Why are apparently so few people worried that a state employee can now select on a computer any item in their individual make-up – their address, phone, mobile, email, passport number, credit card number (any of them), any of their logins to a web service, etc. – and can thus access the content of their communications, who they communicate with, the full range of their internet use, their location, and a great deal else? Continue reading
Tagged with Edward Snowden
A US attack on Syria won’t stop chemical weapons: there’s a better way
An American military strike against Syria in the next few days is a virtual certainty, despite the fact that US public opinion seems as tepid about this action as in the UK.
What may be driving the US is not so much an abhorrence against a resort to chemical weapons – the US said nothing when Israel used the white phosphorous chemical agent against the Palestinians in Gaza two years ago, nor when Iraq used chemical weapons (probably supplied by the West) against the Iranians in the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s. Continue reading
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Regulation of the security services needs to be completely overhauled
The cascade of revelations from the Edward Snowden files gets ever more damning. After exposure of the US National Security Agency’s Prism system and the matching UK GCHQ’s Tempora system, allowing interlocking and virtually unlimited access to almost all internet activity regardless of so-called privacy protections, we now find that a NSA programme entitled XKeyscore to search with no prior authorisation through enormous agency databases containing emails and ‘nearly everything a typical user does on the internet’. Continue reading
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Uncle Sam, what big ears you have!
Translated from the original by François Delapierre
We do not know what is more astonishing. The revelations about the spying on the European Union by the United States intelligence services? Or the surprise this causes among EU leaders? It seems that amid the rhetoric of the unity of the “free world” during the Cold War, prolonged by the idea of the unity of the “West” in the “clash of civilizations”, our dismal European leaders have forgotten that the dominant power in the world has a distinct position to their interests. Continue reading
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What is being done to control mass surveillance?
The cascade of revelations about secret surveillance, thanks to Edward Snowden, rolls on. Today it’s Dropmire which apparently refers to a bug inserted in an encrupted fax machine used for transmission of commercial data at the EU mission in Washington DC. Once revealed, the Americans explain it as designed to collect data on policy disagreements between member states regarding global issues. It is far more likely that it has been used to gather commercially sensitive information to put the US secretly a step ahead in the global market place.
But whichever it is, it is utterly unacceptable and reprehensible to treat allies (or anyone) in this manner, and German outrage has rightly condemned it as tactics reminiscent of the Cold War. But amid all this flood of revelations of dirty tricks, the central issue still remains: what is being done to stop it since both the US and UK governments, the main perpetrators, have sought to defend it, however feebly and evasively? Continue reading
