The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
I doubt we'll be seeing that particular piece of clever-dick marketing adorning everything electronic anymore - but there it is on my less-than-2-year-old HP laptop.
Peter Presland
".....there is something far worse than Nazism, and that is the hubris of the Anglo-American fraternities, whose routine is to incite indigenous monsters to war, and steer the pandemonium to further their imperial aims" Guido Preparata. Preface to 'Conjuring Hitler'[size=12][size=12] "Never believe anything until it has been officially denied" Claud Cockburn
European Union justice and rights commissioner Viviane Reding is negotiating with the US on the fallout from the NSA scandal. Photograph: Frederick Florin/AFP/Getty
The EU executive is threatening to freeze crucial data-sharing arrangements with the US because of the Edward Snowden revelations about the mass surveillance of the National Security Agency.
The US will have to adjust their surveillance activities to comply with EU law and enable legal redress in the US courts for Europeans whose rights may have been infringed, said Viviane Reding, the EU's justice and rights commissioner who is negotiating with the US on the fallout from the NSAscandal.
European businesses need to compete on a level playing field with US rivals, Reding told the Guardian.
The EU commissioner said there was little she or Brussels could do about the activities of the NSA's main partner in mass surveillance, Britain's General Communications Headquarters or GCHQ, since secret services in the EU were the strict remit of national governments. The commission has demanded but failed to obtain detailed information from the British government on how UK surveillance practices are affecting other EU citizens.
"I have direct competence in law enforcement but not in secret services. That remains with the member states. In general, secret services are national," said the commissioner, from Luxembourg.
As a result of the Snowden disclosures, the EU has reviewed existing data-sharing agreements with the Americans concerning commercial swaps between US and European companies, information traded aimed at suppressing international terrorist funding, and the supply of information on transatlantic air passengers. It is also rethinking ongoing negotiations over exchanging data with the Americans on judicial and police co-operation. And it is drafting new Europe-wide data protection rules requiring US internet companies operating in the EU to obtain permission to transfer data to the US and to restrict US intelligence access to it.
Pressing the Americans in negotiations in Washington last week, Reding was unable to obtain US figures on the scale of the US surveillance of Europeans.
The commercial data exchange, known as "Safe Harbor", was found to be flawed.
"The commission will underline that things have gone very badly indeed. Our analysis is Safe Harbor seems not to be safe. We're asking the US not just to speak, but to act," Reding said. "There is always a possibility to scrap Safe Harbor … It's important that these recommendations are acted on by the US side by summer 2014. Next summer is a Damocles sword. It's a real to-do list. Enforcement is absolutely critical. Safe Harbor cannot be only an empty shell."
The commission is to come forward on Wednesday with a set of recommendations addressing the risks exposed by Snowden. The package was agreed in Brussels on Monday, said senior officials, but is opposed by Britain's representative in the commission, Lady Ashton.
The Snowden disclosures are "a wake-up call for the EU and its member states to advance swiftly on data protection reform", the commission is expected to say."The question has arisen whether the large-scale collection and processing of personal information under US surveillance programmes is necessary and proportionate to meet the interests of national security … EU citizens do not enjoy the same rights and procedural safeguards as Americans."
Reding stressed that US concessions on legal redress were central to Brussels' demands. American citizens in Europe can go to the courts if they feel their rights are infringed. Europeans without right of residence in America may not.
"For two years I have asked for reciprocity," said Reding. "I couldn't get that. It needs a change of [US] legislation and the administration has always told me they couldn't get that through."
Senior EU officials are cautiously confident that the Obama administration realises the damage done to transatlantic trust by the Snowden leaks and that it will act to assuage some of the EU concerns.
"The US tone has changed," said a senior official present at the Washington negotiations last week. "The Americans were always stonewalling. Now the cat is out of the bag. We are seeing movement."
US flexibility contrasted with outright British hostility to EU moves to reinforce privacy rights, the officials said. The new EU rules being drafted on data protection were opposed openly "150%" by the British, said another senior official. "There's nothing new here."
But the Germans were also opposed, arguing that the new regime was not strict enough. The Scandinavians and some east Europeans also had some reservations about new data privacy rules from Brussels, suggesting they will have trouble surviving in current form.
The aim is to get the new regulations through the legislative cycle by next May, but that looks unlikely.
Cecilia Malmström, the commissioner for home affairs, is to declare on Wednesday that the onus is on Washington to come clean about the Snowden disclosures.
"Serious concerns still remain following the revelations," she will say. "If the US wants to overcome current tensions, they need to shed full light on these allegations. Our co-operation with the US in the fight against terrorism has been put into question by the NSA revelations."
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
Edward Snowdon is featured on bus ads in the nation's capital. (Photo: Thank You Ed Snowden)
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden continues to cool his heels in Russia to escape prosecution in the United States, but his profile is rising in the nation's capital on buses plying the streets of Washington, D.C.The bus campaign to call attention to Snowden's dilemma is in its second day, according to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF), a D.C-based public interest group.
The PCJF is behind the "Thank You Ed Snowden" ads plastered on the side of city Metrobuses, part of a broader public advocacy campaign to oppose the NSA's "massive, covert spying and bulk surveillance programs." The effort includes a letter writing campaign to Congress.
"The NSA placed malware on more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide. Yes, the NSA, using taxpayers money, infected more than 50,000 computer networks with malicious software designed to steal sensitive information," the group said in a statement.
"We are acting now because the government spying agencies are truly out of control," it added.
