The British government has admitted that its practice of spying on confidential communications between lawyers and their clients was a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Details of the controversial snooping emerged in November: lawyers suing Blighty over its rendition of two Libyan families to be tortured by the late and unlamented Gaddafi regime claimed Her Majesty’s own lawyers seemed to have access to the defense team’s emails.
The families’ briefs asked for a probe by the secretive Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), a move that led to Wednesday’s admission.
“The concession the government has made today relates to the agencies’ policies and procedures governing the handling of legally privileged communications and whether they are compatible with the ECHR,” a government spokesman said in a statement to the media, via the Press Association.
“In view of recent IPT judgments, we acknowledge that the policies applied since 2010 have not fully met the requirements of the ECHR, specifically Article 8. This includes a requirement that safeguards are made sufficiently public.”
The guidelines revealed by the investigation showed that MI5 – which handles the UK’s domestic security – had free reign to spy on highly private and sensitive lawyer-client conversations between April 2011 and January 2014.
Month: February 2015
Hoping for spy reforms? Jeb Bush, dangerously close to being the next US prez, backs the NSA
Former Florida governor, brother of former President George W Bush, son of former President George H W Bush, and Republican frontrunner for the 2016 US presidential election, Jeb Bush … has strongly defended the NSA’s mass surveillance of innocent people.
Speaking at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs as part of his run for the White House, Bush made it clear that if he did become president he would retain the programs introduced under his brother’s administration.
While covering broad foreign policy topics, Bush appeared to go off script when he said that in order to effectively tackle Islamic terrorism, it was necessary to have “responsible intelligence gathering and analysis – including the NSA metadata program, which contributes to awareness of potential terror cells and interdiction efforts on a global scale.”
He continued: “For the life of me, I don’t understand.. the debate has gotten off track, where we’re not understanding or protecting.. we do protect our civil liberties.. but this is a hugely important program to use these technologies to keep us safe.”
Fast forward to the 28-minute mark for the fun to begin in this vid, streamed live on Wednesday, of his talk
Yet Another Report Showing ‘Anonymous’ Data Not At All Anonymous
As companies expand the amount of data hoovered up via their subscribers, a common refrain to try and ease public worry is that consumers shouldn’t worry because this data is “anonymized.” However, time and time again studies have highlighted how it’s not particularly difficult to tie these data sets to consumer identities — usually with only the use of a few additional contextual clues. It doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about cellular location data, GPS data, taxi data or NSA metadata, the basic fact is these anonymous data sets aren’t really anonymous.
The latest in a long stream of such studies comes from MIT, where researchers explored (the actual study is paywalled) whether they could glean unique identities from “anonymous” user data using a handful of contextual clues. Studying the purportedly anonymous credit card transactions of 1.1 million users at 10,000 retail locations over a period of three months, the researchers found they could identify 90% of the users’ names by using four additional data points like the dates and locations of four purchases. Using three clues, including more specific points like the exact price of a purchase, allowed the identifying of 94% of the consumers. Intentionally trying to make the data points less precise didn’t help protect consumer privacy much
Stephen Kim Spoke to a Reporter. Now He’s in Jail. This Is His Story.
ON THE MORNING of June 11, 2009, James Rosen stepped inside the State Department, scanned his building badge and made his way to the Fox News office in the busy press room on the second floor. It was going to be a hectic day. Like other reporters working the phones that morning, Rosen was looking for fresh news about the latest crisis with North Korea.
Two weeks earlier, North Korea had conducted a nuclear detonation that showed the rest of the world it possessed a functioning bomb. The United Nations was on the verge of a formal condemnation, but no one at the U.N. or inside the U.S. government knew how North Korea’s unpredictable regime would respond and whether things might escalate toward war.
Rosen called Stephen Kim, a State Department expert on rogue nations and weapons of mass destruction. Kim, a U.S. citizen who was born in South Korea, spoke fluent Korean and had worked at one of America’s nuclear-weapons labs. He probably knew more about what was going on in Pyongyang than almost anyone else in the building.
The call, according to metadata collected by the FBI, lasted just half a minute, but soon afterward Kim called Rosen and they talked for nearly a dozen minutes. After that conversation, they left the building at roughly the same time, then spoke once more on the phone after they both returned.
A classified report on North Korea had just begun circulating, and Kim was among the restricted number of officials with clearance to read it. He logged onto a secure computer, called up the report at 11:27 a.m., and phoned Rosen 10 minutes later. A few minutes past noon, he left the building again, and a minute later Rosen followed. The destruction of Kim’s life would center on the question of what the two men discussed during that brief encounter outside the State Department.
Voltage Pics: Suing Disabled Kids For Piracy is Bad PR
while the company has no real idea of the nature of the people they’re targeting, Wickstrom said his company had limits on who would be pursued for cash demands. According to SMH, the executive said that his company “would not pursue an autistic child, people who were handicapped, welfare cases, or people that have mental issues.”
Some compassion from Voltage perhaps? Not exactly – the company seems more interested in how that would look on the PR front.
“That kind of press would ruin us,” Wickstrom said, adding that “the majority” of piracy was in fact occurring at the hands of vulnerable groups.
If that’s truly the case and any “vulnerable” people inform the company of their circumstances, Voltage stands to make very little money from their Australian venture, despite all the expense incurred in legal action thus far. Strangely, they don’t seem to mind.
“This is truly not about the money here, it’s about stopping illegal piracy,” Wickstrom said.
John Oliver Highlights The Ridiculousness Of Corporate Sovereignty Provisions
Now countries can try to counteract the influence of that kind of marketing, but if tobacco companies feel threatened, they’ll put them through legal hell. Let me take you on a world tour of how they attack laws intended to protect public health, because it’s kind of amazing.
Let’s start in Australia. In 2011, they passed a plain packaging law, and what that means is this. [Shows (fair use!) news clip describing required packaging of cigarettes with no branding, and scary health pictures]. Australia’s plain packaging law bans tobacco company branding from packaging and replaced it with upsetting photos, such as the toe tag on a corpse, the cancerous mouth, the nightmarish eyeball, or the diseased lung. Now, yes, I’m pretty sure I’d find a healthy lung disgusting, but, that thing does look like you’re trying to breathe through baked ziti, so [instructing staff] take it down! Just take it down!
Perhaps unsurprisingly, since this law was implemented, total consumption of tobacco cigarettes in Australia fell to record lows and… nightmares about eyeballs have risen to record highs. [Instructing staff] Take it down! Take down the demon eye!
To get these laws, though, Australia has had to run a gamut of lawsuits. First, two tobacco companies sued Australia in its highest court to stop them. The result, was a little surprising, as Australia’s attorney general let everyone know. [Shows clip of AG announcing not just the victory, but Big Tobacco having to pay the government’s legal fees.] Yes! Score one for the little guy! Even if that little guy is the sixth largest country in the world by landmass.
And the tobacco companies didn’t just lose. The judges called their case “delusive,” “unreal and synthetic” and said their case had “fatal defects.” ….
But Australia’s legal troubles were just beginning. Because then, Philip Morris Asia got involved. [Shows clips of a news report saying Philip Morris considering using ISDS provisions to take the Australian government to a tribunal claiming it lowered the value of the company’s trademarks].
That’s right. A company was able to sue a country over a public health measure, through an international court. How the fuck is that possible? Well, it’s really a simple explanation. They did it by digging up a 1993 trade agreement between Australia and Hong Kong which had a provision that said Australia couldn’t seize Hong Kong-based companies’ property. So, nine months before the lawsuits started, PMI put its Australian business in the hands of its Hong Kong-based Philip Morris Asia division, and then they sued, claiming that the “seized property” in question, were the trademarks on their cigarette packages.
And you’ve got to give it to them: that’s impressive. Someone should really give those lawyers a pat on the back… and a punch in the face. But, a pat on the back first. Pat, then punch. Pat, punch….
UK Police Raid Movie & TV Show Site, Three Arrested
Following an investigation by the Hollywood-affiliated anti-piracy group Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), this morning detectives raided individuals said to be involved in the operations of a movie and TV show download site.
The men, aged 24, 25 and 26, all from the Southwark area of London, were arrested at 06:45 on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and copyright infringement offenses. Equipment and financial documents were also seized.
Speaking with TorrentFreak a few moments ago, FACT said that they weren’t able to name the site “for operational reasons.” Nevertheless, police say it was popular among users.
“The site was extremely popular. It was viewed about 70,000 times a day and, internationally, it ranked thousands of places higher than a well-known and legitimate film download site,” said investigating officer Detective Sergeant Neil Reynolds.
Russia Reaches The Censorship Endgame: Banning VPNs, Tor And Web Proxies
Speaking at Infoforum-2015, Russian MP Leonid Levin, who is deputy head of the Duma Committee on information politics, indicated that access to anonymization and circumvention tools such as TOR, VPNs and even web proxies, needs to be restricted.
Samsung’s spying smart TVs don’t encrypt voice recordings sent over the internet
The telly only records what’s said in front of it after the wake-up command, such as “Hi TV”, is spoken – so it’s not recording all the time. This could change in a future firmware update, Lodge points out, but for now this is reassuring.
However, recorded voice commands are sometimes sent as encoded audio to an outside organization for processing – this applies to any commands more complex than, say, changing the volume. For example, spoken web search requests are piped to a company called Nuance to analyze and turn into query results sent back to the TVs.
A specific server receives data from the televisions in plaintext, and replies with unencrypted responses; for those itching to firewall off access, it is:
av.nvc.enGB.nuancemobility.net 208.94.122.45
The information is sent over port 443, normally used for TLS-secured HTTPS connections and typically not firewalled off. The stream is not encrypted, Lodge said. This allows a man-in-the-middle in the network to eavesdrop on the data and tamper with it.
GCHQ Will Have To Start Letting Everyone Know Whether Or Not They’ve Been Illegally Spied On
Last December, the IPT (Investigatory Powers Tribunal) ruled that GCHQ’s surveillance programs didn’t violate human rights, despite being broad and untargeted dragnets. This ruling — in response to several legal challenges brought in the wake of the Snowden leaks — was unsurprising. The IPT has overwhelmingly supported GCHQ’s spying efforts in the past, having only sided against it in one-half of one percent of the challenges brought against it.
The IPT’s ongoing support of the UK’s intelligence community is unsurprising. To declare any of its programs as illegal or in violation of citizens’ rights would be to implicate itself for its near-constant approval of surveillance programs. That makes its February decision a bit of an aberration. In response to Privacy International’s legal challenge, it changed course slightly, declaring certain elements of the GCHQ’s spying efforts “illegal” — specifically, information sharing with the NSA. But this was only a partial capitulation. The IPT went on to say that this was once illegal but now was not, thanks to its December 2014 ruling. In some bizarre way, the legal complaints brought against the GCHQ managed to legalize its once-illegal partnership with the NSA.
However, its February decision makes it clear that operations prior to December 2014 were illegal, and provides an opening for UK citizens to force a bit more transparency on their intelligence community.
Because the IPT found the intelligence sharing to be illegal, anyone, inside or outside the UK, can file a complaint to the IPT and ask if their communications were part of that illegal sharing, and be legally entitled to an answer. [Privacy International’s Eric] King explained, “If they don’t find anything, it’s likely they respond ‘no determination’. If they do find something, the IPT is obliged to give a declaration to the individual that their communications were illegally interfered with.”
This is far more transparency than has been granted by the NSA, which still responds to similar inquiries about files on citizens (from those citizens themselves) with its omnipresent Glomar declaration, neither confirming nor denying the collected results of its domestic surveillance programs.