Security devours freedom

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

A flock of sheep is in the enclosure and the mother ewe asks: “Children, do you know why we are surrounded by barbed wire?” “I know, Mom!”, says one of the lambs. “That is there to keep the terrorists out, so that we can enjoy our freedom in peace.”

The terrorists hate us for our freedoms we are being told and in order to fight them and to keep us safe we have to give up our freedoms piece by piece to the powers-that-be.

The powers-that-be press the people to clamor for more and more security and protection by creating more and more threats and claiming that in order for them to be able to protect us they need to have access to all our telephone data, our Internet data, and more and more surveillance of all our lives, of everything that we do. We must, we are told, to give up more and more freedoms for which the terrorists hate us here so much.

Well, the way things are going there will soon be nothing left anymore for them to hate us any longer. We will have given away all those freedoms, more or less voluntarily, to be safe from terrorists (and criminals).

All those CCTV cameras neither deter crime, nor do they help to solve crime, and they definitely do not stop terrorism. Neither will broad telephone intercepts, especially on cell phone networks, and data collection and retention. But it will make “1984” look like a children's story.

Incrementally our freedoms, that we are being told the terrorists hate us so badly for, are being eroded and removed and the people, in general, by clamoring for more and more safety and security, having been first scared by the powers-that-be into believing all those threats and dangers, are playing right into the hands of the elite whose aim is to remove our freedoms from us.

More and more surveillance, data retention, monitoring of everyone's Internet activity and (mobile) telephone calls, and whatever else they are going to come up with next is not there to keep us, the public, safe but to monitor everything that we do just in case that we get ideas above and beyond our station.

It is all about people control and has absolutely nothing to do with making and keeping us safe from terrorist attacks or such like. How can any of those measures prevent a suicide attacker carrying out his “mission”? It cannot and will not. In the same way that police and soldiers on the streets, even in armored carries, won't. If you shoot a suicide bomber the bomb goes off, if you challenge him he will detonate it. Off it goes in any case and there will be victims.

None of those measures are designed to keep us safe. They are designed to keep us controlled and to keep us in a perpetual state of fear.

© 2017

Is it time to rethink our communications?

Is it time to rethink how we communicate and what means we use?

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

In the light of the government surveillance of Internet traffic, etc., it may be time to rethink how we communicate with one another and which steps to take to regain our privacy.

When it comes to letters and especially emails the use of ciphers may have to be considered once again to stop the authorities spying on the content of such messages.

However, any algorithm-based and especially computer-generated codes and cyphers can be broken by the same machines that generate them. It has been shown, though, that messages as were created by espionage agencies during the World Wars, the Cold War, and already before, are, basically, uncrackable by computers. The message found on the leg of a dead carrier pigeon from the time of WWII in 2012 in Britain and which GCHQ and other have admitted they will never able to crack as they cannot understand what the code is based on. It could appear that that particular cypher is based on a book that both the sender and recipient had and the code based on that.

The 5-figure code thus created never repeats the same number for the same letter or word and thus is, basically, uncrackable, at least not in a short space of time, not even by the most powerful computers.

Both emails and letters have been and are subject to intercept by the like of the NSA, GCHQ and other spy agencies and while emails will arrive at the recipient letters may not or are also subject to intercept and then delivery, slightly delayed.

While, in theory, law enfarcement (no, this is not a typo) do require a warrant to intercept mail (and this goes also for telephonic communications) the truth is a different one and intercept without warrant happens rather all too frequently.

We can always, nowadays, take it for granted that the authorities will take it upon themselves, claiming they have to act to prevent terrorist attack, to read the letters (and other postal communications) of people who they deem to fall into the terrorist category, and this could even simply be journalists and bloggers.

So other ways needs to be found and used to prevent such intercepts.

Here we may have to reconsider, and I use that word deliberately, the use of couriers and dead letter drops.

Such couriers, as in the days of the coffee houses of old and the penny post, could just be someone who travels to a certain location where he or she either drops a letter or package off at an address or, better still, some other collection point. In the days of the penny post such a drop off point was another coffee house, obviously, where the recipient would visit daily or every so often and then take receipt of his mail.

It is a sad state of affairs that in a so-called free society one has to even consider such steps despite the postal law that states that tampering – and that includes the agencies – with the mail in any shape or form is a felony. It would appear that the law only applies to ordinary mortals and the agencies deem themselves above the law and, apparently, are treated in such a way as well by the law.

Every citizen is, in our society, which is supposed to be free, regarded as a terrorist and criminal, so it would appear, considered guilty until he or she can prove him- or herself innocent and every contact one may have and correspond and communicate with, whether by email, mail, telephone or social media is considered a co-conspirator.

It has to be assumed that even if the authorities are not reading each and every mail and email the details of sender and recipient are being recorded and archived “just in case”.

