Europe

Britons under heavy state surveillance

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David Cameron is keen for the world to know he’s a fan the Magna Carta, in his words the “foundation of all our laws and liberties.” So fond is the UK prime minister of the 799-year-old document – despite not knowing its meaning (“Great Charter”) just two years ago – that he plans next year to project scenes of British history on to parliament to mark its 800th anniversary.

Perhaps, though, the lightshow is meant only to divert us from how empty a concept liberty in Britain could become. Just as the Magna Carta itself is an overrated document – almost none of it has legal force today, and even at the time it served primarily to protect the rights of a small group of wealthy barons – the UK’s contemporary legal protections are being eroded, and fast.

Nowhere is this clearer than in a witness statement of Charles Farr, the Home Office’s beleaguered director of security and counter-terrorism, to a legal case mounted by civil liberties groups in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations.

Farr’s statement discusses, in veiled terms, GCHQ’s mass-surveillance programs – revealed by the Guardian – and the intelligence agencies’ interpretations of the laws that underpin them. These interpretations are so broad as to effectively render UK citizenship an almost irrelevant protection from government surveillance.

To enter your house, the government needs a warrant. You have a right against self-incrimination in police interviews. But online, through legal sophistry, such rights dissolve to nothing.

Communications between two UK citizens, referred to as “internal communications,” require an individual warrant to intercept; communications in which at least one party is foreign, referred to as “external,” can be intercepted under certificates covering broad subject areas, issued by the secretary of state – each one potentially affecting millions of people.

Whether a communication is internal or external is therefore crucial: if it’s the former, you’re protected and can only be surveilled with a warrant. If it’s the latter, you’re fair play to be collected and analyzed in foreign intelligence dragnets, with a lower degree of protection.

Offline, the distinction is obvious: write a letter to a UK address, or call a UK landline, and your communication is protected. Online, the agencies have given themselves carte blanche. Farr’s statement reveals the UK has judged that if you communicate with friends on Facebook or other social media sites, you are actually communicating with Facebook. And, since their servers are overseas, that’s an external communication. The same holds true for Google searches, Twitter posts and more – all, they say, can be within the dragnet.

This ruling comes despite well-known interpretations of the law for email: if one Brit emails another, that communication is “internal,” even if it travelled through foreign servers to get there. The agencies have, it seems, willfully ignored that precedent to re-engineer the rules for the second wave of internet communications, and done it entirely in secret.

The implications of such a ruling go much further than messages: GCHQ has already been shown to record, in bulk, webcam chats… These would, it seems, now qualify as external communications
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The scope goes further still as the “internet of things” – home appliances hooked up to the web – catches on. Today, you can buy heating or air-conditioner systems that track your movements using your mobile phone to warm or cool your house when you’re on your way home. If it’s run by a company held overseas, that record is also an external communication.

There’s not a shred of evidence that agencies have sinister intent in their collection programs: they’re not trying to build the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. But it’s impossible to separate UK communications from those of foreigners, so the agencies are struggling for a legal way to collect both.

Their judgment is that privacy is only challenged once such information is looked at by an analyst, not when it merely sits on a server. But to mount a legal challenge, you must show you were surveilled – and the agencies will never reveal who was or was not a surveillance target, saying that’s classified.

In their earnest desire to make sure they can track terror targets, our surveillance agencies have been drawn into collecting the innermost details of millions of lives: whom we talk to, what we say, where we are and how we live.
This is how liberty is eroded: not with a bang but with a subclause.

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