Archive - Eric is Awake

Published on: January 26, 2024

Trump's Plans Could Plant the Seed for Sedition

Former President Trump has made his plans for a second term explicit as he seeks to tie up the Republican nomination. On his shopping list of vengeance fuelled policies is the removal and replacement of intelligence services personnel. The sacking of FBI head James Comey during his first term is seen as a minor preamble to the proposed purges planned.

In a video released to social media, Trump unveiled his plan to "dismantle the deep state’’ and “clean out all the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus. The departments and agencies that have been weaponised will be completely overhauled”. This is in addition to a pledge to weaponize the Department of Justice for personal revenge among a plethora of measures to shape the country to his will under the guise of resisting and destroying favoured far right bogeyman ‘the Deep State’.

Trump’s opponents cite the charges against him for the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol as evidence of both seditious conspiracy and insurrection. But whatever the result of the various court indictments, he seems to have a strong chance of returning to the White House even if Biden drops dead and is replaced by Michele Obama at the last moment like some showbiz conjuring trick. This raises the question of who will be the ones accused of committing sedition and insurrection during his next term? The President himself or those in the intelligence services that he has in his sights who may seek to resist him?

Some veterans of past volatile administrations point out that the infrastructure of US governance is pretty robust and that vying constitutional interpretations aside, it survived `Trump 0.1’ pretty intact. But the former chief of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard N. Haas argues that although his country has been through other violent and divisive eras, this time, it is the system itself that is threatened. As he put it, the greatest threat to Global Security? ‘It’s us.”

The naked and clear ambition of the putative 47th President is unprecedented in scale and scope. Faced with such a program, some who see the US on the brink of becoming a near totalitarian state may feel they have a responsibility to resist in order to protect the constitutional rights that would be subverted and undermined by the measures. We are not talking here about Democrats and civil rights activists, although they will be on the streets and in the debating chamber and courts as expected. We are talking about the establishment itself. What Trump likes to call corrupt bureaucrats have some precedents for forming active cabals within the intelligence services carrying an agenda that steps outside their established remit. If they follow these precedents, they may fulfil the chief conspiracists theories and strengthen his hand.

Amid the fallout of the Cambridge spies, an officer called Peter Wright was appointed chairman in 1964 of a MI5/MI6 committee codenamed "Fluency" charged to find other traitors inside the UK intelligence service and within the government itself. This led to the formation of an inner circle led by Wright who were tasked with investigating the Prime Minister Harold Wilson for signs of his Soviet sympathies and possible treachery. It triggered a campaign that became known as the "Wilson Plot" with a file opened on him in the name of Henry Worthington. There followed a series of burglaries, unofficial briefings, planted ‘evidence’ and rumours dressed as fact planted in newspapers to discredit the Labour administration and hint that the Prime Minister might possibly be a Soviet agent.

Although consistently denied, the existence of a security service out of control and accountable to no one was indisputable. There is a general perception reinforced by countless TV dramas (the excellent Slow Horses et al) that despite dragging the service out of the shadows and making MI5 subject to oversight by the Investigatory Powers Commissioner's Office (IPCO), the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, the concept of formations of unaccountable cabals to undermine the government of the day or to influence who may form that government remains possible. The same is true of the US intelligence services. After all, there is enough strong evidence that it has happened before with much of the FBI and CIA machinations around the Kennedy assassination remaining arcane and unresolved.

The question is, faced with their defenestration, are there ‘inner circles’ and ‘contingency measures committees’ forming in the FBI and the CIA even as we speak?

Published on: May 16, 2020

Climbing for Perspective - Yet Another Lockdown Diary

Orwell really knew how to self-isolate. He sequestered himself on the Isle of Jura at the end of a road 35 miles from the only shop and the only pub. No electricity, no telephone. He was running away from journalism and perhaps from possible assassins after he was placed on a death list by Stalinist stooges. Against this example of deliberate separation, we are merely amateurs. Biographers talk about how bleak the house, Barnhill was. Perched above a seal-draped bay on a tiny island in the Inner Hebrides, the pictures some of them paint is of a fatal self-imposed privation. I did not find it so when I stayed there. I understood. The scenery, the silence and the solitude is beautiful and calmed the turmoil inside that he must have felt. I wish I was there now.

