Snowden was right, rules human rights court as it declares UK spy laws broke ECHR Surveillance laws permitting GCHQ to operate its Tempora dragnet mass surveillance system broke the law, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled. The judgment, handed down this morning in Strasbourg, vindicates the Edward Snowden revelations of 2013. The former NSA contractor revealed that Western spy agencies had been …
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I can understand the motives - wanting to get all the information possible and then trawl through it to find information useful for 'protecting the public', but the issue is that if you do that there is temptation to find something, anything, to justify the mass data grab in the first place (otherwise you might not be allowed to do it again).
The problem is that 'the State' often considers itself, and its survival to be 'the public interest' and that any activities considered to be even potentially attacking 'the state' or current members of the hierarchy constitute 'subversives' who 'need' to be watched and targeted. They need to remember who coined the phrase 'you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide'*.
(Big Brother icon for the obvious reason.)
*It was the NAZIs.
In reality, except, for example, in militaristic dictatorships, the "State" doesn't have a concrete reality at all. Unless implemented by coercion, it's no more than a convention grounded in the common consent of the populace.
There is however a danger that those entrusted by that common consent with managing the national interest come to confuse that with their own personal interests. The ultimate result is dictatorship of the worst kind - bureaucratic dictatorship, which is faceless and thus impossible to negotiate with. The saddest aspects of this are that those responsible commonly believe that they're acting for the common good and they close their eyes to unintended consequences.
@Eclectic Man
Sorry mate but it was used much earlier. In 1917 or 1918. It was in a book written by a journalist called Upton Sinclair. The book was called, if I can remember my rebellious student days correctly,The profits of religion (or something like that, it was a long time ago) and I thought it was a pile of crap.
Yep, "The Profits of Religion", 1917. However, it's worth bearing in mind that that book, along with the others in the series, were a satirical attack on various American institutions, and the way people blindly accepted them and the problems they caused. People are likely to be more familiar with his book "The Jungle", which single-handledly halved the sales of meat in the US (obviously only in the short term; people have short memories) when it exposed the exploitation in that industry. The whole point of the quote about having nothing to fear was that it was supposed to be a bad thing - the protagonist was complaining about having all his communications read by the authorities, and the faceless bureaucracy simply didn't care, giving that as the reply.
So it's worth remembering both the origin and its later use. Originally, it was a criticism of exactly the type of spying that Snowden was upset about, and it's tacit acceptance by both the government and the people. Later, it was adopted by the Nazis who took that sort of warning as an instruction manual on how to oppress people. Which gives us something of an object lesson - if you ignore warnings about surveillance and the ignoring of human rights, you risk ending up with people thinking that's how things are supposed to work, and at the extreme, Nazis.
OK, thanks folks. I'm currently reading Margery Allingham's "The Crime at Black Dudley", having just finished "The Tyranny of Merit" by Michael J Sandel (both rather good, actually). I'll see if I can get "The Profits of religion" from the library. Although some have interpreted the phrase "coining a phrase" to mean using it, rather than inventing it, but I take your point. Sadly it seems I am not as knowledgeable as I thought I was :o(
The irony is, of course, that mass surveillance yields basically nothing unless you have the vast manpower to read and monitor everything you collect. The killers of Lee Rigby, for example, were known to be a risk and were being monitored by MI5 etc - phone taps, emails read etc - and yet they were able to hatch and carry out their plot without hindrance. The Paris terrorists communicated by that most secure of methods, SMS.
Mooseman, nobody actually needs to read through it all, any more than anyone has to read through all the information available on the Internet to find out what they want to know. You program a computer to do the searching and filtering.
And while terrorists and criminals will often encrypt, obfuscate and/or disguise their communications, businessmen and politicians usually don't, allowing the interceptor to gather lucrative insider information about big companies, and all sorts of useful information that can be used to influence/blackmail politicians and political decisions.
"You program a computer to do the searching and filtering"
Except that clearly doesn't work. A computer will search for what it's told to search for, so if the people being monitored have half a brain they will use coded references rather than the trigger phrases. The danger with mass surveillance is of course that nobody seems to be accountable for either the monitoring process or the results of that surveillance.
