Recently in Anonymous political briefings Category

This Mail on Sunday article seems suspiciously like Whitehall securocrats trying to manipulate the Press and public opinion, to spin the way for another stab at the reviled Communications Data Bill power grab.

They do not seem to have learnt anything from their previous failures to convince Parliament or the public. Why can't they cite some actual, relevant recent cases, to justify their "we must grab everything (for free, in secret), even from millions of innocent people" policies ?

This article is so full of half truths and spin, that it has provoked Spy Blog to comment on almost every section:

Spy chiefs warn PM: Internet giants including Google and Facebook are shielding terrorists and paedophiles

Cameron told internet giants have withdrawn cooperation with MI5
Some are obstructing requests for help tracking terrorists and criminals
Follows Edward Snowden's claims firms are used to snoop on Brits

By Robert Verkaik

Published: 01:01, 27 April 2014 | Updated: 01:01, 27 April 2014

David Cameron has been warned by the country's top spy chiefs that internet companies including Facebook and Google are undermining national security.

The Prime Minister was told internet giants have 'withdrawn' their cooperation and are obstructing MI5 requests for help tracking terrorists and major criminals, including paedophiles.

What evidence is there of any actual obstruction ? There is none whatsoever in this article.

It follows fugitive Edward Snowden's claims that the firms are used to snoop on British citizens, which is disputed by spy chiefs.

Before the US whistleblower's disclosures, they willingly responded to lawful requests for details of phone calls, emails, text messages and other private information.

Now the companies are said to be concerned about being seen to acquiesce too easily.

It is clear from the Oral evidence to the Joint Committee on the Draft Communications Data Bill (.pdf) back in the summer of 2012, i.e. before the Snowden revelations that big US based companies Google, Facebook and Yahoo even then insisted on a clear Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty request from UK Police via US law enforcement partners, typically the FBI.

They also have 24 hour rapid response teams in place to expedite urgent requests e.g. kidnap situations where lives are immediately at risk.

So what, exactly has changed ? There is now proof via the Snowden revealed documents, that the years of goodwill and voluntary cooperation with say the UK Police, have been completely undermined by the out of control mass surveillance and actual attacks on their infrastructure by NSA and GCHQ and their 5 Eyes partners intelligence agencies.

One of the fears is that intelligence officers will lose the ability to monitor the safety threat posed by British jihadists travelling to Syria, for example Londoner Mohammed El Araj, 23, who is said to have died while fighting for militants with links to Al Qaeda.

What threat from returning fighters, exactly ?

What safety threat to the UK can someone who has died in Syria pose ? Where are the examples of any such UK fighters in Syria who have returned to the UK ? How many are there ?

How many of them are totally disenchanted by the realities of civil war ideologies like e.g. George Orwell after fighting in the Spanish Civil War ?

What about UK fighters who have actually been trying to liberate the country from the evil Assad regime ? What if they have received direct or indirect support, money or training or weapons from UK or other allied agencies ?

What about non-combatants who "only" help with food or medical relief etc. for refugees ? A few of these may actually become radicalised towards violence after what they have witnessed in Syria, but most will not.

If there really is such a threat, why have there been no arrests or convictions of returning fighters from Syria (or Afghanistan or Pakistan or Somalia or Oman etc.) ?

The intelligence agencies have access to credit card, bank account, passport, visa and travel booking data systems, none of which has anything to do with Google etc. Why does this does not reveal any travel plans of jihadists going to, or returning from Syria ?

Any wannabe terrorists stupid enough to put their travel plans on Facebook, should be trivial to track down.

How exactly are such "returning fighters" going to magically smuggle in the AK-47s and RPGs that they have been using in Syria, back into the UK ?

A security source told The Mail on Sunday: 'One of the impacts of the Snowden disclosures is that internet companies have withdrawn their willing co-operation and that has affected some operations.'

Why can't these "security source" briefings be from named, official spokesmen, on the record ? This might add some credibility and public trust in the Government's message, which is totally lacking in these sneaky "anonymous" briefings.

The fact that NSA and GCHQ were / still are, snooping on vast amounts of innocent customers data flowing between the datacentre communications links of companies like Google and Yahoo, regardless of how well they were cooperating with informal requests and formal legal demands for data, is hugely significant.

This counterproductive and easily avoidable betrayal of the companies' trust in the authorities is entirely the fault of the US and UK securocrats and politicians..

The source added that a key bone of contention was the internet service providers' unwillingness to hand over encryption keys that unlock data being sought by law enforcement agencies.

Why are law enforcement agencies seeking encryption keys from Google, Facebook, Yahoo or from "internet service providers" ?

Which "encryption keys" is this anonymous "security source" moaning about ?

Are Whitehall securocrats seriously expecting Google to hand over the private de-cryption keys of their search engine or web mail etc. web servers ?

Given the millions of innocent people who use these web servers every day, it would be completely disproportionate, even to try to decipher tens of thousands of terrorist suspects TLS encrypted web sessions and even if they could legally serve a US based company with a RIPA Part III section 49 notice.

Have any such encryption keys ever been handed over to UK law enforcement agencies in the past (no RIPA section 49 notices have been reported as such in the handful of individual cases referenced by the various RIPA Commissioners' Annual reports)

Such section 49 notices are supposed to be narrowly targeted and have the provision to demand de-ciphered plaintext, where this is available, without putting millions of other customers and users data at risk.

It would be a horrible legal precedent if Google or Facebook or Yahoo ever handed over their web servers' private keys to anyone, especially a foreign Law Enforcement Organisation like the UK police..

What then would stop repressive regimes like Iran or China or governments which are nominally democratic, but which are sliding towards authoritarianism like Turkey or Venezuela from legally demanding the same, in order to repress their political dissidents ?

