Drone Future

A perimeter fence protects something extraordinary at the end of a grey, plain-looking residential street in East Lancashire, England. Hidden under tight security inside a hangar at Warton aerodrome are prototypes that represent the next generation of unmanned aircraft, known more commonly as drones. The latest technology, being developed and tested at Warton by defence contractor BAE Systems, is considered the final step toward integrating military-style drones into civilian airspace across British skies. It is revolutionary and groundbreaking. But it is also deeply controversial.

For many, the mere mention of the word drones conjures up negative connotations. They have become potent, deadly weapons in the so-called War on Terror, deployed with increasing frequency by the United States under the Barack Obama administration.

Controlled by satellite navigation and flown remotely by pilots based in the US states of Nevada and Virginia, drones have killed up to an estimated 4,000 suspected militants and 1,000 civilians in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia since 2002. Human rights groups allege that America has violated international law in how it is using drones, committing war crimes in the process. Members of the unmanned aircraft industry in Britain, however, are keen to present the aircraft in a new light – distancing them from warfare in a bid to win over the public.

“The military determine how they use them in conflict zones and it does get bad press,” says John Moreland, general secretary of the Unmanned Aerial Systems Association, a trade group based in Middlesex. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we condone the actions that governments use them for.

“As much as we deal with the military aspect of the vehicles that we get involved in, those are operated by the military under military rules and they’re nothing to do with civilians like ourselves that produce the equipment.”

Currently, small “mini-drones” – similar in size to radio-controlled model aircraft – can legally be flown under existing UK regulations. Most of these are under 20kg, carry small cameras, and can only be flown up to 400 ft in areas that are not densely populated.

In contrast, military-style drones are much larger, can soar at heights of more than 20,000 feet, and can only be flown in segregated military airspace for safety reasons. But technology being developed by BAE Systems in Warton is working on changing this, by integrating advanced “sense and avoid” technology so that the larger drones can be flown alongside manned aircraft in normal airspace.

“The primary reason they will be used is to collect data,” Moreland says. “You won’t see them, they will be at high altitude. They will be in controlled airspace, working within all the rules of the aviation authority, and for all intents and purposes they will appear to everybody else, to all the controllers, as just another aircraft.”

Not everyone shares Moreland’s relaxed attitude about drones. A concern for civil liberties campaigners is that police could use them to conduct secretive surveillance from an eye so high in the sky that it is invisible from the ground. Police forces across England have held meetings about introducing large drones, and the European Parliament is working on a plan to use the aircraft for border security purposes, tracking immigrants and smugglers attempting to enter countries on the continent illegally by boat. This follows the trend set in America, where drones known as “Predators” are deployed in states like Texas as part of border-security patrols.

“I think that there are civil liberties and privacy issues that simply aren’t being dealt with,” says Chris Cole, an Oxford-based campaigner who runs a popular website called Drone Wars UK. “The problem is nobody is taking these issues on board and yet we are pushing ahead with enabling unmanned aircraft to fly over our heads without addressing these questions. The big military companies are not doing this for our own good – they just see future profits in this area. So I think that there are real concerns.”

The sense and avoid technology being developed by BAE Systems is set to be tested in 2013, and experts working in the drone industry estimate that as early as 2015 they could be operational in civilian airspace alongside manned aircraft. Some are even predicting that, at some point in the not-so-distant-future, we will see unmanned aircraft flying passengers in the same way some trains today, like the Paris Metro, function without drivers.

But a more pressing concern, particularly for activists such as Cole, is Britain’s ongoing role conducting drone attacks in conflict zones. Last month it was revealed that British pilots had flown drones over Libya during the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi, contradicting previous government claims that the RAF had only flown them in Afghanistan. This has raised questions about whether the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has been candid about the full extent of its involvement in drone strikes.

“This is one of the most important ethical and legal questions of our time with regard to militarism and the armed forces – how drones are changing the nature of warfare,” Cole says. “The problem is they are not being very transparent about the use of drones. The public interest in this issue is so important, but the data about how drones are being used is not being disclosed by the MoD.”

Pressure on the government to release information about how it uses drones in warzones is likely to heighten in the months ahead. Pilots of a fleet of ten “Reaper” drones that the RAF uses to conduct attacks in Afghanistan are to be relocated to England for the first time later this year. The pilots, currently based in Nevada, will relocate to RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire, where they will pilot the drones using joystick-like controls from behind large monitor screens.

