"I don't think  in the last two or three hundred years we've faced such a concatenation
of  problems all at the same time.... If we are to solve the issues that are ahead of us,
we are going to need to think in completely different ways."
  Paddy Ashdown, High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina 2002 - 2006

"Telecoms firms have accused the Government of acting like the East German Stasi over plans to force them to store the details of every phone call for at least a year. Under the proposals, the details of every email sent and website visited will also be recorded to help the police and security services fight crime and terrorism. But mobile phone companies have attacked the plans as a massive assault on privacy and warned it could be the first step towards a centralised ‘Big Brother’ database.   They have also told the Home Office that the scheme is deeply flawed. The criticism of Britain’s growing ‘surveillance culture’ was made in a series of responses to an official consultation on the plans, which have been obtained by The Mail on Sunday. T-Mobile said in its submission that it was a ‘particularly sensitive’ time as many people were commemorating the 20th anniversary of the protests that led to the collapse of ‘surveillance states in Eastern Europe’. Martin Hopkins, head of data protection and disclosure, said: ‘It would be extremely ironic if we at T-Mobile (UK) Ltd had to acquire the surveillance functionality envisaged by the Consultation Document at the same time that our parent company, headquartered in Germany, was celebrating the 20th anniversary of the demise of the equivalent systems established by the Stasi in the federal states of the former East Germany.’"
Telecom firms' fury at plan for 'Stasi' checks on every phone call and email
Mail, 27 December 2009

"A plan to allow phone tap evidence in courts was left in tatters today as a review said it was unworkable. In a victory for M15, Gordon Brown's proposal to introduce intercept evidence at criminal trials was quietly shelved as a report said it would cost billions. Critics said the decision marked another creeping extension of the Government's secret justice agenda. It means that potentially important information gained via phone tap recordings and email interceptions will not be available to juries. Civil liberty campaigners say the bar on intercept evidence will only be used as an excuse for more secret inquiries. Ministers have already forced through plans for secret hearings into controversial deaths to replace a jury inquest if sensitive intelligence information forms part of the evidence. It also means that authorities will have to continue using the secret Special Immigration Appeals Commission and control order hearings to keep tabs on suspects, who cannot be prosecuted as the intercept evidence against them cannot be put before a jury. Since 2007, the Government has been considering the use of covert surveillance intelligence in trials of terrorists and major crime bosses in a bid to secure more convictions. Legal and counter-terrorism sources believe that the extremist cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri could have been jailed for involvement in international kidnapping had intercept material been available to prosecutors. But the prospect of secret evidence ever being used in criminal courts in England and Wales appeared remote today as a review concluded it was not legally viable. A Whitehall official said storing all phone tap and email correspondence for use in criminal trials would require vast 'electronic warehouses', costing billions of pounds. An official report also warned that introducing such evidence would expose the techniques used in covert surveillance operations to terrorists and serious criminals.....Currently, police and the Security Service are not required to keep all the intercept material they record. Much of the conversation overheard through phone taps is not transcribed, with full records being kept only of key passages - none of which can be revealed to a jury in a suspect's trial. But evidence from phone tapping and other interceptions is widely used in other countries, including Australia and the United States, where it has been used to secure convictions against Mafia gangsters. Isabella Sankey, policy director at Liberty, said: 'The bar on intercept evidence is used by Government to justify a dangerous parallel legal system. 'Whether it’s control orders that bring punishment without trial, or ‘secret inquests’ for those killed on the State’s watch, the bar is used as excuse for ever more secrecy. 'We are the only common law country in the world to maintain such an illogical ban; its abolition is already long overdue.' MPs from across the political spectrum have urged the Government to reconsider. They argue that the use of intercept evidence, which is also supported by the former Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Ken Macdonald, could secure more terrorist convictions and reduce the need for some suspects to be placed under control orders. Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said: 'If Australia and the United States can both use intercept evidence in court without the world coming to an end, it cannot be beyond the realms of British ingenuity to do the same."
Tapped phone calls won't be allowed in court, as Brown's plan is defeated
Daily Mail, 10 December 2009

"Many government buildings are now ringed with security barriers, and most senior politicians have got used to having bodyguards or armed policemen outside their homes. The threat of terrorism has also justified the proliferation of CCTV cameras and the storage of credit card transactions, mobile phone records and email, all of which have been produced in court whenever there is a major terrorist trial....."
Al-Qaeda and a decade of terror
Daily Telegraph, 7 December 2009