After 9 weeks of Lockdown, not for the first time, I woke up with the miseries. So I cycled up the hill to Alexandra Palace hoping to get a lift from Mr & Mrs Endorphin. But they were self-isolating and wouldn’t open the door. I was almost arrested for being doleful in a built-up area. Police gave me the choice of being locked up inside for a long time or going home…

At the summit, in front of the People’s Palace, London lay before me, not like a patient etherised upon a table. But like a deluded escapee from an institution, convinced they are well and normal again, only to suddenly notice they are naked in the lion house at the zoo. People are on the streets again in great numbers. Not realising our government is using them and their children as canaries in the coal-mine. Guinea pigs in a social experiment. They have been off the wheel of working to consume, consume, consume too long for their liking. Time to sacrifice a few for the greater good.

The feeling is of a nameless dread that sits in your stomach like a lead weight and even though me and mine are all healthy and have nothing much to complain about, feeling like this is an excuse for me to beat myself up about everything.

Lockdown and my first London Marathon postponed. Months of training down the drain and I stopped running altogether. I have to start training again for October. But not today. Definitely not today.

But because I know this is how my brain works in these circumstances, my only trick is to sweat and write my way out of it. So labouring up the hill to Ally Pally and venting this sentiment here right now on this blog, I must shake it off and perform that mental sleight of mind that gets me over this hump and up the long incline to perspective. I am ready for another day of writing my way there. Now where are my crampons?

Published on: March 1, 2019

All the Years of Trying. An Ode to Patrik Fitzgerald

‘All the Years of Trying’ is a film about cult singer-songwriter punk poet and originator of folk punk, Patrik Fitzgerald; that has it's YouTube premiere - https://buff.ly/2S4J1M3 on St Patrick's Day 17th March. Fitzgerald kicked against the brash three-chord orthodoxy by performing waif-like and vulnerably alone with an acoustic guitar and a tattered book of poems at the height of the punk revolution, composing the ultimate anthem ‘Safety Pin Stuck in My Heart’. Although never making it to the dizziest heights of pop fame he continues to be a well respected figure, cited as an early influence by author and poet Benjamin Zephaniah and legendary journalist and Nirvana biographer, Everett True. The film is directed by filmmaker Dom Shaw who first met Patrik 41 years ago and filmed him for his seminal punk documentary ‘Rough Cut & Ready Dubbed’ which won the 1981 John Grierson award for best documentary. ‘All The Years of Trying; features some of Fitzgerald’s best known songs and interviews with people influenced and entranced by his music, and is an affectionate tribute to an old friend. ‘I knew Pat long before I met him’ says Shaw ‘because every song was soaked with his own vulnerability and humour that myself and many others could completely identify with.’ #PatrikFitzgerald #PunkPoet #Punk

Published on: August 18, 2014

Can We Really Be Bothered To Take Back Our Privacy?

Speaking via Google Hangouts from Russia on June 5th 2014, during a talk with Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder J.P. Barlow at the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York City, Edward Snowden was all about the good news for what he likes to call ‘netizens’. That’s what we are now, you and I, ‘netizens’. Just using the greatest step forward in communication since Alexander Graham Bell was first put on hold, makes it so.

The advice and the watchword from Snowden and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are all about a discipline that first saw military use in the era of Julius Caesar - Cryptography. The putative Emperor God favoured a standard substitution cipher to communicate with his generals which was considered quite innovative at the time and really boosted his capacity to outwit the enemy. But we all know what happened to Julius. An audacious rise up the ranks through judicious military strategy and a risible comb-over period before succumbing to hubris and failing to kick against the pricks of his rivals who stabbed him near the Theatre of Pompey (very sensitive area to be punctured) thus qualifying him as the very first post-mortem report. Apparently his death was mostly attributable to blood loss from multiple stab wounds. I like that ‘mostly’. As if his hay fever also played a major part in his demise. JFK’s fate was probably mostly down to his lactose intolerance.

The modern interpretation of cryptography of course is encryption. The way we take back our privacy is apparently by obfuscating everything we do online. The Reset the Net campaigners freely admit all they are doing is promoting consumer encryption tools that make NSA surveillance harder and more expensive. Therefore, contrary to the conference strap line, you are not taking back your privacy; you are simply putting a price on it, forcing spooks to do a cost benefit analysis on breaking your codes.

Reset the Net has a privacy pack that is designed to slow the NSA and GCHQ down to a slow muddy trudge through your privacy rather than a joyful gambol through the open fields of your Facebook statuses and your online purchases from ‘Iamnotaspy.com.’

On your mobile, you are advised to download Chatsecure, Textsecure, Redphone and Cryptocat from…the Google Play store, respected guardians of your privacy with no record at all of compromising your data. Thunderbird and Enigmail will encrypt your email if you download them from Mozilla. It may also be possible to use Universal Encryption Managers from almost a thousand providers.

The Tor Network is recommended and before you download it, be sure to read their latest top security advisory about a ‘relay early’ traffic confirmation attack. Apparently, and who knew this could happen, unknown persons who probably thought the metadata of folks who use the Tor Network might be worthy of more attention than you naïve felons and cyber activists who use Firefox or Chrome, decided to make a special effort to find out what you were so all fired up to protect.

And here is where the real cost benefit analysis takes place on a purely personal level. Let us assume for a moment that the recommended browsers and software are not compromised by special teams of code monkeys set up to focus on them by virtue of their ubiquity amongst users who wish to conceal their data. Let us also assume that the authors of these instruments are not seduced into the ranks of GCHQ and the NSA or Chinese State Security to lead them by the hand through the back door portals of their arcane mysteries. Let us assume your eyelids are not already growing heavy at the thought of all that software downloading and round the back technology you are going to have to master in order to keep track of what the trackers are not keeping track of. Let us assume you give a flying cleft stick (early cryptography) about protecting your state-shaking hacktivism from detection.

Most of you are not doing that sort of thing. You are, in the main, and purely by statistical probability, not a member of Anonymous, not a paedophile, not a criminal laundering your drugs proceeds through a Cayman Island shell company operated by a Limited Liability Partnership through the UK where the Government has made it so very easy to hide your ill-gotten gains. Therefore, all this activity of camouflage and misdirection is all about a principle.

‘They shall not have my data, even if that data is mind-numbingly boring and mundane and nobody cares if I also bought ‘Gone Girl’ after the ‘The Anarchist Cookbook’.’

A noble and principled stand. There may well be some satisfaction in making yourself a target for more attention from those trawling the metadata only for them to discover that you are kinky for ‘Hello Kitty’ underwear and that you buy every Jo Nesbo novel, the second it becomes available. But frankly, it just makes most of us tired at the very thought.

Part of me wants to stand up for the principle, knowing it is already a lost cause. But the other part of me, the part that really wants to get to the shops before I have to go to work again, simply despairs at the low ambition of such measures. It’s a pretty miserable level of attainment to know that all your efforts to anonymise your every action are only slowing up the process. That every vote to restrict the routine surveillance of every ‘netizen’ is always subverted by the gatekeepers of the latest technology, whatever quasi-democratic decision is made in the heavily bugged corridors of power. That, in the end, it is just too much effort to be anonymous and that the quid pro quo of using these bastard child technologies of Mr A G Bell Esq. is the absolute abandonment of privacy and the monetisation of your every online action.

