EU beschuldigt GB van spionage inzake Brexit.......

De EU beschuldigt Groot-Brittannie van spionage inzake de onderhandelingen met de EU over de Brexit. Zo zou GB via een hack door het Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) aan negatieve EU kritiek op May's Chequers Plan voor de Brexit zijn gekomen..... Dit is uiteraard gunstig voor de Britse onderhandelaars......

Annie Machon, die het hieronder geschreven artikel publiceerde op Consortium News, noemt nog een voorbeeld en haalt bovendien de dappere klokkenluider Katharine Gun aan die een aantal zaken naar buiten bracht en daar bijna voor werd veroordeeld.......

Zie welk smerig spel wordt gespeeld door de Britse overheid. Echt bewijs voor de Britse hacks zijn er niet, maar gezien alle smerige zaken die GB heeft geflikt, is het zeer waarschijnlijk dat GB inderdaad ook in de Brexit onderhandelingen zich weer van één van haar smerigste kanten (heeft laten en) laat zien.......

Ongelofelijk dat ook de Britse regering een grote bek heeft over Russische manipulaties, waar NB geen flinter bewijs voor is, terwijl het zichzelf bezighoudt met manipulaties middels het hacken van zelfs bevriende naties en dat al ver voor er van een Brexit sprake was, ja zelfs al voor de aanslagen van 911...... Ga maar eens na wat dit betekent voor de omgang met landen als Rusland waar de Britse regering vijandig tegenover staat.......

Have British Spies Been Hacking the EU?

August 17, 2018 at 10:50 pm

Written by Consortium News

The European Union has accused British intelligence agencies of disrupting Brexit negotiations—creating a new public dispute that could poison further an already toxic situation.

(CN Op-ed) — Just after midnight on Aug. 16, I was called by LBC Radio in London for a comment on a breaking story on the front page of The Daily Telegraph about British spies hacking the EU. Even though I had just retired to bed, the story was just too irresistible, but a radio interview is always too short to do justice to such a convoluted tale. Here are some longer thoughts.

For those who cannot get past the Telegraph paywall, the gist is that that the European Union has accused the British intelligence agencies of hacking the EU’s side of the Brexit negotiations. Apparently, some highly sensitive and negative EU slides about British Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan for Brexit, the Chequers Plan, had landed in the lap of the British government, which then lobbied the EU to suppress publication.

Of course, this could be a genuine leak from the Brussels sieve, as British sources are claiming (well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?). However, it is plausible that this is the work of the spies, either by recruiting a paid-up agent well placed within the Brussels bureaucracy, or through electronic surveillance.

The Ugly Truth of Spying

Before dismissing the latter option as conspiracy theory, the British spies do have experience. In the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003, the United States and the United Kingdom were desperate to get a United Nations Security Council resolution to invade Iraq, thus providing a fig leaf of apparent legitimacy to the illegal war. However, some countries within the UN had their doubts (including France and Germany), and the U.S. asked Britain’s listening post, GCHQ, to step up its surveillance game. Forewarned is forearmed in delicate international negotiations.

                     

                          Katherine Gun: Threatened with prosecution.

How do we know this? A brave GCHQ whistleblower named Katharine Gun leaked the information to The Observer. For her pains, she was threatened with prosecution under the draconian terms of the UK’s 1989 Official Secrets Act and faced two years in prison. The case was only dropped three weeks before her trial was due to begin, partly because of the feared public outcry, but mainly because her lawyers threatened to use the legal defense of “necessity”—a defense won only three years before during the case of MI5 whistleblower David Shayler. Tangentially, a film is being made about Gun’s story this year.

We also have confirmation from one of the early 2013 Edward Snowden disclosures that GCHQ had hacked its way into the Belgacom network—the national telecommunications supplier in Belgium. Even back then, there was an outcry from the EU bodies, worried that the UK (and by extension its closest intelligence buddy, the U.S.), would gain leverage with stolen knowledge.

So, yes, it is perfectly feasible that the UK could have done this, even though it was illegal back in the day. GCHQ’s incestuous relationship with America’s National Security Agency (NSA) gives it massively greater capabilities than other European intelligence agencies. The EU knows this well, which is why it is concerned to retain access to the UK’s defense and security powers post-Brexit, and also why it has jumped to these conclusions about hacking.