Already, anti-war activists have held demonstrations at the base to protest. 74-year-old veteran campaigner Helen John has set up a pre-emptive peace camp, vowing to stay indefinitely in “total defiance” over what she calls “murder by remote control.”

“Having lived through WWII, I witnessed the destruction of my grandmother’s house, cut in two by a V2 rocket,” John says. “I feel deeply ashamed that in the 21st century we are bringing in a new generation of murderous technology to blight the future.”

Since 2007 the MoD’s Reaper drones have fired more than 280 missiles and flown for 30,000 hours above Afghanistan, the equivalent of having flown from London to Sydney over 500 times. The government has been hesitant to release figures showing casualties inflicted by British drones. However, in December 2010 David Cameron said 124 insurgents had been killed in British drone strikes, while in April 2011 it emerged that four Afghan civilians were killed and two others injured in an attack by an RAF drone in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.

The MoD has accepted there is a wider debate to be had about issues around the deployment of drones. It is also keen to distance itself from the style of drone attacks perpetrated by the United States, which take place covertly in multiple countries outside established laws of war.

“I wouldn’t want you to confuse the way we operate drones with the way the Americans operate drones,” says Lex Oliver, an MoD spokesman. “They use them for wholly different missions.

“The UK’s rules of engagement for using a drone are exactly the same as for using a manned aircraft. They’re still operated by a pilot it’s just that they are operated by a pilot remotely as opposed to a pilot who’s sat in the aircraft.”

It is estimated that the MoD will have spent half a billion pounds sustaining its Reaper drones in Afghanistan by 2015. The government continues to fund and invest in developing more advanced unmanned technology, and has lent financial backing to an ambitious drone being developed by BAE Systems at its Warton base.

“Taranis,” named after the Celtic god of thunder, is a stealth unmanned aircraft that has been described as resembling a spaceship out of Star Wars. The aim of Taranis, according to BAE Systems, is to test whether it is possible to build a remote controlled stealth drone capable of “precisely striking targets at long range, even in another continent.” It will be the first of its kind and, if testing next year proves successful, could mark a major step towards a day when manned fighter jets are considered a remnant of the past. A dream or a nightmare, depending on where you stand.

Scandale (2).doc

An email claiming to reveal a political scandal will grab the attention of almost any journalist. But what if the email was just a ruse to make you download government-grade spyware designed to take total control of your computer? It could happen - as a team of award-winning Moroccan reporters recently found out.

Mamfakinch.com is a citizen media project that grew out of the Arab Spring in early 2011. The popular website is critical of Morocco’s frequently draconian government, and last month won an award from Google and the website Global Voices for its efforts “to defend and promote freedom of speech rights on the internet.” Eleven days after that recognition, however, Mamfakinch’s journalists received an email that was not exactly designed to congratulate them for their work.

The email, sent via the contact form on Mamfakinch.com, was titled “Dénonciation” (denunciation). It contained a link to what appeared to be a Microsoft Word document labeled “scandale (2).doc” alongside a single line of text in French, which translates as: “Please do not mention my name or anything else, I don't want any problems.” Some members of the website’s team, presumably thinking they’d just been sent a major scoop, tried to open the file. After they did so, however, they suspected their computers had become infected with something nasty. Mamfakinch co-founder Hisham Almiraat told me that they had to take “drastic measures” to clean their computers, before they passed on the file to security experts to analyze.

What the experts believe they found was, they said, “very advanced”—something out of the ordinary. The scandale (2).doc file was a fake, disguising a separate, hidden file that was designed to download a Trojan that could secretly take screenshots, intercept e-mail, record Skype chats, and covertly capture data using a computer’s microphone and webcam, all while bypassing virus detection. Christened a variety of names by researchers, like “Crisis,” and “Morcut,” the spy tool would first detect which operating system the targeted computer was running, before attempting to infect it with either a Mac or Windows version.

Once installed, the Trojan tried to connect to an IP address that was traced to a U.S. hosting company, Linode, which provides “virtual private servers” that host files but help mask their origin. Linode says using its servers for such purposes violate its terms of service, and confirmed the IP address in question was no longer active. The use of Linode was a clear attempt to make the Trojan hard to track, according to Lysa Myers, a malware researcher who analyzed it.

But there were a couple of clues. The Trojan’s code repeatedly referenced the acronym “RCS” alongside occasional mentions of the Italian name “Guido.” This pointed straight to an Italian company called Hacking Team, one of the leading providers of spyware-style tools to governments and law enforcement agencies worldwide.

Hacking Team’s flagship product is called “Remote Control Systems,” a Trojan it describes as “eavesdropping software which hides itself inside the target devices.” RCS can spy on Skype chats, log keystrokes, take webcam snapshots - identical to the Trojan used to target the Moroccans. It can also be tailored to infect a computer via “opening a document file,” according to marketing materials, and “can monitor from a few and up to hundreds of thousands of targets.”

Hacking Team did not respond to repeated requests by phone and email for comment. Notably, however, during an interview last October the company’s co-founder David Vincenzetti told me that RCS had since 2004 been sold “to approximately 50 clients in 30 countries on all five continents.” (Most people today consider there to be seven continents - Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia/Oceania, Europe, North America, and South America - but in parts of Europe it used to be taught that there were only five: Africa, America, Asia, Australia, and Europe.) So while it’s not possible to say for sure whether Moroccan authorities are using RCS, it’s certainly being deployed by countries in that region of the world, by Vincenzetti’s own admission.

The Moroccan case is not isolated, and it’s likely we’ll hear more about such attacks in the future. Last month, a number of Bahraini activists were targeted with a Trojan tool purportedly designed by a British spy tech company, Gamma Group, which is one of Hacking Team’s main competitors. Human rights organizations have been concerned for some time about Western companies selling high-tech surveillance equipment to countries in which it may be abused. Ever mounting evidence of the equipment being used to target pro-democracy activists and journalists could have repercussions for the companies involved and is likely to strengthen the case for stricter export controls.

Thanks to Jean-Marc Manach for help with the French translation.

This article first appeared at: Slate.com

Surveillance Proof

As government agencies in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia push for increased surveillance powers, one pioneering American is pushing back.

New York-based entrepreneur Nicholas Merrill is making progress on a project he revealed in April: an encryption-based telecommunications provider designed to be “untappable.” After crowd-funding almost $70,000 in donations, Merrill says that he has held talks with a host of interested venture capitalists and a few “really big companies” apparently interested in partnering up or helping with financial support. Now the “surveillance-proof” software is in development, and he is on track to begin operating a limited service by the end of the year.

Merrill’s ultimate aim is to create a telecommunications infrastructure that inhibits mass surveillance. First, he is building an Internet provider that will use end-to-end encryption for Web browsing and email. Then he plans to roll out a mobile phone service that will enable users to encrypt calls, making them difficult to intercept. The key to decrypt the communications would be held by each individual customer, not Merrill’s company. Because the telecom firm would be unable to access the communications, law enforcement agencies that want to read or listen to communications would be forced to serve warrants or court orders on individuals directly. “This would make it impossible to do blanket, dragnet surveillance of all the customers of a telecommunications carrier,” Merrill says.

The idea for the project is not to help bad guys evade detection, though undoubtedly that’s how some critics will see it. Rather, Merrill is particularly keen to develop the technology to help journalists and human rights organizations—groups, he says, “whose right to confidentiality is more or less accepted under the law.”

Merrill has a strong record of defending user privacy. In 2004, he became the first ISP executive to successfully challenge a secret FBI “national security letter” demanding he hand over customer information. His willingness to question the constitutionality of the secret letter at the time put him at odds with most major telecoms providers, which have a poor track record when it comes to protecting customer privacy. In 2005 and 2006, a number of companies were revealed to have handed over troves of customer data and opened up wiretaps to the National Security Agency, sometimes without a warrant.

Today, Merrill admits prospective funders of his latest project have expressed concerns that it could lead to a confrontation with powerful actors (“It’s challenging to go up against some of the forces that are trying to open up all communications to wiretapping,” he says). But he is trying to address this by showing that government and law enforcement agencies could themselves benefit from his technology. Cybersecurity and privacy are part of the same problem but framed differently, he believes. Both could be addressed at once by ubiquitous encryption of communications and data transfer—protecting user privacy while also helping prevent malicious hackers from stealing information.

Some establishment figures have already been won over by Merrill’s argument. The advisory board of his nonprofit research institute, Calyx, which is developing the technology, includes a former NSA technical director and a former federal prosecutor who is also ex-CIA. Whether he can get the backing of current members of the U.S. law enforcement community, though, is another matter altogether. Merrill’s technology could be seen as creating extra barriers for law enforcement and the authorities would likely oppose it for that reason. Existing U.S. wiretapping law, called CALEA, states that telecom providers "shall not be responsible for decrypting" communications if they don't possess "the information necessary to decrypt.” But that may change under reforms proposed by the FBI, which is actively seeking more surveillance powers.

As governments increasingly move toward expanding their power to conduct electronic surveillance, it is inevitable that innovative technologists, software developers, and cryptographers will work to help people protect the privacy of their personal communications. Earlier this week the NSA’s chief tried to quell concerns over allegations that it is building a huge domestic surveillance center in Utah, dismissing whistle-blowers’ claims as “baloney.” Given the NSA’s recent history, however, it is likely many Americans will remain skeptical about the spy agency’s reassurances—and some will turn to encryption.

Merrill aims to launch his telecommunications firm first in the United States before tackling the international market, where there are also mounting concerns about government surveillance schemes. “We’re not trying to force people to use our service,” Merrill says. “What we’re trying to do is re-envision how the telecommunications industry could work if privacy and encryption technology was built in from the beginning.”

This article first appeared at Slate.com

Web of Deceit

Some were grabbed off the streets, blindfolded and bundled into the back of a car. Others were detained at airports and taken away by force on small private jets, often to secret locations in countries known for torture. Extraordinary rendition, a kind of state-sanctioned kidnapping that breaches international law, became a popular method used by US authorities to capture terror suspects in the years following the 2001 World Trade Centre attacks. But only now are full details about the practice, and the many corporations that have profited from it, beginning to emerge.

In recent weeks human rights group Reprieve has been publicising some of the private companies that helped organise the renditions, most carried out under the authority of the George W. Bush administration between 2001 and 2008. Among the firms are military contractors such as Virginia-based DynCorp, paid to organise the logistics of rendition flights to places like Thailand, Egypt, Syria and Morocco. But there are also less conspicuous firms that played a key role, some with strong UK connections. One is Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), an IT firm that has held contracts with the NHS and Transport for London.

“The role played by the prime contracting companies – DynCorp and CSC – was extremely significant,” says Crofton Black, a Reprieve investigator. “They basically ran a significant proportion of the entire project in terms of helping move people around between detention sites. The various operating companies that provided the airplanes and crews are significant too, because it’s unlikely these guys didn’t know what was happening in their planes.”

According to Reprieve, court documents show that CSC organised rendition flights on behalf of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to carry prisoners between a number of locations, including the notorious Guantánamo Bay detention camp and secret “black sites” in North Africa, South East Asia and Eastern Europe. It is alleged that the prisoners were held incommunicado and tortured during lengthy interrogations. CSC, which turned over £10.2 billion in 2011, has a string of British investors, including Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC and Prudential.

Earlier this year, Reprieve wrote and asked CSC to sign its “zero tolerance for torture” pledge promising that it would not be involved in rendition, secret detention and torture in the future. The company declined, saying that individual pledges on specific topics were “not within the framework” of its existing corporate responsibility programme. Reprieve is now writing to investors in the firm asking them to “confirm whether investing in companies implicated in torture is compatible with their ethical commitments.”

“CSC has explicitly refused to rule out taking on such missions in the future,” Black says. “It’s fine for the investors to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that ‘we didn’t know such missions were going on in 2005.’ But they can’t say that anymore. So they have to come to come to terms with the fact that they are investing in a company that has basically made a commitment not to honour international law, which is effectively what CSC refusing to sign the zero tolerance for torture pledge means.”

At the same time as details about private companies’ involvement in extraordinary rendition continue to emerge, new information about the scale of Britain’s role in the programme has also been revealed. In the wake of the civil war in Libya last year, documents were uncovered showing in 2004 MI6 had helped US authorities abduct Libyan dissident Abdelhakim Belhadj and his pregnant wife in Bangkok, where they were flown to Tripoli and abused by Muammar Gaddafi’s secret police.

Belhadj is now suing MI6 and then-foreign secretary Jack Straw, a serving Blackburn MP, for complicity in torture and misfeasance in public office. Government sources say MI6’s role in rendition was part of “ministerially authorised government policy" – but Straw has gone on record claiming that "no foreign secretary can know all the details of what its intelligence agencies are doing at any one time."

