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.......
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.
