Reply to post: @Ken Hagan - Re: Haven't a clue

@Ken Hagan - Re: Haven't a clue

"The problem is proving that the money spent trawling (which is measured in the billions if some reports are to be believed) would not turn up more results if it were spent differently.

Correct. In a democracy, I defy anyone to come up with a more effective scheme that a government can use to escape proper and efficient scrutiny by its citizens than to involve itself in secrecy and surveillance in the name of security. The fundamental–a priori–logic behind government involvement in such activities automatically means that they must remain secret from everyone–the citizenry included.

Government secrecy is a fundamental weakness within the very structure of the democratic process of Western democracies; we citizens have to accept whatever our governments say about such matters irrespective of the questions we put to them for, ipso facto, their silence or answers must always obfuscate. Western democracies never stop proclaiming openness yet 'Everything in the West is secret unless there is a conscious decision to the contrary.' [Ralston Saul]

In an ideal world where the bona fides of our governments were 100% guaranteed then government secrecy carried out with the sole purpose of protecting the citizenry would be acceptable and not in dispute. Trouble is we live in a real world where we have to have regular elections 'to keep the bastards honest', yet The State's security apparatus continues from one regime to the next and escapes such scrutiny every time. (Similar can be said about the diplomatic service whose default modus operandi is secrecy–as history has shown, often wars can start without any effective input from the citizenry.)

History has well demonstrated that secrecy often accedes to unaccountable power. Despite much recent rhetoric from governments to the contrary, there's not just one smoking gun but many which essentially all point to abuse of power by governments at the expense of their citizenries. Furthermore, there's precious little evidence that these abuses have actually made citizens safer–witness the recent attacks in Paris.

If governments had genuine bona fide intentions then, as we've seen with the Paris attacks, their first recourse (excuse) wouldn't be to blame encryption for their surveillance failures especially when there's no supporting evidence [that's been made available to us]. Second, governments are obsessed by secrecy even when there's no longer any need for it, why do they keep old–dead–cases secret forever and a day unless they have something very serious to hide? For example, why do they still keep secret many WWII files after 70+ years when even the most secret of secrets, Enigma, has been made public? As with so many aspects of State security, we are not even told the extent of these ancient files let alone their contents or for the reasons why they continue to remain secret.

[Not for one moment am I advocating that operational matters be broadcast to the world, clearly they should be kept secret for the duration. If it's not already clear then what I'm referring to is the general ongoing secrecy, self-protecting nature, lack of transparency, and unaccountability that surrounds these secret state bureaucracies and that their very presence (given their present structure) is seriously undermining our democracy. If that were not enough, governments have resorted to the age-old tactic of scaring the hell out of citizens by promulgating the highly secret nature of state security–the FUD principle.]

The fact is governments have shown that they cannot be trusted; moreover, our system of governance is sufficiently broken that secrecy that surrounds security remains inviolate, essentially we citizens cannot enter into any meaningful discourse about how to fix it.

Strong encryption is one of the few remaining protections we citizens still possess to keep the intrusive, meddling State at bay. Therefore, we need to wage the strongest possible political fight to keep the status quo. As I see it, if we fail then we're one further step along the road to totalitarianism.