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Commentary and analysis of recent UK politics events

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Edward Snowden voted Guardian person of the year 2013 for his whistleblowing on worldwide surveillance activities.

Online gamers are targeted by NSA and GCHQ

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Online gaming is big business, attracting tens of millions of users worldwide who inhabit their digital worlds as make-believe characters, living and competing with the avatars of other players. What the intelligence agencies feared, however, was that among these clans of elves and goblins, terrorists were lurking.

The NSA document, written in 2008 and titled Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments, stressed the risk of leaving games communities under-monitored, describing them as a “target-rich communications network” where intelligence targets could “hide in plain sight”.

Games, the analyst wrote, “are an opportunity!”. According to the briefing notes, so many different US intelligence agents were conducting operations inside games that a “deconfliction” group was required to ensure they weren’t spying on, or interfering with, each other.

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But the documents contain no indication that the surveillance ever foiled any terrorist plots, nor is there any clear evidence that terror groups were using the virtual communities to communicate as the intelligence agencies predicted.

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Image of Iain Duncan SmithIain Duncan Smith blames everyone else at the work and pensions select committee

After months of trying, MPs on the work and pensions select committee finally had a chance to question Iain Duncan Smith on the DWP’s abuse of statistics and the chaos surrounding Universal Credit today. On the former, Duncan Smith bullishly pointed out that the department had published “over 500” statistical releases and had received just two critical letters from the UK Statistics Authority. He again declared that he “believed” thousands of people had moved into work as a result of the introduction of the benefit cap, despite the UKSA warning that this was “unsupported by the official statistics”.

But when he was questioned on the false statement by Conservative chairman Grant Shapps that “nearly a million people” (878,300) on incapacity benefit dropped their claims, rather than face a new medical assessment for the employment and support allowance (which resulted in another reprimand from the Statistics Authority to Duncan Smith and Shapps), he took a strikingly different line. Rather than defending the claim, he replied that it was “nothing to do with the department” and blamed CCHQ for the inaccurate “conflation of data”. Speaking from what appeared to most to be a glass house, he added: “I’ve tried to get my colleagues at Central Office to check first before they put anything out about the areas that the DWP covers because it’s complex”. One was left with the image of Duncan Smith pleading with Shapps and other Tory apparatchiks not to twist statistics for the purposes of political propaganda but his own record meant he received little sympathy from the committee.

After being challenged on the DWP’s demonisation of benefit claimants through its references to “a something for nothing culture”, Duncan Smith similarly sought to shift the blame, noting that it was “a minister” from the last government (Liam Byrne) who first referred to “shirkers” and “workers”, to which the only appropriate reply is ‘two wrongs don’t make a right”.

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Related: Universal credit failed IT system write-off increased by £6m

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Commentary and analysis of recent UK political events

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Following Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger appearance yesterday, MI5 boss Andrew Parker is called to the home select affairs committee. Andrew Parker has previously appeared before the Intelligence and Security Committee with advance notice of questions. The committee is expected to ask Parker to justify his severe criticism of the Guardian for publishing articles sourced from the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden i.e. essentially that publication by the Guardian endangered national security and that terrorists are now able to evade government snooping (spying).

Food poverty in UK has reached level of ‘public health emergency’, warn experts

Young people to be allowed to remain in foster care until age 21

The lies behind this transatlantic trade deal

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From the outset, the transatlantic partnership has been driven by corporations and their lobby groups, who boast of being able to “co-write” it. Persistent digging by the Corporate Europe Observatory reveals that the commission has held eight meetings on the issue with civil society groups, and 119 with corporations and their lobbyists. Unlike the civil society meetings, these have taken place behind closed doors and have not been disclosed online.

Though the commission now tells the public that it will protect “the state’s right to regulate”, this isn’t the message the corporations have been hearing. In an interview last week, Stuart Eizenstat, co-chair of the Transatlantic Business Council – instrumental in driving the process – was asked if companies whose products had been banned by regulators would be able to sue. Yes. “If a suit like that was brought and was successful, it would mean that the country banning the product would have to pay compensation to the industry involved or let the product in.” Would that apply to the European ban on chicken carcasses washed with chlorine, a controversial practice permitted in the US? “That’s one example where it might.”