In other countries, too, the repercussions of extraordinary rendition continue to be felt. In March, Poland became the first EU country to indict one of its officials over CIA renditions, with the country’s prime minister promising an end to “under-the-table deals." It is alleged that a military garrison in the north-east of the Poland was used as a CIA black site where terror suspects were interrogated and subjected to waterboarding, a kind of torture that makes a person feel as if they are drowning.

Some details about the rendition programme, like the names of the terror suspects involved, are difficult to establish as they remain classified. But more revelations may soon emerge as part of a major new academic effort to pull together all of the information that has so far been published about extraordinary rendition. Launched by University of Kent academic Dr Ruth Blakeley in May, the Rendition Project is studying reams of court documents and flight logs, collating data about hundreds of victims of rendition and secret detention since 2001. It hopes to chronicle the 45 countries, 6500 flights and 140 aircraft allegedly connected to the CIA renditions programme.

“I don’t think the world is very well informed about the types of things that governments in the US and UK do,” Blakeley says, explaining her motivation for starting the project. “On both sides of the pond current governments don’t really want to carry out investigations [into rendition] because their own records are not that squeaky clean either.”

Prior to coming in to office in 2008, US president Barack Obama condemned many of his predecessor’s more aggressive counter-terror policies. He barred waterboarding and signed an executive order entitled "Ensuring Lawful Interrogations," designed to increase oversight. But he didn’t outlaw extraordinary renditions. Obama has also significantly heighted the use of unmanned military drones, remotely controlled aircraft that are used to bomb suspected militants in places such as Pakistan and Yemen. Some argue that, to avoid using the costly and controversial rendition method, Obama has favoured drone strikes – killing rather than capturing.

“It’s expensive to detain people in prison,” Blakeley says. “A lot of people say drone attacks are Obama’s preference because you just get rid of the people and you don’t have all the messy stuff afterwards to deal with... It avoids the public outcry around rendition.”

London-based human rights group Cage Prisoners, founded by Birmingham-born Moazzam Begg, a former Guantánamo detainee, believes rendition is still happening today but on a lesser scale. The group, which campaigns to raise awareness about individuals held extra-judicially as part of the so-called War on Terror, argues public inquiries into extraordinary rendition are the only way to redress the abuses of international law that became commonplace after 2001.

“There’s no way that we can adequately compensate those who had these things happen to them,” says Asim Qureshi, executive director at Cage Prisoners. “In the grand scheme of things, for those people inquiries mean nothing, because they’ve already had their lives ruined by renditions.

“But for the future they become important, because this is effectively the way the human rights industry can fight back – by bringing these legal cases, by having the process of accountability, and by really placing the emphasis back on due process and the rule of law.”

Police In Crisis

A cloud of controversy is hanging over police forces across the country as they face unprecedented change. While deep budget cuts force job losses and dent morale, damaging allegations about corruption and racism surface on an almost monthly basis. The scale of these problems has been played down by police chiefs – but critics are clear the forces are facing a crisis.

Figures published late last month revealed that more than 8,500 allegations about police corruption were recorded by forces in England and Wales between 2008 and 2011. Contained in an Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report, the allegations included rape and sexual assault, perverting the course of justice, the provision of false statements, theft, database misuse and fraud. Only 13 police officers were prosecuted and found guilty.

The corruption figures came fresh on the back of recent disclosures about the rising level of racism complaints levelled against the police. Records published earlier this year under the freedom of information act showed an increase by more than 30 per cent in allegations of racism at forces across England and Wales. And if that news wasn’t bad enough for the country’s cops, at the same time, police budgets have been slashed – causing staff shortages and leading to fears about potential privatisation.

“I think we’re facing a crisis in lack of leadership,” says Simon Reed, vice chairman of the Police Federation, an organisation that represents 124,000 police officers in England and Wales. “We do not have leaders in the service who are standing up for the service, responding to these allegations and standing up to the government – that’s the view among the rank and file.”

Reed, a former officer with Bedfordshire Police, accuses the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) of “covering up” how hard forces have been hit by cuts by trying to “put a brave face on it.” He accepts that racism and corruption allegations are serious – but believes that they are being overplayed.

“Our police service is the most scrutinised anywhere in the world,” he says. “We’ve always had allegations, whether it’s racism or corruption, but the actual level is still very low. To put it in perspective, the number of complaints officers get is considerably less than we see made against banks. Banks will get hundreds of thousands of complaints a year.”