Going forward, the group plans to expand the bus campaign in Washington. The Partnership is also filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) demands with the NSA, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and the FBI.
The effort is designed to get more information on their spying programs that could possibility lead to a legal challenge on constitutional grounds.
Snowden, 30, a computer specialist, former CIA employee and former NSA contractor, disclosed as many as 200,000 classified documents to the news media outlining the broad extent of intelligence gathering activities by the super-secret spy agency.
He's considered a fugitive from justice by U.S. authorities, who have charged him with espionage and theft of government property. He faces life in prison if convicted on all counts.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
REUTERS
Edward Snowden is seen in front of the Christ the Saviour Cathedral in central Moscow.
On Monday Mark Hosenball of Reuters reported that Edward Snowden has a "doomsday" cache of documents he stole from the NSA, which is set to dump onto the Internet and/or into the hands of selected journalists if "something happens" to Snowden.
Several officials told Hosenball that the documents contain the names of specialists and intelligence agents.
So the intelligence community is freaking out for good reason: releasing those names would have deadly consequence.
Former NSA officer John Schindler hearkened back to previous defectors, "Back in the 1970s, Ed's forerunner Phil Agee, a former CIA officer who got in bed with Cuban intel & KGB and authored 3 books that exposed CIA ops mostly in Latin America (sound familiar?) blew the covers of several hundred US intel officers abroad, who had to be pulled back. Also got the CIA station chief in Athens killed." "Same thing would happen now - huge problem if true," Schindler wrote via email. Schindler took great pains in our email correspondence to note his "skepticism" that Snowden has a list of names. Others are not so skeptical. Both The New York Times and The Guardian make reference to a secret wiki spies used to communicate, though they make reference to Signals Intelligence "listeners" and not necessarily field agents. Certain unnamed sources insist to Reuters the documents do contain names and resumes of intelligence personnel. Were those documents released, and were they to contain the names of field agents, case officers, or station chiefs, the results would be disastrous. When Valerie Plame was outed as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, all her contacts were then outed as potential spies. Damage like this has a cascading effect, often affecting the lives of people several degrees separated from the intelligence agent.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
Leaders from around the world pose for the G20 summit 'family photograph' in Toronto, Canada, on 27 June 2010. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Canada allowed the US National Security Agency (NSA) to conduct widespread surveillance during the 2010 Group of 20 summit in Toronto, according to a media report that cited documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The report by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp is the latest potential embarrassment for the NSA as a result of Snowden's leaks, although it remains unclear precisely what information the agency was looking for during the summit.
Snowden has already revealed the agency spied on close allies such as Germany and Brazil, prompting diplomatic spats with Washington.
The CBC report, partly written by former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, cited briefing notes it said showed that the United Statesturned its Ottawa embassy into a security command post during a six-day spying operation by the US agency as President Barack Obama and other world leaders met that June.
CBC said the operation was no secret to Canadian authorities and it quoted an NSA briefing note describing the operation as "closely co-ordinated with the Canadian partner".
The Canadian equivalent of the NSA is the Communications Security Establishment Canada, or CSEC.
US authorities declined to comment specifically on the report. "As a matter of policy we have made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations," said Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council.
CBC said the documents did not reveal the targets of the NSA operation, but described part of the US eavesdropping agency's mandate at the Toronto summit as "providing support to policymakers".
A spokesman for Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper declined to comment on the allegations in the report, but said security organisations were subject to independent oversight.
CSEC, which has a very low public profile, employs about 2,000 people. It is part of the so-called Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network that also includes the US, Britain, New Zealand and Australia.
Last month, Brazil demanded an explanation for media reports that said CSEC agents had targeted its mines and energy industry.
CSEC head John Forster, pressed about the CBC report at a meeting of the Canadian House of Commons defence committee, declined to comment on the specifics of Canada's intelligence operations but appeared to play down the idea his agency had played an active role during the G20 summit.
"Under law, CSEC cannot target Canadians anywhere in the world or anyone in Canada, including visitors. I cannot ask my international partners to do anything that I am not allowed by law to do," he told legislators on Thursday.
Forster's comments left open the possibility that the NSA had requested help from CSEC.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
The gardens at Woking crematorium in Surrey are neat and peaceful, and full of well-tended rows of red, pink and yellow autumn flowers. Under the blooms sit further rows of small, clean white postcards, on which mourners have written their thoughts and prayers for the deceased.
The crematorium was founded in 1878 (to the indignation of residents who didn't want the town to become the first in the country to have such a godless facility) and sits directly opposite the Winston Churchill sports centre.
A few of the dead have memorials here; many more have their names recorded in the books of remembrance that are stored in the vaults. Alan Mathison Turing is not one of them.
Turing was cremated here on Saturday 12 June 1954, five days after he died. His ashes were spread by his elder brother John, in Tennyson Lake Garden North, a secluded 1.6-hectare (four-acre) garden next to a pond where their father's remains had also been scattered.
Archives at the crematorium only record that Turing was 41 and that his occupation was "university reader". There is nothing else to mark his death.
The Times obituary, which appeared on the same day, noted Turing was a mathematician and logician who had branched into "the design and use of automatic computing machines".
The piece bemoaned how the second world war had "interrupted Turing's mathematical career for six critical years between the age of 27 and 33" and his death had deprived the world of a man who could have "made much greater discoveries". Few people knew the truth: Turing was a master codebreaker, and during those "lost" war years, he had made one of the most important discoveries in British military history.
He had enabled the codes used by the Nazis to send messages to and from their commanders to be cracked.
