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Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy | Naomi Wolf | Comment is fre... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...i-coordinated-crackdown-occupy banksters Occupy Wall Street FBI fusion centers surveillance
shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • New documents prove what was once dismissed as paranoid fantasy: totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent
  • It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks themselves. The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, in a groundbreaking scoop that should once more shame major US media outlets (why are nonprofits now some of the only entities in America left breaking major civil liberties news?), filed this request. The document – reproduced here in an easily searchable format – shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.
  • As Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF, put it, the documents show that from the start, the FBI – though it acknowledges Occupy movement as being, in fact, a peaceful organization – nonetheless designated OWS repeatedly as a "terrorist threat"
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  • Verheyden-Hilliard points out the close partnering of banks, the New York Stock Exchange and at least one local Federal Reserve with the FBI and DHS, and calls it "police-statism":"This production [of documents], which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI's surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement … These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."
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Obama administration under pressure as US senators demand end to secrecy | World news |... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...tion-pressure-nsa-surveillance surveillance state NSA NSA-blowback
shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • The fallout from the affair continued to have international ramifications. German government spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters on Monday that the chancellor, Angela Merkel, would question Obama about the NSA program when he visits Berlin on 18 June. The issue could tarnish a visit that both sides had hoped would reaffirm strong German-American ties.In a heated debate in the European parliament on Tuesday, lawmakers complained that for a decade they had yielded to US demands for access to European financial and travel data and said it was time to re-examine the deals and to limit data access.
  • "We need to step back here and say clearly: mass surveillance is not what we want," said Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Green lawmaker in charge of overhauling the EU's outdated data protection laws.Lawmakers said the EU privacy overhaul and existing transatlantic data-sharing deals – the Swift agreement on sharing financial transaction data and an agreement on airline passenger name records – were in jeopardy. "It is time we grasped the nettle here and put our minds to ending the program," said Martin Ehrenhauser, an Austrian independent member of the European parliament.
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Clapper admits secret NSA surveillance program to access user data | World news | guard... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-secret-nsa-surveillance-prism surveillance state prism NSA social media Verizon
shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • The US has admitted using a secret system to mine the systems of the biggest technology companies to spy on millions of people's online activity, overshadowing attempts by Barack Obama to force China to abandon its cyber-espionage program. As concern mounted over the sweeping nature of US surveillance, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, confirmed revelations by the Guardian that the National Security Agency uses companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple to obtain information that includes the content of emails and online files.
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MoD pays out millions to Iraqi torture victims | Law | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...mod-iraqi-torture-victims war crimes torture rendition human rights
shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • The Ministry of Defence has paid out £14m in compensation and costs to hundreds of Iraqis who complained that they were illegally detained and tortured by British forces during the five-year occupation of the south-east of the country.Hundreds more claims are in the pipeline as Iraqis become aware that they are able to bring proceedings against the UK authorities in the London courts.
  • Lawyers representing former prisoners of the British military say that more than 700 further individuals are likely to make claims next year.Most of those compensated were male civilians who said they had been beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened before being interrogated by British servicemen and women who had detained them on suspicion of involvement in the violent insurgency against the occupation. Others said that they suffered sexual humiliation and were forced into stress positions for prolonged periods.
  • Many of the complaints arise out of the actions of a shadowy military intelligence unit called the Joint Forward Interrogation Team (Jfit) which operated an interrogation centre throughout the five-year occupation. Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross complained about the mistreatment of detainees at Jfit not long after it was first established.Despite this, the interrogators shot hundreds of video films in which they captured themselves threatening and abusing men who can be seen to be bruised, disoriented, complaining of starvation and sleep deprivation and, in some cases, too exhausted to stand unaided.
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  • During proceedings brought before the high court in London, lawyers representing the former Jfit prisoners suggested the interrogation centre could be regarded as "Britain's Abu Ghraib".
  • Next month, the high court will hear a judicial review of the MoD's refusal to hold a public inquiry into the abuses. Human rights groups and lawyers for the former prisoners say the UK government is obliged to hold an inquiry to meet its obligations under the European convention on human rights – and particularly under article three of the convention, which protects individuals from torture.After a hearing, the high court highlighted matters supporting the allegations of systemic abuse. These included:• The same techniques being used at the same places for the same purpose: to assist interrogation.• The facilities being under the command of an officer.• Military doctors examining each prisoner at various stages in their detention.• Investigations by the Royal Military police that were concluded without anyone being held to account.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 Dec 12
     
    The Brits at least have the decency to attempt to make amends for its soldiers who tortured prisoners. Not so in the U.S. *Every* "war on terror" detainee who has filed a case for damages in the U.S. has been thrown out of court at the government's request, usually on grounds of the State Secrets privilege. It is a sad situation that our courts allow government secrecy about unlawful conduct to trump individual rights to redress for injury. 
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CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou given more than two years in prison | World news | guar... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...tleblower-john-kiriakou-prison Obama war on whistleblowers torture CIA
shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • The former CIA officer John Kiriakou was sentenced Friday to more than two years in prison, by a federal judge who rejected arguments that he was acting as a whistleblower when he leaked a covert officer's name to a reporter. A plea deal required the judge to impose a sentence of two and a half years. US district judge Leonie Brinkema said she would have given Kiriakou much more time if she could.Kiriakou's supporters describe him as a whistleblower who exposed aspects of the CIA's use of torture against detained terrorists. Prosecutors said Kiriakou was merely seeking to increase his fame and public stature by trading on his insider knowledge. The 48-year-old Arlington resident pleaded guilty last year to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. No one had been convicted under the law in 27 years.
  • His 2007 interviews about the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah were among the first by a CIA insider confirming reports that several detainees, including Abu Zubaydah, had been waterboarded.
