Author Archives: News Sources

Obama’s ‘Insider Threat’ policy equates whistleblowers, spies, and terrorists

Steven Aftergood writes: A national policy on “insider threats” was developed by the Obama Administration in order to protect against actions by government employees who would harm the security of the nation. But under the rubric of insider threats, the policy subsumes the seemingly disparate acts of spies, terrorists, and those who leak classified information.

The insider threat is defined as “the threat that an insider will use his/her authorized access, wittingly or unwittingly, to do harm to the security of the United States. This threat can include damage to the United States through espionage, terrorism, [or] unauthorized disclosure of national security information,” according to the newly disclosed National Insider Threat Policy, issued in November 2012.

One of the implications of aggregating spies, terrorists and leakers in a single category is that the nation’s spy-hunters and counterterrorism specialists can now be trained upon those who are suspected of leaking classified information.

The National Insider Threat Policy directs agencies to “leverag[e] counterintelligence (CI), security, information assurance, and other relevant functions and resources to identify and counter the insider threat.”

“Agency heads shall ensure personnel assigned to the insider threat program are fully trained in… counterintelligence and security fundamentals….”

Agency heads are directed to grant insider threat program personnel access to “all relevant databases and files” needed to identify, analyze, and resolve insider threat matters.

The National Insider Threat Policy was developed by the Insider Threat Task Force that was established in 2011 by executive order 13587. The Policy document itself was issued by the White House via Presidential Memorandum on November 21, 2012 but it was not publicly released until last week. [Continue reading…]

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The NSA admits it analyzes way more people’s data than previously revealed

Atlantic Wire: As an aside during testimony on Capitol Hill today, a National Security Agency representative rather casually indicated that the government looks at data from a universe of far, far more people than previously indicated.

Chris Inglis, the agency’s deputy director, was one of several government representatives — including from the FBI and the office of the Director of National Intelligence — testifying before the House Judiciary Committee this morning. Most of the testimony largely echoed previous testimony by the agencies on the topic of the government’s surveillance, including a retread of the same offered examples for how the Patriot Act and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act had stopped terror events.

But Inglis’ statement was new. Analysts look “two or three hops” from terror suspects when evaluating terror activity, Inglis revealed. Previously, the limit of how surveillance was extended had been described as two hops. This meant that if the NSA were following a phone metadata or web trail from a terror suspect, it could also look at the calls from the people that suspect has spoken with — one hop. And then, the calls that second person had also spoken with — two hops. Terror suspect to person two to person three. Two hops. And now: A third hop. [Continue reading…]

Let’s put that into numbers. Let’s suppose the suspect has a small circle of 25 contacts but each of them has a more commonplace network of 100 contacts and each of them also has 100 contacts.

That means when the NSA identifies one suspect it will then actively engage in surveillance on as many and perhaps more than 250,000 people!

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The creepy, long-standing practice of undersea cable tapping

Following revelations that both the U.S. and the U.K. spy agencies, the NSA and GCHQ, are tapping directly into the Internet’s backbone, The Atlantic asks: how does one tap into an underwater cable?

The process is extremely secretive, but it seems similar to tapping an old-fashioned, pre-digital telephone line — the eavesdropper gathers up all the data that flows past, then deciphers it later.

More than 550,000 miles of flexible undersea cables about the size of garden watering hoses carry all the world’s emails, searches, and tweets. Together, they shoot the equivalent of several hundred Libraries of Congress worth of information back and forth every day.

In 2005, the Associated Press reported that a submarine called the USS Jimmy Carter had been repurposed to carry crews of technicians to the bottom of the sea so they could tap fiber optic lines. The easiest place to get into the cables is at the regeneration points — spots where their signals are amplified and pushed forward on their long, circuitous journeys. “At these spots, the fiber optics can be more easily tapped, because they are no longer bundled together, rather laid out individually,” Deutsche Welle reported.

But such aquatic endeavors may no longer even be necessary. The cables make landfall at coastal stations in various countries, where their data is sent on to domestic networks, and it’s easier to tap them on land than underwater. Britain is, geographically, in an ideal position to access to cables as they emerge from the Atlantic, so the cooperation between the NSA and GCHQ has been key. Beyond that partnership, there are the other members of the “Five Eyes” — the Australians, the New Zealanders, and the Canadians — that also collaborate with the U.S., Snowden said.

