Liberty News

A challenge to GCHQ's use of non-specific warrants to authorise the bulk hacking of smartphones, computers and networks in the UK is starting at the court of appeal.

The case, brought by the campaign group Privacy International (PI), is the latest twist in a protracted battle about both the legality of mass snooping and the primacy of civil courts over an intelligence tribunal that operates partly in secret.

The original claim dates back to 2014 and was brought at the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) following revelations by the American whistleblower Edward Snowden. The IPT hears complaints about government surveillance and the intelligence services. Some of its hearings are held behind closed doors.

PI, along with seven internet service providers, argued that computer network exploitation (CNE) carried out by GCHQ , the government monitoring station in Cheltenham, breaches human rights.

Swedish parliament proposals for an extension to mass internet snooping have been leaked local ISP Bahnhof.

Sweden's government wants to extend the holding period under existing data retention legislation. Today, providers have to retain users' IP address information for six months, but a submission to the inquiry asks that be raised to 10 months.

The use of VPNs is also under fire with a demand that ISPs log the first activation of each new anonymisation service.

There's also talk of demanding providers rework their networks to reduce sharing of IP addresses between users.

Bahnhof CEO Jon Karlung writes that it looks like Sweden is imitating China, where the state requires the network to be tailor-made for monitoring, not for the internet to work as well as possible.

Rick Falkvinge of Private Internet Access writes that Sweden is ignoring a 2014 European Court of Justice ruling against data retention , instead doubling down on the forbidden concept of surveillance of people who are not currently any suspicion.

The US internet company DreamHost is fighting government demands for it to hand over details of millions of activists.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) wants all visitors' IP addresses - some 1.3 million - to a website that helped organise a protest on the day of President Trump's inauguration. In addition to the IP addresses, DreamHost said that the DoJ requested the contact information, email content and photos of thousands of visitors.

DreamHost is currently refusing to comply with the request and is due in court on 18th August,

In a blog post on the issue, DreamHost said that, like many other online service providers, it was regularly approached by law enforcement about customers who may be the subject of criminal investigations. But, it added, it took issue with this particular search warrant for being a highly untargeted demand.

Civil liberties group The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is helping DreamHost fight its case, said: No plausible explanation exists for a search warrant of this breadth, other than to cast a digital dragnet as broadly as possible.

Update: Government data demand narrowed down a little

24th August 2017 See  article from theregister.co.uk

The US Department of Justice has eased up in its legal fight against hosting company DreamHost, saying it no longer wants all IP logs associated with a Trump protest site.

That is not the end of the matter, however. The DoJ still wants records related to what it suspects was the planned coordination of illegal acts. It has slightly limited the request to a six-month window ending on the day of the protest itself, to subscribers of the site as opposed to simple visitors, and it has said it does not want draft blog posts or images.