  • Paul Merrell on 26 Jan 13
     
    Obama's war against government whistleblowers continues. 
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The Stunning Hypocrisy of the U.S. Government - BlackListedNews.com - 1 views

www.blacklistednews.com/...M.html NSA-Patriot-Act-NDAA Edward-Snowden hypocrisy
shared by Gary Edwards on 24 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Please read this rather good summary in this morning’s New York Times of the worldwide debate Snowden has enabled – how these disclosures have “set off a national debate over the proper limits of government surveillance” and “opened an unprecedented window on the details of surveillance by the NSA, including its compilation of logs of virtually all telephone calls in the United States and its collection of e-mails of foreigners from the major American Internet companies, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and Skype” – and ask yourself: has Snowden actually does anything to bring “injury to the United States”, or has he performed an immense public service?
  • The irony is obvious: the same people who are building a ubiquitous surveillance system to spy on everyone in the world, including their own citizens, are now accusing the person who exposed it of “espionage”.
  • It seems clear that the people who are actually bringing “injury to the United States” are those who are waging war on basic tenets of transparency and secretly constructing a mass and often illegal and unconstitutional surveillance apparatus aimed at American citizens – and those who are lying to the American people and its Congress about what they’re doing – rather than those who are devoted to informing the American people that this is being done.
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  • The Obama administration leaks classified information continuously. They do it to glorify the President, or manipulate public opinion, or even to help produce a pre-election propaganda film about the Osama bin Laden raid.
  • The Obama administration does not hate unauthorized leaks of classified information. They are more responsible for such leaks than anyone.
  • What they hate are leaks that embarrass them or expose their wrongdoing.
  • The “enemy” they’re seeking to keep ignorant with selective and excessive leak prosecutions are not The Terrorists or The Chinese Communists.
  • It’s the American people.
  • The people who have learned things they didn’t already know are American citizens who have no connection to terrorism or foreign intelligence, as well as hundreds of millions of citizens around the world about whom the same is true.
  • What they have learned is that the vast bulk of this surveillance apparatus is directed not at the Chinese or Russian governments or the Terrorists, but at them.
  • And that is precisely why the US government is so furious and will bring its full weight to bear against these disclosures.
  • What has been “harmed” is not the national security of the US but the ability of its political leaders to work against their own citizens and citizens around the world in the dark, with zero transparency or real accountability.
  • If anything is a crime, it’s that secret, unaccountable and deceitful behavior: not the shining of light on it.
  • At a press conference to discuss the accusations, an N.S.A. spokesman surprised observers by announcing the spying charges against Mr. Snowden with a totally straight face. “These charges send a clear message,” the spokesman said. “In the United States, you can’t spy on people.”
  • “The American people have the right to assume that their private documents will remain private and won’t be collected by someone in the government for his own purposes.”
  • “Only by bringing Mr. Snowden to justice can we safeguard the most precious of American rights: privacy,” added the spokesman, apparently serious.
  • Gary Edwards on 24 Jun 13
     
    Extremely well linked story from "Washington's Blog" excerpt: "The Government's Hypocrisy Is the Core Problem Congress has exempted itself from the prohibition against trading on inside information … the law that got Martha Stewart and many other people thrown in jail. There are many other ways in which the hypocrisy of the politicians in D.C. are hurting our country. Washington politicians say we have to slash basic services, and yet waste hundreds of billions of dollars on counter-productive boondoggles.  If the politicos just stopped throwing money at corporate welfare queens, military and security boondoggles and pork, harmful quantitative easing, unnecessary nuclear subsidies,  the failed war on drugs, and other wasted and counter-productive expenses, we wouldn't need to impose austerity on the people. The D.C. politicians said that the giant failed banks couldn't be nationalized, because that would be socialism.  Instead of temporarily nationalizing them and then spinning them off to the private sector - or breaking them up - the politicians have bailed them out to the tune of many tens of billions of dollars each year, and created a system where all of the profits are privatized, and all of the losses socialized. Obama and Congress promised help for struggling homeowners, and passed numerous bills that they claimed would rescue the little guy.  But every single one of these bills actually bails out the banks … and doesn't really help the homeowner. The D.C. regulators pretend that they are being tough on the big banks, but are actually doing everything they can to help cover up their sins. Many have pointed out Obama's hypocrisy in slamming Bush's spying programs … and then expanding them  (millions more). And in slamming China's cyber-warfare … while doing the same thing. And - while the Obama administration is spying on everyone in the country - it is at the same time the most secretive administration ever (ba
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Latin America is ready to defy the US over Snowden and other issues | Stephen Kinzer | ... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...den-ecuador-defy-united-states surveillance state NSA Snowden Latin-America decline of the American Empire
shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Any country that grants asylum to Snowden risks retaliation from the United States, including diplomatic isolation and costly trade sanctions. Several don't seem to care. The fact that Latin America has become the favored refuge for a United States citizen accused of treason and espionage is an eye-popping reminder of how fully the continent has emerged from Washington's shadow."Latin America is not gone, and we want to keep it," President Richard Nixon told aides as he was pressing the covert operation that brought down the Chilean government in 1973. A decade later, the Reagan administration was fighting proxy wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. In the 1980s the US Army invaded two Caribbean countries, Grenada and Panama, to depose leaders who had defied Washington.
  • During the 1990s the United States sought to impose the "Washington Consensus" on Latin American governments. It embodied what Latin Americans call "neo-liberal" principles: budget cuts, privatization, deregulation of business, and incentives for foreign companies. This campaign sparked bitter resistance and ultimately collapsed. In spite of these military, political, and economic assaults – or perhaps because of them – much of Latin America has become profoundly dissatisfied with the made-in-USA model. Some of the continent's most popular leaders rose to power by denouncing the "Washington Consensus" and pledging to pull their countries out of the United States orbit.Because President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela was the most flamboyant of these defiant leaders, some outsiders may have expected that following his death, the region would return to its traditional state of submission. In fact, not just a handful of leaders but huge populations in Latin America have decided that they wish for more independence from Washington.
  • This is vital for Snowden because it reduces the chances that a sudden change of government could mean his extradition. If he can make it to Latin America, he will never lack for friends or supporters.
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  • From Ecuador, Snowden could travel widely. Everything from the splendor of Bolivia's Lake Titicaca to the vibrancy of teeming Caracas awaits him. With luck, he might even be able to visit Guatemala in September to attend the grand festival being planned for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jacobo Arbenz, the reformist president who the United States deposed in 1954.
  • Paul Merrell on 27 Jun 13
     
    Remember when the U.S. routinely overthrew Latin-American governments at will, at the first sign of a government's resistance to U.S. dictates? The last time that occurred overtly was in 1989, with the invasion of Panama (although there have been later clandestine attempts). The cases of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden's selection of Ecuador as the refuge nation least likely to hand them over for U.S. prosecution illustrates the declining influence of U.S. government in Latin America.   
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Merkel compared NSA to Stasi in heated encounter with Obama | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...erkel-compares-nsa-stasi-obama surveillance state NSA NSA-blowback EU EU-Parliamentary-Inquiry Snowden law international law
shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • In an angry exchange with Barack Obama, Angela Merkel has compared the snooping practices of the US with those of the Stasi, the ubiquitous and all-powerful secret police of the communist dictatorship in East Germany, where she grew up.The German chancellor also told the US president that America's National Security Agency cannot be trusted because of the volume of material it had allowed to leak to the whistleblower Edward Snowden, according to the New York Times.Livid after learning from Der Spiegel magazine that the Americans were listening in to her personal mobile phone, Merkel confronted Obama with the accusation: "This is like the Stasi."The newspaper also reported that Merkel was particularly angry that, based on the disclosures, "the NSA clearly couldn't be trusted with private information, because they let Snowden clean them out."
  • Snowden is to testify on the NSA scandal to a European parliament inquiry next month, to the anger of Washington which is pressuring the EU to stop the testimony.
  • A draft report by a European parliament inquiry into the affair, being presented on Wednesday and obtained by the Guardian, says there has to be a discussion about the legality of the NSA's operations and also of the activities of European intelligence agencies.The report drafted by Claude Moraes, the British Labour MEP heading the inquiry, says "we have received substantial evidence that the operations by intelligence services in the US, UK, France and Germany are in breach of international law and European law".
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Syria war: new push against Assad being planned, reports suggest | World news | theguar... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...al-effort-southern-front-assad war & peace Syria U.S. foreign policy
shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • After months of battlefield stalemate in Syria, a flurry of reports from Washington, Jerusalem, Amman and the Gulf suggests a major new clandestine effort is under way to open up a "southern front" against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.Central to the mooted plan is a renewed push to provide Syria's badly divided and often ineffectual moderate, secular rebel groups with additional funding, upgraded weapons and intelligence support.What use they may make of such support, if indeed it fully materialises, remains to be seen.The initiative, as reported in the region, is set against a backdrop of secret talks in the US last month between Susan Rice, Barack Obama's national security adviser, and Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi interior minister in charge of covert action programmes in Syria.According to the usually well informed Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, spy chiefs from Jordan, Turkey, Qatar and other regional countries also attended the discussions, focused on making a "stronger effort" to help the rebels.
  • After months of battlefield stalemate in Syria, a flurry of reports from Washington, Jerusalem, Amman and the Gulf suggests a major new clandestine effort is under way to open up a "southern front" against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.Central to the mooted plan is a renewed push to provide Syria's badly divided and often ineffectual moderate, secular rebel groups with additional funding, upgraded weapons and intelligence support.What use they may make of such support, if indeed it fully materialises, remains to be seen.The initiative, as reported in the region, is set against a backdrop of secret talks in the US last month between Susan Rice, Barack Obama's national security adviser, and Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi interior minister in charge of covert action programmes in Syria.
  • According to the usually well informed Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, spy chiefs from Jordan, Turkey, Qatar and other regional countries also attended the discussions, focused on making a "stronger effort" to help the rebels.This meeting has been linked in turn to last month's launching by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) of what they termed a spring offensive in the south of Syria. The offensive began days after they received new US weapons funding that may eventually total $31.4m (£18.9m), rebel commanders said.After holding back for months owing to fears that new arms might fall into the hands of al-Qaida affiliates, unidentified American officials said Congress had given closed-door approval in January for renewed cash for light weapons intended for the moderate, secular opposition in the south.The new US funding supposedly augments a fresh push by Gulf states to finance rebel operations in the southern region of Syria, which are ultimately aimed at Damascus. More than $1bn has been disbursed since last summer, much of it for weapons purchases in eastern Europe, according to Gulf government sources quoted by regional media.
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  • Detailed media reports claim the operational plans, supply routes and tactics for the new push are being overseen by a secret international operations command centre in Amman staffed by military officials from 14 countries, including the US, Britain, Israel and Arab states opposed to the Assad regime."Rebel fighters and opposition members say the command centre, based in an intelligence headquarters building in Amman, channels vehicles, sniper rifles, mortars, heavy machine guns, small arms and ammunition to Free Syrian Army units," the Abu Dhabi-based National newspaper reported.Jordan denies the existence of the centre and of reportedly CIA-run rebel training facilities in northern Jordan.
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The NSA is turning the internet into a total surveillance system | Alexander Abdo and P... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...sa-internet-surveillance-email surveillance state NSA email lies
shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Another burst of sunlight permeated the National Security Agency's black box of domestic surveillance last week.According to the New York Times, the NSA is searching the content of virtually every email that comes into or goes out of the United States without a warrant. To accomplish this astonishing invasion of Americans' privacy, the NSA reportedly is making a copy of nearly every international email. It then searches that cloned data, keeping all of the emails containing certain keywords and deleting the rest – all in a matter of seconds.
  • The NSA appears to believe this general monitoring of our electronic communications is justified because the entire process takes, in one official's words, "a small number of seconds". Translation: the NSA thinks it can intercept and then read Americans' emails so long as the intrusion is swift, efficient and silent.That is not how the fourth amendment works.Whether the NSA inspects and retains these messages for years, or only searches through them once before moving on, the invasion of Americans' privacy is real and immediate. There is no "five-second rule" for fourth amendment violations: the US constitution does not excuse these bulk searches simply because they happen in the blink of an eye.The government claims that this program is authorized by a surveillance statute passed in 2008 that allows the government to target foreigners for surveillance. Although the government has frequently defended that law as a necessary tool in gathering foreign intelligence, the government has repeatedly misled the public about the extent to which the statute implicates Americans' communications.
  • There should no longer be any doubt: the US government has for years relied upon its authority to collect foreigners' communications as a useful cover for its sweeping surveillance of Americans' communications. The surveillance program revealed last week confirms that the interception of American communications under this law is neither "targeted" at foreigners (in any ordinary sense of that word) nor "inadvertent", as officials have repeatedly claimed.Last week's revelations are a disturbing harbinger of future surveillance. Two months ago, this newspaper reported that the US government has been forcing American telecommunications companies to turn over the call records of every one of their customers "on an ongoing daily basis", to allow the NSA to later search those records when it has a reason to do so. The government has since defended the program, in part on the theory that Americans' right to privacy is not implicated by the initial acquisition of their phone records, only by their later searching.That legal theory is extraordinarily dangerous because it would allow the NSA to acquire virtually all digital information today simply because it might possibly become relevant tomorrow. The surveillance program revealed by the New York Times report goes one step further still. No longer is the government simply collecting information now so that the data is available to search, should a reasonable suspicion arise at some point in the future; the NSA is searching everything now – in real time and without suspicion – merely on the chance that it finds something of interest.
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  • That principle of pre-emptive surveillance threatens to subvert the most basic protections of the fourth amendment, which generally prohibit the government from conducting suspicion-less fishing expeditions through our private affairs. If the government is correct that it can search our every communication in case we say or type something suspicious, there is little to prevent the NSA from converting the internet into a tool of pervasive surveillance.
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Aug 13
     
    Obama was apparently technically accurate but materially misleading when he he said that no one is reading your email. But government computers are reading every email. "Although conduct by law enforcement officials prior to trial may ultimately impair that right, a constitutional violation occurs only at trial. Kastigar v. United States, 406 U. S. 441, 453 (1972). The Fourth Amendment functions differently. It prohibits 'unreasonable searches and seizures' whether or not the evidence is sought to be used in a criminal trial, and a violation of the Amendment is 'fully accomplished' at the time of an unreasonable governmental intrusion. United States v. Calandra, 414 U. S. 338, 354 (1974); United States v. Leon, 468 U. S. 897, 906 (1984)." United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 US 259, 265 (1990), http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=10167007390100843851  
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Michael Hayden talks to CNN about XKEYSCORE program. - 0 views

www.slate.com/...n_about_xkeyscore_program.html surveillance state NSA xKeyScore Deep Dive Hayden
shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Does the NSA really operate a vast database that allows its analysts to sift through millions of records showing nearly everything a user does on the Internet, as was recently reported? Yes, and people should stop worrying and learn to love it, according former NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden. Last week, the Guardian published a series of leaked documents revealing new details about an NSA surveillance program called XKEYSCORE. The newspaper said that the program enabled the agency to “search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals,” and secret slides dated 2008 showed how people could be deemed a target for searching the Web for “suspicious stuff” or by using encryption. Following the disclosures, Hayden appeared on CNN to discuss the agency’s surveillance programs. The general, who directed the NSA from 1999 through 2005, was remarkably candid in his responses to Erin Burnett’s questions about the Guardian’s XKEYSCORE report. Was there any truth to claims that the NSA is sifting through millions of browsing histories and able to collect virtually everything users do on the Internet? “Yeah,” Hayden said. “And it's really good news.”
  • Not only that, Hayden went further. He revealed that the XKEYSCORE was “a tool that's been developed over the years, and lord knows we were trying to develop similar tools when I was at the National Security Agency.” The XKEYSCORE system, Hayden said, allows analysts to enter a “straight-forward question” into a computer and sift through the “oceans of data” that have been collected as part of foreign intelligence gathering efforts. How this process works was illustrated in the Guardian’s report. Analysts can enter search terms to sift through data and select from a drop-down menu a target’s “foreignness factor,” which is intended to minimize the warrantless surveillance of Americans. However, operating a vast electronic dragnet such as this is far from an exact science, and the NSA’s system of sifting data from the backbone of international Internet networks likely sometimes involves gobbling up information on Americans’ communications and online activity—whether it is done wittingly or not. Indeed, the NSA reportedly only needs to have 51 percent certainty that it is targeting a foreigner. And as leaked secret rules for the surveillance have shown, even if the NSA does “inadvertently” gather Americans’ communications, it can hold on to them if they are deemed valuable for vague “foreign intelligence” purposes or if the communications show evidence of a crime that has occurred or may occur in the future.
  • In the CNN interview, Hayden described XKEYSCORE as “really quite an achievement” and said that it enabled NSA spies to find the needle in the haystack. But his ardent defense of the system is unlikely to reassure civil liberties advocates. Having Hayden’s support is a rather dubious stamp of approval, particularly because he was responsible for leading the NSA’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program, which was initiated post-9/11 and exposed by the New York Times in 2005. Hayden later went on to lead the CIA from 2006 through 2009, where he oversaw the use of the waterboarding torture technique and the operation of a controversial black-site prison program that was eventually dismantled by President Obama. The former NSA chief retired in 2009, but he has since become a regular media commentator, using a recent column at CNN to blast Snowden for leaking the secret NSA documents and implying that he’d like to see the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald prosecuted as a “co-conspirator” for his role reporting the surveillance scoops.
