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NLPWESSEX, natural law publishing |
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| SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY NEWS ARCHIVE - 2008 To 2011 | ||
| To Go Direct To Current Surveillance News Reports - Click Here To Go Direct To 2008 - 2011 Surveillance News Reports Archive - Click Here | ||
Surveillance Society News Reports Current |
Selected News Extracts 2008 - 2011 2011 "Sir Richard
Dearlove, Britain’s former chief spymaster has said the country should start spying
on its Eurozone neighbours to protect the economy as the common currency is wracked by
national defaults. Sir Richard Dearlove, who served
as head of MI6 until 2004, said that Britain must not be 'squeamish' about using the
intelligence services to defend its economic interests. The former C said central banks
like the Bank of England maintained extensive networks of contacts to secure information
on future developments. But specialist intelligence agencies should also undertake the
task of financial security. 'I am addressing the future of the euro and how defaults
affect us economically,' he told the Global Strategy Forum. 'Efficient central bankers
should be able to handle themselves but I am indicating they could and might need help
from time to time on the currency issue.' Sir Richard added that 2008 financial crisis had
changed his views on the role of intelligence agencies in protecting the economy. Britain
needed to be 'forewarned and forearmed’ in anticipation of a future crisis. He said:
'I don’t think we should be squeamish about using all means to protect ourselves
financially.'.... As one of the highest regarded global spy agencies, the Secret
Intelligence Service, or MI6, has deep ties with its intelligence counterparts across
Europe. Sir Richard acknowledged that MI6 was a leader in efforts to integrate
Europe’s intelligence agencies. By ordering the
foreign intelligence agency to actively spy on its partners, the government would risk a
backlash from the country’s closest neighbours and allies. Countries vulnerable to
quitting the euro would be sure to view the move as an act of selfishness at a time of
national weakness.... Sir Richard noted that the Bank of England had effectively intelligence
capabilities – though it did not classify these
activities as spying. As such MI6 would play a subordinate
role to the Bank. Sir
Richard was appointed head of MI6 in 1999 and was head of the organisation during the
September 11 attacks on the US by al Qaeda. When he retired in 2004, the final year of his
career had been overshadowed by controversy over the dossier used by the government to
accuse Iraq of pursuing a secret Weapons of Mass Destruction programme.' 2010 "The
top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11,
2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money
it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how
many agencies do the same work.... In Washington and
the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under
construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent
of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of
space." 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...." "With Google’s Latitude, parents
will be able to swoop down like helicopters on their children, whirr around their heads
and chase them away from the games arcade and back to do their French verbs....However
Orwellian it sounds, don’t worry. The police and
security services can already track you down from your phone without any help from Google..." "Over the past few days, at trade
fairs from Las Vegas to Seoul, a constant theme has been the unstoppable advance of 'FRT',
the benign abbreviation favoured by industry insiders. We learnt that Apple's iPhoto
update will automatically scan your photos to detect people's faces and group them
accordingly, and that Lenovo's new PC will log on users by monitoring their facial
patterns....So let's understand this: governments and
police are planning to implement increasingly accurate surveillance technologies that are
unnoticeable, cheap, pervasive, ubiquitous, and searchable in real time. And private businesses, from bars to workplaces, will also operate such
systems, whose data trail may well be sold on or leaked to third parties - let's say,
insurance companies that have an interest in knowing about your unhealthy lifestyle, or
your ex-spouse who wants evidence that you can afford higher maintenance payments. Rather
than jump up and down with rage - you never know who is watching through the window - you have a duty now, as a citizen, to question this stealthy rush towards permanent individual surveillance. A
Government already obsessed with pursuing an unworkable and unnecessary identity-card
database must be held to account." 2008 "Our
privacy is being invaded by the world's security services in every second of every day, as a
routine matter. Vast quantities of information are
collected by commercial enterprises such as Google or Tesco. Against these invasions of our privacy we have little or no
protection." 2007 "Officials from the top of Government
to lowly council officers will be given unprecedented powers to access details of
every phone call in Britain under laws coming into force tomorrow. The new rules compel
phone companies to retain information, however private, about all landline and mobile calls, and
make them available to some 795 public bodies and quangos. The move, enacted by
the personal decree of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, will give police and security services a right they have
long demanded: to delve at will into the phone records of British citizens and
businesses. The Government will be given access to details of every phone call in Britain.
....The initiative, formulated in the wake of the Madrid and London terrorist
attacks of 2004 and 2005, was put forward as a vital tool in the fight against terrorism .... Files will also be kept on the
sending and receipt of text messages. By 2009 the Government
plans to extend the rules to cover internet use: the websites we have visited, the people we have emailed and phone calls made over the net.... The new measures were
implemented after the Home Secretary signed a 'statutory instrument' on July 26. The
process allows the Government to alter laws 2006 "The
FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal
investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's
microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations. ......Kaplan's opinion said
that the eavesdropping technique 'functioned whether the phone was powered on or off.'
Some handsets can't be fully powered down without removing the
battery.....Security-conscious corporate executives routinely remove the batteries from
their cell phones, he added....A BBC article
from 2004 reported that intelligence agencies routinely employ the remote-activiation
method. 'A mobile sitting on the desk of a politician or
businessman can act as a powerful, undetectable bug,' the
article said, 'enabling them to be activated at a later date to pick up sounds even when
the receiver is down.'........ A 2003 lawsuit revealed that the FBI
was able to surreptitiously turn on the built-in microphones in automotive systems like
General Motors' OnStar to snoop on passengers'
conversations. When FBI agents remotely activated
the system and were listening in, passengers in the vehicle could not tell that their
conversations were being monitored. Malicious hackers have followed suit. A report
last year said Spanish authorities had detained a man who write a Trojan horse that
secretly activated a computer's video camera and forwarded him the recordings." 2005 "Police in Israel say they have
uncovered a huge industrial spying ring which used computer viruses to probe the systems
of many major companies. At least 15 Israeli firms have been implicated in the espionage
plot, with 18 people arrested in Israel and two more held by British police. Among those under suspicion are major Israeli telecoms and media
companies. Police say the companies used a 'Trojan
horse' computer virus written by an Israeli to hack into rivals' systems. Interpol and the
authorities in Britain, Germany and the US are already involved in investigating the
espionage, which Israeli police fear may involve major international companies." |
|
| MORE SURVEILLANCE INFORMATION SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY BULLETINS |
||
| Contact | 'We Need A New Way Of Thinking' - Consciousness-Based Education |
| 2008 - 2011 Archive |
| 2011 - 2010 - 2009 - 2008 & Earlier |
| 2011 |
"Meet the Brossarts, a North
Dakota family deemed so dangerous that the local sheriff needed unleashed an unmanned
Predator drone to help bring them in. The Brossart's alleged crime? They wouldn't give
back three cows and their calves that wandered onto their 3,000-acre farm this summer. The
same aerial vehicles used by the CIA to track down and assassinate terrorists and
militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan are now being deployed by cops to spy on Americans
in their own backyards. ... The Brossarts are the
first known subjects of the high-flying new surveillance technology that the federal
government has made available to some local sheriffs and police chiefs - all without
Congressional approval or search warrants. Local authorities say the Brossarts are known
for being armed, anti-government separatists whose sprawling farm is used as a compound.
.... increasingly, the federal government and local police agencies are using ... drones
to spy criminal suspects in America with sophisticated high-resolution cameras, heat
sensors and radar. All of it comes without a warrant. ... Allowing local sheriffs and
police chiefs access to spy planes happened without public discussion or the approval of
Congress. And it has privacy advocates crying foul, saying the unregulated use of the
drones is intrusive.... All of the surveillance
occurred without a search warrant because the
Supreme Court has long ruled that anything visible from the air, even if it's on private
property, can be subject to police spying. However, privacy experts say that predator
drones, which can silently fly for 20 hours nonstop, dramatically surpasses the spying
power that any police helicopter or airplane can achieve." |
"Mass interception of entire
populations is not only a reality, it is a secret new industry spanning 25 countries. It
sounds like something out of Hollywood, but as of today, mass interception systems, built
by Western intelligence contractors, including for ’political opponents’ are a
reality. Today WikiLeaks began releasing a database of hundreds of documents from as many
as 160 intelligence contractors in the mass surveillance industry. Working with Bugged Planet and Privacy International, as well as media
organizations form six countries – ARD in Germany, The Bureau of Investigative
Journalism in the UK, The Hindu in India, L’Espresso in Italy, OWNI in France and the
Washington Post in the U.S. Wikileaks is shining a
light on this secret industry that has boomed since September 11, 2001 and is worth
billions of dollars per year. WikiLeaks has released
287 documents today, but the Spy Files project is ongoing and further information will be
released this week and into next year. International surveillance companies are based in
the more technologically sophisticated countries, and they sell their technology on to
every country of the world. This industry is, in practice, unregulated. Intelligence agencies, military forces and police authorities are
able to silently, and on mass, and secretly intercept calls and take over computers
without the help or knowledge of the telecommunication providers. Users’ physical
location can be tracked if they are carrying a mobile phone, even if it is only on stand
by. But the WikiLeaks Spy Files are more than just about ’good Western
countries’ exporting to ’bad developing world countries’. Western companies
are also selling a vast range of mass surveillance equipment to Western intelligence
agencies. In traditional spy stories, intelligence agencies like MI5 bug the phone of one
or two people of interest. In the last ten years systems for indiscriminate, mass
surveillance have become the norm. Intelligence companies such as VASTech secretly sell
equipment to permanently record the phone calls of entire nations. Others record the
location of every mobile phone in a city, down to 50 meters. Systems to infect every
Facebook user, or smart-phone owner of an entire population group are on the intelligence
market...... In
January 2011, the National Security Agency broke ground on a $1.5 billion facility in the
Utah desert that is designed to store terabytes of domestic and foreign intelligence data
forever and process it for years to come.
Telecommunication companies are forthcoming when it comes to disclosing client information
to the authorities - no matter the country. Headlines during August’s unrest in the
UK exposed how Research in Motion (RIM), makers of the Blackberry, offered to help the
government identify their clients. RIM has been in similar negotiations to share
BlackBerry Messenger data with the governments of India, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the
United Arab Emirates. There are commercial firms that
now sell special software that analyze this data and turn it into powerful tools that can
be used by military and intelligence agencies.... Across the world, mass surveillance contractors are helping intelligence
agencies spy on individuals and ‘communities of interest’ on an industrial scale. The
Wikileaks Spy Files reveal the details of which companies are making billions selling
sophisticated tracking tools to government buyers, flouting export rules, and turning a
blind eye to dictatorial regimes that abuse human rights." |
"A piece of keystroke-sniffing
software called Carrier IQ has been embedded so deeply in millions of HTC and
Samsung-built Android devices that it’s tough to spot and nearly impossible to
remove, as 25-year old Connecticut systems administrator Trevor Eckhart revealed in
a video Tuesday. That’s not just creepy, says Paul Ohm, a former Justice
Department prosecutor and law professor at the University of Colorado Law School. He
thinks it’s also likely grounds for a class action lawsuit based on a federal
wiretapping law. 'If CarrierIQ has gotten the
handset manufactures to install secret software that records keystrokes intended for text
messaging and the Internet and are sending some of that information back somewhere, this
is very likely a federal wiretap.' he says. 'And that gives the people wiretapped the
right to sue and provides for significant monetary damages.' As Eckhart’s analysis of
the company’s training videos and the debugging logs on his own HTC Evo handset have
shown, Carrier IQ captures every keystroke on a device as well as location and other data,
and potentially makes that data available to Carrier IQ’s customers. ... Eckhart has found the application on Samsung, HTC, Nokia and RIM
devices, and Carrier IQ claims on its website that it has installed the program on more than 140 million handsets." |
"An Android app developer has
published what he says is conclusive proof that millions of smartphones are secretly
monitoring the key presses, geographic locations, and received messages of its users. In a
YouTube video posted on Monday, Trevor Eckhart showed how software from a Silicon Valley
company known as Carrier IQ recorded in real time the keys he pressed into a stock EVO
handset, which he had reset to factory settings just prior to the demonstration. Using a
packet sniffer while his device was in airplane mode, he demonstrated how each numeric tap
and every received text message is logged by the software. Ironically, he says, the Carrier IQ software recorded the 'hello world'
dispatch even before it was displayed on his handset. Eckhart then connected the device to
a Wi-Fi network and pointed his browser at Google. Even though he denied the search
giant's request that he share his physical location, the Carrier IQ software recorded it.
The secret app then recorded the precise input of his search query – again, 'hello
world' – even though he typed it into a page that uses the SSL, or secure sockets
layer, protocol to encrypt data sent between the device and the servers. 'We can see that
Carrier IQ is querying these strings over my wireless network [with] no 3G connectivity
and it is reading HTTPS,' the 25-year-old Eckhart says." |
"WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange blasted the mainstream media,
Washington, banks and the Internet itself as he addressed journalists in Hong Kong on
Monday via videolink from house arrest in England. Fresh from accepting a top award for
journalism from the prestigious Walkley Foundation in his native Australia on Sunday,
Assange spoke to the News World Summit in Hong Kong before keeping a regular appointment
with the police....The Internet itself had become
'the most significant surveillance machine that we have ever seen,' Assange said in
reference to the amount of information people give about themselves online. 'It's not an age of transparency at all ... the amount of secret
information is more than ever before,' he said, adding that information flows in but is
not flowing out of governments and other powerful organisations. 'I see that really is our
big battle. The technology gives and the technology takes away,' he added." |
"The most senior figure in the US military has warned that the
number of threats facing his country and its allies have increased over the last decade
and that the armed forces must be kept strong to fight back. In his first speech since
taking over as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Martin Dempsey told an
audience in London on Monday that meeting the new challenges in a time of austerity would
require a transformation in military thinking. He
highlighted the cyber threat as one of the most pressing, and said more needed to be done
to counter the dangers online." |
"'Big Brother' technology which
monitors mobile phones remotely - without warning you that
this is happening - is already in use in many major British retail chains, MailOnline can
reveal. The technology has quietly been in use in the UK for four years in several 'major'
High Street malls and department stores, with little or no publicity. It raises serious
questions about privacy - and this weekend the launch of the technology in the U.S. for
the post-Thanksgiving sales was been greeted with a storm of controversy. Thanks to the
widespread use of CCTV, Britain is already the most 'watched' society on Earth. Unlike
with CCTV, though, victims of 'Footpaths' scanning often get no warning they are being
watched. The surveillance is not for their safety, either - it's for pure commercial gain.
'Our FootPath technology allows us to monitor the path you take as you travel through
premises belonging to any of our clients,' says Path Intelligence, the company behind the
technology. The technology is already in use in several 'major' retail chains in the UK -
although the company's CEO refused to say which. 'We have been installed in various places
since 2008,' CEO Sharon Biggar told MailOnline today. When entering premises with Footpath
technology, the customer receives no warning that their
mobile phone signal is being monitored bar a small sign
somewhere on the premises. Crucially, though, they
do not receive an option to 'opt-out' of being scanned. Customers on all networks will be
scanned by Footpath, and no current mobile phone has a 'defence' against such scanners.
The only way to be safe is simply to switch off. 'FootPath works by detecting a frequently
changing signal from your mobile phone,' says the company. 'This random signal is detected
by a number of our units within the premises. 'We combine the information detected from
the mobile phone signal with a proprietary mathematical algorithm developed by us. This
allows us to determine your path through premises equipped with our receiver units.' 'We
cannot store individual mobile phone numbers and do not read SMS texts or phone calls,'
says Ms Biggar. 'We 'hash' the data immediately so that no computer or person within Path
Intelligence ever knows the number.' Privacy advocates worry, though, that merely
harvesting that sort of data leaves stores open to hackers or employees misusing the
information. 'Store security cameras are a bigger privacy violation - they CAN identify
you.' 'Sat-navs such as TomTom also already scan for mobile phone signals to work out
where there are traffic jams.' Ms Biggar says the technology is largely used to help
stores redesign to maximise sales." |
"In recent weeks, Facebook has
been wrangling with the Federal
Trade Commission over whether the social media website is violating users' privacy by
making public too much of their personal information. Far more quietly, another debate is
brewing over a different side of online privacy: what Facebook is learning about those who
visit its website. Facebook officials are now acknowledging that the social media giant
has been able to create a running log of the web pages that each of its 800 million or so
members has visited during the previous 90 days. Facebook also keeps close track of where
millions more non-members of the social network go on the Web, after they visit a Facebook
web page for any reason. To do this, the company
relies on tracking cookie technologies similar to the controversial systems used by
Google, Adobe, Microsoft, Yahoo and others in the online advertising industry, says Arturo
Bejar, Facebook's engineering director. Facebook's efforts to track the browsing habits of
visitors to its site have made the company a player in the 'Do Not Track' debate, which
focuses on whether consumers should be able to prevent websites from tracking the
consumers' online activity. For online business and social media sites, such information
can be particularly valuable in helping them tailor online ads to specific visitors. But
privacy advocates worry about how else the information might be used, and whether it might
be sold to third parties. New guidelines for online privacy are being hashed out in
Congress and by the World Wide Web
Consortium, which sets standards for the Internet. If privacy advocates get their way,
consumers soon could be empowered to stop or limit tech companies and ad networks from
tracking them wherever they go online. But the online advertising industry has dug in its
heels, trying to retain the current self-regulatory system." |
"A council has been accused of a
‘staggering invasion of privacy’ after announcing it plans to record every
conversation that takes place in taxi cabs. Oxford City Council will fit all of its 652
taxis with at least one CCTV camera to record all conversations between passengers from
the moment the engine starts running. Civil
liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch has said it will complain to the Information
Commissioner over the scheme. Nick Pickles, the campaign group's director, said:
‘This is a staggering invasion of privacy, being done with no evidence, no
consultation and a total disregard for civil liberties.' ‘Big Brother now has big
ears, and they are eavesdropping on your conversations with absolutely no
justification.’ He added: ‘Given that one rail route to Witney [David Cameron's
constituency] is through Oxford, we'll be letting the Prime Minister know that his staff
might want to avoid using Oxford cabs.’ A spokeswoman for Oxford City Council said
video and audio would run all the time in the cabs but officials will only be allowed to
view the material if there has been a complaint.' The authority said complaints against
both taxi drivers and passengers had increased year on year and without CCTV the
allegations 'amount to one persons word against the other'. Complaints included
overcharging, sexual assaults and attacks on drivers." |
"When James Hay was invited to join Facebook by an old
university acquaintance on Friday, he began tapping in his registration details with a
hint of trepidation. Having ignored the social networking behemoth for several years, Hay,
27, figured he would be a 'Billy no-mates' and it would take him months to build up a
collection of online friends. Yet within seconds of keying in his email address Hay, who
works for a television production company in London, was surprised to be sent a list of 45
people he might know. 'It felt as if Facebook already knew a whole load of stuff about me
before I had even signed up,' he said. 'It was spooky.' It transpires that the company, which boasts 800m users worldwide,
has been accumulating information about people who have not even joined the site —
and without their knowledge or consent. Many
who are invited to sign up receive a list of suggested friends before they even hand over
any personal details. These so-called
'shadow profiles' are mainly the result of two key actions by Facebook. The site stores
names that are searched for by existing users. If someone is not already on Facebook, they
could be alerted to who was looking for them when they do eventually sign up. The company also encourages users to synchronise the contacts in
their email address books with their Facebook account. This instantly gives the company
access to that user’s full list of real-life friends and acquaintances. The
acquisition of such information about non-users is now being investigated by
Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner (IDPC) as part of a series of complaints about
Facebook’s practices that challenge whether it has breached European privacy laws.
Facebook retains every IP address from which a user logs on to the site, helping the
company to identify home and work computers for each user." |
"The astonishing extent of
Britain’s surveillance society was revealed for the first time yesterday. Three
million snooping operations have been carried out over the past decade under controversial
anti-terror laws. They include tens of thousands of undercover missions by councils and
other state bodies which are not responsible for law enforcement. Cases include a family who were spied on to check they were not cheating
on school catchment area rules and so-called ‘bin criminals’.The campaign group
Justice is demanding the hugely controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act
– under which all the operations were authorised – be scrapped altogether.
RIPA, billed as ‘anti-terror legislation’, was passed by Labour in 2000
supposedly to regulate snooping by public bodies. But Justice, which has campaigned on
privacy matters for decades, says the result has been a huge increase in intrusive
surveillance. Since the Act was passed, there have
been: More than 20,000 warrants for the interception of phone calls, emails and
internet use; * At least 2.7million requests
for communication data, including phone bills and location information; * More than 4,000
authorisations for intrusive surveillance, such as planting a bug in a person’s
house; * At least 186,133 authorisations for directed (covert) surveillance by law
enforcement agencies; * 61,317 directed surveillance operations by other public bodies,
including councils; * 43,391 authorisations for ‘covert human intelligence
sources’. In total, the report says there have
been around three million decisions taken by state bodies under RIPA, not including authorisations given to the security and intelligence
services. Yet fewer than 5,000 of these – just
0.16 per cent – were approved by judges. In the
remaining cases, they required only the approval of a bureaucrat or, in a small number of
cases involving large scale intrusion, a Secretary of State." |
"During the last two years, Facebook has made a bewildering number of
changes to its site - many of which can see personal data being laid open to advertisers,
'friends of friends' or the world. These changes often happen with no warning, and little
explanation. In the last 18 months, Facebook has
changed its privacy policies eight times - including changes that automatically tell
people where you are, and a change that let third parties access users' telephone numbers
and addresses. In a survey, 48 of users agreed that,
'I can't keep up with the number of changes Facebook has made to its data security
settings.'Dr Robert Reid, scientific policy advisor for Which Computing, which conducted
the survey said, 'Multiple changes per month to long-winded policies that are barely
notified to users is leaving consumers of the social network feeling confused and
powerless.'Sixty per cent of the 953 users surveyed said that they felt worried about,
'People who are not my friends accessing information about me on Facebook.'... A worrying
19 per cent of users said that they had never changed their privacy settings. This
potentially leaves open information such as phone numbers, addresses and email addresses,
which could be used in identity theft." |
"Britain's largest police
force is operating covert surveillance technology that can
masquerade as a mobile phone network, transmitting a signal that allows authorities to
shut off phones remotely, intercept communications and gather data about thousands of
users in a targeted area. The surveillance system
has been procured by the Metropolitan police from
Leeds-based company Datong plc, which counts the US Secret Service, the Ministry of
Defence and regimes in the Middle East among its customers. Strictly classified under
government protocol as 'Listed X', it can emit a signal over an area of up to an estimated
10 sq km, forcing hundreds of mobile phones per minute to
release their unique IMSI and IMEI identity codes, which can be used to track a person's
movements in real time. The disclosure has caused concern among lawyers and privacy groups
that large numbers of innocent people could be unwittingly implicated in covert
intelligence gathering. The Met has refused to confirm whether the system is used in
public order situations, such as during large protests or demonstrations." |
"Google faced down demands from a US law enforcement agency to take
down YouTube videos allegedly showing police brutality earlier this year, figures released
for the first time show. The technology giant's biannual transparency report shows that Google
refused the demands from the unnamed authority in the first half of this year. According
to the report, Google separately declined orders by other police authorities to remove
videos that allegedly defamed law enforcement officials. The
demands formed part of a 70% rise in takedown requests from the US government or police,
and were revealed as part of an effort to highlight online censorship around the world.
Figures revealed for the first time show that the US demanded private information about
more than 11,000 Google users between January and June this year, almost equal to the
number of requests made by 25 other developed countries, including the UK and Russia. Governments around the world requested private data about 25,440 people in
the first half of this year, with 11,057 of those people in the US. It is the first time
Google has released details about how many of its users are targeted by authorities, as
opposed to the number of requests made by countries." |
"Facebook Ireland is under fire
for allegedly creating 'shadow profiles' on both users and nonusers alike. The startling charges against the social-networking giant come from the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (IDC),
which, Fox News reports today, is launching a 'comprehensive'
investigation against Facebook Ireland for extracting data from current users--without
their consent or knowledge--and building 'extensive profiles' on people who haven't even
signed on for the service. Names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, work information, and
perhaps even more sensitive information such as sexual orientation, political
affiliations, and religious beliefs are being collected and could possibly be misused,
Irish authorities claim." |
"Council snoopers went through
the bins of more than 30,000 families last year. The figure was double that of the
previous year, despite a Coalition pledge to stamp out the intrusive practice. It was
revealed in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Daily Mail. We can reveal that inspectors are building up a disturbingly detailed
profile of families’ lives by rifling through their rubbish in secret. In some cases,
they divide the contents into 13 main categories and 52 sub-categories of waste. Councils
claim it is so householders can be targeted for future recycling efforts such as
leafleting campaigns. But campaigners fear this data could be passed to other departments
such as health or social services. The audits, which are held on a database, can reveal an
extraordinarily sophisticated portrait from what sort of foods are eaten and what kind of
goods are bought in a particular street. Inspectors, often hired in from the private
sector, check supermarket labels, types of unwanted food – and even examine the
contents of discarded mail. Councils were accused yesterday of using Big Brother tactics
to ‘spy on residents with alarming frequency and for ever more spurious
reasons’." |
| "A German hacker organization
claims to have cracked spying software allegedly used by German authorities. The Trojan
horse has functions which go way beyond those allowed by German law. The news has sparked
a wave of outrage among politicians and media commentators. It sounds like something out
of George Orwell's novel '1984' -- a computer program that can remotely control someone's
computer without their knowledge, search its complete contents and use it to conduct
audio-visual surveillance via the microphone or webcam. But the spy software that the
famous German hacker organization Chaos Computer Club has obtained is not used by
criminals looking to steal credit-card data or send spam e-mails. If the CCC is to be
believed, the so-called 'Trojan horse' software was used by German authorities. The case has already triggered a political shockwave in the country and
could have far-reaching consequences. On Saturday, the CCC announced that it had been
given hard drives containing a 'state spying software' which had allegedly been used by
German investigators to carry out surveillance of Internet communication. The organization
had analyzed the software and found it to be full of defects. They also found that it
transmitted information via a server located in the US. As well as its surveillance
functions, it could be used to plant files on an individual's computer. It was also not
sufficiently protected, so that third parties with the necessary technical skills could
hijack the Trojan horse's functions for their own ends. The software possibly violated
German law, the organization said. So-called Trojan horse software can be surreptitiously
delivered by a harmless-looking e-mail and installed on a user's computer without their
knowledge, where it can be used to, for example, scan the contents of a hard drive.... If
the CCC's claims are true, then the software has functions which were expressly forbidden
by Germany's highest court, the Federal Constitutional Court, in a landmark 2008
ruling which significantly restricted what was allowed in terms of online
surveillance. The court also specified that online spying was only permissible if there
was concrete evidence of danger to individuals or society. German politicians from all
sides of the political spectrum have reacted to the news with alarm. Government spokesman
Steffen Seibert said that Chancellor Angela Merkel was taking the CCC's allegations very
seriously." Electronic Surveillance Scandal Hits Germany Der Speigel, 10 October 2011 |
"While it had been rumored
it's unfortunately now confirmed that California governor Jerry Brown has sold out your
privacy to law enforcement. After a bad
court ruling gave law enforcement the ability to search your mobile phone during a
traffic stop, the California legislature realized the ridiculousness of the situation and
passed the bill requiring a warrant pretty quickly. But, unfortunately, despite widespread
support for it, Governor Brown has vetoed the bill, meaning that your mobile phones are fair game for
searches without a warrant." |
"Facebook has been caught
telling porkies by an Australian technologist whose revelations that the site tracks its
800 million users even when they are logged out have embroiled Facebook in a global public
policy – and legal – nightmare. Facebook's
assurances that 'we have no interest in tracking people' have been
laid bare by a new Facebook patent, dated this month, that describes a method 'for tracking
information about the activities of users of a social networking system while on another
domain'." |
"Many wireless carriers keep
people's cellphone data for more than a year, according to a Justice Department document
released by the American Civil Liberties Union. The
government document was meant to help law enforcement agents who were seeking cellphone
records for their investigations. The ACLU obtained the document as part of a Freedom of
Information Act request for records on how law enforcement agencies use cellphone data.
According to the 2010
document, the four national wireless carriers all keep records of which cellphone
towers a phone uses for at least a year. This information could potentially be used to
determine a person's location. T-Mobile officially keeps the cell tower data for four to
six months, but the document notes that the period is 'really a year or more.' AT&T
keeps all cell tower records since July 2008, Verizon keeps the data for one rolling year
and Sprint keeps the information for 18 to 24 months." |
"Internet companies such as
Google, Twitter and Facebook are increasingly co-opted for surveillance work as the
information they gather proves irresistible to law enforcement agencies, Web experts said
this week. Although such companies try to keep their users' information private, their
business models depend on exploiting it to sell targeted advertising, and when governments
demand they hand it over, they have little choice but to comply. Suggestions that BlackBerry maker RIM might give user data to British
police after its messenger service was used to coordinate riots this summer caused outrage
-- as has the spying on social media users by more oppressive governments. But the vast
amount of personal information that companies like Google collect to run their businesses
has become simply too valuable for police and governments to ignore, delegates to the
Internet Governance Forum in Nairobi said. 'When the possibility exists for information to
be obtained that wasn't possible before, it's entirely understandable that law enforcement
is interested,' Google's Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf told Reuters in an
interview." |
"Microsoft allegedly tracks the
location of its mobile customers even after users request that tracking software be turned
off, according to a new lawsuit. The proposed class
action, filed in a Seattle federal court on Wednesday, says Microsoft intentionally
designed camera software on the Windows Phone 7 operating system to ignore customer
requests that they not be tracked. A Microsoft representative could not immediately be
reached for comment. The lawsuit comes after concerns surfaced earlier this year that
Apple's iPhones collected location data and stored it for up to a year, even when location
software was supposedly turned off. Apple issued a patch to fix the problem. However, the
revelation prompted renewed scrutiny of the nexus between location and privacy. At a
hearing in May, U.S. lawmakers accused the tech industry of exploiting location data for
marketing purposes -- a potentially multibillion-dollar industry -- without getting proper
consent from millions of Americans. The lawsuit against Microsoft cites a letter the
company sent to Congress, in which Microsoft said it only collects geolocation data with
the express consent of the user." |
"A sleepy Home Counties market
town has become the first in Britain to have every car passing through it tracked by
police cameras. Royston, in Hertfordshire, has had a set of police cameras installed on
every road leading in and out of it, recording the numberplate of every vehicle that
passes them. The automatic number-plate recognition
system will check the plates against a variety of databases, studying them for links to
crimes, and insurance and tax records, and alerting police accordingly. There were
just seven incidents of vehicle crime in the town last month, and residents believe the
unmarked cameras are an invasion of their privacy. The system, due to be switched on in
the next few days, also allows police to compile 'hotlists' of vehicles that they are
interested in... Details of the cars movements will stay on police records for two years,
or five if the car is connected to a crime, the Guardian reported." |
"Two key senators want to know
if the leader of the vast U.S. intelligence apparatus believes it’s legal for spooks
to track where you go through your iPhone. In a
letter that Sens. Mark Udall (D-Colorado) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) will send later on
Thursday, obtained by Danger Room, the senators ask Director of National Intelligence
James Clapper, 'Do government agencies have the authority to collect the geolocation
information of American citizens for intelligence purposes?' Both senators are members of
the panel overseeing the 16 intelligence agencies. In May, they sounded
warnings that the Obama administration was secretly reinterpreting the Patriot Act to
allow a broader amount of domestic surveillance than it had publicly disclosed....
Geolocation is a particular interest of Wyden’s. Technically, there are few obstacles
to clandestine geodata collection, since most mobile phones feature built-in GPS.... The
2008 FISA Amendments Act that blessed
the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance programs allowed intelligence
agencies greater leeway to collect metadata on Americans’ communications abroad.
It’s unclear to the senators if that or any other law prompted the spy community to
move into geolocation collection. That’s why Wyden and Udall want 'unclassified
answers' from Clapper. If Clapper thinks his spies can go after U.S. citizens’
geodata, they want the 'specific statutory basis' for that collection, along with a
description of any 'judicial review or approval by particular officials' that might
accompany it. They also want to know if Clapper thinks there’s any affirmative legal
'prohibition' to geodata collection by spies, if the spy chief doesn’t think
it’s legal." |
"Before hitting the streets, Oakland police officer Huy Nguyen's
routine usually goes something like this: Gun ready? Check. Bulletproof vest strapped?
Check. Body camera secured? Check. Wait, body camera? 'It feels uncomfortable when I don't
have it,' Nguyen said of the video camera that is
smaller than a smartphone and is worn on his chest.
'You can never be too safe.' Oakland and hundreds of other police departments across the
country are equipping officers with tiny body cameras to record anything from a traffic
stop to a hot vehicle pursuit to an unfolding violent crime. The mini cameras have even
spawned a new cable reality TV series, Police POV, which uses police video from
Cincinnati, Chattanooga and Fort Smith, Ark. Whether attached to shirt lapels or small
headsets, the cameras are intended to provide more transparency and security to officers
on the street and to reduce the number of misconduct complaints and potential
lawsuits." |
"Bugging a
phone is by several orders of seriousness a graver intrusion than accessing messages.... Hacking into the phone messages of a missing girl was one
grisly (and for the News of the World catastrophic) example of a species of espionage that
has been commonplace." |
"Sir Richard Dearlove,
Britain’s former chief spymaster has said the country should start spying on its
Eurozone neighbours to protect the economy as the common currency is wracked by national
defaults. Sir Richard Dearlove, who served as head
of MI6 until 2004, said that Britain must not be 'squeamish' about using the intelligence
services to defend its economic interests. The former C said central banks like the Bank
of England maintained extensive networks of contacts to secure information on future
developments. But specialist intelligence agencies should also undertake the task of
financial security. 'I am addressing the future of the euro and how defaults affect us
economically,' he told the Global Strategy Forum. 'Efficient central bankers should be
able to handle themselves but I am indicating they could and might need help from time to
time on the currency issue.' Sir Richard added that 2008 financial crisis had changed his
views on the role of intelligence agencies in protecting the economy. Britain needed to be
'forewarned and forearmed’ in anticipation of a future crisis. He said: 'I don’t
think we should be squeamish about using all means to protect ourselves financially.'....
As one of the highest regarded global spy agencies, the Secret Intelligence Service, or
MI6, has deep ties with its intelligence counterparts across Europe. Sir Richard
acknowledged that MI6 was a leader in efforts to integrate Europe’s intelligence
agencies. By ordering the foreign intelligence agency
to actively spy on its partners, the government would risk a backlash from the
country’s closest neighbours and allies. Countries vulnerable to quitting the euro
would be sure to view the move as an act of selfishness at a time of national weakness.... Sir Richard noted that the Bank
of England had effectively intelligence capabilities –
though it did not classify these activities as spying. As
such MI6 would play a subordinate role to the Bank. Sir Richard was appointed head of MI6 in 1999 and was head of the
organisation during the September 11 attacks on the US by al Qaeda. When he retired in
2004, the final year of his career had been overshadowed by controversy over the dossier
used by the government to accuse Iraq of pursuing a secret Weapons of Mass Destruction
programme.” |
"Authorities in Britain are more
likely to request details about internet users than in any other country, according to
Google. A report by the search engine website
reveals that law enforcement officials and government agencies made 1,162 separate
requests for data from the company in just six months. When population sizes are taken
into account, the figure puts Britain second in a table of 26 developed countries.
