Slashdot Mirror
UK Gov't May Track All Facebook Traffic
Jack Spine writes "The UK government, which is becoming increasingly Orwellian, has said that it is considering snooping on all social networking traffic including Facebook, MySpace, and bebo. This supposedly anti-terrorist measure may be proposed as part of the Intercept Modernisation Programme according to minister Vernon Coaker, and is exactly the sort of deep packet inspection web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee warned about last week. The measure would get around the inconvenience for the government of not being able to snoop on all UK web traffic."
They'd have to go for hardware encryption/decryption.
Deleted
Concerned? Nah, not really.
The current incumbents are so fekking incapable they would struggle to work out which end of a USB stick goes where. The chances of them implementing *any* form of large scale IT system is zero. Zip . Nada. Not gonna happen.
They'll be out of office in a year or so anyway.
As technology accumulates, the hatred between people tends to decrease. - Steven Pinker
Facebook already does offer encryption - https://www.facebook.com/. Sure, not everything works 100% perfectly, and it sometimes reverts to plain http, but with the use of enforced https through NoScript in Firefox, 98% of the stuff on Facebook can be made to work reliably over HTTPS.
What's tragic is that people like you are laughed at where I live.
"You're saying we don't live in a free society? That's ridiculous!"
But it's not a ridiculous statement at all. The past 15 years has taken both the US and the EU much closer to totalitarian superpowers run by an elite of politicians rather than by the people.
People don't want this kind of monitoring everywhere, it's an agenda pushed by the ruling elite (which shouldn't even be "ruling" in the first place). Of course, saying this to any average person makes you sound crazy and paranoid so they stop listening and it all fells rather futile. :(
You'll have to force https, almost every link I looked at reverted back to http.
God: An invisible friend for grown-ups.
Possibly.
Definitely. They have to under the terms of the Regulatory of Investigatory Powers act. That act allows local councils to spy on you for almost any reason, of course it allows central government to spy on you on Facebook. Under the terms of that act if you fail to provide your private encryption keys then they can put you in prison: you have to show that you've deleted them.
If you work for an ISP, communications provider or some other organisation providing a service to a target you have to assist them in spying. You can't tell anybody, not even a solicitor. Note that this act was passed in 2000 before the "War on Terror" started. The most controversial parts of the act required ministerial activation but almost the whole thing is live now.
The excuse given at the time was that it was a tidying up exercise to regulate activities that the secret intelligence services were undertaking anyway; the point of the act was to move it all onto a regulatory footing. My cynical view is that the SIS wanted legal cover for their massive technical interception plans and so ended up with the RIP act safe in the knowledge that some future crisis would unfold that would give them the full act they wanted.
I wrote to my MP about that act when it was being debated about ten years ago; the most serious powers contained have only come into force recently and it's everything all the detractors said it would be. My MP didn't even bother to reply with a form letter even though I pointed out I was sixteen, knew more about the technology than they did and was willing to talk to them about it. The constituency I lived in wasn't even that large so it's not like my MP had massive time pressures.
They say they want young people involved in politics, that's just another lie.
Nick