Over the three year period between 2008 and 2011, forces in the north had 1400 corruption allegations levelled against them – around 15 per cent of the total across England and Wales. West Yorkshire had the most of the northern forces – at 309 – followed by Greater Manchester (287); Merseyside (267); Lancashire (231); North Yorkshire (141); and South Yorkshire (165). London’s Metropolitan police, Britain’s largest force, came top of the overall list, with 1,487.

The most common allegation in the IPCC’s report – 33 per cent of all that were recorded – involved perverting the course of justice, followed by theft or fraud and abuse of authority. In one case, the chief constable of North Yorkshire police admitted gross misconduct at an internal hearing after “irregularities” were found in the force’s recruitment process. This was the first time in 34 years that a serving chief constable had faced such a hearing. The chief constable and the deputy constable, it emerged, had jointly assisted relatives in circumventing the first stage of a recruitment exercise.

The IPCC says that police corruption is “not endemic” but is “corrosive of the public trust that is at the heart of policing.” Of the 8,500 allegations recorded between 2008 and 2011, just 837 were referred to the IPCC, leaving individual forces to investigate their own officers in the vast majority of cases. The watchdog has vowed to take a more “proactive role” investigating corruption allegations as it has accepted that “the public is understandably doubtful about the extent to which, in this particular instance, the police can investigate themselves.”

Some campaigners, however, believe the IPCC is part of the problem. They claim that because a third of the watchdog's investigators are former police officers, it lacks full independence and the teeth to hand out serious punishments.

Val Swain, a spokesperson for civil liberties group the Network for Police Monitoring, argues structures set up to hold the police to account have “neither the will nor the capacity” to do so.

“The real-life experience of many is that the police are able to act with almost complete impunity,” Swain says. “The IPCC has recognised the need to improve public confidence in the complaints procedure, but it is far from clear how they are going to make the changes necessary to achieve this.

“The number of police officers who are found guilty of misconduct is very low. Of those, most will face nothing more serious than a written warning. Given the lack of sanction, the establishment of a culture of corruption seems almost inevitable.”

Complaints about police accountability over corruption also punctuate the debate about racism. Despite receiving hundreds of racism allegations, the police themselves have dismissed the majority of complaints against them by ruling that they are untrue or cannot be substantiated.

ACPO says a rise in racism complaints in recent years is down to more people now coming forward report alleged abuse. But critics argue racism remains an institutional problem within police forces and is not being tackled efficiently enough.

“Without the action it’s never really going to change,” says Sophie Khan, a solicitor who specialises in cases involving racial discrimination and the police. “90 per cent of my cases have a racist element to it. It happens time and time again, year after year.

“It impacts on a lot of people’s lives the way that they get treated. When they’re walking down the street or in the custody suite – they are treated differently depending on the colour of their skin.”

Uncomfortable issues were raised for police forces after the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993. A subsequent report into Lawrence’s death, authored by Sir William Macpherson, accused the Metropolitan Police of being “institutionally racist” over how it had handled the investigation. The report made 70 recommendations, many aimed specifically at improving police attitudes to racism.

But race scandals have continued to dog police forces across the country. In 2003, video footage emerged showing Greater Manchester Police (GMP) trainees and officers using racist language, with one filmed making a Ku Klux Klan-style hood and saying he wanted to “kill” an Asian colleague. Figures released earlier this year showed GMP received 351 racism complaints between 2007 and 2011, the second highest in the country behind the Met.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission says it is “seriously concerned” about allegations of racist police behaviour. “We hoped and believed that this sort of culture had been tackled by all the changes that followed the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry,” said a spokesperson.

Questions around the culture within the police service, though, are not likely to be addressed in the immediate future. Sir Hugh Orde, president of ACPO, has emphasised his priority is to deal with the forces’ financial problems. Police nationwide are facing 20 per cent budget cuts and an expected 16,000 job losses by 2015.

"For the first time officers suddenly feel vulnerable," Orde said in an interview last month, making it clear where his sympathies lie. "There is a sense they feel let down.”

Secret Justice

Alarming links between British spy agencies and torture, unlawful abductions and dealings with dictators have been exposed in recent years, prompting investigations and major court cases. But now, in a historic move that could erode centuries-old principles of open justice, the government wants to limit sensitive material being disclosed publicly – enabling complicity in human rights abuses to be kept secret.