"The CIA  is to be given broad access to the bank records of millions of Britons under a European Union plan to fight terrorism. The Brussels agreement, which will come into force in two months’ time, requires the 27 EU member states to grant requests for banking information made by the United States under its terrorist finance tracking programme. In a little noticed information note released last week, the EU said it had agreed that Europeans would be compelled to release the information to the CIA 'as a matter of urgency'. The records will be kept in a US database for five years before being deleted. Critics say the system is 'lopsided' because there is no reciprocal arrangement under which the UK authorities can easily access the bank accounts of US citizens in America. They also say the plan to sift through cross-border and domestic EU bank accounts gives US intelligence more scope to consult our bank accounts than is granted to law enforcement agencies in the UK or the rest of Europe. In Britain and most of Europe a judge must authorise a specific search after receiving a sworn statement from a police officer. This weekend civil liberties groups and privacy campaigners said the surveillance programme, introduced as an emergency measure in 2001, was being imposed on Britain without a proper debate. Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said: 'The massive scope for transferring personal information from Europe to the United States is extremely worrying, especially in the absence of public debate or parliamentary scrutiny either at EU or domestic level.'.... The terrorist finance tracking programme mines thousands of transactions by sifting through records from the nerve centre of the global banking industry, a Belgian co-operative known as Swift. This routes about £3 billion between banks and other financial institutions each day. According to the EU information note, the United States can request “general data sets” under the scheme based on broad categories including 'relevant message types, geography and perceived terrorism threats'. The scheme is run out of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The covert spying operation remained secret until 2006."
Brussels gives CIA the power to search UK bank records
Sunday Times, 6 December 2009

"Anyone who's a regular Google search user will know that the only way to avoid the company tracking your online activities is to log out of Gmail or whatever Google account you use. Not any more. As of last Friday, even searchers who aren't logged into Google in any way have their data tracked in the name of providing a 'better service'. The company explained: 'What we're doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition enables us to customise search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser.' However, if you've previously been a fan of the log-out method to avoid being tracked, there's still the option to disable the cookie by clicking a link at the top right of a search results page."
Google expands tracking to logged out users
TechRadar, 6 December 2009

"Yahoo isn’t happy that a detailed menu of the spying services it provides law enforcement agencies has leaked onto the web. Shortly after Threat Level reported this week that Yahoo had blocked the FOIA release of its law enforcement and intelligence price list, someone provided a copy of the company’s spying guide to the whistleblower site Cryptome. The 17-page guide describes Yahoo’s data retention policies and the surveillance capabilities it can provide law enforcement, with a pricing list for these services. Cryptome also published lawful data-interception guides for Cox Communications, SBC, Cingular, Nextel, GTE and other telecoms and service providers. But of all those companies, it appears to be Yahoo’s lawyers alone who have issued a DMCA takedown notice to Cryptome demanding the document be removed. Yahoo claims that publication of the document is a copyright violation, and gave Cryptome owner John Young a Thursday deadline for removing the document. So far, Young has refused....The price list that Yahoo tried to prevent the government from releasing to Soghoian appears in one small paragraph in the 17-page leaked document. According to this list, Yahoo charges the government about $30 to $40 for the contents, including e-mail, of a subscriber’s account. It charges $40 to $80 for the contents of a Yahoo group."
Yahoo Issues Takedown Notice for Spying Price List
Wired, 4 December 2009

".... it's important to distinguish between the government - the temporary, elected authors of national policy - and the state - the permanent bureaucratic and military apparatus superficially but not fully controlled by the reigning government..... If secrecy is necessary for national security and effective diplomacy, it is also inevitable that the prerogative of secrecy will be used to hide the misdeeds of the permanent state and its privileged agents.....  I suspect that there is no scheme of government oversight that will not eventually come under the indirect control of the generals, spies, and foreign-service officers it is meant to oversee."
W. W - In defence of WikiLeaks
Economist (Democracy In America Blog), 29 November 2010

"Plans to store information about every phone call, email and internet visit in the United Kingdom have in effect been abandoned by the Government. The Home Office confirmed the 'Big Brother' scheme had been delayed until after the election amid protests that it would be intrusive and open to abuse. Although ministers publicly insisted yesterday that they remained committed to the scheme, they have decided not to include the contentious measure in next week's Queen's Speech, the Government's final legislative programme before the election. The effect of this move could be to kill off the plans for years. The Conservatives have not ruled out reviving the idea but remain sceptical about the practicality of Labour's proposals....A Whitehall source told The Independent last night that the project, estimated to cost up to £2bn over 10 years, was 'in the very long grass'. Civil rights campaigners welcomed the move but warned that ministers were already responsible for introducing a range of databases and surveillance measures that breached basic liberties. The data retention proposals have been championed by the intelligence agencies and police as a vital tool for tracking terror plots and international crime syndicates....Civil liberties groups welcomed the shelving of the plan, but said basic freedoms remain under attack on a variety of fronts. Among the most controversial is the ID card scheme which has already been trialled at some airports. The scheme is set to be rolled out nationally by the end of the year, beginning in Manchester. Ministers now say that it will be voluntary."
Ministers cancel 'Big Brother' database
Independent, 10 November 2009

