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Google and Facebook Can Be Legally Intercepted, Says UK Spy Boss
mpicpp sends this news from the BBC:
The U.K. government has revealed that intelligence service GCHQ can snoop on British citizens' use of Facebook, Twitter and Google without a warrant because the firms are based overseas. U.K. spy boss Charles Farr said that such platforms are classified as external communications. The policy was revealed as part of an ongoing legal battle with campaign group Privacy International (PI). PI said the interpretation of the law "patronizes the British people." According to Mr Farr, Facebook, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and web searches on Google, as well as webmail services such as Hotmail and Yahoo are classified as "external communications," which means that they can be intercepted without the need for additional legal clearance."
Fascist toadie says what? :p
Funny that Facebook et al are internal when EU courts want to issue subpoenas or legal rulings, yet are external when the spy agencies want to snoop on them.
Captcha: Gambit
They never had a concept of the individual being anything but a serf to the state. And before people mention the magna carta, that's a document for the nobles protecting them from a tyrant kind.
Just as in WW2, they had laws illegalizing looking for radio transmissions by saying that it's illegal to capture transmissions NOT MEANT for you. And other such hamfisted means. They would have made Dick Cheney proud.
In America that wouldn't fly (up to 40~ish years ago), although our governement has slightly different means to achieve basically the same end. It just realizes that our sensibilities are a bit different historically.
Maybe not so much anymore. In terms of domestic oppression, we're lagging just a few decades behind in some area and in others we just don't tell the citizenry. What they don't know can't hurt them, right?
After all, it is a foreign entity ripe for the plucking, cams in the ladies rooms, and judges chambers just to be prudent, and we'll even setup fereign websites for all you Brits to log into to watch those skanks in their daily habits.
patroniSes
FRA only interecept traffic passing the boarder.
Oh wow ..
But at least we've always known about it.
Only Americans are allowed to spy on other people because non-citizens have no rights. Not cool if they do it to US.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
If Google is considered 'external communications' and an 'overseas' company, then why is Google paying UK taxes?
"The State's criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscationâ"that is to say, in crime."
"Like all predatory or parasitic institutions, its first instinct is that of self-preservation. All its enterprises are directed first towards preserving its own life, and, second, towards increasing its own power and enlarging the scope of its own activity. For the sake of this it will, and regularly does, commit any crime which circumstances make expedient."
"Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: you get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you."
The Criminality of the State, Albert Jay Nock, American Mercury, March 1939. http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~ck...
"What we call a government is after all nothing but a group of individuals, who, by a variety of sanctions, have acquired the power to govern their fellows. The sanctions range from the fraud of divine right to that of sheer conquest; from the imbecility of hereditary privilege to the irrationality of counting voters. In most cases the extent to which these sanctions produce capable legislators, judges, and administrators will not bear critical examination. Nominally, government exists and functions for the public. Actually it exists and functions for the benefit of those who have in one of these absurd ways acquired power to govern. It is accepted mainly because of the sheer inertia of great masses of people. Ostensibly, of course, it is accepted because it confers a sufficiency of visible benefits upon society to make the officials who operate it tolerated in spite of the selfish and idiotic exercise of the powers conferred upon them."
Ralph Borsodi, "This Ugly Civilization", Ralph Borsodi, Simon And Schuster, 1929. http://www.schoolofliving.org/...
I worry about the blowback on this. Not just the hardened diaper snipers (the hardcore CP guys who will not turn on each other because no prosecutor will ever cut them a deal, ever) will still be tough to prosecute, but now everyone and their brother will go that route and be equally as hard to catch, be it true crimes like CP and explotation of children or other offenses (extortion, blackmail, etc). TrueCrypt may no longer be developed, but it is going to be the de facto encryption standard for a long time.
In fact, there is interest in PGP and GPG again, utilities thought too cumbersome in daily life.
The result is going to be active security on endpoints, and maybe even a wholesale move to encryption providers that don't like the US or the UK. China and Russia will be happy to protect someone, provided their guys have their own backdoors. Yes, endpoints are spy-able, but if people on a whole start having an offline computer just for signing and encrypting, it means every endpoint needs a physical black-bag attack mounted against it to be effective.
Mail and telephone calls from off shore are also external communications.
What's their status?
I foresee an uptick in the sales of Guy Fawkes masks, and it isn't even November.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
These are the kinds of politicians that need to be excised from their positions, regardless of party or affiliated ideology. They are supposed to treat their positions as duties, not twist the law to justify committing 'end justifies means' immoral acts out of self interest.
"Legal" means whatever you want it to mean when you're the one who gets to determine what it means.
That's why peering disagreements are very useful for these types of national security threats.
NSA/GHCQ/SIS/TLA/etc paid pervs are an immediate, specific, and harmful impact to the national security of 'insert your country here'.
Time for them to be severely reduced in size with much increased oversight.
Who the hell cares about "legally"?? Certainly not the people who vote for and reelect the crooks that are doing this. Fuck you people! Vote for something different if you don't like it. Vote for the same old shit like you're doing, and you get what you deserve. I have no sympathy.
Asshole moderators are forcing me to post AC. Fuck them too.
-F
And, of course, they can snoop on American citizens on google and facebook, as well as for all other communications in Great Britain because the Americans are foreigners.
When you have five eyes, and each eye is in a different country, it's quite easy to work around those pesky "no watching yourself" laws.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
surely any comment made on twitter/fb has protection under the 1st amendment? Of course not, but it'd be good if they followed their own laws now and then.
They are following their own laws: that is quite literally the problem. Despite the best efforts of the US government, and apparently to the surprise of some of its citizens, the US constitution does dot apply to other countries like the UK. It is perhaps even more surprising that it often does not seem to always apply in the US as well but that's a different issue to the one being discussed here.
My guess is that there was probably some Victorian-era law on the books passed back when international communication was a rare and uncommon thing which allowed the government to monitor such rare events. Fast forward 100 years and suddenly a huge fraction of everyone's communication is international. So for a group called "Privacy International" the sad irony is that there is no international privacy in the UK.
hold Charles Farr down and shit down his throat. Teach that authoritarian fuck whose boss.
... Charles Farr is the worst. Maybe even worse than Blair.
He is the main driving force behind the Snooping Charter, both under Brown.. and resurrected under the Coalition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Remember, these were the powers he was pushing for whilst the NSA was reading our FB accounts and email, had compromised elliptic curve cryptography etc. GCHQ was recording our phone calls and even webcam images.
Hello NSA and GCHQ,
Well done lads. May I congratulate you on all that newly gained data. You must be now possess the world's biggest archive of webcam pics of teenage girls, X-Box One videos of kids playing CoD and truly immense amounts of cat Gifs. Am sure your highly regarded intelligence analysts can gain amazing insight as they engineer software to tell the difference between 'Lol, I was soooo drunk' and 'Allah wants me to declare Jihad on my local pig farm' posts. You also deserve a clap for replacing the shaky centralised Total Information Awareness project by simply spying on everything.
So while Iraq burns, Russia moves on Ukraine, terrorist attacks blast through Kenya you fucking idiots are probably spending all those taxpayer resources on collecting pointless shit.
Still never mind - at least those teen girl webcam pics will all go into the facial recognition database. Makes it easier to track them in case their future sluttiness becomes a threat to the British and American way of life.
Article 12.The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
http://www.un.org/en/documents...
Universal means it is about all humans, not only Anglo-saxons, British or US citizens.
This brings me to the question: how secure is https these days?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
However the Google pages that get returned by all UK ISPs are in the UK, because those ISPs use DNS hijacking to return their own servers' IP addresses (with a nice Google skin) whenever UK citizens ask for Google, and those servers are in the UK.
As to why they do it, something to do with complying with UK censorship legislation.
Key word that you failed to highlight - "arbitrary". Changes the meaning of that sentence a *lot*.
It is rather well know facebook and google are in bed with the government...do they need to intercept it? This is just throwing sand in our eyes...
A declared "right" is useless unless it is recognised and enforced. Who's going to do it?
Also 'interference'. Me viewing all your twitter messages without you knowing isn't interferance.
But UK signed the The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It should either follow it, or withdraw its signature. I am not singling out UK or any other nation. Every government, which signed it, should work on compliance.
If there is a criminal activity, then a judge must look into it and give a permission to search the Gmail account of a particular individual. It is as simple as that.
The problem here is one of The FSA vs OathBreakers. Those in the F_ree S_hit A_rmy want youtube channels and free email and that crappy webpage on facecrook. The OathBreakers don't give a f**k about the rule of law. My personal oppinion is that if you publish to a website you don't actually OWN, then you
A. have to trust said company, not so incompetent to expose your database tables accidentally, or maliciously, or secretly.
B. anything actually published is now in the public "somewhere" if not archive.org, *.cache.com ; If the Oath breakers want to collect that "published data" without a warrant who cares.
C. The FSA wouldn't be here if they paid for their own websites. WHY DO YOU HAVE ACCOUNTS ON THESE WEBSITES STILL? WHY?!
anyway, you know how the latest in that Stingray ( http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/judge-allows-us-marshals-seizure-of-stingray-records-dimisses-lawsuit/ ) ordeal with the ACLU getting end-run by the US Marshalls well now then
A. Whoever has the data can manipulate/ cleanse it / further deny it - fsck all burn in hell you backstabbing piece of dung fsck OathBreakers )
B. WHY do you PAY for a god dammned phone still?! WHY?! Go buy a HAM RADIO for god sakes, learn electronics, pay for something that is going to last your lifetime and can be either sold at Estate Sale or Passed down to your children when you die. All you young ass idiots, do you know back in the 60's we didn't have no fucking mobile phones, you had to find a PAY PHONE BOOTH. You had to coordinate when people would be around--to even answer the phone sometimes. Phone Tag. You all don't seem to grasp that. You are allowing "a Luxury" , a Convienence, a NON necessity to steal your fscking data!!
C. This stops overnight when nobody will buy their god damn phones or deal with these fscking communications companies gone fascist. IF nobody has a fscking AT&T account, AT&T doesn't get paid, enough time and eventually NO MORE AT&T at all. Unless AT&T want to spend their own money to stay lit -- make no mistake they have a LOT of money.
Somewhere down the line, Government has tossed the rule of law out, this is the neucleous for all this grief. Banksters are propped up by NSA spying, and nothing is sacred anymore with this fscking Extra Constitutional HORSESHIT.
Well, the current government keeps attacking and undermining human rights so lets see.
Now this is making more sense. When the NSA says, "we aren't spying on all Americans", it means "WE aren't spying on all Americans, the Brits are, and then we get to see what they collected." So: technically correct, but morally bankrupt.
Is it any wonder that ordinary citizens are cynical about their representatives? Whose interests are they really representing? Not ours, that's for sure.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
'nuff said