The controversial plans are set to be included in the Justice and Security Bill, formally announced earlier this month in the Queen’s Speech. The Ministry of Justice says “common-sense” change is needed to protect national security and better equip courts to pass judgment in cases involving classified information. Because the new legislation would enable the government to present evidence to a judge without having to disclose it to the whole court, however, there are major concerns it could lead to cover-ups and put the government and other public bodies above the law.

“The simple fact is that closed courts are inherently unfair,” says Clare Algar, executive director of human rights group Reprieve. “What the government is proposing is a system in which they can use whatever evidence they like against the citizen, but the citizen is unable to challenge or even to see that evidence. This is unacceptable in any circumstances.

"Our current system is working well, and judges have always been extremely deferential to the government on matters of national security. Yet it appears that our security services are attempting to undermine our justice system because they are unwilling to be held accountable in a court of law."

Justice secretary Ken Clarke argues that the government will have to reveal “damaging” secret security information or settle out of court unless ministers can order some cases to be conducted behind closed doors. Clarke says that Britain’s intelligence-sharing relationship with America was dented after a ruling in 2010 forcing ministers to reveal a document showing British complicity in the torture of West London resident Binyam Mohamed, who was held at US-run prison Guantanamo Bay over alleged links to terror groups.

But last month the government’s claims that US authorities have withdrawn or reduced the amount of intelligence it shares with Britain were attacked by the joint parliamentary committee on human rights as being based on “spurious assertions”. And former officers from the US Central Intelligence Agency told the Daily Mail the US would “never hold back” information from British spies if it was “important to their domestic security.”

Prominent critics argue that the reform, far from being motivated by a desire to protect national security, has more to do with preventing politically damaging details from being made public.

“We should not sacrifice Britain’s open and transparent justice system simply to protect politicians and their officials from embarrassment,” said former director of public prosecutions Ken MacDonald in February. “After a decade in which we have seen our politicians and officials caught up in the woeful abuses of the War on Terror, the last thing the government should be seeking is to sweep all of this under the carpet. However, that is exactly what their disastrous secret justice proposals are likely to do.”

Macdonald’s scathing remarks took on added significance last month, when it emerged spy agency MI6 had tried to avoid having to appear in open court by offering a payment of £1 million to Abdelhakim Belhadj, a Libyan dissident it helped hand over to Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2004 as part of America’s extraordinary rendition programme. Belhadj and his pregnant wife were abducted by US authorities in Bangkok after a tip-off from MI6. They were forced on a plane to Libya where they were mistreated by Gaddafi’s secret police – and are now suing Sir Mark Allen, an ex-senior member of MI6, for “complicity in torture" and "misfeasance in public office."

If the Bill were to become law by the time Belhadj’s case makes it to a British courtroom, a government minister could sign off a “closed material procedure” (CMP) certificate vetoing sensitive information about MI6’s role being publicly disclosed. CMPs were first established by Labour in 1997 to be used mainly in a small number of immigration cases concerning the deportation of terror suspects. In 2010, for instance, alleged extremists based in Manchester and Liverpool were accused of having links to al-Qaida – but in subsequent deportation hearings CMPs were applied to keep evidence against them secret.

Crucially, aside from cases involving terror suspects and torture, the newly proposed Bill has far wider ramifications. It would apply across all civil court cases or inquests and could potentially be used not only to protect the security services – but also to halt sensitive information involving the police, the army and other public bodies from being revealed. (The definition of “sensitive” information is broad, encompassing the disclosure of anything deemed contrary to the interests of national security, the international relations of the United Kingdom, or the detection and prevention of crime.)

Inquest, a charity that provides support to bereaved people affected by contentious deaths, such as deaths in custody and police shootings, believes the government’s proposals “seriously undermine fundamental legal principles of natural justice and open justice.” The group, whose members number lawyers involved in high-profile cases including the Hillsborough disaster and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, has warned that the Bill, if legislated, would “fuel fears that the state is attempting to deliberately prevent information about its own culpability in deaths becoming publicly known.”

“It is deeply regrettable that the government is pursuing proposals to extend the use of closed material procedures,” says Helen Shaw, Inquest’s co-director. “It is abundantly clear that there is no need for such sweeping changes to the law.”

But not all elements of the Bill have been subject to such intense criticism. While many argue it would be particularly detrimental to the accountability of the secret services in the courtroom, others point out that at the same time, in stark contrast, it also contains a proposal to enhance their accountability to parliament. Currently spy agencies MI6, MI5 and GCHQ are overseen by the intelligence and security committee (ISC), an executive-appointed group of nine parliamentarians, which reports directly to the prime minister. The government wants to improve the ISC by having it report formally to parliament for the first time.