"All telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer's personal communications, showing who they are contacting, when, where and which websites they are visiting. Despite widespread opposition over Britain's growing surveillance society, 653 public bodies will be given access to the confidential information, including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the Ambulance Service, fire authorities and even prison governors. They will not require the permission of a judge or a magistrate to access the information, but simply the authorisation of a senior police officer or the equivalent of a deputy head of department at a local authority. Ministers had originally wanted to store the information on a massive Government-run database, but chose not to because of privacy concerns. However the Government announced yesterday it was pressing ahead with privately-held 'Big Brother' databases which opposition leaders said amount to 'state-spying' and a form of 'covert surveillance' on the public. It is doing so despite its own consultation showing there is little public support for the plans. The Home Office admitted that only a third of respondents to its six-month consultation on the issue supported its proposals, with 50 per cent fearing that the scheme lacked sufficient safeguards to protect the highly personal data from abuse. The new law will increase the amount of personal data which can be accessed by officials through the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which is supposed to be used for combatting terrorism. Although most private firms already hold details of every customer's private calls and emails for their own business purposes, most only do so on an ad hoc basis and only for a period of several months. The new rules, known as the Intercept Modernisation Programme, will not only force communication companies to keep their records for longer, but to expand the type of data they keep to include details of every website their customers visit – effectively registering every click online. While public authorities will not be able to view the contents of these emails or phone calls – but they can see the internet addresses, dates, times and users of telephone numbers and texts. The firms involved in keeping the data, such as as Orange, BT and Vodafone, will be reimbursed at a cost to the taxpayer of £2billion over 10 years. Chris Grayling, shadow home secretary, said he had fears about the abuse of the data. 'The big danger in all of this is 'mission creep'. This Government keeps on introducing new powers to tackle terrorism and organised crime which end up being used for completely different purposes. We have to stop that from happening'. David Davis, the former shadow home secretary, added: 'What is being proposed is a highly intrusive procedure which would allow Government authorities to maintain covert surveillance on public use of telephones, texts, emails and internet access.' He added that the permission to access the data should be granted by judges or magistrates.....The latest figures on the use of the RIPA legislation by public bodies, show that state bodies including town halls made 519,260 requests last year - one every minute - to spy on the phone records and email accounts of members of the public. The number of requests has risen by 44 per cent in two years to a rate of 1,422 new cases every day, leading to claims of an abuse of using the powers for trivial matters such as littering and dog fouling. Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said: 'The Big Brother ambitions of a group of senior Whitehall technocrats are delayed but not diminished....'"
Every phone call, email and internet click stored by 'state spying' databases
Daily Telegraph, 9 November 2009

"The Home Office says it will push ahead with plans to ask communications firms to monitor all internet use. Ministers confirmed their intention despite concerns and opposition from some in the industry. The proposals include asking firms to retain information on how people use social networks such as Facebook. Some 40% of respondents to the Home Office's consultation opposed the plans - but ministers say communication interception needs to be updated.  Both the police and secret security services have legal powers in the UK to intercept communications in the interests of combating crime or threats to national security. But the rules largely focus on communications over telephones and do not cover the whole range of internet communications now being used. The Home Office says it wants to change the law to compel communication service providers (CSPs) to collect and retain records of communications from a wider range of internet sources, from social networks through to chatrooms and unorthodox methods, such as within online games. Ministers say that they do not want to create a single government-owned database and only intend to ask CSPs to hold a record of a contact, rather than the actual contents of what was said. Police and other agencies would then be able to ask CSPs for information on when a communication was sent and between whom. In theory, law enforcement agencies will be able to link that information to specific devices such as an individual's smartphone or laptop. The proposals are technically challenging, as they would require a CSP to sort and organise all third-party traffic coming and going through their systems. The estimated £2bn bill for the project includes compensation for the companies involved....Christopher Graham, the Information Commissioner responsible for overseeing the protection of private information, told the Home Office that while he recognised that the police needed to use communication data to stop crime, this in itself was not a justification to collect all possible data passing through the internet. 'The proposal represents a step change in the relationship between the citizen and the state,' said Mr Graham. 'For the first time, this proposal is asking CSPs to collect and create information they would not have previously held and to go further in conducting additional processing on that information. 'Evidence for this proposal must be available to demonstrate that such a step change is necessary and proportionate."
UK surveillance plan to go ahead
BBC Online, 9 November 2009