Singapore - which has been condemned by human rights groups for its authoritarian regime -
topped the table while Australia came third with 345 requests and France came fourth with
1,021 requests. The U.S. was fifth in the table with 4,601 requests for information in the
second half of last year." |
"Google has been forced to take
action after it was reported the search giant publicises the estimated locations of
millions of iPhones, laptios and other devices with wi-fi connections. The practice meant that if a user had wi-fi turned on, previous
whereabouts of your device - such as your home, office, or even restaurants you frequent -
were visible on the web for all to see. But when it was detailed in an exclusive CNET
report the practice launched a new row over embattled Google's privacy standards. Android
phones with location services enabled on them regularly beam the hardware IDs of wi-fi
devices in the area back to Google. The same happens with Microsoft, Apple and Skyhook
Wireless as part of each company's race to map the street addresses of various access
points and routers around the globe, CNET explained. However both Google and Skyhook
Wireless make the data publicly available on the internet. That means that if someone
knows your hardware ID - or your MAC address - they can trace a physical address that
Google associates with you, such as your home or office address. They can even trace your
favourite restaurant or your gym - anywhere you go frequently that has wi-fi." |
"When President Eisenhower left office in 1960, he provided the American people
with a warning. 'In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition
of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.' Sixty
years later, the military-industrial complex has been joined by another unprecedented
centre of what has increasingly proven to be 'misplaced power': the dozens of secretive
firms known collectively as the intelligence contracting industry. Last February, three of
these firms – HBGary Federal, Palantir and Berico, known collectively as Team Themis
– were
discovered to have conspired to hire out their information war capabilities to
corporations which hoped to strike back at perceived enemies, including US activist
groups, WikiLeaks and journalist Glenn
Greenwald. That such a dangerous new dynamic was now in play was only revealed due to a
raid by hackers associated with the Anonymous collective, resulting
in the dissemination
of more than 70,000 emails to and from executives at HBGary Federal and its parent
company HBGary. After having spent several months
studying those emails and otherwise investigating the industry depicted therein, I have revealed my summary of a classified US intelligence
programme known as Romas/COIN, as well as its upcoming replacement, known as Odyssey.
The programme appears to allow for the large-scale monitoring of social networks by way of
such things as natural language processing, semantic analysis, latent semantic indexing
and IT intrusion. At the same time, it also entails the dissemination of some unknown
degree of information to a given population through a variety of means – without any
hint that the actual source is US intelligence. Scattered
discussions of Arab translation services may indicate that the programme targets the
Middle East....Altogether, the existence and nature of Romas/COIN should confirm what many
had already come to realise over the past few years, in particular: the US and other
states have no intention of allowing populations to conduct their affairs without
scrutiny. Such states ought not complain when they find themselves subjected to similar
scrutiny – as will increasingly become the case over the next several years." |
"If you have Wi-Fi turned on,
the previous whereabouts of your computer or mobile device may be visible on the Web for
anyone to see. Google publishes the estimated location of millions of iPhones, laptops,
and other devices with Wi-Fi connections, a practice that represents the latest twist in a
series of revelations
this year about wireless devices and privacy, CNET has learned. Android phones with location services enabled regularly beam the unique hardware IDs
of nearby Wi-Fi devices back to Google, a similar practice followed by Microsoft, Apple,
and Skyhook Wireless as part of each company's effort to map the street addresses of
access points and routers around the globe. That benefits users by helping their mobile
devices determine locations faster than they could with GPS alone..... Only Google and
Skyhook Wireless, however, make their location databases linking hardware IDs to street
addresses publicly available on the Internet, which raises novel privacy concerns when the
IDs they're tracking are mobile. If someone knows your hardware ID, he may be able to find
a physical address that the companies associate with you--even if you never intended it to
become public. Tests performed over the last week by CNET and security researcher Ashkan Soltani showed that approximately 10
percent of laptops and mobile phones using Wi-Fi appear to be listed by Google as
corresponding to street addresses. Skyhook Wireless' list of matches appears to be closer
to 5 percent. 'I was surprised to see such precise data on where my laptop--and I--used to
live,' says Nick Doty, a lecturer at the University of
California at Berkeley who co-teaches the Technology and Policy Lab. Entering Doty's
unique hardware ID into Google's database returns his former home in the Capitol Hill
neighborhood in Seattle. Here's how it works: Wi-Fi-enabled devices, including PCs,
iPhones, iPads, and Android phones, transmit a unique hardware identifier, called a MAC address, to anyone within a radius
of approximately 100 to 200 feet. If someone captures or already knows that unique
address, Google and Skyhook's services can reveal a previous location where that device
was located, a practice that can reveal personal information including home or work
addresses or even the addresses of restaurants frequented." |
"Private computer experts advised U.S. officials on how cyberattacks
could damage Libya’s oil and gas infrastructure and rob Moammar Gadhafi’s regime
of crucial oil revenue, according to a study obtained by hackers. It remains unclear who commissioned 'Project Cyber Dawn' and how
much of a role the U.S. government played in it, but it shows the increasing amount of
work being done by private companies in exposing foreign governments’ vulnerabilities
to cyber attack. 'For the private sector to be making recommendations ... that’s a
level of ambition that you would not have seen until very recently,' said Eli Jellenc, a
cyber security expert with VeriSign Inc. who is not linked to the study or its authors. The study outlined ways to disable the coastal refinery at Ras Lanouf
using a computer virus similar to the Stuxnet worm that led to a breakdown in Iran’s
enrichment program late last year. It catalogued several pieces of potentially exposed
computer hardware used at the refinery. The study was discussed in some of nearly 1,000
emails stolen by hacking group Lulz Security from Delaware-based Internet surveillance
firm Unveillance, LLC as part of an effort to show how vulnerable data can be. Most of the
emails detail the day-to-day trivia of running a small technology startup, but others
concern an effort to scout out vulnerabilities in Gadhafi’s electronic
infrastructure. Cyberwarfare has assumed an increasingly high profile following dramatic
computer attacks on Google, Inc., U.S. defense contractors and the IMF. This month, the
Pentagon is expected to release policy on whether some cyber attacks should be considered
acts of war and when a U.S. cyber attack might be justified." |
"When young dissidents in Egypt
were organizing an election-monitoring project last fall, they discussed their plans over
Skype, the popular Internet phone service, believing it to be secure. But someone else was
listening in—Egypt's security service. An internal memo from the 'Electronic
Penetration Department' even boasted it had intercepted one conversation in which an
activist stressed the importance of using Skype 'because it cannot be penetrated online by
any security device." Skype, which Microsoft Corp. is acquiring for $8.5 billion, is
best known as a cheap way to make international phone calls. But the Luxembourg-based
service also is the communications tool of choice for dissidents around the world because
its powerful encryption technology evades traditional wiretaps. Throughout the recent Middle East uprisings, protesters have used Skype
for confidential video conferences, phone calls, instant messages and file exchanges. In
Iran, opposition leaders and dissidents used Skype to plot strategy and organize a
February protest. Skype also is a favorite among activists in Saudi Arabia and Vietnam,
according to State Department cables released by WikiLeaks. In March, following the
Egyptian revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, some activists raided the
headquarters of Amn Al Dowla, the state security agency, uncovering the secret memo about
intercepting Skype calls. In addition, 26-year-old activist Basem Fathi says he found
files describing his love life and trips to the beach, apparently gleaned from intercepted
emails and phone calls. 'I believe that they were collecting every little detail they were
hearing from our mouths and putting them in a file,' he says. A cottage industry of U.S.
and other companies is now designing and selling tools that can be used to block or
eavesdrop on Skype conversations. One technique: Using special "spyware," or
software that intercepts an audio stream from a computer—thereby hearing what's being
said and effectively bypassing Skype's encryption. Egypt's spy service last year tested
one product, FinSpy, made by Britain's Gamma International UK Ltd., according to Egyptian
government documents and Gamma's local reseller." |
"The Pentagon has concluded that
computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that
for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military
force. The Pentagon's first formal cyber strategy,
unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an
early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant
a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country's military.
In part, the Pentagon intends its plan as a warning to potential adversaries of the
consequences of attacking the U.S. in this way. 'If you shut down our power grid, maybe we
will put a missile down one of your smokestacks,' said a military official. Recent attacks
on the Pentagon's own systems—as well as the sabotaging of Iran's nuclear program via
the Stuxnet computer worm—have given new urgency to U.S. efforts to develop a more
formalized approach to cyber attacks. A key moment occurred in 2008, when at least one
U.S. military computer system was penetrated. This weekend Lockheed Martin, a major
military contractor, acknowledged that it had been the victim of an infiltration, while
playing down its impact. The report will also spark a debate over a range of sensitive
issues the Pentagon left unaddressed, including whether the U.S. can ever be certain about
an attack's origin, and how to define when computer sabotage is serious enough to
constitute an act of war. These questions have already been a topic of dispute within the
military. One idea gaining momentum at the Pentagon is the notion of 'equivalence.' If a
cyber attack produces the death, damage, destruction or high-level disruption that a
traditional military attack would cause, then it would be a candidate for a 'use of force'
consideration, which could merit retaliation." |
"It is impossible to hear about
sexual or sex-crime scandals nowadays – whether that involving Dominique Strauss-Kahn
or those of former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, Italian Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi, or the half-dozen United States congressmen whose careers have ended in the
past couple of years – without considering how they were
exposed. What does it mean to live in a society in which
surveillance is omnipresent? Like the heat beneath the proverbial boiling frogs, the level of
surveillance in Western democracies has been ratcheted up slowly – but far faster
than citizens can respond. In the US, for example,
President George W. Bush’s Patriot Act is being extended, following a series of
backroom deals. Americans do not want it, and they were not consulted when it was enacted
by their representatives under the pressure of a government that demanded more power in
the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. That does not seem to matter. A
concerted effort is underway in the US – and in the United Kingdom – to 'brand'
surveillance as positive. New York City subway passengers are now advised that they might
experience random searches of their bags. Activists in America are now accustomed to
assuming that their emails are being read and their phone calls monitored. Indeed, the
telecom companies Verizon and AT&T have established areas on their premises for
eavesdropping activity by the National Security Agency. The spate of sex scandals is a
sign of more serious corruption and degradation than most commentators seem to realize.
Yes, sex criminals must be punished; but political career after political career,
especially in America, is ending because of consensual affairs. Consensual sex between
adults is no one else’s business. But now that public figures – especially those
deemed to be 'of interest' to intelligence agencies – are susceptible to being
watched three-dimensionally, the chances of being compromised are far higher than they
were in the days of the UK’s Profumo affair, which brought down a British defense
secretary in the early 1960’s. And there is no end to this crash-and-burn
surveillance strategy, owing to the nature of the information that is caught in the net.
After all, the human sex drive, especially if it compels risky or self-destructive
behavior, has held appeal for dramatists since the ancient Greeks, who originated the
story of Achilles and his vulnerability. And, because sex scandals are always interesting
to read about – certainly compared to yet another undeclared war, or a bailout that
created jobs costing an estimated $850,000 each – they will always be useful
diversions. Citizens’ attention can be channeled away from, say, major corporate
theft and government malfeasance toward narratives involving two hapless individuals (and
their wives and children, who are usually suffering quite enough without the media’s
heavy breathing)." |
"Remember section 215? It was a notorious provision of the USA Patriot Act, renewed
on Thursday, that allowed the government to snoop on what library books you'd
borrowed, what videos you'd rented, your medical records – anything, really, if
investigators thought it might have something to do with terrorism, no matter how
tangential. I
wrote about it for the Boston Phoenix in 2003, as an example of the then budding
excesses of the Bush-Cheney years. Well, section 215 is back – not that it ever went
away. Charlie
Savage reports in Friday's New York Times that two Democratic senators, Ron Wyden of
Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, have accused the Obama administration of using Section
215 for purposes not intended by Congress. Russ
Feingold, then a Democratic senator for Wisconsin, raised similar alarms in 2009. The
senators know what the White House is up to because they were privy to secret testimony.
But under Senate rules, they can't reveal what they learned. Thus they have demanded that
the White House come clean with the public. 'Americans would be alarmed if they knew how
this law is being carried out,' Udall is quoted as saying." |
"Documents left behind by the
FBI in antiwar activist Mick Kelly's apartment are shedding light on why heavily armed
special agents raided the homes and businesses of Kelly and 22 others last September. They
believed that Kelly -- at 5-feet, 10 inches and 145 pounds -- was 'DANGEROUS,' according
to an operation order Kelly's partner found. Kelly legally owns a handgun and a rifle. But
what the misplaced paperwork really shows, several activists said on Wednesday, is that
they have been targeted based on their political beliefs, their travels and the people
they have met rather than any alleged support for terrorism. 'It reads like something out of the 1950s,' Kelly said, pointing to
questions left behind for agents to ask -- including whether Kelly belongs to a socialist
group or knows others who do. He does -- and that's not illegal, he said. FBI special
agent Steve Warfield, a spokesman for the Minneapolis division, said the documents found
by Kelly and his partner, Linden Gawboy, appear authentic. The case became public in
September when the FBI raided homes and businesses in Minneapolis, Chicago and Michigan
looking for evidence that people were providing 'material support' to terrorist groups in
Colombia and the Middle East. In all, 23 people have received subpoenas to appear before a
grand jury in Chicago. Officials with the U.S. attorney's office there have not given
details about who they are investigating or what people are alleged to have done. No one
has been charged in the case, and the activists have refused to testify. Gawboy found the
documents in a file cabinet in the apartment she and Kelly share on April 30. Attorney
Bruce Nestor, who has advised many of those who have been searched and subpoenaed, said
the government's expanded definition of what is considered 'material support' has allowed
agents to go beyond investigating those who give money or weapons -- which the Minnesota
activists deny -- to investigating those who meet with people who belong to 'suspect'
groups. The affidavits that justified the September searches have not been made public, he
said, but 'I suspect they will refer to people hosting speakers ... and they will try to
put that in an evil light.' Activists say the raids and subpoenas are the FBI's efforts to
stifle their rights to free speech and free assembly. For instance, many of the suggested
questions found in the paperwork dealt with who the activists know and with whom they have
met." |
"More than 99% of Android phones
are potentially leaking data that, if stolen, could be used to get the information they
store online. The data being leaked is typically used to get at web-based services such as
Google Calendar. The discovery was made by German
security researchers looking at how Android phones handle identification information.
Google has yet to comment on the loophole uncovered by the team. University of Ulm
researchers Bastian Konings, Jens Nickels, and Florian Schaub made their discovery while
watching how Android phones handle login credentials for web-based services. Many
applications installed on Android phones interact with Google services by asking for an
authentication token - essentially a digital ID card for that app. Once issued the token
removes the need to keep logging in to a service for a given length of time. Sometimes,
the study says, these tokens are sent in plain text over wireless networks. This makes the
tokens easy to spot so criminals eavesdropping on the wi-fi traffic would be able to find
and steal them, suggest the researchers. Armed with the token, criminals would be able to
pose as a particular user and get at their personal information. Even worse, found the
researchers, tokens are not bound to particular phones or time of use so they can be used
to impersonate a handset almost anywhere. '[T]he adversary can gain full access to the
calendar, contacts information, or private web albums of the respective Google user,' the
researchers wrote in a blog post explaining their findings. Abuse of the loophole
might mean some people lose data but other changes may be harder to spot. '...an adversary
could change the stored e-mail address of the victim's boss or business partners hoping to
receive sensitive or confidential material pertaining to their business,' the team
speculated." |
"Cellphones that collect
people's locations are only the tip of the iceberg: Auto makers, insurance companies and
even shopping malls are experimenting with new ways to use this kind of data. Location
information is emerging as one of the hottest commodities in the tracking
industry—the field of companies that are building businesses based on people's data. Some companies are using the data to build better maps or analyze traffic
patterns. Others send users advertisements for services near where they are located. Some
insurers hope to use the data to provide discounts to better drivers. On Tuesday in
Washington, D.C., a Senate Judiciary subcommittee plans a hearing to consider whether a
federal law is required to protect consumer privacy on mobile devices. The hearing was
spurred by the public outcry over recent findings that Apple
Inc. and Google
Inc. gather location-related data from iPhones and Android phones. Both companies are set
to testify.... Currently, there is no comprehensive federal law that protects personal
data—including location—from being shared or sold to commercial partners. Last
December, the Journal's 'What They Know' series found that 47 of the 101 most popular
smartphone apps sent location information to other companies. The use of this trove of
sensitive data is proving controversial. Last month, TomTom
NV, maker of in-car navigation devices, apologized for selling aggregated data from its
devices to the Dutch government, which was using it to set speed traps. .... 'We did not
foresee this type of usage,' said Harold Goddijn, TomTom's chief executive. He said the
company 'fully understands some of [our] customers do not like this' and is taking steps
to 'stop this type of usage in near future.' Insurance companies are starting to tap
location and other data when drivers agree. Italy's Octo Telematics SpA makes technology
that has been installed in more than 1.2 million cars in Europe that can send back
aggregated data about a car's location, acceleration and other driving characteristics,
said Nino Tarantino, Octo's chief in North America." |
"Kathy Thomas knew she was under surveillance. The animal rights and
environmental activist had been trailed daily by cops over several months, and had even
been stopped on occasion by police and FBI agents. But when the surveillance seemed to
halt suddenly in mid-2005 after she confronted one of the agents, she thought it was all
over. Months went by without a peep from the FBI surveillance teams that had been tracking
her in undercover vehicles and helicopters. That’s when it occurred to her to check
her car. Rumors had been swirling among activists that the FBI might be using GPS to track
them — two activists in Colorado discovered mysterious devices attached to their car
bumpers in 2003 — so Thomas (a pseudonym) went out to the vehicle in a frenzy and ran
her hands beneath the rear bumper. She was only half-surprised to find a small electronic
device and foot-long battery wand secured to her metal fender with industrial-strength
magnets. 'I think I must have found it right after they put it on, because there was no
grime on it at all,' she told Threat Level recently. The
use of GPS tracking devices is poised to become one of the most contentious privacy issues
before the Supreme Court, if it agrees to hear an appeal filed by the Obama administration
last month. The administration is seeking to
overturn a ruling by a lower court that law enforcement officials must obtain a warrant
before using a tracker." |
"WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange called Facebook 'the most appalling
spying machine ever invented' in an interview with Russia
Today, pointing to the popular social networking site as one of the top tools for the
U.S. to spy on its citizens. 'Here we have the
world's most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their
addresses, their locations, their communications with each other and their relatives, all
sitting within the United States, all accessible
to US Intelligence,' he said. 'Facebook, Google, Yahoo, all
these major U.S. organizations have built-in infaces for US intelligence. Everyone should
understand that when they add their friends to Facebook they are doing free work for the
United States intelligence agencies,' he added." |
"After a week of silence, Apple
on Wednesday responded to widespread complaints about iPhones and iPads tracking their
users' whereabouts by saying 'the iPhone is not logging your location' and announcing an
upcoming mobile software update. The next version of
Apple's iOS will store data about a phone's location for only seven days instead of for
months, as was previously the case, the company says. Apple blamed the fact that so much
location data had been stored on users' phones and computers on a software 'bug.' 'The
reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly,' the
company said in a news release. 'We don't think the iPhone needs to store more than seven
days of this data.' The software update will be released in a few weeks, Apple said. That
update also will fix another apparent bug, which prevented iPhone and iPad 3G users from
being able to turn off location logging on their mobile devices." |
"In an effort to enhance online security and privacy, the Obama
administration has proposed Americans obtain a single ID for all Internet sales and banking activity.
But a new Rasmussen Reports poll finds most Americans want nothing to do with such an ID
if the government is the one to issue it and hold the information. The Rasmussen Reports
national telephone survey shows that just 13% of American Adults favor the issuing of a
secure government credential to replace all traditional password protection systems for
online sales and banking activities. Sixty percent (60%) oppose such a credential.
Twenty-seven percent (27%) are not sure. Only eight percent (8%) of Americans would be
willing to submit their personal financial and purchasing information to the government or
a government contractor to receive a secure government credential for online transactions.
Seventy-six percent (76%) would not be willing to submit this information for that
purpose. Sixteen percent (16%) are undecided." |
"Like Apple and Google,
Microsoft collects records of the physical locations of customers who use its mobile
operating system. Windows Phone 7,
supported by manufacturers including Dell, HTC, LG, Nokia, and Samsung, transmits to
Microsoft a miniature data dump including a unique device ID, details about nearby Wi-Fi
networks, and the phone's GPS-derived exact latitude and longitude. A Microsoft representative was not immediately able to answer questions
that CNET posed this afternoon, including how long the location histories are stored and
how frequently the phone's coordinates are transmitted over the Internet. Windows Phone
currently claims about a 6 percent market share but, according to IDC, will capture about 21 percent by 2015 thanks to
Microsoft's partnership with
Nokia. Microsoft does say, however, that location histories are not saved directly on
the device. That's different from Apple's practice of recording the locations of visible
cell towers on iPhone
and iPad devices,
which can result in more than a year's worth of data being quietly logged. Google's
approach, by contrast, records
only the last few dozen locations on Android phones." |
"...the Buffalo homeowner didn't need long to figure out the reason
for the early morning wake-up call from a swarm of federal agents. That new wireless
router. He'd gotten fed up trying to set a password. Someone must have used his Internet
connection, he thought. 'We know who you are! You downloaded thousands of images at 11:30
last night,' the man's lawyer, Barry Covert, recounted the agents saying. They referred to
a screen name, 'Doldrum.' 'No, I didn't,' he insisted. 'Somebody else could have but I
didn't do anything like that.' 'You're a creep ... just admit it,' they said. Law enforcement officials say the case is a cautionary tale. Their
advice: Password-protect your wireless router...... It's
unknown how often unsecured routers have brought legal trouble for subscribers. Besides
the criminal investigations, the Internet is full of anecdotal accounts of people who've
had to fight accusations of illegally downloading music or movies. Whether you're guilty
or not, 'you look like the suspect,' said Orin Kerr, a professor at George Washington
University Law School, who said that's just one of many reasons to secure home routers.
Experts say the more savvy hackers can go beyond just connecting to the Internet on the
host's dime and monitor Internet activity and steal passwords or other sensitive
information. A study released in February provides a sense of how often computer users
rely on the generosity — or technological shortcomings — of their neighbors to
gain Internet access. The poll conducted for the Wi-Fi Alliance, the industry group that
promotes wireless technology standards, found that among 1,054 Americans age 18 and older,
32 percent acknowledged trying to access a Wi-Fi network that wasn't theirs. An estimated
201 million households worldwide use Wi-Fi networks, according to the alliance. The same
study, conducted by Wakefield Research, found that 40 percent said they would be more
likely to trust someone with their house key than with their Wi-Fi network password. For
some, though, leaving their wireless router open to outside use is a philosophical
decision, a way of returning the favor for the times they've hopped on to someone else's
network to check e-mail or download directions while away from home. 'I think it's
convenient and polite to have an open Wi-Fi network,' said Rebecca Jeschke, whose home
signal is accessible to anyone within range." |
"Online adverts could soon start
stalking you. A new way of working out where you are by looking at your internet
connection could pin down your current location to within a few hundred metres. Similar techniques are already in use, but they are much less accurate.
Every computer connected to the web has an internet protocol (IP) address, but there is no
simple way to map this to a physical location. The current best system can be out by as
much as 35 kilometres. Now, Yong
Wang, a computer scientist at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of
China in Chengdu, and colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have
used businesses and universities as landmarks to achieve much higher accuracy." |
"The most talked-about feature
of Apple's iPhones and iPads these days isn't a clever new software application. It's a
hidden digital record on every device of the locations where it has been used - a
numerical travelogue that effectively traces its owner's movements by noting the times and
places it has been used. The 'consolidated.db' file has been discussed by security researchers for months, but it didn't receive widespread
attention until the O'Reilly Radar
technology blog published an expose April 20. Within a day, two members of Congress had dashed off letters to Apple demanding more
information, including an explanation of why the data were being collected and stored in
unencrypted form. And now several European countries
are launching their own investigations. Apple has remained mum, as it often does when its
motives are questioned. But the issue here isn't what the company might do with the file.
Alex Levinson, a computer forensics researcher who uncovered the file last year, says he's
seen no evidence that Apple or application developers can extract it from iPhones or
iPads. The only exception, Levinson believes, would be if the user hacked the device to
install apps not approved by Apple. 'Jailbreaking' an iPhone or iPad undermines its
built-in protections, raising the chance of a malicious app copying data from
consolidated.db and transmitting it to someone else. The data can be examined, however, by
anyone who takes physical possession of the device - a jealous lover, a thief, an attorney
with a subpoena. The O'Reilly researchers greatly simplified the task by creating a program that culls the latitude
and longitude information, then displays it on a map. As privacy threats go, this one
seems pretty mild. The data don't show the precise locations where the device was used;
instead, they compile the GPS coordinates of the cellphone towers and Wi-Fi access points
the phone has been connected to. Unless you frequent the local red light district or lie
to your spouse about the 'errands' you run, there's not much in consolidated.db to get
worked up about. Granted, the data may be useful to the police, who have already started poring over suspects' phones for clues.
But for law-abiding citizens, consolidated.db is likely to be less revealing than the text
messages and emails stored on their devices. And although there doesn't seem to be a way
for users to stop the location data from being logged, it's easy enough for them to
program the device to scramble the information whenever it's removed to prevent it from
being read by anyone else.So why all the fuss? Some of it stems from the suspicion that
the devices are transmitting the logs back to Apple, which they don't appear to be doing.
But another reason is the mystery around why the information is being recorded in the
first place." |
"The row over the privacy of
mobile phone users escalated today as it was revealed that Google devices regularly
transmit user locations back to the company. The new
revelations come after Apple was this week slammed by several Congress members for the way
user locations are being stored in unencrypted databases on the iPhone and iPad, sometimes
stretching back several months. In Google's case an Android HTC phone tracked its location
every few seconds and transmitted the data back to Google several times an hour, according
to new research by security analyst Samy Kamkar for the Wall Street Journal. It also
transmitted the name, location and signal strength of any close Wi-Fi networks and the
phone's unique identifier. Both Google and Apple have previously admitted they are using
location data to build massive databases of Wi-Fi hotspots. This can then be used to
pinpoint individual's locations via their mobile phones, which in turn could help the
companies tap into the huge market for location-based services, currently worth
$2.9billion. This figure is expected to rise to a staggering $8.3billion in 2014,
according to research company Gartner. Location data is some of the most valuable
information a mobile phone can provide, since it can tell advertisers not only where
someone's been, but also where they might be going — and what they might be inclined
to buy when they get there." |
"Apple Inc (AAPL.O) must clear
up 'a string of open questions' about user data stored by its iPhone, iPad, and other devices, a spokesman for
Germany's consumer protection ministry said on Thursday. The call follows a similar request made by U.S. Senator Al Franken on
Wednesday, which cited a report by security researchers alleging the company's iOS4
operating system secretly compiled customers' location data in a hidden file. 'Apple must
reveal where, for how long, and for what purpose the data is saved, who has access to it,
and how it is protecting against unauthorised access,' ministry spokesman Holger Eichele
said. 'The secret collection and storage of a smart phone's location data would be a major
invasion of privacy,' he added. Germany
has particularly strong data protection laws, and companies such as social networking site
Facebook and search engine Google have faced challenges here from regulators." |
"The 'Universal Forensic
Extraction Device' sounds like the perfect cell phone snooping gadget. Its maker,
Israel-based Cellbrite, says it can copy all the content in a cell phone -- including
contacts, text messages, call history, and pictures -- within a few minutes. Even deleted
texts and other data can be restored by UFED 2.0, the latest version of the product, it
says. And it really is a universal tool. The firm says UFED works with 3,000 cell phone
models, representing 95 percent of the handset market. Coming soon, the firm says on its website: 'Additional major
breakthroughs, including comprehensive iPhone physical solution; Android physical support
– allowing bypassing of user lock code, (Windows Phone) support, and much more.' For
good measure, UFEC can extract information from GPS units in most cars....The
U.S. Supreme Court is currently mulling a related issue involving the use of
persistent GPS monitoring of suspects without a warrant. In that case, the FBI placed a
GPS monitoring device on a suspect's car without a warrant and then tracked his driving
for driving weeks. The Department of Justice says the technique is akin to surveillance on
public roads, but a federal appeals court ruled that such aggregation of movements over
time constituted a Fourth Amendment violation. Because the ruling conflicts with other
appeals court rulings in similar cases, the Department of Justice recently asked the
Supreme Court to take the case and settle the matter." |
"Security researchers have
discovered that Apple's iPhone keeps track of where you go
– and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to
the owner's computer when the two are synchronised. The file contains the latitude and
longitude of the phone's recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone
who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner's movements
using a simple program. For some phones, there could be almost a year's worth of data
stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple's iOS 4 update to the
phone's operating system, released in June 2010. 'Apple has made it possible for almost
anybody – a jealous spouse, a private detective – with access to your phone or
computer to get detailed information about where you've been,' said Pete Warden, one of
the researchers. Only the iPhone records the user's
location in this way, say Warden and Alasdair Allan, the data scientists who discovered
the file and are presenting their findings at the Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco on
Wednesday. 'Alasdair has looked for similar tracking code in [Google's] Android phones and
couldn't find any,' said Warden. 'We haven't come across any instances of other phone
manufacturers doing this.' Simon Davies, director of the pressure group Privacy
International, said: 'This is a worrying discovery. Location is one of the most sensitive
elements in anyone's life – just think where people go in the evening. The existence
of that data creates a real threat to privacy. The absence of notice to users or any
control option can only stem from an ignorance about privacy at the design stage.' Warden
and Allan point out that the file is moved onto new devices when an old one is replaced:
'Apple might have new features in mind that require a history of your location, but that's
our specualtion. The fact that [the file] is transferred across [to a new iPhone or iPad]
when you migrate is evidence that the data-gathering isn't accidental.' But they said it
does not seem to be transmitted to Apple itself....They have blogged about their discovery
at O'Reilly's
Radar site, noting that 'why this data is stored and how Apple intends to use it
— or not — are important questions that need to be explored.'... Apple can
legitimately claim that it has permission to collect the data: near the end of the
15,200-word terms and conditions
for its iTunes program, used to synchronise with iPhones, iPods and iPads, is an
86-word paragraph about 'location-based services'. It says that 'Apple and our partners
and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time
geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected
anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our
partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. For
example, we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt in to
their location services." |
"Cellphone users say they want
more privacy, and app makers are listening. No, they're not listening to user requests.
They're literally listening to the sounds in your office, kitchen, living room and
bedroom. A new class of smartphone app has emerged that uses the microphone built into
your phone as a covert listening device -- a 'bug,' in common parlance. But according to
app makers, it's not a bug. It's a feature! The apps use ambient sounds to figure out what
you're paying attention to. It's the next best thing to reading your mind. The issue was
brought to the world's attention recently on a podcast called This Week in Tech. Host Leo Laporte and his panel shocked listeners by
unmasking three popular apps that activate your phone's microphone to collect sound
patterns from inside your home, meeting, office or wherever you are. The apps are Color, Shopkick and IntoNow,
all of which activate the microphones in users' iPhone
or Android
devices in order to gather contextual information that provides some benefit to the user.
Color
uses your iPhone's or Android phone's microphone to detect when people are in the same
room. The data on ambient noise is combined with color and lighting information from the
camera to figure out who's inside, who's outside, who's in one room, and who's in another,
so the app can auto-generate spontaneous temporary social networks of people who are
sharing the same experience. Shopkick works on both
iPhone and Android devices. One feature of the app is to reward users for simply walking
into participating stores, which include Target, Best Buy, Macy's, American Eagle
Outfitters, Sports Authority, Crate & Barrel and many others. Users don't have to
press any button. Shopkick listens through your cellphone for inaudible sounds generated
in the stores by a special device. IntoNow is an iOS app that allows social networking
during TV shows. The app listens with your iPhone or iPad
to identify what you're watching. The company claims 2.6 million 'broadcast airings' (TV
shows or segments) in its database. A similar app created for fans of the TV show Grey's
Anatomy uses your iPad's microphone to identify exactly where you are in the show, so it
can display content relevant to specific scenes. While IntoNow is based on the
company's own SoundPrint technology, the Grey's Anatomy app is built on Nielsen's
Media-Sync platform. Obviously, the idea that app companies are eavesdropping on private
moments creeps everybody out. But all these apps try to get around user revulsion by
recording not actual sounds, but sound patterns, which are then uploaded to a server as
data and compared with the patterns of other sounds....You should know that any data that
can be gathered, will be gathered. Since the new microphone-hijacking apps are still
around, we now know that listening in on users is OK. So, what's possible with current
technology? By listening in on your phone, capturing 'patterns,' then sending that data
back to servers, marketers can determine the following: * Your gender, and the gender of
people you talk to. * Your approximate age, and the ages of the people you talk to. * What
time you go to bed, and what time you wake up. * What you watch on TV and listen to on the
radio. * How much of your time you spend alone, and how much with others. * Whether you
live in a big city or a small town. *What form of transportation you use to get to
work." |
"The first time Greenpeace USA realised they had a security problem
was in April 2008 when Mark Floegel, senior investigator with the environmental
organisation, took a call from a colleague. 'He told me Jim Ridgeway, a reporter with
Mother Jones, was writing a piece and would call me for comment. I didn't know what he was
talking about,' Floegel said. Ridgeway revealed
Greenpeace had been 'targeted' by a private security company and that a trove of sensitive
documents was stashed in a Maryland storage locker. Greenpeace, no stranger to black ops -
covert, sometimes illicit and deniable operations - was about to get a window into an
alleged nexus between corporate titans and private security companies. The documents were stored by John Dodd, the millionaire heir to a local
beer distributorship and the prime investor in a now-defunct private security company,
Beckett Brown International. The company was set up in 1995 after a chance meeting in a
Maryland bar connected Dodd to several ex-Secret Service officers who wanted to get into
private security. Dodd provided $700,000 on the proviso he owned BBI until it was repaid.
Before long, business was booming. By 2001, relations between Dodd and BBI had soured.
When he learned staff were 'sterilising the office', shredding records before closing
shop, Dodd drove a truck to the firm's Maryland address and retrieved piles of documents.
Dodd began reading documents and, says Floegel, began to suspect 'criminal activity' and
contacted 'victims'. Greenpeace recovered 20 boxes of documents. They included
confidential employee details such as email passwords, Social Security numbers, donor
payments, privileged attorney-client conversations and strategic plans to fight climate
change, ocean pollution, genetic engineering and other campaigns. The boxes also had BBI
work logs, plus documents sent to defendants and clients such as Wal-Mart, Halliburton,
the National Rifle Association, the Carlyle Group and Monsanto. The documents, many posted
on the Greenpeace USA site, make intriguing reading. The 'BBI Targets' include Friends of
the Earth, the Centre for Food Safety and the National Environmental Trust/GE Food Alert,
and various scientists and individuals, as well as Greenpeace, with various handwritten
notes listing addresses and phone numbers. It is this cache that Greenpeace has mined for
evidence in a lawsuit levelled against a handful of ex-BBI employees. The defendants also
include two public relations firms, Dezenhall Resources and Ketchum and two
multinationals, chemical giants Dow Chemical and Sasol America. Greenpeace has filed a
detailed complaint and the case is proceeding in a Washington DC courtroom. 'It took
several months to sift through the records,' says Floegel. He says they reveal a narrative
of BBI activity, including client reports advising, 'Greenpeace will do this, Greenpeace
will do that'. It is a window into a murky world where BBI, whose staff included ex-CIA
and Secret Service officers, allegedly reported to Dezenhall and Ketchum who, in turn,
channelled confidential material, allegedly filched from Greenpeace, to Dow and Sasol. The
complaint accuses defendants of "clandestine and unlawful activities", claiming
they stole confidential documents, conducted illicit surveillance - sometimes using
off-duty policemen - and 'in all likelihood' broke into Greenpeace offices and other
locations between 1998-2000. It cites at least 200 illegal actions in this period. One
email, found in 'Ketchum Dow emails and docs', and addressed to Timothy Ward, then BBI's
'director of investigative services', reveals a global dimension to BBI activities, as the
BBI man discusses a 'sensitive all-source intelligence collection effort' on foreign
greens. The defendants' aim, says Greenpeace, was to disrupt campaigns against 'the
companies' activities that were damaging to the environment', including the impact of
toxins leaked from a Sasol plant in Louisiana and Dow's production of dioxins and
genetically modified organisms." |
"It's recently been revealed
that the U.S. government contracted HBGary Federal for the development of software which
could create multiple fake social media profiles to manipulate and sway public opinion on
controversial issues by promoting propaganda. It could also be used as surveillance to
find public opinions with points of view the powers-that-be didn't like. It could then
potentially have their 'fake' people run smear campaigns against those 'real' people. As disturbing as this is, it's not really new for U.S. intelligence or
private intelligence firms to do the dirty work behind closed doors. EFF previously warned that Big Brother wants to be
your friend for social media surveillance. While the FBI Intelligence Information Report Handbook (PDF) mentioned
using 'covert accounts' to access protected information, other government agencies
endorsed using security exploits to access protected
information..... The 6th Contracting Squadron at MacDill Air Force Base sought the
development of Persona Management Software which could be
used for creating and managing fake profiles on social media sites to distort the truth
and make it appear as if there was a generally accepted agreement on controversial issues.
'Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can
interact through conventional online services and social media platforms.'... According to Redacted News, the leaked emails showed how names can be
cross-referenced across social media sites to collect information on people and then used
to gain access to those social ciricles. The emails also talked of how Facebook could be
used to spread government messages..." |
| "It's recently been revealed
that the U.S. government contracted HBGary Federal for the development of software which
could create multiple fake social media profiles to manipulate and sway public opinion on
controversial issues by promoting propaganda. It could also be used as surveillance to
find public opinions with points of view the powers-that-be didn't like. It could then
potentially have their "fake" people run smear campaigns against those
"real" people. As disturbing as this is,
it's not really new for U.S. intelligence or private intelligence firms to do the dirty
work behind closed doors....According
to Redacted News, the leaked emails showed how names can be cross-referenced across
social media sites to collect information on people and then used to gain access to those
social ciricles. The emails also talked of how Facebook could be used to spread government
messages: 'Even the most restrictive and security conscious of persons can be exploited.
Through the targeting and information reconnaissance phase, a person's hometown and high
school will be revealed. An adversary can create a classmates.com account at the same high
school and year and find out people you went to high school with that do not have Facebook
accounts, then create the account and send a friend request. Under the mutual friend
decision, which is where most people can be exploited, an adversary can look at a targets
friend list if it is exposed and find a targets most socially promiscuous friends, the
ones that have over 300-500 friends, friend them to develop mutual friends before sending
a friend request to the target. To that end friend's accounts can be compromised and used
to post malicious material to a targets wall. When choosing to participate in social media
an individual is only as protected as his/her weakest friend.'" Army of Fake Social Media Friends to Promote Propaganda PC World, 23 February 2011 |
"Some startling figures tumbled
out on rampant phone
tapping in the country when telecom service provider Reliance
Communications told the Supreme Court
on Monday that the authorities had asked it to tap 1.51 lakh phone numbers in a five-year
span between 2006 and 2010. This works out to an
average of over 30,000 telephone interceptions every year by a single service provider on
the orders of various law enforcing agencies. Or, over 82 telephones were intercepted
every day by a single service provider....If Reliance's ratio of phones tapped to the
number of its subscribers were to be taken as representative and applied to other service
providers, it is a fair assumption that government agencies were tapping more than one
lakh phones every year. In Delhi
alone, Reliance tapped a total of 3,588 phones in 2005 when the teledensity was low
compared to today. It also included Amar Singh's number which was put under surveillance
— allegedly on a forged letter from Delhi Police." |
"Private spying by large
corporations into the affairs of environmental groups, as
revealed by the Guardian, is nothing new in the US. Last November, as
Mother Jones reported, Greenpeace went into federal district court in Washington,
seeking an injunction against Dow Chemical Company and Sasol North America for meddling in
its internal affairs. (Sasol is the big South
African energy company with operations, including chemicals, in the US.) Greenpeace is
claiming these two multinational chemical outfits between 1998 and 2000 set up a
clandestine operation to break into Greenpeace Washington offices to steal 'confidential
information and trade secrets', go through its trash cans, conducted surveillance of its
employees and ran an undercover operation to penetrate and disrupt the organisation's
campaigns involving climate change, genetic foods and chemical pollution. According to
the suit, the chemical companies and their PR firms employed a now-defunct private
detective firm called Beckett Brown International (BBI) to do the dirty work. The
companies have denied the allegations; detailed responses to the Greenpeace complaint are
due soon." |
"The Obama administration's
Justice Department has asserted that the FBI can obtain telephone records of international
calls made from the U.S. without any formal legal process or court oversight, according to
a document obtained by McClatchy. That assertion was
revealed — perhaps inadvertently — by the department in its response to a
McClatchy request for a copy of a secret Justice Department memo. Critics say the legal
position is flawed and creates a potential loophole that could lead to a repeat of FBI
abuses that were supposed to have been stopped in 2006. The controversy over the telephone
records is a legacy of the Bush administration's war on terror. Critics say the Obama
administration appears to be continuing many of the most controversial tactics of that
strategy, including the assertion of sweeping executive powers." |
"The US Justice Department wants
Internet service providers and cell phone companies to be required to hold on to records
for longer to help with criminal prosecutions....
Kate Dean, executive director of the Internet Service Provider Association, said broad
mandatory data retention requirements would be 'fraught with legal, technical and
practical challenges.' Dean said they would require 'an entire industry to retain billions
of discrete electronic records due to the possibility that a tiny percentage of them might
contain evidence related to a crime.'" |
"A police
spy married an activist he met while undercover in the environmental protest
movement and then went on to have children with her, the Guardian can reveal. He is the
fourth spy now to have been identified as an undercover police officer engaged in the
covert surveillance of eco-activists. Three of those
spies are accused of having had sexual relationships with the people they were targeting.
The details of the activities of the fourth spy, who is still a serving Metropolitan
police officer, emerged as the senior police officer managing the crisis in undercover
operations insisted that officers were strictly banned from having sexual relationships
with their targets. Jon Murphy, the chief constable of Merseyside, told the Guardian it
was 'never acceptable' for undercover officers to sleep with people they were
targeting.... The Guardian also today fully identifies two of the other undercover
officers involved in spying on the eco-activists, previously called Officer
A and B.Their
names and photographs were not used after representations from senior police, but both
have now been extracted from undercover roles in other investigations, and they can be
named as Lynn Watson and Mark Jacobs." |
"It's the flip-side of enjoying
instant communication with your friends. Facebook has courted a fresh privacy row by
allowing developers of apps access to sensitive information including telephone numbers
and addresses. The social networking site announced the change on its blog, saying: 'We
are now making a user's address and mobile phone number accessible.' Internet security
analysts and privacy experts are now advising people to remove their phone numbers and
addresses from the site. While Facebook users must
grant individual applications permission to access their details, it is likely that many
who have clicked their approval plenty of times before will not notice the change in
terms. They will pass on their contact details unknowingly, leaving them more vulnerable
to becoming victims of spam, it is feared. Graham Cluley, of IT security firm Sophos,
said: 'The ability to access users' home addresses will also open up more opportunities
for identity theft, combined with the other data that can already be extracted from
Facebook users' profiles. 'You have to ask yourself - is Facebook putting the safety of
its 500-plus million users as a top priority with this move?' Facebook, which gives
advertisers the ability to target users according to their stated interests, geographical
location and other insights, has been criticised increasingly over the years for how it
handles the privacy of its account holders.... it is often unclear who exactly is behind
the small and seemingly harmless pieces of software available via Facebook, which many
users enjoy signing up for in order to brighten up their profile pages or to play games or
quizzes with friends. Facebook has opted against a systematic program of vetting potential
applications, such as that by Apple. The website therefore inevitably hosts a number of
potentially rogue, independent applications that have been designed by third parties to
misleadingly gain access to users' information, and farm it out on as wide a scale as
possible." |
"An undercover policeman who
spent seven years living as an environmental activist has claimed that at least 15 other
agents had infiltrated the movement and disclosed
that sexual entanglements with them were commonplace. Mark Kennedy, 41, a former
Metropolitan Police officer who posed as a climate change protester known as 'Mark Stone',
spoke out about the 'grey and murky' world of undercover policing in which he said 'really
bad stuff' was secretly going on. Last week the £1 million trial of six environmental
activists accused of plotting to break into the Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired power station
in Nottinghamshire collapsed amid questions over Mr Kennedy’s involvement. The
Independent Police Complaints Commission is now investigating whether Nottinghamshire
Police withheld secret recordings made by Mr Kennedy showing that those accused were
innocent of conspiracy from the prosecution. In an interview with the Mail on Sunday the
former policeman said he had been 'hung out to dry' by his former handlers in the National
Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) which sent him to infiltrate radical environmental
groups in 2003. He insisted that he had been instrumental in preventing 'bloodshed' amid
clashes between police and protesters and claimed that key intelligence he had gathered
had been passed to Tony Blair and other European leaders.... Mr Kennedy also disclosed
that he knew of at least 15 other undercover police who had infiltrated the movement and
said that by the time he left in 2009 there were at least four others. 'The world of
undercover policing is grey and murky,' he said. 'There is some bad stuff going on, really
bad stuff.' The scale of public money invested in such operations was also laid bare as he
disclosed that in addition to his £50,000-a-year salary, his handlers paid up to
£200,000 a year into a secret bank account to help him maintain his cover." |
"Police
chiefs are being called on to review the way long-term undercover operations are handled
amid growing concerns about the secretive unit at the heart of their
spying operation. The lawyer and former director
of public prosecutions Lord Macdonald said the handling of undercover officers appeared to
be 'alarming' and 'opaque' after Mark Kennedy was unmasked
as an undercover police officer spying on the environmental movement. 'There should be
published guidelines,' said Macdonald. 'It is particularly important that the public
understands what the principles and what the rules are. The fact this operation is so
opaque, nobody knows how it was run, what the objectives were, why it ran for so long, I
think that's quite alarming.' Claims made against police include that during his seven
years as a spy Kennedy acted as an agent provocateur and had a string
of sexual relationships with fellow activists. But the case has also highlighted the
role of the secretive police intelligence units overseen by the Association of Chief
Police Officers (Acpo) to which both Kennedy and a second
undercover officer known as Officer A had been seconded. 'There is this whole issue of
what Acpo is,' said Macdonald. 'It's a limited company. It's an odd sort of organisation.
There should be published guidelines, there should be a debate about it. The police should
invite comment and discussion ... The whole purpose is to maintain public confidence.' The
furtive apparatus that oversees the police fight against 'domestic extremists' dates back
to the late 1990s animal rights militants were its focus. Many were prepared to resort to
violence, intimidating scientists, sending letter bombs and, most notoriously, digging up a
grandmother's grave. The police took an
aggressive stance that led to the jailing of many of key animal rights figures. But
according to critics, once this threat had subsided the officers who had built up the
infiltration units sought new targets to justify their budgets and existence.
Environmentalists say the burgeoning green movement fitted the bill. They say police were
given licence to carry out widespread and intrusive surveillance of entire legitimate
organisations. In the late 1990s the remit was
extended to 'include all forms of domestic extremism, criminality and public disorder
associated with cause-led groups'. Police dismiss the claims, insisting they only monitor
the minority on the far left and right who might commit crimes such as damaging property
or trespass to promote their political aims. There are three little-known 'domestic
extremism' units working under the direction of Detective Chief Superintendent Adrian
Tudway. Concerns have been growing about their accountability and subject to agreement
they will be taken over by the Met under a 'lead force' agreement – the same way the
Met has overall command of national counter-terrorism operations. Tudway, the 'national
co-ordinator for domestic extremism', commands about 100 staff and has a budget of about
£9m a year. By far the biggest segment of this 'domestic extremism' apparatus is the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), which has
been compiling a database of protesters and campaign groups across the country since 1999.
It is believed several undercover police officers – including Kennedy and Officer A
– had been living long-term in the environmental movement, feeding intelligence back
to NPOIU. With around 60 to 70 staff, NPOIU costs
£5m a year to run, according to the latest official figures. Its budget has doubled in
the last five years. Housed at a secret location in London, its official remit is 'to
gather, assess, analyse and disseminate intelligence and information relating to criminal
activities in the United Kingdom where there is a threat of crime or to public order which
arises from domestic extremism or protest activity'. Essentially it is
pooling intelligence from special branch officers, uniformed surveillance teams and
undercover officers that can be shared with police forces around the country. Sensitive information from undercover officers, other informants
in protest groups and covert intercepts are handled by a section of the NPOIU called the
Confidential Intelligence Unit. The database
contains descriptions of people, their nicknames or pseudonyms, reports of their
activities and photographs of them. The only activists so far confirmed to be on the
database are 85-year-old John Catt and his daughter Linda, two peaceful campaigners from
Brighton. John Catt often goes to demonstrations, where he likes to take out his sketch
pad and draw the scene. Police files revealed how the NPOIU had logged their presence at
more than 80 lawful demonstrations over four years, recording details such as their
appearance and slogans on their T-shirts.....Catt and his daughter deny any involvement in
criminal activity and neither of them have criminal records. Anton Setchell, the police
chief who was previously in charge of 'domestic extremism', told the Guardian in 2009 that
it was possible that protesters with no criminal record were on the database but police
would have to justify their inclusion. 'Just because
you have no criminal record does not mean that you are not of interest to the police,' he said. 'Everyone who has got a criminal record did not have one once.'
The second organisation is known as the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit
(Netcu). It gives out advice to police forces, companies, universities and other
organisations to cope with protests that it believes will be unlawful. The Cambridgeshire-based unit, set up in 2004, liaises with
thousands of companies in aviation, energy, research, farming and retail. The third unit, the National Domestic Extremism Team, was set up in 2005
and consists of detectives who assist police forces around the UK." |
"The California Supreme Court
allowed police Monday to search arrestees' cell phones without a warrant, saying
defendants lose their privacy rights for any items they're carrying when taken into
custody. Under U.S.
Supreme Court precedents, 'this loss of privacy allows police not only to seize
anything of importance they find on the arrestee's body ... but also to open and examine
what they find,' the state court said in a 5-2
ruling. The majority, led by Justice Ming Chin, relied on decisions in the 1970s by the
nation's high court upholding searches of cigarette packages and clothing that officers
seized during an arrest and examined later without seeking a warrant from a judge. The
dissenting justices said those rulings shouldn't be extended to modern cell phones that
can store huge amounts of data. Monday's decision allows police 'to rummage at leisure
through the wealth of personal and business information that can be carried on a mobile
phone or handheld computer merely because the device was taken from an arrestee's person,'
said Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar, joined in dissent by Justice Carlos Moreno. They
argued that police should obtain a warrant - by convincing a judge that they will probably
find incriminating evidence - before searching a cell phone." |
| 2010 |
| "Police in Delaware may soon be unable to use global positioning
systems (GPS) to keep tabs on a suspect unless they have a court-signed warrant, thanks to
a recent ruling by a superior court judge who cited famed author George Orwell in her
decision. In striking down evidence obtained through warrantless GPS tracking, Delaware
Judge Jan R. Jurden wrote that 'an Orwellian state is now technologically feasible,'
adding that 'without adequate judicial preservation of privacy, there is nothing to
protect our citizens from being tracked 24/7.' The ruling goes against a federal appeals
court's decision last summer that allowed warrantless tracking by GPS. Jurden was ruling
on the case of Michael D. Holden, who police say was pulled over with 10 lbs. of marijuana
in his car last February. Holden was allegedly named by a DEA task force informant in
2009, and in early 2010, without obtaining a warrant, police placed a GPS device on his
car, allowing them to follow him whenever he used the vehicle." Judge warns of ‘Orwellian state’ in warrantless GPS tracking case Raw Story, 30 December 2010 |
"Scores of foxhunters can sit easier in their saddles on the biggest
day of the sport’s calendar today after a judge cast doubt on the legality of covert
filming by anti-hunt activists. The ruling, in
a case that cannot yet be reported, lays down that covert surveillance by third parties
must be authorised in line with procedures in the Regulation of Investigating Powers Act
(Ripa). The Home Office says that the Act must be
used in accordance with the European Convention on Human Rights. 'It also requires, in
particular, those authorising the use of covert techniques to give proper consideration to
whether their use is necessary and proportionate,' official guidance states. This suggests
that the type of speculative surveillance carried out by some organisations and hunt
monitors cannot be authorised because it is not necessary or proportionate for the
prevention or detection of an offence under the Hunting Act. The Association of Chief
Police Officers (Acpo) is so anxious that forces may be acting unlawfully that it has
asked for advice from the Crown Prosecution Service." |
"Your digital camera may embed
metadata into photographs with the camera's serial number or your
location. Your printer may be incorporating a secret code on every page it prints which
could be used to identify the printer and potentially the person who used it. If Apple
puts a particularly creepy patent
it has recently applied for into use, you can look forward to a day when your iPhone may
record your voice, take a picture of your location, record your heartbeat, and send that
information back to the mothership. This is traitorware: devices that act behind your back to betray your privacy. Perhaps the most notable example of traitorware was the Sony rootkit. In 2005 Sony BMG produced CD's which clandestinely
installed a rootkit onto
PC's that provided administrative-level access to the users' computer. The copy-protected
music CD’s would surreptitiously install its DRM
technology onto PC’s. Ostensibly, Sony was trying prevent consumers from making
multiple copies of their CD’s, but the software also rendered the CD incompatible
with many CD-ROM players in PC’s, CD players in cars, and DVD players. Additionally,
the software left a back door open on all infected PC’s which would give Sony, or any
hacker familiar with the rootkit, control over the PC. And if a consumer should have the
temerity to find the rootkit and try to remove the offending drivers, the software would
execute code designed to disable the CD drive and trash the PC. Traitorware is sometimes
included in products with less obviously malicious intent. Printer
dots were added to certain color laser printers as a forensics tool for law enforcement, where it could help authenticate documents or identify forgeries.
Apple’s scary-sounding patent for the iPhone is meant to help locate and disable the
phone if it is lost of stolen. Don’t let these
good intentions fool you—software that hides itself from you while it gives your
personal data away to a third party is dangerous and dishonest. As the Sony BMG rootkit
demonstrates, it may even leave your device wide open to attacks from third parties." |
"One of the hallmarks of an
authoritarian government is its fixation on hiding everything it does behind a wall of
secrecy while simultaneously monitoring, invading and collecting files on everything its
citizenry does. Based on the Francis Bacon
aphorism that 'knowledge is power,' this is the extreme imbalance that renders the ruling
class omnipotent and citizens powerless. In The Washington Post today, Dana Priest and William Arkin continue their 'Top Secret America' series by describing how America's vast and growing Surveillance State now
encompasses state and local law enforcement agencies, collecting and storing
always-growing amounts of information about even the most innocuous activities undertaken
by citizens suspected of no wrongdoing.... Today, the Post reporters document how surveillance and enforcement methods pioneered in America's
foreign wars and occupations are being rapidly imported into domestic surveillance (wireless fingerprint scanners, military-grade infrared cameras,
biometric face scanners, drones on the border).... Meanwhile,
the Obama Department of Homeland Security has rapidly expanded the scope and invasiveness
of domestic surveillance programs -- justified, needless to say, in the name of Terrorism..... The results are predictable. Huge amounts of post/9-11
anti-Terrorism money flooded state and local agencies that confront virtually no Terrorism
threats, and they thus use these funds to purchase technologies -- bought from the
private-sector industry that controls and operates government surveillance programs -- for
vastly increased monitoring and file-keeping on
ordinary citizens suspected of no wrongdoing. The always-increasing cooperation
between federal, state and local agencies -- and among and within federal agencies -- has
spawned massive data bases of information containing the activities of millions of
American citizens. 'There are 96 million
sets of fingerprints' in the FBI's data base, the Post reports. Moreover,
the FBI uses its 'suspicious activities record' program (SAR) to collect and
store endless amounts of information about innocent Americans... Even the FBI admits the
huge waste all of this is -- ''Ninety-nine percent doesn't pan out or lead to anything'
said Richard Lambert Jr., the special agent in charge of the FBI's Knoxville office --
but, as history conclusively proves, data collected on citizens will be put to some use
even if it reveals no criminality. ... To
understand the breadth of the Surveillance State, recall this sentence from the original Priest/Arkin article: 'Every day, collection
systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7
billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of
communications.' As Arkin and Priest document today, there are few safeguards on how
all this data is used and abused. Local police departments routinely meet with
neoconservative groups insisting that all domestic Muslim communities are a potential
threat and must be subjected to intensive surveillance and infiltration. Groups engaged in plainly legal and protected political dissent have been
subjected to these government surveillance programs. What we have, in sum, is a vast,
uncontrolled and increasingly invasive surveillance state that knows and collects more and
more information about the activities of more and more citizens. But what makes all of
this particularly ominous is that -- as the WikiLeaks conflict demonstrates -- this
all takes place next to an always-expanding wall of secrecy behind which the Government's
own conduct is hidden from public view. Just
consider the Government's reaction to the disclosures by WikiLeaks of information which
even it -- in moments of candor -- acknowledges have caused no real damage:
disclosed information that, critically, was protected by relatively low-level secrecy
designations and (in contrast to the Pentagon Papers) none of which was designated
'Top Secret.'.... That's the mindset of the U.S.
Government: everything it does of any significance can and should be shielded
from public view; anyone who shines light on what it does is an Enemy who must be
destroyed; but nothing you do should be beyond its monitoring and storing eyes. And what's most remarkable about this -- though, given the
full-scale bipartisan consensus over it, not surprising -- is how eagerly submissive much
of the citizenry is to this imbalance. .... the
imbalance has become so extreme -- the Government now watches much of the citizenry behind
a fully opaque one-way mirror -- that the dangers should be obvious. And this is all
supposed to be the other way around: it's government officials who are supposed
to operate out in the open, while ordinary citizens are entitled to privacy. Yet
we've reversed that dynamic almost completely. And
even with 9/11 now 9 years behind us, the trends continue only in one direction." |
| "Few devices know more personal details about people than the
smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner's real
name—even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off. These phones don't keep secrets. They are sharing this personal data
widely and regularly, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found. An
examination of 101 popular smartphone 'apps'—games and other software applications
for iPhone and Android phones—showed that 56 transmitted the phone's unique device ID
to other companies without users' awareness or consent. Forty-seven apps transmitted the
phone's location in some way. Five sent age, gender and other personal details to
outsiders. The findings reveal the intrusive effort by online-tracking companies to gather
personal data about people in order to flesh out detailed dossiers on them. Among the apps
tested, the iPhone apps transmitted more data than the apps on phones using Google Inc.'s
Android operating system. Because of the test's size, it's not known if the pattern holds
among the hundreds of thousands of apps available. Apps sharing the most information
included TextPlus 4, a popular iPhone app for text messaging. It sent the phone's unique
ID number to eight ad companies and the phone's zip code, along with the user's age and
gender, to two of them.... 'In the world of mobile, there is no anonymity,' says Michael
Becker of the Mobile Marketing Association, an industry trade group. A cellphone is 'always with us. It's always on.'...
Smartphone users are all but powerless to limit the tracking. With few exceptions, app
users can't 'opt out' of phone tracking, as is possible, in limited form, on regular
computers. On computers it is also possible to block or delete 'cookies,' which are tiny
tracking files. These techniques generally don't work on cellphone apps.... The Journal
also tested its own iPhone app; it didn't send information to outsiders. The Journal
doesn't have an Android phone app. Among all apps tested, the most widely shared detail
was the unique ID number assigned to every phone. It is effectively a 'supercookie,' says
Vishal Gurbuxani, co-founder of Mobclix Inc., an exchange for mobile advertisers. On
iPhones, this number is the 'UDID,' or Unique Device Identifier. Android IDs go by other
names. These IDs are set by phone makers, carriers or makers of the operating system, and
typically can't be blocked or deleted. 'The great thing
about mobile is you can't clear a UDID like you can a cookie,' says Meghan
O'Holleran of Traffic Marketplace, an Internet ad network that is expanding into mobile
apps. 'That's how we track everything.' Ms. O'Holleran says Traffic Marketplace, a unit of
Epic Media Group, monitors smartphone users whenever it can. 'We watch what apps you
download, how frequently you use them, how much time you spend on them, how deep into the
app you go,' she says. She says the data is aggregated and not linked to an individual....
By tracking a phone's location, Mobclix also makes a 'best guess' of where a person lives,
says Mr. Gurbuxani, the Mobclix executive. Mobclix then matches that location with
spending and demographic data from Nielsen Co. In roughly a quarter-second, Mobclix can
place a user in one of 150 'segments' it offers to advertisers, from 'green enthusiasts'
to 'soccer moms.' For example, 'die hard gamers' are 15-to-25-year-old males with more
than 20 apps on their phones who use an app for more than 20 minutes at a time." Your Apps Are Watching You Wall St Journal, 18 December 2010 |
"I don't want to live in a world where everyone is watched all the
time.... Everyone everywhere should be able to speak and read and form their own beliefs
without being monitored..... It's not just the state.
If it wanted to, Google could overthrow any country in the world. Google has enough dirt
to destroy every marriage in America.... I love
Google. And I love the people there. Sergey Brin and Larry Page are cool. But I'm
terrified of the next generation that takes over. A benevolent dictatorship is still a
dictatorship. At some point people are going to
realize that Google has everything on everyone. Most of all, they can see what questions
you're asking, in real time. Quite literally, they can read your mind." |
"More than two years ago, Mother
Jones exposed a private security firm run by former Secret Service agents
that had spied on an array of environmental groups on behalf of corporate clients, in some
cases infiltrating unsuspecting organizations with operatives posing as activists. Now,
one of the targets of this corporate espionage is fighting back. On Monday, Greenpeace filed suit in federal
district court in Washington, DC, against the Dow Chemical Company and Sasol North
America, charging that the two multinational chemical manufacturers sought to thwart its
environmental campaigns against genetically engineered foods and chemical pollution
through elaborate undercover operations. Also named
in the suit are Dezenhall Resources and Ketchum, public relations firms hired by Sasol and
Dow respectively, and four ex-employees of that now-defunct security firm, Beckett Brown
International (BBI). The suit charges that between 1998 and 2000 the chemical companies,
the PR firms, and BBI 'conspired to and did surveil, infiltrate and steal confidential
information from Greenpeace with the intention of preempting, blunting or thwarting its
environmental campaigns. These unlawful activities included trespassing on the property of
Greenpeace, infiltrating its offices, meetings and electronic communications under false
pretenses and/or by force, and by these means, stealing confidential documents, data and
trade secrets from Greenpeace.' Greenpeace is seeking an injunction against further
trespass and thefts of trade secrets, as well as compensatory and punitive damages. The
lawsuit stems from an April 2008 Mother Jones article that detailed a series of black ops
carried out by BBI against Greenpeace and other environmental groups. The story was based
largely on internal BBI records made available to the magazine by John Dodd, a principal
investor and officer of BBI. At the time, Dodd said he decided to come forward after
discovering that BBI's employees had defrauded him and engaged in unscrupulous snooping on
activist groups and other targets. Mother Jones reporters sifted through thousands of
pages of internal documents that included billing records, surveillance reports, and email
correspondence from undercover operatives in Washington and Lake Charles, Louisiana.
Contained in the trove were a variety of internal Greenpeace records, including strategy
memos, campaign plans, donor lists, and documents that included credit card information
and the social security numbers of Greenpeace employees. Also unearthed were similar
records belonging to other organizations, including Friends of the Earth, GE Food Alert,
the Center for Food Safety, and Fenton Communications, a PR firm that represents various
environmental groups." |
"The police are seeking powers to shut down websites
deemed to be engaged in 'criminal' activity. The Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA)
has tabled a plan for Nominet, which oversees .uk web addresses, to be given the domain
closing power. Nominet said the idea was only a proposal and invited people to join the
debate on the form of the final policy. IT lawyers
said the proposal would be 'worrying' if it led to websites going offline without judicial
oversight. 'It's not policy at this stage,' said
Eleanor Bradley, director of operations at Nominet." |
"Robert
S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, traveled to Silicon Valley on Tuesday to meet with top
executives of several technology firms about a proposal to make it easier to wiretap
Internet users. Mr. Mueller and the F.B.I.’s
general counsel, Valerie Caproni, were scheduled to meet with senior managers of several
major companies, including Google
and Facebook,
according to several people familiar with the discussions. How Mr. Mueller’s proposal
was received was not clear. 'I can confirm that F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller is visiting
Facebook during his trip to Silicon Valley,' said Andrew Noyes, Facebook’s public
policy manager. Michael Kortan, an F.B.I. spokesman, acknowledged the meetings but did not
elaborate. Mr. Mueller wants to expand a 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law
Enforcement Act, to impose regulations on Internet companies. The law requires phone and
broadband network access providers like Verizon
and Comcast
to make sure they can immediately comply when presented with a court wiretapping order.
Law enforcement officials want the 1994 law to also cover Internet companies because
people increasingly communicate online. An interagency task force of Obama administration
officials is trying to develop legislation for the plan, and submit it to Congress early
next year. The Commerce Department and State
Department have questioned whether it would inhibit innovation, as well as whether
repressive regimes might harness the same capabilities to identify political dissidents,
according to officials familiar with the discussions. Under the proposal, firms would have to design systems to intercept and
unscramble encrypted messages. Services based overseas would have to route communications
through a server on United States soil where they could be wiretapped." |
"Britain is heading for a new
surveillance state of unmanned spy drones, GPS tracking of employees and profiling through
social networking sites, the information watchdog has warned. The relentless march of the surveillance society has seen snooping
techniques 'intensify and expand' at such a pace that regulators are struggling to keep
up, according to Christopher Graham, the Information Commissioner. Despite moves by the
Coalition Government to row back intrusions of privacy, a new wave of monitoring risks
making the spy state greater than ever. Mr Graham's predecessor warned in 2006 that the UK
could be 'sleepwalking into a surveillance society' and an updated report for him today
said such concerns are 'no less cogent' in 2010..... It said that 'visual, covert,
database and other forms of surveillance have proceeded apace' and that much of it 'goes
beyond the limits of what is tolerable in a society'. Britons are already the most watched
citizens in the democratic world because of an army of surveillance systems including
CCTV, cameras that track vehicles, vast Government databases and the sharing of personal
data such as air passenger details." |
| "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 |
"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." |
"Even the most law-abiding
driver might feel a shiver down the spine when spotting this speed camera at the roadside.
For as well as detecting speeding, it is packed with gizmos that check number plates to
make sure insurance and tax are up to date. It also
measures the distance between vehicles to spot tailgating and takes pictures of the inside
of the car – to make sure you are wearing a seat belt. The latest weapon in speed
camera technology can capture footage from 150ft away. It is the first to detect multiple
offences at the same time and is connected to police computers via satellite, so that
prosecutions can be started within seconds of any offence. Development of the system,
known as Asset – Advanced Safety and Driver Support for Essential Road Transport
– is being funded with around £7million of European money. It is undergoing
testing in Finland and is expected to be deployed across Europe from 2013, with each unit
costing £50,000.... The ‘Big Brother’-style set-up takes various pictures
before filing details back to a central database via a GPS system. The equipment
automatically destroys images over a month old and those in which no traffic violation is
evident. Its testing comes at a time when the Government has cut central funding for speed
cameras and reduced the road safety budget by £38million." |
"Every email, phone call and
website visit is to be recorded and stored after the Coalition Government revived
controversial Big Brother snooping plans. It will allow security services and the police
to spy on the activities of every Briton who uses a phone or the internet. Moves to make
every communications provider store details for at least a year will be unveiled later
this year sparking fresh fears over a return of the surveillance state. The plans were
shelved by the Labour Government last December but the Home Office is now ready to revive
them. It comes despite the Coalition Agreement promised to 'end the storage of internet
and email records without good reason'. Any
suggestion of a central 'super database' has been ruled out but the plans are expected to
involve service providers storing all users details for a set period of time. That will
allow the security and police authorities to track every phone call, email, text message
and website visit made by the public if they argue it is needed to tackle crime or
terrorism. The information will include who is contacting whom, when and where and which
websites are visited, but not the content of the conversations or messages.... Isabella
Sankey, director of policy at Liberty, said: 'One of
the early and welcome promises of the new Government was to ‘end the blanket storage
of internet and email records’. 'Any move to amass more of our sensitive data
and increase powers for processing would amount to a significant U-turn. The terrifying
ambitions of a group of senior Whitehall technocrats must not trump the personal privacy
of law abiding Britons.' Guy Herbert, general
secretary of the No2ID campaign group, said: 'We should not be surprised that the
interests of bureaucratic empires outrank liberty. 'It is disappointing that the new
ministers seem to be continuing their predecessors' tradition of credulousness.'" |
"Law enforcement and
counterterrorism officials, citing lapses in compliance with surveillance orders, are
pushing to overhaul a federal law that requires phone and broadband carriers to ensure
that their networks can be wiretapped, federal officials say. The officials say tougher legislation is needed because some
telecommunications companies in recent years have begun new services and made system
upgrades that caused technical problems for surveillance. They want to increase legal
incentives and penalties aimed at pushing carriers like Verizon,
AT&T,
and Comcast
to ensure that any network changes will not disrupt their ability to conduct wiretaps. An
Obama administration task force that includes officials from the Justice and Commerce
Departments, the F.B.I.
and other agencies recently began working on draft legislation to strengthen and expand
the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, a 1994 law that says telephone and
broadband companies must design their services so that they can begin conducting
surveillance of a target immediately after being presented with a court order." |
"Fans of James Bond know that biometric systems can be fooled to gain
access to secure areas: now a US National Research Council report commissioned by the CIA, DARPA
and the Department of Homeland Security confirms it. Never mind using severed fingers or
'retinal transplants' to dupe security systems. The
natural changes that occur due to age and health - and the fact that prints from the same
finger can differ because of dirt or moisture - mean that anyone can unwittingly fool the
technology, leaving such systems 'inherently fallible', according to the report. It recommends that system designers wishing to improve their systems do
so by considering any identification as likely but not definitive, and by developing
methods to accommodate the inevitable mistakes." |
"A computer virus dubbed the
world’s 'first cyber superweapon' and which may have been designed to attack
Iran’s nuclear facilities has found a new target — China. The Stuxnet computer
worm has wreaked havoc in China, infecting millions of computers around the country, state
media reported this week. Stuxnet is feared by
experts around the globe as it can break into computers that control machinery at the
heart of industry, allowing an attacker to assume control of critical systems like pumps,
motors, alarms and valves. It could, technically, make factory boilers explode, destroy
gas pipelines or even cause a nuclear plant to malfunction. The virus targets control
systems made by German industrial giant Siemens that are commonly used to manage water
supplies, oil rigs, power plants and other industrial facilities." |
"Developers of email, instant-messaging and
voice-over-internet-protocol applications would be forced to redesign their services so
their contents can be intercepted by law enforcement agents armed with legal wiretap
orders under federal legislation reported on
Monday by The New York Times. The legislation would, among other things, require
cellphone carriers, websites and other types of service providers to have a way to
unscramble encrypted communications traveling over their networks, the report said. It specifically mentions companies such as Research in Motion and
Skype, which are popular in part because their cellular communications and VoIP services
respectively are widely regarded as offering robust encryption that's impractical if not
impossible for government agents to crack." |
"Federal law enforcement and
national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the
Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is 'going
dark' as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone. Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable
communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social
networking Web sites like Facebook
and software that allows direct 'peer to peer' messaging like Skype
— to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate
would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages. The bill, which
the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions
about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And
because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example
that is copied globally." |
"Cyberterrorism is such a threat
that the U.S. president should have the authority to shut down the Internet in the event
of an attack, Former CIA
Director Michael
Hayden said. Hayden made the comments during a visit to San Antonio where he was
meeting with military and civilian officials to discuss cyber security. The U.S.
military has a new Cyber Command which is to begin operations on October 1. Hayden
said the president currently does not have the authority to shut down the Internet in an
emergency." |
"A computer virus that has infected more than 60,000
machines in Iran may be a sophisticated cyber-warfare attack on Iran’s clandestine
nuclear arms programme, software experts have told The Times. The 'Stuxnet Worm'
was detected in July but has since evolved through a number of refinements. This virus is
distinct because it is designed to attack the software that controls machinery in a
specific industrial installation. Industry experts have speculated that the target could
be the Natanz facility, where Iran conducts its nuclear enrichment programme. Western
computer software engineers have spent months examining the virus, which remains focused
on Iran, although smaller outbreaks have occurred in Indonesia, India and Pakistan. 'It is
fairly safe to say that Iran or a specific organisation within Iran was the target,' Kevin
Hogan, head of the Dublin global response centre for Symantec, an internet security
company, said. While warning that much about the Stuxnet Worm remained unclear, he said:
'The virus searches for the Siemens Simatic Step 7 programme [which] allows a pipeline
substation to function or a petrol refinery, sewage treatment plant, potentially a nuclear
processing plant. Stuxnet modifies the programmes in those devices, it is very
implementation specific.' The Siemens software is used for controlling and monitoring
temperature within an industrial plant. Alan Bentley, senior vice-president of the IT
security specialist Lumension, described the virus as 'the most refined piece of malware
ever discovered'. Features of the Stuxnet
virus have led industry experts to speculate that a nation state may be behind its
creation, with Israel and the US the most obvious suspects. They cited as one such feature the sophisticated nature of the
programme, which exploits four previously unknown flaws within the Windows software used
by most computers." |
"The FBI improperly opened
investigations into Greenpeace and other animal rights and anti-war groups after the
September 11 attacks of 2001, the US government has admitted. Inspector-General Glenn Fine said the FBI tactics were 'troubling' because
they singled out some of domestic groups for investigations that ran for up to five years
and were extended 'without adequate basis'. He said: 'In several cases there was little
indication of any possible federal crimes. In some cases, the FBI classified some
investigations relating to non-violent civil disobedience under its Acts of Terrorism
classification.' As well as Greenpeace, groups that were investigated included People for
the Ethical Treatment of Animals and anti-war groups the Catholic Worker and the Thomas
Merton Centre in Pittsburgh." |
"Pennsylvania lawmakers plan to investigate claims that a company
hired to provide information to the state's Office of Homeland Security was gathering
information on groups who staged various protests and rallies. The Senate Veterans Affairs and Emergency Preparedness Committee
has scheduled a Sept. 27 hearing in Harrisburg regarding the Institute of Terrorism
Research and Response. Committee chair Sen. Lisa Baker, R-Luzerne, said she wants to know
if people were targeted for exercising their rights of free speech and assembly. Gov. Ed Rendell on Tuesday apologized to the groups, who became the
subject of regular anti-terrorism bulletins distributed by his homeland security director,
James Powers. The governor said he was embarrassed to learn of the bulletins, and added
he's canceling a $125,000 contract with the Philadelphia-based company. He did not fire
Powers. The bulletins were shared with representatives of the natural gas industry because
of concern over acts of vandalism at wells in the Marcellus Shale region." |
"FBI agents improperly opened
investigations into Greenpeace and several other domestic advocacy groups following the
Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, and put names of some of their members on terror watch
lists with evidence that turned out to be 'factually weak,' the Department of Justice said
Monday. However, the internal review by Inspector
General Glenn Fine did not conclude that the FBI purposely targeted the groups or their
members, as many civil liberties advocates had charged after anti-Iraq war rallies and
other protests were held during the administration of President George W. Bush. Rather,
Fine said, the FBI tactics appeared 'troubling' in singling out some of the domestic
groups for investigations that ran for up to five years, and were extended 'without
adequate basis.' He also questioned why the FBI continued to maintain investigative files
against the groups." |
"An obscure York nonprofit with
ties to Philadelphia University and Jerusalem is behind the state Homeland Security
agency's monitoring of protesters, environmentalists and gays, documents show. The
Institute of Terrorism Research and Response is headed by Michael Perelman, who formerly
worked for the York City Police Department, and Aaron Richman, a former police captain in
the Israeli capital, according to filings with the Pennsylvania Department of State. Gov. Ed Rendell apologized Tuesday after the disclosure that the state Office
of Homeland Security paid the institute $125,000 for weekly reports the agency used to put
Marcellus shale hearings and a gay and lesbian festival on terror watch lists for law
enforcement. 'We are appalled at what we have learned so far about these reports,' said
Witold Walczak, legal director for the ACLU of Pennsylvania. 'It all smacks of J. Edgar
Hoover. Saying that no harm was done is simplistic. Just raising questions about a group
or a person can cause harm. Dissent does not equal danger.' Perelman declined to comment
but provided a statement that explained in general terms what his organization
does..." |
"Smart phones do many things
these days: surf the Internet, send e-mail, take photos and video (and — oh, yes
— send and receive calls). But one thing they can do that phone companies don't
advertise is spy on you. As long as you don't leave home without your phone, that handy
gadget keeps a record of everywhere you go — a record the government can then get
from your telephone company. The law is unclear about how easy it should be for the
government to get its hands on this locational data — which can reveal whether you've
been going to church, attending a Tea Party rally, spending the night at a date's house or
visiting a cancer-treatment center. A federal
appeals court ruled last week that in some cases the government may need a search warrant.
