Category Archives: Government

Arts, Books, Government, National Security, Society

Book Review: Pegasus

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: The reporting of the world’s most powerful spyware program should teach us that no one is safe from such systems. But will it?

EDWARD SNOWDEN’S infamous leaks in 2013 from the US National Security Agency triggered a global debate around state surveillance – but even he couldn’t quite believe the scale of the story described to him in the summer of 2021.

Whistle-blowers had handed French investigative journalists Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud a list of 50,000 mobile phone numbers. These belonged to people flagged for attack by a cybersurveillance software package called Pegasus.

The investigation that followed is the subject of Pegasus: The story of the world’s most dangerous spyware, a non-fiction thriller and a must-read for all, not just those interested in cryptography and communications. As the authors warn: “Regular civilians being targeted with military-grade surveillance weapons – against their will, against their knowledge, and with no recourse – is a dystopian future we really are careening toward if we don’t understand this threat and move to stop it.”

Pegasus offers a fascinating insight into how journalism is coping with a hyper-connected world. Eyewitnesses and whistle-blowers have better access than ever to sympathetic campaigning journalists worldwide. But this advantage is shared with the very governments, corporations and organised crime networks that want to silence them.

To drag Pegasus into the light, Richard’s ‘Forbidden Stories’ consortium choreographed the activities of more than 80 investigative journalists from 17 media organisations working across four continents and in eight languages. The consortium’s mission is to continue and publish the work of other journalists facing threats, prison or murder.

Its Pegasus investigation commenced in March 2021, knowing full well that it had to conclude by June that year. By then, NSO – the Israeli company that created Pegasus in 2016 – was bound to twig that its brainchild was being hacked.

The bigger the names linked by the consortium to that list of phone numbers, the harder it would be to keep the investigation under wraps. Early on, the name of a journalist called Jorge Carrasco cropped up. He led one of the consortium’s cross-border collaborations, which aimed to finish the investigations of murdered Mexican journalist Regina Martinez. Then things got silly: the names of half the French cabinet appeared. Then president Emmanuel Macron.

The narrative of Pegasus is a pulse-accelerating account that is never afraid to delve into well-crafted technical detail. The authors explain how Pegasus gains free rein on a mobile device without ever tipping off the owner to its presence. It turns out to have evolved out of software designed to serve consumers waiting in queues on tech support call lines.

Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie, two of the founders of NSO, cut their teeth developing programs that allowed support technicians to take charge of a caller’s phone.

Before long, a European intelligence service came calling. Eventually, Pegasus was sold to more than 60 clients in over 40 countries. It was the first software to give security services an edge over terrorists, criminal gangs and paedophiles – and over whistle-blowers, campaigners, political opponents, journalists and at least one Emirati princess struggling for custody of her children.

The book is detailed but it isn’t a diatribe against the necessary business of government surveillance and espionage. It is about how, in the contest between ordinary people and the powerful, software is tilting the field wildly in the latter’s favour.

The international journalistic collaboration that was the Pegasus Project sparked the biggest global surveillance scandal since Snowden. It led to a European Parliament inquiry into government spyware, legal action from major tech companies, government sanctions against NSO and countless individual legal complaints.

Yet, the authors spend little time sitting on their laurels. Demand for such systems is only growing. Certain governments are making offers to certain tech firms that add zeroes to the fees NSO once enjoyed. Nor do the authors expect much from the public debate sparked by their investigation: “The issues… might have been raised,” they concede, “but the solutions are not even in the works.”

– Pegasus by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud is published by Macmillan

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Arts, Culture, Government, History, Society

The West must deal with the legacy of slavery. Apologies are not enough

DEALING WITH HISTORIC SLAVERY

Intro: It is time Western governments started to talk seriously about reparations

ON December 19, 2022, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, announced his country’s apology for participating in and profiting from the transatlantic trade of enslaved people. This is the first time a Western nation has formally apologised for its role in slavery, an indictment on others who should similarly take the stand and show genuine remorse.

Speaking at the National Archives in The Hague, Mr Rutte said the role of the Netherlands in slavery was “ugly, painful, and even downright shameful”.

