UK Government Wins Villain of the Year

Anonymous Cowpat writes "The BBC is reporting that the UK Government, or rather their six month presidency of the EU, has been awarded the Internet Villain of the Year award by the Internet Service Providers Association for being the driving force behind the new EU data retention laws. These require that ISPs and other telecomms providers keep records of the time\date & recipient of every communication made by their subscribers."

Comments

The Customer Wins!

[Saxerman]

"At the end of the day ISPs are not law enforcement agencies so they should not have to pay for it all," [a spokesman for the Internet Service Providers' Association ] said.

And, of course, they won't need to as they'll merely pass the savings (sic) to their customers. While politicians might be willing to merely call this the 'cost of doing business in the age of terrorism' I call it yet another stab into the heart of freedom and liberty.

Big Brother means cheaper big hard drives...

[__aaclcg7560]

If all the companies are required to maintain this extra information, that would force the hard drive companies to produce higher capacity hard drives while driving down the unit cost. Who wouldn't mind paying $50 USD per terabyte?

Retaining Logs - Pah

[LazySlacker]

thats the least of it.

• id cards
• extradition for crimes commited on our soil
• extradition with out reciprocal agreements
• Gitmo, an 'Anomaly'
• an attempt at almost indefinate detention without trial
• security services (or anyone) not allowed to link recent attacks here to a certain invasion

It would appear that if you want to get legislation past PM Blair - just add a terorist threat - or say your name is Bush (guess who with have the extradition agreement with with).
I'm not even starting to list domestic issues (well I guess id card is domestic) and will completely skip Iraq itself.

Myopia

[lheal]

Perhaps a little review is in order:

1. China seeks not allow its citizens even to know what privacy means, and puts journalists in jail for using the web to speak out.
2. Something over 90% of the email I get is falsely titled advertising from people I've never met and will never meet trying to sell me products I don't want. And so:
3. The communications companies want to double-bill for bandwidth.
4. There is an active market for system exploits, bot armies, and malware-driven popup ads.
5. The U.S. wants to keep DNS root server rights to itself. This is not such a big deal to me, but other people got worked up over it.

With all of that, the EU wanting to make sure data is kept, not forever, but just long enough for most normal criminal investigations to take place doesn't bother me much. If they did other stuff with it, that would be a problem, but just making sure it's there seems prudent.

When will the English take back their country?

[deacon]

Really, when will enough be enough? Or are there so many state "workers" voting to keep things as they are that you have no escape?

First they took your guns, and you sat in the pub and said it was for the good of the people.

Then they effectively took away your right to self-defense (they took away the means in step one), and you locked yourself in your bathrooms when the burglars break into your occupied house.

Then, they sent letter to the shopkeepers telling them not to bother reporting thefts of less than 75 pounds and not to detain thieves.

Linky:

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006060516,00 .html

You have cameras installed in every orfice, officious busybodies poking noses into your every affair.

Your medical system is refusing treatment to patients who are over weight (gasp) or smoke (the horror) in order to save money. An un-assimilated population of immigrants is holding up signs saying "wait for the real holocaust"

What will it take to push you over the edge, the banning of cricket?

Wake up, it is already too late, and you better get cracking on fixing things.

Re:When will the English take back their country?

[Pantero Blanco]

The medical care part of your post made sense. This part didn't:

"'First they took your guns'
Most of us didn't have/didn't need them."

Your argument for why it doesn't matter that your Government took your guns is that you didn't need them at the time and most people didn't have them? Do you think they're just going to give them back to you when you DO need them? Even the tired old "they're too dangerous for the common man to use" argument makes more sense than that.

And why does how many people have or don't have something matter when the Government is trying to ban it? Most people 15-20 years ago didn't have cell phones; does that mean it shouldn't have mattered if the Government had banned them from private use? Plenty of people fifteen years ago would have liked to regulate the purchase of computers and bandwidth, you know (some still would).

Re:When will the English take back their country?

[techno-vampire]

Well there has to be some criteria, money is limited, the other answer is to tax more to create more money.

We don't have socialized medicine in the USA. We also don't have doctors refusing to treat patients because they're overweight or because they smoke. We also don't have three to four month waiting lists for bypass surgery, or a large number of other proceedures. Maybe the answer isn't more taxes, it's going back to the old system of private practice because it works better. Yes, that would mean you'd have to pay for health insurance, but it probably wouldn't be any more than the taxes you're paying now, and you'd get a lot better service for it.

Re:When will the English take back their country?

[Martz]

Being a UK citizen - and once being happy we got rid of the Conservative goverment with a Labour victory, I've become very annoyed and angry at the situation. I've written numerous letters to my MP, who has made plenty of promises and shown to be good at writting replies to me - perhaps nothing more. It does require a huge amount of effort from an individual to change things, and this combined effort can make a difference.

I was reminded of it tonight watching a satirical comedy current affairs show, when the last demonstration/protests which actually influenced the Goverment into changing a decision - was for lowering the homosexual age of content. [The gag of the story was that it wasn't 16 year olds males demonstrating, rather it was millions of 40+ single men with leather trousers and pierced ears]. Millions of people marched, the goverment listened - and the law was changed. Democracy worked?

The lastest demonstrations were at the G8 summit, whereby the day after the London underground/bus bombings took place - whilst all of the countries security was focused in Gleneagles. Before *that*, up to a million people demonstrated in London against the invasion of Iraq. So many many people were on the streets, a huge turn out which took an enormous amount of effort for people to make - people traveled several hundred miles to be there, which is a mean feat in itself in the UK anyway).

If the goverment won't listen to a few hundred thousand people (minimum, 1 million max) who peacefully demonstrate, execute their primary right to disagree with the goverment decision as strongly as possible - what can be done? How many people does it take to reverse a decision, or to even get a referendum on it?

The control and balance does need to be taken back, but people have too much to lose these days. They aren't directly interested in anything which isn't going to effect their bank balance or routine. Back in the day perhaps, the average family might have a lot less, be more hardup and actually demonstrating and protesting publicaly and peacefuly wouldn't be much more effort than their general hardships. Now-a-days (pipe in mouth, slippers on and reminiscing about the war..) we have it too easy that we order pizza thats cooked less than a mile away, delivered by scooter, and posted through our letterboxes. We are lazy, and we do not care/

What chances do we have while we have it so easy, such an appeased population. :(

I disagree with the examples in your post, but you are actually pointing in the right direction I think. As long as you make a noise, even if it isn't for the right reasons - just at the moment.

Re:When will the English take back their country?

[geekoid]

so the person arguing against socialised medicine is getting socialized medicine and it 'works fine'?

what did I miss?

Re:UK's not the only one

[TubeSteak]

IMHO, it doesn't really matter who is the first one to get such laws passed.

All that matters is it gets passed.

Once that happens, the laws will spread through Europe & eventually overseas... all in the name of "harmonization"

It's a kind of backdoor way to get laws passed in your country that would otherwise be unacceptable to the populace. The Bush Administration (maybe Clinton did it to, I dunno) is the most recent example I can think of.

They encouraged restrictive European laws that would never have flown in the U.S. of A. and once they were passed in Europe, U.S. law had to be "harmonized".

CONtrol

[sane?]

What you don't seem to understand is that its all driven by a fear of not being 'in control'. How can you be 'in control' if you can't access what people are saying, what they are doing? How can you understand them if you don't know their innermost thoughts?

UK government is scared by that they don't understand, Islam, Internet, anything that has passed their arts education by. They don't understand and therefore they need 'more information' to feel that they have 'kept on top' of the problems that confront them.

You know that feeling when you are swimming, but its not working out and you are getting lower and lower in the water, swallowing more and more water? That's the UK, and when they realise it, the US governments.

Re:UK's not the only one

[Skrekkur]

It's a kind of backdoor way to get laws passed in your country that would otherwise be unacceptable to the populace. The Bush Administration (maybe Clinton did it to, I dunno) is the most recent example I can think of. They encouraged restrictive European laws that would never have flown in the U.S. of A. and once they were passed in Europe, U.S. law had to be "harmonized".

I think you are forgetting your patriot act, which got passed in the U.S. Those laws are pretty restrictive in every sense and restrict freedom and human rights far beyond that these laws do. They got passed "through the backdoor of terrorism" or more precisely the threat of it. These laws might have actually inspired these, since one of the arguments that could be used with this is to ease the track of terrorist activity.
The NSA operate the echelon spy network http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EcheloN/ which does far more than just keeping logs for going through if something happens.
That said I highly disagree with these kinds of laws, and the minister of justice here in iceland is pushing for similar laws, and might actually getting through. You are right about one thing though, once such laws get passed in one or more western nation (expecially european one) it will greatly increase the odds of similar laws passing elsewhere and since the european union is rather large I fear the influence alot.
Just remember, we will get all kinds of bad and stupid laws if we don t get our voices heard.

Re:Please explain this to me.

[db32]

I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure banks are legally required to keep a transaction history (beyond just not wanting to upset their customers). The lawmakers would be the ones to tell them they have to keep it. That doesn't mean the lawmakers can just come in and grab everyones transaction history just because they want to. They have to go through a process to gain access to the specific transaction histories they want for their investigation, and have to show why they need them.

The "AAHH LOG EVERYTHING" as well as "OMG THEY ARE TRACKING US ALL" are both kneejerk reactions, and to me labeling this fiasco as a villianous thing, let alone the MOST villianous thing, just makes the side trying to prevent it look stupid.

I said I don't have much of a problem with the idea, not that I agree with every aspect of the way they are going about doing it. The problem here is reactions like "So you want us to all stay in our homes" just makes your case look bad. If you want to get things done in a sane manner, you can't react with insane behaviour. I don't want it to be a huge draconian thing, but as long as people respond with such innane comments and "awards" there will be no meaningfull opposition because they will be laughed off.