Slashdot Mirror
UK Outlines Plan For Internet Black Boxes
RobotsDinner writes "In what sounds like a dystopian sci-fi plot, the Home Office has made public plans to outfit the country's Internet with upstream data recorders to log pretty much everything that passes through. 'Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database. The vision was outlined at a meeting between officials from the Home Office and Internet Service Providers earlier this week.'"
fuck this police state
If they store all the raw data, they'll be downloading movies, music etc. Then they'll have to sue themselves... out of existence!
The sooner we get to vote these clowns out, the better. Thr trouble is, the electorate have very short memories and either don't care about or don't remember such things when they get to vote. Mix in sundry wars, the collapse of banking, big brother mentality, greed etc etc and you have no good reason to let them stay BUT suddenly all the press report people rate Gordon Brown as our best hope to get out the financial state we're in. Ermm... who was in charge when the mess happened huh?
Last night on the radio there was a scary report on the UK radio where there has just been a Scottish by-election and they asked people why they voted the way they did and most camed out with excuses like 'my dad always voted for them', 'my wife told me to', 'they were the best of a bad bunch' etc.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Fully encrypted internet coming in 3, 2, 1 ...
Threat escalation in a system whose knowledge limit gives the advantage to your opponent is dumb to the point of retardation.
Our sons will be amazed that once we used a non ecrypted web where anyone could read our personal messages.
Seriously what use is this except to use as evidence for people you wish to persecute IF they happen to be doing anything dodgy online? Who's going to spend the time and money tracking down every 12 year old that downloads a movie or says the word "shit" on a public forum? What the fuck is wrong with these people, that they spend money on this? It doesn't even make sense if you do want a police state because there is always a way around this kind of thing and it's about as cost effective as a high class hooker. It means the people coming up with this aren't just evil: They're so evil they make cartoon and joke character the likes of Dr. Evil look sane. Governments around the world have seriously lost the plot.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Why do I get a sinking feeling whenever I hear the words 'government' and 'database' in the same sentence? It's made much, much worse when the words 'giant' and 'central' are between the two.
These clowns wouldn't be able to keep the data secure anyway, so soon enough any half-witted criminal will be able to do whatever they want with our connection logs.
It's enough to make you vote Tory. Ugh.
£10 to the first person to hack one and switch it off! (alternativly a hammer might do but i think they will forsee that)
Personally i think this will be a massive invasion of privicy and a security risk. How many people will want to shop online if they know all their details of what they order and where is going to be stored for any dirty hacker to find!
raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database
... and then left on a bus.
Anyone up for bouncing empty packets around?
Time to buy stocks in the major SAN/disk-companies!
Also reminds me of the Swedish internet snooping laws...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law
English is not my first language, so cut me some slack -: Om du kan lasa det har sa kan du Svenska
So I assume the UK Government wants to store a mirror of the content on piratebay?
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
But I've got a better plan. How about I give you the finger, and you give us our country back.
+10 script kiddie points for every black box 0wn3d... They'll not last 10 minutes!
These guys seem to offer a public VPN service - anyone got any experience, or know of something on a lower latency path from UK? (e.g. VPN servers situated in mainland Europe).
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
*sigh*, just another sign of how ridiculous this country is right now. I'm going to be voting for the conservatives because the labour party is too right wing...
It's a shame our three party system is currently right wing, more right wing, and retards. (I'm a liberal at heart, but christ, have you seent the libdems policies?)
Do I need a larger hard drive?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Reverse spam (reason):
As the cost of listening in on private communication is getting lowerer, we are seeing an effect similar to what we saw when mass-communication was made simple and cheap by email. The marginal cost of listening in on you as well, is close to zero, just as the cost of sending an additional email is close to zero for a spammer who has already sent a large amount of spam.
When that cost is sufficiently low, government has no reason to abstain from listening in. After all, if you look at every individual, you are bound to cover every criminal/hindu/terrorist/addict/pedofile/political opponent/whatever voter negative phrase.
We need to raise that cost in terms of the labour required. If they can not automate it, they will be forced to focus on the real enemies.
She made the willows dance
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has hailed spectacular, record-breaking public demand for identity cards and will allow people to pre-register within the next few months.
"I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they have nothing to hide and want me personally to have every detail of their lives and pressing ten-pound notes into my hands for their very own precious pink and blue card," she said, taking another hit of her pipe.
The first biometric cards are being issued this month to foreigners who can be forced into it. They will be issued to young people on a voluntary basis from 2010, per every teenager's dream of having their every movement tracked.
