IN 1996 John Perry Barlow, a computer activist who had once been a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, penned “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, an attempt to capture the promise of openness and liberation that the young internet seemed to offer. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel,” it began. “I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind…You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21657751-ever-second-world-war-spies-have-pushed-development-computers-lookout To anyone familiar with the history of the computers that make the internet possible, it was an ironic idea. The modern computer came of age during the second world war. Colossus, a lumbering electromechanical contraption widely regarded as the first modern computer, was assembled at Bletchley Park, the headquarters of Britain’s vast wartime code-breaking operation. It was a machine built to spy and to break open German secrets. These days, with worries about mass surveillance, digital espionage and computer crime filling the papers, the unsavoury heritage of the computer seems impossible to escape.
It is that heritage—together with its modern implications—that lie at the heart of “Intercept”, a new book by Gordon Corera, the BBC’s security correspondent. The message of this dual history of computers and electronic spying is that the two are inextricably linked, with developments in one constantly spurring advances in the other. Contrary to its modern mythmaking as a home of rugged, independent entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley, Mr Corera reminds readers, owes its existence to the munificence of America’s soldiers and spies, whose endless appetite for more and faster chips spurred the technologies that would eventually bring cheap computers to everyone. These days, the computerised world presents spies across the globe with both a challenge and an opportunity. Unlike the paper kind, electronic data is weightless, and computers are riddled with security holes. That makes stealing secrets easier than ever. At the same time, computers are able to place the sort of cryptography with which Bletchley Park struggled in the second world war into the hands of everyone—including criminals, foreign spies and terrorists. Balancing the risks and rewards can sometimes be difficult. Mr Corera describes how Markus Wolf, the head of East Germany’s notorious Stasi (which, at one point, was thought to have files on about a third of the nation’s citizens), resisted the temptation to computerise his organisation’s miles of paper files. After all, pointed out Mr Wolf, the very convenience of computerised data made a big leak more likely. That point was spectacularly illustrated in 2013, when Edward Snowden walked out of America’s National Security Agency with tens of thousands of pilfered documents, a feat that would have been impossible in the pre-computer age. Mr Corera has been given plenty of access to Western intelligence agencies, and he describes their dilemmas with sympathy. Monitoring the internet for suspicious behaviour may help forestall a terrorist attack, they point out, and arguments about privacy can seem abstract and unreal after such attacks succeed. At the same time the author does not shy away from the implications of granting the spies ever more power to surveil. Technology has made practical the kind of mass surveillance that would have turned Mr Wolf green with envy. In the West, at least, such powers are held in check by laws governing how the agencies behave. But the temptation to go further, to trade a little more privacy for a little more security, is always present. At the same time, the ability to conduct such mass surveillance is no longer confined to nation-states. The internet’s biggest companies—such as Facebook and Google—have put a corporate twist on mass surveillance. The price for their services is collecting up users’ data: detailed lists of their preferences, habits, opinions and life histories, all packaged up and sold to advertisers to help them target commercial products. The book’s main message, though, is that computers have automated espionage, and made it cheap and easy. Spying on someone used to be hard, labour-intensive work. Tails had to be set, hidden microphones planted, post intercepted and steamed open. These days a person’s laptop and smartphone broadcasts their life across the internet, pre-packaged into a form that other computers can digest, analyse and correlate. Never mind all those cold-war thrillers set in 1970s Berlin. The true golden age of spying and surveillance—whether carried out by states or, increasingly, by companies—is now. -- Avinash Shahi Doctoral student at Centre for Law and Governance JNU Register at the dedicated AccessIndia list for discussing accessibility of mobile phones / Tabs on: http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/accessindia@accessindia.org.in/ To unsubscribe send a message to accessindia-requ...@accessindia.org.in with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in Disclaimer: 1. Contents of the mails, factual, or otherwise, reflect the thinking of the person sending the mail and AI in no way relates itself to its veracity; 2. AI cannot be held liable for any commission/omission based on the mails sent through this mailing list..
