International Law

Freedom Not Fear Day - Saturday 11th October 2008

Posted on September 29, 2008
Freedom Not Fear Day - Saturday 11th October 2008 It is not just in the United Kingdom that people are getting heartily sick of the repressive technological control freakery, which supposedly democratic governments are imposing on their populations, in wasteful, ineffective, often counter-productive "security theatre" attempts to "Be Seen To Be Doing Something" about political and sociological problems, like crime or terrorism...

BT Webwise Phorm deep packet inspection snooping without consent trial starts Tuesday September 30th 2008

Posted on September 29, 2008
The

Where are the Most Menacing CCTV Spy Cameras ?

Posted on September 23, 2008
There are now generations of children who have never known life without CCTV camera surveillance in the United Kingdom. We are no safer from crime as a result of the millions of such cameras snooping on much of our lives. Long gone are the days when the snoopers could only afford, or were only content, with just a single spy camera...

Still time to email your MEP regarding the Telecoms Package Amendments

Posted on September 23, 2008
There is still time to email / fax your Member of the European Parliament e.g. via WriteToThem.com, ahead of tomorrow's vote on some dubious amendments to some forthcoming European Union telecommunications and internet legislation. See The Open Rights Group for details: ask your MEPs to vote for Telecom package amendments 133 and 138 La Quadrature du Net has a wiki with the Telecom Plenary Package Amendments in question...

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The Noor Hanif letter and political blog censorship via the threat of expensive legal action

Posted on September 17, 2008
Spy Blog does not usually get involved with blog tag memes, whereby one blogger nominates a few others to comment on a particular topic, and then to pass on the same meme to others, chain letter style. However, we have been involved in the Streisand Effect, in defence of the right to free speech of political bloggers and the public in general, regardless of the fact that they might be expressing political views which we disagree with...

BBC Panorama - interesting transcript of the full interview with Ray White regarding GCHQ and the Omagh bomb attack

Posted on September 15, 2008
Our previous article BBC Panorama - GCHQ mobile phone interception and tracking and the Omagh bomb attack and speculations, seem to have been broadly correct. The half hour broadcast programme itself, did not really add any extra factual details to the Sunday Telegraph article...

The Daily Mail is still confused by images of the MI5 and MI6 headquarters buildings

Posted on September 15, 2008
Why do the Daily Mail's online picture editors keep mis-identifying images of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) headquarters building at Vauxhall Cross, at the corner of Vauxhall Bridge and the Albert Embankment, on the South side of the river Thames in London, with that of the Security Service (MI5) ? The latter is at Thames House, on the North side of the River Thames, at the corner of Lambeth Bridge and Victoria Embankment, near to the Houses of Parliament...

West Midlands Police - lost or stolen 4GB USB memory device with "top secret terrorist investigation data"

Posted on September 15, 2008
Here we go again. The Birmingham Post reports that: West Midlands Police search for lost memory stick Sep 15 2008 By Mark Cowan POLICE in the Midlands have spent four days searching for a computer memory stick said to contain top-secret information on terror suspects...

National Automatic Number Plate Recognition Database data retention function creep

Posted on September 15, 2008
Back in 2005, we warned that the unelected, unaccountable quango, the Association of Chie Police Officers and the Home Office were creating, by stealth , and without any public debate or consultation, a new National Automatic Number Plate Recognition Database which could retain the vehicle movement data of millions of innocent motorists, for excessive periods of time, i...

BBC Panorama - GCHQ mobile phone interception and tracking and the Omagh bomb attack

Posted on September 14, 2008
The forthcoming BBC Panorama television documentary Omagh - What The Police Were Never Told scheduled to be broadcast on Monday 15 September on BBC1 at 8.30pm might be of interest to regular Spy Blog readers. The Sunday Telegraph article The words that might have saved Omagh Could a coded message intercepted by intelligence have prevented the biggest atrocity of the Irish Troubles, in which 29 people died? Despite two trials, and millions of pounds spent, still no one is in prison for the Omagh bombing...

The next Home Office data security and privacy disaster ? Sharing all our financial details with private sector "specified anti-fraud organisations"

Posted on September 11, 2008
Where will the next UK Government security and privacy data loss disaster occur ? Given how inept the Home Office has failed to implement policies of Data Minimisation (as recommended in the Data Sharing Review by the Information Commissioner Richard Thomas and Dr...

