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Using The Web to Fight Bad Legislation
Over in the UK, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill is in severe danger of becoming law. In a nutshell, ISPs will be classed as telecoms operators, the Home Secretary can demand taps on ISP traffic with little deliberation -- and without publicity -- and you can be jailed for not handing over decryption keys, even if the police can't prove that you ever had those keys in the first place. There's more on this at the URL above; it's difficult to do it justice in this space. Anyway, the good folks over at STAND are a bit concerned about this. After their earlier @dopt an MP campaign, and their Operation Dear Jack photostory, they've unveiled their latest attempt to involve people. They've set up a web/fax MP gateway. Tap in a few details, including your postcode, and then compose your message. The backend determines who your local MP is, and then faxes your carefully crafted comments off to them. What could be easier? Just remember that it's only for British constituents, and naturally, you should only use your own postcode.
Whether ISPs are seen as telecoms operators is IMO not the important issue in this bill.
If I have understood it correctly (and unfortunately I think I have) then it will mean suspects are NOT innocent until proven guilty. If a suspect has encrypted data and has lost the key, it is up to him/her to prove they have lost the key. It is NOT up to the prosecution to prove that they haven't. If they can't prove it they face jail.
The important point here is where the burden of proof lies. It should NOT lie with the defendant in this case IHMO.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
To me, an ISP is a bit like a post (mail) office. If you mail an illegal document to someone, you shouldn't hold the mailman responsiblle for delivering it. It's the same for ISP's - they just deliver.
Unfortunately, the same rules would cover this - if they can get an order to tap your phone, they can get one to open your mail.
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-=DaveHowe=-
Would you please explain the problem that this causes. Are you planning to do anything that you really don't want the government knowing about?
When you enter a society you give up your rights, to gain protection. This is what is happening. If you don't like it, leave the country.
Now, the idea of forcing you to give them your key, with a two year jail term if you don't give them it, even if you just lost it is a bit excessive. However, if the government knows you have kiddie porn on your computer, but as they are walking in you encrypt it, should they be able to force you to give them the key? If they can't then you will go free and a child molester is on the streets. Is that safety?
Nate Custer
"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm; usually because they could not walk" Nietzsche
- Unfortunately, this posting has missed the two main thrusts of the bill. ISPs have been "cooperating" for years with the LEAs provided they produce the correct paperwork (most insist on a court order; some don't) but this is pretty normal - I don't think anyone can really object to the police having a right to tap any communication device given a suitable bench warrant. The *real* problems are these:-
- The RIP "orders" don't require a judge's signature - they can be issued based on several different people's authorisation, don't have any time or size limits, and don't need to justify their existance to anyone
- Give the authorised authorities, without judicial review, the right to write out an order as follows:
- Demand from an *innocent* person, not suspected of any crime, their secret decryption keys - on the basis that the demanding officer thinks that it appears *to him* that some data he has seen was encrypted
- Emprisonment if you don't produce a key - not HAVING a key is not a defence unless you can prove you never had it; this is impossible anyhow, and could make the common procedure of expiring keys and generating new ones at regular intervals a criminal offence
- Emprisonment if you tell anyone you have been required to hand over a key - even by changing your key if the LEA thinks that will tip people off (and yes, this does let them continue to read your mail indefinitely)
- No requirement to safeguard the key once they have it - so if you are a bank, and are forced to hand over your electronic funds transfer key, you may find the local plod's cleaners can pick it up.
- No legal right to appeal (apart from to a closed board not required to publish or justify their decisions) or compensation (there *is* a discressionary compensation scheme, but I suspect if your business loses four or five billion after a competing firm gets details of every bid you put in (and undercuts you by one dollar
:+) you may find they don't think you are entitled to it.
There are just SO MANY reasons why this is wrong and open to abuse - none of which seem to have been considered while drafting it.--
-=DaveHowe=-
Yes, I am
I am not talking criminal activity here - When I am away from home, I send my wife intimate letters, I make phone calls to her I would be embarrassed to have eavesdropped. I don't want *any* of this to be available to any government official who is interested - It should be only be available to a police officer who has convinced a Judge it is needful to solve a criminal investigation. If I *didn't* believe this, I would use postcards and talk to people by broadcast radio.
