One interesting feature of the Category Theory conference in Cambridge last month was that lots of the other participants started conversations with me about the whole-population, suspicionless surveillance that several governments are now operating. All but one were enthusiastically supportive of the work I’ve been doing to try to get the mathematical community to take responsibility for its part in this, and I appreciated that very much.

The remaining one was a friend who wasn’t unsupportive, but said to me something like “I think I probably agree with you, but I’m not sure. I don’t see why it matters. Persuade me!”

Here’s what I replied.

“A lot of people know now that the intelligence agencies are keeping records of almost all their communications, but they can’t bring themselves to get worked up about it. And in a way, they might be right. If you, personally, keep your head down, if you never do anything that upsets anyone in power, it’s unlikely that your records will end up being used against you.

“But that’s a really self-centred attitude. What about people who don’t keep their heads down? What about protesters, campaigners, activists, people who challenge the establishment — people who exercise their full democratic rights? Freedom from harassment shouldn’t depend on you being a quiet little citizen.

“There’s a long history of intelligence agencies using their powers to disrupt legitimate activism. The FBI recorded some of Martin Luther King’s extramarital liaisons and sent the tape to his family home, accompanied by a letter attempting to blackmail him into suicide. And there have been many many examples since then (see below).

“Here’s the kind of situation that worries me today. In the UK, there’s a lot of debate at the moment about the oil extraction technique known as fracking. The government has just given permission for the oil industry to use it, and environmental groups have been protesting vigorously.

“I don’t have strong opinions on fracking myself, but I do think people should be free to organize and protest against it without state harassment. In fact, the state should be supporting people in the exercise of their democratic rights. But actually, any anti-fracking group would be sensible to assume that it’s the object of covert surveillance, and that the police are working against it, perhaps by employing infiltrators — because they’ve been doing that to other environmental groups for years.

“It’s the easiest thing in the world for politicians to portray anti-fracking activists as a danger to the UK’s economic well-being, as a threat to national energy security. That’s virtually terrorism! And once someone’s been labelled with the T word, it immediately becomes trivial to justify using all that surveillance data that the intelligence agencies routinely gather. And I’m not exaggerating — anti-terrorism laws really have been used against environmental campaigners in the recent past.

“Or think about gay rights. Less than fifty years ago, sex between men in England was illegal. This law was enforced, and it ruined people’s lives. For instance, my academic great-grandfather Alan Turing was arrested under this law and punished with chemical castration. He’s widely thought to have killed himself as a direct result. But today, two men in England can not only have sex legally, they can marry with the full endorsement of the state.

“How did this change so fast? Not by people writing polite letters to the Times, or by going through official parliamentary channels (at least, not only by those means). It was mainly through decades of tough, sometimes dangerous, agitation, campaigning and protest, by small groups and by courageous individual citizens.

“By definition, anyone campaigning for anything to be decriminalized is siding with criminals against the establishment. It’s the easiest thing in the world for politicians to portray campaigners like this as a menace to society, a grave threat to law and order. Any nation state with the ability to monitor, infiltrate, harass and disrupt such “menaces” will be very sorely tempted to use it. And again, that’s no exaggeration: in the US at least, this has happened to gay rights campaigners over and over again, from the 1950s to nearly the present day, even sometimes — ludicrously — in the name of fighting terrorism (1, 2, 3, 4).

“So government surveillance should matter to you in a very direct way if you’re involved in any kind of activism or advocacy or protest or campaigning or dissent. It should also matter to you if you’re not, but you quietly support any of this activism — or if you reap its benefits. Even if you don’t (which is unlikely), it matters if you simply want to live in a society where people can engage in peaceful activism without facing disruption or harassment by the state. And it matters more now than it ever did before, because government surveillance powers are orders of magnitude greater than they’ve ever been before.”

That’s roughly what I said. I think we then talked a bit about mathematicians’ role in enabling whole-population surveillance. Here’s Thomas Hales’s take on this:

If privacy disappears from the face of the Earth, mathematicians will be some of the primary culprits.

Of course, there are lots of other reasons why the activities of the NSA, GCHQ and their partners might matter to you. Maybe you object to industrial espionage being carried out in the name of national security, or the NSA supplying data to the CIA’s drone assassination programme (“we track ‘em, you whack ‘em”), or the raw content of communications between Americans being passed en masse to Israel, or the NSA hacking purely civilian infrastructure in China, or government agencies intercepting lawyer-client and journalist-source communications, or that the existence of mass surveillance leads inevitably to self-censorship. Or maybe you simply object to being watched, for the same reason you close the bathroom door: you’re not doing anything to be ashamed of, you just want some privacy. But the activism point is the one that resonates most deeply with me personally, and it seemed to resonate with my friend too.

You may think I’m exaggerating or scaremongering — that the enormous power wielded by the US and UK intelligence agencies (among others) could theoretically be used against legitimate citizen activism, but hasn’t been so far.

There’s certainly an abstract argument against this: it’s simply human nature that if you have a given surveillance power available to you, and the motive to use it, and the means to use it without it being known that you’ve done so, then you very likely will. Even if (for some reason) you believe that those currently wielding these powers have superhuman powers of self-restraint, there’s no guarantee that those who wield them in future will be equally saintly.

But much more importantly, there’s copious historical evidence that governments routinely use whatever surveillance powers they possess against whoever they see as troublemakers, even if this breaks the law. Without great effort, I found 50 examples in the US and UK alone — read on.

Six overviews

If you’re going to read just one thing on government surveillance of activists, I suggest you make it this:

Deep dive into First Unitarian Church v. NSA: why freedom of association matters. David Greene, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 27 January 2014.

Among many other interesting points, it reminds us that this isn’t only about “leftist” activism — three of the plaintiffs in this case are pro-gun organizations.

Here are some other good overviews:

And here’s a short but incisive comment from journalist Murtaza Hussain.

50 episodes of government surveillance of activists

Disclaimer Journalism about the activities of highly secretive organizations is, by its nature, very difficult. Even obtaining the basic facts can be a major feat. Obviously, I can’t attest to the accuracy of all these articles — and the entries in the list below are summaries of the articles linked to, not claims I’m making myself. As ever, whether you believe what you read is a judgement you’ll have to make for yourself.

1940s

1. FBI surveillance of War Resisters League (1, 2), continuing in 2010 (1)

1950s

2. FBI surveillance of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1)

3. FBI “surveillance program against homosexuals” (1)

1960s

4. FBI’s Sex Deviate programme (1)

5. FBI’s Cointelpro projects aimed at “surveying, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations”, and NSA’s Project Minaret targeted leading critics of Vietnam war, including senators, civil rights leaders and journalists (1)

6. FBI attempted to blackmail Martin Luther King into suicide with surveillance tape (1)

7. NSA intercepted communications of antiwar activists, including Jane Fonda and Dr Benjamin Spock (1)

8. Harassment of California student movement (including Stephen Smale’s free speech advocacy) by FBI, with support of Ronald Reagan (1, 2)

1970s

9. FBI surveillance and attempted deportation of John Lennon (1)

10. FBI burgled the office of the psychiatrist of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg (1)

1980s

11. Margaret Thatcher had the Canadian national intelligence agency CSEC surveil two of her own ministers (1, 2, 3)

12. MI5 tapped phone of founder of Women for World Disarmament (1)

13. Ronald Reagan had the NSA tap the phone of congressman Michael Barnes, who opposed Reagan’s Central America policy (1)

1990s

14. NSA surveillance of Greenpeace (1)

15. UK police’s “undercover work against political activists” and “subversives”, including future home secretary Jack Straw (1)

16. UK undercover policeman Peter Francis “undermined the campaign of a family who wanted justice over the death of a boxing instructor who was struck on the head by a police baton” (1)

17. UK undercover police secretly gathered intelligence on 18 grieving families fighting to get justice from police (1, 2)

18. UK undercover police spied on lawyer for family of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence; police also secretly recorded friend of Lawrence and his lawyer (1, 2)

