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."

Comments

Oh come on

[Peter_J_G]

Hitler stopped the German people from being able to protest with the Reichstag Decree - as no-one was able to protest, Hitler was able to build the worlds most brutal totalitarian state and invaded Poland in 1939, Britain and France declared war, a generation was devastated in the hope that future generations might live without tyranny. In 1945 the allies declared victory and said never again. To protect the world from war they had to protect the citizen from the state - in 1950 the leaders of the war torn countries of Europe came together to try to prevent these horrors from ever happening again, in comes the European convention of human rights authored by Winston Churchill, and contained the fundamental protections of an individual from their own government, including, ban on torture ,no detention without charge, innocence until proven guilty, right to privacy, right to protest and freedom of speech. We in the UK have became too cosy with the idea that we have these rights anymore. I often wonder when people will wake up and realize they have had their freedoms taken away. I wondered if it would happen when they gave taking pictures of police a maximum 10 year jail sentence - nope. I wondered if it would happen when they allowed records of phone calls, web history and emails to be for police - nope, I wondered if it would happen when someone was arrested under the anti-terror act for shouting "rubbish" at a New Labour party conference - nope. Wake up.

Re:What if Facebook forced encryption?

[causality]

Perhaps the USA and the UK aren't so different after all.

Well, it seems that our system has more checks and balances than the UK does. We have 50 individual sovereign states that are still willing to flip Washington off every now and then. We have the Supreme Court which has shot down or at least severely constrained many attempts by the Executive and Legislature to violate our founding documents. The Upper House of our Legislature isn't toothless and actually has the power to stop legislation. We also (yeah I couldn't resist) have guns ;)

I'm hard pressed to think of what checks and balances remain under the British system. The House of Lords was defanged a long time ago and if the Monarchy ever refused Royal Assent I'm sure that would be end of it as an institution. Hopefully our friends across the pond will wake up before it's too late.....

Those checks and balances are largely useless if most of the population honestly believes in the "safety is more important than freedom" type of fear-mongering. Pragmatically, this means only that those who would like to transform the USA into a totalitarian state just need to be more patient. Or they just need to remain underground.

What do I mean by underground? Look at how long the warrantless-wiretapping was going on, illegally, before it was exposed. Then look at how the Bush administration retroactively granted the telcos immunity from prosecution for assisting this illegal program (if that isn't a violation of "no ex post facto" then it should be). So, how many such illegal activities are happening right now that we don't know about?

It might be tempting to look at the UK and think we're so much better off. That's your ego talking because it wants to feel like a part of something greater than itself, namely, the national ego. But let's say that you are correct, that the USA really is better off than the UK. We're certainly walking down the same path. So, perhaps the UK is a little ahead of us and has already travelled farther down that path. That means that If we don't change soon, the UK is merely providing a vision of our immediate future. How about if we travel a completely different path that doesn't lead to the same destination before we make comparisons? I prefer not to be on a sinking ship at all. I like that much better than wondering whether the ship I'm on is sinking more slowly than the adjacent ships.