Mid-Book Audiobook Review: “How Spies Think” by David Omand
https://alecmuffett.com/article/113370
#DavidOmand #gchq #intelligence #surveillance

Mid-Book Audiobook Review: “How Spies Think” by David Omand

Christ, I’m having a hard time with this book, and I’m not even done / he hasn’t even gotten onto the “tech industry” parts yet. I seek greater understanding of the mindset of how Sir David Omand, GCB, former head of GCHQ, got on stage at an event I attended in 2015* and said words to the effect: “Google has all this lovely data, why should the Government not also have it, too?”

I’ve just gotten into the third part of the book which appears headed in this direction, so I will let you know.

In the meantime I would summarise the first two parts of the book as a recap of how intelligence analysts work and then an extended love-letter to Bayesian Probability and Bayesian Statistics, the tools by which UK Government intelligence analysis craft their imperfect understanding into dubious likelihoods which they then communicate to politicians using a horrendously ordained table of canned phrases, glossing over everything they don’t know with “we have no evidence that…” and then on those occasions where it all goes terribly wrong holding their hands-up to say “…it’s not our fault, guv, we only told them what believe on the basis of what little we know, and we followed all of our procedures…”

This, of course, subsequently justifies the ratchet to demand ever-increasing amounts of knowledge, in order to have greater “situational awareness” and to know more, in order to keep releasing these estimates. It’s telling that all the most laudatory parts of the book so far deal with intelligence from Soviet double-agents and/or getting into the face of criminals like Radko Mladic, whereas all the failures (e.g. the Falklands invasion) have been due to a lack of attention and/or “due care” by both politicians and intelligence officers, rather than any lack of “data”.

The whole thing, so far, is apparently underscored by the perspective that “we know what’s good for us is good for the little people, so we shall pursue what’s good for us” — and not very much big-picture cost/benefit analysis.

My father once shared a story — it may actually have been a meme of the era — about the analysis of British Government population statistics in colonial west Africa in the 1950s; it went along the lines of: “…never forget when looking at all these numbers that you may draw whatever firm conclusions you like from them, but in most instances the actual numbers were written-down on a form by the village watchman who put down whatever he damn-well pleased”.

This is at the forefront of my mind each time Omand talks about an analyst deciding how probable [any given event] is. Iain Lobban may be able to corroborate this, I’m fairly certain that our parents were in the same area, doing similar work, and knew each other.

Onto Part Three…

[*] you can see the back of my head, front row, far left

#davidOmand #gchq #intelligence #surveillance

End #GovernmentByWhatsApp, urges former #GCHQ head

Sir #DavidOmand tells parliamentary inquiry the platform should be restricted to ‘background mood music’
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/26/end-government-by-whatsapp-urges-former-gchq-head