US surveillance

rick_chasey

A little terrifying, if predictable.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... fbi-boston

Be sure to say hello to them. It's not just journos anymore.

Initialised

How they are treating the current wave of hacktivists is pretty bad too:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... cyberspace

itboffin

This is not new my army radio training in the mid 80s we listened to calls, not mobile obs but even so. Various govs have spent a lot of money on listening stations adding mobile and internet was/is inevitable

rick_chasey

itboffin wrote:

This is not new my army radio training in the mid 80s we listened to calls, not mobile obs but even so. Various govs have spent a lot of money on listening stations adding mobile and internet was/is inevitable

Doing that without permission is bad enough but recording every phone call, email etc on a big database I find particularly disturbing.

No different to stasi land in that respect.

itboffin

Permission from who? us?

you're joking right?

rick_chasey

itboffin wrote:

Permission from who? us?

you're joking right?

Judges etc.

The same system they have for searching properties etc.

I've watched the wire. To phone tap they need to make a good and credible case to judges. Can't just tap for the fun of it.

When they do it without, it's a big deal, and rightly so.

sketchley

There could be a difference between recording and accessing. So everything is recorded and encrypted but can only be accessed with a court order. That is the kind of grey area where these things could quite legally sit....

greg66_tri_v2.0

I'm surprised at the surprise. The NSA is notorious. The protection for US citizens is a practical one: no one has the time to analyse all the communications that can be intercepted. So key words raise red flags - and those comms get pulled put for review. The rest just sit there.

Plaster "national security" across a plan and you can do what you want these days. Forget court orders. The one heartening point in the article was that Americans are beginning the question their loss of liberties, because, arguably, the single biggest consequence of 9/11 was the rapid erosion of everyday freedoms that are part of. A democratic society.

greg66_tri_v2.0

Rick Chasey wrote:

itboffin wrote:

Permission from who? us?

you're joking right?

Judges etc.

The same system they have for searching properties etc.

I've watched the wire. To phone tap they need to make a good and credible case to judges. Can't just tap for the fun of it.

When they do it without, it's a big deal, and rightly so.

You're learning your law from the wrong programmes. Watch Enemy Of The State.

itboffin

Americans have no freedom thats the biggest joke ever, they just dont know it or care.

True story, in 2006 I built London's biggest outdoors wireless network for the corp of London, now this attracted the attention of the Met and all of their more interesting departments, so after a couple of meetings where they asked lots of funny "dad" type questions, someone asked if we could record all traffic over this 1 mile area, erm yes of course we can - duh

So then I gave them an idea of home much data a day and how much that would cost (hardware) but the deal breaker was when I explained the physical storage space all this data would need. We discussed the budget they had laughed a lot then had another cup of coffee and left it at that.

The US on the other hand has a limitless budget so nothing is out of the question.

On the otherside of the coin the commercial world is just as interested in your personally "profile" and does everything thing that not yet illegal to gain that information, I know I used to do this.

navt

Didn't the U.S. government develop Google and Facebook and Twitter? Just saying.

rick_chasey

Greg66 Tri v2.0 wrote:

I'm surprised at the surprise..

Who mentioned surprise? ?

It's concerning. It's stasi esq and there's good reason why that's a bad thing.

domgears

Greg66 Tri v2.0 wrote:

Rick Chasey wrote:

itboffin wrote:

Permission from who? us?

you're joking right?

Judges etc.

The same system they have for searching properties etc.

I've watched the wire. To phone tap they need to make a good and credible case to judges. Can't just tap for the fun of it.

When they do it without, it's a big deal, and rightly so.

You're learning your law from the wrong programmes. Watch Enemy Of The State.

Do you guys get "Person of Interest" in the UK, we are on season 2 here in Singapore, very interesting indeed.

daviesee

I thought this has been common knowledge for decades. :?:

Wake up call if you think you have privacy I suppose.

And yes, these days "security" trumps "rights".

tailwindhome

What do you think the chaps at GCHQ have been doing for the past 50 years?

rick_chasey

TailWindHome wrote:

What do you think the chaps at GCHQ have been doing for the past 50 years?

Figured it was more targetted.

"We have good reason to intercept this chap's communications for the next three month"

Judge: "have two months"

Not blanket of any email or phone call or text made, let alone those of other nations.

I'm surprised so many people are ok with it. When I watched the lives of others everyone seemed agreed that this spying was a bad thing. The same when I shared Stasiland (book) with people.

daviesee

Rick Chasey wrote:

Figured it was more targetted.

Recorded until flagged or required.
Chances are no one will ever listen, or care.

It will mostly be lost in the traffic. Can you imagine how much data there must be?

I don't know what you can do if you are offended but very little I would imagine.

