UK Spy Agency Fails In Attempt To Bury Records Of Its Criminal Activity

from the can't-have-a-secure-nation-without-a-certain-amount-of-crime dept

Hi, kids! Do you like state-ordained violence? Want to see me [redacted] in each one of my [redacted]? Wanna copy me and do exactly like I did? [Bond theme intensifies.]

The Snowden leaks gave us some of the first looks behind the Vantablack curtain surrounding intelligence efforts engaged in by US allies in the UK. The Snowden sneak peek enabled legal challenges that routinely found UK intelligence agencies were violating the rights of UK citizens, as well as those the UK government has unilaterally declared rightsless.

More rights violations and general wrongfulness has been uncovered. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal doesn't like what it's been seeing from MI6, which has apparently let its sources and informants run wild. The Tribunal doesn't say what criminal violations have been committed in the name of national security, but its limited ruling expresses its displeasure with attempted MI6 interference and its apparent blessing of criminal actions.

MI6 agents and informants may be committing crimes in the UK, a watchdog has revealed.

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal disclosed the ruling despite government attempts to keep the matter secret.

It also said questions raised should be disclosed to campaigners, who have been asking for greater legal clarity over what the intelligence agencies can do.

It comes a day after the intelligence services watchdog raised its own questions about some MI6 activities.

The ruling [PDF] doesn't say anything about the criminal acts. Instead, it focuses on MI6's attempt to derail the judicial process. Ongoing legal proceedings have demanded a level of forthcoming-ness British intelligence agencies aren't accustomed to. MI6 reacted badly. This resulted in MI6 employees trying to talk the court into shutting further transparency down. The court rejected this… publicly.

Fifthly, in March 2019, it was recognised that the direct communication which took place with the tribunal was inappropriate. An apology was given and it was clearly recognised that nothing like this should happen in the future. At the hearing before us, Sir James Eadie acknowledged that everyone had recognised that something serious had gone wrong.

These conversations dealt with revelations British intelligence agencies felt shouldn't be shared with the public.

On 5 March 2019, two members of the respondents’ staff contacted the tribunal secretary to state that the documents should not have been provided to the tribunal. On 7 March 2019, the tribunal secretary wrote to the respondents at the request of the President and stated that it was inappropriate to seek to intervene in the way that they had sought to do.

The government wants to hide something. Possibly that "something" is included in a recent report by IPT's oversight. The recently released report doesn't dig into the details, but makes it clear something approaching abhorrent was ordained by intelligence community handlers.

On renewal, six months after the original submission, SIS set out a number of indicators that the agent may have been involved in, or have contemplated, the serious criminality referenced above. We concluded that, on the basis of this new information, SIS’s ‘red lines’ had most likely been breached, but the renewal submission failed to make this clear. Whilst the submission referred to SIS’s ‘red lines’ and provided information about criminality that may have occurred and noted an increased risk in the case, it did not make expressly clear that SIS’s ‘red lines’ had probably been crossed.

That's the determination. Bad things were done but it was not made clear that bad things were done in written reports. It's a policy violation. It's also probably a human rights violation, but as far as its oversight can see, it's mostly problematic because the proper James Bond paperwork wasn't filled out correctly.

The IPT's refusal to bury this decision shows it's willing to tackle the most problematic aspects of national security openly, for the most part. The fact that MI6 tried to bury everything via a bypass of the adversarial process is an indication it won't be handling things honestly in the future. When the bad stuff comes out -- as it always does eventually -- UK spooks will try to bury it.

Filed Under: investigatory powers tribunal, mi6, secrecy, transparency, uk

Ex-MI6 Boss: When It Comes To Voting, Pencil And Paper Are 'Much More Secure' Than Electronic Systems

from the and-he-should-know dept

Techdirt has been worried by problems of e-voting systems for a long time now. Before, that was just one of our quaint interests, but over the last few months, the issue of e-voting, and how secure it is from hacking, specifically hacking by foreign powers, has become a rather hot topic. It's great that the world has finally caught up with Techdirt, and realized that e-voting is not just some neat technology, and now sees that democracy itself is at play. The downside is that because the stakes are so high, the level of noise is too, and it's really hard to work out how worried we should be about recent allegations, and what's the best thing to do on the e-voting front.

