But for that to work as an argument against monitoring the public, you have to start with the assumption that everyone has an essential right to not be seen, to be able to do everything in total privacy. In a world of 6 billion people I put forward the suggestion that no one on Planet Earth has that essential liberty.

I call BS on that Leeds. I live in a house with 3 other people, but I can still go to "my room" and do things there. If I am talking to my family in the UK, why should the UK government listen in on the conversation, just because I don't live in the UK any more?

There are no grounds for that and there were laws in place to make that illegal over the telephone network, unless the authorities had probable cause and obtained a warrant. Because I'm using Skypeout, the conversation is probably being logged by GCHQ, even though they have no probable cause and they haven't acquired a warrant.

The laws of the country where I live guarantee me that freedom. The laws of the UK supposedly guarantee me that freedom, although it seems Hague is saying that GCHQ can ignore the law without actually breaking the law. Doublethink and Newspeak are standard tools of the UK Government it seems.

You are starting from the position that everyone has something to hide. Sure but most is of no interest to anyone else. What is wrong with privacy? Once we start doing things that threaten the public then that is where we should expect to lose privacy. Not before.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk.

France 'has vast data surveillance' - Le Monde report

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23178284

God help Team Merkel if they're caught with anything similar... It'll be interesting to see how France reacts.

With a gallic shrug?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/ju ... -talks-nsa

I wonder when she'll have a chat with Dave, or at least Hague.

Best way to show displeasure is to slash the numbers of US diplomats to an absolute minimum, maybe less than a dozen and see how they cope. If the numbers of tourists are slashed because they cannot process visas then businesses in the US will start to complain.

Prism fallout: EU to investigate US and UK surveillance operations

Calls for more protection for Edward Snowdens of the world

http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/ ... ns-1164051

Excellent.
...


French officials claim spying allegations 'hardly resemble reality'

http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/ ... y--1164079

Yeah, that's pretty much the spin and what look like outright lies we got from William 'doesn't like his private life in the press' Hague, too.

In the last few weeks there have been disclosures that the German French and Australian spy agencies were doing similar things so the protestations of Angela were premature.

Microsoft goes on the Prism offensive, asks U.S. Attorney General to step in

http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/ ... py-1166416



Words fail me.

Most sources that know what they are talking about seem to agree that PRISM is getting the metadata upstream by splitting the cable (source ip-address, date, time etc.), but they can't get the encrypted information. They then present Microsoft, Google et al with a request for the exact information they need.

What you need with the cloud is PIE (pre internet encryption). Having an SSL encrypted connection isn't going to help when the hosted gets a legal request to hand over the information, because it is being stored unencrypted, it is only the transmission that is normally encrypted. If you use TNO (trust no-one PIE), they can't get at the data, without a lot of effort.

Edit: don't forget, the US Government don't need any help from Microsoft to intercept email. If they are already splitting the cable upstream, then all sent email is, in its SMTP form, is in plain text, so they don't need to get a court order to force Microsoft et al to get the contents of email. A tap on a cable outside any company that has email servers will be able to do this.

yeah. This isn't actually true. A lot of businesses - particularly in the medical and finance sectors - send email to 'trusted partners' using TLS encryption of the SMTP transaction (we occasionally have to swap certificates with people for this). Of course, USGov could just force one or other company to give them the encryption keys or just hand over the emails but 'listening on the wire' won't be able to capture that email in any useful form.

True, but 99% of email is sent over SMTP without encryption. I use personal certificates and encrypted email for one project, but our servers are not set up to send encrypted smtp. The certs are also expensive, so most people don't bother, unless they have to.

True true. The mass of email transactions are unencrypted. However I suspect the ones that, from an international or industrial espionage point of view, you'd actually be interested in are the ones that are most likely to be scrambled..