8/1/2013, “Exclusive: NSA [during Obama admin.] pays £100m in secret funding for GCHQ,” UK Guardian, Nick Hopkins, Julian Borger [Obama gave $132.6 million in free spy equipment to UK]
• Secret payments [2009-2012] revealed in leaks by Edward Snowden…GCHQ expected to ‘pull its weight’ for [Obama] Americans…Weaker regulation of British spies ‘a selling point’ for NSA”
9/20/18, “Britain Moves From Democracy to Authoritarian State in Pernicious Veil of Secrecy,“ Strategic Culture, Editorial, via truepublica.org.uk, first published in Sept. 2015
“First published September 2015. This article is now [as of 9/17/18] three years old. In that time, Britain has dramatically moved forward with its intentions to become the Western world’s foremost surveillance state. And whilst all attention is on Brexit – a recent disclosure in Australia revealed that Britain is to press ahead with forcing all technology companies to provide backdoor access to encryption systems to the state.”
“Everything that was proposed by the government in this article has become law. By 2020, Britain will be a classed as a ‘techno Stasi-state’ because the general public turned a blind eye and effectively waved through the legitimisation of authoritarian decrees.
One should not forget that openness and participation are antidotes to surveillance and control.
When David Cameron won the 2015 election one of the first things he said was; “For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone“. This ominous statement immediately threw a dark shroud over Britain’s civil liberties laws, its openness and public participation.
Few of the mainstream establishment press thought this was worthy of mention. From ZeroHedge – It’s not just those domestic extremists and crazy “conspiracy theory” kooks who took serious issue with UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s overtly fascist language when it comes to freedom of expression in Great Britain”. The Independent was more sanguine – “This is the creepiest thing David Cameron has ever said".
New powers being brought in by the Conservatives should be of great concern to everyone.
Theresa May, the most authoritarian Home Secretary in Britain aside of world wars is by far one of the most dangerous politicians walking in the corridors of power.
These new powers are expected to be the introduction of banning orders for organisations who use hate speech in public places, but whose activities fall short of proscription and include:
One. New Extremism Disruption Orders to restrict people who seek to radicalise young people;
Two. Powers to close premises where extremists seek to influence others;
Three. Strengthening the powers of the Charity Commission to root out charities who misappropriate funds towards extremism and terrorism;
Four. Further immigration restrictions on extremists;
Five. A strengthened role for Ofcom to take action against channels which broadcast extremist content.
Simply take out the word ‘extremist’ from those five points and you have the existence of something completely different. Of course you could be forgiven for thinking that the government would not abuse such laws. But they already allow for such abuses to take place on current terror laws, for instance:
- The BBC is using laws designed to catch terrorists and organised crime networks to track down people who dodge the £145.50 licence fee.
- The Metropolitan Police Service has also come under fire for using the same powers to access the phone logs of journalists on two newspapers to trace their protected sources.
- In addition, Big Brother Watch discovered 372 councils had been authorised (by gov’t) to use the terror laws 9,607 times -the equivalent of around eleven spying missions a day to hunt down non-payment of council tax.
- Seven public authorities, including the BBC, refused under the Freedom of Information Act to disclose why or how often they had used the powers. The BBC now refuses 48% of such requests.
There is proof that local authorities have even used terror laws to surveillance dog fouling, underage sunbed users and people breaking smoking bans.
Now that the Conservative government in Britain has it’s feet under the desk it is preparing to enact new legislation that, under the guise of the “war on terror,” that will vastly expand police-state powers and essentially criminalise speech and other political activity.
Presented officially as an anti-terrorism bill, the proposed measures will be targeted at any popular opposition to the government’s policies of aggressive militarism abroad and austerity measures in Britain, or for that matter anything the government deems worthy of oppressing.
The new bill will include a series of measures targeting groups and individuals deemed by the government to be “extremist.”
This term is defined so vaguely as to encompass a wide array of political activity (such as local anti-fracking groups).
The new bill will create extremist “disruption orders” for individuals and “banning orders” for groups. The targets for these new police powers will be those who have conducted “harmful” behaviour.
“The “harmful” behaviour covers activities that pose “a risk of public disorder, a risk of harassment, even alarm or just distress or creating a ‘threat to the functioning of democracy’.”
This will be used to criminalise campaigns critical of government policy and protests, which are frequently dispersed by the police on precisely the grounds that they disrupt public order. The language also indicates that the government would have the authority to target those merely planning such activity prior to it taking place – and they would do that through mass surveillance.