Note also the careful avoidance of any mention of intelligence agencies by the anonymous Whitehall briefer - the Snowden revelations show that GCHQ and NSA have been attacking internet encryption systems, regardless of the damage to internet e-commerce etc. i.e. working against National Security (one definition of which is "the economic well being of the United Kingdom)

N.B. encrypted web or email traffic protocols currently do not hide the Communications Data / metadata of a web or email session, which gives law Enforcement a lot of intelligence to work with, even without being able to read the contents of a web session or an email in transit.

None of this helps if the suspects or political activists use an extra layer of end to end encryption e.g. by GPG encrypting the contents of their Google gmail message.

The source added: 'It is not simply about terrorism; it's about serious crime, including paedophiles and gangland crime bosses.'

Intelligence agencies are interested in paedophiles only for blackmail, not chiid protection

This same anonymous Whitehall "security source" seems to be trying to drag GCHQ & MI5 into the specialised world of online paedophile investigations (is it Charles Farr or someone else at the Home Office's Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism ?)

This is something which is not in their intelligence remit. Intelligence agencies are peripherally interested in paedophiles, but only so as to blackmail and recruit them if they are of intelligence value. According to the Snowden documents there have also been controversial amateurish attempts to "disrupt" through smearing via social media, some non-terrorist political or religious alleged supporters of terrorists' causes, against whom they have no actual evidence. None of this is for actually for child protection, unlike Police investigations..

Intelligence agency staff conducting non-criminal i.e. intelligence investigations, do not have any legal immunity from the draconian UK child porn laws which criminalise possession or copying of child porn images, They have no powers of arrest, so they might as well leave such investigations to the Police, anyway. There is a limited immunity from the Child Porn laws for Police officers who are investigating actual crimes.

if the specialised Child Porn Police units cannot cope with the cumulative psychological damage of having to view lots of such evil material, or cannot establish working relationships with their foreign counterparts, then wasting intelligence services resources in trying to duplicate this will not help

Now Mr Cameron has been briefed by Sir Iain Lobban, head of the Government's intelligence gathering operation GCHQ, and Andrew Parker, director general of MI5.

According to a report, more than 500,000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) requests for data were made to communication service companies last year.

c.f. 2013 Annual Report of the Interception of Communications
Commissioner (.pdf) by Rt. Hon. Sir Anthony May

Facebook rejects a third of requests made by UK law enforcement authorities and other agencies, while Yahoo turns down a quarter.

No ! These figures are not for UK Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 interception warrants or Communications Data "requests" as outlined in deliberately obscured statistics in the report above. They are from their own, USA based voluntary Mutual Legal Aid Treaty transparency statistics.

Neither Facebook nor Yahoo are UK based major telecommunications, Internet Service or Postal companies i.e. they are not Communications Service Providers, which fall under RIPA.

That is what the controversial Draft Communications Data Bill / "Snoopers Charter" was trying to wangle, before it was shelved for now.

And despite pressure from Home Secretary Theresa May, Yahoo is moving its entire operation to Dublin, beyond the scrutiny of British surveillance laws. If others follow, it is feared the country will be left even more dangerously exposed.

Most of Yahoo'e infrastructure is in the USA. The move to Dublin of their European subsidiary is as much to do with corporation tax as with the UK surveillance laws.

The fact that millions of innocent Yahoo customers had their private webcam video chats snooped on in bulk by GCHQ is also significant and should have been avoided.

Ministers have already been told that the thousands of top-secret files stolen by Snowden and published in the Guardian, have caused massive damage to Britain's intelligence capability.

Note the weasel words ! The Guardian have not published "thousands of top-secret files", they have only published a handful of pages from a few files, all (with one minor exception) having first been vetted by the UK government.

There is no evidence of "massive damage" - top terrorists and criminals and spies were already avoiding email and mobile phones etc. The US Government did more damage by publicising the names of participants in an intercepted supposed Al Quaeda online chat conference than any of the published Snowden documents have done. Remember that Osama bin Laden did not use either mobile phones or the internet and evaded the hunt for him for years.

The source said that it is vital that internet companies help police and security services to stay one step ahead of their targets in a rapidly changing digital world.

Under existing arrangements, police and intelligence agencies use RIPA to request crucial data and wiretaps.

But requests are being rejected or sent back for further consideration, even in the case of Home Secretary-approved warrants.

So why was there no mention of these rejected "Home Secretary-approved warrants" in Rt.Hon. Sir Anthony May's report, published just before Easter this year, which specifically discusses the Snowden revelations ?

Access to data has proved essential in thwarting terrorist atrocities and organised crime.

In 2007 police and MI5 foiled an Al Qaeda plot to kidnap, torture and behead a British Muslim soldier. Telephone taps and internet surveillance played a crucial role in jailing five men.

UK telephone taps (or Communications Data / Traffic Analysis / Metadata) are important, but they have got nothing to do with Google, Facebook or Yahoo.

Even the Daily Mail reports at the time contradict that requests / demands to the "internet giants" were crucial to this case:

Al Qaeda was behind 'plot' to behead soldier

It is understood that a tip-off from a trusted informant last summer sparked the dramatic events in Birmingham when nine men suspected of being members of the terror cell were arrested in a series of raids across the city.

During a six-month, £10million surveillance operation involving 250 police officers and MI5, cameras, telephone taps and surveillance teams had been used to monitor the group's movements.

And in 2012 paedophile John Maber, 47, who shared online footage of his rape of a child, was jailed after police intercepted an internet offer he made to abuse a child over a webcam.

The article is dominated by the large image of this convicted child rapist.

Why does the Mail on Sunday deliberately choose not to mention that:

John Maber: Paedophile prison officer jailed for life

Maber, a senior prison officer,

[...]

Maber, who worked at London's Pentonville Jail, was caught after police in New Zealand intercepted an offer from him to abuse a child online.

Why couldn't the Whitehall briefers or the Mail on Sunday find a more relevant example of an online child rapist caught through voluntary or legally enforced cooperation by Google, Facebook or Yahoo ?

MP Rob Wilson said: 'It's right that internet companies take great care in how they handle their users' personal information and who has access to it

But people will clearly expect them to co-operate with the police and others when it comes to tackling matters like serious crime or the dreadful scourge of online paedophilia.

'And they will be rightly concerned if the police and intelligence agencies are facing unnecessary difficulties and delays.'

In its most recent government requests report Facebook stated: 'We respond to valid requests relating to criminal cases. Each and every request we receive is checked for legal sufficiency and we reject or require greater specificity on requests that are overly broad or vague.'

Yahoo said: 'We carefully review Government Data Requests for legal sufficiency and interpret them narrowly in an effort to produce the least amount of data necessary to comply with the request.'

Google declined to comment directly on the claims but it is understood to follow a policy of fully scrutinising every incoming request.

Rejecting overly broad or vague or illegal requests from foreign i.e. UK police agencies
is not "shielding terrorists and paedophiles"

The Internet Service Providers Association said its members were 'understandably cautious' about handing over data but that none of the companies wanted to break the law.

Google, Facebook and Yahoo also have to comply with privacy and data protection laws, at both US Federal and State level, not just with UK laws which have triggered a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty request.

A Home Office spokesman said: 'The Government is committed to ensuring that law enforcement and intelligence agencies have the powers they need to investigate crime, protect the public and safeguard national security.'

That is not sufficient. One of the deliberately vague definitions of National Security is "the economic well being of the United Kingdom".

The Home Office pretends to be ignorant of the UK internet economy, but they really must not be allowed to continue to put it at risk, i.e. to put "the economic well being of the United Kingdom" at risk through their existing overbroad, disproportionate, weakly regulated, non-transparent snooping powers and definitely not by simply calling for even more mass snooping and politically expedient but impossible to enforce restrictions.

The whole complicated bureaucratic mess of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and the interplay with the Intelligence Services Act needs urgent reform to make it fit for the the modern internet age.

Is the Sunday Times helping to set up Charles Farr as the fall guy for the Coalition government's failure to undo the massive damage to our freedoms and liberties which was done by Labour, with the help of this former MI6 officer, who is now the Director General of the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism at the Home Office ?

This article by David Leppard has several anonymous opinions from people who have worked with or against Charles Farr, almost none of which are complimentary.

Is he really the sole architect of Labour and the Coalition's counterproductive anti-terrorism and mass surveillance policies, or are there other guilty mandarins who should also be named and shamed ?

The Sunday Times
22nd April 2012

page 23

Profile Charles Farr

Chief snooper pops out of the shadows

The volatile former spy turned security mandarin is going public to defend his plan to monitor all our digital communication, writes David Leppard

When the embattled Theresa May appears before a committee of MPs on Tuesday to give evidence about her work as home secretary she will be accompanied by one of Whitehall's most powerful, controversial and secretive mandarins. Charles Farr, the Home Office's top "securocrat", is set to emerge from the shadows for the first time as he is asked to defend the coalition's plans to monitor the internet use and digital communications of everyone in Britain.

Do not pin too much hope in the Home Affairs Committee, they have been bamboozled by the Home Office and by the intelligence agencies many times before. Perhaps Dr. Julian Huppert (Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge) might get a few telling questions in, but he is unlikely to get any straight answers.

Farr is probably Whitehall's most important and influential spy, the man most closely associated with "Big Brother Britain". He was responsible for the so-called "snooping bill" that caused the government so many prob­lems earlier this month. He personally oversaw the introduction of the coalition's rebranded regime of control orders to detain terror suspects without charge and he drove its ambitious attempts to curb the radicalisation of young Muslim men.

A bright and driven bureaucrat, he has shaken up Whitehall's security machine, impressing successive ministerial bosses with his vision since he was plucked from MI6 in 2007 by John Reid, the former Labour home secretary, to head the Home Office's security and counterterrorism office. Farr won plaudits for overhauling the government's handling of the war on terror.

Impressing John "not fit for purpose" Reid, (now a lobbyist for the G4S private security company) the former hard line Communist and drinking partner of the Bosnian Serb war criminal Radovan Karadžić, should not be seen as a positive character reference.

"He has made a major contribution to the government's counterterrorism efforts, principally because of his leadership," said Patrick Mercer, former chairman of the Commons subcommittee on counterterrorism. Yet talk to current and former colleagues, and they will tell you there is a flip side to the 52-year-old Farr. They portray him as a bucca­neer whose intelligence past and explosive temper raise questions about his constitutional role as a civil servant -- and the robust style in which he does business.

Little is known of Farr's early life and career. He was educated at Monkton Combe, a private school near Bath, of which Slr Richard Dearlove, a former M6 chief and his future boss, is also an old boy. After leaving in 1977 Farr studied English at Magdalen College Oxford, alma mater of several spies including Sir John Scarlett, another former MI6 chief.

So he probably has little clue about the technology and business implications of his policies, which affect the internet, mobile phones, computer databases etc.

He joined MI6 some time in the 1980s, serving in South Africa and Jordan. Farr is understood to have come to prominence, as one contemporary recalled, "flying around Afghanistan in a helicopter with thousands of dollars in bundles, doing deals with farmers to not grow opium. Bad policy as it turned out, but he did it very well". So well, in fact, that he was appointed an OBE in 2003. He would go on to run MI6's counterterrorism department before Reid spotted him.

