{"id":5319,"date":"2020-11-06T11:50:08","date_gmt":"2020-11-06T11:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodvale.com\/?p=5319"},"modified":"2020-11-06T11:50:08","modified_gmt":"2020-11-06T11:50:08","slug":"secret-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/secret-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"Secret Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just weeks after the publication of a new book about the British intelligence services, the new Director-General of MI5 has promised more \u2018visibility\u2019 from his organisation.
\nSpeaking at his first media briefing since taking the top spot at MI5, Ken McCallum detailed the threats facing Britain, including State interference by Russia. He also suggested that although his organisation needed to be \u2018invisible\u2019 in much of what it does, he wanted parts of MI5 to be more visible and open to the public.
\nHowever, after a lifetime of studying the intelligence services, Dr Paul Lashmar, author of the recently published, Spies, Spin and the Fourth Estate<\/em>, takes these comments with a large amount of scepticism. Pointing, for example, to McCallum\u2019s comments about Russia being a threat to British democracy Paul says: \u2018For those of us that have been calling for an inquiry into the impact of online disinformation by Russia and other hostile forces on the 2016 Brexit vote, we are told by MI5 and government \u201cmove along here, there is nothing to see\u201d\u2014they can\u2019t have it both ways.\u2019
\nHead of the Department of Journalism at City University and an investigative journalist for over forty years, Dorchester based Paul makes the point in Spies, Spin and The Fourth Estate<\/em> that there is much to be concerned about for British democracy from within the security services themselves. Increasingly invasive powers, a lack of accountability and oversight, and \u2018massive\u2019 reliance on private contractors are some of the points that he believes need to be addressed to make sure the intelligence services are not only robust enough to do their jobs, but also to protect the freedom of the people they are there to safeguard.
\nIn his book, Paul traces the activities of various organisations tasked with protecting the country through The Great War, the inter-war years, the Second World War and the Cold War, right up to the present day and the \u2018War on Terror\u2019.
\nHis detailed account, drawing on years of research and experience writing about the security services, and especially their reliance on and interaction with journalists, paints a fascinating picture of a powerful force. One that, in general, he believes is a force for good. But he is concerned that it may have already amassed data way beyond its needs. Speaking about GCHQ, for example, Paul explains: \u2018I don\u2019t think people understand how powerful GCHQ working with the Americans now is. It\u2019s not about what they might get about you in the future. They already have in their files a huge amount of detail about everybody in the country\u2014it\u2019s sitting in computers. It\u2019s frightening. They build huge warehouses full of servers where they download metadata, phone calls etc. With an increasingly authoritarian air to the current government, that\u2019s frightening, really frightening.\u2019
\nDespite new regulations attempting to monitor and regulate intelligence services, Paul\u2019s depth of frustration with their intrusive activity is mirrored by his concerns about whether we have the ability to monitor these organisations the way we should. \u2018If you are critical of the intelligence services you are perceived to be anti-intelligence\u2019 he says. \u2018I am not at all anti-intelligence. But I believe they should be properly accountable. And they are not properly accountable, even with the new regulations. The fact that the Government tried to put Chris Grayling in as the chair of the Intelligence Security Committee (ISC) demonstrates the appallingly poor accountability that currently exists and there\u2019s lots of evidence in the book that supports that.\u2019
\nIn their defence, Paul is quick to point out some \u2018extraordinary good work\u2019 done by Dominic Grieve as Chair of the ISC. But he also says that \u2018by and large since 1996 the ISC has been a cheerleader for intelligence, rather than a critical independent oversight mechanism. We haven\u2019t had effective oversight for just about all that time really, except for a short period around 2016 to 18.\u2019 Paul questions whether we have the manpower and resources to monitor such secretive organisations properly. \u2018We don\u2019t have the skill base in accountability to deal with it\u2019 says Paul. \u2018They just don\u2019t have enough inspectors and people who understand what is going on at GCHQ to do that. It\u2019s a really interesting question. This isn\u2019t me saying that GCHQ and other amazing agencies aren\u2019t doing great work in monitoring terrorists and protecting us, but it\u2019s the most powerful secret tool in the country by a long shot\u2014and it needs to be regulated properly with oversight. The history of intelligence, as laid out in my book, shows that if you give people who are operating in secret, \u2018power\u2019, they will always push the edges of the envelope\u2014push it that bit further\u2014interfere with this or that bit of politics\u2014push the people that their politics supports\u2014embarrass people…\u2019