"Vernon Bogdanor, the Professor of Government at the University of Oxford, argues in his book The New British Constitution that a series of measures including devolution legislation, the Human Rights Act and the abolition of the House of Lords have already replaced one constitutional system with another. The fundamental codes that govern our relationship with the state are being rewritten and we are supine. Yet increasingly the State’s tentacles strangle us with a sinister if well-intentioned paternalism. The fear of paedophiles and terrorists has made potential criminals of us all. We are watched by cameras, monitored by agencies, registered on databases. The State can eavesdrop on phone calls, spy on our bank accounts. British citizens can be detained without trial. We have no protection against Parliament, when the party that dominates it decides to dominate us. It is time for a written constitution, ratified by the people. Professor Bogdanor argues that one reason we have never codified our constitution is that statements of citizens’ rights typically mark a new beginning, a birth, or rebirth of a new state. Our tortuous relationship with Europe could be such a catalyst. Our country is being reborn as a satellite of Europe yet, as the revolution is a bloodless one, it passes without protest. We are alone among the member states in not having a written constitution. This makes us vulnerable to European creep, and the dribbling away of civil liberties."
How to protect ourselves from Eurocreep
London Times, 6 November 2009

"A mother took a council to court yesterday after it used surveillance powers designed to combat terrorism to establish whether she had lied to get her children into a 'good' school. Jenny Paton, her partner and three children were followed for nearly three weeks by officers from Poole Borough Council, using the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa). They wrongly suspected that she did not live in the school’s catchment area. Speaking before a two-day hearing of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, Ms Paton, 40, poured scorn on the council’s actions. She said: 'Some of the operational aspects are ludicrous and completely outrageous and I think we all need protecting from the way local authorities are using Ripa. This is about saying ‘no more’. Let’s have more safeguards and better scrutiny.' She asked why the officials, if they doubted her story, did not knock on her front door and speak to her....Ripa was introduced in 2000 to define when covert techniques, such as secret filming, could be used by police, local councils and benefit fraud teams. The powers have been used almost 50,000 times by public authorities such as local councils and the health service since 2002. After public alarm the Government is about to curb the powers that councils have gained under Ripa. Local authorities have used legislation intended to tackle terrorism and serious crime to deal with minor offences such as dog fouling. Conway council in Wales used the Act to spy on a worker who claimed to be sick, and Kensington and Chelsea council in London used it to monitor the misuse of a disabled parking badge. Under reform plans, set out yesterday, junior council officials will lose their power to authorise surveillance operations on behalf of local authorities. There are, however, plans to extend its use to allow officials to trace parents who refuse to pay child support. Investigators will be given access to the phone and internet records of thousands of fathers who do not co- operate with the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission."
School place dispute mother sues council over use of terror powers
London Times, 6 November 2009

"Councils are to have their powers to snoop on the public curbed under government plans aimed at addressing alarm at the expansion of the surveillance state. Local authorities have used legislation intended to tackle terrorism and serious crime to deal with minor offences such as dog fouling. Under the plans, published today, relatively junior council officials will lose their power to authorise surveillance operations on behalf of local authorities. Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, will say that only council chief executives and officials at director level will have the right to order investigations involving techniques such as eavesdropping, tracking vehicles and secret filming..... But the proposals stop short of meeting demands from the Local Government Association for greater involvement by councillors and the public in authorising and overseeing Ripa powers. The association called for local people to be co-opted on to a committee overseeing surveillance and also for senior local councillors to be responsible for authorising surveillance."
Alan Johnson announces plans to curb excessive council surveillance
London Times, 4 November 2009

"When governments turn their minds to economic stimulus, they usually end up in well-ploughed furrows. A tax break here, a consumer spending voucher there, and a nice public-works binge to round it all off. China may be among the first to realise there may be a useful stimulus effect from scaring the bejeezus out of the international business community. A rich seam of paranoia is already there, waiting to be mined. A senior executive at a global car manufacturer recently told me he had been warned by 'a three-letter agency from Virginia' to use a separate set of personal electronics when in China: a second laptop, BlackBerry and mobile. Otherwise, the (American spook) adviser added darkly, 'they' (Chinese spooks) will steal everything from the secret plans for car door handles to that online birthday card from your auntie. I asked a 'risk mitigation' expert (ex-British spook) what he thought of this. 'Everyone should have two of everything; basic sense,' he explained. How handy for the Chinese electronics industry, which produces most of these gizmos and is desperate to rekindle exports."
Japanese advertisers adopt the sick bag
London Times, 21 October 2009

