Slashdot Mirror
UK Building Eavesdropping Infrastructure
This Sunday Times story about a new office under MI5 scheduled to open later this year with the innocuous name of "Government Technical Assistance Centre" to oversee the content of e-mail sent by and to Britons ought to give pause to anyone interested in online privacy. Though governments will always be several steps behind determined privacy seekers, this bodes ill for anyone who'd prefer to keep the contents of their e-mail even nominally secret. "The security service and the police will still need Home Office
permission to search for e-mails and internet traffic, but they
can apply for general warrants that would enable them to
intercept communications for a company or an organisation," says the article. How comforting.
First, in the UK as well as the countries that more or less inherited their constitutional structures from it, the doctrine of crown immunity means that it is not, in general, possible to sue the executive government. There is legislation specifically allowing many sorts of legal action against governments in all the relevant jurisdictions however I would be very surprised if the UK Government has passed legislation permitting the intelligence services to be sued - this would be very out of character in the home of the Official Secrets Act and oversight-free intelligence organisations.
Second, even assuming that the UK Government may be sued for the actions of the Security Service (commonly referred to as MI5), they would have to have done something illegal, and the illegality would have to be proven. Given that the Security Service can get warrants to read people's email, the whole process would presumably be above board. Even assuming the action was illegal (ie the proper permissions had not been sought) given the high level of secrecy surrounding Security Service operations, one probably have the greatest of difficulty proving anything useful.
Third, you can forget about going to court and complaining that the legislation is unconstitutional or otherwise beyond the power of parliament - this is a concept foreign to the UK constitutional arrangement. The parliament has power to pass any law. The only check on this might be an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. If you are not from a Council of Europe country I don't think you have standing before that court and, even then, the court does not have a record of intervening in areas of "National Security".
On the issue of the right of the British Government to listen to the communications of non-Brits outside Britain, the British government has always maintained that the Royal Prerogative of the Security of the Realm (or national security - the name changes) permits it to operate overseas intelligence services. This right is also claimed by other countries. While it doesn't legalise under the local law anything that the SIS may do outside Britain, it does mean that the electronic spying done by GCHQ and this new outfit from within the UK is unassailable under UK law and, since it occurs in Britain, not covered by anyone else's law.
>> For example, in Britain they can legally force you to decrypt data,
:-O
>> while in the U.S. all I would have to do is invoke my fifth amendment
>> right against self-incrimination.
>
> It wouldn't do you any good. The Fifth applies to the state's compelling
> you to testify against your self. It says precisely nothing against
> your case. There is no
> Fifth Amendment right to refuse to comply with a search warrant.
You cannot order up a search warrant in the U.S. to force a person to decrypt his own encrypted messages or data files. That doesn't fall under the rubric of a search warrant. Now, you could be ordered by a Court to produce the plaintext as part of testimony, under the threat of contempt of Court, *BUT*--and *here's the important part*, if the contents of the encrypted files would be self-incriminating, you don't have to decrypt them. Just say the magic words "On the advice of counsel I decline to answer, invoking my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution" and they can't make you decrypt the messages or data. But, the real kicker is, a defendant doesn't have to testify at his own trial. So, unless there were some other compelling reason for a defendant to testify, he wouldn't even have to utter those words (which a jury wouldn't like very much). Now, the prosecutor could in theory ask the judge to order decryption of the materials as part of the discovery process, but again the magic words come into play. If a police officer, however, executed a search warrant and seized my computer files, and told me to decrypt them, I'd say, "Fuck off porkmeister, and by the way I want an attorney so the questioning ends until I'm provided with one. And by the way, my drives are encrypted with 256-bit Blowfish *and* Triple-DES, and my RAM and swap partition are wiped with 32 pass extended character rotation on shutdown, so good luck." That is, they would be encrypted to that extent if I were a computer cracker, drug trafficker, arms dealer, etc. etc. As it is, the only encryption I use regularly is PGP, since I like to set a good example and to keep my conversations private, and a Windows program called Scramdisk which I use to keep my little sister and other users of my computer from accidentally tripping over my collection of bestiality pr0n.
>> suppodedly only with warrant, but you and I both know the reality
>
> No I don't know the reality that you're talking about. Of course,
> I'm just a ticket-writing donut-chomping cop, so I'd have no
> idea what law-enforcement officers would do.
That would be the reality--I wish it were an alternate one, but it isn't--in which some law enforcement types get an "us-vs.-them" attitude about suspects, forgetting for the time being that such suspects are in fact innocent until proven guilty and still enjoy the protections afforded by a Constitution which our ancestors fought for. Not all cops are like that, but quite a few are. I have first-hand experience with police officers who are willing to engage in extortion and violate the rights of suspects. I won't re-hash the particular charges since they can be found in a prior posting, but suffice it to say that the arresting officer attempted to extort a confession by threatening to say that I was violent and un-cooperative unless I told him what he wanted to hear, resulting in a very high bail. Naturally, he said, if I told him what he wanted to hear then he'd say I was cooperative and the magistrate would set a low bail, but if not, he'd say I was violent an un-cooperative. He then lied to the magistrate when I refused to confess, resulting in excess bail--which in itself is a violation of Constitutional rights to a reasonable bail. I checked the statutes in my state, and that qualifies as extortion, a worse felony than the one I was arrested for. The case against me was eventually dismissed, BTW.
This isn't even that far off-topic, since the essence of our fears when broad surveillance initiatives like this new UK legislation is that these surveillance powers will be abused. If it were all about catching terrorists and kiddy porn traffickers and people like that, there wouldn't be much uproar. The problem is that the potential to abuse this system is inherent. Corrupt or misguided LEA officers could use such broad powers to open Hoover-esque files on citizens who aren't doing anything really illegal, but who go against the grain of society in moral or (ir)religious ways. LEA could intercept e-mail and read it for fun, or worse agents could surveil against people they personally don't like or knew in some other capacity. Government agencies could monitor dissidents or people who have libertarian values, just waiting for someone to make a small slip like mentioning pot use to give them an excuse to pounce or discredit. Agencies also have a tendency to hold grudges--in the US the IRS, for example, has been shown to repeatedly audit and harass people it doesn't like, like whistleblowers and people who have beaten them in tax court. The potential for abuse is limitless, and that's why such systems are inherently bad--not because of the system itself, but because of the people who use and abuse it.
Just one quick quote: "The mushrooming of surveillance has been explained by the sense of panic
and crisis felt throughout the government during this period of extremely
vocal dissent, large demonstrations, political and campus violence, and
what at the time seemed the inauguration of a period of wide- spread
anarchy. While officials... suggested that these crises justified the
surveillance, they failed to recognize that the rights guaranteed by the
constitution are constant and unbending to the temper of the times..."--Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, 1973
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Can I sue the British government for this?
This is a typical American response. Why must all problems be solved with a lawsuit? Look at how much we bitch and moan about frivolous lawsuits, and even not so frivolous ones like the DeCSS, Napster, and Microsoft suits. How come the first idea for action has to be a lawsuit? Would a lawsuit even help in this case? Could it prevent the British government from doing anything (especially since it doesn't appear that anyone has an concrete evidence of exactly what they're doing).
A better solution than figuring out someone to put some sort of blame on in an effort to make a little side cash is to encrypt your e-mail using PGP or GPG or some such utility. Britain (or any other country, company, person, or machine for that matter) can look at my encrypted e-mail all the want for all that I care.
Picking a fight is never the best way to solve anything. The best defense is a tactic which renders the opponent's offense useless, not one that fights back.
NOTE: I am an American
If you believe that a police state isn't a stable form of government, then ask yourself this: how did the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc governments remain in power for more than 60 years without being overthrown through popular revolution? Remember: the people most likely to rebel are those who remember what it was like before the police state came into being.
What killed the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries was economic competition from the outside. But that wouldn't exist in a world police state. Nor would references to other, better systems, except in the hands of a few: remember that a police state has to control information in order to control people. The way to make that happen is for the state to control the education systems and the means of information dissemination. Hence, controls on the communications infrastructure.
It should be obvious that you can't build a police state in a single generation, because the contrast would be too great. You have to build it a little at a time, slowly enough that people won't notice. A right removed here, a privilege revoked there, a restriction put somewhere else. Rebellion can only happen if the people believe that what they have isn't good, but whether or not they believe that is largely determined by what they can contrast their current condition against. That's why the "ruling class" has to remain untouchable and mysterious: the populace has to believe that there's no way for them to get from where they are to where the ruling class is, otherwise they'll yearn for it and become dissatisfied with their own conditions.
