Big Brother is Watching Us
Written by Matt B · first published 14/08/2008
Who's watching the bloggers?
From the tinfoil-hat Dept.
Thanet Star would like to know if Thanet bloggers are being targeted by Thanet District Council spying and surveillance as it starts to emerge just how fully local councils have been using "anti terror laws" to crack down on minor offences.
If you think I'm just being paranoid consider that Poole Borough Council
According to figures from the Office of the Surveillance Commissioner the number of applications from local councils for "directed surveillance" has doubled from last year to this to 12,494 requests where as the number of applications made by the police has fallen to around 19,000 applications.
So what can we do - read on to find out.
So clearly, despite the fine words being spoken by some, the momentum of law is heading in quite it's own direction. Perhaps it is time to protect ourselves. What can we do to maintain some level of privacy and spot when we have become victims of snooping?
Indeed do we need to do anything? It is often trotted out that the innocent have nothing to fear but I fear this is not true. In fact we have something to worry about as bloggers.
According to The Independent
Additionally consider that according to PCPro News the
Frankly I find that a terrifying idea given that we have few "courts of appeal" when a council abuses it's power. There is no public funding available to take a council to court and the Local Government Ombudsman (LGO) has no power to enforce it's decision on a council. Indeed one council did not like the outcome of a case and so switched to a different office of the LGO altogether. This leaves us in a position whereby on the whole a Council can do whatever they like and a councillor can likewise.
The fact of the matter is most or all surveillance will be carried out without your ever knowing about it. Most of the things that will be done will be invisible to you. So if you are in contact with a good source (say within a council) or just feel little paranoid then it might be a good idea to follow a few basic privacy tips.
1. Never make sensitive calls via your own phone (especially via your mobile). Skip tracers (people that find people that have "skipped out" on debts) that have switched to the growing "private protection" game recommend getting a prepay (pay as you go) phone which you should not register and (after destroying the sim card) should be thrown away after a month.
While this sounds fairly hard core this will serve to protect both you and your source. If you don't like the idea of throwing away phones each month then consider using only public pay phones and n good tinfoil-hat tradition make sure you don't use the same one twice.
2. When you meet your source switch off your mobiles and pagers and leave them elsewhere. Because of the technology used to maintain mobile phone connectivity a mobile phone can be used to pin an owner down to within a few meters for all the time it is switched on. If you and your source show up at the same location you have just endangered your source's secrecy.
3. Never phone your source at home or at work. Calls from unusual numbers will quickly identify your source as the likely source of a leak. Agree to meet in such locations as (a) do not have much CCTV and (b) you might naturally run into each other (pubs, cafés, Westwood Cross and church fêtes spring to mind).
4. If you email use an account that allows SSL (https) secure connections (as you would for banking) and create the account specially, do not publicise and use a username that is nondiscript. For example "sneaky.blogger" or "MyRealName" are probably a bad idea where as "blue.sea" or "NiceRoses2913" are possibly better ideas.
Do not use gmail. While it might take a while for a council to force records from Google they keep all emails forever. This is not what you want.
Save your email off-line and then delete them (empty that trash can too).
5. Give 'em something to read - all night long. If you are sure that you are going to be watched give them a head ache. Use your free evening calls to phone everyone you can, every day and overwhelm them with data. Do the same with email and if you know a little code set your computer up to access hundreds of random websites an hour while you are not there.
If you can get everyone to email you long emails full of waffle and keywords that might be searched for. This will cause the people sifting your email to have to read some very uninteresting and long messages.
Phone yourself from every phone you get access to. Say hello to your answer phone and hang up. The more calls you have on that record the harder it will be to find anything significant.
You could agree to preface your actual message with x paragraphs of mundane content (how much you paid for those shoes, the fact that you got up 3 minutes before the alarm clock, etc) where x has some agreed relationship to the date. While you and your friends will know to skip the first x lines or paragraphs the poor soul that has to read the intercepted mails has no idea.
What this does is use up resources with white noise and reduces the usefulness of spying on you. You could extend this to going for long walks that go nowhere if you believe that the authorities are following you.
6. Like the cockneys establish an unintelligible culture. This is actually quite simple to do - simply start by introducing cultural slang and substitutions with your peers. If you have a friend (let's call him Bob) known for making mistakes you could say that "you-know-who seems to have done a Bob". Only the participants in the conversation have a direct line one what is being said.
