Apple Versus The FBI Shows That The Surveillance Lobby Will Break Any Business, by Loz Kaye

On the face of it, Apple's Tim Cook is a pretty unlikely radical hero.

He is the Chief Executive of a globally dominant company that produces shiny devices and wants a slice of everything that you do.

But Tim Cook's message to customers refusing to cooperate with the FBI in gaining access to one of their shiny devices, is one of the most significant personal acts of defiance of surveillance overreach since Snowden. 

 If you have not already had the news via one of Tim's shiny devices, the FBI has obtained a court order for Apple to hack an iPhone used by one of the San Bernadino shooting suspects.

Reasonable enough, many would say. However, it is the detail of what is being required that is deeply worrying. 

It is about ordering Apple to create a tool to eliminate security protections the company had built in to the phone software to protect customers from, well, amongst others, criminals and terrorists.

This really is not the equivalent of the police checking up on a criminal's phone records as we have seen 101 times on cop shows. 

As Cook puts it: “The government suggests this tool could only be used once, on one phone. But that's simply not true… The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers”. 

The entire thrust of the US law enforcement has been to suggest wanting encryption that actually works is suspicious and unpatriotic.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of reasons for needing access to secure communications, for both business and individuals.

After all, even the UK Ministry of Defence has released its app to access casualty administration and compassionate leave requests for service personnel for Apple devices.

No doubt the debate on the balance of intercept legal powers will continue to rage. Bill Gates has just weighed in on behalf of the FBI, with about as much authority as a confused Clippy.

What this court order has done is fundamentally to change the focus of that debate. 

Up to this point, the battle has been about the authorities on one side, civil liberties groups on the other, and communications services providers being expected to make sense of it all. 

Now every business is in the frame. What is at stake here is a product that Apple makes, and how it produces information. 

The FBI is willing to break into, and so break, a company's product. And try to break that company publicly, with a vigorous legal and media onslaught.

What the FBI is proposing has profound implications, not only for our privacy, but also for how we manufacture, and for how we do business.

Increasingly, all our things are making data: our car, our thermostat, our solar panels, even the fridge. If Apple can be forced into changing its product, then so can any manufacturer.

If Apple can be forced to act completely contrary to what it believes that its customers want, then so can any business. 

CEOs may think that the FBI is 100 per cent right in what they are doing, but they should still be worried even if they do not think of their business as directly “tech” related. 

This is not just an American debate. Cameron has also been thundering about about companies providing safe spaces for terrorists to communicate in, even while the Government has promised there is no intention of an encryption ban.

Proposed British surveillance legislation in the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill was criticised by the Science and Technology Select Committee for lack of clarity on the issue.

That lack of clarity opens the door to what is being proposed by the FBI, and to even more extreme measures than that, in the United Kingdom. A letter such as Tim Cook's would have been illegal under the terms of the Bill.

Many have pointed out that Apple's record on privacy is, at best, patchy. At the end of the day, their job is to sell phones, not to be the champion of civil liberties. That is as it should be.

But if businesses of any kind are to continue to innovate and protect their customers, then they will have to engage in this debate and be bold.

Cook has made the technological and customer service arguments. It is time for businesses to make the political ones.

Will There Be Much EU Left to Brexit From?, by Loz Kaye

With a new year, the prospect of the “Brexit” referendum draws ever closer. With Cameron's negotiations set to push forward in February, a date this summer starts to look increasingly likely, possibly as soon as six weeks after the May elections.

In any case both campaign groups have continued to gear up. What's noticeable as 2016 has begun is how oddly insular the Yes/In campaign's line of attack has been.

It's been about British jobs, British influence, British farming, even the British space industry. All of this is based on the notion that the EU is a stable unifying force both politically and financially.

However well-intentioned the progressive hopes for Europe are, it makes for a selfish yes that's about trying to show what's in it for us, rather than trying to address the challenges we face together as an international community.

And there are plenty of challenges. The Yes campaign view of what the EU offers is bizarrely divorced from what is actually happening on the mainland right now. The EU is in deep crisis, unable to deal with threats to freedom of movement, financial stability and progressive values.

If anything has shown this, it is the turmoil unleashed by the humanitarian disaster of people fleeing conflict zones and oppression. Even the half-hearted attempts to respond have not been honoured. At the beginning of this year only 0.17% of the pledged target of relocations had been met, just 272 Syrians and Eritreans.

Besides, if your frame for dealing with refugees is Europe, you have to draw a not-Europe line somewhere. Whether that is Calais, Siklos, or the Syrian border. Whether that line is a discrete blue sign with stars or with barbed wire.

Since the waves of sympathy generated by pictures of Alan Kurdi's body on the beach, the European establishment has been focusing on keeping refugees out, not helping them.

There are border controls in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, fences have been rolled out in Hungary. The Schengen agreement is in real terms dead, if it can be suspended so easily.

The most obvious symbol of European cooperation on the ground is being undermined with each ID check on a Scandinavian train. The EU has been entirely unable to handle the situation once it has arisen.

It is all very well for Commissioner Avramopoulos to call in ministers for a meeting and insist freedom of movement must stand.

It is all very well for commentators to suggest that the Danish government is not abiding by EU law. The reality is that ministers are clearly indifferent to what Commissioners think or what EU law is.

Perhaps the In/Yes camp just think this is member states not living up to the ideal. But whether it's in the Baltic or in the Balkans the fundamentals of how the EU is supposed work are simply being ignored. 

Cameron's objection to “ever closer union” is beginning to look increasingly moot.

Poland is under investigation by the commission for its media laws, with Guy Verhofstadt suggesting that the country might not have been admitted to the EU had they been in place.

Denmark voted against ditching its justice area opt-out in a recent referendum. Despite a forced Greek return to the drachma being avoided, the Eurozone's woes can hardly be described as over. The fiscal pact is causing inevitable political as well as financial tensions.

The formation of a Portuguese government after elections was held up, with the President having reservations about left-leaning Eurosceptic support, despite the coalition's being able to command the necessary mandate.

While the President's actions fell well short of being the “coup” that was claimed by many on social media, the political stand-off underlined being part of the fiscal pact is far from a guarantee of stability.

The chief art of European politics has been how elegantly problems can be kicked further down the road. But this does not make for the promises of unity and reliability held out by the Yes campaign.

None of the crises that the EU has faced has been dealt with satisfactorily, and that is becoming more and more apparent across the continent.

By the time we get to the referendum, there may well be not much EU left to Brexit from.

Labour Holds the Future of Surveillance in its Hands, by Loz Kaye

Even with operations ongoing, attention has started to turn to what the political response to the horrific Paris attacks should be. Already the pressure has been to push through new surveillance laws in the Investigatory Powers Bill.

Some like Lord Carlile, with ghoulish speed exploited the tragedy to push their own pro-surveillance agenda. This is despite France's having passed measures similar to the Bill. There is no hard evidence that encrypted communications were used, despite media claims.

The Home Secretary resisted calls to fast-track the bill. She can after all afford to be measured; as things stand, its passage is a done deal. That is, unless Labour has a significant change of heart.

Bluntly, since the General Election, that is the only prospect that civil liberties campaigners have of a law that properly balances liberty and security.

With the new parliamentary mathematics, the future of surveillance really does lie in Labour's hands. Going by recent history, it is fair to say a dramatic change of heart seems like something of a long shot.

One of the legacies of the Blair-Brown era is a well entrenched view in a section of the electorate that Labour is authoritarian, that it is still the party of ID cards, of 90-day detention, of former Home Secretaries who queue up to support ever more intrusive intercept powers.

So far it has been business as usual from Andy Burnham, who was keen to underline that the Investigatory Powers Bill isn't a “Snoopers' Charter” in his eyes, and even pressed for its passage to be speeded up due to the Paris attacks. 

This is despite some new signals coming out of the party, not least with digital rights champion Tom Watson being voted in as Deputy Leader. 

The recent thrust of the Labour Party has been much more pro-civil liberties, opposing scrapping the Human Rights Act, defending freedom of information, highlighting Tory threats to trade unionism.

Addressing the legitimate concerns about the bill would make complete sense in this context, not least as it relies on the Human Rights Act for its operation.

The Labour Party should reflect on the reality of what is being proposed.

