Ratf*ck A Go Go! Atlanticists and MI5 Go After Trump!

I try to keep a certain distance from the anti-Trump circus.  But I do want to put some thoughts on record, given the obsession with Trump’s Russia connection and what I see is a determined effort to minimize the British/NATO angle in the attack on Trump.

My personal feeling is that there are significant swaths of the European establishment that derive their mission and meaning from serving as allies to the United States in an anti-Trump effort: the British government and intelligence services, NATO, various right-leaning European governments, their think tanks, in other words, the Atlanticists.

They didn’t like Trump because he was more interested in dealing directly and positively with Russia on matters of US strategic concern in the Middle East and Asia and much less interested in perfecting the Atlanticist Euro-centric anti-Russian containment/deterrence apparatus and backing crazy EU/NATO expansion stunts like the Ukraine operation.

Perhaps similar to Trump’s interest in dealing with China instead of doing pivot.  Difference is, Atlanticist lobby is much more entrenched in Washington, the NATO alliance is miles ahead of the “box of sand” Asian containment network, and Great Britain is America’s primary intelligence partner.

So I think people over the pond, particularly in Europe, were interested in feeding documentation on Trump’s murky Russia connections to his opponents, and especially on behalf of Hillary Clinton, who is very much an Atlanticist fave.  Effort was pretty low key at first because nobody expected Trump to get anywhere, but things picked up when he got the nomination, and then shifted into apesh*t crazytime when he got the presidency.

The British link is there for all to see in the notorious Steele dossier.  What people don’t want to see is the inference that Steele was either getting dirt from MI5/GCHQ or is simply a cut-out for a British effort.

I should say the possibility that the UK intelligence service may have been deeply involved in preparing the brief against Trump does not elicit an urge from me to spontaneously genuflect concerning the accuracy of the evidence.  I daresay psyops—packaging and releasing selective intel and innuendo at opportune times through deniable channels for maximum effect--is a core mission of British spookdom, as is making up utter crap, like the notorious “dodgy dossier” on Saddam Hussein.

An interesting datapoint is the Guardian leg-humping a story about Michael Flynn having conversations with a Russian-English historian causing “concern” to “US and UK officials”.   The only useful conclusion from this farrago, as far as I can tell, is that a) investigating Things Flynn was an official US-UK joint and not just Christopher Steele lunching Russian emigres in Grosvenor Square and b) the UK press is doing a similar tag teaming with US media to sell Trump/Russia like it pitched in with the US to sell Saddam/Iraq.

And the Guardian is doing it this time!  You’ve come a long way, baby!

The mega-uproar over the “GCHQ tapped Trump” story was, to me, quite interesting, for the massive full-court pushback it elicited and the grudging backdown from the Trump administration.

If the story proved out true, it would be a disaster for the UK.  

On the institutional level, confirmation that US investigatory and intel outfits resorted to GCHQ to, shall we say, supplement collection related to US citizens and *ahem* circumvent US laws would lead to demands for that bane of all spook prerogatives, oversight and perhaps a committee to review requests for intel exchange between the US and GCHQ before they happened (I recall reading that currently the NSA can reach into Five Eyes servers and pull out whatever it wants whenever it wants; it would be fun to find out in open testimony if that actually happens!).

On the political level, it would be hard to escape the imputation that Great Britain was conducting politically-motivated collection/querying/handover of intel concerning disfavored US politicians and officials, and that the English bulldog was INTERFERING IN AMERICA’S SACRED ELECTIONS, you know, like a certain country, name begins with R ends with A led by a guy name begins with P ends with N is allegedly doing.

It would be interesting to see how the public relations fracas on terms of “Putin trolls pushed fake news on Facebook” vs. “GCHQ pushed fake news into the FBI” would play.

GCHQ/MI5’s powerful capabilities and their slavish eagerness to put them at the service of the US are the glittering jewels in the tattered collar of the British poodle.  If GCHQ becomes a “normal” intelligence interlocutor of the US—with the added stigma of having engaged in politicized active measures on behalf of US factions—then the UK risks dropping to parity with *gasp* Germany as another arm’s length partner.

Fox’s alacrity in yanking some guy called “Judge Nap” for publicizing the GCHQ surveillance allegations was interesting.  You might expect Fox would be keen to push this rather provocative and open-ended talking point to provide some aid and comfort to Trump and ride a ratings-boosting angle.  But Fox shut Nap down!  

Wonder if Rupert Murdoch got the call from the UK government that any encouragement of this kind of tittle-tattle would call down the wrath of the British government on Rupert’s extensive media holdings in Britain.

Well, with Judge Nap in the cooler, I doubt any other Fox commentators will be too interested in pursuing that allegation.

And maybe the US intel community told Trump he’d be gone in a heartbeat if he threatened to compromise the US-GB special spook relationship to save his skin.  So he backed off.

If Trump falls on his ass I expect that will provide the political cover for some discrete “now it can be told” bragging about how the Atlanticist band of brothers joined hands to defeat the Russian menace.  If Trump hangs on, it just goes into the secret museum of US-UK ratf*cking operations.

NSA as Massa of the Global Sigint Plantation

Craig Murray caused quite a fuss in 2004 when, as UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, he openly criticized the systemic and severe human rights abuses of the Karimov regime.  He was publicly and pointedly stomped on by the British government, with the full encouragement of the Bush administration, for complicating Western access to the Karshi-Khanabad airbase and queering the Global War on Terror pitch.

Murray subsequently wrote an extremely interesting and disarming memoir, Murder in Samarkand (published in the US as Dirty Diplomacy, so I’ll throw in a link to Dirty Wars as well so readers can savor the full dirty spectrum).  In his book, Murray discusses his extensive travels inside Uzbekistan, his contacts with embattled activists, and what he saw and heard and said  (and drank--see under index subject Craig Murray—personal life—alcohol, pages 90-2, 93, 236, 250, 251, 253, 256, 263, 265, 272, 282, 290, and 315--and lusted after—see under the index subject Craig Murray—personal life—women, attraction to, pages 18, 92, 118-19, 121, 128-9, 164-5, 250-1, 252, 253, 256, 263, 264-6, 268, 269, 305-6) in order to place in context the determined efforts of the UK government to smear his reputation. 

Uzbekistan presents an interesting conundrum for liberal human rights activists, not because of its human rights violations, which are undeniably ghastly, but because of its rather bizarre status as a private, for-profit operation of the Karimov family and its allies.

Per my reading of Murray’s book, Uzbekistan looks like a slice of the antebellum US South, and not just because of its total commitment to the cotton culture that dominates the economy and lives of its people, and has also dried up the Aral Sea and otherwise devastated the ecology of Central Asia.  There is so much money to be made off dominating the state-controlled cotton industry (and mining out the gigantic lump of gold that Uzbekistan is fortuitously perched upon) that there is little incentive for Karimov to cultivate the diversified, urbanized market-driven economy that nurtures feisty bourgeoisie and the contentious democratic forces beloved by liberal reformers.

Plantation systems are bad for integrated economies and immiserated citizenry, be they slaves in the South or Uzbeki citizens ordered into the fields for the harvest, but they can be very profitable for plantation owners.  The key point is to foreclose employment alternatives and maintain access to an underpaid, immobile, and docile workforce.  That was certainly the situation in the South, and not only in the pre-Civil War period.  With property-rights conscious Northerners unwilling to attack the foundations of the plantation system through confiscation and redistribution of land to freemen to introduce competition into the market in land and labor, the ability to enforce a local employment monopoly was preserved and the captive-worker system immediately reconstituted itself, first with the Black Codes—which explicitly tied freedmen to the plantations through the implementation of restrictive labor contracts (and also mandated fines for landowners seeking to lure workers away from their existing employment with offers of higher wages)—and then the debt peonage of the sharecropping system, which persisted well into the 20^th century.

Unless the Karimov family is interested in encouraging a revolutionary rumpus by aware, empowered, and aggrieved workers, I expect similar conditions to obtain in Uzbekistan and the local oligarchy will display little interest in market reforms or development of new economic sectors unless their revenues can be safely and ferociously extracted.  And with Karimov trampling on local discontent quite ruthlessly and playing the “indispensable ally in battle against Islamicist terrorists” card rather effectively, don’t look for a new Lincoln to apply external pressure on behalf of the Uzbek masses.

