The
need for the British State to protect itself from cyber warfare by other states and international
enterprises
Information to place present
developments in context.
1.
In 1984 I
was the
only local authority chief officer (and with 10 years’ experience), one of a handful
of public service senior personnel among directors of national and
international producing, financial and other service corporations being
considered at the Henley Management
College Senior Management course as suitable for General Management and
where afterwards I prepared a paper on the implications of the course for
Local Government which after sending to Michael Heseltine, the MP for Henley, he wrote to say the document was
being circulated in Whitehall, and where I had
correspondence from the head of human resources at the Ministry of
Defence.
1.1 Three
issues from that course are relevant to Inquiries presently being undertaken by
Committees and individual members of the House of Commons. The first was the
value of moving Headquarters to countries with stable governments who offered
low corporate taxation together with the ability to trade with the least state
interference. A general contempt for politicians was expressed although there
appeared to be division between those who held this opinion because politicians
could be bought and those because they could not.
1.2 Secondly
there was advice from the European Director of an International USA based corporation
on the direct employment or use of “creatives” who could achieve new high-level
profit-making business units but whose activities were likely to include crossing
lines in terms of state lawfulness and corporate ethical standards. It was
essential to take precautions in advance to eliminate record of their
involvement by the company and individual accountability for their employment
or use if they crossed the line and were caught. The bigger companies,
particularly world-wide companies were able to plan for this in advance and
have a unit(s) with responsibility for the task of eliminate corporate
involvement and individual accountability.
1.3 Thirdly
the construction of the such courses was based on the psychometric testing of
all senior managers, using information on their known backgrounds, both
personal and occupational and which have been explained and developed by Meredith
Belbin in his series of research studies and advisories.
2 Psychometric
testing and analysis with its predictive potential has developed over recent decades
because of our increased knowledge of how the human brain works and impacts on
perception and behaviour and the work on artificial intelligence which I suggest
if adapted to test tube created life forms threatens to make human beings
redundant and expendable. In 1962 my psychology tutor was the head of the Department
of Behavioural Science at Oxford University the creative John Beichon who took
his team to the USA, became Chief Executive of Which, headed a London Polytechnic
and helped the development of the Open University.
2.1 In
the four hour marathon of the Digital Culture Media and sports House of Commons
Select Committee on March 27th witness Christopher Wylie mentioned how the
development of psychometric testing and analysis was the basis
or a major component in the predictive work underpinning the selection
of those to be individually targeted to achieve their
involvement/participation or to turn out for a specific activity such as voting, and he mentioned the value of the Cambridge
location because of the proximity with the Cambridge Psychology Institute, its
work and its professors in providing the framework to which harvested data and
the digital technology would be applied.
3. Because
of issues related to Brexit and more general Party politics it is possible
individual politicians may not have the research sources or advisors to place
the present situation the context of recent events and therefore I believe the following
information may be of value and I begin with the extraordinary loss of mass data collation in the UK which was open
to data harvesting by other states and international corporations. I attach as
an appendix of the BBC news report which listed the succession of data losses and
included concerns in relation to security, criminals and Terrorism. This pales
into insignificance given the nature and volume of confidential information
taken by Edward Snowden from the USA before his flight to Russia.
4 It
is also evident that the David Cameron Nick Clegg coalition government had an
awareness of the implications of developments in cyber warfare when in September
2013 the Defence Secretary Philip Hammond issued press statements and
announcements that as part of the MOD’s full spectrum of Defence capability the
recruitment of hundreds of cyber experts and cyber reservists to help defend
the UK’s national Security. Mrs May was Home Secretary at this time.
It is
worrying that when the Prime Minister was asked about the cyber threat to our democratic
institutions and processes during this afternoon’s Liaison Committee meeting
she said she had not been made aware of any evidence to this effect
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