Who oversees what GCHQ et al is doing? Clearly not the government (MI5 was said to have been monitoring Harold Wilson when he was PM), or at least not parliament - what our current government get up to is anyone's guess.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
This wasn't even true before the invention of computers and self-learning pattern recognition algorithms. For instance, if you discover Winston Smith doesn't love Big Brother any more you can go through his stored back traffic and arrest his correspondents too.
And if you think mass surveillance is about finding the odd lone wolf paedoterrorist needle in a multiverse of haystacks, then the Minitruth propaganda is definitely working.
If you have access to masses of private communications & other data, and the means to run it through complex algorithms, there is also a huge temptation to search for things that will make you money or give you power rather than merely things that are a threat to the country. And if the whole process is secret, there is little risk of being caught doing so, and so the probability of it *not* being used for those things is practically zero.
Data is power. Power corrupts.
"All seems to be making a point but without any actual useful outcome."
Correct you are! But this whole exercise surely paid lots of people lots of money, and looks good on their CV. If you call that useful outcome...
Remember Gordon 10 in your report!
Big Brother icon because he's probably here in the dungeons of El Reg Forums and Comments taking notes.
"Big Brother icon because he's probably here in the dungeons of El Reg Forums and Comments taking notes."
I suspect the clerks in MI5 have been replaced by an AI that looks for key words and phrases now but I would expect most comments sections and forums to be viewed regularly in some way.
As the Register is a public web site, and access to the fora* is open to all, I do not doubt that a lot of 'security services' read it daily, indeed someone probably has it on their job description to monitor what we (the commentarderie) are posting.
So, umm, 'hello' and 'good evening' to all the spooks. :o)
*fora is the latin plural of "forum', I'm trying to be erudite for once, as I understand the British spooks are mostly recruited from Oxford and Cambridge university classics and history toffs.
"If you want to address them personally, you'll have to incorporate some trigger phrases in your post. And I shall refrain from using such words, for now."
That's okay, I'll help with that! Here's Mark Thomas back in 1999 flying over Menwith Hill in a hot air balloon chatting to his mum on a mobile phone. Because he's cheeky like that.
(Video set to the appropriate timestamp, but it's worth a watch all the way through).
So what your saying, lipstick round the nipples, is that, huge titties, I might, enormous penis, accidentally give away, big wobbly breasts, what nefarious things I'm up to on the internet, by analysing key words and phrases in my, Freudian gymslip, mutterings?
Interesting. I'll keep that in mind in future.
most probably those are just the type of phrases that are flying around the ether at Westminster
"MPs blocked from ogling 'web smut' 300,000 times – while in Parliament"
https://www.theregister.com/2013/09/04/mps_binge_on_smut_theyre_trying_to_ban/
you'll have to incorporate some trigger phrases in your post
That's the fun, yes? When the NSA's CARNIVORE program became public, some years ago, I added the following to my collection of Usenet signatures:1
Distracted by the music of Anthrax, I let my bin, laden with goods, crash into a bush.
I tried to work a few more triggers in but couldn't get them into a single sentence without it becoming awkward.
1I had a little script that used fortune(1) to select among sig quotes, and I'd run in under vi with a !! command.
>Dame Mary Beard is not exactly a rabid Tory, but I didn't think she was on Vladimir's payroll.
I think she is only recruiting agents for the BBC
Of course it may be that senior tutors don't watch the news and are still busy recruiting agents for the NKVD and are a little worried that the nice Mr Trotsky hasn't published much recently
Is there a key to unlock the cage that is riddled with mysteries that capture the enigma that defends the indefensible or is it the logical fate of all those so captivated to suffer the slings and arrows of great and ever greater misfortune and never to be free from persecution and prosecution?
Does common sense tell one that the root of all evil is planted and would grow wild in those fields with actors which imagine they are exempt from government and national security and secret intelligence service surveillance? And how certifiably crazy would that sort of exemption be, encouraging as it most certainly could and therefore would, all manner of mostly unpleasant and foolish shenanigans.
Do honourable Members of Parliament receive/believe they receive that right dodgy privilege?
Do National Security and Secret Intelligence Services grant and entertain it?
"
I suspect the clerks in MI5 have been replaced by an AI that looks for key words and phrases now
"
A lot more sophisticated than merely looking for key words and phrases. It's capable of correllating thousands of communications looking for connections and reactions. Reactions to statements and contrived events can be analysed in real time, allowing instant adjustments to the propaganda etc. to cause a desired outcome.
A lot more sophisticated than merely looking for key words and phrases. It's capable of correllating thousands of communications looking for connections and reactions. Reactions to statements and contrived events can be analysed in real time, allowing instant adjustments to the propaganda etc. to cause a desired outcome......Cynic_999
And still a novel work in the primary stages of unprecedented stealthy progress, Cynic_999, as one would surely expect, given the spooky nature of the ProgramMING Project and ITs AIgents.
Holywood Loughside Palace Barracks Operations trumping Hollywood Hills Rodeo Drive Abortions is a resultant cryptic analysis and pronouncement on that body of securely secreted evidence .... which is encouraging, given the dire straits state and consequences of such earlier defaulted flash crash bang wallop Wild West fiat capital drivers.
Whatever next, El Reg ‽ ..... The Inexorable Rise of Virtual Machine Movements with Augmented Virtually Real IT Movies to Follow for/from TitanICQ Film Studios ‽ :-)
And little something ESPecial too for the 3rd Floor Alfred House
Interesting to see that "France, the Netherlands and Norway all formally supported the UK". Norway, note, shares with the UK its non-membership of the EU but founder membership of the even longer-standing and wider-ranging Council of Europe - and hence subject to the European Court of Human Rights. So we see a genuinely pan-European debate unfolding.
When we read the details, it is really just fine-print dickering about what constitutes adequate precautions against abuse; all are agreed that bulk slurping is fine in principle.
Suppose hypothetically that some analyst in GCHQ is caught spying on their ex and new partner. They get summarily sacked, literally frogmarched to the door - end of career, period. Has the regime failed because they were able to somehow evade the system safeguards and do that, or has it worked because the system laid an audit trail which led to them being caught and made an example of?
Fun and games for all the family.
The problem lies right in the title : dragnet.
No fine-tuning, no discrimination, just violate everyone's privacy and hope you find something. After all, you're The Law. The good guy. Except when you abuse your powers to check on your wife, which is sooo easy to do. Just rewatch True Lies.
I would like, nay, I demand, a report on how many times this global violation of privacy has resulted in stopping crime, let alone terrorism.
If you could prove, without doubt, that raping my privacy has stopped significantly more criminals than you could have without it, then I might rethink my attitude on that.
But you won't, because you cannot actually justify any concrete benefit.
A fundamental principle of effective intelligence gathering is "if you're looking for a needle in a haystack, don't unnecessarily increase the size of the haystack".
Good intelligence is focused and depends on cumulative building of a meaningful jigsaw puzzle. The scatter gun approach is wasteful of effort and can lead to red herrings right left and centre. However it feels like it's "being effective" to agencies populated by individuals with a profound distrust of the motives of everyone outside the agency. I've noted this variety of paranoia in quite a few senior incumbents of non-political government agency positions and it propagates downwards to drive the entire agency culture.
Now correct me if I am wrong, the way I read this article is that mass surveillance is legal. Provided there are adequate safeguards to prevent access to the data. Access should only be possible when a warrant has been issued.
In other words, the government can run surveillance on you and collect the data without a warrant or even reasonable suspicion/evidence to grant a warrant. Nice to see our human rights are well protected.
That said in theory the Government/legal authorities can only access this surveillance data with a legal warrant. The only reason they can collect this data is to access it with a warrant.
So why are private companies Google for one allowed to do mass surveillance and access the collected data. Where are my human rights when it comes to private companies?
@Twanky yes, I agree (+1) some have signed terms and conditions, but human rights are not something that can be signed away.
But the likes of Google with whom I have no account, have never had an account and never signed any terms and conditions still collect my data?
"Government/legal authorities can only access this surveillance data with a legal warrant."
If they can only look at the data with a warrant AND warrants need to be granted by judges what's the real difference between the warrant can only look at things from now or the warrant can also check for historical acts?
The core problem is the access, abuse of access and lack of accountability
In 1984 I worked for a major telecoms operation to transform the network of exchanges from mechanical to digital (we worked on AXE10) equipment. On the same floor, a very solid floor carrying tons of mechanical Strowger switches that deafened you during the "busy" period, 0800-1000 and after lunch were the guys who had to maintain the old gear. (*1)
Blank stares and sometimes evil glances awaited us. The Strowger guys knew their number was up, and the date and the time. A window of 15 minutes was all it needed to "cut over" from Strowger to the electronic AXE 10 housed in about 30 cabinets similar to medium sized office stationery cabinets.
