UK Government Has Secretly Created A Huge Database Storing Details About Its Citizens' Private Lives -- Since 2000

from the database?-what-database? dept

Long before the vast planetary surveillance programs being carried out by the Five Eyes team were revealed by Edward Snowden, there was Echelon, a similarly globe-spanning system for slurping up communications. The person who did more than anyone to expose this top-secret collaboration was the UK journalist Duncan Campbell:

In 1988, he revealed the existence of the ECHELON project, which has since 1997 become controversial throughout the world. In 1998, he was asked by the European Parliament to report on the development of surveillance technology and the risk of abuse of economic information, especially in relation to the ECHELON system. His report, “Interception Capabilities 2000” was approved by the European Parliament in April 1999, and presented to the parliament in Brussels in February 2000. In July 2000, the European Parliament appointed a committee of 36 MEPs to further investigate the ECHELON system.

The MEPs wrote another report, "on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system)", which was presented in July 2001. It would doubtless have created some pretty big waves in the EU had not the attack on the Twin Towers a few months later meant that nobody wanted to be seen weakening the intelligence services. The report was filed and Echelon was forgotten -- and carried on as before. A new article by Campbell published in The Register shows that around the same time that most politicians lost interest in exposing mass surveillance, the UK government was busily building another, highly-intrusive monitoring system that was only acknowledged very recently:

Finally, on November 4th [2015], the Home Office took the lid off what had been going on secretly since 2000. Asking Parliament to allow mass surveillance of telephone records to continue, Home Secretary Theresa May admitted that "under Section 94 of the Telecommunications Act 1984 ... successive governments have approved the security and intelligence agencies' access" to [bulk] communications data from communication service providers", claiming that it helped MI5 "thwart a number of attacks here in the UK".

According to Campbell, that "bulk communications data" includes detailed records of telephone calls, health records, personal credit card and banking transactions, flight bookings and internet records. As he points out, the fact that all this data was being gathered secretly meant that repeated -- and heated -- Parliamentary debates about whether it should be collected, conducted in the belief that currently it was not, were a complete sham:

MPs and peers spent months arguing about a pretence, and in ignorance of the cost and human rights implications of what successive governments were doing in secret.

As well as duplicity, that bespeaks a stunning contempt on the part of the UK government for both Parliament and the public. That indifference to people's concerns is also manifest in the latest attempt to bring in a Snooper's Charter, officially known as the Investigatory Powers Bill. Campbell points out that the only response from the UK authorities to widespread fears about the creation of a huge, intrusive database recording key aspects of UK citizens' lives is to pretend it doesn't exist:

Vigilance on behalf of liberty has had little discernible impact, except in the field of semantics. Across 299 pages in the new Investigatory Powers Bill, the word "database" does not appear once.

Billions of call and internet records, stolen financial data, intercepted travel records, a heap of bulk personal datasets on matters including religion, racial or ethnic origin, political views, medical condition, sexual orientation, or legally privileged, journalistic or otherwise confidential information, all joined up together and archived in secret do not constitute a "database", whatever techie readers may think. And that's official.

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Filed Under: citizens, dossiers, echelon, privacy, surveillance, uk

Brazil, EU Take Pride In Temporarily Avoiding The NSA With New Joint Undersea Cable Run

from the undersea-blowback dept

Long before there was Edward Snowden (or even an NSA), there have, unsurprisingly, been government intelligence operatives gifted at tapping communications networks, be they via satellite dish or undersea cables. In fact, before Snowden, back when most people (including most of the press) treated total surveillance as the incoherent ramblings of paranoids, there was Echelon. The highly-confidential program, jointly operated by the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand, truly took off in the 1960s, and focused on using any means necessary to gather communications intelligence. The program started with a focus on intercepting satellite lines, then shifted to undersea cable taps, microwave transmission intercepts, and other options.

Currently, Brazil (justly none too happy with our voracious surveillance appetites) relies on U.S. undersea cables to carry almost all of its communications to Europe. That should change soon with a joint announcement that Brazil and the EU are building an undersea communications cable from Lisbon to Fortaleza to further reduce Brazil's reliance on the United States:

"At a summit in Brussels, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said the $185 million cable project was central to "guarantee the neutrality" of the Internet, signaling her desire to shield Brazil's Internet traffic from U.S. surveillance. "We have to respect privacy, human rights and the sovereignty of nations. We don't want businesses to be spied upon," Rousseff told a joint news conference with the presidents of the European Commission and the European Council. "The Internet is one of the best things man has ever invented. So we agreed for the need to guarantee ... the neutrality of the network, a democratic area where we can protect freedom of expression," Rousseff said."

To pretend the NSA lacks the ability to simply tap this new cable run, nab that same data at any of a million interconnection points, or just get it handed to them by other intelligence agencies is perhaps either naive, a bit of political salesmanship for the project, or both. Still, it's another instance of how the NSA revelations have significantly tarnished international/U.S. relations, resulting in a large number of countries making it a point of pride to avoid using U.S. technology. That's not going to be particularly great for U.S. industry, and we're likely only just seeing the tip of the iceberg.

Filed Under: brazil, echelon, european union, nsa, surveillance