People applying for cards and passports from 2012 will have to provide fingerprints, photographs and a signature, which Ms Smith believes will create a market worth about £200m a year by the "mended windows" theory of economics. "It takes money that was being wasted on food and rent and puts it into circulation for the betterment of the whole economy, particularly our dear friends at EDS Capita Goatse."
The Home Office is talking to retailers and the Post Office about setting up booths to gather biometric data. "We're sure everyone would be happy with having their fingerprints taken at Tesco when they get their shopping."
In her speech, Ms Smith rejected claims handing enrolment over to private firms would compromise security. "We're introducing new certification authorities and so forth, which will mean that masses of data never leaves our offices and the BNP never gets a database of every immigrant in the country or anything like that."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Can we just modify the bittorrent protocol so that port 80 is fine and each packet starts with an GET /$RANDOM\n HOST $RANDOM?
Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I can think of no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Write a script to do the following:
Search for a common word on google (eg "the"). Then write a bot to visit every link in turn, and every link referenced by those pages (ie recurse to a depth of 2).
Do this for the forst 100,000 links from google.
Comapred to huge torrents, etc this probably won't take up much of your monthly quota if you have one, but it'll really fuck up their stats. If everyone did it, their stupid idea would become as worthless to them as it ought to be.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
And here we were joking about how retarded the idea of filtering all traffic in Australia was.
Not only do they intent to capture every packet, but they also intent to store them and analyze them off-line.
Especially considering the growth of bandwidth usage the past couple of years, this is nothing short of an absurd idea.
I'm increasingly amazed (well, until my amaz-o-meter reached $FF a while back) at the Orwellian policies being established in the home of Orwell. I mean, from traffic cameras to tracking of people in public places, to storing of all types of personal information and communication -- even the Stazi would be impressed.
I haven't been to the UK in several years. Could someone explain how these projects have any kind of public support at all? Even in the US -- hardly a standard-bearer for liberal thought -- the UK proposals would produce an uproar.
What is the underlying sentiment of the people that continues to produce these ideas?
I am a registered voter in M.P. and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's constituency. I just hope I can persuade enough other voters to vote for someone else at the next election.
My theory is the big IT contractors that work for the Government have probably pursuaded ministers that this is a good thing.
These IT contractors are mainly responsible for computerising the various departments within the Government (e.g. the NHS, "chipped" passports and implementing National ID Cards). These systems have cost the tax payer millions and millions of pounds and two of these are complete. There are probably just a handful of these companies (and close may have ties to the established "old boys" network) working for the Government and have shareholders(some are also Government ministers) to answer to.
This has been a major cash cow for these companies and now they need to persuade the Government to spend even more money to keep them afloat. As you can imagine the Government is a *huge* client to have on your order books, the last thing you want as a contractor is to lose your client - your survival may depend on it.
The contractor and Government minister(probably a shareholder) will influence Government policy and departments (e.g. the police think monitoring the internet is a "great" idea) to ensure this cash cow is alive and kicking and everybody "wins".
The police get a "mine" of "evidence" to "convict criminals", the Government can justify thier existance, the minister shares gain value (and maybe get a promotion), the contracter gets paid and of course the Government patronisingly "pats us on the head" and tell us they are looking after our best interests.
The whole thing stinks and will get worse while our Labour "Government" is in power.
FTA:
'One delegate at the meeting told the Independent: "They said they only wanted to return to a position they were in before the emergence of internet communication, when they were able to monitor all correspondence with a police suspect. '
Oh, so that's all right then.
Soon, they'll want to re-introduce national identity cards...oh wait.
Then what? Ration books? National Service (Conscription)?
I can hear sirens outside. Someone just knocked at the door I'll be back in a......
They publish this sort of rubbish all the time. The standard spin for the paper is that the government wants to know everything and how life would all be much better if only multinational corporations were able to store data about us.
While it's possible that the UK government may be trying to do something stupid and excessive, a story in the telegraph is neither evidence for or against this fact.
im suddenly in the market for one.
Remember to vote Lib Dem, SNP, Plaid Cymru, etc in the upcoming general election. Anyone but Labour or Conservative.
Isn't this story wildly inaccurate, at least according to The Register?
What about our daughters, you insensitive clod!
All rites reversed 2010
Excellent! Now we can find out what happened just before a major internet crash! It's not pretty when servers come crashing down with hundreds of websites in them. Now we have at least a chance to recover the black box and find out.
There was a Question Time (BBC programme where people get to question the political parties) where one of the party members asked Jeff Hoon (the transport secretary) "how far is the government willing to go undermine civil liberties to monitor extremists?".
His answer? "To stop terrorists killing people in our society quite a long way, actually." Which sent a chill down my spine.
It also didn't help by the fact that he was deliberately trying to confuse the audience into thinking that the police getting a court order to monitor someone's internet traffic was the same as continually monitoring everyone's internet traffic in case a court order is sought. Even though several people attempted to correct him.
You can see it on iPlayer here. Start at about 40 minutes in.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
If this crazy scheme ever goes ahead wouldn't tor still allow us privacy (until the make such applications illegal ...)
Although the blackbox would contain details of us using tor they wouldn't be able to see what we were doing with it - right ?
If that fails we should group together and start physically attacking the locations which host these databases (my dream is to see the citizens of the UK rise up with axes and start to attack the cctv/bb infrastructure)
cheers
Boris Johnson has stopped the wastage of cash on extending the London car tax zone westwards. The NHS project is being scaled back. People are beginning to believe that PCSOs on the beat are far more effective at crime prevention than CCTV systems or policemen in cars. These people are desperate to keep their revenue streams intact. They need to sell a vast scheme to the UK Government, and what better than to prey on the control freakery and insecurity of Labour, a government so incompetent that it has illegal immigrants working in the department that is supposed to prevent illegal immigration.
Meanwhile we have massive infrastructural problems in IT because of a lack of people to carry out necessary on-the-ground projects. Dismantling these vast Government willy-waggling programmes and reallocating skilled staff to fixing the IT problems in local and national government all over the country would be a huge benefit - but it would mean dismantling departments, and it would mean overpaid business development managers getting the push and real IT implementers getting more visibility. And we don't want that, do we?
Personally, I think ALL responsibility for Government IT should be taken away from people like Smith, who should revert to her proper job as an inner city nightclub bouncer, and be handed over to a department staffed by people who would not merely be forbidden to accept any gifts or trips from large IT companies, but would have to agree never to work for an IT company with a turnover in excess of, say, 500 million Euros after leaving Government. There is simply no other way to prevent corruption.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Hadrians Firewall??? Getting more like China over hear everyday :(
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
First, do you mean that everybody with half a brain doesn't already work under the assumption that, if they wanted to, the UK government (or indeed any government) can *already* do this, or *are* already doing this? If in doubt assume the worst. The Internet is an insecure channel, which is why things like SSH and SSL exist. You *know* that your ISP can / will monitor the basic contents of your connection (just ask the record companies, or Phorm). At any point, a court could order surveillance of your Internet connection remotely without your knowledge. Therefore the *only* sensible thing to do is to treat your Internet connection as the insecure channel that it is.
Secondly, I don't believe for a second that there's enough processing power anywhere to do anything useful with this amount of data or intercept anything more than a specific customer or two. The infrastructure required to pipe entire ISP's worth of data to "some secret datacentre" is something that would not go unnoticed, would raise an awful lot of eyebrows and technical problems, not to mention a technical nightmare for ISP's and governments alike. They can't get every doctor's surgery online, for God's sake, after decades of work and that's making them an international embarassment and costing *billions*.
If the plans go through and the equipment is installed, there's no practical way it can "monitor" everything simultaneously for those magic words, and doing it via protocol/plaintext analysis on a CPU inside an ISP is a damn sight easier than that mythical American data centre that recognises multilingual speech in every phone conversation taking place across the country (Yeah, right, I can't even get ViaVoice or the automated bank systems to recognise a number correctly three times out of ten in English from a limited vocabulary on a perfectly clear, high-quality microphone, with oodles of processing power behind it).
What this is, is a filter. It would allow the government to implement a wiretap quickly once they had a suspect, so that they can issue a command that would send a BGP request or similar, which the ISP would be required to honour, which would allow them to intercept the traffic to a particular IP that they already suspect. It might even have a decent amount of processing power on the ISP side so that the full IP contents don't have to be re-transmitted over the "super-secret-network" to a mainframe for analysis.
The problem is, for anything practical, you have to then bring that evidence to court and show that you were entitled to that information in the first place (i.e. you had a *prior* court warrant to allow you to do so) or it just gets thrown straight back out, if not in the UK, then in the appeal to the EU court (who are no friends of the UK when it comes to legal decisions), etc.
