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UK's GCHQ Admits To Using Vulnerabilities To Hack Target Systems
Bismillah (993337) writes "Lawyers for the GCHQ have told the Investigatory Powers Tribunal in the UK that the agency carries out the same illegal Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) operations that criminals and hackers do. Except they do it legally. GCHQ is currently being taken to court by Privacy International and five ISPs from UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Zimbabwe and South Korea for CNE operations that the agency will not confirm nor deny as per praxis."
Their behavior is highly rewarding. The voters approve, on both sides of the pond. What do they have to be ashamed of? The public that allows this are the ones who should be ashamed.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
will not confirm nor deny as per praxis.
What does an explodey Klingon moon have to do with this?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"Police carry the same projectile weapons that criminals do. Except they do it legally."
" If there is no law or treaty that interdicts the GCHQ from hacking third parties then it cannot be illegal."
They have already been found to have broken the law in UK jurisdiction.
https://privacyinternational.org/?q=node/482
There are plenty of laws. And GCHQ are not protected by Jurisdiction, Belgacom can prosecute for the Belgian telephone hack as can everyone else. The bit we know from Snowden shows its far worse than IPT are admitting, they did bulk collection, and defined British telecoms as foreign simply by defining it as foreign if it passed through any offshore server along the way. So all gmail and hotmail email were defined as foreign and open to surveillance, even Brit to Brit comms was intercepted and handed over the NSA.
@phayes: "Something is illegal when there are laws or treaties adopted by the country in question that render the actions illegal. If there is no law or treaty that interdicts the GCHQ from hacking third parties then it cannot be illegal.
Computer Misuse Act 1990
'Sections 1-3 of the Act introduced three criminal offences:
unauthorised access to computer material, punishable by 6 months' imprisonment or a fine "not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale" (currently £5000);
unauthorised access with intent to commit or facilitate commission of further offences, punishable by 6 months/maximum fine on summary conviction or 5 years/fine on indictment;
unauthorised modification of computer material, subject to the same sentences as section 2 offences.'
Just because a police officer in the UK has the right to arrest and interrogate suspects, it is not legal for him to arrest and interrogate people in other countries too. And the lawsuits are in other countries.
I look forward to those responsible being identified and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Or past offences ignored and new laws enacted to make future actions legal or new laws enacted and applied retrospectively.
How can voters 'approve' of secret programs, to spy on them?
Their people in the House of Lords recently tried to slip 'snoopers charter' into an amendment, the Lords rejected it demanding instead a debate of surveillance. Hence nobody can pretend this has approval, even the Lords want to find the details of it and debate it. Also you don't try to legalize something that is already legal. We found out they have a huge database of private British info, and its freely accessed by Ministry staff. No warrants, no checks, and Snoopers Charter would have made it legal retrospectively.
Good luck telling a judge that his private info, and that of his family are freely available to everyone in certain ministries without so much as a warrant, or check.
Fearmongering isn't necessary if approval is given:
https://www.privacysos.org/node/1660
"If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that ‘We won the war on terror and everything’s great,’ cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive." - FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes
Oh, my! Hah ha ha, please forgive me! Ha ha ha ha That's a good one!
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
What they've done is to use a blanket warrant to grab ALL data on the excuse of 'terrorism', that gives them a searchable database, which no longer has the individual judicial checks. In particular they've done a full take on the pipes into the UK, which by its nature carries mostly UK to UK data.
GCHQ then handed this feed to the NSA, who have indexed it, on the promise they won't misuse it, and NSA in return has given them access to a search interface, PRISM back on this data and others.
NSA built a haystack, and the one thing we know is it isn't likely to contain needles, because its easy-to-get bulk data on everyone, not difficult-to-get signals intelligence on terrorists. The quantity of 'hay' they collect is connected to the ease by which they can intercept it, not the likeliness of it for 'terrorism'.
And of course once you remove the judicial protections and checks and balances, it all goes out the window. We learned of the memo saying NSA should keep any UK intelligence useful to the US, despite the 5 eyes 'no-spy' treaty, and that the SWIFT agreement was circumvented by simply assigning NSA staff to the treasury. Well duh!
In the process of turning US industry into surveillance machines, they've undermined encryption, withheld security holes, signed secret corporate commercial surveillance agreements. Undermining US products by coercion and bribery.
All because one General decided that instead of 'thin thread' approach of going after just the info they needed, they'd do a big 'store it all', and then do the searches adhoc without judicial checks after the fact.
You say 'clear legal framework' but it was clear from the leaks that the FISA judge was misled about the database stuff. He approved a tap, for a specific purpose, and instead it went into a database for other purposes. If FISA judges cannot be told the truth then how can this be a 'clear' anything?
NSA lied to the court:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130821/16331524274/declassified-fisa-court-opinion-shows-nsa-lied-repeatedly-to-court-as-well.shtml
None of this has been approved by the democracy it operates in. We get glimpses of how abused the systems was sometimes:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140813/23203228207/unsealed-jewel-v-nsa-transcript-doj-has-nothing-contempt-american-citizens.shtml
Keep in mind we're not talking about detail here, the basis of "collect everything one judicial warrant then search it later without warrant", for Britain this was one of the parts of Snoopers Charter. When GCHQ failed to get it, it went ahead with Tempora anyway with a faulty legal interpretation. It was clearly a breach of the law, yet they did it anyway.
