“Burnham’s innovation concentrates power in the hands of civil servants.” (Jonathan Brady/WPA/Getty)
The 21st century is an age of information warfare, and the British public is in the trenches. Every day, there’s some new barrage of malevolent online content, cooked-up in the troll factories of Moscow, Beijing and Tehran. Nor is this mere Whitehall paranoia. When the Iranian regime disconnected outside internet access in January, it silenced a network of pro-Scottish independence social-media accounts. We may never know how many militant SNP voters are holed up in Tabriz, but I suspect it’s fewer than post on X. The Russians, meanwhile, probably have weaponized concerns over the Henry Nowak case using far-Right patsies.
So yes, information warfare is real, and yes, foreign powers use propaganda against their adversaries. This is hardly new: in Ancient Greece, the Athenian leader Themistocles engraved stones at a watering hole, encouraging his enemy’s Ionian levies to defect. If, however, the Government is right to combat outside threats, its domestic opponents are equally right to be suspicious about the National Center for Information Defense (NCID). Announced by Andy Burnham on Tuesday, it will disrupt “hostile information attacks” and “deepfakes”, and quash a “distorted and untrue narrative about Britain”. That’s fine as far as it goes — if only the NCID wasn’t conjured in a Whitehall that has proved itself a foe of legitimate criticism.
Unsurprisingly, Burnham’s announcement first attracted the ire of free-speech campaigners, who quickly noted that the Government already has a bubbling cauldron of acronymic monitoring units at its disposal. The variety here is truly bewildering, from the Media Monitoring Unit to the Defending Democracy Taskforce to the National Cyber Force. At first blush, indeed, NCID seems to be a classically British amalgamation of existing units. By putting them under one roof, the reasoning goes, duplication and waste is avoided.
The problem is that if Burnham’s innovation promises to save cash and pool ideas, it also concentrates power in the hands of civil servants. That only increases the danger that the NCID “grows arms and legs”, evolving like a fish wriggling out from a swamp, desperate to feed and grow. It hardly helps that interdepartmental rivalries will be triggered among the spooks, cops, civil servants and even soldiers involved in officialdom’s many online media monitoring operations, with the NCID doubtless eager to make its mark too.
That matters, for the Government can increasingly not be trusted to separate opinion from genuine disinformation. During Covid, to give one example, dissenting voices found themselves on official watchlists, while only last year, Whitehall labeled people concerned with mass migration as “cultural nationalists” potentially worthy of Prevent referrals. To an old Special Branch hand like me, then, the NCID rings a distant Cold War bell. Subversion, it seems, is back in fashion — except this time, the primary “threat actors” are less sweaty Stalinists and more anyone challenging the post-1997 consensus.
Having worked in the field, both in monitoring online extremists and actual terrorists, the NCID operation strikes me as pure “parapolitics”. The liminal space between conventional politics, intelligence, security and propaganda, parapolitics is usually the domain of niche sociology journals. Parapolitical activity is sometimes practiced covertly. This time, though, the powers-that-be have decided to hide in plain sight. Yes, the Government seems to be saying, we’re watching.
Of course, Whitehall has long maintained such capabilities, mashing up civilian media operations with politics long before the internet ever existed. During the Second World War, for instance, it established the Ministry of Information and the Political Warfare Executive, designed to counter Nazi propaganda, undermine enemy morale and — crucially — keep an eye on the home front by monitoring public sentiment. After 1945, the Attlee government created the Information Research Department to combat Soviet disinformation. As ever, the Russian bear looms large in the history of British domestic security, with hybrid capabilities developed to keep him behind the Iron Curtain.
During the Cold War, monitoring and combating “subversion” became primarily an MI5 and Special Branch problem. The official definition, first introduced in 1972 by MI5, encompassed “activities which threaten the safety or well-being of the state, and are intended to undermine or overthrow parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means”. The civil service effectively withdrew from the field, allowing anti-communist surveillance to become a classic quasi-political, quasi-policing issue. Were operations keeping tabs on communists designed for police action or pure intelligence purposes? In the parapolitical hall of mirrors that was postwar intelligence, no one really seemed to know.
This thinking wouldn’t survive the fall of the Berlin Wall, let alone the towers of 9/11. Nor is this surprising: despite the dangers of jihadi bombs, they hardly subverted the state. There was no overwhelming ideological threat from overseas, no evil empire. Islamist terrorism was too fragmented to seem threatening; to suggest Islamism generally might pose problems was long deemed politically unpalatable. Instead, the police and security services switched to a far more granular role, one encompassing proactive counter-terrorism intelligence and law-enforcement operations. Think less John Le Carré and more Jack Bauer. Not unrelatedly, the post-9/11 “CONTEST” strategy also saw “domestic extremism” downgraded in the face of al-Qaeda threats, with combating the puny far-Right increasingly contracted out to the social services, educational institutions and charities.
