GCHQ

Labour minister falsely linked journalists to ‘pro-Kremlin’ network in emails to GCHQ

Spread the love

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/20/labour-minister-falsely-linked-journalists-to-pro-kremlin-network-in-emails-to-gchq

Josh Simons (left) named Paul Holden (centre) and Gabriel Pogrund (right) in emails to NCSC officials. Composite: Guardian Design/Labour Together/Sky News/Simon King/Getty Images

[Guardian] Exclusive: Josh Simons pressed intelligence officials to investigate reporters, in emails described as ‘McCarthyite smear’

A Labour minister who claimed to be “surprised” and “furious” at a PR agency’s work to investigate journalists on his behalf had been personally involved in naming them to British intelligence officials and falsely linking them to pro-Russian propaganda, the Guardian can reveal.

Josh Simons, who was running the thinktank Labour Together at the time, was also involved in telling security officials that another journalist was “living with” the daughter of a former adviser to Jeremy Corbyn. Officials were told by Simons’ team that the former adviser was “suspected of links to Russian intelligence”.

The extraordinary disclosures are contained in emails that Simons and his chief of staff at Labour Together sent to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a division of the spy agency GCHQ, in 2024. A spokesperson for Simons, a Cabinet Office minister, said: “These claims are untrue.”

The emails, seen by the Guardian, lay out in detail what Simons and his team wrote to intelligence officials in an effort to get them to investigate the sourcing behind a story in the Sunday Times about Labour Together’s failure to disclose political donations.

When informed by the Guardian about what had been communicated about them to intelligence officials, some of those named in the emails accused Simons of orchestrating a “McCarthyite smear” campaign that left them feeling “violated”.

…

Article continues at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/20/labour-minister-falsely-linked-journalists-to-pro-kremlin-network-in-emails-to-gchq

Continue ReadingLabour minister falsely linked journalists to ‘pro-Kremlin’ network in emails to GCHQ

George Monbiot: The UK government didn’t want you to see this report on ecosystem collapse. I’m not surprised

Spread the love

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/27/uk-government-report-ecosystem-collapse-foi-national-security

Lake Titicaca in South America. Its water levels are receding, partly due to shifts in rainfall caused by Amazon deforestation. Photograph: Benjamin Swift/The Guardian

It took an FOI request to bring this national security assessment to light. For ‘doomsayers’ like us, it is the ultimate vindication

…

When the report at last appeared, thanks to an FoI request lodged by the Green Alliance, The Times reported that it had been significantly “abridged”, I expect by the same goons. Some of its starkest conclusions had been omitted. Even so, the assessment – believed to have been compiled by the joint intelligence committee (on which the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ sit) – is not exactly reassuring.

It echoes warnings some of us have made for years, only to be dismissed as nutters, doomsayers and extremists. It tells us that “ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions. Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse (irreversible loss of function beyond repair).” This presents a threat to “UK national security and prosperity”. It says “the world is already experiencing impacts including crop failures, intensified natural disasters and infectious disease outbreaks. Threats will increase with degradation and intensify with collapse.” The results will include geopolitical and economic instability, increased conflict and competition for resources. “It is unlikely the UK would be able to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food.” It also warns that “conflict and military escalation will become more likely, both within and between states, as groups compete for arable land and food and water resources”.

…

But what was cut from the report is, according to The Times, even graver, including a warning that the shrinkage of glaciers in the Himalayas, causing declining river flow, would “almost certainly escalate tensions” between China, India and Pakistan, leading to the possibility of nuclear war. Again, some of us have been trying to persuade governments to focus on this threat with little success.

…

The report, notably shorter than most of its kind, gives every appearance of having been hastily and crudely truncated.

…

I know this government exists only to disappoint us. But its environmental failures are even more striking than its failures on other issues. When the ruling party compares unfavourably with the one that brought us Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, it’s worse than a betrayal. It’s a threat to our survival.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/27/uk-government-report-ecosystem-collapse-foi-national-security

dizzy: It was difficult to select extracts from this article, suggest that you read the original.

Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Continue ReadingGeorge Monbiot: The UK government didn’t want you to see this report on ecosystem collapse. I’m not surprised

Online Safety Bill: Whatsapp, Signal issue stark final warning against mass snooping of messages

Spread the love
Image of GCHQ donught building. Doesn't look like a doughnut. Look. Oh c'mon, can't you see - open your eye.
Image of GCHQ donught building

https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/online-safety-bill-whatsapp-signal-element-breaking-encryption-mass-surveillance-messaging-apps-b1091873.html

The heads of three major messaging apps have exclusively told The Standard that the Online Safety Bill, which is facing one of it’s final votes this week, will lead to the mass surveillance of every private online message and London’s reputation as a place to do business will be destroyed if the bill passes into law.

They also say Prime Minister Rishi Sunak can forget about the UK becoming a technology superpower if that happens, as tech firms will leave London and no one will want to start a business here.

“If the Online Safety Bill does not amend the vague language that currently opens the door for mass surveillance and the nullification of end-to-end encryption, then it will not only create a significant vulnerability that will be exploited by hackers, hostile nation states, and those wishing to do harm, but effectively salt the earth for any tech development in London and the UK at large,” Meredith Whittaker, president of not-for-profit secure messaging app Signal told The Standard.

“Passing the bill as-is sends the clear message that the UK government would rather make law based on magical thinking, than honor longstanding expert consensus when it comes to issues of complex technology.”

…

https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/online-safety-bill-whatsapp-signal-element-breaking-encryption-mass-surveillance-messaging-apps-b1091873.html

Continue ReadingOnline Safety Bill: Whatsapp, Signal issue stark final warning against mass snooping of messages

The Home Office says you don’t need to know about its ‘spying’ on lawyers

Spread the love
Image of GCHQ donught building. Doesn't look like a doughnut. Look. Oh c'mon, can't you see - open your eye.

Original article republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Exclusive: Government refuses to answer questions about its surveillance of immigration lawyers

Jenna Corderoy 24 April 2023, 10.00pm

The government has refused to answer questions about its “monitoring” of human rights lawyers – saying revealing the extent of its surveillance is not in the public interest.

In February, immigration minister Robert Jenrick admitted during a parliamentary debate that the Home Office is “monitoring the activities” of “a small number of legal practitioners”, after claiming that “human rights lawyers abuse and exploit our laws”.

Using Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, openDemocracy asked the Home Office how many legal practitioners it is monitoring, the nature of the monitoring and when it began. We also asked which unit within the department is carrying out the surveillance or if it has been outsourced to private firms.

The Home Office has now rejected the request, saying it is not in the public interest to disclose any of the information. openDemocracy has appealed against this decision.

Paul Heron, senior solicitor at the Public Interest Law Centre, told openDemocracy: “Government ministers spying on lawyers sounds like something from an authoritarian state. It is a direct threat to the rule of law and undermines the principles of justice and fairness.

“State surveillance of lawyers, and indeed any worker, is a clear violation of human rights and civil liberties and undermines the very foundation of a free and democratic society.”

Heron added: “The Home Office’s refusal to respond openly, adequately and indeed at all to the FOI request from openDemocracy regarding the monitoring strategy of lawyers by the Home Office should be a real concern, indicating not only a fundamental lack of transparency but a fundamental lack of accountability.”

State surveillance of lawyers, and indeed any worker, is a clear violation of human rights and civil liberties

Jon Baines, a senior data protection specialist at law firm Mishcon de Reya, shared Heron’s concerns.

Speaking to openDemocracy, Baines said: “The secrecy shown by the Home Office is regrettable, particularly as there is a distinct lack of any meaningful analysis of the public interest factors weighing in favour of disclosure.

“Secret monitoring of lawyers by the state has very serious connotations, and if the information really is exempt from disclosure, it is incumbent on the Home Office to give more detail and more justification for what is an inherently oppressive activity.”

The Home Office’s silence comes ahead of the return of the Illegal Migration Bill to the Commons this week, for its third and final reading before moving to the Lords. On Monday, the Equality and Human Rights Commission warned that the bill “risks breaching international obligations to protect human rights and exposing individuals to serious harm”.

The government claims the legislation will deter people from crossing the English Channel in small boats.

In February, Tory MP Bill Wiggin used a parliamentary session about a violent incident outside a hotel used to temporarily house asylum seekers in Knowsley, Liverpool to ask about legislating to stop such crossings.

Jenrick replied: “This is one of the most litigious areas of public life. It is an area where, I am afraid, human rights lawyers abuse and exploit our laws.”