What we really need is someone distant from the current US debate, and yet with a great deal of knowledge of how foreign intelligence services hack into computer systems. Maybe someone like Sir John Sawers, former head of MI6, the UK's CIA. Here's what he said recently to the BBC on the subject of e-voting:

"Bizarrely the stubby pencil and piece of paper that you put your cross on in the ballot box is actually much more secure than anything which is electronic."

And added:

"The more things that go online, the more susceptible you are to cyber attacks."

Since MI6 has probably been involved in quite a few of those attacks, Sir John speaks with a certain authority. He also has a good analysis of why there is this constant push for e-voting, even though security experts are pretty unanimous in their warnings of the dangers:

"The only trouble is, the younger generation of people expect to be able to do things remotely and through electronic devices."

That also goes some way to explaining the naivety of most people when it comes to the Internet of Things. Many people just "expect" everything to be digital and online and linked to its own app, even when it's just a hair brush.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: cybersecurity, e-voting, evoting, john sawers, mi6, security, uk

Practical Applications For Massive Surveillance Databases: Timely Birthday Cards, Travel Diaries

from the the-ultimate-vanity-search-engine dept

If you want to get a feel for the gobsmacking amount of information being collected by UK surveillance agencies (MI5, M16, GCHQ), all you have to do is see how it's being misused. Privacy International, which has been steadily suing the UK government over domestic surveillance, has received another set of documents that show the banality of dragnet surveillance evil. The banality is not so much the dragnet itself (although that's not to say it isn't its own form of evil) as it is the uses it's put to.

Ryan Gallagher, writing for The Intercept, points out that spies are using surveillance collections as backup Day-Timers -- apparently with enough frequency they've had to be warned to knock it off.

The documents include internal guidance codes for spies who have access to the surveillance systems. One memo, dated June 2014, warns employees of MI6, the U.K.’s equivalent of the CIA, against performing a “self-search” for data on themselves, offering a bizarre example that serves to illustrate the scope of what some of the repositories contain.

“An example of an inappropriate ‘self search’ would be to use the database to remind yourself where you have traveled so you can update your records,” the memo says. “This is not a proportionate use of the system, as you could find this information by another means (i.e. check the stamps in your passport or keep a running record of your travel) that would avoid collateral intrusion into other people’s data.”

The information collected includes data that could reveal political preferences, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, memberships in associations or groups, mental/physical health along with biometric data and financial documents. With a little digging, the massive database could be used to uncover journalists' sources and privileged communications.

The wealth of information at the fingertips of British spies helps explain why they never seem to forget important dates.

“We’ve seen a few instances recently of individual users crossing the line with their database use, looking up addresses in order to send birthday cards, checking passport details to organise personal travel, checking details of family members for personal reasons…"

The world's greatest search engine isn't Google. It's GCHQ. Of course, the documents also point to various levels of oversight, none of which appear to have much of a deterrent effect. A monitoring system of some sort appears to be in place and it's likely what flagged agents' self-searches. But it's unlikely to catch other inappropriate searches involving someone other than the person performing the search. These, too, are forbidden, but it's likely these violations were part of a pattern of sustained abuse, rather than one-off searches -- which would likely have slipped under the radar as being just another intelligence-related search.

What's worse is access to these vast data stores apparently went oversight-free for several years, and it's not entirely clear from what's been released that comprehensive oversight is even in place at this point in time.

One 2010 policy paper from MI6 states there is “no external oversight” of it or its partners’ “bulk data operations,” though the paper adds that this was subject to review.

This may not seem completely terrible -- after all, six years government time is like 30 days real time -- until you realize the GCHQ has data sets dating back nearly 20 years (harvesting began in 1998) and MI5's bulk collection is more than a decade old at this point. And it continues onward, getting more massive by the moment. The GCHQ wants to collect 50 billion records every day, utilizing people's web browsing, phone calls, and email. While the agencies insist this is all for fighting terrorism and international crime, the cold reality is that it's just as useful for reconciling travel expenses and making sure Mom always gets her birthday card on time.

