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jimv1 Great Old One Joined: 10 Aug 2005 Total posts: 2645 Gender: Male |
 Posted: 08-06-2013 10:40 Post subject: |
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| GCHQ has been part of all this surveillance for years as a watchdog for the US. |
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| Pietro_Mercurios Heuristically Challenged
Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 08-06-2013 11:03 Post subject: |
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| jimv1 wrote: | | GCHQ has been part of all this surveillance for years as a watchdog for the US. |
Long before the internet was anything more than a bright idea, they had ECHELON in place to do much the same thing. |
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| Mythopoeika Boring petty conservative
Joined: 18 Sep 2001 Total posts: 8820 Location: Not far from Bedford Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 08-06-2013 13:42 Post subject: |
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| Pietro_Mercurios wrote: | | jimv1 wrote: | | GCHQ has been part of all this surveillance for years as a watchdog for the US. |
Long before the internet was anything more than a bright idea, they had ECHELON in place to do much the same thing. |
Yes...I hardly think this is news.
It's been known for years that GCHQ's ECHELON program has been operating hand-in-hand with the US CARNIVORE program.
All this recent talk of PRISM is just an extension of that earlier program, and suddenly everybody's talking about it in the press like it's a sudden shock revelation. |
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| jimv1 Great Old One Joined: 10 Aug 2005 Total posts: 2645 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 09-06-2013 11:43 Post subject: |
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Whatever it's been called historically, dismissing it as old news or downplaying it as 'we've seen it all before' isn't going to make the issue of our communications being monitored for whatever purpose go away.
As I've said before, there's always a mission and function creep attached to the surveillance initiatives rolled out over us.
What is more saddening is the stance taken by William Hague who has offered this rather insightful comment.
| Quote: | "If you are a law-abiding citizen of this country going about your business and your personal life you have nothing to fear – nothing to fear about the British state or intelligence agencies listening to the contents of your phone calls or anything like that. Indeed you will never be aware of all the things those agencies are doing to stop your identify being stolen and to stop a terrorist blowing you up tomorrow.
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I really thought we'd gone beyond 'Nothing to hide, nothing to fear', years ago. |
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| Ronson8 Things can only get better.
Great Old One Joined: 31 Jul 2001 Total posts: 5970 Location: MK Gender: Male |
| Posted: 09-06-2013 12:03 Post subject: |
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| If we want to our government to protect us from terrorists and extremists it's surely a price worth paying. |
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| jimv1 Great Old One Joined: 10 Aug 2005 Total posts: 2645 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 09-06-2013 12:20 Post subject: |
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| Ronson8 wrote: | | If we want to our government to protect us from terrorists and extremists it's surely a price worth paying. |
Ah yes. The tender care of a benign government keeping us safe and warm at night.
The point is, it's not just our government. It's the US government keeping an eye on communications, probably including MPs of all parties, journalists etc. |
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| JamesWhitehead Piffle Prospector Joined: 02 Aug 2001 Total posts: 5543 Location: Manchester, UK Gender: Male |
| Posted: 09-06-2013 12:35 Post subject: |
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When we think of surveillance, we tend to think initially of private conversations we might not want to share with the world. When I say "we" there, I mean the few dozen left who would sooner take a dump in public than bleat out their affairs on a mobile in a crowded place.
The science of filtering the sewage of contemporary communications for nuggets of security interest must be fearsome indeed. I wonder if They have twigged yet that terrorists now employ the cute kitty code, where their nefarious plans are disguised as a series of photographs of cats. Meetings are arranged by the Terrorist Ring Back system - not a word being spoken. I'm also informed that that ROFLists encode their evil business as emoticons.
The beauty of these systems lies in the way they render acts of terror unnecessary, all civilization seeming to have been pulverized by these simple but terrible acts of faux-communication.  |
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| Ronson8 Things can only get better.
