The Privacy Mission

CHAPTER 4Spooks

I am starting with the spooks because I believe it is necessary to understand what they do in the background in order to understand the full range of attacks and vulnerabilities we face. Ostensibly, the intelligence agencies are there, certainly in Western democracies, to protect our national security, our economic well‐being and us as individuals. However, as a result of their activities, which they carry out in utter secrecy, they actually create more vulnerabilities than they stop.

In Chapter 2, I referred to a quote from Bill Binney, the former technical director of the NSA, about the agency's aim in the 1990s to achieve “total mastery of the internet”. In their drive to do so, they gather up pretty much everything on the internet, but that does not help them do their jobs any more efficiently. In fact, I would argue that it hinders their efforts to protect us, the people, because they are dredging up everything and therefore all the nuggets of intelligence that could preemptively protect society are being drowned out in a tsunami of information.

The 1990s – When the World Changed

The 1990s was when the world really changed for the spies because that was when there was a real acceleration across all elements of society to get onto the internet. Up until that point, if a spy agency wanted to investigate someone it was quite a labour‐intensive, difficult process. Spies had to carry out a real‐world investigation, which meant physically bugging people's phones, ...