Slashdot Mirror
UK Police To Step Up Hacking of Home PCs
toomanyairmiles writes "The Times of London reports that the United Kingdom's Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain to routinely hack into people's personal computers without a warrant. The move, which follows a decision by the European Union's council of ministers in Brussels, has angered civil liberties groups and opposition MPs. They described it as a sinister extension of the surveillance state that drives 'a coach and horses' through privacy laws."
When your government is hacking you, is it illegal to lock them out?
The U.K. government might as well just announce that their subjects no longer have any rights at all. They have effectively all been removed in practice. To put things in perspective, this country is on the verge of banning kitchen knives to try to reduce violent crime (now that private possession of firearms has been completely outlawed). The saddest part of all is that the subjects of the U.K. support this nonsense by a large margin.
meh, court oversight doesn't do anything anyway. The courts are happy to rubber stamp any search warrant where there is reasonable expectation that evidence might be found. And if the police find nothing? Oh, there's no oversight on that. Around 1998 I had police knock on my door and seize my computers because they had obtained a warrant on the grounds that I had spoken online with someone who had hacked into a national ISP via a corporate phone conference line, running up their bills. The police had reason to believe that they might find evidence of his crime on my computers. As such, I was required to suffer the inconvenience of having my hardware forfeit for months while they investigated. In the end they found nothing and, after much harassing on my part, eventually returned the hardware. No apology, no oversight.
How we know is more important than what we know.
[tinfoil-hat]The annual free tax utility software CDs from the Revenue[/tinfoil-hat]
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
As one of the participants at DefCon said a couple of years ago when discussing the FBI's 'Magic Lantern' software, "If they want to arrest you they don't even need any evidence any more. They can just dump some kiddie porn in your browser cache and kick in the door. Good luck proving it wasn't you that put it there."
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I'm a gun ownership supporter, and I agree with you philosophically, but I have to say this.
You don't seriously think a pack of armed citizens could actually stop the government from tyrannically taking away its rights do you? We've seen how successful "militia" groups have been when put face to face with ATF. If we're to believe the 9/11 stories, at least one plane load of Americans citizens didn't even have the guts to unite and take down hijackers armed with sporks and box cutters.
And look at our rights being taken away now... many citizens protested, but most just bitched and moaned and carried on with their lives with absolutely no willingness to go through the hell that protestors do. And if you haven't noticed, this generation by and large defines patriotism as being loyal to the government and going along with whatever it commands. You can't even say you're ashamed of your president without the public lashing out against you and branding you a traitor.
In the last two election cycles, we watched citizens, pundits, and politicians each call the "other guy" a dangerous lunatic with dangerous connections whose dangerously wrong ideas will bring about the end of life on our continent and perhaps the world. And in the next breath, these same people screaming that the end was nigh, made low-brow jokes about those candidates. If each election determines the fate of humanity, why do we still laugh and sing, and act as if it's business as usual?
I think the reality is that if things should ever come to Nazi Germany here in the US, the vast majority of Americans will shit their pants and hope that by buying a new iPod or pledging allegiance to a favorite cable news company, they will be left alone.
And when the tanks and stormtroopers move into suburbia, of those Americans who do own guns, more than half of them will shoot their loved ones in the faces, blow out their TVs, accidentally kill a neighbor, or take out a street lamp. Maybe one or two partisans will actually hit the broadside of a large armored vehicle or defend a street for a few hours. But maybe, just maybe, the ordinary citizens that comprise our military will refuse to take those tanks into suburbia too.
Sorry, my basic rifle marksmanship training came courtesy of the Army; I don't think I'd trust any armed civilian militia to protect me. The armed citizenry of the 18th century had something the armed citizenry of the 21st lacks: a sense of duty to the higher cause of Liberty and a real, qualified distrust of our leaders rather than manufactured political angst.