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On 26/06/13 12:16, Martijn Grooten wrote:
I've not read the entire thread and there's a lot of replies and I've been out for 3 days, so apologies if I repeat stuff.On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 9:45 AM, Brad Rogers wrote: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.Yes, that. It makes it a _lot_ easier and our activities are a _lot_ more traceable.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.'Dissident organisations' like family and friends of a murdered black teenager?Does anyone here believe that what they get up to is *so* important that GCHQ monitor their every move? Surely not.
It used to be said that all international phone calls, and like the net many went via the UK because of our geographic position, were monitored with a system in place to record calls with key words like "Jane Fonda" (Hanoi Jane anyone?).
As for Stephen Lawrence, McDonalds, eco groups undercover stuff etc., I'm just about prepared to believe in a met dept out of control as they do sound sort of stupid, though Kim Philby's "My Secret War" doesn't make the security services sound much smarter, until the Guardian tells me better.
So, Al Quaida, Jane Fonda, bin Laden, Snowden, Shermantivov. al Jezzera, Hassan i Sabbah to you all. Maybe DCLUG will get attention now....
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