The "Intelligence gap" is doublespeak
Britain recently talks about new legislation to address “gaps” in intelligence gathering for police and spy agencies. It wants to “modernise” (that British spelling) its data interception, in order to “maintain capability”.
All this sounds quite reasonable, which is why they’re phrasing it in this way. It’s misleading doublespeak, carefully chosen to prevent the British public from understanding what rights and freedoms they’re allowing their government to strip.
“Gaps”
A gap describes something where you have both sides, but are missing a bit somewhere in the middle. For example, a person who worked 2009-2011 and 2013-current is said to have a gap in his employment history.
But if someone had no employment history, perhaps because they are still at school and aren’t old enough to have ever worked, they do not have “gaps” in their employment history. They have a complete lack. We are talking about something they never before had and that doesn’t exist yet.
When the government describes desired capabilities like searching all global e-mail in real-time as a “gap”, they are staking out new territory. It’s a claim of manifest destiny, where the government simply redefines the limits what it is entitled to and logically deduces that anything within those new limits is fair game.
“Modernise”
To modernise something is to make it more like the current day. Any change you make to a system is modernising it, by default. Such a change is typically welcome, long-awaited, and widely accepted as necessary. It is progressive, rather than regressive, and usually made primarily to catch up with current needs, social ideals or technology.
To describe a change as “modernising” is a clever trick, since it depicts its opponents as old-fashioned and ignorant, and its supporters forward-thinking and practical. It distracts citizens from asking whether or not the changes are good or necessary.
“Maintain capability”
In the 1990s, wiretapping a telephone required a warrant and covered a single phone line for a limited period of time. The technology to wiretap all phones at once simply did not exist, so there was no debate over whether or not it was right to deploy such a system.
The capabilities Britain currently uses or wants to make legal are unprecedented. We know thanks to the Snowden leaks that Britain operates Tempora, a system recording all voice calls and Internet use, Dishfire for recording SMS messages, and MUSCULAR, a wiretap siphoning data directly from Google and Yahoo’s servers. The resulting data can be queried based on broad selectors rather than individual warrant. Human rights groups condemn countries like China for less.
Even systems like a log of web activity going back two years is far beyond what police had in the 1990s. Whether or not the government should have this ability is a matter for the public to debate, but by no stretch of the imagination can it be described as merely “maintaining capability”.