Call of Chicago: The Five Eyes Have It

I got a friend over there in the government block
And he knows the situation and he’s taking stock,
I think I’ll call him up now
Put him on the spot, tonight.

— Bob Geldof, “Someone’s Looking At You”

Her Majesty the Queen having graciously given her assent at the end of last month, the Investigatory Powers Bill has become the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016. And what’s the Investigatory Powers Act when it’s at home? At its bottom, it’s two Acts in one. The first half essentially provides legal cover to the program of mass surveillance that MI5 and GCHQ have been doing in the United Kingdom for years and years: gathering the metadata (who called who when from where) on every phone or text message in the UK and storing it. The second half allows a remarkably wide spectrum of the British government to access the ICRs (Internet Connection Records) of every website, app, and similar reached from or based in the UK. When you browse good old pelgranepress.com, GCHQ (and Scotland Yard, and the fire department, and Food Standards Scotland, and … ) can find out when you visited (though not which specific page), how long you stayed, your ISP number, and a few more interesting facts, all without the tedium of a warrant. (Further provisions allow the British government to hack individuals or even entire cities, but they have to get permission from a panel of judges for that.) As you might infer, that means staying underground in Night’s Black Agents just got harder, for Agents and vampires alike.

But ha ha ha, I hear you chortle, I’m an American so GCHQ can GCHFO. Not so fast, my fine patriotic friend. First of all, as Edward Snowden revealed, the NSA (in the great tradition of public-private partnership) works with telecommunications and Internet companies to gather and store similar metadata and ICRs. The recently enacted USA Freedom Act of 2015 ended the legal authority for the NSA to maintain its own metadata archive (unless it didn’t) but reinforced the NSA’s access to theoretically private corporate versions of the same records. (The USA Freedom Act not only extended most of the relevant provisions of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 but also managed to achieve an even more bleakly ironic name.) And of course, none of these laws by careful design did anything about Five Eyes cooperation, slightly better known as ECHELON.

ECHELON began in 1961 as a cooperative effort between the NSA and GCHQ to monitor (i.e., tap and record) all communications satellite transmissions, then spread to telephone switchboards, transoceanic cable traffic, radio signals, and finally the nascent Internet in 1981. By then the US and UK SIGINT agencies had been joined by the relevant surveillance forces in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand: hence Five Eyes. Even then, that was a misnomer, as Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway had varying degrees of access to Five Eyes product. India, Israel, Sweden, Switzerland, South Korea, and Singapore (among others) have more limited deals in exchange for hosting ECHELON SIGINT facilities. France almost made it Six Eyes in 2009 (France has its own Intelligence Act of 2015 for metadata and ICR collection) but the CIA vetoed the full partnership required. (Don’t worry, France gets most of the benefits of Five Eyes membership under the LUSTRE agreement of 2011.) Because it is a full partnership: if, say, some pesky and ironically named law prevents the NSA from snooping on American citizens’ records, the NSA just asks Canada’s CSE to snoop on American records, all legal under Canadian law. And the NSA is sure to return the favor if the CSE wants to track some Canadian radical in Toronto.

The Heat is (Echel) ON

When it’s too hot to breathe
And it’s too hot to think.
There’s always someone looking at you.

— Bob Geldof, “Someone’s Looking At You”

So what care you about such civics metadata? You’ve got vampires to kill. Not so fast, my burned buddy: All those eyes could start watching you any minute, especially after you start setting off bombs and shooting people near security cameras. Even if who you were shooting didn’t show up on the cameras.

This might turn up in any number of ways. If the Agents have an active opposition within that government — vampire infiltrators, Project EDOM, or just a grimly determined Javert — then they need to stay off the Internet. And off their phones. Even burner phones, or perhaps even especially burner phones.

The Director can abstract this by adding +1 to all Heat roll Difficulties in a Five Eyes or associated country for each 2 points spent on Research or Network (looking on the Internet; calling someone for help). If the Director thinks a certain investigation or operation involves a little too much Web browsing or phone activity, she can always toss in another +1 on top.

Heat is also hotter in the Five Eyes’ targets, of course: the NSA makes a very deliberate habit of owning all electronic communications in Iran and Pakistan, for instance. Just quickly scanning the map, it looks like your best bet is a country like Uzbekistan where the government uses old-fashioned surveillance to track foreigners but doesn’t have an electronic cooperation deal with the NSA, or a region mostly off the security systems’ radar like West Africa or the Caribbean.

If the Agents whine that “of course they were on Tor” or whatever, she can remind them that the NSA cracked those systems years ago, but allow points spent on Digital Intrusion or Preparedness to “shield” points spent on Research and Network in Five Eyes nations. If the Agents have a case officer or other contact in ECHELON, they might even get a free “Heat shield” for their online (or on-phone) activities … as long as they do a favor or five for their Big Brother, of course.