Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I'm out of here!
Fuck the UK!
Snail mail no longer the subject of jokes.
I thought the cameras were bad enough, but this goes far, far beyond anything remotely reasonable. If they do this, they should have no problem listening to every phone call, opening up every piece of mail and package. In fact, they should just put microphones in every house, restaurant, bus and automobile.
Next year, they'll want to plant RFID into every person.
Is the UK government and authorities completely without morales? Or are they this > close to being destroyed by some threat? Or are they incompetent? Or all of the above?
PGP.
Assuming email messages in the UK are actually sent using clients and servers in the UK, it seems that this would be a great time to start working on getting a newer fixed up protocol ready to completely replace the easy to snoop on SMTP.
How about this. Lets start a movement for false positives. If you know someone from the UK, email them saying "Hey, dude, dont forget to plant that bomb at the government building on 231 baker st. Oh yeah, and remeber the time we agreed on. 11:15 on tuesday the 21st. " Police state or no police state, they cant arrest us for doing nothing, espically people outside of the UK sending emails to the UK.
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.
I wonder whether the UK govt will have the money to implement such a grand plan after the Zillion Quids Great Gift to the banks.
:(){
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!
Tenemus pyrobolos atqui jacimus cognitiones.
Joe the Plumber is laughing his ass off at you Brits.
If you're using snail-mail you must have something to hide!
No sig today...
If this database were publicly accessible, and could be used by anyone to monitor the communications of anyone (like in David Brin's The Transparent Society) then I might not object to this sort of system. It could just as easily be used by the people to find government corruption as it could be used by the government to prosecute individuals.
However, if the database could be used only by a few to monitor anyone, then this is clearly incompatible with the concept of a free country.
It does not matter if they're unable to do it effectivly now. The thing is, they are trying to. That is why this whole thing smells of bull shit. What the flying fuck happened to civil rights? More and more we see governments walk all over them with no explaination whatsoever. This is unacceptable. We not only need to bill burned, we need to see someone fired for drafting it.
How long before somebody thinks it's "necessary" to see the content as well?
No sig today...
I would have thought that the British would have learned not to piss off their citizens in the late 1700s. ;-)
"People should not be afraid of their government, instead a government should be afraid of its people."
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Q: Is the UK government and authorities completely without morales?
A: Lead Programmer Jose Morales left the program recently for a position at Yahoo China. Many pundits claim that without him the implementation of the Communications Data Bill will fail as no one can read his code and his commenting mostly consisted of rambling diatribes against the IMF.
Orwellian down to the doublespeak:
There are no plans for an enormous database which will contain the content of your emails, the texts that you send or the chats you have on the phone or online.
Translation: We might build one now, we might build one later. We might already be building one, just without a plan.
See? No lies, just no plans!
Nor are we going to give local authorities the power to trawl through such a database in the interest of investigating lower level criminality under the spurious cover of counter terrorist legislation.
In other words: There's going to be a database, but only available to those sufficiently high up in the government. Not to local authorities. What a relief!
If you think I'm being too harsh, read again. If there's not going to be such a database, why would she go on to talk about who should have or not have access to such a database?
Some of the commentary on the speech is at least as disturbing as the speech itself:
The raw idea of simply handing over all this information to any government, however benign, and sticking it in an electronic warehouse is an awful idea if there are not very strict controls about it.
How'd you fall this far, Britain?
So, to translate: It's actually a fine idea, so long as there are sufficiently strict controls. I wonder who gets to decide how strict those controls should be.
And who controls the controllers, so to speak?
More of the same:
The government must present convincing justification for such an exponential increase in the powers of the state.
Again: A giant database of every email ever sent, from now till forever, in Britain, is alright so long as there's sufficient justification.
At least someone has the balls to take a stand:
These proposals are incompatible with a free country and a free people.
Amen.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Your post advocates a
(*) technical (*) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting terrorism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from dictatorship to dictatorship before a bad federal law was passed.)
(*) Terrorists can easily encrypt their email
( ) Other legitimate email users would be affected
( ) It will stop terrorists for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
[...] anybody feeling ambitious? :)
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Does Britain actually have problems with terrorism?
