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UK Outlines Plan For Internet Black Boxes

Posted by timothy on from the but-don't-panic-they'll-say-don't-panic-on-them dept.

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.'"

5 of 419 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Win win situation by aproposofwhat · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  2. Re:Good news by fluch · · Score: 4, Informative

    Tor might be helful here...

  3. Erm... by robajob · · Score: 5, Informative

    Isn't this story wildly inaccurate, at least according to The Register?

  4. Re:Let's Do Something! by damburger · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?
  5. Frightened rich Londoners by Kupfernigk · · Score: 3, Informative
    They are supported by MPs because they have houses in London and are surrounded by frightened middle class and upper class people. I live in a small town and in the last 20 years petty crime has dropped, especially since PCSOs (a kind of return to the old village policeman) were introduced and started talking to the local kids instead of trying to recognise them on CCTV pictures.) The UK is actually run on the basis that it is all like London. It is not.

    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."