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British Spies Are Free To Target Lawyers and Journalists
Advocatus Diaboli writes British spies have been granted the authority to secretly eavesdrop on legally privileged attorney-client communications, according to newly released documents. On Thursday, a series of previously classified policies confirmed for the first time that the U.K.'s top surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters has advised its employees: "You may in principle target the communications of lawyers." The country's other major security and intelligence agencies—MI5 and MI6—have adopted similar policies, the documents show. The guidelines also appear to permit surveillance of journalists and others deemed to work in "sensitive professions."
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Anybody at all?
The purpose of a government under crony capitalism is to ease the flow of cash toward those prepared to offer kick-backs.
People who are highly talented in very narrow fields - thus unable to analyse the bigger picture - are employed as civil servants to facilitate this.
Whence GCHQ, NSA, etc.
Hardly anyone will notice one right removed at a time.
There can be no defense of this. This is the government engaging in totalitarianism as standard practice. There cannot possibly be a moral or ethical defense of this practice.
Seriously? After all the wide spread surveillance operations blown open this year, how is this surprising?
Here is my predicted response:
Public outcry
Politician wagles finger at agency,
agency waggles finger at signed blessing from politician,
politician shrugs at public
public, licks KFC grease off lips
nothing happens
Welcome to your new system of government.
It is difficult not to see these revelations as the last gasp of privacy for the once proud British people.
When the law is compromised to it's very roots as it now appears, then the only law that matters is that of breaking down and rebuilding...
The part concerned by these news in bold. Everything else left uncut because Sun Tzu.
The Use Of Spies
1. Raising a host of a hundred thousand men and marching them great distances entails heavy loss on the people and a drain on the resources of the State.
The daily expenditure will amount to a thousand ounces of silver. There will be commotion at home and abroad, and men will drop down exhausted on the highways.
As many as seven hundred thousand families will be impeded in their labor.
2. Hostile armies may face each other for years, striving for the victory which is decided in a single day.
This being so, to remain in ignorance of the enemy's condition simply because one grudges the outlay of a hundred ounces of silver in honors and emoluments, is the height of inhumanity.
3. One who acts thus is no leader of men, no present help to his sovereign, no master of victory.
4. Thus, what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge.
5. Now this foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits; it cannot be obtained inductively from experience, nor by any deductive calculation.
6. Knowledge of the enemy's dispositions can only be obtained from other men.
7. Hence the use of spies, of whom there are five classes: (1) Local spies; (2) inward spies; (3) converted spies; (4) doomed spies; (5) surviving spies.
8. When these five kinds of spy are all at work, none can discover the secret system. This is called "divine manipulation of the threads." It is the sovereign's most precious faculty.
9. Having local spies means employing the services of the inhabitants of a district.
10. Having inward spies, making use of officials of the enemy.
11. Having converted spies, getting hold of the enemy's spies and using them for our own purposes.
12. Having doomed spies, doing certain things openly for purposes of deception, and allowing our spies to know of them and report them to the enemy.
13. Surviving spies, finally, are those who bring back news from the enemy's camp.
14. Hence it is that which none in the whole army are more intimate relations to be maintained than with spies.
None should be more liberally rewarded. In no other business should greater secrecy be preserved.
15. Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity.
16. They cannot be properly managed without benevolence and straightforwardness.
17. Without subtle ingenuity of mind, one cannot make certain of the truth of their reports.
18. Be subtle! be subtle! and use your spies for every kind of business.
19. If a secret piece of news is divulged by a spy before the time is ripe, he must be put to death together with the man to whom the secret was told.
20. Whether the object be to crush an army, to storm a city, or to assassinate an individual, it is always necessary to begin by finding out the names of the attendants, the aides-de-camp, and door-keepers and sentries of the general in command. Our spies must be commissioned to ascertain these.
21. The enemy's spies who have come to spy on us must be sought out, tempted with bribes, led away and comfortably housed. Thus they will become converted spies and available for our service.
22. It is through the information brought by the converted spy that we are able to acquire and employ local and inward spies.
23. It is owing to his information, again, that we can cause the doomed spy to carry false tidings to the enemy.
24. Lastly, it is by his information that the surviving spy can be used on appointed occasions.
25. The end and aim of spying in all its five varieties is knowledge of the enemy; and this knowledge can only be derived, in the first instance, from the converted spy.
Hence it is essential that the converted spy be treated with the utmost liberality.
26. Of old, the rise of
stand up... sit down... stand up... sit down... I wish the priest would just pick a position and rape me...
