UK Oversight May Set the Bar Even Lower Than US Congressional Oversight

The intelligence and security committee is a watchdog that rarely barks. Indeed, its members have sometimes kept their harshest words for those who raise the alarm while they doze. Before Edward Snowden blew the whistle, the ISC never used its privileged access to the intelligence agencies to interrogate the bulk harvesting of communications data, or even to reveal that it happened. Perhaps it never knew. After all, it was – until he was caught chatting cheerfully about his light workload – chaired by Sir Malcolm Rifkind. Its members are nominated by the prime minister, and the technical expertise that it draws on often comes from former intelligence insiders.

In the week that the foreign secretary has said that it’s time to “move on” from Snowden, this slumbering scrutineer has finally got around to acknowledging the systematic trawling of web traffic and call records. This must be counted as progress – of a very British sort.

  Guardian

Glenn Greenwald weighs in.

Just as the Bush administration and the U.S. media re-labelled “torture” with the Orwellian euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques” to make it more palatable, the governments and media of the Five Eyes surveillance alliance are now attempting to re-brand “mass surveillance” as “bulk collection” in order to make it less menacing (and less illegal).

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The Committee actually acknowledged for the first time (which Snowden documents log ago proved) that GCHQ maintains what it calls “Bulk Personal Datasets” that contain “millions of records,” and even said about pro-privacy witnesses who testified before it: “we recognise their concerns as to the intrusive nature of bulk collection.” That is the very definition of “mass surveillance,” yet the Committee simply re-labelled it “bulk collection,” purported to distinguish it from “mass surveillance,” and thus insist that it was all perfectly legal.

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One of the many facts that made the re-defining of “torture” so corrupt and indisputably invalid was that there was long-standing law making clear that exactly these interrogation techniques used by the U.S. government were torture and thus illegal. The same is true of this obscene attempt to re-define “mass surveillance” as nothing more than mere innocent “bulk collection.”

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By itself, common sense should prevent any of these governments from claiming that sweeping up, storing, and analyzing much of the internet – literally examining billions of communications activities every week of entire populations – is something other than “mass surveillance.” Yet this has now become the coordinated defense from the governments in the U.S., the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

  Glenn Greenwald

And as a British reporter found out, you simply cannot take on Glenn Greenwald. Don’t try. You’ll just look like the idiot you probably are.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Last night, I was on the BBC program Newsnight to discuss the new report. As usual, they decided to interview me first, and then interview a security services official after me, so that I could not respond to what the official said. In this case, the interviewee after me was former GCHQ director David Omand.

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Omand literally demands that there be no more surveillance disclosures or debate because The Committee Has Spoken (also a clearly coordinated message).

  Glenn Greenwald