The story of Turing and the team at Bletchley Park was not one GCHQwanted to boast about in the 1950s or in the decades thereafter; his work was top secret, his private life complex and, for the time, scandalous.
Turing was gay. He killed himself by eating an apple laced with cyanide two years after he had been convicted of having a sexual relationship with a young man from Manchester.
Just about everything Turing did in his professional and personal life, and the environment in which he did it, has changed since his death.
But if you are tracing the roots of the relationship between GCHQ and theNSA, to understand why the agencies work so closely together, and why they seem so genuinely perplexed (and angry) by the furore now surrounding them, then it is to Turing and his contemporaries that you have to turn.
Looking back is also the only way to appreciate how the intelligence agencies have ended up on the path to mass surveillance, and managed to travel a long way down it, without facing the kind of public scrutiny they are confronted with now. The fathers of the institutions that have become security behemoths were men such as Turing and Wolf Friedman, an American cryptologist who was as brilliant as his British counterpart although somewhat less eccentric.
There had been codebreakers before these two, but their work was on the verge of a technological revolution that is still going on today.
Working in Hut 8 at Bletchley Park, then the home of GCHQ's forerunner, the Government Code and Cypher School, Turing found a way of reading messages sent by the Germans, using a codebreaking machine called the bombe. Across the Atlantic, Friedman developed a way of cracking the Purple machine, the device used by Japan to code wartime messages.
British and American spies had worked closely during the first world war, but the bonds were pulled tighter in the spring of 1941, when four US officials travelled to Bletchley Park to deliver a model of the Purple machine.
They received intelligence gifts in return and the exchange of information has been going on ever since.
During the second world war, codebreaking was the endeavour of small teams of gifted individuals, working with crude machines that hummed and whirred as cogs and wheels of varying sizes turned at different speeds.
The enemy was known and the purpose of the interceptions clear to seize the initiative in a global war between countries who threatened each other's existence.
But in the years that followed, the enemies changed, intelligence capabilities developed, and the newly renamed GCHQ and newly formedNSA, created in October 1952, began an inexorable rise, intertwining interests and capabilities that insiders say would now be almost impossible to untangle. Professor Anthony Glees, who has written about this relationship, says it is one of Britain's last claims to global power status.
"In large part this position stems from three facts of British life, each directly connected in purpose to the other: our nuclear deterrent capability, our armed forces and our secret intelligence community," he said.
"Yet what gives us our critical mass as a power is one single, overarchingly important reality: our intense and intimate security relationship with the USA. Intelligence co-operation is its throbbing heart."
One senior member of Britain's intelligence community told the Guardian: "The relationship between the NSA and GCHQ is unique. Most intelligence agencies compete with each other. The CIA, for instance, sees MI6 as a competitor. They work with each other, but there is always some tension. The NSA and GCHQ are not like that.
"When you get a GCHQ pass it gives you access to the NSA too. You can walk into the NSA and find GCHQ staff holding senior management positions, and vice versa. When the NSA has a piece of intelligence, it will very often ask GCHQ for a second opinion. There have been ups and downs over the years, of course. But in general, the NSA and GCHQ are extremely close allies. They rely on each other."
This symbiosis developed during the attritional years of the cold war. It continued to evolve as signals intelligence Sigint, as the agencies call it became as important as human intelligence (Humint) recruiting "moles" and informers.
And with the onset of the internet and cyberwarfare, GCHQ and the NSA, always in lockstep, achieved pre-eminence among their agency peers.
The Snowden files revealed intelligence-gathering is now being conducted on a grand scale, with the NSA and GCHQ exploiting advances in technology to tap into, store and analyse more and more information.
Without Snowden, we would not have known that the amount of personal data available to GCHQ from internet and mobile traffic increased by 7,000% between 2008 and 2012.
That is just what the UK collects; the files also revealed that 60% of all Britain's refined intelligence comes from the NSA.
From humble beginnings in rickety wooden huts, GCHQ has become the keystone of Britain's spy agencies, and its "doughnut" headquarters in Cheltenham is probably the most remarkable building ever constructed in the UK.
Covering more than 92,000 sq metres (1m sq ft), it is packed with supercomputers operated by codebreakers and data miners who work behind concrete and limestone walls that are up to 2.5 metres (8ft) thick.
With a staff of 6,400, it is the biggest of Britain's intelligence agencies. It is rather smaller, however, than the NSA.
At its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, the NSA has more than 1,000 buildings on a 2,000-hectare (5,000 acre) site and employs an estimated 40,000 people. That figure does not include the analysts at different bases across the world, or the army of subcontractors needed to keep the agency running smoothly. Edward Joseph Snowden was one of them. Snowden
For a man who has been at the centre of worldwide attention for five months, surprisingly little is known about Snowden.
After "outing" himself in June, insisting he didn't want to hide behind a cloak of anonymity, he has spoken on just a few occasions, and only when circumstances seemed to demand it.
He avoided everyone he didn't want to see when he was in Hong Kong, the first place he escaped to, and for several weeks he remained beyond the reach of the world's media, and doubtless a small army of spies, while holed up in a hotel room in the transit area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport.
In the absence of regular pronouncements, there has been much animated speculation about why he did what he did, who has the material he took, and what kind of damage he has done.
And most of it remains just that speculation, albeit of a kind that has fuelled character assassinations from those circling the wagons around the intelligence agencies.
Traitor was a barb he must have expected; he has also been branded aself-serving twerp (by the former head of MI5 Stella Rimington), a naive narcissist, and perhaps strangest of all, a cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood (in the Washington Post).