And while that's a step forward, it's not good enough. The rule should be that the
government always needs a warrant to access your cell-phone records and obtain data about
where you have been. When you carry a cell phone, it is constantly sending signals about
where you are. It 'pings' nearby cell-phone towers about every seven seconds so it can be
ready to make and receive calls. When it does, the phone is also telling the company that
owns the towers where you are at that moment — data the company then stores away
indefinitely. There is also a second kind of locational data that phone companies have,
thanks to a GPS chip that is embedded in most smart phones now. This is even more accurate
— unlike the towers, which can only pinpoint a general area where you may be, GPS can
often reveal exactly where you are at any given moment within a matter of meters. 'About
90% of Americans are walking around with a portable tracking device all the time, and they
have no idea,' says Christopher Calabrese, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties
Union's Washington office..... The federal government's position is that it should be able
to get most of this data if it decides it is relevant to an investigation, with no need
for a search warrant. If the government needs a warrant, it would have to show a judge
evidence that there was probable cause to believe that the cell-phone user committed a
crime — an important level of protection. Without this requirement, the government
can get locational data pretty much anytime it wants. It
is not hard to imagine that the government could also one day use cell-phone data to
stifle dissent. Cell-phone records could tell them who attended an antigovernment rally.
It could also tell them who is going into the opposition party's headquarters or into the
home of someone they have questions about. Cell-phone data may be the most efficient way
ever invented for a government to spy on its people — since people are planting the
devices on themselves and even paying the monthly bills. The KGB never had anything like
it. And, indeed, the U.S. government already appears
to be sweeping up a lot of data from completely innocent people. The ACLU recently told
Congress of a case in which, while looking for data on a suspect, the FBI apparently used
a dragnet approach and took data on another 180 people. The FBI has said that if it does
happen to gather data on innocent people in the course of conducting an investigation, it
keeps that information for as long as 20 years....Last week, the Philadelphia-based U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit pushed back. A federal magistrate judge, in a good
and strong decision, had ruled that the government must always get a warrant if it wants
cell-phone data. The appeals court scaled that back a bit, ruling that magistrate judges
have the power to require the government to get a warrant, depending on the facts of the
particular case. The fight over cell-phone tracking is similar to one now going on in the
courts over GPS devices — specifically, whether the government needs a warrant to
place a GPS device on someone's car." |
"Over the past several years,
entities closely linked to the private security firm Blackwater have provided
intelligence, training and security services to US and foreign governments as well as
several multinational corporations, including Monsanto, Chevron, the Walt Disney Company,
Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and banking giants Deutsche Bank and Barclays, according to
documents obtained by The Nation. Blackwater's work
for corporations and government agencies was contracted using two companies owned by
Blackwater's owner and founder, Erik Prince: Total Intelligence Solutions and the
Terrorism Research Center (TRC). Prince is listed as the chairman of both companies in
internal company documents, which show how the web of companies functions as a highly
coordinated operation. Officials from Total Intelligence, TRC and Blackwater (which now
calls itself Xe Services) did not respond to numerous requests for comment for this
article. One of the most incendiary details in the documents is that Blackwater, through
Total Intelligence, sought to become the 'intel arm' of Monsanto, offering to provide
operatives to infiltrate activist groups organizing against the multinational biotech
firm.....Through Total Intelligence and the Terrorism Research Center, Blackwater also did
business with a range of multinational corporations. According to internal Total
Intelligence communications, biotech giant Monsanto—the world's largest supplier of
genetically modified seeds—hired the firm in 2008–09. The relationship between
the two companies appears to have been solidified in January 2008 when Total Intelligence
chair Cofer Black traveled to Zurich to meet with Kevin Wilson, Monsanto's security
manager for global issues..... After the meeting in Zurich, Black sent an e-mail to other
Blackwater executives, including to Prince and Prado at their Blackwater e-mail addresses.
Black wrote that Wilson 'understands that we can span collection from internet, to reach
out, to boots on the ground on legit basis protecting the Monsanto [brand] name.... Ahead
of the curve info and insight/heads up is what he is looking for.' Black added that Total
Intelligence 'would develop into acting as intel arm of Monsanto.' Black also noted that
Monsanto was concerned about animal rights activists and that they discussed how
Blackwater 'could have our person(s) actually join [activist] group(s) legally.' Black
wrote that initial payments to Total Intelligence would be paid out of Monsanto's
'generous protection budget' but would eventually become a line item in the company's
annual budget. He estimated the potential payments to Total Intelligence at between
$100,000 and $500,000. According to documents, Monsanto paid Total Intelligence $127,000
in 2008 and $105,000 in 2009....Reached by telephone and asked about the meeting with
Black in Zurich, Monsanto's Wilson initially said, 'I'm not going to discuss it with you.'
In a subsequent e-mail to The Nation, Wilson confirmed he met Black in Zurich and that
Monsanto hired Total Intelligence in 2008 and worked with the company until early
2010." |
"A mind reading machine is a
step closer to reality after scientists discovered a way of translating people's thoughts
into words. Researchers have been able to translate
brain signals into speech using sensors attached to the surface of the brain for the first
time. The breakthrough, which is up to 90 per cent accurate, offers a way to communicate
for paralysed patients who cannot speak and could eventually lead to being able to read
anyone thoughts. .... The experimental breakthrough came when the team attached two button
sized grids of 16 tiny electrodes to the speech centres of the brain of an epileptic
patient. The sensors were attached to the surface of the brain The patient had had part of
his skull removed for another operation to treat his condition. Using the electrodes, the
scientists recorded brain signals in a computer as the patient repeatedly read each of 10
words that might be useful to a paralysed person: yes, no, hot, cold, hungry, thirsty,
hello, goodbye, more and less. Then they got him to
repeat the words to the computer and it was able to match the brain signals for each word
76 per cent to 90 per cent of the time. The computer picked up the patinet's brain waves
as he talked and did not use any voice recognition software. Because just thinking a word
– and not saying it – is thought to produce the same brain signals, Prof Greger
and his team believe that soon they will be able to have translation device and voice box
that repeats the word you are thinking." |
"Fears about loss of privacy are being voiced as India gears up to
launch an ambitious scheme to biometrically identify and number each of its 1.2 billion
inhabitants. In September, officials from the Unique Identification Authority of India
(UIDAI), armed with fingerprinting machines, iris scanners and cameras hooked to laptops,
will fan out across the towns and villages of southern Andhra Pradesh state in the first
phase of the project whose aim is to give every Indian a lifelong Unique ID (UID) number.
'The UID is soft infrastructure, much like mobile telephony, important to connect
individuals to the broader economy,' explains Nandan Nilekani, chairman of the UIDAI and
listed in 2009 by Time magazine as among the world's 100 most influential people..... In
talks and television interviews, Nilekani has maintained that the benefits of the UID
project far outweigh its risks.' 'It's worth taking on the project and trying to mitigate
the risks so that we get the outcomes we want,' he told the CNN-IBN television channel in
an interview. But the possibility of religious
profiling by state governments or misuse by caste lobbies is real. This is because the central government has decided to include caste as a
category in the UID questionnaire to be filled out by applicants.Because identity is
already a potent issue and the trigger for frequent identity-related conflict – such
as the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat that left 2,000 people dead – any exercise
that enhances identification is fraught." |
"Coulsongate is throwing some very important light into a very murky
area. It now seems clear that the police knew that the private investigator Glenn
Mulcaire and the News of the World royal reporter Clive Goodman had illegally intercepted
the voicemail messages of many more politicians, sportsmen, celebrities and others than
just the 8 for which they were jailed. The New York Times has quoted detectives,
however, as alleging they did not pursue these investigations because of their close
relationship with Murdoch’s newspaper. This raises key questions about
Britain’s power structure and how it works..... A
central tenet of a civilised and democratic society is that the various power institutions
– the political system, the banks and financial sector, industrial corporations,
criminal justice and security services, and the media – must operate independently
and at arm’s length from each other in a manner that is transparent and
accountable. If they are found covertly to collude with each other in order to
give surreptitious and improper assistance to one of the other powerful forces in society,
it is a very serious threat about which Parliament should be urgently demanding a thorough
and comprehensive public inquiry." |
"The policeman who found the body of MI6 codebreaker Gareth Williams
said it was submerged in ‘fluid’, The Mail on Sunday has learned. An inquest
heard last week that the 31-year-old spy was padlocked in a sports hold-all and left in
the bath of his two-bedroom flat in Pimlico, Central London. But the disclosure that he
was also covered by liquid – not thought to be blood or water – has raised fears
that a substance was used to accelerate decay and complicate toxicology tests..... speculation that he was the victim of a professional
‘hit’ was given credence last night after further details of his work were
disclosed. ‘He was involved in some very sensitive projects, known as codeword
protected,’ said a security expert. ‘This meant that only the people in his cell
would know what he was working on, and nobody else in his organisation. ‘You are
signed in to these projects and once you finish one you are signed out and you no longer
have access to any data or news about what is happening in the project.’
......‘It is an aggressive form of Bluetooth or similar wireless technology,’
said the security expert. He said such devices would be used by spies on the ground
to steal data from the handsets of unsuspecting terrorists, organised criminals or
officers from rival intelligence agencies. 'Traditionally,
there has been a separation of MI6 and GCHQ,’ said the expert. ‘MI6 has been
full of the James Bond types working on the ground and GCHQ is filled with boffins with
beards who are doing their scientific stuff. ‘But recently there has been a
merger of these agencies’ work and Williams was at the forefront of that. This was
why he was on secondment to MI6.’ He added that Mr Williams did similar work when he
had stints at the National Security Agency in America. The NSA is the equivalent of GCHQ
and has been leading the West’s attempts to intercept communication between Al Qaeda
cells. Mr Williams worked for the Special Delivery Team, a unit set up in the NSA to
create advanced bugging and intercepting devices." |
"John Prescott tonight demanded
the Metropolitan police reopen its investigation into the News of the World phone-hacking
scandal as the Observer revealed that Scotland Yard holds News International documents
suggesting that he was a target when deputy prime minister. Two invoices held by the Met
mention Prescott by name. They appear to show that
News International, owner of the NoW, paid Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the
heart of the scandal, for his help on stories relating to the deputy PM. Lord Prescott
spoke of his anger that the information, spelled out in a letter from the Yard's legal
services directorate, emerged only after he was given a series of personal reassurances by
detectives at the highest level that there was 'no evidence' his phone may have been
hacked. The invoices are both dated May 2006, at a time when Prescott was the subject of
intense media scrutiny following revelations that he had had an affair with his secretary,
Tracey Temple. There is also a piece of paper
obtained from Mulcaire on which the name 'John Prescott' is written. The only other
legible word on this document is 'Hull'." |
"Investigators have found no evidence so far that murdered MI6 spy
Gareth Williams was gay, it emerged yesterday. His family and friends have said there was
nothing to suggest he was gay and have reacted furiously to ‘untruths’ that he
led a colourful homosexual lifestyle, claiming the rumours could be government smears
aimed at discrediting him. Police inquiries have supported their view that he was not gay.
Scotland Yard has denied speculation that gay paraphernalia was discovered in the flat or
that there is any link to a male escort. Mr Williams was found dead last Monday at his
£400,000 flat in Pimlico, central London, just half a mile from MI6 headquarters. His
body was discovered in the bath stuffed into a sports holdall.... One line of enquiry is
that the cipher and codes specialist could have died in a bizarre accident and that his
body was later put in the bag. Detectives are also looking at whether he may have been
killed by a foreign intelligence agency seeking to stop his work on intercepting messages
and code-breaking, the Telegraph reported. The Metropolitan police continue to describe
his death as ‘suspicious and unexplained’. A security source said any
‘unexplained’ movements of money in the Mr Williams’ bank accounts were
being scrutinised for clues as to how he met his death. It emerged yesterday that Mr
Williams was thought to have made at least two trips to Afghanistan, helping break coded
Taliban messages at MI6’s key listening station in Kabul. He is also said to have played an important role in the development of a
highly sensitive and secret electronic intelligence gathering system called Echelon and was helping with a new system to
monitor internet phone calls such as Skype." |
"The Pentagon is contemplating an aggressive approach to defending
its computer systems that includes preemptive actions such as knocking out parts of an
adversary's computer network overseas - but it is still wrestling with how to pursue the
strategy legally. The department is developing a range of weapons capabilities, including
tools that would allow 'attack and exploitation of adversary information systems' and that
can 'deceive, deny, disrupt, degrade and destroy' information and information systems,
according to Defense Department budget documents. But officials are reluctant to use the
tools until questions of international law and technical feasibility are resolved, and
that has proved to be a major challenge for policymakers. Government
lawyers and some officials question whether the Pentagon could take such action without
violating international law or other countries' sovereignty." |
"Government agents can sneak
onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car
and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights,
because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway - and
no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements. That is the
bizarre - and scary - rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction,
recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants -
with no need for a search warrant. It is a dangerous
decision - one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of
totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the
judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy
that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.... if government
agents can track people with secretly planted GPS devices virtually anytime they want,
without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are one step closer to a classic police
state — with technology taking on the role of the KGB or the East German Stasi.
Fortunately, other courts are coming to a different conclusion from the Ninth Circuit's
— including the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
Circuit. That court ruled, also this month, that tracking for an extended period of time
with GPS is an invasion of privacy that requires a warrant. The issue is likely to end up
in the Supreme Court." |
"Israeli government claims that it does not spy on the United States
are intended for the media and popular consumption. The reality is that Israel’s
intelligence agencies target the United States intensively, particularly in pursuit of
military and dual-use civilian technology. Among nations considered to be friendly to
Washington, Israel leads all others in its active espionage directed against American
companies and the Defense Department. It also
dominates two commercial sectors that enable it to extend its reach inside America’s
domestic infrastructure: airline and telecommunications security. Israel is believed to
have the ability to monitor nearly all phone records originating in the United States,
while numerous Israeli air-travel security companies are known to act as the local Mossad
stations....FBI sources indicate that the increase
in Mossad activity is a major problem, particularly when Israelis are posing as U.S.
government officials, but they also note that there is little they can do to stop it as
the Justice Department refuses to initiate any punitive action or prosecutions of the
Mossad officers who have been identified as involved in the illegal activity.....Stewart
Nozette appears to be headed towards eventual freedom as his case drags on through the
District of Columbia courts. Nozette, an aerospace scientist with a top secret clearance
and access to highly sensitive information, offered to sell classified material to a man
he believed to be a Mossad officer, but who instead turned out to be with the FBI. Nozette
has been in jail since October, but he has now been granted an additional 90-day delay so
his lawyers can review the documents in the government’s case, many of which are
classified. If Nozette demands that sensitive information be used in his defense, his case
will likely follow the pattern set in the nine-times-postponed trial of AIPAC spies Steve
Rosen and Keith Weissman, who were ultimately acquitted in April 2009 when prosecutors
determined that they could not make their case without doing significant damage to
national security. A month after Rosen and Weissman were freed, Ben-Ami Kadish, who
admitted to providing defense secrets to Israel while working as an engineer at Picatinny
Arsenal in New Jersey, walked out of a Manhattan court after paying a fine. He did no jail
time and continues to receive his substantial Defense Department pension. The mainstream
media reported the Rosen and Weissman trial intermittently, but there was virtually no
coverage of Ben-Ami Kadish, and there has been even less of Nozette." |
"A Liberal
Democrat adviser to Nick Clegg has called on Scotland Yard to explain why it held his
details as well as Clegg’s name on a secret police database. Fiyaz Mughal, who
advises the deputy prime minister on combating violent extremism, wrote to Sir Paul
Stephenson, the Metropolitan police commissioner, last week demanding to know why
surveillance officers logged his identity on the database after he spoke at a peaceful
rally in Trafalgar Square. A spokesman for
Clegg, who will be running the country this week while David Cameron is on holiday, said
he would look into the matter. Details of the surveillance appear on a police criminal
intelligence report of a rally last year to protest against the BBC’s refusal to
broadcast a charity appeal for Gaza. A team of surveillance officers from the forward
intelligence team of the Met’s public order unit were watching the demonstration to
gather information about various protesters linked to groups including Stop the War and
the Socialist Workers party. Although they were spying only on the demonstrators, they
noted the presence of several speakers. One of them was Mughal, who was identified in the
log as 'the inter-faith adviser to Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats'. Another was
Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour MP for Islington North. Corbyn was unavailable for comment this
weekend. But Mughal expressed his fury in a letter to Stephenson. 'It seems that simply
speaking at a lawful demonstration warrants a criminal intelligence report,' he wrote.
'Such activity by the Met, in my opinion, is tantamount to an intrusion into the human and
civil rights of citizens who are undertaking their legitimate right to demonstrate.' Shami
Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, the human rights group, said the Met needed stricter
controls on what information is placed in databases. 'It
is bad enough that swaggering officers from so-called ‘forward intelligence’ use
aggressive photography and other tactics to discourage peaceful protest and turn activists
into enemies of the state,' she said." |
"....online stalking is prompted by tiny files hidden
inside... computers. These secretly identify their age, location, favourite movies, love
of gadgets, the books they buy — sometimes even the words they type into websites.
This data is packaged and sold to companies seeking customers. Welcome to the shadowy
world of 'behavioural advertising', where the tastes, dreams, desires and family size of
unsuspecting internet users are for sale to advertisers and even governments. ... How does
it work? At its heart the technique relies on innocuous-sounding programs or software
called cookies and beacons. They are either dumped onto your computer or identify it (and
you) when you log onto a website. This allows all your movements on the internet to be
tracked, often in real time.... Last week The Wall Street Journal tested the world’s
top 50 websites to find out just how many cookies, beacons and other trackers they fed
into your computer. The 50 sites installed 3,180 tracking files on a test computer used in
the survey. Only one, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, installed none. One of those
studied, the search engine Google, insisted last week that it did not store details of
what individuals searched for, other than anonymously. So if you searched for something
such as 'hair loss treatments', it would not sell on that information to interested
parties. However, users of Google’s email service have been astonished by its seeming
perspicacity....When you visit the auction site eBay or the travel site Expedia,
information about what you were looking for and some basic information on the sort of
person you are will be auctioned within seconds on a data exchange run by BlueKai, a
Seattle-based firm. Every day BlueKai sells 50m pieces of information about
individuals’ browsing habits so that advertisers can respond immediately.
'Advertisers have always collected information on people,' according to Emma Wilson,
managing director of Harvest Digital, an ad agency. 'In the last year or so that has
multiplied exponentially. You don’t know the specifics of each person — no one
has my name and address, for instance — but ads that know my age, where I live and
what I buy can follow me around Facebook or track me across the internet.' Some tracking
companies pair up your online behaviour with data from other sources about household
income, geography, family size and education to make well informed guesses in real time
about what you might be about to do — or how much you might be able to spend —
and sell those conclusions....Advertisers argue that the information they collect is
anonymous but Professor Lilian Edwards, who teaches internet law at Sheffield University,
warns that 'it is incredibly easy to de-anonymise data. If you are a household with more
than an average number of children, for example, you are very easy to identify.'.... Data
monitoring of this kind has alarmed campaigners for some time. In 2004 Richard Thomas, the then information commissioner, whose job it
is to protect the public’s private information, sounded an urgent warning: 'My
anxiety is that we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society where much more
information is collected about people, accessible to far more people shared across many
more boundaries than British society would feel comfortable with.' Edwards fears that that point has already arrived. 'Things have
got desperately out of control,' she said. 'The problem isn’t just the ads, it’s
the entire database held on you and how that database is combined with external research
using quantitative methods. How do you know they haven’t made two plus two equal
five? You may be branded a credit risk or affiliated with terrorist organisations without
knowing it. And once it’s out, it is very, very hard to put the genie back in the
bottle.' There is no doubt governments are
in the market for this kind of data. Last
week Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates announced that they would ban some services
available on BlackBerry smartphones. The problem was that the encryption on the phones was
so good that it made it very difficult for the governments to spy on people’s email
messages. Most observers agree that many people are unaware they can opt out of the
constant monitoring and also that the means of doing so is too complex. Until recently the
social media site Facebook required users to click 50 times to activate privacy
settings." |
"A semi-secret government
contractor that calls itself Project Vigilant surfaced at the Defcon security conference
Sunday with a series of revelations: that it monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet
service providers, hands much of that information to federal agencies, and encouraged one
of its 'volunteers,' researcher Adrian Lamo, to inform the federal government about the
alleged source of a controversial video of
civilian deaths in Iraq leaked to whistle-blower site Wikileaks in April. Chet Uber, the director of Fort Pierce, Fl.-based Project Vigilant, says
that he personally asked Lamo to meet with federal authorities to out the source of a
video published by Wikileaks showing a U.S. Apache helicopter killing several civilians
and two journalists in a suburb of Baghdad, a clip that Wikileaks labeled 'Collateral Murder.' Lamo, who Uber said worked as
an 'adversary characterization' analyst for Project Vigilant, had struck up an online
friendship with Bradley Manning, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst who currently
faces criminal charges for releasing the classified video. In
June, Uber said he learned from Lamo’s father that the young researcher had
identified Manning as the video’s source, and pressured him to meet with federal
agencies to name Manning as Wikileaks’ whistleblower. He then arranged a meeting with employees of 'three letter' agencies and
Lamo, who Uber said had mixed feelings about informing on Manning. 'I’m the one who
called the U.S. government,' Uber said. 'All the people who say that Adrian is a narc, he
did a patriotic thing. He sees all kinds of hacks, and he was seriously worried about
people dying.' Uber says that Lamo later called him from the meeting, regretting his
decision to inform on Manning. 'I’m in a meeting with five guys and I don’t want
to do this,' Uber says Lamo told him at the time. Uber says he responded, 'You don’t
have any choice, you’ve got to do this.' 'I said, ‘They’re not going to
throw you in jail,’' Uber said. '‘Give them everything you have.’'
Wikileaks didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. IDG reporter Robert
McMillan confirmed
Uber’s relationship with Lamo, who told McMillan that 'Mr. Uber was, among a few
others, an instrumental voice in helping me come to my ultimate decision.' Uber’s Wikileaks revelation is one of the first public
statements from the semi-secret Project Vigilant. He
says the 600-person 'volunteer' organization functions as a government contractor bridging
public and private sector security efforts. Its mission: to use a variety of
intelligence-gathering efforts to help the government attribute hacking incidents. 'Bad
actors do bad things and you have to prove that they did them,' says Uber. 'Attribution is
the hardest problem in computer security.' According
to Uber, one of Project Vigilant’s manifold methods for gathering intelligence
includes collecting information from a dozen regional U.S. Internet service providers
(ISPs). Uber declined to name those ISPs, but said that because the companies included a
provision allowing them to share users’ Internet activities with third parties in
their end user license agreements (EULAs), Vigilant was able to legally gather data from
those Internet carriers and use it to craft reports for federal agencies. A Vigilant press
release says that the organization tracks more than 250
million IP addresses a day and can 'develop portfolios on any
name, screen name or IP address.' 'We don’t do
anything illegal,' says Uber. 'If an ISP has a EULA
to let us monitor traffic, we can work with them. If
they don’t, we can’t.' And whether that massive data gathering violates privacy?
The organization says it never looks at personally identifying information, though just
how it defines that information isn’t clear, nor is how it scrubs its data mining for
sensitive details. ISP monitoring is just one form of
intelligence that Vigilant employs, says Uber. It also gathers a variety of open source
intelligence and employs numerous agents around the world." |
"iPhones generally store more data than other high-end phones -- and
investigators such as Fazio frequently can tap in to that information for evidence. And
while some phone users routinely delete information from their devices, that step is
seldom as final as it seems. 'When you hit the delete button, it's never really deleted,'
Fazio said. The devices can help police learn where
you've been, what you were doing there and whether you've got something to hide. Former hacker Jonathan Zdziarski, author of iPhone Forensics (O'Reilly
Media) for law enforcement, said the devices 'are people's companions today. They organize
people's lives.' And if you're doing something criminal, something about it is probably
going to go through that phone: • Every
time an iPhone user closes out of the built-in mapping application, the phone snaps a
screenshot and stores it. Savvy law-enforcement agents armed with search warrants can use
those snapshots to see if a suspect is lying about whereabouts during a crime. • iPhone photos are
embedded with GEO tags and identifying information, meaning that photos posted online
might not only include GPS coordinates of where the picture was taken, but also the serial
number of the phone that took it. • Even
more information is stored by the applications themselves, including the user's browser
history. That data is meant in part to direct custom-tailored advertisements to the user,
but experts said some of it could be useful to police. Clearing out user histories isn't
enough to clean the device of that data, said John B. Minor, a member of the International
Society of Forensic Computer Examiners. Just as users
can take and store a picture of their iPhone's screen, the phone itself automatically
shoots and stores hundreds of such images as people close out one application to use
another. 'Those screen snapshots can contain images
of e-mails or proof of activities that might be inculpatory or exculpatory,' Minor said.
• The keyboard cache logs everything that
you type in to learn autocorrect so that it can correct a user's typing mistakes. Apple
doesn't store that cache very securely, Zdziarski contended, so someone with know-how
could recover months of typing in the order in which it was typed, even if the e-mail or
text it was part of has long since been deleted." |
"One of the fastest-growing
businesses on the Internet, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found, is the business
of spying on Internet users. The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and
analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are
deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far
more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in
the vanguard of the industry. • The study found
that the nation's 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology
onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more
than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none. • Tracking technology is
getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to
"cookie" files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new
tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess
location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools
surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them. • These
profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like
exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months. The new technologies are transforming
the Internet economy. Advertisers once primarily bought ads on specific Web pages—a
car ad on a car site. Now, advertisers are paying a premium to follow people around the
Internet, wherever they go, with highly specific marketing messages. In between the
Internet user and the advertiser, the Journal identified more than 100
middlemen—tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks—competing to
meet the growing demand for data on individual behavior and interests." |
"The Obama administration is
seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an
individual's Internet activity without a court order
if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation. The
administration wants to add just four words -- 'electronic communication transactional
records' -- to a list of items that the law says the
FBI may demand without a judge's approval. Government
lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user
sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user's
browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the 'content' of
e-mail or other Internet communication. But what officials portray as a technical
clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy
advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national
security letters. These missives, which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own
authority, require the recipient to provide the
requested information and to keep the request secret.
They are the mechanism the government would use to obtain the electronic records." |
| "The privacy of millions of
Facebook users has been jeopardised after some of their details were harvested and
published on the internet. An online security consultant who wished to highlight the
social networking site's privacy issues published a list of data taken from more than
100million users' profiles. Ron Bowles used a piece
of code to scan Facebook profiles, collecting data not hidden by the user's privacy
settings. The list has been shared as a downloadable file which has now spread rapidly
across the internet, prompting anger and concern from millions of users around the
world....Simon Davies, from the watchdog Privacy International, told BBC news that
Facebook had been given ample warning that something like this would happen. He said:
'Facebook should have anticipated this attack and put measures in place to prevent it. 'It
is inconceivable that a firm with hundreds of engineers couldn't have imagined a trawl of
this magnitude and there's an argument to be heard that Facebook have acted with
negligence. 'It adds to the confusion which has long surrounded the privacy settings -
people don't fully understand them and this is the result,' he said." Facebook privacy fears for 100m users as their personal details are published on file-sharing site Daily Mail, 29 July 2010 |
"The Archbishop of York
yesterday revealed he has been stopped and searched by police eight times, as he warned
new anti-terrorist powers are a threat to civil liberties. Dr John Sentamu said police should not be able to ask for someone's bank
accounts to be frozen merely because they are suspected of terrorism. The Ugandan-born
Archbishop told peers that he had been stopped and searched by officers because he had
been suspected of crime, warning that the new asset-freezing law could lead to people
losing their money and property just because their faces did not fit. His warning is
likely to carry weight with ministers because of his powerful record both as an opponent
of racism and a critic of left-wing 'multiculturalism'. Dr
Sentamu, who is second to the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Church of England hierarchy,
was speaking in the Lords on the Terrorist Asset-Freezing Bill. The law, which is not
opposed by Labour, would allow the courts to freeze assets on 'reasonable suspicion' that
someone is a terrorist, rather than the more demanding rules that there must be a
'reasonable belief' of their involvement in terrorism. Revealing his experience of being stopped and searched, the Archbishop
said: 'When the policeman suddenly realised that I was a bishop, that didn't stop me being
stopped and searched.' And he claimed that such police checks were often on the basis of
'he doesn't look like one of us'." |
"The personal details of several
Kiwi celebrities have been released by hackers as proof they have cracked Hell Pizza's
customer database. Private information including passwords, email and home addresses,
phone numbers - plus pizza orders - have fallen into the hands of the anonymous cyber
hackers. Hell have called in police and it has
raised fears that they could access the personal details of hundreds of thousands of New
Zealanders. The company warned its 230,000 customers to change their internet passwords in
an email on Friday night.... Executive director Martin Cocker from NetSafe said if Hell
Pizza has been breached it was embarrassing for them not to know. However, he said it was
good Hell Pizza had warned customers as there was no legal obligation to do so." |
"The Ministry of Truth was how George Orwell described the mechanism
used by government to control information in his seminal novel 1984. A recent trip to
Europe has convinced me that the governments of the world have been rocked by the power of
the internet and are seeking to gain control of it so that they will have a virtual
monopoly on information that the public is able to access. In
Italy, Germany, and Britain the anonymous internet that most Americans are still familiar
with is slowly being modified. If one goes into an internet café it is now legally
required in most countries in the European Union to present a government issued form of
identification. When I used an internet connection at a Venice hotel, my passport was
demanded as a precondition and the inner page, containing all my personal information, was
scanned and a copy made for the Ministry of the Interior -- which controls the police
force. The copy is retained and linked to the transaction. For home computers, the IP
address of the service used is similarly recorded for identification purposes. All records
of each and every internet usage, to include credit information and keystrokes that
register everything that is written or sent, is accessible to the government authorities
on demand, not through the action of a court or an independent authority. That means that
there is de facto no right to privacy and a government bureaucrat decides what can and
cannot be 'reviewed' by the authorities. Currently, the records are maintained for a
period of six months but there is a drive to make the retention period even longer.... all
of the arguments for intervention are essentially themselves fraudulent and are in reality
being exploited by those who favor big government and state control. The anonymity and low cost nature of the internet means that it can be
used to express views that are unpopular or unconventional, which is its strength. It is
sometimes used for criminal behavior because it is a mechanism, not because there is
something intrinsic in it that makes it a choice of wrongdoers. Before it existed, fraud
was carried out through the postal service and over the telephone. Pornography circulated
freely by other means. As for the security argument,
the tiny number of actual terrorists who use the internet do so because it is there and it
is accessible. If it did not exist, they would find other ways to communicate, just as
they did in pre-internet days. In fact, intelligence sources report that internet use by
terrorists is rare because of persistent government monitoring of the websites..... The real reason for controlling the internet is to restrict access
to information, something every government seeks to do. If the American Departments of
Defense and Homeland Security and Senator Lieberman have their way, new cybersecurity laws
will enable Obama's administration to take control of the internet in the event of a
national crisis. How that national crisis might be defined would be up to the White House
but there have been some precedents that suggest that the response would hardly be
respectful of the Bill of Rights. Many countries already monitor and censor the internet
on a regular basis, forbidding access to numerous sites that they consider to be
subversive or immoral. During recent unrest, the governments of both Iran and China
effectively shut down the internet by taking control of or blocking servers.... As this
article was being written, a story broke reporting that Wordpress host Blogetery had been
shut down by United States authorities along with all 73,000 Blogetery-hosted blogs. The
company's ISP is claiming that it had to terminate Blogetery's account immediately after
being ordered to do so by law enforcement officials 'due to material hosted on the
server.' The extreme response implies a possible
presumed terrorist connection, but it is important to note that no one was charged with
any actual offense, revealing that the government can close down sites based only on
suspicion. It is also likely only a matter of time
before Obama's internet warfare teams surface either at the Defense Department or at
State. Deliberately overloading and attacking the internet to damage its credibility,
witness the numerous sites that have been 'hacked' and have had to cease or restrict their
activities. But the moves afoot to create a legal framework to completely shut the
internet down and thereby control the 'message' are far more dangerous. American citizens
who are concerned about maintaining their few remaining liberties should sound the alarm
and tell the politicians that we don't need more government abridgement of our First
Amendment rights." |
"A controversial covert
surveillance system that records the public's conversations is being used in Britain. The technology, called Sigard, monitors movements and speech to detect
signs of threatening behaviour. Its designers claim the system can anticipate anti-social
behaviour and violence by analysing the information picked up its sensors. They say alerts
are then sent to police, nightclub bouncers or shop security staff, which allow them to
nip trouble in the bud before arguments spiral into violence. The devices are designed to
distinguish between distress calls, threatening behaviour and general shouting. The
system, produced by Sound Intelligence, is being used in Dutch prisons, city centres and
Amsterdam's Central Rail Station. Coventry City Council is funding a pilot project which
has for six months and has installed seven devices in the nightlife area on the High
Street. Dylan Sharpe, from Big Brother Watch, said: 'There can be no justification for
giving councils or the police the capability to listen in on private conversations. 'There
is enormous potential for abuse, or a misheard word, causing unnecessary harm with this
sort of intrusive and overbearing surveillance.' A CV1 spokesman said: 'We had the system
for six months. It is no longer in use.' No one from the organisation was available to
comment on whether the trial was a success. The new Coalition Government has announced a
review of the use of CCTV with a pledge to tilt the balance away from snooping by the
authorities to defend civil liberties." |
| "Europe has signed a deal to
hand over all bank transaction data to the US in order to help the ongoing war on
terrorism. The SWIFT agreement was signed yesterday
in Brussels by Spanish minister for home affairs Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba and the US
embassy's economic economic officer to the EU, Michael Dodman." Europe approves US mass data grab The Register, 29 June 2010 |
"... suspicious spouses, protective parents, and concerned companies
are turning to cheap and hard-to-detect commerical spyware apps to monitor your mobile
communications..... A decade ago the idea that anyone with little technical skill could
turn a cell phone into a snooping device was basically unrealistic. But as the smart-phone market proliferates—it grew 86 percent in the United
States alone last year—so do all the ethical kinks that come with it. Among them is a
growing sector of perfectly legal smart-phone spyware apps that are peddled as tools for
catching a cheating spouse or monitoring the kids when they’re away from home. But
what they can effectively do, for as little as $15 or as much as several hundred, is track
a person with a precision once relegated to federal authorities. 'Not only can you look at a person’s e-mail or listen to
their calls, in some cases you can also just turn on the microphone [on a smart phone] and
listen to what the person is doing any time you want,' says Chris Wysopal, cofounder and CTO of Veracode, a software-security
company....Turning what is essentially cell-phone-bugging software into a business model
is not a bad idea, technically speaking. The smart-phone market—largely dominated by
the Symbian, Research in Motion, and iPhone operating
systems—has 47 million users in the United States and is expected to exceed 1 billion
worldwide by 2014, according to Parks Associates, a market-research firm. In most cases, people’s lives are tethered to these handsets.
