Britain & The USA Have Been Spying On Their Friends

Britain was last caught reading foreign diplomats emails during the 2009 G20, but that's hardly the first time a government has snooped on its allies. At that particular G20 meeting, the British spy agency GCHQ set up fake Internet cafes for delegates to use so as to log their keystrokes, broke into their BlackBerries and kept round-the-clock records of phone calls during the summit. 

Meanwhile, various American agencies monitored the phone calls of former Russian president and current prime minister.

The surveillance of private communication dates from long ago. Discovering traces of intelligence operations that occurred two thousand years ago, which even then were meant to be secret, is not impossible and the intelligence business is as old as civilisation itself.

Once the steps in the process have been identified, they can be traced in almost any civilisation that left historical records. 

In the days preceding modern forms of technical collection, whereby sound recording devices, hidden cameras, and satellites gather data, people were the only means commanders and political leaders had to collect the vital information they needed to survive the plots of their enemies. Before bugging devices, there were eavesdroppers behind curtains, and the toga and dagger might indeed have been symbols for the way the Romans carried out their domestic and foreign policy objectives.

Spying on your allies has long been a staple of international diplomacy, dating back to the first embassies established by 16th century Italian city-states, where cryptanalysts would slice open the wax seals of intercepted, coded messages with hot knives before deciphering them. Before the advent of email, modern spy agencies had to break codes hidden within telegraphs in order to read them. In at least once case in the early 20th century, the US government used surveillance and code cracking to score a major diplomatic victory against Japan.

• As revealed by Edward Snowden, the US National Security Agency (NSA) was illegally collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans. The NSA tapped directly into the servers of nine internet firms, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, to track online communication.

• Britain’s GCHQ and US Intelligence spy on Internet communications. The UK spy agency was tapping fibre-optic cables that carry global communications and sharing vast amounts of data. The GCHQ operation, codenamed Tempora, had been operating for eighteen months and GCHQ was able to boast a massive  collection of data, tapping into 200 fibre-optic cables to give it the ability to monitor up to 600 million communications every day.

WikiLeaks claim have seen documents that confirm the Central Intelligence Agency hacks smartphones, computers and connected TVs to spy on American citizens and others around the world.  The techniques disclosed in these documents are highly targeted and the vast majority of ordinary citizens are outside the scope this type of surveillance.

For average citizens starting to think about how to keep their communications out of reach of Big Brother, here are some of the ways to lock down devices and keep government entities, advertisers and corporations out of your daily lives.

• To avoid surveillance, by governments or others users, you should switch to more secure apps for messaging, like Signal, which is free for download. The app is designed to avoid surveillance, allowing users to send encryption-protected information to others who also use the app and collects and stores very little data about users. 

• WhatsApp, for example, is also encrypted but it does store metadata - the information about who you are messaging and where, and is owned by Facebook whi have recently changed their privay policy to share user data with other companies that it owns.

• Similarly, iMessage is encrypted by default, but Apple stores metadata on user conversations for up to 30 days and can hand the information over to law enforcement with a warrant. Messaging on iPhone is also only encrypted between two iPhone users, so texting Android users will revert messages to unencrypted SMS. Apple has had a well-reported dispute with law US enforcement over equipping devices with so-called “back doors” to enable them to access user information. 

No method is 100% secure, as the CIA has been able to access phones directly, bypassing encryption. This means they could install keyloggers or other surveillance tools directly onto user devices, intercepting communication at the source. The documents released by WikiLeaks allege that the CIA built hacking tools that could remotely control devices including iPads, iPhones, Android devices and computers, hacking the camera and microphone to secretly record video and sound. 

A very simple and inexpensive way to put a stop to this is to simply cover the camera with electrical tape or a Post-it Note. 

Even without the government looking over our shoulders, social media makes it easy to give away a lot of privacy on our own, posting vacation photos and other personal details. Going completely dark on social media, deleting Facebook and Instagram accounts and moving to a cabin in the woods to avoid tracking, may be too extreme for the average consumer. These companies want to know everything you do online, whether it’s when you post to social media, or what subject you’re reading about on Wikipedia. 

As tracking techniques get more advanced each year, so do the methods to thwart such attempts. There are literally dozens of browser extensions built to help protect users from tracking. But while it’s generally known by most people that our online activities, where and what we browse, are being tracked in some way, not many people realise that companies have been using a sneaky hidden trick for decades that allows them to snoop on your email activity. They do this through a snooping trick called a tracking pixel. This email tracking device allows a company to see when and where you’ve opened an email they’ve sent you, how long it took for you to read it, and how often you’ve returned to read the email again.  

In Britain, the key legal safeguards to protect private citizens from being spied no by their own government are the 1994 Intelligence Services Act and the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). Today these laws have been completely overtaken new digital systems and software.  Only if you have nothing to hide does the average citizen have nothing to fear.

Fast Company:    Historynet:   The Atlantic:   Open Democracy:   HistoryandPolicy:    Marketwatch:     BBC: 

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