We're being ruled over by a lawless bunch of Tory thugs

This week both the Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and the Home Secretary Priti Patel have used their Tory party conference speeches to spit venom at “lefty lawyers” and “do-gooders” because they attempt to hold this malicious, lawless shambles of a government to the rule of law.

Meanwhile the Tories are trying to push through three outrageous pieces of legislation through parliament simultaneously, all of which seek to undermine international law, and drastically redefine the powers of agents of the British state to behave lawlessly.

Internal Market Bill

The Internal Market Bill is designed to tear up Boris Johnson’s “Oven Ready” Brexit deal with the EU, within a year of signing it.

Having rushed it through parliament and then hastily signing it off with the EU in January 2020 (to delirious Brexiteer celebrations) this isn’t just a Brexit plan any more, it’s now a signed and sealed international treaty.

For Johnson and the Tories to suddenly turn around and say that the deal they signed is flawed nonsense that has to be ripped up in the faces of the people they just signed it with is an outright affront to common decency, but it’s also an attack on the rule of law, because not only does it involve tearing up a binding international treaty they only just signed, it also severely endangers the Good Friday Agreement.

The Tory Northern Ireland minister Brandon Lewis actually stood up in parliament and admitted that the Internal Market Bill is intended to break international law, and somehow this lawless Tory regime is being allowed to get away with brazenly turning the UK into an international pariah state that reneges on its signed and sealed international commitments.

Overseas Operations Bill

The next outrageously lawless piece of Tory legislation is the Overseas Operations Bill, which seeks to provide British military personnel legal immunity from prosecution for torture, murder, and war crimes, as long as they can cover up what they did for five years.

This despicable effort to effectively legalise torture and war crimes clearly contravenes all kinds of international agreements and accords, most notably the UNCAT, which states that victims of torture are entitled to justice and redress, no matter when the violations occurred.

Aside from the lawlessness of this legislation, it also sets an appalling precedent because if the UK uses domestic legislation to exempt their military personnel from legal accountability for torture and war crimes, why on earth wouldn’t other rogue regimes follow suit?

Additionally, this drive to provide impunity for torturers, murderers, and war criminals within the ranks of the UK armed forces is likely to have severely adverse consequences on the front line, because the push back from opposition combatants is likely to be absolutely fierce if British soldiers are perceived to be a lawless and unaccountable militia who are encouraged by their government to torture, murder civilians, and commit heinous war crimes with promises of legal impunity.

Spy Cops Bill

Then there’s the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Spy Cops) Bill which seeks to give agents of the state extraordinary powers to commit crimes, up to and including rape, torture, and murder, with legal impunity.

We already know that Spy Cops have perpetrated all kinds of outrages whilst spying on all kinds of non-violent campaign groups; they’ve entrapped activists by orchestrating criminal actions themselves. They’ve conducted sexual relationships with their targets, up to the point of raising kids with their victims before hastily disappearing off the scene entirely once their assignment is over; and they’ve even infiltrated groups campaigning against police violence and miscarriages of justice in order to smear them and disrupt their activities.

This new Spy Cops Bill is designed to allow spy cops to do all of the above, and even to commit crimes in order to fit people up, as long as they invent some spurious excuse for why framing an individual (for example by uploading child sexual abuse or terrorist materials onto their computer) is “in the national interest”.

Alarmingly it isn’t just police, military, and secret services operatives the Tories are plotting to give immunity from prosecution for fitting people up, and committing heinous crimes like torture, rape, and murder. The same powers are being given to agents of all kinds of quangos like the Food Standards Agency, the Gambling Commission, the Competition and Markets Authority, and the Environment Agency!

Even if you’re the kind of drooling far-right authoritarian who believes that spy cops should be given immunity from prosecution if they commit forgery, perjury, fraud, rape, torture, or murder in the course of their work, surely you’ve got to be left left wondering why on earth the Tories are so keen to rush through legislation designed to exempt employees from the Food Standards Agency or Gambling Commission from prosecution from engaging in such criminality too.

And it hardly takes a genius to understand what a terrifying assault on the rule of law it is for the Tory government to give spy cops (and all kinds of other state employees) legal immunity from prosecution if they’re caught committing heinous crimes on behalf of the state.

How does the right to a fair trial survive legislation designed to give spy cops legal immunity from prosecution, even if they commit crimes themselves in order to fit up members of activist groups that the UK government has taken a dislike to?