19. UK undercover police spied on human rights lawyers Bindmans (1)

20. GCHQ accused of spying on Scottish trade unions (1)

2000s

21. US military spied on gay rights groups opposing “don’t ask, don’t tell” (1)

22. Maryland State Police monitored nonviolent gay rights groups as terrorist threat (1)

23. NSA monitored email of American citizen Faisal Gill, including while he was running as Republican candidate for Virginia House of Delegates (1)

24. NSA surveillance of Rutgers professor Hooshang Amirahmadi and ex-California State professor Agha Saeed (1)

25. NSA tapped attorney-client conversations of American lawyer Asim Ghafoor (1)

26. NSA spied on American citizen Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the USA’s largest Muslim civil rights organization (1)

27. NSA analyst read personal email account of Bill Clinton (date unknown) (1)

28. Pentagon counterintelligence unit CIFA monitored peaceful antiwar activists (1)

29. Green party peer and London assembly member Jenny Jones was monitored and put on secret police database of “domestic extremists” (1, 2)

30. MI5 and UK police bugged member of parliament Sadiq Khan (1, 2)

31. Food Not Bombs (volunteer movement giving out free food and protesting against war and poverty) labelled as terrorist group and infiltrated by FBI (1, 2, 3)

32. Undercover London police infiltrated green activist groups (1)

33. Scottish police infiltrated climate change activist organizations, including anti-airport expansion group Plane Stupid (1)

34. UK undercover police had children with activists in groups they had infiltrated (1)

35. FBI infiltrated Muslim communities and pushed those with objections to terrorism (and often mental health problems) to commit terrorist acts (1, 2, 3)

2010s

36. California gun owners’ group Calguns complains of chilling effect of NSA surveillance on members’ activities (1, 2, 3)

37. GCHQ and NSA surveilled Unicef and head of Economic Community of West African States (1)

38. NSA spying on Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (1)

39. CIA hacked into computers of Senate Intelligence Committee, whose job it is to oversee the CIA

(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; bonus: watch CIA director John Brennan lie that it didn’t happen, months before apologizing)

40. CIA obtained legally protected, confidential email between whistleblower officials and members of congress, regarding CIA torture programme (1)

41. Investigation suggests that CIA “operates an email surveillance program targeting senate intelligence staffers” (1)

42. FBI raided homes and offices of Anti-War Committee and Freedom Road Socialist Organization, targeting solidarity activists working with Colombians and Palestinians (1)

43. Nearly half of US government’s terrorist watchlist consists of people with no recognized terrorist group affiliation (1)

44. FBI taught counterterrorism agents that mainstream Muslims are “violent” and “radical”, and used presentations about the “inherently violent nature of Islam” (1, 2, 3)

45. GCHQ has developed tools to manipulate online discourse and activism, including changing outcomes of online polls, censoring videos, and mounting distributed denial of service attacks (1, 2)

46. Green member of parliament Caroline Lucas complains that GCHQ is intercepting her communications (1)

47. GCHQ collected IP addresses of visitors to Wikileaks websites (1, 2)

48. The NSA tracks web searches related to privacy software such as Tor, as well as visitors to the website of the Linux Journal (calling it an “extremist forum”) (1, 2, 3)

49. UK police attempt to infiltrate anti-racism, anti-fascist and environmental groups, anti-tax-avoidance group UK Uncut, and politically active Cambridge University students (1, 2)

50. NSA surveillance impedes work of investigative journalists and lawyers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

Back to mathematics

As mathematicians, we spend much of our time studying objects that don’t exist anywhere in the world (perfect circles and so on). But we exist in the world. So, being a mathematician sometimes involves addressing real-world concerns.

For instance, Vancouver mathematician Izabella Laba has for years been writing thought-provoking posts on sexism in mathematics. That’s not mathematics, but it’s a problem that implicates every mathematician. On this blog, John Baez has written extensively on the exploitative practices of certain publishers of mathematics journals, the damage it does to the universities we work in, and what we can do about it.

I make no apology for bringing political considerations onto a mathematical blog. The NSA is a huge employer of mathematicians — over 1000 of us, it claims. Like it or not, it is part of our mathematical environment. Both the American Mathematical Society and London Mathematical Society are now regularly publishing articles on the role of mathematicians in enabling government surveillance, in recognition of our responsibility for it. As a recent New York Times article put it: