Snowdon is a dummy

All the money you owe me.

On data protection and privacy day, it’s worth remembering that politicians are all too willing to trade in our personal information
[...]
Privacy is something most of us agree is a fundamental right, placed in human rights charters alongside life, freedom of expression, and more. Curtail a private life enough, and the other freedoms wither: self-determination is difficult when someone is constantly evaluating your choices, and free expression is all but impossible with constant monitoring.

And so the unthinking trades we make each day become difficult. Soon, no one will be able to fly into or out of the EU without trading 42 pieces of their private information. Whether in the UK, USA, or several other countries, the mere act of making a phonecall relies on the trade-off of giving away for storage the detail of who you were calling, when, and for how long. Even the act of coming to the Guardian to read this article has (for most users) involved such a trade: to sell the adverts that sustain the site, and simply for us to know what you’re reading, relies on cookies which give us a limited amount of information.

Privacy has become at once a fundamental right and a low-cost commodity. There seems little to no prospect of reversing that, however strange or alien it may seem. We will be making trades for the forseeable future – which means it’s important we start thinking about the price.

The most important issue we have to address is the bad trades that others – such as politicians – would make on our behalf. On Monday, a group of four peers tried to reintroduce the snoopers charter – a huge expansion of UK domestic mass surveillance powers – as an amendment, with minimal public attention and barely any parliamentary debate.

There has been little to no evidence such a trade would bring any benefit: most terror attacks to date have come from those already known to the security services. Our spies cannot track even the needles they find, but they respond by fighting to make the haystack even bigger.

We must make sure we know what politicians would give up on our behalf. But when even fragmentary information can reveal our private lives, we should think about what we trade ourselves, how it could be used, and what we get in return.

You’re reading this article online, where every click is a transaction of your privacy. This article is ending. What will you trade next?

As you know, I personally think that in the long run the loss of privacy will be seen more as a good thing than a bad one.

Frank Apisa wrote:

As you know, I personally think that in the long run the loss of privacy will be seen more as a good thing than a bad one.

Already Walther von der Vogelweide (c. 1170 – c. 1230) the most celebrated of the Middle High German lyric poets wrote: joch sint iedoch gedanke frî ("yet still thoughts are free").

Die Gedanken sind frei ("thoughts are free") is a German song about the freedom of thought from about 1810.
Since the days of the Carlsbad Decrees and the Age of Metternich, "Die Gedanken sind frei" was a popular protest song against political repression and censorship, especially among the banned Burschenschaften student fraternities. In the aftermath of the failed 1848 German Revolution the song was proscribed.

I do hope to have your support at least for the privacy of thoughts.

The less individualistic we are...the greater the chance of unity and peace among all.

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that Britain's GCHQ acted unlawfully until December 2014 in accessing data on millions of people in the UK that had been collected by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) because the arrangements were secret.

Campaign groups Liberty, Privacy International, Amnesty International and others brought the case against the British intelligence agency in the wake of revelations about mass surveillance by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The court found that the collection contravened Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right to a private and family life. It also breaches Article 6, which protects the right to a fair trial.

The breaches could open up the possibility of anyone asking for the information that GCHQ holds on them to be deleted. Some of the privacy groups that brought the complaint are beginning proceedings to do so.

The IPT has never ruled against any intelligence agency since it was set up in 2000. It found in December that GCHQ’s access to the data was lawful from that point onward, and it re-affirmed that decision today. That ruling is now being appealed.

GCHQ pointed to that decision in its response to today's ruling, which it said it welcomed.

A GCHQ spokesperson said: "We are pleased that the Court has once again ruled that the UK’s bulk interception regime is fully lawful. It follows the Court’s clear rejection of accusations of ‘mass surveillance’ in their December judgment."

But the court said today that historical collection was unlawful because the rules governing how the UK could access information received from the NSA were kept secret.

It concerned practises disclosed as part of documents disclosed by Edward Snowden, and related to information found through the NSA’s PRISM and UPSTREAM surveillance programmes.

PRISM allegedly allowed the NSA access to data from companies including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Skype. UPSTREAM allowed the NSA to intercept data through the fibre optic cables that power the internet.

The ruling comes after a legal challenge brought by civil liberties groups Privacy International, Bytes for All, Amnesty International and Liberty. Some of those groups will now seek to find whether their information was collected through the programmes and ask for that information to be deleted.

"For far too long, intelligence agencies like GCHQ and NSA have acted like they are above the law,” said Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International. “Today’s decision confirms to the public what many have said all along — over the past decade, GCHQ and the NSA have been engaged in an illegal mass surveillance sharing program that has affected millions of people around the world.”

But GCHQ argued that the decision was based on a technicality.

“Today’s IPT ruling re-affirms that the processes and safeguards within the intelligence-sharing regime were fully adequate at all times - it is simply about the amount of detail about those processes and safeguards that needed to be in the public domain," a spokesperson said. "We welcome the important role the IPT has played in ensuring that the public regime is sufficiently detailed.

“By its nature, much of GCHQ’s work must remain s e c r e t. But we are working with the rest of Government to improve public understanding about what we do and the strong legal and policy framework that underpins all our work. We continue to do what we can to place information safely into the public domain that can help to achieve this”.

Edward Snowden’s NSA whistleblowing has led more journalists to protect their data and sources, but they’re not giving up on stories

[...] The survey of 671 journalists, conducted by the US-based Pew Research Center and Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, found that 64% believe that the US government has probably collected data about their communications.

49% said that they have changed the way they store and share potentially sensitive documents in the last year as a result, while 29% have altered the way they communicate with fellow journalists.

However, only 3% have opted not to pursue a particular story due to concerns about electronic surveillance and hacking, although 13% have not reached out to a particular source for those reasons. Just 2% have considered abandoning investigative journalism.
... ... ...

SAN FRANCISCO Mon Feb 16, 2015 3:08pm EST
(Reuters) - The U.S. National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other top manufacturers, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on the majority of the world's computers, according to cyber researchers and former operatives.
[...]
Kaspersky said it found personal computers in 30 countries infected with one or more of the spying programs, with the most infections seen in Iran, followed by Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria. The targets included government and military institutions, telecommunication companies, banks, energy companies, nuclear researchers, media, and Islamic activists, Kaspersky said. (reut.rs/1L5knm0)

The firm declined to publicly name the country behind the spying campaign, but said it was closely linked to Stuxnet, the NSA-led cyberweapon that was used to attack Iran's uranium enrichment facility. The NSA is the agency responsible for gathering electronic intelligence on behalf of the United States.

A former NSA employee told Reuters that Kaspersky's analysis was correct, and that people still in the intelligence agency valued these spying programs as highly as Stuxnet. Another former intelligence operative confirmed that the NSA had developed the prized technique of concealing spyware in hard drives, but said he did not know which spy efforts relied on it.

NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines declined to comment.

Kaspersky published the technical details of its research on Monday, which should help infected institutions detect the spying programs, some of which trace back as far as 2001. (bit.ly/17bPUUe)

The disclosure could further hurt the NSA's surveillance abilities, already damaged by massive leaks by former contractor Edward Snowden. Snowden's revelations have hurt the United States' relations with some allies and slowed the sales of U.S. technology products abroad.

The exposure of these new spying tools could lead to greater backlash against Western technology, particularly in countries such as China, which is already drafting regulations that would require most bank technology suppliers to proffer copies of their software code for inspection.

Lord I guess NSA wish to ruin all the US base hard drive manufactures now that they had done a number on the cloud storage industry.

New documents show that Britain's electronic spying agency, in cooperation with the U.S. National Security Agency, hacked into the networks of a Dutch company to steal codes that allow both governments to seamlessly eavesdrop on mobile phones worldwide.

The company targeted by the intelligence agencies, Gemalto, is a multinational firm incorporated in the Netherlands that makes the chips used in mobile phones and next-generation credit cards. Among its clients are AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers around the world. The company operates in 85 countries and has more than 40 manufacturing facilities. One of its three global headquarters is in Austin, Texas and it has a large factory in Pennsylvania.

In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year. Its motto is “Security to be Free.”