Dead letter drops – and no, you don't have to kill the letter first – can be many kinds of locations and I am sure that we all have seen such in use in spy movies or read about them in the appropriate kind of books. But dead letter drops were not just used by spies but also by others who had to operate in one way or the other clandestinely and it would appear that in our society today we all will have to send much of our communications in one or the other clandestine way.

Other ways of such communications are letters (and emails) that appear totally normal stating, for instance, that “Uncle Jim's cow has a new calf”, but the true meaning being only known to the sender and the recipient. Such messages were used, by radio broadcast via the BBC in those days, for the resistance and SOE agents in occupied France.

Telephonic communications cannot, unless one has a serious end-to-end encryption VoIP system, be considered secure at all and cell phone communications not at all. All must be regarded as being monitored and thus we must either work out codes with the other side or, on the other hand, be careful what we say and how we say things.

The spy agencies of our various countries, external and internal, employ computer programs – Echelon and Carnivore being just two of them – that scan in real time for so-called key words and the list of those words is available on the Internet on more than one location. The mere use, in email or telephone call, of such a key word or several of them will immediately trigger the program to intercept and record the communication and may render the parties subject to investigation and further surveillance.

Government and its agencies are definitely out of control and no change in government will make the slightest difference. It would appear that, while we are all being considered terrorists and criminals we will have to make the change and change the system, not the government.

© 2013

We don't spy on Americans, just anti-government Americans

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

We don't spy on Americans, just anti-government Americans, stated the Director of the Fusion Center, Richard Davis, in support of the CCTV cameras, drones and other spying operations of the US government on home soil.

It would appear that Mr. Davis either lives in a fantasy world or, and that is more like it, he believes that the people are stupid and believe everything that they are being told.

Those cameras and other surveillance measures, in the same way as in Britain, in Germany, and elsewhere, are watching everyone and they do not make a distinction between good guy and bad guy.

But, as the authorities have said in Britain, and also in Germany when the Federal Trojan was being introduced to spy on people's PCs from within their PCs, you don't have to worry about anything if you have nothing to hide and are not breaking the law.

This surveillance state has nothing to do, despite what we are being told, as we can see from the statement by Mr. Davis, with fighting crime but everything to do with powers-that-be fearful of its citizenry because the government no longer serves the people, as it should do, but only itself and the powers-that-be.

It is all about people control, in the way envisioned by George Orwell in his novel “1984” only much more sophisticated and much subtler than in that book. In fact the powers-that-be have, in many cases, got the people to demand the CCTV surveillance and other other measures that they, the powers-that-be wanted, under the guise of that it is protecting the people and especially that it is protecting the children.

The mantra with regards of protecting the children is being used time and again and has been used. Restricting access to Internet sites, filtering content and all that was also “to protect the children”. However, it is not the governments' job to do that but that of the parents.

Other excuse was the “war on terror”. Sorry, but who is the real terrorist, namely our very governments, who insist, such as does the USA, to use killer drones to attack the wrong target and kill children in Afghanistan and Pakistan and who support rogues states such as the Zionist entity in Palestine.

CCTV cameras neither deter nor prevent nor help solve crimes, a fact admitted even by senior police officers in public, and neither do they do any thing to lessen any possible terrorist attacks.

The US Supreme Court has rules that it is no longer the job of the police to protect the citizens but that it their job, and only job, is to enforce the law.

All the surveillance methods that are being employed, from “simple” CCTV to monitoring telephone, Internet and the rest, are aimed at doing but one thing and that is to control the people and to enable the authorities to act against those that think along lines that run counter to what the powers-that-be want people to think.

They spy on all of us, not just on the criminals and terrorists and when Mr. Davis says that they are only spying on anti-government Americans he is saying that they are after everyone who does not agree with the policies of the government and who wish to live differently.

Whatever happened to the land of the brave and the home of the free. The free definitely are no longer free as they are not allowed to be free. And they call it a democracy, not that the United States were ever meant to be one; they were, in fact, meant to be a Constitutional Republic.

But leaving that factor aside we are all facing this same threat from our very governments, namely to have our liberties and our privacy infringed upon further and further until such a time, no doubt, that Orwell's “1984” looks more like a child's comic than reality for reality will be far worse and the Gestapo and the Stasi will look like schoolboys in comparison.

The worst part of it is going to be, however, that the majority of the people will have given their consent to this by clamoring for more and more security, not being prepared to do their own bit in that department.

The people have abdicate their own power and responsibility to others who have assumed control and claim that because they were elected to office they have the right to implement all those restrictive measures and more. They see being elected to office meaning that they have the right and authority to make decisions on behalf of the people and tell them what to do as they see the people as nothing more than naughty children. This is not representative government, that is dictatorship and a dictator can be a single man or a parliament. It makes no difference to the outcome.

We will never be free (again) until we make the changes necessary to change the system. We do not need a new government, we need a new system; one without a government.

© 2013

Powers of RIPA legislation abused

Ex-Chief of MI5 'astonished'

by Michael Smith

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) was passed in 2000 to regulate the way in which public bodies such as the police and the security services carry out surveillance.

To begin with originally only a small handful of authorities were able to use RIPA but its scope has, for some reason, been expanded enormously and now there are at least 792 organisations using it, including hundreds of local councils.

This has generated dozens of complaints about anti-terrorism legislation being used to spy on, for example, a nursery suspected of selling pot plants unlawfully, a family suspected of lying about living in a school catchment area, and paperboys suspected of not having the right paperwork.

Now those campaigning against the abuse of RIPA have got a new ally in the person Lady Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5. In a speech in the House of Lords recently, she said she was "astonished" when she found out how many organisations were getting access to RIPA powers.

Those that nowadays, more or less willy-nilly seem to be granted the right to carry our surveillance for this or that reason, should never, so it seems as far as the Security Services are and were concerned, be given those powers and rightly so.

While there may be reasons in fact for councils and others to, at times,m be granted powers under RIPA no council, per se, needs to carry our covert surveillance of dustbins for instance as to what people put into them. The same is true in respect to other uses that RIPA has been used for.

When RIPA was introduced the activities authorised by that legislation were meant be confined to the intelligence and security agencies, the police, and Customs and Excise.

The legislation was drafted at the urgent request of the intelligence and security community so that its techniques would be compatible with the Human Rights Act when it came into force in 2000.

Nowadays, however, for reasons unfathomable, every authority of whatever kind, from local councils and trading standards – and that latter one can still be understood – over the Milk Marketing Board equivalent and the one responsible for eggs and whatever else, aside from police, security services and HMRC, that is to say Customs and Excise, are given such covert surveillance powers.

Britain is the fast becoming, if it is not already, an all-pervasive surveillance society and British subjects are the most spied upon people on this planet, ahead even, so it would appear to citizens of Russian and even of Cuba.

On the principle governing the use of intrusive techniques which invade people's privacy, there must be total clarity in the law as to what is permitted and they should be used only in cases where the threat justifies them and their use is proportionate.

Presently, however, it would appear to be neither and as far as a great many people who are in the know amongst the general public are concerned this is very disconcerting and it is creating resentment amongst the people.

However, it seems that the current Labor administration in the United Kingdom could care less as to what the public thinks really. They have a majority in the House and hence do not care one iota about the people.

How can we expect to combat terrorism on our shores when we alienate the general law-abiding public who should be the eyes and ears of the authorities by using spy techniques and anti-terror legislation against them who have done nothing wrong.

The idea of the DNA and fingerprint database and the idea of monitoring all email and Internet traffic of every subject of Her Britannic Majesty is not going to bring the people onto the side of the government. Rather the opposite.

People who work in the field of security, I am sure, can see that but those that try to lord it over the people, whether central or local government do not care, it would seem. Councils up and down the country use RIPA powers against people that may or may not put the wrong stuff into their dustbins; who may put their dustbins out at the wrong day, and such like. As far as I, and Lady Manningham-Buller, see this is a total misuse of the powers of the act. Time some reigning on was done here.

© M Smith (Veshengro), December 2008
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Private Web spies monitor activists online for Australian police and attorney-general

God defend me from my friends – from my enemies I can defend myself

by Michael Smith

A private intelligence company has been engaged by police in Australia to secretly monitor internet and email use by activist and protest groups, according to a report.

The company was hired by Victorian Police, the Australian Federal Police and the federal Attorney-General's department to monitor and report on the internet activities of anti-war campaigners, animal rights activists, environmental campaigners, and other protest groups.

The Melbourne-based firm has for the past five years monitored websites, online chat rooms, social networking sites, email lists and bulletin boards, so says the report, and has gathered intelligence on planned protests and other activities, and even though many, if not even the majority, of those on the watch list have broken no laws.

Welcome to the fascist Dominion of Australia. Then again, it would appear that the mother country, Britain, is headed the same way, with the security services running roughshod over all civil liberties possible. Is this a sign of things to come?

This private intelligence company has also prepared threat assessments and intelligence reports for government agencies that included material from media reports, speeches, academic journals and publicly available company data, but no private correspondence, so it is claimed, was monitored.

As to the latter I would, personally, be very dubious. If they go as far as they have gone the chances are that they may have gone further still but that this is more secret than other things.

The company was not named at the request of its management for fear extremists may target the firm.

The news comes a month after Victorian police were found to have targeted community and activist groups in a long-running covert operation.

So much for the claims of freedom and liberties in Australia. If that is freedom and liberty then I would not want to see what happens should they change tack.

There is one difference between Australia and the UK and that is that in Australia it seems to be easier to find out those things that the services are up to compared to the UK. In the latter place the law and the culture of secrecy makes getting such information very difficult indeed, despite of the “Freedom of Information Act” and if they can claim that they are monitoring suspected terrorists then, well, no chance of getting info and anything that ends up leaked and then published could get one killed.

© M Smith (Veshengro), November 2008
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