Theresa May unveils UK surveillance measures in wake of Snowden claims

Theresa May unveils UK surveillance measures in wake of Snowden claims


New surveillance powers will be given to the police and security services, allowing them to access records tracking every UK citizen’s use of the internet without any need for any judicial check, under the provisions of the draft investigatory powers bill unveiled by Theresa May.

It includes new powers requiring internet and phone companies to keep “internet connection records” – tracking every website visited but not every page – for a maximum of 12 months but will not require a warrant for the police, security services or other bodies to access the data. Local authorities will be banned from accessing internet records.

The proposed legislation will also introduce a “double-lock” on the ministerial approval of interception warrants with a new panel of seven judicial commissioners – probably retired judges – given a veto before they can come into force.

But the details of the bill make clear that this new safeguard for the most intrusive powers to spy on the content of people’s conversations and messages will not apply in “urgent cases” – defined as up to five days – where judicial approval is not possible.

The draft investigatory powers bill published on Wednesday by the home secretary aims to provide a “comprehensive and comprehensible” overhaul of Britain’s fragmented surveillance laws. It comes two-and-a-half years after the disclosures by the whistleblower Edward Snowden of the scale of secret mass surveillance of the global traffic in confidential personal data carried out by Britain’s GCHQ and the US’s National Security Agency (NSA).

It will replace the current system of three separate commissioners with a senior judge as a single investigatory powers commissioner.

May told MPs that the introduction of the most controversial power – the storage of everyone’s internet connection records tracking the websites they have visited, which is banned as too intrusive in the US and every European country including Britain – was “simply the modern equivalent of an itemised phone bill”.

In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are

In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are

Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.

Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.

Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.

The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.

Edward Snowden: NSA Too Busy Spying on Americans To Catch Terrorists

Edward Snowden: NSA Too Busy Spying on Americans To Catch Terrorists

Specifically, the board concluded, “we have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation.”

When it comes to legal concerns, the board noted “There are four grounds upon which we find that the telephone records program fails to comply with Section 215,” that “the program violates the Electronic Communications Privacy Act,” and that “The NSA’s telephone records program also raises concerns under both the First and Fourth Amendments to the United States Constitution.”

Spy Agency’s False Flag Operations Exposed by Snowden leaks

Spy Agency’s False Flag Operations Exposed by Snowden leaks


The document, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations,” reveals shady practices like using “honey traps” that may start as Internet dating, but the PowerPoint also points to in-person meetings to discredit the subject.

Other findings include “false flag” operations (undertaking malicious actions and making it look like the work of a group they wish to discredit), the application of social sciences like sociology and psychology to disrupt and steer online activist discussions, lure targets into compromising sexual situations, deploy malicious software and virus and post lies about targets in order to discredit them.

Norwegian MPs nominate Snowden for Nobel Peace Prize

Norwegian MPs nominate Snowden for Nobel Peace Prize

In July, the German branch of Transparency International also awarded Snowden its Whistleblower Award. That same month, a Swedish sociology professor also nominated NSA leaker Snowden for the Nobel Peace Prize for his “heroic effort at great personal cost.”

Professor Stefan Svallfors said giving Snowden the Nobel nod could “save the prize from the disrepute incurred by the hasty and ill-conceived decision” to give the 2009 award to Barack Obama.

Edward Snowden tells German TV that NSA is involved in industrial espionage

Edward Snowden tells German TV that NSA is involved in industrial espionage

The National Security Agency is involved in industrial espionage and will take intelligence regardless of its value to national security, the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has told a German television network.

In a lengthy interview broadcast on the public broadcaster ARD TV on Sunday, Snowden said the NSA did not limit its espionage to issues of national security and cited the German engineering firm Siemens as one target.

“If there’s information at Siemens that’s beneficial to US national interests – even if it doesn’t have anything to do with national security – then they’ll take that information nevertheless,” Snowden said in the interview conducted in Russia, where Snowden has claimed asylum.

Earth to Bill Maher: Edward Snowden Isn't the Crazy One

Earth to Bill Maher: Edward Snowden Isn't the Crazy One

Libertarians don’t believe that the people who work for the government are evil. It’s the institution of government itself, a monopoly on the use of force that can martial the resources of the entire nation. That kind of power is dangerous even when used by good people with good intentions.

This isn’t some new age idea cooked up by pot-smoking libertarians in the 1970s. It’s a founding American principle and the reason for the entire Bill of Rights. It was summed up best by Thomas Paine in the pamphlet credited with convincing most American colonists to support independence from Great Britain:

“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.”