GCHQ can monitor MPs' communications, court rules
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Also, the Prime Minister and most members of the cabinet are MPs. I wonder if this disclosure affects them too?
[1] http://www.tcij.org/resources/handbooks/infosec
[2] http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/hacks_hackers_security_fo...
Now that they are in the same basket as everyone else I wonder if they will change their tune.
It's always funny when someone who thinks they are a above the law they are creating end up subject to it.
All MPs official business should be a matter of open, transparent public record. Nothing they do as part of their every day work should be encrypted or private. The singular exception should be matters of national security, and even then their communications should be recorded in a secure manner with full accountability under the law if there's any suspicion of wrongdoing (e.g. lying to parliament about another countries WMDs).
Public office should be public.
In this sense, the MP is acting more like a journalist with a source. The source should be protected.
Would you raise issues with your representative if the tabloid press could harvest it and selectively quote you to monster you.
E.g. lets say a drug addict who has successfully managed hid their addiction wants to offer their perspective of new drug legislation to their MP. Or a paedophile who wants to gather support for promising treatment option. Or someone with family or community ties to extremists of some shade or the other wants to propose ways of reducing their influence.
There are a multitude of situations where there might be bad fallout from public knowledge about what a persons raises with their MP even if what they raised is positive for the wider community.
Yes, secrecy also allows for negative effects, but it's not nearly as simple as just writing off the benefits of being able to guarantee privacy.
And of course in NI you might get much worse. As might a moderate reporting problems at a local Mosque
Treatment of constituents issues needs to be private as these are often sensitive and personal (housing, family law and benefits issues).
Official business should be on the record. In part the Alistair Carmichael trial is about the boundary between political and official.
Things that one may argue should be public: Financial backing of legislators, minutes of official meetings and hearings, votes, legal arguments for spying, and so on.
But the conversations occurring behind the scenes which ALWAYS facilitate dealmaking will never be public. It wil happen in backrooms of pubs if you insist they communicate via telnet.
They should probably do that, especially for anything sensitive, whether or not GCHQ monitoring them is legal, both because the GCHQ might do illegal things and because the GCHQ might not be the only entity surveilling them.
OTOH, given Parliamentary sovereignty, its fairly trivial for Parliament to deal with the problem that GCHQ monitoring of their communications is currently legal, and this doesn't seem to be something where just the opposition is unhappy (while the government has been positive on the ruling so far, at least some Conservative MPs have been quoted as concerned about the ruling in some of the published reports.)
I'm actually fine with that. in fact, public officials should probably use open communication. it's the save rule that allows my employer to read my work email as they wish.
They'll enshrine this so deeply in law there will be no going back without violent revolution.
That won't happen though, as the cattle are distracted and well fed - and any move against them which fails will only serve to further their interests, for you are simply a terrorist who hates the British values of suspicion, greed and prejudice.
If the opposition has too good a reputation to be called a terrorist, I.e. They're in government, famous, etc., again, easy, say they're a paedophile and nothing they say will ever matter again.
Either way, don't expect positive change from this. Expect May to hop up on a podium and explain that human rights prevent us from keeping you safe from the terrorists and so we must pass a bill that allows us to shoot dangerous people and the ten billion illegal immigrants who are taking your jobs right now, on sight, oh and by the way we're exempt from Surveillance.
I believe it will catalyze the political class, such that there really won't be any way but the mainstream way from now on. We'll see political factions fade away over the next few years, until there are only a few, or maybe eventually just a couple, of the same slight shade of grey ..
The UK has legally incorporated the requirements of the Charter via the Human Rights Act.
Even if the UK were to exit the EU, the UK is also a member of the Council of Europe, and bound by the European Convention on Human Rights, and discrimination under the law is also prohibited by Article 14 of the ECHR.
Due to the nature of the blanket surveillance GCHQ is indulging in (tempora etc), this is impossible to do with any certainty - everything is swept up and stored. So they could pass a law, but it would be meaningless.
Positive change comes in small steps, and starts with awareness, don't be so cynical.
Various parliamentary immunities and exemptions already exist; extending these to include enhanced protection against surveillance would not be defining a new class of citizen. To the extent such immunities create a new class of citizen, those existing immunities and exemptions have already created it.
And, in any case, this is the United Kingdom we're talking about, a country whose government acts in the name of a monarch and whose parliament consists, in addition to a house of elected members, a house consisting of "Lords Spiritual and Temporal". Its hardly as if differing classes of citizens is a novel concept -- its already a rather overt feature of the British system.
Intelligence agencies didn't want us to know that, we learned it from whistleblowers.
I'm not sure what role GCHQ has with regard to blocking websites or if we know what they actually advocate. They have been known to do things clandestinely ;-)
https://theintercept.com/2015/06/22/controversial-gchq-unit-...
Educate yourself! The GCHQ is a reprehensible organ of an authoritarian state! Under no circumstances must we allow those who grant themselves the privilege of extreme secrecy, the further miscreant privilege of rampant social engineering - of which censorship is but a minor aspect!
“Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.”
― Benjamin Franklin
Maybe, some of them might begin to realize what they have done ... but I doubt it.
[1] https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-ben-franklin-really-said
Of course he did only talk about his current problems.
Still it is a very good quote that deserves to be seen not only in it's singular, historical meaning, but also in a wider look.
And as we see, we all need a broader look to preserve humanity -- or freedom and humanity will finally perish.
A few months ago there was a leak [1] which suggested GCHQ were spying on Scottish MSPs (Members of the Scottish Parliament) and MEPs.
Now, of course, they can continue to spy on Scottish elected officials without anyone being able to claim unfair treatment of MPs over others.
Edit: The other argument is of course that before this ruling, MPs were "above the law" so to speak. So in that sense it is a bit of a re-balancing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_Doctrine
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-3365...
That being said we are on a slippery slop when the State thinks it needs to protect itself from its elected members of parliament.
We have the same thing in Germany, the domestic intelligence services keeping tabs on MPs. Of course Germany has a rich tradition in this kind of behaviour.
MI5 themselves beg to differ[3] (though they don't address Wallace's allegations directly, it seems.)
And the whole idea, with a fictional PM, was made into a novel by eminently monitorable ex-MP Chris Mullin[4] and then a miniseries.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Wallace
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Wilson_conspiracy_theories
3: https://www.mi5.gov.uk/home/about-us/who-we-are/mi5-history/the-cold-war/the-wilson-plot.html
4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_British_CoupLike that time when the King was a Nazi spy. That was awkward. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v10/n16/paul-foot/the-great-times-they-... . The position of the Sinn Fein MPs is awkward as well.
Peter Hain complained about the security forces holding a file on him due to anti-apartheit campaigning: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/25/special...
And now we have Jeremy Corbyn being openly denounced as a "threat to national security". This has got Russia Today laughing at us, pointing out that we'd be condemning the same language if used by a regime we didn't like.
(EDIT: To be clear: I find this spying disgusting, but that does not change the fact that there was no good legal basis for assuming MPs were somehow protected)
The idea that MPs were above being spied on had no basis in law whatsoever. The only reason some people believed this was that Wilson said so, and nobody challenged the fact that no law was passed to actually prevent the security services from carrying out such spying. But the public statements of the prime minister has no legal standing whatsoever to set policy for government departments.
That MPs for decades have believed that the word of a politician not packed up by actual laws, or even actual government policies passed on to the security services, would in any way protect them is what is bizarre here.
On the upside, someone finally challenged it in court, rather than just blindly accept the "of course the Wilson doctrine still stands" nonsense.
Slightly ironic considering James H. Ellis worked for GCHQ