\nFrom undermining \u2018isolationists\u2019 opposed to America entering the Second World War to intensive propaganda efforts in Northern Ireland, as well as the promotion of moderate Islam, Spies, Spin and the Fourth Estate<\/em> offers no shortage of detail about security services tactics and \u2018tradecraft\u2019 over many years. The word \u2018Spin\u2019 in the title alludes to the many occasions where journalists and writers were co-opted to perform as propagandists. Despite the fact that a journalist\u2019s role should be, as Paul puts it, to act as a \u2018challenge to the presuppositions that exist in the intelligence world as elsewhere\u2019, from Daniel Dafoe to Roald Dahl, many journalists\u2019 talents have been used to assist when necessary. In fact, there were those that made their careers by being a pair of \u2018safe hands\u2019 and therefore were granted early access to information\u2014as long as they spun it with the required angle. In the main, these were more establishment oriented than left-wing. They tended to be \u2018people from the right or centre-right, certainly not from the left\u2019 said Paul. \u2018Those journalists, academics and politicians appeared to have a level of knowledge that other people from the left didn\u2019t have and therefore their careers blossomed. It was a very effective mechanism for isolating people from the left because they couldn\u2019t get that information.\u2019
\nMaking the point that intelligence gathering and investigative journalism utilises similar techniques Paul reminds us that \u2018the fourth estate\u2019 or journalism, has another aspiration: \u2018the concept of the freedom of the press within a democracy suggests that the news media preserve the citizen\u2019s liberties from an overbearing state and corporate sector.\u2019 However, he says that \u2018reporting critically on the world of intelligence is regarded as one of the most difficult specialist beats in journalism as it is, by definition, a world of secrets.\u2019 Today, the ability to simply report, let alone investigate, has become more than difficult. Not least due to the suborning of journalists over many years. Today the game has changed says Paul. \u2018When I started out, if you were sent to a trouble spot as a journalist, you could rush around and wave your press card and people would think \u201coh, that\u2019s a journalist\u201d and not touch you. These days, the assumption is that you are a spy, or you\u2019re up to no good, or you\u2019re just a lackey of the bourgeois media. We both know journalists who are now much more cautious about going to danger spots because they might get kidnapped or taken hostage. Or even worse beheaded and killed.\u2019
\nSpies, Spin and the Fourth Estate<\/em> shines a light onto activities that may have been undertaken with the intention of protecting western democracies but the long term result is an abuse of power that makes it increasingly difficult to hold to account. \u2018Intelligence agencies will tell you they are there to defend democracy, so why is it they have had a hundred years of subverting journalism and the media?\u2019 asks Paul. \u2018It seems to me, the notion of the freedom of the press is a fundamental aspect of democracy. And no one ever asks that question. Why do intelligence agencies consistently misuse the media for their own benefit? Given that they are interfering with the freedom of the press and the free flow of information. They have always interfered with it. I think that\u2019s a big question that\u2019s never been properly answered.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just weeks after the publication of a new book about the British intelligence services, the new Director-General of MI5 has promised more \u2018visibility\u2019 from his organisation. Speaking at his first media briefing since taking the top spot at MI5, Ken McCallum detailed the threats facing Britain, including State interference by Russia. He also suggested that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5320,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[13],"class_list":["post-5319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-features","tag-fergus-byrne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5319\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}