It would keep the records of the councillor emailing residents about potholes, scoop up details of the activist planning by-election leafleting on social media. It would keep visits to trade union or cooperative society websites.

Without proper checks on how the security services use the immense amount of information generated by our on-line lives, it could build up a frighteningly accurate picture of any of us; of our political affiliations, for example.

Andy Burnham may not think this is mass surveillance, but it is clearly surveillance en masse. 

There is currently a genuine political opportunity for Labour on the issue.

The Liberal Democrats have been the most high profile and best informed of mainstream parties challenging the rush to blanket surveillance. But they are now tainted by being in government during the Snowden revelations scandal.

Their most high profile parliamentarian with relevant experience on the intelligence agencies is Lord Carlile, who is defiantly in favour of the Snoopers' Charter agenda. 

The possibility is there for Labour to demonstrate a break with the past which has seen the party, both apparently uninterested in contemporary digital politics, and unwilling to engage with the tech community's concerns on subjects ranging from intercept to the digital economy.

What ought to make an impression is that the people who have been most vocal about their concerns on the Investigatory Powers Bill are the very people who are supposed to carry it out – communications service providers and digital business.

The current turmoil in the party is a significant danger for campaigners who want to see an Investigatory Powers Act that is fit for purpose, and that does not hand away freedoms that were so hard won by the Labour Movement.

The number one narrative on Corbyn's leadership is that the party is weak on security, and even his most ardent supporters will surely concede the Leadership have done themselves no favours. 

We run the risk that arguing for the right measures on intercept powers will be sucked in to the vortex of tabloid hysteria. 

That is why the argument on surveillance must be made just as much on security grounds as on grounds of citizens' rights.

Does this look like a government that cares much for civil liberties? Weakening encryption, even by signalling we want communications to be able to decrypted by service providers, lays us open to devastating cyber attack.

The lack of focus and targeting in the bulk approach have left our country vulnerable by an inability to concentrate on the real present threats.

The government is considering spending an estimated £2.5 billion over a decade on storing information that all acknowledge will be mostly useless in protecting us, when £2.3 billion has been cut from policing.

When it comes to armed response units, it is Theresa May, not Corbyn, who is the immediate threat to them. She is happy make cuts to them while pouring money in to the bottomless pit which is blanket surveillance.

After all, being critical of the Investigatory Powers Bill could unite both sides in Labour right now, a radical new vision and strength on protecting the nation.

For all our sakes, it must.

Footnote 32, by Loz Kaye

If the history of this century has been about anything so far, then it is the bargain of national security. A constant state of war carried out on a need-to-know basis.

Our governments of various political hues, the NSA, CIA, GCHQ, have constantly asked for, even demanded, our trust. We're keeping you safer, trust us. We're acting within the law, trust us. We need the powers we ask for (and many more you don't know about), trust us.

The shocking report to the Senate Intelligence Committee on CIA torture activities has revealed one tiny corner of the truth, one tiny corner of the misery the US - and by collusion its allies - has unleashed on the world.

News outlets have shied away from describing the atrocities contained in it for what they actually are. I can't. It's rape, kidnap, mental cruelty, thuggery, torture and murder.

Once and for all, this report shows how flawed that bargain of national security has become. The trust we have been asked to have in the war on terror and the rush to mass surveillance has been dangerously misplaced.

The report is full of instances where the public and their elected representatives have been lied to.

The CIA claimed that these “enhanced techniques” led to useful information, preventing terrorist attacks. The committee found that in no case examined was this true. Not one.

CIA Deputy Director of Operations James Pavitt told the Senate Intelligence committee in 2001 they would be informed of each individual who entered CIA custody. Didn't happen.

Pavitt denied torture, and in 2002 denied existence of a detention facility. Lies.

The CIA lied about the number of people detained. They lied about videotaping of interrogations. They lied about using starvation. They lied about using sleep deprivation to medically damaging extent.

The idea that we should take the security services' word at face value after this is not just laughable, it's obscene.

In lots of places, coverage of the report has been rather warped by the CIA's point of view.

It was presented that the failure had mainly been that the torture was ineffective. In other words, that if it had been effective, then it might have been worth persevering with the anal rehydration and simulated drownings. 

