February 16, 2006
Australia joins the wiretapping bandwagon
The Australian Parliament is considering legislation that will allow spies, police and other security agencies to wiretap the phones of third parties to suspected terrorist plots, and also intercept email, SMS and monitor mobile calls. Australian journalists are opposing this legislation because of its likely interference with the freedom of the press. If this new law passes, journalists must assume that their conversations with sources will be intercepted. This will not only deter confidential sources but may also lead to a culture of self-censorship.
I haven't heard similar concerns voiced over Bush's warrantless wiretapping, perhaps because the American media lack imagination as to how dirty the administration is likely to play.
In other news, a judge ruled that the US administration must respond to a Freedom of Information request from the Electronic Privacy Information Center by releasing documents about its wiretapping program within 20 days or compiling a list of what it is withholding.
There have been many outcries about how Bush's wiretapping practices not only are illegal in themselves - raising questions as to what the rule of law means for this administration - but violate the civil rights of the people and organizations whose phones are tapped. Without even the minimal control of a warrant (and let's not forget that it is extremely minimal, very, very few warrants are ever denied by the FISA court), there is nothing stopping the administration from listening in on activists, political opponents or even the Bush's daughters' boyfriends.
But less attention is paid to how fruitless all those wiretappings are - an argument that can be made just as strongly for the use of torture. The administration will, of course, say that they've obtained a great deal of useful information which, "for national security reasons and to not let the enemy know how we work, we can't divulge, but trust us, it's working."
But in the real world, tactics like wiretapping and torture only work as mechanisms of social control, not as intelligence gathering methods. Just as the fear of being tortured may keep a population from rising up against those in power, the fear of having their conversations listened to may control the actions of activists and journalists. On the one hand, wiretapping makes access to sources and the exchange of information more difficult, it forces you to either use burdensome (encrypted) communication methods or to limit discussions of sensitive subjects to in-person meetings. These are the interferences over the freedom of the press that Australian journalists are complaining about. On the other hand, wiretapping gives the government access to your personal life - conversations with your husband, children, parents, best friends and so forth - which it can subtly or not so subtly use to blackmail you into keeping yourself in check. We say many embarrassing things to those close to us that we would not want to see published on the front page of the Times. Indeed, a cynic might wonder if the pass that the American press has given the Bush administration might somehow be connected to these matters.
But wiretapping - like torture - is a terrible method for obtaining useful information. Indeed, the leaks about the NSA wiretapping also suggest that little if any useful information has come out of them. That's because we shouldn't expect terrorists - at least those smart and organized enough to carry out significant attacks - to be stupid enough to talk about their plans over unsecured networks. After all, if you are a terrorist you must assume your phones and e-mail are tapped.
Foreign governments have been tapping phone communications pretty much since the phone was invented. Human rights organizations worldwide operate under the assumption that their phones are tapped. Sometimes the tapping is very open - in particular when someone is actually listening in rather than just taping you. You may hear them or can anticipate your phone call being terminated at a particular poignant moment. Other times it's a bit more subtle, like when I was in Rwanda for a conference and was talking to my husband on the phone about what I'd say in my presentation, only to have my hosts called by the administration expressing worries as to my possible criticism of the reigning regime. But most of the time the wiretapping is anonymous, you don't really know it's going on but you can assume your phones are tapped, it's more, you must assume they are tapped lest you endanger any of your contacts. So you get used to only using the phone for trivial conversations. Anything confidential, anything you don't want the government to know, you don't discuss in an open line.
Fortunately, technology has come to the rescue of the hapless human rights activist. The invention of PGP, encryption software that allows you to send confidential communications via e-mail and encrypt the files on your computer so that no one else can read them, has untied our hands like nothing before. We personally very successfully used PGP to coordinate the criminal prosecution against Pinochet and Argentinian military in Spain. We had three or four intelligence services behind us - tapping phone lines, breaking into our offices an so forth - but encryption helped keep our information secure.
For phone conversations, we rely on Skype, an internet telephony tool that encrypts phone calls. Still, Skype is closed-source and was recently sold to eBay so we don't really trust the encryption enough to discuss anything really confidential.
And you can be assured that if we, small-time human rights activists take these precautions, terrorists who are trying to hide their nefarious plans will as well.