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UK Gov't May Track All Facebook Traffic

Posted by timothy on from the posted-before-curfew dept.

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."

5 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. What if Facebook forced encryption? by davidwr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What if Facebook and other sites enforced encryption? Sure, it would slow things down and increase their cost, but if they did, it would be "chic" to encrypt, and a generation of users would start demanding end-to-end encryption everywhere.

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
    1. Re:What if Facebook forced encryption? by Firehed · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Content on Facebook (and any other social networking site with privacy controls) isn't for public consumption - it's for consumption by those whom you've marked as friends.

      Encryption would prevent packet sniffing, and as Facebook is owned and operated in the US, I don't see how the UK government could subpoena the data successfully*. That whole jurisdiction thing - ya know.

      *Unless they have servers located in the UK. With 200m or so users, they probably do Of course, Facebook could just threaten to block UK users, posting the contact info of various government officials so you can complain to them for forcing FB into such a situation. Facebook is easily large enough for that kind of stunt to actually work.

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      How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
    2. Re:What if Facebook forced encryption? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Content on Facebook (and any other social networking site with privacy controls) isn't for public consumption

      At a job interview (relatively high clearance required) my potential employer presented me with, among other things, questions about blog posts I had written. The odd thing? I never mentioned the account and I had never published any articles from it. They were just sitting on a well-known company's server in draft mode.

      People have no idea how much is being collected and how many companies have been compromised, knowingly or not.

  2. Re:Wow by warren.oates · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There's a Jules Feiffer play, later a movie, Little Murders in which an FBI agent is reading one of the character's mail. This character starts sending letters to himself for the FBI agent to read, chiding him for invading other people's privacy and so on. Eventually, the FBI agent commits suicide.

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    Doh.
  3. Re:Who cares by malkavian · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As a UK Citizen, yes I am, and yes I do write the letters to the MPs to complain. The government we've had for the last 12 years, near enough, has overseen a huge erosion in the English Civil Liberties. Hell, it's architected them. It's been expanding for as long as it's been in power, pushing politically correct agendas, and trying to tag and barcode the populace on the sly (but these days, it's not on the sly; they just tag on "to counter terrorism", and leave it at that). And what really bugs me is that I lived through the 70s and 80s when the IRA were very active. Bombings weren't too uncommon, and we got through it as a populace. We were still free.
    These days, there's been one real attack (and at the time, the UK was actually taking military action in the Middle East, as it is still doing), and the NuLabour overlords take that as affirmation that they can barcode, DNA tag, and record every single thing you do (attempts to monitor phone traffic, email, network, have mandatory trackers in your cars, they already have sensors in the waste bins you put your rubbish in to be collected by the bin men to record what you dispose of, CCTV that's used to spot people who take their kids to a school that they may not be in the official catchment area of, and other completely outrageous examples of totalitarianism that would have Orwell penning new chapters in 1984 over).
    Actually, the register has a nice little snippet from our current overlords. I suspect they're ever so slightly slanting what was said, but hey, it says what a lot of us think anyway..