Slashdot Mirror
UK Gov't Proposes Massive Internet Snooping, Data Storage
Barence writes "Big Brother Britain moved a step further today with the news that the Government will store 'a billion incidents of data exchange a day' as details of every text, email and browsing session in the UK are recorded. Under new proposals published yesterday, the information will be made available to police forces in order to crack down on serious crime, but will also be accessible by local councils, health authorities and even Ofsted and the Post Office. The Conservatives have criticised the idea, with the Shadow Home Secretary saying, 'yet again the Government has proved itself unable to resist the temptation to take a power quite properly designed to combat terrorism to snoop on the lives of ordinary people in everyday circumstances.'"
use it. it won't be long before every communication is encrypted and signed
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Most network encryption methods might not be 100% bulletproof, but if more people did it, massive data collection projects like this would be a lot less worthwhile.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
Humans have an annoying tendency to save things.
We fear our own demise, and we seek permanence in our surroundings and possessions.
We do the same with data.
We create far more data than we will ever be able to manage. In principle, it's a horrible idea. In practice, it's unfeasible. The only thing this will result in is harassment and inconvenience for people when the data is leaked/stolen/hax0red.
The government is NOT watching everyone - they can't. The government wants you to THINK everyone is being watched.
The Conservatives have criticised the idea, with the Shadow Home Secretary saying, 'yet again the Government has proved itself unable to resist the temptation to take a power quite properly designed to combat terrorism to snoop on the lives of ordinary people in everyday circumstances.'"
An of course, once they are in power, they will stop the data logging? - or will they conveniently forget and keep it going?
So you don't mind me watching you have sex (wait an anonymous coward posting shit on Slashdot, you don't have sex)? Masturbate? Bathe? Shit?
How about we set you up in a glass cage for a week in the middle of (say) Times Square?
Or, how about you read this article http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565 linked to by another Slashdotter at one time. You have to register to download it, but a fake email address works just as well.
But more to the point, you have got something to hide, everybody does. Who hasn't broken the law at one stage or another? Speeding? Jaywalked? Partaken of some illicit substance? Blasphemed? (You know why Mary was a virgin? She only had anal sex.) You get the idea, everyone is guilty of something, and that means everyone has something to hide from the government.
I wank in the shower.
No, what is worrysome is they assume that everyone could be a terrorist. If we assumed everyone within a 20 block radius was a murderer, real murder cases would take forever to be solved. Same with this, if everyone is a terrorist, they look for all the people who are obviously not terrorists and try to make them be a terrorist rather then actually figuring out who really are terrorists (and no, 80 year old English grandmothers are not terrorists).
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Seriously, though, if you want to solve the problems of government intrusion, you gotta open source the government.
To make any significant change to the deeper power structures of any large government you need a revolution. People in positions of global scale aren't going to give up that power just because you have a lot of signatures on a petition. You cannot vote high ranking bureaucrats and lobbyists out of power. But for ordinary citizens to attempt to use force to uproot those currently in positions of power would require them to be "terrorists" (gasp!) The only way to take down a large modern government without warfare is to wait for it to collapse under it's own bloated weight like the USSR did.
We are all just people.
What disturbs me about this is that it's my taxes that pay for this crap. I'd prefer them to spend it on something that's worthwhile, something that may be to my benefit - like roads, sewers, hospitals and ambulances. Instead Gorden Scunner Broon and his unelectable cretins (aka MPs) do this in the name of "National Security". This won't make an iota of a difference to national security.
They're also proposing to give us all biometric ID cards to improve national security. Sorry I meant force us to pay nearly a hundred quid each for a Gov't issued piece of useless plastic. That won't make an iota of a difference either.
They'll have a national database with stuff about each one of us. That won't make an iota of a difference for national security. It'll just be another expensive white elephant and another opportunity for them to lose a couple of CD-ROMs in the post.
I won't vote for Broon. I'll be voting for anyone other than Broon and his cronies. I won't have an ID card. I don't want email snooping.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.