Category Archives: Society

Government, Intelligence, National Security, Society, Technology

Britain’s security and intelligence services: Responsibility not just power

SECURITY SERVICES

Intro: Given the extent of their reach and a recent parliamentary report into their activities an operational realignment is called for

Our security and intelligence agencies face greater challenges today than ever before. Advanced and sophisticated technology has become commonplace, and the world strains to keep up or nearly buckles under the weight of our digital communications. Monitoring the activities of terrorists, criminals and other malign forces have become difficult to spot because of the subversive methods they use in defying detection.

Bodies such as GCHQ, though, are hardly mere victims of the electronic advance. You may often hear security chiefs talking about their desperate searches for needles in haystacks, but the fact is they have an impressive operational capacity to cut through a lot of the chaff in order to find what they seek.

The Security and Intelligence Services (SIS) ability to obtain and examine vast swathes of raw data and processed information has been furiously debated ever since the revelations of Edward Snowden, the US fugitive, about how the British agency received data relating to UK citizens from America’s National Security Agency up to 2014 – a practice which was branded unlawful by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. Notwithstanding, there will always be a divergence of views between those who place primacy on GCHQ doing anything in its power to maintain public safety, and those who feel unease at the prospect of innocent people being subjected to continued intrusion.

Earlier this month a report on these matters by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee was a notable intervention. The committee members, like many of their peers across other government departments, believe that the bulk collection of data by GCHQ is legitimate and does not amount to unjustified, Orwellian surveillance. But they do appear to accept that the current legislation, which sets the parameters for such activities, is overly complex and lacks transparency. The legislation may have political oversight in regulating the activities of SIS, but its lack of public transparency and accountability was summed up well by the committee’s description of the existing legal framework. Intelligence agencies, they said, were being provided with a ‘blank cheque to carry out whatever activities they deem necessary’. In essence that is a damning indictment on the legislation that governs the work of our intelligence agencies. The committee has called for a new, single piece of legislation to replace and clarify current statutes as a matter of priority by the next government.

The discovery that a handful of intelligence officers have misused surveillance powers and have subsequently been disciplined by their superiors should also be of concern. The committee may speak reassuringly about the number of wrongdoers being in ‘very small single figures’ but the disclosure will hardly boost public confidence in the integrity of Britain’s security personnel. The recommendations of the committee are right, therefore, to suggest that the next government should consider criminalising such improper use of surveillance techniques.

Despite these positive proposals, there is nevertheless something troublingly simplistic about the committee’s top-line conclusion about GCHQ’s bulk interception capability. It says soothingly: ‘GCHQ are not reading the emails of everyone in the UK’. Whilst it is true that thousands of emails are read by security analysts every day, and that there remains a feeling that individual privacy of citizens comes a poor second to other considerations, few would have suggested otherwise against GCHQ’s simple assertion. That may be comforting for some, but surveillance does have the ability to antagonise as well as protect.

At a time when threats to this country are at a pitch not previously seen Britain’s security and intelligence agencies have a difficult job in tracking and monitoring those who wish to do us harm. But it must not be forgotten that the powers invested at their disposal are immense and more than proportionate for which they are needed. Simply asking that they be used responsibly is surely reason enough to help appease those who clamber to an argument of unnecessary state intrusion into many innocent people’s lives. Such a request stems from a belief that the glue which binds British society is primarily the combined force of its liberal values, not one that erodes it through a heavy-booted security capability.

 

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Aid, Government, Politics, Society, United Nations

Food, hunger and undernourishment…

ENOUGH TO GO AROUND

Global undernourishment shouldn’t exist. Each day the world’s farmers produce the equivalent of 2,868 calories per person on the planet – enough to surpass the World Food Programme’s recommended intake of 2,100 daily calories and enough to support a population inching toward nine billion. The world as a whole does not have a food deficit, but individual countries do.

Why do 805 million people still have little to eat? Access is the main problem. Incomes and commodity prices establish where food goes. The quality of roads and airports determines how easily it gets there. Even measuring undernourishment is a challenge. In countries with the highest historical proportions of undernourishment, it can be hard to get food in and data out.

Things are slowly getting better. Since the early 1990s world hunger has dropped by 40 percent – that means 209 million fewer undernourished people, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. Future progress may prove difficult, but it will be critical to first improve overall food production and availability in places like sub-Saharan Africa. Once that is secure, the focus can then turn to access.

