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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.'"
As it stands, they aren't going to store the raw data - just information on the endpoints.
This in itself is disturbing, since as Bruce Schneier points out, data mining of this sort is inherently flawed.
It strikes me that this is politically driven - i.e. that GCHQ has an ample supply of mathematicians who can see that this is useless, but that the idiocracy that is Neues Arbeit still believes the bullshit that their highly paid, poorly educated advisors spew out.
Trouble is, the idiots won't listen to sense, so we'll have to wait until the next election to vote in another lot of idiots who may or may not be as stupid as this lot.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
I thought we were already doing this and the listening post is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCHQ_CSO_Morwenstow
Nu Labour just want legalize the process so that local government can have access to the data - so they can bust people downloading porn or visiting political web sites they don't like.
Tor might be helful here...
Isn't this story wildly inaccurate, at least according to The Register?
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. Politicians are interested in their own careers, money and power, and therefore courting the media, politics is now all about advertising. I now refuse to vote, in someway I feel that voting legitimizes a completely broken system. Short of full scale anarchy I don't see how you fix the political system in the UK.
Human societies progress despite the very best efforts of politicians.
Bitter and twisted, DON'T ever FORGET the TWISTED
Actually Outlook, by default, when receiving and sending, attempts to negotiate secure channels. You can override it to choose SSL, TLS or none; but the default is "auto".
Thatcher did a great job, considering she spent most of her time fixing Labour's screwups (nationalisation .. eugh..)
They throw the letter in the bin, and continue on their merry way.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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."