Britain’s GCHQ Domestic Spying Apparatus to be granted Greater Surveillance Powers after Paris Attacks
Following the tragic events in Paris, David Cameron is meeting with security heads to potentially grant the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) even greater spying powers. In a disgusting (yet predictable) move by Cameron and fellow Western leaders, these latest attacks are being used as a justification for illegal GCHQ and National Security Agency (NSA) spying, and as a pretext to further expand the surveillance state – which is already at heights never seen before in human history. This is the first time that governments have had the capacity and technological capability to monitor the behaviour, conversations, opinions and habits of the people on such a grand scale, in a quest to predict the behaviour of entire populations.
Tony Porter, the governments own surveillance commissioner, is worried at the level of spying in Britain and the lack of knowledge the public has about the pervasiveness of government snooping. Referring mainly to the ubiquitous CCTV cameras in the UK, Porter recently revealed how he is troubled by the apathy and ignorance of many citizens who don’t understand how the information is used, and he points out that the data obtained from these devices can be used to “predict behaviour”. Along with the sophistication and level of GCHQ spying – which compiles copious amounts of data on the public with no warrant, it unveils the surveillance state that Britain has become, even surpassing George Orwell’s dystopian vision of the future in his book 1984. Across the water in the US, high-level NSA whistleblower William Binney has been warning the public about Stasi-style surveillance for years, describing the NSA as “totalitarian” in nature and their practices as “a total destruction of the rights you thought you had under the constitution”. He also states that the objective of the surveillance state is “to set up the way and means to control the population.”
Cameron’s meeting supposedly stems from a desire to prevent terrorist attacks in Britain, yet he does not even pay lip service to a major cause of the attack, namely; the support and creation of rebel armies and terrorists in Syria by NATO powers, in addition to the perennial Western wars in the Middle East. A wonderful article by Tony Cartalucci titled: Paris shooters just returned from NATO’s proxy war in Syria, documents how the Kouachi brother’s returned home in the summer of last year after fighting alongside the al-Qaeda affiliated Syrian rebels, and this latest attack is partly blowback from NATO policy in Syria. NATO powers (including France) have been arming, funding and training this assortment of rebel bandits for years, but not one leading Western politician has called for an end to the proxy war in Syria to prevent future attacks.
The failure of French intelligence and security services to prevent the attacks also raises serious questions. NATO powers have long been aware that returning fighters from Syria pose a security threat on their return, and the Kouachi brothers were on the radar of both French and British intelligence for years. Cherif Kouachi was arrested and jailed for terrorist activities in 2008, with both brothers travelling to Yemen in 2011 for weapons training from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), according to Reuters. If the Kouachi brothers weren’t high level terror threats that required serious attention from intelligence services since their return from Syria, then who is?
Despite the French Prime Minister merely explaining the lapse as “clear failings”, it is a highly suspicious that these individuals weren’t being tracked by the state up until the attacks. The news that Helric Fredou, a police commissioner who was involved in the investigation of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, supposedly committed suicide at around 1am on Thursday is also highly suspicious.
This has led many to believe that these attacks may have been allowed to take place in order to provide the pretext for a further erosion of civil liberties in NATO countries, and in an attempt to pass internet censorship bills under the guise of fighting online terrorism. There is also discussion that France may implement legislation similar to the tyrannical patriot act passed in the US after 9/11. The war on terror has always been a war on the people’s civil liberties, and a justification for a surveillance state that the Stasi would be envious of.
It is difficult to ascertain exactly what happened in Paris last week. It may have simply been blowback from the proxy war in Syria, or it may have been of a more nefarious nature in the form of a stand down by French intelligence, or an attack directly ran by the French state. Whatever the cause of the attacks, it is clear that the leaders of the West will use this tragic incident as a pretext to attempt to further erode the people’s civil liberties in Europe and elsewhere.
Steven MacMillan is an independent writer, researcher and editor of The Analyst Report.