The Home Office must give more detail and more justification for what is an inherently oppressive activity

Later in the debate, Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael asked: “The minister told us a few minutes ago that part of the problem here is human rights lawyers who abuse and exploit our laws… could the minister tell the House how many solicitors, advocates and barristers have been reported by the Home Office in the last 12 months to the regulatory authorities?”

Jenrick did not answer the question or provide figures. Instead, he said: “We are monitoring the activities, as it so happens, of a small number of legal practitioners, but it is not appropriate for me to discuss that here.”

At the time, Jenrick’s comments prompted dismay and concern among lawyers.

In its FOI refusal, the Home Office stated that a disclosure would “inhibit free and frank analysis in the future, and the loss of frankness and candour would damage the quality of risk assessments and deliberation and lead to poorer decision-making”.

Explaining its decision to withhold the information, the department said: “The Home Office has a process that allows caseworkers to check companies and individuals are qualified to provide immigration advice and reporting mechanisms that allows us to escalate any issues to regulatory bodies.”

Original article republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingThe Home Office says you don’t need to know about its ‘spying’ on lawyers

Partial anatomy of a hack by GCHQ – It’s pwned

Spread the love

[5/2/15 I may have been mistaken about the running inside virtualization and that is probably normal livecd messages. There is still something amiss with the different ps axu(s) – it does at least make me very suspicious since I can’t think of any reason why that would happen other than nasty. I’m also surprised that this system is so difficult to boot into OpenBSD. You can’t be too paranoid, or can you?]

I’ve got an AMD64 thin client as a gateway / router that also runs a tor relay. It usually runs dnsmasq but has been running the more conventional dhcpd and named recently. It uses a small camera-style flash card as a hard drive running current and patched OpenBSD. My internal network connects to this through a switch. I run firewalls on all machines – pf on this of course and usually arno-iptables-firewall on debian boxes. This box currently has an uptime of over 59 days.

Image of GCHQ donught building. Doesn't look like a doughnut. Look. Oh c'mon, can't you see - open your eye.

Just recently I’ve had a hard drive fail on my desktop debian machine. I was very surprised at this since it’s very low mileage and being debian linux it hardly ever gets powered down. It appeared to have many and increasing terrible errors that also seemed to jump about whenever I tried e2fscking them. I can’t help but suspect that GCHQ contributed to the apparent demise of this drive.

My new replacement drive arrived yesterday and I had decided to install an OpenBSD xfce desktop. None of the OpenBSD install cds were recognised. What’s going on here?

At the OpenBSD box:

# ps axu | grep bin
root         1  0.0  0.0   744   148 ??  Is    23Nov14    0:01.16 /sbin/init
_syslogd 12341  0.0  0.1   756   876 ??  I     23Nov14    0:08.61 /usr/sbin/sys
_iscsid  10832  0.0  0.1   624   548 ??  Is    23Nov14    0:00.00 /usr/sbin/isc
root     17049  0.0  0.1  1068  1100 ??  Is    23Nov14    0:00.04 /usr/sbin/ssh
_sndio    1059  0.0  0.0   712   344 ??  I<s   23Nov14    0:00.00 /usr/bin/sndi
root     25566  0.0  0.1   904  1092 ??  Ss    23Nov14    0:09.31 /usr/sbin/cro
< (xterm widened) >
# ps axu | grep bin 
root         1  0.0  0.0   744   148 ??  Is    23Nov14    0:01.16 /sbin/init
_syslogd 12341  0.0  0.1   756   876 ??  S     23Nov14    0:08.61/usr/sbin/syslogd
_iscsid  10832  0.0  0.1   624   548 ??  Is    23Nov14    0:00.00 /usr/sbin/iscsid
root     17049  0.0  0.1  1068  1100 ??  Is    23Nov14    0:00.04 /usr/sbin/sshd
_sndio    1059  0.0  0.0   712   344 ??  I<s   23Nov14    0:00.00 /usr/bin/sndiod
root     25566  0.0  0.1   904  1092 ??  Ss    23Nov14    0:09.31 /usr/sbin/cron
_tor     18528  0.0  2.8 21700 25344 ??  S<    23Nov14  1927:49.62 /usr/local/bin/tor

That can’t be right – that tor only appears in the second and subsequent ps axu(s). Having huge difficulty i.e. it is impossible, to install OpenBSD to my desktop machine. They’re pwned.

