Surveillance

[Joss Wright]

On Tue, Oct 01, 2013 at 12:28:11PM +0200, Adam Back wrote:
> Apparently the UK is worse than the US even - less pretense about not spying
> on their own subjects, 

This, depressingly, does seem to be true in just about every sense. To
make matters worse, there are far more open debates at the political
level about increasing the ongoing level of surveillance, even in
response to what has become known recently. At least the US has the
decency to be ever-so-slightly ashamed in public.

> 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.).

The advantage that the UK, or at least its population, has over the US
comes mainly from European law and the protections afforded there. (Of
course, this is all predicated on the fact that most laws seem to be
largely ignored behind the scenes, but let's work with that while we're
talking legal restrictions.)

There was an interesting discussion of this recently on the ietf-privacy
mailing list, based on Caspar Bowden's research note for the European
Parliament. The whole thread, and the note, are worth a read for people
who haven't seen them:

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf-privacy/current/msg00326.html
 
> You are her majesty's subject not a citizen

This, at least, is just incorrect. Since the British Nationality Act of
1981 came into force in 1983, only a small (and diminishing) set of
people are British Subjects, and as far as I understand it it is no
longer possible to become a British Subject.  The overwhelmingly vast
majority of the British population are, in fact, British Citizens. See,
for example:

http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/britishcitizenship/

and, specifically,
http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/britishcitizenship/othernationality/britishsubjects/

(The term 'subject' does still occur in old laws and traditions for
historical reasons.)

Joss
-- 
Joss Wright | @JossWright
http://www.pseudonymity.net