When you enter a society you give up your rights, to gain protection. This is what is happening. If you don't like it, leave the country.
As a member of society, I am willing to give up those rights needful to for that society as a whole to function; I expect in return safeguards and public accountability for those that have access to those powers, and for abuse of those powers to carry a jail term. This isn't happening here.
Now, the idea of forcing you to give them your key, with a two year jail term if you don't give them it, even if you just lost it is a bit excessive. However, if the government knows you have kiddie porn on your computer, but as they are walking in you encrypt it, should they be able to force you to give them the key?
Ah, enter the Four Horsemen of the Internet. Can we please have a bit of originality here? NO-ONE is going to hand over their keys if it only costs them two years inside to refuse - Serving five years for child abuse (with what tends to happen to convicted child porn suppliers inside) isn't going to be a viable option. This is ONLY going to be served on innocent correspondents of suspected criminals, who are going to be frightened enough to abandon the master key to every "secure" message they have ever received rather than serve time. The keyword is INNOCENT here - not KiddiePorn supplier, not KiddiePorn perverted watcher, but bankers and travel agents.
If they can't then you will go free and a child molester is on the streets. Is that safety?
Works for me. Any criminal dumb enough to drop themselves into ANY jail term worse than the two years for non-production of a key, is going to be too dumb to encrypt their data in the first place. Any criminal smart enough to encrypt, will use a different and probably Stenoed storage method; This law will be about as affective against KiddiePorn as a law that requires all KiddiePorn suppliers to register themselves at the local police station so they can be picked up more conveniently...
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-=DaveHowe=-
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Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
If you can't be bothered to spend a little while thinking about the issues, what makes you think that they will take much attention? If I was FAX-bombed with dozens of identical letters, I would be more annoyed than anything else.
Do you have any idea how PK cryptography works? the majority of these warrants are not going to be served on the suspected criminals - otherwise why are there such draconian punishments for the "Tipping Off" offence? They are going to be served on innocents who have more to lose by serving the two years than from any "criminal" information they reveal by doing so. It's a part of technology swinging back - Improvements in digital exchanges and computer analysis have made interception and monitoring possible to a degree that would have been unthinkable a mere twenty years ago, back in the days of mechanical switches. Now, encryption is threatening to take the new-found powers away from them, and then some - in the old mechanical days, you could at least rely on that, when a given pair was croc-clipped to a recorder, that you would be able to understand what you heard (they may use a codebook approach, and talk about candy rather than cocane, but you could probably figure it out in time). They would have to go back to physically sneaking into places and planting bugs! Gosh, how terrible.
This is not a "troll" (whatever that is) /. sense (you havent' mentioned stone females or hot grits) but in Usenet, someone that makes patently wrong and uninformed statements that get a "flamebait" rating here on /. are trolls..
It isn't in the usual
, I am simply pointing out that other countries have different standards of privacy & freedom.
Hmm. I *am* english, and I am disgusted at this - it violates MY standards of privacy and freedom, and I suspect no polititian would consider signing it for a minute if he thought it applied to him.
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-=DaveHowe=-
Please think before going into a standard rant about how our freedoms are being eroded.
Mine are. I'm a UK citizen.
It is obvious to anyone even from a cursory glance at the proposed legislation, that this will affect only those who are attempting to hide some nefarious activities. Or those subversives who would threaten the national security interests of the United Kingdom.
Nonsense, and it looks like you didn't even take a 'cursory glance'. It threatens anyone who might be suspected of having anyencrypted material on their computer, whether or not they are aware of it.
This is not a "troll" (whatever that is), I am simply pointing out that other countries have different standards of privacy & freedom.
As a UK citizen, I can tell you that, although you may not be trolling, your point of view is severely naive.
Also let us not forget that although freedom of expression and democracy are enshrined in the Constitution of the United States of America, the British subject enjoys no such rights, and it was for this reason, that our ancestors decided to leave that little island off the coast of Europe, in order to enjoy "true freedom" in the USA.