Anyway, I was struck with a passage in Murray’s book in which he speculates on the reason why the Blair government attacked him so intemperately, and went to inordinate lengths to 86 his career.

Murray had complained that intel provided by the Uzbek government through the CIA to the UK was tainted by the fact that it was obtained through torture.  Beyond the fact that tortured detainees often provide false information in order to stop their mistreatment, the UK is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture and, by the interpretation of Murray and others, was precluded from possessing (as well as using in a court of law) evidence obtained under torture.

The UK government begged to differ, for reasons that might have had little to do with the quality and morality of torture-extracted intel.  In 2006, Murray wrote:

I now believe that in protesting about intelligence obtained by torture in Uzbekistan I had hit an even more sensitive point than I had realized…I had also been hitting at the foundations of the UK-US intelligence sharing agreement.  This was put in place by Churchill and Roosevelt, and under it the CIA and MI6 exchange everything, as do the US National Security Agency (NSA) and UK General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).  As the US have four times the volume of intelligence that we do, our intelligence services view this agreement as of the highest importance and are particularly anxious that there should be no derogation from the principle that everything should always be shared…Therefore, if the CIA gets information from torture, we have to accept it in order to maintain the integrity of the agreement and the principle that everything is always shared…

Murray was, in Brit-speak, spot on concerning British anxieties about the US relationship, as the Snowden trove confirmed.  In August of last year, the Guardian printed this account of GCHQ groveling to the NSA (undoubtedly amplified by the fact that the NSA had underwritten over $100 million of GCHQ projects over the last three years):

The leaked papers reveal that the UK's biggest fear is that "US perceptions of the … partnership diminish, leading to loss of access, and/or reduction in investment … to the UK".

…

GCHQ seems desperate to please its American benefactor and the NSA does not hold back when it fails to get what it wants. On one project, GCHQ feared if it failed to deliver it would "diminish NSA's confidence in GCHQ's ability to meet minimum NSA requirements". Another document warned: "The NSA ask is not static and retaining 'equability' will remain a challenge for the near future."
…
The overriding necessity to keep on the right side of the US was revealed in a UK government paper that set out the views of GCHQ in the wake of the 2010 strategic defence and security review. The document was called: "GCHQ's international alliances and partnerships: helping to maintain Britain's standing and influence in the world." It said: "Our key partnership is with the US. We need to keep this relationship healthy. The relationship remains strong but is not sentimental. GCHQ must pull its weight and be seen to pull its weight."

Astonishingly, the document admitted that 60% of the UK's high-value intelligence "is based on either NSA end-product or derived from NSA collection". End product means official reports that are distillations of the best raw intelligence.

One side of the story is the UK’s poodlicious commitment to serving as the US intelligence community’s most eager and able overseas partner.  And the need to placate the US and buttress Britain’s standing as a meaningful player in the world power game goes a certain way to explaining why it would engage in a bizarre stunt like yanking Glenn Greenwald’s partner into temporary custody in order to rummage through his belongings while he was transiting London.

But I’m also struck by the implications for the senior partner in the process, the United States.  The intimidating character of US demands are best backed up if the US is the indispensable superpower, the hegemon, if you will, in the global intelligence space.  If the UK is reliant on US intel for the majority of its own intelligence product, that’s good for the US in terms of the cooperation it can elicit from the UK on a broad range of policy matters beyond intel sharing.  

Massive surveillance isn’t just a question of catching the “bad guys”.  It’s also a question of getting the “good guys” to do what we say.  It’s a matter of power, not just security.

If, on the other hand, it looks like international outrage and public concern over the massive character of US data collection is going to put a crimp into the NSA’s style, the US loses a valuable weapon in its arsenal—for encouraging compliance by its state allies as well as adversaries.

And that’s why it is unsurprising that President Obama hesitates to impose any meaningful restrictions on the NSA’s activities.  The idea that the US “gets it all”—and friendly governments are dependent upon the US for their own intelligence needs—is a useful strategic asset.  That’s a case that the US security services have to make continuously, both in day to day clandestine performance and in occasional hegemonistic chest-thumping in the public sphere.