UK intelligence agency GCHQ has already been caught acting unlawfully by spying on two international human rights organisations. In addition, last year it was revealed that GCHQ were illegally eavesdropping on sacrosanct lawyer-client conversations in order to both disrupt and make gains on negotiations. GCHQ failed to follow its own secret procedures. “If spying on human rights NGOs isn’t off-limits for GCHQ, then what is?” said Privacy International.
From here we can see we now have a vast illegal state surveillance system that the East German Stasi would have had wet dreams about. The government is slowly closing down Britain’s very open society and they intend on doing so using one of Britain’s finest philosophers and a well tried and tested theory.
The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow a single watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. Although it is physically impossible for the single watchman to observe all cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that all inmates must act as though they are watched at all times, effectively controlling their own behaviour constantly.
Today, the internet has become the architecture of the state managed panopticon.
Speaking to the Guardian weeks after his appointment as the UN special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci described British surveillance oversight as being “a joke”, and said the situation is worse than anything George Orwell could have foreseen.
Terror laws we have are already being abused. One is reminded of 82 year old Mr Wolfgang‘s pass being seized and he then detained under the Terrorism Act for interrupting Tony Blair’s speech at the Labour party conference in 2005.
Some of the most egregious cases of misuse include: a council in Dorset putting three children and their parents under extreme surveillance to check they were in the catchment area for the school they had applied to.
Like the prisoners of Jeremy Bentham’s building – there is no privacy in the panopticon.
A report by the House of Lords Constitution Committee, Surveillance: Citizens and the State, had warned in 2009 that increasing use of surveillance by the government and private companies was a serious threat to freedoms and constitutional rights, stating, “The expansion in the use of surveillance represents one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the Second World War. The government’s of 2010 and 2015 have taken no notice at all.”
‘Tempora‘ was one such government mass surveillance and spying programme among many. It is alleged that GCHQ produces larger amounts of metadata than America’s NSA.
By May 2012 300 GCHQ analysts and 250 NSA analysts had been assigned to sort data.
The amount and type of data collected and stored is mind-boggling. Every email, phone call, location data, relationships, family and friends, affairs, work, income, expenditure, social habits, it simply has no end. You would not write down the passwords to your email account, bank or Amazon account, social media platforms and give a stranger the list. But that is exactly what GCHQ and other organisations have acquired.
“‘Optic Nerve‘, another UK state surveillance mission, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing. They have stored naked pictures of you, your children and pictures you have sent to family and friends in a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy. This was a biometric exercise of epic proportions. The programme collected 2 million citizen images in just a few months. We have no idea how far this programme went.”
On May 13th 2013, Edward Snowden made a dash via Hong Kong to Moscow. That June, the spying and surveillance revelations came forth. And what came forth was the stunning realisation that our government has been lying to us about the sheer scale of state surveillance conducted on a truly industrial scale.
Not happy with all this illegal state activity over its citizens, new orders that the government are now seeking contain bans on individuals broadcasting their views on television, and anyone subject to an order will be compelled to submit any written publication, including social media posts, to the police before it is printed. In addition, the orders will make it illegal for individuals to attend or address public gatherings or protests.
Banning orders will allow the government to outlaw any organisations it feels is not in their interests. If such a move is taken, anyone found to be a member of such an organisation will be guilty of a criminal offence. Authorities will also be able to shut down premises used by groups.
Human rights group Privacy International branded the new proposal as an “assault on the rights of ordinary British citizens.”
As the Guardian ’s home affairs editor wrote in an analysis of the proposal, “the official definition of non-violent extremism is already wide-ranging” and, as Big Brother Watch has pointed out, the national extremism database already includes the names of people who have done little more than organise meetings on environmental issues.”
Last year the government even attempted to hold an entire terrorism trial in secret before abandoning it at the last minute. Together with a sweeping attack on democratic rights and legal norms, the Conservatives’ anti-terror bills will further advance the government’s right-wing agenda. [In the US this is the “agenda” of the entire political class. A “right-wing agenda” no longer exists in the US. The only agenda is government.]
Cameron’s proposals, aided by Home Secretary Theresa May, make clear that the Conservatives are determined to vastly expand the repressive powers of the state.
In little more than five years the state has gone from an open society of democratic principle to one that resembles an authoritarian state. We are living in an electronic concentration camp. Everything you do in life is now recorded and there is no place to escape. Soon, it will be impossible to have a dinner party with friends without the state knowing about it and wanting to know the purpose of your gathering. Quite the opposite of Cameron’s ‘big society’ project, that is destined to fail in the years ahead.