It’s how we e-mail, text, search, and, on occasion, even call someone. And the
dependence just continues to grow. Last year
consumers paid for and downloaded more than 670 million apps that can turn a phone into
everything from a book reader to a compass. Smart-phone users effectively carry a
real-time snapshot of what happens in their daily lives. This
is what makes the smart phone the perfect way to track someone....Among the top commercial spyware vendors who have ventured into this
space are FlexiSPY,
MobiStealth,
and Mobile Spy. While
the services vary, what they do is essentially the same. According to all three spyware
Web sites, a person must have legal access to a smart phone to install a piece of spyware.
For example, if you’re spying on a family member, that means the phone is family
property. If you’re an employer monitoring your employee, the phone should be
company-owned. To install the spyware, you have to have the phone in your possession for
at least a few minutes to download the app. (There are apps that can be downloaded
remotely, but that’s less common and not legal.) In
Mobile Spy’s case, once the software is installed, you can log into your Mobile Spy
web account to view e-mails, text messages, pictures taken, videos shot, calendar entries,
incoming and outgoing calls, and GPS coordinates. MobiStealth and FlexiSPY take it a step
further and allow a person to remotely record any conversations that take place near the
cell phone. 'The most threatening [part] is that it’s pretty impossible to tell if
this is happening to you,' says Mislan. That’s because once the spyware app is on the
phone it is virtually undetectable to the average user. There is no typical corresponding app icon, nor is it listed on any menu.
At best, it may show up with a generic name like 'iPhone app' or 'BlackBerry app,' so that
it appears to be a regular part of the system. There is nothing illegal about making these
apps, and almost all makers have disclaimers on their Web sites warning people not to use
their products illegally.... If the software is
already on a phone, Mislan says there is little that consumers can do on their own to
confirm this. Even if you’re positive you are being spied on, doing something like
replacing the SIM card is not always enough to wipe a phone clean of the problem. In some cases, Mislan advises consumers to reach out to companies like
SMobile Systems that offer security solutions for cell phones—a growing market in
themselves. Wysopal says that as with so much
that’s technology-related, something big has to break before things change in the
smart phone–spyware space. 'You’ll have to see someone important, like a
politician, have their phone compromised,' he says. 'If that happened, it would be a
wake-up call.'” |
"Details of a spying deal between Britain and the US are
made public today, more than 60 years after it came into force. Headed 'top secret', the
UKUSA Agreement was drawn up after the Second World War to enable the two allies to share
almost all information gathered on foreign governments, military forces and other
organisations. The seven-page document, released by
the National Archives, formed the basis for co-operation between London and Washington
throughout the Cold War and beyond, in an arrangement unparalleled in Western
intelligence. Ed Hampshire, principal
records specialist at the National Archives, said: 'The agreement represented a crucial
moment in the development of the ‘special relationship’ between the two wartime
allies and captured the spirit and practice
of the signals intelligence co-operation which had evolved on an ad hoc basis during the
Second World War. Today intelligence sharing between Britain’s MI6 and the US is well
established, although it has come under pressure recently because of concerns over alleged
human rights violations, including the secret rendition by the CIA of British residents.
National sensitivities were overcome and the deal was finalised on March 5, 1946, although
it took 60 years for Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) to
confirm that it even existed. The areas covered are listed as: '1) collection of traffic;
2) acquisition of communication documents and equipment; 3) traffic analysis; 4)
cryptanalysis; 5) decryption and translation; 6) acquisition of information regarding
communication organisations, practices, procedures, and equipment.' The pact stressed that
the exchange of intelligence would be unrestricted, except when both sides agreed that
specific information could be excluded. 'It is the intention of each party to limit such
exceptions to the absolute minimum.' Britain and Washington also pledged not to collect
intelligence against each other or to tell any 'third party' about the accord’s
existence.The UKUSA Agreement was extended later to include three other English-speaking
nations: Canada in 1948 and Australia and New Zealand in 1956. It forms the foundation for
co-operation in signals intelligence between these five countries today." |
"Apple updated its privacy
policy today, with an important, and dare we say creepy new paragraph about location
information. If you agree to the changes, (which you must do in order to download anything
via the iTunes store) you agree to let Apple collect store and share 'precise location
data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device.' Apple says that the data is 'collected anonymously in a form that does not
personally identify you,' but for some reason we don't find this very comforting at all.
There appears to be no way to opt-out of this data collection without giving up the
ability to download apps." |
"Every Google web search could
be stored for up to two years under a controversial new EU plan that has the backing of
more than 300 Euro-MEPs. 'Written Declaration 29' is
intended to be used as an early warning system to stop paedophiles by logging what they
look for using search engines. But civil liberty groups have hit out at the proposal which
they say is a 'completely unjustifiable' intrusion into citizens' privacy. And they claim
that there is no evidence that it would even be effective in trapping paedophiles who
would never use search engines like Google to look for child pornography. The declaration,
sponsored by an Italian and a Slovakian MEP, claims that it is 'essential to ensure that
the internet continues to afford a high level of virtual democracy, which does not present
any threat to women and children.' The motion asks for Directive 2006/24/EC to be extended
to all web search engines, which would include Google, as part of a European early warning
system for paedophiles. The directive came into effect in the March following the 2005
London terror attacks and lets EU member states monitor and store personal emails and
other internet activity for up to two years for counter-terrorism puposes. Simon Davies,
director of Privacy International which campaigns for tougher privacy laws, said: 'Most
paedophiles operate through chatrooms and private communication rather than search engines
like Google so they would not be affected,' he added." |
"Some of Britain’s biggest firms were last night accused of
‘spying’ on their customers after they admitted ‘listening in’ on
disgruntled conversations on the internet. The
companies include BT, which uses specially developed software to scan for negative
comments about it on websites including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Budget airline easyJet, mobile-phone retailer Carphone Warehouse and
banks including Lloyds TSB are also monitoring social networking sites to see what is
being said about them. The firms claim there is nothing sinister about the practice, with
BT insisting it is merely acting as ‘a fly on the wall’ to ‘listen and
engage with our customers’. But privacy campaigners have accused them of
‘outright spying’ while legal experts have suggested that firms making
unsolicited approaches to customers could fall foul of data protection laws." |
"The
£4.5bn national identity card scheme is to be scrapped within 100 days, the home
secretary, Theresa May, announced today. The 15,000 identity cards already issued are to
be cancelled without any refund of the £30 fee to holders within a month of the
legislation reaching the statute book. Abolishing the cards and associated register will
be the first piece of legislation introduced to parliament by the new government. May said
the identity documents bill will invalidate all existing cards. The role of the identity
commissioner, created in an effort to prevent data blunders and leaks, will be abolished.
The government said the move will save £86m over four years and avoid £800m in costs
over the next 10 years that would have been raised by increased charges. An allied
decision to cancel the next generation of biometric fingerprint passports will save a
further £134m over four years. Savings to the public under the whole package will total
£1bn. The publication of the identity documents bill today marks the end of an eight-year
Whitehall struggle over compulsory identity cards since they were first floated by the
then-home secretary David Blunkett in the
aftermath of 9/11. More than 5.4m combined passport and identity cards were due to be
issued when the scheme was started in earnest next year. This was projected to rise to 10m
ID cards/passports being issued ever year from 2016 onwards.... The next generation of 'biometric' passports is also due to be
cancelled. They were due to include electronic
fingerprints alongside the existing digitised photograph already included in chips in the
latest passports." |
"Google
Inc. said an internal investigation has discovered that the roving vans the company uses
to create its online mapping services were mistakenly collecting data about websites
people were visiting over wireless networks. The Internet giant said it would stop
collecting Wi-Fi data from its StreetView vans, which workers drive to capture street
images and to locate Wi-Fi networks. The company said it would dispose of the data it had
accidentally collected. Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research
for Google, wrote in a blog post that the company uncovered the mistake while responding
to a German data-protection agency's request for it to audit the Wi-Fi data, amid mounting
concerns that Google's practices violated users' privacy. Google
had previously said it was collecting the location of Wi-Fi hot spots from its StreetView
vehicles, but not the information being transmitted over those networks by users." |
"Google has refused to rule out
extending controversial facial recognition technology, despite being hit by a storm of
complaints over privacy. The internet search giant
already offers one facial recognition feature through its Picasa photo software, which
scans your pictures and suggests matches with other pictures that may include the same
people. Google's CEO Eric Schmidt would not rule out a further roll-out, saying: 'It is
important that we continue to innovate.'.... With facial recognition a face is detected
and tagged by the user. It is then rotated so that the eyes are level and scaled to a
uniform size and compared with all the other pictures on the user's database. The system
then displays any close matches. There are fears this technology could be added to the
Google Goggles tool, which was launched last year. This currently allows people to search
for inanimate objects, like the Eiffel Tower, on the internet by taking a picture of it on
a mobile phone. However, if combined with facial recognition software, customers could use
it to identify strangers on the street. In theory this could make it very easy to track
someone's private information down just by taking a picture of them." |
"Identity cards will be scrapped
under plans announced by the new Conservative and Lib Dem coalition government, new Home Secretary Theresa May has said. Their abolition is among
measures the parties have agreed to reverse what they say was 'the substantial erosion' of
civil liberties in recent years. Other proposals
include reforms to the DNA database, tighter regulation of CCTV and a review of libel
laws. Labour claims ID cards help tackle benefit
fraud and identity theft. The Tories and Lib Dems have both opposed ID cards from the
outset, arguing they are expensive, intrusive and have done little to tackle the most
serious threats to society such as terrorism and organised crime. In a statement, the Home
Office said it would announce 'in due course' how the process of rescinding ID cards and
the accompanying National Identity Register would move forward.... The new government is also proposing to scrap all future biometric
passports and the Contact Point Database as part of a new so-called 'Freedom or Great
Repeal Bill'. It wants to 'roll back' powers it says
were taken by the state under Labour and has pledged to defend trial by jury, restore
rights to non-violent protest, end the storage of internet and email records without good
reason, introduce safeguards against the 'misuse' of anti-terrorism legislation. The new
government also wants extra safeguards over the retention of people's DNA by the
police." |
| "The US must prepare itself for
a full-scale cyber attack which could cause death and destruction across the country in
less than 15 minutes, the former anti-terrorism Tsar to Bill Clinton and George W Bush has
warned. Richard Clarke claims that America's lack of preparation for the annexing of its
computer system by terrorists could lead to an 'electronic Pearl Harbor'. In his warning, Mr Clarke paints a doomsday scenario in which the
problems start with the collapse of one of Pentagon's computer networks. Soon internet
service providers are in meltdown. Reports come in of large refinery fires and explosions
in Philadelphia and Houston. Chemical plants malfunction, releasing lethal clouds of
chlorine. Air traffic controllers report several mid-air collisions, while subway trains
crash in New York, Washington and Los Angeles. More than 150 cities are suddenly blacked
out. Tens of thousands of Americans die in an attack comparable to a nuclear bomb in its
devastation. Yet it would take no more than 15 minutes and involve not a single terrorist
or soldier setting foot in the United States. The scenario is contained the pages of his
book, Cyber War: The Next National Security Threat, written with Robert Knake.... 'The
biggest secret about cyber war may be that at the very same time the US prepares for
offensive cyber war, it is continuing policies that make it impossible to defend
effectively from cyber attack,' says the book. In part, the US has been hampered by the
unforeseeable success of the internet and expansion of computerised networks, which are
now used in almost every aspect of industry but have led to a hazardous degree of
over-dependence..... Meanwhile America may have invented the internet, but at least 30
nations have created offensive cyber-war capabilities, which aim to plant a variety of
viruses and bugs into key utility, military and financial systems of other states. The
authors are convinced that there will at some point be a cyber-war between two nations and
are concerned that such a conflict would 'lower the threshold' for a war with bombs and
bullets. Ironically, the United States is currently far more vulnerable to cyberwar than
Russia or China, or even North Korea, because those countries have not only concentrated
on their cyber defences but are less reliant on the internet. 'We must have the ability to turn off our connection to the internet and still be able to continue to
operate,' Mr Knake, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Daily
Telegraph. 'Relying on a system as precarious as the
internet is a big mistake. It is a fundamentally insecure ecosystem that is ripe for
conflict and gives countries with disadvantages in conventional weapons an asymmetrical
advantage.' Britain, as a nanny state more tolerant of government interference, is far
better prepared than its giant ally across the Atlantic." Cyber attack 'could fell US within 15 minutes' Telegraph, 7 May 2010 |
"We marched into Baghdad on flimsy evidence and we might be about to
make the same mistake in cyberspace. Over the past few weeks, there has been a steady
drumbeat of alarmist rhetoric about potential threats online. At a Senate Armed Services
Committee hearing this month, chairman Carl Levin said that 'cyberweapons and cyberattacks
potentially can be devastating, approaching weapons of mass destruction in their
effects.'..... The cyberalarmist rhetoric conflates the various threats we might face into
one big ball of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. This week for example, the director of the
Central Intelligence Agency announced that a cyberattack could be the next Pearl Harbor.
Cyberwar, cyberespionage, cyberterrorism, cybercrime – these are all disparate
threats. Some are more real than others, and they each have different causes, motivations,
manifestations, and implications. As a result, there will probably be different
appropriate responses for each. Unfortunately, the popular discussion largely clumps them
into the vague and essentially meaningless 'cyberthreat' category. Let’s take a deep
breath. Before we can effectively address any of these amorphous 'cyberthreats,' we must
first identify what, specifically, these threats are and to what extent the federal
government plays a role in defending against them. The war metaphor may be useful
rhetoric, but it is a poor analogy to the dispersed and different threats that both public
and private information technology systems face. The fact is, as long as we have had
networks, they have been under attack. But over the past 20 years network operators have
developed effective detection, prevention, and mitigation strategies. This is why we
should be wary of calls for more government supervision of the Internet...And there’s
the fact that we have seen a wasteful military-industrial complex develop before, and in
this rush to 'protect' we might be seeing a new one blossoming now. The greater the threat
is perceived to be – and the less clearly it is defined – the better it is for
defense contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton, which last week landed $34 million in
Defense Department cybersecurity contracts.....At the
heart of calls for federal involvement in cybersecurity is the proposition that we
reengineer the Internet to facilitate better tracking of users in order to pinpoint the
origin of attacks. The Rockefeller-Snowe bill looks
to develop such a 'secure domain name addressing system.' That’s a slippery slope.
And there’s the fact that we have seen a wasteful military-industrial complex develop
before, and in this rush to 'protect' we might be seeing a new one blossoming now. The
greater the threat is perceived to be – and the less clearly it is defined – the
better it is for defense contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton, which last week landed $34
million in Defense Department cybersecurity contracts. That money could certainly be put
to better use right now. Anyone concerned about net
neutrality or civil liberties – in particular online privacy and anonymity –
should take notice. Before the country is swept by fear and we react too quickly to the
'gathering threat' of cyberattacks, we should pause to calmly consider the risks involved
and the alternatives available to us." |
| "US software firm Retina-X
Studios on Tuesday released a more vigilant version of its Mobile Spy program that
captures every email and picture from BlackBerry smartphones. 'We invite you to open your eyes to the real actions of what your child or
employee does on your BlackBerry device,' Retina-X chief executive James Johns said in a
release. 'What if they are being dishonest or worse? The advantages of knowing the answers
are far better than not knowing at all.' The previous version of Mobile Spy software kept
track of text messaging and telephone calls, providing online access to data by employers,
parents or whoever else is paying for smartphone accounts. New Mobile Spy 4.0 software
also provides employers or parents with smartphone contacts, calendar events, memos and
records of which mobile phone towers a device was within range range of, according to
Retina-X. 'These new abilities help parents and employers track the activities of their monitored
phones with greater accuracy,' the Arizona-based company said in a release. 'This new
feature gives parents a way to monitor whether or not a teenager is sending naughty
pictures. Employers can find out if company secrets are being snapped for later
retrieval.' Versions of Mobile Spy are available for iPhone devices as well as for
smartphones running on Android, Symbian, or Windows Mobile software, according to the
Retina-X website." Spy software watches BlackBerry email/photos Agence France Presse, 27 April 2010 |
"The first town in Britain to
scrap fixed speed cameras has seen no increase in accidents, it was revealed yesterday. But the number of motorists prosecuted for speeding there
dropped by more than 40 per cent. Swindon switched off its cameras over claims they were a
' blatant tax on the motorist' which did nothing to improve safety. Yesterday, supporters
of the move hailed the figures as proof they were right. Now the Conservative-run council
has urged other authorities to follow suit, saying the money can be better spent on other
measures to cut casualties. In the six months after the fixed cameras were switched off at
the end of July, nine accidents were recorded - the same number as in the equivalent
period the year before. Between August last year and January, there were seven minor
injury accidents and two serious ones - neither fatal - at the four sites monitored by the
cameras. In the six months from August 2008 there were eight minor accidents and one
fatal. A comparison of speeding fines issued over the two six-month periods reveals a drop
of 42 per cent - from 3,681 to 2,120. Of the 2008-09 total, 1,393 motorists were caught by
the fixed cameras that have now been deactivated - the rest by mobile cameras, which
remain in use. The fall was revealed in figures released under the Freedom of Information
Act. It means the Government - which receives income from the fixed cameras - has lost
revenue of around £80,000. Yesterday, Swindon Council leader Roderick Bluh said: 'Fixed
speed cameras are more about fund-raising than road safety. These figures completely
vindicate our position.'" |
"Speed cameras which communicate
with each other by satellite are being secretly tested on British roads. The hi-tech
devices can follow drivers’ progress for miles to calculate whether they have broken
speed limits. Combining number plate recognition technology with global positioning
satellites, they can be set up in a network to monitor tens of thousands of cars over huge
areas for the smallest breach. Known as SpeedSpike, the system uses similar methods of
recognition as the cameras which enforce the congestion charge in London, and allow two
cameras to 'talk' to each other if a vehicle appears to have travelled too far in too
short a space of time. After a covert national trial
which has not been publicised until now, just days after a report showed motorists have
been fined almost £1billion in speeding tickets under Labour, authorities hope the new
cameras will enable them to re-create the system used on motorway contraflows....
Conservative MP Geoffrey Cox, whose Devon constituency is close to the Cornish test site,
said fundamental questions had to be addressed before such an 'alarming' level of
surveillance was extended. He said: 'You always have to ask if it is really necessary to
watch over people, to spy on them and film them. 'We will get to a point where it becomes
routine and it should never be a matter of routine that the state spies on its
citizens.'" |
"MI5 used hidden electronic
surveillance equipment to secretly monitor 10 Downing Street, the Cabinet and at least
five Prime Ministers, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. The extraordinary disclosure comes
despite a succession of parliamentary statements that no such bugging ever took place. And
it follows a behind-the-scenes row in which senior Whitehall civil servants – backed
by Prime Minister Gordon Brown – attempted to suppress the revelation. The Mail on
Sunday has learned that top-secret files held by the Security Service show it installed
electronic listening devices in three highly sensitive areas of No10 – the Cabinet
Room, the Waiting Room and the Prime Minister’s study. It means that for nearly 15
years, all Cabinet meetings, the offices of senior officials and all visitors to the Prime
Minister – including foreign leaders – were being bugged. The disclosure is
highly shocking in its own right but it will also bring genuine concerns as to why the
Cabinet Office still wants to suppress it. Comments
from MI5 chief Jonathan Evans suggest that the attempted block was not done on grounds of
national security but for wider public interest reasons. This must raise the possibility that the bugging was carried out for
political purposes and officials do not want to admit it went on in the past because similar operations are continuing today. It is understood that the top-secret MI5 file on the operation is short
and does not reveal why the bugs were installed. Crucially, the documents also fail to
answer whether all the Prime Ministers in office during the period of the operation, from
1963 to 1977, were told that their conversations were monitored. The files also contain no
‘product’ – transcripts of conversations overheard by the devices –
suggesting that the bugs, while working, were not being actively used by MI5. It is unknown, however, if the devices were being monitored by any other
agency, including GCHQ, the Government’s eavesdropping centre, or MI6.
Details of the surveillance operation were due to be revealed in The Defence Of The Realm,
the official history of MI5 written by highly respected Cambridge University historian
Professor Christopher Andrew. It is understood MI5 believed there were no national
security concerns over the disclosures. But weeks before the book’s publication late
last year, the Cabinet Office – which oversees MI5 for the Prime Minister –
ruled that the references had to be removed on unspecified public interest grounds. Its
insistence led to a behind-the-scenes row with Prof Andrew, who wrote of ‘one
significant excision’ which was ‘I believe, hard to justify’. The comments
by the historian have prompted significant speculation over what he was forced to remove. Now this newspaper can reveal the deletions relate to the
eavesdropping devices that were first installed in Downing Street in July 1963 at the
request of the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan..... The bugs remained in Downing
Street throughout Douglas-Home’s term and also the premierships of his successors
Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. In all, the
equipment monitored the most sensitive areas of Downing Street for around 15 years. It was
finally removed on the orders of James Callaghan in about 1977, the year after he took
office. The files do not make it clear whether Prime Ministers Heath and Wilson knew there
were surveillance devices in No10. The revelation
that there were bugs in Downing Street will add to conspiracy theories surrounding the
alleged plot to overthrow Wilson. Indeed Wilson’s actions while in office suggest he
was never told his office had been bugged. Seemingly obsessed by the idea that he and
other MPs were under surveillance, he introduced the Wilson Doctrine – still in place
today – which bans the bugging of MPs’ telephone calls..... After Wilson stepped
down, he co-operated with a book suggesting there had been a plot by Right-wing intelligence officers to undermine
him. The claim was later supported by former senior
MI5 officer Peter Wright in his banned Spycatcher memoir. It also prompted Callaghan,
Wilson’s successor, to launch an investigation into the allegations. The MI5 files indicate that it was Callaghan who finally ordered
the surveillance devices to be removed from Downing Street. Despite this, Callaghan made a
statement to the House of Commons denying that No10 had ever been bugged. He said: ‘The Prime Minister is satisfied that at no time has the
Security Service or any other British intelligence or security agency, either of its own
accord or at someone else’s request, undertaken electronic surveillance in No 10
Downing Street.’ The first indication of the Whitehall cover-up over the bugging
operation was revealed by Prof Andrew in the preface of his book." |
"When Harold Macmillan called in MI5 in 1963 and asked it to bug his
office, he thought the whole world was coming apart, writes Stephen Dorrill. He was trying
to keep a lid on an unprecedented level of scandal that threatened to undermine his Tory
Government and confidence in the British Establishment.... Macmillan felt he could not
trust anybody – but turned for counsel to Dick
White, director-general of foreign intelligence service MI6. It is possible that White suggested installing the listening devices in
No10 as some kind of insurance policy..... The level of official paranoia at the time
cannot be underestimated. But it is the revelation that the bugs were still in place in
Downing Street during Harold Wilson’s two administrations, between 1964 and 1970 and
1974 to 1976, which is the most startling. Wilson
believed that elements of the Establishment and members of MI5 and MI6 were plotting against him.... Now,
despite countless official denials, it appears that Wilson – whose claims that he was
under surveillance are often dismissed as the ramblings of an ill and paranoid man –
was right." |
"At a warehouse in New Jersey,
6,000 used copy machines sit ready to be sold. CBS News chief investigative correspondent
Armen Keteyian reports almost every one of them holds a secret. Nearly every digital
copier built since 2002 contains a hard drive - like the one on your personal computer -
storing an image of every document copied, scanned, or emailed by the machine. In the
process, it's turned an office staple into a digital time-bomb packed with highly-personal
or sensitive data. If you're in the identity theft business it seems this would be a
pot of gold. 'The type of information we see on
these machines with the social security numbers, birth certificates, bank records, income
tax forms,' John Juntunen said, 'that information would be very valuable.' Juntunen's
Sacramento-based company Digital
Copier Security developed software called 'INFOSWEEP' that can scrub all the data on
hard drives. He's been trying to warn people about the potential risk - with no luck.
'Nobody wants to step up and say, 'we see the problem, and we need to solve it,' Juntunen
said. This past February, CBS News went with Juntunen to a warehouse in New Jersey,
one of 25 across the country, to see how hard it would be to buy a used copier loaded with
documents. It turns out ... it's pretty easy." |
"In 2006 and 2007, Siobhan Gorman, a highly regarded intelligence
reporter for the Baltimore Sun, wrote
a series of articles about how the National Security Agency was (mis)managing a highly
sensitive, very expensive collection program known as Trailblazer. Relying on interviews
with current and former senior intelligence officials as well as internal documents,
Gorman was able to show that the NSA's 'state-of-the art tool for sifting through an ocean
of modern-day digital communications' was a boondoggle of sorts -- and that the agency had removed several of the privacy safeguards that were
put in place to protect domestic conversations and e-mails from being stored and
monitored. A program known as 'Thin
Thread,' which had proved its worth to the NSA before 9/11 and which contained several
civil liberties safeguards, was abandoned in favor of Trailblazer because the latter
program, according to Gorman's sources, 'had more political support' and was a favorite of
then NSA-director Michael Hayden's." |
"The home secretary has revealed
plans for primary legislation requiring passport applicants to be fingerprinted and
enrolled on the National Identity Register.
Alan Johnson said the move would convert the current small-scale identity card programme
into a scheme eventually covering the vast majority of the population. In response to a
question from his Conservative shadow Chris Grayling, Johnson said: 'The provisions of the
Identity Cards Act 2006 will be amended by further primary legislation, so that everyone
aged 16 and over who applies for a British passport will have the choice of being issued
with an identity card or a passport (or both documents) and for their identity details,
including facial image and fingerprint biometrics, to be recorded on the same National
Identity Register.' The use of primary legislation could make such a bill hard to pass
through parliament, even if Labour forms the next government, as the Liberal Democrat as
well as Conservative parties oppose identity cards. With an election likely to be held on
6 May, opinion polls suggest a narrow victory for the Conservatives or a hung parliament
as the likely outcome. As the government plans to link passport applications to the ID scheme by 2012, legislation would be required in the first couple of years
of the new parliament. Research by Kable last year found that scrapping identity cards and fingerprinting for passports would save £3.08bn
over a decade, whereas scrapping the cards but retaining fingerprinting would reduce the
saving to £2.2bn. The government plans to require all 10 fingerprints for passport and ID
applications, although only two will be held on the document's chip." |
"All counter-terrorism laws
passed since 11 September 2001 should be reviewed to see if they are still necessary, says
a committee of MPs and peers. It questioned whether ministers could legitimately argue,
nine years on, that a 'public emergency threatening the life of the nation' remained..... It said the government should drop entirely its plan to
extend the period terrorism suspects can be held without charge from 28 to 42 days. The
plan was shelved in the face of opposition in the House of Lords but remains as a draft
bill, to be enacted if needed. The committee said the draft bill was 'alarmingly broad'.
The need for the current 28-day limit, extended from 14 days in 2005, should be revisited
and bail should be considered 'in principle' for some terrorist suspects, the committee
said. It complained that the intelligence agencies' insistence on control over the
examination and transcription of intercept evidence - like phone taps - amounted to a 'de
facto veto' of efforts to see it used as evidence in court.... It added: 'In our view it devalues the idea of a 'public emergency' to
declare it in 2001, and then to continue to assert it more than eight years later.' The committee has already called for a full inquiry into claims UK
security services were complicit in the torture of terrorism suspects - a claim denied by
the head of MI6..... The wide-ranging report also says the independent reviewer of
terrorism laws - currently Lord Carlisle - should be appointed by, and report directly to
Parliament and criticises the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, for choosing not to appear
before the committee in public. The committee's chairman, the Labour MP Andrew Dismore,
said: 'There is no question that we face a serious threat from terrorism, or that we need
legislation to counter that threat. The question is, are the counter-terror measures we
have in place justifiable, on an ongoing basis, in light of the most up-to-date
information we have.'" |
"All public services could be delivered online within four years
under an ambitious pledge by Gordon Brown to create a paperless state and save billions of
pounds, The Times has learnt. Tens of thousands of public sector jobs could go in
Jobcentres, benefit offices, passport centres and town halls if face-to-face transactions
are scrapped in favour of cheaper and more efficient online form-filling. On Monday the
Prime Minister will announce plans that he claims could save billions of pounds over four
years by making dealing with the State as easy as internet banking or shopping on Amazon.
Cash will also be saved on postage stamps, telephone calls and government buildings as the
switch to the internet leads to the phasing out of call centres and benefit offices. The aim is that within a year, everybody in the country should have a
personalised website through which they would be able to find out about local services and
do business with the Government. A unique identifier will allow citizens to apply for a
place for their child at school, book a doctor’s appointment, claim benefits, get a
new passport, pay council tax or register a car from their computer at home. Over the next
three years, the secure site will be expanded to allow people to interact with their
children’s teachers or ask medical advice from their doctor through a government
version of Facebook. But union leaders and privacy experts
immediately warned that the Government’s record on IT projects was already
catastrophic and there would be key concerns about privacy, data protection and fraud.
In addition many elderly, disabled and undereducated people
find it difficult to carry out transactions online." |
"Harry was a Russian secret service agent who spoke perfect English
and wore cowboy boots with his uniform. I never knew what his face looked like because he
wore a mask during the lengthy interrogation sessions he put me through during five days
of captivity in Federal Security Service (FSB) hands in Chechnya in 1999. The first item
taken from me by Harry and his friends was my laptop. I was as much unnerved as relieved
when it was returned on my release. 'I can have it back?' 'Yeah, have it back,' the FSB
agent replied, and laughed. Within 24 hours of arriving home in London the laptop was
deluged with spam, pornography and Russian hate mail, eventually crashing completely. The
act was more a digital slap on the wrist than the attacks that the Russians would
allegedly inflict on entire countries several years later, but it was my first experience
of cyberwar. The incident came to mind eight years later on a February morning in Helmand,
southern Afghanistan, when I heard a Royal Marines colonel briefing his officers. He
mentioned, almost as an aside, that one of the men’s e-mail accounts had been closed
after being compromised by a 'hostile intelligence agency'. In other words, someone hacked
into a soldier’s computer to see what might be found there. Last December, in Sri
Lanka, a senior UN official confided to me that his e-mails were being intercepted by a
'key log' program that allowed everything he wrote and received to be read by an
intelligence agency. Today barely a week passes without the phrase 'cyberattack' in the
news. It is a loose term, incorporating everything from criminal hacking and commercial
espionage to attempts to seize control of weapon systems or sabotage national
infrastructures. Britain is treating the surge of hostile computer activity seriously
enough to have established two organisations last year to co-ordinate, assess and expand
its cyber strategy. The Office for Cyber Security (OCS), established by the Cabinet
Office, was created in the autumn after a warning by intelligence chiefs that China may
have acquired the ability to cripple key points of infrastructure such as
telecommunications. Whitehall departments were allegedly first targeted by Chinese hackers
in 2007. Later that year Jonathan Evans, director-general of MI5, wrote to 300 chief
executives warning of potential Chinese hacking attacks and data theft. In the year up to
November 2009 Britain suffered 300 cyber intrusions — defined as a sophisticated
attempt, successful or not, to steal data or sabotage systems — on government and
military networks..... The majority of attacks have been to obtain funds from commercial
organisations, and a full assault on a country’s banks, stock market, energy grid,
telecommunications and health systems is more likely if countries are already in a 'hot'
war. There are several other potential triggers, however. In 2007 Estonian ministries,
banks and newspapers were bombarded with denial-of-service attacks — mass requests
for information that cause systems to crash — for several days after the Government
moved a Soviet war memorial in the capital, Tallinn. In 2008 Georgia complained of similar
attacks during its brief conflict with Russia over the breakaway province of South
Ossetia. The Russians were blamed in both cases, although they denied involvement.... The
murky world of cyberwar is inhabited by small-time hackers, criminal syndicates and people operating with the support of their government. 'Everything that happens to us is called an ‘attack’,' said a
senior official with a lead role in British cyber operations, '[but] most of what we see
on a large scale ... is about the exfiltration of data — theft, not an attack.' There
exists, however, an overlap between the interests of hostile state intelligence agencies
and cybercriminal syndicates seeking to steal intellectual data for profit. Russian
cybercrime syndicates, better known as partnerka, lead commercial espionage in Europe and
are known to have links with Harry and his comrades in the FSB. China has its own
dedicated cyber operations headquarters within the People’s Liberation Army but also
holds top rank in the league of cyberhostile countries — the list used by Western
security companies to warn business clients of cyber-threat. The West’s nuclear
strategy was based on deterrence — the assurance that a guaranteed second strike
would prevent a first strike from coming. Yet cyberwar is more complex because the attacks
have certain things in common: they are fast, cheap and hard
to trace. 'Attribution
is unbelievably difficult,' admitted Lord West. 'These guys could attack [as if it was
from] your site — the attacks would come in from different nodes in a strange way
that you can’t even identify. Follow the attack back and it gets to you — but it
wasn’t you.' The sophistication of commercial
and state-sponsored activity has developed immensely since the attacks on Estonia and Georgia, with
denial-of-service operations now considered relatively low-grade. More worrying is
'zero-day malware' — an unidentifiable new generation of Trojan programs that are
implanted into a host computer and lie dormant until activated. 'Let’s say that
someone has received an e-mail that looks like it’s from someone they know, about a
subject they feel comfortable with,' said Ian McGurk, associate director for information
security at Control Risks, a security consultancy. 'As a consequence they trust the
material. If there’s an attachment — a photograph, a Word document, whatever
— embedded within that attachment is some sort of malicious code that is going to
install itself on the machine. That machine is then compromised, and a Trojan is installed
that can search for information.' As well as
transmitting information back to its handler, zero-day malware can also hand a computer to
outside control before going on to infect an entire system. Raimund Genes, the chief technical officer ofTrend Micro, said: 'We grew
up fearing the mushroom cloud, now we should fear a roomful of hackers with their
electricity and internet bills paid for by a government.'” |
"Almost 1,700 people, also
including car park attendants and dog wardens, already have powers to hand out a string of
fines and even take photographs of low level offenders under the Community Safety
Accreditation Scheme. But the Government has quietly announced it plans to review the
scheme with chief police officers to see how it can be expanded
further. Rank and file
officers warned the move is 'blurring the lines' of legitimate law enforcement and is
creating a 'third tier' of policing. Even chief constables are now cautious over the
scheme following it's rapid growth, which has seen numbers increase by a fifth in just 12
months. It will further fuel concerns that, with increasing budget pressures, the
Government is keen to push for policing on the cheap." |
"Elvis died in 1977. But that didn’t prevent hackers from
inserting his digital photo into a U.K. passport, and using it at a self-service passport
machine at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport to gain clearance to board a plane.This
incident occurred in September 2008. But this security vulnerability persists, as proven
by the recent assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior Hamas operative, in a Dubai
hotel on January 20…The alleged killers of Mr. Mabhouh included 11 people holding
U.K. and other European passports. All of the killers used passports containing fake
photographs and signatures. Naturally, this wasn’t supposed to happen. When
governments began issuing digitally encoded passports a few years ago, it was supposed to
improve border security....the 'ultra-secure' RFID
chips digital passports contain can be cloned with about $100 worth of off-the-shelf
electronic equipment. As a result, we have teams of
assassins and who-knows-who-else roaming the world with digitally modified passports.
