The chilling effect¶

A journalist investigating this arrangement will, in the course of their research, interact with infrastructure connected to the provider’s network. The undisclosed recipient will know a journalist is investigating, who their sources are, and how far along they are, in time to act on that knowledge. The MCLU does not need to enumerate the actions available to a party in this position in Ankh-Morpork. The city’s history provides adequate illustration.

A guild official investigating their own provider’s exposure will do so using the guild’s communications infrastructure, which is managed by the cloud provider. The investigation of the surveillance arrangement is conducted through the surveillance arrangement. This is either an unfortunate coincidence of infrastructure or a remarkably effective feature of the apparatus, and the MCLU no longer assumes coincidence.

Sources who approached the MCLU did so at professional risk, through channels they believed to be reasonably private. The MCLU cannot now guarantee those channels were as private as either party understood. We have not named them. We are saying this publicly because they deserve to know the conditions under which their information is being used.

The effect of knowing, or suspecting, that enquiries are logged and forwarded to the subject of those enquiries is to make such enquiries more consequential than they should be. Some people will decide the enquiry is not worth making. The arrangement continues. This is, if not the intended purpose of the apparatus, a convenient feature of it, and the MCLU considers naming it directly to be the available counter.

We are still waiting for acknowledgement that the apparatus exists. We have noted how long we have been waiting. The record will reflect it.