OpenBSD doesn’t install under a Linux  virualization ‘wrapper’. Linux runs under Linux virtualization, OpenBSD won’t – at least not under this virtualization.

“NET: Registered protocol family 17

mpls_gso: MPLS GSO support” it reads – it’s embedded Linux.

It appears to be a very small wrapper in IPv6 coming from the OpenBSD router / gateway. My laptop starts complaining that BIOS has been changed – not seen that message before. The tor router relay is stopped pretty sharpish.

GCHQ? Well my connection to my ISP is to their ‘audit’ machine. I guess that means GCHQ. My close friend’s car was hours late back from it’s first service – shouldn’t the first service only be oil and filter, a half hour job? After that it was clear that cops could hear everything said in that car and were often waiting for us to arrive. A friend who I was once close to had the ‘Water Board’ round to check his taps. He remarked that she was well-presented. I’ve noticed that local ‘Scientific Investigation’ policewomen are well-presented. Oh, and we had a deep cover spy at our anti-casualisation group meetings. He was also at a pre-G8 2005 meeting. I think that he was Met, very interested in me and an apparent dirty, hairy anarchist cop.

I was using a password 29 characters long. My guess is that they used my mobile to map my keyboard – different characters sound different and there are differences in the time I take to reach them. Or they could have watched (spied) through the window.

I don’t know if they wanted me to find this or not.  I met someone from GCHQ in the Bunch of Grapes one Friday afternoon many years ago. It’s their job, it’s what they do.

I watched this a few hours earlier. You may get lost after the first 10 minutes or so. 30 to 37 minutes or so is good for politicians.

Can’t copy embed code. Bloody GCHQ. Bruce Schneier at MIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXtS6UcdOMs

I’m listening to this at the moment

but while I’m listening to this I want to explain a far greater danger than terrorism that I face almost daily because you see, I am a cyclist.

Yesterday I was almost mown down by a motorist that was on the wrong side of the road and almost mowed me down. He had not seen me because he was texting.

Motorists on mobile phones are lethal to cyclists – a far greater danger than any supposed attacks by ‘terrorists’. I can attest that there is a far greater danger to people – pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists – than terrorism. We need a sense of proportion, to be measured and to asses issues. As a cyclist, I am telling you it is far more dangerous than any fake manufactured, terrorism nonsense. I accept that there are a very few terrorists – usually insane. How can they be anything other than insane? But, they are caught up in the terrorist narrative. Cycling and being a pedestrian is far more dangerous.

Where is the international campaign against motorists using mobile phones? Surely NASA, GCHQ can catch these ‘t*******ts’? Don’t they cause terror to ordinary people and kill indiscriminitely? Actually, yes they do. And far more than this terrorism BS.

There are very few terrorist. Yes they should be pursued. There is fake, manufactured terrorism which is still terrorism pursued by nation-states and criminal cabals. There are also a few poor sods caught up in the terrorism narrative but let’s get it in perspective.

Indiscriminite drones. Stop it.

Ok, er, cycling is nothing compared to rockets from a drone. It’s much the same that it’s totally undeserved but I reckon a drone is far more lethal

– he’s talking about speed limits now

struck by lightening

I suggest that you watch the Greenwald vid. still long to go – talking about inscenity now

Talking about terrorism defined as what Muslims do. We had this in Uk recently with the car driven into council offices up North which then exploded. Strangely enough that wasn’t a car bomb and was reported on the news as most definitely not terrorism …

Intermission: I take advantage of this intermission to point out out that I do magick: that I have converted water into wine with the assistance of fruit, sugar and yeast. I made Melomel for the first time this year and I think that it may have been the first medicine (Meddygon Myddfai). Untreated, unadulterated honey and currant fruits worked really well. It was like a universal medicine – anything that was wrong with you it cured. I believe that it is possible to keep bees without exploiting them.

OK, intermission over.

<snip>

22/1/15 2.40am At least they know that I’m not into CP. I wish that they would go for the ones that are (and more). Actually, I want them to go for the people that abuse children. My understanding of GCHQ’s purpose is that it’s outside their remit. I think that GCHQ is military and concerned with defence. Can we change that so that they catch paedos?

better now ;)

Continue ReadingPartial anatomy of a hack by GCHQ – It’s pwned