Juan Cole: In ‘Spectre,’ James Bond becomes Edward Snowden

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

The latest entry in the Daniel Craig reboot of the James Bond film franchise, Spectre , turns Bond into more muscular version of Edward Snowden, as he takes down a vast 9-nation attempt at electronic surveillance and information-sharing that would also benefit a criminal cartel.

Tooling around the reviews, it strikes me as remarkable that this theme seems to be being ignored. In part, reviewers may not wish to mix their entertainment with politics. But the Bond series has always been political. I argued that the second film in the Daniel Craig Quartet, “Quantum of Solace” (2008), turned Bond into a defender of the left-leaning, pro-peasant government of Evo Morales in Bolivia, as a reaction against Bush-Cheney neo-imperialism. Producer Michael G. Wilson was responsible at least in part for that Leftist Bond. From a show business family and the step-son of long-time Bond series producer Albert Broccoli, Wilson did a law degree at Stanford in the 1960s and was at a firm specializing in international law. As with “Quantum,” concern for law and the rights of ordinary citizens is at the heart of “Spectre.”

In the terms of the intelligence world, “Spectre” is an argument between old-fashioned human intelligence (Humintel) and signals intelligence (SIGINT). The script imagines an expansion of the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing program of the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to “Nine Eyes,” adding in countries such as China and South Africa. This expansion is spearheaded by a mole within MI6, “C” (Andrew Scott), though it seems clear that “C” is a stand-in for the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). Although the US National Security Agency became notorious for its lawlessness and massive reach after the Snowden revelations, GCHQ is even more unconstrained. Because internet communications bounce around the world before arriving at the recipient, many are routed through undersea cables across the Atlantic. These cables come up out of the water on the west coast of Britain, and GCHQ has put sniffers on them, scooping up petabytes of our information and data-mining it.

The government of David Cameron, and especially the crypto-fascist Home Minister Theresa May, have long engaged in massive domestic surveillance and now intend to implement the bulk collection and storage of information on all the websites a Briton visits. In addition, Cameron wants to outlaw consumer encryption of the sort Apple is now increasingly offering its customers (Apple can’t turn over information to the FBI or NSA because even it doesn’t have the encryption keys). It seems a little unlikely that any such encryption ban is possible. ................(more)

http://www.juancole.com/2015/11/spectre-becomes-snowden.html