7

Complicity

In the run-up to the London Olympics in 2012, the British state went into characteristic paroxyms of security. Warnings were made about terrorists targeting the games and potential protesters were preemptively detained. MI5 set up a countdown clock to the opening ceremony in their Vauxhall foyer.¹ The Royal Navy moored their largest ship, HMS Ocean, in the Thames, with a complement of marines aboard. The army mounted Rapier surface-to-air missiles on tower blocks around the venues (an operation later revealed to be an elaborate, and successful, sales pitch to foreign governments). And the Metropolitan Police announced that they would use drones to watch over the city.²

The last item got me interested. For many years I’ve followed the evolution of unmanned aerial vehicles – drones – from secret military projects into everyday tools of war, and onto the home front in the form of both high-level surveillance platforms and cheap Christmas toys. But British police forces have not exactly had the best of luck with them. Essex Police, the first force to acquire drones, mothballed its programme in 2010. The same year, Merseyside Police were caught flying a drone without a licence from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA); in 2011, newly licenced, they crashed and lost it in the River Mersey – and decided against replacing it.³

When the games were over, I filed a Freedom of Information request with the Metropolitan Police, asking if they had in fact used drones during the games, and if so, where and under what conditions.⁴ Their response, some weeks later, surprised me: they refused to confirm or deny that they held any information related to my request. I reformulated the question a number of times: I asked if they had applied for a CAA licence to fly drones, which they refused to answer (although the CAA were happy to tell me that they had not). I asked if they had contracted a third party to fly drones for them, and they refused to answer. I asked what aircraft, of any kind, they owned or leased, and was told they had three helicopters, and would not confirm or deny anything else.

The helicopter response seemed odd: If they would talk about helicopters, why wouldn’t they talk about drones? What makes them so special? Despite repeated efforts to answer the question, including taking my case to the Information Commissioner, the UK’s arbiter on Freedom of Information questions, I never received an answer. Any question about drones was immediately placed under the rubric of possible covert operations, rendering it exempt from public disclosure. It began to feel like drones were a useful shroud under which anything could be hidden. It seems that the spectre of the drone is so powerful, so shadowy, that it can carry not only cameras and weapons systems, but an entire regime of secrecy, a secrecy born of covert military operations that has grown to infect every aspect of civil life. This weaponised secrecy was borne out in the very language with which the police rebuffed my questions. Every time and every way I asked, the response was always the same: ‘We can neither confirm nor deny whether such information is held.’ These words – their very form – originated in the covert history of the Cold War. These words are a kind of magic spell, or political technology, transforming civil life into a conflict between government and the governed as assuredly as any military technology – and creating a new kind of truth in the process.

In March of 1968, the Soviet ballistic missile submarine K-129 was lost in the Pacific with all hands. The West was first alerted to the sinking when the Soviet Navy scrambled a flotilla of ships to K-129’s last known location. They churned up a huge area of sea some 600 miles north of the Midway Atoll, but after weeks of fruitless trawling, naval command called off the search.

The United States, however, had access to a tool the Soviets didn’t possess: a network of underwater listening stations designed to detect nuclear explosions. Trawling not the ocean but the reams of hydrophone data turned up a recording of an implosion event on March 8 – and its echoes had spread far enough to be triangulated from several points, giving an approximate location. A specially configured US submarine was dispatched, and after three weeks of searching it came across the wreck of K-129 lying in more than three miles of water.

The US intelligence community was delighted: in addition to three ballistic missiles, K-129 would have been carrying codebooks and cryptographic equipment. Its recovery, from under the noses of the Soviet Navy, would be one of the intelligence coups of the Cold War. The problem was that three miles was much deeper than any salvage operation ever undertaken, and any attempt to raise the submarine would have to be performed under conditions of utmost secrecy.

Over the next few years, the Central Intelligence Agency contracted with several suppliers of classified technologies to build a unique ship, called the Hughes Glomar Explorer after the billionaire businessman Howard Hughes, who agreed to provide a covering name. The Glomar Explorer was massive, hugely expensive, and topped by a drilling rig twenty metres tall. Lockheed Ocean Systems built a separate, state-of-the-art submersible barge, just to sneak a massive grappling claw into the ship without detection. In public, Hughes claimed that the ship was to be used to mine manganese nodules – accretions of precious metals that litter the ocean floors. Manganese nodules are real, and worth a lot of money, but nobody has ever managed to gather them economically. This didn’t stop a huge industry developing around the possibility in the ’60s and ’70s, largely thanks to the Hughes name and the CIA’s cover story. The ship’s real purpose was to go out and fetch K-129.

Setting sail in 1974, the Glomar Explorer positioned itself above the wreck, opened the hidden doors in its keel, and let down the claw. Having successfully grasped the intact hull of the submarine, it started to lift – but at some point during the operation, the huge steel claw suffered a catastrophic failure, and most of the submarine sheared away. It’s still unknown how much of K-129 was actually recovered, as details have remained classified ever since. Some reports claim that two missiles were recovered; others refer to documents and devices. The only confirmed items were the bodies of six Soviet submariners who were subsequently buried at sea in a steel container, due to radiation fears.