Headhuunter

I agree, it's definitely of concern. The government/state in the US and possibly the UK (and of course other countries) is becoming increasingly intrusive all in the name of "security". I have nothing to hide and I'm sure anything they have on me is lost in a mass of data but the state/government spying on its citizens makes me uncomfortable. It's ironic that the US condemns countries like Saudi Arabia for banning the use of Blackberries because the state there was unable to access messages sent when, as pointed out in the article, Saudi is simply trying to get the same access to these messages that the US (and other countries) already has. I find it amusing and worrying that the US still tries to pitch itself as the land of the free etc etc when class mobility was recently found to be lower than in most countries in Europe including the UK and the state routinely spies on its citizens' communications.... It doesn't even seem to do any good as we can see from the recent marathon bombings.

sketchley

There is a lot of law in UK (RIPA) and europe (Human Rights Act) that means this (telecommunication interception) shouldn't happen here without a warrant.

IANAL but there do appear to be grey areas that could allow this in the uk;

1. In the interested of national security the home secretary could issues a very wide ranging warrant, however if this ever came out it would be politcal suicide so I don't think this happens.
2. Calls could be routed outside the country (think satelite) at which point interception and recording is not illegal.
3. It could be argued that recording a call is not interception and only subsquent access (with a warrant) would be.

wgwarburton

daviesee wrote:

Rick Chasey wrote:

Figured it was more targetted.

Recorded until flagged or required.
Chances are no one will ever listen, or care.

It will mostly be lost in the traffic. Can you imagine how much data there must be?

I don't know what you can do if you are offended but very little I would imagine.

Routine use of PGP would help a lot. Currently, however, it would probably get you flagged.

(I'm not suggesting this would be "secure", neither would it achieve full privacy, as protecting the keys would be an issue), however widespread adoption would make surveilliance much harder.

Is that what you want, though?

How to prevent abuse is the challenge, not how to prevent monitoring.

Cheers,
W.

sketchley

WGWarburton wrote:

daviesee wrote:

Rick Chasey wrote:

Figured it was more targetted.

Recorded until flagged or required.
Chances are no one will ever listen, or care.

It will mostly be lost in the traffic. Can you imagine how much data there must be?

I don't know what you can do if you are offended but very little I would imagine.

Routine use of PGP would help a lot. Currently, however, it would probably get you flagged.

(I'm not suggesting this would be "secure", neither would it achieve full privacy, as protecting the keys would be an issue), however widespread adoption would make surveilliance much harder.

Is that what you want, though?

How to prevent abuse is the challenge, not how to prevent monitoring.

Cheers,
W.

Quite, particuarly as RIPA requires you to disclose them if asked, and makes it a criminal offence not to provide them......

davmaggs

There's several hundred public bodies that have the right to conduct surveillance on you.

They include local councils following you and going through your communications to check that you didn't lie on a school application form (yes, this has been done). HMG is also pushing through laws to force every ISP to log all your internet traffic.

Posts above assume that this only effects really dodgy people and that the courts need to be involved, so this confusion somehow adds protection. I argue that with so much data accumulating and being so accessible it will impact the average punter too. Not Hollywood paranoa style, but more like run ins with low-level bureaucracy.

Have a row with someone who works at a public body and they can now really **** with your life, accidentally be drawn into a media story and a journo with cash can pay off an administrator to see your data or start legal action against a public body and see if they restrain what they look at.

The really bad people know this stuff, they aren't daft enough to be emailing or phoning from home.

sketchley

@davmaggs you are talking about RIPA. I think bigger threat is security of the database themselves and people access them outside of the law rather than poeple acting within the law which has safeguards. Even "low-level bureaucracy" still need authorisation of "senior member of the authority" to do the stuff you are talking about and there are all kinds of code of practice they must follow to do it.

With authorisation from "senior member of the authority", there are several government agencys that can use direct survalence (following you), covert intellegence (informers) and use communication data (records of calls etc) but even then they do not have access to actual communictions (emails, phone calls etc), "In the interests of national security, for the purpose of preventing or detecting serious crime and for the purpose of safeguarding the economic well-being of the United Kingdom" and only then with the home secretary's permission. Inside all of this RIPA only allows use the above for certain purposes within each department use outside of this is illegal.

As I said above legal use shouldn't be a concern. Illegal or unauthorised is a different matter....

See here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation ... s_Act_2000

davmaggs

Sketchley; The trouble with RIPA it has been used by local authorities for low-level anti-social crime. The powers that were used were supposed to be the serious stuff that you mention, and yet the moment they were available 'mission-creep' occurred and they were used.

As for the idea that the law prevents misuse. There's far too many examples of this not working, even senior Police officers are being taken to court (at last). Technical measures may hinder the nosy civil servant, but I suspect that after a while the effort of signing off every check means that passwords will be left on post-it notes and all the other things lazy humans do to bypass effort.

bigmonka

itboffin wrote:

Americans have no freedom thats the biggest joke ever, they just dont know it or care.

True story, in 2006 I built London's biggest outdoors wireless network for the corp of London, now this attracted the attention of the Met and all of their more interesting departments, so after a couple of meetings where they asked lots of funny "dad" type questions, someone asked if we could record all traffic over this 1 mile area, erm yes of course we can - duh

So then I gave them an idea of home much data a day and how much that would cost (hardware) but the deal breaker was when I explained the physical storage space all this data would need. We discussed the budget they had laughed a lot then had another cup of coffee and left it at that.

The US on the other hand has a limitless budget so nothing is out of the question.

On the otherside of the coin the commercial world is just as interested in your personally "profile" and does everything thing that not yet illegal to gain that information, I know I used to do this.

Interesting stuff, what kind of physical storage space would you need out of interest?

bigmonka

There's an American girl where I work who, after the Boston marathon bombings, phoned her Mum in New Jersey to talk about it and make sure that the family in Boston was ok. A couple of hours after the phone call a police car turned up at her mum's house having been alerted about a call to England talking about bombings.
It all seemed a bit unbelievable but I've got no reason to doubt that its a true story. I'm amazed that they have the resources to send people out to investigate every call after an attack like that which lots of people must have made phone calls about.

rjsterry

davmaggs wrote:

Sketchley; The trouble with RIPA it has been used by local authorities for low-level anti-social crime. The powers that were used were supposed to be the serious stuff that you mention, and yet the moment they were available 'mission-creep' occurred and they were used.

As for the idea that the law prevents misuse. There's far too many examples of this not working, even senior Police officers are being taken to court (at last). Technical measures may hinder the nosy civil servant, but I suspect that after a while the effort of signing off every check means that passwords will be left on post-it notes and all the other things lazy humans do to bypass effort.

Take for example, the law on photographing police officers.

http://www.met.police.uk/about/photography.htm

Very specific and limited powers to stop, search and view digital images have in some cases been stretched into a blanket ban on photographing the police.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2013/apr/29/act-terror-arrest-filming-police-video

I'm pretty sure that the instances of council's using similar legislation in relation to school admissions and the like were also found to be illegal and well outside the intentions of the legislation, but that was only after someone dug their heels in.

SteppenHerring

Back in the 80s, my mum was quite into knitting her own yoghurt, being in the CND lot etc. A bunch of them did get together in the pub and hatched a plot for a fake demo at the local airbase which they then phoned each other about. A lot of police did turn up (no protesters though).

Quite worrying as I could've been talking to my friends about buying ... stuff ... at the time.

The thing that gets me is the effort "they" seem to put into hassling green/anti-war/anti-cuts demonstrators - basically anyone who publicly disagrees with the government. White van men with handheld mobile phones are meanwhile ignored.

daviesee

BigMonka wrote:

Interesting stuff, what kind of physical storage space would you need out of interest?

About this size.

rjsterry

SteppenHerring wrote:

Back in the 80s, my mum was quite into knitting her own yoghurt, being in the CND lot etc. A bunch of them did get together in the pub and hatched a plot for a fake demo at the local airbase which they then phoned each other about. A lot of police did turn up (no protesters though).

Quite worrying as I could've been talking to my friends about buying ... stuff ... at the time.

The thing that gets me is the effort "they" seem to put into hassling green/anti-war/anti-cuts demonstrators - basically anyone who publicly disagrees with the government. White van men with handheld mobile phones are meanwhile ignored.

Quite. The stuff with undercover officers who didn't so much step over the line as take a running jump at it, including starting families, is particularly concerning. Reading a few emails seems pretty small beer in comparison.

sketchley

davmaggs wrote:

Sketchley; The trouble with RIPA it has been used by local authorities for low-level anti-social crime. The powers that were used were supposed to be the serious stuff that you mention, and yet the moment they were available 'mission-creep' occurred and they were used.

As for the idea that the law prevents misuse. There's far too many examples of this not working, even senior Police officers are being taken to court (at last). Technical measures may hinder the nosy civil servant, but I suspect that after a while the effort of signing off every check means that passwords will be left on post-it notes and all the other things lazy humans do to bypass effort.

I never said the law prevents misuse where did you get that from?

The law is very specific about what can be used, by who, and for what and even the code of practice that must be followed when doing so. If everyone stuck to the law then this wouldn't be a problem. The problem is misuse or to put another way illegal use of this data. If as you say "even senior Police officers are being taken to court" then this is happenning outside of the law otherwise why are they being taken to court? Use / access of this data outside of the specifics that are allowed in law, should be and is as far as I know treated as serious offence.