tim's experiment

It is brave of Mr Snowden to blow the whistle on his country’s spies, but the story does not come as a big surprise. This sort of thing has been going on for decades. Nor am I impressed by the suggestion that it is subject to some kind of judicial oversight. I suppose the arrangement in America is that if you wish to intercept one named individual’s mail, email, phone calls or whatever with a view to later prosecution then you have to get a court order. But that is not most of what is going on.

Huge quantities of electronic traffic are being hoovered up and searched for signs of subversive activity. We all know roughly how this works. The people who accommodate this blog often remind its author (who doesn’t usually bother) of the importance of putting down a few keywords. This ensures that the person who is searching for the topic you have covered can find it.

People who are really keen on attracting traffic take advantage of the way computer searches work. In the early days of the internet most of the commercial sites were selling porn. In order to attract customers using search engines they generally included a large slab of prose which consisted simply of 57 synonyms for “sex”. Sometimes these were repeated several times. Later they discovered that they could conceal this part of the site from customers by the simple wheeze of printing it in white type on a white background. The computer search engine still read it but the visitor, unless he highlighted the text by accident, did not.

Now whatever miraculous means the American spies and codebreakers use to collect the millions of bits of internet which they wish to scour for items of interest, in the end they are going to have to come down to something rather similar to sort out the possible wheat from the much more numerous chaff.  So if for example I insert here some such meaningless phrase as “terror bomb avenge Osama blow up White House death to America” the computer will pick this out as a potentially interesting item. Hi guys! Sorry. False alarm.

This does not actually do me any harm. But it would be foolish to suppose that this is always the case. Many people find themselves mysteriously banned from flying, for example. Others have bombs dropped on their houses. Some of them find the police taking a mysterious interest in their innocent activities. Some people whose illegal projects are in the dream stage are offered help by bogus co-conspirators who, when the fake bomb is planted, then arrest everyone concerned, to the great credit of the law enforcement agency concerned.

So there is a cost to this sort of thing. A gentleman who wrote to the Post last week put his finger on the heart of the matter (though he proceeded to draw the wrong conclusion) when he said that in the hunt for lawbreakers it was sometimes necessary for innocent people to be questioned, and even detained. Indeed it is. But it is expected, in civilised societies, that the inflicting of inconvenience of this kind will be proportionate to the seriousness of the crime involved, and the chances of the technique solving it. We do not arrest the whole population in the hunt for a shoplifter.

There was a time when an important legal principle stated that it was better for 100 guilty people to go free than for one innocent one to be punished unjustly. This now seems to have been replaced in the USA by the view that it is better for 100 innocent foreigners to be killed than for one American to be endangered. Americans must feel safe from terrorism, even while they sacrifice thousands of their fellow citizens every year to the absurd notion that it is a human right to have a gun in your pocket.

When Mr Obama says that Americans do not need to worry about being unlawfully snooped on he leaves open the possibility, indeed the certainty, that the rest of us should be very worried indeed. Yet human rights are supposed to be universal. Can you have a black man as President and still be racist? I suppose so.