THERE WAS A SIMPLE AIM at the heart of the top-secret program: Record the website browsing habits of “every visible user on the internet.”
Before long, billions of digital records about ordinary people’s online activities were being stored every day. Among them were details cataloging visits to porn, social media, and news websites, search engines, chat forums, and blogs.
The mass surveillance operation — code-named KARMA POLICE — was launched by British spies about seven years ago without any public debate or scrutiny. It was just one part of a giant global internet spying apparatus built by the United Kingdom’s electronic eavesdropping agency, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.
The revelations about the scope of the British agency’s surveillance are contained in documents obtained by The Intercept from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Previous reports based on the leaked files have exposed how GCHQ taps into internet cables to monitor communications on a vast scale, but many details about what happens to the data after it has been vacuumed up have remained unclear.
Amid a renewed push from the U.K. government for more surveillance powers, more than two dozen documents disclosed today by The Intercept reveal for the first time several major strands of GCHQ’s existing electronic eavesdropping capabilities.
One system builds profiles showing people’s web browsing histories. Another analyzes instant messenger communications, emails, Skype calls, text messages, cellphone locations, and social media interactions. Separate programs were built to keep tabs on “suspicious” Google searches and usage of Google Maps.
The surveillance is underpinned by an opaque legal regime that has authorized GCHQ to sift through huge archives of metadata about the private phone calls, emails, and internet browsing logs of Brits, Americans, and any other citizens — all without a court order or judicial warrant.
Metadata reveals information about a communication — such as the sender and recipient of an email, or the phone numbers someone called and at what time — but not the written content of the message or the audio of the call.
As of 2012, GCHQ was storing about 50 billion metadata records about online communications and web browsing activity every day, with plans in place to boost capacity to 100 billion daily by the end of that year. The agency, under cover of secrecy, was working to create what it said would soon be the biggest government surveillance system anywhere in the world.
Radio radicalization
The power of KARMA POLICE was illustrated in 2009, when GCHQ launched a top-secret operation to collect intelligence about people using the internet to listen to radio shows.
The agency used a sample of nearly 7 million metadata records, gathered over a period of three months, to observe the listening habits of more than 200,000 people across 185 countries, including the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, Canada, Mexico, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and Germany.
A GCHQ graphic illustrating how KARMA POLICE works.
A summary report detailing the operation shows that one aim of the project was to research “potential misuse” of internet radio stations to spread radical Islamic ideas.
GCHQ spies from a unit known as the Network Analysis Center compiled a list of the most popular stations that they had identified, most of which had no association with Islam, like France-based Hotmix Radio, which plays pop, rock, funk, and hip-hop music.
They zeroed in on any stations found broadcasting recitations from the Quran, such as a popular Iraqi radio station and a station playing sermons from a prominent Egyptian imam named Sheikh Muhammad Jebril. They then used KARMA POLICE to find out more about these stations’ listeners, identifying them as users on Skype, Yahoo, and Facebook.
The summary report says the spies selected one Egypt-based listener for “profiling” and investigated which other websites he had been visiting. Surveillance records revealed the listener had viewed the porn site Redtube, as well as Facebook; Yahoo; YouTube; Google’s blogging platform, Blogspot; the photo-sharing site Flickr; a website about Islam; and an Arab advertising site.
GCHQ’s documents indicate that the plans for KARMA POLICE were drawn up between 2007 and 2008. The system was designed to provide the agency with “either (a) a web browsing profile for every visible user on the internet, or (b) a user profile for every visible website on the internet.”
The origin of the surveillance system’s name is not discussed in the documents. But KARMA POLICE is also the name of a popular song released in 1997 by the Grammy Award-winning British band Radiohead, suggesting the spies may have been fans.
A verse repeated throughout the hit song includes the lyric, “This is what you’ll get, when you mess with us.”
The Black Hole
GCHQ vacuums up the website browsing histories using “probes” that tap into the international fiber-optic cables that transport internet traffic across the world.
A huge volume of the internet data GCHQ collects flows directly into a massive repository named Black Hole, which is at the core of the agency’s online spying operations, storing raw logs of intercepted material before it has been subject to analysis.
Black Hole contains data collected by GCHQ as part of bulk “unselected” surveillance, meaning it is not focused on particular “selected” targets and instead includes troves of data indiscriminately swept up about ordinary people’s online activities. Between August 2007 and March 2009, GCHQ documents say that Black Hole was used to store more than 1.1 trillion “events” — a term the agency uses to refer to metadata records — with about 10 billion new entries added every day.
As of March 2009, the largest slice of data Black Hole held — 41 percent — was about people’s internet browsing histories. The rest included a combination of email and instant messenger records, details about search engine queries, information about social media activity, logs related to hacking operations, and data on people’s use of tools to browse the internet anonymously.
Throughout this period, as smartphone sales started to boom, the frequency of people’s internet use was steadily increasing. In tandem, British spies were working frantically to bolster their spying capabilities, with plans afoot to expand the size of Black Hole and other repositories to handle an avalanche of new data.
By 2010, according to the documents, GCHQ was logging 30 billion metadata records per day. By 2012, collection had increased to 50 billion per day, and work was underway to double capacity to 100 billion. The agency was developing “unprecedented” techniques to perform what it called “population-scale” data mining, monitoring all communications across entire countries in an effort to detect patterns or behaviors deemed suspicious. It was creating what it said would be, by 2013, “the world’s biggest” surveillance engine “to run cyber operations and to access better, more valued data for customers to make a real world difference.”
GCHQ is able to identify a particular person’s website browsing habits by pulling out the raw data stored in repositories like Black Hole and then analyzing it with a variety of systems that complement each other.
KARMA POLICE, for instance, works by showing the IP addresses of people visiting websites. IP addresses are unique identifiers that are allocated to computers when they connect to the internet.
In isolation, IPs would not be of much value to GCHQ, because they are just a series of numbers — like 195.92.47.101 — and are not attached to a name. But when paired with other data they become a rich source of personal information.
To find out the identity of a person or persons behind an IP address, GCHQ analysts can enter the series of numbers into a separate system named MUTANT BROTH, which is used to sift through data contained in the Black Hole repository about vast amounts of tiny intercepted files known as cookies.
Cookies are automatically placed on computers to identify and sometimes track people browsing the internet, often for advertising purposes. When you visit or log in to a website, a cookie is usually stored on your computer so that the site recognizes you. It can contain your username or email address, your IP address, and even details about your login password and the kind of internet browser you are using — like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
For GCHQ, this information is incredibly valuable. The agency refers to cookies internally as “target detection identifiers” or “presence events” because of how they help it monitor people’s internet use and uncover online identities.
If the agency wants to track down a person’s IP address, it can enter the person’s email address or username into MUTANT BROTH to attempt to find it, scanning through the cookies that come up linking those identifiers to an IP address. Likewise, if the agency already has the IP address and wants to track down the person behind it, it can use MUTANT BROTH to find email addresses, usernames, and even passwords associated with the IP.
Once the agency has corroborated a targeted person’s IP address with an email address or username, it can then use the tiny cookie files associated with these identifiers to perform a so-called pattern of life analysis showing the times of day and locations at which the person is most active online.
GCHQ was extracting data containing information about people’s visits to the adult website YouPorn.
In turn, the usernames and email and IP addresses can be entered into other systems that enable the agency to spy on the target’s emails, instant messenger conversations, and web browsing history. All GCHQ needs is a single identifier — a “selector,” in agency jargon — to follow a digital trail that can reveal a vast amount about a person’s online activities.
A top-secret GCHQ document from March 2009 reveals the agency has targeted a range of popular websites as part of an effort to covertly collect cookies on a massive scale. It shows a sample search in which the agency was extracting data from cookies containing information about people’s visits to the adult website YouPorn, search engines Yahoo and Google, and the Reuters news website.
Other websites listed as “sources” of cookies in the 2009 document (see below) are Hotmail, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, WordPress, Amazon, and sites operated by the broadcasters CNN, BBC, and the U.K.’s Channel 4.
In one six-month period between December 2007 and June 2008, the document says, more than 18 billion records from cookies and other similar identifiers were accessible through MUTANT BROTH.
The data is searched by GCHQ analysts in a hunt for behavior online that could be connected to terrorism or other criminal activity. But it has also served a broader and more controversial purpose — helping the agency hack into European companies’ computer networks.
In the lead-up to its secret mission targeting Netherlands-based Gemalto, the largest SIM card manufacturer in the world, GCHQ used MUTANT BROTH in an effort to identify the company’s employees so it could hack into their computers.
The system helped the agency analyze intercepted Facebook cookies it believed were associated with Gemalto staff located at offices in France and Poland. GCHQ later successfully infiltrated Gemalto’s internal networks, stealing encryption keys produced by the company that protect the privacy of cellphone communications.
Similarly, MUTANT BROTH proved integral to GCHQ’s hack of Belgian telecommunications provider Belgacom. The agency entered IP addresses associated with Belgacom into MUTANT BROTH to uncover information about the company’s employees. Cookies associated with the IPs revealed the Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn accounts of three Belgacom engineers, whose computers were then targeted by the agency and infected with malware.
The hacking operation resulted in GCHQ gaining deep access into the most sensitive parts of Belgacom’s internal systems, granting British spies the ability to intercept communications passing through the company’s networks.
Cryptome surveillance
In March, a U.K. parliamentary committee published the findings of an 18-month review of GCHQ’s operations and called for an overhaul of the laws that regulate the spying. The committee raised concerns about the agency gathering what it described as “bulk personal datasets” being held about “a wide range of people.” However, it censored the section of the report describing what these “datasets” contained, despite acknowledging that they “may be highly intrusive.”
