Slashdot Mirror
UK Government To Monitor All Internet Use
nk497 writes "The UK government has further detailed plans to track all communications — mobile phone calls, text messages, email and browser sessions — in the fight against terrorism, pedophiles and organized crime. The government said it's not looking to see what you're saying, just to whom and when and how. Contrary to previous plans to keep it all in a massive database, it will now let ISPs and telecoms firms store the data themselves, and access it when it feels it needs it." And to clarify this,
Barence writes "The UK Government has dropped plans to create a massive database of all internet communications, following stern criticism from privacy advocates. Instead the Government wants ISPs and mobile phone companies to retain details of mobile phone calls, emails and internet sites visited. As with the original scheme, the actual content of the phone calls and messages won't be recorded, just the dates, duration and location/IP address of messages sent. The security services would then have to apply to the ISP or telecoms company to have the data released. The new proposals would also require ISPs to retain details of communications that originated in other countries but passed over the UK's network, such as instant messages."
Ok I guess Orwell was about 25 years off
So now the only method of sending data without leaving a trace is the British Postal Service. Providing they don't loose you mail of course...
{sarcasm} It's cheaper to just waterboard the suspect rather than save all that data {/sarcasm}
Table-ized A.I.
When will governments figure out that pushing big brother tactics on their constituents doesnt help them find the badguys in fact all it does is make the law abiding masses paranoid and pushes the ones they are after further underground into darknets, and other more nefarious methods.
In the end the only thing this will be used for successfully is kowtowing to corporate interests and eroding the rights of citizens.
Yeah, yeah. I've heard the movie and book don't mesh but the overall theme is still the same: Complete access to what anyone and everyone is doing, thinking or writing.
On a related note, the following quote from Sneakers isn't too far off either:
There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
It's not clear if the government is planning to legislate to force ISPs and phone companies to keep this data, or if they just 'advise'.
If the latter, then I imagine there'll be the few ISPs that stand up and say "no" and market themselves on that very fact.
But in the most incompetent way possible. Letting the ISP's store the data? So you're telling me that tracking the communications of the worlds most dangerous terrorists is so incredibly important that it can potentially be left in the hands of a 20 year old intern charged with swapping the backups tapes? Hyperbole of course, but come on, if you (the UK gov) aren't storing the data, do you really know it will be available when you need it?
I'm honestly sure who I trust less to securely maintain a database containing large amounts my of private data. The government have consistently proven themselves incapable of managing large scale IT projects, or of taking privacy seriously. On the other hand, I don't trust my ISP either - will they be prevented from outsourcing any part of the chain involved in collecting and storing this data, for example, or is my data going to be available for $1 in Delhi anytime soon? It's a lose-lose situation.
Oh no... it's the future.
I no longer have any hope for Great Britain.
The country that spawned the magna carta is on an irreversible spiral into a police state.
They will continue to erode the rights of people in the name of "terrorism" and "child pornography."
And the general populace seems happy to let it happen.
If they're telling the truth, and not monitoring the data itself, just the endpoints.. then what good does encrypting do?
If the UK evicted its Muslim immigrants, and gave up trying to occupy Northern Ireland, wouldn't that lower the threat level enough for these measures to be easily repealed?
Because evicting an ethnic slice of the population is not likely to cause civil unrest...
And Americans stocking up on guns and ammo:
That would end if people didn't believe that Obama and the Democratic leadership were itching to infringe on their 2nd amendment rights. Most sportsman are extremely annoyed by the run on ammo and firearms because it's driving up prices for everybody -- but it isn't going to end until some sanity comes out of Washington.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
First Northern Ireland, a majority of the population wants the be part of the UK a plebiscite could be held and nothing changes.
Second, why in the world would you think evicting British Muslims would stop religious fanatics to continue spreading their terror in Europe (yes the UK is part of Europe)?
With such a thought pattern I'm surprised you managed to log on.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
No. First, the Muslim terrorists we've had problems with mostly weren't immigrants, they were born in Britain. Second, the north of Ireland isn't a significant terrorist threat any more, since most of the terrorists are now in the regional government; a couple of splinter factions have taken to shooting people again lately, but for practical purposes they're almost beneath contempt. Third, if you think for one moment this is really about terrorism then I've got a tower in Paris to sell you.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
So now terrorists are following tourists who take pictures of those "bobbies on bicycles, two by two" and stealing the images right out of their cameras? Why bother? Just cut the middleman and pose as a tourist yourself. And since the police presumably wear uniforms and are thus identifiable even without photos, what's the benefit?