Great Old One Joined: 31 Jul 2001 Total posts: 5970 Location: MK Gender: Male |
| Posted: 09-06-2013 13:16 Post subject: |
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Sums it up nicely James.  |
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| Jonfairway Great Old One Joined: 09 Mar 2005 Total posts: 1163 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 10-06-2013 12:50 Post subject: |
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so it is all just normal
they were keeping an eye on him as being a threat
yet he walks thro street and chops some ones head off..
cant watch all of the people all of the time
but could watch some of the people all of the time ?
you know.... the ones they have down as terrorists... |
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| jimv1 Great Old One Joined: 10 Aug 2005 Total posts: 2645 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 22-06-2013 10:27 Post subject: |
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More GCHQ revelations and an excellent piece by Henry Porter.....
| Quote: | GCHQ revelations: mastery of the internet will mean mastery of everyone
If you think loss of privacy is a price worth paying for security, ask what a totally monitored future would look like.
Henry Porter
The Guardian, Friday 21 June 2013 18.50 BST
'This is for everyone" was the message that flashed around the Olympic Stadium, as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the world wide web, was revealed hunched over a computer in the London 2012 opening ceremony. With Edward Snowden's latest dramatic leak that the British GCHQ and the US's NSA are executing a plan – codenamed MTI, or Mastering the Internet – to collect a significant amount of the world's communications, that generous slogan, which applied as much to the web as the spirit of the Games, now has a rather sinister undertone. The web is for everyone and so, we learn, is surveillance.
Britain and the US have boasted of their democratic virtues for generations and they also gave the internet to the world – the Americans providing the network and the British the idea. But now the two countries are rapidly perfecting a surveillance system that will allow them to capture and analyse a large quantity of international traffic consisting of emails, texts, phone calls, internet searches, chat, photographs, blogposts, videos and the many uses of Google.
The system is currently vacuuming signals from up to 200 fibre- optic cables at the physical points of entry into the country, and will eventually allow for the shift that will occur in internet traffic with the continued rise of Asia. Mastering the Internet treats the rights of billions of foreign web users, the possible menace to the privacy of British and American citizens and the duties of their legislators with equal contempt. After Iraq and the banking crash, the world may come to see MTI as further evidence of a heedless delinquency in two of the world's oldest democracies.
As the enormous implications of this story become clear, about such things as the lack of meaningful oversight in both countries, the use of commercial companies and the wholesale disregard for the fundamentals of our two democratic systems, it's important to recognise that a decisive moment has been reached.
The impact of all dramatic stories eventually fades, but this revelation is of pivotal importance: either we allow the completion of MTI, or we demand that the two agencies are brought to account and properly controlled by the politicians that we put in power to look after our interests, not to squander our freedoms.
It is an alarming fact that over the last two weeks, as details of Prism and the covert acquisition of phone records have been laid bare, politician after politician, on both sides of the Atlantic and from both sides of the left-right divide, has argued that the loss of a little liberty is a small sacrifice to make for security. Most appreciate that no such transaction exists in the real world, for the very reason that those making the argument stand to gain so much from public acquiescence. This is about the unscrutinised power of a deep state and its burgeoning influence on society. Thanks to Snowden, the world has evidence of the totally monitored future that GCHQ and NSA plan for us, and that political establishments turn a blind eye to. As he said of the US's director of national intelligence James Clapper's assurances to Congress, "Baldly lying to the public is the evidence of subverted democracy."
That is a vital point in this debate, yet fear still trumps everything. On Tuesday, the head of NSA, General Keith B Alexander, and the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, insisted that many terror plots had been stopped by surveillance. In Britain, the foreign secretary, William Hague, who is in charge of GCHQ and must know about the project to Master the Internet, was joined by three former home secretaries, Jack Straw, Lord (John) Reid and Alan Johnson, to reassure us that mass surveillance was indeed necessary to make interdictions and, in the case of these Labour ministers, that further powers were needed.
All of them, especially Straw, a former foreign secretary, must have had some idea of the scope of GCHQ and NSA operations. So why are they continuing to lobby for more powers under the communications data bill, when the ones already granted to GCHQ under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and to the NSA under the Patriot Act appear to provide all the access required?
