[HN Gopher] GCHQ's mass data-sharing violated right to privacy, ...
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GCHQ's mass data-sharing violated right to privacy, court rules
Author : robin_reala
Score : 197 points
Date : 2021-05-25 10:09 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I find it strange that they ruled it was fine to give illegally
| collected information to America. Maybe I'm missing some of the
| finer details, but it seems like they're kowtowing to the US with
| that.
| toyg wrote:
| It's just acceptance that US and UK are now joined at the hip,
| when it comes to security.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| This ruling is extending that attachment to all of Europe
| though. I figured they'd at least put up a show of denying
| it, but the ruling seems to publicly say all of Europe can do
| whatever the US intelligence agencies want.
| ianpurton wrote:
| I guess that would be a 2 way street.
| notyourday wrote:
| It's a charade. I will pay attention when those that
| participated in both deciding to do it and doing it go to
| prison.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Edward Snowden exposed the world's largest surveillance state. It
| seems most of us are comfortable with it. The Chinese are
| following in our footsteps and they are about two generations
| away from the mass global surveillance that the NSA (and
| partners) conduct.
|
| Remember it was our global surveillance dragnet that made us have
| Nelson Mandela (and other blacks) arrested.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2016/05/16/478272695/retired-cia-agent-c...
|
| The NSA also conducted surveillance (illegally but they were not
| white) on homegrown black leaders (considered
| communists/terrorists/traitors by the white US government) like
| Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24279394
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/26/nsa-surveillan...
| daniellarusso wrote:
| I was talking to a colleague about TIA, and he was not
| familiar.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness
|
| Not sure if this was the inspiration for 'Person of Interest'
| tv series.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| If you want to go down the rabbit hole on the history and
| pervasiveness of the surveillance state, its media propaganda
| arms and the torture and drugging of US citizens:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra
| cassianoleal wrote:
| And if you want to dip your toes a little outside of "US
| citizens":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| The School of the Americas is pretty disgusting too.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institut
| e_f...
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| Interesting question. Apparently the answer is yes.
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-
| institution/how-t...
| abecedarius wrote:
| > It seems most of us are comfortable with it.
|
| That doesn't quite follow. There are lots of issues where lots
| of people, even a supermajority, disagree with the status quo
| for a very long time. Motion seems to depend on it becoming a
| partisan or culture-war issue. If neither 'side' sees an
| immediate prospect of wielding an issue against the other, the
| problem stays a "yeah it sucks but what can you do?" kind of
| thing.
|
| (Yes that's compatible with many people actually being comfy
| with it. I'm objecting to the "most of us" part.)
| throwaway292893 wrote:
| This comment downplays the CCPs authoritarian regime. It
| matters what you do with the surveillance (Uighur genocide).
|
| In many ways China's tracking is much more intrusive. Noone
| should spy on its citizens, but at least you have trials in the
| West.
| sneak wrote:
| The US imprisons its ethnic minorities in inhumane camps
| (where torture in the form of extended stays in the SHU is
| not only legal but routine, as well as the same forced
| sterilizations) at a rate 17x higher (per capita) than China
| does, FWIW.
|
| https://talkpoverty.org/2017/08/23/u-s-still-forcibly-
| steril...
|
| It does matter what you do with the surveillance.
|
| Senior DEA officials say they use warrantless mass
| surveillance to perform parallel construction "almost daily",
| according to Reuters.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-
| idUSBRE97409R2013...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
|
| Trials are mostly for show, as the actual source of the
| evidence in these kinds of cases is completely illegal under
| the US constitution, and the evidence admitted and used in
| the sham trials is actually inadmissible under the rules of
| evidence ("fruit of the poison tree").
|
| From the Reuters article above:
|
| > _The undated documents show that federal agents are trained
| to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up
| where the information originated, a practice that some
| experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a
| fair trial._
| throwaway292893 wrote:
| Complete FUD. Nice article full of nothing to distract
| though. There are millions of Uighurs in concentration
| camps right now, sterilized, raped, beaten.
|
| https://www.saveuighur.org/camps/
|
| I don't know if you are part of the 50 cent army, but your
| talking points mirror them.
| sneak wrote:
| It's very well documented:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarc
| era...
| throwaway292893 wrote:
| So is the Uighur genocide, lets be angry about it all.
|
| The difference is, the Uighurs only crime is being
| ethnic, there are other things at play with incarceration
| numbers.
|
| All races are incarcerated, only Uighurs are rounded up
| and sent to their own special work camps with no crime
| needed.
|
| You're trying to compare prison with concentration camps,
| that's FUD.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| We don't care about it anywhere when we pay and commit
| it. In fact we give the leaders who commit multiple
| genocides Nobel Peace Prizes.
| sneak wrote:
| I agree, but we can do a lot more about it in the places
| we have political authority, so long as we don't dismiss
| the very real threat to millions of US minorities of
| torture, forced sterilization, and a lifetime of
| stigmatization as "complete FUD".
|
| People who don't compare US prisons (where overcrowding,
| rape, physical and psychological abuse, poor medical
| care, lack of hygiene supplies, and torture are
| completely routine) to concentration camps are ignorant
| of the realities of the situation.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| There's also the fact it seems to be routine for
| prosecutors to offer deals to people where they just plead
| guilty straight up in return for lighter sentencing. I can
| only wonder how many innocent people take this deal.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| We have held people (including Uyghurs) in Guantanamo bay
| without trials or being charged for up to and over 18 years.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2020/09/30/918454831/trial-of-
| sept-11-de...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/31/uighur-men-
| lea...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_detainees_at_Guantanamo.
| ..
| throwaway292893 wrote:
| Because they were terrorists, we didn't hold 3 million of
| them in gitmo simply because they were ethnic minorities.
|
| Orders of magnitudes in difference.
|
| Holding a few dozen suspected terrorists !== holding 3
| million people (nearly an entire race)
|
| You can justify there may be proof for those few alleged
| jihads. You cannot reasonably prove those 3 million people
| are all terrorists.
|
| Where are the cries to shut down these camps like there
| were cries to shut down Gitmo?
| 1cvmask wrote:
| They were alleged terrorists. They were released after
| they were found to not be terrorists. Otherwise they
| would still be in captivity I suppose.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| China's justification for holding Uyghurs is that they
| are terrorists, with a similar amount of evidence
| provided as for Guantanamo detainees.
| MagnumOpus wrote:
| Orders of magnitude. While both strain credulity, it is
| more plausible to take a government at its word for 300
| people than for 3 million.
|
| Plausibly it could be the case that there are 100 wrongly
| imprisoned people in Camp X-Ray without legal recourse...
| But equally plausibly there are at the very least
| 1,000,000 wrongly imprisoned people in the Uyghurstan
| concentration camps, with thousands added every day...
| atatatat wrote:
| A good chunk of Twitter et al.
|
| Where are _you_?
| igravious wrote:
| > Edward Snowden exposed the world's largest surveillance
| state. It seems most of us are comfortable with it. The Chinese
| are following in our footsteps and they are about two
| generations away from the mass global surveillance that the NSA
| (and partners) conduct.
|
| It's unclear whether most of us are comfortable with it. I know
| that I personally feel fairly powerless and helpless and unsure
| as to what to do in the face of it,
|
| Regarding your statement about the Chinese following in the
| footsteps of the Five Eyes, wouldn't you say that is pure
| speculation?
|
| > Remember it was our global surveillance dragnet that made us
| have Nelson Mandela (and other blacks) arrested.
|
| I think it's important to maintain a distinction between the
| normal so-called spy-craft that led to Mandela's arrest in 1962
| to which that NPR article refers and the global surveillance
| dragnet which Snowden brought to light. There's no suggestion
| in that NPR article that it was wire-tapping which provided
| information as to Mandela's whereabouts.
|
| > he NSA also conducted surveillance (illegally but they were
| not white) on homegrown black leaders (considered
| communists/terrorists/traitors by the white US government) like
| Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King:
|
| The BBC article you link to says this: "The agency eavesdropped
| on civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Whitney Young as
| well as boxing champion Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist
| Tom Wicker and Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald." Tom
| Wicker and Art Buchwald are white by the looks of it - so I'm
| not sure why you're trying to crowbar the US's race issue into
| a topic which is not about race (it's about class struggle and
| power).
| azalemeth wrote:
| In many ways this ruling does not go far enough.
|
| > The court said it had identified three "fundamental
| deficiencies" in the regime. They were that
|
| > bulk interception had been authorised by the secretary of
| state, and not by a body independent of the executive;
|
| > that categories of search terms defining the kinds of
| communications that would become liable for examination had not
| been included in the application for a warrant;
|
| > and that search terms linked to an individual (that is to say
| specific identifiers such as an email address) had not been
| subject to prior internal authorisation.
