Good chance spies are hoovering up your personal data in bulk, documents show
RT | April 21, 2016
British security services “routinely” collect personal data on bulk from thousands of public and private organizations, including confidential medical and financial records, newly-disclosed documents show.
The previously-confidential files, obtained by campaign group Privacy International (PI) as part of an ongoing legal case challenging the collection of bulk personal datasets (BPDs), have revealed “the staggering extent to which the intelligence agencies hoover up our data.”
In March 2015, the government first owned up to the use of BPDs by its intelligence agencies, including by MI6, MI5 and GCHQ. BPDs include call logs, internet traffic, and medical, financial and travel records of British citizens.
“It goes far beyond monitoring our text messages, email messages, and social media posts. The intelligence agencies have secretly given themselves access to potentially any and all recorded information about us,” PI explains.
“The agencies themselves admit that the majority of data collected relates to individuals who are not a threat to national security or suspected of a crime. This highly sensitive information about us is vulnerable to attack from hackers, foreign governments, and criminals,” PI’s legal officer Millie Graham Wood said in a statement.
BPDs currently account for 5 percent of all data stored by GCHQ, the files reveal.
An oversight committee reviews the storage of BPDs every six months. Since 2005, home secretaries have had to reauthorize the collection of these data sets twice a year.
Wood warned the government’s controversial Investigatory Powers Bill would codify and legitimize these practices.
“The agencies have been doing this for 15 years in secret and are now quietly trying to put these powers on the statute book for the first time, in the Investigatory Powers Bill, which is currently being debated in Parliament. These documents reveal a lack of openness and transparency with the public about these staggering powers and a failure to subject them to effective Parliamentary scrutiny.”
In a statement, the Home Office defended the use of BPDs, saying their acquisition provides “vital and unique intelligence.”
The document cache also contains guidance for intelligence officers who have access to surveillance systems. One document aimed at MI6 employees warns officers not to scour the surveillance databases “for information about other members of staff, neighbors, friends, acquaintances, family members and public figures unless it is necessary to do so as part of your official duties.”
The revelations come after a survey revealed the majority of Britons remain unconcerned about the potential ramifications of the Investigatory Powers Bill.
Of 1,600 respondents surveyed by Broadband Genie, 75 percent said they had not heard of the IP Bill. Asked if they backed the government’s plans to ramp up mass surveillance in Britain, a third said they didn’t care either way.
Is This Even Legal? EU Court to Investigate UK Surveillance Bill
Sputnik — 28.03.2016
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has scheduled an emergency hearing to investigate the United Kingdom’s recently adopted Investigatory Powers Bill on its compatibility with EU law, UK media said.
The hearing, which may result in the European Union limiting the powers of the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) surveillance body, has been scheduled for April 12, The Guardian newspaper reported on Sunday.
On March 15, the House of Commons passed the Investigatory Powers Bill, also dubbed as the “snoopers’ charter” by its critics with 281 votes for and 15 against. The bill is now proceeding through the committee stage for further scrutiny.
The ECJ has previously ruled against the UK government’s surveillance legislation. In 2014, the court declared the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 (Dripa) to be inconsistent with EU laws after the case was brought to Luxembourg by two UK lawmakers.
April’s hearing is expected to be attended by the Conservative member of parliament David Davis, of the lawmakers that took Dirpa to the ECJ for scrutiny, according to the newspaper.
The snoopers’ charter has been designed to give UK police and intelligence services sweeping powers. the legislation requires internet providers to store their customers’ browsing history for up to 12 months and grant access to law enforcement regardless of whether a user is under investigation or not. Police will also have the authority to hack into phones, laptops, tablets and computers.
UK Home Secretary Theresa May has defended the bill, claiming it prioritizes privacy and limits intrusiveness into personal data.
New documents yet more evidence of UK & European role in US drone strikes
Reprieve | June 24, 2015
The Guardian and the New York Times have today revealed the existence of documents showing the contribution made by UK intelligence agency GCHQ to US drone strikes in Yemen.
The British Government has to date refused to comment on its role in such strikes, describing them consistently as “a matter for the Yemeni and US Governments.”
However, legal charity Reprieve has previously raised concerns over European complicity in covert drone strikes – considered by many experts to be in violation of international law – through the sharing of intelligence and the provision of infrastructure.
In Germany, Reprieve has helped civilian drone strike victim Faisal bin ali Jaber to bring a case against the Government over the role played in Yemen strikes by the military base at Ramstein.
Meanwhile, in the UK, Reprieve unearthed a contract showing that a high-tech data link had been provided between RAF Croughton – a base leased by the US in Lincolnshire – and Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, from where US strikes against Yemen have reportedly been launched.
Commenting, Reprieve legal director Kat Craig said: “This is yet more damning evidence of the key role played by the UK in the illegal US drone war. This campaign has taken place in the shadows, killing hundreds of civilians while leaving their families with no access to justice. President Obama won’t even confirm it is taking place; while the UK and Germany follow his lead by stonewalling questions on the part they play. It is time Europe came clean on the support it provides to this misguided campaign, which the evidence suggests is making the world a more dangerous place for all of us.”
GCHQ Oversight Tribunal Has To Ask GCHQ’s Permission To Reveal GCHQ’s Wrongdoing
By Glyn Moody | Techdirt | March 7, 2014
One of the key themes to emerge in the debate about surveillance is the oversight of the agencies involved, and to what extent it is effective. In the US, that has been put into stark relief by news that the committee that is supposed to keep an eye on the spies was itself spied upon. And now over in the UK, we learn that things are just as bad when it comes to the equivalent oversight body, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT). Its powers sound impressive:
The Tribunal can investigate complaints about any alleged conduct by, or on behalf of, the Intelligence Services – the Security Service (sometimes called MI5), the Secret Intelligence Service (sometimes called MI6) and GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters).
The scope of conduct the IPT can investigate concerning the Intelligence Agencies is much broader than it is with regard to the other public authorities. The IPT is the only Tribunal to whom complaints about the Intelligence Services can be directed
Unfortunately, the IPT’s credibility as the public’s watchdog for the intelligence services has just been seriously undermined by the following information published by The Guardian :
A controversial court that claims to be completely independent of the British government is secretly operating from a base within the Home Office, the Guardian has learned.
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which investigates complaints about the country’s intelligence agencies, is also funded by the Home Office, and its staff includes at least one person believed to be a Home Office official previously engaged in intelligence-related work.
It gets worse:
the IPT will not say whether GCHQ had disclosed the existence of its bulk surveillance operations, which attempt to capture the digital communications of everybody — including those people who complain to the tribunal.
Nor will it disclose whether it has issued any secret ruling on the lawfulness of those operations, on the grounds that the rules under which it operates stipulate that it cannot do so without the permission of GCHQ itself. It has not sought that permission on grounds it knows it would not be given.
So the body tasked with overseeing GCHQ has to get GCHQ’s permission before it can reveal any wrongdoing by GCHQ, which it doesn’t bother doing when it knows it would be refused. Isn’t oversight a wonderful thing? Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+
The Realms of Impunity
GCHQ, Privacy, and Murder
By Binoy Kampmark | Dissident Voice | January 30, 2014
It will only get worse, but the last few days have been interesting in the accumulating annals of massive surveillance. Britain’s equivalent of the National Security Agency, GCHQ, has been placed under the legal microscope, and found wanting.
The legal briefs who have been advising 46 members of the all-party parliamentary group on drones has handed down a sobering assessment of the GCHQ mass surveillance program: It is, for the most part, illegal. In some cases, it may well patently criminal.
According to barristers Jemima Stratford QC and Tom Johnston, the behaviour of GCHQ staffers, in many instances, potentially violates the privacy safeguards laid out in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), largely due to the sheer vagueness of its remit. Such lack of clarity has enabled GCHQ staffers to rely “on the gaps in the current statutory framework to commit serious crime with impunity.”
Some of these are worth noting. Mass, bulk surveillance would be in contravention of privacy protections under EU law. “We consider the mass interception of external contents and communications data as unlawful. The indiscriminate interception of data, solely by reference to the request of the executive, is a disproportionate interference with the private life of the individuals concerned.”
Interception of bulk metadata (phones, email addresses) is treated as a measure “disproportionate” and in violation of Article 8 of the ECHR. That in itself was of little surprise. Of even greater interest was how the barristers dealt with the musty, archaic nature of existing legislation which the executive has been all too keen on using.
Much of this expansive, illegal behaviour lies in the way the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa) has been left in the technological lurch. Use, retention and destruction protocols on metadata are deemed inadequate, given the few restrictions on the practice. For one, Ripa distinguishes between metadata itself and the content of the messages, a clearly anachronistic form of reasoning that has yet to change.
The act, for example, provides too broad a discretion to the foreign secretary, currently William Hague, while providing “almost no meaningful restraint on the exercise of executive discretion in respect of external communications.”
The rather deft way GCHQ has also gone about intercepting communications – via transatlantic cables – cannot be accepted as legal, and would make no difference “even if some or all of the interception is taking place outside UK territorial waters.”
A troubling, though hardly astonishing feature of the brief is accountability of GCHQ staffers to potential criminal liability. The spectre of this rises for the information gathered and subsequently shared for use by allies, notably the United States. Intelligence used for targeting non-combatants with drone strikes is taken as one specific, and troubling example.
“An individual involved in passing that information is likely to be an accessory to murder. It is well arguable, on a variety of different bases, that the government is obliged to take reasonable steps to investigate that possibility.” The transfer itself, suggests the advice, would be unlawful for that reason. Nor can UK officials rely on the obtuse notion of “anticipatory self-defence” which is used by Washington to justify drone strikes in areas where they are not officially involved. Britain has yet to succumb, at least in that area, to flights of legal fancy.
The way such data is used in drone strikes is hardly an academic issue. It has been the subject of legal deliberations by the Court of Appeal and the High Court. The Court of Appeal’s decision in the Noor Khan case (Dec 2013) involved evidence dealing with GCHQ’s alleged supply of information to the CIA in a drone strike. The claimant’s father, in that case, had been killed by such a strike in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan.
Unfortunately, the Court of Appeal proved all too reluctant to venture into operational matters, feeling that doing so would ask the court to “condemn the acts of the persons who operate the drone bombs.” In Lord Dyson’s view, “It is only in certain established circumstances that our courts will exceptionally sit in judgment of such acts. There are no such exceptional circumstances here.” More’s the pity.
The advice will find itself the subject of scrutiny by the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, a body that has come surprisingly late to the game. After all, it took a committee on drones and their questionable deployments, not one dealing with intelligence and security, to produce some sound observations on mass surveillance.
How far the views achieve traction is anybody’s guess. Committees have a habit of making a hash of sound observations and it may well fall to others, such as the Joint Committee on Human Rights, to man the decks for reform. But the words of Labour MP Tom Watson, who chairs the committee on drones, are worth noting. “If ministers are prepared to allow GCHQ staffers to be potential accessories to murder, they must be very clear that they are responsible for allowing it.”
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne and can be reached at: bkampmark@gmail.com.
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Legal Analysis Requested By Members Of Parliament Says GCHQ Surveillance Is Illegal Too
By Mike Masnick | Techdirt | January 29, 2014
We’ve seen a few times now how legal analysis suggests that the NSA’s surveillance activities are clearly illegal. However, over in the UK, the government has appeared to be even more protective of the surveillance by GCHQ, and even more insistent that the activities have been legal. While there’s a thriving debate going on in the US, many UK officials seem to have pushed back on even the possibility of a similar debate — and there has been little suggestion of reform. While it’s still unclear how much reform there will be of the NSA, the UK government hasn’t indicated even an openness to the idea.
But now, similar to the recent PCLOB report in the US, a legal analysis of the GCHQ, written at the request of a bunch of Members of Parliament, has argued that much of what GCHQ is doing is illegal under UK law:
In a 32-page opinion, the leading public law barrister Jemima Stratford QC raises a series of concerns about the legality and proportionality of GCHQ’s work, and the lack of safeguards for protecting privacy.
It makes clear the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa), the British law used to sanction much of GCHQ’s activity, has been left behind by advances in technology. The advice warns:
- Ripa does not allow mass interception of contents of communications between two people in the UK, even if messages are routed via a transatlantic cable.
- The interception of bulk metadata – such as phone numbers and email addresses – is a “disproportionate interference” with Article 8 of the ECHR.
- The current framework for the retention, use and destruction of metadata is inadequate and likely to be unlawful.
- If the government knows it is transferring data that may be used for drone strikes against non-combatants in countries such as Yemen and Pakistan, that is probably unlawful.
- The power given to ministers to sanction GCHQ’s interception of messages abroad “is very probably unlawful”.
There’s a lot more in the report, described at that Guardian link above, which is well worth reading. It makes you wonder how much longer the UK government can pretend that everything is perfectly fine with the GCHQ’s activities.