How does the ECHR right to freedom from torture and degrading treatment survive legislation designed to give agents of the British state the power to commit acts of torture and abuse with legal impunity?

Tory lawlessness

All three of these bills are aimed squarely at undermining international law, and giving agents of the British state the power to behave lawlessly.

This sickening combination of radical anti-lawyer rhetoric from leading Tory figures, and all of this deliberately lawless Tory legislation should be terrifying to anyone who considers the rule of law to be one of the essential pillars of democracy.

But let’s not kid ourselves that this tsunami of Tory lawlessness and anti-lawyer rhetoric is something that’s come out of the blue, because there were loads of warnings before the 2019 general election, stretching all the way back to the coalition government era.

⚫ Page 48 of the Tory manifesto that pledged to tear up our human rights and replace them with a set of Tory allowances, and to dramatically reduce the powers of judicial review.

⚫ Johnson and Cummings’ decision to unlawfully suspend parliament in September 2019 in order to evade democratic scrutiny of their hopelessly flawed “Oven Ready” Brexit deal.

⚫ The appointment of Priti Patel as Johnson’s Home Secretary, despite the fact that she was forced to resign in 2017 after getting caught red-handed acting as an agent of a foreign state embedded in the UK government, and her plot to divert funds from the UK overseas aid budget into the illegal Israeli military occupation of the Golan Heights.

⚫ The outright Tory refusal to defend the High Court Judges after the “Enemies of the People” Daily Mail headline, and Theresa May’s subsequent decision to hire the author of that outrageous hit piece as one of her closest political advisers.

⚫ Theresa May’s unlawful and sickeningly racist “Hostile Environment” that led to the systematic persecution of black black British citizens, to the extent of thousands being denied jobs, housing, banking services, social security, and medical treatment, and scores of black British citizens even being deported out of the UK altogether.

⚫ Chris Grayling’s unlawful Tribunal Fees, designed to protect bad bosses by pricing low-income workers out of the justice system, with upfront £1,200 fees if they wanted to seek compensation for their mistreatment at work.

⚫ Iain Duncan Smith’s unlawful forced-unpaid-labour schemes, followed by his bizarre attempt to bypass the legal judgement against his lawless behaviour by retroactively rewriting his botched and unlawful legislation so that it would have made sense had it been written that way at the time, which was also subsequently declared unlawful in the courts.

It’s not like the British public had no warning that handing a Tory government a whopping great parliamentary majority would result in the deliberate destruction of law and order in the United Kingdom.

Anyone who has paid even the slightest attention since 2010 knew exactly what would be on the cards, but millions obviously concluded that the ideologically driven destruction of the rule of law, and Britain’s descent towards the status of lawless far-right pariah state would be a price worth paying in return for whatever (probably imaginary) benefit they thought they’d be getting from handing absolute power to the bone-idle, bigoted liar Johnson, and his cabinet of radically right-wing Tory ghouls.

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20 questions mainstream media should ask about the Institute for Statecraft scandal (but probably won't)

The Tory government has been caught red-handed shovelling over £2 million in public cash at a dodgy propaganda unit called the Institute For Statecraft which disguises itself as a charity for the purposes of avoiding tax.

A cache of leaked documents has revealed that this publicly-funded pseudo-charity has been interfering in the democratic processes and broadcast media outlets of our European neighbours, and furthermore the Twitter account they runwith the extraordinarily misleading name "Integrity Initiative" has repeatedly published highly partisan political attacks on the Labour opposition.

Here's a full article on the scandal with more details.

The mainstream media have been extremely quiet on the story, and don't be naive enough to expect to be hearing any BBC coverage of this scandal whatever.

However if we did have any kind of functional mainstream media (one that was intent on actually holding the powerful to account and asking incisive questions about their behaviour rather than generally running distraction for them and burying their scandals), here are some of the questions mainstream media journalists should be asking about the Institute for Statecraft scandal:

• What is  UK-based charity doing meddling in Spanish political processes?

• What is a UK-based charity doing bragging about "silencing" people on Serbian television?

• Are the Spanish and Serbian governments aware that a UK-based (and UK government funded) organisation has been actively meddling in their states, and did they give permission?

• What Key Performance Indicators have the Tory government set in regards to the £2 million+ in public funding, or is it just a "no strings" handout from the government?