Several months after the operation, the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh at the New York Times got hold of the story. The US government managed to delay publication by claiming that the operation was still ongoing, and that publicity would cause an international incident. A burglary at Hughes’s offices in LA put another reporter onto the story, however, and in February 1975 the Los Angeles Times ran a partial account of the mission, riddled with errors, which led to a media frenzy. The New York Times subsequently went to press with their version of events, and the story became widely known.⁵

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Glomar operation was the way in which it was performed in plain sight, without anyone knowing what was occurring. From the Hughes cover story, to the submersible barge – which was manoeuvred into position just off the coast of California’s Catalina Island, in full view of beachgoers – to the Soviet ships that sailed within 200 yards of the Explorer while it raised the submarine, the entire process was conducted simultaneously in secret and in the open. The Glomar’s legacy was to be the continuance of this strategy of opacity and misdirection into the realm of everyday life.

In 1981, another journalist, Harriet Ann Phillippi, used Freedom of Information legislation to press the CIA for more detail on the project and its attempted cover-up. The agency formulated a novel response to her request – and invented a new kind of public discourse in the process. Concerned that anything they revealed, knowingly or unknowingly, might be of use to the Soviet adversary, an associate general counsel at the CIA using the pseudonym Walt Logan wrote the following statement: ‘We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information requested but, hypothetically, if such data were to exist, the subject matter would be classified, and could not be disclosed.’⁶

This formulation, which has come to be known in US law as the ‘Glomar response’, creates a third category of statement between affirmation and renunciation, between truth and falsehood. Often shortened to ‘neither confirm nor deny’, or simply NCND, the Glomar response has subsequently escaped from its CIA handlers, leapt the boundaries of National Security, and metastasised through official and public discourse.

A quick search of the internet today reveals that the words ‘neither confirm nor deny’ have infested every aspect of contemporary communication.⁷ On a single day in September 2017, the phrase appeared in news reports attributed to Brazil’s finance minister (regarding his presidential ambitions), the sheriff’s office of Stanly County, North Carolina (nuisance 911 calls), the University of Johannesburg (corruption allegations), an Argentine goalkeeper (transfer to Zimbabwe), the special adviser to the president of Biafra on media and publicity (terrorist designations), Honda Motorcycles (new models), the New York Police Department (campus surveillance), the Georgia Judicial Qualifications Commission (urinating in court), a Marvel Comics editor (the return of the Fantastic Four), reality star Kylie Jenner’s publicist (possible pregnancy), and the FBI, the Secret Service and the Securities and Exchange Commission (regarding a financial hacking case). To neither confirm nor deny has become an automatic response: a statement of refusal to engage in discussion or disclosure of any kind, and the default position of those from whom – Jenner perhaps aside – we expect trust.

Perhaps we are naive to do so. The concealment of the true nature of the world in order to benefit those in power has a long history. In ancient Egypt, the flooding of the Nile each year was crucial to both agriculture and the state’s revenues. A ‘good’ inundation irrigated the fertile plains along the river and deposited rich nutrients, but there was always the risk that a too-powerful flood would wash away fields and villages, or that too little water would result in drought and famine. Atop this annual cycle, the Egyptian nobility and priesthood built a civilisation of extraordinary wealth and stability, predicated on their ability to predict the arrival and strength of each year’s flood and its likely effects – and the resulting tax levels. Each year, in celebration of the death and rebirth of Osiris, the priests would lead elaborate ceremonies and rituals marking Akhet, the Season of the Inundation, culminating in the announcement of the flood. In turn, the authority of their predictions translated into the authority of theocratic rule. But this authority was not – or at least not only – the gift of the gods. Hidden within the sacred boundaries of temple complexes on islands and riverbanks were structures called nilometers: deep wells dug into the earth and marked with columns or sets of steps, which measured the depth of the water in the river. The nilometers were scientific instruments: read correctly, and compared against centuries of data marked on the walls, the priests and rulers could forecast the behaviour of the river, and make the appropriate pronouncements and preparations. The function, and even existence, of the nilometers was hidden from the lay population. If questioned, the Egyptian priests would no doubt have responded, ‘We can neither confirm nor deny …’

To bring such a scenario back up to date, consider the secret numbers. Since the 1940s, the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States, and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the United Kingdom – and no doubt their counterparts in Russia and China – have been hiring mathematicians at the height of their intellectual powers straight out of the top university maths departments. Once inside these organisations, all of their research is classified and is hidden from the general public. Occasionally, examples of their ingenuity leak out. Diffie–Hellman key exchange, named after the two mathematicians who created it, was first published in 1976 and formed the basis for public key cryptography, widely used today to encrypt Email and web pages.⁸ But in 1997, the British government declassified documents showing that the process had been invented independently several years earlier by James Ellis, Clifford Cocks and Malcolm Williamson, three mathematicians working at GCHQ.⁹