So nobody in the UK reads Slashdot? Dont be so damned US-centric, sunshine.
The point is, that by criticising this law, you are demonstrating your ignorance of other cultures. (After all the USA is not the center of the universe, even though we sometimes act like it is) :-)
No YOU demonstrate your ignorance. This encroaches my freedom. Stop behaving like the only audience for Slashdot is American.
Freedom of speech and democracy are not the "accepted norm" in every country in the world. The more advanced Socialist societies like Europe, and the United Kingdom, recognise that some freedoms are not absolute, and must be curbed for the greater good of the majority, or to protect the weaker members of society.
Sorry to correct you, but the UK is not Socialist, since New Labour avoids Socialism as much as it possible can. And I disagree that 'curbing freedoms' is necessarily a good ideal; freedom is the only political absolute.
For example, recently the subjects of Her Majesty democratically decided to give up their rights to own handguns, since they recognised that that freedom was not worth having, since it would inevitably lead to crazed gunmen running amok.
Deranged drivel. We have never had the right to own hadguns, nor has their been any vote on the subject. Where do you get this bizarre idea from?
Her Majesty's subjects have also agreed to being monitored by thousands of public video cameras whenever they are in a public space. Again the aim is not to erode their freedoms, but rather to protect them from antisocial elements.
More drivel. There was no agreement at all. This has happened without any public consent. Stop talking crap.
Freedom of expression is all very well, in a culture (like the US) which has had over 200 years to adapt to it, but for ancient cultures like the British, and Europeans, such ideas are not fundamental. More important is the idea of a consensus, and even more important, of equality
Your First Amendment is under attack daily, so dont make me laugh. And just for the record, the ideas of 'consensus' and 'equality' are probably no more important over here than they are in the USA. Stop talking naive nonsense, please.
For this reason, we Americans should not jump up and down and shriek like stuck pigs with self-righteous indignation every time a foriegn culture comes up with an idea that we do not like. Instead we should take time out and consider, if these ideas have any relavence closer to home ?
Oh we're back to Slashdot as a USA-only forum are we? Sorry, sunshine, but if there's anyone Stateside or int he rest of the world interested in helping us out with this one, then they are welcome to comment.
Given that this new law seems to give the authorities the power they need to better hunt down and prosecute net criminals, I suspect this legislation could be put to good use by our own crimebusters in the FBI and CIA, to increase their effectiveness. Just think, if you have nothing to hide, why would this legislation worry you ?
Oh yeah, the FBI and CIA dont have agendas, and neither do the UK security services. No-one innocent ever goes to jail. Policemen don't do bad things, and just because a law says they can lock you up, without trial, and there is an impossible burden of proof of innocence on the individual, then that OK. Sunshine, fuck right off. You have a lot of learning to do.
The USA could use a politician with true conviction of his beliefs, like the Presdent of the UK, Tony Blear. It would make a change from the current circus parade of criminals, adulterors ex-movie stars and nonentities we currently have to endure, and which make us the laughing stock of the very countries and cultures we are criticizing.
Erm, get some facts will you? His name is Tony Blair, and he's our Prime Minister. We don't have a President. And Margaret Thatcher, Mussolini and Hitler all had conviction in their beliefs. That aint an automatic win.
Personally, I trust Blair about as far as I could spit a camel. And I live in the UK so I reckon Im a bit better a judge than you, who knows so bloody much about our country.
Fact is this is a serious issue. It puts innocent people at risk of arrest, and incarceration, and the onus on them to prove innocence. For the benefit of the intelligence-impaired, like dmg above, thats a VERY BAD thing.
free experimental electronic music netlabel at www.viablehybrid.com
The key to understanding where this legislation is going is in the statement of purpose. "The economic well-being of the UK" can only have one real meaning - the ability to harass, jail, or retrieve communications from trade-union activists.
Before I get accused of paranoia, cast your minds back to the '80's and how much of a role MI5 and other Government agencies such as Special Branch played as key agents in breaking the Great Miners Strike.
"But" I hear you say "this is a Labour government, and aren't they sympathetic to the Trade Union movement?"
Dream on. "New" Labour has repeatedly demonstrated their hostility to the TU movement. They have categoricaly refused to repeal any of the disgraceful anti trade union laws passed in by the Conservative governments of the 80's and 90's, which infringed on the Civil liberties of all UK citizens (although many still don't realise quite the extent of those laws), and which were opposed by the Labour Party at the time. New Labour have also been actively distancing themselves from the historic link with the Unions for a long time now. Many of them are ex -Thatcherites, and some (like Tony Blair for instance) have publicly expressed their admiration of Margaret Thatcher.
The Trade Union movement is still an International movement, and technically Labour is still affiliated to that. If you want to get active over this disgraceful piece of legislation, you can do so if you are a Trade Union member in any part of the World. I strongly urge all trade unionists who object to this Bill to email, write or fax Jack Straw in your official capacity. Also talk about this to your local branch meetings and bring it up on regional committees etc.
www.labournet.org is as always very informative about this bill and the strubble against it.
"The great are only great because we are on our knees"
-James Connolly, Irish Freedom Fighter and socialist
Richard Stallman wrote about these proposals last November in Linux today.
Chris
--
Check out MKDoc a mod_perl CMS
On the contrary -- the purpose of social organizations in civilized society (as opposed to your IngSoc version) is the protection of rights from aggressors. Since the government is the most dangerous aggressor, it must be constrained the most severely.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
To understand the phrase "the national security interests of the United Kingdom", I consult Robert Ringer's Newspeak-to-English translation of JFK's famous line: "Ask not what the people in power can do for you; ask what you can do for the people in power".
Obviously, the real objective of the power sought in this legislation is to gather up another club for use against opponents of the people in power.
This is not a "troll" (whatever that is)
TROLL: 1)obnoxious cyber-graffiti, 2)a post profoundly devoid of logical thought and steeped in knee-jerk button-pushing. Your post fits the latter definition.
Also let us not forget that although freedom of expression and democracy are enshrined in the Constitution of the United States of America, the British subject enjoys no such rights
Political freedom is largely an outgrowth of the British tradition. The fact that the British failed to live up to this standard did force us to kick them out, but that doesn't negate the underlying historical reality.
The point is, that by criticising this law, you are demonstrating your ignorance of other cultures.
No, it demonstrates that we recognize that some cultures (e.g. a culture of power-hungry politicians) are inferior to others (e.g. a culture of free people).
Freedom of speech and democracy are not the "accepted norm" in every country in the world.
See previous comment. Some countries have better norms than others.
For example, recently the subjects of Her Majesty democratically decided to give up their rights to own handguns, since they recognised that that freedom was not worth having, since it would inevitably lead to crazed gunmen running amok.
Her Majesty's subjects have also agreed to being monitored by thousands of public video cameras whenever they are in a public space. Again the aim is not to erode their freedoms, but rather to protect them from antisocial elements.
Both imposed by scams of the people in power, not by general consent as you imply. Even if there had beem majority consent, it would be irrelevant; both British and American political traditions recognize the need for a rule of law that supersedes the decision of three wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner.
Freedom of expression is all very well, in a culture (like the US) which has had over 200 years to adapt to it, but for ancient cultures like the British, and Europeans, such ideas are not fundamental.
I've already addressed your error concerning the British political tradition. In any case, an ancient error is no more deserving of respect than a recent one.
More important is the idea of a consensus, and even more important, of equality
Been there, done that, run the body count into eight figures. Can we give it up as a bad idea now?
Given that this new law seems to give the authorities the power they need to better hunt down and prosecute net criminals
I'd rather see them hunt down and prosecute the criminals in power who violate the supreme law they have sworn to uphold.
Just think, if you have nothing to hide, why would this legislation worry you?
On the contrary, I have plenty to hide. Not that I've done anything wrong, mind you, but given the government's habit of abusing police powers to harass opponents it is only prudent not to give them anything that could be distorted into grounds for bringing frivolous legal actions.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
"We have a long history in this country of distrust of the governments, and for good reason."
