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
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I only hope next election we vote them out, as all the promises they originally made (eg Freedom of Information) evaporated, and instead we get more draconian measures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.
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
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
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.
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'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.
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.
Firstly, most Icelanders speak English but their language is very much Icelandic. Secondary, it is very hard to move to live there. While they do accept many tempory immigrants, they are infamous for how they politically treat them. Lastly, while the government may try to protect its citizens, I've found the Icelanders to be much the same with respects to Europe as what Southern Rednecks are in the USA. "Are these guys for real!?" is something you'll be saying alot if you spend time around them.
Oh and they like to eat whales while saying it is for 'research'.
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"