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GCHQ captured emails of journalists from top international media | UK news. GCHQ’s bulk surveillance of electronic communications has scooped up emails to and from journalists working for some of the US and UK’s largest media organisations, analysis of documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals. Emails from the BBC, Reuters, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, the Sun, NBC and the Washington Post were saved by GCHQ and shared on the agency’s intranet as part of a test exercise by the signals intelligence agency.

The disclosure comes as the British government faces intense pressure to protect the confidential communications of reporters, MPs and lawyers from snooping. The journalists’ communications were among 70,000 emails harvested in the space of less than 10 minutes on one day in November 2008 by one of GCHQ’s numerous taps on the fibre-optic cables that make up the backbone of the internet. It goes on to caution “such approaches pose a real threat”, and tells staff they must be “immediately reported” to the chain-of-command. Operation Socialist: How GCHQ Spies Hacked Belgium’s Largest Telco. When the incoming emails stopped arriving, it seemed innocuous at first. But it would eventually become clear that this was no routine technical problem. Inside a row of gray office buildings in Brussels, a major hacking attack was in progress.

And the perpetrators were British government spies. It was in the summer of 2012 that the anomalies were initially detected by employees at Belgium’s largest telecommunications provider, Belgacom. Last year, documents from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden confirmed that British surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters was behind the attack, codenamed Operation Socialist. The full story about GCHQ’s infiltration of Belgacom, however, has never been told.

Now, in partnership with Dutch and Belgian newspapers NRC Handelsblad and De Standaard, The Intercept has pieced together the first full reconstruction of events that took place before, during, and after the secret GCHQ hacking operation. The beginning. JTRIG Tools and Techniques. Obtained Emails Show NSA Officials Knew In Advance Of GCHQ's Plans To Destroy The Guardian's Computers. Last year, in a move simultaneously symbolic, thuggish and completely futile, GCHQ officials forced The Guardian to destroy computers "containing" Snowden documents.

The fact that the documents were also housed elsewhere (including at two American newspapers) mattered little. The point was simple: we can get to you. In the service of "national security," the GCHQ came down on the journalistic entity with something straight out of the Running A Dictatorship For Fun And Profit handbook.

Exact words deployed: "You've had your debate. There's no need to write more. " NSA officials notably refused to comment on the GCHQ's actions, perhaps hoping critics would view the silence as disapproval or, at the very least, pointedly not condoning the hardware destruction. The White House publicly condemned the destruction, stating that it was "hard to imagine" this sort of thing happening domestically. GCHQ's attempted prior restraint found support from the upper levels of the NSA. ISPs take GCHQ to court in UK over mass surveillance. Internet service providers from around the world are lodging formal complaints against the UK government's monitoring service, GCHQ, alleging that it uses "malicious software" to break into their networks.

The claims from seven organisations based in six countries – the UK, Netherlands, US, South Korea, Germany and Zimbabwe – will add to international pressure on the British government following Edward Snowden's revelations about mass surveillance of the internet by UK and US intelligence agencies. The claims are being filed with the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT), the court in London that assesses complaints about the agencies' activities and misuse of surveillance by government organisations. Most of its hearings are held at least partially in secret. The IPT is already considering a number of related submissions. Later this month it will investigate complaints by human rights groups about the way social media sites have been targeted by GCHQ.

UK spy agency intercepted webcam images of millions of Yahoo users. Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal. GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally. Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of "a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy". GCHQ insists all of its activities are necessary, proportionate, and in accordance with UK law. Huge swath of GCHQ mass surveillance is illegal, says top lawyer. GCHQ's mass surveillance spying programmes are probably illegal and have been signed off by ministers in breach of human rights and surveillance laws, according to a hard-hitting legal opinion that has been provided to MPs. The advice warns that Britain's principal surveillance law is too vague and is almost certainly being interpreted to allow the agency to conduct surveillance that flouts privacy safeguards set out in the European convention on human rights (ECHR).

The inadequacies, it says, have created a situation where GCHQ staff are potentially able to rely "on the gaps in the current statutory framework to commit serious crime with impunity". At its most extreme, the advice raises issues about the possible vulnerability of staff at GCHQ if it could be proved that intelligence used for US drone strikes against "non-combatants" had been passed on or supplied by the British before being used in a missile attack. Such surveillance may also be a breach of the ECHR, it adds. GHCQ Targets Engineers with Fake LinkedIn Pages. The Belgacom employees probably thought nothing was amiss when they pulled up their profiles on LinkedIn, the professional networking site. The pages looked the way they always did, and they didn't take any longer than usual to load. The victims didn't notice that what they were looking at wasn't the original site but a fake profile with one invisible added feature: a small piece of malware that turned their computers into tools for Britain's GCHQ intelligence service.

The British intelligence workers had already thoroughly researched the engineers. According to a "top secret" GCHQ presentation disclosed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, they began by identifying employees who worked in network maintenance and security for the partly government-owned Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom. Then they determined which of the potential targets used LinkedIn or Slashdot.org, a popular news website in the IT community. 'Quantum Insert' A Visit from Charles and Camilla. British Accuse David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald's Partner, Of 'Terrorism' By Mark Hosenball WASHINGTON, Nov 1 (Reuters) - British authorities claimed the domestic partner of reporter Glenn Greenwald was involved in "terrorism" when he tried to carry documents from former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden through a London airport in August, according to police and intelligence documents.

Greenwald's partner, David Miranda, was detained and questioned for nine hours by British authorities at Heathrow on Aug. 18, when he landed there from Berlin to change planes for a flight to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. After his release and return to Rio, Miranda filed a legal action against the British government, seeking the return of materials seized from him by British authorities and a judicial review of the legality of his detention. At a London court hearing this week for Miranda's lawsuit, a document called a "Ports Circulation Sheet" was read into the record.

A key hearing on Miranda's legal challenge is scheduled for next week. GCHQ accused of monitoring privileged emails between lawyers and clients | UK news. GCHQ is probably intercepting legally privileged communications between lawyers and their clients, according to a detailed claim filed on behalf of eight Libyans involved in politically sensitive compensation battles with the UK. The accusation has been lodged with Britain's most secret court, the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT), which examines complaints about the intelligence services and government use of covert surveillance.

Most of its hearings are in private. The allegation has emerged in the wake of the Guardian's revelations about extensive monitoring by GCHQ of the internet and telephone calls, chiefly through its Tempora programme. The system taps directly into fibre optic cables carrying the bulk of online exchanges transiting the UK and enables intelligence officials to screen vast quantities of data. The eight Libyans, members of two families now living in the country's capital, Tripoli, say they were victims of rendition.

Snowden leaks: MI5 chief accused of using 'foolish self-serving rhetoric' | World news. A former director of public prosecutions has launched a strident attack on the head of MI5 for using "foolish self-serving rhetoric" to resist legitimate calls for Britain's intelligence agencies to face more scrutiny in the face of revelations about their surveillance capabilities. Lord Macdonald QC said it was wrong for Andrew Parker and other senior figures in the intelligence community to argue that greater scrutiny and more transparency would affect the ability of MI5, GCHQ and MI6 to do their work. Arguing that the existing legislation governing the services was "anti-modern", the peer, now a defence lawyer, said that an urgent review of the oversight regime was needed to prevent an "an increasing subservience of democracy to the unaccountability of security power".

The MI5's chief's views were shared by Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the chair of the intelligence services committee, which is supposed to provide parliamentary scutiny of the agencies. British Intelligencey Agency GCHQ 'Hacked Belgium ISP Belgacom' Leaks from Edward Snowden indicate that GCHQ targetted Belgium ISP Belgacom, which reported a breach earlier this month, according to a report. On Monday, Belgacom said it was concerned about an intrusion into its IT systems, saying it had found an unknown virus and filed a complaint with the Federal Prosecutor. Belgian Prime Minister Elio di Rupo said the attack suggested “high-level involvement by another country”, the AP reported. Today, Der Spiegel said it was sitting on GCHQ documents related to “Operation Socialist”, which was designed to “enable better exploitation of Belgacom”. The leaks indicated Belgacom employees with high-level access were targeted with malware.

Slides also suggested GCHQ wanted to carry out man-in-the-middle attacks on Belgacom customers, whilst looking into the vulnerability of the MyBICS reporting tool run by the telecoms firm. Belgacom counts the European Commission, the European Council and the European Parliament among its customers. US and UK spy agencies defeat privacy and security on the internet | World news. US and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions and emails, according to top-secret documents revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden.

The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments. The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – "the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet".

But security experts accused them of attacking the internet itself and the privacy of all users. Exclusive Glenn Greenwald Interview: "I Won't Be Kept Out of My Country for Doing Journalism!" Glenn Greenwald. (Photo: Agência Senado / Flickr) Glenn Greenwald, the US lawyer-turned-blogger-turned-journalist, has been writing about state-sponsored repression, surveillance, torture and leaks for years.

He has four best-selling books but nothing compared to the watershed event in June when Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras received a cache of top secret documents from NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden. On August 21, from his home in Rio de Janeiro, Greenwald described the latest twists and revelations in the NSA spy scandal. Jonathan Franklin: Your partner, David Miranda, was detained and held at Heathrow airport for 9 hours; all his electronics were taken away, and he was interrogated about your reporting on the NSA.

What was the message the US/UK governments were trying to send you by detaining David Miranda? JF: Puts a different meaning to the term "Miranda" warning, eh? JF: How would you describe this new kind of Miranda warning? JF: You are a US lawyer. The Cozy Relationship between Britain and its Intelligence Apparatus. The Snowden affair was actually going pretty well for British Prime Minister David Cameron. After the initial uproar, many of his fellow citizens quickly lost interest in the surveillance scandal and in the fact that the British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had launched what was presumably the most ambitious project ever to monitor global data communications. The opposition helped out by making itself largely invisible. And the Liberal Democrats, in a coalition government with the Conservatives, likewise did nothing despite the party's tradition of being champions of privacy protections.

The United Kingdom is not an authoritarian surveillance state like China. But it is a country in which surveillance has become part of everyday life. The cold eyes of the security apparatus keep watch over everything that moves -- in underground stations and hospitals, at intersections and on buses. Journalists Deferring to National Interests Cozy Relationship. Biography | www.duncan.gn.apc.org. Duncan Campbell is an investigative journalist, author, consultant and television producer specialising in privacy, civil liberties and surveillance issues. His best-known investigations led to major legal clashes with successive British governments. Campbell now also works and is recognised as a forensic expert witness on computers and communications data.

He has providing specialist testimony in over a hundred criminal and civil cases and has given evidence to the House of Commons and the European Parliament on surveillance legislation. For over three decades, he has produced and researched in-depth reports for television, print and online media. His award-winning work into topics including government secrecy, corporate crime and medical fraud has earned critical acclaim and provoked legal challenges.

He has published on a wide range of subjects in leading UK newspapers including the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, Independent, Mail on Sunday, Daily Express. New Statesman Background.

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