How much is the government allowed to know?

[mjw47]

 

E.g. there's a number of accounts I have, which will of course exist electronically in the relevant banks' systems, but with which or about which there is positively zero electronic communications ever to or from me/any of my devices (whether email, log-in or the like). All old-school paper-based in sealed envelopes.

 

And by stating that fact on a forum which will be monitored by the 'authorities' you have made yourself a 'person of interest'.

 

What is this man attempting to hide, they will ask themselves.

 

Prepare yourself for a dawn raid! :o

[L00b]

And by stating that fact on a forum which will be monitored by the 'authorities' you have made yourself a 'person of interest'.

First, they'd have to correlate who L00b is. Not too hard, in fairness, with several thousand posts here and a supercomputing-powered semantics engine. But this isn't FB or Twitter (and the like) where many (most?) peeps are registered under their real names ().

 

Then they'd have to match a potential ID with accounts details. A tad harder, without any electronic trail or records to match.

 

Then they'd have to match the accounts with the banks and countries. At that stage, for some of them, they'd be at a complete dead end, due to some of the countries' statutes, which have made bank secrecy a constitutional matter.

 

For others, they'd have to go to the local Court (whatever these new UK Statutes say - they only apply to the UK, it's all in the name ): for a fishing trip, with nothing else than a potential name and banking details obtained without consent, you can guess what they'd be told

What is this man attempting to hide, they will ask themselves.

In the UK, I have nothing to hide, and am whiter than white. My accountant actually told me I was doing things too by-the-book

[Chelle-82]

First, they'd have to correlate who L00b is. Not too hard, in fairness, with several thousand posts here and a supercomputing-powered semantics engine.

 

Then they'd have to match the ID with accounts details. A tad harder, without any electronic trail or record to match.

 

Then they'd have to match the account with the banks and countries. At that stage, for some of them, they'd be at a complete dead end, due to some of the countries' statutes, which have made bank secrecy a constitutional matter (no less). That one really irks the Yanks, still - LOL

 

For others, they'd have to go to the local Court (whatever the UK Statutes say - they only apply to the UK): for a fishing trip, with nothing lese than a name and banking details, you can guess what they'd be told

In the UK, I have nothing to hide, and am whiter than white. My accountant actually told me I was doing things too by-the-book

 

Well you've just landed your accountant in it

[L00b]

Well you've just landed your accountant in it

My accountant has full plausible deniability

[Waldo]

If you don't like the gov. having information on you; one solution is to flood / overload them with information. If you think about. If an organisation has no information on you; they're in the dark. If they have a moderate amount of information, they'll know what you're about, more or less. However, if they have masses and masses, of information on you, sometimes contradictory information, they're practically just as much in the dark as if they have no information at all.

 

As a strategy, you can resist authority or tyranny, in 2 ways, 1. Not doing what they want or demand. 2. Excessively (OTT) doing what the want or demand.

[L00b]

How much is the government allowed to know?

 

Speaking of which, Germany just told top U.S. embassy intelligence official to leave country. Oh boy. Bit of a black eye for Obama, there.

[redfox]

the govt reaction follows a ruling from the european court. As a result of that ruling phone providers, the likes of google/facebook etc would not be under any obligation to retain data at all.

 

Mobile phone companies retain a great deal of data which is exceptionally useful in the detection of and prosecution of serious crime. The police have to make requests pursuant to the legislation (RIPA) to obtain that information. The use of telephone data is one of the most frequently used and potent pieces of evidence available to prosecutors.

 

There must of course be appropriate safeguards in place to prevent the unlawful obtaining and use of such information but not to have it available at all if nothing was done I would suggest create very real problems for those responsible for the prosecution of serious criminals.

 

I do however find it of considerable concern that there is now so much surveillance going on that there are insufficient checks and balances partly because there are never going to be enough people with the right skill set to check - there already working for GCHQ etc

[Mecky]

Hard to imagine how much GCHQ would have to pay people to monitor sites as interesting as SF.

Unless they needed to know where the Police helicopter was.

 

They already do

[tzijlstra]

Thanks for all the replies, appears I am not alone in this issue (didn't think for a second I would be!)

 

The biggest problem is that we DON'T KNOW what the government is playing at, in fact, I suspect the vast majority of democratically elected MPs haven't got a clue what the GCHQ and related agencies are playing at. This is my biggest issue: It is completely and utterly Orwellian.

 

However, if you piece some of the evidence together you quickly get a very nasty looking pot of brown stuff and there are a few non-elected officials that keep stirring in it to see what will come up.

 

I know the information retrieval field fairly well, a lot of the things I described are perfectly possible to achieve (whether legally or not) by a semantic program - no human intervention needed except for keying in the search-term, hence my use of find-engine to describe it.

 

Your bank-details, without you realising it, are most likely available for pennies on the black data market. Who is to stop the wizzkids at GCHQ to utilise this data? Hell they even have the power to seize it for free under the data protection act, who says they destroy it?

 

As rightly pointed out, the EU is increasingly getting annoyed with the interference of intelligence services in the name of anti-terrorism, catching the US inserting a spy into a German committee established to research the Merkel GSM tap scandal certainly puts things in focus.

 

The Dutch government has recently demanded data from the UK regarding their access to Dutch servers, when it was half-revealed that the GCHQ is running several bot-nets at very high level. Edward Snowden revealed the GCHQ is operating at a level more advanced than any US counterpart.

 

It is time that the British public gets angry about this.

[Waldo]

Isn't it something of a balance Tim? On the one hand, we need our intelligence service to be in the know, so as to avert any potential threat. On the other hand, we want to know that they are acting for, and in, the best interests of the public. Yet, if there is transparency around their activity, if politicians are more clued up about what goes on and what GCHQ know; isn't that in itself a danger? Presumably, the more people in the know, the more chance the bad guys have of finding out how they are being spied upon and who is ratting them out etc...

 

I don't know. How do you reconcile national security with the publics desire for privacy?

 

I know if I was a bad guy, I'd seek to use the governments' own surveillance and intelligence, against them. There is no need to attack an organism (entity, organisation, gov. whatever) directly, if you can engineer a situation whereby the organisms own defence mechanism serves to harm itself as it reacts to a perceived threat.