Snowdon is a dummy

We sleepwalked into this, it started with 9/11, we would have no idea of the extent were it not for Snowden. Security services always want more power whether they need it or not. We shouldn't assume those in power want what's best for us.

And we shouldn't assume that less personal privacy is evil.

Nick Clegg and Theresa May are heading for a confrontation over the future of Britain's anti-terror laws in the aftermath of the controversy over the detention of the partner of the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald.

As Europe's human rights watchdog warned that the treatment of David Miranda could have a "chilling effect" on press freedom, senior Liberal Democrat sources indicated they were prepared to press for major revisions to the Terrorism Act 2000.

The Lib Dem move was flatly rejected by the home secretary, who ruled out any further changes to the act beyond proposals announced before the detention of Miranda.

But the home secretary received a blow when the 47-strong Council of Europe, which polices human rights on the continent, wrote a strongly worded letter to May about the detention of Miranda.

Thorbjorn Jagland, the general secretary, asked May how the treatment of Miranda and the British government demand for the Guardian to destroy hard drives containing leaked NSA files were compatible with Britain's obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. "These measures, if confirmed, may have a potentially chilling effect on journalists' freedom of expression as guaranteed by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights [ECHR]," he wrote. "I would therefore be grateful to you if you could provide information on these reports and comment on the compatibility of the measures taken with the UK's obligations under the convention."

The intervention by the Council of Europe is a significant boost for Miranda, whose lawyers will on Thursday ask the high court for an interim injunction to prevent the police or government using, copying or sharing any of the data they may have taken from his laptop, phone and other electronic equipment they seized at Heathrow.

The National Security Agency on Wednesday declassified three previously secret court rulings related to its domestic surveillance programs, including one revealing a massive unconstitutional collection of Americans’ emails.

While heavily redacted in some portions, the rulings from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are the most in-depth look into the NSA programs first revealed this summer to be gathering information from Americans. In one document, related to an April 2011 petition from the government to continue its collection of internet communications, FISC judge John Bates expressed his concern that the Court was only just learning of the extent of the collection process, which “exceeded the scope of collection previously disclosed by the government and approved by the Court.” This led the Court to realize that it had been operating under false pretenses in judging whether government actions are legal under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act.

At the heart of the FISC’s concern was the NSA’s “upstream collection” — constituting approximately 9 percent of the more than 250 million internet communications the NSA acquires yearly under Section 702 — which siphons off international data passing through U.S.-based cables into a repository where it could be stored for later analysis. This is separate from the discrete Internet communications acquired under the PRISM program, which it gets from Internet service providers. The transactions in question are effectively unable to be sorted between foreign and domestic traffic and further unable to distinguish between a single discrete communication and multiple communications which may or may not have been about the target the NSA analyst was searching for. As a result, thousands of solely domestic email conversations were swept up in the process.

The outcome was a ruling from the Court that the collection was unconstitutional, requiring the NSA to revamp its methods and purge all domestic communications from its databases in 2012. Despite the change in procedures, one footnote in the 2011 ruling spotlights the extent to which the administration had previously misled the Court over the breadth of the NSA’s programs:


The Court is troubled that the government’s revelations regarding NSA’s acquisition of Internet transactions mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program.
[...]
Contrary to the government’s repeated assurances, NSA has been routinely running queries of the metadata using querying terms that did not meet the standard required for querying. The Court concluded that this requirement had been “so frequently and systematically violated that it can be fairly said that this critical element of the overall … regime has never functioned effectively.”

The release of the formerly Top Secret documents is being portrayed as part of the Obama administration’s efforts to shine light on the NSA, in hopes of tamping down on criticism that the body lacks transparency. The administration has repeatedly insisted that the NSA’s programs are reviewed by all three branches of government in response to critic’s claims that the FISC serves as a “rubber-stamp” to the administration. And as promised in President Obama’s press conference on the matter two weeks ago, the government launched a website — hosted on Tumblr — to play host to the newly public documents as well as other items released since the scandal’s beginning. However, the documents’ release was not entirely voluntary, instead being the result of a Freedom of Information Act request from the Electronic Freedom Foundation and American Civil Liberties Union.

I've not said it's necessarily evil, but without any checks, balance or oversight who knows what they're getting up to.

Frank Apisa wrote:

And we shouldn't assume that less personal privacy is evil.

Not per se evil, correct. Neither is the loss of free movement, loss of free speech, ... ... ...

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who’s called for a special advocate to represent Americans’ privacy rights before the secret court, said the NSA mistake was a “highly intrusive breach.” He said it “shows once again the need for strong and effective oversight of government surveillance.”

“Now the question is how many other such unconstitutional practices occurred without the court knowing,” he said, “and without a special advocate to blow the whistle?”

In 2008, the NSA began collecting large swaths of emails that were to, or from, foreigners of interest or mentioned email addresses of foreigners of interest, according to officials who provided information to reporters Wednesday but weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

But the NSA was unable to segregate the emails of Americans.

“On occasion,” one of the officials said, “some of those might prove to be wholly domestic.”

About 250 million Internet communications were collected each year, according to the documents. As many as 56,000 were Americans’ emails.

The violation was discovered three years later as part of a routine oversight process that includes the NSA and the Justice Department. Last year, the NSA destroyed those emails.

“They were having a discussion and a light bulb went off on somebody’s head and said, ‘Oops, this may be a problem,’” an official said.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/21/199985/feds-wrongly-collected-americans.html#storylink=cpy

Right Frank we will love being spy on by our own government 24/7.

Oh please Frank, sometimes I think you do this deliberately. I never said such things were evil per se, but if we just sit round on are arses doing nothing, those that are in power will use that inaction to take more stuff away from us, increase their wealth and control our actions.

David Miranda has been granted a limited injunction at the high court to stop the government and police "inspecting, copying or sharing" data seized from him during his detention at Heathrow airport – but examination by the police for national security purposes is allowed.

Miranda had taken the government to court to try and get the data returned, but judges ruled that the police would be able to make limited use of what had been taken during his nine-hour detention on Sunday. He is the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who has exposed mass digital surveillance by US and UK spy agencies.

The court ruled the authorities must not inspect the data nor distribute it domestically or to any foreign government or agency unless it is for the purpose of ensuring the protection national security or for investigating whether Miranda is himself involved in the commission, instigation or preparation of an act of terrorism.

But the ruling also meant that data cannot be used for the purposes of criminal investigation – although the court had previously heard that the Met had launched a criminal investigation after analysing the seized data.

Detectives have been trawling through the documents that they say Miranda was carrying as he changed planes in London on his way back to Rio de Janeiro, where he lives with Greenwald..

Jonathan Laidlaw QC, appearing for the Metropolitan police, said the data contains "highly sensitive material the disclosure of which would be gravely injurious to public safety". There were "tens of thousands" of pages of digital material, he added.

Laidlaw said the investigation was being carried out by officers from SO15, charged with investigating terrorism and matters involving national security, but declined to give further details. "I am not prepared to alert defendants here or abroad about the criminal investigation that has begun."

He said police were only part way through their investigation of the material so for the court to prevent them from continuing "would be dreadful situation to confront the police [with], bearing in mind the results of the part of the assessment it has been possible thus far to undertake".

The court earlier heard from Steven Kovats QC, counsel for the home secretary, Theresa May, that the data included tens of thousands of classified UK intelligence documents, "disclosure of which would risk lives". He added that May "does not accept that we are concerned here with journalistic material" and believes Miranda "is not a journalist, and stolen documents can't be held in confidence and don't qualify as journalistic materials".
[...]