Top Euro court: UK's former snooping regime breached human rights The UK government breached human rights rules by failing to ensure proper oversight of its mass surveillance programmes, according to the European Court of Human Rights. In a judgment handed down today, the court said the safeguards within the government's system for bulk interception of communication were not robust enough to …
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2018/06/18/chinas-social-credit-system-spreads-to-more-daily-transactions/
"Under the guise of counter-terrorism, the UK has adopted the most authoritarian surveillance regime of any Western state, corroding democracy itself and the rights of the British public," said Big Brother Watch."
Chekism: where the secret political police strongly control all spheres of society.
If you look at the USA and Russia. If you look at all the ex CIA, KGB and FSB officers working for hedge funds, or in Russia being oligarchs, you can see that those countries already have Chekist regimes.
Why do retired senior US intelligence officials get to keep their top secret security clearances? Why are they entitled to on-going briefing on top secret matters when they're no longer working for the government? It is so they can run business, advice hedge funds, control retirement funds, and control private industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekism
"Why do retired senior US intelligence officials get to keep their top secret security clearances? Why are they entitled to on-going briefing on top secret matters when they're no longer working for the government?"
There have been cases of former intelligence officers being called in to consult in "This is what we THINK is happening, but you've dealt with this guy face-to-face -- what do YOU think is going on?" cases. For that, they need clearances to get to look at the raw data. I don't necessarily think a clearance should be revoked at the instant that someone leaves a TLA, but I can see a case to be made for a sunset clause: after n-number of years, that sort of interpersonal data becomes too stale to be useful and clearances should be allowed to lapse.
In my experience specific clearances are linked to your role and most certainly get revoked once you leave that role. Generic clearance levels (currently SC, DV etc in the UK) don't and can be transferred between roles but these don't function as an 'all areas access', just a sort of indication that this chap is ok and you don't have to be too careful around them. They are also time limited.
Yeah, as expected. And they knew what they were doing when they broke the law.
But they're the government so they won't face prosecution.
The laws we pay them to write and enforce aren't good enough for our civil servants to obey. The laws they write and enforce only apply to us.
For the security conscious whether they be simply paranoid or engaged in nefarious activity one must assume everybody... from the government down to your next door neighbor is keeping tabs on you. Here at work we have an email alert setup that tells us when the MAC code of certain phones appear on the wifi network. Postman, Sandwich van driver, Boss etc.
Well, the authorities SAY the bulk-tapping is no longer happening, but we have no way of knowing that
I just assumed that GCHQ keep tabs on the Yanks, and that the NSA keep tabs on the Brits, and they swap relevant info.
Note that I'm not suggesting they should or shouldn't, only I'd be very suprised if there's not some sort of arrangement in place that sidesteps domestic lawmakers. After all, you never know who the plebs will vote for next.
So the risk of privacy abuses exists (to the extent that privacy is considered in a legal context) because the information use isn't appropriately guarded but the practice in place is not otherwise considered unlawful. Fix the oversight and the practice meets the legislation (if not the cultural niceties).
Or at least the practice that was in place would meet the legislation, because now current practice is covered under a different regime.
Agree with some of the complaint, dismiss other bits, split decisions anyway, have some costs, no enforcement. As the icon says, "Meh!"
To everyone involved in bringing this case... if you happen to read this - you have my thanks for keeping the pressure up on this. You do all of us that value our rights and liberties a great service.
Have a beer for your troubles. Even if that seems a little light as a reward.
So this is another nail in the coffin of state surveillance, huh?
Hey! You've got to take those nails back out! You forgot to put state surveillance in the coffin before you started nailing it up! Next time we need something buried, we're going with a different group of coffin makers.
However, the court said the sharing of information with foreign government was not in breach of the rules.
WTF ? Not ok to collect data because appropriate handling processes were lacking. Sounds fair enough!
Share data with third parties that have even worse procedures for handling the data ? That is ok?????
What are they smoking I need some for the mother-in-law!
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