The conduct of the British government and its intelligence services are acting under a pernicious veil of secrecy to the detriment of all citizens.”
truepublica.org.uk
……………
Added: More on $132.6 million in free spy equipment Obama gave UK, 2009-2012:
8/1/2013, “Exclusive: [Obama administration] NSA pays £100m in secret funding for GCHQ,” UK Guardian, Nick Hopkins, Julian Borger [Obama gave $132.6 million in free spy equipment to UK]
• Secret payments [2009-2012] revealed in leaks by Edward Snowden…GCHQ expected to ‘pull its weight’ for [Obama] Americans…Weaker regulation of British spies ‘a selling point’ for NSA”
“The US government has paid at least £100m [$132.6 million US taxpayer dollars] to the UK spy agency GCHQ over the last three years to secure access to and influence over Britain’s intelligence gathering programmes. The top secret payments are set out in documents which make clear that the [Obama administration] Americans expect a return on the investment, and that GCHQ has to work hard to meet their demands.
“The US government has paid at least £100m [$132.6 million US taxpayer dollars] to the UK spy agency GCHQ over the last three years to secure access to and influence over Britain’s intelligence gathering programmes. The top secret payments are set out in documents which make clear that the [Obama administration] Americans expect a return on the investment, and that GCHQ has to work hard to meet their demands.
“GCHQ must pull its weight and be seen to pull its weight,” a GCHQ strategy briefing said. The funding underlines the closeness of the relationship between GCHQ and its US equivalent, the National Security Agency. But it will raise fears about the hold Washington has over the UK’s biggest and most important intelligence agency, and whether Britain’s dependency on the NSA has become too great.”…
Added: UK Guardian article linked above in Strategic Culture piece:
NSA gets “global” data from “partner” GCHQ which “has a light oversight regime compared with the US”. “850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors with top secret clearance had access to GCHQ databases.”…"UK officials could also claim GCHQ “produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA”….Britain’s technical capacity to tap into the cables that carry the world’s communications – referred to in the documents as special source exploitation – has made GCHQ an intelligence superpower.”
6/21/2013, “GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables for secret access to world’s communications,” UK Guardian, Ewen MacAskill, Julian Borger, Nick Hopkins, Nick Davies, and James Ball
“Exclusive: British spy agency collects and stores vast quantities of global email messages, Facebook posts, internet histories and calls, and shares them with NSA, latest documents from Edward Snowden reveal”
“Britain’s spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA). The sheer scale of the agency’s ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.
One key innovation has been GCHQ’s ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months.
GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects.
This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user’s access to websites – all of which is deemed legal [in the UK], even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets.
The existence of the programme has been disclosed in documents shown to the Guardian by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as part of his attempt to expose what he has called “the largest programme of suspicionless surveillance in human history”.
“It’s not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight,” Snowden told the Guardian. “They [GCHQ] are worse than the US.”
However, on Friday a source with knowledge of intelligence argued that the data was collected legally under a system of safeguards, and had provided material that had led to significant breakthroughs in detecting and preventing serious crime.
Britain’s technical capacity to tap into the cables that carry the world’s communications – referred to in the documents as special source exploitation – has made GCHQ an intelligence superpower.
By 2010, two years after the project was first trialled, it was able to boast it had the “biggest internet access” of any member of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance, comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
UK officials could also claim GCHQ “produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA”. (Metadata describes basic information on who has been contacting whom, without detailing the content.)
By May last year [2012] 300 analysts from GCHQ, and 250 from the NSA, had been assigned to sift through the flood of data.
The Americans were given guidelines for its use, but were told in legal briefings by GCHQ lawyers: “We have a light oversight regime compared with the US”.
When it came to judging the necessity and proportionality of what they were allowed to look for, would-be American users were told it was “your call”.
The Guardian understands that a total of 850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors with top secret clearance had access to GCHQ databases….
For the 2 billion users of the world wide web, Tempora represents a window on to their everyday lives, sucking up every form of communication from the fibre-optic cables that ring the world.
The NSA has meanwhile opened a second window, in the form of the Prism operation, revealed earlier this month by the Guardian, from which it secured access to the internal systems of global companies that service the internet.