It is possible to get the attack on civil liberties out of proportion in this debate and play down the successful interruptions of terror plots by web and phone surveillance. Yet it is vital to stress that good police and intelligence work on the ground are as much responsible for foiling terror as interceptions. The point about these latest revelations is that they show there are more than adequate powers for interception on both sides of the Atlantic and that the terror agenda and, to a lesser degree, the fear of paedophilia, may well have been used to elaborate a huge system of espionage and domestic surveillance.
The battle ahead is intellectual. What is worrying is the complacency in the centre ground, expressed by respected political commentators like David Brooks, Thomas Friedman and Bill Keller in the New York Times, the FT's Gideon Rachman and the Independent's Steve Richards, who seem happy to countenance losing a little liberty to make the world safer. None of the Americans compared their government's response to the loss of life from terror with its response to the vastly greater and no less ugly loss of life from gun crime. Their British counterparts, meanwhile, are sometimes guilty of being far too impressed with power, especially the dark energy of the intelligence agencies, as well as importing some of the inconsistencies and blind spots in American opinion.
The story of MTI must surely shake that complacency and demand a review of the profit-and-loss account in the safety versus liberty debate. And that must take in the effect the actions and views of a generation of middle-aged politicians, journalists and spies will have on people aged under 25, who may have to live with total surveillance under regimes that may be much less benign than the ones we know. As I have asked before, will my generation pass on a society that is substantially less free than the one we inherited, together with tools of oppression never before seen?
We are fond of saying that the younger generation doesn't know the meaning of the word privacy, but what you give away voluntarily and what the state takes are as different as charity and tax. Privacy is the defining quality of a free people. Snowden's compelling leaks show us that mastery of the internet will ineluctably mean mastery over the individual.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/21/gchq-mastery-internet-mastery-everyone
Nothing to hide, nothing to fear. In the light of the latest McLibel news, the question I'm asking myself this morning is if they have a record of your data what could they ADD to it? I'm also a bit concerned that more and more people have accepted the conditioning and are finding the principles of the surveillance state 'normal' and what should be expected. Happy to sacrifice their privacy to a free phone app, and letting privacy and freedom slip away. |
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| theyithian Keeping the British end up
Joined: 29 Oct 2002 Total posts: 11649 Location: Vermilion Sands Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 23-06-2013 05:47 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | State Although intrusive surveillance does infringe a few liberties, it's necessary if you are to be protected from terrible things.
Citizen (anxiously) What terrible things?
State Can't tell you, I'm afraid, but believe us they are truly terrible. And, by the way, surveillance has already prevented some terrible things.
Citizen Such as?
State Sorry, can't go into details about those either.
Citizen So how do I know that this surveillance racket isn't just bureaucratic empire building?
State You don't need to worry about that because it's all done under legal authority.
Citizen So how does that work?
State Regrettably, we can't go into details because if we did so then the bad guys might get some ideas.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/22/gchq-internet-snooping-kafkaesque |
This is what you get when you feed the beast. Once you invite the state to do that which you, your friends, your family and your neighbors once did for each other, the power-hungry decide they rather like making decisions on your behalf and take all the control they can get. |
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| jimv1 Great Old One Joined: 10 Aug 2005 Total posts: 2645 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 23-06-2013 11:53 Post subject: |
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| theyithian wrote: | | Quote: | State Although intrusive surveillance does infringe a few liberties, it's necessary if you are to be protected from terrible things.
Citizen (anxiously) What terrible things?
State Can't tell you, I'm afraid, but believe us they are truly terrible. And, by the way, surveillance has already prevented some terrible things.
Citizen Such as?
State Sorry, can't go into details about those either.
Citizen So how do I know that this surveillance racket isn't just bureaucratic empire building?
State You don't need to worry about that because it's all done under legal authority.
Citizen So how does that work?