Spies should listen in to whatever they need to listen in to. That's what they're there for. Nations spy on other nations. It's not pretty, but it's reality. That might include otherwise privileged or sensitive conversations - I bet Angela Merkel would feel that her conversations are in some way "privileged" (clearly not in an attorney-client sense). The worrying aspect here appears to be if, when, and how that data might have been passed to other areas of government. Passing, say, data gained from spying on defence lawyers and passing that to the government prosecutor should be criminal.
FTFY.
The lawyers themselves turn all the sensitive information to the government, no need to spy on them.
Well, there is: it's called security.
Start by not using fax, unencrypted email, or ordinary phone-calls.
Of course, GCHQ can probably still just demand information, but at least you know about it in that case.
...you might as well spy on everybody. Seriously, who ever thought there were rules to warfare? Spying is warfare by the way. You either win, or you lose. There is no inbetween.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I'll wager that big foot is found before any nation allows free speech. How is it that people have any faith in the notion of rights when nonsense like spying on lawyers and journalists is tolerated?
Orwell, Englishman, wasn't writing about USSR when he made 1984. It was about UK.
Sadly, democracy is dead. We no longer have a government that represents the people. We no longer have a state that adheres to the principles that guided our ascent from feudal rule. Another system will come but first these hegemonists will create a world in which they believe we will cling to their heels as they rape us by night. Instead they will multiply fear and inequity until they too become powerless. As has happened before, we'll slowly pick up the pieces. Or, maybe we'll wake up first...
... for those that still had some doubts. GCHQ is a totalitarian institution, and an enemy of freedom and common decency. This is no surprise, any government agency will always grab all power it can get and use it. Governments need to be kept under control by the citizens, or they always devolve into totalitarianism. That is one of the reasons secret laws _must_ be avoided at all cost. Sadly, the UK population is deeply asleep at the wheel. They will pay an excessively high price for their failure.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Because there's never any intelligence value in those communications! Terrorists are always foreigners operating outside of the country in the public!
I am certain that most of those guys are ISIS sleeper agents! They need to spy on all of them heavily!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yet on the other I don't see why, if you were trying to stop a serious threat
What serious threat are you stopping by spying on the communications of journalists and lawyers? We protect the professional actions of those groups for VERY good reasons. Reasons which far outweigh any information that might be gleaned from violating their confidential relationship. If a client cannot trust their communications to be confidential between themselves and their lawyer then there is no possible way for them to have a fair trial.
1/ If the information gathered by spying was specifically barred from being used in court
You don't need to involve a court to ruin someone's life. See Guantanamo Bay. Plenty of evidence there that would be inadmissible but the government is keeping people locked up indefinitely without charge or any opportunity to seek redress.
2/ If additional authority had to be granted by the judiciary for the act
Which results in a rubber stamp kangaroo court like the FISA court.
3/ If there were clear checks and balances in place to deal with abuse.
Checks and balances require a separate party with equal power. No such entity exists if actions like these are perfectly legal.
If you violate lawyer client privilege you remove someone's ability to get a fair trial.
If you violate doctor patient privilege you endanger public health as well as potentially the health of that person.
If you violate journalist source relationships you enable corruption by the state.
We protect these relationships because any minor benefit to the state achieved by violating the sanctity and trust in these relationships has follow on consequences that endanger the well being of a democratic society. Public health, fair trials, government accountability. All these things are kept in check in large part because we protect certain relationships between professionals and the groups they work with.
I'm earfully waiting to see lots of earless solicitors and journalists walking near Old Bailey and Fleet Street. Poor chaps and lasses!
There was never real freedom and security or privacy. It always was an illusion, Western Governments always had the ability to crush any individual they considered as bothersome.
The 2 key differences now is:
#1 Due to new technology, it has becomes easier for the government to monitor EVERYBODY vs having limited resources and having to wisely pick and choose who you monitor like they did in the past.
#2 They are slowly slowly, dropping the pretense. Where as in the past they would put on an entire show and dance if abuses like this surfaced (and there was many abuses such as the red scare in the US in the 1950's for example) and then return back to business when their propaganda machines called the news monetized the "scandal" to death and moved on to other trending topics...At worst if it was real serious and people insisted on justice, they would simply jail the low level patsy they had on stand by.
What do you believe spying is, exactly?
Exactly.
Kilmarnock Football.Club
Surely they should only target lawyers if the lawyers themselves were criminals ... oh wait!
Yes. By all means do that. Become a person of interest. Become an unemployable martyr. Encrypt all you like, they'll order you to surrender the keys. Refuse to do it, or play smartass and pretend to having forgotten, you will go to jail. When are you going to understand that IT'S OVER? The game has ended, and the powerful have won.
If you violate lawyer client privilege you remove someone's ability to get a fair trial.
If you violate doctor patient privilege you endanger public health as well as potentially the health of that person.
If you violate journalist source relationships you enable corruption by the state.
All of those are features, not bugs for the government.
