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