Now You Can Find Out Whether British Spooks Illegally Spied on You
by Joshua Kupstein
Motherboard, February 16, 2015
Thanks to a recent court ruling in the UK, you'll soon be able to find out whether British spies illegally accessed your data through sharing programs with US intelligence agencies.
Starting today, a new site set up by Privacy International will begin funneling requests from anyone—not just UK citizens—to check whether the British intelligence agency GCHQ was snooping on their communications via the NSA's PRISM and UPSTREAM surveillance programs.
That was a huge concern after the Snowden revelations suggested that the "Five Eyes" spying alliance (the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) have created a giant racket for second-hand surveillance.
While many of the individual countries have so-called "minimization" procedures for scrubbing "incidentally" collected data about their own citizens, there's nothing stopping them from getting that same data when it's collected and shared by an allied country.
"This will allow the public to finally know how the Snowden revelations have affected them personally and will allow people to hold intelligence agencies to account for their unlawful surveillance on the world’s communications," said Mike Rispoli, a spokesperson for Privacy International. "Even if you don’t think you were spied on (you probably were), it may be fun to know either way."
CONTINUED...
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/now-you-can-find-out-whether-british-spooks-illegally-spied-on-you
What will they think of next?
= new reply since forum marked as read
I hope they don't find out about the cat breading.
ECHELON Today: The Evolution of an NSA Black Program
By Tom Burghardt
Antifascist Calling and Global Research 13 July 2013
People are shocked by the scope of secret state spying on their private communications, especially in light of documentary evidence leaked to media outlets by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
SNIP...
Before PRISM there was ECHELON: the top secret surveillance program whose all-encompassing “dictionaries” (high-speed computers powered by complex algorithms) ingest and sort key words and text scooped-up by a global network of satellites, from undersea cables and land-based microwave towers.
Past as Prologue
Confronted by a dizzying array of code-named programs, the casual observer will assume the spymasters running these intrusive operations are all-knowing mandarins with their fingers on the pulse of global events.
Yet, if disastrous US policies from Afghanistan and Iraq to the ongoing capitalist economic meltdown tell us anything, it is that the American superpower, in President Nixon’s immortal words, really is “a pitiful, helpless giant.”
In fact, the same programs used to surveil the population at large have also been turned inward by the National Security State against itself and targets military and political elites who long thought themselves immune from such close attention.
Coupled with Snowden’s disclosures, those of former NSA officer Russell Tice (first reported here and here), revealed that the agency–far in excess of the dirt collected by FBI spymaster J. Edgar Hoover in his “secret and confidential” black files–has compiled dossiers on their alleged controllers, for political leverage and probably for blackmail purposes to boot.
While Tice’s allegations certainly raised eyebrows and posed fundamental questions about who is really in charge of American policy–elected officials or unaccountable securocrats with deep ties to private security corporations–despite being deep-sixed by US media, they confirm previous reporting about the agency.
When investigative journalist Duncan Campbell first blew the lid off NSA’s ECHELON program, his 1988 piece for New Statesman revealed that a whistleblower, Margaret Newsham, a software designer employed by Lockheed at the giant agency listening post at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, England, stepped forward and told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in closed session, that NSA was using its formidable intercept capabilities “to locate the telephone or other messages of target individuals.”
Campbell’s reporting was followed in 1996 by New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager’s groundbreaking book, Secret Power, the first detailed account of NSA’s global surveillance system. A summary of Hager’s findings can be found in the 1997 piece that appeared in CovertAction Quarterly.
As Campbell was preparing that 1988 article, a report in the Cleveland Plain Dealer alleged that arch-conservative US Senator Strom Thurman was one target of agency phone intercepts, raising fears in political circles that “NSA has restored domestic, electronic, surveillance programmes,” said to have been dialed-back in the wake of the Watergate scandal.
CONTINUED...
http://www.globalresearch.ca/echelon-today-the-evolution-of-an-nsa-black-program/5342646
some government agency out there keeping an eye & ear on the slimy fucks claiming to run our government or if said agency is spying on other countries ass well it's kind of how the world works. The program Echelon spied on Strom Thurmond which probably wasn't a bad idea considering his reputation.
As far as this program per your own link “Right now,” Snowden said, “the buffer can hold three days of traffic, but that’s being improved."
So once again erh meh ghawd in three days it all goes poof unless..........
The goal of wholesale surveillance, [font color="green"]as (Hannah) Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” [/font color]And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.
Chris Hedges, The Last Gasp of American Democracy
So you don't have anything to worry about, giftedgirl77? Good for you!
The company and its Hollerith punch card machines enabled the fascists to tabulate census data and find out "who was who?" and "who did what?"and "who lives where?"
Oh. The IBM machines and the cards they used to process information also were used to find out "how many Jews?" and "where are they?"
IBM & "Death's Calculator"
by Edwin Black
EXCERPT...
When the Reich needed to mount a systematic campaign of Jewish economic disenfranchisement and later began the massive movement of European Jews out of their homes and into ghettos, once again, the task was so prodigious it called for a computer. But in 1933, no computer existed. When the Final Solution sought to efficiently transport Jews out of European ghettos along railroad lines and into death camps, with timing so precise the victims were able to walk right out of the boxcar and into a waiting gas chamber, the coordination was so complex a task, this too called for a computer. But in 1933, no computer existed.
However, another invention did exist: the IBM punch card and card sorting system-a precursor to the computer. IBM, primarily through its German subsidiary, made Hitler's program of Jewish destruction a technologic mission the company pursued with chilling success. IBM Germany, using its own staff and equipment, designed, executed, and supplied the indispensable technologic assistance Hitler's Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before-the automation of human destruction. More than 2,000 such multi-machine sets were dispatched throughout Germany, and thousands more throughout German-dominated Europe. Card sorting operations were established in every major concentration camp. People were moved from place to place, systematically worked to death, and their remains cataloged with icy automation.
SNIP...
I was haunted by a question whose answer has long eluded historians. The Germans always had the lists of Jewish names. Suddenly, a squadron of grim-faced SS would burst into a city square and post a notice demanding those listed assemble the next day at the train station for deportation to the East. But how did the Nazis get the lists? For decades, no one has known. Few have asked.
The answer: IBM Germany's census operations and similar advanced people counting and registration technologies. IBM was founded in 1898 by German inventor Herman Hollerith as a census tabulating company. Census was its business. But when IBM Germany formed its philosophical and technologic alliance with Nazi Germany, census and registration took on a new mission. IBM Germany invented the racial census-listing not just religious affiliation, but bloodline going back generations. This was the Nazi data lust. Not just to count the Jews — but to identify them.
CONTINUED...
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/gypibm.html
For me, one who's carried this knowledge most of my adult life, I find it difficult to grasp how anyone could fail to fathom where today's secret government and all its illegalities will head. It is scary, DJ13. I do know one thing, things would be a lot worse if there weren't so many real Democrats.