What we do know about Snowden suggests he doesn't easily fit into any of those categories, or indeed, any stereotype. He does not look like a computer boffin, nor does he speak in the manner of a tortured ideologue.
There is no Julian Assange-like messiah complex for cod-psychologists to dissect, and money doesn't appear to matter much to him. He hasn't asked for, or received, any payment from the Guardian.
He remains something of an enigma, happy to stay out of the limelight.
Born on 21 June 1983, Snowden spent his early years in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His parents, Lonnie and Elizabeth Snowden, were teenage sweethearts who met at Northeastern high school and married in a "back garden" wedding in 1979, when they were 18. They had a daughter, Jessica, and then Edward. They split up in 2001 and Lonnie, who retired from the US coastguard, has since remarried and moved to Pennsylvania.
In 1993, when Snowden was 10, the family moved to Crofton, Maryland, near the NSA's HQ. Neighbours who spoke to US newspapers said he was polite, quiet and seemed to spend too much time looking at computers. Dawn Whitmore, a former classmate, remembered him as a shy and serious boy, who sported a pudding-bowl haircut and thick glasses. "He was very well thought-out with what he was trying to say. He was always very, very nice with me, but I was also a very nerdy, shy girl."
Snowden went on to Anne Arundel community school, but dropped out in his second year. He dropped out again in 2004 but must have studied at home to earn a GED (General Educational Development) the equivalent of a high-school certificate.
Snowden might have ended up in the army he had four months in the reserves in mid-2004. "I enlisted shortly after the invasion of Iraq and I believed in the goodness of what we were doing," Snowden said. But he broke both legs in an accident and never completed his training.
Though he may not have had a string of formal qualifications, sitting in front of a screen honed something inside him, because in 2005, after a spell as a security guard, he was taken on by the CIA as an IT analyst. He was obviously good at it, because within two years he was one of the agency's operatives working in Geneva, Switzerland. It was not an experience he enjoyed.
"Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world," he said. "I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good."
Snowden had a variety of jobs with confusing titles. Essentially the posts gave him privileged access to internal networks: ironing out problems, making systems work more efficiently and, ironically, making sure they were secure.
He was a troubleshooter, which is the principle reason why he managed to see so many documents and spirit them away without leaving an electronic fingerprint.
"When you're in positions of privileged access, you're exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee," he said. "And because of that you see things that may be disturbing. You recognise that some of these things are actually abuses. And when you talk to people about them in a place like this … people tend not to take them [the abuses] very seriously.
"Over time that awareness of wrongdoing builds up. And the more you talk about it the more you're ignored, the more you're told it's not a problem, until eventually you realise these things need to be determined by the public and not by somebody who was simply hired by the government."
In 2009 Snowden left the CIA to work in the private sector and four years later he got a job with Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting company that supplies computer specialists to the NSA. Initially he was posted to Japan, then Hawaii. Snowden has admitted he only took the $122,000-a-year (£75,000) post to get access to certain material. By 20 May 2013, he had gathered what he wanted.
He boarded a flight to Hong Kong, leaving behind him a bewildered girlfriend, a boss who thought he needed time off to treat epilepsy (his cover story), and any chance he could ever again lead a normal life.
In interviews over the past four months, he has attempted to answer the questions that have been thrown at him, particularly by those who have made the most damaging claim that he must have given his secrets to foreign governments.
He insists this is completely untrue. "This is a predictable smear that I anticipated before going public, as the US media has a kneejerk 'Red China!' reaction to anything involving Hong Kong or China, and is intended to distract from the issue of US government misconduct.
"Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now. No. I have had no contact with the Chinese government. I only work with journalists."
In his most recent interview in the New York Times, Snowden said he hadn't taken any secret files with him to Russia, where he has been given asylum for a year. "What would be the unique value of personally carrying another copy of materials onward? There's a 0% chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents."
The four computers Snowden has been carrying with him since he left Hawaii were not jam-packed with secret files after all; they were a decoy. US officials who have been to Moscow have since said this is correct.
The other accusation made against Snowden is that he revealed secrets that would put people's lives in danger. He denies this emphatically. "I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. The public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the 'consent of the governed' is meaningless."
But the revelations must have affected national security? Think again, he asks.
"US officials say this every time there's a public discussion that could limit their authority. US officials also provide misleading or directly false assertions about the value of these programmes.
"Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programmes began operation shortly after September 11, how many terrorist attacks were prevented solely by information derived from this suspicion-less surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to achieve that, and ask yourself if it was worth it.
"Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it." Mastering the internet
Snowden was still a teenager when 2,996 people were killed on 9/11. The failure to detect the plot sent the intelligence services into panic; they recruited as many Islamic specialists and linguists as they could, redirected operations towards Osama bin Laden and began the deliberate, elaborate process of building an intelligence machine that could feed information to sustain the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was the first glimpses of this evolving apparatus that so worried Snowden and led him seven years later to undertake the biggest ever theft of material stamped with the highest classification levels, called Strap 1 and Strap 2.
The wars against the terrorists coincided with a period of huge technological innovation, making it more difficult for the agencies to detect the important "noise" they were listening for amid all the chatter from the rest of us.
In Britain, the challenge thrown down by the explosion in use of the web, mobile phones and social media was met by a GCHQ programme that showed remarkable ambition. It was called Mastering the Internet (MTI).
