ISPs take legal action against GCHQ

I don't know about you, but despite having (unknowingly at the time) walked past a live IRA bomb in my childhood which detonated a few hours later, I feel far more threatened by mass surveillance than by any other state or non-state actor by any means. Mass surveillance has a truly chilling effect upon democracy, upon speech, upon the way we think. It is actively poisonous to freedom. And it is happening - her denials aside, these are not mere assertions: thanks largely to Snowden (and the other, not-so-publicised leakers), they are strongly and undeniably evidenced. Other evidence is available and can be obtained. This action - and Snowden's leaks - is the external oversight intended, and needed, to stop mass surveillance - any system of "oversight" in place has clearly failed.

Thing is, GCHQ have operated for over two decades now under the understanding that they have authority to actually conduct SIGINT operations at large - but that it's the responsibility of analysts internal, external (TSS/SIS/NCA/MoD/etc) and extraterritorial (NSA and the rest of the Five Eyes, etc) that query GCHQ about the results of those operations with specific targeted selectors (search queries; email addresses, names, IP addresses, website names, et al) to obtain sufficient clearance and authority to do so. (Broadly the same doctrine NSA have: that the interception itself isn't spying, the search/analysis of the intercepts is. Convenient for them, but questionable at best.)

The operations themselves, however, are frequently in much murkier territory; sometimes without any oversight or accountability at all, and a good number are conveniently obscured; from internal and external oversight, and even from Government Cabinet ministers such as Ms May, because it's too sensitive! Doesn't matter if you're TOP SECRET//STRAP1 or how many orange and purple forms you wave around, unless you're actively part of the individual SCI compartment in question, you're probably not even aware it exists, except maybe by a vague probably-two-word cover name (which is supposed to be arbitrary, but the newer guard loves their cute buzzwords too much). This is long-standing, if low-key, practice, spanning multiple governments - infrastructure and inertia outlasts governments which come and go, after all. Indeed, that was the entire basis under which the "Mastering The Internet" initiative was able to be set up in the first place; to my own knowledge this broad, general doctrine actually dates back a longer way in GCHQ than NSA, at least to the early 80s and the SystemX exchange intercept circuits. (It stands in stark contrast to their search policies, which they're obviously much happier to parade around before oversight.)

Can she honestly say that she knew of the actual modus operandi of, for example, the infamous OPTIC NERVE database - a very large collected archived corpus of images (quite a number of them explicit, as you'd expect from a huge recorded cache of intimate conversations the participants believed private) collected via mass passive interception of Yahoo! webcam chats of all user streams transiting the interception points - and believed that was a lawful, necessary and proportionate infringement of human rights justifying a warrant?! (If she could, I doubt she'd want to.) Who did? Probably no-one. Sir Anthony May: Did you see that? No, I thought not. It seems plainly wrong to me, as obvious an unjustifiable operation as one could be, to no actual useful intelligence purpose, and a clear sign that the boys from Cheltenham had indeed gone rogue - and one entirely unreported, until Snowden.

Thanks, Snowden, Greenwald, the Guardian, Jacob, et al. Your work is incredibly valuable and you deserve those awards. Now maybe we can have a conversation about all of this - but such a conversation obviously can't be effective when we're still being so profoundly, patronisingly whitewashed.