NUJ video - Press Freedom: "Collateral Damage"

Posted on September 09, 2008
The National Union of Journalists has today released a press release and an online Flash video, which gives a glimpse of the deliberate targeting of even fully accredited media photographers who are covering political protests and dissent in the UK. NUJ film shows police obstruction of journalists The nine-minute video, called Press Freedom: "Collateral Damage", includes examples of the police obstructing journalists in their work...

Communications Data Retention - internet access, internet e-mail and internet telephony

Posted on August 28, 2008
Chapter 46, The Bastion Saint-Gervais, The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas, 1844 - text available online via Project Gutenberg: "But why did we not breakfast at the Parpaillot?" "Because we have very important matters to communicate to one another, and it was impossible to talk five minutes in that inn without being annoyed by all those importunate fellows, who keep coming in, saluting you, and addressing you...

New GCHQ careers recrutiment website launched - why is this not run securely by GCHQ themselves ?

Posted on August 22, 2008
A new GCHQ careers recruitment website seems to have been launched this week at www.gchq-careers.co.uk This is again, like the MI6 Officers website (see our previous blog article - Yet Another MI6 Secret Intelligence Service recruitment website), a Government website which has been outsourced to a recruitment agency, in this case to TMP Worldwide For no good reason, this website does not bother to use a "...

Home Office and PA Consulting lose the names and addresses of all the most serious criminals in the UK

Posted on August 21, 2008
It appears that the Home Office and their sub-contractor PA Consulting have put people's lives in danger, by losing an unencrypted memory stick, containing the personal name and address details of every prisoner in in the UK, about 84,000 people, and also the 43,000 most dangerous criminals...

Yet Another MI6 Secret Intelligence Service recruitment website

Posted on August 21, 2008
The spy business in the UK seems to be booming, at least so far as the creation of Flashy, if somewhat flawed, recruitment websites is concerned There was a front page advertisement for MI6 Officers in The Guardian on Wednesday [hat tip to the Obsolete blog)] - see: Guardian readers, Britain needs you If nothing else, it's a good time to be a spy: it must be, MI6 is advertising on the front of the Guardian * Richard Norton-Taylor * guardian...

The Guardian - MI5 Restricted document - Understanding radicalisation and violent exrtremism in the UK - whistleblower leak or propaganda briefing ?

Posted on August 20, 2008
The Guardian newspaper (Thursday 21st August 2008) claims a Front Page Exclusive story with three articles and a bloated 350Kb .pdf image scan of a single page: MI5 report challenges views on terrorism in Britain Exclusive: Sophisticated analysis says there is no single pathway to violent extremism Background: the makings of an extremist Explainer: counter-terrorism strategy Why has the Americanism "Explainer" crept in to The Guardian ? Picture: the MI5 briefing note N...

Sunday Telegraph magazine article on the harrassment of photographers by jobsworths - time for a bit of sousveillance ?

Posted on August 15, 2008
The Sunday Telegraph "Seven" magazine, has an article about the illegal Harassment of Photographers by officious jobsworths: Has our increasingly paranoid society declared war on the humble 'weekend snapper'? Last Updated: 12:01am BST 17/08/2008 Page 1 of 3 An amateur photographer is chased by the police after taking pictures on the seafront; another man is frogmarched away when using his camera in a town centre...

Draft Constitutional Reform Bill Clause 43

Posted on August 13, 2008
As we get further disillusioned with what passes for effective Parliamentary scrutiny of this Government's never ending output of ever more complicated legislation, which seems to be a substitute for actually achieving anything positive, we did notice that some of our worries about the Draft Constitutional Reform Bill are shared by some other people Joint Committee on the Constitutional Renewal Bill report CLAUSE 43 361...

Racist CCTV - facial recognition techniques used to classify people by race - thankfully this is only an art project !

Posted on June 15, 2008
One of very first thoughts , upon learning that Facial Recognition image processing was actually being deployed on the streets of London, in the Borough of Newham, was that if the system had any success at all in picking out individual faces from a crowd, then it would not be difficult to use such a system to racially classify people by skin colour...