In America, similar projects were just as audacious. The files released by Snowden show the agencies have been, and remain, determined to eavesdrop on every possible method of communication, regardless of how much extraneous material they gather in the process; they have puttaps on the cables that carry raw internet traffic across the world; they have gone further "upstream" and devised ways of getting material from the computers which run the big internet service providers; they have refined their relationships with mobile phone companies so they can getdetails of every call made and received; and they found ways of defeating encryption software too, setting supercomputers to crack codes, or by inserting secret "back doors" into the software itself.
The scale of this technological achievement is admirable, the logic behind it clear; but all this impressive architecture has been built without any political discussion about whether this is the right thing to do, or any endorsement from millions of members of the public, whose personal lives are now being recycled through giant databases.
A sense of the anxiety that was driving GCHQ to do this was revealed in an internal memo, dated Tuesday 19 May 2009, which was written jointly by the director in charge of the MTI project and a member of the agency's cyber-defence team. The memo was a "prioritisation and tasking initiative" to another senior member of staff, who was being urged to come up with new ideas, fast.
"It is becoming increasingly difficult for GCHQ to acquire the rich sources of traffic needed to enable our support to partners within HMG [Her Majesty's government], the armed forces and overseas," they wrote.
"The rapid development of different technologies, types of traffic, service providers and networks, and the growth in sheer volumes that accompany particularly the expansion and use of the internet, present an unprecedented challenge to the success of GCHQ's mission." The memo continued: "We would like you to lead a small team to fully define this shortfall in tasking capability [and] identify all the necessary changes needed to rectify it."
The two chiefs said they wanted "potential quick-win solutions not currently within existing programme plans".
Those existing programmes might have been a reference to the NSA'sPrism project, and Tempora, GCHQ's crown jewel, which was in development. The former was started in 2007 as a way for the NSA to get access to the computer systems which run Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple and other giants of the web world.
A 41-slide PowerPoint presentation dated April 2010 was among the Snowden documents, and it revealed the NSA was very pleased with the information it was receiving, which included search histories, the content of emails, videos, photos and live chats.
The NSA hailed Prism as "one of the most valuable, unique and productive accesses", and said it had generated 24,005 reports in 2012 (from a total of 77,000 over the previous five years).
Some of this information was being shared with GCHQ, though it is still unclear how much of this material was sought requiring a warrant signed by a minister rather than offered by the Americans, which would not.
Using secret court orders, the US was already bulk-collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers. With Prism, the NSA had another way of accessing vast amounts of information about people who were not under any suspicion at all.
But this was nothing compared with Tempora.
The British programme was far more ingenious, a real breakthrough in capability, albeit one which critics say meant an even bigger potential intrusion into the private lives of ordinary people.
GCHQ had been tapping the undersea cables that carry the internet in and out of the UK for years, but Tempora provided the ability to analyse the information in almost real time, rather than dumping the data into vast but simple electronic storage bins that take time to sift through.
The buffering that Tempora allows acts like Sky+ television, slowing down or briefly halting the stream of information to make it easier for other filters to search for keywords, names, or patterns of behaviour.
GCHQ keeps the content of messages for three working days, and the simple "metadata" which includes details of who sent and received them for up to 30 days. The programme was trialled at GCHQ's station in Bude, Cornwall (which is partly funded by the NSA) and was an instant success.
British delight at having scooped the Americans was matched by theNSA's desire to get its hands on the project; an internal US guide to using the system, which became fully functional in 2011, described it as "an exciting opportunity to get direct access to enormous amounts of GCHQ's special source data". When the NSA was offered access to Tempora for a trial period, the agency told its analysts to be on best behaviour.
"[We] need to be successful!," a memo urged. "We're depending on you to provide the business case required to justify expanded access."
"We need to prove that NSA's access is necessary to prosecute our mission and will greatly enhance the production of the intelligence. The success of this three-month trial will determine expanded NSA access to internet buffers in the future."
The strategy seems to have worked. By May last year, an internal GCHQ memo said it had 300 analysts working on intelligence from Tempora, and the NSA had 250.
The documents show Tempora gave the UK "the biggest internet access" of any member of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance, comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
They also show that by 2012 GCHQ was handling 600m "telephone events" each day. It had tapped more than 200 fibreoptic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time.
With each cable carrying data at a rate of 10 gigabits a second, the tapped cables could, in theory, deliver more than 21 petabytes a day equivalent to sending all the information in all the books in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours. "This is a massive amount of data!" one of the documents said. "You are in an enviable position have fun and make the most of it."
All this activity was approved in the UK by a subsection of a law which was introduced in 2000 the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) a time when the agencies could not have envisaged being able to conduct surveillance on such a massive scale, when buffering was not even possible. Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, said these "blinding transformations" had rendered Ripa and other intelligence legislation "anti-modern".
"The spooks, who once sat in cubicles steaming open the glued-down flaps of a few dozen suspect envelopes, now have more fertile plains to furrow and the marvellous means to do it. Now they can steam open everything." The law
Mr Justice Michael Burton seems an amiable fellow: ruddy-faced and quick-witted, he is a specialist in commercial law and well known around the Inns of Court for his interest in amateur dramatics.
He is also the newly appointed president of the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT), which assesses complaints against Britain's intelligence agencies.
A speech he gave to lawyers over lunch on Monday 14 October was a first; no other head of the tribunal has ever spoken in public before, though Burton assured his audience in the City of London that he had no intention of marking this historic occasion by telling them anything of great interest. However, he did give a glimpse into the problems faced by the IPT, without offering any particular solutions.
"We do receive a large number of applications from individuals about their belief, or often their paranoia, that they are being targeted," the judge explained after finishing a roast beef sandwich.
