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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
But I've got a better plan. How about I give you the finger, and you give us our country back.
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
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?
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)?
Isn't this story wildly inaccurate, at least according to The Register?
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.
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.
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."
We need software which sends trigger words between peers, 24/7/365.
No sig today...
WTF? There is no content on Piratebay - that's what makes the site legal.
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?
Unfortunately, countries that have some direct democracy (Switzerland I believe does some) don't seem to have any better respect for privacy.
The problem is that it isn't an issue for 99% of the population. The reason the government wants to spy on you is to determine if you are outside what society considers 'normal' and then harass you for it. Normal people think this is just fine, because they don't trust 'wierdos' either. Thus democracies, and democracies, have a tendency towards enforcing banality at gunpoint.
I once heard a quote that sums this up; 'Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Freedom is an armed sheep contesting the issue'
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."
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.
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
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.
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.