Surveillance

[Adam Back]

Apparently the UK is worse than the US even - less pretense about not spying
on their own subjects, less legal restrictions (to the extent the NSA and
their nominal oversight even respected the restrictions, which clearly they
did not much respect and subverted with clear internal complaints of the
oversight to the extent that the info was disclosed to them.).

You are her majesty's subject not a citizen, and the royal family hasnt
exercised their powers nor even expressed displeasure such is the etiquette
in a century.  The best you've got is the house of lords, however even their
powers have been weakened and dilluted by politically appointed peers by
parliament, which in my view was two steps backwards; at least the
hereditary peers were a break on change, are typically wealthy people who
dont want the politicians to screw up the country and to some extent have
more aligned interests with the people than policitians who typically have
no actual views, just play to opinion with no regard for the direction their
actions push civil society and democracy.

It may well be that for most westerners the best you could do is use a
russian or chinese internet proxy for internet, voice SIP, video chat/IM
etc.  The chinese are interesting in having their own source of backdoors
(electronics manufacturing) possibly rivaling the US software and key
backdoors.  They may have a state level interest and competence to find and
eliminate US originated backdoors.  Similarly for russia.

Adam

On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 10:08:35PM -0400, Tom Ritter wrote:
>On 30 September 2013 21:45, Juan Garofalo <juan.g71 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>         Am I right in assuming that the US is the only country who has its
>> own subjects PLUS a good deal of the world under close surveillance?
>
>I would say you are incorrect. The UK and the US cooperate very, very
>closely. Likewise, the Echelon/Five Eyes program is a publicly
>documented SIGINT sharing program
>(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON).
>
>-tom