Waheed Ali (25) aka Shipon Ullah from Bangladesh aged 3 and brought up by foster parents after his died. In 2001 after visiting the Iqra bookshop and borrowing videos of muslims being killed in Bosnia, he started practising his religion and dreaming of fighting a jihad. Later that year he would attend a training camp in Pakistan with MOhammad Sidique Khan and would get within a mile of the Taliban front line against the North Alliance in Afghanistan.
Sadeer Saleem (28) met Mohammad Sidique Khan when he was 14 at a Youth Club that Khan helped run. The pair, together with Whaeed Ali, Shehzad Tanweer planned to travel to Pakistan together.
Mohammed Shakil (32) Kashmir born was a close friend of Mohammad Sidique Khan. In 2003 he had travelled to Pakistan with Khan and attended a training camp.
Two of them were convicted of : conspiracy to attend a place used for terrorist training(?).
They were cleared of helping the July 7th bombers choose their targets. Ali, Saleem and Shakil who spent two days in December 2004 in London with the bus bomber, Hasib Hussain, and were joined there by another of the attackers, Jermaine Lindsay, who killed 26 people on a Piccadilly line underground train had denied the charges and said they were on a sightseeing trip.
They are the only people to be charged over the attacks which sparked the biggest criminal investigation in British history. The scale of the investigation was immense, with more than 37,000 exhibits forensically examined and 4,700 telephones seized, producing more than 90,000 numbers requiring analysis. Also, 24,000 people needed to be traced, interviewed and eliminated. The prosecution alleged they conducted a "hostile reconnaissance" of potential targets during a two-day visit, claiming it was "an important first step in what was, by then, a settled plan to cause explosions in the UK". Detailed "cell site analysis" of mobile phone use, including calls to the London Tourist Board and various attractions, allowed the group's movements across London to be mapped.
Survivors of the attacks and family members of those who died said the verdicts strengthened the case for an independent inquiry into the bombings, and whether they could have been prevented. These charges would not have been brought unless both the police and the prosecution were satisfied that there was significant evidence implicating the defendants in the preparation of the 7/7 attacks.
Presumably, these surveillance techniques to fight terrorism, is why Jacqui Smith wants to extend the governments' access to our personal data. She also thinks it's acceptable as long as the government isn't storing this data all in one place, so she wants the ISP's to do the Stasi's dirty work for them. She said the Government had rejected the idea of a centralised database because it would impinge on privacy. She favoured a "middle way" in which primary communication companies, such as BT or Virgin, and leading internet service providers would have the job of collating phone, email and web use.
ISP's already have to hold a certain amount of our data for billing purposes, queries etc.. (currently one year). She wants them to spy on social sites like Facebook, Bebo and ALL IP Phone Calls, so virtually nothing we do, is private if the government decide they want a look! The ISP's will receive 2billion in extra funding but it will also mean the price of phone calls will rise, so you can pay for the government to spy on you! Nice!
This is, the delayed and modified Home Office "consultation" on Communications Data snooping and retention.
it is called laughingly : Protecting the Public in a Changing Communications Environment.
You are invited to provide some responses to some Questions, but, of the three Options, this "consultation" document has already ruled out two of them! The choice left is referred to as "A middle way".
Pages 26 - 27
"III. A middle way
The Government is therefore consulting on a range of "middle way" options that seek to balance the rights to privacy and security. These options are all based on the model for collecting and retaining data that exists today: the communications service provider would collect the data and store it and allow access by the authorities on a case-by-case basis under RIPA. All the data would therefore continue to be distributed around and held by different communications providers.
As a first step, the Government would legislate to ensure that all the data that public authorities might need, including the third party data (from overseas communications), is collected and kept in the UK. Communications service providers based in the UK would therefore continue to collect and retain communications data relating to their own services but also collect and store the additional third party data crossing their networks. This would therefore include communications data which does not come under the scope of the EU Data Retention Directive.
All the data retained by the communications service providers would continue to be accessible on a case-by-case basis to public authorities, subject to the same rigorous safeguards that are now in place"
The lack of proportionality shown by the "Town Hall Stasi" and various Counter-Terrorism units abusing their RIPA and Data Protection Act powers, is not a "rigorous safeguard". (The same rigorous safeguards that allow the smoking, fat, dustbin, dog shit police to hassle us using "counter terrorism" laws).
Remember that, unlike most other civilised countries, there is no independent judicial warrant required for access to this Communications Data, only self authorisation by officials within the organisations demanding the data. (One could at least have hoped that they would have to put their evidence in front of a judge before poking their noses into our business).
My Question to Jacqui Smith is, with all these technical resources, manpower (11 forces) and taxpayers money (100 million quid so far) at your fingertips, your forces still didn't have enough evidence to enable you to prove whether these men had been accomplices or not.
What on earth makes you think that prying into a 1,000 facebook sites or randomly scanning millions of communications and invading private citizens freedom in a democracy (WHO YOU SERVE), will make any difference to one of your "operations?"
Other data sources :
You've nailed it Sue. Her proposals will actually make the job harder. It's a bit like increasing the size of the haystack, making it much more difficult to find the needle. Why do these idiots believe we are fooled by their nonsense?
ReplyDeleteIt's an excuse to catalogue and spy on us!
ReplyDelete