• Aside from the £2 million+ in government funding, who else is funding this pseudo-charity?

• Were Tory government ministers aware ofInstitute for Statecraft's foreign interference tactics before the internal document cache was leaked?

• Did Tory government ministers sign off on the covert political interference in other European states, or did the charity use public funds in this manner purely of their own accord?

• Is this foreign meddling an abuse of charitable status, and how much do these clearly uncharitable political activities undermine public faith in what charities actually exist to do?

• Is it acceptable for the governing UK party to lavish £2 million+ of public funds on an organisation that smears their political rivals?

• Does a UK governing party actually have any legal responsibility to ensure that the public funds they're distributing are not used for the purpose of attacking their political rivals, and if not, why not?

• Does the £2 million in government funding for an organisation that is interfering in other nations' sovereign affairs constitute evidence that the Tories are quietly privatising and outsourcing the functions of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office?

• If this was a right-wing pro-Brexit pseudo-charity (like the Institute for Economic Affairs for example) that was caught red-handed spreading partisan political smears and interfering in democratic processes, would award winning investigative journalists like Carole Cadwalladr be quite so keen to talk the scandal down and pivot criticism away from the guilty parties?

• Does the fact that numerous UK mainstream newspaper journalists have been named as collaborators working in "clusters" on behalf of the Institute For Statecraft in the leaked documents explain their media colleagues' disinclination to properly investigate the scandal?

• Have members of the "cluster" cells this pseudo-charity has set up received payment or incentives for their involvement, and if so how much? 

• Have the MPs who have involved themselves with this pseudo-charity properly declared their involvement, and any payment or benefits, on the Register of Parliamentary Interests?

• Is the colossal amount of money this government-funded pseudo-charity is flinging around on running seminars and foreign jollies (globs of between £20,000 and £60,000 for seminars and academies),  an absolute affront to decency at a time when disabled people, low-income workers, and literally millions of British children are being condemned to destitution by Tory austerity dogma?

• Isn't setting up shadowy publicly-funded operations to spread online propaganda and interfere in the affairs of other European democracies exactly what the UK government accuses Putin and the Russian state of doing?

• Even if we agree with this pseudo-charity's extraordinary use of public funds, isn't getting caught red-handed meddling in other countries affairs a massive display of incompetence from whoever signed off on this scheme at the Foreign Office?

• Doesn't getting caught engaging in shady cyber-war activities and overseas political interference massively damage the UK's credibility when it comes to criticism of stuff like Russian propaganda bot farms, and Russian political meddling overseas?

• Is it time for the Charity Commission to draw up new rules to prevent this kind of egregious political abuse of charitable status?

Aside from these specific questions, there's also the thought experiment of whether Jeremy Corbyn would be getting such an easy ride had he become Prime Minister and then set about pumping £2 million+ of public funds into a shady left-wing pseudo charity that smeared his political opponents at home and interfered in the democratic processes and broadcast media of our European neighbours? [if your answer to this thought experiment isn't "absolutely no way" then you can't have been paying much attention at all for the last three years have you?]

None of these are difficult questions to come up with, and any journalist willing to peruse the cache of leaked documents should be easily capable of thinking up plenty of other pertinent questions about this scandal.

However it seems unlikely these questions will be asked by most mainstream media outlets (and especially the BBC) because they undermine the prevailing mainstream media narrative that casts the Russians as the perpetual baddies because they spread propaganda and interfere in other countries affairs (which they do) and the Brits as the honest and trustworthy goodies standing firm against the nasty Russian threat (despite getting caught red-handed engaging in the same kind of propaganda tactics, foreign meddling, and geopolitical influence-mongering).

In fact the leaked Institute for Statecraft documents reveal the shady means by which this prevailing 'new cold war' mainstream media narrative is actually being spread, including the development of "clusters" of journalists working to spread the Institute's propaganda.

Half of the problem is that in order to question the Institute for Statecraft scandal, a lot of mainstream media hacks would have to question themselves and their colleagues.

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Theresa May's Snoopers' Charter gives 20,000+ people the ability to go data trawling

People who were actually paying attention to what Theresa May was up to will already know that her Internet Snoopers' Charter allows all kinds of state employees to trawl through the private communications data of innocent people. Until now we didn't really have much idea of how many people Theresa May has given permission to snoop on innocent law-abiding citizens, but now we know that the number is at least 20,000!

