Ditchley Park on Internet Security

The Ditchley Foundation is an international political think tank that is headquartered at Ditchley Park, an eighteenth century manor house near Charlbury in Oxfordshire. It occupies a very strange demimonde between the official published politics of Westminster and Washington, and that black world of hidden organizations like the Bilderberg Group. Unlike Bilderberg though it has a very detailed and glossy official website, see: http://www.ditchley.co.uk/, and it publishes a report on all its meetings. However, Ditchley's members operate under strict rules of confidentiality; none of them ever comment to the press and the actual minutes of meetings are always kept private. Since it was founded in 1958, just four years after Bilderberg, it has hosted several conferences every year, all under the "Chatham House rules" of covert politics. Renowned members include its chairman former Prime Minister Sir John Major, Lord Carrington and, very strangely, the civil rights activist Shami Chakrabarti. A few years ago I took a little "stroll" around the public access areas surrounding Ditchley Park, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/ditchley-park.html (something tells me I'll be heading back there again soon). A couple of weeks ago, a three day conference took place there concerning digital security. Attending were senior officials of GCHQ, the UK's national electronic intelligence agency, and police experts on cybercrime and terrorism. Also present were officials from Google and Apple from many countries around the world. Unusually a few selected press representatives were allowed to attend, although only under strict regulation. In fact although the BBC's Gordon Corera was present the corporation has not broadcast a single word about this conference. The prime source for what went on is in fact a page in Glenn Greenwald's The Intercept, see: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/22/apple-google-spy-summit-cia-gchq-ditchley-surveillance/. The Ditchley Foundation itself has yet to publish its official report on this event, but it has released a conference program (contrary to what The Intercept implies, there's no need to "obtain" it; it's openly available from the Foundation's website: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2085593-ditchley-intelligence-and-security-conference.html.

Top of the agenda were the revelations of Edward Snowden. I'm personally still not sure whether Snowden is a real whistleblower yet; he might be a plant designed to ease pressure on the authorities and even disseminate false information. However, if he is real then it's to be expected that the likes of Ditchley Park are concerned by him. The veteran investigative reporter Duncan Campbell was there. The fact that the likes of him managed to get through the door adds to the question of whether this meeting really was a covert gathering to discuss real secrets. Perhaps it was just some kind of show trial. Our suspicions should be raised even more in that one of the spy attendees stated that Snowden's renegade actions had permanently changed the landscape of electronic surveillance and that "the cold winds of transparency are here to stay"; as if these people really give up that easily. There was some conflict between the head of GCHQ and the representatives of tech giants of Apple and Google. This is portrayed as nice liberty-loving internet companies trying to remain free under the criticism of authoritarian state intelligence agencies. I find that unlikely. The boards of the major internet companies are as much political appointments as those of any other media; it sounds like this is what Richard D Hall would call a "phoney bone of contention". Campbell has written his own post about the meeting, see: http://www.duncancampbell.org/content/talking-gchq-interception-not-required. Interestingly this entire event took place under the shadow of the US Congress voting whether or not to renew the Patriot Act of 2001, see: http://www.ibtimes.com/patriot-act-renewal-senate-overwhelmingly-votes-proceed-1948604; this subject was also brought up in last week's Mind Set Podcast, see: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/ben-emlyn-jones-on-mind-set-podcast-88.html. It has now been approved overwhelmingly by the Senate, and there was never any possibility otherwise in my view. Was this event at Ditchley Park a "charm offensive" the way Duncan Campbell says it was? If so then he himself was brought in to be one of the smiling suits. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was timed specifically to placate the anticipated reaction to the Patriot Act renewal. I doubt very much if anything was talked about at Ditchley Park last month that the Foundation wasn't perfectly happy to have spread all over the media like wildfire. In fact that might have been its specific purpose. Other workshops might well have taken place there to which the press were not invited, ones that had a very different theme and agenda indeed.