What causes hunger?

Although there are enough calories for everyone alive, people go undernourished for a variety of reasons – virtually all of which are related to access. Reasons and specific examples include:

Natural Disasters – In Haiti, a series of events, including an earthquake (2010), hurricane (2012), and a drought (2014), have severely limited Haiti’s capacity to ease undernourishment.

Erratic Weather – Almost two-thirds of Bolivians living in rural areas of western South America depend on subsistence crops. Recurring droughts and floods bring food deficits. Undernourishment has stunted the growth of one-quarter of all children under five.

Civil War – In the Central African Republic, fighting between government forces and Muslim rebels has led to wide displacement. Farm yields decreased by 40 per cent from 2012 to 2013. Nine out of ten households report eating just one meal a day.

Economic Swings – Since the 2008 recession, Tajikistan has seen reduced prices for its main exports – cotton and aluminium – which has led to lower incomes. A majority of its people spend up to 80 percent of their income on food.

Poor Infrastructure – In Zambia, unreliable roads are the biggest barrier for Africa’s food imports and exports, according to the World Bank. Only 17 percent of the rural population has access to an all-weather road.

Restrictive Leaders – Strained diplomatic ties have resulted in severe sanctions on nearly all North Korean trade. Much of the population of North Korea relies on food rations. The country has received food aid from China, South Korea, and the United States.

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Arts, Education, Philosophy, Society

Philosophy: An introduction…

Philosophy & Ethics

While the earliest philosophers sought to understand the earlier universe, it was not long before philosophy turned its attention to humans themselves, and the way we lead our lives. The idea of virtue was central to life in classical society, but difficult to define; concepts of good and evil, happiness, courage and morality became the subjects of debate in the branch of philosophy known as ethics, or moral philosophy.

In trying to ascertain the nature of a virtuous life, philosophers raised the question of what the goal of life should be – what is its ‘purpose’? How should we lead our lives, and to what end? The concept of the ‘good life’, eudemonia, figured largely in Greek philosophy, and embodies not only a virtuous life, but also a happy one. Several different schools of thought emerged as to how this ‘good life’ could be achieved, including the cynics, who believed in harmony with nature, the Epicureans, who believed pleasure to be the greatest good, and the stoics, who believed in acceptance of things beyond our control.

Where ethics and moral philosophy seek to define virtue and what constitutes the ‘good life’, the closely related branch of political philosophy examines the nature of concepts such as justice, and what sought of society can best allow its citizens to lead ‘good’ lives. The problems of how society should be organised and governed were of paramount importance not only to classical Greece, but also in the development of nation-states in China at much the same time, and elsewhere as new civilisations emerged.

As a branch of philosophy, political philosophy deals with ideas of justice, liberty and rights, and the relationship between a state and its citizens. It also examines various forms of government, such as monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, tyranny and democracy, and how each affects the rights and freedoms of the individual, as well as examining the relationship in how they exert their authority through the rule of law.

Aesthetics

As the classical Greek philosophers sought to define concepts such as virtue and justice, giving rise to the branches of moral and political philosophy, they also asked the question: ‘What is beauty?’ This is the fundamental question of aesthetics. As a branch of philosophy, aesthetics tries to establish what, if any, objective criteria there are for judging whether something is beautiful, but, in a wider sense also examines all aspects of art – including the very basic question ‘What is art?’

At various times in history, the emphasis of aesthetics has moved from what constitutes art to the religious or socio-political significance of works of art, a general theory of our appreciation of art and how we perceive it, and the process of artistic creativity itself. Philosophical and ethical problems are also raised when considering such matters as the authenticity of a work of art or the sincerity of its creator.

Eastern and Western philosophies

Although the tradition that began in ancient Greece still tends to dominant philosophical discussion in the Western world, philosophy is by no means restricted to that single tradition. Thinkers such as Laozi and Confucius in China also founded their own traditions of philosophy from different starting points, as, arguably, did Buddha in India. For them, and subsequent Eastern philosophers, questions of metaphysics were considered to be adequately explained by religion – hence the Eastern traditions are much more focused on concepts of virtue and the way in which we should lead our lives. In China especially, this moral philosophy was adopted by the ruling dynasties and took on a political dimension.

Eastern and Western philosophies developed very separately until the 19th century, when European philosophers, notably Schopenhauer, began to take an interest in Indian religious and philosophical thought. Elements of Eastern philosophy have subsequently been incorporated into some branches of Western philosophy.

Philosophy vs. religion

Religion and philosophy offered two distinctly different approaches to answering our questions about the world about us – religion through belief, faith and divine revelation, and philosophy through reason and argument – but they often cover much the same ground and are sometimes interrelated. Eastern philosophy developed side by side with religion, and Islam saw no incompatibility between its theology and the philosophy it inherited from the classical world, but the relationship between Western philosophy and Christianity was very often uneasy. Church authorities in the medieval period saw philosophy as a challenge to their dogma, and Christian philosophers risked being branded as heretics for attempting to incorporate Greek philosophical ideas into Christian doctrine. But more than that, philosophy also brought into question issues of belief as opposed to knowledge, faith as opposed to reason – questioning, for example, whether there was any evidence for miracles or even whether the existence of God could be proved.

Philosophy vs. science

Throughout much of the history of philosophy, there was no such thing as science in its modern form: in fact, it was from philosophical enquiry that modern science has evolved. The questions that metaphysics set out to answer about the structure and substance of the universe prompted theories that later became the foundations of ‘natural philosophy’, the precursor of what we now call physics. The process of rational argument, meanwhile, underpins the ‘scientific method’.

Since the 18th century, many of the original questions of metaphysics have been answered by observation, experiment and measurement, and philosophy appeared to be redundant in these areas. Philosophers have since changed their focus to examine science itself. Some, like Hume, challenged the validity of inductive reasoning in science, while others sought to clarify the meaning of terms used by science, opening up a ‘philosophy of science’ that considers areas such as scientific ethics and the way science makes progress.

 

ONE of the features of philosophy that distinguishes it from other ways at looking at the world is that its students are encouraged not to accept the conclusions of their teachers, but to discuss, argue and even disagree. This is exactly what happened in the very first school of philosophy, the Milesian school founded by Thales: his student Anaximander asked if the Earth was supported by water then what supported that? He suggested that the Earth was a drum-shaped cylinder hanging in space, with one of the flat surfaces forming the world we live on. Anaximander, also had a pupil, Anaximenes, who said that the world was self-evidently flat and floated on air. Using the same sort of arguments as Thales, he concluded that the single element from which everything is made is air. Although the conclusions of the Milesian philosophers seem to us hopelessly wrong in the light of later scientific discoveries, the process of reasoning used to reach them – especially argument and counter-argument – still forms the basis for philosophical investigation.

The argument Anaximander used to challenge his teacher’s theory of the Earth floating on water involved an idea that crops up in several strands of philosophy. If the world is supported by a body of water, then what supports the water? And then, what supports that? And so on, ad infinitum. The same pattern can be seen in arguments involving cause and effect: if something causes something else, then what causes that? This apparently unending chain is called infinite regress. Some philosophers saw the existence of infinite regress as proof that the universe is eternal, but many were uncomfortable with the idea and proposed that there must be an original or first cause for everything (an idea that chimes with the modern theory of the Big Bang). For some, the first cause or ‘prime mover’ was an abstract idea akin to pure thought or reason, but, for medieval Christian philosophers especially, it was God: indeed, the idea of a first cause was at the heart of Thomas Aquinas’s cosmological argument for the existence of God.

Heraclitus: everything is in flux

In contrast to the school of philosophy founded by Thales at Miletus, just along the Ionian coast in the city of Ephesus lived a solitary thinker, Heraclitus, who had very different philosophical views. Rather than suggesting a single element from which everything was derived, he suggested an underlying principle – that of change. Heraclitus saw everything as consisting of opposing properties or tendencies, which come to together to make up the substance of the world. The analogy he gave was that the path up a mountain is the same as the path down.

In this theory, known as the ‘unity of opposites’, the tension and contradiction of opposing forces is what creates reality, but is inherently unstable. Therefore, everything is constantly changing: everything is in a state of flux. Just as the water in a river is constantly flowing onwards, but the river itself remains the same, that which we consider to be permanent, unchanging reality consists not of objects, but processes.

– This concludes An introduction to Philosophy. Further entries in this area will be offered in the future.

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