You could say that Europe has a long history of distrusting corporations, which the US does not. I'd rather have the government reading my email than NewsCorp or WalMart. Any day. See also the strict data protection and privacy laws in Europe that do not exist at all in the US. It's a cultural difference
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. "
Well, Franklin was a genius, but this overused quote is nonetheless trite. My definition of essential liberty is not the same as yours (or, indeed, Franklins), which is very much to the point here.
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You can fill it in with anything you want, as long as the people who you wish to use your key know that it's your key.
Sorry to strike down on this sentence since your post was so good otherwise
There *are* no political absolutes. There are far too many cases where one freedom or other "absolute" right collides with another.
Right to life? Yes! an absolute right, you say.
But at what cost. Do I have the right to demand 24/7 free instant access to a medical team? If not, there goes a piece of that "absolute right"
Freedom of speech? Including that standard example of yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre.
Freedom of thought? yes perhaps that. But only as long as I keep my thoughts to myself. If I start expressing my thoughts (other than "nice" thoughts) I might be stepping on someone else's "absolute" freedom.
Politics is the art of weighing one freedom or right against another. If there was such a thing as an absolute right, there would be no need for politics.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
a) Instant arrest.
b) Torture until confession.
c) Death upon confession.
d) Death upon claim of innocence.
In fact, it was common practice for the accusers and torturers and especially the church to split up the accused's estate.
Back a few short decades ago, in the USA, if you didn't like someone you could accuse them of being a communist. This would, among other abuses, often result in,
a) Swift arrest.
b) Interrogation and humiliation.
c) Blacklisting upon confession.
d) Blacklisting upon insistance of innocence.
Often, the only way to clear your own name was to finger other friends and associates as being communists.
Now we have this new legistlation being considered in the UK. It has much in common with the travesties above. With this proposed law, one of the dangers is that if someone doesn't like you, they will simply have to send you encrypted email, then cry encrypter! This will result in, among other things,
1) Sudden search, seizure, and probable arrest.
2) Interrogation and humiliation.
3) Jail sentence upon confession.
4) Jail sentence upon claim of innocence.
This will happen regularly by jilted lovers, angry employees, school children, and the police. It is no trouble at all to put files on someone's computer. It will be especially easy for the police, who if they decide not to take the encrypted email route, will instead be able to waltz in your home, shove you out of the way, and directly plant any files they want anywhere on your system. When you are asked for your decryption key, well, gosh, officer, I don't have one.
The burden of proof should NEVER have to reside with the accused.
Just like that, because you pissed off the wrong guy, you get two years.
You will if this insane law gets passed, that is.
She's an encrypter! Burn her!
-Jason
Dear Mr Truswell,
I am writing to you to express my deep concerns regarding the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill, 2000 and to urge you to vote against it at its second reading on 6th March.
As I am sure you are aware, the bill makes provisions relating to the interception of communications and the carrying out of electronic surveillance. It also provides for the establishment of a tribunal for which it is to be commended.
The bill is deeply flawed, however, in several respects and may result in the criminalisation of large portions of the internet-using public. I list my principal objections below:-
1) Section 11.(4) obliges employees at internet service providers (ISPs) to observe wiretap warrants or face two years imprisonment. Revealing the existence of a wiretap is punishable by five years imprisonment and there is no whistleblower clause (Section 18.(2)). In fact, the requirement to install a wiretap on request by warrant is extended to " a person (...) who has control of the whole or any part of a telecommunication system located wholly or partly in the United Kingdom." (11.(4)(c)), which can be easily interpreted to mean any person who own a land-line telephone, fax or mobile phone.
This widens the number of people capable of being prosecuted for refusing to serve a warrant considerably. One of the features of the internet is that potentially, anyone can operate a "public telecommunications service" online. By widening the definition, the bill is placing a huge liability on British companies to provide interception capabilities, which foreign companies do not have to comply with.
2) Section 8.(3) allows for the mass monitoring of communications sent from or received outside the UK with the permission of the Home Secretary. Note that this allows for the serving of unnamed warrants which grant blanket permission to the security services to monitor any particular type of communication. The section, in limiting itself to communications external to the UK, is clearly aimed at national security concerns but is easily open to abuse. This is because data on the Internet is not confined to national boundaries. Domestic internet traffic will frequently travel via a route that takes it overseas. The e-mail that a constituent in Yorkshire sends his MP in London might very well get there via Amsterdam and New York, such is the nature of the internet. Clearly, then domestic traffic will fall under the remit of Section 8.(3).