"An astonishing £380 a minute will be spent on surveillance in a massive expansion of the Big Brother state. The £200million-a-year sum will give officials access to details of every internet click made by every citizen - on top of the email and telephone records already available. It is a 1,700 per cent increase on the cost of the current surveillance regime. Last night LibDem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne described the sum as 'eye-watering'. 'There is already enough concern at the level of Government snooping,' he said. 'In an era of tough spending choices, it cannot be a justified response to the problems we face as a country to lavish millions of pounds a year on state spying. ' The increase in money spent on tapping phones and emails is all the more baffling when Britain is still one of the few countries not to allow intercept evidence in court, even in terrorist cases.' State bodies including councils are already making one request every minute to spy on the phone records and email accounts of members of the public. The number of snooping missions carried out by police, town halls and other government departments has rocketed by 44 per cent in two years to a rate of 1,381 new cases every day. Ministers say the five-year cost of the existing regime is £55.61million, an average of £11million a year. This is paid to phone companies and service providers to meet the cost of keeping and providing private information about customers. The cost of the new system emerged in a series of Parliamentary answers. It is to cover payments to internet service providers so they can store mountains of information about every customer for a minimum of 12 months, and set up new systems to cope. The actual content of calls and emails is not be kept - only who they were from or to, when they took place and where they were sent from. Police, security services and other public authorities can then request access to the data as part of investigations. Some 653 bodies are currently allowed access, including councils, the Financial Services Authority, the Ambulance Service and fire authorities and prison governors. The new rules allowing access to internet records will be introduced by Parliament before the end of the year. They are known as the Intercept Modernisation Programme. Ministers had originally wanted to store the information on a massive Government-run database, but chose not to because of privacy concerns. Yesterday Alex Deane, director of campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: 'The Government is preparing to make British people pay through the nose so that they can track our movements online.'"
Big Brother Britain: £380 a MINUTE spent on tracking your every click online
Daily Mail, 21 October 2009

"A proposal to allow Cheltenham listening post GCHQ to monitor any email, phone call or website visit of people in the UK has been condemned by internet firms. The London Internet Exchange, which represents more than 330 companies, including BT, Virgin and Carphone Warehouse, says the Government's surveillance proposals are an 'unwarranted' invasion of people's privacy. The £2 billion project, pioneered by former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, would allow the Benhall-based intelligence headquarters access to the records of internet providers in an effort to maintain its defences against terrorism. The firms will be asked to collect and store vast amounts of data, including from social networking sites such as Facebook, although intelligence workers will not be able to view the actual content of emails and phone calls. But the companies, who would have to co-operate with ministers for the scheme to be implemented, say the Government has misled the public about the extent to which it plans to monitor internet activity. A private submission from the London Internet Exchange to the Home Office said: 'We view the description of the Government's proposals as maintaining the capability as disingenuous – the volume of data the Government now proposes we should collect and retain will be unprecedented.'This is a purely political description that serves only to win consent by hiding the extent of the proposed extension of powers for the state.' The criticism is the latest blow to the scheme. Ms Smith was forced to abandon plans for a giant database of internet records in April following privacy concerns. She tried to salvage the project by announcing £2 billion of public money would instead be spent on helping internet providers to retain information for up to 12 months. But the London Internet Exchange said the proposals were unworkable. It said: 'We aren't aware of any existing equipment (an internet firm) could purchase that would enable it to acquire and retain such a wide range of data.'In some common cases it would be impossible in principle to obtain the information sought. A spokesman for GCHQ said: 'The Home Office has consulted publicly on its proposals. 'It recognises that this is a complex and sensitive subject with a fine balance to be made between protecting public safety and civil liberties. 'GCHQ is providing technical advice and support to the Home Office and has no plans to monitor all internet use and phone calls in Britain.'"
Internet firms condemn plans for GCHQ email access
This Is Gloucestershire, 4 August 2009

"All internet and phone traffic should be recorded to help the fight against terrorism, according to one of the UK's former spy chiefs. Civil rights campaigners have criticised ministers' plans to log details of such contact as 'Orwellian'. But Sir David Pepper, who ran the GCHQ listening centre for five years, told the BBC lives would be at risk if the state could not track communication. Agencies faced 'enormous pressure' to keep up with technology, he said. 'It's a constant arms race, if you like. As more technology, different technology becomes available, the balance will shift constantly.' The work of GCHQ, which provides intelligence on foreign and domestic threats, is so secretive that until the 1980s the government refused to discuss its existence....Last year, then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith announced plans for a database to record details of the times and dates of messages and phone calls but said the content of conversations would not be kept. She said such data was used as 'important evidence in 95% of serious crime cases' and in almost all security service operations....Details of the times, dates, duration and locations of mobile phone calls, numbers called, website visited and addresses e-mailed are already stored by telecoms companies for 12 months under a voluntary agreement. However, the Liberal Democrats said the government's plans were 'incompatible with a free country and a free people'. In February, the Lords constitution committee said electronic surveillance and collection of personal data had become 'pervasive' in British society. Its members said the situation threatened to undermine democracy."
UK 'must log' phone and web use
BBC Online, 7 June 2009

