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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."
Meh. Just another excuse to snoop on people without justification. If a warrant is issued then at least there is a paper trail leading back to who applied for the warrant any why. If this law goes through then it will be a free-for-all and history has demonstrated very well what happens then.
Also, as far as I'm aware, UK security services have been doing this for some time, this simply makes it legal. Given the majority of the population are not very tech savvy their solution wouldn't need to be that complex, although I imagine its more complex than just a key logger. The only evidence I have for this is talking to people who work in these organizations. The advice to me was get using TOR (although I can never configure it right) so maybe its not too complex, or maybe they were double bluffing me. Who knows? I'm guessing the arrest levels aren't so high because they would have to arrest almost everyone under 30 who's been on a computer. Once they've got the logistics sorted I'm sure they'll happily cart us to the gulag though.
=Smidge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
Hack into people's PC? How do they do that, and what do they get out of it?
You just got troll'd!
so it seems that 1984 only got the year wrong after all. unfortunately the fear and paranoia in the public's mind is only going to fuel more of this ridiculous nonsense.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
When your government is hacking you, is it illegal to lock them out?
Feh. I'm in the UK and using windows. I dont think I really have anything to w
Really? The recommended methodology of the police is the same as that used by opportunistic criminals to steal credit card information, that the police warn about?
C'mon, it's just impossible to satirize this kind of thing. It's not fair.
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
It is not possible to allow the "good guys" only to have access to secure operating systems and security technologies such as encryption while simultaneously locking the "bad guys" out. The British government will have to decide what is more important, providing secure online banking, shopping, and other electronic services as part of operating in a modern economy OR hobbling the information economy with restrictions to catch a few more low-level or careless "bad guys" at the expense of even more loss of privacy for millions of ordinary British citizens and substantial encumbrance of legitimate economic activity involving computers, the Internet, and other "sensitive" technologies. If it is easy for the police to "hack in" then it is easy for the spammers, terrorists, or anyone else to "hack in" as well. The British reaction always seems to be, "We ought to have a law against that!" instead of simply acceptating that bad things will sometimes happen despite the best laid plans or intentions and moving on with "acceptable risks" in an open society.
Just get her to sign the treaty.
Every couple minutes, just in case. Why do you ask?
It's only a newspaper story. It's confused as to whether the Home Office are operating this power or talking about it.
Just so. What's particularly suspicious is that although they have a quote from Liberty about this, there doesn't seem to be anything about it on Liberty's website -- this should be front-page news for them. In fact, the last thing Liberty has on the subject is this from last year, in which the European Court of Human Rights ruled that RIP was a violation of human rights and that the UK was obliged to add more transparency and accountability.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
"But again, truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty you need only look into a mirror."
I used to think V for Vendetta was fiction. It's starting to look like a documentary.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Truecrypt will allow full encryption for either a Windows or Linux system. However, even if you have full drive encryption, once your computer is hacked and accessible while running data can extracted from it.
Didn't the UK also have a semi resent law about being forced to hand over passwords as well? If so encryption won't protect you much, as long as whatever you are hiding is worth spending the five year penalty in jail.
If I break into your machine and am accessing it at your user level or at a higher level I will be looking at the same contents YOU are looking at - which is to say unencrypted unless you have lots of stuff you leave locked up and never use (lol). Encryption is GREAT when someone kicks in the door and runs off with a system that's sitting there turned off. It's less great when they get in while you're using it via network or physical means - you know grabbing your ass and shoving you away from the keyboard.
Crypto isn't the magic wand to fix this....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
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.
This is where a unified, written Constitution comes in handy. Yeah, those can be abused as well... the Right wing points to courts basically ignoring the 10th Amendment for decades, and the Left Wing points to a number of Bush wartime programs. But the fact is, it's still much easier to plead your case in courts when you have your Constitution on paper, in clear written form, instead of a collection of traditions and court cases.
Want to complain that the US government is doing illegal searches and seizures? At least you have a 4th Amendment to point to and say "you're violating this law". In a country with an un-written Constitution, even if there's a court precedent on the issue, without a written Constitution, the government can simply decree a thing, and it's so, until they're booted out of office.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I know you were joking, but I have a story that is likely similar (not Linux though...).
Quite some years ago, I was running an Amiga as my main system (relatively high end Amiga 4000, not some toy games thing). I was talking to a guy on IRC and he was bragging about putting a bomb on a plane. This was well before 2001, so the world wasn't in the grips of "OMG terrorists!", but it still seemed like a fairly big deal to me. Now, from my perspective, I was pretty sure the guy was just talking out his arse, but I wasn't really 100% sure, so for safety's sake, I didn't really want to just leave it.
At this point, let me elaborate that I was in fact a teenager, and also not particularly "worldly wise". It was at this point, I made somewhat of a mistake. I had access to a few servers I really shouldn't have, and decided that since I didn't want to get involved in the process of a police investigation (there's nothing more I could tell them other than what the guy said on IRC), I sent an email "anonymously" through a badly configured mail server (forging my own headers using telnet as my SMTP client) and informed the police and the airport in question about what the guy had said.
Two days later, the police arrived at my door (um, yeh, I'd sent the email "anonymously", but hadn't taken any steps to obscure my IP address, so all they needed to do was call the owner of the mail server, followed by my ISP). They had a search warrant stating they could seize any computer related equipment in my house, and stated it was issued "under suspicion of Attempted Murder and Breach of the Telecommunications Act" (no I'm not kidding... it really did say "Attempted Murder").
They took all my computers and related equipment (right down to a stack of old SCSI drives I had in my sock drawer). I spent a couple of MONTHS without them. I got a nice write-up in the local paper, but that wasn't much consolation. After two months, I made a complaint to the Police Complaints Authority stating that it really was ridiculous for the police to have my stuff for so long (their ongoing excuse was that they sent it to another city for analysis). I finally got it back about two weeks after that, only to find that they'd ripped the HDD out of my A4000 and erased it. I can only assume they stuck it in a PC, saw that it was "not formatted" and tried to "recover" the data from it.
They made no statements about whether my HDD had been "helpful" in their investigation or not, and I heard no further from them after that (including no further comments about the "suspicion of attempted murder"!). The best I could get from them was a weak apology about my data loss, as being a private individual (and unemployed at that), there was no protection for my data under the law (if I'd been a company, I probably could've sued, but a private individual's data was (may still be?) essentially considered worthless in the eyes of the law).
For reference: the country this happened in was New Zealand - normally a pretty nice place, but don't expect small town cops, or even the "computer analysis team" to have ANY idea what they're doing or admit that this is the case (actually, I would HOPE this has changed over the years, but I wouldn't bet on it).
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Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The RIPA act http://security.homeoffice.gov.uk/ripa/ makes it an offence to NOT disclose passwords when required, by the law enforcement agencies of this country. Non disclosure is punishable by up two years imprisonment!