Gestapo Watch - No hiding place as spy HQ plans to see all

[wepmob2000]

This might not be news to everyone, but it is really quite an alarming development.....

From The Sunday Times October 5, 2008

There’s no hiding place as spy HQ plans to see all

By David Leppard

Intelligence chiefs want access to all communications made in the UK, but they face a fight

Every call you make, every e-mail you send, every website you visit - I’ll be watching you.

That is the hope of Sir David Pepper who, as the director of GCHQ, the government’s secret eavesdropping agency in Cheltenham, is plotting the biggest surveillance system ever created in Britain.

From his office in the agency’s famous “doughnut” building, Pepper is masterminding an innocent-sounding project called the Interception Modernisation Programme.

The scope of the project - classified top secret - is said by officials to be so vast that it will dwarf the estimated £5 billion ministers have set aside for the identity cards programme. It is intended to fight terrorism and crime. Civil liberties groups, however, say it poses an unprecedented intrusion into ordinary citizens’ lives.

Aimed at placing a “live tap” on every electronic communication in Britain, it will dwarf other “big brother” surveillance projects such as the number plate recognition system and the spread of CCTV.

Pepper and his opposite number at MI6, Sir John Scarlett, are facing opposition from mandarins in the Treasury and Cabinet Office who fear both its cost and ethical implications.

The spy bosses say a central database is essential to “capture” the array of communications between terrorists planning to attack Britain. Draft e-mails, chatroom discussions and internet browsing on encrypted jihadist websites are the preferred forums for Al-Qaeda cells to plan their attacks, they say. However, other officials and many in the business and academic community are wary.

A spokesman for the information commissioner, Richard Thomas, said yesterday that this summer he had called for a public debate about government proposals for the state to retain people’s internet and phone records.

“The commissioner warned that it is likely that such a scheme would be a step too far for the British way of life. Proposals that threaten such intrusion into people’s lives must be properly debated,” the spokesman said.

Despite the lack of public debate, Pepper’s officials have been aggressively marketing his plans in a round of White-hall briefings over the past few weeks.

One of their charts depicts a steep upward line showing the amount of electronic communications data that are being “captured” in the databases of hundreds of private telephone companies and internet service providers. But future projections show a sharp fall in the amount of communications data firms can, or are willing to, retain.

If this information is not centrally stored, it will disappear, making it impossible for police and intelligence agents to reconstruct the history of so-called “friendship trees” between members of terrorist cells.

The sheer scale of electronic communications today is mind-boggling. Last year 57 billion text messages were sent in the UK, up from 1 billion in 1999. The number of broadband internet connections has grown from just 330,000 in 2001 to 18m in 2007. And each day 3 billion e-mails are sent - 35,000 every second. Somewhere in that mass of data, terrorists are communicating with each other about their next attack.

At the moment the data are spread across temporary storage sites held by hundreds of private firms. To agents and police trying to detect or reconstruct what MI5 calls terrorist “attack planning”, it’s like looking for a needle in a million haystacks.

But there are mounting concerns at the Treasury about the costs of Pepper’s project. According to Richard Clayton, a security expert at Cambridge University, the system will require the insertion of “thousands” of black box probes into the country’s computer and telephone networks.

Known as Deep Packet Inspection equipment, these probes will “steal” the data, analyse and decode the information and then route it direct to a government-run database.

No one yet knows exactly how to ensure police and intelligence agencies do not abuse their access to the database.

The law on surveillance

United Kingdom: Telephone and internet companies must give details of calls or web use to law enforcement agencies if a senior officer certifies that it is needed for an investigation. Last year 520,000 such requests were made. Interception may be authorised for 653 public bodies. For the security services, a minister must give approval; for the police, a chief constable.

United States: The government requires a special order approved by FBI officials to demand data on telephone calls and internet use. To intercept communications it needs a court order. If there is a threat to national security, emergency wiretaps can be used for a week.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4882622.ece

[TonyGosling]

No hiding place for freedom.
This destruction of civil liberties is the central guiding theme in the planning of 9/11 and 7/7.

