ECHELON to cast a wider net

Ministers are considering spending up to £12 billion on a database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.

GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, has already been given up to £1 billion to finance the first stage of the project.

Hundreds of clandestine probes will be installed to monitor customers live on two of the country’s biggest internet and mobile phone providers - thought to be BT and Vodafone. BT has nearly 5m internet customers.

With an international recession on the way (or it’s already started depending on who you speak to), the Labour government want to expand the role and powers of the Government Communications Headquarters - at the cost of £12 billion. No doubt this is in part because the existing ECHELON system is unable to cope with the explosion of digital communication since the mid-90s due to the rise of mobile phones and the Internet becoming mainstream.

When I started thinking about this, I thought that it might be unworkable. Hell, the amount of processing required to monitor a high traffic transient site like 4chan seems astronomical until I remembered news from earlier this year - Google “Phorm packet inspection” or read this handy round up of Phorm news from The Register. This technology is available now and BT have already run secret trials on it’s customers last year. BT and Vodafone are the two companies rumoured to be taking part in the GCHQ trials and if successful, it wouldn’t surprise me if legislation was introduced making it compulsory for all UK ISPs to have similar packet inspection technology with the logs made available to GCHQ. Or just bypass all that and install the system on the physical networks spanning the country.

I had this entry sat unfinished in my drafts folder since the story broke last week and was thinking about deleting it. However I think it’s still relevant in regards to 2 news stories from yesterday:

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.

Aside from being unworkable (how will it cover the second hand market for phones or the existing phones in circulation?), won’t this legislation mainly punish those with a low income, stereotypically the main users of PAYG phones? Up until last year I hadn’t had a passport for around 10 years and it cost me around £80 to get one. Will this now be the entry cost to owning a mobile phone?

This is of course ignoring the main fallacy of this proposed legislation - those who are intent on breaking the law will still break the law. Creating more laws for them to break will in all likelihood not stop them from breaking laws. Theoretically it would also encourage identity fraud and theft - if a passport is the only way to get a phone, then won’t this incite a black market for fake or fraudulent passports? Won’t criminals look to stealing phones even if they will only be able to use them for as long as the phones aren’t reported stolen? Hell, The Wire explains very succinctly what happens to criminal networks as you try and monitor their communications - they find other, more difficult to monitor, means of communicating.

Maybe The Times article is just being vague. Maybe it’s the sale of pay as you go SIM cards that the Government want to regulate. That still won’t address one major problem - from my current residence I can walk into Hackney Central and pass at least 5 independent shops offering PAYG SIMs on any network for less than £3 each. If this legislation were to come into effect, will all the mobile service providers be able to recall all of these cards? Will they be able to track down all the cards that aren’t recalled?

This proposal is also missing or conveniently ignoring the point that thanks to existing mobile phone technology the Police can already pinpoint a suspect via mobiles. You don’t need a new iPhone to be tracked down via GPS - phones can be located to within metres using cell site analysis. Couple this with data on repeated calls from a particular location and bingo, you’ve just found out this suspect’s house, place of work or local pub.

So once more, Labour are pushing for a national database - the key part of that last quote being “part of a much bigger database”. Despite mounting opposition to Identity Cards and the National Identity Register (a 2006 YouGov poll revealed that 79% agreed that Britain has become a “surveillance society” and that 51% were unhappy with this) Labour wants the right to spy on all British citizens through the oxymoron of restricting our civil liberties to protect our freedom.

Thankfully, at least one person is standing up against this bullshit. Amazingly it’s not the ever delectable Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty (although I’m sure she has something to say) but one of Tony’s cronies, Sir Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions. I caught him on Channel 4 News ahead of his speech last night and was surprised that the head of the Crown Prosecution Service was warning about “mission creep” of legislation brought in to aid the Police and Secret Service:

“We need to understand that it is in the nature of state power that decisions taken in the next few months and years about how the state may use these powers, and to what extent are likely to be irreversible.

“They will be with us forever,” he said. “And they in turn will be built upon on.

“So we should take very great care to imagine the world we are creating before we build it. We might end up living with something we can’t bear.”