class: center, middle, inverse, title-slide # Dirty Wars ## Identity, Identification, and Intelligence Organisations ### Jack McDonald --- class: inverse # Small Group Discussion .question[What constitutes "mass surveillance"? Is it possible to meaningfully differentiate between mass surveillance and non-mass surveillance?] ??? --- # Lecture Outline Remainder of main lectures are about practices that are heavily associated with dirty war: Area where states and their agents are liable to mess with constitutive rules to "get things done" Surveillance is a general issue in society - it enables state power, and also enables state institutions to provide security - but there are strong domestic norms related to the control of surveillance powers Selective violence requires intelligence that enables reliable identification of legitimate targets It is possible to examine many of the theoretical aspects of dirty wars through the prism of intelligence institutions Evaluating institutional responses to underlying intelligence dillemmas demonstrates the importance of norms in dirty wars ??? --- class: inverse # Part 1: Intelligence and Society ??? --- # Blind Leviathans? .left-33[ ![Leviathan](../img/9/leviathan.jpg) ![The standard CIA intelligence cycle](../img/2020/intelcycle.png) ] .right-33[ .medium[ > For as long as people have been writing about war and statecraft, the value of secret agents and undercover sources has been recognized. Mark Phythian, _Principled Spying_ > A key paradox of civil war is that it increases the need for monitoring the population while simultaneously undermining the actors' capacity to do so... Decentralization produces more local information, but it simultaneously generates problems of moral hazard because inaccurate information leads to indiscriminate violence, causing counterproductive effects. Stathis Kalyvas, _The Logic of Violence in Civil War_ ] ] ??? Kalyvas quote p.183 Irreducible dillemma - how do you not get played? Irreducible tension - efficiency vs integrity/Security Irreducible threat - connection with society vs infiltration --- # Surveillance, Technology, and Society .left-33[ ![Production line](../img/r6/production.jpg) ![Punching in](../img/r6/punch.jpg) ] .right-33[ .medium[ > Intense forms of abstraction and generalisation also encourage powerfully asymmetrical forms of knowledge, with one individual or institution able, for the first time, to measure very large populations. Keith Breckenridge, _Biometric State_ > The most important means of identifying British subjects in the twentieth century was not the identity cards of the National Register, but the simple automobile driver's license. Jon Agar, _The Government Machine_ > The instruments which serve authority best are those which expend the smallest amount of energy possible to produce the effects of control or domination. Olivier Razac, _Barbed Wire: A Political History_ ] ] ??? --- # Surveillance, Coercion and Repression .left-33[ ![Suffragettes](../img/9/suffra.jpg) ![Woodstock](../img/9/woodstock.jpg) ![Stonewall](../img/9/stonewall.jpg) ] .right-33[ > In Hitler's Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin's USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens. Anna Funder, _Stasiland_ ] ??? Binds of intelligence organisations --- # Contemporary Problem: Dataveillance .left-column[ ![Fingerprints](../img/r5/fingerprint.png) ![Enforced identification practices](../img/r5/badges.jpeg) ![Biometrics in Iraq](../img/r1/biometrics.jpg) ] .right-column[ .medium[ > Data surveillance is now supplanting conventional surveillance techniques... With mass dataveillance, the fundamental problems of wrong identification, unclear, inconsistent, and context-dependent meaning of data, and low data quality are more intense than with personal dataveillance. Roger Clarke, _Information Technology and Dataveillance_ Most contemporary digital surveillance problems (e.g. biometric recognition) are outgrowths of prior issues, but with important differences Some important issues highlighted by bulk collection/bulk access: - Scale of information available to states - Ease of processing - Access to wide varieties of data - Inseparability of social life from data production ] ] ??? --- class: inverse # Part 2: Intelligence and Identification ??? --- # The Private Holmes Problem .pull-left[ ![Sherlock Holmes](../img/9/sherlock.jpg) How does an individual know who/what is, or is not, a permissible target? ] .pull-right[ How does an organisation "know" about the external world? Intelligence production requires internal and external coordination Standards of truth and knowledge production are a mix of internal and external factors Technology matters - it defines how information can be detected/recorded/etc ] ??? --- # Identity and Identification .left-33[ ![France, 1944](../img/9/france.png) ![Collateral Murder shot](../img/9/cm.png) ] .right-33[ Constitutional law, international law, ethics, politics and strategy all contain different overlapping categories of persons > Information is a key resource in irregular war; it is the link connecting one side’s strength with the other side’s weakness. > It is possible, nevertheless, to distinguish between three major sources of information: material indices, violent extraction, and consensual provision. Stathis Kalyvas, _The Logic of Violence in Civil War_ ] ??? --- # False Positives .pull-left[ > It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. William Blackstone, _Commentaries on the Laws of England_ > ...the difference between judicial and intelligence truth. Michael Hayden ] .pull-right[ False negative: person