“For hundreds of years, people were made merchandise, exploited and abused in the name of the Dutch state,” Rutte said. “For that, I offer the apologies of the Dutch government.”

That the Dutch government found the courage to fully acknowledge and officially apologise for its role in “abetting, stimulating, preserving and profiting from centuries of slave trading” is highly commendable and liberating.

However, the paths to reconciliation and healing suggested by the government are equally underwhelming.  

In his apology, Rutte admitted that “centuries of oppression and exploitation still have an effect to this very day” and talked about “doing justice to the past and healing in the present”.

To start this healing process, the Dutch PM said, his government will work to “enhance knowledge of the history of slavery” and to “ensure more awareness, acknowledgement and understanding”. To facilitate this, Mr Rutte announced the creation of a $216m fund to tackle the legacy of slavery and boost education.

Yet, nowhere in his landmark apology did Rutte express an intention to take the one action descendants of enslaved people have repeatedly said would make the biggest difference in righting the wrongs of the past: by paying reparations.

The Netherlands, like most Western nations, owes the immense economic prosperity it is experiencing today in large part to the profits it made from slavery.

In 2019, a five-year research project funded by the Dutch Research Council, entitled “Slaves, commodities and logistics” concluded that “economic activities related to the slave trade between Europe, Africa and America made a significant contribution to Dutch prosperity in the second half of the eighteenth century”.

According to the study, in the year 1770 some 5.2 per cent of the Dutch gross domestic product (GDP) was based on the transatlantic trade of enslaved people – a contribution that is equivalent to the entire port of Rotterdam today. Rutte did not mention any of this in his carefully curated speech.

Despite offering a historic official apology for slavery, the Dutch government clearly still has no intention to return to the descendants of enslaved people what it stole from them.

Regrettably, the Netherlands is not alone among countries that benefited from slavery in refusing to pay. The governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and others are remaining stubbornly silent in the face of increasingly louder calls for reparations.

The basic premise and defence of governments’ refusal to pay up always offer the same tired arguments when it comes to addressing racial injustice of the past. They claim that “no one alive today is directly benefitting or suffering from slavery”, that it is “a thing of the past”, and that “it would be impossible to determine who deserves to be paid”. Such arguments, of course, do not stand even the most basic of scrutiny. For one thing, people are still clearly benefitting and suffering from slavery.

In the United States, the Brookings Institution estimates that the average white family has around 10-times the amount of wealth as the average Black family. In the United Kingdom, too, people from Black African backgrounds typically hold the least wealth, which equates to around one-tenth of the wealth held by white Britons.

Such inequalities, compounded by systemic racism in all areas of life and society – from health and housing to education and law enforcement – are direct, modern-day consequences of slavery affecting millions of people.

And slavery is hardly just a “thing of the past”. In countries shaped by and built around it, such as in Suriname – one of the smallest countries in South America – where direct descendants of people enslaved by the Dutch were brought to work in plantations now make up most of the population.

In Africa, the immense wealth lost to slavery cannot simply be ignored or forgotten, since its return of what’s owed would resolve most of the continent’s fundamental problems almost overnight.

The question of who should receive reparations is not necessarily complicated either. After the abolishment of slavery, the Netherlands, the US, France, Denmark and the UK all moved to compensate former slavers for so-called “loss of property”. The UK government only finished paying the debts it acquired to pay former slavers in 2015. But all this time, none of the former slave-holding countries paid a single penny to formerly enslaved people or their descendants.

It is therefore high time for compensation to be paid not to those who “made people into merchandise” but to those who continue to carry the pain and the scars of their ancestors.

The Caribbean Community, a grouping of 15 Caribbean countries whose populations are dominated by descendants of formerly enslaved people, created a 10-point plan for reparatory justice for European governments.

The group wants, among other things, a full formal apology, repatriation opportunities, debt cancellation, the transfer of technology, psychological rehabilitation, and African knowledge programmes.

This 10-point plan would be a good starting point for governments truly willing to confront the past and start a healing process.

Any form of economic redress cannot merely assuage the collective conscience of white people in the West: it must be unapologetically substantive and enduring, despite the high costs of financial restitution.

