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.'"

Comments

i hate this country

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck this police state

Elections

[clickclickdrone]

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.

Re:Elections

[Yvanhoe]

It is your (not mine, I'm not in UK) to remind other voters about these issues. In return they'll tell you about agriculture and financial problems that were not adressed and that you didn't really mind at the time.

Re:Elections

[phoenix321]

Boycotting election never helped, never will, nobody, nowhere. Vote whatever you like, make your ballot invalid - but not voting is definetly a silent YES to current politics.

No election boycott EVER reached its intented goals, only idiot politicians in the Third World encourage this.

Good news

[Thanshin]

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.

Re:Good news

[sakdoctor]

Fully encrypted net NOT coming in 3,2,1

For websites we have the political blockade of mixing up encryption, "trust", and money. Totally broken, totally beyond repair.

Then on the personal side you can't have a one-sided encrypted connection. You can't use encrypted jabber/email/etc because none of your friends or relatives do. In fact you can't use jabber at all because all your friends are locked into msn, or even use web services like facebook to communicate.

Everyone's screwed.

bad idea, perhaps?

[bs7rphb]

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.

Most likely...

[Gordonjcp]

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.

Re:Win win situation

[davester666]

So would they store the individual parts of BitTorrent traffic, or would they just automatically be a client and peer all torrents?

And what about https traffic? I believe the keys used to encrypt the data are normally thrown away after they are used. Is the gov't going to require all business's to forward the keys to these servers?

And given the current high-level of protection that the UK gov't applies to the data and computers under it's control, how soon will these servers be repurposed by hackers for denial-of-service attacks (as they have most excellent tubes connected to the internets)?

However, I am sure they will "catch" some idiot who sends out an email with "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".

This would have to get so expensive to do, and yet, only be able to catch the dumbest of terrorist (the ones that would text "Now, where do I set the bomb off again?").

I hate their lying ways

[I cant believe its n]

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.

Re:I hate their lying ways

[montyzooooma]

The cost of "listening" may drop to zero, but the cost to interpret the data is going to rise exponentially as the volume increases.

Re:I hate their lying ways

[fluch]

Your statement contains two steps: first listening, then interpreting. Apparently the politicians cannot think that far...

Re:I hate their lying ways

[MrNaz]

Facial recognition software, voice pattern recognition software, intelligent pattern finding software... the list of automated analysis technology developments goes on.

It's easy to discard the majority of meaningless stuff automatically these days so that humans can focus on a subset of the data with a higher signal to noise ratio, and the ability of software to isolate such a subset is getting better, meaning that SNR will only get better, reducing the costs per hit of human analysis.

Does anyone out there still believe the made up religious fanatic terrorist fundamentalist threat pretext any more? I don't know about you, it's pretty obvious to me that that threat was just made up by the US/UK/Australian governments as an excuse to carry out the biggest power grab in history.

If the threat really was from organized groups who are well-resourced and determined to derail Western society, you have to wonder how this would help. You also have to wonder how it'd even help catch child porn purveyors who are typically reasonably computer literate, at least enough so to use encrypted ZIP files. The only conclustion that I can come to is that we have been lied to from the very beginning about the real reason behind all these security measures, and that so-called national security threats are nothing more than fabricated pretexts to consolidate the domination of the already rich and powerful even further, and to give their control a new, global reach.

To me, child porn and the terrorist threat are the equivalent of those malware popups. "Your country is infected with terrorism and/or child porn. Click here to install anti-terrorist / anti-child porn legislation, social controls and security-minded leaders who will protect you from the Bad Guys(tm)."

Re:I hate their lying ways

[MrNaz]

I don't know about you, but if I was high up in an intelligence organization and my internal team of developers came up with a great new was of spying, I don't know if I'd be releasing it under the GPL. I'd be keeping it secret.

Remember, these organizations have budgets that are larger than many entire countries' GDP so they can afford to hire large developer teams to work on things that the commercial marker wouldn't find profitable.

At the moment, commercial software can do rudimentary facial recognition in digicams and the like. If that's what my $200 Casio camera can do, imagine with a $200 million dollar NSA data mining cluster can do.

Re:I hate their lying ways

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

But isn't this what legal systems call "assuming facts not in evidence"?

I graduated from a well-known university, and I met some very clever people there, far smarter than I am. I expect that some of those people were at least approached by the security services, and maybe some of them actually joined. However, I rather doubt that those of them who remained in academia have suddenly become less smart than those who signed up. If the academic community hasn't developed and published research into, say, breaking well-established encryption algorithms other than by brute force, then I'm inclined to think that the government hasn't developed such techniques either, certainly not for all of the algorithms in use. It's just not credible that even a secretive government intelligence organisation with its hands in many pies could silence the entire academic community without any leak. Governments just aren't that competent.

In any case, the evidence against them is pretty damning. Look at the picture of systematic incompetence that has emerged over the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes in recent weeks. Recall that the biggest terrorist attacks in recent history occurred just a few years ago and no-one picked up all the warning signs. Notice that while serving government ministers and senior figures in the police and security services are quick to claim the need for these sweeping powers, they have plenty of critics who have also been in privileged positions and would have had access to the same secret information about the real picture that the government has but we as average citizens do not. Look at the results of trials of the technology the government are actually installing in places like airports, or planning to use with the ID card scheme. Do we really believe that this is all an elaborate ruse to hide the true capabilities, and remarkably not a single person involved in the process at any level has leaked even a hint to the contrary?

If the threat were really as great as the government makes out and the government really had reliable means to fight it, these sorts of things wouldn't be happening. But of course it's very easy to claim that they have secret knowledge none of us have, and we mere citizens don't understand what terrible things might happen, and we should just trust them. Such is the politics of fear, which must be opposed at every turn of the dark path down which it leads us.

Re:I hate their lying ways

[Xest]

"Does anyone out there still believe the made up religious fanatic terrorist fundamentalist threat pretext any more? I don't know about you, it's pretty obvious to me that that threat was just made up by the US/UK/Australian governments as an excuse to carry out the biggest power grab in history."

What? 9/11, 7/7 and the Nadrid train bombings did actually happen. It absolutely is a real threat and there was even analysis of it as an emerging threat long before current governments started using it to push their agenda.

Unfortunately in the case of the British government I do even believe that they think this will help and in a way hell I even think it's possible that it would. If they can see everything everyone is doing then yes I think it could reduce crime.

What I don't agree with is the cost. My grandfather didn't fight on the beaches of Normandy so that our own government could instead come and take away the freedoms he fought for. Frankly, I'd rather live everyday free and run the risk that I be one of the 1 in 100 million people that die from a terrorist attack once every 10 years or whatever than I would be totally safe but not have any freedom at all. I have a higher chance of dying in a car crash each day but I wont stop driving because of that because in the grand scheme of things, that chance is still very small.

The problem is people like Jacqui Smith who simply don't understand that we want freedoms and I can even understand why this is- because she is in a position where this wouldn't effect her. Being in the position she is she'd be privalaged enough to not be one of the citizens under her that have to suffer this. As such she can't possibly understand the worry this brings the rest of us unless it is the case that it's made clear to her for this to go ahead she must also accept that every single communication she makes must also be logged and available to the public to monitor.

I agree with your sentiment, but your theory behind it seems a little paranoid. I don't think our governments are out to get us, they're just outright incompetent and entirely disconnected from the citizens they serve. It's easy to tell everyone they have to be monitored when you yourself aren't subject to such monitoring because you can claim your communications are sensitive to national security and must hence remain private.

The problem you have in formulating your power grab plan is that you're crediting the people behind these ideas (again for example Jacqui Smith) with being intelligent enough to understand the flaws in her plan. To give an example that's fairly applicable here on Slashdot, think of your average fanboy. A fanboy will choose product/idea x and argue that it's the best or that their idea is right. You can provide countless facts and proof counter to their claim but it doesn't matter, they'll still believe they're right. This is the position Jacqui Smith is in, id cards, internet monitoring and so on are her pet projects, it doesn't matter how wrong they are, they don't want to hear it. They've sided with these ideas and they're not going to let go until they're forced to (i.e. election time).

I do think it's possible to counter these things but there has to be the will to do so, the public needs to stand up and say enough is enough or at least provide work arounds (truly secure encrypted communication with encryption keys passed via a separate unmonitored medium such as post, voice or similar). In the UK the NO2ID campagin is a good start, it gets it's voice heard on the national news and such but they need more volunteers, more help, more donations to have a real policy changing effect.

I do rather thing conspiracy theories are rather counterproductive and are really no different to the politics of fear you talk down when it comes to. It seems more sensible to take a step back and look at a more realistic view of what's going on and deal with it in the best way possible- actually make the physical effort to campaign against it.

Look A Little Deeper?

[mrpacmanjel]

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.

A few points

[ledow]

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.

Civil disobedience is also cheap

[Joce640k]

We need software which sends trigger words between peers, 24/7/365.

Re:ok

[magarity]

WTF? There is no content on Piratebay - that's what makes the site legal.

What is up with England?

[tjstork]

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?

Jacqui Smith's police state

[MindKata]

"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."