Public key cryptography relies on creating mathematical problems for which no efficient solution is known: cracking the code without possessing its key requires a mathematical operation so complex as to be impossible. A common encryption approach is the factorisation of two primes. The encoding is done with a number created by multiplying two very large prime numbers; the keys are those two original numbers. Depending on the size of those numbers, even a supercomputer might take years to discover them. But there are a couple of problems with this assumption. The first is general: while factorisation is powerful if everyone uses different prime numbers, it turns out that most implementations use the same small set of primes over and over again, significantly reducing the complexity of the problem. It’s widely believed by security researchers that NSA, with its massive computers and $11 billion annual budget, has in fact broken a number of commonly used primes, and is thus able to read a significant amount of encrypted communications.¹⁰ The advent of quantum computing, in which NSA is investing heavily, will no doubt accelerate this effort.¹¹ But more specifically: think on those thousands of mathematicians, working in secret for more than seventy years in the closed halls of Cheltenham and Fort Meade. They invented public key encryption and didn’t tell anyone about it. In the decades since, who is to say that they have not formulated entirely new fields of mathematics – the secret numbers – that allow for entirely new kinds of calculations? Such revolutions in mathematics have happened before; and if Euclid, Euler or Gauss were working today, there’s a good chance they’d be working for one of the security agencies, and their discoveries would have disappeared into the secret library.

The new dark age is full of such cloudy possibilities. If it sounds far-fetched, simply recall that the CIA spent billions of dollars pulling off the deepest salvage operation in history while keeping it a secret from the public and its enemies, and that it continued to work on technological innovations for decades. It was the CIA, not the US Army or Air Force, that developed and built the first unmanned aerial vehicles – the Predator and Reaper drones that have revolutionised contemporary warfare, and done so by expanding the paranoia and secrecy of the intelligence agency first onto the battlefield, and then across the planet. And for all the CIA’s advances in engineering, it is in information technology that it has invested most heavily, swapping defence contractors like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin for Silicon Valley tech companies like Palantir, which help it infiltrate modern communications and social networks. Or you could remember that in 2012, the even more secretive National Reconnaissance Office, which is charged with satellite surveillance, announced that it was donating two unused space telescopes to the public. NASA officials discovered that, while built in the late 1990s, both exceeded the capabilities of the most powerful civilian version of the technology, the Hubble Space Telescope. Moreover, their short focal length implied that they had been built for looking down, not up. As one science journalist wrote, ‘If telescopes of this caliber are languishing on shelves, imagine what they’re actually using.’¹² It is these three-letter agencies, and their equivalents in other countries, that are emblematic of the new dark age. As their power and size has grown over the decades, so huge parts of global history and scientific discovery have simply slipped away into the classified world.

The promulgation of official secrecy is deeply corrosive to the way we know and understand the world because we cannot know our own history, nor understand what we are truly capable of. In 1994, the US government formed a bipartisan committee, the Commission on Government Secrecy, with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as chairman. Moynihan and his colleagues’ task was to examine all aspects of secrecy in the United States, from the classification of documents to security clearances – essentially, what was permitted to be known, and who was permitted to know it. The three-year investigation found that the United States was marking 400,000 new documents every year as top secret, the highest level of classification, and was holding more than 1.5 billion pages of classified material over twenty-five years old.

Moynihan’s final report included the statement that ‘[the] secrecy system has systematically denied American historians access to the records of American history. Of late we find ourselves relying on archives of the former Soviet Union in Moscow to resolve questions of what was going on in Washington at mid-century.’¹³ Twenty years later, Donald Trump found that even as president he was not able to persuade his own intelligence agencies to release their complete records on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, an event whose murky and often classified history has poisoned the relationship between the American government and its people for decades.¹⁴

In the United Kingdom, the situation is far, far worse. In 2011, after a legal fight that lasted more than ten years, a group of Kenyans tortured by colonial authorities won the right to sue the British government. The four complainants, selected from among 6,000 depositions, had all been imprisoned in concentration camps in the 1950s and subjected to appalling abuses. Ndiku Mutua and Paulo Muoka Nzili had been castrated; Jane Muthoni Mara had been raped with bottles filled with boiling water; and Wambugu Wa Nyingi survived the March 1959 Hola Massacre, in which camp guards beat eleven detainees to death, leaving seventy-seven others with debilitating injuries. For years, the British government denied the events, and also denied the existence of any records that would corroborate them, along with the rights of former colonial subjects to challenge their oppressors following independence. Once the last of these objections was overturned by the High Court in London, the government was forced to admit that it did indeed possess such documents – thousands of them.¹⁵

Known as the ‘migrated archive’, a huge cache of colonial-era documents was stored at secret sites around the UK for decades, its existence unknown to historians and denied by civil servants. At Hanslope Park in the Midlands, a secretive government research facility, around 1.2 million documents revealed details of the Kenyan ‘pipeline’ system, which historians compared to the Nazi concentration camps. Thousands of men, women, and even children suffered beatings and rape during screening and interrogations. Common torture tactics included starvation, electrocution, mutilation, and forcible penetration, and extended to whipping and burning detainees to death. The files also contained details of colonial activities in at least thirty-seven other nations, including massacres of villagers during the Malayan emergency, the systematic subversion of democracy in British Guiana, the operation of Army Intelligence torture centres in Aden, and the planned testing of poison gas in Botswana.