Some 160 years after the abolition of slavery in Europe and the US, Western countries, quite evidently, have an obligation not only to apologise, but also to commit to reparations and by embarking on comprehensive social justice programmes.

Apologies are commendable. But descendants of enslaved people also need proper indemnity and social change.

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Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

UK Government Policy is anti-family

SOCIETY

THE Observer’s editorial, on Sunday January 15, the sister newspaper of the Guardian, concerns how hostile the UK has become in families having children. The editor points to how parents are being forced to bring up their offspring in conditions that will have grave repercussions for society.

According to the old proverb, ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ That will have little meaning for many parents today, but the proper place for institutions outside the family in the birth and upbringing of our children is a pressing matter indeed. Recent evidence suggests that government is grievously failing parents in many ways.

Alarmingly, it starts even before birth. A report released last week from the Care Quality Commission (CQC), highlighted a worrying decline in women’s experiences of NHS maternity services in England. The trend comes in the wake of several inquiries into the very poor maternity care on offer in some hospital trusts, with more than 1,000 babies dying or who are left with severe injuries each year as a result of something having gone wrong during labour. The CQC has found four in ten maternity services are providing unacceptable levels of care. This goes well beyond the general resourcing and staffing issues within the NHS that have created a national crisis; it reflects more directly a cultural under-prioritisation of the care of women and their babies that has not been adequately addressed by successive UK governments.

Government policy, too, has a marked influence on the context within which parents bring up their children: the expense in having a child, the level of support on offer when things go wrong, and the difficulties of juggling childcare with maintaining a career. Political decisions made over the last decade has, undoubtedly, resulted in Britain becoming a more hostile place to bring up a family.

The cost-of-living crisis has pushed up the already high cost of raising a child to the age of 18 even further. An estimate provided by the Child Poverty Action suggest the average figure is now £160,000 for couples and £200,000 for lone parents. Even if both parents work full-time at the minimum wage, it is forecast they will fall more than £1,700 a year short of the income needed to attain a basic minimum standard of living. This reflects the fact that as wages have stagnated over the last decade, the cost of living – including housing, food and energy – has increased, and government support for low-paid parents has been significantly scaled back since 2010 through austerity.

Successive Conservative chancellors have reduced tax credits and benefits for low-income families with children while introducing generous tax cuts that have benefited the better off: a redistribution not just from the less to the more affluent, but from families with children to those without. This has undermined the financial safety net that was put in place for families by the last Labour government. It was a provision in recognition of the fact that Britain has too many jobs that simply do not pay enough for parents to be able to provide for their children. It should come as no surprise, then, that child poverty rates have risen since 2010, with almost one in three children in the UK living in poverty.

Long-term issues in the housing market have also introduced much greater uncertainty in relation to raising children. Rising house prices mean more parents will never be able to afford to buy their own home: one in five households now live in privately rented accommodation, up from one in 10, 20 years ago. This trend will continue to rise, with more children being brought up in rented homes. This not only has a huge impact on living standards – Britain has the most expensive rents in Europe – but on safety and security. More than a quarter of homes in the private rented sector do not meet the government’s minimum “decent homes” criteria. Also, a vast number of renters remain vulnerable to short-term tenancy agreements, at the end of which they can be evicted through no fault of their own. The law in England, in particular, has much to do to protect tenants from the uncertainties they face. The growing numbers of parents who rent property deserve to be able to achieve much greater stability for their children through controlled rents and long-term tenancies.

The other pressing factor for parents is childcare, a huge financial outlay, particularly for young children not yet at school. Recently released data shows that Britain now has the joint-highest childcare costs of any OECD country. Government support with these costs is generally erratic and it is harder still to access quality nursery provision in the least affluent areas. Yet, as studies have shown, high-quality childcare provision is associated with better educational outcomes, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, higher levels of parental wellbeing and better economic outcomes for women. Modelling by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) suggests that investing in universal free childcare for the under-fives would boost economic growth and result in a higher tax take.

The anti-family sheen of government policy and neglect mean that many parents cannot give their children the level of security they aspire to, affecting the rest of their lives. It will also put some people off having children, with wider consequences for the whole of society given the higher tax burden that Britain’s low birth rate will impose on future generations.

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