Transcript

Controlling
Information: who holds
the power in the
internet age?
Sir David Omand GCB
Former Security and Intelligence Coordinator, Cabinet Office, UK and Visiting Professor, War
Studies Department, King's College London

Guy Herbert
General Secretary, NO2ID

Nigel Inkster CMG

Director of Transnational Threats and Political Risk, International Institute for Strategic
Studies and Former Assistant Chief and Director for Operations and Intelligence, SIS

13 April 2011

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Transcript: Controlling Information

Sir David Omand:

We all know the sensation: to connect to the internet is to feel yourself having
instant access to humankind’s accumulated knowledge. Every major scientific
discovery, every important work of culture, maps of everywhere. I can get a
search engine to provide me with thousands of references on any subject I
choose. In that sense the internet does provide a democratization of
information.

But the authorities, and commercial companies, also use it, tracking
information about all the electronic traces we leave as we shop with a credit
card, book an airline ticket or cross a border. An essential capability for public
security in a democracy, provided we have the rule of law and proper
oversight - not necessarily so benign in an authoritarian regime. So there will
be countries where this technology will not necessarily be empowering the
people.

The internet is the medium of choice for industrial scale leaking. But there will
be a downside. We risk the continued erosion of trust in society if we abandon
the importance of a duty of confidence, whether to the family, our employer or
the State.

We have a law to protect whistleblowers, we have freedom of information

legislation, and we have a media free to conduct investigative journalism. But
we start with trust in privacy and keeping secrets - unless breaking
confidence really is judged necessary in the public interest. The test is
genuine public interest, not just selling newspapers because the public might
be interested in the Wikileaks dump of diplomatic cables.

Finally, access to the internet does not confer the power of wisdom. The
internet is filled with misinformation, and downright wrong information. The
largest consumers of broadband have been internet porn and on-line games,
and now social media sites. The blogosphere reveals a world of old media
stories, conspiracy theories, celebrity froth and personal emotional rants. The
problem is too much information. Serious people will still pay someone else to
do the selecting - through listening to BBC Radio 4 perhaps, or going to a
respected media website. So influence, if not power, will still rest back with
the opinion formers – a cheerful conclusion for media folk.

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Transcript: Controlling Information

Guy Herbert:
Information about you is power over you, as every blackmailer, taxman, or
village gossip knows.

The web is a familiar face covering universal, flexible, networked computing.

Information can be found, transmitted, matched and re-matched faster than
we can grasp. That is changing the distribution of power, yes, but also its
nature and quantity.

Our slow-grown social institutions - and our individual social brains - are not
equipped to cope. The flux of power is not one way. But individuals seldom
have the capacity to use the new power. They are most likely prey to new
predators.

Privacy and confidentiality aren’t well understood and aren’t well protected -
either in law or moral status - because in the past they haven’t needed to be.
Personal intuitions about sharing personal information - even our intuitions
about what is personal - are formed by our sense of the limits of personal
acquaintance. We have a feeling for the repeatability of conversation and the
amount that we remember of what we see and hear. But we begin to live in a
world where nothing is forgotten, and what is passed on may reach anyone.

States, on the other hand, have an appetite for information. Getting enough
was always a problem. They gorge on data that they cannot contain, and
cannot digest. The technology of the early 21st century is being grafted onto
the planning urges of a century before.

Interpretation looks easier, because processing is easier: but it is really

harder. More apparent detail is more temptation to intervene in detail - directly
with the person the state thinks it ‘knows’, not through mediating institutions.
The database state does have more power than its predecessors. And is,
though yet naively, more inclined to use it. If our habits and institutions do not
evolve fast to constrain it, then individual liberty is at risk.

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Transcript: Controlling Information

Nigel Inkster:
A little over a decade ago Scott McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems said
in the context of the internet ‘privacy is dead; get over it.’ I’m not sure privacy
was ever much more than on life-support. For most of recorded history people
have had less privacy than we might imagine and what they had may have
reached its apogee during the period of industrial urbanisation. And I certainly
don’t think secrecy is dead because of the internet.

It’s certainly getting harder to keep secrets in a networked world. Much has
been made of the impact of the US State Department cables recently
disseminated by Wikileaks. But we need to keep that episode in context. The
cables were downloaded from SIPRNET, a classified Defense Department
database designed to remedy the pre-9/11 problem of insufficient information
sharing within an overly stove-piped US government. But the US and allied
intelligence communities, anticipating the kind of episode which has now
occurred, never put their material on SIPRNET. And it now appears that
SIPRNET didn’t have the monitoring systems that would flag up anomalous
behaviour. These are things that can be fixed. Wikileaks revealed few secrets
to those familiar with the issues; the biggest news was that the US public and
private discourses were broadly the same.

The internet has undoubtedly empowered individuals and civil society,

arguably at the expense of traditional centres of power. But these centres can
and are fighting back. A case in point is China, a country which is no friend of
freedom of information. Though China seeks to control and limit what its
citizens see and say on the net, it has recognised the impossibility of
controlling everything and has developed a suite of sophisticated techniques
which one US researcher has called ‘networked authoritarianism’ and which
gives the impression of freedom and privacy- until the axe falls.

Western governments haven’t followed this path, nor should they. But
government and statecraft do and always will require a measure of secrecy
and governments will have to think much harder about how they can preserve
this in an era of promiscuous connectivity. And we shouldn’t lose sight of the
fact that when it comes to security the human factor is still paramount.

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