Mass surveillance
Wholesale surveillance of the citizenry is the new normal, introduced in countries such as the USA and the UK partly in secret, partly under the smokescreen of the war on terror introduced after September 11th, 2001. Few (if any?) serious commentators regard legal or ethical obstacles to mass surveillance as effective - the only remaining limitations on data collection are technical.
GCHQ, for example, have admitted to collecting enormous numbers of images from unwitting computer users webcams, some of which are pornographic in nature. In 2014 the LAPD argued in a US court that all license plate data was required to aid in ongoing investigations.
Taken to an extreme, the agencies’ arguments would allow law enforcement to conduct around-the-clock surveillance on every aspect of our lives and store those records indefinitely on the off-chance they may aid in solving a crime at some previously undetermined date in the future. If the court accepts their arguments, the agencies would then be able to hide all this data from the public. - EFF, 2014[1]
Contents
Examples
| Page name | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| "Digital identity" | information used by computer systems to represent a person or group. | |
| "Smart city" | A prison-city with an algorithm as warden | |
| "Strike Hard Campaign" | A research project into repressive social control carried out against Chinese Muslims. | |
| 1-3-30 Plan | A Rockefeller Foundation sponsored large scale surveillance proposal and simulation. Held April 2020 | |
| Australia/Universal surveillance | ||
| CONTEST | ||
| ECHELON | ||
| The world's most popular social network, with over 1,000,000,000 users in 2014. | ||
| Global Internet/Skynet conglomerate | ||
| InfraGard | Program to turn private-sector corporations - having access to enormous amounts of information on citizens - into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI. | |
| Inslaw | Complex financial/political fraud the full dimensions of which were never uncovered, but some of which were forced onto the official record. | |
| Internet/Surveillance | Wholesale surveillance of the citizenry is the new normal, introduced under the smokescreen of the "war on terror". | |
| LifeLog | A DARPA project to create a system of collecting data about users in a single place. It was cancelled when Facebook started, in February 2004. | |
| Mail Isolation Control and Tracking | A US mail program to photograph of the exterior of every piece of mail that is processed in the United States. | |
| Maximator-Alliance | Intelligence Alliance, similar to Five Eyes. | |
| NSA/Boundless Informant | ||
| NSA/PRISM | ||
| NewsGuard | A tech company which is teaming up with Microsoft as regards "fake news" | |
| Project SHAMROCK | NSA surveillance program | |
| Romas/COIN | US SIGINT program of mass surveillance and data mining operated against the Arab world through 2009-2011 | |
| Satellite | ||
| Sentient World Simulation | ||
| ShadowNet | ||
| Surveillance and censorship program | The UK government's 'Surveillance and censorship' (SAC) program is alleged by Kevin Galalae to be a part of the their CONTEST 'war on terror' strategy. He describes it as a project to 'brainwash the young and the impressionable to hold skewed and hypocritical views in line with the British Government’s foreign and domestic policy objectives'. | |
| United States Postal Inspection Service | The "law enforcement arm of the United States Postal Service." |
A Mass surveillance victim on Wikispooks
| Title | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Denis Rancourt | Formerly a former tenured professor of physics, Rancourt was dismissed after covert surveillance and legal maneuverings by the University of Ottawa in Canada. |
Related Quotations
| Page | Quote | Author | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Vaccine passport" | “Eventually we will need some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested (for COVID-19) recently, or when we have a vaccine, who has received it.” | Bill Gates | 18 March 2020 |
| "Vaccine passport" | ““We have no plans to introduce them” said the prime minister (Boris Johnson) when talking about so-called vaccine passports. “I certainly am not planning to issue any vaccine passports and I don't know anyone else in government who would”, said Michael Gove and “no one has been given or will be required to have a vaccine passport” said the man himself, the vaccine's minister Nadhim Zahawi. Now in a slope slipperier than the ones Eddie the Eagle used to chuck himself off, it seems the government have changed their mind. First it was talk of nightclubs or sports events, and now the government is I quote “not ruling out making students be fully vaccinated to attend lectures”.... I guarantee you this is not where it ends.” | Michelle Dewberry | 26 July 2021 |
| Australia/1975 coup d'état | “There were a number of points of tension between Whitlam's government and the United States intelligence apparatus. Whitlam had close ties with the United States, in 1964 receiving a "Leader" travel grant from the U.S. Department of State to spend three months studying under U.S. government and military officials.
After coming to power, Whitlam quickly removed the last Australian troops from Vietnam. Whitlam government ministers criticised the US bombing of North Vietnam at the end of 1972. The US complained diplomatically about the criticism. In March 1973, US secretary of State William Rogers told Richard Nixon that "the leftists [within the Labor Party would] try to throw overboard all military alliances and eject our highly classified US defence space installations from Australia". In 1973, Whitlam ordered the Australian security organisation ASIS to close its operation in Chile, where it was working as a proxy for the CIA in opposition to Chile's president Salvador Allende. Whitlam's Attorney-General Lionel Murphy used the Australian Federal Police to conduct a raid on the headquarters of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) in March 1973. CIA Chief of Counter-Intelligence, James Angleton, later said Murphy had "barged in and tried to destroy the delicate mechanism of internal security". Australian journalist Brian Toohey said that Angleton considered then Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam a "serious threat" to the US and was concerned after the 1973 raid on ASIO headquarters. In 1974, Angleton sought to instigate the removal of Whitlam from office by having CIA station chief in Canberra, John Walker, ask the director general of ASIO, Peter Barbour, to make a false declaration that Whitlam had lied about the raid in Parliament. Barbour refused to make the statement. In 1974, Whitlam ordered the head of ASIO, Peter Barbour, to sever all ties with the CIA. Barbour ignored Whitlam's order and contact between Australian and US security agencies was driven underground. Whitlam later established a royal commission into intelligence and security. Jim Cairns became Deputy Prime Minister after the 1974 election. He was viewed by US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and defence secretary James Schlesinger as "a radical with strong anti-American and pro-Chinese sympathies". The US administration was concerned that he would have access to classified United States intelligence. Whitlam instantly dismissed ASIS chief WT Robinson in 1975 after discovering ASIS had assisted the Timorese Democratic Union in an attempted coup against the Portuguese administration in Timor, without informing Whitlam's government. Whitlam threatened to reveal the identities of CIA agents working in Australia. He also threatened not to renew the lease of the US spy base at Pine Gap, which was due to expire on 10 December 1975. The US was also concerned about Whitlam's intentions towards its spy base at Nurrungar.” | Wikipedia | 2022 |
| Backdoor | “Every year, we learn about some issue in WhatsApp that puts everything on their users' devices at risk. Which means it's almost certain that a new security flaw already exists there. Such issues are hardly incidental – they are planted backdoors. If one backdoor is discovered and has to be removed, another one is added” | Pavel Durov | 5 October 2022 |
| CONTEST/Prevent | “I hear criticism but I absolutely don't accept it. Prevent is not about spying on communities. It's about safeguarding.” | 2017 | |
| China | “The US believes a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot down over its territory is part of a wider fleet that has spanned five continents.
"The United States was not the only target of this broader programme," Secretary of State Antony Blinken said. He added that the US had shared information gathered from the balloon debris with dozens of other countries. China has denied the balloon was being used for spying purposes, and says it was a weather device blown astray. US officials have described the balloon as being about 200 ft (60m) tall, with the payload portion comparable in size to regional airliners and weighing hundreds - or potentially thousands - of pounds. Its presence in US airspace set off a diplomatic crisis and prompted Secretary Blinken to immediately call off a trip to China - the first such high level US-China meeting there in years. It was later shot down by a US fighter jet off the eastern coast. Citing unnamed officials, the Washington Post reported that the US believes the suspected surveillance balloon project was being operated from China's coastal Hainan province and targeted countries including Japan, India, Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines.” | BBC | 2023 |
| FBI | “According to its analysis of the documents in this FBI office, 1 percent were devoted to organized crime, mostly gambling; 30 percent were "manuals, routine forms, and similar procedural matter"; 40 percent were devoted to political surveillance and the like, including two cases involving right-wing groups, ten concerning immigrants, and over 200 on left or liberal groups. Another 14 percent of the documents concerned draft resistance and "leaving the military without government permission." The remainder concerned bank robberies, murder, rape, and interstate theft.” | Noam Chomsky Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI | |
| Bill Gates | “Eventually what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person […] Because you don’t want people moving around the world where you’ll have some countries that won’t have it under control, sadly. You don’t want to completely block off the ability for people to go there and come back and move around. So eventually there will be this digital immunity proof that will help facilitate the global reopening up.” | Bill Gates | 24 March 2020 |
| ID2020 | “Beyond the enormous economic interests that motivate the promoters of the Great Reset, the imposition of the vaccination will be accompanied by the requirement of a health passport and a digital ID, with the consequent contact tracing of the population of the entire world. Those who do not accept these measures will be confined in detention camps or placed under house arrest, and all their assets will be confiscated.” | Carlo Maria Viganò | 25 October 2020 |
| Logic Industries | “ In 2008 Abu Dhabi authorities agreed to pay an Israeli owned company $816mn to install security systems protecting oil and gas installations in the emirate. Through working with two partner companies former Intelligence agent Mati Kochavi has also won contracts to implement the entire emirate-wide Falcon Eye surveillance project that monitors the movements of all those living in Abu Dhabi.” | ||
| Mobile phone | “A mobile phone is a tracking device that also makes calls” | Julian Assange | |
| Holger Münch | “The still high incidence of punishable hate posting shows a need for police action. Our free society must not allow a climate of fear, threat, criminal violence and violence either on the street or on the internet.” | Holger Münch | 21 June 2017 |
| National Security Agency | “Your Data: If You Have Nothing to Hide, You Have Nothing to Fear” | National Security Agency | |
| Platformization | “Platform businesses, such as Amazon, Google and Facebook, have come to dominate their respective markets. They have generated massive network effects by facilitating exchanges with technology. As these platforms get more popular, their user value increases, leading to a virtuous cycle where the entire market coalesces around them. Their success has benefited consumers, with both low prices and access to more data-driven services. But this has also resulted in winner-take-all dynamics, making them powerful monopolies and preventing new entrants from coming in and attracting the market away from the dominant platforms. While users have come to coalesce around these platforms because their needs are being well-served, their powerful network effects risk guaranteeing their winner-take-all position. In their initial days, these platforms rapidly gained user acceptance by providing value to them. Their benevolence is increasingly looking like dominance. While they have enabled interactions and opened up markets, increasing efficiency for customers and vendors alike, they are attracting scrutiny. Data has become currency and they have a monopoly on it.” | Sangeet Paul Choudary | 8 May 2017 |
| Dick Schoof | “Here you come to the metaphor of the frog in the pan. If you slowly make the water in the pan hotter, the frog would stay put. But if you throw the frog into a hot pan, it jumps right out.” | Dick Schoof | 2023 |
| TSA | “El Reg: "Sonic Screwdriver is cleared aimed at molesting seized machines, or during black bag operations, not at interfering with factory-fresh products in transit."
