Every Email In UK To Be Monitored

ericcantona writes "The Communications Data Bill (2008) will lead to the creation of a single, centralized database containing records of all e-mails sent, websites visited and mobile phones used by UK citizens. In a carnivore-on-steroids programme, as all vestiges of communication privacy are stripped away, The BBC reports that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith says this is a 'necessity.'"

Comments

PGP...

[Anonymous Coward]

PGP.

Re:PGP...

[DaveAtFraud]

I used to work for a network monitoring company that used both content and context to classify Internet traffic. Actually, it's a lot easier than even using PGP. All it takes is something as trivial as a ROT13 encryption, using a foreign language, or using code words.

Simply obscuring the message means that the analysis engine has to try to decrypt the message without knowing the encryption algorithm and the key. It may be possible to recover both but you need something like the computing power at the disposal of the NSA. Code words or foreign languages are even worse because the analysis must also be carried out in the language used in the e-mail (meaning the analysis has to be carried out in all possible languages without knowing a priori which language the e-mail was written in). As the Navaho "wind talkers" demonstrated during WWII, this can be a very effective means of obscuring a message.

I'm not saying don't worry about it. It's still offensive to even suggest that all e-mails be monitored. I'm just saying that the technical reality of attempting to capture and analyze all e-mails for suspicious content if the population being monitored is at all large is pretty daunting. We ran into all of the above problems where I worked plus some others that would take even longer to describe. Web traffic and certain other internet traffic can be easily classified. For e-mail, SMS, IM, etc., you will only catch what people leave in plain site.

To me, this ranks right up there with a politician demanding that all porn, hate speech, etc. be filtered. It only sounds like a good idea until you start to try to figure out how to do it. Then it becomes obvious that it's not technically feasible. Hopefully, the Brits will figure that out before they spend too much money on the project.

Cheers,
Dave

This article is misleading

[belmolis]

In a carnivore-on-steroids programme, as all vestiges of communication privacy are stripped away,

This is quite misleading. According to the linked article, the program will only log traffic information, not message content. This may not be good, but it is a far cry from stripping away "all vestiges of communication privacy", and it means that it is not comparable to Carnivore, which actually would log message content.

Forcible decryption

[adoarns]

Made worse by UK statute giving the police the authority to order the disclosure of encryption keys or the decryption of encrypted data.

Yay fifth amendment and subsequent interpretations equating disclosing cipher keys with self-incrimination!

Re:Police state bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

yes they can. theyve locked up the liquid bombers for exactly that sort of thing. conspiring to commit murder.

Re:Time for a new protocol

[erikina]

Apparently they're only logging origin and recipient. So PGP isn't going to help you. In response to the GP: http://freenetproject.org/freemail.html

No, it is USE

[electrogeist]

How many ways to get what you want
I use the best
I use the rest
I use the enemy
I use anarchy

Re:Police state bullshit.

[Ihmhi]

Three words for you (and people in the States, as well): "Making terrorist threats".

It's been used on people of all ages and colors. Yes, even kids:

* Middle School Kids have been threatened with being put on the Terrorist Watch List.
* A student was arrested for "Zombie Fiction" because the story was set at a high school. Not *his* high school, mind you, *a* high school.
* A Chinese student was arrested because he made a map of his school for a video game (probably Counter Strike or a similar FPS)
* Two boys were arrested for talking about shooting up their school, probably jokingly.

I miss the days when there were these petty requirements for things like evidence and probable cause.

Re:In other news

[hughk]

There are specific laws protecting normal post that the government must comply with. It requires a warrant to have that post intercepted inside the UK.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Human Rights Violation

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuse me but:

Article 12.

            No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as stated by the UN.

http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

Get the facts!

[Macka]

Exactly. Ericcantona, the poster of this story is having a good laugh at the expense of the tin foil hat brigade frothing at the mouth over this. Especially considering what he posted is complete mis-information. Here's a quote from an informed article:

The laws order the retention of who called whom, when and for how long but not the content of phone calls. The internet log retention orders will also mandate the keeping of information on a user's activity but not the content of any communications.

A telecoms business lobby group told OUT-LAW.COM at the passing of the Regulations last year that the orders would have little impact on the industry.