[Busker]

Perhaps it is time to demonstrate outside the home address of Sir David Pepper?

See how he likes a little loss of privacy and to be "checked in" and "checked out" of his home.

It would need to remain peaceful and within the law though.

[fish5133]

I suspect they are just trying to "legalise" what they are already doing.

[TonyGosling]

God help us. This will soon be a country more spied upon than Communist East Germany under the Stasi
Daily Mail / 23-10-2008

http://www.underthecarpet.co.uk/Pages/NewsArticle.php?num=5237
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1078026/STEPHEN-GLOVER-This-so on-country-spied-Communist-East-Germany.html

We live at a time when many of the certainties taken for granted by our parents and grandparents are being destroyed under our very eyes.

Even in the socialist Seventies, no one imagined the Government could control not one, not two, but three High Street banks.



Our forefathers also believed, with some justification, that Britain was the freest country in the world.

Unlike some Continental nations, let alone those in the Soviet Bloc, we did not have a large state apparatus spying on people's private activities.

However, since 1997 New Labour has progressively undermined this assumption.

We have more CCTV cameras than any other country in the world. Our DNA database, which comprises four million people, many of whom have committed no crime at all, is also bigger than that of any other country. Identity cards are in the pipeline.

Even so, I am dumbfounded by proposals unveiled by Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, in a speech yesterday.

The Government is considering creating one vast database which will contain details of every single e-mail and telephone call, mobile or otherwise, made in the United Kingdom.

Every call you make, every visit to an internet site, every e-mail you send - all will be logged and stored in some vast Government computer, if Ms Smith has her way.

If this had been proposed ten years ago, no one would have believed it. Even now, after ten years of creeping surveillance by an authoritarian Government, it seems incredible.

The Home Secretary envisages a society more spied upon than communist East Germany was under the Stasi, and potentially more watched over than George Orwell's nightmarish society in his novel 1984.

That is what I mean about the speed of change. None of our treasured assumptions holds true.

A Labour Home Secretary can propose changes which offend against the values our grandfathers held dear - and for which, in part, they fought - without any apparent sense that she is flying in the face of hundreds of years of history, and certainly without the smallest indication of shame or sign of regret.

How did this come about? The Labour Party may have traditionally harboured fellow travellers and communist sympathisers who had no difficulty with the concept of overweening state control.

But it was also a party of liberty and freedom. For many years, while in opposition, Labour voted against the Prevention of Terrorism Act in Northern Ireland.

Whether it was right or wrong in that case, it was steadfastly opposed to the state assuming exceptional powers to deal with terrorism.

All that is dead and buried. Labour is now the party of state control, and its traditional love of freedom is restricted to a few maverick backbenchers whose views are ignored by the hierarchy.

Its old veneration for individual liberty has gone the way of Nineveh and Tyre.

Maybe the party's Stalinist leanings were always stronger than we thought. Maybe it has succumbed to the nexus of spooks and security freaks that lurks at the heart of Whitehall.

What is in a way even more shocking is that most of us do not object very much. In the Sixties, students demonstrated, possibly a little hysterically, against their academic records being held on file by universities.

Even under present arrangements, the Government can find out which phone calls we have made, and which e-mails we have sent, going back one year, which is a far more onerous form of supervision than a few innocuous files.

And yet, like bovine subjects in a science fiction fantasy who have been schooled into docility by the authorities, we scarcely let out a whimper of complaint.

I understand, of course, that we face a threat from extremist Islamic terrorists - the true extent of which it is impossible to evaluate. Special measures have to be considered.

But they should not include a form of surveillance over the private lives of perfectly law-abiding individuals which is open to abuse by the state.

Would it not be preferable - and more consonant with the principle of individual liberty - if foreign-born suspected terrorists could be deported from this country?

And can't home-grown suspected terrorists be surveyed and watched without all of us being subjected to intrusive surveillance that is bound to be abused?

We can be certain it would be. Jacqui Smith foresees the powers being used to help track down suspected terrorists and criminals, but before long details of our e-mails and phone calls would fall into the hands of other servants of the state whose responsibilities have nothing do with the prevention of terrorism or crime.

At the moment, believe it or not, the authorities launch bugging operations against 1,000 people a day.

In the last nine months of 2006, 253,557 applications were made to track phone calls, private correspondence and other communications, the great majority of which were granted.

Most of these had nothing to do with terrorism or crime. Some 800 agencies, including nearly 500 councils, have the right to snoop on our e-mails.

It is true that Ms Smith does not envisage the state being able to read the contents of our e-mails, or listen to our calls, without a warrant. It is clear, though, that under present arrangements a warrant is easy to obtain.

The monitoring of our private communications by various agencies of the state that already takes place would become easier once intimate information about all of us was held in a single permanent database.

And then, of course, we can be sure that some official would leave a laptop or data stick, containing the details of millions of people, in a pub.

Even if I believed the Government had the right to hold such data - which I obviously don't - I would have no confidence that civil servants who have lost computer disks concerning the tax affairs of 25 million citizens could be trusted with information about our private communications.

Earlier this week, the Government was forced to back down over its Bill to extend the period which suspects can be held without charge from 28 to 42 days.

Though the Lords should be congratulated for defeating the measure, the powers, had they been approved, would have affected only a handful of people.

By contrast, Ms Smith's proposals are much more pervasive since they would affect all of us.

I don't want my e-mails routinely inspected, or my phone calls listened to, by someone sitting in Cheltenham GCHQ, and I am sure neither do you.

I don't want to live in a country where that is possible. It would not be the country of our parents nor the one our forefathers fought for - nor the country that we were told, when we were children, that we were blessed to live in.

We already live in a fledging Stasi state, and we should fight to ensure we do not live in a fully fledged one.

If Jacqui Smith gets her database, the terrorists will have won. They will have destroyed our values and our conviction, old-fashioned but still worth cherishing and defending, that individual liberty is of pre-eminent importance.

This is not a war - I mean the one against ever greater surveillance - which those who believe in a free society can afford to lose.

More articles on: Police State behaviour ->

[TonyGosling]

Social networking, CCTV and airport scanners see Britain 'sleepwalking into a surveillance society'

By Jack Doyle, Home Affairs Correspondent
Last updated at 5:32 PM on 11th November 2010

Social networking sites storing more personal data
Airport scanners allow 'voyeuristic opportunism'
CCTV cameras encroach into private areas and schools
Databases can sort individuals by class and ethnicity

The onward march of Britain's 'Surveillance Society' was exposed last night in a devastating report.

Experts warned of a raft of new technologies capable of ever greater intrusion into individuals' private lives.

Legal protections are struggling to keep up with the growth of 'harmful' forms of surveillance with 'disturbing' effects, the Surveillance Studies Network warned.

The report - from a group of academics - praised the new Government for ditching intrusive state databases and national ID cards, but it identifies a string of new threats.

It also led to a call for new safeguards to prevent snooping powers being misused.

The report expressed concern over the amount of data gathered and stored by private companies such as social networking sites, which it states has ' increased exponentially' in recent years.

It also raised questions over 'function creep' in which the use of technologies expand far beyond what they were originally intended for, such the national network of 10,000 Automatic Numberplate Recognition (ANPR) cameras.

The report warned that the use of body scanners at airports which have led to problems of 'voyeuristic opportunism' - as operators snoop on naked passengers or colleagues.

And unmanned aerial police drones, originally used by the military, were found to have presented 'significant' privacy problems and are 'more pervasive than CCTV'.

Yesterday's report warned of the rise of 'surreptitious' and 'unaccountable' surveillance practices amid 'weak' legal protections.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1328445/Social-networking-CCTV -airport-scanners-Britain-sleepwalking-surveillance-society.html