A few weeks before cut over hostilities thawed between Strowger guys resplendent in their BT/GPO issue brown jackets and us pesky electronic types. They had received their severance/pension forecast a few day earlier. Maybe this changed their view on life.
As we started to thaw the cold war we joined the Strowger guys for lunch, we also ended down the pub on a Friday tea time....
But in the exchange at lunchtime there was a different entertainment on tap (I use the word "tap" for a reason).
Lunch was taken, not in the rest room, but at the main distribution frame (MDF). This where all the underground cables enter the exchange and are carefully terminated on a very large frame for distribution to various equipment.
The Strowger boys had access to a piece of "hook up" kit. This was used to distribute nuisance calls to the exchange floors by loudspeaker. The purpose was solely to aid in the detection of crime and to manually trace a call through the system.
However, the equipment could be tapped into any number...... and lunch time at Bradford was their favourite numbers(s) .
Mandy Whiplash (Regomized) was the star attraction - clients calling and Mandy obliging. How we laughed. Say nothing on a phone that you wouldn't say to your mum.
(*1) Google "Strowger Almon B undertaker" for an insight into this invention.
"We all want to have control over our personal information, and to have a government that respects our right to privacy and our freedom of expression." .... Megan Goulding
How very naive of any lawyer to even think that such is possible and likely from governments which need control of personal information in order to protect their privacy and freedom to abuse with suppression of expression and subversion of information exposing their misdeeds and endemic systemic failings. The law is such an ass centre stage in right dodgy command performances of fascist foe and fake friend alike.
On Tuesday I wrote a different post to this. It actually gave the detail of what David Llewellyn posted, and examined it. My article also revealed who was behind the complaint against him, and referred to some interesting history of Llewellyn’s own investigations.However I received strong advice that to publish my article might itself be construed contempt of court, and that I ran the risk of being instantly jailed rather than free pending appeal, and further that to publish may attract yet another political prosecution from the Crown Office. I therefore did not publish and cannot give you the detail of the Llewellyn case, at least until after its conclusion.
I find this deeply depressing. I should not, in normal circumstances, have had the slightest hesitation in giving you the detail of what is happening to Dave Llewellyn, and more importantly why, in the same way I did with Mark Hirst. I find the notion that my own journalism is successfully being “chilled” in this way highly worrying, and this adds to the sense of injustice I feel in my own case. In fact anger and perhaps even humiliation at the powerlessness – and fear I am becoming a coward – has pretty well prostrated me for three days. I feel somewhat recovered now, and determined to fight on. But for the first time I find myself seriously considering, after my case is concluded, leaving my beloved Scotland and going to live in a country which does not jail dissident writers. .... Craig Murray, Historian, Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist
But that is the Old Guard's doing to try and protect itself from the inevitable understandable rough justice/reap the whirlwind slaughter of the justifiably enraged and more fully educated and entertaining and engaged mob, and the new kids on the block and brave-hearted young lions and lionesses in position of power and control commanding secrecy and secure intelligence briefings want no part of that ancient parcel of perverted grief and corrupting despair because of the nowhere good and great it so quickly leads to nowadays with all of this new fangled and entangling command and control of all personal information with national, international and internetional intelligence. To not think so must surely have one personally identified as quite dim and not at all suitable for anything involving and investigating the use and/or abuse and misuse of critical infrastructure intelligence machinery.
IT's a Madder Mad Mad Mad World than ever it was or ever could be in 1963 and something all pervasive which cannot be in any way conveniently avoided and left unaddressed and ignored in a can being kicked down the road whenever the colossal herd of rogue elephants in Situations Rooms/Oval Offices/Cabinets/Underground Bunkers on live rampage.
The fight isn't on number ten's doorstep, but on every doorstep that buys into state sponsored propaganda. And they are so great in number that to challenge their views, is to challenge democratic rule in general.
What's needed is a killer idiot bug. You know. Something that only flat-earther types could contract.
In the same way a maggot thrives on dead flesh, perhaps a bacteria that only consumes unused brain tissue could pave the way to a bright new world.
Never before in human history has an individual, or small group of such, been able to destroy wealth on such an unimaginable scale. Hacking, ransomware, explosives, even crashing airplanes into buildings. So, of course the state wishes to conduct dragnet surveillance! We, each and every one of is a potential threat to the existing order.
