Slashdot Mirror
UK Government Expands Spying Powers
An anonymous submitter provides the best write-up of this story: "Today's front page story of The Guardian covers an attempt by the UK government to expand the number of organisations entitled to demand communications data under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA). Previously only Customs and Excise, the Inland Revenue, various law enforcement bodies and intelligence agencies were able to demand this information. The list of agencies proposed in the new Draft Statutory Instrument authorises practically everyone from local councils to the Food Standards Agency to demand traffic data. Traffic data includes almost all information attached to a communication apart from the contents of the communication itself. The location of your mobile phone, for example. Who you called on it and who's called you. The URLs you've visited or IP addresses of people who've visited your server... and the list goes on. The two o'clock update has a quote from the PM's spokesman reassuring us how safe we're all going to be once the Department of Work and Pensions can check our phone records. There's also an editorial piece to emphasise that this is a Bad Thing."
This is not offtopic, it's a historical perspective on this subject, from the U.S. viewpoint. Many Slashdot readers are too young to remember Nixon, so here's a reminder of why so many Americans worry about giving government police and spy agencies too much unregulated power.
After Nixon's resignation, the Church Committee, named after its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, conducted a wide-ranging investigation of US intelligence agencies. In its final report, issued in April 1976, the committee concluded: "Domestic intelligence activity has threatened and undermined the Constitutional rights of Americans to free speech, association and privacy. It has done so primarily because the Constitutional system for checking abuse of power has not been applied."
The committee said the abuses by the intelligence apparatus mirrored the growth of excessive executive power and excessive secrecy, and that in the name of "national security" intelligence officers and their senior officials blatantly disregarded the law and the civil liberties of their targets. (Sound familiar, anyone?)
The Church Committee revealed the enormous scope of the operations against anti-war demonstrators, civil rights activists and left-wing political parties. This included the FBI's Counterintelligence Program (Cointelpro), which had the stated goal "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" left-wing opponents of government policy. FBI headquarters alone developed over 500,000 domestic intelligence files on US citizens.
In addition the committee found:
* At least 26,000 individuals were at one point catalogued on an FBI list of persons to be rounded up in the event of a "national emergency."
* Nearly a quarter of a million first class letters were opened and photographed in the US by the CIA between 1953 and 1973, producing a CIA computerized index of nearly 1.5 million names.
* Separate files were created on approximately 7,200 Americans and over 100 domestic groups in the course of the CIA's Operation CHAOS (1967-1973), aimed at crushing the student anti-war movement.
* Millions of private telegrams sent from, to, or through the US were obtained by the National Security Agency from 1947 to 1975 under a secret arrangement with three US telegraph companies. (Replaced now by Eschalon)
* An estimated 100,000 Americans were the subjects of United States Army intelligence files created between the mid-1960s and 1971.
* Intelligence files on more than 11,000 individuals and groups were created by the Internal Revenue Service between 1969 and 1973 and tax investigations were started on the basis of political rather than tax criteria.
The Senate committee also found that these agencies sent anonymous letters attacking the political beliefs of targets in order to induce their employers to fire them. Similar letters were sent to spouses in an effort to destroy marriages. The committee also documented criminal break-ins, the theft of membership lists and misinformation campaigns aimed at provoking violent attacks against targeted individuals.
One of the most infamous operations uncovered by the Church Committee was the FBI's campaign to "neutralize" civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. This included an extensive surveillance program to obtain information about the "private activities of King and his advisers" to use in order to "completely discredit" them. The FBI mailed King a tape recording made from microphones hidden in hotel rooms. As one agent testified, this was an attempt to destroy King's marriage. The tape was accompanied by a note suggesting that the recording would be released to the public unless King committed suicide.
The FBI's Cointelpro operations against the Black Panthers involved the killing of several leaders, including Fred Hampton, by the Chicago police, as well as the frame-up and imprisonment of scores of others.