Indeed, digital passports actually are far less secure than their predecessors.The reason
is that digital passports—and indeed digital data in general—suffers from an
inherent security flaw…If you take a non-digital passport and try to modify it
physically, it’s very hard to do so without leaving some evidence of what you’ve
done. There might be smudges, ink marks, or microscopic impressions of a razor blade used
to cut out an old photo and insert a new one.But with our new 'ultra-secure' digital
passports, if you figure out how to change the data on the RFID chip, the earlier data
vanishes. There’s absolutely no trace of the tampering.... even before governments
issued the first digital passports, hackers cracked the encryption codes. Indeed, as far back as 2006, hackers demonstrated how a simple
microchip reader purchased off the Internet could clone all the information in a U.K.
passport’s 'ultra-secure' RFID chip.... Surely,
the governments that assured us that RFID passports represented a huge security advance
knew the risks of relying on digital technology. The only possible conclusion was that
they had a hidden agenda for introducing them—an agenda having nothing to do with
security....The purpose of the database is to create a 'lifetime personal travel history'
of anyone who holds a passport. Your photograph, your fingerprints, and details of each
entry, exit or transit will be part of your dossier in a 'biographic and biometric travel
history database.' This data can be shared with anyone your government chooses.
Potentially, it could be shared with any of the 150 countries that have introduced, or
have promised to introduce, RFID-equipped passports." |
"Who remembers Echelon, the
top-secret telecommunications spy network said to be run by the US and allied Anglophone
nations, and to be triggered as soon as certain key words or phrases are spoken on the
phone? A lot of you, we'd guess. So it's interesting
to note that Pentagon boffins have now stated that perhaps the most intriguing reputed
capability of Echelon - the ability to automatically pick out words of interest and flag
that conversation up as important to its human masters - doesn't work. Or anyway, it only
works on good, clear lines: a noisy or degraded signal frustrates it. The news comes as
part of a solicitation from the Pentagon crazytech bureau, DARPA, in which the maverick
military mayhem mavens request assistance with building a Robust Automatic Transcription
of Speech (RATS) system. According to DARPA: Existing transcription and translation and
speech signal processing technologies are insufficient for working with noisy or degraded
speech signals that are of importance to current and future Department of Defense (DoD)
operations. Currently, there is no technological solution [our emphasis] which effectively
addresses this kind of noisy and distorted speech signal, so operational units are forced
to allocate significant human resources for this task. One should note that America's
feared National Security Agency (NSA, generally thought to be in charge of Echelon) is
actually an arm of the DoD, not a civilian organisation. DARPA says that the proposed RATS
system should be able to tackle noisy audio signals and tell on its own whether they are
speech or something else such as music. It should then be able to identify the language
being spoken, and tell whether the speaker is a person of interest using voiceprint
technology. Finally, the RATS software should be able to 'identify specific words or
phrases from a list of items in the language being spoken' - just what Echelon is supposed
to be able to do already, only DARPA assure us that no such tech exists. Or anyway, none
able to tackle a noisy signal....The DARPA solicitation can be read here
in pdf." |
"Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones
thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws
written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. On Friday, the first federal appeals court
to consider the topic will hear oral
arguments (PDF) in a case that could establish new standards for locating wireless
devices. In that case, the Obama administration has
argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no 'reasonable
expectation of privacy' in their--or at least their cell phones'--whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that 'a customer's Fourth
Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own
records" that show where a mobile device placed and received calls. Those claims have
alarmed the ACLU and other civil liberties groups, which have opposed the Justice
Department's request and plan to tell the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in
Philadelphia that Americans' privacy deserves more protection and judicial oversight than
what the administration has proposed. 'This is a critical question for privacy in the 21st
century,' says Kevin Bankston, an attorney at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation who will be arguing on Friday. 'If the courts do side with the
government, that means that everywhere we go, in the real world and online, will be an
open book to the government unprotected by the Fourth Amendment.'" |
"Chip-and-PIN readers can be
tricked into accepting transactions without a valid personal identification number, opening the door to fraud, researchers have found. Researchers at Cambridge University have found a fundamental flaw in the EMV
— Europay, MasterCard, Visa — protocol that underlies chip-and-PIN validation
for debit and credit cards. As a consequence, a device can be created to modify and
intercept communications between a card and a point-of-sale terminal, and fool the
terminal into accepting that a PIN verification has succeeded. 'Chip and PIN is
fundamentally broken,' Professor Ross Anderson of Cambridge University told ZDNet UK.
'Banks and merchants rely on the words 'Verified by PIN' on receipts, but they don't mean
anything.' The researchers
conducted an attack that succeeded in tricking a card reader into authenticating a
transaction, even though no valid PIN was entered. In a later test, they managed to
authenticate transactions, without the correct PIN, with valid cards from six different
card issuers. Those issuers were Barclaycard,
Co-operative Bank, Halifax, Bank of
Scotland, HSBC and John Lewis." |
"Privacy campaigners expressed
shock last night after it emerged that large amounts of confidential personal information
held about British citizens on a giant computer network spanning the European Union could be accessed by more
than 500,000 terminals. The figure was revealed in a
Council of the European Union document examining proposals to establish a new agency,
based in France, that would manage much of the 27 EU member states' shared data. But the
sheer number of access points to the Schengen Information System (SIS) – which holds
information regarding immigration status, arrest warrants, entries on the police
national computer and a multitude of personal details – has triggered concerns
about the security of the data. Statewatch, a group that monitors civil liberties in
Europe, said it was aware of a case in Belgium where personal information extracted from
the system by an official was sold to an organised criminal gang." |
"We've heard a lot about security issues with the iPhone, but the
BlackBerry isn't immune to threats from malicious apps. Tyler Shields, a senior researcher
at the Veracode Research Lab, has written a piece of spyware that allowed me to shoot an
SMS command to his phone and have his contact list forwarded to my e-mail address in a
demonstration. With another short text command, I was able to get his BlackBerry to e-mail
me any SMS messages he sends. And if I had wanted--and he had allowed me--I could have
seen a log of all his calls, monitored his inbound text messages, tracked his location in
real-time based on the GPS (Global Positioning System) in his device and turned his
microphone on to listen to conversations in the room and record them. 'It's trivial to
write this type of code using the mobile provider's own API [application programming
interface] they provide to any developer,' Shields said in an interview in advance of his
talk on the spyware scheduled for the ShmooCon
security show on Sunday....He calls his program 'TXSBBSpy' and is releasing the source
code but not an executable version of it. 'My goal is to show how easy it is to create
mobile spyware,' he said. TXSBBSpy 'can take data from the phone, both in real-time and in
snapshots, and send it off via SMS or e-mail to any Web server or TCP [Transmission
Control Protocol] or UDP [User Diagram Protocol] network connections,' Shields said. While
I was able to control the spyware using text messages sent from my mobile phone, the
spyware had to be first installed on his BlackBerry for the snooping to work. This can be
done by sending the target victim an e-mail or text with a link to a Web page where the
spyware is surreptitiously installed. Or it can be hidden inside a legitimate-looking app
downloaded from the App Store. The risks are similar to those posed by Swiss
researcher Nicolas Seriot in his iPhone spyware demo at the Black Hat DC security
conference on Wednesday. 'These types of behaviors we're demonstrating will be universal
across all mobile platforms,' Shields said." |
"Britain's armed forces could be
used on a regular basis on the streets of Britain to
confront the threat of terrorism, under the terms of a strategic defence review announced
yesterday. Two of the six 'key questions' to be considered by the SDR will focus on
domestic threats which 'cannot be separated from international security', according to a
Green Paper setting out the grounds for a full scale review to start after the election.
Decisions need to be made on the 'balance between focusing on our territory and region and
engaging threats at a distance' and 'what contribution the armed forces should make in
ensuring security and contributing to resilience within the UK'." |
"The Home Office has created a
new unit to oversee a massive increase in surveillance of the internet, The Register has
learned, quashing suggestions the plans are on hold until after the election. The new
Communications Capabilities Directorate (CCD) has been created as a structure to implement
the £2bn Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP), sources said. The CCD is staffed by
the same officials who have have been working on IMP since 2007, but it establishes the
project on a more formal basis in the Home Office. It
is not yet included on the Home Office's list
of directorates. The intelligence and law enforcement agencies have pushed hard for new
laws to force communications providers to store details of who contacts whom, when, where
and how via the internet. However, following a consultation last year, when the Home
Office's plans were heavily
criticised by ISPs and mobile companies, it was widely assumed progress on IMP would
slow or stop. The CCD has continued meeting with industry to try to allay concerns about
the project's costs, effect on customer privacy and technical feasibility.....Officials envisage communications providers will maintain giant
databases of everything their customers do online, incluing email, social networking, web
browsing and making VoIP calls. They want providers to process the mass of data to link it
to individuals, to make it easier for authorities to access. Access to communications data is currently governed by the Regulation of
Investigatory Powers Act. Under European legslation ISPs are required to retain basic
information about what their customers do online, but not to open their data packets to
record who they contact on Facebook, for example." |
"Internet users are being spied on in their own home as the
Government uses the threat of terrorism and the spread of child pornography to justify
launching a dramatic expansion of surveillance society, according to a leading academic.
The authorities have taken 'advantage of the terrorist bombing in London' to erode civil
liberties, according to Professor Ian Walden, an expert on internet communication and
online security. He said today’s 'Orwellian' surveillance of our online habits was
even more intrusive than the introduction of CCTV on Britain's streets. 'You can now hide
cameras but generally cameras are a physical manifestation of surveillance. With the
internet, you are sitting at home which you think is private, but of course it is declared
a public space because your service provider knows everywhere you’ve gone, everything
you’ve downloaded, it knows everything, potentially', he told The Daily Telegraph.
His comments come after the Government announced it was pressing ahead with privately held
'Big Brother' databases that opposition leaders said amounted to 'state-spying' and a form
of 'covert surveillance' on the public. The police and security services are set to
monitor every phone call, text message, email and website visit made by private citizens.
The details are set to be stored for a year and will be available for monitoring by
government bodies. 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 have
contacted, when and where, as well as the websites they have visited. Ministers had
originally wanted to store the information on a single government run database, but backed
down after privacy concerns were raised. 'Once happy to leave cyberspace
‘unregulated’, Governments, including that of the UK, seem increasingly willing
to encroach on what we do, say and see over the Internet,' said Professor Walden, head of
the Institute of Computer and Communications Law at Queen Mary, University of London. He
warned that increasing use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter will
give the authorities access to information about individuals' private lives....Professor
Walden, a former trustee on the Internet Watch Foundation, the industry self regulatory
body, said that problems such as child pornography, illegal file sharing and terrorism are
used to justify ‘Big Brother-like’ scrutiny of all internet activity, even
though the vast majority of web users are law abiding. 'The police clearly took advantage
of the terrorist bombing in London to get an agenda, which has been around for years,
pushed to the forefront' he said. 'They would never have got Government support for data
retention, which became a European issue, without the Madrid and London bombings.' The
2004 Madrid bombers used one shared web based email account to make plans, rather than
exchanging messages that could be intercepted....'Concerns from civil liberty groups are
we will lose the liberties that we thought we had without necessarily notifying us. Why
does the data on all of us have to be retained in order to find out about those that are
bad?' He highlighted the danger of laws created to catch dangerous criminals later being
manipulated to spy on millions on households. Local councils have been criticised for
using anti-terrorism (RIPA) laws to snoop on residents suspected of littering and dog
fouling offences. 'My concern is that its easy
policy-making… if you say it’s against terrorism and it’s against child
pornography then nobody is going to say no.' His comments echo those made by Dame Stella
Rimington, the former head of MI5, who last year accused ministers of interfering with
people's privacy and playing straight into the hands of terrorists, by creating a 'police state'. The shift towards greater state control of online content, and how it will
impinge on our rights, will be discussed by Professor Walden in his inaugural lecture at
Queen Mary, University of London on Wednesday 3 February 2010." |
"A series of botched IT projects has left taxpayers with a bill of
more than £26bn for computer systems that have suffered severe delays, run millions of
pounds over budget or have been cancelled altogether. An investigation by The Independent has found that the total cost of
Labour's 10 most notorious IT failures is equivalent to more than half of the budget for
Britain's schools last year. Parliament's spending watchdog has described the projects as
'fundamentally flawed' and blamed ministers for 'stupendous incompetence' in managing
them." |
"The £8.1 billion rollout of
smart meters in Britain could be knocked off course unless the Government and Ofgem, the
energy regulator, act urgently to convince the public that the information provided by the
meters will be held securely. Fears that data on energy consumption could be misused by
criminals, police or insurance companies have curtailed the compulsory introduction of the
meters in the Netherlands, according to a report by Datamonitor, the market analyst. Dutch
consumer and privacy organisations were concerned that information relayed as frequently
as every 15 minutes could allow employees of utility companies to see when properties were
empty or when householders had bought expensive new gadgets. Smart meters, which are due to be rolled out to the UK’s 26 million
households by 2020, are fitted with information and communications technology so that they
can send data and receive instructions. The intention is that they will transform the
energy industry — enabling the transition to a low-carbon economy — but
utilities have been frustrated at the delay to agreeing a common model and standards for
use. Now Datamonitor is warning that the introduction of smart metering will rival the
creation of the internet as a telecommunications project and will stretch utility industry
practices and processes to breaking point." |
| 2009 |
"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.’" |
| "Scores of foxhunters can sit easier in their saddles on the biggest
day of the sport’s calendar today after a judge cast doubt on the legality of covert
filming by anti-hunt activists. The ruling, in
a case that cannot yet be reported, lays down that covert surveillance by third parties
must be authorised in line with procedures in the Regulation of Investigating Powers Act
(Ripa). The Home Office says that the Act must be
used in accordance with the European Convention on Human Rights. 'It also requires, in
particular, those authorising the use of covert techniques to give proper consideration to
whether their use is necessary and proportionate,' official guidance states. This suggests
that the type of speculative surveillance carried out by some organisations and hunt
monitors cannot be authorised because it is not necessary or proportionate for the
prevention or detection of an offence under the Hunting Act. The Association of Chief
Police Officers (Acpo) is so anxious that forces may be acting unlawfully that it has
asked for advice from the Crown Prosecution Service." Judge casts doubt on legality of covert filming by anti-hunt activists London Times, 26 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." |
"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....." |
"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." |
"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." |
"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." |
".... 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." |
"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." |
"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....'" |
"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." |
"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." |
"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." |
"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." |
"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." |
"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.'" |
| "The man who led the
investigation into the Soham murders has attacked the Government’s new vetting
scheme, which will force 11 million adults to have formal criminal record checks. Retired
Detective Chief Superintendent Chris Stevenson said that 'no amount of legislation, record
keeping or checking' could prevent future murders of children by paedophiles. He accused
ministers of creating a state of paranoia after the deaths of Holly Wells and Jessica
Chapman in 2002. Mr Stevenson said that he felt
compelled to voice his criticism after being ordered to stop taking pictures of his
grandson at a village football match. He said that efforts to keep paedophiles at bay had
gone too far and needed to get 'back on an even keel'.... Writing in The Times today, Mr Stevenson says: 'The furore that has
gripped the nation since [Soham] has made us all paranoid. Is it in the interests of
children?.... Are we feeding the paranoia that stops a grandfather taking a picture of his
nine-year-old grandson playing football? Surely this cannot continue, someone needs to put
things back on an even keel.” Soham police officer attacks Government’s new vetting scheme London Times, 15 September 2009 |
| "The fears of Diana, Princess of Wales, for her safety and her
preoccupation with surveillance were 'entirely justified', Michael Mansfield says today.
The QC, the best-known brief at the Bar, says that the predictions of the late Princess
'came to pass' and that Britain has slid seamlessly into George Orwell’s 'Big
Brother' society. In an extract from his autobiography published in The Times
today, the QC says that it was 'utterly reasonable for the Princess to suppose that Big
Brother was looking over her shoulder, that her telephone communications were being tapped
and her movements by car were being tracked'. She had a 'credible and understandable basis
for her belief', he says in Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer.... In his book the QC, 67, who is stepping down from full-time work
at the Bar, condemns the 'surreal proposals' for a centralised database monitoring every
call or e-mail. 'That these surreal proposals should even be contemplated shows how far
beyond Orwell’s worst fears we have travelled.
'The whole idea of Big Brother is now part of mainstream cheap light entertainment . . .
this is both sinister and symbolic.It’s Jim Carrey’s film The Truman Show
for real.'” Diana was right to be worried, says top QC, Michael Mansfield London Times, 2 September 2009 |
| "Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a
U.S. Senate bill proposed
handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the
Internet. They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay
Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors.
CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of
S.773 (excerpt),
which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector
networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency. The new version would allow the
president to 'declare a cybersecurity emergency' relating to 'non-governmental' computer
networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat." Bill would give president emergency control of Internet CNet News, 28 August 2009 |
| "The Home Office is unlikely to respond to an invitation to see how a
UK identity card was cracked and cloned. A Home Office spokesman confirmed it had received
an offer from Adam Laurie, an
expert in radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, to demonstrate how he cloned
a government-issued ID card with little more than
a mobile phone and a laptop. The spokesman said the
Home Office was developing an industry-wide approach to implementation and security issues
associated with the card and could not respond to individual matters. He could not give
details of how or when such an approach would be made.....Laurie told Computer Weekly that
he was waiting for the Home Office to respond to his offer to disclose how he did it. He
said it was normal among security researchers to give suppliers a chance to fix security
breaches in their systems before taking the matter further. Laurie said he had been
interested in security weaknesses with respect to the
RFID technology used in the UK's e-Passports. He had wondered if there were similar
weaknesses in the ID card, which is now being issued to foreign nationals. 'It turns out there are,' he said. Laurie corrected one aspect of earlier
reports that he had changed and added information to the original card. 'What I did was use the information on the card as a template for
a new card that I wrote my own data to,' he said. That data included a digitised picture
of himself, his digitised fingerprints, and a message that read, 'I am a terrorist - shoot
me on sight.' 'That data was read and accepted by
the Golden Reader tool, which is the same reader used at border control to read the
passports, and presumably by the readers that the Home Office has still to issue,' said
Laurie. The Golden
Reader tool was developed by secunet Security Networks AG for the German Federal
Office for Information Security (BSI). It is a piece of software designed to read
passports securely. It supports extensive cryptographic methods and has been used widely
to test the interoperability of ID systems. A German researcher, Lukas Grunwald, demonstrated at
the 2006 Black Hat security conference how he used Golden Reader to clone an ICAO
(International Civil Aviation Organisation) e-Passport of the type issued in
Britain." Home Office unlikely to accept ID card cloner's offer of demonstration Computer Weekly, 19 August 2009 |
| "Twenty years ago today the world witnessed the power of the crowd.
Hungary’s reformist communist Government permitted the pan-European picnic near the
city of Sopron, on the border with Austria, as a symbol of its commitment to a united
Europe. The border was to be opened so that about 100 dignitaries and officially approved
picnickers could cross freely back and forth. But Hungary was crowded with thousands of
East Germans desperate to escape to the West. Many camped near the site of the picnic,
waiting for the crucial moment. When the border was opened at three o’clock they
surged forward. The guards did not open fire. They stepped back and allowed the East
Germans to break through. This, not the opening of the Berlin Wall in November, was the
tipping point. August 19, 1989, accelerated a chain of events that brought down communism
and the Soviet Union itself. Such is the power of the crowd. After
1989 Big Brother was no longer welcome in Budapest, Prague or Warsaw — he moved to
London to be ever more warmly embraced by successive Labour administrations. The birthplace of political liberties, the home of the Magna Carta, is
now one of the most intrusive democracies in the world. Labour governments have introduced
surveillance and monitoring systems of which the communists could only dream. Of course,
Britain is not a real police state. But it is certainly sliding further into
authoritarianism.....supine citizens allow local and national government to intrude ever
further into their daily lives, logging, tracking and recording everything from household
waste disposal to mobile telephone use. These small changes seem to herald a more dramatic
constitutional shift: the rewriting of the social contract under which citizens are
apparently regarded not as active participants in society, but, at best as irritants to be
monitored, and at worst as potential criminals to be pre-emptively arrested, just as
George Orwell predicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four....When the communists [in Hungary]
took over a town, for example, they did not appoint the mayor, but a deputy, to work
behind the scenes and stealthily take control of the police and municipal administration.
In my more cynical moments I imagine Labour ministers following a similar methodology.
They would never say openly: 'We intend to criminalise public protest; to grant sweeping
blanket powers of arrest to the police and change the very foundation of law, making
citizens prove their innocence, rather than have the police and judiciary prove their
guilt while demonstrating.'....changes are introduced stealthily, rarely debated by
Parliament and are nodded through with the acquiescence of the Opposition, in the name of
that useful catch-all 'security'. Whether by design
or not, that seems to me to be happening.” Adam LeBor - Freedom is now flowing from West to East London Times, 19 August 2009 |
| "The extent of snooping in modern Britain is shocking. The scale
of the state's prying was buried in the back of the annual
report (pdf) from the interception of communications commissioner, Sir Paul Kennedy,
one of a flurry of reports released by the government just before MPs broke for the summer
recess. The report revealed that 504,073 requests for
communication data were made by public bodies last year – a staggering 1,381 a day
– one request for every minute of last year. Most
of these requests were made by the police and security services. Many will be justified
and proportionate. The sheer number of requests, however, is shocking. When requests first
hit the half million mark in 2007, it was suggested that this was just part of the
bedding-down process. In fact, surveillance seems to have settled at this level, 44%
higher than the more modest numbers of 2006. Surveillance has soared even though the
assessment of the terrorist threat has eased. State-sanctioned spying on one in every 78
adults every year cannot be a proportionate response to our problems. Neither the Home
Office nor the commissioner have presented figures showing how useful such interceptions
were in securing convictions, but we know that wholesale local authority use of physical
snooping powers is often ineffective as well as intrusive. Only 9% of such surveillance
helps with convictions. The argument in favour of such intrusion is always that those who
have nothing to fear have nothing to hide, but that was also the argument that used to be
made by the KGB in the Soviet Union to justify the recording of internal movements at
every hour of the day and night. Free citizens should not have to justify themselves to
their state, for it is the state that should serve the citizen. Privacy is a right in any
civilised society. We have sleepwalked into a surveillance state without serious debate
and without adequate safeguards. The government's infatuation with social control shows
that it has misunderstood the lessons of George Orwell's 1984, which
was a warning, and not a blueprint. We are not yet living under the Stasi, but we are
living in a country whose proud liberal history is under threat. The requests for communications data were made under the Regulation of Investigatory
Powers Act 2000. These 'Ripa' powers allowed the public bodies granted them the
ability to authorise themselves
to access 'communications data', details of when you sent or received an email or text or
made a phone call, and to whom. The government
promised when introducing them that these substantial powers would only be used to tackle
terrorism and other serious crime. In reality, however, Ripa powers of physical
surveillance have been used to spy on ordinary people for trivial offences,
such as dog-fouling, over-filling their bins or lying about their children's school
catchment area. It is the nature of bureaucratic creep: powers for one purpose prove handy
for another. We can assume the same has happened with
intercept. Originally, only nine organisations were
authorised under Ripa powers, such as the police and the security services but now over
800 are, including all councils....The Liberal Democrats want better checks and balances.
Leaving the power of issuing warrants for intercept communications with the home
secretary, who is also in charge of the police, is like asking the fox to guard the
henhouse. We must review the power to issue these warrants, restricting their use to
serious crime or introducing extra checks by independent magistrates. The Conservatives,
unbelievably, want to relax the rules governing the use of these powers for the police and
the security services. The Labour-Tory consensus lives. Only the Liberal Democrats now
stand four square against the surveillance state." Chris Hune - Fighting the surveillance state Guardian, Comment Is Free, 11 August 2009 |
| "Britain has one and a half
times as many surveillance cameras as communist China,
despite having a fraction of its population,
shocking figures revealed yesterday. There are 4.2million closed circuit TV cameras here,
one per every 14 people. But in police state China, which has a population of 1.3billion,
there are just 2.75million cameras, the equivalent of one for every 472,000 of its
citizens. Simon Davies from pressure group Privacy International said
the astonishing statistic highlighted Britain's 'worrying obsession' with surveillance.
'Britain has established itself as the model state that the Chinese authorities would love
to have,' he said. 'As far as surveillance goes, Britain has created the blueprint for the
21st century non-democratic regime. 'It was not intended but it has certainly been
the consequence.' It is estimated that Britain has 20 per cent of cameras globally and
that each person in the country is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily." Revealed: Big Brother Britain has more CCTV cameras than China Daily Mail, 11 August 2009 |
| "Last year Gordon Brown proposed limited use of intercept evidence,
gathered by intelligence agencies, in the courts.... Sir Paul Kennedy, the Interception of
Communications Commissioner, who inspects intelligence and law enforcement agencies to
ensure that intercept operations conform to the terms of the Regulation of Investigatory
Powers Act...recommended in his annual report that
the Wilson doctrine — a 1966 ruling that MPs should never be subject to telephone
bugging — should be abandoned. 'Why should MPs
not be in the same position as everyone else?' Sir Paul said....many senior police and
intelligence officials have serious concerns that disclosure of intercept material will
benefit criminal and terrorist organisations by exposing human sources and revealing the
sophisticated technology that they use in covert surveillance....Last year Downing Street
asked Sir John Chilcot, who will chair the inquiry into the Iraq war, to examine the
issues and he devised conditions under which intercept evidence might be introduced. Mr
Brown said that it should be possible to find a way to use some intercept material as
evidence, but added that key conditions on safeguarding national security would have to be
met. Sir Paul said in his report that those conditions — which include agencies such
as MI5 retaining control over the intercepted material — could not be met....In
another report published yesterday, the Chief Surveillance Commissioner complained that
senior police officers and public officials with powers to authorise covert surveillance
did not understand their powers and were unwilling to be trained. Sir Christopher Rose
said that he had been disturbed that one police force that was recommended to have
training in the operation of surveillance legislation had asked for a two-day course
instead of the required five days." Gordon Brown's plans to use phone tapping evidence in court thrown into chaos London Times, 22 July 2009 |
| "A police force has suspended
searches of people under controversial anti-terror laws after figures exposed the futility
of the legislation. Hampshire Police conducted 3,481 stop and searches under Section 44 of
the Terrorism Act in 2007/8 – but arrested no one in connection with terror. The statistics marked a huge increase on 2004/5, when the force carried
out 275 stop and searches under Section 44, and a large jump from 2006/7 when there were
580. They are in sharp contrast to the similarsized neighbouring force, Thames Valley,
which used the stop and search powers 244 times in 2007/08, making 40 arrests unconnected
to terrorism. The decision to stop implementing the anti-terror laws was welcomed by civil
liberties campaigners. Last month Lord Carlile, the independent reviewer of terror laws,
accused police of making unjustified and ‘almost certainly’ illegal searches of
white people to provide ‘racial balance’ to Government figures. In remarks which
deepened the controversy surrounding the powers, Lord Carlile said he knew of cases where
suspects were stopped by officers even though there was no evidence against them. Section
44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 gives police the right to stop and search anyone in a defined
area without having grounds of ‘reasonable suspicion’." Police force calls time on stop and search - after using power 3,400 times but failing to make single terror arrest Daily Mail, 16 July 2009 |
| "CCTV, RFID tags and GPS-enabled
phones are among the technologies that can be used to keep track of your movements. The furore around the Chinese
government’s Green Dam software has raised the issue of the way modern technology
is used to monitor our daily lives. Here, we list seven of the technologies that can be
used to keep track of your movements....Radio
frequency identification chips are already widely
used in supermarkets and shops for the purpose of stock control, but some people fear
their use could be widened to monitor the habits and behaviour of ordinary citizens. At the moment, these tags, which are little bigger than a grain of
sand, are embedded into pints of milk and library books. When paired with an RFID reader, the tags can help to provide detailed
information about items, such as their location, or how many there are. Although most people are happy for RFID tags to be used in stores
to monitor stock levels, they’re less happy about the idea of the chips still sending
out a signal once they leave the shop. On a benign
level, such tracking capabilities would mean a store would know that people in
Hertfordshire prefer blue cashmere jumpers, while those in Aberdeen favour the brown
versions. But on a more sinister level, it could also enable them to glean an
unprecedented insight into our personal lives, and target their brands to us accordingly. To those people who fear a 'surveillance culture', the ability to
tag and track everything from our food to our clothes would be the next step on an already
slippery slope.... It now appears that some of the
technology the Iranian authorities have been using to listen in on phone calls made on
fixed-line phones and mobile handsets was sold to the government by Nokia Siemens, a joint
venture between the Finnish phone maker and the German technology giant. Nokia Siemens
said it believed the product was being used by the government to monitor calls, but some
experts have speculated that it could also be used for a practice known as 'deep packet
inspection' – a process that enables agencies to block communications, as well as
monitor the nature of conversations and even covertly
alter this for the purpose of propaganda and disinformation. Nokia Siemens, rocked by this
association with a repressive regime, have pointed out that Iran is not the only country
using its monitoring technology – many Western governments, including the UK and US,
apparently use it for 'lawful intercepts'... Gunwharf Quays shopping centre
in Portsmouth shot to fame last year when it was revealed that surveillance software was
monitoring the signals given off by shoppers’ mobile phones to track their movements.
The technology allowed researchers to tell when someone entered the shopping centre, what
stores they visited, how long they spent in each one, and what time they left. It could
even tell what route they took, and the country they were visiting from." Big brother is watching: The technologies that keep track of you Daily Telegraph, 2 July 2009 |
| "A secret NSA surveillance
database containing millions of intercepted foreign and domestic e-mails includes the
personal correspondence of former President Bill Clinton, according to the New York Times. An NSA
intelligence analyst was apparently investigated after
accessing Clinton’s personal correspondence in the database, the paper reports, though it didn’t say how many of Clinton’s
e-mails were captured or when the interception occurred. The database, codenamed Pinwale,
allows NSA analysts to search through and read large volumes of e-mail messages, including
correspondence to and from Americans. Pinwale is likely the end point for data
sucked from internet backbones into NSA-run surveillance
rooms at AT&T
facilities around the country. Those rooms were
set up by the Bush administration following 9/11, and were finally legalized last
year when Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act. The law gives the telecoms immunity for
cooperating with the administration; it also opens the way for the NSA to lawfully spy on
large groups of phone numbers and e-mail addresses in bulk, instead of having to obtain a
warrant for each target. The NSA can collect the
correspondence of Americans with a court order, or without one if the interception
occurs incidentally while the agency is targeting people 'reasonably believed' to be
overseas. But in 2005, the agency 'routinely examined large volumes of
Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants,' according to the Times, through
this loophole. The paper reports today that the NSA is continuing to over-collect e-mail
because of difficulties in filtering and distinguishing between foreign and domestic
correspondence. If an American’s correspondence pops up in search results when
analysts sift through the database, the analyst is allowed to read it, provided such
messages account for no more than 30 percent of a search result, the paper reported. The
NSA has claimed that the over-collection was inadvertent and corrected it each time the
problem was discovered. But Rep. Rush Holt (D-New Jersey), chairman of the House Select
Intelligence Oversight Panel, disputed this. 'Some actions are so flagrant that they
can’t be accidental,' he told the Times." NSA Secret Database Ensnared President Clinton’s Private E-mail Wired, 17 June 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." |
"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." |
| ".... passports from 2011 will have the same
things as ID cards. They'll have a chip containing a facial picture, and also a
fingerprint. Now the computer system has to be upgraded because apparently it's out of
date. And most of that money is going to be spent on that. ID cards only represents just
over a billion pounds of the overall cost... [The Tories] can certainly scrap the little
plastic card which calls itself a British ID card. However, what they can't scrap is the database because that's
going to used to store details of people who have got passports, to keep passports secure.
And effectively if you wait ten years after 2011 you will have 80% of the population with
their details on a database - whatever you call it - and stored
in the same way that you would
have with ID cards." Rory Maclean - Reporter BBC Radio 4 Today Programme, 6 May 2009 - 06:32 am |
| "Spy chiefs are pressing ahead
with secret plans to monitor all internet use and telephone calls in Britain despite an
announcement by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, of a ministerial climbdown over public
surveillance. GCHQ, the government’s
eavesdropping centre, is developing classified technology to intercept and monitor all
e-mails, website visits and social networking sessions in Britain. The agency will also be
able to track telephone calls made over the internet, as well as all phone calls to land
lines and mobiles.....The £1 billion snooping project — called Mastering the
Internet (MTI) — will rely on thousands of 'black box' probes being covertly inserted
across online infrastructure. Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said Smith’s
announcement appeared to be a 'smokescreen'. 'We opposed the big brother database because
it gave the state direct access to everybody’s communications. But this network of
black boxes achieves the same thing via the back door,' Chakrabarti said. Informed sources
have revealed that a £200m contract has been awarded to Lockheed Martin, the American
defence giant. A second contract has been given to Detica, the British IT firm which has
close ties to the intelligence agencies..... An industry insider, who has been briefed on
GCHQ’s plans, said he could not discuss the programme because he had signed the
Official Secrets Act. However, he admitted that the project would mark a step change in
the agency’s powers of surveillance. At the moment the agency is able to use probes
to monitor the content of calls and e-mails sent by specific individuals who are the
subject of police or security service investigations. Every interception must be
authorised by a warrant signed by the home secretary or a minister of equivalent rank. The new GCHQ internet-monitoring network will shift the focus of
the surveillance state away from a few hundred targeted people to everyone in the UK.... Ministers have said they do not intend to snoop on the actual content
of e-mails or telephone calls. The monitoring will
instead focus on who an individual is communicating with or which websites and chat rooms
they are visiting.....GCHQ said it did not want to discuss how the data it gathered would
be used." Jacqui Smith's secret plan to carry on snooping Sunday Times, 3 May 2009 |
| "Police who arrested the Conservative frontbencher Damian Green
trawled his private e-mails looking for information on Britain’s leading civil
liberties campaigner. Officers from Scotland Yard’s antiterror squad searched the
computer seized from his parliamentary office using the key words 'Shami Chakrabarti'
– even though the Liberty director had nothing to do with the leaking of Home Office
documents that prompted the investigation. In an interview with The Times, Mr Green warned that his arrest and the raids on his Commons
office and homes smacked of a 'police state'.... Mr
Green said serious questions remained about the handling of the case by the police and the
Government. 'This was the first time since we became a democracy that an opposition MP had
been arrested for political work,' he said. 'Arresting opposition politicians is something
you associate with police states. We should be very vigilant that we don’t take steps
towards that and this was quite a significant step towards it.' Mr Green said he found it
surprising that the police had not informed the Home Secretary that they were about to
arrest a Shadow frontbencher. 'I have spoken to former senior ministers of both parties
and everyone says, ‘Of course we would have been told’ ' he said." Shami Chakrabarti was target in police search London Times, 18 April 2009 |
| "A fortnight ago, I received an unexpected seasonal greeting via
email. 'Chag Sameach, Hilary,' it read - to translate, that's Hebrew for 'Happy holiday'.
