UK Spy Agencies Seek Single Law to OK Data Collection of ‘Privileged’ Conversations

Melissa Melton

Is it OK to listen in on private conversations between a lawyer and a defendant on trial for a serious crime? What about sifting through the communications of an entire country, or even continent, in pursuit of a wanted criminal or terrorist?

Ask any spy agency about their practices of collecting millions (and probably even billions) of phone calls, cell phone data, e-mails and other communications data from the population, and you’ll be probably get the same basic answer:

NSA's SIM Card Scandal Bigger Than You Think

Vladimir Platov

Stolen encryption keys are just the beginning. US NSA appears to have compromised big telecom, IT manufacturers, online banking, and even passports, starting on the factory floor. 

Recent days have been marked by a record number of news stories regarding the US and its allies trying to establish total control over Internet users.

On February 16, researchers at the Moscow-based security group Kaspersky Lab announced the discovery of the ultimate virus which has virtually infected all spheres of military and civilian computing in more than 40 countries around the world. They’ve managed to discover a piece of malware that must have been installed on hard disks while they were still being manufactured, and due to its complexity and a certain number of features that it shares with Stuxnet, it’s safe to assume that it was created by US secret services. 

Find Out if You've Been Spied on - and Join the Fight for Privacy

Nadia Kayyali

Want to know if GCHQ spied on you? Now you can find out. Privacy International (PI) has just launched a website that lets anyone find out if their communications were intercepted by the NSA and then shared with GCHQ.

The website is the result of a February 6 ruling by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT). Similar to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in the US, the IPT is a special court in the UK established by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) that deals with issues of surveillance and human rights.

The February 6^th ruling held that intelligence sharing between GCHQ and NSA done prior to December 2014 was unlawful. The decision, which applied to information collected by the NSA through Prism and Upstream, was based on the secrecy of the rules governing sharing of that information. This followed a December ruling in which the court held that information sharing between the NSA and GCHQ could continue because the oversight of the data-collection program had been made public, bringing it into compliance with European law. Privacy International disagreed with the decision made by the tribunal on this point and is appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.  

How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations

Glenn Greenwald

A page from a GCHQ top secret document prepared by its secretive JTRIG unit

One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.

Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”

By publishing these stories one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, the use of “honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses. But, here, I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.

Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums. Here is one illustrative list of tactics from the latest GCHQ document we’re publishing today:

Police State Britain

image source

Stephen Lendman

Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) operates like NSA. They work cooperatively. They're out-of-control rogue agencies. 

They spy on their own populations. They do it globally. They conduct espionage. They collect enormous amounts of personal information. They do it illegally. 

Obama wages war on freedom. He targets whistleblowers and investigative journalists exposing government wrongdoing. So does Britain. It equates doing so with terrorism.

London's Guardian is threatened. Its offices were raided. Hard drive stored information was destroyed. Its editor, Alan Rusbridger, was warned. Cease and desist or else.