The migrated archive also contained evidence that it was only a small part of a much larger, and largely destroyed, hidden history. Accompanying the remaining files – most of which have still not been released – are thousands of ‘destruction certificates’: records of absences that attest to a comprehensive programme of obfuscation and erasure. In the dying years of the British Empire, colonial administrators were instructed to gather up and secure all the records they could, and either burn them or ship them to London. This was known as Operation Legacy, and was intended to ensure the whitewashing of colonial history. Government offices, assisted by MI5 and Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, either built pyres or, when the smoke became too obvious, packed them into weighted crates and sunk them offshore, in order to protect their secrets from the governments of newly independent nations – or from future historians.

Even when incriminating evidence survives for decades, it isn’t safe. Until 1993, a collection of 170 boxes of documents flown to Britain as part of Operation Legacy were stored in London, where they were marked ‘Top Secret Independence Records 1953 to 1963’. According to remaining records, they took up seventy-nine feet of shelf space in room 52A of Admiralty Arch, and included files on Kenya, Singapore, Malaya, Palestine, Uganda, Malta, and fifteen other colonies. A surviving partial inventory notes that the Kenyan files included documents about the abuse of prisoners and about psychological warfare. One batch, entitled ‘Situation in Kenya – Employment of Witch Doctors by CO [Colonial Office]’, carried the warning, ‘This file to be processed and received only by a male clerical officer.’¹⁶ In 1992, perhaps afraid that a Labour victory in the upcoming general election would lead to a new period of openness and disclosure, the Foreign Office ordered thousands of documents shipped to Hanslope Park. In the process, the top secret independence records simply disappeared. No destruction certificates were issued, and no record has been found in other archives. By law, the documents should have been transferred to the National Archives, or their further classification justified, but instead they were simply expunged from the record. Historians have been forced to the conclusion that, fifty years after the events they documented took place, the only remaining records were destroyed in the heart of the British capital.

The brutality in Kenya was ‘distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany or communist Russia’, wrote the colony’s own attorney general to its British governor in 1957.¹⁷ Nevertheless, he agreed to write new legislation permitting it, as long as it was kept secret. ‘If we must sin, we must sin quietly’, he affirmed. Operation Legacy was a deliberate and knowing effort to obscure the violence and coercion that enabled imperialism, and its manipulation of history prevents us from reckoning with the British Empire’s legacy of racism, covert power, and inequality today. Moreover, the habit of secrecy it engendered permits its abuses to continue into the present day. The torture techniques developed in colonial Kenya were refined into the ‘five techniques’ deployed by the British Army in Northern Ireland, and then into the CIA’s ‘enhanced interrogation’ guidelines. In 1990, the police archive at Carrickfergus, which contained vital evidence regarding the actions of the British state in Northern Ireland, was destroyed by arson. Evidence increasingly links the fire to the British Army itself. When investigators tried to establish whether CIA rendition flights had stopped over on the British territory of Diego Garcia, they were told that the flight records were ‘incomplete due to water damage’.¹⁸ It’s hard to think of a more apt, or horrible, excuse: having failed to cover up its waterboarding of detainees, the intelligence agencies resorted to waterboarding information itself.

Looking back over this litany of deception suggests that we have been living in a dark age for quite some time, and there are signs that contemporary networks are making it harder to hide the sins of the past – or the present. But for this to be true, we would have to be getting better not only at spotting the signs of obfuscation, but also at acting to curb it. As the torrent of revelations about global surveillance practices released over the last five years have shown, awareness of this corrosion rarely translates into remedy.

When the first headlines about the activities of NSA and GCHQ started to appear in newspapers around the world in June of 2013, there was an initial uproar. Both agencies, it was shown, had been spying on millions of people globally, including their fellow citizens, in collusion with other governments and the corporations that largely administer the internet. First it was revealed that 120 million Verizon customers in the United States were being closely monitored, with both participants in every call having their phone numbers logged, together with their locations, and the time and duration of the call. This data was collected by the phone company before being turned over to the FBI, who in turn passed it to NSA. The next day came the exposure of the PRISM operation, which gathered up all of the data passing through the servers of the largest internet companies – including emails, documents, voice and video chats, and pictures and videos from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, Apple and others. A short time later, it was revealed that the intelligence agencies’ reach went even deeper into the system, including the collection of raw data from the actual cables that carry information around the world. When asked what it was like to use NSA’s back end system, XKeyscore, Edward Snowden replied, ‘You could read anyone’s email in the world, anybody you’ve got an email address for. Any website: You can watch traffic to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at: You can watch it. Any laptop that you’re tracking: you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world.’¹⁹