I can tap your Internet illicitly, or put an tap on your keyboard, or steal your machine and find evidence that you committed a murder, or a terrorist act, or a copyright infringement - it *isn't* necessarily true that such evidence is admissable in court. In fact, it's more likely to *jeopardise* a case against you, even if I'm a policeman, because it was collected by illegal means which means it is possible that an order is given that it *must* be disregarded and cannot be brought up ever again in any court. So my hard work to prove you are a terrorist may actually end up making you a free man *forever* from anything in that confession. The only way to make sure it's admissable is to ask permission from the court *first* (i.e. get a warrant, based on your suspicions), in which case you could get all the information you wanted anyway. You can think about "super-secret" organisations not limited by such things all you want - the fact is that if they exist, they already have all the capabilities they ever need without such assistance.
If the plans go through, it's just how it works now, only speeded up a bit. The legal ramifications alone of any other method would have lawyers begging to take cases on.
I'm interested in hearing why you believe that voting Conservative is equivalent to voting Labour when it comes to these kinds of matters? It was after all a Conservative Minister who stood down and held a by election on a ticket against the attacks on freedom by Labour. The Liberals have shown themselves to be completely lacking in any of the qualities required to function well as a Government, with two car crash like leadership elections and a complete about turn in their tax policy. I genuinely haven't decided how I will vote at the next election, and although it is likely to be Conservatives I will openly admit it is largely because I don't like the alternatives. Chances are I will vote tactically to maximise the chances of a Conservative Goverment without sufficient margin to pass Bills without the support of either the Liberals or Labour.
...where the government distrusts its citizens and snoops upon them, and citizens take steps to protect themselves from the government, and the government gets more power to snoop more intrusively, and so on ad absurdum.
As we have seen, massive data collection is useless without the wit to mine that data (as per 9/11). This will not prevent another 9/11, this will merely give little men power too big for them. And we are simply not doing enough to stop this.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
I'm sure the UK gov is pretty much just trying their best to copy George Orwell's Big Brother from the book 1984.
The electorate don't have the vote when it comes to policy or legislation. That's where the sleight of hand comes in.
You only get to vote for a "representative" ( misnomer if ever there was one ) who then proceeds to represent the interests of him/herself.
The only way you can affect these things is either by mounting a revolution ( not likely to work ) or joining a political party and getting direct influence on policy ( not easy, but the only alternative ). All the rest is just whining and moaning, wasted words and self delusion.
It probably should read more like "Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database. It will subsequently be copied onto laptops, USB flash drives, portable hard drives and DVDs. Which will be left in random locations, including pub car parks, petrol stations, trains and taxis."
Your only other option is the Conservatives, who would consider this measure as not going far enough and as for "sundry wars, the collapse of banking, big brother mentality, greed etc etc" - multiply by 2.
I suppose you could always vote Libdem - or your could just not vote (same thing, I guess).
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: democracy just doesn't work.
I do think it's a bit naive to blame politicians for the current economic mess, as if they were deliberately masterminding the whole thing on their own. Politicians are not driven by the good of the nation, they are driven by votes pure and simple - and it's because of our stupidity not theirs that we end up in the situations that we do.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
We need software which sends trigger words between peers, 24/7/365.
No sig today...
Great, so when everybody votes for a 3rd party with no hope of getting elected (at least not in England) and we end up with gordon the clown again due to people screwing around, you'll be happy?
Seriously, show some disdain yes but please don't go so far to accidentally get that idiot re-elected.
Oh, and the lib dems are a party so schizophrenic that voting for them in a general election is just plain silly.
Personally, I'll be voting either SNP or Green in the upcoming General.
Just depends on who I like better having had a proper chance to scrutinize their respective policies.
Great logic there. Everyone votes for someone other than Labour, so Lavour get back in? WTF? Whom would you rather have in power? The Tories? Get to fuck. I'm not letting those Smithite screw-ups run my affairs ever again. Compaired to their 18 years of fuckups, Labour aren't too bad. At least they managed to get working social reforms in place (and don't give me any of your Daily Mail anecdotal bullshit about scallies and gun crime).
"Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?"
why the UK government wouldn't condemn illegal Phorm trials.
The Conservatives have been responsible for numerous restrictions being placed on the activities of private individuals that affect no-one other than the individuals concerned throughout the 80s and 90s.
They are still the same party, even if there is a little bit of fresh blood mixed in there.
In a similar vein to Labour since '97, they have done some good, but the good comes with the bad, and quite frankly, I could really do without the bad.
"Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?"