The research was done by Claire Broadley at Who is Hosting This. Over 100 Freedom of Information requests were submitted, and although several government agencies including the Home Office (the department that actually introduced the Snoopers' Charter!) didn't bother to respond, those that did respond have revealed that over 20,000 people have been given the power to snoop on the private communication and browsing data of innocent people.

Unsurprisingly there are a lot of cops and military personnel in the list of 20,000+, but there are also 45 people at the Food Standards Agency, 56 at the Gambling Commission, 59 at the DWP, 326 at the Department of Health Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, 75 at the Information Commissioner’s Office, 548 at the Office of Communications, 45 at the Health and Safety Executive, and hundreds more at various other non-terrorism related government agencies.

Even if you're the kind of person who remains unconcerned at the government legislating that our Internet providers create massive hackable data dumps of all of the private communications data of millions of innocent people, and nonchalant that these data dumps can be browsed by the employees of all manner of UK government agencies, surely you've got to accept that allowing 20,000+ people to trawl these data dumps of private browsing and communications data is an obvious recipe for data misuse?

Do you really believe that nobody amongst these 20,000 government employees might try to use their new snooping powers to do stuff like search for blackmail material or tittle tattle to sell to the tabloid press, commit industrial espionage, settle old scores by leaking embarrassing personal information, search for inside information to sell on or manipulate markets with, trawl around looking for sexually explicit material to masturbate over or sell, cyber stalk their current or ex partner, or any manner of other ways of misusing the private communications data they've been handed access to by Theresa May's government?

The really interesting thing is that there are right-wing authoritarian people out there who defend this to the hilt. These right-wing blowhards are normally the kind of people to furiously decry the nanny state and the meddling of quangos like the Health and Safety Executive. But now, because it's their beloved nanny-dominatrix Theresa May has imposed the most extreme surveillance system of any developed nation in history, they're suddenly deliriously happy that so many government agencies have been given permission to trawl through everyone's private data, and unable to see any potential problem whatever with the creation of vast hackable data dumps, or the fact that over 20,000 people have been given permission to trawl them, and the recipe for large-scale data misuse that entails.

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The Snoopers' Charter allows the state to lie in court

I've already written articles explaining that Theresa May's Snoopers' Charter (Investigative Powers Act) is the most draconian state surveillance legislation ever introduced in the developed world.

I've already pointed out that the Snoopers' Charter will create vast hackable data dumps containing the private Internet browsing information of millions of UK residents and British companies.

I've already pointed out that the Snoopers' Charter will allow all kinds on non-terrorism related organisations (from the Food Standards Agency to the Gambling Commission) to access to these massive data dumps of people's private information.

I've already pointed out the staggering levels of gullibility and searing hypocrisy of people who actively support Theresa May's draconian and invasive spy regime.

Now it turns out that the Snoopers' Charter has enshrined Parallel Construction into UK law, which means that agents of the state will be allowed to tell lies in court in order to secure convictions, and furthermore it bans anyone from questioning those lies.

The relevant part of the Investigatory Powers Act is Section 56. The section is written in the usual kind of impenetrable language used in government legislation. I'm going to spell out in simple English what section 56 legislates. If you want to cross-reference my layman's explanation with the actual wording of the act, click the green link above.

• 56 (1) In British courtrooms and Inquiries it is now forbidden to make disclosures that would 

(a) reveal that evidence was obtained by electronic spying (snooping).

(b) suggest that electronic spying (snooping) has ever been going on, may have been going on, or may go on in the future.

• 56 (2) Details all of the actions that are defined as electronic spying ("Interception-related content")

• 56 (3) A list of people who people who are able to act as electronic spies (snoopers), which includes police chiefs, spy chiefs, the head of HMRC, the head of the defence staff, the heads of non-British agencies with whom the British government is sharing information, any person holding office under the crown, anyone working for the police, anyone working for HMRC, anyone working for a postal service, anyone working for a telecommunications provider, anyone working as a subcontractor for a postal service or telecommunications company.

• 56 (4) Retroactive clauses to prevent the prosecution of people who were doing this kind of electronic spying unlawfully before the Snoopers' Charter became law in November 2016.

Section 56 of the Snoopers' Charter is really alarming stuff because it creates a legal obligation on prosecutors to lie in court about how their surveillance-related evidence was obtained, and it also prevents defence lawyers from presenting proof that evidence was obtained by spying, or even suggesting that the evidence might have been obtained by spying.