State Regrettably, we can't go into details because if we did so then the bad guys might get some ideas.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/22/gchq-internet-snooping-kafkaesque |
This is what you get when you feed the beast. Once you invite the state to do that which you, your friends, your family and your neighbors once did for each other, the power-hungry decide they rather like making decisions on your behalf and take all the control they can get. |
That article also points out that since RIPA, unsavvy Ministers were unaware of the floodgates it could open so I'd say there's been a laissez-faire attitude to the whole implementation. Probably not wilful, but ignorance by Home Secretary after Home Secretary. This is giving them the benefit of the doubt though. 'Autotuned' Hague has not been been giving full answers to questions raised. 'No case to answer' is a cunning way of getting around stating what is and isn't true.
As I've been saying for yonks, the surveillance state is making suspects of us all.But if you're picturing 1984, I'd say the reality is more Brazil. Buttle/Tuttle - what's the difference?. Not ruthless jackboot efficiency but the duplicity, innefficiency and corruption that we know has a stranglehold on the system. And 'looking after us' we have a search process that probably involves a computer algorithm and we all know how efficient government computer systems are.
It's great that it's protecting us from terrorists but who's going to protect us from this setup if it all goes wrong? Our status as individuals in a democratic society is under a real threat. Secret courts, no legal aid etc...you see where this is heading? |
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| JamesWhitehead Piffle Prospector Joined: 02 Aug 2001 Total posts: 5543 Location: Manchester, UK Gender: Male |
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| jimv1 Great Old One Joined: 10 Aug 2005 Total posts: 2645 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 25-06-2013 18:03 Post subject: |
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A new low. Trying to find dirt and smear the family of a murdered teenager. Evidence they were looking for included participation in demonstrations.
As if the right to demonstrate or campaign is an illegal or heinous activity instead of a legitimate message to the powers that be.
I find another of my concerns about the surveillance state tools falling into the hands of a less benign future government echoed by a senior intelligence officer in this article.
| Quote: | How can we invest our trust in a government that spies on us?
We should not fear some Orwellian future state where we're subjected to total electronic scrutiny – it's our present reality
George Monbiot
The Guardian, Monday 24 June 2013 20.30 BST
'If you are a law-abiding citizen of this country, going about your business and your personal life, you have nothing to fear." That's how William Hague, the foreign secretary, responded to the revelations of mass surveillance in the US and the UK. Try telling that to Stephen Lawrence's family.
Four police officers were deployed to spy on the family and friends of the black teenager murdered by white racists. The Lawrences and the people who supported their fight for justice were law-abiding citizens going about their business. Yet undercover police were used, one of the spies now tells us, to hunt for "disinformation" and "dirt". Their purpose? "We were trying to stop the campaign in its tracks."
The two unfolding spy stories resonate powerfully with each other. One, gathered by Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, shows how police surveillance has been comprehensively perverted. Instead of defending citizens and the public realm, it has been used to protect the police from democratic scrutiny and stifle attempts to engage in politics.
The other, arising from the documents exposed by Edward Snowden, shows that the US and the UK have been involved in the mass interception of our phone calls and use of the internet. William Hague insists that we should "have confidence in the work of our intelligence agencies, and in their adherence to the law and democratic values". Why?
Here are a few of the things we have learned about undercover policing in Britain. A unit led by a policeman called Bob Lambert deployed officers to spy on peaceful activists. They adopted the identities of dead children and then infiltrated protest groups. Nine of the 11 known spies formed long-term relationships with women in the groups, in some cases (including Lambert's) fathering children with them. Then they made excuses and vanished.
They left a trail of ruined lives, fatherless children and women whose confidence and trust have been wrecked beyond repair. They have also walked away from other kinds of mayhem. On Friday we discovered that Lambert co-wrote the leaflet for which two penniless activists spent three years in the high court defending a libel action brought by McDonald's. The police never saw fit to inform the court that one of their own had been one of the authors.
Bob Lambert has been accused of using a false identity during a criminal trial. And, using parliamentary privilege, the MP Caroline Lucas alleged that he planted an incendiary device in a branch of Debenhams while acting as an agent provocateur. The device exploded, causing £300,000 of damage. Lambert denies the allegation.
Police and prosecutors also failed to disclose, during two trials of climate-change activists, that an undercover cop called Mark Kennedy had secretly taped their meetings, and that his recordings exonerated the protesters. Twenty people were falsely convicted. Those convictions were later overturned.
