Why NSA's war on terror is more than just a 'neat' hacking game
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We're now getting to the point where we can begin to assess the bigger picture. What do the Snowden revelations tell us about what's wrong with the NSA – and its leading overseas franchise, our own dear GCHQ?
The first, and most glaring, realisation is that the so-called democratic "oversight" of these intelligence agencies is so inadequate as to be effectively non-existent. And before Sir Malcolm Rifkind chokes on his muesli I should add that this is not because he and his kind – all those legislators and officials involved in this "oversight" – are lazy, corrupt or incompetent. The likelihood is that most of the stout parties involved in the oversight charade are conscientiously implementing the rules as they see them.
The problem is that the system of rules for ensuring that networked intelligence agencies stay on the right side of the line are ludicrously obsolete in relation to the technologies and the geeks that they are supposed to regulate. With computing power doubling every two years, bandwidth tripling and storage capacity quadrupling every year, any set of rules formulated in any given year is going to be looking out of date within three and laughable in five.
The second thing that emerges from the Snowden revelations is how catastrophic the concept of the "war on terror" has been. Normally, when a country declares war, a set of accepted legal conventions comes into force, and the populace simply has to put up with them. In 1939, for example, HMG became effectively omnipotent within the borders of the UK. The government could do whatever it deemed necessary, right down to requisitioning any piece or item of private property for a military purpose. Civil liberties were suspended. Censorship was comprehensive. It was, of course, draconian, but people knew where they stood. And they knew who the enemy was.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/10/nsa-war-on-terror-neat-hacking-game
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