"The reality is that nothing much has changed. The new legislation will make little practical difference as most telecoms providers keep certain information for billing purposes and customer records," said Michael Eagle of the Federation of Communications Services. "That information would be enough to meet the requirements of law enforcement agencies. There is no need to keep more data that you are ever likely to be asked for."

Only a fool believes everything he/she reads on Slashdot without checking out the facts first.

Re:I'd like to know, too.

[daveewart]

Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Provisional_IRA_Actions - the numerous bombings by the IRA in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

Then *one* incident in 2005 by "Actual Terrorists" and everyone goes ape.

Re:That's it

[radio4fan]

I left in 2007.

There wasn't one single thing that made me go, but the accumulative weight of paranoia and illiberalism.

Shamelessly ripped off from here:

• The government can ban any groups it labels 'terrorist' (Terrorism Act 2000)
• The government can monitor any and all private communication (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000)
• Armed forces can be deployed on UK soil in peacetime (Civil Contingencies Act 2004)
• Property and assets can be seized without warning or compensation (Civil Contingencies Act 2004)
• Spontaneous protest is now illegal around Parliament (Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005)
• Without trial, any British citizen can be tagged, put under house arrest and banned from using the telephone or internet (Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005)
• Any citizen can be imprisoned without charge for 28 days (42 days has passed the house of commons) (Terrorism Act 2006)
• The executive can change any current legislation without consulting Parliament, with very few exceptions (Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006)
• Arbitrary punishments with no legal precedents can be issued with little legal recourse, based on hearsay evidence (Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003)
• British citizens can be extradicted to the United States with no evidence presented (Extradition Act 2003)
• Compulsory identification for all British citizens, with an unlimited amount of details stored in a central database, which the private sector will have access to (Identity Cards Act 2006)
• Upon arrest the police have claim to your DNA, even if you are released without charge (Criminal Justice Act 2003)

Note that some of this predates 9/11.

The government is not-so-gradually putting in place all the mechanisms that a totalitarian police state needs.

What's sickening is that this is largely supported by or ignored by the public.

Every letter I wrote to my MP was replied to by a "we need it to keep people safe, and the public support this measure" fob-off.

In theory I should stick around to try and change things, but it's like staying in a pool that other people are shitting in.

Re:I'd like to know, too.

[jeremyp]

The word is "bombs" not "firecrackers". Fifty odd people died in that attack as well as lots of people being injured. The casualty figures were higher than for any IRA attack on mainland Britain.

Apart from 7/7 there was a copy cat attack that failed a few weeks later, an attempt to drive a burning landrover into Glasgow airport and an attempt to blow up aircraft by using explosives disguised as soft drinks, all of which failed.

So, while the response by the British government has been totally disproportionate (including some monumental screw-ups by the police that would be funny if innocent people hadn't been killed), the threat is/was more serious than firecrackers on a few tube trains.

Or you could join the online petition against it

[Ice Tiger]

A petition has already been started on the downing street website (http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/no-to-1984/).

Feel free to express your views against this.

Everyone needs to use encryption

[elfguy]

Every email needs to be encrypted and every web site needs to use SSL. That's the only way we'll beat all the control attempts by the various governments.

Re:Jeeee-zus

[evilandi]

Hey, Britain. What's going on over there?

Nothing.

Yet again, Slashdot has confused "a proposal by a British government minister" with "a law which has been passed by both Houses of Parliament". The former has occured, the latter has not.

It won't happen for two reasons:

1. The upper house (House of Lords) is stuffed full of Conservatives who can't be removed (and won't support it.

2. The lower house (House of Commons) is up for election in less than two years. The Conservatives will win by a landslide and the intercept programme will be cancelled.

3. Nobody is stopping anyone from running their own mailserver with TLS. Whilst it is theoretically practicable to monitor email traffic from all UK ISPs, it is not theoretically practicable to monitor encrypted email servers in every household. Running your own mailserver is neither difficult nor expensive these days. Ditto using an offshore mailserver and connecting through encrypted POP/IMAP.

The real scandal here is that a government minister should suggest spending quite so much money on something that is so trivial to circumvent.

[Remember, in the UK, right-wing (Conservatives, capitalists, currently opposition but widely expected to win in 2010 by a landslide) = libertarian, left-wing (Labour, socialists, current government) = authoritatian. There are other significant parties such as the Liberal Democrats who do pretty much what it says on the tin.]