As in point five what you are doing is giving them a hard time and reducing the meaningfulness of the gathered data. A friend and I have great delight in using excessive verbiage where uniqueness of words is valued highly. In such cases cleaver euphemisms come to the fore such that "chasing girls" becomes "mammiferous activities" - reach for that dictionary spy boy.
7. Encrypt your connections. Ask your favourite websites (especially those that might carry news or opinions our local council might not like) to use https (like banks do) so that the content of the pages you read can not be intercepted and examined (without spending unimaginably large sums of money). A self signed certificate is fine as we care only for encryption and not trustworthiness for banking details.
I am working towards a solution whereby Thanet Star should be available over https and will let you know when this is ready.
8. Use an Onion. To stop your activities showing up on your ISP records you can use a software solution called tor. It works by creating an "onion network" whereby all the messages are bundled up time and again and sent through the network (of which you are now part) and out onto the general Internet via a randomly located PC. It is next to impossible to trace what you were looking at while the onion network was used.
9. Use multiple guides - don't just take my word for it check out what other people are saying. The website ehow.com has an article called: How to Leak a Story to the Press.
10. Give them a shock and post yourself an email from a new hotmail address (something like GovernmentInformer22@hotmail.com or TDC-leaks@yahoo.co.uk should be enough to get their interest). Go to an Internet Café or library (if you can find one) and make the new email account. Send yourself a short message that says "I know you are reading my email".
If they are reading your email this should make them feel a little nervous and set off lots of panic. If you are lucky a press release will be made that denies "allegations" of snooping (gotcha). Most likely you will have no idea if it ever got read by anyone else but yourself.
11. Use your eyes. Take a slow walk around the block an hour before you normally go to work or take a quick run during the commercial break of your favourite soap. Look out for cars with people sitting in or vans parked up. Make a mental note of the number plate and get back inside. (write down the time, date and reg plate).
Do this a few times over a number of days. Police favour unmarked vans but anything might be used. Be on the lookout for Mears (TDCs work force currently) vans parked after hours or someone that seems to be driving around the block.
Also look out for vans that pull up, do nothing and leave again later. Once you have identified a potential doorstep spy you can try leading them on a wild goose chase or confronting them (they don't like that too much) or you could call 999 and tell them that you know your house is being "cased" by robbers (because it might not be the authorities watching you).
12. Use the post. Regular post is a lot harder to intercept and has the most laws protecting it. Set yourself up a Post Office box and encourage your source to do likewise (if you want to contact them). There are hundreds of good reasons for this such as doubting the local postman's abilities to personal reasons such as planning a divorce or a sudden desire to run a small mail order business.
Make sure you use strong tamper evident envelopes and other securities. You could even write using a cypher or code if you want. Communicate via post and be ready to burn stuff (envelopes, covering letters etc) after you have read it.
This will make it very hard to connect you with any mail although going to opent he box might be tricky if you are being followed (but that's what family and friends are for).
There is no way to be utterly sure that you have complete privacy but that is not the object of this activity. The idea is to make it shockingly expensive to maintain such surveillance and obsquare and distort any information that they do get on you. Your aim is to make them give up and "bug" someone else while keeping your sources safe.
Lean on a council too hard or object to hard to their actions and any benefits or support they offer will suddenly become subject to massive ammounts of red tape. Offend someone and the whees of "due process" will start moving and not in your favour. I call this bullying and this was my guide to making life hard for bullies.
From the tinfoil-hat Dept.
Thanet Star would like to know if Thanet bloggers are being targeted by Thanet District Council spying and surveillance as it starts to emerge just how fully local councils have been using "anti terror laws" to crack down on minor offences.
Even junior council officials are being allowed to initiate surveillance operations in what privacy campaigners likened to Eastern bloc police tacticssays Times Online under the headline Terror law turns thousands of council officials into spies.
If you think I'm just being paranoid consider that Poole Borough Council
[...] admitted spying on a family to check they were living in the correct school catchment area. Jenny Paton, 39, Tim Joyce, 37, and their three daughters had their movements scrutinised and timed by an undercover official.says guardian.co.uk under the headline Council used terror law to spy on fishermen. Meanwhile telegraph.co.uk says Council snoopers access 900 phone bills as they report
Simon Davies, director of the campaign group Privacy International, said: 'Surveillance has become a free-for-all among local government. It's a game anyone can play and they do.
According to figures from the Office of the Surveillance Commissioner the number of applications from local councils for "directed surveillance" has doubled from last year to this to 12,494 requests where as the number of applications made by the police has fallen to around 19,000 applications.
So what can we do - read on to find out.
The activities of the snoopers have damaged the reputation of local councils, the town halls’ national body warned.reports Mail Online under the headline Terror laws aren’t a licence to snoop, councils warned. However This is London reports Council snoopers to get new powers to seize phone and email records - with taxpayers footing the £50m bill wherein they write
Town halls, along with the police, security services, health authorities and other public bodies, will have access to 'communication' records of anyone suspected of involvement in even the most minor crime.
So clearly, despite the fine words being spoken by some, the momentum of law is heading in quite it's own direction. Perhaps it is time to protect ourselves. What can we do to maintain some level of privacy and spot when we have become victims of snooping?
Indeed do we need to do anything? It is often trotted out that the innocent have nothing to fear but I fear this is not true. In fact we have something to worry about as bloggers.
According to The Independent
[...] UK defamation law had discouraged critical media reporting on serious public interest matters, affecting the ability of scholars and journalists to publish their work.(Britain's libel laws are stifling free speech, says UN). This might go some way towards explaining the current inability of our local papers to report "hard news".
Additionally consider that according to PCPro News the
information will be made available to police forces in order to crack down on serious crime, but will also be accessible by local councils, health authorities and even Ofsted and the Post Office.(Government proposes email and internet tracking). The article goes on to quote the Home Office:
Each local council can make a decision for themselves on what is the most interest to them.
Frankly I find that a terrifying idea given that we have few "courts of appeal" when a council abuses it's power. There is no public funding available to take a council to court and the Local Government Ombudsman (LGO) has no power to enforce it's decision on a council. Indeed one council did not like the outcome of a case and so switched to a different office of the LGO altogether. This leaves us in a position whereby on the whole a Council can do whatever they like and a councillor can likewise.
The fact of the matter is most or all surveillance will be carried out without your ever knowing about it. Most of the things that will be done will be invisible to you. So if you are in contact with a good source (say within a council) or just feel little paranoid then it might be a good idea to follow a few basic privacy tips.
1. Never make sensitive calls via your own phone (especially via your mobile). Skip tracers (people that find people that have "skipped out" on debts) that have switched to the growing "private protection" game recommend getting a prepay (pay as you go) phone which you should not register and (after destroying the sim card) should be thrown away after a month.
While this sounds fairly hard core this will serve to protect both you and your source. If you don't like the idea of throwing away phones each month then consider using only public pay phones and n good tinfoil-hat tradition make sure you don't use the same one twice.
2. When you meet your source switch off your mobiles and pagers and leave them elsewhere. Because of the technology used to maintain mobile phone connectivity a mobile phone can be used to pin an owner down to within a few meters for all the time it is switched on. If you and your source show up at the same location you have just endangered your source's secrecy.
3. Never phone your source at home or at work. Calls from unusual numbers will quickly identify your source as the likely source of a leak. Agree to meet in such locations as (a) do not have much CCTV and (b) you might naturally run into each other (pubs, cafés, Westwood Cross and church fêtes spring to mind).
4. If you email use an account that allows SSL (https) secure connections (as you would for banking) and create the account specially, do not publicise and use a username that is nondiscript. For example "sneaky.blogger" or "MyRealName" are probably a bad idea where as "blue.sea" or "NiceRoses2913" are possibly better ideas.
Do not use gmail. While it might take a while for a council to force records from Google they keep all emails forever. This is not what you want.
Save your email off-line and then delete them (empty that trash can too).
5. Give 'em something to read - all night long. If you are sure that you are going to be watched give them a head ache. Use your free evening calls to phone everyone you can, every day and overwhelm them with data. Do the same with email and if you know a little code set your computer up to access hundreds of random websites an hour while you are not there.
If you can get everyone to email you long emails full of waffle and keywords that might be searched for. This will cause the people sifting your email to have to read some very uninteresting and long messages.
Phone yourself from every phone you get access to. Say hello to your answer phone and hang up. The more calls you have on that record the harder it will be to find anything significant.
You could agree to preface your actual message with x paragraphs of mundane content (how much you paid for those shoes, the fact that you got up 3 minutes before the alarm clock, etc) where x has some agreed relationship to the date. While you and your friends will know to skip the first x lines or paragraphs the poor soul that has to read the intercepted mails has no idea.
What this does is use up resources with white noise and reduces the usefulness of spying on you. You could extend this to going for long walks that go nowhere if you believe that the authorities are following you.
6. Like the cockneys establish an unintelligible culture. This is actually quite simple to do - simply start by introducing cultural slang and substitutions with your peers. If you have a friend (let's call him Bob) known for making mistakes you could say that "you-know-who seems to have done a Bob". Only the participants in the conversation have a direct line one what is being said.
As in point five what you are doing is giving them a hard time and reducing the meaningfulness of the gathered data. A friend and I have great delight in using excessive verbiage where uniqueness of words is valued highly. In such cases cleaver euphemisms come to the fore such that "chasing girls" becomes "mammiferous activities" - reach for that dictionary spy boy.
7. Encrypt your connections. Ask your favourite websites (especially those that might carry news or opinions our local council might not like) to use https (like banks do) so that the content of the pages you read can not be intercepted and examined (without spending unimaginably large sums of money). A self signed certificate is fine as we care only for encryption and not trustworthiness for banking details.
I am working towards a solution whereby Thanet Star should be available over https and will let you know when this is ready.
8. Use an Onion. To stop your activities showing up on your ISP records you can use a software solution called tor. It works by creating an "onion network" whereby all the messages are bundled up time and again and sent through the network (of which you are now part) and out onto the general Internet via a randomly located PC. It is next to impossible to trace what you were looking at while the onion network was used.
9. Use multiple guides - don't just take my word for it check out what other people are saying. The website ehow.com has an article called: How to Leak a Story to the Press.
10. Give them a shock and post yourself an email from a new hotmail address (something like GovernmentInformer22@hotmail.com or TDC-leaks@yahoo.co.uk should be enough to get their interest). Go to an Internet Café or library (if you can find one) and make the new email account. Send yourself a short message that says "I know you are reading my email".
If they are reading your email this should make them feel a little nervous and set off lots of panic. If you are lucky a press release will be made that denies "allegations" of snooping (gotcha). Most likely you will have no idea if it ever got read by anyone else but yourself.
11. Use your eyes. Take a slow walk around the block an hour before you normally go to work or take a quick run during the commercial break of your favourite soap. Look out for cars with people sitting in or vans parked up. Make a mental note of the number plate and get back inside. (write down the time, date and reg plate).
Do this a few times over a number of days. Police favour unmarked vans but anything might be used. Be on the lookout for Mears (TDCs work force currently) vans parked after hours or someone that seems to be driving around the block.
Also look out for vans that pull up, do nothing and leave again later. Once you have identified a potential doorstep spy you can try leading them on a wild goose chase or confronting them (they don't like that too much) or you could call 999 and tell them that you know your house is being "cased" by robbers (because it might not be the authorities watching you).
12. Use the post. Regular post is a lot harder to intercept and has the most laws protecting it. Set yourself up a Post Office box and encourage your source to do likewise (if you want to contact them). There are hundreds of good reasons for this such as doubting the local postman's abilities to personal reasons such as planning a divorce or a sudden desire to run a small mail order business.
Make sure you use strong tamper evident envelopes and other securities. You could even write using a cypher or code if you want. Communicate via post and be ready to burn stuff (envelopes, covering letters etc) after you have read it.
This will make it very hard to connect you with any mail although going to opent he box might be tricky if you are being followed (but that's what family and friends are for).
Conclusion
There is no way to be utterly sure that you have complete privacy but that is not the object of this activity. The idea is to make it shockingly expensive to maintain such surveillance and obsquare and distort any information that they do get on you. Your aim is to make them give up and "bug" someone else while keeping your sources safe.
Lean on a council too hard or object to hard to their actions and any benefits or support they offer will suddenly become subject to massive ammounts of red tape. Offend someone and the whees of "due process" will start moving and not in your favour. I call this bullying and this was my guide to making life hard for bullies.
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