As the architect of UK plans for the mass interception of Internet traffic resigns her post, resistance to the Big Brother scheme is increasing, writes Martyn Marwick.

As Jacqui Smith, the UK’s unpopular, indeed, deeply despised, Home Secretary (a post similar in its responsibilities those of a Minister of the Interior in other parts of the world) quits the stage to the sound of relieved cheering, resistance to her totalitarian plan to compel Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to create, maintain and make available to "the authorities" a massive database containing the details of every online communication made in Great Britain is gaining momentum.

Ms. Smith, whose dictatorial bent has become more and more evident over the years, was implacably determined to get her way but was forced by dint of outraged public opinion to pay a degree of lip service to the notion of democracy and therefore, at the end of April,  agreed to "a consultation period" during which interested parties would be able to voice their concerns about the £2 billion Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP). An innocuous title for a Stasi-like scheme that drives a coach and horses through the concept of the right of individual privacy.
And, now she’s gone, leaving the can of worms she opened for her successor to deal with.

Source/Full Story: TelecomTV

In today’s Guardian, Ian Cobain tells the disturbing story of Jamil Rahman, a British citizen, raised in south Wales. His claims of abuse in Bangladeshi custody while British intelligence officers were in the same building add another location to an expanding list of countries in which the British intelligence services are accused of being involved in the use of torture. It also provide the clearest indication yet of direct British involvement in interrogations in other countries.

According to Rahman, whose lawyers believe they have enough evidence to start civil proceedings against home secretary Jacqui Smith, two masked men of European origin were present – and appeared to be directing events – when he was seized from the home of his Bangladeshi wife on 1 December 2005 and taken to a cell in an office of the Bangladeshi intelligence services, where he was held for three weeks. Rahman said he was “stripped, beaten and told that his wife would be raped and murdered and her body burned” and made to record a number of false confessions, including a statement that he had masterminded the terrorist attacks in London on 7 July 2005.

What makes Rahman’s claims particularly disturbing are his reports about the behaviour of two MI5 agents, who, he said, responded to his complaints that he had been tortured and had made false confessions, by saying, “They haven’t done a very good job on you,” and adding, “That’s good, you’ve learned your lesson,” when interrogations resumed after further abuse.

Source/Full Story:: guardian.co.uk

SPY chiefs are pressing ahead with secret plans to monitor all internet use and telephone calls in Britain despite an announcement by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, of a ministerial climbdown over public surveillance.

GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, is developing classified technology to intercept and monitor all e-mails, website visits and social networking sessions in Britain. The agency will also be able to track telephone calls made over the internet, as well as all phone calls to land lines and mobiles.

The £1 billion snooping project — called Mastering the Internet (MTI) — will rely on thousands of “black box” probes being covertly inserted across online infrastructure.

The top-secret programme began to be implemented last year, but its existence has been inadvertently disclosed through a GCHQ job advertisement carried in the computer trade press.

Last week, in what appeared to be a concession to privacy campaigners, Smith announced that she was ditching controversial plans for a single “big brother” database to store centrally all communications data in Britain.

“The government recognised the privacy implications of the move [and] therefore does not propose to pursue this move,” she said.

Grabbing favourable headlines, Smith announced that up to £2 billion of public money would instead be spent helping private internet and telephone companies to retain information for up to 12 months in separate databases.

However, she failed to mention that substantial additional sums — amounting to more than £1 billion over three years — had already been allocated to GCHQ for its MTI programme.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said Smith’s announcement appeared to be a “smokescreen”.

“We opposed the big brother database because it gave the state direct access to everybody’s communications. But this network of black boxes achieves the same thing via the back door,” Chakrabarti said.

Source/Full Story:   Times Online

DNA profiles of almost a million innocent people are to be destroyed as part of a major overhaul of the police national database. They include people who have been arrested and never charged, and those taken to court but found not guilty.

Civil rights groups gave a cautious welcome to the proposals – which will be announced by the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, this week – but said more needed to be done.

An estimated 800,000 of the 5.1m DNA profiles on the database belong to people in England and Wales who have no criminal conviction.

A Home Office consultation paper will also outline plans to delete all physical DNA samples on the database, including mouth swabs, hair and blood. The move follows widespread concerns that the samples could be shared with third parties.

The campaign group Genewatch, which opposes the DNA database, has warned that health and drug companies want access to the samples to create profiles to predict who is genetically susceptible to different illnesses and diseases. There have also been fears the samples could one day be used for racial profiling or even to predict criminal behaviour.

The proposal to scale back the database and destroy the samples comes after a landmark judgment by the European court of human rights last December that ruled the government was wrong to hold the DNA profiles – the genetic codes that identify individuals – of innocent people indefinitely.

Source/Full Story:: The Observer

A BRITISH agent has thrown the war against drug traffickers into chaos by leaving top secret information about covert operations on a bus in South America.

In a blunder that has cost taxpayers millions of pounds and put scores of lives at risk, the drugs liaison officer lost a computer memory stick said to contain a list of undercover agents’ names and details of more than five years of intelligence work.

It happened when the MI6-trained agent left her handbag on a transit coach at El Dorado airport in Bogota, Colombia. Intelligence chiefs were forced to wind up operations and relocate dozens of agents and informants amid fears the device could fall into the hands of drugs barons.

The incident, which was hushed up by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), the agent’s employer, is an embarrassment for the government. It is another blow for Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, who has ultimate responsibility for Britain’s anti-drugs operations and the safeguarding of criminal intelligence.

Source/Full Story:: Times Online

STRATFOR Today »–> April 22, 2009

By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart

On April 8, British authorities mounted a series of raids in Merseyside, Manchester and Lancashire that resulted in the arrest of 12 men suspected of being involved in a plot to conduct attacks over the Easter holiday weekend. In a press conference the following day, Prime Minister Gordon Brown noted that the men arrested were allegedly involved in “a very big terrorist plot.” British authorities have alleged that those arrested sought to conduct suicide bombing attacks against a list of soft targets that included shopping centers, a train station and a nightclub.

The searches and arrests targeting the suspects purportedly involved in the plot, which was dubbed Operation Pathway, had to be accelerated after Bob Quick, the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in charge of terrorism investigations, inadvertently allowed reporters to see a classified document pertaining to the operation as he was entering 10 Downing Street to brief Brown and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith on April 8. An embarrassed Quick resigned April 9 over the gaffe.

In spite of the leak, the British authorities were successful in detaining all of the targeted suspects, though the authorities have reportedly not been able to recover explosive material or other bomb-making evidence they were seeking. British authorities arrested 12 suspects, 11 of whom were Pakistani citizens. Smith told British Parliament on April 20 that all 11 of the Pakistani nationals entered the United Kingdom on student visas. The youngest of the Pakistani suspects, who is reportedly still a teenager, was remanded to the custody of British immigration authorities to face deportation proceedings April 9. The rest of the 11 suspects were released by British authorities April 21, though ten reportedly were placed in the custody of immigration officials.

Many of the specific details of the plot have not yet come out, and due to the sensitive nature of the intelligence sources and methods involved in these types of investigations, more details may never be fully divulged now that there will be no criminal trial. However, when viewed in the historical and tactical context of other terror plots and attacks (in the United Kingdom and elsewhere), there are some very interesting conclusions that can be drawn from this series of events and the few facts that have been released to the public so far.

This case also highlights the tension that exists within the counterterrorism community between advocates of strategies to disrupt terrorist attacks and those who want to ensure that terror suspects can be convicted in a court of law.

continue

So, do you see how the stage is set for persecution ?

Source:  guardian.co.uk

Changing technology means the prospect of a chemical or biological terrorist attack in Britain is now more realistic, says the government’s updated counter-­terrorism strategy published today.

It also discloses that serious ­preparations are under way in the UK to protect against the use of roadside bombs and other “novel homemade explosives” imported from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The document confirms that the government intends to challenge radical views that “reject and undermine our shared values and jeopardise community cohesion” and it will do this by supporting groups and projects through the £70m-a-year Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) programme.

The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, said the government had no intention of outlawing such views or criminalising those who hold them, but she added: “We will not hear these views in silence. We should all stand up for our shared values and not concede the floor to those who dismiss them.”

The document defines those who reject “shared values” as scorning the institutions and values of parliamentary democracy, dismissing the rule of law, and promoting intolerance and discrimination on the basis of race, faith, ethnicity, gender or sexuality. Smith said those who publicly voiced homophobic views would be open to challenge.

The home secretary said the measures would ensure that local authorities understood the risk to community cohesion posed by some organisations.

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Britain has launched a clandestine alliance that recruits citizens and trains them to act as undercover agents against terror suspects.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the initiative is vital for safety in the UK. According to him, tens of thousands of civilians have already been trained for the purpose.

Brown said Sunday that the individuals range “from security guards to store managers” who know how to “deal with an incident and know what to watch for as people go about their daily business in crowded places such as stations, airports, shopping centers and sports grounds.”

British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said the strategy, called Contest Two, would be more open than past counter-terrorism efforts. In the last two years, the UK has imprisoned over 80 suspected terrorists.

Brown went on to claim that more than two-thirds of the plots threatening the UK are linked to Pakistan, saying al-Qaeda members in northern Pakistan and in alleged UK networks are attempting to organize attacks in Britain.

The British prime minister concluded by saying that by 2011, Britain will be spending £3.5 billion a year on counter-terrorism activities.

Source: Press TV

Hollywood might be the center of trendsetting when it comes to fashionable dress and abominable personal behaviors, but it seems to me that Britain has become the trendsetting capital when it comes to fascist governments…so, behold thine future Amerika.

Source: The Guardian

The government is planning to get around a European court ruling that condemned Britain’s retention of the DNA profiles of more than 800,000 innocent people by keeping the original samples used to create the database, the Guardian has learned.

A damning ruling last December criticised the “blanket and indiscriminate nature” of the UK’s current DNA database – which includes DNA from those never charged with an offence – and said the government had overstepped acceptable limits of storing data for crime detection.

Last month the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, said she would publish a white paper setting out “a more proportionate, fair and commonsense approach”, but she has not given any indication whether DNA samples already obtained would be destroyed. However, Home Office sources said the government, which was given three months to respond to the ruling, has “no plans” to destroy samples of DNA.

The revelation raises questions about the extent of the government’s response to the court’s findings and prompted fresh criticism last night of its “surveillance state” ambitions. The Guardian this week revealed the scale of Whitehall plans to mine data on innocent citizens from public and private databases in order to enhance the fight against terrorism.

Writing in today’s Guardian, the justice secretary, Jack Straw, accepts he must climb down on a controversial clause in the coroners’ and justice bill, which civil liberties critics have warned is too vague and widely drawn. Straw admits there are “justifiable concerns” that personal data – from medical records to the identity card register – could be used for purposes far removed from their original intention.

The concerns over handling DNA samples come as the Home Office has set out amendments to the police and crime bill which would give the home secretary power to make new regulations about the retention of DNA, without further parliamentary scrutiny.

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