Last week saw the start of the Jewish festival of Passover. How kind, I thought, at first.
But this was no ordinary greeting. It didn't come from a friend, relative or even a
colleague. It came from Ocado, the delivery partner of Waitrose. And, rather than being a
thoughtful gesture, it was actually an invitation to spend my hard-earned cash on Passover
groceries. Call me paranoid, but this direct - and ethnic - marketing ploy made me feel
slightly uneasy. How on earth, I wondered, did Ocado know I was Jewish? After racking my
brains, I decided that Ocado could only have concluded I was Jewish because I have
occasionally bought fried gefilte fish balls, a Jewish delicacy, as part of my monthly
shop. Now, you don't have to be Jewish to enjoy fishballs, but it helps. My non-Jewish
husband finds them repellent. Though I'm not a practising Jew, I am proud of my identity
and have no wish to conceal it. Yet, it concerns me that a shop should mark me out as
Jewish because I occasionally enjoy Jewish food. Had I bought a curry, would Ocado assume
I was Indian and send me 'Happy Diwali' greetings? And what else could they have concluded
about me, by recording what I buy? Does the supermarket think that because I like Jewish
food I must fit other racial stereotypes? Will it only be a matter of time before it sends
me special offers on Woody Allen DVDs and self-help books? As
the grandchild of German Jews persecuted by the Nazis and forced to wear yellow stars
before they fled to safety in Britain, being listed on any database as a Jew doesn't sit
comfortably with me. What if this information were to fall into the hands of nationalists
or extremists? Or what if a future government decided that people who eat fishballs are
undesirables? You might think I'm over-reacting, but
supermarket ethnic profiling has reportedly been used by the authorities to mark out
individuals for observation. Following the September 11 attacks, U.S. federal agents were
said to have reviewed the shopping records of the terrorists involved to create a profile
of ethnic tastes and shopping patterns associated with extremism." Supermarket Big Brother: The spy in your shopping basket... but how DOES Ocado know I'm Jewish? Daily Mail, 16 April 2009 |
| "Fears that Britain was slipping into a surveillance society were
heightened yesterday as Brussels initiated legal action after declaring that UK laws
guaranteeing data protection were 'structurally flawed' and well below the European
standard. The criticism arose after the European
Commission investigated the use of 'behavioural advertising technology' by British
internet service providers, which it found was illegal under European — but not
British — law. 'I call on the UK authorities to change their national laws and ensure
that national authorities are duly empowered and have proper sanctions at their disposal
to enforce EU legislation on the confidentiality of communications,' Viviane Reding, the
European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, said. A Commission statement yesterday said that Brussels had sent several
letters to the British authorities since last July asking why
the Government had not taken action against BT after the company used Phorm technology
— a covert method of targeting advertising based on user browsing habits — to
secretly monitor the internet activity of 30,000 broadband customers in trials between
2006 and 2007....Richard Thomas, the Information
Commissioner, does not have any power to enforce the Regulation of Investigatory Powers
Act, which governs interception, and the Office of the Surveillance Commissioners can only
investigate interceptions by public authorities. In February Mr Thomas told The Times that
his office required more powers to investigate private companies suspected of data
breaches. He also criticised the Government for introducing a series of laws that risked
'hard-wiring surveillance' into the British way of life. The Government has two months to
respond to the 'infringement proceedings' — the first stage of a legal process that
could end up in the European Court of Justice for an alleged breach of the EU Data
Protection Directive. Despite complaints from those affected by the trials, and privacy
campaigners, the Government took no action against BT or Phorm. City of London Police
dropped its investigation last year, saying the scheme was legal as customers had
'implicitly consented' to be monitored." Britain in the dock over secret tracking of internet accounts London Times, 15 April 2009 |
| "If the Conservatives win the next General Election and cancel ID Cards,
there will be little in effect to cancel. The IT
infrastructure for passports is being combined with that of ID Cards. So the £650m worth of contracts which were awarded this week to CSC
and IBM for new ID Cards and passports IT will remain largely intact....The Treasury requires that the Identity and Passport Service is
self-funded. But it's not possible yet to split the costs of the infrastructure between ID
Cards and passports. So ID Card costs will be mixed into passport fee increases. Already
passports cost up to £114 - and officials don't deny that we're heading towards the £200
passport." Heading for the £200 passport to help pay for ID Cards? ComputerWeekly (Blog), 8 April 2009 |
| "Internet service providers (ISPs) are required to store details of
user e-mails and net phone calls from Monday as a European Union directive comes into
force. Governments say it will protect citizens but civil liberty campaigners are not so
sure. To whom did you send your first e-mail today? I ask, because from today ISPs inside
the EU are legally required to store details of that e-mail for up to a year. And the same
goes for any internet phone call you make or website you visit. This so-called
communications data is now being held on the ISPs' servers just in case the authorities
want to come and look at it. Many ISPs have actually been holding on to this kind of data
as a matter of course - to help defeat spam, to monitor and manage their own networks and
because governments have asked them to do so voluntarily. The
difference now is that it is a legal requirement. To be clear, the contents of the e-mails
are not logged, nor are the contents of any net phone calls. This is about connections
between people and organisations. Governments believe that they can look for patterns in
these relationships that would help them flag potentially dangerous individuals or
organisations....'Technology makes it very easy to
collect, store and process data,' said Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights
Group. 'The problem is there is a growing temptation from the security services and police
to say we want more, we want to do more and keep more of our data.' He said the problem
with traffic pattern analysis was that we became 'judged on our past mistakes'. 'There is
a basic risk we become a mere data trail - that rather than being able to exercise choice
we become who we are based on our history.' Mr Killock said the legislation could also
have the opposite effect to the one intended by governments. 'People who really do want to
do obnoxious things will simply hide themselves away - using encryption techniques and
anonymisers. 'It will make it harder for the security services that actually monitor the
people they think are a risk." Campaigners warn of user data creep BBC Online, 6 April 2009 |
| "Millions of us are unwittingly signing away our rights to privacy
when we upgrade to flashy new mobile phones, warn campaigners. The latest handsets are so
advanced they can reveal the location of the owner to within a few yards - along with
their internet shopping habits, their interests and the names and addresses of their
friends. Although phone providers are not supposed to pass on this 'Big Brother' data
without permission, a 'worryingly large number' of people give consent for the information
to be sold to marketing companies, campaigners say. Simon Davies, of human rights group
Privacy International, said the danger came when customers signed up to contracts or
downloaded new mobile phone applications without reading the small print. One of the most
potentially intrusive applications is Google Latitude, which lets mobile phone owners
'share' their location with anyone in the world. Mr Davies added that the risks of such
snooping software on these 'smart phones' were far more sinister than Google's
controversial-Street View service. 'People are giving consent for mobile phone companies
to pass on this information without realising the consequences,' he said. 'Ninety per cent
are mesmerised by the shiny new phone and don't understand the implications of signing
away rights they would normally have under the Data Protection Act. 'People should care
because this sort of information can be passed to a third party such as a credit provider
or a credit reference company. It provides an
enormous database that could be cherry-picked by the Government or police. 'It provides a remarkable insight into who you are, what you do, who you
know and where you have been. Unless regulators get to grip with this we are all
doomed.' Records of website visits, messages, phone calls and even real-life
locations visited can be stored by a mobile phone company. Although each application is
relatively harmless on its own, combining data from several is potentially lucrative. Glyn
Read, a former marketing director of SAS Institute, a leading behavioural analysis
company, said the ‘real worry’ would come when governments start to demand
access to the data.‘What is going on at the moment is the opening of a barn door in
your personal habits,’ he told the Guardian. ‘The value of understanding
people's personal information is enormous - this will allow a form of subliminal
advertising.'...Neil Andrew, head of portal advertising for the mobile phone company 3,
said his company would only pass on information with the consent of a customer. But he
conceded: ‘Mobile is the key to understanding
where a person is and what they have been browsing.’" 'Privacy risk' of new mobiles that give away location and stored details to marketing firms Daily Mail, 3 April 2009 |
| "Should President Obama have the power to shut down domestic Internet
traffic during a state of emergency? Senators John Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) and Olympia
Snowe (R-Maine) think so. On Wednesday they introduced a bill to establish the Office of
the National Cybersecurity Advisor—an arm of the executive branch that would have
vast power to monitor and control Internet traffic to protect against threats to critical
cyber infrastructure. That broad power is rattling some civil libertarians. The Cybersecurity Act of 2009
(PDF) gives the president the ability to 'declare a cybersecurity emergency' and shut down
or limit Internet traffic in any 'critical' information network 'in the interest of
national security.' The bill does not define a critical information network or a
cybersecurity emergency. That definition would be left to the president. The bill does not
only add to the power of the president. It also
grants the Secretary of Commerce 'access to all relevant data concerning [critical]
networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting
such access.' This means he or she can monitor or access any data on private or public
networks without regard to privacy laws....The
cybersecurity threat is real,' says Leslie Harris, head of the Center for Democracy and
Technology (CDT), 'but such a drastic federal intervention in private communications
technology and networks could harm both security and privacy.' The bill could undermine
the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), says CDT senior counsel Greg Nojeim.
That law, enacted in the mid '80s, requires law enforcement seek a warrant before tapping
in to data transmissions between computers. 'It's an incredibly broad authority,' Nojeim
says, pointing out that existing privacy laws 'could fall to this authority.' Jennifer
Granick, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that
granting such power to the Commerce secretary could actually cause networks to be less
safe. When one person can access all information on a network, 'it makes it more
vulnerable to intruders,' Granick says. 'You've basically established a path for the bad
guys to skip down.'" Should Obama Control the Internet? Mother Jones, 2 April 2009 |
| "Drivers face having their every move tracked by a 'spy in the car'
black box. The system will constantly check a vehicle's speed - making cameras redundant -
and allow for pay-as-you-go tolls. The £36million EU project is partly funded by the UK
Government and backed by car makers and the telecoms industry. It will be unveiled later this year with a view to its integration
into future cars. Manufacturers suggest this could be as early as 2013. Vehicles fitted with the system will emit a constant 'heartbeat' pulse
revealing their location, speed and direction of travel. EU officials believe the
technology will significantly reduce road accidents, congestion and carbon emissions. But
civil liberties campaigners say it will have profound implications for privacy by creating
a Europe-wide system of Big Brother surveillance. The European Commission has already
asked governments to reserve a radio frequency for the system to operate on.
Engineers say the system will be able to track cars to within a yard, making it
significantly more accurate than existing satellite navigation technology....The
Department for Transport said there were no plans to make the system mandatory in new
cars. Its introduction will be on a voluntary basis, according to Paul Kompfner, manager
of the Cooperative-Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems project....Simon Davies, of Privacy
International, a watchdog, said: 'If you correlate car tracking data with mobile phone
data, which can also track people, there is the potential for an almost infallible
surveillance system.'" The black box that tracks every mile you drive and will make speed cameras obsolete Daily Mail, 1 April 2009 |
| "Privacy campaigners expressed alarm today over government plans to monitor all conversations on social networking
sites in an attempt to crackdown on terror. A Home
Office spokesman said that the internet eavesdropping plan, which would be set out in the
next few weeks, would cover any social network that allows people to chat to one another,
including Facebook, MySpace, Bebo
and Twitter as well as internet calls on Skype. He said the proposal would update
existing plans to store information about every telephone call, email, and internet visit
made by anyone in the UK on a central database. 'We have no way of knowing whether Osama
bin Laden is chatting to Abu Hamza on Facebook. Or terrorists could be having a four-way
chat on Skype,' he said. He said the government was not interested in the contents of the
communication: 'What we want to monitor is that so-and-so is logged on to that site and
spoke to so-and-so. It's the who, when and where, not the content.' But he conceded that in 'high-profile cases' the
police would want to examine the contents of social network chatter. 'The security service
would want the ability to capture information that could lead to conviction,' he said.
Under the new proposals, the sites that host social networks could be required to hold
data about who users correspond with for up to a year....Privacy campaigners criticised
the plan, saying it would be another unwieldy, costly and unnecessary failure. Shami
Chakrabarti, director of human
rights group Liberty, said: 'The widescale use of social networking websites
highlights the enormity of government ambitions for a centralised communications database
for the surveillance of the entire population … Technological development is used as
an excuse for centralised snooping of a kind that ought never to be acceptable in the
oldest unbroken democracy on earth.'" Home Office defends plan to monitor social network conversations Guardian, 25 March 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." |
"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." |
| "The travel plans and personal details of every holidaymaker,
business traveller and day-tripper who leaves Britain are to be tracked by the Government,
the Daily Telegraph can disclose. Anyone departing the UK by land, sea or air will have
their trip recorded and stored on a database for a decade. Passengers leaving every
international sea port, station or airport will have to supply detailed personal
information as well as their travel plans.... Even swimmers attempting to cross the
Channel and their support teams will be subject to the rules which will require the
provision of travellers' personal information such as passport and credit card details, home and email addresses and exact travel
plans....By the end of the year 60 per cent of
journeys made out of Britain will be affected with 95 per cent of people leaving the
country being subject to the plans by the end 2010.... In
most cases the information will be expected to be provided 24 hours ahead of travel and will then be stored on a Government database for around ten years.
The changes are being brought in as the Government tries to tighten border controls and
increase protection against the threat of international terrorism. Currently passports are
not checked as a matter of routine when people leave the country....Britain is not the
only country to require such information from travel operators. The USA also demands the same information be supplied from
passengers wishing to visit America. But the scale
of the scheme has alarmed civil liberties campaigners. 'Your travel data is much more
sensitive than you might think,' Phil Booth of the privacy group, NO2ID said. 'Given that
for obvious reasons we're encouraged not to put our home address on our luggage labels,
and especially given the Government's appalling record on looking after our data, it just
doesn't seem sensible for it to pass details like this and sensitive financial information
around.' 'It is a sad refection of the times that the dream of freedom of movement across
Europe has had to take second place to concerns about national security,' said Edmund
King, the AA's president.....The changes would mean that Eurostar, Eurotunnel and ferry
companies will now have to demand passport details from passengers at the time of booking,
along with the credit card information and email address which they would have taken at
the time of the reservation." All travel plans to be tracked by Government Daily Telegraph, 14 March 2009 |
| "An increasing number of today's
schoolchildren are forgoing the humiliating daily name call of registration, and are
instead having to 'fingerswipe' in and out of class, or to give it its proper name:
biometric registration. According to campaign group LeaveThemKidsAlone, schools have
fingerprinted more than two million children this way, sometimes even without their
parents' consent. A
statement on its website claims: 'It's part of an enormous softening-up exercise,
targeting society's most impressionable, so they'll accept cradle-to-grave state snooping
and control.' Hard-pressed schools and local
councils with tight budgets are being enticed by a new generation of software that
promises to cut administration costs and time. In the last 18 months, several Guardian
readers have written into the paper expressing concern at this new technology being
trialled on their children. Everything from 'cashless catering schemes' to 'kiddyprints'
instead of library cards is being introduced by stealth into the nation's schools, it is
claimed....The implications are vast – the nation's schools aren't exactly the safest
place for the storage of this sensitive data – and anyone with access to the system
and a mobile SIM card can download the information from a computer, increasing the chances
of identity theft. Unless the computer system is professionally purged, before this data
has a chance to be leaked, it can remain in cyberspace for eternity to be retained for all
sorts of dubious purposes. It's odd that this drive towards fingerprinting children
coincides with the government's keenness to expand the national
DNA database – we already have one of the largest in the world – with more
than four million people on file, including nearly 1.1 million children. Odd too that
VeriCool is reported to be part of Anteon, an American
company that is responsible for the training of interrogators at Guantánamo and Abu
Gharib. The implications are vast – the nation's schools aren't exactly the
safest place for the storage of this sensitive data – and anyone with access to the
system and a mobile SIM card can download the information from a computer, increasing the
chances of identity theft. Unless the computer system is professionally purged, before
this data has a chance to be leaked, it can remain in cyberspace for eternity to be
retained for all sorts of dubious purposes. It's odd that this drive towards
fingerprinting children coincides with the government's keenness to expand the national
DNA database – we already have one of the largest in the world – with more
than four million people on file, including nearly 1.1 million children. Odd too that
VeriCool is reported to be part of Anteon, an American
company that is responsible for the training of interrogators at Guantánamo and Abu
Gharib. It seems that in the blink of an eyelid
(or iris scan), our children are losing the civil liberties and freedoms we are fighting
so hard to preserve." Why are we fingerprinting children? Guardian, Comment Is Free, 7 March 2009 |
| "Privacy advocates are issuing warnings about a new radio chip plan
that ultimately could provide electronic identification for every adult in the U.S. and allow agents to compile attendance lists at anti-government
rallies simply by walking through the assembly. The
proposal, which has earned the support of Janet Napolitano, the newly chosen chief of the
Department of Homeland Security, would embed radio chips in driver's licenses, or
'enhanced driver's licenses.' 'Enhanced driver's licenses give confidence that the person
holding the card is the person who is supposed to be holding the card, and it's less
elaborate than REAL ID,' Napolitano said in a Washington Times report. REAL ID is a plan
for a federal identification system standardized across the nation that so alarmed
governors many states have adopted formal plans to oppose it. However, a privacy advocate
today told WND that the EDLs are many times worse....Participants could find themselves on
'watch' lists or their attendance at protests or rallies added to their government
'dossier.' She said even if such license programs are run by states, there's virtually no
way that the databases would not be linked and accessible to the federal government.
Albrecht said a hint of what is on the agenda was provided recently by California Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger. The state's legislature approved a plan banning the government from
using any radio chips in any ID documentation. Schwarzenegger's veto noted he did not want
to interfere with any coming or future federal programs for identifying people." Radio chip coming soon to your driver's license? WorldNetDaily, 28 February 2009 |
| "Fraudulent bankers are more of a danger to society than terrorists
and the failure to reassure people that their money is safe is an 'absolute failure of
public policy', a former Director of Public Prosecutions says today. Writing in The Times,
Sir
Ken Macdonald says that the systems for regulating markets and for prosecuting market
crime have completely broken down...In his article, Sir Ken lambasts the 'liberty-sapping addictions' of the Home Office and the
'paranoiac paraphernalia of national databases and ID cards'. He also attacks the rush to 'bring in lots of terror law, the tougher the
better'. Rather than ensuring that people's money and financial security 'will not be
stolen from them', legislators wanted 'criminal justice to be an auction of fake
toughness', he says. Sir Ken has previously criticised government plans to extend the time
that terrorism suspects could be held without charge beyond 28 days; and, recently, plans for increased surveillance and data retention." Sir Ken Macdonald rounds on Britain's banking robbers London Times, 23 February 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." |
| "For most of the past century, Britain's
secret state bugged, blacklisted and spied on leftists, trade
unionists and peace campaigners, as well as Irish republicans and anyone else regarded
as a 'subversive' threat to the established order. That was all supposed to have been
brought to a halt in the wake of the end of the cold war in the early 1990s. MI5 now
boasts it has ended its
counter-subversion work altogether, having other jihadist fish to fry (it will have soon
doubled its staffing and budget on the back of the 9/11 backlash).Whether those claims
should be taken at face value must be open to question. But it now turns out that other
arms of the secret state have in any case been stepping up to the plate to fill the gap in
the market. The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) insists that its confidential
intelligence unit – reported last week to be now coordinating surveillance and
infiltration of 'domestic extremists', including anti-war
protesters and strikers – is not in fact a new organisation, but has been part of
its public order intelligence operations since 1999, liaising with MI5 and its 44 forces'
special branch outfits across the country. But yes, Acpo's spokesman tells me, it is in
the business of targeting groups such as those
involved in the recent Gaza war protests, trade
unionists taking part in secondary industrial action and animal rights organisations
– though only if they break the law or 'seek to break the law'. Now, that
qualification could be used to cover a very wide group of political and industrial
activists indeed: including all those
students who have been occupying university buildings since the new year in protest at
Israel's carnage in the Palestinian territories; all those engineering construction
workers who staged mass
walkouts at refineries and power stations over the past couple of weeks; and all those
who blocked streets – or threw their shoes at police – around the Israeli
embassy in London at the height of the Gaza bombardment in January. Add to that the fact
that Acpo, and the government as a whole for that matter, bandies around the term 'extremism' without being able to make even a face-saving
stab at what it actually means – 'there doesn't seem to be a single, commonly agreed
definition', Acpo's spokesman concedes – and
you have a recipe for a new lease of life for the
harassment and criminalisation of legitimate dissent, protest and industrial action. In case there were any doubt about the kind of thing this intelligence
outfit is up to, a recent advertisement for its new boss specified that the unit would be
specifically working with government departments, university authorities and private
corporations to 'remove the threat' of 'public disorder that arises from domestic
extremism' using 'secret data' and 'sensitive source material'. But since Acpo operates as
a private company outside the Freedom
of Information Act – and the budget and staffing of its confidential intelligence
unit are, well, confidential – who's going to hold them to genuine account?" Seamus Milne - We are all extremists now Guardian, Comment Is Free, 16 February 2009 |
| "Forget about those old-school spy devices planted under phones and
inside vases. For the most covert spy operations, the U.S. government is planning to
create cyborg insects with micro-scopic sensors, video surveillance cameras, and global
positioning systems to aid the Department
of Defense. A 'solicitation notice' from the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) explains how HI-MEMS (hybrid insect
microelectromechanical systems) will introduce nanoscale
electronics in moths and other insects during their
early stages of metamorphic development. New tissue growth would accommodate the MEMS
implants in later metamorphic stages. The proposal also suggests the use of swimming and
hopping insects with embedded microphones for recording conversations and gas sensors for
detecting new chemical warfare testing. 'We are currently supporting three research teams
at the University
of Michigan, MIT, and Boyce Thompson Institute,' says Jan Walker, a DARPA
spokesperson. 'The insect species being investigated include large moths and horned
beetles.'" Future Watch: This Room is Bugged PC Magazine, 10 February 2009 |
| "A ‘Big Brother’ database is being built by the Government
to store details of millions of our international journeys for up to ten years. The computer system, housed at a secret location on the outskirts
of Manchester, will record names and dates of every movement in and out of the UK by air,
sea or rail. Reservation and payment details,
addresses and telephone numbers, names of travelling companions and even details of
luggage carried will also be stored. Ministers insist the database, part of the
Government’s ‘EBorders’ project, is vital to the fight against terrorism,
illegal immigration and organised crime. But as details emerged yesterday, opponents
warned that the spy system – which will track the 250million journeys in and out of
the country each year – amounted to another building block in Britain’s growing
surveillance society." Beware, Big Brother is watching your trips abroad: Government plans to store details of ordinary people's journeys into and out of UK Mail On Sunday, 8 February 2009 |
| "Billions of times a day, people entrust Google with the details of
their lives. Every time you enter 'acne', 'coffin' or 'new car' into the Google search
bar, you are telling the Googlebots a tiny part of what you are up to. Many people, I
suspect, don't think about this and when they do, they don't care enough to change to a
different search engine. The reason is because, by and large, people trust Google not to
do anything evil with their anonymised personal information. So far, Google has earned
that trust....what worries people is that we have to
take it on trust that Google will not use all that personal information in a way we object
to in the future." Sure, the Googlebots know your deepest secrets - but it's worth it London Times, 6 Febuary 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." |
| "New software that allows people to track friends, partners and
children has triggered privacy and safety concerns. Google Latitude, launched yesterday by
the internet search engine company for use with its Google maps software, allows users to
activate tracking software on their mobile phone or wi-fi device. That enables them to
appear on home computer maps so their friends and loved ones can see where they are. But
the technology has raised concerns that people will be able to spy on their partners from
home – and fears that it could potentially place children at risk from paedophiles.
Helen Hughes, a family lawyer, said she feared that the device would be used by people to
track their partners. 'In abusive relationships there is an element of control. You will
see people checking receipts to find out when their partner was at the shops. This could
be abused by people seeking to control their spouses.' The software is extremely precise
as it uses the Global Positioning System which can calculate a person's location within
yards.Dr Andreas Komninos, a computing expert with Glasgow Caledonian University, said the
information could possibly be misused in the future. 'Google are always gathering data;
the problem is now this information is very personal. A phone number is very specific to
an individual,' he said. Google has stated it will not retain any information about users'
movements. But Dr Komninos said: 'I would take
Google's promise with a pinch of salt. I can foresee a situation in the future where
agencies could force the company to store the data, possibly for police or anti-terrorist
use.' Dr Komninos has also warned parents to be
watchful of their child's use of the new software. 'In theory, it is a possible security
risk,' he said." Fears over Google phone tracking Scotsman, 5 February 2009 |
| "With Google’s Latitude, parents will be able to swoop down like
helicopters on their children, whirr around their heads and chase them away from the games
arcade and back to do their French verbs....However Orwellian it sounds, don’t worry.
The police and security services can already track
you down from your phone without any help from Google..." Sloping off could soon be a thing of the past London Times, 5 February 2009 |
| "Privacy critics are panning Google's new Latitude application, which
allows users to track friends via GPS on their mobile phones, saying the application could
be abused by suspicious partners and paedophiles.... Critics have said the application is
a 'privacy minefield' and could be abused by overzealous employers, jealous spouses or
paedophiles. Others say it could be misused in the
future by police or government organisations to illegally track wanted individuals....Last
year Google was signed up by US intelligence agencies to help them better handle and share
information gathered about terrorist suspects. According to reports in the San Francisco
Chronicle the search giant is working with agencies such as the National Security Agency." Google's mobile phone tracking service under fire from privacy critics Brand Republic, 5 February 2009 |
| "Since last autumn, BT – under the 'Webwise' banner – has been trialling a
technology called Phorm, which dials direct into your
internet service provider's network and intercepts communications between you and the
websites you visit, using information about the sorts of things you are viewing to serve
you targeted ads....should we tolerate Phorm? Thanks to hard work from campaigners at the Foundation for Information Policy Research and the Open Rights Group, and activists at dephormation.org.uk and nodpi.org, we now have that choice. The Information Commissioner's
Office has ruled that BT must ask the explicit permission of its customers to 'opt in'
before enrolling them into its Webwise trial (rather than the pernicious 'opt out' clauses
so beloved of marketers and junk mail operatives). ....Like
the MP, the journalist, the doctor and the priest, ISPs have the power to know the
intimate details of our lives. They should be prevented from abusing that power, and
shielded from the power of those (like the Home Office, with its widely reported plans to
'modernise' the state's interception capability) who would seek to force them to break
their confidence with us. If this does not happen, it is not only the digital economy that
will suffer, it is modern liberty itself." Your ISP is watching you Guardian, Comment Is Free, 2 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." |
| "A leading Chinese dissident who worked as an MI6 informant was
convicted yesterday of murdering a millionaire author to steal his identity....Most of the evidence was heard in secret after MI6 requested that
the press and public be excluded for almost all of the case. Jacqui Smith, the Home
Secretary, agreed to a Public Interest Immunity certificate, making it the first murder
trial covered by a secrecy order on the ground of national security." MI6 informant Wang Yam found guilty of killing millionaire author to steal his identity London Times, 17 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." |
| "A U.S. Foreign Intelligence
court released a ruling Thursday upholding the right of the president and Congress to
wiretap private international phone conversations and intercept e-mail messages without a
court-issued warrant...While the court released the
once-secret opinion, Attorney General-designate Eric Holder was answering questions about
the legality of the nation’s controversial warrantless surveillance programs during his Senate
confirmation hearing. During his time in the Senate, President-elect Barack Obama endorsed the
latest version of the current administration’s surveillance policy. That means that
Holder now must gingerly evaluate how the warrantless program came about, whether it is
working to its fullest extent, whether and to what extent it reaches too far in infringing
constitutional privacy rights, and what can be done if it does. On Thursday morning,
Holder was clear in telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that he believes the president
has power within Article II of the Constitution (like the power to eavesdrop) that the
Congress may not take away, writes Cohen." Federal Court Upholds Wiretap Law CBS News, 15 January 2009 |
| "Over the past few days, at trade fairs from Las Vegas to Seoul, a
constant theme has been the unstoppable advance of 'FRT', the benign abbreviation favoured
by industry insiders. We learnt that Apple's iPhoto update will automatically scan your
photos to detect people's faces and group them accordingly, and that Lenovo's new PC will
log on users by monitoring their facial patterns....So
let's understand this: governments and police are planning to implement increasingly
accurate surveillance technologies that are unnoticeable, cheap, pervasive, ubiquitous,
and searchable in real time. And private businesses,
from bars to workplaces, will also operate such systems, whose data trail may well be sold
on or leaked to third parties - let's say, insurance companies that have an interest in
knowing about your unhealthy lifestyle, or your ex-spouse who wants evidence that you can
afford higher maintenance payments. Rather than jump up and down with rage - you never
know who is watching through the window - you have a
duty now, as a citizen, to question this stealthy rush towards permanent individual
surveillance. A Government already obsessed with
pursuing an unworkable and unnecessary identity-card database must be held to
account." Let's face it, soon Big Brother will have no trouble recognising you London Times, 13 January 2009 |
| "Police have been given the
power to hack into personal computers without a court warrant. The Home Office is facing
anger and the threat of a legal challenge after granting permission. Ministers are also drawing up plans to allow police across the EU to
collect information from computers in Britain. The moves will fuel claims that the
Government is presiding over a steady extension of the 'surveillance society' threatening
personal privacy. Hacking – known as 'remote searching' – has been quietly
adopted by police across Britain following the development of technology to access
computers' contents at a distance. Police say it is vital for tracking cyber-criminals and
paedophiles and is used sparingly but civil liberties groups fear it is about to be vastly
expanded. Remote searching can be achieved by sending an email containing a virus to a
suspect's computer which then transmits information about email contents and web-browsing
habits to a distant surveillance team. Alternatively, 'key-logging' devices can be
inserted into a computer that relay details of each key hit by its owner. Detectives can
also monitor the contents of a suspect's computer hard-drive via a wireless network.
Computer hacking has to be approved by a chief constable, who must be satisfied the action
is proportionate to the crime being investigated. Last
month European ministers agreed in principle to allow police to carry out remote searches
of suspects' computers across the EU." New powers for police to hack your PC Independent, 5 January 2009 |
| 2008 |
| "Activists in Pennsylvania say they're pressing ahead with a lawsuit
to ban touch-screen voting machines in the state's 67 counties. The suit alleges the
machines are vulnerable to computer hackers, don't leave a paper trail to verify votes are
accurately recorded and don't always work properly, said the League of Women Voters.
Joining the league in the suit are the NAACP, Public Interest Law Firm of Philadelphia and
incoming state Treasurer Rob McCord of Bucks County, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported
Monday. The state Supreme Court last week gave the plaintiffs the OK to proceed with the
suit against the machines, which already are being used in 50 of the state's counties, the
Post-Gazette said." Activists sue to ban voting touch screens United Press International, 22 December 2008 |
| "When police raided Tory MP Damian Green’s home, they
‘sheepishly’ asked whether children were present before ransacking it. His wife
assumed they were being polite. But, under sinister new guidelines, officers must assess
all children they encounter – including while ‘searching premises’ –
for a police database called MERLIN. This, in turn, feeds into a giant new Whitehall
database on Britain’s children, Contact Point, which goes live nationally in January.