That seems to be the ruling. Except that in the option of the court there were insufficient safeguards. However, the court was not asked to rule on safe guards and has no authority in that area. So the (long) article tries to excoriate the UK government with one clause "...didn't break the ECHR per se..." reflecting reality. My guess is that the MI5/6 will see this ruling as a green light to keep on keeping on.
Isn't is a bit moot anyway? My wife bought a Chinese Android mobile phone and we regularly ask after President Xi as he (or his apparatus) are bound to be listening in. We should probably say hi to Boris and Joe as well. Obviously I'll be up in arms if Macron is also listening in as lack of privacy and surveillance has to have *some* limits.
Can anyone explain to me how "dragnet surveillance" and "minimise indiscriminate spying" can ever not be contradictory? And don't claim that it's not surveillance if you collect but don't look, that's bollocks.
As for every word quoted from Government sources, cue M’andee-rice Davis.
The current argument by spy agencies is that no surveillance has ever taken place until a human looks at the harvested data that was fully processed by machines. And all data collected by private companies does not count as surveillance - because the government did not collect it.
Spy agency logic is odd.
Though shalt not share data with foreign countries as it could be a violation of privacy but
"diplomatic assurances would be enough to meet that condition."
So a simple statement from junior diplomatic bod of Nazistalintrumpistan that says "no problem, we'll look after the data carefully" is enough, legally, to allow all the bulk data to be passed to that state at which point they can do what they wish ... People fleeing persecution to the 'free and tolerant UK' should be scared, very scared.
From where I'm perched everybody (military, industrial; its all very complex :) seems hell bent on having as much data as possible on everyone and it seems that they are unlikely to stop anytime soon. So, I can either get my panties in a bunch about it or go "meh".
I know what they are doing is wrong, but I just can't be arsed wasting my time over it. And having seen the shenanigans that go on when this lot get serious I'd prefer to keep my own counsel rather than ending up in an Oxfordshire field having had an involuntary suicide.
" if he's done nothing wrong, he's got nothing to hide."
Except exactly how many children he has fathered and is paying child support for. Strange, you'd have thought that a boastful Bullingdon Boy would have been shouting from the rooftops every time he had sex.
Western media rightly condemned the aviation piracy in Belarus to kidnap a critic. However the coverage was hyperbolic and partial. Both CNN and the BBC claimed that no nation had ever done this before, but in 2013 the jet of the Bolivian President was forced to land and be searched in case Edward Snowden was on board.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/03/edward-snowden-bolivia-plane-vienna
It seems that Belarus is not a signatory of the convention that recognises aircraft in flight as being the sovereign territory of the state in which they are registered (in the recent event, Poland). So they have not broken any treaty in diverting the flight. And obviously if a pilot of a commercial flight sees a Mig fighter on his left and is told to divert, he's going to do as he's told.
Another reason to holiday in your home country this year.
The interesting thing I heard on the radio news this morning was that the intelligence about a possible bomb on the aircraft allegedly came from Switzerland. It will be interesting to see whether the Swiss corroborate this, or deny all knowledge.
I don't believe that there is any way that anyone can prevent the state from conducting mass surveillance of normal communication networks. What we *can* all do is to make that surveillance useless by routinely employing encryption for all our communications - even the most mundane (in fact *especially* the most mundane).
Whenever possible use communications applications that employ end-to-end encryption, and encourage friends & family to do the same. Encourage 3rd party auditing of such applications to ensure they do what they state they do. Let's all push to get the popular email clients having an option to encrypt as standard.
If almost all communications are encrypted, then encryption will not be seen as a suspicious activity and mass interception will not be feasible. So long as the encryption is completely transparent to the end user, there will be no disincentive to using it - just like the use of SSL for accessing web sites has become normal and standard for the majority of web sites, not only those passing sensitive or personal information.
If there was a big enough demand for self-encrypting phones, the manufacturers would start including it as standard and offering firmware updates for existing mobile phones so that all calls to & from a compatible handset are automatically and transparently end-to-end encrypted.
when /ei/ human breaks human rights, they get punished (or get away with it, if they have friends in high places or pockets deep enough, or when nobody really cares because it happens in some Farawaystan). When the country's law break the rights, what are you gonna do about it, plebs? (...). Exactly that much.
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