We acquiesce through apathy and I really do understand how equally miserable a response that is. I’d really like to justify it by suggesting we all just give up trying and accept that we should never do anything online at all that we do not wish to be susceptible to snooping. That we should, like certain Russian intelligence oligarchs, revert to cash only transactions, Adler typewriters and dead letter drops in the park, even if all we are concealing is our dirty laundry bags with those ‘Hello Kitty’ drawers right at the bottom where no one can see. But I just can’t be bothered.

Published on: February 21, 2014

The Prevention of Journalism

It is easy to feel that what appears to be a recent tide of encroachment on the freedom of the press is merely business as usual in the realm of nations subject to the ebb and flow of more or less repressive governments. Even though this is ineluctably accurate, the post-Snowden environment puts the usual tactics in different areas of the world under a particular focus. It is common for these encroachments to occur most frequently when at war. The war does not have to be against another nation. The enemy within, a shifting and malleable distinction, will do just as well. In a world where half the hemisphere is engaged in a war against a noun -Terrorism - even this shallow pretext is almost unnecessary.

To see how much these tactics are very much unchanged despite years of what may be perceived as intellectual progress in the fourth estate, one need look no further than George Orwell’s 1946 essay, ‘The Prevention of Literature; stimulated in part by the recent wartime strictures of reporting and partly by the acquiescence of the British left to a self-censorship or denial of utilitarianism that allowed them to indulge in a fantasy that the Stalinist propaganda emerging from Russia was to be counterbalanced by a publication by the Soviets of the truth when the ‘crisis’ was over. In it, he described an attitude that chimes with some resonance with the response to Snowden and others on a personal level.

‘The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background. Although the point of emphasis may vary, the writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always branded as a mere egoist. He is accused, that is, either of wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privileges.’

Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker calls Snowden ‘a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison’. The Al-Jazeera journalists imprisoned in Egypt, along with political scientist Amr Hamzawy facing charges over a tweet questioning a court ruling, will undoubtedly find themselves accused of arrogance and narcissism during interrogation and court cross-examination. Just as patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, a claim that the truth is already revealed and that the errant hack is indulging in a selfish fantasy by publishing a different perspective is the last gasp of a regime in a state of flux, struggling to establish absolute control after recent political upheavals.

There are three types of censorship that restrict the freedom of the press. The first is a blatant characteristic of the straightforward out-and-out totalitarian regime as practiced in China (although this is beginning to change) or South Korea - a complete ban on all un-licensed reporting that is filtered through a bureaucracy that can close down a paper or arrest a journalist without any justification beyond the state’s desire.

The second is the self censorship forced on journalists by law, bureaucratic regulation, and politically motivated criminal investigations as in Russia. This is the unkindest cut of all but at least allows journalists to do all they can to find more and more inventive ways of coding the truth into oblique, parody or clearly understood satire that test the very limits of the repressive laws. The same is true of censored literature, although the fact that repression produces great books, (Bulgakov’s Master & Margarita et al) should not be a reason to perpetuate the habit.

Finally there is the most insidious form of censorship. The ‘death by a thousand cuts’ as represented by exemplars such as post-apartheid South Africa’s 2004 Law on Anti-terrorism that permit authorities to restrict reporting on the security forces, prisons, and mental institutions. A recent Protection of Information Bill initially permitted the South African government to classify a wide range of information—including “all matters relating to the advancement of the public good” and “the survival and security of the state”—as in the “national interest” and thus subject to significant restrictions on publication and disclosure. It mandated prison terms of 3 to 25 years for violations and did not allow a “public interest” defence. Even in its revised form, any whistle blowing reporting that would ‘directly or indirectly benefit a foreign state or non-state actor or prejudice national security’ can lead to a prison sentence. Plus ca change.

This form is also represented by the Miranda case where the use of an obscure clause of terrorism legislation leads to a seemingly glacial encroachment on investigative journalism that creeps up on our liberties and engulfs them piece by piece.