What the commission and its member governments fail to explain is why we need offshore arbitration at all. It insists that domestic courts “might be biased or lack independence”, but which courts is it talking about? It won’t say. Last month, while trying to defend the treaty, the British minister Kenneth Clarke said something revealing: “Investor protection is a standard part of free-trade agreements – it was designed to support businesses investing in countries where the rule of law is unpredictable, to say the least.” So what is it doing in an EU-US deal? Why are we using measures designed to protect corporate interests in failed states in countries with a functioning judicial system? Perhaps it’s because functioning courts are less useful to corporations than opaque and unjust arbitration by corporate lawyers.

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Commentary and analysis of recent UK (and Australian) UK politics news.

Image of GCHQ donught buildingEdward Snowden has released a document showing that Australia offered to share evidence about ordinary citizens with its ‘5-eyes’ surveillance partners. The document is a record of a 2008 meeting at GCHQ discussing what information can be shared. Different partners offered different categories of surveillance to be shared with their spy partners.

Revealed: Australian spy agency offered to share data about ordinary citizens

Australia’s surveillance agency offered to share information collected about ordinary Australian citizens with its major intelligence partners, according to a secret 2008 document leaked by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The document shows the partners discussing whether or not to share “medical, legal or religious information”, and increases concern that the agency could be operating outside its legal mandate, according to the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC.

The Australian intelligence agency, then known as the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), indicated it could share bulk material without some of the privacy restraints imposed by other countries, such as Canada.

“DSD can share bulk, unselected, unminimised metadata as long as there is no intent to target an Australian national,” notes from an intelligence conference say. “Unintentional collection is not viewed as a significant issue.”

The agency acknowledged that more substantial interrogation of the material would, however, require a warrant.

The editor of the Guardian Alan Rusbridger was called before the home affairs committee to defend the Guardian publishing material leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

David Cameron and British intelligence chiefs have accused The Guardian of damaging national security with its reporting. In November the head of MI6 told MPs Al Qaida and other terrorist groups have been “rubbing their hands with glee” over the information revealed by Snowden.

But Rusbridger insisted The Guardian had behaved responsibly and had acted carefully to protect the identities of intelligence agents. “This is not a rogue newspaper, this is a serious newspaper with long experience,” he said.

Guardian will not be intimidated over NSA leaks, Alan Rusbridger tells MPs

Rusbridger said the Guardian had been put under the kind of pressure to stop publishing stories that would have been inconceivable in other countries.

“They include prior restraint, they include a senior Whitehall official coming to see me to say: ‘There has been enough debate now’. They include asking for the destruction of our disks. They include MPs calling for the police to prosecute the editor. So there are things that are inconceivable in the US.

“I feel that some of this activity has been designed to intimidate the Guardian.”

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Guardian editor Rusbridger defends leaked files stories

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24464286

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has insisted it was right to publish secret files leaked by US intelligence analyst Edward Snowden.

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His comments come after the new director general of MI5, Andrew Parker, said such revelations risked causing enormous harm.

Making public the “reach and limits” of intelligence-gathering techniques gave terrorists the advantage, he added.

The paper said the leaks had prompted a debate which was necessary and overdue.

Mr Snowden, a former CIA contractor, fled to Russia with a wealth of secret data including some 58,000 files from GCHQ, Britain’s electronic eavesdropping agency.

The stories that followed in the Guardian newspaper, based on material provided by Mr Snowden, revealed the huge capacity of British and US intelligence agencies – GCHQ and NSA – to monitor communications.

In his first public speech since his appointment in April, Mr Parker said intelligence gathered by GCHQ had played a vital role in stopping many UK terrorist plots over the past decade.

He warned that terrorists now had tens of thousands of means of communication “through e-mail, IP telephony, in-game communication, social networking, chat rooms, anonymising services and a myriad of mobile apps”.

Mr Parker said it was vital for MI5 – and by inference its partner GCHQ – to retain the capability to access such information if it was to protect the country.

Mr Rusbridger said those on the security side of the argument wanted to keep everything secret and did not want a debate.

“You don’t want the press or anyone else writing about it. But MI5 cannot be the only voice in the debate,” he told BBC Radio 4’s World at One.

He added that his newspaper had revealed the “extent to which entire populations are now being potentially put under surveillance”.

“I just spent a week in America where everybody is talking about this, from the president down.”

He added: “It’s quite surprising to me that the number of MPs in this country who have said anything at all in the last four months can be counted on one hand – Malcolm Rifkind, Tom Watson, David Davis.

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