Re: [LUG] OT surveillance

[Philip Hudson <phil.hudson@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 26 Jun, 2013, at 9:45 am, Brad Rogers wrote:

> On Wed, 26 Jun 2013 08:03:54 +0100
> Martijn Grooten <sweetwatergeek@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hello Martijn,
>
> > On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 5:30 AM, Kai Hendry wrote:
> > > Are we comfortable with that?
> > I certainly am not.
> > But what still isn't clear to me, is how GCHQ deals with encrypted
> > traffic. If they just have to discard it (except perhaps the metadata
>
> Do people genuinely believe that, prior to the advent of email,
> governments did *not* 'spy' on their own citizens?  They've always  
> done
> it, they always will.  It's just that email makes it easier for them  
> to
> do so.
>
> Whilst they have the (in theory) ability to monitor all  
> communications,
> something like 99.99% of it will be of no interest to them.  They'll
> monitor people that are known activists (e.g. Abu Hamza), members of
> dissident organisations and so forth.  The rest will be cherry picked
> either at random, or flagged because of certain criteria such as
> keywords.
>
> Does anyone here believe that what they get up to is *so* important  
> that
> GCHQ monitor their every move?  Surely not.

Every word of which is true as far as it goes and for certain data  
sets; not one word of which is a reason not to constrain the spooks.

--
Phil Hudson                  http://hudson-it.no-ip.biz
@UWascalWabbit                 PGP/GnuPG ID: 0x887DCA63


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