The Liberal Democrats are watching our watchmen?

LibDems custodiet ipsos custodes?

The Home Office wants to log with whom you communicate, wherever and however, just in case you’re naughty – but the Liberal Democrats object…

It’s been a good few months for surveillance, its practitioners and its supply industry – barnstorming industry conferences, massive media coverage of technology and puff pieces on government projects stateside … oh, wait, is this meant to be covert? Oops.

James Bamford – famous in security circles for lifting the lid on the NSA – wrote a huge piece in WiReD about the National Security Agency’s intention to turn Salt Lake City into an enormous datacentre; Forbes provides an executive summary:

In his just-published cover story for Wired, Bamford lays out the NSA’s plans for a vast new facility in Bluffdale, Utah that aims to become a storage and analysis hub for the record-breakingly massive collections of Internet traffic data that the NSA hopes to gather in coming years not from just foreign networks, but domestic ones as well.

The story adds confirmation to what the New York Times revealed in 2005: that the NSA has engaged in widespread wiretapping of Americans with the consent of firms like AT&T and Verizon. But more interestingly and more troubling in the eyes of many who value their privacy it details the Agency s plans to crack AES encryption, the cryptographic standard certified by the NSA itself in 2009 for military and government use and until now considered uncrackable in any amount of time relevant to mortals.

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