Orwell mentions attending a meeting of the PEN club to celebrate the tercentenary of John Milton’s anti-censorship tract Areopagitica. It is now 370 years since that template for the freedom of the press and of writers in general was published at the height of the English Civil War in opposition to the Licensing Order of 1643 and it seems we are still fighting to defend its precepts. As the appeal against the Miranda verdict is prepared, the blind seer’s words ring out over the centuries and echo around the corridors of power. ‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.’

Published on: January 20, 2014

How to Destroy a Public Sector Organisation 101

This module is for those seeking Corporatization of state assets, government agencies or municipal organizations into corporations. We will be using as our models, the BBC and the National Health Service. You, at the back of the class. Capita? Are you chewing gum? Spit it out or share some with the whole class. Pardon? You don’t understand the business model for sharing your gum? Quite right. Gold star.

Now, to understand the methodology of turning public assets into private investment opportunities, we need to understand a basic Machiavellian principle of divide and rule. This would normally apply to a rebellious underclass, but works just as well for the public sector. Firstly, ensure that you repeatedly describe the publicly funded institution as ‘bloated expensive and too centralised’. Think of a slow moving luxury ocean liner with its hull clad in Louis Vuitton and gold leaf, even if the image in most people’s heads is a battered shabby whale with scars all over it. Ensure that there are no comparable private institutions so that no one can compare the running costs or challenge your assertions that the institution is no longer ‘fit for purpose’.

Next, destroy the economy of scale by introducing an internal market. Firstly break up each part of the institution into smaller fund holding units that compete with each other to provide services at external market prices that were previously absorbed by the overhead at cheaper rates achieved through the economies of scale.

A perfect business model to study here is from the nineties - John Birt’s visionary ‘Producers Choice’ initiative in the BBC that divided the BBC’s 23,000 staff into 8,500 buyers and 14,500 sellers. This meant a light bulb replacement in an office used by one programme would be charged against their production budget along with office rental and the costs of requesting a music track from the BBC sound library and discovering that it was now cheaper to ‘outsource’ the need by nipping down to a supermarket and buying it. Thus, the BBC, (the bloated luxury liner clad in gold and Vuitton) which used to operate like an old Hollywood studio with its own carpenters, props and costume stores etc could now sell of all of these wasteful assets and pay the market price for private companies to supply them with what they previously supplied to themselves at a fraction of the cost. Even when the model is discovered to have been flawed and is scrapped, the important work has been done and the economies of scale fatally damaged.

Another instructive example from the nineties is the UK National Health Service which was also subjected to the internal market by turning each health authority into a separate fundholding trust with its own management rather than the centralised layers of administration (remember to say bloated and unwieldy) that were wilfully capitalising on the economies of scale by cleaning hospitals, buying equipment, feeding and caring for patients from the same budget. The staff costs of course, would initially rocket by 800% due to the new layers of management required for each trust, but you can’t make an omelette fit for purpose without over-egging. Then, show your adaptability to market forces by changing the structure at least three times but always retaining the internal market ensuring the institution becomes more and more expensive and can be cherrypicked by private providers for the most lucrative services.

The final part of this module covers the closing stages for which all of this preparation has carefully laid the ground. Declare the public institution a wasteful drain on the nation’s resources and argue for a complete private sector replacement dictated by the market with some cursory inspectorate to ensure that some basic standards that are no longer economic to maintain can be seen to occasionally be observed by high profile incidents that are exposed and censured whilst the majority remain un-reported. Argue that the country can no longer afford the public funded institution and hope that the British people maintain their reputation for apathy and resignation and don’t flood the streets to protest that everything they have come to rely upon is being taken away and sold to the highest bidder.

Next term, how to divert attention from tax avoiding international corporations by scapegoating foreigners and homosexuals for everything that is wrong with the European project, the economy, the welfare system and the lack of decent real ale in golf clubs Farage Major and Cameron Minor, see me after class. Putin? Insolent boy. Put your shirt back on at once.