Irreal

Perhaps this will help. Remember yesterday when I wrote about the MI5’s Andrew Parker assuring us that “MI5 is not about “browsing the lives” of the public? Here’s what they do when they think no one’s watching: The Intercept reports that the KARMA POLICE program aimed to record the website browsing habits of “every visible user on the Internet.” KARMA POLICE was designed to provide the government with “either (a) a web browsing profile for every visible user on the Internet, or (b) a user profile for every visible website on the Internet.” In other words, browsing the lives of the public was exactly what they were up to¹.

KARMA POLICE started in 2007-2008 so this is a long standing program having nothing to do with ISIS or current terrorist problems. Their explicitly stated intent was to create the world’s biggest surveillance engine. Read The Intercept’s report about the extent of that surveillance and see if it doesn’t make you want to grab a pitchfork and follow the torches.

There is a dark cloud on their horizon, though: encryption.

“The spread of encryption … threatens our ability to do effective target discovery/development,” says a top-secret report co-authored by an official from the British agency and an NSA employee in 2011.

“Pertinent metadata events will be locked within the encrypted channels and difficult, if not impossible, to prise out,” the report says, adding that the agencies were working on a plan that would “(hopefully) allow our Internet Exploitation strategy to prevail.”

Remember this the next time your government starts talking about children and kidnap victims as the reason they need to compromise encryption. Here from their own mouths is the real reason.

Andrew Parker, head of MI5 and Britain’s representative of the international cabal of nosey Parkers¹ who wish to scrutinize every bit of our on-line activities—for our own good, of course—is complaining to the BBC about how hard it is to monitor everyone’s comings and goings on the Internet. Although he doesn’t use the words “going dark,” it’s the same nonsense that the FBI is pushing here in the United States.

Normally, this wouldn’t be worth remarking on but Mr. Parker assures the BBC that “MI5 [is] not about “browsing the lives” of the public.” He also says that technology companies have an ethical duty to cooperate with the government on encryption. The idea that governments are not “browsing the lives of the public” is ridiculous on its face. They are, in fact, doing just that as Edward Snowden’s revelations demonstrate.

All this, as I mentioned the other day, reminds me of the recent contretemps over ad blocking. Mr Parker and his colleagues here in the U.S. are asking us to trust them. But why should we? They’ve demonstrated over and over again that they will abuse any powers we give them, using tortured interpretations of existing legislation to justify wholesale surveillance of citizens’ Internet and phone activities. Now, like the advertisers, they are whining that people are fighting back with strong encryption and other measures to safeguard their privacy.

And like the advertisers, Mr. Parker and his colleagues are arguing that it’s unethical to resist their surveillance and that tech companies should help them make that resistance impossible. But, really, this wouldn’t be happening if they hadn’t abused their authority to begin with. Their current difficulties with encryption are not on the technology companies; they’re on them.

Would be too snarky for me to point out that these are the same people who want us to give them our crypto keys?

— matt blaze (@mattblaze) September 24, 2015