Magna Carta versus Snoopers’ Charter

black_sheep_text_OK, this has to be a bleed­ing obvi­ous point, but I feel moved to make it anyway.

After the bru­tal Wool­wich murder of  Drum­mer Lee Rigby,  there were calls from the Brit­ish securo­crats to resur­rect the dis­cred­ited Com­mu­nic­a­tions Data bill — aka the Snoop­ers’ Charter.  Cap­it­al­ising on the nation’s shock, they believed it was the right time to push through a par­tic­u­larly dra­coni­an piece of legis­la­tion, as I wrote at the time.

The aim of the Snoop­er­’s Charter is to store all the meta-data of our com­mu­nic­a­tions in the UK, which means they can poten­tially be used as evid­ence against us at some neb­u­lous future point if the leg­al goal­posts shift — as they seem to be doing at an alarm­ing rate these days.

Not only are act­iv­ists now being called “domest­ic extrem­ists” or “ter­ror­ists”, but the concept of secret courts seems to be meta­stas­ising at an alarm­ing rate — it is not longer just a concept used in immig­ra­tion and now civil courts, it has reached the giddy heights of the Supreme Court in the UK, with the secret hear­ings around the Ira­ni­an Mel­lat bank. Top UK Law Lord Neuber­ger was recently quoted, in the Daily Mail of all places, as say­ing that secret justice is no justice.

But I digress. Post-Wool­wich, the securo­crats were over­taken by events. The cour­ageous Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the fact that the NSA and its pals like GCHQ are already hoover­ing up all our elec­tron­ic com­mu­nic­a­tions, as well as spy­ing on top politi­cians. As a res­ult the securo­crats have gone to ground, but no doubt they will try to slith­er out again soon.

Or per­haps not — today still fur­ther sur­veil­lance hor­rors emerged as a res­ult of the Snowden dis­clos­ures: the UK listen­ing post GCHQ, which has long had an unhealth­ily inces­tu­ous rela­tion­ship with the NSA, has gone to the next level with the “Total Mas­tery of the Inter­net” pro­gramme, code­named “TEMPORA.

The repor­ted cap­ab­il­it­ies of TEMPORA are huge — GCHQ can tap into all the inform­a­tion flow­ing through the trans-Atlantic fibre optic cables and bey­ond. It is truly suck­ing on the fire hydrant of information

This should be gobsmack­ing news, but the concept was already repor­ted in The Register 4 years ago. The trouble is, nobody really cared then or just thought it was a bunch of geeks being para­noid. Now this is glob­al news thanks to the brave actions of a whistleblower.

One has to won­der if the UK gov­ern­ment is so keen to ram the Snoop­ers’ Charter into law as a ret­ro­grade jus­ti­fic­a­tion for the endem­ic PRISM and TEMPORA snoop­ing that has already been going on for years? And let’s not for­get the old pro­to­type snoop­ing programe, ECHELON

As a lead­ing European pri­vacy cam­paign­er recently wrote, by the year 1215 Brit­ish bar­ons had more basic rights under the Magna Carta than we mod­ern day serfs can pos­sibly aspire to now.

How can we be going back­wards, so fast?

O tem­pora, o mores indeed.…. some clas­si­cist, some­where in the bowels of the Brit­ish intel­li­gence agen­cies, is hav­ing a laugh.