The tapping process apparently involves using so-called “intercept probes.” According to two analysts I spoke to, the intelligence agencies likely gain access to the landing stations, usually with the permission of the host countries or operating companies, and use these small devices to capture the light being sent across the cable. The probe bounces the light through a prism, makes a copy of it, and turns it into binary data without disrupting the flow of the original Internet traffic. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s Orwellian America

The Washington Post reports: The Department of Homeland Security has warned its employees that the government may penalize them for opening a Washington Post article containing a classified slide that shows how the National Security Agency eavesdrops on international communications.

An internal memo from DHS headquarters told workers on Friday that viewing the document from an “unclassified government workstation” could lead to administrative or legal action. “You may be violating your non-disclosure agreement in which you sign that you will protect classified national security information,” the communication said.

The memo said workers who view the article through an unclassified workstation should report the incident as a “classified data spillage.” [Continue reading…]

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From Tom Paine to Glenn Greenwald, we need partisan journalism

Jack Shafer writes: I would sooner engage you in a week-long debate over which taxonomical subdivision the duck-billed platypus belongs to then spend a moment arguing whether Glenn Greenwald is a journalist or not, or whether an activist can be a journalist, or whether a journalist can be an activist, or how suspicious we should be of partisans in the newsroom.

It’s not that those arguments aren’t worthy of time — just not mine. I’d rather judge a work of journalism directly than run the author’s mental drippings through a gas chromatograph to detect whether his molecules hang left or right or cling to the center. In other words, I care less about where a journalist is coming from than to where his journalism takes me.

Greenwald’s collaborations with source Edward Snowden, which resulted in Page One scoops in the Guardian about the National Security Agency, caused such a rip in the time-space-journalism continuum that the question soon went from whether Greenwald’s lefty style of journalism could be trusted to whether he belonged in a jail cell. Last month, New York Times business journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin called for the arrest of Greenwald (he later apologized) and Meet the Press host David Gregory asked with a straight face if he shouldn’t “be charged with a crime.” NBC’s Chuck Todd and the Washington Post‘s Walter Pincus and Paul Farhi also asked if Greenwald hadn’t shape-shifted himself to some non-journalistic precinct with his work.

The reactions by Sorkin, Gregory, Todd, Pincus, Farhi, and others betray — dare I say it? — a sad devotion to the corporatist ideal of what journalism can be and — I don’t have any problem saying it — a painful lack of historical understanding of American journalism. [Continue reading…]

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How the CIA breaks into the computers the NSA cannot reach

Matthew Aid writes: During a coffee break at an intelligence conference held in The Netherlands a few years back, a senior Scandinavian counterterrorism official regaled me with a story. One of his service’s surveillance teams was conducting routine monitoring of a senior militant leader when they suddenly noticed through their high-powered surveillance cameras two men breaking into the militant’s apartment. The target was at Friday evening prayers at the local mosque. But rather than ransack the apartment and steal the computer equipment and other valuables while he was away — as any right-minded burglar would normally have done — one of the men pulled out a disk and loaded some programs onto the resident’s laptop computer while the other man kept watch at the window. The whole operation took less than two minutes, then the two trespassers fled the way they came, leaving no trace that they had ever been there.

It did not take long for the official to determine that the two men were, in fact, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives conducting what is known in the U.S. intelligence community as either a “black bag job” or a “surreptitious entry” operation. Back in the Cold War, such a mission might have involved cracking safes, stealing code books, or photographing the settings on cipher machines. Today, this kind of break-in is known inside the CIA and National Security Agency as an “off-net operation,” a clandestine human intelligence mission whose specific purpose is to surreptitiously gain access to the computer systems and email accounts of targets of high interest to America’s spies. As we’ve learned in recent weeks, the National Security Agency’s ability to electronically eavesdrop from afar is massive. But it is not infinite. There are times when the agency cannot gain access to the computers or gadgets they’d like to listen in on. And so they call in the CIA’s black bag crew for help.