Do it at airports during a customs inspection. Take the computer out of the owner's sight and install whatever you want. Or better still, come up with some sort of bogus excuse to force everyone to put their laptops in checked baggage, and then do it in the baggage handling process. That way the subject wouldn't know they had been targeted. Not that anyone would ever dream of doing something as disruptive as arbitrarily forcing people to check their laptops of course...” | 23 March 2017 | |
| Peter Thiel | “I believe that it is always important to exchange views with people, no matter what their perspectives are. I think we have a lot of problems in our society and we need to be finding ways to talk to people. We need to find ways to talk to people where not everything is completely transparent. Libertarianism is not synonymous with radical transparency. That’s often an argument that Stasi would make in East Germany, when everything had to be monitored by society. And I think you have the best conversations in smaller groups where not everything is being monitored. That’s how you can have very honest conversations and you can think better about the future.” | Peter Thiel | 2016 |
| Russ Tice | “Why would anyone believe a bloody word of what NSA says about their mass domestic surveillance programs? They have lied repeatedly in the past and they are likely lying now. They have been collecting meta data and content, word-for-word, both voice and text, for some time now.” | Russ Tice | 2019 |
| UK | “The UK's communications watchdog Ofcom has overturned its ban on the use of GSM gateways (COMUGs) for overseas phone calls – leaving one of the longest prosecutions in modern English legal history hanging in the balance. The decision comes after a controversial public consultation exercise held earlier this year, in which The Register caught the Home Office's secret spy powers unit trying to anonymously lobby the regulator and keep the ban.” | Gareth Corfield | 10 July 2017 |
| UK/Deep state | “The UK's communications watchdog Ofcom has overturned its ban on the use of GSM gateways (COMUGs) for overseas phone calls – leaving one of the longest prosecutions in modern English legal history hanging in the balance. The decision comes after a controversial public consultation exercise held earlier this year, in which The Register caught the Home Office's secret spy powers unit trying to anonymously lobby the regulator and keep the ban.” | Gareth Corfield | 10 July 2017 |
| Naomi Wolf | “I am not overstating this, I can't say it forcefully enough, this is literally the end of human liberty in the West if this plan [of vaccine passports] unfolds...” | Naomi Wolf | 29 March 2021 |
Related Documents
| Title | Type | Publication date | Author(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Document:10 Ways We Are Being Tracked Traced and Databased | blog post | 10 July 2010 | 'Activist' | A summary overview of technological developments in the main branches of surveillance technology with examples of their current and developing application. |
| Document:Google and the NSA | article | 24 August 2013 | Julian Assange | |
| Document:Hacker Generations | article | 23 August 2011 | Richard Thieme | On the origins and real meaning of "Hacker"; a term which, in company with "conspiracy-theory", "Holocaust-denial" and many others has been co-opted/invented by Establishments to marginalise research deemed most threatening to the Official Narratives that define "Consensus trance" reality. |
| Document:Hacking on a Scale you can Barely Imagine | article | 6 December 2012 | John Pilger | On the glaring omissions and hypocrisies of the Leveson Inquiry into Press standards, noting especially the vast covert programs of interception and permanent storage of every item of electronic communication on the planet for later data-mining wherever the state might deem it expedient to re-construct the life and movements of targetted individuals. |
| Document:Julian Assange at Moment of Truth | Video transcript | 15 September 2014 | Julian Assange | Speech by Julian Assange to the Moment of Truth event in New Zealand on 15 September 2014 |
| Document:NSA GCHQ and the Death of Gareth Williams | article | 14 November 2011 | Trowbridge Ford | A speculative article connecting the NSA with the death of Gareth Williams |
| Document:The Essential Rules of Tyranny | webpage | 29 July 2011 | Brandon Smith | |
| Document:The demise of global communications security | Wikispooks Page | 21 September 2005 | Wayne Madsen | |
| Document:Unthinking extremism - Radicalising narratives that legitimise surveillance | paper | 26 October 2015 | Ben Harbisher | |
| File:Dissent or Terror FINAL 0.pdf | report | 20 May 2013 | Beau Hoda | Dissent or Terror a report that details how the counter-terrorism apparatus was used to monitor the Occupy Movement nationwide |
| File:Full-Disclosure.pdf | report | 4 December 2013 | The Adversaries | If your UK internet service and equipment provider is BT (and probably any other of the large UK ISP's), then it is a trivial matter for GCHQ and its agencies to route a duplicate of all your traffic to a spook server, access your home computer network, install malware and retrieve any passwords and encryption keys stored on it. You have been warned. |
| File:Operation-shady-rat.pdf | report | 2 August 2011 | Dmitri Alperovitch |
Rating
8 November 2017 Robin A good overview of this important topicAlthough rather wordy and in need of better structure, this page gathers a lot of relevant information in one place and presents insight into this important topic.