"I am afraid we get quite a lot of complaints from members of the public who say, for example, 'When I was 14, I had my tonsils removed and I believe that MI5 implanted electronic equipment in me.' "Very often the sign is whether they are resident in a mental institution. It ranges from that to very serious complaints."
The tribunal is one of the cornerstones of the regime designed to scrutinise the agencies, a regime described by William Hague, the foreign secretary, as one of the best in the world. But Burton's court has taken a fair degree of flak over the years, for reasons he described himself.
"The media describes the IPT using terms such as 'a secret closed court', 'a little-known complaints body', 'one of the most secretive judicial bodies in the country', 'the UK's most secret court most of whose cases are held in closed session'," Burton said. "Almost all of that is untrue."
Really? The IPT is certainly unlike any other court; it does not publicise a list of when it is holding cases or where; almost all of its hearings are in private there will be no public sessions for the rest of this year. And it almost always in more than 99% of cases fails to uphold complaints against the secret services or local authorities.
Snowden's documents show GCHQ declaring the tribunal has never ruled against a British agency since the court was established 13 years ago. The IPT will not say whether this is true or not. It is a secret.
The tribunal will also not even say where it is based. Its website refers to a PO box in central London. The Guardian tracked this down to a post office delivery office in the centre of an enormous building site near MI6 headquarters in Vauxhall, south London.
Apparently the IPT doesn't have a permanent home. In his speech, Burton acknowledged the court, which has eight part-time members, moves around various buildings in Whitehall. This is not done to bamboozle reporters or members of the public, he said, but because the tribunal is shunted around to where-ever there is free space.
The Snowden files suggest GCHQ is not unduly worried about the IPT; it is easy to see why. Over the past 13 years, it has heard 1,469 cases. It has upheld complaints against councils and police forces on 10 occasions that's 0.68% of the total.
The figure is actually even lower because two of the successful complaints referred to the same matter in 2010.
The case in question illustrates another criticism often levelled at the IPT. It involved Poole council and its unlawful surveillance operation on Jenny Paton and her three children. It took the IPT more than two years to rule the council had no business using anti-terrorist laws to establish whether the Patons lived outside a school's catchment area.
But while there is some transparency in the way local authorities can use and abuse their power, there is nothing similar for the agencies.
This is the essential conundrum of the tribunal. How can people bring credible cases to the tribunal, if nobody knows what the agencies are doing even in the broadest sense? With too little in the public domain, it is not surprising that many cases fall at the first hurdle for being "frivolous or vexatious".
When the IPT does decide to take on a complaint, it can ask for "all such documents and information as the tribunal may require". But this exchange relies on trust. The court has no way of checking whether it is getting what it needs. The panel will then make an assessment in secret before making a ruling, whose details will almost certainly never be published.
In eight years up until 2010, the IPT had only disclosed findings from five cases, a situation that even the police have been embarrassed by.
Giving evidence to parliament, the police lead on surveillance, Chief Constable Nick Gargan, admitted the IPT was largely anonymous and needed to be more transparent.
"[It] ought to be encouraged to be more publicly visible both in terms of encouraging people to use it and, where meaningful claims have been made, to actually publicise those findings," he said.
Burton said he was open to ideas about how the IPT could make itself more accessible, but only to a point. He said he wouldn't approve anything that meant "all-important secrecy was lost".
The parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC) is the other essential plank of oversight cited by the government, but it has also been bedevilled by criticism since it was established in 1994.
Too weak, too close to government, too reluctant to criticise the agencies are some of the recurring jibes. Earlier this year, it won new powers to force the agencies to hand over material, and a small increase in the staff to review it. But while doubling of its budget to £1.3m will give it more clout, it is starting from a low base.
With a team of part-time staff, the committee's nine MPs have a huge job to provide credible oversight of the three spy agencies, which have a combined staff of more than 10,000 and a combined annual budget of £2bn.
The ISC is now also responsible for reviewing the work of the military's "defence intelligence" unit, which will add to the mountain of documents available for review.
The committee's announcement on Thursday 17 October of a broad inquiry into surveillance, which will include some public hearings, is a watershed moment for the ISC, and its chair, Sir Malcolm Rifkind. He has insisted his team is capable of doing the job, but even former heads of the committee have acknowledged what a formidable task this is.
"The ISC is underfunded. It needs more people working for it," said Kim Howells, a former Foreign Office minister who chaired the committee for two years until 2010. "It needs more investigators and it needs to be able to call on expertise whenever it is required. It might be a no-brainer, but you try to persuade the Cabinet Office to part with the cash."
Howells also revealed how Gordon Brown tried to influence the ISC when he was prime minister, even though it is supposed to be entirely beyond this kind of executive interference.
"I had the most terrible battles with him and the head of the civil service. They didn't really understand the committee must be absolutely scrupulously independent of government and the agencies."
The former MP, who retired at the last election, called for parliament to determine whether the laws governing the agencies are "too swingeing and give too much leeway to executive action". "That is where the debate should be. And if parliament thinks there is too much power then parliament should change the law."
He conceded the job of the ISC becomes extremely difficult if it is "not trusted by either parliament or the media, and if people don't accept what it says. Then the suspicion of collusion starts to grow." But he defended the MPs who have served on the committee, saying they could be trusted to do a good job, if they had more support.
"Generally they are people who are either at the end of their political life or near the end, they have quit climbing the greasy pole, or been dragged off it."
Paul Murphy, an ISC chairman during Labour's years in power, remembered his committee had nobody to help them make sense of vast numbers of technical documents. He was in charge between 2005 and 2008 when many of the current surveillance programmes were likely signed off by ministers. Yet Murphy and his team were often flying blind.
"We didn't have an investigator. You'd effectively have to rely on the word of the agencies and if there was any dispute you'd have to go through the documents yourself, which we did. Reams of it.
"The documentation is so vast now that the ISC may need more than investigator. It's not an easy position to fill and the person has to have carte blanche. Even then you have to be selective because it is such a huge task." 'The golden age'
Alan Turing remains the one true superstar of Britain's intelligence community. His feats during the second world war are now being celebrated in a way that was unimaginable when he died.
There are statues in honour of him in Guildford and Manchester, where he lived and worked, and he was the subject of a rare speech on 4 October last year by Sir Iain Lobban, the current director of GCHQ, to mark the 100th anniversary of the codebreaker's birth.
He rattled through the stories of Turing's peculiarities burying his silver bullion and then forgetting where; chaining his mug to his radiator; cycling in his gas mask to ward off hay fever. Lobban credited Turing with starting the "irrevocable change" that led to the formation of GCHQ and its evolution into "the highly technological intelligence organisation that it is today".
He said that if Turing were alive he would be working on threats from cyberspace, a clever way of co-opting the codebreaker and his achievements into surveillance programmes that would have been inconceivable to him. "Our challenges come from the explosion in the volume of communications as well as the relentless increase in new ways of accessing and processing that volume," said Lobban. "Then, code related simply to the encryption of communications; today, code refers to the way in which we program IT systems. Then, the challenge was to identify German and Japanese communications; today, the challenge can simply be to cope with the number of different communications options. Today the internet provides the virtual global landscape for an analogous struggle."
But the struggle is different, and surveillance strategy has been turned on its head to deal with it.
Snowden's files revealed the mouth of the intelligence funnel has been stretched wide open over the last decade. Using technologies that are becoming more powerful and sophisticated, GCHQ and the NSA have been undertaking government-authorised data trawling; the secret services have quietly ushered in the age of the digital dragnet.
The agencies say they cannot do their work without these capabilities and they want to expand them; critics say they should not have been able to acquire them without a proper debate, and without more muscularaccountability.
Perhaps it was this tension that led James Clapper, the director of US national intelligence, to concede that a fork in the road had been reached with the Guardian revelations, and not before time. "As loth as I am to give any credit to what's happened here, which is egregious, it's clear that some of the conversations this has generated, some of the debate, probably needed to happen," he said.
The arguments are delicately poised, the issues could not be more important: how to balance privacy and security in the 21st century. The Snowden files make it clear that GCHQ and the NSA have turned Turing's niche pursuit into intelligence-gathering on an industrial scale. An internal memo to analysts at GCHQ dated late 2010 summed up the mood about the powers now available to them: "We are in the golden age."
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
The secret document shows the partners discussing whether or not to share citizens' "medical, legal or religious information". Photograph: Kacper Pempel/Reuters
Australia's surveillance agency offered to share information collected about ordinary Australian citizens with its major intelligence partners, according to a secret 2008 document leaked by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The document shows the partners discussing whether or not to share "medical, legal or religious information", and increases concern that the agency could be operating outside its legal mandate, according to the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC.
The Australian intelligence agency, then known as the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), indicated it could share bulk material without some of the privacy restraints imposed by other countries, such as Canada.
"DSD can share bulk, unselected, unminimised metadata as long as there is no intent to target an Australian national," notes from an intelligence conference say. "Unintentional collection is not viewed as a significant issue."
The agency acknowledged that more substantial interrogation of the material would, however, require a warrant. Metadata is the information we all generate whenever we use technology, from the date and time of a phone call to the location from which an email is sent.
"Bulk, unselected, unminimised metadata" means that this data is in its raw state, and nothing has been deleted or redacted in order to protect the privacy of ordinary citizens who might have been caught in the dragnet. Metadata can present a very complete picture of someone's life.
The working document, marked secret, sheds new light on the extent to which intelligence agencies at that time were considering sharing information with foreign surveillance partners, and it provides further confirmation that, to some extent at least, there is warrantless surveillance of Australians' personal metadata.
The DSD joined its four intelligence-sharing partners the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand, collectively known as 5-Eyes to discuss what could and what could not be shared under the different jurisdictions at a meeting hosted by Britain's GCHQ at its headquarters in Cheltenham on 22-23 April, 2008.
The notes, published today by Guardian Australia, suggest that Australia was open to pooling bulk data that almost certainly includes information about Australian citizens.
Clearly indicating the different attitudes between the intelligence partners, the Canadians insisted that bulk collection could only be shared if information about its citizens was first "minimised", meaning deleted or removed. The various techniques used in "minimisation" help protect citizens' privacy.
The GCHQ memo taker, reporting on this, said that "bulk, unselected metadata presents too high a risk to share with second parties at this time because of the requirement to ensure that the identities of Canadians or persons in Canada are minimised, but re-evaluation of this stance is ongoing".
By contrast, DSD, now renamed the Australian Signals Directorate, offered a broader sweep of material to its partners.
DSD offered to share bulk, unselected, unminimised metadata although there were specific caveats. The note taker at the meeting writes: "However, if a pattern of life' search detects an Australian then there would be a need to contact DSD and ask them to obtain a ministerial warrant to continue."
A "pattern of life" search is more detailed one joining the dots to build up a portrait of an individual's daily activities.
