacko at times.  Now, however, reality is trumping weird fiction.

Along came 9/11.  Suddenly, the threat from conspirators became vivid and tangible.
  The threat was terrorism and terrorists.  These people were archetypical conspirators: the theory became reality.  In order to combat the threat, governments needed extra powers.  But, it was argued, the common man would never tolerate such arrogation of power (at least once the immediate threat had passed), so it was better to keep them ignorant whilst government powers expanded secretly.  But the powers-that-be felt righteous in proceeding this way, because in their own eyes they were the good guys--protecting people , preventing harm, defending the innocent, etc.  The righteous end very definitely justified illicit means.

Since secretive terrorist groups relied substantially upon high-tech communication, the expansion of surveillance capability over billions upon billions of phone calls, e-mails, and other electronic communication was a wonderful boon.  Suddenly, snooping was taken to a heretofore unbelievable level.  Just in time.  But the rot set in immediately.

The Guardian has revealed that in the UK the electronic spy agency, the Government Communications Headquarters("GCHQ") has argued strenuously against its making its eavesdropping admissible in courts of law.  Why?  Because it did not want the public to know what it was doing. 

The UK intelligence agency GCHQ has repeatedly warned it fears a "damaging public debate" on the scale of its activities because it could lead to legal challenges against its mass-surveillance programmes, classified internal documents reveal.  Memos contained in the cache disclosed by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden detail the agency's long fight against making intercept evidence admissible as evidence in criminal trials – a policy supported by all three major political parties, but ultimately defeated by the UK's intelligence community.  Foremost among the reasons was a desire to minimise the potential for challenges against the agency's large-scale interception programmes, rather than any intrinsic threat to security, the documents show.

Let's get this clear.  The intelligence agencies (and political parties) wanted to spy on everyone, everywhere without warrant, but did not want its data used in courts as evidence, for fear of public backlash.  In other words, the intelligence agencies wanted to operate outside the judicial system.  What this implies is that extra-judicial executions in back streets was the next operational step. 

Let's think this through.  An intelligence agency learns via electronic eavesdropping that a suspect is indeed a threat.  But he or she cannot be arrested and tried because the evidence must be kept secret.  What to do?  Black ops.  Take him or her out on the quiet.  Oh, but it's OK.  We have the evidence.  They represent a clear and present danger.  It's just that we are not going to bring that evidence before the court.  The public might not like how we gathered the evidence, since we are watching and eavesdropping on them as well.

The papers also reveal that:
• GCHQ lobbied furiously to keep secret the fact that telecoms firms had gone "well beyond" what they were legally required to do to help intelligence agencies' mass interception of communications, both in the UK and overseas.
• GCHQ feared a legal challenge under the right to privacy in the Human Rights Act if evidence of its surveillance methods became admissable in court.
• GCHQ assisted the Home Office in lining up sympathetic people to help with "press handling", including the Liberal Democrat peer and former intelligence services commissioner Lord Carlile, who this week criticised the Guardian for its coverage of mass surveillance by GCHQ and the US National Security Agency.

The most recent attempt to make intelligence gathered from intercepts admissible in court, proposed by the last Labour government, was finally stymied by GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 in 2009.  A briefing memo prepared for the board of GCHQ shortly before the decision was made public revealed that one reason the agency was keen to quash the proposals was the fear that even passing references to its wide-reaching surveillance powers could start a "damaging" public debate.

The snooping, surveilling, spying, Panoptican State operating extra-judicially on a mass scale came into being in the space of ten short years in the West.  It all happened while we were sleeping.  What a shift!  What a transformation.  What a revolution.  Stalin, Beria, the Stazi--suddenly these demons and institutions of secret state terror seem not so strange any more. 

When men stop believing in God, they will act as if they were gods.  The lust for power, illegal power, will become both insatiable and undeniable.  Quickly.