The Snowden documents shine light on some of the core GCHQ bulk data-gathering programs that the committee was likely referring to — pulling back the veil of secrecy that has shielded some of the agency’s most controversial surveillance operations from public scrutiny.
KARMA POLICE and MUTANT BROTH are among the key bulk collection systems. But they do not operate in isolation — and the scope of GCHQ’s spying extends far beyond them.
GCHQ’s logo for the SOCIAL ANTHROPOID system.
The agency operates a bewildering array of other eavesdropping systems, each serving its own specific purpose and designated a unique code name, such as: SOCIAL ANTHROPOID, which is used to analyze metadata on emails, instant messenger chats, social media connections and conversations, plus “telephony” metadata about phone calls, cellphone locations, and text and multimedia messages; MEMORY HOLE, which logs queries entered into search engines and associates each search with an IP address; MARBLED GECKO, which sifts through details about searches people have entered into Google Maps and Google Earth; and INFINITE MONKEYS, which analyzes data about the usage of online bulletin boards and forums.
GCHQ has other programs that it uses to analyze the content of intercepted communications, such as the full written body of emails and the audio of phone calls. One of the most important content collection capabilities is TEMPORA, which mines vast amounts of emails, instant messages, voice calls, and other communications and makes them accessible through a Google-style search tool named XKEYSCORE.
As of September 2012, TEMPORA was collecting “more than 40 billion pieces of content a day” and it was being used to spy on people across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, according to a top-secret memo outlining the scope of the program. The existence of TEMPORA was first revealed by The Guardian in June 2013.
To analyze all of the communications it intercepts and to build a profile of the individuals it is monitoring, GCHQ uses a variety of different tools that can pull together all of the relevant information and make it accessible through a single interface.
SAMUEL PEPYS is one such tool, built by the British spies to analyze both the content and metadata of emails, browsing sessions, and instant messages as they are being intercepted in real time.
One screenshot of SAMUEL PEPYS in action shows the agency using it to monitor an individual in Sweden who visited a page about GCHQ on the U.S.-based anti-secrecy website Cryptome.
Domestic spying
Partly due to the U.K.’s geographic location — situated between the United States and the western edge of continental Europe — a large amount of the world’s internet traffic passes through its territory across international data cables.
In 2010, GCHQ noted that what amounted to “25 percent of all internet traffic” was transiting the U.K. through some 1,600 different cables. The agency said that it could “survey the majority of the 1,600” and “select the most valuable to switch into our processing systems.”
Many of the cables flow deep under the Atlantic Ocean from the east coast of the U.S., landing on the white-sand beaches of Cornwall in the southwest of England. Others transport data between the U.K. and countries including France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway by crossing below the North Sea and coming aground at various locations on England’s east coast.
According to Joss Wright, a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, tapping into the cables allows GCHQ to monitor a large portion of foreign communications. But the cables also transport masses of wholly domestic British emails and online chats, because when anyone in the U.K. sends an email or visits a website, that person’s computer will routinely send and receive data from servers that are located overseas.
“I could send a message from my computer here [in England] to my wife’s computer in the next room, and on its way it could go through the U.S., France, and other countries,” Wright said. “That’s just the way the internet is designed.”
In other words, Wright adds, that means “a lot” of British data and communications transit across international cables daily, and are liable to be swept into GCHQ’s databases.
GCHQ is authorized to conduct dragnet surveillance of the international data cables through so-called external warrants that are signed off on by a government minister.
The external warrants permit the agency to monitor communications in foreign countries as well as British citizens’ international calls and emails — for example, a call from Islamabad to London. They prohibit GCHQ from reading or listening to the content of “internal” U.K. to U.K. emails and phone calls, which are supposed to be filtered out from GCHQ’s systems if they are inadvertently intercepted unless additional authorization is granted to scrutinize them.
However, the same rules do not apply to metadata. A little-known loophole in the law allows GCHQ to use external warrants to collect and analyze bulk metadata about the emails, phone calls, and internet browsing activities of British people, citizens of closely allied countries, and others, regardless of whether the data is derived from domestic U.K. to U.K. communications and browsing sessions or otherwise.
In March, the existence of this loophole was quietly acknowledged by the U.K. parliamentary committee’s surveillance review, which stated in a section of its report that “special protection and additional safeguards” did not apply to metadata swept up using external warrants and that domestic British metadata could therefore be lawfully “returned as a result of searches” conducted by GCHQ.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, GCHQ appears to have readily exploited this obscure legal technicality. Secret policy guidance papers issued to the agency’s analysts instruct them that they can sift through huge troves of indiscriminately collected metadata records to spy on anyone regardless of nationality. The guidance makes clear that there is no exemption or extra privacy protection for British people or citizens from countries that are members of the Five Eyes, a surveillance alliance that includes the U.K., as well as the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
“If you are searching a purely Events only database such as MUTANT BROTH, the issue of location does not occur,” states one internal GCHQ policy document, which is marked with a “last modified” date of July 2012. The document adds that analysts are free to search the databases for British metadata “without further authorization” by inputting a U.K. “selector,” meaning a unique identifier such as a person’s email or IP address, username, or phone number.
Authorization is “not needed for individuals in the U.K.,” another GCHQ document explains, because metadata has been judged “less intrusive than communications content.” All the spies are required to do to mine the metadata troves is write a short “justification” or “reason” for each search they conduct and then click a button on their computer screen.
Intelligence GCHQ collects on British persons of interest is shared with the domestic security agency MI5, which usually takes the lead on spying operations within the U.K. MI5 conducts its own extensive domestic surveillance as part of a program called DIGINT (digital intelligence).
“We think and behave differently based on the assumption that people may be watching.”
GCHQ’s documents suggest that it typically retains metadata for periods between 30 days and six months. It stores the content of communications for a shorter period of time, varying from three to 30 days. The retention periods can be extended if deemed necessary for “cyberdefense.”
One secret policy paper dated January 2010 lists the wide range of information the agency classes as metadata — including location data that could be used to track your movements; your email, instant messenger, and social networking “buddy lists”; logs showing who you have communicated with by phone or email; the passwords you use to access “communications services” (such as an email account); and information about websites you have viewed.
GCHQ headquarters in Cheltenham, England.
www.gchq.gov.uk
Records showing the full website addresses you have visited — for instance, www.gchq.gov.uk/what_we_do — are treated as content. But the first part of an address you have visited — for instance, www.gchq.gov.uk — is treated as metadata.
In isolation, a single metadata record of a phone call, email, or website visit may not reveal much about a person’s private life, according to Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
But if accumulated and analyzed over a period of weeks or months, these details would be “extremely personal,” he told The Intercept, because they could reveal a person’s movements, habits, religious beliefs, political views, relationships, and even sexual preferences.
For Zuckerman, who has studied the social and political ramifications of surveillance, the most concerning aspect of large-scale government data collection is that it can be “corrosive toward democracy” — leading to a chilling effect on freedom of expression and communication.
“Once we know there’s a reasonable chance that we are being watched in one fashion or another, it’s hard for that not to have a ‘panopticon effect,’” he said, “where we think and behave differently based on the assumption that people may be watching and paying attention to what we are doing.”
Light oversight
A GCHQ spokesperson declined to answer any specific questions for this story, citing a “long-standing policy” not to comment on intelligence matters. The spokesperson insisted in an emailed statement that GCHQ’s work is “carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorized, necessary, and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight.”
It is unclear, however, whether in practice there are sufficient internal checks in place to ensure GCHQ’s spies don’t abuse their access to the troves of personal information.
According to the agency’s documents, just 10 percent of its “targeting” of individuals for surveillance is audited annually, and a random selection of metadata searches are audited every six months.
When compared to surveillance rules in place in the U.S., GCHQ notes in one document, the U.K. has “a light oversight regime.”
The more lax British spying regulations are reflected in secret internal rules that highlight greater restrictions on how NSA databases can be accessed. The NSA’s troves can be searched for data on British citizens, one document states, but they cannot be mined for information about Americans or other citizens from countries in the Five Eyes alliance.
No such constraints are placed on GCHQ’s own databases, which can be sifted for records on the phone calls, emails, and internet usage of Brits, Americans, and citizens from any other country.
The scope of GCHQ’s surveillance powers explain in part why Snowden told The Guardian in June 2013 that U.K. surveillance is “worse than the U.S.” In an interview with Der Spiegel in July 2013, Snowden added that British internet cables were “radioactive” and joked, “Even the Queen’s selfies to the pool boy get logged.”
In recent years, the biggest barrier to GCHQ’s mass collection of data does not appear to have come in the form of legal or policy restrictions. Rather, it is the increased use of encryption technology that protects the privacy of communications that has posed the biggest potential hindrance to the agency’s activities.
“The spread of encryption … threatens our ability to do effective target discovery/development,” says a top-secret report co-authored by an official from the British agency and an NSA employee in 2011.
“Pertinent metadata events will be locked within the encrypted channels and difficult, if not impossible, to prise out,” the report says, adding that the agencies were working on a plan that would “(hopefully) allow our Internet Exploitation strategy to prevail.”
Documents published with this article:
- TDI Introduction
- TINT External July 2009
- Social Anthropoid Briefing
- Sensitive Targeting Authorisation
- QFD BLACKHOLE Technology Behind INOC
- Pull Steering Group Minutes
- Access: Vision 2013
- Op Highland Fling Event Log
- Operational Engineering November 2010
- NGE BLACK HOLE ConOp
- Next Generation Events
- Events Analysis
- Legalities
- JCE UK Legalities Context
- HRA Auditing
- GCHQ Analytic Cloud Challenges
- Events
- Demystifying NGE Rock Ridge
- Data Stored in BLACK HOLE
- Cyber Defence Operations Legal Policy
- Crypt Discovery Activity
- Content-Metadata Matrix
- Cloud Developers Exchange July 2011
- Broadcast Analysis
- Blazing Saddles Tools
- Architecture Risk 2012
- ADD SD BLACK HOLE
- 200G Iris Access
My concern is that the NSA are tracking & attacking US Citizens via their little Bude facility in Cornwall, UK- and pissing off the very people paying them for security. And I have that concern because Bude/DINSA have already attempted to upload my files via my own NIC firmware. They didn’t even try to encrypt the stream. Just turned that sht into a smb fileshare.
So, I know you do- and are supposed to do. But I’m wondering if you know what you’re doing.
It would be really nice if you Fer’s reading this in Bude or Sterling/Fort Meade would do your Got Damn jobs and stop Muslims and Leftists from killing us. Just a kind request. That would be an outstanding change of strategy from sucking your Halal Leaders k0ks(Buraq Hussein/Cameron) and pretending you’re doing Western Civilization a favor.
Just give it some thought as you watch the Muslim Brotherhood’s human waste moving closer and closer to your families homes while you waste away serving the very people shipping them to your doorstep. Consider it. And quickly. Giving the 13th Imam and the 13th Waffen SS Division all of this data isn’t helping your F’ing cause, aholes.
Cryptome slide could be fake: that1archive.neocities.org/subfolder1/gchq-cryptome-slide.html
What the heck?!? So now were being watched even when we visit sites like Youporn or Fapshows.com? How can this be legal? Don’t we have any privacy on the internet anymore?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/exclusive-in-2009-ed-snowden-said-leakers-should-be-shot-then-he-became-one/
This explains how quickly FIVEEYES found Snowden’s Ars Technica account…. and irc logs.
Its all about the Mission !. We-they-no one- all for the System ? what is the System no one !. Thank you .
A GCHQ spokesman declined to answer any specific questions for this story, citing a “longstanding policy” not to comment on intelligence matters. The spokesman insisted in an emailed statement that GCHQ’s work is “carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight.”
World population: 7, 275,000,000 | 100%
OECD population: 1,271,000,000 | 17.5%
United Kingdom population: 63,181,775 | .87%
At less than one (1) percent of total world population, just where do they think they get their authorization?
Wow, a country whose government has been dominated by a cabal of child rapists for at least a third of a century and whose military recently threatened a coup d’etat against a progressive head of one of the major political parties is a partner in the NSA’s “Five Eyes” conspiracy, which vacuums up data on AMERICAN CITIZENS. It’s time to END FIVE EYES AND PROSECUTE ITS AUTHORS FOR VIOLATIONS OF THE US CONSTITUTION AND UN DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS!!!!!
Wanted: Hackers needed by 5-Eye nations for covert spying on the people you live with in the supposed “HA!” democracy you live in.
Benefits: Nice salary. No pension because WE DON’T EXIST. No future references because WE DON’T EXIST.
Caveats: If you talk, we send you to Hell, literally, within screaming distance of Chelsea Manning. If you try to leave, we will help you by making you vanish permanently. If you guff up, we will punish you as above. If you qiestion the non-governmental governmental contractor whatever moron in charge of you, you will go to Hell as above. When the eventual whistle blows, you will be hung out to dry if necessary to save your paymasters’ sorry arses. You will be hated by the population you spied upon. You will be in serious danger from the serious maniacs you were puported to be spying on. And the IT industry in the West will be dead and gone, so good luck finding a job outside of China and Russia’s medieval spy programs or going gamekeeper-turned-poacher, bozo.
Requirements: Stupidity, greed, a complete disregard for humanity and the vengeance they might reap and some computer literacy is helpful.
Good luck and remember, previous convictions are not a hindrance!
Send CVs addressed to “We-Love-&-Worship-Satan-Apollyon-And-Wish-To-Bring-On-Armageddon-With-Our-Vain-&-Stupid-Deeds” via a hack using well-established backdoor protocols built into MS Office to the usual tedious and habitual cloak-and-small-daggers offenders funded with taxpayers honest sweat and toil as per last time.
Sadly your pretty much right on the button, it’s kind of endemic to the society we live in, just because hackers have means to harvest other people’s personal and private information as it flows across the wire with toolkits such as wireshark it doesn’t make it perfectly ok to do so. But then you only have to look at the state of mainstream operating systems such as linux to view the lunacy of a cult following gone mad. The number of distributions built around it is phenomenal. Not all of them pleasant, but then the same can be said of arseholes who got there hands on Windows. “Warrior Pride?!” It’s refreshing to know that not everything is mainstream and some people like it that way, for example if you where to approach a developer that used a c-sharp based system such as Plan 9 which is capable of using your USB cable as a device bridge with the suggestion of running Java they would undoubtedly inform you to GoFY (go f*** yourself).
What in hell has happened of late to Louise Cypher?
I am missing her here so bad, as I guess are others too.
Just thought this was worthy of a little mensch’n, like.
excellent article. The NSA, Unit 8600 and other five eyes partners are doing it too.
I agree good write up but it just goes to show why you can’t trust spies in the long run, mission creep and over-reach gone into over drive, trying to take over things they don’t own. Cyber-army and cyber soldiers indeed, I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my entire life oh and there great at quoting how many attempts they’ve foiled because of there efforts but can’t give you any concrete evidence because it’s classified. I know horseshit when I hear it.
If showdown had told everyone to use plan 9 instead of Debian I would have thought ah now here’s a hacker with Duffs device but he was just a lowly analyst who had no idea what he had. There’s a reason 9 base is included in the Debian tree and a reason Eagles ride is called BellHop.
Anyone for a Game of Football?
RABBITS – Random Advanced Bits Bell Intelligence Transmission System
It used to belong to Lucent who’ve open sourced it in wake of all the illegal activity conducted by the intelligence services. Privacy is in the hands of hackers once again, where it belonged in the first place. The files use wormDISK(tm) technology and can not simply be broken into or stolen. Unlike what the moron who runs the NSA would have you believe, according to him hackers are going to turn off his power ( the sooner the better) or maybe blow up his PC. Find it for free online just research for Plan 9 and give two fingers to both the NSA and GCHQ.
I can’t think of a better nor more convoluted and expensive way for a government to make enemies of ifs own people.
If “a person’s movements, habits, religious beliefs, political views, relationships, and even sexual preferences” (Ethan Zuckerman, as quoted) are so important to a state, it cannot be for the pupose of selling him/her something he/she neither wants nor needs, unlike commercial enterprises that also steal such information for that purpose on places such as those mentioned in this article.
Therefore, on the logical assumption that the state considers all its citizens to be terrorists, anarchists, perverts or simply just gay rather than law-abiding people, then citizen-subsidized “black holes and mutant vomit” can only be instruments of unbridled power to attempt to silence them, blackmail or harm them.
Why then should there be “a chilling effect”, i.e. auto-censure, on freedom of expression and communication, since we are, in any case, considered to be criminals of one kind or another and all that we say, think or do will be vacuumed into a vast black anus to feed unbridled power? On the contrary, how can democracy be preserved unless people and the media refuse to be fearful in expressing their opinions, particularly where abuse of any kind is concerned?
Bruising nouns to call these spies and additional decorative adjectives to describe their lucrative unrestrained activities at vast expense to the tax-payer defy even the richest imagination and vocabulary.
I truly feel like they have declared war on anyone who is not “them” at that these are the darkest of days. I lived for a long time in the shadow of a major NATO base and never feared Russian nukes or WW3. I fear this, though, but only because everyday, decent people have become so apathetic. Rule Britannia needs the “never never never shall be slaves” bit removed as the sheep are surely in the pen and ready for slaughter.
So… private-sector internet providers get everyone internet access, and the government records everything we do on the internet with their assistance.
Now, uh, what’s the merger of state and corporate power called again? Starts with an “F” – I think…
I would like to know if the bodycams have been integrated into the system for generating information about friendly adversaries in a crowd. It can be easily done using a reasonably fast link and a facial recognition software. The BlackLivesPeople have created such a fuss recently that we have now brought this on ourselves with our own tax.
Wonderful work by The Intercept and all thanks to the heroic Edward Snowden.
That Britain is now a thuggish semi police state (they don’t shoot protesters on the streets, yet, so “semi” seems right) is a very sad thing. Even worse than the States, or so it seems.
What is interesting to contemplate is two things: one, none of this Big Brotherism seems to have any actual results in stopping terrorists. If it did, we’d hear about that loud and long. The UK stasi aren’t shy about bragging. Second, now the UK and EU are inviting hordes of dodgy Middle Easterners, claiming to be “refugees” into the bosoms. No screening, no info on most of them (unlike the millions who have their private communications monitored.)
So legal citizens and foreign residents are treated as criminals, while this same government is admitting hordes of unknown people from the very place where violence and terror is rampant. No background checks.
So it is hard to escape the conclusion, proffered by others here, that all of this monitoring isn’t about stopping violence by terrorists, but simply to add a secret (now not so much) tool of government control and potential blackmail over the citizenry.
Why else probe the private communications of the population in a democracy while inviting in hordes of strangers about whom you know nothing but self serving claims of victimhood? We already know these folks are economic opportunists, not true escapees from violence. They were safe where they were, no?
Instead, the UK/EU leaders can claim to be humanitarians while hiding their covert schemes (costing billions of course, paid to highly educated e-spooks) to discern the private beliefs and habits of voters, peaceful citizens and others who happen to be victims of this ghastly spying.