If the state is prepared to abuse its powers and instruments so widely and gravely in cases such as this, where there is a high risk of detection, and if it is prepared to intrude so far into people's lives that its officers live with activists and father their children, what is it not prepared to do while spying undetectably on our private correspondence?
Already we know that electronic surveillance has been used in this country for purposes other than the perennial justifications of catching terrorists, foiling foreign spies and preventing military attacks. It was deployed, for example, to spy on countries attending the G20 meeting the UK hosted in 2009. If the government does this to other states, which might have the capacity to detect its spying and which certainly have the means to object to it, what is it doing to defenceless citizens?
It looks as if William Hague may have misled parliament a fortnight ago. He claimed that "to intercept the content of any individual's communications in the UK requires a warrant signed personally by me, the home secretary, or by another secretary of state".
We now discover that these ministers can also issue general certificates, renewed every six months, which permit mass interception of the kind that GCHQ has been conducting. Among the certificates issued to GCHQ is a "global" one authorising all its operations, including the trawling of up to 600m phone calls and 39m gigabytes of electronic information a day. A million ministers, signing all day, couldn't keep up with that.
The best test of the good faith of an institution is the way it deals with past abuses. Despite two years of revelations about abusive police spying, the British government has yet to launch a full public inquiry. Bob Lambert, who ran the team, fathered a child by an innocent activist he deceived, co-wrote the McDonald's leaflet, is alleged to have lied in court and has been accused by an MP of firebombing, was awarded an MBE in 2008. He now teaches at St Andrews University, where he claims to have a background in "counter-terrorism".
The home office minister Nick Herbert has stated in parliament that it's acceptable for police officers to have sex with activists, for the sake of their "plausibility". Does this sound to you like a state in which we should invest our trust?
Talking to Sunday's Observer, a senior intelligence source expressed his or her concerns about mass surveillance. "If there was the wrong political change, it could be very dangerous. All you need is to have the wrong government in place." But it seems to me that any government prepared to subject its citizens to mass surveillance is by definition the wrong one. No one can be trusted with powers as wide and inscrutable as these.
In various forms – Conservative, New Labour, the coalition – we have had the wrong government for 30 years. Across that period its undemocratic powers have been consolidated. It has begun to form an elective dictatorship, in which the three major parties are united in their desire to create a security state; to wage unprovoked wars; to defend corporate power against democracy; to act as a doormat for the United States; to fight political dissent all the way to the bedroom and the birthing pool. There's no need to wait for the "wrong" state to arise to conclude that mass surveillance endangers liberty, pluralism and democracy. We're there already
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/how-trust-state-spies-citizens[/b]
A recent comment from the Guardian struck home. It went along the lines of...
Once the tools of a fascist state are in place, it will only be a matter of time before one arises.
This is what we have to fear. |
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| Quake42 Warrior Princess
Great Old One Joined: 25 Feb 2004 Total posts: 5212 Location: Over Silbury Hill, through the Solar field Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 26-06-2013 09:27 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | This is what you get when you feed the beast. Once you invite the state to do that which you, your friends, your family and your neighbors once did for each other, the power-hungry decide they rather like making decisions on your behalf and take all the control they can get.
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Nah, this is nothing to do with the welfare state. Governments have wanted information on their citizenry since the dawn of civilisation. What's changed now is that they have the technology to do relatively easily on a widespread scale what previously required vast amounts of manpower.
| Quote: | A new low. Trying to find dirt and smear the family of a murdered teenager. Evidence they were looking for included participation in demonstrations.
As if the right to demonstrate or campaign is an illegal or heinous activity instead of a legitimate message to the powers that be.
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Pretty awful but I'm not especially surprised by this revelation. The Lawrences are seen now as heroes, almost secular saints (which in itself is not I think especially helpful) but at the time of the murder the police believed they were trouble makers, primarily because they had hired a lawyer well-known for actions against the police.
Even then thought there was a need to insert an undercover cop into the campaign group. Now, they could just scrutinise the family and their supporters' electronic communications in the hope of finding something embarrassing or damaging. |
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