The world is coming to grips with the depth and scale of government surveillance following revelations, released by whistleblower Edward Snowden, about the US’s National Security Agency (NSA) Prism program. On 9 July a panel of experts convened at the Frontline Club to debate the balance between personal privacy and national security.

Mark Urban (left), Sir Malcolm Rifkind (centre), John Kampfner (right), Photo: Jim Treadway

“Balance does not exist,” argued author and commentator John Kampfner, who advises Google on free expression.  Kampfner said that because citizens demand total security, governments simply “cannot allow for balance.”

A deeper question than balance seemed to emerge in the debate, however –  that of trust. Can governments and corporations be trusted to wield the deeply penetrative surveillance technology that has so recently arrived in their hands?`

Sir Malcolm Rifkind believes they can.  The Chairman of the UK’s Intelligence and Security Committee and a former Foreign and Defence Secretary, opened his remarks by saying:

“Let’s start from the presumption that the people who run GCHQ, MI6 and MI5 are decent, responsible people, with high levels of integrity.  I think it’s a reasonable assumption.”

The Director of Oxford’s Internet Institute, Helen Margetts pointed out:

“PRISM is [said] to have cost $20 million, which is completely and utterly ludicrous.  As one tech blog put it, most security consultants ‘won’t get out of bed for less than $100 million’.  The actual cost is probably billions.”

Academic and journalist John Naughton disagreed with Rifkind:

“What comes out [from authorities] is, ‘Trust Us.’  And the trouble with that is that, in recent decades at least, our political masters haven’t deserved our trust…”

The big problem is that the technology operates outside of the laws. . . . Without a warrant – in this country – GCHQ can scoop up all of our email metadata [and] all of our mobile phone metadata, and . . . all of your click streams are collected.  In other words, every website we’ve ever visited. . . . You have an amazingly detailed picture of everybody. My question is:  in the long run, can you actually square this with liberal democracy?

John Naughton (left), Helen Margetts (right); Photo: Jim Treadway

Rifkind offered a powerful counterpoint:

“Ask yourself . . . why in America, since 9/11, there’s not been a single further example of that kind of a mass atrocity, or why in this country, apart from the 7/7 bombings, not a single person has been killed – since Lee Rigby, a few weeks ago.  In each and every year since 7/7 –  or since 9/11, whichever you prefer – there have been at least one and sometimes two terrorist plots – in this country – that have been uncovered. . . . I know for a fact that in each of these terrorist plots that were disrupted, it was metadata [that] was a substantial part of the evidence…”

In that light, the chair Mark Urban, an author and an diplomatic and defence editor for BBC Two’s Newsnight, asked:

“To what extent do we as citizens . . . with a phone and a computer, give our consent to the companies?  Is it possible to live a modern, networked life, without giving that consent?”

To which Naughton answered:

“Our futures are bounded by the nightmares of two old Etonian writers.  One of them is George Orwell, who thought we’d be destroyed by the things we fear.  And one of them is Aldous Huxley, who thought we’d be destroyed by the things we love – things that delight us [iPhones and Google etc]. We’re sleepwalking into a nightmare. . . . We are sleepwalking into this amazing, dystopian world, and we love it.”

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/the-trade-off-individual

As Vin Ray introduced BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson to an audience at the Frontline Club on Tuesday 15 January, he joked that the evening would be a cross between ‘This Is Your Life’ and ‘Desert Island Discs’.

The first clip that Simpson chose to illustrate his influences was from the 1956 film adaptation of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which made a strong impression on him as a boy.

“The really frightening thing seemed to me at the age of 14–15 was that the state could destroy the memory of what had happened, that it could change history and make it impossible for anybody else to check it out. And this of course happened in both the Soviet Union under Stalin and in China under Mao.”

Before Simpson became the foreign correspondent we all recognise and to cover those states threatening individuals’ memory and voice, he started his career with the BBC in 1966 as a trainee sub-editor, mostly subbing the weather forecasts. He spoke with a passionate loathing about his months of servitude, and the ‘slave driving’ masters in charge.

“I was absolutely crap at it and I hated it. . . . I escaped from there after 15 months and it was like digging a tunnel out of Stalag Luft 7.”

And what an escape.

On his first day as a reporter, Simpson was punched by then prime minister, Harold Wilson, for asking him if he was going to call a general election, but soon found himself covering the apartheid in South Africa and learning lessons in objectivity from Sir Hugh Greene, director-general of the BBC.