If you oppose these plans, then do something about it. You could do worse than by visiting the No2ID cards website: http://www.no2id.net/ But, you can be even more productive and write to your MP to complain about this. Here's how you can contact your local MP: http://www.writetothem.com/ And don't forget to sign the petition opposing the governments plans to introduce an internet monitoring database: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/privacy-matters/
Oh, and the lib dems are a party so schizophrenic that voting for them in a general election is just plain silly.
And all the other political parties AREN'T schizophrenic? That's practically the definition of a political party, say one thing and do another.
It's hateful to hear you won't be voting for a party (even if you agree with their policies) because you think they are 'silly'.
Being as the Lib Dem's have never been in power themselves (!) and the policies which are important to me are ones they agree with, I'll be voting for them.
Posting anonymously (over an SSH proxy too) so Labour can't see what I'll be voting for in the next election and try to change my mind or the result (again).
Posting anonymously (over an SSH proxy too) so Labour can't see what I'll be voting for in the next election and try to change my mind or the result (again).
Whoops!
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
so much for posting anonymously... fucksocks!
hang on... there's a large van outside and someone at the door... brb.
The secret police always have the best porn!
"I'm so mad at this tax increase for this stupid new internet monitoring system, I want to bomb 11 Downing Street tomorrow at 9 AM".
Whilst Americans are celebrating the voting in of a (supposedly) more humane and liberal President, we are continuing our hunched shuffle towards a police state. As much as the Tories complain about this, they would do the exact same if they were in power and not in opposition. Both parties have roughly equivalent agendas. They oppose these agendas when they are in opposition in order to preserve the facade of democracy, and promote them when in power. I am 27 and have never known a change in government.
Don't pin your hopes on the Lib Dems either. The only way they will get into power is by becoming the same as the ruling parties, as Labour did in the 80s and 90s.
Our democracy is a sham, our freedom is moribund. The British public is so indoctrinated and obedient they will continue to vote for carbon copies of the exact same politicians from now until eternity. The worst thing is, our country deserves no better. The racist, petty minded, selfish bean counters that populate this island have done nothing to earn freedom. I'm no better for staying.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
There was a by-election yesterday. The Labour candidate won, unfortunately.
- I would not trust anything the Tory-graph reported :-)
- But mainly I do not trust any *news* website that puts an advert for "Gilly_870 ..." in it's sidebar !!
Outgoing, adventurous, positive, funny, and mischievous. I am a very passionate woman, and expect to receive from life what I put into it.
Routing my non encrypted data through an host that is probably listening to my data stream.. Seems like a wonderful idea..
Oh wait...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Even the last two directors of our security service say the Government is way over the top. But (see posts below) the paranoia is of huge benefit to the large,foreign IT firms who want to put this stuff in and are worried about their gravy train of huge, over-budget projects coming to a stop in the recession. The opportunity to create huge server farms, cable backbones and data mining operations out of taxpayer money must look like take-candy-off-a-rich-baby time, and with no risk its effectiveness will be called into question. If as we susopect the terrorist threat is minute and under control, they will not have to worry too much about the effectiveness of the system. Allow me to sell you my tiger repellent spray for use in Iceland.
(You may want to discount some of my opinion because I work for a consultancy that aims to do - guess what? -reduce IT costs.)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
i'll see your conspiracy theory and raise you.
If the government was really as evil as everyone thinks then it would make more sense for them to already have this system in place waaaaay before ever mentioning it to the public. Perhaps they have had it up for long enough to get some good dirt on a lot of trouble-makers so now they are saying they are gonna go it as a way of retroactive immunity.
With the system now out in the open they can now bring up what they have found from this program and bring the hammer down while still appearing to play within the rules.
btw, tin foil is for pussies. i gave myself a severe head trauma so I could get a metal plate put in my head and not look suspicious.
Similarly, the cost to store and archive this will be immense. Especially the physical space to contain all those disk drives.
In turn that will require a substantial manpower to maintain the installation. Do the salesmen who are persuading the civil servants to advise the ministers to do such things actually realise the implications (other than commission beyond their dreams of avarice)
So you don't remember the 1980's then?
I mean, the people there railed about Bush doing his USA PATRIOT and wiretaps, and immediately turn around and enact successive governments that would make the Stazi -blush-. Cameras everywhere, universal internet monitoring. Where is the England that gave us John Lennon?
This is my sig.
"Isn't a Labour government grand?"
