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'Staggering Reach' of UK Surveillance and 15-Year Coverup Revealed
Frank Church warned us.
What they do with the information collected should be of prime import to anybody who gives a damn about Democracy.
'Staggering Reach' of UK Surveillance and 15-Year Coverup Revealed
Privacy International releases trove of documents detailing extent of British spying operations
by Nadia Prupis, staff writer
Common Dreams, April 21, 2016
Newly released documents reveal the "staggering extent" of the British government's mass surveillance of its citizens, ongoing since at least the 1990s, and its 15-year coverup of those operations.
The documents, acquired by the London-based watchdog group Privacy International, show that the UK's intelligence agencies—MI5, MI6, and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)—"routinely requisition personal data from potentially thousands of public and private organizations" under Section 94 of the 1984 Telecommunications Act.
That includes financial data; confidential health records; travel records; content of communications, including with lawyers, doctors, and ministers of Parliament; and personal online activity, such as petition signing, among other data. The documents also show that agencies continued to request information on scores of citizens despite privately acknowledging (pdf) that it is "unlikely to be of intelligence or security interest."
Privacy International obtained the documents as part of an ongoing case about the use of these so-called "Bulk Personal Datasets" and the 1984 law, which the group describes as "pre-internet legislation that was never intended to enable this level of intrusion in a digital age." A trial will take place later this summer at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), which hears cases about surveillance and intelligence.
"The information revealed by this disclosure shows the staggering extent to which the intelligence agencies hoover up our data," said Millie Graham Wood, legal officer at Privacy International. "This can be anything from your private medical records, your correspondence with your doctor or lawyer, even what petitions you have signed, your financial data, and commercial activities."
As the Guardian notes:
The frequency of warnings to intelligence agency staff about the dangers of trespassing on private records is at odds with ministers’ repeated public reassurances that only terrorists and serious criminals are having their personal details compromised.
(....)The papers show that data handling errors remain a problem. Government lawyers have admitted in responses to Privacy International that between 1 June 2014 and 9 February this year, “47 instances of non-compliance either with the MI5 closed section 94 handling arrangements or internal guidance or the communications data code of practice were detected.” Four errors involved “necessity and proportionality” issues; 43 related to mistransposed digits, material that did not relate to the subject of investigation or duplicated requests.
The documents also come as Parliament considers sweeping surveillance legislation known as the Investigatory Powers Bill, and often referred to by opponents as the "Snooper's Charter."
The government has argued that under the law, intelligence agencies would only conduct targeted searches of legally obtained records in national security investigations. However, as Wood explains, "the agencies themselves admit that the majority of data collected relates to individuals who are not a threat to national security or suspected of a crime. This highly sensitive information about us is vulnerable to attack from hackers, foreign governments, and criminals.
"The agencies have been doing this for 15 years in secret and are now quietly trying to put these powers on the statute book for the first time, in the Investigatory Powers Bill, which is currently being debated in Parliament," she said. "These documents reveal a lack of openness and transparency with the public about these staggering powers and a failure to subject them to effective Parliamentary scrutiny."
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
SOURCE: http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/04/21/staggering-reach-uk-surveillance-and-15-year-coverup-revealed
If they're doing it to Mary Poppins' peeps, you better believe they do it to their partners in Five Eyes on this side of the Atlantic.
7 replies
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Missed Calls:
Is the NSA lying about its failure to prevent 9/11?
James Bamford
Foreign Policy, July 21, 2015
March 20, 2000, as part of a trip to South Asia, U.S. President Bill Clinton was scheduled to land his helicopter in the desperately poor village of Joypura, Bangladesh, and speak to locals under a 150-year-old banyan tree. At the last minute, though, the visit was canceled; U.S. intelligence agencies had discovered an assassination plot. In a lengthy email, London-based members of the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, a terrorist group established by Osama bin Laden, urged al Qaeda supporters to “Send Clinton Back in a Coffin” by firing a shoulder-launched missile at the president’s chopper.
The same day that Clinton was supposed to visit Joypura, the phone rang at bin Laden’s operations center in Sanaa, Yemen. To counterterrorism specialists at the National Security Agency (NSA) in Fort Meade, Maryland, the Yemeni number—967-1-200-578—was at the pinnacle of their target list. They monitored the line 24/7. But at the time, the agency now claims, it had no technical way of knowing who was placing the call. The culprit, it would later be revealed, was Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the men bin Laden had picked months earlier to lead the forthcoming 9/11 attacks. He was calling from his apartment in San Diego, California.
The NSA knew about Mihdhar’s connection to bin Laden and had earlier linked his name with the operations center. Had they known he was now reaching out to bin Laden’s switchboard from a U.S. number, on the day an al Qaeda-linked assassination plot was planned, the agency could have legally obtained an order to tap the San Diego phone line. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in fact, approves eavesdropping on suspected terrorists and spies in the United States. By monitoring Mihdhar’s domestic calls, the agency certainly would have discovered links to the 9/11 hijackers living on the East Coast, including Mohamed Atta.
It’s likely, in other words, that 9/11 would have been stopped in its tracks.
A decade and a half later, that call and half a dozen others made from the San Diego apartment are at the center of the heated debate over the NSA’s domestic surveillance activities—namely the agency’s collection of the public’s telephone metadata, which George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s administrations have claimed was authorized by the 2001 Patriot Act. (That law expired this June and was replaced with the USA Freedom Act, which states that, without a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the NSA will no longer have access to telephone metadata records.)
CONTINUED...
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/21/missed-calls-nsa-terrorism-osama-bin-laden-mihdhar/
Bush was a front monkey.
What you said, bbgrunt.
Words to a great song by a great man, John Mayall:
Television Eye
Television Eye,
hypnotizing me in my bed.
I’ve got no time to sleep,
my eyes are turning bloodshot red.
You’ve got me in your eye,
staring at your many channeled head.
Television Eye,
before you got me hooked,
I used to read.
Now you’re by my bedside,
shining empty lights on me.
‘Round the clock commercials,
Trying to sell me things I’ll never need.
It’s hard to turn you on,
even though you’ve never turned me on.
Trying to slow my thinking,
I feel my mind is nearly gone.
Television Eye,
You’ve had me in your power too long.
I’ve got to be crazy or something.
It’s just ridiculous.
Why am I wasting time watching you?
I’ve got better things to do.
I’ve got to leave…
-- John Mayall
IMO:
If you can control what people think about, you can control what they do.
This is the essence of public relations, marketing and psyops.
And it is why the Bushies and the satanic turds they serve spend so much time and money “catapaulting the propaganda,” to borrow a phrase from an incurious monkey.
The nation's Founders mention only one business by name in the Constitution -- a Free Press. They knew, for a democracy to survive -- for our Republic to succeed -- required an informed citizenry.
(That was in 1776 -- before radio or photography, "General" Alberto Gonzales.)
Frank Capra explained it perfectly: “A free press means a free people.”
Meaning, the more the People know -- the more Truth -- the better the government.
And that is why the Press is no longer free. It is owned and operated by the BFEE.
So people don't hear the facts about Bush lying America into war. Or about his family and cronies profiting from war. Or about torture being employed on a mass scale. Or about spying on Americans... It's also why public education is marked for termination by the GOP and Neo-Democrats -- and, of a piece, the arts are de-funded and ignored.
As you know, an educated populace is harder to mis-lead. That makes the enlightened into the enemies of the fascist state.
Which explains the smart phone. On Amazon I can watch back episodes of "Friends" and Seinfeld for 99-cents.