"The use of closed-circuit television in city and town centres and public housing estates does not have a significant effect on crime, according to Home Office-funded research to be distributed to all police forces in England and Wales this summer. The review of 44 research studies on CCTV schemes by the Campbell Collaboration found that they do have a modest impact on crime overall but are at their most effective in cutting vehicle crime in car parks, especially when used alongside improved lighting and the introduction of security guards. The authors, who include Cambridge University criminologist, David Farrington, say while their results lend support for the continued use of CCTV, schemes should be far more narrowly targeted at reducing vehicle crime in car parks. Results from a 2007 study in Cambridge which looked at the impact of 30 cameras in the city centre showed that they had no effect on crime but led to an increase in the reporting of assault, robbery and other violent crimes to the police. Home Office ministers cited the review last week in their official response to the critical report from the House of Lords constitution committee on surveillance published earlier this year. The peers warned that the steady expansion of the 'surveillance society', including the spread of CCTV, risked undermining fundamental freedoms, including the right to privacy....The Campbell Collaboration report says that CCTV is now the single most heavily-funded crime prevention measure operating outside the criminal justice system and its rapid growth has come with a huge price tag. It adds that £170m was spent on CCTV schemes in town and city centres, car parks and residential areas between 1999 and 2001 alone. "Over the last decade, CCTV accounted for more than threequarters of total spending on crime prevention by the British Home Office,' the report says. The Lords report said that £500 million was spent in Britain on CCTV in the decade up to 2006, money which in the past would have gone on street lighting or neighbourhood crime prevention initiatives."
CCTV schemes in city and town centres have little effect on crime, says report
Guardian, 18 May 2009

"Not happy with pushing the EU Data Retention Directive which would make ISPs store communication data for 12 months Vernon Coaker, the U.K. Home Office security minister, now wants all social networking sites and IM messaging service monitored as well. The Interception Monderisation Programme (IMP) is the government proposal for legislation to use mass monitoring of traffic data as an antiterrorism tool. The IMP has two objectives; that the government use deep packet inspection to monitor the Web communications of all U.K. citizens; and that all of the traffic data relating to those communications are stored in a centralized government database. The problem is that social networking sites aren’t covered by the directive. There is some opposition to this move but given the country’s predilection to treating everyone as a subject of surveillance it is hard to see this not happening."
The U.K. wants your Twitter chatter under surveillance
The Inquisitr, 19 March 2009

"From time to time, when low in spirits, I find solace in websites on 'How to Disappear'. It is not an urge to deceive loved ones and insurance companies like the appalling canoe man, but merely to toy with the idea of slipping below the official radar. Imagine walking cheerfully through the world: harmless and innocent, untraceable, unlisted, unfollowed, private. The guides make it clear how hard this is. It is not only CCTV and biometric passports that betray our whereabouts but also banking, bills, phones, cars, laptops (how ironic , just as you completed your escape, to be outed by web records showing you surfing for advice on how often to throw your prepay phone in the river). As technology moves on, not only fingerprinting but facial scanning may betray you, and if - while remembering your gloves and refraining from sneezing your DNA - you take your sunglasses off to see the cash machine screen on your secret bank account, then iris-recognition technology will get you, snap! Oh yes, we have all watched Spooks. Well, it is a pleasantly paranoiac way to pass a depressed half-hour, and there is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom. There is something fundamentally unnerving about being watched. After the fall of Ceausescu, our Romanian friends said that one of the worst things under his regime was not lousy housing, shortages or even fear of arrest but that 'They knew everything, they knew where you went'....'But,' splutters government when we jib at this, 'it's for your own good! We're protecting you!'. The same tone of hurt ministerial outrage will be heard more and more as people come to realise exactly what is involved in the vast new 'e-borders' system, currently being set up to track everybody's international travel just because a tiny minority are up to no good. A huge new database near Manchester will hold your personal travel history and mine for up to ten years. A pilot is already running on 'high-risk' routes; by the end of April 100 million will be tracked, by next year all rail, air and ferry travellers; by 2014, everyone. And what will they know? Who you are, where you live, how you paid, your phone and e-mail, where you're going, who's with you, where you plan to stay and when you'll be back. In most cases they want your intentions logged a full day in advance. We may be forced to be 'EU citizens' in a hundred other ways, but there'll be no more casual booze-cruises or spontaneous hops to the Normandy gîte or Frankfurt office; not without telling Nanny. .... [there will be a] a £5,000 fine for not notifying your movements online 24 hours early.... Opposition voices have pointed out the complexity, the cost, the paucity of consultation, the extraordinary power given to the UK Border Agency by statutory instruments without parliamentary scrutiny. Given the cases of councils already using anti-terrorist powers to catch litterbugs and school admissions cheats, there is a real fear that e-borders will be used to trump up tax claims or detect petty infringements like taking your children abroad in the school term. And there is something profoundly dispiriting in the principle of us all being suspects: universal surveillance rather than targeted concentration on known criminals and murderous creeps with terrorist ambitions. All this began when Tony Blair was embarrassed by a question about how many failed asylum seekers were here, and when it became clear that UK immigration control is ludicrously ineffective in an enlarged, porous EU. The depressing thing is that there used to be a reasonable system for knowing who was here - exit checks on passports. These were largely abandoned in 2004 to save money.  Under e-borders, the idea is that the pendulum will swing back until they know everything about everyone. And having so much information, they will become even more confused and give your plans to some cowboy IT contractor, who will leave it on a train seat to be picked up by grateful burglars, blackmailers and gossips.   They'll write in saying this is a caricature. It's not. It's an extrapolation, based on experience."
Libby Purves - E-borders - the new frontier of oppression
London Times, 16 March 2009