3) Section 12.(1) allows the Home Secretary to oblige ISPs to monitor their own users. Currently, ISPs do not do this (for obvious reasons of privacy) and in fact the technology to do so does not exist - it would be incredibly complex and cumbersome to implement due to the vast amount of traffic that flows through an ISP. Any monitoring system attached to an ISP will, by necessity, be accessible from the rest of the internet and it will come under electronic attack from crackers (or 'hackers' as the popular press incorrectly calls them.) The monitoring equipment will be an easy target for hackers, many of them beyond the jurisdiction of UK courts, who will make their own uses for the names, addresses and credit card numbers collected by the monitoring equipment.
4) Section 16.(1) prohibits revealing the existence of a wiretap warrant in a court of law. Thus, there is no legal recourse for those who believe they are the illegitimate target of a wiretap.
5) Section 46.(2) governs the treatment of keys to encrypted data. Anyone under suspicion of any crime or in conflict with any public authority is required to hand over their private keys or face two years imprisonment. Handing over a key should not be a trivial exercise. The potential liability to companies and individuals of losing control of their private keys is incalculable. Allowing any statutory body to demand these keys trivialises the importance of encryption in the future of the internet. It is comparable to allowing any government body access to the most private areas of citizens' life.
The government is in the habit of indicating that this bill is necessary to defend against monstrous criminal acts. They claim that without it, drug barons, child pornographers and terrorists will use encryption to evade paying for their crimes. Usefully, this bill guarantees that they will. If you encrypt all your data, and refuse to hand over the key, you can be punished to a maximum of two years . This makes it worthwhile for criminals to pursue this aim, while actively dissuading regular citizens from taking the risk that they will be imprisoned for being unable to decrypt their own data. As the old Net proverb has it: if you outlaw encryption, only outlaws will use encryption. Additionally, the defence of "forgetting your passphrase" will quickly become discredited: making it even more difficult for innocent citizens to use this as a legitimate defence. This section also reverses the burden of proof - rather than the burden being on the authorities to prove that the defendant has a key, the burden is on the defendant to prove that he or she does not have a key.
To summarise, the bill is poorly drafted and provides powers to the authorities at the expense of public privacy, and even goes against the basic assumption of innocence which is a cornerstone of English criminal law. I urge you to vote against the government on this bill.
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
I have a couple hundred megs of data that I encrypted a couple years ago and have not been able to recover the keys. Basically I moved and misplaced the disk with the key during the move. I've been optimistic that one day I'll be digging through my closet and it'll turn up.
Suppose I lived in the UK? Does this mean I would be legally required to destroy the encrypted data since I'm no longer certain I possess the key. In my case I'd probably delete it since it doesn't seem likely that I'll ever find the key to this data.
What about unidentifiable files on my hard drive? What if there's a temp file that contains what looks like garbage. How would I prove that it's not encrypted data? The average computer user is never going to able to account for every file on their hard drive. The expert computer user probably won't either. Won't this allow the UK govt to basically prosecute *anyone* with a computer and garbage files on it? It just seems like a shortcut to lock up anyone owning a modern computer without actually having to produce evidence. The user can be required by law to produce something that doesn't even exist. Scary stuff.
numb
If you're American, then the answer is no. As a UK subject, the answer is Yes
No I'm not american, I'm Swedish.
The point was *instant* access. ie my own personal team watching over me constantly, just in case.
We can always save/prolong more lives by pouring more money into the health service. However we must draw a line somewhere, or we will be too preoccupied by surviving, to actually live. (and the doctors deserve a life too..)
All opinions are my own - until criticized
What do you do when a law reduces your freedom to increase someone else's. In real life, I happily give up the freedom to knock people down, so that I may enjoy the freedom of not *being* knocked down.
How can I make that decision if I want an *absolute* freedom?
