No, this is not what you think. It is not about morality or ethics, as in taking the “high road” or “low road” in partisan debates. I am more of a “politics is war by other means” type of person so my adherence to the Clausewitzian axiom reversed perspective pretty much dictates how I view the situational ethics involved when it comes to political cut and thrust. But that is a discussion for another day.
Instead, this is a tale of two stories. One immediate and material, the other a blast from the past by way of tactical advice.
More immediately, after years of living comfortably with older gadgets and machines, in recent years I have bought a modern car and a smart phone. I used to drive manual transmission vehicles that could accomodate my sporting gear (wagons and 4WDs, mostly). But I married a person who does not drive but wants to, so we traded in for an automatic transmission vehicle. I hated it but she felt that it would make her learning to drive easier. That proved somewhat true but I always felt a sense of loss of control because I could not downshift and clutch brake as I had done for many years. In any event, within the last year our family vehicle needs expanded what with the pre-adolescent in the house, so we bought a newer 4WD vehicle with all sorts of gadgets–rear cameras, proximity sensors, all sorts of screens, switches, dials and settings, self-adjusting mirrors and lights, multi-positional electronic seats, etc. It is all fine and dandy, but as I said to the automobile salesperson, I feel like I am in an airplane cockpit at times. In fact, I get distracted by instrumentation that did not exist 15 years ago. All to just get from point A to point B (my racing car enthusiast days ended many moons ago). In any event I am getting used to the amenities even if I still do miss the old pedal press-and-shift days.
Even more recently I was forced to buy a smart phone. My service provider, and in fact most all NZ service providers, are moving away from 3G networks and to 4-5G systems. My old 3G compatible circa-2000 phone, which was only good for text and calls and which did not even have an operating GPS, had to be replaced by the end of next month. Now I have a gadget that talks, changes colours, offers reminders and gives directions, takes videos, surfs the internet, offers me a zillion absolutely mindless “apps” as well as a few useful ones, and is, as I am sure you well know, a hand-held computer. If I could only get my pudgy fingers to accurately hit keyboard keys and links I might be able to actually use the darn thing for more than–you guess it–calls and texts. Because that is all that I needed.
The salesperson whom we dealt with to upgrade my phone said it was more a museum piece than a functional gadget in this day and age. That was exactly the point of having it. Let me explain.
At a time and a place long ago I held a position in a government security agency that had a keen interest in a hostile country (truth be told, the hostility was more ours than theirs). As part of the job , my duties included analysing intelligence streams about that country from assorted dedicated agencies, including what are known as “signals and technical” (sigint/techint) intelligence agencies. These agencies use various technologies to acquire information from designated targets, including infrared and thermal signatures, satellite imagery, acoustic eavesdropping, electronic tapping and hacking and a number of other non-human acquisition platforms (I was more connected to the human intelligence side of things due to my non-technical expertise but in that particular job was the consumer of signet/techint flows because it played a policy-making role).
Signals and technical intelligence collection happens from space to the seafloor. It is quite literally a full spectrum, multi-dimensional enterprise. It covers tapping/hacking into bulk data flows like those in undersea fiberoptic cables now being targeted in the Baltic Sea (such as via the PRISM program exposed by Edward Snowden) to individual cell phones and laptops possessed by targeted people and agencies (be they public, private, non-governmental, religious, etc.).
When I assumed that governmental role I was briefed on its intelligence capabilities in that country. What I found was interesting, to say the least. At that time, all of the human intelligence agents in the country had been revealed to be working as double agents for its government, so we were being fed bogus information while they received precise and detailed information about networks, sources and methods. That problem took years to rectify and led to some spectacular sequels years later.
With no reliable human intelligence (known as “nonofficial cover”) assets in the country, we were forced to rely exclusively on signet/techint capabilities, of which we had many of high degrees of sophistication, both near and far from targets. Among these were acoustic sensors and intercepts designed to pick up conversations by the senior leadership of the country. The leadership was a very small circle of confidants and insiders led by two people in particular, so we put a lot of effort into listening to them. We were pretty good at that, and I got to know waaaaay too much about the bathroom and bedroom habits of some of those targeted individuals.
However, we could never get a bead on the private conversations of the two main leaders even though we had their offices under acoustic and visual surveillance (the latter can be used for lip-reading purposes, among other things). That baffled us until we began to more closely study their daily routines and habits. Among them was a weekly, sometimes more than weekly, lunchtime walk by the two main principals to plazas within walking distance of the main government building where their offices were located. Once at these locations they would sit on park benches a few dozen meters across from each other while their security details discreetly cleared space around them. They cleared space not so much as a crowd control exercise because although my government saw these leaders as the enemy, their people did not (at least at that time). So it was not unusual for members of the public to walk up to the leaders and hug them, shake their hands and engage in conversation with them. The leaders usually left time for that, but at some point they needed quiet and space in order to have their own private conversations. It was a type of hiding in plain sight exercise.
Once the security guys moved people away from their respective park benches (and that was not hard to do since this walking routine was familiar to residents of the streets around the government offices and had become an accustomed sight), the leaders would take out cheap walkie-talkies sold as a children’s toy and speak to each other that way about highly sensitive matters. Since we had no lip reading assets in their vicinity (who would have been uncovered anyway), and out signing/techint means did not extend to or pick up the frequencies of the walkie-talkies in those locations, we remained deaf to their chats for years.
Which brings me to the moral of this story. When I asked the signet/techint agency specialists why this was an effective counter-intelligence tactic, they responded by saying that “when we go high tech, they go low tech.” They explained that if you really want to keep something secret in this (then!) day and age, you have a conversation and commit it to memory, not paper and certainly not to digitalised data. A note or letter that can be destroyed is a second-best option, old fashioned land lines are a third best option (because the tap on the phone line had to be physical and relatively close to the phone in question), and then resorting to what is known as espionage tradecraft (dead drops, unwitting messengers carrying information in different guises, etc.), would have to suffice. But the latter is not apt for official government communications unless that government is under serious siege (perhaps like Venezuela or Iran recently).
A an aside, some of the idiocy that is now on display in Washington DC is apparent in the lack of communications security awareness by senior government officials. The use of apps like Signal and Telegram by such people displays a grotesque disregard for basic common sense, much less situational awareness of the perils of using social media to conduct business about matters of State. I guess walkie talkies are not available at their locations.
My old cell phone was one such low tech device. It could not be followed, it could not geo-locate, it could not accept apps, it did not do email or internet. In a word, it was a”dumb” phone that I held in my hand. I liked it that way because even though I do not have State secrets to share, I do not like the idea of commercial actors like telecommunications companies acquiring and then selling my personal data just because I need to use the bloody phone and require use of their devices in order to do so. As it is, I am already getting bombarded by advertising and links suggestions just because I added my social media accounts (just two of them) to my new phone. That sucks.
Which brings me back to the original purpose of this post. Whether your approach to politics is to go high or to go low, when it comes to modern day telecommunications, take a tip from that old adversary of my former government by keeping your most sensitive thoughts off high tech platforms no matter how convenient they are (this is true for those who use VPNs as well, as that only partially disguises address and data flows but not the entirety of communication patterns for those with the knowledge and capabilities to decrypt or decode them). It may seem quaint, but if you must save things in writing, best to write a poem or letter on paper instead. Because file cabinets and desk drawers can still serve a purpose other than as computer stands or old junk repositories.
In the end convenience comes at a cost, and that cost is measured by the price of your privacy being made publicly available by the owners of the technologies that now control our daily routines.