The only benefit I can see is to police who are acting outside the law and don't want any evidence recording that.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I agree. The only reason they are not storing the content now is technological limitations. Once that barrier is removed, they will certainly take the next step.
Wholesale surveillance is not limited by good will, it's limited by technology.
When all else fails, run.
And you think group foo won't violently resist such a thing? And make the problem far far worse. And won't it make it very dangerous for British tourists to travel just about anywhere where members of group foo may live?
...but I can't think of a single major breakthrough that led to all of the rest.
The election of Tony Blair as Prime Minister and the rise of New Labour, 1997.
The government said it's not looking to see what you're saying, just to whom and when and how.
There is only one reason that a government who spies on you only spies on you a little: it's not cheap enough yet to spy on you a lot.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
If they're doing what? I'm not sure I follow...
...it will now let ISPs and telecoms firms store the data themselves, and access it when it feels it needs it.
Oh, thankyouthankyouthankyou sir, you are too kind, your generosity overwhelms me. Would you like to lash me with that nice whip you have there?
I'm wondering what the implications are for private T1 lines. My company has a pipe from the US to the UK. Would those communications be logged also, or are they just talking about the usual ISP stuff, like cable, DSL, dial-up, etc? What about satellite based internet service? What about VPN tunneling? Would they require access to that communication level as well?
It seems to me that the best government should be the smallest *practical* size. Having no government at all wouldn't work, it would be jungle law.
We don't need the government to monitor banks, manage trade, run healthcare, etc, because those tasks can be performed by private institutions regulated by market forces. What the government needs to do is to set the smallest possible set of rules to ensure that no distortions will arise in the market.
The question of how this system is working is debatable, I admit. Current regulations today are completely unbalanced. Healthcare in the US, for instance, has been a victim of runaway medical malpractice suits. In order to avoid liability, doctors order so many unneeded tests that healthcare costs have run out of control. Or take the electrical power system. In several places they deregulated the quality of service, but kept prices regulated, guess what happened to the resulting quality?
Now, OTOH, justice and police work is something that cannot be privatized. You can privatize security services, you can privatize jail administration, but you cannot privatize courts or police investigation. It's not possible to have judges bidding among themselves for presiding lawsuits. It's not possible to have detectives bidding among themselves to investigate murders.
In conclusion, I think the government is more justified in trying to seek more power to perform criminal investigations than to seek more power to control the market.
This political position might be called "conservative" in the US and UK and "liberal" everywhere else, but it must be understood that, like any political position, it should be tempered with caution. I do not want to concede absolute power to the government in crime fighting just as I do not want to take away all the power the government has to regulate the private corporations. But I think the main reason for the existence of the government is to make sure justice is applied correctly, not to replace market forces.
You have a short memory. I was living in England at the peak (or nadir) of Thatcher's reign, and she had everything well set on its present course.
I think his point was that even during the Thatcher years, you at least had Labour as an alternative. But when Tony Blair took control of the Labour party and sent it down it current Thatherite course, British politics effectively became varying shades of conservatism.
Why isn't the internet considered another form of speech?
Regulation slows innovation and usually creates as many problems as it solves.
15TW = 15,000 Nuclear Reactors. (Approx. one accident a month.)
I just find it amusing that they claim they're not interested in what we're looking at, just the start and end points of the connections. If they wanted to know what we were looking at, sounds like it'd be pretty damned simple just to navigate to the logged IP address... Forgive me, but this sounds like them saying "We're going to monitor you using GPS - don't worry, we only store the coordinates, not what you were looking at!".
I wish that were true: goodbye spambots...
1b) What do you do with the 57.2 million non muslims who may take exception to ethnic cleansing?
Ditto for the Northern Ireland residents. Often uses of such stats ignore the fact that not everyone believes in forced segregation.
(We would like the right to free beer, but even if we brew it at home for our own use, the government has the right to tax it, and indeed everything else.)
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Plus they can offload the costs to the ISPs!
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca