{"id":465,"date":"2013-06-14T07:00:33","date_gmt":"2013-06-14T07:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/?p=465"},"modified":"2013-06-14T07:51:59","modified_gmt":"2013-06-14T07:51:59","slug":"spying_on_scotland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/spying_on_scotland\/","title":{"rendered":"Spying on Scotland: A Modest Proposal"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Dr.<\/a>

Dr. Andrew Neal, University of Edinburgh<\/p><\/div>\n

In this piece, Andrew Neal reflects on the recent US spying scandal, particularly in light of revelations that the British GCHQ was making use of this intelligence. This piece was originally published on securitypolitics<\/a> on 11 June 2013<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The recent revelations about domestic surveillance in the US were controversial because the National Security Agency was secretly spying on the communications of American citizens. In the US, debates about intelligence have always hinged on a distinction between citizens and foreigners. The\u00a0Foreign Intelligence Service Act<\/a>\u00a0has long made it perfectly acceptable for US agencies to spy on foreigners at home or abroad. These powers have been consistently approved and upheld by US courts.<\/p>\n

In the UK, successive governments have tried to create a law to allow blanket communications surveillance. This would be the mass collection, retention and analysis of communications \u2018metadata\u2019; not the content of telephone calls and emails but connections, numbers, times, locations, call length, frequency and so on. This data could be used for sophisticated forms of\u00a0social network analysis<\/a>.\u00a0Ad hoc<\/i>\u00a0groupings of libertarians in parliament, led by the Liberal Democrats, have successfully blocked the Communications and Data Bill or \u2018Snoopers\u2019 Charter\u2019.<\/p>\n

It now transpires that the UK intelligence agency GCHQ has been getting around the continuing lack of a legal basis for this kind of surveillance. It has been receiving the data it wants from the NSA in the US. This falls under a legal grey area. It seems that British\u00a0data protection laws do not apply<\/a>\u00a0if the data of UK citizens is already in the US (e.g. Gmail, Dropbox, Facebook, Skype, Flikr, pretty much everything). This is a convenient way for a government to avoid the charge that it spies on its own citizens. Instead, another government spies on that population as foreigners, then hands the intelligence over.<\/p>\n

Now, one of the uncertain issues in the Scottish independence debate is what kind of intelligence agencies a new Scotland would create. Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon told the\u00a0Foreign Affairs Committee<\/a>\u00a0that an independent Scotland would create its own domestic intelligence agency, but that the Scottish Government was taking advice on establishing a foreign intelligence service like MI6. Members of the intelligence community have said that Scotland would also need some kind of \u2018mini-GCHQ<\/a>\u2019 to defend against cyber attacks. Whatever the decision, an independent Scotland would not have the resources to replicate the advanced communications intelligence facilities of GCHQ. It would also be starting from scratch and so take years to establish credible capabilities.<\/p>\n

This raises some questions. If Scotland is not going to monitor domestic communications like the UK government wants to, then will this leave an unsurveilled utopia of personal freedom north of the border? Could a would-be terrorist simply move to from London to Gretna to avoid having his or her communications monitored, then plan the next attack? And given that UK communication systems (land lines, mobile networks, internet infrastructure) are completely integrated, how would an independent Scotland implement a different legal regime for data protection and surveillance, even if it wanted to?<\/p>\n

Here is a modest proposal. The US-UK intelligence sharing relationship shows us the way. An independent Scotland could simply allow GCHQ to spy on its citizens\u2019 communications, then share the intelligence with the Scottish Government. This way, GCHQ would be spying on foreigners, the Scottish government could legitimately say that it does not monitor its own citizens\u2019 electronic activities, and the UK security services would avoid the terrifying Gretna scenario.<\/p>\n

So here are two questions for First Minister\u2019s Question Time at the Scottish parliament: \u201cWould the First Minister allow UK intelligence agencies to spy on the citizens of an independent Scotland? And would the Scottish government make use of the resulting intelligence?<\/p>\n

Dr Andrew Neal\u00a0<\/a>is a Lecturer at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. He blogs at\u00a0securitypolitics<\/a>\u00a0and tweets\u00a0@andrewwneal<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this piece, Andrew Neal reflects on the recent US spying scandal, particularly in light of revelations that the British GCHQ was making use of this intelligence. This piece was originally published on securitypolitics on 11 June 2013. The recent … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":471,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465\/revisions\/471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/referendum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}