The GCHQ mass tapping operation has been built up over five years by attaching intercept probes to transatlantic fibre-optic cables where they land on British shores carrying data to western Europe from telephone exchanges and internet servers in north America.
This was done under secret agreements with commercial companies, described in one document as “intercept partners”.
The papers seen by the Guardian suggest some companies have been paid for the cost of their co-operation and GCHQ went to great lengths to keep their names secret. They were assigned “sensitive relationship teams” and staff were urged in one internal guidance paper to disguise the origin of “special source” material in their reports for fear that the role of the companies as intercept partners would cause “high-level political fallout”.
The source with knowledge of intelligence said on Friday the companies were obliged to co-operate in this operation. They are forbidden from revealing the existence of warrants compelling them to allow GCHQ access to the cables.
“There’s an overarching condition of the licensing of the companies that they have to co-operate in this. Should they decline, we can compel them to do so. They have no choice.”
The source said that although GCHQ was collecting a “vast haystack of data” what they were looking for was “needles”….
However, the legitimacy of the operation is in doubt. According to GCHQ’s legal advice, it was given the go-ahead by applying old law to new technology. The 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) requires the tapping of defined targets to be authorised by a warrant signed by the home secretary or foreign secretary.
However, an obscure clause allows the foreign secretary to sign a certificate for the interception of broad categories of material, as long as one end of the monitored communications is abroad.
But the nature of modern fibre-optic communications means that a proportion of internal UK traffic is relayed abroad and then returns through the cables.
Parliament passed the Ripa law to allow GCHQ to trawl for information, but it did so 13 years ago with no inkling of the scale on which GCHQ would attempt to exploit the certificates, enabling it to gather and process data regardless of whether it belongs to identified targets.
The categories of material have included fraud, drug trafficking and terrorism, but the criteria at any one time are secret and are not subject to any public debate. GCHQ’s compliance with the certificates is [self-policed] audited by the agency itself, but the results of those audits are also secret.
An indication of how broad the dragnet can be was laid bare in advice from GCHQ’s lawyers, who said it would be impossible to list the total number of people targeted because “this would be an infinite list which we couldn’t manage”.
There is an investigatory powers tribunal to look into complaints that the data gathered by GCHQ has been improperly used, but the agency reassured NSA analysts in the early days of the programme, in 2009: “So far they have always found in our favour”.
Historically, the spy agencies have intercepted international communications by focusing on microwave towers and satellites. The NSA’s intercept station at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire played a leading role in this. One internal document quotes the head of the NSA, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, on a visit to Menwith Hill in June 2008, asking:
“Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith.”
By then, however, satellite interception accounted for only a small part of the network traffic. Most of it now travels on fibre-optic cables, and the UK’s position on the western edge of Europe gave it natural access to cables emerging from the Atlantic.
The data collected provides a powerful tool in the hands of the security agencies, enabling them to sift for evidence of serious crime. According to the source, it has allowed them to discover new techniques used by terrorists to avoid security checks and to identify terrorists planning atrocities. It has also been used against child exploitation networks and in the field of cyberdefence. It was claimed on Friday that it directly led to the arrest and imprisonment of a cell in the Midlands who were planning co-ordinated attacks; to the arrest of five Luton-based individuals preparing acts of terror, and to the arrest of three London-based people planning attacks prior to the Olympics.
As the probes began to generate data, GCHQ set up a three-year trial at the GCHQ station in Bude, Cornwall. By the summer of 2011, GCHQ had probes attached to more than 200 internet links, each carrying data at 10 gigabits a second. “This is a massive amount of data!” as one internal slideshow put it. That summer, it brought NSA analysts into the Bude trials. In the autumn of 2011, it launched Tempora as a mainstream programme, shared with the Americans….
The GCHQ documents that the Guardian has seen illustrate a constant effort to build up storage capacity at the stations at Cheltenham, Bude and at one overseas location, as well a search for ways to maintain the agency’s comparative advantage as the world’s leading communications companies increasingly route their cables through Asia to cut costs.
Meanwhile, technical work is ongoing to expand GCHQ’s capacity to ingest data from new super cables carrying data at 100 gigabits a second. As one training slide told new users: “You are in an enviable position – have fun and make the most of it.””
………………………………..
Added: GCHQ gets slap on the wrist, continues on as a lawless nation:
6/22/2015, “GCHQ spied on human rights organisations, court confirms,” wired.co.uk, Katie Collins
“UK intelligence agency GCHQ acted unlawfully in spying on two international human rights organisations, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal has revealed today.