Whine all you want, but telling the government "if you do this, you are tilting the table towards yourself, violating your job contract" is not going to cause them to change anything. Because it's intentional. The only remedy is going to the court. Not the court of public opinion, but a court of law. Without anybody going to jail, the erosion of rights will just continue.
If a lawyer or journalist needs protection, they need to run for public office. Or do they spy on politicians over there too?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Start by not using fax, unencrypted email, or ordinary phone-calls.
Of course, GCHQ can probably still just demand information, but at least you know about it in that case.
Burner phones? Hard to tap a moving target, and there wouldn't be any way to get the content of the phone call, unless the telecos are preserving all phone audio. Best case, they'd have metadata.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
This assumes you're unique. If you're one of millions of people using default/secure communication from the likes of Apple and Google, that will tend to mask any additional encryption you bring to the table. Then, you're not a person of interest for using encryption, and you only have to avoid becoming a person of interest the old fashioned way.
You forgot to mention that we can't even do a proper revolution now because the government took all our guns away.
Guns aren't required for a revolution to occur. India kicked out the British largely without guns. The Civil Rights movement in the 1960s-70s was accomplished without guns. The USSR fell apart without civil war. If enough of the citizenry decides to force a change then change will happen no matter what weapons the government happens to have. Certainly you can have a revolution with guns but the notion that your little peashooter is what is keeping the most powerful military on the planet in check is pretty much laughable.
Why do people like you continue to propagate this fantasy that British spies should be spying on _every_ British citizen illegally, then give it a thumbs up because the law gets stealth changed so that it's no longer illegal? I'll be fair, people in the US have done the same thing, as have people in Germany.
People that are against this activity don't cry foul because spies are spying on Iran, or DPRK, or Turkey, etc... they are outraged because the spies have turned inward and worry more about people having a negative opinion of their home governments activities. People against this realize the measurable effect this has had on Free Speech, apologists don't want debate and dialogue. People against this activity can make parallels in history to other countries that have done the same thing and where it took the populations, apologists ignore history and seem to believe that being an apologist will make them immune to persecution.
Trying to conflate the jobs of law enforcement and "spying" to be the same thing is simply wrong. Law enforcement is supposed to follow the law when collecting evidence, there is a paper trail (or should be) to ensure that the people claiming to uphold the law are upholding the law. Warrants ensure oversight, Judges are supposed to stop abuses of power with the authority to issue a warrant. The whole system has been circumvented at this point, and there is no accountability or oversight.
Just like in the US, the UK has been spending billions of pounds every year for alleged "domestic terrorism" with no visible or measurable results. What can be viewed and measured is that people don't gather to show discontent with how their tax money is being spent very often. When they do there is a large police force waiting to ambush them and beat them into submission. This is the Government you live in, and complacency won't fix it.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I'm surprised to have not found a reference to the "five eyes" network (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes) or the trick of using foreign intel to glean info on nationals. None of our reporters are safe!
As for lawyers, they can fend for themselves as these legal gladiators are in a sub-human class all their own.
Let's see if the white vans and black helis show up today...
They can link your burner phone to you by using the meta-data to map your movements and comparing to historical records of where you went (how many people spend nights at your house and days at your work?). We can assume they are recording all phone calls, not just meta-data.
All of those are features, not bugs for the government.
Untrue. If you remove the protections of those relationships then the government will eventually pay the price. The government that is strongest is the one that is trusted by the people. A government removes that trust at its own peril.
The only remedy is going to the court. Not the court of public opinion, but a court of law.
Disagree. Vox populi, vox Dei. If the citizens are sufficiently outraged then they will remove the leaders from office. A courtroom might help but a ballot box can fix the problem far more effectively than a jury box.
And, of course, just writing a memo makes it all legally okay.
AC
Then encryption not approved by the government is banned and anyone caught using it - and they WILL catch you, don't be naive - will get fined. Heavily. The numbers will start dwindling fast after that. There is nothing you can do, get over your movie-fueled fantasies.
Our allies can legally spy on your meeting with your lawyer, and then they can tell the relevant government what they learned. Same as with spying on the general population, we can't do it but our allies can do it and tell us all about it.
At some point maybe we should start being concerned that the government is treating the Constitution as a hostile document to be worked around.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
they can't tell where I drive....I didn't install the license plate!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Then we may, "in principle" target the communications of government spies. It is the only way we can level the playing field. Since we have no privacy, let's take away theirs.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I'm actually surprised, because I thought the only rule for intelligence agencies was :
"Do what the fuck you want, but don't get caught."
It's pretty obvious they target everybody, especially people holding potentially sensitive information (e.g. lawyers and journalists).
I don't understand the need for such a policy, and I understand even less the need to disclose it.
