PERSONAL SPACE: Why this decade will be remembered as the one where privacy went public

It will never be fully clear which was the chicken and which the egg when the history of liberty’s destruction finally comes to be written. But the two co-operative factors involved are, without doubt, the State’s obsessive desire to control the citizen; and the arrival of technology to make it possible as never before.
The Slog: By one means or another – retail customer information files, EFTPOS, the internet, Satnav, social networking sites, ISP deals done with national security agencies, and the merging of visual, written and aural media – IT has ensured that everyone now is a target. From here on, all we are looking at is target practice: a training programme for snoopers that will one day ensure those in charge will be advising us when to take a dump and ordering us to buy stuff, or else.
The European Parliament – the sole and tiny bit of the EU that is elected – has decided to probe claims that the UK’s central spying control centre GCHQ launched a cyber attack on a Belgian telecom firm. Allegations that GCHQ attempted to hack into Belgacom – whose customers include the EU’s own offices in Brussels – were revealed in documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
This next bit will knock you dead: Britain said the EU “did not have the power to investigate”. And GCHQ claimed it “works within a strict legal framework.”
Well there you are then: if the spooks claim they’re legal and Whitehall says the EU has no right at all to question that dubious assertion, then who are we – the People – to argue?
I do argue with this, but am at one and the same time chastened by the fact that the head of GCHQ Sir Iain Lobban did not bother to turn up to give evidence at Thursday’s European Parliamentary Inquiry, which is tasked with investigating the extent of the alleged electronic mass surveillance of EU citizens.
How many of you – I wonder – will in future see Sir Iain as a man who feels accountable to anyone?
Across the Pond in the US we have the same thing with the NSA farrago of bollocks. The US National Security Agency (NSA) finally admitted this week that it recently operated a surveillance programme to collect mobile phone location data. But according to a senator privy to classified information about the agency’s activities, the NSA continues to conceal the full facts.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last Wednesday, NSA chief General Keith Alexander acknowledged for the first time that between 2010 and 2011, the spy agency collected location data on Americans as part of a secret pilot project. Alexander’s admission came after the New York Times reported that the trial programme had apparently “received samples in order to test the ability of its systems to handle the data format”.
For me, this is horribly reminiscent of Jacqui Smith (New Labour’s UK Home Secretary) lying her head off in 2009 about a “trial study” by GCHQ – while denying the donation of a £12bn budget to enable the completion – with ISP cooperation – of the installation of 24/7 monitoring of all UK citizen phone calls, texts, emails, blog content and site visits. In fact, the entire budget had already been spent, and its aims have now been achieved in full.
More  worrying than that, however, are the emerging tales of what happens to those who resist what the NSA is up to. Just one major telecommunications company – Qwest – refused to participate in a legally dubious NSA surveillance program in 2001. A few years later, its CEO Joseph Nacchio was indicted by federal prosecutors, and convicted of of insider trading. Yet in truth his only crime was refusing to break the law on the NSA’s behalf.
Released from prison after nearly five years last month, Nacchio told the Wall Street Journal he feels vindicated by the content of the Snowden leaks that show the agency was collecting American’s phone records. When he refused to help the NSA with God’s Work, his regular Government contracts started to disappear. Nacchio was prevented from bringing up any of this defence during his jury trial — the evidence needed to support it was deemed classified and the judge in his case refused his requests to use it. Nice Catch 22, eh?
The thing we have to remember about all the baby-kissers with the winning smiles and the cheesy rhetoric is, once they’re in office at any kind of senior level they know about all of this stuff….but it doesn’t seem to bother them. So as with everything else, they’re not protecting us from the anal neurotics who think every citizen with ethics is a dangerous security risk: it’s the other way round.
Now, scientific ‘advance’ has handed them the chance to have eternal, universal control over everyone. And what did we get in return for this? Satellite telly, mobile phones, and bloody Facebook. Yes, one deally does reap what one sows in this life.

Source 

Art by WB7