The CIA’s clandestine service is now conducting these sorts of black bag operations on behalf of the NSA, but at a tempo not seen since the height of the Cold War. Moreover, these missions, as well as a series of parallel signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection operations conducted by the CIA’s Office of Technical Collection, have proven to be instrumental in facilitating and improving the NSA’s SIGINT collection efforts in the years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Over the past decade specially-trained CIA clandestine operators have mounted over one hundred extremely sensitive black bag jobs designed to penetrate foreign government and military communications and computer systems, as well as the computer systems of some of the world’s largest foreign multinational corporations. Spyware software has been secretly planted in computer servers; secure telephone lines have been bugged; fiber optic cables, data switching centers and telephone exchanges have been tapped; and computer backup tapes and disks have been stolen or surreptitiously copied in these operations. [Continue reading…]

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Former FISA judge spells out why court cannot perform judicial role

James Robertson, a former federal district judge who served on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, addressing the new Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, on July 9, explained why FISA cannot perform the function which is assigned to judges: that they choose between adversaries. Dan Froomkin quotes Robertson from the transcript:

I read the other day that one of my former FISA Court colleagues resisted the suggestion that the FISA approval process accommodated the executive, or maybe the word was cooperated. Not so, the judge replied. The judge said the process was adjudicating.

I very respectfully take issue with that use of the word adjudicating. The ex parte FISA process hears only one side and what the FISA process does is not adjudication, it is approval.

Which brings me to my second and I think closely related point. The FISA approval process works just fine when it deals with individual applications for surveillance warrants because approving search warrants and wiretap orders and trap and trace orders and foreign intelligence surveillance warrants one at a time is familiar ground for judges.

And not only that, but at some point a search warrant or wiretap order, if it leads on to a prosecution or some other consequence is usually reviewable by another court.

But what happened about the revelations in late 2005 about NSA circumventing the FISA process was that Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 and introduced a new role for the FISC, which was to approve surveillance programs.

That change, in my view, turned the FISA Court into something like an administrative agency which makes and approves rules for others to follow.

Again, that’s not the bailiwick of judges. Judges don’t make policy. They review policy determinations for compliance with statutory law but they do so in the context once again of adversary process.

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Unitarian Church, gun groups join EFF to sue NSA over illegal surveillance

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Nineteen organizations including Unitarian church groups, gun ownership advocates, and a broad coalition of membership and political advocacy organizations filed suit against the National Security Agency (NSA) today for violating their First Amendment right of association by illegally collecting their call records. The coalition is represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a group with years of experience fighting illegal government surveillance in the courts.

“The First Amendment protects the freedom to associate and express political views as a group, but the NSA’s mass, untargeted collection of Americans’ phone records violates that right by giving the government a dramatically detailed picture into our associational ties,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. “Who we call, how often we call them, and how long we speak shows the government what groups we belong to or associate with, which political issues concern us, and our religious affiliation. Exposing this information – especially in a massive, untargeted way over a long period of time – violates the Constitution and the basic First Amendment tests that have been in place for over 50 years.”

At the heart of First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA is the bulk telephone records collection program that was confirmed by last month’s publication of an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) further confirmed that this formerly secret document was legitimate, and part of a broader program to collect all major telecommunications customers’ call histories. The order demands wholesale collection of every call made, the location of the phone, the time of the call, the duration of the call, and other “identifying information” for every phone and call for all customers of Verizon for a period of three months. Government officials further confirmed that this was just one of series of orders issued on a rolling basis since at least 2006. [Continue reading…]

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CIA warned Hezbollah about threat of al Qaeda attack

McClatchy reports: The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency warned Lebanese officials last week that al Qaida-linked groups are planning a campaign of bombings that will target Beirut’s Hezbollah-dominated southern suburbs as well as other political targets associated with the group or its allies in Syria, Lebanese officials said Monday.

The unusual warning – U.S. government officials are barred from directly contacting Hezbollah, which the U.S. has designated an international terrorist organization – was passed from the CIA’s Beirut station chief to several Lebanese security and intelligence officials in a meeting late last week with the understanding that it would be passed to Hezbollah, Lebanese officials said.

Hezbollah officials acknowledged the warning and took steps to tighten security in the southern suburbs that are known locally as Dahiya.

“Yes, a warning came from the CIA,” said a Hezbollah internal security commander who spoke on the condition that he not be identified because he was not authorized to talk to reporters. “They passed us this information through the mukhabarat (military intelligence), but we had our own information about the bombs.” [Continue reading…]

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Egyptian protesters seek ‘new revolution’

The Washington Post reports: The men and women who have taken up residence at the Muslim Brotherhood protest camp on the outskirts of Cairo emerged from their tents into the scorching July sunshine on Tuesday with new determination, their defiance reinforced by a night of demonstrations that culminated in deadly clashes with police in the center of the Egyptian capital.

Seven people were reported killed in the encounter, during which police personnel fired tear gas, bird shot and, the Brotherhood says, live ammunition at several thousand supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi who had marched into Cairo’s Ramses Square to call for his reinstatement.

Far from deterring the protesters, “this only makes us stronger,” said Marwan Ghanem, an accountant who was among those who fanned out from the camp to join in the Brotherhood’s boldest push yet into the heart of the city. “We have to rely on the streets to send our message.”

The message that the Brotherhood is seeking to send, two weeks after Egypt’s first democratically elected president was overthrown by the country’s powerful military, is that Egypt will become ungovernable unless Morsi gets his job back. The impromptu encampment outside a mosque in the Cairo suburb of Nasr City where the Brotherhood’s supporters and its fugitive leaders have gathered stands at the center of their escalating campaign of civil disobedience. [Continue reading…]

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Morsi in extended-stay hotel?

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports: Ousted President Mohamed Morsy is not being detained by the army and is being well looked after, according to Colonel Ahmed Mohamed Ali, the official spokesperson for the Armed Forces.

The army has prioritized protecting the ex-president due to the instability witnessed on the Egyptian street, Ali said.

The military spokesperson denied that Morsy was in detention because he was not facing any judicial order to that end.

In an interview with Al Arabiya satellite channel, published on its website on Wednesday, the army spokesperson said that nobody will be excluded from Egypt’s politics in the future. No one would be hunted down for their political opinions, he added.

Ali claimed that the army has no presence in politics because Egypt already has a president and a Cabinet. The army would concentrate on security Egypt and its borders, he said.

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Syria crisis worst since Rwanda, U.N. says

Al Jazeera reports: Six thousand people are fleeing Syria every day as the conflict intensifies and merges with violence in neighbouring Iraq, United Nations officials have said.

The warnings were given on Tuesday at a rare public briefing of the UN’s Security Council in New York

The High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, told the meeting that the organisation had “not seen a refugee outflow escalate at such a frightening rate since the Rwandan genocide almost 20 years ago”.

Ivan Simonovic, the Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, told the meeting that at least 92,901 people were killed in Syria – among them more than 6,500 children – between March 2011 and the end of April 2013.

“The extremely high rate of killings nowadays – approximately 5,000 a month – demonstrates the drastic deterioration of the conflict,” Simonovic told the council meeting.

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Homs: Ruins in a center of Syria’s uprising

The New York Times reports: Little by little, the central Syrian city of Homs is losing its infrastructure and its landmarks. The national hospital lies in ruins. Rebel-held neighborhoods stretch for blocks without an intact building. Many government offices are closed. The silver-domed mosque of Khalid bin al-Waleed — named for an early Islamic warrior particularly revered by Sunnis — stands pockmarked and perforated.

Abandoned cars rust beneath piles of rubble and downed wires.

Homs was an early bellwether of what Syria would become. One of the first cities to rise up in rebellion, it was home to mass demonstrations. As protests turned to armed revolt, the city began to split, largely along sectarian lines, with much of the Sunni majority supporting the uprising and members of President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect joining pro-government militias. Now, after more than a year of siege, bombardment and clashes, which have intensified recently as the government has renewed its assault on rebel strongholds, Homs may well be the site of the most concentrated destruction in the country.

“For two years, the regime couldn’t retake Homs,” said a man who identified himself as Abu Nizar, 55, a resident of the Ensha’at district. “Now they want to retake it, but after changing its demographic and sectarian fabric.”

For many months, Homs has been a city divided. Several central areas have been gradually flattened as they have changed hands, with the army briefly retaking control, only to lose it again. Government-held areas continued to function, with shops and restaurants open, preserving a rhythm of daily life. But recently, the government sought to break what amounted to a stalemate. The army began raining rockets and shells onto rebel areas in and around the old city center as pro-government fighters vowed to retake control and open a route to the north.

On a recent visit, the city seethed with fear and antagonism. “This time we will clean Homs completely and will not leave any germs behind us,” said a pro-government fighter who called himself Abu Haidar. “Homs should be cleaned forever from all traitors.” [Continue reading…]

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Snowden’s whistleblowing opens way for challenges to surveillance programs’ constitutionality

The Washington Post reports: The recent disclosure of U.S. surveillance methods is providing opponents of classified programs with new openings to challenge their constitutionality, according to civil libertarians and some legal experts.

At least five cases have been filed in federal courts since the government’s widespread collection of telephone and Internet records was revealed last month. The lawsuits primarily target a program that scoops up the telephone records of millions of Americans from U.S. telecommunications companies.

Such cases face formidable obstacles. The government tends to fiercely resist them on national security grounds, and the surveillance is so secret that it’s hard to prove who was targeted. Nearly all of the roughly 70 suits filed after the George W. Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping was disclosed in 2005 have been dismissed.

But the legal landscape may be shifting, lawyers say, because the revelations by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor and the principal source of the leaks, forced the government to acknowledge the programs and discuss them. That, they say, could help plaintiffs overcome government arguments that they lack the legal standing to sue or that cases should be thrown out because the programs are state secrets. A federal judge in California last week rejected the government’s argument that an earlier lawsuit over NSA surveillance should be dismissed on secrecy grounds.

“There is one critical difference from the Bush era. We now have indisputable physical evidence that the conduct being challenged is actually taking place,’’ said Stephen Vladeck, an expert on national security law at American University law school. He said Snowden’s disclosures make it “more likely” that cases will at least be allowed to go forward in court, leading to a years-long legal battle over surveillance and privacy. [Continue reading…]

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New EU ‘territorial clause’ causes ‘earthquake’ inside Israel (updated)

Haaretz reports: The European Union has published a guideline for all 28 member states forbidding any funding, cooperation, awarding of scholarships, research funds or prizes to anyone residing in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The regulation, which goes into effect on Friday, requires that any agreement or contract signed by an EU country with Israel include a clause stating that the settlements are not part of the State of Israel and therefore are not part of the agreement.

A senior Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the new ruling, which was published on June 30, as an “earthquake.”

“This is the first time such an official, explicit guideline has been published by the European Union bodies,” the senior official said. “Until today there were understandings and quiet agreements that the Union does not work beyond the Green Line [the pre-1967-war border]; now this has become a formal, binding policy.”

The official noted that the significance of the regulation is both practical and political: From now on, if the Israeli government wants to sign agreements with the European Union or one of its member states, it will have to recognize in writing that the West Bank settlements are not part of Israel.

In the Prime Minister’s Office and Foreign Ministry there is great tension and anxiety over the new regulation and its implications for Israeli-EU relations. The efforts of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Deputy Foreign Minister Ze’ev Elkin to stop the move have all failed. Senior EU officials say they would like to hold talks with Israel concerning the new guideline, but since it will go into effect by the end of this week, the chance of its being amended is extremely slim.

“We will have to decide what to do from this day forward,” a senior Israeli official said. “We are not ready to sign on this clause in our agreements with the European Union. We can say this to the Europeans, but the result could be a halt to all cooperation in economics, science, culture, sports and academia. This would cause severe damage to Israel.” [Continue reading…]

Update: It turns out that these guidelines are not binding on EU member states, they will not be applied to all entities in the occupied territories and they do not go into effect until 2014. More details when I have them.

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Who says crime doesn’t pay? Glaxo makes $1.5 billion pushing drugs with sex in China — risks $10 million fine

Bloomberg News reports: GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s sales in China jumped 20 percent to about 1 billion pounds ($1.5 billion) last year, almost quadruple the pace of growth across its emerging markets. Police say bribes and sexual favors spurred the gain.

The drugmaker now faces allegations of economic crimes involving 3 billion yuan ($489 million) of spurious travel and meeting expenses, and trade in sexual favors, the Public Security Ministry said yesterday. The allegations are “shameful” and would be a breach of the company’s systems and values, Glaxo said in a statement.

Prior to a police probe that began last month, Glaxo embarked on a strategy that tripled its Chinese sales force to more than 4,000 people in three years as the U.K.’s largest drugmaker sought a bigger share of the market. As that expansion was ramping up, Chief Executive Officer Andrew Witty told analysts on a February 2010 conference call that controlling Glaxo’s operations in China was “not a trivial proposition.”

Bribes paid to hospitals, doctors and health officials contributed to the resulting gains in revenue, according to the ministry, which controls China’s police. If found guilty, Glaxo could be ordered to pay a penalty of $5 million to $10 million, according to estimates by Kepler Capital Markets based on fines paid in China for similar violations. [Continue reading…]

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In the battle for our crops, superweeds are winning

Grist reports: Biotech crops, which represent almost all the corn, soy, and cotton grown in the U.S., have finally met their match. And it’s not (only) the millions of consumers demanding labels on food that contains genetically modified crops, or GMOs. As NPR reports, biotech’s super-nemesis is legions of weeds and bugs that have grown immune to the herbicides and pesticides that many of these crops require.

Generally speaking, GMO crops fall into two categories: Some are designed to be resistant to pesticides like Roundup, Monsanto’s all-purpose weed killer. This allows farmers to douse fields with Roundup, killing everything but the corn, soy, or cotton (most commonly) that they’re trying to grow. Other GMO crops actually exude chemicals such as Bt, a “natural” pesticide that kills many of the most damaging bugs.

The technology may or may not be deserving of the World Food Prize but it’s certainly been a huge business success. At least it has been — until the weeds and bugs that these crops are engineered to withstand find ways to kill the crops anyway.

We at Grist have been tracking the scourge of superweeds and superbugs for years now. And whatever the merits of a debate over pros and cons of biotech, the facts on the ground suggest the underdogspests are winning.

It’s fair to say that the story is no longer about the rise of superweeds and superbugs. It’s now about their dominance. [Continue reading…]

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Britain’s ‘light-touch’ oversight: watchdog staff of 10 monitors intelligence gathering performed by 10,000

The Independent reports: The little-known watchdog responsible for ensuring that Britain’s spy agencies act within the law over communication interceptions has been condemned as “ineffective” by civil liberties campaigners – amid concerns that it failed to scrutinise the systems revealed by Edward Snowden.

The Independent has established that the watchdog’s annual report had to be delayed and revised because the first draft made no mention of the hi-tech GCHQ spying programmes exposed by the US whistleblower.

The updated 2012 report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner Office (ICCO) will now be published later this month, after hastily organised revisions were ordered by Whitehall officials.

In documents disclosed by Mr Snowden, it was revealed that Britain’s spy centre in Cheltenham has for at least two years been using advanced technology to access hundreds of trans-Atlantic fibre-optic cables which daily carry hundreds of millions of private telecommunications messages. The programme goes by the codename Operation Tempora.

Gathered legally because digital traffic “leaves” the UK as fibre-optic traffic, the interceptions include phone calls, emails and records of internet usage. This step-change in access technology has exposed the inadequate oversight regimes under which the spy agencies operate, privacy activists say.

According to senior Home Office sources, the ICCO’s revised 2012 report will now make passing references to GCHQ’s latest interception technology. But the report will nevertheless gloss over its own oversight inadequacies and offer a clean bill of health to the UK’s surveillance regime by praising, as it has in past years, the co-operation and diligence shown by intelligence and police agencies in complying with the law.

Around 10,000 staff across the UK’s three main spy agencies, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ in Cheltenham, have access to Tempora’s gathered data, as do 850,000 employees and private contractors of the NSA in the United States.

By comparison, the small ICCO office based in Whitehall’s Queen Anne’s Gate headed by the retired appeal court judge Sir Anthony May, currently has less than 10 full-time staff to carry out its statutory duty of reviewing the interception activity of the UK spy agencies, the Metropolitan Police, HM Revenue and Customs, the Foreign Office, the Home Office and Ministry of Defence. [Continue reading…]

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