Farr's critics say he still carries the legacy of his MI6 heyday -- a mindset they claim is inappropriate for his job at the heart of Whitehall security policy. "When you are an MI6 officer out in the field, trying to stop people getting nuclear weapons in, say, Kazakhstan, you have to be very independ­ently minded and very confident in your own judgment. There's not a lot of ministerial con­trol or public accountability," says an admirer who knows him well. "Charles feels very uncomfortable in the world of domestic politics and doesn't read it very well."

That comment was from "an admirer" !

A former Home Office official went further: "When you're suddenly flung into a top position with management and policy respon­sibility in the Home Office, you can't go on behaving like you are in the Tora Bora caves doing deals with warlords. Your job is to advise ministers who decide policy. You can't go around thinking you are a player in your own right. It's a constitutional concern."

Farr's handling of the now infamous snooping bill seems to typify these contra­dictions. Ministers ran into a storm of criticism after The Sunday Times revealed they were planning to allow the intelligence agencies to monitor social media, Skype calls and email communications as well as logging every site visited by internet users in Britain. The plans were due to be announced in next month's Queen's speech, but were put on hold when they were leaked.

It is no secret in Whitehall that the grandiosely titled communications capabili­ties development programme was Farr's "policy baby". In fact, it was a rehash of an earlier attempt by Farr in 2009 to persuade the then Labour home secretary to build a giant database where the government could hold details of all emails and telephone calls. It obviously needed sensitive handling, but its delivery was bungled by Farr's office and it was dumped by Labour after an uproar. When a new government was elected he tried to resurrect the plan -- with similar results.

Why didn't the Coalition government sack this snoop happy Labour apparatchik when they took office ?

A similar lack of deftness befell Farr's efforts to develop "Prevent", a controversial plank of the government's counterterrorism policy that aimed to identify and thwart thousands of young Muslim men who might be vulnerable to violent extremism. A key strand of Prevent was the policy of dishing out tens of millions of pounds of public money to Muslim youth groups and charities. Basically Farr believed the government should engage with fundamentalist Muslim leaders because they were best placed to stop the radicalisation of the youths who were the most likely to become violent extremists. The problem with the policy was some of these groups were asked to "spot" potential extremists and report on teen­agers who might be vulnerable to grooming.

Critics inside and outside the government soon saw it as turning the Home Office into a giant spying machine. "They were offering money to youth groups and Muslim charities contingent on them spying for the Home Office," said a prominent lawyer, who saw draft documents outlining the conditions of the grant agreements.

The scheme became characterised as a huge bid for surveillance. "It was a blurring of the policy ol surveillance with a different policy of community engagement and building a civil society" said a former Home Office official.

"But if like Charles Fair, you are a career spook you just don't get that. You see everything as an opportunity for surveillance and you see everybody as potentially sinsister."

Perhaps the general public will see Charles Farr as "sinister" and a threat to our freedoms and liberties, who has wormed his way into the heart of Whitehall.

Whatever his intentions, the practical effect of his failed polices, is to have acted as a recruiting sergeant for the next generation of extremists here in the UK and to make the Home Office / MI5 / MI6 / GCHQ and the rest of the Whitehall and Westminster political elites, increasingly hated by the public who should be supporting them.

In the end the policy was binned after a speech in Munich in February last year by David Cameron on Islamic extremism. The prime minister argued that any kind of Islamic extremism, whether violent or not, was unacceptable. It was seen by insiders as an explicit attack on Farr. Reports that Farr "went ballistic" when he read the speech are over-blown. But one insider said: "He was unhappy with the Munich speech. But obviously not unhappy enough to resign."

So if the Prime Minister / Number 10 SpAds are unhappy with Charles Farr, why is he still in a position of power and influence ?

Who are his political allies within the Byzantine corridors of power in Whitehall ?

Does Charles Farr have access to secret material which could be used to blackmail politicians with, like the notorious J. Edgar Hoover did in the USA ?

Although his single-mindedness is widely admired, Farr's volcanic temper has won him few friends in Whitehall. Dealing with warlords on the front line in Afghanistan requires different skills from managing sensi­tive egos in the supposedly collegiate environ­ment of a government office.

Presumably the opium smuggling paedophile Afghan warlords are less duplicitous and more honourable than the civil service mandarins and politicians in Whitehall and Westminster.

In the often heated exchanges during the government's review of control orders in late 2010, a former official recalls one particularly fiery exchange between Farr and a civil liberties campaigner. "He was having one of his explosions, which seemed to last 45 minutes and was quite sinister. You just think: what on earth is going on? Is he all right? It was all very embarrassing and counterproductive."

Another former official, who had a show­down with Farr over policy, recalls: "He's almost messianic. He's like he's on a mission to protect the nation. When you disagree with him he gets very emotional. He's one of these guys who goes white and shakes when he loses his temper."

The cold fury that his policies have stirred up in many people who are at least as patriotic as he is, outside of Whitehall, more than match such alleged temper tantrums

Farr's relationship with MPs reflects the unique challenges of putting an MI6 hawk at the heart of the public policy machine. Farr feels uncomfortable when he is called to give evidence before Commons committees.

Tough.

That is part of what all Whitehall mandarins get their titles, honours and big salaries to do.

On the few occasions when he has testified he has always insisted he is heard in secret. He has told Keith Vaz, chairman of the home affairs committee, that as a serving spy he can't give evidence in public.

Rubbish.

Charles Farr is no longer a serving MI6 officer in the field, he is employed as a civil servant at the Home Office in Marsham Street.

"Charles likes being a secret squirrel," said another MP. "Keith asked him why he can't give evidence in public. Charles replied that there were no pictures of him any where on the internet. Nobody knew what he looked like, which is how he wanted it.

Why ? He is never going on an undercover mission again, is he ?

What makes him more special than the heads of the Intelligence Agencies who have been interviewed and photographed in public ? Nothing.

But Keith replied: 'Everybody knows what you look like: you look like an older version of Harry Potter'."

Unlike the star of JK Rowling's books no one inside Whitehall says Farr is Mr Popular. "He has on occasions adopted a style that could be considered inappropriate," said a former official. "He's a very uncivil servant."

That restrained euphemism sounds like an audition for the planned new series of Yes Minister

Additional reporting: Richard Kerbaj

The anonymous media briefings ahead of next month's Queen's Speech are continuing today, lead by the Sunday Times and followed by the Press Association, with broadcasters like the BBC joining in, second hand.

The Sunday Times has published a rather meagre front page article on the Coalition government's revival of Labour's All Your Internet Are Belong To Us snooping plans:

Instead of just passively waiting for another NuLabour style fait accompli, please contact your local MP and / or join or support cross party groups like NO2ID Campaign or the Open Rights Group

Sunday Times
Sunday 1st April 2012

Government to snoop on all emails
David Cracknell

David Cracknell used to have several "anonymous" sources within Government and was briefed "off the record" by Whitehall spin doctors

Is the poor quality of this article the result of the anti-Murdoch press "cover your own backsides" attitude which now prevails in Whitehall , following the "phone hacking" / corruption scandals which closed the News of the World and which are tainting even the Sunday Times ?

The government is to expand hugely its powers to monitor email exchanges and website visits of every person in Britain.

Under plans expected to be announced in the Queen's speech next month, internet companies will be told to install thousands of pieces of hardware to allow GCHQ, the government's eavesdropping centre, to scrutinise "on demand" every phone call made, text message and email sent and website accessed in real time.

They already have this legal power which does not require any sort of judicial warrant, under the notorious Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. All that GCHQ needs is a "catch all" Warrant or Certificate signed by a Secretary of State i.e. normally, in their case, the Foreign Secretary William Hague.

This introduced the legal power to install "black box" snooping hardware at the major Telecommunications companies and Internet Service Providers, overseen by the Technical Advisory Board.

The amount of money the the Labour government was willing to pay for this snooping infrastructure was a paltry sum, which is why it took so long for any agreement with the ISPs. N.B. the interests and priorities of ISPs and Telecomms companies are not the same as those of their customers.

The volume of internet data flowing today is orders of magnitude more than that envisaged back in 2000, so If the new plan is to really going to install "thousands of pieces of hardware", then this plan will cost billions of pounds.

An effort by Labour to introduce a similar law was shelved in 2006 after fierce opposition from the Tories, Liberal Democrats and pri­vacy campaigners.

The useless Jacqui Smith threatened us with a Communications Data Bill, but that was in 2009, not 2006

While the new law would not allow GCHQ to monitor the content of communica­tions without obtaining a warrant, it would permit the intelligence agency to trace whom a person or group had contacted, when, for how long and how often.

That is no different from the existing RIPA law then

Members of the Internet Service Providers' Associa­tion, which represents more than 200 businesses including BT, Virgin Media and Google, were given some details of the proposals last month and were alarmed by what they were told.

So why does this Sunday Times article not mention the Communications Capabilities Development Programme (CCDP), which is what the ISPs were briefing other journalists on last month ?

See Spy Blog: Whitehall risks public and internet industry revolt against their secretive Communications Capabilities Development Programme (CCDP) internet and phone snooping plans

A senior industry official said: "It's mass surveillance.
The idea is that the network operator should effectively intercept the
communications between, say, Google and some third party

"the network operators are going to be asked to put probes in the network and they are upset about the idea ... It's expensive, it's intru­sive to your own customers, it's very difficult to see it's going to work properly and it's going to be a nightmare to run legally."

The association said: "It is important that proposals to update government's capabili­ties to intercept and retain communications data... are proportionate, respect freedom of expression and the privacy of users."

Why doesn't the Sunday Times name the "senior industry official" or even the "Internet Service Providers' Associa­tion" spokesman ?

Under the current law, companies must keep records for some traditional types of phone and electronic commu­nication for a year.

Hold on, the European Union Data Retention regulations e.g.

The Data Retention (EC Directive) Regulations 2009

are about forcing ISPs and Landline and Mobile Phone companies to keep Communications Data unnecessarily, which they would otherwise have been obliged to delete under the Data Protection Act, since they themselves no longer have any legitimate use for it, especially if the internet or mobile phone bills have been pre-paid. Data Retention is not about access to such retained data.

The new legislation would extend this provision to cover a much wider field, including social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter and online video games.

Perhaps the Sunday Times is actually writing about CCDP then.

N.B. CCDP is not not just a GCHQ project (which has its own "Mastering the Internet" investment programme) but is being "coordinated" by the technologically inept Home Office.

It is not physically possible to get Communications Traffic Data form foreign based social media websites like FaceBook or Twitter without actually using techniques such as Deep Packet Inspection and perhaps even Man-In-The-Middle Attack SSL / proxies i.e. it requires actual Interception of the Content of these websites to do this.

The only countries which attempt to do this at the moment are repressive regimes like Iran, China, Saudi Arabia etc.

Dominic Raab, a Tory MP who has campaigned for civil liberties, said: "If over-zealous officials are trying to resuscitate Labour's flawed paln for 'big brother' monitoring, ministers need to nip this in the bud."

MI5 and GCHQ have been lobbying hard for the wider powers which, they believe, are a crucial tool to combat terrorism and serious crime.

Serious Crime is not within the remit of either GCHQ or MI5

The Police cannot cope properly with the vast amount of data they already gather, so why will "searching for a needle in a haystack, by throwing in several more haystacks", be cost effective ?

There is no evidence that holding 6 month or 1 year old Communications Data of hundreds of millions of innocent people in the European Union, has been of any use in catching criminals or terrorists. Where it has been of use, e.g. in the recent Toulouse serial killer / extremist case, the Communications Data has been very recent and the searches have been narrowly targeted to a suspects known phones or email addresses or to a victim's web advert etc.

At present GCHQ can use probes to monitor the content of calls and emails sent by specific individuals who are the subject of police or security service investigation, provided it has ministerial approval.

For "ministerial approval" read "ministerial or senior official rubber stamp"

There should actually be independent Judicial warrants for such intrusive interception surveillance, not rubber stamping by politicians.

The Home Office said it would introduce new legislation "as soon as parliamentary time allow" but stressed that the data to be monitored would not include content.

Why does the Sunday Times not name this anonymous Home Office spokesman ?

Which part of the phrase "Deep Packet Inspection = Interception of Content" does the Home Office not understand ?

Have all the civil servants and SPADs who embarrassed themselves and the Home Office over the BT / Phorm scandal now been promoted to other jobs, leaving their inexperienced "generalist" replacements to magically formulate "policy" without any technical experience or knowledge ?

Incredibly this article does not really mention Mobile Phones and especially Mobile Phone Location Data.

This, like other forms of Communications Data is available via automated gateway computer systems to authorised Police and Intelligence Agency investigators, but it is meant to be narrowly targeted and proportionate, under a combination of the Regulation of Investgatory Powers Act 2000 (which permits such agencies to make such requests) and the Data Protection Act 1998 (which exempts the Telcos and Mobile Phone Networks and ISPs from prosecution for handing such data over to them)

Is this Sunday Times article, a high quality briefing / leak by Whitehall mandarins ?

Is it safe to interpret the omissions like Soviet era Kremlinologists, and read between the lines that some of the previously evil plans which have been touted, have been watered down ?

Our opinion is that no, this is a flawed article, which has either had many important details removed by the editors for front page space reasons, or which is being deliberately deceitful by omission.

Unfortunately, as is so often the case with today's "news" industry, this article has been re-published by , for example, the Press Association, with even fewer important technical and legal details:

The Independent
Sunday 01 April 2012

Expansion of GCHQ internet monitoring proposed

Gavin Cordon

[...]

The Home Office confirmed that ministers were intending to legislate "as soon as parliamentary time allows".

"It is vital that police and security services are able to obtain communications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public. We need to take action to maintain the continued availability of communications data as technology changes," a spokesman said.

Why does the Independent not name this anonymous "spokesman" ?

"Communications data includes time, duration and dialling numbers of a phone call, or an email address. It does not include the content of any phone call or email and it is not the intention of Government to make changes to the existing legal basis for the interception of communications."

[...]

Note the (deliberate ?) omission of Mobile Phone Location Data in this alleged definition of Communications Data. This does not include Tweets or Facebook "likes" , which do require interception of the content of a web browsing session (also deliberately not mentioned ?)

David Davis, one of the few Conservative MPs who stood up for civil liberties when in opposition to Labour, has rightly criticised this plan in this BBC video clip, in which he does mention some of the things omitted by the Sunday Times:

Email and web use 'to be monitored' under new laws

However, we are not sure where the "retention for 2 years" comes from and despite the mention of "magistrates and courts", none of that has applied since 2000 - the only "warrants" are those rubber stamped by politicians or officials for Interception, and "self authorised" requests by the Police and Intelligence Agencies. There is no involvement of independent Judges or Magistrates at all in the UK, with either electronic (or postal) communications Interception or with Communications Data or with Intrusive Surveillance (planting of bugging or tracking devices, use of Confidential Human Intelligence Source informants etc.)

Elizabeth Filkin, the former Parliamentary Standards Commissioner (who proved to be too competent for the sleazy MPs) has produced an interesting report into the cosy relationship between the top managment of the Metroplitan Police Service and the print media, specifically, but not exclusively News International.

The Ethical Issues Arising from the Relationship Between Police and Media (302 Kb .pdf)

When reading this report, you could and should mentally replace the words "MPS" or "Metroplitan Police Service", with "Downing Street" or "Whitehall Department" and especially with "Home Office", "Cabinet Office", "Ministry of Defence MoD", "Security Service MI5", "Secret Intelligence Service MI6" or "GCHQ".

Almost all of Elizabeth Filkin's conclusions and reccomendations for improving the Metropolitan Police's duties of transparency and accountability to the public, whilst protecting the operational security of ongoing investigations and also protecting the personal details of innocent members of the public and junior staff etc., could and should be applied to these other powerful, privilged, yet increasingly untrusted, supposedly public institutions.

The Metroplitan Police Service has been practicing the black arts of media spin and manipulation and their public reputation has suffered as a result.

Favoured access:

3.2.1 Inequality of access

It is felt both internally and externally that the MPS has not given equal access to all parts of the media for a number of years and that certain special relationships have developed selectively.

The kind of off the record nature of it all is actually counter-productive, and if we really want to hold public institutions to account we have to do it in an open, transparent and proper way. But the way they operate is they have the kind of closed press briefings, drinks at the pub - it's a club. Journalists get too close to senior police officers, because you get far more stories if you're nice to them than if you're not. And the result is I think we are quite generally in this industry, too reluctant to write critical pieces, than we were previously.

A Journalist

Trading information and even betraying details about innocent members of the public, in order to about to divert media attention away from embarrasing stories about the MPS themselves:

3.1.2 Trading

I have also been given examples where inappropriate information has been provided to the media, to dilute or prevent the publication of other information which could be damaging to the MPS or senior individuals within it. Of course there can be proper and ethical negotiations with the media to prevent the obstruction of an investigation, harm to
members of the public or the MPS, or to ensure accuracy in reporting. However some negotiations have included unethical placing of material, or offering exclusive stories to the media to bury other information.

"So that if you get the Press Officer who says, well, if I give Reporter 'A' a particular story exclusively, then next week Reporter 'A' will do me a favour. And you've got a direct conflict now between what the public needs and what the Press Officer wants."

Nick Davies, Freelance Journalist

Lack of Transparency, even when there is no justifiable operational need for it:

4.4 TRANSPARENCY

According to some, MPS contact with the media has in the past been characterised by back door briefings through informal and unofficial channels. This view was also reached when MPS communications were the subject of some informal advice from the private sector in 2010. I understand that this offer of help from an outside expert on improving communications with the public was undermined by the threat of negative press coverage.

Some contact will involve trusting the media with confidential information. There will also be occasions when negotiation between the MPS and the media will be necessary to ensure accurate reporting. I am concerned that some may use these proper practices to justify a general lack of transparency both in terms of who has contact with the media and what information they provide. Problems like the trading of information or the apparent closeness of some relationships with the media fuel the perception that the business of dealing with the press is by its nature secretive.

"I think if you spend your whole career working on secretive investigations, and concealing information, things like that, which is really, really important, it just goes to your head somehow, sometimes, and you think that you kind of own this information, and you forget that you're there to serve the public."

A Journalist

[...]

In most circumstances police officers and staff providing information to the media should expect to be named. In some instances it may be appropriate for only their role or position to be published. It should always be the case that the information is attributed to the MPS.

The culture of secrecy and the use of "Anonymous briefings" attributed to "police sources" are as stupid and counterproductive as those attributed to "Whitehall sources"

"I phoned up and said 'I've got some questions here', it was almost as though you were asking for them to release something which is privileged information somehow, it's absolutely not. So I just try back channels now, trying other contacts in the Met, going round the back within the slightly kind of shadowy stuff that you have to do to get data, because the front door doesn't work."

A Journalist

It is clear both from speaking to journalists and politicians, and from media reports even during the time of my review, that use of the word 'police source' can mislead. Every time this phrase is used it implies a leak. I have been told that it is also used in situations where the information comes from a different but related organisation such as the MPA, or as a generic term to try and protect the real provenance of a source. It is also sometimes used where the information has been legitimately and formally supplied by the MPS press office. This is a damaging practice with the potential to create a perception that leaks from the MPS are more widespread than they are.

The BBC Radio 4 documentary series Secret Britain should be of interest to Spy Blog readers.

The first programme in the series was broadcast last Tuesday 16th August 2011, but it still available (for now) online via the BBC iPlayer

One Hundred Years of Secrecy

Presented by veteran investigative journalist Peter Hennessey, with sound bites from
retired heads of intelligence agencies, Whitehall mandarins, politicians and the occasional whistleblower.

The programme "celebrates" the 100th anniversary of the notorious Official Secrets Act 1911, which , amidst mainstream media inspired hysteria and collective Must Be Seen To Be Doing Something panic amongst the politicians, after a foreign security crisis.

The influence of this overbroad "catch all" Act and the way in which it was sneaked through Parliament in a rush, without proper debate or scrutiny set the tone for almost all subsequent "security" legislation to date.

The supposedly more narrowly targeted Official Secrets Act 1989 also commands little public confidence,has led to some dubious prosecutions yet it has not prevented "leaks" from the Whitehall and national security / counter-terrorism bureaucracy. It therefore needs urgent reform

The most interesting quotation in the broadcast was from Sir Stephen Lander, the retired Director General of MI5 the Security Service (who was also later in charge of the Serious Organised Crime Agency).

His comment on the Security Service Act 1989,

SSL: "I think, fundamentally, it was a wonderful thing to have done for the Service. It was the most important thing that happened in my time. MI5 getting legislation for the Service.

Apart from anything else, it made us so much more operationally aggressive, and more confident.

PH: Because you had "cover" ?

SSl: Yep, We were "proper".

And it was a beautiful piece of draughting, at something, you know, "there shall continue to be a Security Service" without having previously acknowledged that it had previously existed in law - hah hah - a beautiful piece of draughting.

Sir John Scarlett, the former Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service MI6 was also complimentary about the Intelligence Services Act 1994, which put MI6 and GCHQ on a statutory legal footing.

However he is utterly wrong to claim that

The 1994 Act, allowed, a very large amount of information, to be made available for public discussion and in the public domain, about, the work, of the Service, the role it plays in Government, the way it's structured, quite a bit, in effect, about its resources, about it's preoccupations, its targets, and that process of releasing information into the public domain, began in 1994.

And now there is a vast amount of information available through, Parliamentary reports, Commission reports, and now, in recent years, through the websites,o the Services, and so on.

[...]

For all the ups and downs over the years, it's worked as least as well as we could have expected, and I would say, broadly better.

Regular Spy Blog readers will have noticed just how uninformative and secretive the censored Intelligence and Security Committee and various Commissioners' Reports have been over the years. The websites of the intelligence services are not very informative either - probably the best is that of MI5

Obviously tactical, operational security details of particular ongoing operations and investigations should remain secret. This radio programme illustrates with a couple of examples, the corrosive effect of self authorised "national security" secrecy, with criminal penalties with which to threaten whistleblowers, but without any counterbalancing criminal penalties for use against officials and politicians who abuse the privilege of such secrecy, simply to hide or cover up their political embarrassment or their managerial or technological incompetence or the whiff of corruption or treason,

The next programme in the series is:

D for Discretion: Can the Modern Media Keep a Secret?

This forthcoming programme looks as if it will talk about the increasingly irrelevant DA-Notice System of voluntary self censorship by the mainstream media.

The "Defence Advisory Notice System" - as it is now called - is supposed to be entirely voluntary. In reality, though, it's very rare for any of the mainstream media organisations to ignore the committee's requests. But how does this work in the age of Wikileaks and citizen journalism? This programme looks at the challenges to the system posed by social media websites. What happens if members of the public try to reveal government secrets on Twitter - in a similar way to this year's row about super-injunctions? And how do newspapers like The Guardian square their Wikileaks collaborations with their own editorial guidelines on national security issues?

Broadcast times:

Tue 23 Aug 2011 09:00 BBC Radio 4

Tue 23 Aug 2011 21:30 BBC Radio 4

and then online via iPlayer for a while.

The phrases "the BBC learns" or "the BBC understands that" or "Whitehall sources" etc. are euphemisms for an "off the record" a "leak" / briefing by a Whitehall spin doctor, not for revelations by a worried whistleblower.

The BBC and other mainstream media should refuse to publish such anonymous briefings about changes to Government policy. There should be a named official Government spokesman and Minister who takes the credit or blame for the policy announcement. If the final details of Government policy have not yet been decided, then they should say so and invite comment and advice from the public and outside experts, who know at least as much as they do about the issues.

This particular the media spin is about the hugely controversial "Control Orders" scheme, which , like so many "security" policies introduced by the inept and authoritarian former Labour government, has been both a practical disaster and a propaganda victory for our enemies, through the destruction of our basic freedoms and fundamental human rights i.e. exactly what they are trying to achieve.

The Home Office or the Prime Minister's Office should simply announce their new proposals officially, as a public consultation, on a website, for everyone to see and comment on, before they are implemented.

Given the appalling scheme which Labour produced in secret, there is no excuse for repeating the same mess, with slightly different variations.

The BBC often claims to be independent of the British government, but that is not the impression given by this report:

11 January 2011 Last updated at 19:25

Control orders: BBC learns detail of replacement regime

The coalition plans to replace control orders with a new range of restrictions to keep terror suspects under surveillance, the BBC has learned.

One working title for the new curbs is "surveillance orders".

[...]

The BBC understands the new orders would give the security services the power to:

* ban suspects from travelling to locations such as open parks and thick walled buildings where surveillance is hard

If the BBC were actually doing a proper job of investigative journalism, instead of just parroting the Government line, they would have asked how exactly is this stupid idea is possible to enforce.

Are MI5 and the Police really going to compromise their Surveillance Sources and Methods, by revealing exactly where "surveillance is hard" for them ? Unlikely.

Does this mean that the fabled airborne Surveillance Drones are useless for enforcing such "Surveillance Orders" ?

Does "thick walled buildings" include the London Underground Tube system or concrete car parks ?

* allow suspects to use mobile phones and the internet but only if the numbers and details were given to the security services

The existing Control Orders were incapable of preventing this, so the new "Surveillance Orders" will be just as useless.

Are the Controllees really likely to be ignorant of Mobile Phone interception and location tracking ?

* ban suspects from travelling abroad

Presumably none of the existing Control Orders aimed at British citizens have yet done so, since this would be a direct challenge to our fundamental human right of freedom to travel, which would require Derogation from the European Convention on Human Rights making the United Kingdom morally equivalent to totalitarian regimes like North Korea.

Remember, these are not bail conditions, where someone can be forced to surrender their Passport, these Orders are applied to people who have not been charged or convicted of any crime. Just because they have been used sparingly so far, is no excuse for creating a legal infrastructure of repression which can easily be used against other political or religious dissidents or opponents in the future.

* ban suspects from meeting certain named individuals, but limited to people who are themselves under surveillance or suspected of involvement in terrorism

Under the planned new orders, the security services would lose the power to impose overnight curfews, force suspects to phone into a monitoring company every time they entered or left their homes and lift the ban on them using mobile phones and the internet.

They would also lose the power to force suspects to live in a particular location, known as "relocation orders", or limit the visitors to their homes

Giving secret policemen and bureaucrats the power, without arrest, charge or conviction, to force your relocation to somewhere more administratively convenient for them, is indistinguishable from the legal power to set up Concentration Camps.

Tagging

However, one detail that appears to remain unresolved is over the future of tagging.

This will no longer be used to enforce a curfew by informing the authorities whether or not a suspect is at their home.

But some in government are pushing for the security services still to have the power to tag suspects simply so they can keep tabs on them by knowing if they are no longer sleeping regularly at one particular address

Who exactly are these "some in government" ?

Have they been lobbied by the security industry companies who have or are bidding for multi-million pound contracts electronic tagging services to the criminal justice system ?

N.B. former Labour Home Secretary John Reid gets £50,000 a year from the foreign owned multinational G4S (which took over the Group 4 Security and Securicor brands in the UK) to act as a "consultant".

The BBC has also learned that the government is drawing up tough new anti-terror laws that could be rushed through Parliament after a major terrorist incident - in case the new surveillance orders proved inadequate in the face of increased threat levels.

Whitehall sources said the draft legislation would - if enacted - give the police and the security services effectively the same powers they have now under existing control orders.

The so-called Terrorism Prevention Orders would be put before Parliament if the heads of the three intelligence agencies and the home secretary agreed there was a national emergency.

No ! There are already plenty of Emergency Powers available under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. In what way are those draconian, Henry VIII powers in any way insufficient ?

Rushing through repressive terrorism legislation after a single "major terrorist incident" is utterly wrong - look at the creepy, authoritarian, badly draughted legal mess that Labour in the UK and the Republicans in the USA made with the hodge podge the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 or the PATRIOT Act.

Any such proposed legislation should be published and debated, now, so that everyone is clear on the fine details before it is ever needed.

But shadow home secretary Ed Balls said that the process had "descended into a shambles" as ministers struggled to find a way of keeping the coalition united.

"With daily leaks, briefings and counter-briefings, this is a chaotic and disorderly way in which to decide national security policy," he said.

Why didn't the BBC point out that that is exactly the modus operandi of the previous Labour government and that Ed Balls was himself a prime abuser of anonymous leaks and briefings ?