Somebody Needs to Watch the Watchers

But that was then, and this is now. On Jan. 1, 2017, the UK government finally signed a law called the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), governing the legal framework for GCHQ to snoop. The IPA gave GCHQ the most draconian and invasive powers of any Western democracy. Otherwise known in the British media as the “snoopers’ charter,” the IPA had been defeated in Parliament for years, but Theresa May, then home secretary, pushed it through in the teeth of legal and civil society opposition. This year, the High Court ordered the UK government to redraft the IPA as it is incompatible with European law.

May: Breaking up is hard to do.

The IPA legalized what GCHQ previously had been doing illegally post-9/11, including bulk metadata collection, bulk data hacking, and bulk hacking of electronic devices.

It also gave the government greater oversight of the spies’ actions, but these measures remain weak and offer no protection if the spies choose to keep quiet about what they are doing. So if GCHQ did indeed hack the EU, it is feasible that the foreign secretary and the prime minister remained ignorant of what was going on, despite being legally required to sign off on such operations. In which case the spies would be running amok.

It is also feasible that they were indeed fully briefed, and that would have been proper protocol. GCHQ and the other spy agencies are required to protect “national security and the economic well-being” of Great Britain, and I can certainly see a strong argument could be made that they were doing precisely that (provided they had prior written permission for such a sensitive operation) if they tried to get advance intelligence about the EU’s Brexit strategy.

This argument becomes even more powerful when you consider the problems around the fraught issue of the border between the UK’s Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland, an issue about which the EU is being particularly intransigent. If a deal is not made, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement could be under threat and civil war might break out again in Northern Ireland. You cannot get much more “national security” than that, and GCHQ would be justified in this work, provided it has acquired the necessary legal sign-offs from its political masters.

Our Complicated World

However, these arguments will do nothing to appease the enraged EU officials. The UK government will continue to state that this was a leak from a Brussels insider, and publicly at least, oil will be seen to have been poured on troubled diplomatic waters.

Behind the scenes, though, this action will multiply the mutual suspicion and no doubt unleash a witch hunt through the corridors of EU power, with top civil servant Martin Selmayr (aka “The Monster”) cast as witchfinder general. With him on your heels, you would have to be a brave leaker, whistleblower or even paid-up agent working for the Brits to take such a risk.

So, perhaps this is indeed a GCHQ hack. However justifiable the move might be under the nebulous concept of “national security,” this event will poison further the already toxic Brexit negotiations. As Angela Merkel famously, if disingenuously, said after the Snowden revelation that the U.S. had hacked her mobile phone: “No spying among friends.” But perhaps this is an outdated concept—and the EU has not been entirely friendly to Brexit Britain.

I am just waiting for the first hysterical claim that it was the Russians instead or, failing them, former Trump strategist in chief, Steve Bannon, reportedly on a mission to build a divisive alt-right movement across Europe.

Annie Machon is a former intelligence officer in the UK’s domestic MI5 Security Service.

By Annie Machon / Republished with permission / Consortium News / Report a typo

May en de samenwerking met DUP: niet verenigbaar met het Goede Vrijdag-Akkoord!

In het Goede Vrijdag-Akkoord (of Akkoord van Belfast), dat een eind maakte aan grootschalige terreur in Noord-Ierland, werd gesteld dat de Britse overheid ten allen tijde onpartijdig zou moeten handelen, als het gaat om bemoeienis met dit in feite illegaal bezette deel van Noord -Ierland.

Onbegrijpelijk dat de ijskoude, inhumane neoliberale regering May nu een verbond aangaat met de protestante DUP, in feite een terreurorganisatie met een politieke tak (waar NB de psychopathische haatzaaier Paisey deel van uitmaakte..)....

The Canary bracht vorige week dinsdag het volgende artikel over deze zaak en gaat m.n. in op een pamflet geschreven door een partijgenoot van May en minister in haar kabinet, Michael Gove. In dit pamflet heeft Gove grote kritiek op het Goede Vrijdag-Akkoord, dat hij als een capitulatie voor de IRA ziet.....