This cartoon in the independent, sums up why we are heading into a total Big Brother police state.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/the-daily-cartoon-760940.html?ino=9
This party isn't really labour. Labour was started to help the people. This lot are only interested in helping the rich. This Labour government has become a bunch of arragant, closeminded, greedy, self-righteous, control freaks, pulling the whole UK into their personal police state hell and no one can tell them anything, otherwise they get labelled opposition (or worse) and then simply ignored.
Jacqui Smith MP, is one of the worst of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqui_Smith "As the UK Home Secretary, she has been noted for advocating strongly authoritarian policies."
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
OK lets do the maths...
Say 15E6 machines connected to the internet at any one time in the UK. Figure plucked from the air. Now assume each message is only 256 bytes large and 1 message a second 24/7.
That's 3.32E14 bytes or 33TB every day.
Now if someone writes a SETI type program that randomly connects to web sites (in the background) at a rate of 1 per second... hmmm...
I've often thought about this, especially as most of my friends seem to use Facebook and I am certain Facebook would hand over any private data to any government agency that asked.
Instead of joining in the normal way, I would design a "$myname" app for Facebook for my friends who want to stay in touch. That app would have the functionality my profile would normally have, but would be encrypted and all the data would be off Facebook's servers.
Just a thought I've been mulling over recently, especially with the data mining of so many countries lately.
Unity in Diversity
According to the latest Netcraft data, to archive the internet you need 534,832 CDs. If you can go without porn, you can make do with about seven.
Just run a spider style of program that send out millions of upstream connections per day - you don't even need to wait for downstream content, just send upstream requests - let them wade through THAT at their expense. It does say that it records website 'visits', not the content transferred right? ;)
Could someone explain how these projects have any kind of public support at all?
Why would they need it?
Sad but true...
When do we start fighting back against these people, bottom line, its a few individuals in power that want this. How do we start fighting back, when? When do we tell them to F*ck off and we dont want this and we want them to sit on their thumb and spin.
Screw this police state bullsh*t. I say no. If we all say no, then surely we can tell them to go F*ck themselves. I.e. put these plans of theirs in the incinerator, then kick them out of office.
Oh, so this is the DBA job for the multi-petabyte DB? Too bad the interviewer had a "jolly good time" keeping the gun pointed at my head....
Have they an idea of the amount of data to fit in each box and, finally, into the central database?
This will ensure the thing won't ever happen!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Dear hot women of the UK,
If you need to flee the country for the sake of your personal freedoms, my bed across the Ocean welcomes all as a safe haven.
Wow! Someone found a way to build the biggest ever porn database in a really short time...
I think (tin foil hat securely on) that it is too late, these "black boxes" are already upstream and the powers-that-be are just floating the idea of public knowledge of these black boxes. Now that they know the reaction is highly negative, some under-secretary somewhere can be punished for thinking that public knowledge would be possible, and the government can use this distraction to get on with other more nefarious data monitoring and mining.
I continue to think that I am being monitored, and as long as I conduct myself accordingly that I will have nothing to fear except the continued erosion of my privacy and the potential eventuality that failure to comply with group-think will land me in trouble.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
I'd say that was fortunate - better a Labour candidate than another loony from the even more self interested, hateful and divisive Scottish National Party (who were the primary competition for that seat).
The amount of parochial anti-English bullshit in Scotland today is an absolute ******* embarrassment - and the SNP are largely responsible for stirring up the usual suspects, although tiny minded hateful bigots have never been in short supply.
I live in the U.S. and will provide U.K. citizens with custom VPN configurations at reasonable cost (especially considering the sorry state of the U.S. dollar).
Sounds like you're are going to need it, mate.
Accounts can be had from servers in either the U.S. or the Netherlands, depending on your needs.
admin@amigahost.com
The political system in the UK is broken, there is no choice, there are two main parties, neither of which are interested in the country or the population.
As unrepresentative as our first-past-the-post system can be, your vote for a smaller party can still count for something here (unlike places like the US, which really does seem to be a 99.9% two-party system). The whole "I live in a safe seat, my vote doesn't count" argument is bunk.
For one thing, there is no such thing as a safe seat: where I live, the Labour MP had a very strong margin, but lost most of her majority the following time after stabbing a significant chunk of her electorate in the back, and then got removed by a huge margin the time after that. She was not removed by a Tory, either. There are several parties in the UK with a surprisingly large amount of popular support for the relatively few seats where they come first: the Lib Dems, Scottish National Party, etc. Sometimes, first-past-the-post does work in their favour, because a relatively small swing away from one of the larger parties might be all it takes to change the colour of a seat in Parliament.
This is because you don't get any roll over from votes at the past election. Everyone starts from zero, every time. Sure, the incumbent often attracts some additional weight simply by being the incumbent, but that only counts if their supporters show up and vote. (On this basis, I consider that political parties that send around election advertising claiming that "Only X and Y parties can win this seat!" should be held accountable for making a false claim under the misleading advertising rules just as anyone else would be.)
One need only look at the US election results to see how unrealistic this "safe" idea is: how many "safe" states changed colour (color? ;-)) earlier this week, after many years of voting the other way?
The sad thing is that people like you, who don't like status quo but refuse to vote to change it, are the reason why the "safe seat" myths persist. For noble reasons, you are doing exactly the wrong thing. Instead, may I suggest that you at least show up on election day and spoil your ballot if you really see no-one you wish to vote for? This prevents claptrap about how the government of the day has the implicit support of anyone who didn't show up and the like, and makes it very clear to potential future candidates that there was someone willing to cast a vote who found no-one to represent their views this time.
I generally do vote for someone in any major election, but for the locals there are sometimes only a few candidates who aren't as strongly aligned with their given party's principles as candidates for the major positions (primarily MPs in this country). In these cases, I have sometimes disagreed strongly enough with the position of each candidate that I would not vote for any of them, but I still showed up, and wrote a suitable one-liner across my ballot expressing my displeasure and the fact that someone could have had this vote, which I know party reps at the counting will have seen.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Encrypt everything, move on, keep computers away from dullards in government, they do not and will never understand computers (its just a big phone witha typewriter isnt it??) - twats.
LOL I guess Orwell vision is coming to reality..ironically, '1984' happens in London.
Does it run Linux?
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
I love Big Brother.
We're at war with Eastasia, you know. They raised the weekly chocolate ration to 15 grams this week. That's a doubleplusgood thing you know.
Excuse me comrade, I need to go: it's time for the two-minute hate!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
How is that ironic? Blair (Orwell's real name) was English after all.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Or some people read it like that?
But the people can dismantle all that. They pay for it, after all, and it's supposed to be a democracy.
Mod parents up! *sigh* where are my modpoints when I truly need them?
The tsunami of data generated on any backbone should easily overwhelm any possible system long before it's realized you can't really data mine this mother lode.
But since they'll try anyway it might be time to load up on Seagate and Western Digital stock while the market is down.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Back when I was boring my friends with mention of the UKs plans to store all e-mails (precursors to the current black box route) one of my friends pointed out that not even the Chinese Communist party has considered doing that. They have their filters and so on but they really are one step behind the Brits when it comes to spying on their own people. And, as she readily pointed out the Chinese people would be pissed off by it. I guess the Brits are more cowed.
There is a lot of anger in this discussion... but I think it's good to express our anger but it would be better to think about solution. What can we do to defend our privacy? It is not just UK - don't forget about Sweden, Finland, Australia... and these are only the countries that made their plans public... how many countries are there spying on us without us knowing about it? And you all know how internet works... the fact that UK is is going to spy on their traffic does not mean that only UK residents will be affected... you never know which server is where and what way your packets go... I think it's time to make sure that we all are NOT going to live in surveillance society. We have to assume that majority of people don't care about privacy and consequences of its loss until it's too late... and they are not going to do too much about protecting it... so the solution should be simple, easy to use... I know, we have VPNs and stuff... but that is not enough... it has to be something that could be easily adopted for all kinds of traffic. It should be something that is not easy to ban without loosing too much of benefits... so much that if any country decides to ban it it would mean significant loss in comparison to free countries - something like the technology that can make encryption so easy to use that many important web apps in any free country could by connected only thru encrypted connection protecting privacy of it's users... we have to use the fact that no country can control the whole internet. What else would this thing need to be? How could it work? What do we have to do to protect ourselves as world internet community? What do you think about proposals like IPETEE (http://newteevee.com/2008/07/09/the-pirate-bay-wants-to-encrypt-the-entire-internet/)?
So the british security services have more money to spend then england itself earns? That is fantastic!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
His answer? "To stop terrorists killing people in our society quite a long way, actually." Which sent a chill down my spine.
The war in Iraq has made Britain a tempting target for Islamic extremism, but funnily enough Geoff Hoon strongly supports the Iraq War.
When it comes to preventing terrorism, it seems Mr. Hoon rates bombing Iraqis more important than maintaining British civil liberties.
This sounds like a new backup system.
1. Put a laptop in the UK that deletes every file you upload after a 5 min delay.
2. Upload all info you want backed up. The government mirrors it, but doesn't delete it.
To recover you sue the UK in a court case, get copies of your data, then drop the case. Kinda expensive with the lawyer time, but for a unlimited backup it probably isn't too bad.
> It would be if we had a Labour government, but this is NooLabour
This chart nicely summarises the drift of the Labour Party to the authoritarian right:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/images/enPartiesTime.gif
So essentially we now have a replica of the US system of two right-wing parties distinct only in the minds of their supporters.
Those working in the public trust should familiarize themselves with proper responses to people who would willingly surrender their privacy because they think they've got nothing to hide. I found the following paper quite helpful:
"I've Got Nothing to Hide" and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy, by Daniel Solove.
Britain is the new USA.
But... the future refused to change.
As a test to show how good the Black Box system is, let's see how long it takes for my house to be raided by the secret service.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
Who comes up with these ideas? These schemes keep emerging from the government whoever the politicians are. I've said before that sometimes I feel the Stasi came over here to the UK after the fall of the DDR, and they were not politicians, they were appartchiks. I doubt that kicking out this adminstration change anything? A total cull of parts of the Home Office and Justice departments seems to be what is needed.
So how does that affect your ping times?
From a 2006 interview with Gilliam. "The 65-year-old native of Minnesota who emigrated to England in the 1960s and helped form the legendary comedy group Monty Python, held dual citizenship for three decades. (He married a British citizen and has three children.) This past year, though, he renounced his U.S. citizenship. He sees the current political scene in America â" and its extension into the world â" to be scarily similar to the Orwellian nightmare of his cult film."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/10/06/entertainment/main2071659.shtml
Good move, Terry! Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. He wanted change, and to paraphase Mencken, he's going to get it good and hard.
Make your choice, Project Venus or 1984?
Perhaps we should try electing people with above room temp IQs. Anyone think that will work?
Think Deeply.
There actually *IS* a difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, but it seems to be basically only that the Democrats want people to like them, while the Republicans want selected rich people to like them. This means that the Democrats use more camouflage, and proceed less abusively (unless they can come up with an acceptable excuse)...but they never seem to roll back the abuses that have been previously begun.
It's really too bad that revolutions never seem to improve things either.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
this must be a feature of this new obama presidency. yeah, that's it, a feature!
Labour is the same as the Tories.
Democrats are the same as Republicans.
You people never learn, do you?
You just keep voting them in, year in and year out.
Someone once pointed out that if you put cheese in a maze, mice will navigate that maze until they find the cheese. But if you take the cheese out, eventually the mice will stop trying.
But with humans, once they think the cheese is in there, they'll keep navigating that maze no matter how many times they never find the cheese. Because they "know" the cheese is there.
Same thing with the state - people just keep on believing that if they just had the "right" people in the government, everything will magically work out just fine.
Humans vs robots - as Dr. Tim used to say, anyone who doesn't realize that they're 99.95 percent robotic is too stupid to talk to.
You think Obama is going to make a difference?
Making Excuses for Obama
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13698
The Limits of Change
What to expect from the Obama administration on the foreign policy front
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13709
Forget the Honeymoon
Getting down to bizness with Obama
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13728
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
There are actually vaild reason why Americans are so fiercely protective of the right to bare arms. This is a big one.
Republicans do in fact slow down government intrusions. At least *some* of them try. And they have this tendency to spy on enemies, or at least foreigners. Democrats promote "looking inward". What exactly do you think they mean by that one ?
Obama with a democrat congress will "fix" those republican oversights, not looking inward enough. In fact Obama's claiming now there will be compulsary government service for everyone :
http://change.gov/americaserves/
But don't worry : you won't be forced into the military. Well it'll be sort of like military, compulsory, orders, hierarchy, etc. but the commander will be different. Say who do we know is a "community organiser" ?
BTW: any news on when my $5000 check comes in, Obama ?
when, in a public uproar, all the CCTV, internet tapping etc is removed, that crime goes up, because people feel they can get away with it, at least for a while? and that is then used as an excuse for them to be reinstalled.
Horrible.
What's worse, quite a lot of the spooks can no longer think that far either and are no longer separated enough from political control and prosecutorial action. Result: artefacts of synthesis and interpretation likely to be taken as truth, because they come out of the magic fusion machine. Damning 'evidence' available against anyone suspected. Similar 'evidence' against those above suspicion never examined. Confirmation bias feedback.