Date: 8/2/07
Author:
Source: Middle East Times

LONDON --  A new exhibition in London lifts the lid on the real-life world of spying, amid concerns about a developing "Big Brother" society and its effects on individual freedoms and civil liberties.

"The Science of ... Spying" opens at the Science Museum Saturday, promising to be "the world's biggest interactive exhibition examining the secrets of modern espionage."

"It is a huge theme that everybody is interested in. Everybody wants to be a spy," said Sara Milne, chief executive of "The Science of ..." series, which has already looked at aliens, and next year plans to focus on climate change.

"We want to go into the real world of spying. We are not doing a James Bond show here. We are dealing with the real life tools of the trade."

Visitors - or "trainee spies" - will be tested on how well they can crack codes, gather covert information, and give a convincing cover story, as well as finding out about the gadgets and techniques used by real-life agents.

Electronic bugging and tracking devices, mini cameras, and remote computer keystroke readers are featured in addition to how current spy technology is affecting our everyday lives, and how it will develop in the future.

Two separate reports last year warned that the UK - where there is a CCTV camera for every 14 people - was becoming a "surveillance society," and was the worst in the Western world alongside Russia for protecting individual privacy.

But despite strong opposition from civil liberties campaigners, Prime Minister Tony Blair is forging ahead with controversial plans for biometric identity cards and "e-passports," which he argues will help national security.

He also wants the police to widen the DNA database to include people who have been arrested but released without charge and also increase the remote monitoring of car journeys.

The show, put together with help from former agents at Britain's MI6 overseas intelligence agency, British military intelligence, and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), hopes to raise awareness of such issues, Milne said.

"It is opening up that whole debate," added Harry Ferguson, who worked for MI6 overseas in the 1980s and 1990s. More safeguards were now needed to protect the private citizen, he stated. He said the show accurately reflects the rapid changes in the world's second-oldest profession in the last 20 years, but also how the relative ease of electronic intelligence gathering has created its own problems.

The 9/11 Commission in the US highlighted deficiencies in piecing together intelligence before the September 11, 2001 attacks. And after the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, claims that president Saddam Hussein was amassing weapons of mass destruction were later disproved.

Ferguson, who has written two books based on his time with a customs team targeting heroin smugglers, said choosing the right information was getting harder as technology threw up more and more potential leads.

It was also forcing some terrorist suspects to go back to "Cold War" espionage tactics like "dead-letter drops" and "brush contacts", knowing they cannot escape the spies electronically, he added.

"The buzzword is 'data-mining.' Now there is so much gathering of intelligence, but finding out where the important information is, is where a lot of energy is being spent," he said. "[The intelligence services] are always complaining they have not got enough manpower to do it. What really needs to happen, when it comes down to it, is hard surveillance, people on the ground, talking to contacts."

Ferguson, who also hopes the show will encourage children to be the spies of the future, said that appeared to be the case after two men arrested under anti-terror laws last week were released without charge Wednesday.

Angry Muslim leaders in Birmingham, east central England, have said there was no evidence to arrest or charge the pair - or seven others also detained - despite a six-month surveillance operation.

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