It became clear that the international nature of the internet meant that there was no possible restriction on its surveillance, no objection to governments spying upon their own citizens; everyone was a foreigner to someone, and once the data was collected it went into the pot. The vampire squid kept expanding: first it was NSA and GCHQ; next it was the ‘Five Eyes’ of the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, which the ‘Nine Eyes’ expanded to Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway; then it was the SIGINT Seniors Europe, or ‘Fourteen Eyes’ group, with Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden all joining in – even when it was obvious that their own politicians, embassies, trade missions and UN delegations were the target of the other side. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany complained that her private cell phone was tapped during the same period her own Federal Intelligence Service, the BND, was handing over troves of information on European citizens, defence contractors and critical industries.²⁰ Every private detail of the personal lives of billions of internet and phone users sloshed around inside vast tanks of data, the scale and size of which exceeded what was previously considered to be even technically possible.

A programme called Optic Nerve specifically targeted the webcams of Yahoo Messenger users, the most popular chat programme for commodities traders and horny teenagers alike. From each broadcast, one still image was saved every five minutes – a limit supposedly enforced ‘to comply with human rights legislation’ – and run through facial recognition software to identify participants. GCHQ was forced to implement additional controls to protect staff from the significant proportion of the data that revealed ‘undesirable nudity’.²¹ Stories emerged of NSA contractors searching the emails and text messages of spouses, lovers, exes and crushes, a practice sufficiently widespread to gain its own jokey codename, LOVEINT, and demonstrating the ease with which the system could be accessed.²² Other code words revealed the preoccupations and dark humour of their creators. Regin, a piece of malware used to infiltrate telecom systems in Belgium and the Middle East, contained cricket-themed code words like LEGSPIN and WILLISCHECK, believed to refer to English fast bowler Bob Willis.²³ Another GCHQ operation to harvest IP addresses of website visitors was code-named KARMA POLICE, apparently after the Radiohead song of the same name, which includes the lyric, ‘This is what you’ll get when you mess with us.’²⁴

The stories continued for months, obscure technological jargon became common knowledge, and poorly designed Powerpoint slides were seared into the memory of millions. Code words multiplied, becoming a kind of sinister poetry: TEMPORA, MUSCULAR, MYSTIC, BLARNEY and BOUNDLESS INFORMANT; NOSEY SMURF, HIDDEN OTTER, CROUCHING SQUIRREL, BEARDED PIGGY and SQUEAKY DOLPHIN. Ultimately, these endless lists come to obscure the practical reality of a global surveillance system that is irreducible to its component parts. As Edward Snowden wrote in his first email to the filmmaker Laura Poitras, ‘Know that every border you cross, every purchase you make, every call you dial, every cell phone tower you pass, friend you keep, article you write, site you visit, subject line you type, and packet you route, is in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited but whose safeguards are not.’²⁵ But what remains most striking, just a few years after the revelations, is ultimately not their extent, but how obvious they should have been – and how little has changed.

The existence of a concerted technological effort to intercept civilian communications has been known since at least 1967, when a telegraphist named Robert Lawson walked into the offices of the Daily Express in London and informed the investigative journalist Chapman Pincher that every cable or telegram that entered or left the UK was collected each day by a Ministry of Public Buildings and Works van and taken to an Admiralty building to be examined, before being returned. The story ran in the next day’s paper, making clear that the cable intercepts were part of a much larger operation involving phone taps and the opening of letters. At the time, the existence of GCHQ was not even known to the public, and even when the government’s own commission of inquiry into the affair both confirmed that the reporting was accurate, and denounced a number of official statements as misleading, the affair slipped quickly from the public memory.

In 2005, eight years before the Snowden revelations, the New York Times revealed that in the aftermath of 9/11 the NSA had been granted extensive secret powers by President George W. Bush to spy on US communications without the need for a warrant.²⁶ The article revealed the existence of a project, which had been code-named Stellar Wind, for building a vast database of the communications of American citizens, including email communications, telephone conversations, financial transactions, and internet activity. A former NSA analyst, William Binney, went on the record to confirm the extent of the programme, and it was attacked in the press for its clear overstepping of constitutional protections. The project had already been the subject of internal government turmoil when it was discovered that, contrary to the presidential authorisation, the NSA was not only tapping communications with a foreign connection, but collecting data on all the communications it could. The White House’s response was simply to reauthorise the programme under a different rubric. Binney continued to make noise about the project over subsequent years, and as late as 2012 Wired magazine carried a report on the NSA’s construction of a vast new data centre in Utah that suggested that Stellar Wind was still active, quoting Binney on its capabilities.²⁷

In May 2006, an AT&T contractor named Mark Klein revealed that the NSA had the capability to monitor huge amounts of communications. In 2002, he had met an NSA agent who was recruiting AT&T management for a special project; the following year he discovered a secret room inside the largest San Francisco telephone exchange, which only the technician recruited by NSA was allowed to enter. The room was adjacent to the machinery that routed all public telephone calls. Klein himself was subsequently put to work in another room in the exchange; this one handled internet traffic for a company called Worldnet. Klein’s job involved splitting the fibre-optic cables in certain circuits and routing them to the secret room. These specific circuits were the ones that connected Worldnet’s customers with the rest of the internet, and discussions with other AT&T employees revealed that similar splitter cabinets had been installed in exchanges in other cities. In each case, the diverted fibre led to a NarusInsight ‘semantic analyser’ machine, which could sift through huge amounts of information to pick out preprogrammed words and phrases.²⁸ The size of the ‘take’ strongly implied that NSA was monitoring not only foreign communications, but indiscriminately hoovering up domestic traffic as well. A lawsuit against AT&T, based on Klein’s evidence and filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, alleged as much; but while it became a major media story, it was blocked by the US government, which quickly passed retroactive legislation to make the company immune from legal action.

And even without such revelations, why was nobody looking? The scale of the black budget was there for anyone to see; the listening stations built for the Cold War were still humming away, even expanding; the fields of antennae and satellite dishes appeared on Google Maps, perched on white cliffs over the cable landing sites. GCHQ even had a trade union until 1984, when it was very publicly banned by Margaret Thatcher in one of the longest running labour disputes of the twentieth century. Yet discussions of the agencies’ capabilities remained the preserve of students of intelligence – and, as we will see in the next chapter, fodder for conspiracy theorists.

It wasn’t until the 2013 release of documents by Edward Snowden that some kind of critical paranoid mass was achieved. Why this should have been the case is debatable; perhaps it was the sheer volume of it, and its visual and narrative flair. It overflowed our ability to ignore it, simply by keeping on coming, day after day, in a welter of buzzwords and ridiculous project names and eye-searing Powerpoint slides, like a never-ending marketing meeting with Satan himself. Perhaps it was Snowden’s own story that so powerfully captured our attention: his sudden appearance in Hong Kong, his flight to Russia, the need for a young, elusive protagonist to carry the narrative. Snowden’s revelations were also the first to connect known NSA and GCHQ programmes – to reveal their total operational entanglement, and thus the ways in which global surveillance made everyone into a target, negating any possibility of being protected by the perceived superiority of one’s own government.

And yet, no action. In the United States, proposals to end warrantless wiretapping and curb the blanket collection of data by the intelligence agencies, such as the Amash–Conyers Amendment, have been defeated in both houses of Congress, while other bills remain stuck in committees. The USA FREEDOM Act – formally titled the Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-collection and Online Monitoring Act – passed into law on June 2, 2015, essentially reinstating the Patriot Act, which expired the day before. While much touted as a regulatory response to the Snowden revelations, the act left most of the NSA’s capabilities intact, including blanket collection of metadata – every detail of a communication except its content, which could subsequently be acquired through a secret subpoena. In any case, the act could at any time be subverted by presidential decree, just as previous versions were in the years after 9/11, and overseas operations remain entirely undisturbed. A process that was founded on the systematic and covert overruling of law was never going to be reversed by more legislation. The British government, which never passed any law preventing GCHQ surveillance of its own citizens before or after the revelations, contented itself with issuing increasingly draconian censorship demands, known as D-Notices, to newspapers reporting on the affair. In the face of the ongoing global war on terror and an industrial intelligence complex of almost unimaginable power, the rest of the world could simply protest in vain.

Ultimately, the public appetite for confronting the insane, insatiable demands of the intelligence agencies was never there and, having briefly surfaced in 2013, has fallen off, wearied by the drip-drip of revelation and the sheer existential horror of it all. We never really wanted to know what was in those secret rooms, those windowless buildings in the centre of the city, because the answer was always going to be bad. Much like climate change, mass surveillance has proved to be too vast and destabilising an idea for society to really get its head around. Like awkward, half-joking, half-terrified conversations about the weather, it has become merely another whining hum of paranoia in the background of everyone’s daily routines. Thinking about climate change spoils the weather, rendering it an existential threat even when it’s nice. Thinking about mass surveillance spoils phone calls, emails, cameras, and pillow talk. Its black ichor coats the things we touch every day. Its implications stretch so deep into our everyday lives that it’s easier to add it to the long list of things we simply agree not to think.

This is a pity, because there’s much that remains to be thought and argued about regarding mass surveillance – indeed, of any surveillance, and of any image entered as evidence. Global mass surveillance relies on political secrecy and technological opacity, and the two feed upon one another. While governments have always spied on their own people as well as their enemies, their ability to eavesdrop on every moment of life has been radically enhanced by networks and processing power – by the spread of computation into the walls of every home and down every street, into our workplaces and into our pockets. Technical possibility breeds political necessity, because no politician wants to be accused of not doing enough in the aftermath of some atrocity or exposé. Surveillance is done because it can be done, not because it is effective; and, like other implementations of automation, because it shifts the burden of responsibility and blame onto the machine. Collect it all, and let the machines sort it out.

