Slashdot Mirror
UK Email Retention Plan Technically Flawed
deltaromeo points out a BBC report calling the UK's law requiring ISPs to retain users' emails for at least a year an "attack on rights." The article also points out financial and technical flaws with the plan (which we first discussed in October). TechCrunch goes a step further, detailing how it conflicts with other governmental goals. Quoting:
"...with one hand the government seeks to lock down the British Internet with an iron fist, while at the same time telling us it is boosting innovation and business online. It is quite clearly blind to the fact that one affects the other. Are we also expected to think that the consumers using online services are not going to be put off from engaging in the boom of 'sharing' that Web 2.0 created? How would you feel if every Twitter you sent, every video uploaded, was to be stored and held against you in perpetuity? That may not happen, but the mere suggestion that your email is no longer private would serve to kill the UK population's relish for new media stone dead, and with it large swathes of the developing online economy."
Worse still, in UK after you are arrested you will be requested to provide a key to decrypt hundreds of KB of those random numbers that you sent, and you will be in prison until the key is working. Do you think they will believe that your emails were just random numbers? "That's what every crypto-terrorist is claiming!" they will tell you.
As it stands, you'd be better off if every 32-bit word that you sent is a sequential group of 4 bytes from your favorite book (or its ciphertext, if you wish, made with a known key.) At least when they put your feet over hot coals you will be able to save yourself. If that doesn't happen the numbers remain pretty random and your experiment will be unaffected.
There's something deeply wrong with a country's attitude to privacy when its people have to turn to the US for better protection.
That was my first thought. When I was young and naive, I posted to Usenet under my real name. I knew that was for worldwide distribution, but at the time I didn't expect it to be for worldwide *perpetual* distribution. Then DejaNews comes along and brings back a lot of things that I'd expected to fade away like BBS posts used to do.
I'm lucky. There's nothing horribly embarrassing or wildly contradicting my current opinions out there. I'd hate to be, say, a reformed racist who'd posted some crazy stuff out there, and who now gets to have people he meets form their opinions about him based on who he was ten years ago.
These days my real name is a conformist sheep, and I keep my crazy politics to pseudonyms. And even still, I have to think twice about what I say because I know the government is archiving it all for when they want to cherry-pick it to declare me unpatriotic if I embarrass them in some major way. I've accepted that level of exposure, but it's disheartening that the world's superpowers are devolving into this level of totalitarianism.
Free speech, indeed.
Really, I don't think most people will care. If a nice leaflet/broadcast/website from the government explains "it's to catch terrorists" and "it's to catch really super big evil criminals" - most people will say "well I am not one of those so I don't care". A few people will mutter over their pints of beer and a couple of articles will appear in the papers, uber-geeks will use some encryption or other work around, the real criminals will read the geek websites and learn how to cover their tracks, and 99% of the population will just go on as before. They don't mind giving their credit card details out to online stores they've never heard of before, they'll not worry the government keeps a copy of their emails.
Little public outrage was voiced here in the UK when Echelon became known about. A few left wing and liberal newspapers wrote big articles on it blowing the whole thing open to the middle class public and it didn't get much more feedback than a few people switching their vote to a different mainstream party, a couple of letters from Angry of Tunbridge Wells to the Times, and a few dozen hackers waving banners outside a government building or two. The man on the Clapham omnibus just won't care.