The Tories have vowed to scrap it, arguing that it threatens family privacy and
children’s safety. But civil liberties campaigners say we must resist it now, before
it is too late. Since April 1, hundreds of thousands of State employees, from police to
teachers, youth and nursery workers, social workers and sports coaches, have been entitled
to interrogate children aged up to 19, using the ‘Common Assessment Framework’
(CAF), a creepy, eight-page, 60-section questionnaire. CAF includes eyewateringly intimate
questions about children’s sexual behaviour, their family’s structure, culture
and religion, their views on ‘discrimination’, their friends, secret fears,
feelings and family income, plus ‘any serious difficulties in their parents’
relationship’.How has such a terrifying
intrusion into private life crept, almost unnoticed, under the radar? The answer is New Labour has cleverly packaged CAF as an aid to
‘child protection’ and delivering better services as part of its Every Child
Matters project (ECM). The £224million programme has been beset by delays,
incomprehensible acronyms and New Labour gobbledegook. But let us not be deceived –
it is about control, not care, and spying, not safety.... Tragically, Britain, the cradle
of parliamentary democracy, is becoming notorious worldwide for snooping on its citizens. Professor Nigel Parton, NSPCC Professor of Childhood Studies at
Huddersfield University, warned a recent international conference in Finland that the
Every Child Matters agenda means what we are witnessing is the emergence of the
‘preventive-surveillance state’, with ‘major implications for the civil
liberties and human rights of the citizen, particularly for children and parents’. Once, people who warned of a growing police state seemed paranoid. The
Damian Green raid was a wake-up call. Let us now protect our children, our and our
country’s future, with all our might." Has your child been CAFed? How the Government plans to record intimate information on every child in Britain Mail, 7 December 2008 |
| "State officials are to be given powers previously reserved for times
of war to demand a person's proof of identity at any time. Anybody who refuses the Big
Brother demand could face arrest and a possible prison sentence. The new rules come in
legislation unveiled in today's Queen's Speech. They are presented as a crackdown on
illegal immigration, but lawyers say they could be applied to anybody who has ever been
outside the UK, even on holiday. The civil rights group Liberty, which analysed clauses
from the new Immigration and Citizenship Bill, called them an attempt to introduce
compulsory ID cards by the back door. The move would effectively take Britain back to the
Second World War, when people were stopped and asked to 'show their papers'. Liberty said:
'Powers to examine identity documents, previously
thought to apply only at ports of entry, will be extended to criminalise anyone in Britain
who has ever left the country and fails to produce identity papers upon demand. 'We believe that the catch-all remit of this power is disproportionate
and that its enactment would not only damage community relations but represent a
fundamental shift in the relationship between the State and those present in the UK.' One
broadly-drafted clause would permit checks on anyone who has ever entered the UK - whether
recently or years earlier....No reasonable cause or suspicion is required, and checks can
be carried out 'in country' - not just at borders. The law would apply to British citizens
and foreign nationals, according to Liberty's lawyers. The
only people who would be exempt are the tiny minority who have never been abroad on
holiday or business....Currently, police are allowed
to ask for identity documents only if there is a reasonable suspicion that a person has
committed an offence. During the Second World War, ID cards were seen as a way of
protecting the nation from Nazi spies, but in 1952 Winston Churchill's government decided
they were not needed in peacetime. They were thought to be hindering the police because so
many people resented being asked to produce them. Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti said
last night: ' Sneaking in compulsory identity cards via the back door of immigration law
is a cynical escalation of this expensive and intrusive scheme.' .... LibDem spokesman
Chris Huhne said: 'Ministers seem to be breaking their promise that no one would ever have
to carry an ID card. This is a sly and underhand way of extending the ID card scheme by
stealth.' There was also concern last night that the Government is seeking to revive
controversial plans for secret inquests. The measure - which would have let
the authorities hold a hearing like the Jean Charles de Menezes inquest behind closed
doors - was removed from counter-terrorism legislation earlier this year. But
it could be re-introduced as part of a Coroners and Death Certification Bill." Big Brother police to get 'war-time' power to demand ID in the street - on pain of sending you to jail Daily Mail, 3 December 2008 |
| "On Tuesday last week a judge at Kingston-upon-Thames Crown Court
threw out a case against Sally Murrer, a journalist charged with aiding and abetting
misconduct in a public office — the same charge that the Met wants to pursue against
Mr Green. The Murrer case turned on Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights,
the right to freedom of expression. The court ruled, as courts across Europe have ruled,
that leaks to journalists are not criminal unless they involve matters of national
security or impair the investigation of serious crime. The evidence against her — gained by planting bugging devices and
raiding her home and her office (sound familiar?) — was ruled to have been obtained unlawfully." In light of Sally Murrer’s case, Damian Green's arrest was absurd London Times, 1 December 2008 |
| "The House of Commons office of Damian Green, the Tories' immigration
spokesman, is routinely swept for electronic bugging devices, along with other offices
belonging to senior Conservatives, amid fears of covert monitoring, The Independent on
Sunday has discovered. Anger surrounding the shadow
immigration minister's arrest last week escalated dramatically last night over suspicions
of a major bugging scandal inside the Palace of Westminster. The IoS understands that even before his surprise arrest on
Thursday Mr Green was aware that his Commons office, phone calls and emails could be under
surveillance because of the sensitive nature of his job. The fresh revelations rocked the
Commons just days before the high point of the parliamentary calendar, the Queen's Speech,
which takes place on Wednesday. Tory leader David Cameron last night said the Prime
Minister must denounce the arrest of Mr Green or risk charges of hypocrisy because he
'made his career' from Whitehall leaks. Writing in the News of the World, Mr Cameron
added: 'If this approach had been in place in the 1990s, then Gordon Brown would have
spent most of his time under arrest.' Several offices
within the Commons and Portcullis House belonging to senior Tory MPs and officials are
checked regularly by security experts for listening devices and other surveillance
equipment. The IoS has learnt that there are 'major
concerns' at the highest levels of the Tory party over suspected monitoring by the
authorities. Any such monitoring may not be illegal but would be hugely controversial. Last night, a Conservative MP wrote to Gordon Brown demanding an
urgent review of the Wilson doctrine, the convention that protects MPs from phonetapping
but does not cover other surveillance techniques. It
is not known whether a covert device has ever been found during searches. But if the
suspicions are proved right, it would have major implications for the protection of
parliamentary privilege. Ben Wallace, the Conservative MP for Lancaster & Wyre, said
the Wilson doctrine, which dates back to 1966, needed to be changed to cover all forms of
surveillance, not just intercepting of calls. He said: 'It
is disturbing that the authorities may have exploited the difference between surveillance
and intercept in order to pursue Members of Parliament over the past 10 years.'" Bugging scandal inside the Commons Independent On Sunday, 30 November 2008 |
| "The practice of using a brown envelope to pass on information is
commonplace in Westminster. At any one time, there are hundreds of MPs, researchers,
journalists and visitors at Portcullis House, and the handing over of an ordinary envelope
would rarely be noticed. As the IoS reveals today, the practice stems from a real concern that their movements are being monitored by MI5 or
Special Branch. Last Thursday's raid by nine
anti-terrorist police officers on Mr Green's office, just off the Portcullis House atrium,
has triggered accusations of contempt of parliamentary privilege. In four co-ordinated
raids at his home and offices, anti-terror police seized the MP's computers, mobile phone,
BlackBerry and bank statements – as well as rifling through old love letters between
Mr Green and his wife. But the revelation that the
offices of senior frontbenchers are routinely swept for bugs will send shockwaves through
Westminster. It has serious repercussions for the
operation of the Wilson doctrine, the convention that protects MPs from phone-tapping. In
1966, following a series of allegations of bugging of MPs' telephones, the Prime Minister,
Harold Wilson, ordered a ban on phone-tapping on all MPs. Yet
the doctrine has failed to keep pace with modern technology, and MPs fear there is a
'wide-open door' to security services listening to the conversations and reading the
content of their emails, perfectly legally. The
doctrine covers only the intercept of communications – tapping phone lines or
snatching data from mobile phone conversations, as well as the intercept of unopened
emails and post. What is not covered are already opened emails and post, and, crucially,
listening devices planted in an MP's office. One intelligence expert said it was possible
for legally available software to be planted on a computer that copies all emails sent
from that address....A Westminster source said last night: 'MPs need to take precautions.
The Damian Green case shows they are vulnerable to arrest, even if the information is not
a threat to national security. Sweeping of offices for bugs may be one precaution, but if
something is of great sensitivity, it is safer to pass things on in person.'" MPs fear security services now have 'open door' to snoop Independent On Sunday, 30 November 2008 |
| "I was born in Milton Keynes when it was a village. I completed my
journalistic apprenticeship on one local newspaper and I was still there, 32 years later,
on another. I'd worked part-time for 20 years to fit in with the needs of my autistic son
James, but I knew the town inside out. My dog-eared contacts book bulged with trusted
names and numbers. There were councillors, local dignitaries, gossipy hairdressers,
teachers ... and, of course, police officers. That sun-soaked morning last year, there was
no flicker of premonition that my world was about to be torn apart in a frenzy of police
officers, criminal investigations and court proceedings that would threaten not just my
own family life but the country's perception of Press freedom. I hadn't a clue, as I
shopped in Laura Ashley, that eight plainclothes police officers were poised to arrest me,
lock me in a cell, interrogate me, strip-search me and finally put me in the dock for a
multi-million-pound Crown Court trial after which I could technically be sent to prison
for life. I had no understanding of what heinous crime they thought I'd committed.
Officially, I was charged with three counts of the ancient common-law offence of aiding
and abetting misconduct in a public office - the same charges levelled at Shadow
Immigration Minister Damian Green last week when he was arrested over claims he had leaked
confidential Government documents....It was only afterwards that it dawned on me what
sinister implication this case could have for journalists all over Britain....
Technically, thousands of my media colleagues could be arrested just like me.....At the
time I simply felt violated. How dare these people
bug my conversations and even download texts from my
daughters?......What I discovered was shattering. I came to realise that the case wasn't
about me at all, but the rights of every journalist in the country.My defence barrister,
Gavin Millar QC, told the court that, under Article 10 of the Human Rights Convention, my
right to freedom of expression had been breached by the State. Thames Valley Police had no
right to have bugged my conversations with Mark, a confidential source, and my arrest was
also unlawful.....Millar went on to argue that journalistic privilege, unless it posed a
genuine threat to national security, must extend to a reporter's sources, otherwise no
confidential source would ever again speak to a reporter. His argument, which ran for
eight-and-a-half hours, was described by Judge Richard Southwell as a masterclass on
journalistic human rights and the freedom of the Press....When I heard about the arrest of
Conservative MP Damian Green last week, I was amazed at the parallels between his
experience and my own....". Sally Murrer - I faced life in jail ... just for writing about Milton Keynes Daily Mail, 29 November 2008 |
| "A Tory frontbencher was questioned by police last night after being
arrested as part of a leak inquiry. Damian Green, the Shadow Immigration Minister, was
arrested in Kent and had his home, constituency office and Commons office searched by counter-terrorism officers.
He may be charged for receiving documents allegedly passed by a male Home Office official
who was also arrested. Conservative sources said that David Cameron was furious about the
treatment of one of his team and described the arrest as 'Stalinesque'.....Mr Green, the
MP for Ashford, is facing questions about four leaks to the media between November last
year and September this year. They include a letter from the Home Secretary to Mr Brown
over the economic downturn’s impact on crime. It is understood that the Home Office
and Whitehall were alarmed at this disclosure because it was circulated among so few
people. Other damaging stories include a list,
prepared by Labour whips, of MPs’ likely voting intentions on legislation to extend
to 42 days’ detention without charge. Mr Green
was released and bailed to return to the police station in February. Speaking outside the
House of Commons early today, he said: 'I was astonished to have spent more than nine
hours under arrest for doing my job. I emphatically deny I have done anything wrong. In a
democracy, opposition politicians have a duty to hold the Government to account. I was
elected to the House of Commons precisely to do that and I certainly intend to continue
doing so.'” Tory frontbench MP Damian Green arrested over leaks London Times, 28 November 2008 |
| "Earlier this year the saga took a twist when it was revealed in Mr
Kearney's statement that he had been pressurised by the Metropolitan Police to bug Labour MP Sadiq Khan
while he met a constituent, Babar Ahmad, who was being held in the prison pending
extradition to the US. That led to a huge row about the bugging
of MPs." 'They said I would go to jail for life' BBC Online, 28 November 2008 |
| "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 |
| "Britain's intelligence chiefs want to crack down on the country's
media and are pursuing a law that would ban publication of 'sensitive' stories about the
services, according to a report from Joseph Farah's G2
Bulletin. The request came at a recent secret meeting with the Parliamentary
Intelligence and Security Committee, a team of members of Parliament who serve as
watchdogs for the country's intelligence services. The meeting appropriately was held in
the Cabinet Office complex adjoining Downing Street, a security facility at the heart of
Whitehall known as COBRA.....news has emerged of the
MI5 and MI6 joint request, which could lead to a dramatic shift in the relationship
between government and the media. The request comes at a time when Britain and its media
are the most spied on nation in the West. More than four million CCTV cameras keep
round-the-clock watch on citizens who are photographed on average over 400 times a day. A complex infrastructure of laws already ensures 'sensitive' stories are
protected – on the grounds they can 'put national security at risk.' Those who
violate the Official Secrets Act can get heavy prison sentences. Others come under a group
of laws collectively known as D-Notices. They cover publications of details ranging from
the home addresses of a security chief and decisions on the design of nuclear weapons
stored at Harwell to specific research work done at Porton Down – Britain's
Chemical-Biological Research Center – and naming field agents." 'Sensitive' news reports face crackdown WorldNetDaily, 18 November 2008 |
| "Britain's security agencies and
police would be given unprecedented and legally binding powers to ban the media from
reporting matters of national security, under proposals being discussed in Whitehall. The Intelligence and Security Committee, the parliamentary watchdog of
the intelligence and security agencies which has a cross-party membership from both
Houses, wants to press ministers to introduce legislation that would prevent news outlets
from reporting stories deemed by the Government to be against the interests of national
security. The committee also wants to censor reporting of police operations that are
deemed to have implications for national security. The ISC is to recommend in its next
report, out at the end of the year, that a commission be set up to look into its plans,
according to senior Whitehall sources. The ISC holds huge clout within Whitehall. It
receives secret briefings from MI5, MI6 and GCHQ and is highly influential in forming
government policy. Kim Howells, a respected former Foreign Office minister, was recently
appointed its chairman. Under the existing voluntary code of conduct, known as the
DA-Notice system, the Government can request that the media does not report a story.
However, the committee's members are particularly worried about leaks, which, they
believe, could derail investigations and the reporting of which needs to be banned by
legislation. Civil liberties groups say these restrictions would be 'very dangerous' and
'damaging for public accountability'. They also point out that censoring journalists when
the leaks come from officials is unjustified. But the committee, in its last annual
report, has already signalled its intention to press for changes. It states: 'The current
system for handling national security information through DA-Notices and the [intelligence
and security] Agencies' relationship with the media more generally, is not working as
effectively as it might and this is putting lives at risk.' According to senior Whitehall
sources the ISC is likely to advocate tighter controls on the DA-Notice system –
formerly known as D-Notice – which operates in co-operation and consultation between
the Government and the media." MPs seek to censor the media Independent, 10 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." |
| "Home secretary Jacqui Smith has insisted biometrics taken from people in high-street businesses will be secure. While anti-ID campaigners have said it will be almost impossible to lock
fingerprints to biographical details in a secure manner if those biometrics are taken
in a high-street business, Smith said on Thursday that the process would be secure. 'It is
clearly important, and part of the work we are doing and the plans we have in place, to
ensure the secure, controlled transfer of any biometrics,' Smith told ZDNet UK at a press
event. 'I believe it is technically possible to do that. I don't see the challenge is
greater because more people are accredited to do it.' Smith added that accredited
businesses would have a strong competitive reason to ensure that the biometric transfers
they perform are secure, as failure to do so would have an impact on their reputation.
However, so far the Home Office has given no
precise information as to how fingerprints would be linked to biographical data,
or any details about how the National Identity Scheme would be implemented....Conservative shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve told ZDNet UK in an
emailed statement that his party would discontinue the scheme, a move he said
would benefit security. 'We would scrap this expensive white elephant and use the
savings to do things that would actually improve our security,' Grieve said. 'The home
secretary should stop kidding herself, admit this project is dead and devote her energies
to carrying out her primary responsibility, which is ensuring the safety of the citizens
of this country.' Anti-ID card campaigner Phil Booth said that far from increasing
security, ID cards would be a risk. 'They are not introducing security and convenience,
they are doing exactly the opposite,' Booth told ZDNet UK. 'Enrolment in the high street
will introduce security holes a mile wide. People will link biometric details to false
biographical details, while the system will be plagued by systems errors.' The campaigner
added that biometric passports, drivers' licences and other forms of identification would
not be affected if ID cards were scrapped. 'This has nothing to do with passports, driving
licences, or anything else,' Booth said. 'Get rid of the ID cards scheme and all the
issues go away. There will be no 'black hole' left anywhere.'" Home secretary defends high-street biometrics plans ZDNet, 7 November 2008 |
| "The cost of new
soon-to-be-launched UK ID card is set to skyrocket to nearly £60 as the cost of capturing
biometric data and fingerprint amounts to almost as much as the cost of the card holding
them. The Press Association understands that this
hidden charge will now be outsourced to external providers that could include the post
office, high street stores or even supermarkets. The Home Office secretary, Jacqui Smith,
said that the 'market' for providing the data collection service would be worth around
£200 million for the 7 million or so adults expected to sign for the new card. The card,
which will become compulsory for foreign nationals as early as next year, will replace
bank statements, driving license and other documents that can be used as proof of
identity. The estimated cost of rolling out the highly controversial scheme has increased
several times over the last decade and is currently standing at more than £4.7 billion
according to the latest estimates. Similarly, the cost of passport has risen from £18
back in 1997 to £100 today when the cost of capturing biometric data is factored in.
Speaking at the Social Market Foundation in London, Ms Smith said that the new ID card
could eventually be used to replace the "dictionary of different passwords",
which would pave the way for a massive roll-out of stand alone and embedded ID card
readers." Home Office Enlists Help Of Supermarkets, Post Office As ID Card Costs Double SecurityPortal, 7 November 2008 |
| "Hundreds of drivers are being recruited to take part in
government-funded road-pricing trials that could result in charges of up to £1.30 a mile
on the most congested roads. The test runs will start early next year in four locations
and will involve fitting a satellite-tracking device to the vehicles of volunteers. An
on-board unit will automatically deduct payments from a shadow account set up in the
driver’s name....The on-board unit could be used to collect all road charges, such as
congestion charges in London and Manchester and tolls for crossing bridges and using new
lanes on motorways. In the longer term the technology
could be used to introduce pricing on all roads,
with the price varying according to the time of day, direction of travel and the level of
congestion. Drivers would use the internet to check all their payments on a single bill.
They would choose whether the bill showed where they had travelled or simply the amounts
they had paid. Ministers hope to overcome concerns about loss of privacy by allowing
drivers to instruct the on-board unit not to transmit locations to the billing centre but
simply the number of miles driven at each charging rate." National road toll devices to be tested by drivers next year London Times, 5 November 2008 |
| "Internet 'black boxes' will be
used to collect every email and web visit in the UK under the Government's plans for a
giant 'big brother' database, The Independent has learnt. Home Office officials
have told senior figures from the internet and telecommunications industries that the
'black box' technology could automatically retain and store raw data from the web before
transferring it to a giant central database controlled by the Government. Plans to create a database holding information about every phone call,
email and internet visit made in the UK have provoked a huge public outcry. Richard
Thomas, the Information Commissioner, described it as 'step too far' and the Government's
own terrorism watchdog said that as a 'raw idea' it was 'awful'. Nevertheless, ministers
have said they are committed to consulting on the new Communications Data Bill early in
the new year. News that the Government is already preparing the ground by trying to allay
the concerns of the internet industry is bound to raise suspicions about ministers' true
intentions. Further details of the database emerged on Monday at a meeting of internet
service providers (ISPs) in London where representatives from BT, AOL Europe, O2 and BSkyB
were given a PowerPoint presentation of the issues and the technology surrounding the
Government's Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP), the name given by the Home Office
to the database proposal. Whitehall experts working on the IMP unit told the meeting the
security and intelligence agencies wanted to use the stored data to help fight serious
crime and terrorism, and said the technology would allow them to create greater 'capacity'
to monitor all communication traffic on the internet. The 'black boxes' are an attractive
option for the internet industry because they would be secure and not require any direct
input from the ISPs. During the meeting Whitehall officials also tried to reassure the
industry by suggesting that many smaller ISPs would be unaffected by the 'black boxes' as
these would be installed upstream on the network and hinted that all costs would be met by
the Government. 'It was clear the 'back box' is the technology the Government will use to
hold all the data. But what isn't clear is what the Home Secretary, GCHQ and the security
services intend to do with all this information in the future,' said a source close to the
meeting. He added: 'They said they only wanted to return to a position they were in before
the emergence of internet communication, when they were able to monitor all correspondence
with a police suspect. The difference here is they will be in a much better position to
spy on many more people on the basis of their internet behaviour. Also there's a grey area
between what is content and what is traffic. Is what is said in a chat room content or
just traffic?' Ministers say plans for the database have not been confirmed, and that it
is not their intention to introduce monitoring or storage equipment that will check or
hold the content of emails or phonecalls on the traffic." Government black boxes will 'collect every email' Independent, 5 November 2008 |
| "Google gathers so much detailed information about its users that one
critic says some state intelligence bureaus look 'like child protection services' in
comparison. A few German government bodies have mounted a resistance.....Google's Internet
empire has become a political issue here. And only a fraction of the company's data comes
from the car-mounted cameras. There’s also the popular Gmail service ("Google
Mail" in Germany), the YouTube video portal, a social network called Orkut, and the
Google Desktop program, which allows users to search their own computers. The company has
also introduced its own browser, called Chrome. And it's entered the world of mobile
communication with a new cell phone operating system called Android. The first
Android-compatible phones all but sold out before the official market launch in the US
last week, with 1.5 million advance orders. With its services, Google has established
itself as a global online power in just a decade. Through massive acquisition of Internet
services -- like YouTube -- it has built itself into a data-collection empire. One click
by a user lets Google take search data, along with a date and time, as well as specific
details like IP addresses, the type of browser used, language settings and even log-in
user names.....It’s also well-known that Google checks for keywords in the content of
e-mails sent through its mail program, then displays relevant advertisements in a sidebar.
This clever exploitation of information for direct advertising has turned Google into a
multi-billion-dollar organization. The company brought in over $16 billion in revenue last
year. This is what makes the debate in Germany such bad news for the corporation. Denying
Google data cuts to the heart of its business model. More and more customers are
wondering: What does Google know about me? Well, compared to what Google knows about us,
many intelligence agencies look 'like child protection services,' says Hendrik Speck,
professor at the applied sciences university in Kaiserslautern, a southwestern German
city. Theoretically, he says, Google could record a query for pregnancy tests, then nine
months later provide advertisements for diapers. Or -- six years later -- it could show
offers for after-school homework help. 'The more data Google collects from its users, the
higher the price it can ask for advertisements,' says Speck..... As the company’s
head of data protection, Fleischer is in charge of protecting hundreds of millions of
users' data -- 29 million in Germany alone. It’s also his job to assuage the growing
unease on the part of many users and politicians about the Google 'data monster.' The
Molfsee citizens' concerns are just as unfounded, Fleischer says, and for the same reason:
'We collect a lot of data, but nothing that identifies any particular person,' he
insists.For Gerald Reischl, author of a book in German called 'The Google Trap,' such
assurances aren't enough. The corporation's 'machinations, hunger for power and dominance
need to be scrutinized,' says Reischl. Even those few Internet users who don’t
regularly access Google sites end up with their data accessible to the company anyway,
thanks to a program called 'Google Analytics.' Google Analytics is a free program for web
site owners to keep track of usage patterns on their site. The data is also saved by
Google. Some sites don’t even mention this to their users. 'Analytics is Google's
most dangerous opportunity to spy' says Reischl. According to some estimates the software
is integrated into 80 percent of frequently visited German-language Internet sites.
SPIEGEL ONLINE no longer uses Google Analytics. 'We want to ensure that data on our
users’ browsing patterns don't leave our site,' says Wolfgang Büchner, one of
SPIEGEL ONLINE's two chief editors.....According to Fleischer... 'We don't know our
users,' he says, 'nor do we want to.' He says Internet logs aren't related to individuals,
and stored IP addresses are nothing but numbers that connect computers to each other.
Under no circumstances, says Fleischer, would data from a conventional Internet search be
combined with the personal information saved through a service that requires a login, such
as Gmail....Thilo Weichert, head of Schleswig-Holstein’s Independent State Agency for
Data Protection, based in Kiel, can relate experiences to the contrary....Google’s
German headquarters tends to react negatively to Weichert’s name. He doesn’t
give them an easy time: The data protection specialist from northern Germany has already
issued a public warning on the Analytics program. 'Most users of the product aren't
entirely aware that by operating Google Analytics they're utilizing a service that
transfers data to the United States, to be broadly used and exploited,' he has written.
'This violates the data privacy laws protecting those who use the Web sites.' Google
reacted with a letter to the governor of Schleswig-Holstein, warning of economic losses
and demanding that Weichert be called off his attack. Such reactions only incite Weichert.
'The company operates in an unacceptably non-transparent manner,' he says. 'Their users
are basically standing naked in front of them, and Google itself discloses only what is
absolutely necessary about its data handling strategy, and then only under
pressure.'....Meanwhile, a top data protection specialist at Google named Peter Fleischer
likes to talk about what’s to come. “Google Health” is a databank where
patients can store their medical records and retrieve them over the Internet. This service
could radically change the nature of the health system -- and it could change Google
itself as well. When the topic turns to health, most users are likely to sit up and take
notice. They start asking what happens with their data." Does Google Know Too Much? Der Spiegel, 30 October 2008 |
| "It's not insane to be paranoid. That is the comforting message I
took from the speech given this week by Sir Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public
Prosecutions, who warned the Government not to abuse its 'enormous powers of access to
information'. In a direct hit on the Home Secretary's desire to record on an Orwellian
database every e-mail, phone call and website visited, he said that 'freedom's back is
broken' if ministers give in to the pressures of a State that is insatiable.....The same
problems beset the terrorist issue. The Government has been unable to point to a single
case where 42-day detention, or increased surveillance powers, would have made us safer.
Police officers can already get information on most suspects' phone calls and e-mails from
network providers. The suspicion is that the Government wants to hold that data centrally
only to mount fishing expeditions, looking for patterns of behaviour. 'We should take very
great care to imagine the world we are creating before we build it,' Sir Ken said. 'We
might end up living with something we can't bear.'” Camilla Cavendish - I may be paranoid, but they are watching us London Times, 24 October 2008 |
| "This year’s Privacy International survey put Britain bottom of
the European league for surveillance and civil intrusion, a miserable state of affairs for
the home of Magna Carta. [Home Secretary Jackie] Smith’s GCHQ 'interception
modernisation programme', reportedly at a staggering £12 billion, will run alongside the
ID card register, the driving licence centre, the numberplate recognition computer and the
CCTV network in a 'pentagon' of control. Its data bank will one day and for sure fuse with
banking and employment records and that stumbling giant, the National Health Service
personal records computer, each polluting the other with crashing terminals, uncorrectable
inaccuracies and false trails. We know from Russian hacking services that such information
will be freely available because it cannot be kept secret from intruders, thieves or the
laptops of careless officials. That is why the pages of Computer Weekly are crammed with
snake-oil salesmen claiming 'total security' packages. I remember a shack in a Bangalore
suburb offering to 'break all computer encryptions known to man'. The spider at the centre
of this web of control, GCHQ’s Iain Lobban, appears to have so mesmerised Smith that
officials at the Home Office last week leaked a warning that his demands were
'impractical, disproportionate, politically unattractive and possibly unlawful'. Smith was
unmoved. Like every home secretary, she wants, at the flick of a switch, to know who is
doing what, when and where anywhere in Britain and in real time. This is truly Big Brother
stuff. Since 9/11 there has sprung into being a war-on-terror version of the
'military-industrial complex', against which Eisenhower warned Americans as the cold war
developed in the 1950s. The complex roams seminars and think tanks with blood-curdling
accounts of what Osama Bin Laden is planning. Visitors need go no further than the
biennial defence sales exhibition in London’s Docklands to see Eisenhower’s
monsters on parade. They feed on the politics of fear, a leitmotif of this government. The
entire nation is regarded as under suspicion. Never was the adage of Louis Brandeis, the
US justice, more relevant: free men are naturally alert to the wiles of evil-minded rulers
but 'the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachments by men of zeal,
well-meaning but without understanding'. Last week GCHQ lobbyists took to the press
declaring that any opposition to Smith’s surveillance plan would be 'disastrous' for
national security. They even wheeled out the familiar back-up argument for those who might
regard £12 billion as a ludicrous overreaction to terrorism alone. Without the 500,000
intercepts placed on mobile phone calls each year, The Times reported, 'we could not begin
to solve any kidnap whatever'. Likewise the proponents of ID cards call them 'vital' for
public services and those of the NHS computer 'a life saver' for accident victims. They
are nothing of the sort. A feature of this campaign is its sheer mendacity. Smith last
week promised that her surveillance regime would cover only details of electronic
communication, not contents. This is incredible. It reminds me of the old Home Office lie
that all phone taps 'require the home secretary’s personal authority'. Smith’s
apparatchiks want to read the lot. A similar line was spun last year by James Hall, the
head of Home Office 'identity and passport services', in claiming that identity details
would be safeguarded and not sent abroad. At the last Lisbon conference, European Union
members agreed to 'cross-border interoperability . . . highlighted in electronic identity
and e-procurement', with Lady Scotland, the attorney-general, in active participation.
Hall must have known this. ID cards were defended by David Blunkett, a former home
secretary, as to 'protect identity'. He knew they would be churned out from a Bombay back
street at £5 a time. The government does not know the meaning of the term 'safeguard'. A
year ago all 25m recipients of child benefit were told their personal details, addresses
and bank accounts had been handed to contractors and lost. Smith parrots the
totalitarian’s answer that 'the innocent have nothing to fear'. But they do. They
know from experience that government cannot be trusted with private information. In
addition, any errors in that information are almost impossible to correct. Ask anyone
whose credit rating has been falsely challenged by a bank computer." My farewell plea to MPs: defend liberty Sunday Times, 26 October 2008 |
| "....there’s only been three books on NSA, and I wrote all
three....NSA specializes in SIGINT, which is signals intelligence. And what that is is
eavesdropping. And that’s actually where the US gets most of its intelligence....it
gets most of its intelligence from eavesdropping on communications, whether it’s
telephone calls or email or faxes, computer transfers of information between computers,
any kind of information like that, instant messages. It intercepts it. So NSA is the big
ear. And the way it works is, it picks up communications from satellites, it taps undersea
and underground fiber-optic cables, it gets information any way it can...This company,
Narus, which was founded in Israel and has large Israel connections, does
the—basically the tapping of the communications on AT&T. And Verizon chose
another company, ironically also founded in Israel and largely controlled by and developed
by people in Israel called Verint. So these two companies specialize in what’s known
as mass surveillance. Their literature—I read this literature from Verint, for
example—is supposed to only go to intelligence agencies and so forth, and it says, 'We specialize in mass surveillance,' and that’s what they do. They put these mass surveillance equipment
in these facilities. So you have AT&T, for example, that, you know, considers
it’s their job to get messages from one person to another, not tapping into messages,
and you get the NSA that says, we want, you know, copies of all this. So that’s where
these companies come in. These companies act as the intermediary basically between the
telecom companies and the NSA...this is a company that the US government is getting all
its tapped information from. It’s a company that Verizon uses as its tapping company,
its eavesdropping company. And very little is known about these companies. Congress has
never looked into any of this. I don’t know—I don’t think they even know
that there is—that these companies exist. But the company that Verizon uses, Verint,
the founder of the company, the former head of the company, is now a fugitive
in—hiding out in Africa in the country of Namibia, because he’s wanted on a
number of felony warrants for fraud and other charges. And then, two other top executives
of the company, the general counsel and another top official of the parent company, have
also pled guilty to these charges. So, you know, you’ve got companies—these
companies have foreign connections with potential ties to foreign intelligence agencies,
and you have problems of credibility, problems of honesty and all that. And these
companies—through these two companies pass
probably 80 percent or more of all US communications
at one point or another. . And it’s even—gets even worse in the fact that these
companies also supply their equipment all around the world to other countries, to
countries that don’t have a lot of respect for individual rights—Vietnam, China,
Libya, other countries like that. And so, these countries use this equipment to filter out
dissident communications and people trying to protest the government. It gives them the
ability to eavesdrop on communications and monitor dissident email communications. And as
a result of that, people are put in jail, and so forth....These
conversations are transcribed. They’re—and then they’re recorded, and
they’re kept forever. There’s a big
building in Texas that’s being built in San Antonio that’s going to be used to
house a lot of these conversations. NSA is running out of space at Fort Meade, their
headquarters, so they had to expand, and they’re building this very big building.
It’s reportedly going to be about the size of the Alamodome down there, to store all
these—this huge amount of data communications. And when you think how much
information two gigabytes could be put on a small thumb drive, you can imagine how much of
information could be stored in a data warehouse the size of—almost the size of the
Alamodome....the overall big problem is that there is a tremendous amount of eavesdropping
going on. It’s all being stored, it’s all being analyzed, either electronically
or by a human. And the public really doesn’t have much of—knowledge of all this
that’s going on right now." James Bamford, author of The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America Democracy Now, 14 October 2008 |
| Earlier |
"Officials from the top of Government to
lowly council officers will be given unprecedented powers to access details of every
phone call in Britain under laws coming into force tomorrow. The new rules compel phone
companies to retain information, however private, about all landline and mobile calls, and
make them available to some 795 public bodies and quangos. The move, enacted by
the personal decree of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, will give police and security services a right they have
long demanded: to delve at will into the phone records of British citizens and
businesses. The Government will be given access to details of every phone call in Britain.
....The initiative, formulated in the wake of the Madrid and London terrorist
attacks of 2004 and 2005, was put forward as a vital tool in the fight against terrorism .... Files will also be kept on the
sending and receipt of text messages. By 2009 the Government
plans to extend the rules to cover internet use: the websites we have visited, the people we have emailed and phone calls made over the net.... The new measures were
implemented after the Home Secretary signed a 'statutory instrument' on July 26. The
process allows the Government to alter laws |
| "The huge Commons majority he [Blair] enjoyed, the craven
pusillanimity of his party, the implosion of the Conservatives and the consequent absence
of opposition, other than in the Lords – and, to an extent, in the courts –
conspired with a genuine, though irrational,
fear of terrorism and rising street crime
to let the State take greater control over the citizen than it has enjoyed before
in modern peacetime..... Maya Evans found this out when she stood by the Cenotaph to
recite the names of Britain’s Iraqi war dead. For this she was arrested, arraigned
and left with a criminal record. It is hard to conceive of a police officer a generation
ago taking any notice of her since she was causing no public order problem at all. But Ms
Evans had fallen foul of a clause in the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act
which established a one kilometre zone around the Palace of Westminster, within whose
boundaries political criticism can be voiced
only on application to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.... recent research has uncovered 266 separate powers under which the police and other state agents
can enter your home, often using force to do so.... As Peter Lilley, the former minister who led the Cabinet revolt that
resulted in the abandonment of the last ID scheme, observed: 'There is no policy that has
been hawked, unsold, around Whitehall for longer than identity cards. It was always
brought to us as a solution looking for problems.' September
11 and the threat from international terrorism was the problem it had most been looking
for.... There are people who remember
carrying the old wartime ID cards, scrapped in 1952, and cannot see what all the fuss is
about. It is about the database, not the card. This is not about protecting our identities but
about placing them at the disposal of the
state and sundry other organisations that
will have access to them. .... this extension of state control
through the unfettered and unthinking deployment of modern
surveillance technology and databases for
which the Blair years (and those of his successor, unless he does something dramatic to
change course) will most be remembered. Our children, and theirs, will be perplexed as to
why their forebears came so easily, and with so little public debate, to allow the State to manipulate their lives." Philip Johnston, home affairs editor and assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph The Charles Douglas-Home Essay, 2007 - 'Are we a free country any more?' London Times, 20 July 2007 |
| "Almost 450,000
requests were made to monitor people’s telephone calls, e-mails and post by secret agencies and other
authorised bodies in just over a year, the spying watchdog said yesterday. In the first
report of its kind from the Interceptions of
Communications Commissioner, it was also revealed
that nearly 4,000 errors were reported in a 15-month period from 2005 to 2006. .....
He said it was time to lift a ban on tapping the phones of
MPs and peers....." Privacy row as checks on phones and e-mails hit 439,000 London Times, 20 February 2007 |
"The
FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal
investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's
microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations. ......Kaplan's opinion said
that the eavesdropping technique 'functioned whether the phone was powered on or off.'
Some handsets can't be fully powered down without removing the
battery.....Security-conscious corporate executives routinely remove the batteries from
their cell phones, he added....A BBC article
from 2004 reported that intelligence agencies routinely employ the remote-activiation
method. 'A mobile sitting on the desk of a politician or
businessman can act as a powerful, undetectable bug,' the
article said, 'enabling them to be activated at a later date to pick up sounds even when
the receiver is down.'........ A 2003 lawsuit revealed that the FBI
was able to surreptitiously turn on the built-in microphones in automotive systems like
General Motors' OnStar to snoop on passengers'
conversations. When FBI agents remotely activated
the system and were listening in, passengers in the vehicle could not tell that their
conversations were being monitored. Malicious hackers have followed suit. A report
last year said Spanish authorities had detained a man who write a Trojan horse that
secretly activated a computer's video camera and forwarded him the recordings." |
"The
U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call
monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in
court papers filed in New York federal court. The allegation is part of a court filing
adding AT&T, the nation's largest telephone company, as a defendant in a breach of
privacy case filed earlier this month on behalf of Verizon Communications Inc. and
BellSouth Corp. customers. The suit alleges that the three carriers, the NSA and President
George W. Bush violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the U.S. Constitution, and
seeks money damages. 'The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after
9/11,' plaintiff's lawyer Carl Mayer said in a
telephone interview. 'This undermines that
assertion'. The lawsuit is related to an alleged NSA
program to record and store data on calls placed by subscribers. More than 30 suits have
been filed over claims that the carriers, the three biggest U.S. telephone companies,
violated the privacy rights of their customers by cooperating with the NSA in an effort to
track alleged terrorists.... Mayer and Afran said an
unnamed former employee of the AT&T unit provided them with evidence that the NSA
approached the carrier with the proposed plan. Afran
said he has seen the worker's log book and independently confirmed the source's
participation in the project. He declined to identify the employee." |
"Police in Israel say they have uncovered
a huge industrial spying ring which used computer viruses to probe the systems of many
major companies. At least 15 Israeli firms have been implicated in the espionage plot,
with 18 people arrested in Israel and two more held by British police. Among those under suspicion are major Israeli telecoms and media
companies. Police say the companies used a 'Trojan
horse' computer virus written by an Israeli to hack into rivals' systems. Interpol and the
authorities in Britain, Germany and the US are already involved in investigating the
espionage, which Israeli police fear may involve major international companies." |
|
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NLPWESSEX,
natural law publishing |
