Abstract
After the Snowden leaks, it has become evident that a discussion is needed on how to reorganize the huge intelligence agencies so that they fit a Western thinking and to avoid that they are evolving into a clone of what the KGB and the Stasi used to be. Well before the Snowden leaks, the author had been thinking along this line.
On the 26th of October 2012, at the closed workshop on “Online Security & Civil Rights: a Fine Ethical Balance,” Hertfordshire, UK, the author put forward the idea that modern intelligence agencies should be split. The part which is involved today in mass surveillance, should work for the people and no longer for the government. That means that the intelligence agencies should spy on these working in the government and these working for lobbyists. The recipient of this information should be the public at large. The foundation of this idea comes from the Magna Carta and the US Bill of Rights that regard “We the People” as the trustworthy party and the government as potentially corrupt.
In this paper we present the above ideas put forward by the author at the aforementioned 2012 Hertfordshire workshop. We also reflect on these 2012 ideas in the context of the Snowden leaks.
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Notes
- 1.
The exact wording not having been recorded, the statement is based on the author’s and participants’ recollection.
- 2.
A more appropriate use might have been “should be” considered. However, one of the SPW 2014 participants, originally from China, confirmed after the 2014 lecture that in her classes on Marxism, Marx viewed the government as being the trusted party. Whether the population of communist countries regard their government as trustworthy or not, is beside the point.
- 3.
“Proponents of anarchism (known as “anarchists”) advocate stateless societies” (from Wikipedia). In this context a neo-anarchist could be regarded as a proponent advocating societies without proper regulations.
- 4.
At the 2012 workshop, this statement was received in a very critically way. The author responded that the cited web page is at a Japanese governmental site.
- 5.
The fact that IBM electromechanical sorting machines were used by the Nazis to identify these who were Jewish is well known [3].
- 6.
In 2011 Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko was convicted for 7 years for her deal on Russian gas [28].
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Acknowledgment
The slides used at the aforementioned 2012 workshop thanked the organizers and “the anonymous people from intelligence agencies for privately expressing their concerns about the US Patriot Act, and researchers consulting for European Governments stating that what they are doing on the cyber topic violates their constitutions.”
The author also thanks Bruce Christianson for encouraging him to submit the position paper to the Security Protocols Workshop, Cambridge, and the many participants of both this workshop and the 2012 “Online Security & Civil Rights: a Fine Ethical Balance” workshop for their feedback.
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Desmedt, Y. (2014). On the Key Role Intelligence Agencies Can Play to Restore Our Democratic Institutions. In: Christianson, B., Malcolm, J., Matyáš, V., Švenda, P., Stajano, F., Anderson, J. (eds) Security Protocols XXII. Security Protocols 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8809. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12400-1_27
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