UK firms now have to store your online info for 1 year

[Anthea]

'Extreme surveillance' becomes UK law with barely a whimper

Investigatory Powers Act legalises range of tools for snooping and hacking by the security services

A bill giving the UK intelligence agencies and police the most sweeping surveillance powers in the western world has passed into law with barely a whimper, meeting only token resistance over the past 12 months from inside parliament and barely any from outside.

The Investigatory Powers Act, passed on Thursday, legalises a whole range of tools for snooping and hacking by the security services unmatched by any other country in western Europe or even the US.

The security agencies and police began the year braced for at least some opposition, rehearsing arguments for the debate. In the end, faced with public apathy and an opposition in disarray, the government did not have to make a single substantial concession to the privacy lobby.

US whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted: “The UK has just legalised the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy. It goes further than many autocracies.”

Snowden in 2013 revealed the scale of mass surveillance – or bulk data collection as the security agencies prefer to describe it – by the US National Security Agency and the UK’s GCHQ, which work in tandem.

But, against a backdrop of fears of Islamist attacks, the privacy lobby has failed to make much headway. Even in Germany, with East Germany’s history of mass surveillance by the Stasi and where Snowden’s revelations produced the most outcry, the Bundestag recently passed legislation giving the intelligence agencies more surveillance powers.

The US passed a modest bill last year curtailing bulk phone data collection but the victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential election is potentially a major reverse for privacy advocates. On the campaign trail, Trump made comments that implied he would like to use the powers of the surveillance agencies against political opponents.

The Liberal Democrat peer Lord Strasburger, one of the leading voices against the investigatory powers bill, said: “We do have to worry about a UK Donald Trump. If we do end up with one, and that is not impossible, we have created the tools for repression. If Labour had backed us up, we could have made the bill better. We have ended up with a bad bill because they were all over the place.

“The real Donald Trump has access to all the data that the British spooks are gathering and we should be worried about that.”

The Investigatory Powers Act legalises powers that the security agencies and police had been using for years without making this clear to either the public or parliament. In October, the investigatory powers tribunal, the only court that hears complaints against MI6, MI5 and GCHQ, ruled that they had been unlawfully collecting massive volumes of confidential personal data without proper oversight for 17 years.

One of the negative aspects of the legislation is that it fails to provide adequate protection for journalists’ sources, which could discourage whistleblowing.

One of the few positives in the legislation is that it sets out clearly for the first time the surveillance powers available to the intelligence services and the police. It legalises hacking by the security agencies into computers and mobile phones and allows them access to masses of stored personal data, even if the person under scrutiny is not suspected of any wrongdoing.

Privacy groups are challenging the surveillance powers in the European court of human rights and elsewhere.

Jim Killock, the executive director of Open Rights Group, said: “The UK now has a surveillance law that is more suited to a dictatorship than a democracy. The state has unprecedented powers to monitor and analyse UK citizens’ communications regardless of whether we are suspected of any criminal activity.”

Renate Samson, the chief executive of Big Brother Watch, said: “The passing of the investigatory powers bill has fundamentally changed the face of surveillance in this country. None of us online are now guaranteed the right to communicate privately and, most importantly, securely.”

Trump’s victory started speculation that, given his warm words for Vladimir Putin, he might do a deal with the Russian president to have Snowden sent back to the US where he faces a long jail sentence. Snowden has lived in Russia since leaking tens of thousands of documents to journalists in 2013.

But Bill Binney, a former member of the NSA who became a whistleblower, expressed scepticism: “I am not sure if the relationship a President Trump would have with President Putin would be bad for Snowden.

“In Russia, he would still be an asset that maybe Putin would use in bargaining with Trump. Otherwise, Snowden does have a large support network around the world plus in the US and Trump may not want to disturb that. Also, I think any move to get Snowden out of Russia and into US courts would also open up support for at least three other lawsuits against the US government’s unconstitutional surveillance.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/ ... -a-whimper

[Anthea]

UK journalists slam Russia for Big Brother spying laws
but remain silent as same laws get passed in UK

The greatest invasion of privacy known to the British people is about to come into force, allowing spy agencies to access your cellphone and monitor your internet traffic. But why are British journalists and MPs staying remarkably hush-hush about it?

Has mainstream media been told by London and Washington to steer clear of reporting on new spying legislation in the UK, which even Edward Snowden calls “scary”? It seems that journalists in the UK are struggling somehow to pick up the big story some tech sites have broken, in that the British will soon be spied on via their own telephones – and worse, that all their internet history is to be stored by intelligence services and possibly even be used to blackmail them into cooperating with police and security services.

Incredibly, recently the UK House of Lords provisionally gave the green light to the most draconian spying laws to date, which forces internet providers and hardware firms to make it easier for GCHQ to hack into people’s phones and get into their computers to monitor their online habits.

The draft laws were originally introduced into the House of Commons under then-Home Secretary Theresa May in 2015. They are popularly known as the “Snoopers’ Charter.”

You would have had to read the reports on the dark web carefully, though, to believe that you hadn’t seen them weeks earlier somewhere before. In fact, you had. Near-identical laws had been passed earlier in the summer and were splashed around by western media, with UK hacks leading the cavalcade. But that was in Russia.

In June, journalists were scrambling over themselves to demonize Russia’s parliament, which had passed harsh anti-terrorism measures, drawing the wrath of a bevy of human rights campaigners, including NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who warned they will “roll back personal freedoms and privacy.”

Russia’s own lower house of parliament, the State Duma, voted 325 to 1 to adopt the “Yarovaya law,” a package of amendments authored by the ruling United Russia party member Irina Yarovaya, who has carved her anti-democratic reputation out on the backs of protesters and non-governmental organizations who cry that their liberties are being hung out to dry.

Snowden, who has lived in Russia since receiving asylum in 2013, tweeted that the “Big Brother law” was an “unworkable, unjustifiable violation of rights” according to Britain’s own left wing, libertarian broadsheet The Guardian, which quoted him saying it would “take money and liberty from every Russian without improving safety.”


The American whistleblower did cause a ruckus is the UK in October 2015, though, when he told a BBC journalist that Britain’s own data spying center was already spying on people via their cellphones, using a technology called “Smurfs.”

Snowden spoke to Panorama in Moscow, where he fled in 2013 after leaking to the media details of extensive internet and phone surveillance operations by the US National Security Agency (NSA).

He said both agencies had invested heavily in technology allowing them to hack smartphones. "They want to own your phone instead of you," he said.

Where is the same hue and cry though from the British press, when its own two assemblies seem poised to back new laws which would give the security services in the UK new, unparalleled access to the private lives and habits of its citizens?

But it’s not only journalists who are mysteriously not covering the big story which will make George Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother look like a minor inconvenience to privacy.

Parliamentarians themselves seem to have been arrested by some divine power which has prevented them from scrutinizing the text of the “bill” which some suspect has both been written in haste – with entire pages written in vague terms – and is now being rushed through the parliament. Perhaps it might have something to do with one paragraph of the draft, which exempts MPs themselves from being the victim of the new snooping laws?

So why did Russia and now Britain take such moves in the name of anti-terrorism? And why are MPs and journalists trying to keep a lid on it?

For the press themselves, there is too much about the Snooping Charter which chimes with what many tabloid journalists were doing themselves in the UK in recent years – hacking ordinary people’s mobile phones – which culminated in The Leveson Report in 2012 recommending a new press watchdog which could punish phone hacking hacks.

But there is also, more likely, a collusion between MPs and journalists with the former directing political editors to not cover the story until it can be released on the same day as a terrorist incident – thereby giving a pretext for government spin doctors to serenade its virtues while news reporters walk across broken glass with police sirens and flashing lights providing the required audiovisual histrionics.

It’s unlikely that the UK has not been already tapping into telephones for years though and that the charter is more about forcing the private sector to cooperate more on snooping.

Furthermore, it appears that Britain is a little behind both the Russians and the Americans who have been at it for years.

In New York City, A key NSA program called BLARNEY is allegedly run out of a secret location in the building that taps into “communications of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and at least 38 countries, including close US allies such as Germany, Japan, and France,” an NSA report leaked by Edward Snowdon reveals.

According to The Intercept, BLARNEY documents detail how the program does “full take” surveillance, meaning it gathers both content and metadata in bulk by using “commercial partnerships” to “gain access and exploit foreign intelligence obtained from global networks.” The data collection falls into six different categories: “counterproliferation, counterterrorism, diplomatic, economic, military, and political.”

Want to protect yourself from the British government snooping on you? Start looking at getting a VPN and using encrypting software like TOR. Can’t handle all that tech? Become an MP.

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/367537-uk-ru ... ying-laws/

[Anthea]

Britain's spies enter a new era as powers to sweep up vast troves of call, email and text data are signed into law

Investigatory Powers Bill received royal assent after a year in Parliament
While discussed in detail, the new laws faced little opposition from MPs
But outside Parliament they were bitterly contested by civil liberty groups

Britain's intelligence services entered a new era today as controversial new spying laws took effect.

The landmark Investigatory Powers Bill - described by former prime minister David Cameron as one of the most important pieces of legislation of this parliament - was officially given royal assent today.

First unveiled a year ago, the legislation aims to bring surveillance tactics used by police and spy agencies in the digital age under one legal umbrella.

Powers covered by the new regime include:

:: Internet connection records: Communications firms will be required to store data relating to what sites a device connects to - but not a user's full browsing history or the content of a communication - for up to a year.

:: Bulk powers: The tactics used by MI5, MI6 and GCHQ to collect vast troves of data.

:: Equipment Interference: The official phrase used for operations involving hacking into suspects' smartphones and PCs, which are seen as increasingly important as advanced encryption makes monitoring targets more difficult.

The Bill has attracted intense scrutiny, with a string of parliamentary reports calling for revisions while it has come under attack repeatedly from civil liberties groups.

But ministers say it will ensure law enforcement and the security and intelligence agencies have the powers they need in a digital age to disrupt terrorist attacks.

The Home Office said the legislation brings together and updates existing powers while radically overhauling how they are authorised and overseen.

It includes the introduction of a 'double lock' regime for the most intrusive techniques, so that warrants issued by a Secretary of State will require the approval of a senior judge.

A new Investigatory Powers Commissioner will be created, while those misusing the powers could face sanctions including criminal charges.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd said: 'This Government is clear that, at a time of heightened security threat, it is essential our law enforcement, security and intelligence services have the powers they need to keep people safe.

'The internet presents new opportunities for terrorists and we must ensure we have the capabilities to confront this challenge. But it is also right that these powers are subject to strict safeguards and rigorous oversight.

'The Investigatory Powers Act is world-leading legislation that provides unprecedented transparency and substantial privacy protection.'

Some of the provisions in the Bill will require extensive testing and will not be in place for some time, the Home Office said.

In the meantime, measures required to replace the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 (DRIPA), which expires on December 31, will take effect.

Assistant Chief Constable Richard Berry, National Police Chiefs' Council lead for Communications Data, said: 'We are working across law enforcement and with the Home Office to make the necessary changes to our processes and to inform and train our staff ready for implementation of the Act.

'Necessity, proportionality and ethics will be at the heart of our approach to the updated powers working within a robust new oversight regime.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... d-law.html