THESE VITAL SPEECHES

38
CICERO SPEECHWRITING AWARDS
WINNER: PUBLIC POLICY
“Technology, Security, Freedom”
By Charles Crawford for Sir John Sawers, Former
Chief of MI6; Chairman, Macro Advisory Partners
Delivered to Alumni of the University of Nottingham, at the Royal
Institute of British Architects, London, England, Nov. 25, 2015
Back in the 1960s US computer
genius Gordon Moore made an
astute prediction about exponential
growth in computer power. It’s now
called Moore’s Law.
Every two years or so you can
expect double the computer power for
your money.
That relationship has been borne
out over nearly 50 years.
In 1975 the Cray-1 was the world’s
mightiest supercomputer. It had 8
Megabytes: £10 million in today’s
money. My Apple iPhone has 128
Gigabytes of memory, and cost £600.
15,000 times the power, at a fifteen
thousandth of the cost.
Technology gets faster and better
and cheaper and cheaper. Cars and
roads and factories and homes get
safer. Driverless cars.
New medical techniques. Need a
new spare part? Do some Googling,
then use your 3D printer to make one.
Data analytics is one of the new
sciences. Making connections, finding
solutions to problems that were previously
unknowable.
The volume of data is growing at an
exponential rate.
You turn on your mobile phone.
Post a Tweet. Go shopping. Drive past
a CCTV camera. Use your Oyster
card. Watch a YouTube cat video.
Everything you do with a digital
angle—everything anyone does, anywhere
in the world—makes those data
oceans bigger, richer, deeper.
Charles Dickens’ opening of A Tale of
Two Cities is as great as it gets.
It was the best of times
It was the worst of times
The age of wisdom
The age of foolishness
The epoch of belief
The epoch of incredulity
Today, 160 years later, Dickens’ words
sum up our relationship to technology.
The best of times? Or the worst of
times?
The age of wisdom? Or foolishness?
Belief ? Incredulity?
All of them at once?
Thus my three themes tonight. Technology.
Security. Freedom.
Can democratic societies have the
best of times without the worst of times?
We’re going to get more technology.
Lots more technology! Are we going to
get more freedom and less security? Or
more security, but less freedom?
As democracies grapple with these
issues, do terrorists and fanatics feel that
they have more freedom? Will autocracies
become stronger, and democracies
weaker? Do the enemies of democracy
feel more secure?
Dickens’ two cities were London and
Paris.
Just twelve days ago Paris was hit by a
new horrible terrorist attack.
People from across Paris, across
France, across the globe, murdered and
maimed at random. Gunned down by
killers whose twisted ideology sees a
cheerful tolerant culture as the enemy.
Can we stop what happened in Paris
happening here in London?
The honest, unsettling answer:
Yes … Most of the time.
As MI6 Chief, my top priority was
identifying plans hatched abroad to
launch terror attacks against the UK.
We had significant successes: working
with intelligence partners in Britain,
America and the Middle East, we
stopped terrifying attacks.
You don’t see these attacks. Because
they don’t happen. We don’t talk about
them. Why give our enemies clues to
how we are stopping them?
When I joined MI6, I was trained
to spot people tracking me. Telephone
tapping. Intercepting radio communication.
Following you by car or on foot. No
school like the old school!
Today those labour-intensive techniques
are supported by high-end
software. Face-recognition. Footsteprecognition.
Old and new intelligence tradecraft—
they all have their place. But they work
when you know who poses a threat. First
you have to find these people.
You dive deep into those data oceans.
You look for patterns. Snippets of digital
information that suggests activity worth
a closer look.
Then you have to try to work out who
among several thousand possible extremist
sympathisers looks set to launch
a terror attack next week. You also want
to find disaffected people inside terrorist
organisations who might switch sides.
Terrorists are using technology to
change their methods and targets. We
have to change the way we defend ourselves.
You follow terrorists and potential
terrorists where they are.
If a terror suspect enters a pub, it’s
reasonable if not vital that the police
and MI5 have the legal power to enter
the pub and monitor him there.
These days terrorists are scheming
deep in cyberspace.
If the police believe that an active
terrorist suspect is operating online, it’s
reasonable if not vital that the police and
security services have the legal powers to
track him online and identify who he is
communicating with.
The point is this.
People who want to do you harm
benefit from Moore’s Law just as much
as those who want to keep you safe.
As citizens, we want maximum privacy
and maximum security. Unbreakable
encryption is at the centre of the
argument.
Intelligence agencies focus on security
and worry that terrorists will be able to
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