“He said that of course objectivity is the central quality about reporting, but that’s not the same thing as balancing two opposites and regarding them as having equal validity . . . we are not unbiased as between apartheid and it’s effects. I’ve never forgotten that . . . If governments shoot their citizens down, if governments stamp on their faces, as it were, with a boot, if they lock up large numbers of people for merely saying the things they say, then I think you have a duty to tell people about that.”

In South Africa, he also learnt from fellow reporters Charles Wheeler and Brian Barron, and back in the UK from the ever-beautiful Martha Gellhorn.

“She was able to turn what she saw into words in a way that not many of us are able to do. And always there, somehow or other, there’s a fire burning, just as there is, or was, with Charles Wheeler—the sense that the world is a wicked place and it’s her function to tell people about it, to describe it to people. . . . I do feel that my career has been spent in the shallows—she was in the deep.”

As his career has escalated, Simpson has become a generalists, a big name flown in to cover major events all over the world. Yet he is still capable of pulling off the biggest exclusive he, and possibly the BBC, has ever had. In 2001, Simpson led the first foreign cameras into Kabul after the fall of the Taliban in what Martin Bell and Jeremy Bowen described as the best bit of TV news they had ever seen.

Asked whether he had his expectations shattered along his career by the personalities he had met, Simpson admitted that he had found Gaddafi to be “a weirdo airhead who no one ever brought to heel”, Saddam to be “mensch, a tough man with a real sense of humour” and Mugabe to be “highly intelligent”. “But,” he added, “the ‘arsehole quality’ always comes through.”

Ray put a final question to him about fatherhood:

“I don’t want to get killed and I want [my young son] to remember me, but I’ve done this for decades and I don’t want to give up doing it. I feel that if he has any liking or respect for me, it will be partly because of what I do for a living and I don’t want to stop doing it.”

Watch the highlights below and the full event here.

By Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi

Paul Mason, the music teacher turned Newsnight economics editor, shared some trade secrets at the Frontline Club last night as part of its Reflection series in association with the BBC College of Journalism.

Mason, whose first live report for the BBC was on 9/11 in 2001, told interviewer Matthew Eltringham, editor of the BBC College of Journalism website, that as well as being driven by explaining "people, planet and profit", his reporting was about "learning all the time".

Mason grew up in Leigh, Greater Manchester and attended a Catholic grammar school where a big focus was brass band. "I was a child musician," he said, which is why it seemed natural for him to study music at Sheffield University.

In a bid to escape music and try something new, Mason studied politics as a second subject. It was some time later, after years of teaching and writing music, that Mason discovered a passion for journalism. "I never liked teaching. I loved telling stories," he said.

Even before he started at Reed Elsevier during the 1990s, Mason already had an idea about what good journalism should do.

A reporter has to record detail. Whether or not at the time it seems relevant. I love the observation of detail. You can’t do that in a one-minute package, though the best of my colleagues can.

To illustrate the point Mason chose a clip from an early report by the journalist Ray Gosling on life inside the Whittingham Hospital asylum in Lancashire.

When we were kids in Greater Manchester, Ray Gosling was the most brilliant reporter. When I first became a journalist, I thought this is what you should be doing.

What Gosling shares with two other journalists Martin Adler and George Orwell, is an "unflinching gaze" and the abilty to capture the unadorned truth, said Mason.

Mason chose a short clip Adler shot in Iraq, whch showed the fear and confusion that clouded US solidiers relations with ordinary Iraqis. "That’s the kind of journalism you should aspire to. It confronts you with lots of things at once." 

When asked, Mason said such work could be created at the BBC and challenge "group think" culture. That is why there are so many layers, with programmes like Panorama, Newsnight and Radio 4’s Today, he said.

"One of the reasons is so you can bring the whole pallet of reaction."

While fascinated by the craft of reporting, Mason is also enthusiastic about the way social media is changing news reporting.

When the internet came along it was like Christmas to me. Long before I was a journalist I got what it could do.

He was the first BBC journalist to start a blog, despite being told by bosses that such things were "not in the BBC’s universe". Since then Mason has built a huge presence throught both his blog and on Twitter, where he is followed by more than 18,000 people.

Engaging with his audience online "informs my journalism", Mason said. But, he added, the rise of 24-hour-news and social media also means journalists have to raise their game. Instead of just news bulletins, "we have to have instant analysis, instant Panorama".