Theresa May was hoping nobody would see this Northern Ireland document written by her cabinet minister

JUNE 13TH, 2017  BEX SUMNER

Peace in Northern Ireland depends on the UK government being impartial. The Good Friday Agreement requires [paywall] it. But in 2000, one of Theresa May’s own cabinet ministers, Michael Gove, wrote a 17,000-word pamphlet in which he railed against the Good Friday Agreement, calling the peace process a “moral stain”. And it exposes a grave lack of impartiality in Conservative ranks.

The deal

The Conservative government’s plans to do a deal with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has caused a public outcry. On 17 June, demonstrators converged on Downing Street to protest any deal. And political figures from former UK Prime Minister John Major to recent Irish Premier Enda Kenny have warned that a deal could put the peace process at risk.

The Good Friday Agreement, also known as the Belfast Agreement, requires the UK government to act with “rigorous impartiality on behalf of all the people in the diversity of their identities and traditions”.

An alliance between the Conservative Party and the DUP could risk all that. Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams said:

“We told her [May] very directly that she was in breach of the Good Friday Agreement”

Michael Gove

But in 2000, two years after the Good Friday Agreement, Michael Gove wrote a pamphlet called The Price of Peace [pdf] arguing against it:

“The Belfast Agreement poses a threat not just to the Britishness of Northern Ireland but the British way of doing things in law, equality of opportunity, policing and human rights. In every area it creates unhappy precedents, likely to divide our society, burden the taxpayer and bloat the State.

The Belfast Agreement has, at its heart, however, an even greater wickedness… It is a humiliation of

our Army, Police and Parliament. But, worse still, it is a denial of our national integrity, in every sense of the word. Surely, is the Belfast Agreement not the greatest achievement of this Government, but an indelible mark against it?”

“Dangerous idiocy”

In 2016, journalist and Assistant Editor of The Irish Times Fintan O’Toole summarised Gove’s argument. Gove, he said:

“utterly despises the 1998 peace deal… Gove characterised the entire peace process as nothing more than a capitulation to the IRA. He insisted that the cause of the Troubles was British lack of firmness in facing down demands for a united Ireland… This is idiocy but, like Gove’s Brexit theorems, dangerous idiocy”

Gove’s reasons for opposing it? It offered too many rights to too many people. O’Toole again:

“The Belfast Agreement was, as he put it, ‘a Trojan horse’ for democratic reform across the UK. It introduces proportional representation. Horrifically, ‘it enshrines a vision of human rights which privileges contending minorities at the expense of the democratic majority’. Even worse, ‘it offers social and economic rights’…

Underlying this attack is a sense that it would be better to destroy the peace deal, at whatever cost to the people of Northern Ireland, than to allow this monstrosity to undermine a conservative vision of Britishness”.

Terrorism

Gove defended his pamphlet as recently as 2016 when he said on the BBC Andrew Marr Show:

“One of things I would say now, we now have peace in Northern Ireland, I’m delighted that we do, but the things we did during the negotiations in the way that we handled the IRA, I would not have done… There is a moral question about someone who had been engaged in terrorism should be in office and I found that very difficult to take”

But as many have pointed out, the DUP has its own links to terrorism.

The ruling class

Gove is not alone in his views. Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan put it much more succinctly, much more recently:

Daniel Hannan 

✔@DanielJHannan

The @duponline are indeed our friends and allies. The IRA weren't. See the difference?

2:13 PM - 9 Jun 2017

 
•  482482 Retweets
 
•  1,0151,015 likes

And, according to O’Toole, this partiality goes right to the top:

“Gove’s paper epitomises a much deeper set of attitudes to Northern Ireland among what is now the controlling faction of the British ruling class… [May’s] antipathy is quieter and less explicit, but she is essentially Govian. We know this because her signature political issue has been the scrapping of the UK’s Human Rights Act… And this is a straightforward intention to impugn the Belfast Agreement”.

Peace in Northern Ireland is, as Major said, “fragile”. The UK government should be doing everything in its power to support the peace process. But Gove’s pamphlet shows that at least one member of the Conservative government does not support that process. And, with the Conservatives apparently hell bent on risking long-term peace for its own short-term gain, the country urgently needs to speak out.
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Opvallend trouwens dat de DUP na de Brexit, de grenzen met aartsvijand Ierland open wil houden.