Slashdot Mirror
PRESTON: The UK's "Big Brother" Comprehensive National Database System (theregister.co.uk)
gb7djk writes: The investigative journalist Duncan Campbell has written an article at The Register claiming that the UK Government has been secretly creating a database of all telephone calls, financial and travel records for the last 15 years. From the article: "Located inside the riverside headquarters of the Security Service, MI5, in Thames House, PRESTON works alongside and links to massive databases holding telephone call records, internet use records, travel, financial, and other personal records held by the National Technical Assistance Centre (NTAC), a little known intelligence support agency set up by Tony Blair's government in a 1999 plan to combat encryption and provide a national centre for internet surveillance and domestic codebreaking."
He has caused untold damage to the UK's ability to counter terrorism and is providing aid and comfort to the enemy in times of war! How does he dare criticize Tony Blair, the most popular Prime Minister the United Kingdom ever had since the dawn of time? No debate! Arrest! Arrest! Arrest!
And they have a history of illustrious experts on that.
Then they submit their experts to hormone treatment and drive them to suicide.
A bit disgusting, but hey.
I've been living under the impression that all phone and internet traffic is at least logged and probably monitored.
That some details of the operations come out from time to time doesn't alter the basic idea that this is what governments do.
Did anyone think differently in recent years?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
1) The NSA is being forced to reduce the amount of data it holds on American citizens
2) GCHQ is likely to come under similar pressure now PRESTON has been exposed
3) Neither agency has any restriction on the data they hold on foreign nationals.
How long will it be before the NSA exports all it's 'interesting' databases to GCHQ, and vice versa. That way they can clearly state they aren't holding large amounts of data on their own citizens, while retaining full access to their data.
I used to like the Graun but it's gone to hell in recent years. This has been very notable since Corbyn's campaign started when they've been running attack articles pretty much daily. It's got to the point I'm having to go to the Morning Star for balanced reporting...
I started reading the Graun to counterbalance the Torygraph. However the guardian has gone so batshit insane that I often feel I should now be ready the Mail to counterbalance it. The Independent isn't much better either.
That and all the stories which are basically reporting of Twitter spats, endless "Ten reasons why we must x" listicles, aggressive moderation in 'Comment is free' (was free), Their odd obsession with petty aspects of feminism, Adele, rap and a raft of young writers and sub editors who seem to be writing for personal blogs rather than doing proper journalism.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Brits and their redundancies! I spot these things. I also see dead people.
and besides, that was 75 years ago. Back then Britain was #1, with all sorts of sub-kingdoms in its possession. Today, Britain is #10, with nothing anymore but Canada off-island, and much of that is French-held.
It is amazing how George Orwell predicted all these half-a-century or so ago.
Even Yes Minister has one episode on a similar issue, that was three decades back.
Are we ignoring warnings from the past? or decided to be selective in terms of learning from the past?
a coincidence? I think not!
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
So, the most paranoid fantasies about the building blocks of the future totalitarian Britain from the movies became reality already over 15 years ago. It about the time we start growing living donors in the the orphanage systems and collecting people for sexual, religious or political reasons to retirement camps! What is taking so long?
" BT data centres are also directly linked to NTAC for the supply of subscriber information, telephone call records, and domestic internet interception."
i wondered why BT's internet service slowed down massively during peak hours (especially when children got home from school). now we know why. the system which farmed off the monitoring so that we could be spied on wasn't fast enough. hey fuckers: if you're going to spy on us, do it in a way that doesn't affect the profitability of the companies you're shafting, ok? remember what's happening with cisco right now?
Named after the robot dog in "A Close Shave?"
Wendolene: "Daddy created him for good, but...he's turned out evil!"
http://wallaceandgromit.wikia....
>How long will it be before the NSA exports all it's 'interesting' databases to GCHQ, and vice versa.
"How long"? This was the purpose of ECHELON which we spoke about here at length in the 90's. Back then we thought they were merely skirting the law - today we know that they were ready to flip the "full-on illegal" switch after 9/11.