Terrorist financing and money laundering Treasury documents left on a train - time for Whitehall mandarins and Ministerial heads to roll

Posted on June 15, 2008
Even whilst MPs and Lords were being fobbed off in Parliament last Thursday 12th June by Government Ministers, after the Joint Intelligence Committee Top Secret papers were left on a train, regarding the lax and arrogant culture of "these rules and procedures do not apply to me personally", which seems to be endemic amongst senior civil servants in central Whitehall departments, there was Yet Another Example which threatened to give intelligence assistance to enemy terrorists and organised criminals and to unfriendly or evil nation states...

Support the re-election of David Davis via PledgeBank

Posted on June 14, 2008
The Labour party politicians and apologists in the mainstream media may be trying their best to ridicule David Davis' principled stand on liberties and freedoms, which are being betrayed by this authoritarian, yet technologically inept Government, but their online internet fellow travellers, are having rather less success...

Yet Another Review of Whitehall data security - Sir David Omand . Was it an MI5 Security Service officer who lost the Top Secret JIC documents on the train ?

Posted on June 13, 2008
The latest Whitehall national security data scandal is, apparently, "very serious": Yes, Prime Minister Christmas Special - Party Games, BBC: 17 December 1984: Jim Hacker: "Yes, well this is serious." Chief Whip: "Very serious." Sir Humphrey: "Very serious...

David Davis seeks by-election to shame Labour over their creeping authoritarian surveillance police nanny state

Posted on June 12, 2008
David Davis, the Conservative Shadow Home Secretary and Member of Parliament for Haltemprice & Howden in Yorkshire, has announced that he will resign as an MP, and fight a by-election over the principles of civil liberty and the database surveillance state which the Labour Government have inflicted on us, bit by bit, over the last 10 years...

Counter-Terrorism Bill - disclosure of information to intelligence agencies

Posted on June 11, 2008
One of the sections which caught our attention on first reading the text of the Counter-Terrorism Bill 2008 was what appeared to be a retrospective carte blanche, to cover up any past misdeeds of the intelligence agencies, with regard to the handling of confidential disclosures from people who have a duty of confidence e...

Top Secret Joint Intelligence Committee current intelligence assessments left on a train

Posted on June 11, 2008
We are now almost into the second half of 2008, well after the promised tightening up of data security procedures and techniques promised by the still secret Reviews by Kieran Poynter and by Robert Hannigan, which following the scandalous data security and privacy disasters involving the HMRC Child Benefit lost CDROM disks, and the MOD recruitment database stolen laptop computer etc...

Counter-Terrorism Bill - Coroners Inquest nobbling vote won by the Government

Posted on June 10, 2008
Our theory that all the fuss about "42 days" internment without charge would lead to the rest of the controversial measures in the Counter-Terrorism Bill 2008 being smuggled through without any effective opposition seems to be proving true. The vote on the controversial "Coroners Inquests nobbling" section of the Counter-Terrorism Bill: Ayes: 287 Noes...

Home Affairs Committee report - A Surveillance Society ? - unenforceable recommendations which the Government will simply ignore

Posted on June 08, 2008
The House of Commons Select Committee on Home Affairs has published (in print, but , unaccountably in the 21st Century, there is no simultaneous public publication of a web version) a report entitled A Surveillance Society ?. As with similar Home Affairs Committee reports, they seem to interview and taken evidence from a reasonable selection of people, most of whom are critical of one or more aspects of Government policy...

BT internal report leak on illegal secret Phorm test

Posted on June 05, 2008
The forthcoming British Telecom annual general meeting of shareholders at the Barbican in London on July 16th, could be interesting, with a planned protest by furious BT broadband customers who were secretly snooped on for the controversial Phorm advertising interception secret technical trial - see the NoDPI...

Andrew MacKinley MP - under secret surveillance ?

Posted on June 04, 2008
Has Andrew MacKinley, the sometimes rebellious Labour MP for Thurrock, been snooped on by the secret intelligence agencies and by Labour Ministers ? Have his conversations with his constituents and others bee snooped on as well, in contravention of the Wilson Doctrine ? One of his constituents is Michael John Smith, who was convicted of passing aerospace secrets to the Russian KGB, but who is now trying to get his case reviewed...

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