So now we're in the position where politics is corrupted in 5 eyes countries, where the hard line military leaders win elections, and up coming parties have their telephone calls leaked against them. All of that needs to be pulled back in, the protections put back in place, GCHQ staff involved need to be ejected (prosecuted even) and replaced by people loyal to their country, and GCHQ need to only hand narrow data over, on terrorism, with proper judicial checks each time.
Should GCHQ be spying on data, which is mostly British, including sensitive data on commercial, political, journalistic and democratic actors from 200 fibre optics, handing it to NSA who give it to 800,000 NSA staff and private contractors ? It's a no-brainer. No they should not.
https://orderoftruth.wordpress.com/2013/06/22/uk-communications-bill-snoopers-charter-legalises-illegal-activity-of-gchq-and-nsa-in-uk-exposed-by-snowden/
GCHQ staff, to me you are compartmentalized into seeing tiny parts of the bigger picture. Classic 'rubes'.
I'm sorry but did anyone even think that they DIDN'T already do this?
There are plenty of laws prohibiting GCHQ from hacking third parties, e.g. they are in direct violation of European and German law (both civil and criminal law). That's why ISPs have sued them.
The problem is just that it's damned hard to prove it, since GCHQ is somewhat sneaky and backed up by a corrupt and fascist government.
This is why almost every law is covered by an exemption for the purposes of law enforcement (police pretending to be someone else in a sting operation, for example) or national security (which is what GCHQ hide behind).
Like the "Google not paying UK tax" thing - what they did was ENTIRELY legal, or else they'd be before the courts. But it's considered morally "wrong" so the law gets changed over time to match with the expectation (the "spirit" of the law and not just the "word" of the law).
Almost by definition, anything that GCHQ - a military department, effectively, like MI5 etc. - claim they did in the name of national security is legal. Even murder. Otherwise all war would be illegal too.
The law is not one line in a book. Like group policy, it's the result of overlap of thousands of lines from hundreds of books, all with different precedence and priority, and all with confusing text to describe how they operate, to arrive at a single answer for whether someone is allowed to do X or not.
That also depends on treaties signed between the two countries. As for lawsuits brought in country B on the sovereign government of country A, they almost always die a quiet death (Civil suits brought by victims of terrorism upon the Iranian government being an example in which the US State department has been arguing that the suits should be thrown out).
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Snort, "corrupt and fascist government". You're either an anarchist opposed to all government or the hypocritical supporter of your own local flavor.
Every government has it's own spies. Germany's BND in particular having been shown to perform the same mass & targeted data collection that German politicians were claiming that only the NSA & the GCHQ were doing.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Bull. Court cases against sovereign governments are almost always squashed & most of the exceptions are generally kangaroo political courts. The protestations of Anonymous Cowards far far removed from practical repercussions have absolutely no weight.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
So are they responsible for the breach just before Christmas 2013 that exposed millions of credit card details?
Target should sue them, and there could be a class action lawsuit from the affected customers.
And the 1700 workers that were fired in the Twin Cities the other day should get some of the damages too.
the agency carries out the same illegal Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) operations that criminals and hackers do. Except they do it legally.
LOL, So... it is a crime, not because it is morally and ethically questionable, but because you told us it is, and you told us it's OK for you to do it.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
In other countries, they are spies who will be treated as such if caught. Please do catch them.
Unless, of course, those other countries are allies or part of the EU where they may (or may not!) have allowed international co-operation for items of "national security" anyway.
The question is not what GCHQ does, but who is allowing them to do that. The answer in the UK is "the people who draft laws", the answer worldwide is "the people who draft laws" and/or "nobody".
Only for where they are explicitly disallowed will they face punishment abroad, and - let's just think about this - they are spies who need to spy on foreign risks, so the exact countries likely to prosecute (or more likely, assassinate) GCHQ members are exactly those countries they will be keeping an eye on.
Note that I'm not EXCUSING any of this. This is just the reason. But what they are doing to allies is allowed, what they are doing to "enemies" is not allowed in the enemy territory but it's an enemy anyway, and what doesn't come under those categories is extremely difficult to determine without co-operation of allies / enemies anyway.
This has, is, and will go on no matter what for what is essentially a spy agency. How legal it is on our own people, on our own soil is the only matter for UK law (the rest is really foreign policy), and UK law says they can. And EU law says they can. So we can ask to change the law, and the answer will be the same as ever "In the interest of national security..."
"it is not illegal if the president does it"
Neither of the two, I merely stated a fact.
I see that anonymous cowards are still abysmally stupid. If you can look forward to laws that retroactively make some behavior that you dislike illegal then you open the doors to all retroactive laws, like one that I would prefer that would find all the AC's posting dumb comments like yours and neutering them.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Hear hear! That's the most intelligent comment I have ever read from an AC. So intelligent, that given that you posted it as an AC I'm stealing it for future reuse.
Some people ask me "why even attempt to argue against Timothy & his ilk". Your post is a great example of why.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Drivel. Utter drivel.
The NSA, GCHQ, DGSE, etc have all been authorized, even instructed by the elected officials & courts over them to perform the collection they do. That YOU as a basement dwelling AC with no clearance does not have proof of this & believe that your ignorance is proof of anything is just another sign of how ignorant you are.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Says who? You, the hypocritical anarchist? Yeah, right...
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue