Virgin Intelligence: what could possibly go wrong?
Why not abolish internet service providers, Facebook, Google, Yahoo etc and let the National Security Agency (NSA) run the internet?
That way the NSA could spy on whoever it wants, via a spying clause in the standard terms of service agreement. No one, anywhere in the world, could get online without agreeing to the NSA inspecting their online activity.
An attractive consequence would be that it would no longer be necessary for the NSA, at huge expense to the US taxpayer, to employ a battalion of engineers and programmers to invent, insert and maintain spying systems on the world’s PCs and computer networks. A low-grade NSA clerk could just log on to a customer’s account and snoop to his heart’s content.
Indeed, why not provide the NSA with exclusive, worldwide, computer hardware manufacturing rights? That way, NSA engineers could install spying hardware on every new computer system. Again, the cash-savings to US taxpayers would be substantial.
Why maintain the fiction that the NSA doesn’t already do this via the subversion of alleged “private sector” companies backed by secret homeland security court orders? Edward Snowden blew the lie on that one.
But at some point the NSA could be privatised, allowing the spied upon (i.e. everyone) to purchase shares and encourage the NSA, via the shareholder’s meeting, towards greater spying efficiency. At present the snooping industry is run on old fashioned socialist lines under state control. The NSA would become subject to the rigours of the market, like everyone else.
MI6, GCHQ, MOSSAD or even Richard Branson might care to bid for the contract. Why should the NSA be like British Leyland in the 1970s? Surely we want our spies to be trim, efficient, thrusting and embedded in the free market economy? James Bond should be more banker than civil servant, no?
The newly privatised NSA would, of course, have a ‘remuneration committee’ with spies paid bonuses based on the amount of snooping achieved.
At some point we may become like the former East Germany, with neighbour spying upon neighbour (a securitised version of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’).
But until we reach those levels of community spying participation we need a lean, efficient spying industry, freed from the dead hand of state control. Richard Branson (or Alan Sugar?) may be the answer.