"A former head of MI5 has accused the government of exploiting the fear of terrorism and trying to bring in laws that restrict civil liberties. In an interview in a Spanish newspaper, published in the Daily Telegraph, Dame Stella Rimington, 73, also accuses the US of 'tortures'....Dame Stella, who stood down as the director general of the security service in 1996, has previously been critical of the government's policies, including its attempts to extend pre-charge detention for terror suspects to 42 days and the controversial plan to introduce ID cards. 'It would be better that the government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism - that we live in fear and under a police state,' she told the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia....Dame Stella's comments come as a study is published by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) that accuses the US and the UK of undermining the framework of international law. Former Irish president Mary Robinson, the president of the ICJ said: "Seven years after 9/11 it is time to take stock and to repeal abusive laws and policies enacted in recent years. 'Human rights and international humanitarian law provide a strong and flexible framework to address terrorist threats.' The BBC's security correspondent Frank Gardner said the ICJ report would probably have more of an impact than Dame Stella's remarks because it was a wide-ranging, three-year study carried out by an eminent group of practising legal experts....Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Ed Davey said: 'This is damning testament to just how much liberty has been ineffectually sacrificed in the 'war on terror'.' Dame Stella became the first female head of MI5 in 1992."
Ministers 'using fear of terror'
BBC Online, 17 February 2009

"Electronic surveillance and collection of personal data are 'pervasive' in British society and threaten to undermine democracy, peers have warned. CCTV cameras and the DNA database were two examples of threats to privacy, the Lords constitution committee said. It called for compensation for people subject to illegal surveillance....Civil liberties campaigners have warned about the risks of a 'surveillance society' in which the state acquires ever-greater powers to track people's movements and retain personal data.... According to a 2004 European Commission report, Britain has the highest density of CCTV cameras in Europe. It found 40,000 cameras monitored public areas in 500 British towns and cities, compared to fewer than 100 cameras in 15 German cities and no open street CCTV at all in Denmark.....'The huge rise in surveillance and data collection by the state and other organisations risks undermining the long-standing tradition of privacy and individual freedom which are vital for democracy,' Lord Goodlad added. 'If the public are to trust that information about them is not being improperly used, there should be much more openness about what data is collected, by whom and how it is used.'... Human rights campaigners Liberty welcomed the report. Director Shami Chakrabarti said: 'Liberty's postbag suggests that the House of Lords is more in touch with public concerns that our elected government. 'Over the past seven years we've been told 'nothing to hide, nothing to fear' but a stream of data bungles and abuses of power suggest that even the innocent have a lot to fear."
Warning over 'surveillance state'
BBC Online, 6 February 2009