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British ministers answer for GCHQ mass surveillance in European court
RT | January 24, 2014
The court in Strasbourg has ordered British ministers to provide submissions on mass surveillance programs by the UK’s spy agency to find out whether GCHQ’s secret activities went against the European convention on human rights.
Four European civil rights groups filed a case against Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at the European Court of Human Rights over its surveillance methods in September, after being denied the chance to challenge its practices in an open court in the UK.
The UK’s Big Brother Watch, English PEN and Open Rights Group, as well as the German internet activism group, Constanze Kurz, accused GCHQ of violating the European Convention of Human Rights, insisting that alleged hacking of vast amounts of online data, emails and social media breached Article 8 of the Convention, which guarantees European citizens the right to a private family life. Their case refers to two surveillance programs by the domestic spying agency, Prism and Tempora. The campaigners, who teamed up under the umbrella title of Privacy Not Prism, claimed that GCHQ has “illegally intruded on the privacy of millions of British and European citizens.”
In line with the data revealed by former US National Security Agency, Edward Snowden, about the mass surveillance programs operated by the US and Britain, the group said that “GCHQ has the capacity to collect more than 21 petabytes of data a day – equivalent to sending all the information in all the books in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours.” Meanwhile, under UK law, intelligence agencies are supposed to seek permission from the Secretary of State to read an individual’s text messages.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ordered the British government to provide their submissions by May, and the campaigners expect the court to make a ruling before the end of the year.
According to the lawyer for the groups, the ECHR has acted “remarkably quickly” communicating the case to the British government.
“It has also acted decisively by requiring the government to explain how the UK’s surveillance practices and oversight mechanisms comply with the right to privacy. This gives hope the ECHR will require reform if the government continues to insist that nothing is wrong,” Daniel Carey told the Guardian.
Both GCHQ and British ministers have insisted that none of their intelligence programs violated privacy laws and human rights.
According to GCHQ, all of its 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, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence Services commissioners and the parliamentary intelligence and security committee.”
Foreign Secretary William Hague has continuously dismissed allegations that GCHQ breached the law, saying law-biding citizens have no reason whatsover to be alarmed.
“If we could tell the whole world and the whole country how we do this business, I think people would be enormously reassured by it and they would see that the law-abiding citizen has nothing to worry about,” he said in June.
“If we did that, it would defeat the objective – this is secret work, it is secret intelligence, it is secret for a reason, and a reason that is to do with protecting all the people of this country,” Mr Hague explained.
Last week a joint investigation conducted by the UK’s Guardian newspaper and Channel 4 News, and based on the new documents leaked by Snowden, revealed that the NSA created a secret system called Dishfire to collect hundreds of millions of text messages a day. The documents showed that GCHQ had used the NSA database to search the metadata of “untargeted and unwarranted” communications of people in the UK. According to the Guardian report, “The NSA has made extensive use of its vast text message database to extract information on people’s travel plans, contact books, financial transactions and more – including of individuals under no suspicion of illegal activity.”
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The 15 Most Devastating Truths About the PSA Screening Disaster
Lies are Unbekoming | October 26, 2025
The prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test has screened 30 million American men annually for over three decades. The man who discovered PSA in 1970, Richard Ablin, now calls mass screening “a public health disaster.” Two landmark 2012 studies found no survival benefit from radical surgery compared to watchful waiting. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force concluded PSA screening does more harm than good. Yet the $3 billion annual industry continues largely unabated.
These revelations emerge from three insider accounts: Ablin’s The Great Prostate Hoax, urologist Anthony Horan’s The Rise and Fall of the Prostate Cancer Scam, and oncologist Mark Scholz’s Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers. Together they document how a test meant to monitor existing cancer patients became a screening juggernaut that has left millions of men incontinent, impotent, or dead from unnecessary treatment.
The numbers are staggering. Since 1987, when PSA screening exploded nationwide, over one million American men have undergone radical prostatectomies. Studies show 40 to 50 men must be diagnosed and treated to prevent one death from prostate cancer. The other 39 to 49 men receive no benefit but face permanent side effects. Medicare and the Veterans Administration fund most of this treatment, pouring billions into a system that prominent urologists privately acknowledge has failed.
What follows are the most damaging truths about how PSA screening became entrenched despite overwhelming evidence of harm, why it persists against scientific consensus, and what this reveals about American medicine’s inability to abandon lucrative practices even when they damage patients. … continue
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