Schneier on Security

Wesley Parish • May 22, 2019 5:29 AM

With all due respect, this strikes me as rubbish:

Many Western societies are fiercely debating the issue of intelligence oversight—and that debate is healthy. But for all their flaws, there is a categorical difference between the way big Western agencies operate—under judicial, legislative, executive, and other constraints—and the means and methods of their counterparts in places such Russia or China. Getting access to mobile phone records in the West takes more than a mouse click. It typically requires a warrant, which must be sought through a bureaucratic process. In Moscow and Beijing, it’s easy. Indeed, China’s national security law expressly requires every individual and corporation, state-run or not, to aid the intelligence services.

Has said author/s of said article ever read any of the numerous satirical SF novels published during the Soviet era? Where bureaucracy reigns and the efforts of the individual to get any satisfaction let alone make any sense out of the bureaucratic process, is inevitably thwarted?

Read the Strugatski Brothers’ Snail on a Slope and Beetle in an Anthill for confirmation. Or just read Ilf and Petrov, or that greatest of Russian authors of the Twentieth Century, Andrei Platonov. Chevengur‘s a good place to start.

Wesley Parish • May 22, 2019 5:58 AM

And this:

Information in most countries is also ludicrously overclassified, at too high a level and for too long a period of time. Overclassification and excessive secrecy do not protect countries from their adversaries. Such methods only protect bureaucrats from scrutiny. Intelligence agencies use the supposed need to protect sensitive sources and methods to justify their concealment of blunders or activities that deserve public scrutiny. This excessive secrecy makes spy services timid, introverted, risk-averse, and calcified by procedure. Taxpayers end up paying ever greater bills for ever less impressive results. Meanwhile, the enemies of Western democracies, untroubled by such procedures, steal secrets and meddle in U.S. and European politics with abandon.

New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange once made the comment that he was not impressed with the Intelligence service because in far too many cases they merely regurgitated stuff he’d already seen on the evening news or in a newspaper. Michael Moorcock makes a similar comment in either The Russian Intelligence or The Chinese Agent, I forget which. And that in the case of David Lange was back in the eighties – he’s long since joined the choir invisible; he’s an ex-Prime Minister.

And likewise overclassification was criticized and condemned by Dr Paul Myron Linebarger in his book Psychological Warfare in the early fifties. It’s the closed societies’ besetting sin. It’s the reason they fail.

I can’t see the change in technology has changed much in that respect; it undoubtedly has changed the equation somewhat in that it makes failure easier for the unwary, and I doubt anyone in this forum considers anyone in their respective governments wary, let alone competent. (Let me illustrate what I mean – in the uproar following the Christchurch Terror attacks, someone let slip that the relevant intelligence agency had been watching, but not for far-right extremists, even though most Christchurch people are sick to death of their more obvious face, the White Pride lot.)