The Big Brother Thread

[bourbon]

UK: Information Commissioner’s report to Parliament on the state of surveillance (PDF)

[bourbon]

The Cloud Panopticon: Google, Cloud Computing and the Surveillance-Industrial Complex, by Christopher Ketcham and Travis Kelly. CounterPunch Magazine, April 1-15, 2010; vol. 17, no. 7. (PDF)

Kevin Bankston, a privacy expert and attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group engaged in questions of privacy, free speech, and intellectual property in the digital age, warns of the possibilities. “In all of human history,” he says, “few if any single entities, other than the National Security Agency, have ever possessed such a hoard of sensitive data about so many people.” This is the sort of thing that should make the intelligence agencies, says Bankston, “drool with anticipation.” And drooling they are. Stephen Arnold, an IT expert who formerly worked at the defense and intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. and who once consulted for Google, addressed this in a speech before a conference of current and former intelligence officials in Washington, D.C., in January 2006. According to an audio recording in our possession, he reported Google was increasingly sought out by the U.S. intelligence services because click-stream data – and everything else Google archives – “is a tremendous opportunity for the intelligence community.” Google, he said, “has figured out everything there is to know about data-collection.” The relationship with the government had become intimate enough, Arnold said, that at least three officers from “an unnamed intelligence agency” had been posted at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. What they are doing there, Arnold did not reveal.

[davidbfpo]

Currently the UK government has proposed a bill to extensively update the law on law enforcement and security agencies access to communications data. This is a controversial piece of legislation, partly for political reasons as when in opposition the current government opposed similar proposals.

Hat tip to a privacy advocacy group:http://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/ho...companies.html

Parliament has a committee taking evidence on the bill, which has led to some very strange exchanges between them and the industry (Google, yahoo, Skype, Tor and others). Try this passage:

It is in the background brief. The Home Office states, “The Government is introducing legislation to ensure that communications data will continue to be available in the future as it has been in the past”. Another part says, “CEOP is already experiencing significant problems because of the difficulty of obtaining the same level of subscriber information for internet communications as is currently available for traditional telephony”. There is the problem. The key point is that our services cannot be made to look like telephony

Link:http://www.parliament.uk/documents/j...nel%201%29.pdf

Or the use by the Home Office (equiv. Dept. Interior & parts of DoJ) of

...this elusive 25%. If representatives from the Home Office were here today—and we asked them—they might say that telephony was not all on landlines or even on mobile phones but is now over the internet, and they might point at Skype or Tor as developments that have reduced their capability to capture and retain information

It is rare to see a comparison like this, from an industry speaker:

criminals already have the capability to prevent law enforcement making useful use of communications data. Criminals have shown the capability, but human rights workers do not have the same capabilities that criminals have, so they will be put at risk by deep packet inspection and similar things that this Bill could introduce.

From:http://www.parliament.uk/documents/j...nel%202%29.pdf

This blogsite also comments on such matters:http://www.spyblog.org.uk/

[AdamG]

One photo = 1k word Soliloquy