ISPs in the UK are required to censor a wide swathe of content: what began as a strictly limited, opt-in ban on depictions of the sexual abuse of children has been steadily expanded to a mandatory ban on “extreme” pornography, “terrorist content,” copyright and trademark infringement, and then there’s the on-again/off-again ban on all porn sites unless they keep a record of the identity of each user and the porn they request..
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Tag: gchq
EU’s top court rules against the UK mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the UK spy agency GCHQ acted illegally when it engaged in mass-scale domestic surveillance of every Briton’s electronic communications, a programme that was revealed by documents supplied to journalists by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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Watchdog: UK spies engaged in illegal surveillance from 2001-2012
The UK Investigatory Powers Tribunal has ruled that GCHQ (the UK’s domestic surveillance apparatus) illegally engaged in mass surveillance for more than a decade (starting after 9/11), during which time the foreign secretaries who were supposed to be overseeing their activities “delegated powers without oversight,” allowing the spies to police their own activities. (Images: Defense Images, CC-BY-SA; Cryteria, CC-BY)
In Africa, British spies target allied leaders, executives, and telcoms engineers
Le Monde has published a new collection of documents from the whistleblower Edward Snowden, showing that the British spy agency GCHQ targeted the leaders of allied countries in Africa, as well as business executives and employees of telecommunications companies, whose accounts were a means to gaining access to communications infrastructure across the continent.
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UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal says GHCQ illegally spied for 17 years
The independent tribunal ruled on a case brought by Privacy International, concluding that the UK spy agency GCHQ was acting illegally for 17 years while it amassed huge databases of “bulk collection” data of cellphone location and call-data — a practice revealed by the Edward Snowden docs.
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MI5 warning: we’re gathering more than we can analyse, and will miss terrorist attacks
In 2010, the UK spy agency MI5 drafted memos informing top UK officials that its dragnet surveillance programme was gathering more information than it could make sense of, and warning that its indiscriminate approach to surveillance could put Britons at risk when signals about dangerous terror attacks were swamped by the noise of meaningless blips from the general population.
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UK spy agencies store sensitive data on millions of innocent people, with no safeguards from abuse
Privacy International won a lawsuit forcing the UK government to publish thousands of pages of records on the use of “Bulk Personal Datasets” by the spy agencies GCHQ, MI5 and MI6.
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The UK government’s voice-over-IP standard is designed to be backdoored
GCHQ, the UK’s spy agency, designed a security protocol for voice-calling called MIKEY-SAKKE and announced that they’ll only certify VoIP systems as secure if they use MIKEY-SAKKE, and it’s being marketed as “government-grade security.”
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BRITONS: Act now to kill the Snoopers Charter
Ed from the UK Open Rights Group writes, “Right now, the Government is ramming a new snooping law through Parliament. The Investigatory Powers Bill would force companies such as Sky, BT, Google and Facebook to keep detailed records of what we do online for a year — even if we are not suspected of committing any crime whatsoever.”
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Crowdfunding “The Haystack”: an independent documentary on surveillance in the UK
Edward Snowden said that Britain’s spies have “some of the most extensive surveillance powers in the world,” and those powers are about to be dramatically expanded if the Snoopers Charter passes Parliament.
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