Some people have tried to suggest that this legislation weakens the prosecution position by creating doubts over whether they are telling the truth or not, but any defence lawyer who ever tried to even point out the section 56 legislation that obligates the prosecution to lie in court about the sources of their evidence would be in breech of section 56 (1) (b) for suggesting that spying could have been going on.

Aside from the Snoopers' Charter creating legal obligations for witnesses to lie in court, and gagging defence lawyers, section 56 is also deeply concerning because of the retroactive clauses.

The Edward Snowden leaks made it absolutely clear that the UK surveillance state was behaving in a criminal manner by ignoring the law and acting without any parliamentary oversight. Section 56 (4) absolves the secret services of their criminal activity by backdating the Snoopers' Charter to decades before it was actually brought into law.

Section 56 is an effort to make it impossible for anyone to ever question the conduct of British spy agencies again. And by "spy agencies" I mean anyone from the head of MI5 to employees of the Food Standards Agency.

As Gareth Corfield of The Register points out, the introduction of the Snoopers' Charter means that "Theresa May and the British government have utterly defeated advocates of privacy and security, completely ignoring those who correctly identify the zero-sum game between freedom and security in favour of those who feel the need to destroy liberty in order to 'save' it" and that "the UK is now a measurably less free country in terms of technological security, permitted speech and ability to resist abuses of power and position by agents of the State".

NOTE: This article was heavily influenced by Gareth Corfield's article on The Register. I have linked to it several times in the text of the article, but here's another link to it, just in case.

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The intense gullibility of Snoopers' Charter cheerleaders

Unfortunately there are an awful lot of hopelessly gullible people in the United Kingdom. In fact these days the hopelessly gullible are clearly an important electoral demographic, hence the Tory government's ever increasing insistence on addressing the British public in glib, over-simplistic and downright misleading platitudes ("all in this together", "living within our means", "Brexit means Brexit" ...)

Out of this hopelessly gullible demographic, one group stands out above all others: the cheerleaders for Theresa May's introduction of the most invasive state surveillance regime of any democratic country on earth.

I've already written an article explaining how the Tory "catching nasty terrorists" justification is an utterly insufficient explanation for why their Snoopers' Charter gives all kinds of non-terrorism related institutions like the Food Standards Agency, the Health and Safety Executive and the Gambling Commission the ability to trawl through the Internet browsing history of any innocent person they may take an interest in. You can read that here.

Anyone who thinks that the threat of terrorism is adequate justification for allowing employees of the Food Standards Agency the opportunity to trawl through the private Internet browsing data of innocent people is obviously astoundingly naive.

One of the most common concerns about state surveillance legislation is the potential for function creep*. The astounding thing about the Tory Snoopers' Charter is that they've already built function creep into the legislation by allowing dozens of non-terrorism related government agencies and quangos to use these invasive snooping powers.

The fact that the Snoopers' Charter enables state spying that goes way beyond the stated justification is far from the only complaint, but the litany of problems with this atrocious piece of legislation simply doesn't deter the right-wing authoritarian "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" crowd.

One of the Tory trolls who regularly bombards the Another Angry Voice Facebook page with his rote learned tabloid drivel tried to defend the Snoopers' Charter by saying that he didn't mind having his private personal data nicked and kept in massive, easily-hackable data dumps, "as long as they do the same to terrorists".

The idea that this mass trawling of the private browsing data of millions of people is going to catch any terrorist aside from the feeblest kind of idiot is laughably naive because any terrorist with a grain of sense is already using VPNs, anonymous Tor networks, end-to-end encryption and the like to evade mass data trawling.

The idea that harvesting the private communications data of millions upon millions of innocent people and dumping it into easily-hackable databases is a price worth paying in order to catch only the most idiotic of terrorists is absurdly naive.

The foolishness of people who would give up their own liberties (like the right to privacy for example) out of fear is best summed up by the Founding Father Benjamin Franklin who said "those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety".

The problem with right-wing cheerleaders for intrusive state surveillance isn't just their naivety, it's also their cognitive inconsistency.

When it comes to the latest Tory privatisation scam these right-wing Tory apologists are always ever so keen to explain that "the state is too big, and too inefficient to run public services properly", hence the need for public assets to be sold-off on the cheap or simply given away for free to the private sector. However when it comes to state surveillance these Tory apologists are suddenly singing a completely different tune. When it comes to the state creating vast data dumps containing the private information of millions of British citizens and British businesses, they suddenly expect us to believe that the state is so magnificently efficient and infallible that the chances of corruption, data loss and vulnerability to hacking are 0%!

Another example of this kind of cognitive inconsistency is the way that in just a matter of days right-wing loud mouths went from damning Fidel Castro as a horrible dictator to ecstatically cheering over the introduction of an invasive state surveillance system that Castro and the Cuban communists could never have imagined in their wildest dreams.It's clear that right-wing cheerleaders for the Snoopers' Charter are not only staggeringly ignorant about the fact that this bill would only ever catch the most inept of terrorists, they're also capable of the most extraordinary displays of Orwellian Doublethink.

On one level it is actually amusing to witness the remarkably naive and staggeringly hypocritical mental contortions these people are prepared to make in order to justify a state surveillance system that would have made the East German Stasi turn green with envy.

On another level it's deeply concerning that huge numbers of people are actually such enthusiastic supporters of Theresa May and the Tories continually stripping away our rights and liberties that they're willing to overlook the woefully flawed "preventing terrorism" justification narrative; the unlikeliness of actually catching real terrorists through mass data trawling; the dangers of corruption, hacking or data loss; the fact that function creep has actually been written into the legislation; the appalling precedent set to repressive regimes like Turkey and Egypt; and the danger of such surveillance powers eventually falling into the hands of someone even more fanatically right-wing and authoritarian than Theresa May.

What you can do

The Snoopers' Charter is now law, but you can still register your dissent at this atrocious piece of legislation by writing to your MP to complain about it, and by signing the petition to have it repealed.You can keep yourself informed on security and state surveillance issues by following campaign groups and informative blogs like Open Rights Group, EDRi, Techdirt, Electronic Frontier Foundation... 

On the whole the mainstream media have been pathetically unwilling to give the Snoopers' Charter the critical attention it deserves, so you can also help to spread public awareness of this woeful legislation by sharing this article.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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* = The term "function creep" refers to the way that new laws often end up being used in ways that they were never intended. For example - the use of anti-terrorism legislation to throw an elderly man out of the Labour Party conference for shouting "nonsense" at Jack Straw.

How NSA overreach is worse than terrorism

Ever since the Edward Snowden leaks started it has become more and more obvious that the NSA and their Five Eyes partners (the spooks in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) have been making a concerted effort to monitor and control the entire Internet.

They've engaged in vast data stealing exercises designed to sweep up and store the private communications data of virtually everyone; the NSA have employed a team of some 850,000 NSA staff and private security contractors to trawl this ocean of stolen data for whatever they can find; they've damaged international relations by snooping on dozens of heads of state; they've used their snooping powers to spy on companies like the Brazilian oil company Petrobras (surely motivated by industrial espionage, rather than their stated justification of "fighting terrorism"); they've undermined encryption technology - endangering the security of financial transactions; and they've compelled countless US based technology companies to violate the privacy of their own customers and to build backdoors into their products to enable NSA snooping.
 
In order to compress what they've been doing into a single paragraph, I've obviously left out a lot of the nefarious activities orchestrated by the NSA and carried out by their mercenary army of hundreds of thousands of private sector spooks and their Five Eyes collaborators. But even so, the above paragraph is more than enough to demonstrate that the security services in the US, and the other Five Eyes collaborator states, are running dangerously out of control.

The fact that the NSA and their Five Eyes collaborators feel entitled to trawl the Internet for whatever they can find, which is then stored in vast data centres and subjected to algorithmic analysis without the need for any kind of judicial warrant, demonstrates that something fundamental has changed in the relationship between the state and the citizen. Due process has been abandoned, and as far as the security services are concerned, we are all assumed to be guilty. They don't have to be able to show probable cause, they don't have to apply for a warrant from a judge, they just steal our data and use it as they see fit, with no democratic oversight at all over many of their data stealing operations.

The fact that the US state employs a staggering 850,000 NSA staff and private sector contractors to trawl this ocean of stolen data should be alarming to anyone with the brains to think through the logical implications of such a vast mercenary army. You would have to be a hopeless idealist to imagine that there are no "bad apples" at all amongst all these hundreds of thousands. If we assume that just 4% of them (one in every 25) are the kind of people that would use their access to enormous surveillance powers to do things like steal commercially confidential information to order, blackmail people, cyber stalk people, wage petty vendettas against old adversaries ... that would mean a rogue army of some 34,000 thieves, stalkers and blackmailers with access to the NSA's vast caches of stolen data and their extraordinary surveillance capabilities.

The fact that the NSA have been using their powers to engage in industrial espionage against various countries such as Germany, Russia, China and Brazil illustrates that "the few bad apples" narrative, although useful from an illustrative point of view, isn't actually the main concern. The main concern is that the NSA itself is corrupt to the core. Instead of using their powers to maintain the rule of law and to "fight terrorism" they're actually intent on using their unprecedented espionage capabilities in order to undermine global competition for the benefit of US based corporations.

One of the most worrying revelations is that the spy agencies have deliberately compromised the encryption technology used to keep our financial transactions safe, and that they have awarded themselves the power to hack into bank accounts anywhere in the world and simply erase money out of existence, or invent fictional transactions. They have undermined the integrity of the financial system in order to build themselves snooping capabilities that would have blown the minds of the East German Stasi or the Soviet KGB.

Perhaps the most damning element of all (from an American perspective) is the extraordinary amount of damage the NSA have done to the reputation of US technology companies, by compelling them to breech the privacy of their own customers and infecting their products with spyware. This trashing of the reputation of countless US based technology companies comes with an enormous price tag. It has been estimated that the reputational damage inflicted on US technology companies by their own government could amount to $180 billion, as millions of customers are turned off the idea of investing in buggy, insecure and spyware laden products from US companies.

If you add the estimated $180 billion in reputational damage to American companies to the staggering cost of running the NSA and employing an army of 850,000 spooks, the cost of this folly is absolutely enormous.

One of the worst things about having trashed the reputation of their own technology sector, is the fact that the technology sector is one of the few parts of the US economy that is healthy and productive. The US financial sector is a gigantic, virtually unregulated and desperately unstable hotbed of corruption and reckless gambling and US manufacturing power has been in decline since the neoliberals came to power in the 1980s and allowed short-term profiteers to asset strip US productivity. The US economy is in decline, but that decline has been offset by a remarkable period of exponential growth in the US technology sector. Any American with a reasonably comprehensive view of how their economy is structured must be absolutely aghast at the damage inflicted on the technology sector by the power crazed spooks that considered their mission to infect everything they could with spyware as far more important than the long term success of the US technology sector.

Not only does it look like the NSA's overreach is going to cost the US economy vastly more than any terrorist attack ever has, it also looks set to crush US ambition of controlling the Internet, as ever more people realise that the Americans can no longer be trusted to control the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. Any non-US corporation with the slightest regard for data security is going to move away from reliance upon the US technology sector as soon as possible, and any nation that values its own industries is surely going to approve of efforts to wrest control of the Internet away from the US.

The sheer scale of NSA data theft is driving the development of new highly encrypted technology. It is only a matter of time before spook proof browsers and encrypted communications become commonplace, because there is an undeniable market demand for such things. The most terrible thing from a US perspective is that US technology companies will be completely cut off from entry into this new market because everyone is now aware of how the US intelligence agencies have forced US technology companies to infect their own products with spyware and invade the privacy of their own customers. Nobody is ever going to believe US technology companies when they give assurances about privacy, meaning that the next wave of secure communications technology is going to arise outside the US.

The NSA have been using their surveillance powers to engage in industrial espionage in order to benefit US corporations. This is a clear demonstration that they see it as their mission to help US corporations by fair means or foul. Given that this is one of their core objectives, the fact that they have inflicted such an extraordinary amount of damage on the most vibrant sector of the US economy must go down as one of the most spectacular own goals in history. They built a vast data stealing operation in order to help US corporations, but in doing so inflicted more damage on the US economy than Osama Bin Laden could ever have dreamed of.

The NSA have used their scaremongering narratives about the threat of terrorism to justify the slaughter of their own golden goose, yet they would have us believe that they are not responsible. They would have everyone believe that Edward Snowden is the guilty party; that he alone is responsible for the damage to the US technology sector. But their case is a ludicrous one. There is clearly something dreadfully wrong with the way things are set up if just one man (out of some 850,000 spooks) can single handedly wipe an estimated $180 billion off the value of the US technology sector simply by telling the truth.
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