Filed Under: abuse, gchq, mi5, mi6, privacy, surveillance

Move Over Ed Snowden, Al Jazeera Has A Huge New Stack Of Spy Documents

from the and-the-revelations-just-keep-on-coming dept

There have been questions of when (not if) the next "Ed Snowden" situation would show up. There certainly have been a few recent leaks that appear to have been from folks other than Snowden, but they've mostly been one-off leaks. However, this morning, Al Jazeera is claiming that it got its hands on a huge trough of spy documents, in the form of cables from South Africa's spy agency, the State Security Agency (SSA), and it will begin reporting on what's in those documents, in collaboration with reporters at The Guardian:

Spanning a period from 2006 until December 2014, they include detailed briefings and internal analyses written by operatives of South Africa's State Security Agency (SSA). They also reveal the South Africans' secret correspondence with the US intelligence agency, the CIA, Britain's MI6, Israel's Mossad, Russia's FSB and Iran's operatives, as well as dozens of other services from Asia to the Middle East and Africa.

The files unveil details of how, as the post-apartheid South African state grappled with the challenges of forging new security services, the country became vulnerable to foreign espionage and inundated with warnings related to the US "War on Terror".

As Al Jazeera points out, this is not "signals intelligence" (SIGINT) material, but rather "human intelligence" (HUMINT) of the kind normally done by the CIA, rather than the NSA. It's about spies on the ground -- and also, according to Al Jazeera, their humdrum daily office existence. Honestly, it almost sounds like the plot of a bad sitcom: come work at a premier national intelligence agency... and bitch about the lack of parking:

At times, the workplace resembles any other, with spies involved in form-filling, complaints about missing documents and personal squabbles.... One set of cables from the Algerian Embassy in South Africa relates to a more practical concern. It demands that "no parking" signs are placed in the street outside. The cable notes that the British and US embassies enjoy this privilege, and argues that it should be extended to Algeria as well.

Whether or not this latest leak turns up anything more interesting than parking disputes, it is worth noting that another trove of intelligence documents have leaked...

Filed Under: cia, fsb, leaks, mi6, mossad, south africa, ssa, surveillance, whistleblower
Companies: al jazeera, guardian

Humiliating Admission By UK Government That Yet More Of Its Surveillance Was Unlawful

from the well,-not-*completely*-legal dept

A couple of weeks ago, we reported on a small but important defeat for the UK government when the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) ruled that intelligence sharing between the NSA and GCHQ was unlawful. Now, in a sign that the cracks in the UK's impenetrable silence on its surveillance activities are beginning to spread, the Guardian reports on the following surprising development:

The regime under which UK intelligence agencies, including MI5 and MI6, have been monitoring conversations between lawyers and their clients for the past five years is unlawful, the British government has admitted.

Here's why the UK government has suddenly started owning up to these misdeeds:

The admission that the regime surrounding state snooping on legally privileged communications has also failed to comply with the European convention on human rights comes in advance of a legal challenge, to be heard early next month, in which the security services are alleged to have unlawfully intercepted conversations between lawyers and their clients to provide the government with an advantage in court.

Remarkably, the confession has brought with it an unprecedented explanatory statement:

"In view of recent IPT judgments, we acknowledge that the policies adopted since [January] 2010 have not fully met the requirements of the ECHR, specifically article 8 (right to privacy). This includes a requirement that safeguards are made sufficiently public.

"It does not mean that there was any deliberate wrongdoing on their part of the security and intelligence agencies, which have always taken their obligations to protect legally privileged material extremely seriously. Nor does it mean that any of the agencies' activities have prejudiced or in any way resulted in an abuse of process in any civil or criminal proceedings."

This surprise admission shows once again the value of taking legal action against government surveillance, even when the odds of succeeding seem slim. Twice now the UK has revealed details purely as a result of challenges. Perhaps even more importantly, twice now the UK government's standard response to leaks -- that it wouldn't confirm or deny anything, but the British public could rest assured that whatever may have happened was completely legal -- has been shown to be false.

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Filed Under: abuse, attorney client privilege, gchq, human rights, mi5, mi6, nsa, privacy, surveillance, uk