To my mind that is obviously monstrous.

What this has done, though, has been to dispel the Jack Bauer, 24 fantasy that for our spooks the ends justify the means and can be made to do so within a very strict timeframe with space for adverts.

The constant claim has been that lives have been saved, and therefore complaining about collateral damage was naive or dangerous.

We now know that those claims have been made falsely in the past and there is no need to take them as true without question in the future.

Equally, the notion that this was done by a few “bad apples” has also been stripped away.

Far from being a few rogue agents, this torture programme was devised by contractor psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.

They formed a company worth $180m, and received $81m in payouts over seven years. This shows that abuse was planned, systemic and well-funded.

In all the detail of the report, as journalist Trevor Timm pointed out, there is one case that seems to sum up that whole miserable saga.

Gul Rahman was tortured at the CIA black site known as the Salt Pit, he was chained to the floor and froze to death.

Footnote 32 explains curtly, “Gul Rahman, another case of mistaken identity.” A human life, someone who lived, loved and was loved, ended up as a footnote by mistake.

The favourite go to phrase for the mass surveillance lobby is that if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear.

Clearly, Gul Ruhman had everything to fear, freezing to death as a footnote in history. In the globalised war on terror, we can all fear becoming another fatal footnote.

Of course, some of us more than others. Currently, Muslims and people of Middle Eastern origin.

But until the government and mainstream parties truly face up to what they have done, until we have a proper inquiry in the UK, and until the release of the Chilcot Report, then the powers that be deserve our fear, not our trust.

Loz Kaye is the Leader of the Pirate Party UK.

Secret Justice Is No Justice At All, by Loz Kaye

The trial of Erol Incedal, accused of plotting a terrorist attack in Britain, is now underway at the Old Bailey.

Just months ago, I would not even have been able to write that sentence. The fact that we know it is happening at all is thanks to pressure from British journalists and the Court of Appeal.

The trial is still going ahead with significant parts of the evidence being heard in secret. Once more, our shared British freedoms and principles of law that go back centuries are being chipped away.

Initially, senior Old Bailey judge Mr Justice Nicol had ruled that the trial of two men was to be held  wholly in secret and the accused be kept anonymous.

This was challenged by media organisations ,and in June the existence of the trial of “AB” and “CD” was acknowledged.

Anthony Hudson for the media groups told the appeal judges, “As far as we are aware no order has ever been made that the entire criminal trial to be held in private, with the media excluded...”

The appeal judges agreed, allowing “AB” to be identified as Erol Incedal. Lord Justice Gross was unequivocal.

He said, “We express grave concern as to the cumulative effects of holding a criminal trial in camera and anonymising the defendants. We find it difficult to conceive of a situation where both departures from open justice will be justified.”

As ever the justification for a secret trial has been that familiar catch all “national security”.

In particular senior prosecutors claimed that the trial was in danger of not getting underway if details were revealed.

That has clearly not been the case. Such headlines as “Blairs may have been terror target” have not stopped the prosecution.

In the run-up to this trial, it has been described as unprecedented and unique. Well, it is only unique until the next time.

In fact, a parallel secret legal system has been growing up in this country over the last few years.

So-called super injunctions have been a cause of much controversy, and they are not just about the doings of celebrities, but also firms like Trafigura.

Liberty has warned about the use of secret evidence in the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, leaving people unable to defend themselves properly.

Above all, the passing of the Justice and Security Act showed that the intention was not for this case to be unique.

The coalition government actively intend secret courts and the suppression of evidence through closed material procedures.

For all that the Liberal Democrats have claimed to be a break on the Conservatives' worst instincts, this is the reality that they have created, neither liberal nor very democratic.

We are now left with the bizarre situation in the Erol Incedal trial that the secret part of proceedings can be attended by 10 journalists who will not be permitted at this stage to report on the evidence that they hear.

This makes us look ridiculous in the eyes of the world, and hands a get-out to dictators wanting to muzzle the free press.

Surely, we need to be able to hear the evidence for the very reasons of national security and our confidence that justice is being carried out correctly.

Otherwise we are in danger that all the general public comes away with is that this is just about somebody having a bit of paper with Tony Blair's address on it.

The secrecy does nothing to make us safer. Quite the reverse.

It allows conspiracy theories to flourish, and raises the question of whether there are other trials we do not know about. It acts as a recruiting sergeant for the very people who wish us harm.

Of course we want to get to the truth if someone was plotting a “Mumbai style” attack on our streets. That is why we have courts, and that justice needs to be seen to be done, not just pushed through without scrutiny.

As Reprieve's Clare Algar put it, “To hold trials entirely in secret is an assault on the fundamental principles of British justice”.

Even if we know some of the detail of the Incedal case, this trial still leaves justice undermined.

This is a real threat to the very British values that those who argue for the national security state claim to uphold.

Loz Kaye is the Leader of the Pirate Party UK.

Theresa May and the Return of the Snoopers' Charter, by Loz Kaye

This year's conference season has seen the parties laying out their stalls for 2015's General Election.

Given her attitude to civil liberties it should probably come as no surprise that Theresa May's contribution has been to vow that a future Tory government would reintroduce the “Snoopers' Charter”.

Once again the Conservatives are angling to strip us of liberties and privacy in the name of the war on terror.

We have already had this debate during this parliament.

The Communications Data Bill (dubbed the Snoopers' Charter) was intended to further extend already existing powers to retain information on our communications.

In other words, who all of us phone, email, text, location data and much more.

It was rejected as disproportionate, and after all significant obligations already exist for telcos and ISPs to retain this data.

The rejection of the ever further eroding of our rights to a private life has clearly rankled. Politicians have cynically seized every opportunity to try and press for the widening of the scope of mass surveillance powers.

Each time there is a new atrocity the argument is made that the Communications Data Bill would be a way of preventing it.

Former Home Secretaries queueing up to use the appalling murder of Lee Rigby as a justification for the Snoopers' Charter without a shred of evidence that more intelligence would have made a difference was a particularly nauseating example.

Yet again we have Theresa May at the Conservative Conference saying that we are facing a  “crisis in national security”.

The specific justification made each time for further powers is that there is a declining ability of the police and security services to monitor phone and Internet use. Home Secretaries are presenting this as if it's an upgrade to do with the rapid change of technology and the way that we communicate.

Yet we know from the Snowden revelations that it is simply not the case that our capabilities have fallen behind, quite the reverse.

The myriad alphabet soup of surveillance programmes – PRISM, TEMPORA, XKEYSCORE and the rest have an unprecedented reach.

For example GCHQ's ability to tap in to the transatlantic fibre optic cables has in secret allowed it to access to vast streams of sensitive personal information.

The Guardian compared the sheer volume to being equivalent to sending the entire British Library 192 times each day. This is hardly a diminishing capability as Theresa May claims.

All of this took place without proper public debate and under an oversight regime that GCHQ lawyers themselves described as “light”.

It's preposterous of the Home Secretary to claim that we “risk sleepwalking in to a society in which crime can no longer be investigated”.

This is clearly just pre-election jockeying for position to be able to accuse the Liberal Democrats  of “outrageous irresponsibility” for not backing the Snoopers' Charter.

In fact she of all people must be aware that far from preventing mass surveillance, the LibDems have allowed it to continue in government.

This is shown by their craven backing of shoving the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act or “DRIP “ through parliament in a matter of days.

The latest justification for blanket powers is the rise of ISIL. Yet the alarming success of these extremists shows the failure of massive blanket communications interception.

ISIL has grown up, apparently been operating oil refineries and command posts, UK citizens have left to fight in the Middle East, under the all seeing eye of what Edward Snowden described as “the largest programme of suspicionless surveillance in human history”.

Either the US and UK have not actually been able to make sense of the vast streams of data, or we have and not known what to do about it.

The key dishonesty of all those who argue for further invasions of privacy is to confuse monitoring all of us with monitoring where it's required.

Limiting our collective liberty is no guarantee of our security, far from it.

Theresa May hoped for British values prevailing and winning the day in her speech.  The British values I want to see prevail are preserving liberty and private life.

I welcome that debate for the General Election.

Loz Kaye is the Leader of the Pirate Party UK.