Or is this just a power grab?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
2. I'm sure it will take just a few petabytes of Viagra ads for the UK government to develop a foolproof SPAM filter for us all.
3. Just think of the decline in crap emails from management. No more wading through piles of pointless CC'd emails once they become paranoid.
4. Did someone just approve my budget for video phones for everyone? Try archiving that traffic, UK!
I think we all need to look at the glass being half full on this one
...it's called "The Last Enemy." I caught an episode and the thrust of it seemed to be that these powerful surveillance tools become an instant menace once *one* person uses them for the wrong purpose.
So, apparently some people in the UK care enough to get the word out. These tools are being entrusted to people who don't get it.
It's like giving a nuclear-powered car filled with laser-armed sharks to your local branch of Neo-Nazis. (Sorry, had to get the triple analogy in there)
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith ... promised that the content of conversations would not be stored, just times and dates of messages and calls.
I don't trust her any farther than I could throw her, but even if I did, promises mean jack squat. Even if she happens to be the most honest, unabusive
person that exists, there will be someone that abuses this.
That's why the American Founding Fathers had it straight on. If men were angels, there would be no need for government. If angels governed men, there would be no issue.
But since men govern men, this fact must be acknowledged, and governments given as little power as possible over people.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Dear Everyone in the UK, When emailing me, please be up front about the fact that you're emailing me from the UK so I can promptly not respond. Yours, Joe Sixpack The United States of At-Least-We're-Not-Yet-as-Fucked-Up-as-You
Get together a group of 500 similarly frustrated people.
Have each person send everyone on the list a 1GB non-compressible, encrypted message titled "Iraq Iran Afghanistan Islam and North Korea"
This would generate 250TB of data per day that they would need to store.
In a month this would create more than 7 Petabytes of data to warehouse,
which is physically impossible with current technology.
So in short, 500 determined people could bring this system to it's knees in less than a month.
Miss the memo?
Warrantless surveillance of American domestic communications has been going on for years.
Not only has it been comprehensively abused (to exactly nobody's surprise), the spying infrastructure has no legal reason to exist.
That sinister sound you hear is Nixon laughing at you, wearing a Dick Cheney mask.
you had me at #!
How many ways to get what you want
I use the best
I use the rest
I use the enemy
I use anarchy
I'm a Dual US/UK National. Will these new wiretaps be incompatible with the preexisting NSA taps on My AT&T Cell phone?
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
*self-censors the comment I was thinking of making*
Terrorism? Check.
Protecting Children/Child Pornography? Check.
Looks like it's got everything that would be needed to pass it were it introduced here in the US. Plus, it has Murder and Drugs as bonuses. (And before someone misreads my post, yes I know this is happening in the UK.)
Of course not. You can trust the highly trustworthy, never corrupt Federal government to keep the corrupt local government's fingers out of that database and to never misuse that database itself. Suuuuure.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
This is fucking amazing.
Not only does the UK have the most extensive network of CCTV surveillance of its citizens of any country in the world, now every single electronic means of communication will be monitored, intercepted and stored for an in-definite period, with access granted to an unspecified range of bureaucrats and snoops.
WTF for? What evidence is there that this kind of massive untargetted domestic spy effort - against the 99.999% of the population who never commit ANY crimes - can be justified?
It's like fining everyone who uses the freeway just because one or two people might be speeding, or jailing everyone just because one or two people might be murderers.
The UK has NO basis to ever criticize China or any other 3rd world despot or totalitarian state ever again for any abuse of press freedom or censorship or human rights, since now they set the benchmark for over-the-top Govt abuse of power.
As a businessman, I also don't like the idea that if I travel to the UK all my commercial-in-confidence business communications will be recorded by the UK Govt and possibly used to benefit UK companies who may be my competitors. Grrr.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The trouble with big brother sort of things like this is that these programs get out of hand, go out of control, and end up making everyone's lives miserable. And do we really want to live in a world that is so full of cameras and government spying that we can't fart without being caught? And since I'm already on a rant about this sort of thing then what the hell, check out my new web site at this place where I'm going to write about my thoughts about the upcoming election and how I think government should be. Let me sum up by saying that all this government spying over the excuse of doing it to keep us safe well that is not the way I'd solve the security situation around the world. Because you have to find some kind of balance. If you have a government network of ten cameras on every street corner, then, well, you're going to receive so much video data that there won't be enough people in the Universe to watch all of it, much less to pay attention and look for activity that is really suspicious. It just won't work. There is infinity amounts of information in the world. The trick to figure out is how you reject nearly all of it in such a way that most of the remaining information is a positive hit on something suspicious. Unfortunately, governments do not know such boundaries or limits. They pass a law saying there will be fifty cameras on every intersection. They don't stop to think that it will cost millions or maybe even billions of dollars to do it. What do they care anyway? The tax payer will pay for it. This is no way to run a country. It's only a way to take away everyone's liberty without gaining any benefit from it at all. Because governments don't know limits or boundaries, and so they don't know how to do something in moderation. It's too much, too late, ineffective, expensive, and it will accomplish nothing. If only I were running for President right now. Everything would be okay.
Geez, this makes me wonder how well that ParanoidLinux project is coming along. This sort of story really shows why it's such a good idea—having anonymity and encryption is good, but having them auto-configured and applied seamlessly to your online presence is better, especially since privacy is everyone's right, not just techno-geeks'. With undirected, warrantless government monitoring going on, even non-technical users should start asking for good privacy tech. (Disclaimer: Auto-configuration and seamlessness are not necessarily goals of the ParanoidLinux project, but I anticipate that it could be done if enough developers get involved. I am not involved in the project.)
Hmm, turns out they made their first alpha build earlier this week. That's good news; I've been worried that it would turn into vaporware. (Although in the spirit of the article I suppose I should spell that "vapourware".)
There are many people to whom the UK's system is perfectly reasonable.
Earlier tonight, I had an argument tonight with this woman who favors censoring YouTube. It went like this:
Her: I can't believe people put videos of woman being raped up on YouTube. They should stop that.
Me: Well, they'll take them down, and they're usually taken down pretty damn fast.
Her: Thousands of people can see the videos on the meantime. YouTube should screen all videos before putting them up. If they won't do it, they should be forced.
Me: Ugh. That would break YouTube. The expense would be huge. It'd drive YouTube out of business. Would you really rather have no YouTube at all?
Her: Then we'll have the government pay for it, or even set up an agency to review the videos.
Me: The cost to society would still be astronomical. And doing that would provide a very easy avenue for the government to censor anything anyone finds offensive. It's dangerous. If you want to go down that route, why not pass a law stipulating some huge fine for posting videos of rape? Then YouTube will at least be forced to comply on its own.
Her, crying by this point: I don't care. Fines aren't good enough. People might still see the videos. We have to filter them all.
[cut argument about my supposedly not knowing when to stop debating]
Her: It's not about 'cost to society', it's about protecting women. I'm appalled that you would put not being censored ahead of that. I don't know if I can care about someone who doesn't want to protect women. You should go.
Keep in mind this woman will have a doctorate in less than a year. *sigh*
Offcourse not! Why do you question the intellect of the UK government?
My fellow americans:
Guess what? This is as much our burden as it is the UK's. There is an american agenda being pushed here. We already know that the USA's biggest survelliance post is the UK (See NSA's menwith hill listening post). We already know a large amount of traffic is routed through the UK. Finally, we already know the US does not spy on its own citizens, it tells the UK to. In return, the US spies on the UK citizens. That way we're not breaking laws right? This is not a UK only thing. The UK is being used as a world wide communications filter. Let's see average person on earth is connected between 6 hops to any other person on earth. 5 more of these setups and that should have enough data to cover every connected individual, on average. Please check my stats and references and correct me if I am wrong (I recalled them from memory). *sigh, The sad thing is just by knowing your being watched you lose a degree of freedom.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
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
I know we're your wayward cousins from "across the pond" So you can be forgiven if you didn't get the memo. Allow me to quote the most relevant part:
What? You were aware? You just don't care. You like establishing a culture of fear for political purposes, and don't care about what us eggheads say? Oh sorry. Keep calm and carry on.