In testimony to a British parliamentary committee in 2016, the aforementioned NSA whistle-blower William Binney asserted that bulk collection of data by the intelligence agencies was ‘99 per cent useless’. The reason he gave for this was that the sheer volume of information collected swamped analysts, making it impossible to pick out the relevant data to address specific threats. This is a warning that has been sounded many times before, but its implications have not been heeded – indeed, they have been exacerbated. Following the attempted bombing of a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009, President Obama himself admitted that too much intelligence was the problem: ‘This was not a failure to collect intelligence, [but] a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had,’ he stated.²⁹ A French counterterrorism official commented on the case that ‘about the time we’re overcome with envy and awe at the reach and depth of American intelligence-gathering capacity, we start to feel really lucky at not having to process the impossible mass of information it generates’.³⁰

The computational excesses of mass surveillance are seen too in the US drone programme, which for years has been dogged by problems of analysis and interpretation. As the drones multiply and their flight times increase, so do the resolution and bandwidth of the cameras they carry, exponentially exceeding our ability to monitor them. As far back as 2010, one of the US Air Force’s most senior commanders was warning that it could soon be ‘swimming in sensors and drowning in data’.³¹ More information, even for the most advanced information-processing organisations, does not correspond to more understanding. Rather, it confuses and conceals, becoming a spur to further complexity: an arms race akin to the weather forecasting problem, where computation desperately attempts to outrun time itself. As William Binney described in his evidence to the UK parliament, ‘The net effect of the current approach is that people die first, even if historic records sometimes can provide additional information about the killers (who may be deceased by that time).’³²

On multiple levels, mass surveillance simply doesn’t work. Studies have repeatedly shown that mass surveillance generates little to no useful information for counterterrorism offices. In 2013, the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies declared mass surveillance ‘not essential to preventing attacks’, finding that most leads were generated by traditional investigative techniques such as informants and reports of suspicious activities.³³ Another 2014 report by the New American Foundation described the government claims about the success of surveillance programmes in the wake of the 9/11 attacks as ‘overblown and even misleading’.³⁴

At the other end of the spectrum, analysis of the deployment of closed-circuit television in public spaces has shown it to be just as ineffective, in much the same ways as global surveillance. It is vastly expensive, it diverts funding and attention from other approaches to the issues it seeks to address, and it has little appreciable effect. Often cited as a deterrent, it is no such thing. When San Francisco installed hundreds of security cameras in the mid 2000s, the number of homicides within 250 feet of the cameras went down – and spiked in the next 250 feet. People just moved down the street to kill each other.³⁵ CCTV, like global surveillance, serves only to heighten the background hum of paranoia, increasing fears of crime and control while doing nothing to address them. CCTV and mass surveillance are both essentially retroactive and retributive: more intelligence may be gathered, and more arrests made, but only once the crime has been committed. The critical event has already occurred, and the underlying causes are always ignored.

Considering the efficacy of surveillance in this way forces us to reflect on our own strategies for opposing abuses of power. Does throwing light on the subject really help? Improved lighting has long been one of the axioms of security theatre itself, but the installation of lighting on city streets has as often been followed by a rise in crime as it has preceded a fall.³⁶ Criminals may be as emboldened by the light as any victim: when everything is well lit, the malicious look a lot less suspicious, and they know when the coast is clear. Bright light makes people feel safer, but it doesn’t actually make them safer.³⁷

The exposure of the darkest activities of the intelligence agencies has failed to curb them; rather it has reassured the public, while legitimising these same activities. Operations that formerly took place in a hazy zone of obscurity and deniability have been codified in law, and not to our advantage.

Perhaps, while we laud the visual impact of the Snowden revelations for stimulating a debate on mass surveillance, we need to consider that their very visuality provided a distraction from understanding its underlying mechanisms and persistence. If on the one hand we can argue that surveillance fails because of its reliance on images over understanding, and its belief in a single, justificatory narrative, then how can we argue on the other hand that surveillant approaches to countering it will succeed? Yet this is exactly what we do. In opposition to secrecy, we assert transparency. Our demands for clarity and openness may appear to be a counter to opacity and classification, but they end up asserting the same logics. Under this analysis, the National Security Agency and Wikileaks share the same worldview, with differing ends. Both essentially believe that there is some secret at the heart of the world that, if only it can be known, will make everything better. Wikileaks wants transparency for all; the NSA only wants transparency for some – its enemies; but both function according to the same philosophy.

Wikileaks’ original intent was not to become a kind of mirror to the NSA, but to break the whole machine. In 2006, in the very early days of Wikileaks, Julian Assange wrote an analysis of conspiratorial systems of government and how they can be attacked, entitled ‘Conspiracy as Governance’. For Assange, all authoritarian systems are conspiracies because their power depends on keeping secrets from their peoples. Leaks undermine their power, not because of what is leaked, but because increased internal fear and paranoia degrades the system’s ability to conspire. What is damaging is the act of leaking itself, not the contents of any specific leak.³⁸ As Wikileaks entered the public eye and Assange himself became an increasingly powerful and arrogant figure, the organisation became involved in a series of feuds with the intelligence agencies – and ultimately a tool for states to attack one another – and this realisation was lost. What replaced it was a mistaken belief in the power of the ‘smoking gun’: the single source or piece of evidence that would bring down authority.

The problem of the smoking gun besets every strategy that depends on revelation to move opinion. Just as the activities of the intelligence agencies could have been inferred long before the Snowden revelations by multiple reports over decades, so other atrocities are ignored until some particular index of documentary truthfulness is attained. In 2005, Caroline Elkins published a thorough account of British atrocities in Kenya, but her work was widely criticised for its reliance on oral history and eyewitness accounts.³⁹ It was only when the British government itself released documents that confirmed these accounts that they were accepted, becoming part of an acknowledged history. The testimony of those who suffered was ignored until it conformed to the account offered by their oppressors – a form of evidence that, as we have seen, will never be available for a multitude of other crimes. In the same manner, the cult of the whistle-blower depends upon the changing conscience of those already working for the intelligence services; those outside such organisations are left without agency, waiting helplessly for some unknown servant of government to deign to publish what they know. This is a fundamentally insufficient basis for moral action.

Just as the availability of vast computational power drives the implementation of global surveillance, so its logic has come to dictate how we respond to it, and to other existential threats to our cognitive and physical well-being. The demand for some piece of evidence that will allow us to assert some hypothesis with 100 per cent certainty overrides our ability to act in the present. Consensus – such as the broad scientific agreement around the urgency of the climate crisis – is disregarded in the face of the smallest quantum of uncertainty. We find ourselves locked in a kind of stasis, demanding that Zeno’s arrow hit the target even as the atmosphere before it warms and thickens. The insistence upon some ever-insufficient confirmation creates the deep strangeness of the present moment: everybody knows what’s going on, and nobody can do anything about it.

Reliance on the computational logics of surveillance to derive truth about the world leaves us in a fundamentally precarious and paradoxical position. Computational knowing requires surveillance, because it can only produce its truth from the data available to it directly. In turn, all knowing is reduced to that which is computationally knowable, so all knowing becomes a form of surveillance. Thus computational logic denies our ability to think the situation, and to act rationally in the absence of certainty. It is also purely reactive, permitting action only after sufficient evidence has been gathered and forbidding action in the present, when it is most needed.

The operation of surveillance, and our complicity in it, is one of the most fundamental characteristics of the new dark age, because it insists on a kind of blind vision: everything is illuminated, but nothing is seen. We have become convinced that throwing light upon the subject is the same thing as thinking it, and thus having agency over it. But the light of computation just as easily renders us powerless – either through information overload, or a false sense of security. It is a lie we have been sold by the seductive power of computational thinking.

Consider an example from the network itself. Some time prior to May 2016, James O’Reilly, a resident of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, installed a Canary security system in his home. The Canary suite of products, like Google’s Home offerings, perfectly embodies the logic of surveillance and computational thinking: a series of cameras, sensors, and alarms – linked together and through the internet – provide total situational awareness of the home in real time, and the promise of protection and peace of mind through the agency of the all-seeing machines.

On May 1, 2016, a wildfire started in the boreal forest to the southwest of Fort McMurray and, fanned by strong winds, spread towards the town. On May 3, a mandatory eviction order was issued, and 88,000 people abandoned their homes, including O’Reilly. As he was driving away, his iPhone pinged with a notification from the home security system, and started to live stream video, which was later posted to YouTube.⁴⁰

The video opens with a shot of O’Reilly’s living room: table lamps are still illuminated, as are the lights of a fish tank, in which goldfish continue to swim. The trees outside the window are shaken by a strong wind, but nothing seems untoward. Over the next few minutes, shadows start to beat against the door, resolving slowly into billowing smoke. After another minute, the window has turned black, and the frame catches. Fire shatters first the blind, and then the window itself. Smoke pours into the room, and it is gradually obscured. The camera switches to black-and-white night vision. In the growing darkness, an alarm sounds intermittently, but it finally falls silent, and all that can be heard is the crackling of the flames.

It is a nightmarish scene, yet one that seems to embody the conditions of a new dark age. Our vision is increasingly universal, but our agency is ever more reduced. We know more and more about the world, while being less and less able to do anything about it. The resulting sense of helplessness, rather than giving us pause to reconsider our assumptions, seems to be driving us deeper into paranoia and social disintegration: more surveillance, more distrust, an ever-greater insistence on the power of images and computation to rectify a situation that is produced by our unquestioning belief in their authority.

Surveillance does not work, and neither does righteous exposure. There is no final argument to be made on either side, no clinching statement that will ease our conscience and change the minds of our opponents. There is no smoking gun, no total confirmation or clear denial. The Glomar response, rather than the dead words of a heedless bureaucracy, turns out to be the truest description of the world that we can articulate.