"It has taken less than 24 hours after the Bush presidency ended for a former analyst at the National Security Agency to come forward to reveal new allegations about how this nation was spied on by its own government, exclusively here on COUNTDOWN. Our third story tonight, Russell Tice has already stood up for truth before this evening as one source for the revelation in 2005 by the 'New York Times' that President Bush was eavesdropping on American citizens without warrants.   Tonight, the next chapter for Mr. Tice, a chapter he feared to reveal while George Bush occupied the Oval Office, that under the collar of fighting terrorism, the Bush administration was also targeting specific groups of Americans for surveillance, non-terrorist Americans if you will.  Mr. Tice prepared to name one of those groups tonight.   The NSA was already estimated to have collected millions of transmissions, e-mails and phone calls of average Americans simply by patching into the networks of cooperative telecommunications companies.  You will recall the infamous room 641A at the AT&T Folsom Street facility in San Francisco, in which the whole of AT&T‘s portion of the Internet was duplicated inside a room accessible only to the NSA.  Mr. Tice, however, was also involved in another program and told us that he was first directed to focus on these specific groups in order to weed them out from legitimate surveillance targets, but ultimately concluded that the weeding out was actually an internal NSA cover story for a real goal, which was simply spying on those Americans.  Initially, Mr. Bush told the nation all his surveillance was legal."
'Countdown with Keith Olbermann' for Wednesday, 21 January 2009
MSNBC, 22 January 2009

"A secrecy law frequently invoked by the federal government in terrorism cases has been declared unconstitutional by an Ontario Superior Court judge, amid fears a sprawling Toronto conspiracy case risks 'bogging down and becoming unmanageable.' The landmark decision strikes down a portion of the Canada Evidence Act, a controversial law passed by Parliament after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The law effectively directed debates involving government secrecy claims away from open trials and toward specialized hearings in other courts....The invariable effect of the law has been to take secrecy arguments away from main-stage proceedings to a secretive side stage at the Federal Court of Canada, whose judges have specialized national security training and, until now, exclusive jurisdiction of all Canada Evidence Act matters. Judges pondering the overall cases have been forced to await the outcome of protracted Federal Court legal debates to determine what information would be in play."
Ontario judge declares secrecy law unconstitutional
Globe and Mail, 16 January 2009

"Ubiquitous computing will be enabled by widespread tagging and networking of mundane objects (the Internet of Things) such as food packages, furniture, room sensors, and paper documents. Such items will be located and identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through enabling technologies—including Radio Frequency Identifications, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters—connected via the next-generation Internet using abundant, low cost, and high-power computing."
Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World
US National Intelligence Council, November 2008

"Government claims of widespread public enthusiasm for ID cards 'beggar belief', critics have said, as it emerged the cost of cards may double.   Remarks by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith that people 'can't wait' for cards to be introduced would 'haunt' her in the future, campaign group No 2 ID said. The fresh criticism came amid concerns about the cost of providing biometric data and fingerprints needed on cards. This requirement could add an estimated £29 on top of the £30 cost of the card.  Applicants will have to foot the cost of supplying their fingerprints and biometric data such as an iris scan....The first biometric cards are being issued to students from outside the EU and marriage visa holders this month. Cards will then be issued on a voluntary basis to young people from 2010 and for everyone else from 2012. But speaking on Thursday, Ms Smith said there is strong public demand for the cards and she has been 'regularly' approached by people who say they do not want to wait several years to register. People applying for cards and passports from 2012 will have to provide fingerprints, photographs and a signature....Arguments over the cost of ID cards continue to dog the initiative, with the Tories and Lib Dems calling for them to be scrapped. The overall cost of the scheme over the next 10 years has risen by £50m to £5.1bn in the past six months, the government's latest cost report has indicated."
Smith ID comments 'beggar belief'
BBC Online, 7 November 2008

"Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), called the allegations "extremely disturbing" and said the committee has begun its own examination. 'These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones,' said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA's Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003. Kinne described the contents of the calls as 'personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.' She said US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and 'collected on' as they called their offices or homes in the United States. Another intercept operator, former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk, 39, said he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad's Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007. "Calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes one phone call following another," said Faulk. The accounts of the two former intercept operators, who have never met and did not know of the other's allegations, provide the first inside look at the day to day operations of the huge and controversial US terrorist surveillance program.... Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer. 'Hey, check this out,' Faulk says he would be told, 'there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News. Faulk said he joined in to listen, and talk about it during breaks in Back Hall's 'smoke pit,' but ended up feeling badly about his actions. 'I feel that it was something that the people should not have done. Including me,' he said.... Both Kinne and Faulk said their military commanders rebuffed questions about listening in to the private conversations of Americans talking to Americans. 'It was just always, that , you know, your job is not to question. Your job is to collect and pass on the information,' Kinne said.... Both former intercept operators came forward at first to speak with investigative journalist Jim Bamford for a book on the NSA, 'The Shadow Factory,' to be published next week. 'It's extremely rare,' said Bamford, who has written two previous books on the NSA, including the landmark 'Puzzle Palace' which first revealed the existence of the super secret spy agency. 'Both of them felt that what they were doing was illegal and improper, and immoral, and it shouldn't be done, and that's what forces whistleblowers.'"
Exclusive: Inside Account of U.S. Eavesdropping on Americans
ABC News, 9 October 2008