Also, one needn't formally try, convict, etc., a "criminal". One need only make something happen to them. A car accident, a heart attack, etc. A police state has no need for leniency, as long as the fact that the troublemaker died can't be traced back to the source. Obviously this works best when it's not obvious that the person in question was making trouble to begin with.
Lastly, a dumb populace is an easily managed populace. So a police state will be on a sharp lookout for those with above-average intelligence, so that they can deal with the issue, either by relocating them such that they have no more communiction with the rest of the population (this can be explained away by the government by saying that the person is going to a special school or something) or by arranging for an "accident" to happen to them.
Oh, well. I'm just rambling now. But it seems obvious to me that there are lots of ways that a police state can maintain itself indefinitely.
--
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
"First they came for the Jews,
But I did not speak out,
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists,
And I did not speak out,
Because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade-unionists,
And I did not speak out,
Because I was not a trade-unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
And I did not speak out,
Because I was not a Catholic.
Then they came for me,
And there was no one left to speak out for me."
- Pastor Niemller (Anti-Nazi Resistance Movement)
Or how about just:
"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
- Ben Franklin
Using advanced context-based semantics, vast quantities of data can be filtered through the system continuously. That's what the Echelon system does. I can't seem to find the past Slashdot article, though I've searched, about the NSA patent on certain advanced ways to filter data, and its offer to sell some of those means to corporations which have the need to filter and categorize large databases of information, but there was such an article late last year.
In reality, the system could be set up to begin the filtering process at the level of large ISPs--easy enough in Britain since there are fewer ISPs than in the States. Also, it's been shown amply that, despite the U.S.'s prudishness and stupidity about sex and progressive social issues, we do have far more privacy protections in place than Britain and many other EU nations. For example, in Britain they can legally force you to decrypt data, while in the U.S. all I would have to do is invoke my fifth amendment right against self-incrimination. In the same vein, while the U.S. wiretapping legislation CALEA is forcing ISPs to install the capability for law enforcement to conduct digital surveillance of selected customers (supposedly only with warrant, but you and I both know the reality), I can see the UK pushing through a measure to force large ISPs to install government servers which would have all e-mail traffic pass through them practically transparently while simultaneously using the NSA's advanced context-based semantic filtering capabilities to forward copies of those selected e-mails to government computers for further analysis. Since the UK is the US's closest ally, seeing as Echelon was originally a US-UK joint operation into which the Aussies and Canadians were brought, you can bet that British Intelligence has the same advanced filtering technology that the NSA does. The key here is that, the UK intelligence services can get away with doing this openly, and might even get to force ISPs to install their monitoring equipment for them, but in the US no one would even think of openly proposing that all e-mails be subject to such snooping.
Lastly, if someone can find the older story I mentioned above, please give the link. I don't know why I can't find it, but I know it's there...
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
You're both sorely in need of catching up with the program:
/. back in the day.
RFC 2246 defines (and has for well over a year now) the protocol, and the latest commercial releases of sendmail implement it.
So does the Sun Internet Mail Server
Finally, Weitse Venema's postfix MTA has a freely-available TLS patch that implements SMTP encryption for those of us who don't want to pay for it.
There's even an RPM available.
Postfix, BTW, which used to be called vmailer, is the IBM Alphaworks free MTA project that was covered here in
As, indeed, was this entire portion of this thread.
--
So why doesnt everyone encrypt their emails now?
It is too difficult and time consuming to gather public keys from all your associates esp. people who don't know about PGP etc..
Even when you have the public key it is too much hassle to type in your passphrae for routine email making encrypted mail stand out all the more.
But the truth is we don't need to have passphrase protected emails all the time. Only when we are leery of government search warrants do we need to protect the content at the source/destination. Insteed what is necessery is a encapsulation of the email as it travels the internet. This way it can't be picked up by packet sniffers and it will be impossible to ferret out the real encrypted email.
To this end I suggest a addition to sendmail. Every time it delivers a message to the recieving computer a one time key (diffie-hellman) is generated so the message text is unreadable as it travels the internet.
Before we couldn't do this but now with the loosining of laws this is possible...not perfect but better than the status quo
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too: