Imagine a world devoid of privacy. Then, listen to the silence on the wires as America devolves into a fascist, or communist, or totalitarian state. But not on my watch. See you in court!
You might not have heard that Sierra Madre CA is under siege from armies of pedophiles, but despite that, we trust the authorities to handle it, and keep the children safe, and we especially believe that the 70 billion dollar magic pedophile catcher machine is the tool to do it with. That and a little bit of hard science, like predictive ponerology.
What this portends is terrifying.
And, if these miracle tools fail us, we have friends in high places that help us- like the Five Eyes Alliance, which, like our small, private towne, believes that our privacy is sacred-and without which the great United States could never have existed.
Did you know that the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand participate together in an electronic eavesdropping cooperative called “The Five Eyes Alliance“? Or that Britain “has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency”? That’s big news, right!
It’s also four days old. Maybe some of you caught it, but you know what: The surveillance news is coming so fast these days that it’s nearly impossible to process it all. One day, the scandal is that big Internet companies secretly share data with the U.S. government. A few more days pass, and then this drops:
One key innovation has been GCHQ’s ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months. GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects. This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user’s access to websites – all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets.
And this:
By May last year 300 analysts from GCHQ, and 250 from the NSA, had been assigned to sift through the flood of data. The Americans were given guidelines for its use, but were told in legal briefings by GCHQ lawyers: “We have a light oversight regime compared with the US”. When it came to judging the necessity and proportionality of what they were allowed to look for, would-be American users were told it was “your call”.
What this portends is terrifying.
Say you’re the NSA. By law, there are certain sorts of spying you’re not lawfully allowed to do on Americans. (And agency rules constraining you too.) But wait. Allied countries have different laws and surveillance rules. If there are times when America’s spy agency has an easier time spying on Brits, and times when Britain’s spying agency has an easier time spying on Americans, it’s easy to see where the incentives lead. Put bluntly, intelligence agencies have an incentive to make themselves complicit in foreign governments spying on their own citizens.
NSA spokeswoman Judith Emmel rejected any suggestion the U.S. agency used the British to do things the NSA cannot do legally….follow the links to learn more!
The Privacy and First Amendment Beacon Shines On. 