The National Academies.
It's already way past bad enough for revolution, and no one outside of /. seems to care.
It will be very handy to be strolling down the street and have a helpful government man spot you and say "You've got mail".
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
select count(*) from ukmail where content like '%terrorist%' or content like '%bomb%';
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
5 gazillion |
+----------+
1 row in set (in 82 years 3 months 18 days 3 hours 18.2 seconds)
I'm writing my friend a message
In plaintext for you to see
His name it is Osama
And his last name starts with B
My friend he makes explosives
And possibly anthrax
He sends it via envelope
And tiny little sacks
He doesn't like some people
He calls them infidels
He mentioned he was going
To send them all to hell
This message is sarcastic
I know no terrorists
But it's got a lot of keywords
That are on your danger lists
Your policemen may not like it
But to them I will scoff
I don't like in England
So you can just f*** off.
https://yro.slashdot.org/.... Why can't I browse slashdot with https ???
Right now they are just going to record who sent something to whom. So send only SMALL messages and send a lot of them. And use a lot of different email addresses so every possible combination gets recorded. And be sure to reply. Drown out the spam!
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
From "the official government website for citizens":
This email snooping bill is meant
to ensure strict safeguards continue to strike the proper balance between privacy and protecting the public.
Since there is no privacy in Britain anymore then this should be rather easy to accomplish,
As a person who does not live in Britain how can I ensure that the British government is not reading the email that I send to my British friends? The British government already said that they will insist on people giving them private keys to encrypted materials. It's about time that I started sending suspicious emails to police offers in Britain. We need a good "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" (Ref. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monsters_Are_Due_on_Maple_Street) scenario to happen in Britain.
How is this different from what is already in place? Phone companies and ISPs already keep logs and records of these things; how else would the phone company be able to send you a itemised bill? Tne new thing is that they want to collect it in one, central database for convenience.
Nobody in their right mind would imagine that any government authority would be able to listen to all phone conversations happening in the UK or read all emails being sent - let alone analyse them and understand them. And that's just the meaningful emails - add SPAM to that; it just can't be done. So where is actually the big, bad surveillance? As far as I can see, the reason why they want this is because it takes too long to go and retrieve the records from individual ISPs and phone companies - it was a lot easier when there was only one phone company. Speed is of the essence in dealing with crime, especially since they can't get through with extending the period the police can retain terror suspects, and having it all in one database will make it a lot faster to find out who communicated with your suspect when and where.
So, is it worth making a big fuss about? Not to my mind. What does worry me is that this is yet another big project that a public authority will let EDS handle. That combination has in the past led to too many failures and I think they are going to waste a lot of money at a time when it would be better spent elsewhere. That should comfort those who are worried about this project - it doesn't have much chance of getting off the ground. Of course, it shouldn't take a competent database developer many months to make this work; perhaps they should have chosen to develop it as open source?
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:
Only a fool believes everything he/she reads on Slashdot without checking out the facts first.
We have always been at war with $enemy.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Oh for fucks sake.
The Gestapo rounded up and executed the political opponents of Hitler. Thousands of Germans were killed in 1942. These people were not resistance fighters but students, trade unionists, 'communists', etc.
The Gestapo had V-men in every part of German society and bureaucracy. To suggest that they respected anyone's privacy is absurd.
The Gestapo were part of the SS, who killed several old men in my village in reprisal for a stolen map.
Please maintain a sense of perspective. What Britain is doing is frightening and stupid, but it is not comparable to the Gestapo, SS, Stasi, Guoanbu, KGB etc.
Signed, a refugee from Britain now living in a house in France once occupied by the SS.
If the information in the database can be used to identify you (which it obviously can at the very least for emails & mobile phone communications) then you can send a Freedom of Information Request to the Government to be sent a copy of said information.
Now, in itself one request wouldn't really make them reconsider - but if a few tens of thousand or more people started making these demands - which the government has to comply to - then they might get so swamped with requests, that it becomes too costly to maintain the system.
One way to combat this stupid idea is to increase the amount of spam-mails on the net, filling their uber-database with endless crap.
Have an email client which silently replies to each and every spam you receive, while also junking it so that you never see it. When every computer is sending out hundreds of replies to spam every day the surveillance database will have to handle billions of messages.
Apart from the internet melting under the load, what could go wrong?
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
The Gestapo was different from SS, which was different from SA.
Although Gestapo was "owned" by SS, it was administered by the Reich Security Service. Similar to all other dual-control organisations which Hitler in his inherent supreme paranoia wanted to be: fighting amongst each other.
The fact of German V-men has been a myth. Even in 1939, Gestapo employed only about 60-90 informers in Saar-Brucken area.
Iam not justifying Gestapo or Hitler's atrocities.
Am just stating facts: yes in wartime people do get shot for stealing maps. The same way iraqis are "collaterally killed" by US troops.
What Britain is doing is very very frightful. This kind of ALL-Seeing information falling into the hands of a paranoid like Hitler is enough to throw the country into chaos and war easily.
Plus why can't the government become more transparent? They seek to x-ray me, but stall investigations into their own incompetency or outright bribery allegations.
How come the State is more important than me? Am the State, and this is a Government for the people.
In every way this ruling is more dangerous.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
When you said you wanted to be like the USA, we didn't think you would take the worst parts!
What the hell is going on in the UK? I mean, shit, the U.S. is bad, but at least we have the EFF and the ACLU to slow this stuff down.
This is fucked up. UK citizens, how do we help? I mean, shit, if it happens in the UK, it will probably come to the U.S. (and vice versa)
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.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
Am sorry for misunderstanding what you said earlier.
But tell me, how far is it going from this draconian law to becoming a Gestapo state?
Fifty years ago such laws would be have been shouted down by the press and people, not to mention the government itself, but today everyone is silent.
Plus, today if am jailed for forgetting an encryption key, tomorrow my neighbors may be jailed for not telling the government i encrypt my disks!
Freedom is a fragile delicate flower. Once lost, regaining it is a lost cause.
The more we allow government into our private lives, the more we will be pushed out of our homes.
Soon, the schools will be teaching that spying on parents for seditious thoughts is a necessity for security. They will also teach that Security over Freedom is more preferable and that in order to prevent terrorists it is necessary to spy on everyone's bedroom activities since if terrorists can be stopped from being conceived, then the State has ensured security for all.
Tell me where will it stop.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Not that I agree with the governments intentions, but the measure that is proposed intends to collect data about communications, not the content.
That is the destination of every email, phone call and start and end time of every session with an ISP will be logged.
Some of this is required due to EU law, but other measure are UK only.
See the Register story or the actual consultation doc.
A surveillance program (not quite the same as the UK one, but still) was recently fought back here in Sweden. It was mainly a protest led by bloggers, both liberals and leftists, who forced the government into an embarassing crisis as big media and people in general noticed what was happening. The government finally was forced to make big changes, and more importantly, they were taught an important lesson. Perhaps now they fear us, the people, a little bit.
It is possible to fight someone like this. So why aren't people doing just that in the UK? Take it to the blogosphere and the streets. If you don't protest loudly, I'm sorry to say you deserve what you get.
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.
UK:
Does the proposal apply only to emails send from eu/uk based ((web)email)providers? Or any emails travelling through their networks?
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.]
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
With the current value of our dollar, they won't care to lose your patronage. :(
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I've said it before and I'll say it again: At least they're honest about it. If you don't think the US government already does the same thing, you're deluding yourself. They just don't tell us about it.
Hopefully we got over that blowing up people from another religious viewpoint so our people from the "true religion" can run the country stuff years ago.
Actually, not that long ago in Northern Ireland but thankfully it seems to be stopping.
That was after all the reason Guy Fawkes and his friends went to blow up Parliament and the King - not because they wanted an anarchist freestate, or a republic, but because they wanted the protestant king and parliament out and replaced with their chosen catholic king and parliament.
...free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Commissioner Pravin Lal
"U.N. Declaration of Rights"
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)