is actually a terrorist, but you think they aren't False positive: person isn't actually a terrorist, but you think they are As the number of people you surveil goes up, the number of false positives will increase Different security contexts have different standards and processes of "truth" ] ??? How do you overcome/account for mistakes? Public/private accountability --- # Over/Under Collection .left-column[ ![Goldilocks Porridge](../img/9/porridge.jpeg) ![2017 Manchester bomber Salman Abedi](../img/9/salman.jpg) ![SOI from 2018 ISC report](../img/9/soi.png) ] .right-column[ > Bulk powers give the police and security agencies the ability to carry out population wide surveillance. Surveillance should be targeted towards those who are suspected of carrying out a crime. Don't Spy On Us coalition > We urge MI5 to consider what more can be done to connect those seen on the peripheries of investigations, including what processes they need to have in place to take account of the cumulative effect of an individual appearing on the periphery of numerous investigations. Intelligence & Security Committee, _The 2017 Attacks: What Needs to Change?_ ] ??? https://docs.google.com/a/independent.gov.uk/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=aW5kZXBlbmRlbnQuZ292LnVrfGlzY3xneDo1ZGExOTdmNDdhMGJhNDZh The non-existent goldilocks point Risk and risk management 2017 Manchester bomber Salman Abedi --- class: inverse # Small-Group Discussion .question[ How would you approach the problem of over/under surveillance of citizens in the context of counter-terrorism? ] ??? --- class: inverse # Part 3: Governing Intelligence ??? --- # The Problems of Collusion and Complicity .left-33[ ![Pat Finucane](../img/2021/finucane.jpg) .small[Pat Finucane] ![Freddie Scappaticci](../img/9/stakeknife.jpg) .small[Freddie Scappaticci] ] .right-33[ British security forces required agents in both loyalist and republican groups to prevent terrorism in Northern Ireland/UK Repeated inquiries have shown collusion between security forces (notably RUC Special Branch, and the Intelligence Corps Force Research Unit) and the murder of civilians by loyalist paramilitaries One key murder is that of Pat Finucane, an Irish human rights lawyer murdered by UDA/UFF loyalist paramilitaries at his home in 1989 ] ??? --- # Legitimacy, Oversight, & Accountability .left-40[ > Much must remain inaccessible, out of the public sight, behind closed doors. The public should be able to find out what the law does and does not allow, but greater transparency of everyday operations would be self-defeating. David Omand, _Principled Spying_ ] .right-40[ Organisations engaged in intelligence collection are usually governed by general law relevant to information/data processing, and standards of public life Key constraints: - Permitted activities - Permitted purposes - Permitted domains (domestic/foreign) - Legal authority - Process requirements (warrants, etc) - Partnerships (e.g. BT, Facebook) - Available resources and technical constraints ] ??? Hodges quote p. 126 Omand quote p.200 Ways of overcoming binds of intel orgs --- # Norms, Institutions, and Organisations .pull-left[ ![Sandman](../img/9/sandman.jpg) > Rules and responsibilities: these are the ties that bind us. We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves. Neil Gaiman, _The Sandman_ ] .pull-right[ Tension between social norms and organisational practices Intelligence can traverse contexts easily (e.g. what is collected by the police might be used by the security service, and vice versa) Security organisations usually have very distinct resource constraints, legal/political constraints, and organisational cultures Technological change can profoundly re-shape organisational behaviours ] ??? International norms Polity values Institutional norms Personal values The Troubles - Institutional "capture" by protestants (RUC, USC, UDR) - Institutional cultures - Inter-Institution Competition - Civil Military Relations asd --- # New Problems: ANPR & Facial Recognition .left-60[ ANPR invented in 1976 by UK's Police Scientific Development Branch (PSDB) Trialled from 1979, first arrest credited to ANPR in 1981 Deployed as part of "Ring of Steel" network in City of London in 1993 1997 The Police National ANPR Data Centre (NADC) formed as an extension to the Police National Computer service 2003 - ANPR used as part of London Congestion Charge scheme ] .right-60[![First arrest in 2017](../img/r5/facialrecog.jpg) First arrest using facial recogonition in UK: 2017 in wales - football fans! ] ??? --- # Governing Digital Intelligence Digital technologies are amenable to distributing power in theory, but in practice tend towards centralising control Digital technologies enable non-human cognition and information processing Digital technologies minimise costs of storage, knowledge discovery, and combination Digital technologies enable persistent, redundant, available archives of individual behaviour at social scale The use of digital technologies is hard to observe! ??? --- # Dataveillance and Context-Collapse > Contexts are partly constituted by the canonical activities and practices in which people, in roles, engage. > Behavior-guiding norms prescribe and proscribe acceptable actions and practices. Some of them define the relationships among roles and, in this way, the power structures that characterize many familiar social contexts. > Many of the canonical activities of a context are oriented around values—sometimes more aptly called goals, purposes, or ends; that is, the objectives around which a context is oriented Helen Nissenbaum, _Privacy in Context_ ???