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.

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.

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

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: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.]