The UK’s electronic intelligence agency has taken the highly unusual step of issuing a statement to deny it will track all UK internet and phone use.

Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) said it was developing tracking technology but “only acts when it is necessary” and “does not spy at will”.

Can’t say I’m worried.

yeah, it’s pointless tracking *all* activity. They just wait for key words or phrases to flash past like ‘Bomb’, ‘Houses of Parliment’ and ‘Kill Gordon Brown’ and *then* they track it. Like this thread now.

I’ve said it here before, we’re really lucky the terrorists concerned are totally crap. If they got their arses in gear and actually made some effort hiding their communications and activities from everyone we’d be completely screwed.

* waves at GCHQ person *

I am sure this idea will go down a bomb another bright idea from the government I think this will kill civil liberties in Britain

Samuri – the issue is that it’s the government and industrial military complex who define who is a terrorist 🙂

As they’re watching – Can i have a job please?

I know someone who works at GHCQ. they are already watching our interweb traffic/ phones and mostly text messages.
So i look on lots of Islamist websites to see if i get an early morning call….

Are the planning similar measures for people sending letters through the post?

Have they defined “necessary”? Seems a bit of a catch all to me

surely most terrorists will be using there own language, so words like those suggested seem a near pointless thing to watch…

surely most terrorists will be using there own language

haven’t most of the active terrorists in this country been English speaking ?

Of course, the trouble with keywords is that one can easily substitute meaningless alternatives…

Agreed simon.

So you’re thinking the whatsuicidebombjacketworld.com forum has a swear filter translating all their conversations….

Also any sensible terrorists would most likely be using some form of public key cryptography, rather than making plans in plain text.

It’s already started : )

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1176874/Man-strip-searched-held-24-hours-friends-joke-text-sabotaging-train.html

Great!

What happens when you tell your other half what you’re going to do to her when she gets home and rip off her…..with your teeth…

Someones going to listen to my perverted calls! 😈

There used to be a UNIX program called ‘spook’. You could get it to run each time you sent an email message and it would append a signature with phrases like ‘kill the president’, ‘bomb’ and other things like it, in order to distract any security services that were reading your email.

Perhaps we should all get that again.

*waves to the CIA* 😀

One the men recently arrested after that fat idiot policeman went to No10 with top secret documents on show, and then released as most of the “Evidence” was made up, or didn’t exist, didn’t even have a computer.

I’m using pigeons again now.

I tie my confidential messages to carrier pigs. No-one’s willing to wrestle them to the ground to intercept them.

Of course, the trouble with keywords is that one can easily substitute meaningless alternatives…

When i worked for BT and we would carry out maintenance work, if we had to bring circuits down we had to check to see if they were in use. if they were we would wait a bit and if they stayed up we would have a quick listen (against the law but it’s the only way to find out why a phone line is in use at 4 in the morning).

Invariably the discussion would be rather odd and would definately use code words but seemed to revolve around chaps called Charlie, Henry and Harry for the most part. They were busy lads them three. Everyone seemed to know them and wanted them to come round.

Nothing new of course:

“Imagine a global spying network that can eavesdrop on every single phone call, fax or e-mail, anywhere on the planet.

It sounds like science fiction, but it’s true.”

— Echelon Spy Network Revealed (BBC News, Nov 1999)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON