Slashdot Mirror
UK RIP Bill Reintroduced
AIM31 writes "The amendments to RIP bill in the UK, which gives the power to read email headers and history to such bodies as the Postal Service, is back. with amendments. Last time it was rejected after massive protest."
I live in the UK but the number of stupid laws is approaching american levels. Can somone recomend a country I could move to which protects the civil liberties of its citizens; prefrebaly English speaking? Thanks in advance.
There is no god
n/t
This bill is yet another in a long line of bills being introduced by David Blunkett
Compulsory ID cards being another.
The fact that a local council can get the information disturbs me, as I have worked for one, and know how sloppy they can be.
I only hope next election we vote them out, as all the promises they originally made (eg Freedom of Information) evaporated, and instead we get more draconian measures
With issues like this I always wonder if there would actually be a real impact? If they started reading the message bodies I would begin to be upset but the simple fact is (legal or not) people can both read headers and bodies, if they so wish. Of course I am not suggesting that we totally ignore legislation like this (I for one will be opposing it, being a UK citizen) -- as a member of the Slashdot crowd I currently sign all of my outgoing mail with GnuPG. If the going gets tough I can just as easily start encrypting all sensitive email, but of course this doesn't protect my headers.
As I see it the simple fact remains that there is a way around all of these measures -- I can easily forge headers, use another machine, etc. which essentially renders legislation like this useless. I'm going to be a lot more worried when they start to ``outlaw'' these workarounds, most importantly when encryption becomes a big ``no-no''.
Any sensitive communication I don't send over unencrypted email anyway. I'm sure everybody that *really* has something to hide have clued in too. So, I'm just waiting for them to try to outlaw encryption, at least without any government recovery keys...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
From the articler Home Office minister Caroline Flint said: "These proposals are about vital investigatory tools being used now to prevent and detect crime and, in some cases, save lives."
This is the kind of bland statement often used to justify invasions of privacy. We need evidence of the truth of this statement - evidence backed with numbers and convictions, not one-off anecdotes and hypothetical scenarios.
The strikes me as paying a high price in privacy. Not an impossible price, but whatever we are paying for had better be worth it - and the Powers That Be have not made that case yet.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
As protest last time a group sent the then home secretary a bunch of encrypted emails. It would have actually been illegal for him to recieve them because of the poor wording in the bill - you had to be able to decode anything that you recieve.
...simple terrorists aren't the worst thing on this earth. Maybe *paid* terrorists (so called politicans) are. I feel terrorized by them and my Karma points won't change that.
Time to wake up and generalize the use of PGP/GPG and toher tools. Right now if you send an encrypted email, chances are the recipient won't even know what it is and delete it as spam or a virus.
Educate the masses.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
What is Blairs government up to? Compulsory ID cards - which I read that Blunkett is still trying to get introduced, monitoring car speeds via satellite transmission/receivers, mobile police radar "saftey" (speed) cameras used by illegally parked police who refuse to divulge the amount of revenue they raise from issuing tickets etc.
I'm beginning to think that Blair is big brother. Next time, I won't be voting for his lot or any of the others. They're all as bad as each other.
They will be able to use the powers to collect taxes.
What have my email headers got to do with taxes?
Agencies will be given training on the law and how to maximise privacy, it continued.
Maximise privary?! Stop trying to spy on us!!
I'm not suprised by this at all, the government here seems to be doing everything it can to track and control it's population. The only thing that does suprise me is they didn't include the word 'terrorist' in there somewhere.
If Blair, Blunkett and the rest of them were _forced_ to reveal both their email and snail mail to the public and there was no way round it like national security and the rest of the crap they will sell....
But no. Nevermind this is morally wrong (yes they have morals, that's why they shoot democracy onto people), the reason they would refuse would be because something like this would annoy them immensely, since their privacy was grossly invaded, it would never happen.
Seems to me Big Brother needs to be disowned and punished by Big Father (us).
/. Where the truth
Point of fact: this is not a Bill, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act has already passed into law. What this is about is the statutory instrument needed to gave various parts of it effect in law.
David Blunkett is watching you! OooOooOoOo. Well not literally.
Suppose I suspected a council officer of corruption.
Suppose I tipped off a journalist from my home phone or email account.
That council officer can now obtain a complete record of everyone I've phoned or emailed in the last year, plus the fact that I recently visited www.howtoreportcorruptcouncilofficials.co.uk.
This is scary.
Perhaps i'm slighty too young to really remember the cold war, but i'm not so young not to remember the schools here in america teaching us about the evils of the big bad(sic) soviet empire. One issue that was commonly brought up was the right to privacy.
It was sugested that the soviet union on a regular basis snooped through postal mail, which was considered to be repugnent by western nations. Am I to believe that in the UK that e-mail snooping is being sugested? Not that e-mail is remarkably private in the first place, it just seems to be such a violation of human rights to give automatic access to this particular medium, and a complete hypocrisy to consider telephone taps off limits but e-mail which often times goes over traditional telephone lines.
I can appricate the fact that if there is enough evidence to convience a judge, one can get a warrent to search someone's residence. What the hell is wrong with that old procedure.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
They can read my outgoing email if they really want to. Boredom will brainlock them fairly quickly.
As for incoming email, the signal to noise ratio is getting smaller every day. Good luck getting any useful intelligence outta that stream!
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
...it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
So, uh... When are they changing their name to Oceania?
Is it possible (well, I know it is, I guess I mean how difficult is it -IANAC-), to build a reasonably simple programme that would just sit in the background requesting web pages.
Gazillions of them.
Constantly...
Surely the weight of data would flood ISP's.
Okay, problems with this:
Bandwidth - I am on DSL, so not such a problem, but do we need to retrieve all the data? No, just pull the text. And have the thing running in the background. If you have a permanent connection (a la DSL), then run it constantly, whilst you aren't surfing / downloading et cetera. The bandwidth cost to ISP's would rocket, and thus cause fiscal issues for them.
Other problems: None that I can think of - enlighten me.
As for e-mail: Get a pgp key, and send random emails. If you had a key that was specifically used for this then somehow the receiving party could know to just delete all mails sent with that key. Rotate the key every couple of weeks, and voila (oops - wrote viola, thank heavens for preview), the mail can't even be filtered by key.
Seems viable. The big issue is bandwidth usage, both locally and as an issue to the community as a whole. But it puts such a strain on the system (i.e. the monitoring) that monitoring becomes non viable.
Comments?
The best is the enemy of the good
Whats to stop them just disconnecting your account? Mass downloading of pointless data is most probably against the ToS of most isps. To get this to succeed you would need to most likely get a large proportion of the isp's customer base doing it, up to a point where it wouldn't be financially viable to disconnect offenders. /. must be an extreme terrorist group due to it's mass following?
As for e-mail, we have a little term for such action - its called spamming ^_~
Seriously though, [falembait]take off the tin foil hat[/flamebait] What do most of us have to fear? Are they going to go through our collective histories and gone to the assumption that
RIPA is and has been law in the UK for several years now. The implementation of the latest revisions is designed to give legality to practices ALREADY underway with the UK government and local agencies.
Everything the ammendments legalise is already in progress - ILLEGALLY.
Oh how I wish I had a spare couple of million pounds... OH HOW I WISH!!!!
I wonder what George Orwell would've said about this.
What really pisses me off is that this second coming phenomenon has been used too often by labour to pass unpopular bills. When something proves massively unpopular, yield to public pressure and withdraw it, sleep on it for a while till people forget and then slip it when they hardly notice and public momentum has faded.
Blunkett has introduced the most ludicrous of suggestions and laws. I really don't see how he be a minister of anything. He has no respect for people. Not teachers or police officers. How is expanding investigatory powers to 500 other bodies, 500 other bodies!, will contribute to reducing crime and its prevention?
Oh wait, it's to help collect taxes, oh, wait, it's to save lives. Such sloppy excuses. Throw in your "noble" excuses, guys!
Crime in the UK is bad! bad! and the police aren't too bothered about it, most of the time they don't bother to investigate anything, they just take over the phone and advise you to contact your insurane company. Have you ever contacted the police about a theft or a burglary? They just don't give a damn! and yeah like any criminal would use email now that they know it's being snooped! Soooo retarded!
DAMNIT, I'M ANGRY!!!
And this retarded idea that "if you have nothing to hide you it shouldn't bother you" shows great ignorance of privacy rights, as if those concerned about privacy are actively criminal or have things to "hide". DAMNIT!!!!!!!
aaaaaaargghhhh i hate them!! i viscerally do!
That is the problem in itself. Most of us have nothing to fear. It's the issue that the gov't DOES NOT TRUST US. How can one have a positive relationship with anything if there is no trust? And if your personal life is monitered, you have everything to fear. Politics is like a sewer, the bad stuff floats to the top. If you have corrupt officials, you can't throw them out of office, they can blackmail you into voting the crooks back in, because they have your every slight morally grey act on file. This is no way to run a democracy, but a demoncracy.
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
It was illegal for him to recieve them. That part of the bill had already been passed into law
and that is why you posted anonymously?
Actualy, I don't want them finding out that I'm planning a legal demonstration against current government policy, or am planning to take the government to court over a certain important issue related to government corruption.
Why the hell is the local council, the fiure service and the post office investigating kiddie porn anyway?
If police and governmental agencies are not required to obtain a warrant before recording travels and communications of a citizen's computer, then there is no limitation on the State's use of these methods on any person's computer, whether criminal activity is suspected or not. The resulting trespass into private affairs of UK citizens is precisely what article I, section 7 was intended to prevent. It should be recalled that one aspect of the browser and email surveillance in Young that troubled us was the fact that if its use did not require a warrant, there would be no limitation on the government's ability to use it on any private residence, at any time regardless of whether criminal activity is suspected.
As with browser surveillance, use of email tracking is a particularly intrusive method of surveillance, making it possible to acquire an enormous amount of personal information about the citizen under circumstances where the individual is unaware that every single email sent or received, may be recorded by the government.
We conclude that citizens of this nation have a right to be free from the type of governmental intrusion that occurs when browser and email surveillance is used, regardless of reduced privacy expectations due to advances in technology. We hold that under article I, section 7 a warrant is required for these actions.
Most Continetntal Europeans speak English to some degree, and many very well. Even though I learned German and French at school (and had the German prize twice) whenever I go abroad, no one lets me speak to them in their language. They're always too keen to speak English. My sister lives in Germany and speaks German fluently. She loves it.
Stick Men
As part of my work, I have a rack at a co-lo. There are no services other than bandwidth provided by the co-lo (Level 3). I run DNS, mail, web, ftp, etc. etc. on machines at the co-lo for all the domains I use.
.The potential bandwidth this room can saturate is pretty F'ing big - /. effect, eat your heart out! My personal best peak so far has been 76 mbit/second throughput ...
How likely is it that Level-3 are actually storing anything - they'd have to put a transparent proxy in front of my systems, and it would have to be fast enough and good enough to handle the 500 or so racks in the room the my rack is in. Each rack is served with 100mbit (which I use) and 1Gbit endpoints..
They could always have one proxy per customer, I suppose, but that's a lot of rack space going to "waste". I suppose if you use blade servers, you could fit ~120 or so in a rack, otherwise at 1U proxy-machine per customer, you're looking at 13 racks for my room. Did I mention there are several other rooms just as large or larger ?
So, how's it going to work for businesses ?
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Prior to the RIP act, (it is speculated that) the UK and US have had for many years reciprocal agreements to spy on each other's populations using Echelon, neatly bypassing any issues regarding spying on ones own population.
However i think that since 11/09/03 no one gives a toss about the niceties of civil liberties, i.e. Dept. of Homeland Security and RIP. Your privacy has been sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.
Full list of MPs and email addresses
Seriously people, I've mailed my mp about a few things, and had an smail reply each time. Keep it polite and sane, because you know they'll ignore an uninformed rant, and you don't want to waste your time, right?
I suggest simply dropping them a few lines to explain that Blunkett's been pushing several highly unpopular ideas and blatantly ignoring public opinion, and if he continues, well, I for one will be voting for the opposition purely to get rid of him.
Warning: May contain nuts
I know, I live there.
We do have crappy polititians (you may have heard about someone called John Howard, he is the Prime Minister of Australia right now and he is a bastard who does crap like push up the cost of a university education and sending Australians to places like IRAQ when the Australian people dont want Australia to go there) who do stupid things and wont get my vote next time I get the chance to have my say.
However, thanks to our 2-house political system and the way that things are setup and how things tend to go in elections, the Government doesnt automaticly have the power to pass any bill it likes, it has to convince the opposition or the minor parties in the senate to pass the law which can and does result in amendments. For example, there was a recent bill giving ASIO (which is a spy agency and is also connected with anti-terrorisim moves like raids and stuff) greater powers to arrest and detain people they think are connected with terrorisim. However, the minor parties in the senate forced the government to change the bill (for example, giving people who are detained access to a lawyer I think was one of the changes)
Some of the other crappy things our government have been doing (or not doing) lately:
1.Not doing enough to make broadband accessable (the phone system here is mainly owned by Telstra which was government owned until they sold off 49% of it) The government should be pushing telstra to reduce the cost of broadband especially in rural areas. (since all DSL goes through Telstra and most cable goes through Foxtel which is... you guessed it... owned by Telstra there isnt much anyone can do to make broadband cheaper unless telstra drops the costs it charges to consumers and to other broadband providers)
2.Trying to sell of the remaining 51% of telstra. (thankfully its been blocked in the upper house)
Naturally, the government wants the price of Telstra to be as high as possible at the point it actually sells the rest off therefore it has been doing thngs lately that are aimed at boosting the share price (like canceling several enquiries into Telstra and Telecommunications generally)
3.Trying to jack up fees for us poor uni students.
Most australians tend to be at uni under the Higher Education Contributions Scheme. Basicly, this means that the government pays the money for universities but when you start earning above a certain amount, you have to start paying the government back your HECS debt.
The government wants to jack up the amount that you will have to pay for each unit you study and also make it so that you get less time to complete your degree and stuff before you dont get HECS anymore.
4.Generally doing whatever George tells him to (like sending troops into IRAQ and not pusing the US, EU, Japan etc hard enough to remove unfair tarrifs, subsidies and so on)
and 5.Generally doing various crappy things.
> I'm beginning to think that Blair is big brother.
/me thinks he's come back in his time machine and is now prime minister.
George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair.
The headline is wrong and the parent comment is correct.
If your sense of nationality is dependent on superficial aspects like the name of your currency or the colour of your passport, you are already deviod of nationality.
As far as stupid EU laws go, feel free to ignore them - just like the citizens of all the other EU nation states do already. There was actually a very good article on The Register about this.
What has the RIPA got to do with the EU. It's all Blunkett's own work and he can't try to blame someone else. BTW In case you haven't read any history, hanging was abolished in the UK long before it was an EU member.
You're obviously so angry that you've forgotten to switch your brain in and are ranting like a Daily Mail "journalist"
No but, yeah but, no but...
Oh. My. God.
Come to Brazil!
All laws, stupid or not, are simply ignored.
What I'm dying to know is how on earth did this get past the house of Lords (They're supposed to stop stupid laws) to the best of my knowledge the parliament act wasn't even invoked (the one that means you can pass a law directly from the commons if you wait a year and vote on it again) and finally, does the Queen even read these things, were I her I'd be ashamed to sign such ridiculous laws.
No point in throwing away the important ones, after all. Some protections are too fundamental to be discarded willy-nilly. :-)
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
(Disclaimer - haven't read the article yet, but in case they don't mention this...) I assume the UK would have have to comply with EU privacy statutes....
Really. Isn't it about time we paid attention to who introduces this kind of legislation, and tossed them out on their ears?
I don't know anyone who's lining up to live in a police state. If they're our democratically elected officials, surely we can get rid of them once they demonstrate their intention to push this kind of thing.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
I agree. A situation where a party can get approximately 20% of the vote, a little under 10% of the seats and consider that a roaring success is a little suspect.
Or, for that matter, a party can get a little over 40% and get an overall majority of what, 170-odd in a 650ish seat house?
FPTP is a terrible system and should be taken out and shot, quickly. Labour should be ashamed on going back on their 1997 manifesto committment to hold a referendum on alternatives.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Well, I think *someone* is going to get their IP banned :)
But I gotta admit, that was pretty funny. My mom walked by as I clicked, and her reaction was hilarious. Even funnier than the look on that guy's face...
Put down the daily mail and think for your self.
Most of our laws come from the US, this snooping shit has USA written all over it.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
Not just anyone - Blair asked advisor Alastair Campbell how he should begin his televised address to the nation. "How about 'My fellow Americans...?' replied Campbell. See MSNBVC story?
Rubberhose is FAR more clever than that. I wish all the critical posts (and not just the one I'm responding to) would check out the damn link out rather than stupidly arguing about something that you admit you have no idea about.
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
If you have control over your own DNS, mail server, etc, now is the time to set up opportunistic encryption on your server.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I went to a local bar with a female friend of mine (yeah, just friends). Anyway, the bar in question is a biker bar, but the bikers are a friendly lot and a good friend of mine was playing in the band that night.
When I mentioned the bar name she got nervous because a guy who used to stalk her hung out there. She had a court order for the guy to stay away from her but it had expired a few months before. I told her that if he was there we could leave if she felt uncomfortable. She said that was o.k. and so we went there.
About halfway through the night the guy shows up. I asked her if she wanted to leave, but she said no because he was hanging out with some other female in the back of the place.
Everything seemed to go o.k. until the end of the night when the band stopped and the bar was closing. All of a sudden the stalker lunges at her screaming, "Hi Elaine! Hi Elaine!" (neither she nor I have no idea why he was saying this). Anyway the bouncer tackles the guy and has to drag him out of the place. She says that she needed to go to the police because the court said to report anytime he tried anything.
Well we got there and spent forty-five minutes with an officer who did his best to explain why they couldn't do anything. This despite the fact that the guy:
But it was to no avail and the cops weren't even going to bother to question the bouncer at the bar. "We don't know where to find him." the office complained. "He fucking works at such-and-such bar every day! He's not exactly hard to find!" was my reply to this lame ass excuse. But the cop refused to do anything.
This is not the only example of police malfeance that I personally have withnessed, just the most recent.
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
what are you talking about? it's quite the opposite - most US laws come from us, it's based on our laws, just like Canada, and Australia etc.
Comment: Yes I realise the username 'fuckfuck101' makes me sound intelligent, no you cannot buy it from me.
FaxYourMP.com
Let your MP know what you think without leaving your computer...
Canada has no Bill of Rights. Their equivalent of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" is "Peace, Order, and Good Government."
Anyone with half a brain can tell these are not the same thing.
Canada gets a lot of things right, but they also get some very critical things wrong.
+++ATH0
O, Canadadia, land that I lovovove.
+++ATH0
Make that RIAArrrrrr
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham