British politicians keep trying to sneak the Snoopers’ Charter into law – even when it is obvious that the last thing you need when looking for a neeedle in a haystack is more hay

It’s almost Groundhog Day. You can tell, because the same bad internet ideas keep resurfacing, as though everything we fought for has been wiped off the slate overnight and we’ve woken up back at square one. Like the Snooper’s Charter – which four Lords tried to ram into an undebated amendment to the security bill last week, despite the fact that it was effectively identical to several different earlier incarnations, each of which was dismissed as a dumb, ineffective, overreaching load of Orwellian nightmare-fuel.



The fact that some deranged killers murdered some free speech advocates doesn’t make mass surveillance (as opposed to, you know, keeping track of jihadis who are known to be planning acts of terror, which the French spooks failed to do, possibly because they were too busy rolling around in their own mass-surveillance haystacks) any less stupid and unworkable.



At last week’s LSE debate After Snowden one of the panelists pointed out that the plan to carry out mass surveillance has been proposed – and debated at the LSE – for decades, and always found to be unsupported in evidence. It’s expensive and it distracts cops from looking at people who have done things that are genuinely suspicious (such as the Tsarnaev brothers, whom the US spy agencies stopped paying attention to because they were too preoccupied with their Big Data terrorism-detection machine to actually follow people who had announced their intention to commit terrorist acts).



Indeed, there have been attempts to create centralised mass-surveillance databases for as long as ordinary people have been interacting with computers in the course of their daily lives. In 1980, Yes Minister aired its “Big Brother” episode, in which Jim Hacker had to defend his ministry’s plan to put all Britons’ information into a database that could be used by the civil service, police and spies (there’s a wonderful line in that episode, where a current affairs programme host asks Hacker why he wants to put all that data into a database unless he plans to take it out again and look at it?).

Why does this keep coming up, despite the evidence that it doesn’t work? I once asked this of Thomas Drake and Bill Binney, two of the pre-Snowden whistleblowers. They weren’t sure, but one of them said he thought it might be civil-service empire-building: spooks getting ever-larger budgets and more reports on the org chart, more power, and more access to lucrative, private-industry positions after they leave government.

That last part, about private sector jobs, certainly rings true. After all, former NSA chief Keith Alexander left his government job and founded a consultancy that charges clients $1m a month for security advice. Spying is a business, after all: BT and Vodaphone collect huge fees for giving GCHQ illegal access to their fibre optic trunks. The NSA’s massive data-centre in Bluffdale, Utah cost $1.5bn, built by the private sector at public expense.

Remember that Edward Snowden didn’t work for the NSA: he was a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, a company that turned over $5.48bn in 2014. Every new expansion of NSA mass surveillance means potential new contracts for Booz Allen Hamilton.

In other words: spying on everyone may not catch terrorists, but it does make military contractors and telcos a lot of money. Mass surveillance is policy with a business model.

We live in a post-evidence-based-policy world. As Ben Goldacre’s latest collection documents, what governments say they want to do and what they actually do are bizarrely decoupled. Whether the strategic goal is catching terrorists, educating children, or improving health outcomes, the tactics that government deploys are only glancingly related to what the evidence suggests it should be doing.

Instead, in every domain, over and over, the policies that prevail are those with business-models. Policies that create a large pool of wealth for a small number of players, enough money in few enough hands that there’s some left over to lobby for the continuation of that policy.

It’s a bit like going to the grocery store: actual food, like fresh fruit, meat, vegetables, eggs, and so on, is just food. There’s not much to say about it. You can’t make attractive health claims about carrots – you need to extract the betacarotene from them and market it as a kind of magic carrot essence that is especially good for you (even though the stuff turns out to be carcinogenic once you take it out of the carrots). It’s why Michael Pollen advises that you only eat foods that no one makes health claims about. But most of the stuff your grocery store stocks and advertises is stuff that Michael Pollen says we shouldn’t eat: stuff with juicy margins that generate enough profit that there’s a surplus with which to market it.

“Not being spied on all the time” doesn’t have a business model. The benefits of such a policy are diffused. They’re the fact that you’re not added to a no-fly list by an unaccountable algorithm, that you’re not stopped for an illegal turn and then targeted by a Big Data oracle that says your patterns are unusual, making you a person of interest. They’re the freedom to discuss private things with people of your choosing; the knowledge that your government is closing holes in your computer, rather than trying to weaponise them in case they ever need to turn your PC into a traitor, a spy in your midst. In aggregate, these benefits are worth more to all of us than BT’s blood-money is worth to its shareholders, but our benefits are diffuse and long-term, and BT’s benefits are concentrated and short-term.

So we get the Snooper’s Charter, over and over again. Because there is money to pay for lobbyists to push for it, to big up the idea in the press every time it’s floated. There’s money in crassly exploiting the deaths of free-speech advocates to call for more surveillance.

At last autumn’s ORGCon, I saw a speaker from Reprieve talk about her work trying to count and put names to the dead in US drone strikes in countries like Pakistan and Yemen. These strikes are directed by the CIA using metadata (as former CIA director Michael Hayden said: “We kill people based on metadata”), like the unique identifiers transmitted by your phone’s radio-chip. When the metadata patterns convince CIA analysts that they’ve found a terrorist, a drone homes in on that phone and kills anyone in its vicinity – but even the CIA often doesn’t know who they’ve targeted and who else was killed.

The Reprieve speaker, Jennifer Gibson, explained that this was due to a shift in the CIA’s operational model. Historically, the CIA was a Humint (“human intelligence”) agency, which conducted its work by sending spies in fancy dress to go and talk to people in the field. Now, it’s basically become another NSA, a Sigint (“signals intelligence”) agency, hoovering up data and trying to make sense of it. Why does the US now have two Sigint agencies and a greatly diminished Humint capacity? After all, it would be tactically useful for the US to know who it has killed.

I think it’s because Sigint has a business model. There are procurements for Sigint. And where there are procurements, there are lunches at well-funded thinktanks and lobbyists’ offices for Senate Intelligence Committee staffers to talk about how those procurements are the most sensible thing for government. Procurements attract junkets. Procurements produce private-sector jobs. Procurements are laundered back into lawmaking through campaign contributions.

There’s not a lot of pork in Humint. Apart from the odd airplane ticket and putty chin, Humint is basically about hiring people to go and nose around. It may involve bribing officials and other informants, but that’s not the sort of government spending that generates a lot of lobbyist activities on the Hill or in Westminster.

I think that we’ve tacitly acknowledged this in policy circles for years – if you have something you think would be good for society, you need to figure out how it will make a small group of people rich, so they will fight to keep it going. It’s how we got carbon trading! And carbon trading is a great cautionary tale for activists thinking of harnessing policy business models to attain their objectives: the people you make rich will fight for a version of your policy that makes them as rich as possible, even if it means subverting the underlying social good that your policy is supposed to attain.