All the same, that didn’t stop the powers-that-be from gradually developing a digital panopticon, one capable of using content aggregation tools to harvest the internet for dissenting material. Online monitoring units would keep tabs on groups and individuals, flagging “actionable” content for removal, for intelligence purposes, and, occasionally, for criminal prosecutions.
The Coalition government seemed perfectly happy with this Blair-era arrangement, and little changed until the late 2010s. Since then, the surveillance state’s appetite has only grown — especially with the development of new tools like AI, and especially now that, unlike in the 2000s, powerful anti-establishment forces really are on the march. Sure enough, every protest, riot and politically charged furore sees ministers, civil servants and chief constables demanding instant information, as if their intelligence minions possessed scrying balls and oracles. In their own way, populist protest movements have the potential to disrupt key infrastructure, as seen in Dover. They can also potentially incubate lone-wolf extremists. Before he became an infamous nail bomber, David Copeland had dabbled in the BNP.
And so the post-Southport disturbances, anti-immigration protests and “Patriot Platform” blockades have triggered, once more, Whitehall’s hunger for counter-subversion. The issue that concerns me here is proportionality. Where, in the end, is the line between lawful and unlawful protest? This, remember, is the era of non-crime hate incidents and knocks on doors, of journalists being warned of harassment for pursuing legitimate stories like Jason Arday’s. Then there’s interpretation. Does genuinely agreeing with a Kremlin-funded troll make one a dupe or a shill? Or, indeed, a traitor? Managing such questions is work for skilled investigators, not algorithms or quangos.
The Government doesn’t seem completely oblivious to the dangers here. As Defence Secretary Wes Streeting put it yesterday, the new unit wouldn’t infringe upon “the freedom to disagree, the freedom for people to challenge their Government, to challenge Government policy, to criticise robustly what we are doing, and then to have the opportunity to choose a different Government”.
Yet the party Streeting serves has previous for its own information-warfare shenanigans. One example is Labour Together. It shared an address with the Center for Countering Digital Hate, whose stated objective was to “Kill Musk’s Twitter?” Parapolitical indeed. And how many meetings or cutaways are there between Hope Not Hate and its former director of communications Matthew McGregor: now the head of political strategy at No. 10? It isn’t hard to see how such relationships could be exploited by Westminster’s mini Machiavellis.
No genuinely free democracy has successfully managed to entirely censor the internet. British attempts so far have been more farcical than sinister, not least Ofcom’s quixotic attempt to silence 4chan, that venerable US shitposting site. Yet downstream from such debacles come the “ think of the children” excesses of the Online Safety Act, with the mandatory age-gating of content the preferred, if unspoken, option of politicians. I am prepared to bet the new disinformation unit will soon be forming working groups to wargame these “tactical options” for countering disinformation. Yet without transparent frameworks, for instance around who to target and when, we will never know how these ideas are formed. National security is a convenient firewall for policymaking on the sly, with technical possibilities around internet censorship occasionally “run up the flagpole” with investigators.
There’s a broader point here too. Assuming the new agency is successful in identifying online content made in good faith from foreign propaganda — even if they happen to tally — how will they police one against the other? Kremlin trolls do tell outrageous lies, but some of the best information warfare is material that subtly toys with reality. The challenge is to know the difference and act on it accordingly. Most reasonable people want to see foreign propaganda called out for what it is. But I’m not convinced the threat is concomitant with the solutions proposed. Blurring the lines of legitimate debate is unlikely to soften the genuine anger that exists over issues like small boats.
Again, these are matters of judgment. I remember monitoring Twitter one night when Tommy Robinson posted a copy of a hastily scrawled “Osman Notice” — informing him of a threat to his physical safety — pushed by police through his front door. Robinson contrasted it with the apparently favorable treatment of a Muslim cleric who’d been similarly threatened. “Can you get that taken off the Internet?” a senior police officer asked me of Robinson’s posts. Why? “Because it’s embarrassing and the chief constable doesn’t like it,” came the reply. I refused, having neither the power nor desire to involve myself in something so trivial. Yet these, more or less, will be the people in charge of the NCID. And I have no reason to believe they’re much better now.