Crying foul, again: Black Lives Matter

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. London isn't like other countries urban centers. It's Britain's center of everything, government, commerce, culture. But on the other side of the pandemic, the big smoke may not end up dominating quite so much. Maybe that's a good thing. And it's not every day that you get to learn about the cloak and dagger world of spies. But now a researcher has uncovered a decades old pact between spooks from five European countries. Can the alliance continue to do its covert work? First up though, Minneapolis has been engulfed by protests this week over the killing of an unarmed black man by police. On Monday, George Floyd died after a white officer pinned him down kneeling on his neck. In a video, he can be heard repeatedly telling police, I can't breathe. Overnight, protesters threw fireworks at police and set a police building alight. The governor requested reinforcements from the National Guard. The protests have spread to New York, Denver, Phoenix. In Columbus, Ohio, demonstrators tried to enter the State House. In Los Angeles, members of the movement Black Lives Matter gathered outside the hall of Justice. For them, the phrase I can't breathe harks back to an incident that galvanized the movement in 2014. Then Black Lives Matter had Momentum, real cultural currency. It felt like their calls for systemic change might be answered. This week's fiery protests are a reminder that the anger behind the movement hasn't diminished, even if it might seem the movement itself has.

So that phrase I can't breathe that we heard in Minneapolis is very resonant of what we heard from 2014 with a man, Eric Garner, who was choked to death by a policeman.

Adam Roberts is the Economist's Midwest correspondent.

He was saying I can't breathe. And the phrase became a phrase that was used by Black Lives Matter to complain about police brutality and the frequent killing of African American men by the police.

I mean, that's similar to what happened in Minneapolis. I mean, how has Black Lives Matter been responding to this week's incident?

I think we haven't seen as much use of the term Black Lives Matter this week as we might have done a few years ago. But in effect, we're seeing the same thing. It's where ordinary African Americans are absolutely outraged by the behavior of the police, the bad training that they have, and they're furious and they demand that something serious is done to prevent this happening in greater numbers. So this is resonant of what happened in the past few years. And the fact that we're heading into the warm summer months when more of these things seem to happen could suggest there'll be more protests and more incidents to fuel the fire.

But Black Lives Matter seems to have.

Faded from public view somewhat in the past few years.

What's been happening with them in the meantime?

Well, it's interesting to look back over the last few years and ask, what did happen to Black Lives Matter? Because in some ways, it has faded as a presence, as a force. If you, if you look at the interest online for Black Lives Matter in the weeks and the years before, these latest police killings actually had declined a great deal. If you were to look at the individuals who are involved in Black Lives Matter, they haven't been able to sustain the same level of high profile discussion and media attention that they once did. Among the various founders and activists in Black Lives Matter that I've been speaking to in recent months, they've told me that after the election of Donald Trump In 2016, their phone calls went dead. No longer did TV producers and others want to have them on their shows. The interest from the mass media in Black Lives Matter seemed to drift away. Since about 2016, Black Lives Matter has gone into a more dormant phase, but.

Yet hasn't disappeared altogether. I mean, what do you think are the structural issues that have led to that evident decline or at least slipping out of view.

Well, one of the problems with Black Lives Matter is that it decided to form this non hierarchical structure for the organization so they wouldn't pick a single charismatic leader to be the front man or the front woman of the organization. They consciously say that they don't want to have a leader such as Martin Luther King, who could be identified as the face of the organization. Members of the group say that, for example, they don't want to have one leader who could then be assassinated or taken out and therefore to weaken the organization. But the problem with lacking a single charismatic leader is it makes it harder for followers, for donors, partners, to see someone who they can feel in tune with and decide they want to support. And you look at situations such as now with coronavirus, where African Americans are, are being killed at a rate two and a half times greater than white Americans. Black Lives Matter has not emerged as a powerful voice to speak up on that issue. It's not been nimble enough, I think, to really find ways to speak up on issues beyond the violence committed by police and by white vigilantes.

But that's not to say that all of the foot soldiers of the movement have been idle in this time. I mean, what have they been doing?

So there are other ways in which Black Lives Matter has had a great impact. And if you speak to other people, such as one activist I spoke to in Los Angeles who says that the real impact of the charter of the movement has been at a local level. So you look at Black Lives Matter in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in Washington D.C. and you see where activists turn out at local meetings, that's where they have the greatest impact. It's not online, it's not in the mass media. It's the foot soldiers, it's the local activists who actually make a difference and persuade the police to behave differently. This is a sentiment echoed by Patrisse Cullors, who is a co founder, one of the three co founders of Black Lives Matter, when the Economist spoke to her back in 2018.

Local work always impacts the national. And so many of our chapters are working on bell reform. Many of our chapters are working on diverting monies from law enforcement into community responses to violence. This is very powerful work that's happening around the country.

But I mean, the thing that was striking about Black Lives Matter when it was more in the news was the degree to which the sentiment was actually shared across divides of class and color. I mean, what's happened to that?

Well, one of the big reasons that Black Lives Matter had an impact in the mass media and online on a large scale was because of the sympathy of, of white supporters of white liberals who agreed that there was a great problem to be solved. And yet some of these have drifted away. So I spoke to Melina Abdullah, who co founded Black Lives Matter, the local chapter in Los Angeles, and she talks about non black folks having the privilege of being able to feel exhausted by this story and to move away and maybe to take up an interest in something else.

And so what's your view then, in light of all that, about the degree to which Black Lives Matter will get a little bit of a boost, grab more attention in light of the events this week?

Well, I think sadly, these grim events are going to happen again. There'll be more of them. We see that in the summer months you get more violence and the police get more involved in stopping and searching people. So I fear that we may well have other reasons to be speaking again about such misbehavior by the police, and therefore Black Lives Matter has the opportunity to speak up and be noticed again. That said, I haven't seen any evidence that the organization is restructuring or is finding a really dynamic leader to be a strong voice to speak out on these issues to grab the attention. So far, I think the movement is caught between two stools. It's neither dominating the headlines in the way that it did back in 2014, but nor has it completely disappeared. I think it will sustain itself, but it won't be as dominant as it once was.

Adam, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

London is by far the biggest city I've ever lived in. When I first arrived, I couldn't have been more overwhelmed by its size, by.

The number of languages I was hearing.

And by the sheer scope of things to do, to see, to eat.

London is the UK's only really truly global city. I mean, it's arguably Europe's only truly global city.

Duncan Weldon is our Britain Economics correspondent, based naturally in London.

It's a big place. It's a welcoming place. And there's nowhere else in the UK with the same variety of people from all over the world, the same variety of restaurants, the same sort of sheer amount of different museums, theaters, bars.

But even before the pandemic, there were signs that London's polling power was waning. That might seem surprising. The draw of London seems almost inevitable. But the city wasn't always so magnetic.

In the three or four decades immediately after the Second World War, London was very much not in the Ascendant, the city's population peaked just before the Second World War. And after the Second World War, there was a sense in government that London had become too successful, too big compared to the rest of the uk. So there was deliberate effort to sort of constrain London. The land around it was made a green belt on which you couldn't build. Companies were told to relocate out of London to elsewhere in Britain. Manufacturing went into decline and actually by sort of the early 1980s, the population had fallen by a quarter. London was seen as quite a grimy place, not a place you wanted to live. But that really began to change in the 1980s. You had the deregulation of financial services, another start of a finance boom in London. All of the sort of traditional staples of London law. Professional services started to do a lot better. So did creative industries. The population began to grow again. More money came into the city and you go into this sort of virtuous circle. As the transport infrastructure got better, policing got better, schools got better. And so until this virus hit, it looked like we'd had 30 years of London on the rise, both as a city in of itself and relative to the rest of Britain.

Well, look, I'm an enormous fan of the city. I've been here for two decades now. But there is not a single Londoner who doesn't have some gripes about the quality of life.

Oh, absolutely. You know, you're far from alone in that. London usually tops the league tables of pretty much everything in the uk. But one area where it does tend to come towards the bottom is when people are asked about anxiety and life satisfaction. London is in some ways quite a miserable place. In fact, in the decade before the virus hit, more than half a million more British people left the capital than moved to it. One problem with London is it is a very, very expensive place to live. In fact, house prices and rental prices in London for people are about twice as high as they are in the rest of the country. And it's not just housing costs that are higher in London, it's office costs and other commercial renting costs as well. Prime square footage in the capital costs about three times as much as in other cities in southern England and seven to nine times as much as elsewhere in the uk. So one thing we saw even before the virus hit was increasingly large companies saying, we can have a UK office that isn't in London. So Amazon picked Manchester for its major British corporate site in 2018, HSBC, the bank chose to move its retail banking headquarters out to Birmingham in 2017.

And I guess the pandemic sort of exacerbates that trend, that sense of getting out of London being a real saving on cost, if nothing else, completely.

You know, chief financial officers are already eyeing up the savings by reducing their sort of office footprint in expensive locations like London. You know, if people only have to go in two or three times a week, maybe they'll move further out of London somewhere they can get a bigger house, maybe a bit more outdoor space.

But, I mean, many of the world's big cities are expensive. Surely this kind of exodus, this moving of both people and businesses out of these metropolises must be going on elsewhere.

The effect of the pandemic and social distancing is a challenge to urban centres everywhere. But I think there are two particular threats to London. Two of the things that have really made London the city it's become over the last 30 years are basically the two foreigners and fun. Immigration has been very important to London and, you know, Brexit was already going to lead to changes in immigration. The aftermath of this pandemic might also make international migration a bit less than it was. And London is expected exposed to a fall in international immigration, but also fun. You know, people don't just come to London to work, they come to London because it's a good place to live. It's got all of this cultural infrastructure, it's got all of these bars and all of these pubs. And the problem is that social distancing and the need to keep two metres apart from people are a huge challenge to the theatres, they're a huge challenge to how museums work. One hedge fund manager I spoke to said, london without the culture and the restaurants is just a more expensive Frankfurt with more congestion, which might be a little unfair to Frankfurt, but, you know, those sort of sentiments are pretty common.

So if there are all of these people spilling out of London, where will they go? What comparable city do they have to choose?

