Slashdot Mirror
UK Government Wants To Bypass Data Protection Act
rar42 writes "Clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill, currently being debated by the UK Parliament, would allow any Minister by order to take from anywhere any information gathered for one purpose, and use it for any other purpose. Personal information arbitrarily used without consent or even knowledge: the very opposite of 'Data Protection.' An 'Information Sharing Order', as defined in Clause 152, would permit personal information to be trafficked and abused, not only all across government and the public sector — it would also reach into the private sector. And it would even allow transfer of information across international borders. NO2ID has launched a Facebook group to challenge this threat to data protection."
compressed data can be "trivially" returned to the original without any extra knowledge (other than the details of the compressions scheme) encrypted data, even with complete knowledge of the mathematical transform done, can't be undone without finding the extra info somehow. (also compressed data is basically always smaller, encrypted data is usually the same size, plus a header.
It is good practice to use both, so that breaking the encryption on a low entropy message is much harder (as it'll be compressed to a short, high entropy burst, and so no assumptions about "weak messages" can be made).
If you use an obscure compression method, then to automated filters there wouldn't be a difference.
Yes, he fought on the side of communists, (Russian and International) as well as anarchists during the Spanish Civil War. Everyone who read 1984 and understood its message should also read Homage to Catalonia, his factual account of the Civil War. He knew that you could take the horrible tools of repression and what they might look like if machined in England.
Phillip Pullman also did a great piece in the Times related to, although not specifically about, this recently. Oddly, it got pulled by the Times with no explanation. I wonder why?