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Int'l Spy Agencies First to Spot 'Suspicious Interactions' Between Russia, Trump Team
"Watch out. There's something not right here."
Apr 13, 2017
The ongoing probe into ties between Russia and affiliates of President Donald Trump was reportedly first spurred by international spy agencies that picked up "suspicious interactions," which they began sharing with the FBI, the Guardianreported on Thursday.
Speaking to a number of unidentified sources, journalists Luke Harding, Stephanie Kirchgaessner, and Nick Hopkins outlined how the international web of surveillance first picked up on "a pattern of connections that were flagged to intelligence officials in the U.S."
They report:
GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious "interactions" between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added.
Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump's inner circle and Russians, sources said. The European countries that passed on electronic intelligence--known as SIGINT--included Germany, Estonia and Poland. Australia, a member of the "Five Eyes" spying alliance that also includes the U.S., U.K., Canada, and New Zealand, also relayed material, one source said.
Another source suggested the Dutch and the French spy agency, the General Directorate for External Security or DGSE, were contributors.
The agencies, according to one source, "were saying: 'There are contacts going on between people close to Mr. Trump and people we believe are Russian intelligence agents. You should be wary of this.' The message was: 'Watch out. There's something not right here.'"
Wary of the Trump administration's recent accusation that the U.K. helped former President Barack Obama "wiretap" Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Guardian specifies that the "alleged conversations were picked up by chance as part of routine surveillance of Russian intelligence assets," and that the GCHQ "was at no point carrying out a targeted operation against Trump or his team."
According to one source, Robert Hannigan, who at the time was director of GCHQ, "passed material in summer 2016 to the CIA chief, John Brennan. The matter was deemed so sensitive it was handled at 'director level.' After an initially slow start, Brennan used GCHQ information and intelligence from other partners to launch a major inter-agency investigation."
This is roughly around the same time that the FBI obtained an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to surveil Trump adviser Carter Page, which the Washington Postbroke news of on Wednesday.
The new reporting comes amid a whirlwind of international activity, including reports of recently strained relations with Russia after the U.S. took unilateral military action against its ally, the Syrian government, last week. Observers questioned whether the bombing, which was said to be carried out in retaliation for a deadly chemical gas attack on civilians, was a way for Trump to distract from his mounting domestic problems--including low approval ratings and the ongoing probes.
At this point, the FBI as well as intelligence committees in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate have open investigations into the Russian matter. One of the unnamed sources told the Guardian that at least one of those inquiries may "now have specific concrete and corroborative evidence of collusion...between people in the Trump campaign and agents of [Russian] influence relating to the use of hacked material."
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EU's Top Court Delivers "Major Blow" to Mass Surveillance
"Today's judgment is a major blow against mass surveillance and an important day for privacy"
Dec 21, 2016
The European Union's highest court on Wednesday issued a landmark ruling against mass surveillance in a judgment that challenges key portions of the U.K.'s so-called "Snooper's charter," a sweeping surveillance bill that was set to become law by the end of the year.
The decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which directly calls into question both the British law and a similar bill in Sweden, finds that indiscriminate storing of private citizens' communications data is illegal under EU law.
The court's ruling finds that data retention is only allowable when government agencies are investigating a "serious crime," such as terrorism.
The "general and indiscriminate retention" of emails allowed by the the "Investigatory Powers Act," or Snooper's charter, is therefore illegal, the Guardian reports.
"Today's judgment is a major blow against mass surveillance and an important day for privacy," said Camilla Graham Wood, legal officer with the rights organization Privacy International. "It makes clear that blanket and indiscriminate retention of our digital histories -- who we interact with, when and how and where -- can be a very intrusive form of surveillance that needs strict safeguards against abuse and mission creep. Unfortunately, those safeguards are not present in the Investigatory Powers Act, which is why it's a Snooper's Charter."
The Guardian notes:
The finding came in response to a legal challenge initially brought by the Brexit secretary, David Davis, when he was a backbench MP, and Tom Watson, Labour's deputy leader, over the legality of GCHQ's bulk interception of call records and online messages.
Davis and Watson, who were supported by Liberty, the Law Society, the Open Rights Group and Privacy International, had already won a high court victory on the issue, but the government appealed and the case was referred by appeal judges to the [CJEU]. The case will now return to the court of appeal to be resolved in terms of U.K. legislation.
The long-awaited judgment "raises significant questions about whether vast swathes of the [Snooper's charter] should now be repealed," observes Privacy International.
The advocacy group summarizes the key portions called into question by the decision:
- In particular, the judgment raises concerns about the viability of the mandatory communications data retention powers (Part 4 of the Investigatory Powers Act), which are carried over from DRIPA. Under the new Act, communications data -- which includes the who, when and where of our telephone calls, emails and instant messages -- can be subject to a retention order for up to 12 months for reasons that go far beyond what is strictly necessary for fighting serious crime.