|
| Out of _everything_ that Snowden revealed -- the fact that
| _effectively everything_ transmitted electronically from one
| human being to another on this planet ended up in the hands of
| five-eyes; including how the US and UK used each others' rules to
| snoop on each others' citizens without oversight -- how is it the
| case that the court only finds that the problems are:
|
| (1) the wrong civil servant authorised the snooping;
|
| (2) the paperwork did not specify that the types of electronic
| communication examined would be e.g. "email" (which is a valid
| search term!);
|
| and (3) finally, the one with teeth, the fact that investigators
| should have _some vague idea about what they are looking for_
| before they start searching.
|
| I don't know about you, but I'm not reassured by this ruling.
| This isn't an issue for the political parties in any nation, as
| far as I can tell, and I don't quite understand why. We have a
| right to privacy -- let's use it! At the very least, I wish more
| people would use GPG. (And yes, Mac GPG mail is actually pretty
| good and usable. I just have nobody listening on the other side).
| twic wrote:
| On (1), the Secretary of State is not a civil servant, that
| term means a government minister. The point is that the
| interception should have been authorised by someone who is not
| part of the government. I don't know who they think that should
| be - ideally it would be a judge, but often in the UK this
| stuff can be authorised by a senior police officer, etc. It
| might end up being the Investigatory Powers Commissioner, who
| is basically a rubber stamp:
|
| https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_C...
| azalemeth wrote:
| Oh, I know that the Secretary of State is not (officially) a
| civil servant. Both are indeed part of government. But as you
| rightly point out, the person that they do get to
| independently assess this is overwhelmingly likely to agree
| to whatever the executive wants: it will be a rubber stamp
| and thus an approval in all but name from the Secretary of
| State. I very much doubt that if you found yourself in that
| job saying 'no' a lot, you'd be in a position to keep it for
| much longer.
| colinb wrote:
| Perhaps, but isn't it received truth that "Yes Minister"
| means no, except if the minister is feeling "brave", or
| perhaps "courageous"?
| twic wrote:
| Just be absolutely clear for anyone reading, the secretary
| of state in this case is the home secretary, currently
| Priti Patel:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priti_Patel
|
| She is a Conservative party politician who was elected as
| an MP, and then appointed to the home office by the prime
| minister, who is also a Conservative party politician and
| MP. She is not "not (officially) a civil servant", she is
| an elected politician.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| UK court rulings don't actually affect UK security agencies.
| They're immune from consequences.
|
| With no poison tree doctrine, we are one of the few places where
| illegally collected evidence CAN (and is) used in courts.
|
| :(
| bloak wrote:
| I think I read the claim somewhere else on HN very recently
| that the "fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine" is US-only.
|
| In my opinion courts should be allowed to use all relevant
| evidence. Deliberately causing a miscarriage of justice is not
| the right way to punish a different person for having broken a
| different law.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| The problem with this is that you then need another way to
| stop police etc breaking the law.
| gjvnq wrote:
| Brazil also adopts the _fruit of the poisonous tree
| doctrine_.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCpL45_2pOA
|
| However, a recent case clarified that ilicit evidence/proof
| may be used in favour fo the defense. (Lula and the leaked
| Moro messages)
| raxxorrax wrote:
| It is not that such a ruling would have any effect aside that
| legislator retrospectively allow such privacy transgression and
| see no problem with that.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Time and time again Five Eyes have shown that they will do
| whatever they wish "in the name of national security" and nobody
| will be punished. That's why we cannot rely on laws that will be
| "worked around either through legal interpretations or FVEY-
| shoring the work", and _must_ insist that systems from 2021 and
| beyond are built with end-to-end security in mind.
|
| Gone are the days of "the government may be listening" as it's
| now "we definitely know they are listening, recording, indexing,
| searching, and parallel reconstructing". We must start treating
| _everything_ as compromised and actively develop against all
| threats... because if we don 't, then we need to swallow the
| bitter pill and accept that state surveillance is not only
| actively used, but it's going to be actively used against us, and
| we should stop complaining about it.
| linuxftw wrote:
| It's a clever trap we're caught in. We have to rely on 'courts'
| to 'rule' to decide basic rights for us like privacy. Every once
| in a while, the courts throw us peasants a bone, to keep the
| system looking legitimate.
|
| You see, the government didn't perform the necessary rituals to
| deny your rights, and the courts have been clear: the government
| needs to 'vote' and say something about 'the children' before
| they take your rights. Of course, that's only if the courts
| decide to hear your case, which is dependent upon the government
| saying the court is allowed to hear your case.
|
| Just keep working through the system, it's working!
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| And if you stop trusting the system and decide to make a new
| one. you're branded a terrorist and executed.
| typon wrote:
| Seeing Snowden still exiled in Russia...the entire system is so
| incredibly corrupt. It's practically vindictive at this point -
| setting an example of what happens when you expose the truth.
| cronix wrote:
| > setting an example of what happens when you expose the truth.
|
| Snowden came after several others who were persecuted by the US
| Govt. Some even had their doors kicked in and guns pointed at
| their faces while they were in the shower. Check out what they
| did to NSA's Bill Binney, who ran COMINT for the NSA and was
| talking about the programs used to collect data before 9/11,
| and after. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs
|
| Bradley Manning (now Chelsea) and Tom Drake (NSA) also had some
| interesting things to say. Here's a good interview with Drake
| and his lawyer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEq42BDBVWk
|
| It was actually because of how these other whistleblower cases
| were handled being the reason why Snowden went to the press
| instead of followed in their footsteps and reporting up the
| chain of command.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Given the bulk interception capabilities of countries on their
| own citizens the irony is they justify the powers because they
| _don 't_ use them? (except they do, just not to support the
| country) The whole enterprise is illigitimate.
|
| Early in my career in security (many years pre-Snowden) I thought
| Echelon was a fun conspiracy theory and it was really just
| something less extreme with good people doing important work. I
| do not anymore. Our societies should find a way to put an end to
| these agencies peacefully, not unlike nuclear test bans and
| disarmament.
| toyg wrote:
| _> Our societies should find a way to put an end to these
| agencies peacefully_
|
| The reality is that the world is a bad place and these agencies
| are a necessary evil. When they fail in their duties, we have
| things like the Manchester Arena bombing, Charlie Hebdo, and so
| on and so forth.
|
| This does not mean they should be free to run amok, like GCHQ
| obviously has for decades now. There should be checks and
| balances, which are sorely lacking at the moment.
| [deleted]
| motohagiography wrote:
| The second greatest trick evil ever played on us was to
| convince us that it was necessary. They have become too
| powerful to not be held responsible and the order they were
| ostensibly intended to preserve has disintegrated as a direct
| consequence of their failure to allow it to evolve naturally,
| imo.
|
| Their capabilities and their influences on our own democratic
| processes are about as welcome as leftover minefields from
| forgotten conflicts, especially as many of them retire to
| write memoirs and mug for television presenters. They were a
| 20th century artifact of the nation state (which they have
| forfeited) and by all popular accounts now they seem to form
| a kind of seedy post-national shadow government engaged in
| protecting sympathetic capital flows. As ever it was,
| perhaps, but we shouldn't be arguing about whether or not
| their behavior is appropriate so much as whether we should
| tolerate their continued existence at all.
|
| Of course they're an easy straw man, but being the key source
| of deception in the world is neither necessary or
| sympathetic.
| atatatat wrote:
| Yeah, disagree. You cannot stop chaos with bulk surveillance.
|
| Can't even get close, and slay human rights, and therefore
| humanity, in the process.
|
| See: China.
| ganzuul wrote:
| > Our societies should find a way to put an end to these
| agencies peacefully, not unlike nuclear test bans and
| disarmament.
|
| The scientific community needs to wrest control from the
| spooks, IMO. Until we do democracy is make-believe.
| piokoch wrote:
| So, basically court decided that this violation is in general OK
| and not a big deal at all:
|
| "In order to minimise the risk of the bulk interception power
| being abused, the court considers that the process must be
| subject to 'end-to-end safeguards', meaning that, at the domestic
| level, an assessment should be made at each stage of the process
| of the necessity and proportionality of the measures being taken;
| that bulk interception should be subject to independent
| authorisation at the outset, when the object and scope of the
| operation are being defined; and that the operation should be
| subject to supervision and independent ex post facto
| (retrospective) review."
|
| GCHQ cannot be happier seeing "end-to-end safeguards", "necessity
| and proportionality", "independent authorisation". So many
| additional employees will be needed to apply "safeguards" (that
| we will need to make sure look great on paper), budget will have
| to be extend to pay all those "independent" authorizators. And
| what is sweeter than nice "necessity" proof in the days when
| almost anybody can turn overnight to be terrorist because of some
| twit.
|
| Why the court couldn't just say: this was illegal, all data has
| to be deleted until X, next time you want to do this, get a court
| order, as courts are those independent authorizators in all
| countries that follow Montesquieu's separation of powers system.
| waheoo wrote:
| > sharing sensitive digital intelligence with foreign governments
| was not illegal.
|
| Maybe it's time it should be.
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