Two
NGOs, the South African Legal Resources Centre (LRC) and the Egyptian
Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), have been found to have had their
rights violated by GCHQ’s mass surveillance systems. Both
organisations are co-claimants alongside others, including Privacy
International and Liberty, in a legal challenge brought against GCHQ.
“Last year it was revealed that GCHQ were eavesdropping on sacrosanct
lawyer-client conversations. Now we learn they’ve been spying on human
rights groups. What kind of signal are British authorities
sending to despotic regimes and those who risk their lives to challenge
them all over the world?” said James Welch, legal director for Liberty in a statement.
According to the IPT, a court dedicated to holding public bodies to account over covert activities, GCHQ failed to follow its own secret procedures for dealing with the communications it collected, and this is what made its actions unlawful. In the case of EIPR, members of which have been persecuted in Egypt, GCHQ was found guilty of retaining communications “for materially longer than permitted”.
Communications from the LRC, on the other hand, were unlawfully selected for examination in contravention of GCHQ’s secret procedures that were “not followed in this case”. The organisation is known for tackling some of the most oppressive aspects of apartheid, for helping to draft South Africa’s new constitution and for fighting to secure tenancy and education rights.
Janet Love, national director of the LRC, said the organisation was “deeply concerned” by the news. “As a public interest law firm, our communications are self-evidently confidential, and we consider this to be a serious breach of the rights of our organisation and the individuals concerned. We can no longer accept the conduct of the intelligence services acting under such a pernicious veil of secrecy, and we will be taking immediate action to try to establish more information,” she said in a statement.
The court did not, however, find the interception of the NGOs’ communications unlawful in and of itself — something that privacy advocates said was astonishing. “Clearly our spy agencies have lost their way,” said Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International. “For too long they’ve been trusted with too much power, and too few rules for them to protect against abuse. How many more problems with GCHQ’s secret procedures have to be revealed for them to be brought under control?”
It has been neither confirmed nor denied as to whether other privacy and rights organisations, including claimants Liberty and Privacy, also had their communications intercepted — only that if they have, that the IPT has not deemed that surveillance unlawful. The only reason we know for sure that GCHQ has been spying on EIPR and the LRC is that those particular actions were ruled as being unlawful.
Privacy International has pointed out that many aspects of the ruling today remain unclear. In particular, we do not know why it was deemed necessary or proportionate to spy on civil liberties organisations. “If spying on human rights NGOs isn’t off-limits for GCHQ, then what is?” said King. “Mass, suspicionless surveillance can never be justified.”
According to the IPT, a court dedicated to holding public bodies to account over covert activities, GCHQ failed to follow its own secret procedures for dealing with the communications it collected, and this is what made its actions unlawful. In the case of EIPR, members of which have been persecuted in Egypt, GCHQ was found guilty of retaining communications “for materially longer than permitted”.
Communications from the LRC, on the other hand, were unlawfully selected for examination in contravention of GCHQ’s secret procedures that were “not followed in this case”. The organisation is known for tackling some of the most oppressive aspects of apartheid, for helping to draft South Africa’s new constitution and for fighting to secure tenancy and education rights.
Janet Love, national director of the LRC, said the organisation was “deeply concerned” by the news. “As a public interest law firm, our communications are self-evidently confidential, and we consider this to be a serious breach of the rights of our organisation and the individuals concerned. We can no longer accept the conduct of the intelligence services acting under such a pernicious veil of secrecy, and we will be taking immediate action to try to establish more information,” she said in a statement.
The court did not, however, find the interception of the NGOs’ communications unlawful in and of itself — something that privacy advocates said was astonishing. “Clearly our spy agencies have lost their way,” said Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International. “For too long they’ve been trusted with too much power, and too few rules for them to protect against abuse. How many more problems with GCHQ’s secret procedures have to be revealed for them to be brought under control?”
It has been neither confirmed nor denied as to whether other privacy and rights organisations, including claimants Liberty and Privacy, also had their communications intercepted — only that if they have, that the IPT has not deemed that surveillance unlawful. The only reason we know for sure that GCHQ has been spying on EIPR and the LRC is that those particular actions were ruled as being unlawful.
Privacy International has pointed out that many aspects of the ruling today remain unclear. In particular, we do not know why it was deemed necessary or proportionate to spy on civil liberties organisations. “If spying on human rights NGOs isn’t off-limits for GCHQ, then what is?” said King. “Mass, suspicionless surveillance can never be justified.”
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