- The judgment also demands a rethink of the government's significant expansion of data retention powers to so-called 'Internet Connection Records', which could include the retention of browsing histories for the past 12 months.
- The judgment may also mean that the U.K. government is forced to increase safeguards, such as judicial authorization and notification, for data that it keeps about us. These were shown to be lacking in DRIPA. The judgment could mean that the government will need to introduce new safeguards for accessing communications data (including Internet Connection Records) and other intrusive powers contained within the new law.
"In addition to rejecting generalized retention and narrowing down access to serious crime with independent authorization, the CJEU has further established that as a rule only the data of people suspected of direct involvement in [...] crimes can be accessed," observes the U.K.-based Open Rights Group. "Accessing other people's data must be an exception and also based on specific evidence of how this may help investigations."
Wood added: "The court has rightly recognized that our communications data is no less sensitive than the content of our communications. This is something that the U.K. government has willfully ignored, allowing a large number of public bodies to access our personal data without a warrant. The government must now urgently fix the Investigatory Powers Act, so that access to our data is properly authorized."
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UK Set to Approve Most Extreme Spy Bill in 'History of Western Democracy'
"Snooper's charter" poised to become law by end of 2016 after passing both houses of Parliament this week
Nov 18, 2016
The U.K. surveillance bill known as the "Snooper's charter" is poised to become law after passing both houses of Parliament this week. It only needs to be approved by Royal Assent, which is expected to happen by the end of the year.
The Investigatory Powers (IP) Bill is, as transparency advocates describe it, the most extreme surveillance law ever passed by a democracy. Approved amid the chaos of the post-Brexit vote and President-elect Donald Trump's historic upset, the bill has implications that reach far beyond its borders.
Jamie Killock, executive director of the civil liberties organization Open Rights Group, said Thursday, "The passing of the IP Bill will have an impact that goes beyond the U.K.'s shores. It is likely that other countries, including authoritarian regimes with poor human rights records, will use this law to justify their own intrusive surveillance powers."
Open Rights Group summarized the bill's most pertinent provisions:
- Internet Service Providers could be obliged to store their customers' web browsing history for a year. The police and government departments will have unprecedented powers to access this data through a search engine that could be used for profiling.
- The security services will continue to have powers to collect communications data in bulk.
- The police and security services will have new hacking powers.
- The security services can access and analyze public and private databases, even though the majority of data will be held about people who are not suspected of any crimes.
The bill codifies the statutes revealed in 2013 by National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, "as well as increasing surveillance by the police and other government departments," Killock continued. "There will continue to be a lack of privacy protections for international data sharing arrangements with the U.S. Parliament has also failed to address the implications of the technical integration of GCHQ [the U.K.'s Government Communications Headquarters] and the NSA."
The United Nations privacy chief Joseph Cannataci previously called the bill "worse than scary," saying at an Internet Governance Forum panel in Brazil last week, "It is the golden age of surveillance, [governments have] never had so much data. I am just talking about metadata, I haven't got down to content."
"Mass surveillance is alive and well but governments are finding ways of making that the law of the land," Cannataci said. He also criticized the U.K. media and pro-surveillance members of parliament for what he called "an offensive" to distort the debate and push new powers into law.
"[D]o a media analysis of the way the British establishment is trotting out news about the law and the need for the law and ask yourselves the question 'If this is not orchestrated then what is?'" he said.
Matt Burgess, a Wired UK reporter who has done extensive coverage on the bill, wrote on Twitter that the snooper's charter has "been described as being worse than China's, yet is passed incredibly easily. 2016."
Snowden also wrote, "The U.K. has just legalized the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy. It goes farther than many autocracies."
\u201cThe UK has just legalized the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy. It goes farther than many autocracies. https://t.co/yvmv8CoHrj\u201d— Edward Snowden (@Edward Snowden) 1479419993
Killock noted in an op-ed for Newsweek last week that "[a]ll of these practices appear to have existed for many years, in secret and without a Parliamentary vote. Hidden creative interpretations of our existing laws allowed so-called 'bulk powers' to gather information about millions of people, secretly tap internal cables belonging to Google or Yahoo! and to hack foreign companies, such as Belgium's national telecoms provider, turning them into [GCHQ] surveillance conduits. The only reason we know, of course, is because of Edward Snowden's actions, revealing what the U.S.'s NSA and Britain's GCHQ were up to."
The bill was passed just a day before Trump selected the hawkish Tea Party Republican Rep. Mike Pompeo to head the CIA. Pompeo is a proponent of mass surveillance who has previously called for Snowden to receive the death penalty.
"You'd think the sheer revocation of democracy and failure of accountability would be enough to outrage British MPs," Killock wrote in Newsweek. "You'd think this shift from targeted phone taps focused on specific known criminals to one of blanket surveillance to start fishing for new suspects would deserve a principled national debate."
"Apparently not."
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