It is technically possible to strip out the metadata of Australian nationals from bulk collection methods used by the 5-Eyes countries, such as cable taps ensuring the information is not stored, and so could not be pulled in to searches and investigations by agents.
The Snowden documents reveal Australia's intelligence services instead offered to leave the data in its raw state.
Australian politicians have insisted that all surveillance undertaken is in accordance with the law.
But Geoffrey Robertson, writing in the Guardian today, says if what was described in the memo took place, this would be a breach of sections eight and 12 of the Intelligence Services Act 2001. The act sets a strict requirement that ministerial authorisation is required if the data of an Australian citizen is involved, and indicates that the citizen must be a "person of interest", such as someone involved in terrorism or organised crime.
The Cheltenham gathering, which appears to have been convened to consider the issues around the burgeoning collection of metadata and to reach common positions, resolved to avoid pre-emptive efforts to categorise various materials and "simply focus on what is shareable in bulk".
The memo flags privacy concerns around the collection of various types of data, but the meeting, according to the record, resolved not to set "automatic limitations" leaving judgment calls to each country's own agencies.
"Consideration was given as to whether any types of data were prohibited, for example medical, legal, religious or restricted business information, which may be regarded as an intrusion of privacy," the memo says.
"Given the nascent state of many of these data types then no, or limited, precedents have been set with respect to proportionality or propriety, or whether different legal considerations applies to the 'ownership' of this data compared with the communications data that we were more accustomed to handle."
"It was agreed that the conference should not seek to set any automatic limitations, but any such difficult cases would have to be considered by 'owning' agency on a case-by-case basis." The document also shows the agencies considering disclosure to "non-intelligence agencies". It says: "Asio and the Australian federal police are currently reviewing how Sigint [signals intelligence] information can be used by non-intelligence agencies." The record of the Cheltenham meeting does not indicate whether the activities under discussion in April 2008 progressed to final decisions or specific actions. It appears to be a working draft.
Since Snowden leaked the NSA documents to the Guardian and the Washington Post in May, controversy has raged around the world over revelations that surveillance agencies are collecting information in bulk about ordinary citizens' day-to-day activities, without first getting a warrant.
In Australia, the Greens party and the South Australian independent senator Nick Xenophon have been pursuing questions about the extent to which Australian citizens have been caught up in the dragnet, and the extent of Australian intelligence agencies' involvement.
So far, those questions have largely met with stonewalling, both under the previous Labor government and the new Abbott administration.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
::
![[Image: European-Union-justice-an-009.jpg]](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2013/11/26/1385490991451/European-Union-justice-an-009.jpg)
![[Image: edsnowdon-buscampaign-front.jpg]](http://d1i6tehnj672py.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/edsnowdon-buscampaign-front.jpg)
Edward Snowdon is featured on bus ads in the nation's capital. (Photo: Thank You Ed Snowden)![[Image: snowden-58.jpg]](http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/52952b996bb3f7c65a8acdbe-1200-924/snowden-58.jpg)
REUTERS![[Image: G20-summit-family-photogr-009.jpg]](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2013/11/28/1385667685359/G20-summit-family-photogr-009.jpg)
![[Image: NickHopkinsgifs1windowclean.gif]](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/11/29/1385741730318/NickHopkinsgifs1windowclean.gif)
![[Image: NickHopkinsgifsmovingconvey.gif]](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/11/29/1385748506599/NickHopkinsgifsmovingconvey.gif)
![[Image: NickHopkinsgifs3manontablet.gif]](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/11/29/1385741731143/NickHopkinsgifs3manontablet.gif)
![[Image: NickHopkinsgifs5tabletmanlo.gif]](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/11/29/1385741730902/NickHopkinsgifs5tabletmanlo.gif)
![[Image: NickHopkinsgifs4boxscatteri.gif]](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/11/29/1385741730053/NickHopkinsgifs4boxscatteri.gif)
![[Image: NickHopkinsgifs5doorbell.gif]](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/11/29/1385741730548/NickHopkinsgifs5doorbell.gif)
![[Image: Man-typing-on-a-computer--016.jpg]](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/12/1/1385937996921/Man-typing-on-a-computer--016.jpg)
The secret document shows the partners discussing whether or not to share citizens' "medical, legal or religious information". Photograph: Kacper Pempel/Reuters![[Image: 8edbb08c-2668-4999-9c3a-59fad441baf3-460x299.jpeg]](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/12/1/1385937582131/8edbb08c-2668-4999-9c3a-59fad441baf3-460x299.jpeg)
![[Image: ef135fd3-330f-4b87-8774-3e124a4738a9-460x97.jpeg]](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/12/1/1385937668179/ef135fd3-330f-4b87-8774-3e124a4738a9-460x97.jpeg)
Metadata is the information we all generate whenever we use technology, from the date and time of a phone call to the location from which an email is sent.![[Image: 5420e933-8bc7-4607-ad61-ca7d799612ed-460x154.jpeg]](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/12/1/1385937871248/5420e933-8bc7-4607-ad61-ca7d799612ed-460x154.jpeg)
The document also shows the agencies considering disclosure to "non-intelligence agencies". It says: "Asio and the Australian federal police are currently reviewing how Sigint [signals intelligence] information can be used by non-intelligence agencies."![[Image: 9d64e718-b358-41e1-a904-80fb2f14385c-460x100.jpeg]](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/12/1/1385937981334/9d64e718-b358-41e1-a904-80fb2f14385c-460x100.jpeg)
The record of the Cheltenham meeting does not indicate whether the activities under discussion in April 2008 progressed to final decisions or specific actions. It appears to be a working draft.