Brussels attacks: The predictable and despicable powergrab aftermath

The aftermath of the Brussels attacks is as predictable as it is despicable: politicians trying to make a career out of the situation by reducing liberty and increasing surveillance, even though both are counterproductive.

There is a political saying that you should never let a good crisis go to waste. There is another saying among politicians that anything good for the career is ethical by definition. Surveillance hawks haven’t been resting on their laurels on this point.

A couple of days after the Brussels attacks, we can see the political aftermath, and it’s as predictable as it is counterproductive and dangerous. We’re already seeing renewed and stronger calls for more surveillance.

Hours after offering his resignation, Belgium’s minister of justice Koen Geens said its intelligence services need greater access to people’s telephone and internet records.

In this way, it reminds us of the aftermath of the 2004 Madrid bombings, when politicians scrambled to create one of the most invasive schemes ever, the so-called Data Retention: Basically, it meant that every electronic trace you left should be retained by your service operators to use against you. Every person or server you contacted, how, when, from where, and for how long. The “from where” is especially interesting, as it practically provided a history of your movements, day by day, almost down to footstep level.

It would take ten years until the European Court of Justice – the European Union equivalent of a Supreme Court – struck down the Data Retention Directive as utterly incompatible with fundamental human rights. That hasn’t mattered. Politicians keep yelling about more and more and more traceability of common citizens.

Of course, attackers know this. They’re unfazed by this. They’re not using traceable phones. They’re not using phones that are possible to trace, even with new and invasive legislation. They’re not even bothering with encryption but communicating in cleartext. They just carry dozens and dozens of burner phones – single-use phones, discarded after one or a few uses – thus completely negating any collection of data about phones or phonecalls.

It’s politically stated that any reduction in liberties must be “necessary, effective, and proportionate”: it must address an identified and precise problem, it must solve that problem, and must not create worse problems in the process. Mass surveillance is one of these things that have proven to be ridiculously ineffective – those who want to circumvent it, find it trivial to do so for the specific purpose they want to hide.

(Interestingly, California now has a proposed bill to outlaw anonymous burner phones, according to Russia Today. That’s an interesting attempt which accounts for absolutely nothing, as suicide bombers aren’t the slightest concerned with being tracked and identified after a successful attack.)

Of course, proponents of mass surveillance try to justify their cause. But when the proponents of mass surveillance state that surveillance has stopped X number of terror attacks, most of the time, they’re lying through their teeth – and fortunately, this is trivial to verify. Even if the method was secret and can’t be told in public, the “stopped terror attack” is the important part: preparing mass destruction (“terror”) is a very serious crime, almost as serious a crime as actually executing the planned mass destruction. So if we had X number of thwarted plots, we would also have the exact same X number of very public court verdicts of “guilty” of planning such mass destruction. If we don’t have that verdict, there simply wasn’t such a planning in process that was thwarted.

And for most countries, the number claimed is in excess of a dozen, and the actual court records show a big fat zero. This is indicative of another well-established political process known as “lying like a weasel when you think you can get away with it”.

There’s a pattern here of adding surveillance and reducing effectiveness. The only thing proven to work against this kind of attacks is old classic detective police work: the attackers were already known by police and had even been flagged as potential terrorists based on arrests and very traditional police work. Adding more surveillance just doesn’t work: it adds more noise, not more signal.

In one way, the terror attack in Stockholm on Christmas 2010 is some sort of template for these power grabs. In that attack, a lone suicide bomber failed to kill anybody but himself, as his suicide vest detonated prematurely in an alley just ahead of the city streets full of Christmas shoppers; police were busy elsewhere putting out a burning car he had filled with gas cylinders and detonated as a diversionary tactic.

So in the end, this particular attacker killed nobody but himself. That didn’t stop the Swedish Security Police – the Säpo – from immediately demanding new surveillance powers into people’s mail and more, in order to prevent similar attacks in the future. But as it turned out, the attacker had sent a mail to the Säpo explaining exactly what he was going to do, how, and when. However, being a Saturday and all, that mail wasn’t read for a few days more.

In other words, the anti-terror police didn’t fail to prevent this template attack because they couldn’t read other people’s mail; they failed to prevent it because they didn’t read their own mail.

Surveillance doesn’t just not work; it’s counterproductive.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.