“I see this as a measure of making them more accountable,” says Anthony Glees, an expert in security and counter-terrorism at the University of Buckingham. “There is a problem with accountability in our secret agencies; too much secrecy fuels speculation and it leads to a lack of responsible behaviour. But we can’t expect that they can’t have full accountability because then they wouldn’t be secret agencies.”

By enhancing parliamentary accountability while simultaneously planning to radically reduce judicial accountability, though, it is ultimately the overall impact that is of most significance, according to Hugh Bochel, professor of public policy at the University of Lincoln.

“The proposals give greater parliamentary oversight but they reduce the amount of judicial oversight and to some extent civil society and the media,” Bochel says, adding that this is a “negative step.”

“What you need is overlap between all those different forms of oversight and that should give you a good view as you can and accountability in all sorts of different ways.”

Campaigners point out that the Ministry of Justice’s own impact assessment of its plans for secret court proceedings warned of a “reduction in confidence in court processes” and a “higher risk of potential security breaches,” costing up to £11 million every year. This was compounded last month by condemnation from the joint parliamentary committee on human rights, chaired by Dr Hywel Francis, which said in a report that the court plans were a “radical departure from our longstanding traditions of open justice” and “inherently unfair.”

“The government has now tested the parliamentary waters and its proposal to expand secret evidence has been condemned as unfair and unjustified,” says Angela Patrick, director of human rights policy at campaign group Justice. “Proceeding in the face of these conclusions would undermine the coalition’s commitment to civil liberties and could damage public confidence in the justice system irreparably.”

Mass Surveillance in Former Soviet Republics

Western firms that sold dictatorships in the Middle East mass-surveillance technology have been subject to intense scrutiny over the past year. But now a new exposé by journalists in Sweden has shed light on how the same tools are being used closer to home — in ex-Soviet republics across Europe and Central Asia, whose leaders were seemingly shaken by the revolutions of the Arab Spring.

Last week an investigative documentary shown on Swedish public service broadcaster SVT revealed in fascinating depth the extent to which Stockholm-based telecommunications firm Teliasonera is linked to spy agencies in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Georgia, facilitating crackdowns on dissident politicians and independent journalists.

Citing a multitude of sources — including official government documents and whistle-blower testimony — SVT’s reporters documented how companies owned by Teliasonera had allowed “black box” probes to be fitted within their telecommunications networks. The black boxes allow security services and police to monitor, in real-time and without any judicial oversight, all communications passing through, including texts, Internet traffic and phone calls. (Similar so-called “monitoring centers” were set up in Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria with the help of European companies.)

SVT found some citizens who said they had been targeted for the strangest, most banal reasons. Several Azerbaijanis, for instance, said they had been summoned by police and subject to interrogation after phone records showed they had voted for a country other than their own during the televised Eurovision Song Contest in 2009. One man said he was told by officials working for Azerbaijan’s security agency that he was a “traitor” because he had voted for a song performed by musicians from Armenia, a neighbor with whom Azerbaijan has historically had tense relations.

Other cases were far more serious and sinister. Documents obtained by SVT showed an Azerbaijani reporter had his phone tapped after he published a piece about being beaten at the hands of government security agents while covering a story. He was subsequently stabbed in a savage attack and had to flee to France, where he has since taken up a case against the security agency and Teliasonera-owned Azercell in the European Court of Justice.

SVT also reported that the black-box surveillance was used in Belarus to track down, arrest, and prosecute protesters who attended an anti-government protest rally following the 2010 Belarusian presidential election.

Similar stories were reported in relation to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Georgia. In Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, sources said security agencies had even been given their own offices within the telecom providers’ headquarters to snoop on communications. One whistle-blower who worked for Teliasonera told the reporters, “The Arab Spring prompted the regimes to tighten their surveillance... There’s no limit to how much wiretapping is done, none at all.”

In response to the documentary, a spokeswoman for Teliasonera said that “police tap into information from telecom networks to fight crime” and “the rules for how far their authority goes are different from country to country.” When pressed about complicity in human rights violations, she looked shaky, refusing to comment on why security agencies were being given access to telecom buildings in Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.

This article first appeared at: slate.com