I honestly don't see anything wrong with this. The point here is multi-fold:
1. There is a distinction between targetting individuals who are lawyers, and targetting lawyer-client communications. Lawyers are human beings, and not everything they do is a client communication. Lawyers do not become uniquely immune from appropriate investigation, just because they are lawyers. Otherwise that's a pretty gigantic loophole.
2. It's clear that the approval 'in principle' is bound by rules and caveats. Spies don't actually have the authority to spy on their own in this case, they "must" escalate to someone else to grant them that authority. The rule of thumb is given on page 90, point number 5: "there must be evidence of criminal activity by the lawyer". Even then the information is to be kept from anyone involved in the trial.
https://www.documentcloud.org/...
Bears have been granted perpetual licenses to take a dump in the woods.
Requiem for the American Dream
I thought by definition spies did illegal things. Or is that just the James Bond definition? The whole bit about "if you are caught or captured the secretary will disavow all knowledge of your existence" and they have a suicide pill, or they can try to escape as long as they don't divulge any information or whatever.
Unfortunately the "rules" to warfare seem to get ignored more and more as the decades pass. And we wonder why people hide their guns in hospitals when we bomb anywhere else with impunity. But by far the worst was that bit where they sent vaccination workers* to try to find Osama. Might as well just take a giant steaming shit on the Geneva Convention.
*I thought they were specifically Red Cross but can't seem to find a citation that explicitly says so.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
they *weren't* doing this before? color me shocked.
Congraulations, you're a coward.
Says the deluded fool. When are you going to admit that The Matrix is only a movie? Gun nuts cannot challenge the Army with their puny weapons and you can't challenge the Government with your puny computers. What they don't break by technological superiority they break by adjusting the laws. You can't fight City Hall, much less the State. If being realist is being a coward in your testosterone-overdosed world then I'm happy to be a coward. You want to trade punches with a grizzly bear, it's your funeral. But I strongly doubt you will actually dare. In the end, you will cave in. Brave words != brave deeds, and yours aren't even brave words. Just shrill and desperate.
It's very simple.
During WW2 the security services took the right to act extra-judicially. It made sense then - when you are fighting a war to the death and are close to being invaded you can't be fussing around with the niceties.
After WW2 most of the military services disbanded. But the spies kept going - they had the Cold War to fight, and they kept their 'James Bond' attitude to the law going in the old way. But it didn't matter to the general public - this was a secret game going on between the Eastern Bloc and the West, played by not very many people, none of whom were going to go to a court.
Then the Berlin Wall came down. And suddenly the security services had no job justification any more. They panicked, and started looking for other work - terrorism (which they never did before), drug barons, anything they could find. They moved in onto the Police's territory. AND THEY TOOK THEIR MO WITH THEM.
It ought to be obvious that a country should only drop constitutional rules of law if it is in extremis - in clear and present danger of no longer existing as a sovereign state. ALL OTHER situations should be dealt with by a police force, working under laws and answerable to the courts.
But it's too late to put the genie back in the bottle now...
so we wait for our corporate overlords to cover us from government shenanigans... if only we could do something about the government, like vote or something. (mostly targeting the poor voter turnout in US)
Personally, I think the poor voter turn out in the US happened because gridlock worked for the Republicans. The Republican voters counted stopping the Democrats as accomplishing something, but the Democrat voters felt that they derived no benefit from having voted for the Democrats the last time, so they stayed home.
However, I can't even get people who generally agree with me on most voting related stuff to bother using Enigmail, so even with good voter turnout, I think it'll be quite a long time before voters ever force a quorum of politicians in USA to place the interest of the public ahead of the self interest of the government when it comes to online privacy.
After a fashion, we really owe the nudie thieves a debt of gratitude, because if they hadn't made a big stink, the corporate entities might not have done as much as they're doing now. I'm not sure how it came to pass that stealing photos of famous women (when there's plenty of prettier ones available for free) got better results than the rest of the spying, but I reckon I'll take the results and be glad they're available. Who knows, maybe someday a psychohistorian will show that it was inevitable.
I think we can all agree to that one.
Anyone else find it ironic that we bitch about other countries spying on journalists and rigging elections (i.e. Russia, China, etc) and complain about civil rights records but yet, our government does the *EXACT SAME THING*?
Well there is one easy way to solve this but it is very messy. A Stalin-style purge of the intelligence services would actually be perfectly justified given their history. They have been out of control for decades and wreaked havoc. As a rogue state within a state the only solution to them is to destroy them utterly and leave anyone depraved enough to consider starting another one cowering in terror.
Good thinking. Maybe wear a hockey mask for your day-to-day activities, too. Only way to avoid unwanted attention!
Then why don't you post this spiel from a real account? AC rants are almost universally trolls here.