The problem is that the word "freedom" is so soaked in various agendas, that it has almost lost all real meaning.
Not that maximizing your personal definition of it is a bad philosophy though.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
In theory, yes. In practice, you are not obliged to use any given telephone line to access your account - you can usually access via hotel lines, mobile phones and if a friend also has a modem, you can either ride his connection or borrow his pc to log in. However, there *is* one bottleneck - the ISPs. No matter where you connect from, you have to log into the internet somewhere, and many ISPs still do not allow you to even READ your email from outside their own dialup service. It's a lot easier to trap the traffic at one or more ISPs than to do so at the telephone stage, and the signal is "cleaner".
Granted, they still may need a decryption key. But come on! You mean to tell me that a government doesn't have the resources to crack an encryption key?
I mean to tell you that a government doesn't have the resources to crack an encryption key! Cryptography freely available on the internet, such as PGP and Scramdisk, can take a budget of millions of dollars and an acre or so of computers to break *one* key a century - if you are lucky.
Hey if a "cyber-crime" is so serious, you should be able to afford the technology and intelligence to solve it.
If cyber crime was, then they would. The technology is already there - good policework, informants, tempest, keyloggers... But this is *expensive* - far too expensive to waste on "subversives" or "activists" - you would have to reserve it for those genuinely a danger to society
They just want things to be easy.
Don't we all?
The end result? The internet will be crowded with "cops" that have nothing to do. The day will come when we get "speeding tickets" online for using too much bandwidth. Hey, is donutshop.com still available??
More likely, the door of every ISP will be held permanently open by the stream of unaccountable, unidentifiable but authorised "statutory bodies" coming to check every email you ever sent on the basis that your dog licence is out of date... and it will only be a matter of time before key escrow is re-launched, not as a legal requirement, but as a convenience to stop you being dragged out of bed at 3am each day in order to hand over yet another set of session keys...
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-=DaveHowe=-
It's a point of discussion, I suppose. I base my opinion that mods on
Also, one correction -- a troll does not just make patently wrong and uninformed statements. So do genuine idiots / morons / etc. A troll makes them for the express purpose of getting a rise out of people.
This is also true - it's implicit that a troll KNOWS he is Trolling; this was sufficiently borderline it could just have been the more common September-style idiot.
What puzzles me is how you knew all this and _still_ managed to get trolled. /. have one advantage that trolls on usenet tend not to have - the bulk of the readership may not know enough about the subject to tell the difference. *I* read stories I don't have any real knowledge of, in the hope I can somehow acquire $CLUE from the nature of the discussion; Unless Flamebait is marked as such, or is answered, how am I to tell good from bad?
This is because plausable-sounding trolls on
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-=DaveHowe=-
I agree, and said so when the previous bill came up for discussion here.
The problem, though, as another poster pointed out, is that that takes a VERY long time and isn't automatic. In the mean time, we have some extremely illiberal legislation on the books, granting the government powers that most of us seem to find repugnant.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
If this is the first time this has been used for a tech cause, its pretty ironic. I've noticed that while activists are getting more and more involved with on-line organizing, the on-line crowd actually lags. I think its the herding cats thing - That and it's hard to decide how to fix the roof when half the house is out trying to rent a bulldozer.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
So then:
'the only absolute standard for 'rating' a political stance, attitude, or decision, is the amount of freedom it negates, restricts, adds, or enhances'
So, you would (in theory or in practice) approve of an action that enhances overall freedom, but decreases for example happiness, life expectancy, general well being or some other candidate for the "absolute good"?
I remain sceptical of any philosophy that don't take into account real life issues, like limited resources and every beings natural, primary instinct to survive and propagate.
Abstract qualities, such as freedom, don't mean much before you fulfil basic needs like food, water, sleep, and social contact.
Also it is not too hard to construct an example where a reduction in everyones personal freedom increases the *collective* freedom and thus the overall amount of freedom. The (ideal) justice system is the typical example of this. Here you might even have a larger reduction in the theoretical freedom, than what is de facto gained, since most people would never use most of the freedom that is taken away.
All opinions are my own - until criticized