Sick. Pathetic. Scary. Sad.
Semi- is way too generous – no need to shoot when noone is protesting about “them”, just a gentle “baaaaaa-ing” from the flock and some anti-Islam insanities. Anyone seen John Lydon’s crank handle anywhere? Time for a bit of Punk Rock Rebellion!
This story is incomplete without the final link to Beijing where the data now resides in Jing Tong storage. If they could have vacuumed up the OPM database with all the secret information then this is child’s play.
Yes the Internet sucks. The surveillance is bad but the hacking is even worse. Meanwhile PM Cameron [& the BBC] declines to acknowledge the facts of fake records of Australian & UK newspapers being sold by British Libraries UK London Colindale [& Australian public libraries] as newspaper archives. Their purpose to conceal crimes & corruption. The evidence long ago made available to Cameron his govt. & Australian politicians – Australian law enforcement claims the sale of fake newspaper archives is not illegal. https://rjrbtsrupertsfirstnewspaper.wordpress.com/2015/07/27/australian-government-law-enforcement-and-news-media-corruption-in-brief-ref-sbsa-bankruptcy-6/ and
https://rjrbtsrupertsfirstnewspaper.wordpress.com/2015/07/09/australian-newspapers-news-articles-published-erased-from-the-now-fake-records-of-newspapers-published-sold-as-archives-also-exported-to-the-uk-listed-incomplete/
https://rjrbtsrupertsfirstnewspaper.wordpress.com/2015/08/09/uk-responses-to-fake-newspaper-archives-sold-by-british-libraries-uk-london/
I hate the Internet.
Great job, Ryan G. on an infuriating and chilling article. I agree with TomBrown that “the agencies were working on a plan that would “(hopefully) allow our Internet Exploitation strategy to prevail.” is probably even the most chilling part of the article (and after Black Hole (how appropriately named), Mutant Broth, and Samuel Pepys, that’s saying something.
Of course the part about spying on cookies is very troubling indeed. And the fact that every website is so eager to record your IP, and place cookies on your computer makes one wonder at the price we’re really paying for being online.
And let’s not forget that I think it was Edward Snowden himself said that metadata is where most of the intelligence value really is. And I also believe he said “metadata doesn’t lie.” We need to remember those facts whenever someone, anyone says “oh, they’re only collecting metadata.”
These spooks really make me sick.
If you are at all nerd-like like I am, then the saddest thing is that 99.9% of these “spooks” are just like us and 99.5% of them probably don’t buy into the whole political crap connected with mass-surveillance and think the guys at the top are morons. They probably just can’t get any IT jobs any more now that MS churn out regurgitated rehashed shite every few years whilst updating its copyrights and India does all the rest. I bet the politicians are more terrified of the spooks than our unwashed masses, hence their nauseating need to cast Edward Snowden into Tartarus. I wonder how long it would take for me to be arrested for standing outside GCHfkgQ every day blowing a ref’s whistle as encouragement for the CyberNerdSpooks to go “native” (or should I say return to the normal fold of decent humanity)?
This is all a cunning ploy by the British spooks to undermine the US administration and their flunkies’ megalomaniacal schemes by doing something so utterly unacceptable to humanity that even people in the Home Counties rise up and join with everyone in hitting their collective waste products against all rotating air cooling devices in one catastrophically monumental tide of utter fecal fury. It is all in revenge for the misappropriation of British contributions to the war made in the film “Churchill: The Hollywood Years” and for the abuse of Alan Turing, true genius and BritSpook hero trashed by our own idiotic government. I hope. Otherwise, we’re f*cked and I should have never written comments on this website…….
hello…I’ll reply to my orig. post because I’m really confused if there is only one or several “Zeus” es.
Not sure about the lower level spooks buying into the politics of mass surveillance. Probably there are some decent “analysts” or whatever who really are afraid to speak up for fear of losing their jobs or worse. And of course the high level ones are the real problem. “I bet the politicians are more terrified of the spooks than our unwashed masses” – ya know I wouldn’t doubt that!
“I wonder how long it would take for me to be arrested for standing outside GCHfkgQ every day blowing a ref’s whistle as encouragement for the CyberNerdSpooks to go “native” (or should I say return to the normal fold of decent humanity)?” Should I ready a file in a cake to send to you? Nice idea, though…
“doing something so utterly unacceptable to humanity that even people in the Home Counties rise up…” would that it would actually happen. I think you said upthread that no one is “protesting them.” So true. So much apathy and denial. I mentioned downthead that my cousin just bought a smart tv. She’s always one to say – ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.’ And that she has more important things to worry about than surveillance. Well, I’ll give her that we do have to be concerned about our own private lives and those of our families… but shouldn’t we also be concerned about the problems unfolding in the larger world around us?
And just one quick point re: that smart tv….. folks seem to lap up all these invasive gadgets. Many really give very little thought at all to the privacy (or lack thereof) implications. Someone in an article of comment somewhere posited — what will probably happen is that someday ONLY these smart gadgets will be made; what then? What then indeed.
I really think you could stand to make a short 10 minute video that graphically represents how an NSA or GCHQ user would navigate these databases, so that visually average people could get a sense of just how easy it is to connect all data from a single point. The visuals are missing for most people. You need to find a way to connect this information with average people before they will become involved. I wish I could help you do this!!!!!!!
how about building a little app that surfs on its own and thorougly muddles up your surfing habits ?
My first point is WHY ARE ANY DOCUMENTS USED BY The Intercept REDACTED?
Our hero, Edward Snowden, had allegiance only to the USA legally and the fact that the USA had UK documents should be of no concern to The Intercept, Greenwald, etc. The UK documents should be printed / published IN FULL for otherwise you are simply serving the interests of GCHQ, et al.
Between the two, IMO, GCHQ and the NSA, GCHQ is easily the most immoral / amoral entity. They give new meaning to ‘Dirty Tricks’. Compared to them the NSA are veritable virgins. It should be noted that GCHQ is governed by a civilian agency (The Foreign Office) whereas the US as well as in many other countries intelligence organisations are purely military.
The claim that UK intelligence has an oversight mechanism is a sick joke. They take people like RIFKIND, who was a former Foreign Secretary and had GCHQ under his wing, give him a honorific ‘gong’ or two then appoint them to ‘oversee’ their former friends on GCHQ. Some restraint, some ‘oversight’.
MALES in the Middle East are known to be prolific consumers of pornography as anyone who can scan satellite channels in Eastern / Mediterranean Europe can attest, Arabic language advertisements for such material riddle regular ‘family’ channels.
Using the (US) credit card companies data (the method through which pornography is purchased) PLUS surveilling Middle Eastern metadata, it would be extremely easy to build up a database of Dirty Old Men of the Middle East.
It is gratifying to know that many of the precautions taken by ‘concerned entities’ who change their IP addresses several times each day, use multiple ISP carriers, swap out harddrives with re-imaged ones with fresh OS and applications at the end of every shift (clearing malware / cookies that might have been acquired during a shift) is making the scum in the lettered agencies work that much more harder.
With the increasing introduction of Chinese and Korean OS and applications, some with servers in those countries, this article should induce readers to switch away from US-based products and systems and on to countries servers who have a minimum interest in users from the West. This should make NSA / GCHQ work even harder, which can only be good for citizens of the West.
These agencies are fiefdoms unto themselves. In New Zealand only the Prime Minister is ‘read into’ spy agency activities and even then systems / activities involving other countries are precluded from his knowledge. In other countries the security types simply don’t reveal to their civilian masters what they are doing.
It will be interesting to see what the new Labour Party leader does of / when he gains power. It will take a strong man to resist the tempting goodies offered up by the spies.
Labor doesn’t have a snowballs chance in Hell to win anything in the UK…………UKIP and the Cons will be the coalition next.
bet this gets caught in the filters
ISIS IS ISIL bomb kill behead death to America poison hijack plane fly into maim destroy shoot knife allahu akbar Islam Islamic state support terrorism murder IED queen royal family fuck surveillence infiltrate fuck GCHQ send money Syria Iraq hezbollah wound crowd destroy blow up reservoir infrastructure bridge schools army bases children parliament senate house of representatives congress house of lords hospitals boat airplane drone incendiary arson fire petrol phosphorus sarin gas
drone strike imminent… in… 3… 2… kaboom!
kaboom, kaboom, kaboom!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1T6l70XlqU
World Destruction
Speak about destruction. (x3)
This is a world destruction, your life ain’t nothing.
The human race is becoming a disgrace.
Countries are fighting with chemical warfare.
Not giving a damn about the people who live.
Nostradamus predicts the coming of the Antichrist.
Hey, look out, the third world nations are on the rise.
The Democratic-Communist Relationship,
won’t stand in the way of the Islamic force.
The CIA is looking for other detectives.
The KGB is smarter than you think.
Brainwash mentalities to control the system.
Using TV and movies – religions of course.
Yes, the world is headed for destruction.
Is it a nuclear war?
What are you asking for?
This is a world destruction. Your life ain’t nothing.
The human race is becoming a disgrace.
The rich get richer.
The poor are getting poorer.
Fascist, chauvinistic government fools.
People, Moslems, Christians and Hindus.
Are in a time zone just searching for the truth.
Who are you to think you’re a superior race?
Facing forth your everlasting doom.
We are Time Zone. We’ve come to drop a bomb on you.
World destruction, kaboom, kaboom, kaboom!
I going out of my mind that makes two of us-I going out of my mind
This is the world destruction, your life ain’t nothing.
The human race is becoming a disgrace.
Nationalities are fighting with each other.
Why is this? Because the system tells you.
Putting people in faceless categories.
Knowledge isn’t what it used to be.
Military tactics to control a nation.
Who wants to be a president or king? Me!
Mother Nature is gonna work against you.
Nothing in your power that you can do.
Yes, the world is headed for destruction.
You and I know it, the Bible tells you.
If we don’t start to look for a better life,
the world will be destroyed in a time zone!
I in a time zone (x3) Speak about destruction (x1) I in a time zone (x3)
Reading The Intercept puts you TOP OF THE CLASS anyhows. Some fat nerd spook is looking at your Facebook piccies now, probably have a swift moment with Five Fingered Mary under the desk due to the sheer hubristic perversity of it all. I am finding myself falling back more and more onto Ancient Greek to manage the vocabulary needed to express my sheer and utter disgust. I hope Thom Yorke goes one-eye-blinking “Postal” in utter rage at them for using his song to name one of their crimes. Certainly gets the old pulse going again, though.
That is why all the keys to my skip codes are embedded in gay pornography. The number of thrusts in gay porn videos on xvideos.com which are correlated with the letters in the video title. Most intelligence agencies are homophobic so they will never be able to crack that code.
Terrorism: “The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.”
One essential key word is “unlawful”. If the means of coercion is made “lawful”, then presumably any sponsored act can’t logically be labelled terrorism because governments reserve to themselves the sole monopoly on the use of force which admits of no practical limitation. (The Constitution is a theoretical limitation, of course, but obviously not a practical one.)
Indeed, the phrase “state sponsored terrorism” cannot describe any act of officially sanctioned state coercion by actual or threatened force against any persons or property at home or abroad. Everyone is fair game. “Collect it all.”
One waive of the magical get-out-of-jail card (“national security”) instantly excuses any “officially approved” act by agents who (liberally) interpret secret rulings by a secret court administering secret laws in secret proceedings — none of the above subject to any meaningful oversight. We are asked to “trust” people who have deliberately and systematically deceived entire nations of fellow citizens. And on what realistic basis to they suggest we trust them? *crickets* The truth is, it isn’t a request. It’s a command. Obedience is subsumed.
History suggests such vast powers of state eventually (and inevitably) lead to profound mischief: “Over time, the Star Chamber evolved into a political weapon, a symbol of the misuse and abuse of power by the English monarchy and its courts.” Is it really necessary to point out, once again, that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”?
The other tricky key word, of course, is “force”. This does not imply any necessity for crude physical violence. Indeed, the most elegant strategy conquers with the least expenditure of physical effort (“without firing a single shot”, as the old saying goes).
Can there be any greater force for coercion of an entire population than an officially sanctioned and secret regime of perpetual, wall-to-wall surveillance of even the most private aspects of every person’s everyday life? It’s an unseen lash of limitless length which leaves no visible marks. Even the most ruthless slave master of any age would be green with envy to possess it. And now many governments do.
Self-censure spells certain death for liberal democracy. Particularly when every citizen knows he may be regarded as suspect of “something”, but with it left to him to guess what that “something” may be. Silence becomes the only risk-free behavior. And therefore the default behavior.
Because even the most ignorant peasant understands this intuitively, it seems unlikely that government officials do not. And yet they proceed with ever greater effort and arrogance of purpose. The coin phrase “In God we trust” only superficially endorses a vague religious belief. What it more profoundly endorses is the principle that only a Supreme Being could be trusted to wield great power because mankind plainly cannot.
Given what we now know, one may reasonably conclude that the mindset of the STASI state didn’t end with the fall of the Berlin Wall; it metastasized.
What about the KARMA POLICE programs used for surveillance of viewers watching cable, satellite and raw antenna TV channels? And what about the DIGINT tools used to collect additional data in order to interact with the POIs?
Cool, eh? I thought I was being smart using Cut & Paste between Firefox and Google Earth.
The thing everyone forgets is that for any of this to be useful, a nerd with a small dick and rent-a-girling to fund needs to be sitting at the end of it all and occasionally stopping from pulling his pudd so that he can: 1. read some of it. 2. analyse his research. 3. Summon up the faux will to give a shit and go tell his boss what he found and what his opinion is and then ask if he can go to the toilet, please sir. 4. Write a report without slipping into a coma at the whole not-James-Bond-at-all type tedium of it. 5. Counter-hack the out of work hackers he drinks with that want to show him how shite the security is and that Snowden could’ve just hacked in like them and stole it all anyhows and not show his face and laugh at the moron under secret government orders having to work for a living. 6. scratch his rancid balls and sneal off and take the well-paid afternoon off to rent-a-girl and some toot and get his maggot chewed. As a former researcher, I know this all takes a LOOOOOOOOOOOONG time to do by people with anti-authoritarian, sociopathic, complicated and narcissistic personalities who find petrochemical deals and scientific research programs INSANELY DULL and would much rather be drinking and whoring with their fat salaries and not have to be under the insane threat of Prison-Without-Release should they accidently or on purpose guff it all up.
Kind of almost makes it all worthwhile being spied upon.
Are there any remaining Ministers in Whitehall not being blackmailed by British spook gangs?
NO
Apparently, lots of people with WAY not enough to do, so, they, again, in long-venerated tradition of Empire go and try to control the whole world and sure enough! ‘Nuf monkeys have tapped on keyboards in patternly (?) (or is patterned?) frequency to convey the illusion to the monitors that the monitors are actually on to something of merit, by monitoring the monkey(ing) masses. Let’s reduce this to its lowest common denominator: Creating – and reinforcing – the fiction(s) that any external object – person, place or thing – like money or religion or “leader” has power over over any person to the “betterment” of the “powerful” person/object/institution… And, crucially, that the monitors or “powerful” other are separate, distinct from, DISCONNECTED in ANY way from their “subjects” or any other phenomena, period… Here’s to the equinox!
The UK is effectively a police state, it seems.
In all fairness they have far fewer unarmed citizens murdered by police than the U.S., so there’s that.
Their people are not free…so there’s that.
Our people are not free, so there’s that.
Two comments:
1. Terrorists and kiddy fiddlers have become the New Witches. It is actually now perfectly fine to be a “real” witch, in fact the freakier the witch you are the more appearance on Daytime TV you will probably get. This has helped demonise the Internet, a place of BILLIONS upon BILLIONS of individual activities every day, despite terrorists only taking dramatic action every once in a very long while and pervs not really dominating even the smallest corner and most abuse of kids happening by parents and families with no computers or connections necessary. Somehow “the Internet empowers them”, so demonise it or be dirty with them.
2. The nature of pornography on the net has changed from being usually separate or commercial businesses in small groups that were Preview-then-Pay For The Main Content sites to now being this huge interlinked mess of Top Group Pages that very rarely has a commercial aspect but amply demonstrates that Rule 34 is essentially true. Who generates it all and funds it and why, because I haven’t seen the likes of Jenna Jameson and Co in a looooooooooong time? Nostalgia, it’s a strange thing. And being associated with the New Witchcraft, no one talks about it, even Chomsky flees that one…!
So, even if you “looked but did not see” like Bill Clinton “smoked but didn’t inhale” or ever thought that the US deserved a bit of karma, you are now a NeoWitch.
Well, as they say Zeus, first your money, then your cloths! *Thankfully, they won’t catch me nakied on net. .. or see my ‘secret mantel of power’ (h/t Snowden.).
*More likely … they’ll know more and more about less and less and eventually they’ll know everything about nothing.
Nice one, but aren’t you presuming that they know something about anything?
They “know” like the sea “knows” fish piss in it. As I have noted above later, some nerd needs to “mine” for this digital “gold” and, oh f*ck them! They are f*cking stupid anyways, so even given the Answer to Life, The Universe & Everything, they will still just use it to sell adverts to local idiot vendors, make sweeping and wrong generalisations about human behaviour, find out what price Brazil wants to sell petrol for rather than look it up on the usual website and find out what colour panties Angela Merkel is wearing today, the perverts, which she now, whore-like, slips into every phone conversation for their delictation and delight (“Sie rot sind, Schwein Wichser!”). To ask “Why?” is to seek the answer to “stupid is what stupid does” which in itself is probably stupid. These people are 1. Government buffoons. 2. Not even proper Military Buffoons. 3. Computer programming nerds who want to be “spies” because mummy didn’t spank them how they liked to be spanked, and that’s on the monkey. :) Can you tell I hate them and is this now banned hate-speech?
No, no, – this can’t be right. I was just being really paranoid for many years now – believing every one of us might be a “Truman Show,” or that every computer, tablet, smart-phone, car-phone-computer, smart-tv or game system an agent for their “Matrix” – whenever THEY choose.
I got better…
I called the doctor, woke him up. He said …”put the lime in the coconut and drink it bowl up.”
*and remember, it’s not a lie if you believe it (h/t George Castanza)
Unusually timely Nilsson advice. I’m fixing Vietnamese salad tonight, Thai tea.
*why he was always convincing himself about – something
…and my famous cousin just bought a smart tv.
Blackmail is the useful objective, active or passive.
KARMA POLICE….
Domestically it’s Comey’s STASI FBI gang.
All bitches!
One thing I wish is more covered is how social media and other internet service providers enable these governmental mass surveillance capabilities. Even if not purposefully, their gratuitous use of tracking tools (like cookie and IP logging) means that I, as a user, have to accept exposing myself to mass surveillance or simply shelter myself from the rest of the world.
Take my savings bank, for example. Recently, their mobile phone app was updated to access my calender so that I/they may easily schedule an appt with bank staff. Convenient feature of course, but here’s the rub, in order for me to use the app, I MUST provide them access to my calender. Even if this is not something they or I expect to use on a daily, or even a yearly, basis. Maybe to me, the convenience of automatically updating my calender is not worth the cost of exposing such information. Never the less, there is NO options to me other than simply forgo mobile banking altogether, which is really not an option.
Now, I almost certain that my bank does not intend these to my choices, but I also think they never really mapped out all the ramifications/risk (to customers) of embedding “Read/write to User Calender” in their mobile phone app. Or a minimum, they naively think that all risk to customers are simply limited to THEIR intended use, rather than the misuse by other external agents/spies.
This is the kind of forced-opt-in, or more specifically, the lack of big-picture-thinking by app and website developers, that really enables and empowers mass government surveillance.
I don’t think there’s a good option other than rejecting these features. A very large fraction of the research since September 11th has been aimed at surveillance and control, one way or another. It’s getting to the point where if a consumer good was patented after 2000, we probably don’t want it. Why do we need faster, smarter computers than what it takes to browse the Web? Why do we need “smart” phones that just cost a lot of money and are vulnerable to be hacked and otherwise make the user feel really dumb for having trusted them? Maybe it’s time to say hey, our cycle of civilization has had its day, it’s gone past the point of moral sustainability, and now it’s time to it all to decline.
Er, dude, the BANKS are the ones doing this all. See, all the Bad Guys love MONEY, and the BANKS, well, they have all the MONEY, so Bad Guys do their bad shit as advised by the BANKS. Unless of course you carry it around in a bag, in which case keep it quiet because everyone is hacking this site now. The clue was when the BANKS “f*cked up” by paying themselves loads of cash commissions but then all those deals “collapsed” and they “lost” loads of the MONEY they were supposed to be looking after – OOPS! – so they then got the TAXPAYER (that’s you) to PAY MORE MONEY for their “mistakes” because they get to have all the MONEY even when they don’t have it because they “screwed up” (the ” ” means “allegedly”). And you have to pay your tax and kiss it goodbye or go to jail for being a bad boy but a differnt type of bad than theirs. And they don’t. Simple!
As to your first part, the government gets Social Media’s help by saying here, have a monopoly on an industry sector, and because we are so kind and not using anti-monopoly laws on ram one up you, you will give us whatever we ask for, whenever we ask for it. Call it Respect. Or The West’s Version of Corruption That They’d Rather Not Have Considered As Corruption so the Index Thing Looks Nicer for Them, like. Whatever. Again, Simple!
No wonder the Magna Carter is held up by them as a leap forward in freedom, poor old King John was mugged and “western democracy” is just another way of robbing poor, powerless people who toil in the fields. In fact , medieval serfs only owed their landlords 50 days of labour per year, so things have gone considerably backwards.
This is all about political control of the masses, remenber that the enemy is
us, the people. Any revolution shows it clearly.
Knowing what you read, do, watch on line is key to anticipate any social uprising.
Imagine that all a sudden millions of people take to the streets and ask for their
rights, work, housing, peace. What our governements will do ?
We are not there yet and our elected “managers” are there to keep everybody
in lane.
So if not now ? when will “we” the people ask for this to stop ?
Then we need more and better encryption.
>”Then we need more and better encryption.”
O.K. .. and, evidently mike, GCHQ might want to check their security/blowback too! *if nothing else
“””…“Pertinent metadata events will be locked within the encrypted channels and difficult, if not impossible, to prise out,” the report says, adding that the agencies were working on a plan that would “(hopefully) allow our Internet Exploitation strategy to prevail.”…”””
“””…the agencies were working on a plan…””” and that is from 2011.
To me that is the most frightening part of this great article.
How are they going to get around encrypted channels? Have they already done so?
heavy investment in quantum computing (NSA , thus also UK),
They steal the keys from the manufacturers and programmers like the Dutch SIM card job; put pressure on service providers and manufacturers to provide rear-entry access (like they give to their paymasters); grab the data pre-encryption using spyware; or exploit some trusted insider with access and hope it stays hush-hush.
Who knows if they have done so? Who knows if they don’t have bank account and financial transactions hacks redirecting monies to accounts? Who knows if they are not some master criminal agency that have taken over the intelligence agencies in some mega-coup like Los Zetas?
In a digital age EVERYTHING is hackable, and these guys love a challenge if nothing else.
Or they could all go get proper jobs and f*ck off. Their income streams I guess are: 1. Tax revenues. 2. Insider dealing from industry hacks. 3. Providing information to paying customers like the government agencies, military and private sectors. 4. Sponsorship by sugardaddies. 5. Danegeld from hacked victims. 1. is guaranteed if they can keep the electorate at bay. 6. Money siphons. 2. is the major problem if encryption is effective and properly applied. 3. is open to the external vagueries of demand and varies in complexity from job to job. 4. is guaranteed if forthcoming. 5. is the most prosecutably illegal. 6. is probably very likely and may even be ignored by “victims” and “prosecutors” to provide covert funding. The Brits do all the smarts, the Yanks do all the heavyheavymobstercrap. you see a lot of these project/system code names have more of a British feel than an American – it’s the Brainiac and Musclehead Spooky Tag Team!
The problem is we thought we had protection, so who can we trust in the future to provide protection? Their strength – size and apparent unity – is their weakness but only if people can unite and hit each one effectively. Politicians need VOTES – deny them this unless they commit to defunding the Spooks and empower totally impartial inspectors and end the various “Wars” they are conducting. The monopolising industries need CUSTOMERS and LOYALTY – again, deny them this unless they build in security and change their insane Policy Agreements that 99.9999% of people routinely skip over when joining FaceF*ck or Twatter or whatever.
Each country has pros and cons to success. Britain lacks a decent Constitution but it is full of Nerdy Computer Geezers that frankly hate the Yanks and have no real inclination towards giving them World Domination, but enjoy how it empowers them. They also cannot Hide easily in Blighty, like Yanks can go hide in Virginia or Nebraska. Cheltenham is rather easy to go and kick up a merry stink at. Britain lacks the backing of the police and military at anything beyond a basic put down level, as the Poll Tax Riots and similar demonstrated, the Police and Army are closer to Civvy Street than the Hallowed Halls of Power. America’s army and police are very well equipped and very right-wing, but are rather chickenshit and reliant on technology and would baulk at serious crowd control if it came to it, especially against middle-classed neighbours and friends.
It could be a very ugly decade or two, or it could all fall over tomorrow like so many house of cards do and there is way more at stake than just simple encryption – these people are setting up the world’s most severely oppressive mechanism and it will be hard just to say, well, you f*cked up and got a bit megalomaniacal, but hey, we forgive you, here, have the keys the castle again and this time, behave…!
Madness…utter fucking madness….terrorist are not bonafide demented people. They are opportunist and pissed as hell about the way things are. This is not about their religion either. They want what the US wants: control over the rich minerals and resources they have right beneath their feet. They want power, money, and control over everything and everyone. To think that spying the entire population is the way to deal with such terrorists is just plain stupid. But it’s too late now. The surveillance state may think it’s obsession with data collecting is the right thing to do, but no amount of surveillance will cover every human being.
It is not a stupid plan because IT IS NOT THE PLAN. The Plan is SPYING ON YOU because you are obliged to pay for all of this with your taxes, and if people start getting a bit unhappy about that, then out will come the Riot Police and all the toys you paid for and poor old Neil Young will have plenty more than Ohio to write about. Welcome to the Paranoid Cage called US Jingoism, now sit quiet and pay your dues or go to one of their even more exclusive little lockups.
Oh, come now. The U.S. isn’t like that – it has absolutely no interest in controlling the rich minerals and resources. Take this for example: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/29/opinion/selling-off-apache-holy-land.html?_r=0 John McCain’s sneaky little plan that sold off one of the richest copper mines in the U.S. in exchange for some miscellaneous scrap land the Rio Tinto Corporation was finished with. That’s the U.S. secret to escaping the “resource curse”, you know – our country hands over everything valuable to the first guy to find a mineral and bribe a politician, and voters act grateful for a smile and a pat on the head. Eventually the money will all run out, but as long as America is a rich country it can go for a long smooth slide with no one making any waves as long as they’re carrying away the goods.
I am glad Jeremy Corbyn looks a bit like Obi-Wan Kenobi, as he could be the only one who can save us. Poor old Thom Yorke must be choking on his Vegan nut bake; I am sorry, spooks, but Buddha doesn’t work for GCHQ and he spells Karma S.N.O.W.D.E.N.
If KARMA POLICE is indeed from Radiohead, then MEMORY HOLE is from 1984, with an update that would have shocked Orwell. In the novel, a memory hole was an opening into a chute that lead to an incinerator. Now such “worthless” data is sent to archival for the opposite of forgetting.
Actually the memory hole was used for surveillance, it was supposed to be destroyed.
So they have all this information -billions of it- so now what? What can they possibly do with so much of it? Madness..utter fucking madness!! I wish I had
Confuse and bewilder, and manufacture cases against you when they so desire?
Like any sane oldster, I’ve spent a bit of time investigating the various real crimes which appear important to modern history, and I’ve stuck only with the verifiable facts.
Take the JFK assassination: the facts I am sure of consist of Allen Dulles (fired CIA director) visiting Dallas several weeks prior to the murder of President Kennedy, and the photos of Gen. Edward Lansdale (CIA) and Lucien Conein (CIA) which appeared, thanks to the wire services and the photographer, James Altgens (and yes, put-up people have attempted to discredit them, but they have stood the biometric tests of time).
Also, the police just happened to detain and question, but not book, a fellow with ties to the oil companies and mob, Harold Jameson (FBI Case No. 499 731) who just happened to be around when RFK was murdered in LA just after he won the California presidential primary in 1968. Harold Jameson appears to have been the brother of Donald James, of the CIA who was Chief SR/CA, which should translate to Soviet Russia/Covert Actions Section.