The NSA is even on public record at this point about paying the Israelis to spy on Americans, and that's beyond Five Eyes.
If even Slashdotters don't know the surveillance status quo, is there really any hope that the public writ large has any idea what's going on?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I'm guessing the boring name was chosen to it gets lost and ignored if ever comes up in conversation. Preston being a rather dull town in Lancashire and a normal surname. You call something "PrivacyFuckerX" and people are going to cotton on pretty quickly as to it's purpose, politicians excepted obviously as they're mostly thick as two short ones when it comes to technology!
Not that is a very tempting target now is it?
Well since Snoopers Charter was never passed into law, and has been repeatedly rejected, so YES the top law making body in the UK thinks the situation is different! Someone does think the situation is different, the people who run the country.
If they didn't make it legal, its not legal, even if Tony Blair did it, he was only PM not dictator, Parliament trumps government in the UK.
The problems in the UK are largely because the spooks are vetted by the NSA. So all GCHQ staff are chosen to be ones who will obey their masters the US, not ones who will obey their legal masters, Parliament and the elected government in the UK.
This is why we have the insane situation of UK Parliament using Microsoft cloud to communicate interally by email, knowing PRISM can grab that data, and knowing the no-spy agreement was discarded by a secret General Alexander memo (He told his staff to ignore it if they found anything useful on the UK).
So parliament had a debate on whether to bomb Syria with the US, and some politicians said no, and their speeches, their discussions will all have been read by US spooks to brief their diplomats, presidents and UK turncoats to ensure the decision goes the way they want it. UK GCHQ has helped create this appalling situation.
The crime to prosecute is treason.
They lied to the elected leadership, Parliament, while fully informing the NSA. That's treason.
Treason from traitors.
It explains a lot, we've had 3 elections under this surveillance, where all UK political acts have been spied on by MI5, GCHQ, NSA, CIA.
All those debates and discussions in secret by elected leaders and wanna-be elected leaders, all spied on. All those MPs and their families logged and watched by spooks, often FROM A DIFFERENT COUNTRY. I mean FFS, you lied to Parliament, yet President Obama got daily briefings from PRISM and this database! You fucking Stasi!
No wonder politicans in the UK has gone off the rails. No longer representing people, but foreign interests.
They should be strung up. As for Nick Clegg, when they took him aside and explained that they were secretly doing that, he had his duty to go to Parliament and inform them so the courts could intervene and prosecute. Complaining about it when Theresa May admits they've been secretly doing it is too little too late.
I can't disagree with a single word here.
I don't know if it was the moving on of Rusbridger, financial pressures or some sort of coup behind the scenes, but the Guardian has become a lot less Guardian in the last year or two.
I did see a pro-Corbyn artocle tere the other day. The funny thing was a comment Below The Line saying it was just some soft soap to make the next attack piece stand out less! When it gets to that level of distrust by your readers (it seemed plausible enough to me) then your readers have all but abandoned you.
Quite why the Guardian thinks there are plenty of customers in the right-wing section of the news reader marketplace, I do not know. Maybe the expansion to the USA is a factor (although Bernie Sanders' popularity would suggest there's a substantial appetite for something left of (genuine) centre there).
It's a bad day when you see Guardian readers looking to the Huffington Post for something resembling decent reporting.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
To be honest, it's never been the same since the legendary Peter Preston left... although Ian Mayes as the Readers' Editor kept it honest for a while. Once he left, to be replaced by some faceless lawyer type, the decline REALLY set in.
Any paper that purports to be "left wing" (as it then did) but then sacks first Mark Steel, then his replacement Jeremy Hardy, for "being too left-wing" on their op-ed pages, isn't a paper I want o read. The Max Gogarty affair (the paper's reaction to their readers' criticism, more than the deed itself) was the final straw for me.
And yes, Duncan Campbell (the investigative journalist, rather than the Grauniad journalist of the same name), is probably the UK's leading journalistic authority on these matters.