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Aug 13
     
    Let's see, the entire U.S. military has been forbidden from reading The Guardian because the documents Edward Snowden leaked are still classified. But a former NSA chief can confirm their accuracy on CNN?  Surely, even as I write a grand jury is busy indicting him on Espionage Act charges? No? Smells like hypocrisy to me. 
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Brazilian president Rousseff: US surveillance a 'breach of international law' | World n... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ent-un-speech-nsa-surveillance surveillance state NSA NSA-blowback Brazil Internet-Balkanization
shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff, has launched a blistering attack on US espionage at the UN general assembly, accusing the NSA of violating international law by its indiscriminate collection of personal information of Brazilian citizens and economic espionage targeted on the country's strategic industries.Rousseff's angry speech was a direct challenge to President Barack Obama, who was waiting in the wings to deliver his own address to the UN general assembly, and represented the most serious diplomatic fallout to date from the revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
  • Washington's efforts to smooth over Brazilian outrage over NSA espionage have so far been rebuffed by Rousseff, who has proposed that Brazil build its own internet infrastructure."Friendly governments and societies that seek to build a true strategic partnership, as in our case, cannot allow recurring illegal actions to take place as if they were normal. They are unacceptable," she said."The arguments that the illegal interception of information and data aims at protecting nations against terrorism cannot be sustained. Brazil, Mr President, knows how to protect itself. We reject, fight and do not harbour terrorist groups," Rousseff said."As many other Latin Americans, I fought against authoritarianism and censorship and I cannot but defend, in an uncompromising fashion, the right to privacy of individuals and the sovereignty of my country," the Brazilian president said. She was imprisoned and tortured for her role in a guerilla movement opposed to Brazil's military dictatorship in the 1970s."In the absence of the right to privacy, there can be no true freedom of expression and opinion, and therefore no effective democracy. In the absence of the respect for sovereignty, there is no basis for the relationship among nations."
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Sep 13
     
    We should never lose sight of the fact that every time the NSA intercepts a message from a foreign nation, it violates the civil and criminal laws of that nation. The NSA and its staff are serial criminals, not patriots. The Balkanization of the Internet into a non-net of local area networks to protect nations' citizen rights from NSA voyeurs is all too predictable. This will be their legacy unless we can stop them.
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NSA spied on Indian embassy and UN mission, Edward Snowden files reveal | World news | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ance-indian-embassy-un-mission surveillance state NSA NSA-blowback India lies
shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • The US National Security Agency may have accessed computers within the Indian embassy in Washington and mission at the United Nations in New York as part of a huge clandestine effort to mine electronic data held by its south Asian ally.Documents released by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden also reveal the extent and aggressive nature of other NSA datamining exercises targeting India as recently as March of this year.The latest revelations – published in the Hindu newspaper – came as Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, flew to Europe on his way to the US, where he will meet President Barack Obama.The NSA operation targeting India used two datamining tools, Boundless Informant and Prism, a system allowing the agency easy access to the personal information of non-US nationals from the databases of some of the world's biggest tech companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
  • The largest amount of intelligence was gathered from Iran, with more than 14bn reports in that period, followed by 13.5bn from Pakistan. Jordan, one of America's closest Arab allies, came third with 12.7bn, Egypt fourth with 7.6bn and India fifth with 6.3bn.
  • According to one document obtained by the Hindu, the US agency used the Prism programme to gather information on India's domestic politics and the country's strategic and commercial interests, specifically categories designated as nuclear, space and politics.
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  • A further NSA document obtained by the Hindu suggests the agency selected the office of India's mission at the UN in New York and the country's Washington embassy as "location targets" where records of Internet traffic, emails, telephone and office conversations – and even official documents stored digitally – could potentially be accessed after programs had been clandestinely inserted into computers.In March 2013, the NSA collected 6.3bn pieces of information from internet networks in India and 6.2bn pieces of information from the country's telephone networks during the same period, the Hindu said.After the Guardian reported in June that Pm program allowed the NSA "to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders", both US and Indian officials claimed no content was being taken from the country's networks and that the programs were intended to aid "counter-terrorism".
  • A home ministry official told the newspaper the government had been "rattled" to discover the extent of the the programme's interest in India. "It's not just violation of our sovereignty, it's a complete intrusion into our decision-making process," the official said.
  • The Hindu argued that "the targeting of India's politics and space programme by the NSA busts the myth of close strategic partnership between India and US", pointing out that the other countries targeted in the same way as India "are generally seen as adversarial" by Washington.
  • Paul Merrell on 26 Sep 13
     
    An important bit of proof that NSA digital surveillance involves far more than counter-terrorism. 
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Hillary Clinton: we need to talk sensibly about spying | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...hillary-clinton-spying surveillance state NSA Hillary Obama
shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Hillary Clinton has called for a "sensible adult conversation", to be held in a transparent way, about the boundaries of state surveillance highlighted by the leaking of secret NSA files by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.In a boost to Nick Clegg, the British deputy prime minister, who is planning to start conversations within government about the oversight of Britain's intelligence agencies, the former US secretary of state said it would be wrong to shut down a debate.Clinton, who is seen as a frontrunner for the 2016 US presidential election, said at Chatham House in London: "This is a very important question. On the intelligence issue, we are democracies thank goodness, both the US and the UK."We need to have a sensible adult conversation about what is necessary to be done, and how to do it, in a way that is as transparent as it can be, with as much oversight and citizens' understanding as there can be."
  • In her remarks, Clinton did not comment on the UK's oversight arrangements. But she indicated she was wholly supportive of the approach adopted by Barack Obama who – in contrast to Downing Street – has said he welcomes a debate on surveillance in the wake of the NSA leaks.Answering a question from the Guardian at Chatham House, she said the discussion had to take place within a framework that addressed issues of privacy and protection of citizens because some surveillance programmes remained a "really critical ingredient in our homeland security."Clinton, who is considering whether to make her second challenge for the Democratic presidential nomination, added: "It would be going down a wrong path if we were to reject the importance of the debate, and the kinds of intelligence activities that genuinely keep us safe."So how do we sort all of this out? This is a problem that is well over a decade old, where these capacities have corresponded with increasing outreach to consumers on the business side and increasing concern about security on the government side. People need to be better informed."
  • Paul Merrell on 14 Oct 13
     
    Some surveillance programmes remained a "really critical ingredient in our homeland security." So the politics of fear and faux terrorism is more important to Hillary than civil liberties. There is only one political party in the U.S., the War Party.
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There's A Huge New Snowden Leak - And No One Knows Where It Came From [UPDATED] - Yahoo... - 0 views

finance.yahoo.com/...snowden-leak-no-183610597.html surveillance-state GCHQ Snowden El-Reg Seeb greenwald
shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • On Tuesday, news site The Register published a story containing explosive "above top secret" information about Britain's surveillance programs, including details of a "clandestine British base tapping undersea cables in the Middle East." Reporter Duncan Campbell, who wrote the story, said it was based on documents "leaked by fugitive NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden" that other news outlets had declined to publish.  However, it's not necessarily clear how Campbell got his hands on Snowden's document stash.  Glenn Greenwald, who published the first stories based on Snowden's documents in The Guardian, told Business Insider on Tuesday that Snowden has "no source relationship" with Campbell. "Snowden has no source relationship with Duncan (who is a great journalist), and never provided documents to him directly or indirectly, as Snowden has made clear," Greenwald said in an email. "I can engage in informed speculation about how Duncan got this document — it's certainly a document that several people in the Guardian UK possessed — but how he got it is something only he can answer."
  • For his part, Campbell is not interested in discussing how he got the documents used for his story. "Journalists in the UK — just as in the US — do not reveal their sources, or respond to questions as to confidential sources. We protect them. That is our obligation and our duty," Campbell wrote in an email to Business Insider. This isn't the first story Campbell has published allegedly based on Snowden documents. Last August, Campbell wrote a piece for The Independent about the secret British surveillance base. In that article, Campbell suggested The Guardian "agreed to the Government’s request not to publish any material contained in the Snowden documents that could damage national security," including the existence of the surveillance base.
  • Greenwald responded with a column that included a statement from Snowden saying he had not worked with Campbell and speculating the documents were actually by the British government as part of an attempt to make the case his leaks were "harmful." In addition to Snowden's theory that Campbell may have obtained documents from a government source, it also seems possible he was leaked information by a Guardian staffer with access to the documents. Business Insider asked Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger about this possibility on Tuesday and received a response from a representative for the paper who said they have no idea how Campbell obtained any of Snowden's documents.  "We don't know who Mr Campbell's source is. We have always been open and transparent about all of our reporting partners," the representative  said.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • So it seems someone out there is in possession of Snowden documents other newspapers have declined to publish and is eager to release them. In other words, the Snowden leaks have leaked. [UPDATE 20:45 EDT] Duncan Campbell told Wired UK that he " was able to look at some of the material provided in Britain to the Guardian  by Edward Snowden last year." Campbell, who has been reporting about Britain's signals intelligence agency (GCHQ) for more than 30 years,  would not answer a question about whether he has copies of the relevant documents.
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ACLU sues over NSA surveillance program - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...2-a73e-826d299ff459_story.html surveillance state NSA ACLU litigation
shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the constitutionality of the U.S. government surveillance program that collects the telephone records of millions of Americans from U.S. telecommunications companies. It is the first substantive lawsuit following reports in The Washington Post and the Guardian last week that detailed two vast surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency under laws authorized by Congress after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
  • The ACLU suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, challenges the legality of the spy agency’s collection of customer “metadata,” including the phone numbers dialed and the length of calls. The lawsuit asks the court to force the government to end the program and purge any records it has collected, and to declare that the surveillance is unconstitutional.
  • The program, details of which were first disclosed by the Guardian, collects such information, used by intelligence analysts to detect patterns and personal connections, on every phone call made or received by U.S. customers of major American phone companies. The once-secret program was acknowledged last week by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., who is named in the ACLU lawsuit.
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Lawmaker Says There More To NSA Spying - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/here-more-to-nsa-spying-2013-6 surveillance state NSA future-disclosures
shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • A House Democrat said information revealed about the National Security Agency's secret surveillance programs are "the tip of the iceberg," Daniel Strauss of The Hill reports. "I think it's just broader than most people even realize, and I think that's, in one way, what astounded most of us, too," Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) told C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" after a classified briefing with national security officials. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), who also attended the meeting, said that the NSA "violated the spirit of the law when it started collecting data from everyone in the country just because technology now makes that possible.” Barton added that "in America ... You don’t target everyone and violate their 4th Amendment rights just because of a handful of threats. But that is exactly what is happening at the NSA ... it is wrong and it needs to stop now.” More from Sanchez: "I don't know if there are other leaks, if there's more information somewhere, if somebody else is going to step up, but I will tell you that I believe it's the tip of the iceberg."
  • A House Democrat said information revealed about the National Security Agency's secret surveillance programs are "the tip of the iceberg," Daniel Strauss of The Hill reports. "I think it's just broader than most people even realize, and I think that's, in one way, what astounded most of us, too," Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) told C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" after a classified briefing with national security officials. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), who also attended the meeting, said that the NSA "violated the spirit of the law when it started collecting data from everyone in the country just because technology now makes that possible.” Barton added that "in America ... You don’t target everyone and violate their 4th Amendment rights just because of a handful of threats. But that is exactly what is happening at the NSA ... it is wrong and it needs to stop now.”
  • Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian, who has served as a conduit for Snowden's leaks, recently said that there will me many more "significant revelations that have not yet been heard." Greenwald told The New York Times that he received “thousands” of classified documents — “dozens” of which are newsworthy — from the the 29-year-old ex-Booz Allen employee who was contracted by the NSA. Sanchez said that what lawmakers learned "is significantly more than what is out in the media today," which is interesting when considering previous reports by journalists and whistleblowers.
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  • Here's a rundown of the reports and the allegations: In 2006 NSA insiders told Leslie Cauley of USA Today that the NSA has been collecting almost all U.S. phone records since shortly after 9/11. In 2010 Dana Priest and William Arkin of The Washington Post reported that "collection systems at the [NSA] intercept and store 1.7 billion emails, phone calls, and other types of communications" every day. According to a 2007 lawsuit, Verizon built a fiber optic cable to give the "access to all communications flowing through the carrier’s operations center." In April 2012 Wired's James Bamford reported how the U.S. government hired two secretive Israeli companies to wiretap AT&T. AT&T engineer Mark Klein discovered the "secret room" at AT&T central office in San Francisco, through which the NSA actively "vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T" through the wiretapping rooms, emphasizing that "much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic." Former NSA executive and whistleblower Thomas Drake testified that the NSA is using Israeli-made hardware to "seize and save all personal electronic communications."
  • A classified program called Prism, leaked by Snowden, appears to acquire information from the servers of nine of the biggest internet companies. The Washington Post reported that the government's orders "serve as one-time blanket approvals for data acquisition and surveillance on selected foreign targets for periods of as long as a year." NSA Whistleblower William Binney that the NSA began using the program he built (i.e. ThinThread) to use communications data for creating, in real time, profiles of nearly all Americans so that the government is "able to monitor what people are doing" and who they are doing it with. In July the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), established to "hear applications for and grant orders approving electronic surveillance," found that the NSA violated the Fourth Amendment's restriction against unreasonable searches and seizures "on at least one occasion." BONUS: In March CIA Chief Technology Officer Ira "Gus" Hunt said: "It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information." If there is "significantly more" to the NSA's domestic snooping, then we're all ears and eyes.
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Multiple New Polls Show Americans Reject Wholesale NSA Domestic Spying | Electronic Fro... - 0 views

www.eff.org/...-wholesale-nsa-domestic-spying surveillance state NSA polls
shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Yesterday, the Guardian released a comprehensive poll showing widespread concern about NSA spying. Two-thirds of Americans think the NSA's role should be reviewed. The poll also showed Americans demanding accountability and more information from public officials—two key points of our recently launched stopwatching.us campaign. But there's more. So far, Gallup has one of the better-worded questions, finding that 53% of Americans disapprove of the NSA spying. A CBS poll also showed that a majority—at 58%—of Americans disapprove of the government "collecting phone records of ordinary Americans." And Rasmussen—though sometimes known for push polling—also recently conducted a poll showing that 59% of Americans are opposed to the current NSA spying.
  • The only poll showing less than a majority on the side of government overreach was Pew Research Center, which asked Americans whether it was acceptable that the NSA obtained "secret court orders to track the calls of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism." Pew reported that 56% of Americans said it was "acceptable." But the question is poorly worded. It doesn't mention the widespread, dragnet nature of the spying. It also neglects to describe the "information" being given—metadata, which is far more sensitive and can provide far more information than just the ability to "track the calls" of Americans. And it was conducted early on in the scandal, before it was revealed that the NSA doesn't even have to obtain court orders to search already collected information. Despite the aggregate numbers, many of the polls took place at the same time Americans were finding out new facts about the program. More questions must be asked. And if history is any indication, the American people will be finding out much more. Indeed, just today the Guardian reported that its working on a whole new series with even more NSA revelations about spying. One thing is definitely clear: the American public is demanding answers and needs more information. That's why Congress must create a special investigatory committee to reveal the full extent of the programs. Democracy demands it. Go here to take action. 
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US Media Ignores CIA Cover-up on Torture - Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...gnores-cia-cover-up-on-torture war & peace torture CIA Feinstein VIPS
shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • MEMORANDUM FOR: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Vice Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity SUBJECT: U.S. Media Mum On How Your Committee Faced Down Both CIA and Obama We write to thank you for your unwavering support for your extraordinarily courageous and tenacious staff in (1) investigating CIA torture under the Bush/Cheney administration and (2) resisting CIA/White House attempts under the Obama administration to cover up heinous torture crimes like waterboarding.
  • With well over 400 years of intelligence experience under our collective belt, we wondered how you managed to get the investigation finished and the executive summary up and out (though redacted). We now know the backstory – thanks to the unstinting courage of the committee’s principal investigator Daniel Jones, who has been interviewed by Spencer Ackerman, an investigative reporter for The (UK) Guardian newspaper. The titanic struggle depicted by Ackerman reads like a crime novel; sadly, the four-part series is nonfiction: I. “Senate investigator breaks silence about CIA’s ‘failed coverup’ of torture report” II. “Inside the fight to reveal the CIA’s torture secrets” III. ” ‘A constitutional crisis’: the CIA turns on the Senate” IV. “No looking back:  the CIA torture report’s aftermath“
  • Remarkably, a full week after The Guardian carried Ackerman’s revelations, none has been picked up by U.S. “mainstream” newspapers. Not the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post – not even The Hill. (As for alternative media, Charles P. Pierce’s timely piece for Esquire whetted his readers’ appetite for the gripping detail of the Guardian series, explaining that it would be “unfair both to Ackerman’s diligence and Jones’s courage” to try to summarize even just the first installment. “Read the whole damn thing,” Pierce advises.)
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • And so, the culprits who should be hanging their heads in shame are out and about, with some still collecting book royalties and some blithely working for this or that candidate for president. As if nothing happened. Sadly, given the soporific state of our mainstream media – particularly on sensitive issues like these – their silence is nothing new, although it does seem to have gotten even worse in recent years. The late William Colby, CIA director from 1973 to 1976, has been quoted as saying: “The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” Whether or not Colby was quoted correctly, the experience of the past several decades suggests it is largely true. Better sourced is a quote from William Casey, CIA director from 1981 to 1987: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
  • In these circumstances, we know from sad experience that there is no way any of us can get on any of the Sunday talk shows, for example – despite our enviable record for getting it right. Nor does it seem likely that any of the “mainstream” media will invite you to discuss the highly instructive revelations in The Guardian. We respectfully suggest that you take the initiative to obtain media exposure for this very important story.
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Huge swath of GCHQ mass surveillance is illegal, says top lawyer | UK news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...surveillance-spying-law-lawyer surveillance state GCHQ NSA drones law EHCR RIPA
shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • GCHQ's mass surveillance spying programmes are probably illegal and have been signed off by ministers in breach of human rights and surveillance laws, according to a hard-hitting legal opinion that has been provided to MPs.The advice warns that Britain's principal surveillance law is too vague and is almost certainly being interpreted to allow the agency to conduct surveillance that flouts privacy safeguards set out in the European convention on human rights (ECHR).The inadequacies, it says, have created a situation where GCHQ staff are potentially able to rely "on the gaps in the current statutory framework to commit serious crime with impunity".
  • Last year, Hague told MPs: "It has been suggested GCHQ uses our partnership with the US to get around UK law, obtaining information that they cannot legally obtain in the UK. I wish to be absolutely clear that this accusation is baseless."However, the legal advice poses awkward new questions about the framework GCHQ operates within, the role of ministers and the legality of transferring bulk data to other spy agencies.The advice makes clear Ripa does not allow GCHQ to conduct mass surveillance on communications between people in the UK, even if the data has briefly left British shores because the call or email has travelled to an internet server overseas.
  • The legal advice has been sent to the 46 members of the all-party parliamentary group on drones, which is chaired by the Labour MP, Tom Watson.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • In a 32-page opinion, the leading public law barrister Jemima Stratford QC raises a series of concerns about the legality and proportionality of GCHQ's work, and the lack of safeguards for protecting privacy.
  • The opinion notes that the UK has not adopted the doctrine of "anticipatory self-defence" in the same way as the US to provide legal cover for drone strikes in countries where it is not involved in an international armed conflict."Accordingly, in our view, if GCHQ transferred data to the NSA in the knowledge that it would or might be used for targeting drone strikes, that transfer is probably unlawful," the advice states."The transferor would be an accessory to murder for the purposes of domestic law … We consider that, pursuant to the transfer, the agent is likely to become an accessory to murder."Watson said he would be submitting the legal opinion to the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, which is undertaking an inquiry into mass surveillance."MPs now have strong independent advice questioning the legality of major UK intelligence programmes," he said.
  • The advice concludes: "In short, the rules concerning communications data are too uncertain and do not provide sufficient clarity to be in accordance with the law … we consider the mass interception of communications via a transatlantic cable to be unlawful, and that these conclusions would apply even if some or all of the interception is taking place outside UK territorial waters."Leaving decisions about whether data can be shared with agencies abroad to the "unfettered discretion" of ministers is also a probable breach of the convention, the advice warns.
  • "First, the transfer of private data is a significant interference with an individual's article 8 rights. That interference will only be lawful when proportionate."Secondly, the ECHR has held on more than one occasion that surveillance, and the use of surveillance data, is an area in which governments must conduct themselves in a transparent and 'predictable' manner. The current framework is uncertain: it relies on the discretion of one individual."Thirdly, on a pragmatic level,there is a real possibility that the NSA might function as GCHQ's unofficial 'backup' service. If GCHQ is not entitled to hold onto data itself, it might transfer it to the NSA. In time, and if relevant, that data might be transferred back to GCHQ. Without strong guidelines and scrutiny, the two services might support each other to (in effect) circumvent the requirements of their domestic legislation."The opinion adds: "If GCHQ transfers communications data to other governments it does so without any statutory restrictions. Such transfers are a disproportionate interference with the article 8 rights of the individuals concerned. There are no restrictions, checks or restraints on the transfer of that data."
  • At its most extreme, the advice raises issues about the possible vulnerability of staff at GCHQ if it could be proved that intelligence used for US drone strikes against "non-combatants" had been passed on or supplied by the British before being used in a missile attack."An individual involved in passing that information is likely to be an accessory to murder. It is well arguable, on a variety of different bases, that the government is obliged to take reasonable steps to investigate that possibility," the advice says.
  • "If ministers are prepared to allow GCHQ staff to be potential accessories to murder, they must be very clear that they are responsible for allowing it. We have seen a step change in mass covert surveillance and intelligence gathering, underpinned on dubious legal grounds and with virtually no parliamentary oversight. "The leadership of all the main parties should stop turning a blind eye to a programme that has far-reaching consequences around the globe."
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Jan 14
     
    The lawyer who wrote the opinion is a QC, or Queen's Counsel. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen's_Counsel This opinion *will* result in changes in UK law and oversight of GCHQ. And because much of it is based on the European Convention on Human Rights, the opinion will stoke the anti-spying sentiment in the European Community, which is already at fever-pitch. The ECHR is Europe's implementation of several U.N. treaties on human rights, so the blowback may well extend beyond the EU and UK.  
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