Just as Karimov wants to maintain control over the cotton business in Uzbekistan, President Obama wants to assert domination over the Western world’s intel production—and convince the world it has no alternative but to work on America’s digital plantation.  

However, given the massive mission bloat, inefficiencies, and risks inherent in a commitment to maintaining the “getting it all” monopoly, it is an interesting and unanswerable question as to whether the genuine security needs of other nations in particular and the world in general—and the US itself--are well served under the system.

I Spy on the Five-Eye

Well, the guy who said this was full of crap:

David Skillicorn, a professor in the School of Computing at Queen’s University, says this is one piece of the data-sharing relationship "that has always been carefully constructed."

"The Americans will not use Canadians to collect data on U.S. persons, nor will any of the other Five Eyes countries," Skillicorn says.

"In fact, in practice, it’s as if the five countries’ citizens were one large, collective group, and their mutual communications are not intercepted by any in the Five Eyes community."

Actual situation, as per the Guardian today, the NSA honored its no-spy-on-five-eye pledge in the breach:

Britain and the US are the main two partners in the 'Five-Eyes' intelligence-sharing alliance, which also includes Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Until now, it had been generally understood that the citizens of each country were protected from surveillance by any of the others.

But the Snowden material reveals that:

• In 2007, the rules were changed to allow the NSA to analyse and retain any British citizens' mobile phone and fax numbers, emails and IP addresses swept up by its dragnet. Previously, this data had been stripped out of NSA databases – "minimized", in intelligence agency parlance – under rules agreed between the two countries.

• These communications were "incidentally collected" by the NSA, meaning the individuals were not the initial targets of surveillance operations and therefore were not suspected of wrongdoing.

• The NSA has been using the UK data to conduct so-called "pattern of life" or "contact-chaining" analyses, under which the agency can look up to three "hops" away from a target of interest – examining the communications of a friend of a friend of a friend. Guardian analysis suggests three hops for a typical Facebook user could pull the data of more than 5 million people into the dragnet.

• A separate draft memo, marked top-secret and dated from 2005, reveals a proposed NSA procedure for spying on the citizens of the UK and other Five-Eyes nations, even where the partner government has explicitly denied the US permission to do so. The memo makes clear that partner countries must not be informed about this surveillance, or even the procedure itself.

When intelligence community apologists get wrongfooted by these kinds of revelations, one is inclined to wonder: is the so-called security insider who is allaying (and in some cases ridiculing) the public’s anxieties over government surveillance practices a clueless dupe or a duplicitous shill? 

Inquiring minds want to know.

The most recent revelation is tantalizing as it relates to my own personal hobbyhorse, as discussed in a previous post with the theme Blame Canada: did the NSA diddle with traffic patterns through its corporate buddies on the North American backbone and route US persons’ data to Five Eyes partners—like maybe Canada--for storage, collection, and processing, and thereby receive its tittle-tattle on interesting Americans second hand via a foreign intelligence agency, thereby not violating the letter of the U.S. law prohibiting these kinds of interception without a warrant?

With this background, the most interesting element for me was one that the Guardian didn’t even bother to report on.  It only appears in the Guardian’s reproduction of the 2007 memo (click on the image at the head of the article for the full text) authorizing collection of UK persons’ info.  The memo baldly stated that “unmasked” UK data—if I understand it correctly, this simply means in this case “metadata that has been revealed as relating to a UK person” is not only fair game for review by NSA analysts; it may also be dumped into a database for access by GCHQ:

“[US Analysts] Are not required to forward unmasked UK contact identifiers to GCHQ unless specifically requested by GCHQ.  GCHQ should receive all unmasked UK contact identifiers via established or mutually agreed forwarding means or the contact identifiers should be available in the GCHQ-accessible five-eyes [deleted] database, the [deleted] access to [deleted], or other GCHQ-accessible metadata stores.”

Hmmm.  Certainly sounds like the NSA was not only collecting UK data; it was making it available to GCHQ.  If that was the case, one would assume it worked the other way around as well.

There’s probably more onion to be peeled.  Maybe a couple more layers down we’ll find out if we can really {drumroll} “blame Canada.”

If this scenario is determined, I reserve the right to name the illicit, escalating signint exchange with our neighbor in the Great White North "snowballing".  In honor of Kevin Smith, of course.