I mean, obviously the UK has other cities, but London's dominance over the rest of the UK is pretty unusual. When we compare it to other countries, it's not just the political an administrative centre, it's the biggest city in the uk, it's the most productive city in the uk. It's the financial centre, it's also the centre of the cultural and creative industries. You know, to use a U.S. comparison, it's as if you got New York, Louisiana and Washington, D.C. and put them all in one place. Now, before this crisis hit, one big thing the Boris Johnson government was talking about was their hope to Level up growth across the UK to spread prosperity more widely. Now that wasn't about levelling down this crisis though, you know, may spare some of their blushes by spreading growth out more fairly across the country, but not in the way they wanted to do it.

But how deep do you think this could really get? I mean, a lot of what makes London great will still be there when the pandemic has passed. Do you think London might be headed for the kind of decline you described before the 80s?

Yeah, I don't think London is going to go back into a multi decade decline like it had in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Some of the lustre has come off it, some of its core strengths, you know, fun foreigners have been weakened and more home working is a challenge to cities all around the world. London is likely to remain richer and more productive than the rest of the uk. But some of that gap between London and the rest of the UK, which has really become unusually wide over the last 30 years, might start to narrow and in many ways a less centralized country where opportunity is a bit more evenly distributed might be no bad thing.

Duncan, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you very much for having me.

Spying is said to be the world's second oldest profession. The ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu is emphasized the need to know one's enemy. In the Old Testament book of Joshua, Hebrew spies were sent on covert missions to Jericho. Since then, of course, intelligence gathering has become a lot more sophisticated. What hasn't changed is that it's by its very nature a secretive business. And that's why a recent academic paper is such a surprise.

In a pretty rare occurrence, a new spy pact has come to light.

Shashank Joshi is the Economist's defence editor.

A Dutch computer science professor. To the considerable irritation of the Dutch authorities who had kept this under wraps for decades, let the world know about Maximator.

And so what's the history here? How far does it go back?

The pact goes back to 1976 when Denmark joined forces with Germany and Sweden and began intercepting messages sent by satellite and radio. The Netherlands joined in 1978 and France joined in 1985. But it was in 1979 when spies from four countries, this is before France has joined, meeting in a suburb of Munich, very close to the headquarters of the bnd, Germany's foreign spy agency. And they are socializing over a beer and deciding what do we call our budding spy pact? And they look at their beers. They're drinking a local Doppelbock beer, dark malty very nice. And the brand is Maximator. And they think that's it, that's the name for our spy alliance.

And so how is it then that that has come to light after all of these years?

Then a few months ago, we got news that the CIA and German intelligence jointly owned Crypto ag, which was one of the world's most important companies that made cipher machines. These are machines that put diplomatic and military messages into codes so that other people can't read them. And he noticed in these files, this computer science professor, that the operation was known to a few other countries. It was known to Denmark, it was known to the Netherlands, it was known to the Swedes. And he thought, hang on a minute, how do these other countries other than Germany and America know about this operation? So he asked some questions and it became clear through his own sources in Dutch intelligence. It seems, according to this piece, that this alliance had existed since the 1970s. And he realized that this ring had been operating in a very successful way, completely, completely outside the public eye.

So why make these kinds of pacts though? This is notionally, you know, some allies banding together but not letting other allies in on the action. What is the purpose of that kind of alliance?

Well, if you're a small country like Sweden or Denmark, satellite signals intelligence can be an expensive game. You need intercept stations, you need facilities, you need analysts. Some countries may bring particular geographic advantages to the table. For example, the Dutch had intercept stations in the Caribbean that could be very useful for particular purposes. Some countries may have access to particular embassies or compounds. Other countries were seen as not good enough for the game. They just weren't up to scratch. So Belgium, for example, was never invited into this pact because its signals intelligence agencies were simply not good enough. So it's a combination of combining forces becoming more than the sum of your part, but also being very, very secretive about what you have, because of course, if it leaks, if it trickles out, then all of these efforts you've made to steal communications end up all for nothing.

And so, given all that, how does Maximator then figure into the web of other pacts of that sort?

The biggest and most famous signals intelligence alliance is the so called Five Eyes. The alliance between America, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand that is particularly deep and intimate. Maximator is like many of the other smaller pacts that form around particular conflicts or causes. It would be difficult to compare to something as significant as Five Eyes. But former Dutch intelligence officials did tell me that it occasionally had access to some incredibly valuable information that they were not able to share with the Five Eyes. So clearly they have some advantages. On top of that, they're also European, which may be a valuable thing as the gap between America and Europe grows wider.

But surely some of the value of all this is in the very secrecy that has now been taken away from Maximator.

I don't think it'll be too much of an obstacle. It may be slightly awkward for the spies involved now that their meetings and their beer alliance has been revealed, but at the end of the day, we've known about the Five Eyes alliance for decades and it hasn't stopped them hacking into fiber optic cables, servers around the world, all sorts of things. In a similar way, I expect that our Dutch, German, French, Swedish and Danish spies are going to continue to meet up and the game of signals intelligence goes on. And I think the only question is how many more of these kind of European or regional spy pacts exist that we just don't know about right now.

Shashank, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

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