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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.'"

3 of 419 comments (clear)

  1. UK vs. Australia by JustKidding · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Elections by u38cg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    To be fair, there is a pretty strong history in Scottish politics that leads to replies like that. The Conservatives literally destroyed themselves in Scotland for life during the 1980s; it is unlikely they wil return in any numbers until my kids are of voting age. And do bear in mind that voters who stop and give a considered rationale for their voting decisions are unlikely to be good fodder for a sound-bite.

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  3. Question Time by Mr_Silver · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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