There were three so-called tramps, escorted off the grassy knoll by two lackadaisical DPD cops, but they were never booked, according to the chief of the Dallas County Sheriff’s Identification Division, James Kitching. (Although there have been numerous articles, TV shows, etc., which CLAIM they were positively ID’d, these have all proven wrong — none of the three so-called vagrants matched any hoboes names Doyle, Abrams or Gedney, nor did they match Charles Harrelson or Holt or Hunt, etc. As I said, I stick with the facts, what can be proven.)
I would humbly recommend, to any who have never seen the last publicly recorded presence of Lee Harvey Oswald, before the world and pleading for legal representation, to view the following:
http://ftpcontent.worldnow.com/kdfw/projects/JFKvideo/video/jfk006.html
http://ftpcontent.worldnow.com/kdfw/projects/JFKvideo/video/jfk007.html
From this site below:
http://ftpcontent.worldnow.com/kdfw/projects/JFKvideo/
At that site there are other excellent clips, and three which show the DPD people contradicting one another, which is another invalidation of the so-called identification of those three tramps — who have NEVER been successfully id’d yet (the three supposed records of their booking have no thumb print, nor book photo, of course, which invalidates them):
http://ftpcontent.worldnow.com/kdfw/projects/JFKvideo/video/jfk031.html
http://ftpcontent.worldnow.com/kdfw/projects/JFKvideo/video/jfk032.html
http://ftpcontent.worldnow.com/kdfw/projects/JFKvideo/video/jfk033.html
The next three clips are the finest clips I’ve ever seen, although I believe Steve Rivele was given the runaround — yes the shooters were from the Union Corse, but no the Mafia didn’t contract the hit, they were most likely brought in by Lucien Conein:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LbNWUNfnaA&feature=player_embedded
And these two,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFhPEzQMSL0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKarTaDUxyU
The point being, endless disinformation and misinformation, Cuban this, Cuban-American that, plus the Mafia this, the Mafia that, etc., when the constant in the murders/coups of JFK, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., RFK and Salvador Allende are the CIA and David Rockefeller.
Stick with the facts!
[Disclaimer: I love porn, so up front I’ll state: Christina Jolie and Zoey Monroe.]
Pornographic websites are not what they used to be they have no blackmail or shock effect in the EU most people are bored with them. Being watched by people whose leader the Prime Minister is into bestiality is quite worrying and would explain why cat youTube videos are so heavily monitored.
All this collection of data does not seem to be stopping criminality and terrorist hackers are hacking, bombers are bombing and that is just the governments without including the other hackers and bombers.
1980s: There has been a bomb in Oxford Street! and in the days before Al Qaeda there is only one prime suspect the U.S.A. sponsoring terrorists as always. The U.S. has sponsored every terrorist organisation in the world. One way or another throughout its short history the U.S. has attempted to kill you. http://www.the-philosopher.co.uk/whocares/popups/warcrimes.htm
THANKS A LOT FOR THIS DEAR RYAN GALLAGHER! PLEASE PUBLISH MORE ON THIS.
EVERYONE @THE INTERCEPT IS A HERO.
GLENN GREENWALD IS A HERO.
JEREMY SCAHILL IS A HERO.
JULIAN ASSANGE IS A HERO.
EDWARD SNOWDEN IS A HERO.
BUT WITH ALL DUE RESPECT, YOU ARE NOT PUBLISHING ENOUGH.
YOU NEED TO EXPOSE MORE OF THESE DISGUSTING CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES AND CRIMES AGAINST MANKIND COMMITTED BY THE GOVERNMENT.
THE GOVERNMENT IS THE MOST DANGEROUS, THE MOST DISGUSTING ENEMY OF MANKIND.
THANK YOU AGAIN FOR THE GREAT WORK YOU ALL ARE DOING, BUT PLEASE PUBLISH MORE.
THIS RIDICULOUSNESS NEEDS TO END AND HOPEFULLY IF YOU PUBLISH MORE THE SHEEPLE MAY EVENTUALLY WAKE THE F UP!
KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
P.S. LOVE YOU GLENN GREENWALD, KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
Agreed. . . agreed . . . agreed!
Would recommend to any and all who have yet to read this book by Dr. Oscar Guardiola-Rivera: Story of a Death Foretold — a tremendous book on 09/11/73, and the destruction of the Salvador Allende administration by Kissinger, Helms and Nixon.
The clear admission that they are spying on cookies is very important. Cookies are essentially content – they could contain anything. If they have decided to allow themselves to intercept that, they surely must be intercepting anything in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_header_fields .
For example, consider the Content-Length header. The spies say they aren’t intercepting what you’re reading, like the /2015/09/25/gchq-radio-porn-spies-track-web-users-online-identities/ part of this article’s address? Well, that’s fine. They can just record the LENGTH of the page you read, and cross-index it with the length of the page when they browse The Intercept themselves. Right?
Now to be sure, with The Intercept they would have the hindrance of HTTPS before getting to the Content-Length header. However much that is…
Another example: suppose you’re browsing a secure HTTPS site like The Intercept, and you click on a link to a source article that is HTTP. Now as far as I know the “Referer” header field ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer ) contains the plaintext information about what page you visited, and the GCHQ now has a permanent copy of that, right? Even though the link itself when you first typed it in or clicked it is supposedly part of the protected “content”, now it’s part of the metadata, no?
Browsers will not send a referrer when linking or redirecting from HTTPS to HTTP.
I recall when Anonymous was recruiting for people the world over to do an online DDOS (with that ion cannon program, I believe) and I warned people to use a publicly accessed Wi-Fi (away from any security cams, of course) and some commenters said, but they can track you by the MAC address.
No, they can track the MAC address of the AP, or Access Point, the wi-fi router, not the individual user.
And assuming someone were really that good and could actually do so, unless you were using a government PC or laptop or pad, etc., it wouldn’t matter ’cause nobody really has a database of all those MAC addresses. Can you dig it?
[And don’t argue with me about the MAC addressing, I was around when it was all created and coded! If you don’t know the original coder of the hyperlink, do not consider yourself equally knowledgeable in other areas!]
A correctly designed browser, yes. But what about those that weren’t designed correctly?
Wow Ryan, This is a very informative and well written piece. If “usernames and email and IP addresses” are essential to establishing the personal identity of online users, then why is the Intercept so keen on requiring a combination of user names, email addresses and IPs to allow commentary feedback from its readers?
Good question. Thanks, Karl!
Since this article does not mention HTTPS/SSL/TLS I have to assume GCHQ can only collect all this when we do not use SSL or other technologies to encrypt our traffic? I am happy to see that I can read this article with HTTPS.
Ryan, great article, but what do we expect are security services to do? If they do a good job and we don’t get bombs going off, isn’t that a good thing? The alternative is massive state ID system, a worse situation than this surely? Surely the problem with this way of operating is choosing how to use it. Anti terrorist, anti-spying, anti-paedophile, anti-drugs wholesale, organised crime, political corruption. Surely the awkward task is who decides which bits of data get leaked to standard plod to act on?
“If they do a good job and we don’t get bombs going off….” That suggests a link between “good job” and the absence of bombs. Contrary to government marketing efforts, there’s little if any evidence of such a link. Further, there’s every effort to stymie legitimate public inquiry into the efficacy of surveillance without reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.
Mark, when listening to or reading about anything to do with this whole subject, change the word “terrorist” or “drug trafficker” or “pervert” to “you, sir,” and then terrorist might get the picture. These people “failed” to anticipate Russia making a swipe for the Ukraine and since 911 more aircraft have been downed by pilots and airline idiocy than any terrorists. Now the world is digital, The Matrix doesn’t look so dumb after all. Look at the Boston Bombings – two yokels, one still a virgin I reckon, from the sticks of bumpkin Russia “outthought” a trillion-dollar security system – why? Because it was doing its job of supressing and spying on US citizens perfectly well.
My magic rock keeps away tigers.
You don’t see any tigers, do you?
GCHQ and so forth are admitted terrorists — committing crimes, while trying to scare people, to get their political objectives achieved — and they’re certainly blackmailers, since that’s the only thing this sort of spying is good for.
If a bomb goes off in England, GCHQ probably *set* the bomb, honestly. I oppose terrorists and blackmailers, so I want GCHQ shut down with extreme prejudice.
Is there not a “massive state ID system” now in place, or at the very least, well on the way to being in place! I suspect that all the Five Eyes countries have made significant efforts in this regard. I think it to be part and parcel to mass surveillance. What’s the point of following around or watching the citizenry in cyberspace or on a cell or landline if you cannot identify who they are beyond a pseudonym. While the name is irrelevant to the filing of information under phone number, or IP address, the person’s name becomes relevant at the point that the haystack is accessed.
We here in Canada have experienced radical changes, ongoing over the last 20 years, to the demands for ID that in part, demand that the individual be tied to a specific physical location. It starts with our government ID. The incessant demands to show ID, especially of the young, require that the public have “valid” (read government) picture ID. But no longer can a person simply provide an address where they may be contacted. All three levels of government have collaborated to have computer programs that identify and reject a non-residential address. Integral to this scheme was a massive effort to identify and assign a specific street or road address to every piece of private property in the land. -A massive and difficult undertaking in Canada to be sure.
Our Post Office also plays a role. Postal boxes have always been common but recent moves to phase out home delivery are making them ever more so. Guess what? For the last number of years, a person cannot get a post box without providing their physical residence address.
And our federal election law has been amended to play into this effort to ensure that all are properly cataloged with their physical residential address. The government claimed that massive election fraud demanded they act; …To which the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada stood up and detailed that not only was there no massive fraud, there was no fraud evident, period. But our government barged ahead nontheless. Notably, Charlie Angus, a Member of Parliament for a wilderness area of Canada was exempted from voting under the then proposed amendments regarding address requirements. That stymied some of it! At least for the time being. …But it’s a work in progress, you can bet.
Which brings me to my second bone of contention. You appear to advocate for the use of mass surveillance for issues such as terrorism, spying (by the bad guys against the good guys, I assume), pedophilia, drug dealing, organized crime, and political corruption. Your list of appropriate areas for mass surveillance appear to have a ‘hot button’ issue for just about everyone. The problem is that we will all have to submit to ongoing surveillance 24/7 forever or until we rise up against it, which would be no small undertaking. Always watching what we say, what we read, what we write, and with whom we associate is our future under mass surveillance. …And all because law enforcement wants to conduct investigations into everyone, and do so in secret.
First of all, we’re talking domestic issues for the vast bulk of your list of suitable targets for mass surveillance. The only thing that would save us to any measure would be the sheer volume. Secondly, it’s is all secret. That’s the elephant in the mass surveillance room. We cannot control elements of government that operate in secret. Just look at what public oversight was in the U.S. under Feinstein or in the UK under Rifkind. Those that were supposed to be held accountable by the oversight committees were in fact driving the bus in a manner, and had trussed up any meaningful oversight like a Christmas turkey. And I don’t see that that has improved much.
Secrecy has no place in a democracy. The public is not ruled by government. We rule government. Secrecy scuttles this critical paradigm. Secrecy as it is presently evolving provides broad, and perhaps unlimited authority to police, security and military agencies. It is nothing less than a parallel government. It is that parallel government that dictates what the norms and operations are to be in their newfound world. Should we suffer at their hands, we are unable to even take them to court for we have no evidence of what they are doing, …just the result.
Let’s look at the individual categories in the light of mass surveillance and secrecy.
Terrorism
What this has brought us in Canada is a number of lawsuits and notoriety. Our national police and our security service sent a number of persons of Middle East decent to rendition for torture in association with the U.S. A common denominator in all cases was the police refusing to provide evidence but saying, “trust us, this or that person is very bad. Very dangerous. We just can’t tell you what we know”. Interestingly this approach protected them for some time. They even had the balls to submit questions to be put by the torturers. In at least one instance they attended at the site to sit on the sidelines as questions were put to the poor hapless victim of their incompetence and duplicity.
The most famous case, perhaps because it was the first, was that of Maher Arar. He was a engineer, and importantly for what was to follow, his wife was a PhD. Our RCMP put him on a list of suspected terrorists and he was pulled off of a plane in the U.S.and in short order, rendered to Syria for torture. His wife mounted a very effective campaign to publicize his plight. After a year or more, she obtained his release. A subsequent inquiry witnessed the police present evidence for their actions as being that he had been observed to have a conversation with another similarly identified suspect, (ie, trust us, we have the evidence, we just can’t tell you), in the rain, outside of a social club in Montreal. The police said this was evidence of guilt because it was an attempt to frustrate audio surveillance. That’s it. That’s all they had because they couldn’t reveal that their evidence on him was simply contact with another up the line. It was secret. It was their new tool, mass surveillance. And it did not provide objective grounds of wrongdoing on which to proceed.
When the Snowden documents were revealed, it became readily apparent what had occurred to Arar and the rest of those that we sent to torture. Those that came in contact by phone or perhaps the Internet with someone identified as being “very bad, very dangerous” was, in the absence of any concrete evidence, seen as a suspect. What to do, what to do?? –‘Why, we’ll just give his name and travel info to the Americans, and we’ll have our “evidence” in short order’.
This is what happens when those that are seen as powerless for one reason or another are tossed into the mix of junk science, gross incompetence, duplicity and airheaded stupidity. The protections of our law exist for good reason. I’m not aware of even one culprit so much as suffering disciplinary action. Bear in mind that if a private citizen participated in such a diabolical scheme that they would be jailed for many years, and would have had their face on the front of every newspaper in the land as that of a monster. So much for effective oversight.
Spying
No comment
Pedophilia
Get a warrant, as has been, and hopefully presently is, the practice! This has worked well to achieve a balance between privacy and the detection of criminal activity in the past. The vast majority of the public do not want to be investigated simply because they have contacted someone for some reason or another. Just because the crime is abhorrent doesn’t mean that we owe law enforcement the right to take the easy route. (Refer to details above for a refresher on what can happen when that occurs). Law enforcement is a respected and very good paying job in the Five Eyes countries. ….They’ll do it our way, thanks very much.
Drug Dealing
The vast majority of the public do not want to be put under investigation simply because we have had contact with someone, or someone that has had contact with someone, that is involved with drugs. The consequences of being identified with drug activity can be staggering in the present atmosphere. Again, there is no controlling an agency that operates in secret. The sky’s the limit. Everything that can flow from being put on a list that is secret is a possibility, starting with travel restrictions in at least some of the Five Eyes countries.
The following is an example of what is going on, mainstream. The U.S. demanded that designated groups of transportation and warehouse workers in Canada hold a Transportation Security Clearance (TSC), ostensibly to identify and remove terrorists from contact with goods bound for their country . The U.S. demanded and received the right to, in association with the RCMP, secretly investigate applicants, their family, friends and associates for secret criteria and to retain and share the subsequent file for as long as they please and with whomever they please. Those rejected are deemed a security threat, removed from their job, and in all likelihood put on an American list. Obviously terrorists, you say! Think again. While we don’t know anywhere near all of the criteria, we do know that it excludes anyone with a criminal record, no matter how long ago. Any past drug involvement including use, and association with anyone involved in drugs is also a fail. So if your brother in law is, or was, growing marijuana, you’re a fail and a security threat. Or if you have tested positive for drugs in the past, ditto, even though drug test records were initially promised to be private. A fail is obviously a life altering event.
And it may all hang on the opinion of the officer analyzing the mass surveillance data of those that the applicant associates with. This is a world apart from identifying terrorists. One wonders how an honest officer could participate in this scheme.
At the time that all this was pending, it was unclear how they would ever get the manpower to investigate applicants, their family, friends, and associates. This appeared to be a massive undertaking. And then came Snowden and it all became clear. It also became clear how subjective it all was. One hop, two hops, three hops! It is completely how the investigator sees it. No recourse. No upstart courts. They are judge, jury and executioner. What many of them had been advocating for in veiled terms for decades. Police nirvana. It was truly a life lesson to watch our business community shepherd this through a minority Parliament.
In my view, anyone after reading this that proposes that law enforcement merit being allowed to fly over the protections of the law for reasons of expediency is either a little short or bald faced duplicitous.
Organized Crime
Get a warrant! Law enforcement has had great success in the past with this tried and true method. The Five Eyes are democracies, all of which share a common legal system flowing from the Magna Carta and England. Objective grounds are required to proceed. …As they should be. Never mind proposing that we all submit to warrantless investigation of our activities, 24/7.
Political Corruption
Yet again, get a warrant! This is a very delicate area. Politicians attract all sorts, and past experience has demonstrated that the police can work to discredit those that they feel threatened by. J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI was a master at getting the goods on everyone. It guaranteed him job security, at the very least.
In Canada, our RCMP perhaps were pivotal in bringing in a law and order Conservative government. The incumbent Liberal government was staggering under the weight of a significant scandal but all indications were that they would form a minority government. The RCMP put the finance Minister under investigation with announcements of charges pending against some number of people for insider trading based on privileged information in the recent Budget. There was a very strong inference of involvement by the Minister in all of this. It was the final handicap on their election chances. They lost and assumed Opposition. …But after the election, the case just fell apart. There was nothing save one mid-level bureaucrat that had bought a small amount of stock in a company that had a tenuous claim to any benefit from the Budget.
It’s absolute folly to ever erect a law enforcement system that operates in secret to vacuum through the daily activities of our elected reps and the various bureaucrats that wield power over the police such as the Freedom of Information Commissioners, Police Boards, Judges, etc. You couldn’t entrust a bunch of angels with that license let alone an element of the civil service that feels that they have an entitlement to call the shots.
Since we vote for the people that vote to spend money on this spying of us, let’s just save some time and money and cut out the middlemen. We just report directly on ourselves and neighbors and eliminate Parliament/GCHQ and Congress/NSA. Since it is all for our benefit, this will be much more efficient and effective.
Chilling article. It is one I will share with my high school students. The question now is how do we reverse this trend?
Definitely a good idea to hand this to your students,
it might also be good to ask them what they think of parents handing their 8+ year olds cell phones. After 10 years of use and upgrades, a pretty good profile on that peson has been compiled for
use by both Corporations and Govenment.
One or two of them might realize what that means for their future.
That’s Panoptikonically Kool!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12gLKggzj9g
I wonder if it was the United Nations project that got an employee of brandon.com.ua in this system.
source:
https://theintercept.com/document/2015/09/25/social-anthropoid-briefing
(1) There’s not much that can be done when MPs, like US members of Congress, and the citizens they represent, have no fundamental objection to what the national security apparatus is doing. (2) The apparatus’s obsession with porn is interesting; presumably, it relates to its usefulness as blackmail.
A phenomenally good article — a true act of public service. What journalism is supposed to be; thank you!
Yes, this is phenomenal reporting.
It’s also what mainstream news would look like if media companies were not directly in service of the permanent ruling structure.
What can you say after an article like this? The Brits are reading this anyway. Here’s a good one. I hope you (GCHQ) choke on all that data!!!