Mastering the Internet

I’ve covered this before, but I was thinking about two things while reading this. If these sorts of things go on pretty much in every country, all the surveillance is shared among nations to help each other out catching “bad guys” - that’s one of the main arguments for this Orwellian nightmare - and if internet isn’t really located within a certain country, there are two main questions:

Firstly, how can any agency or government claim to NOT be monitoring their own citizens? Why do they lie about this? Any email, any chat, any online activity isn’t confined to one computer or one area of the world, it travels all over the place. And so any control-grid automatically becomes global and it’s impossible not to be targeting their own populace.

Secondly, if these kinds of cooperation exist, what stops one country to spy on another country’s people, and then share it with the in-house agency that is stopped by law from doing it themselves?

In Sweden the new very creepy laws have only one flaw comes to the controllers, they are not allowed to spy on Swedish citizens, at least not without a court order. But if they get their British counterpart to do that for them, is a court order then really necessary?

Oooops, did CIA and Mossad find some information about some Swedish citizens and then send it to us? We didn’t do anything, we followed the law, it was them, but we needed to act on this information. Right? So a couple of Muslims got sent to Egypt for interrogation? So what? Dumdidumd, tralalala…

This way they can circumvent the law, and also they have their own hands clean. If British intelligence assassinates some people that happened to get picked up by the Swedish monitors, it wasn’t the Swedes fault, they just relayed the information.

Is this how it works or is supposed to work?

And even if there are some international agreements or laws that may prevent this between western countries, how about out-sourcing such surveillance to a country that isn’t compliant with such rules and then buy, steal or exchange that information?

If Bloggers, certain dissidents or supposed terrorists starts to disappear, I would probably look at this little scheme for confirmation…

Very scary shit…


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Mastering the Internet" is reportedly a massive UK government mass surveillance project led by the British communications intelligence agency GCHQ, with a budget of over £1 billion. According to reports in The Register and the Sunday Times, as of early May 2009, contracts with a total value of £200m had already been awarded to suppliers.[1] [2]

Responding to these reports, GCHQ issued a press release countering these claims of mass surveillance, stating that "GCHQ is not developing technology to enable the monitoring of all internet use and phone calls in Britain, or to target everyone in the UK