Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
"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.
"But who's going to install it? people of a political bent who oppose your wiretaping. The sort of people who will be first against the wall when the military coup comes."
Curiously enough, an edition of Slashdot that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future listed the people who installed such software as "a bunch of people of a political bent that opposed the governments wiretapping who were the first against the wall when the military coup came."