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."
The UK is just putting together the biggest porn database in the history of the world to provide a search engine along with relevant advertising to bring in some extra cash.
Nothing can go wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong...
Table-ized A.I.
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...
And in other news hundreds of people dressed up as Guy Fawkes have been seen marching angrily up to parliament...
"i lost my dignity on a slippery wiener"
{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.
Problem ( mostly ) solved.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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
Well, I am not going to feel safe until *everyone* is in jail. That is the only way to make sure there is not a criminal free somewheres.
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
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?
Example of an intercepted IM conversation:
AC1: I'm thinking to get a new car next week
AC2: Sweet, what colour are you getting?
AC1: Dude? "colour"?
AC2: I didn't put that 'u' there...
My webcomic
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.
That wouldn't be profitable enough. Unless some company came up with a proprietary way to ship tonnes of people off the island and win a governmental contract so they can bribe I mean contribute to the politicians coffers.
Tor recently recieved an accidental DDos
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.
Let's talk about IM. I run an XMPP server which a few of my friends use. Everyone that connects to it used TLS. If they did enough traffic analysis, they might just about be able to tell who I was talking to, but are they really expecting ISPs to correlate every packet anyone sends to that machine (which is not located on their network) and communicate this data to all other UK ISPs so that they can try to work out who I am talking to? And what happens when I talk to someone using a busy server like jabber.org or gmail.com? They see some encrypted packets going from my machine to that server (well, they don't, because my server is outside the UK, but let's pretend that they do). Then, a second or so later, they see a few million packets going out to various other people. Are they just expecting Google to turn over their logs, or do they expect the ISPs to magically work out who I am talking to be analysing every packet going everywhere?
The same applies to email. My mail server is set up to use TLS, and so most of the time they can't do deep packet inspection to learn the destination, all they know is that my machine has delivered a mail to the recipient's mail server, and that a lot of people later on have checked their mail on that machine.
It seems that this will only stop terrorists who are stupid enough to use their ISP's mail servers, which surely isn't a huge number.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If they keep a database of ALL email sent, it'll be interesting to see how many days it takes until their backup servers are overrun with billions of nigerian prince scams, fake virus alerts and phony offers to get free cash from Microsoft.
Ok, someone out there needs to write a program that will randomally access web sites. It should contain a list of reprehensable sites, as well as use randomally generating site names. It should do accesses on some randomzed time schedule, not continuously. You don't want it to run often enough to significantly slow down your own browsing.
This is how you poison their database, fill it full of useless data. Go ahead, and track this!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
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...
Can we please have an election sometime soon and throw Jacqui Smith out of the Home Office? I'm sure she can get a job working for the Chinese or North Korean governments.
So what is a secure way to stop this tracking?
Not using your ISPs mail service seems a start but obviously not a complete answer....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
>> 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."
Likely the only reason for this decision is that the government have probably just realised how much hardware and infrastructure they would need to buy in order to store, maintain and efficiently search all that info themselves. Consequently they have just pushed it off onto the ISPs/telcos instead.
It also gives a very translucent illusion that they care about rights to privacy even though there would be nothing stopping them accessing the data 24/7 anyway.
Of course the obvious pitfall is that the data will now be held by private companies which are (in theory at least) less secure than the government. I can't wait for the first "loss", private sale, or other misuse of data that no doubt the gov. will do everything they can to cover up from the public, yet will get caught out anyway. Its all so predictable.
Any particular right you have in mind there? I can't quite see your argument here. There's been a gradual erosion of civil liberties throughout the last decade or so, but I can't think of a single major breakthrough that led to all of the rest.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
It's recently been made illegal to photograph the police in the UK because the pictures might be useful to terrorists - it doesn't matter if you intend to use such pictures for terrorism, only that a terrorist might possibly want to have one of the pictures.
This new law has predictably led to such Kafkaesque situations like this story as reported by an actual constable there.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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."
Since pretty much all major UK ISPs will be using Phorm, all 3-letter Agencies could just use that data. Not like anyone in the UK really gives a damn about their privacy.
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia: Fear of long words
If everyone started connecting to many other random other services on the network all the time, you could effectively hide in the crowds. Just make sure that the connections last long enough to be meaningful. Something like a web spider that constantly probes at a specific data rate. Throw in some sophistication with regards to data transfer, repition of connnections, etc and you may be able to hide. Also, if enough people do it, it will cost the ISP much to store the information and make it irrelivant. The trick is to make your browsing look random, which can be difficult; also you would need to filter for stuff like child porn and other stuff you definitely do not want associated with yourself.
---- aut viam inveniam aut faciam
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.
The devil is always in the details.
1) what do you do with the 1.6 million muslims (most of whom are peaceful & law-abiding) who are presently living in the UK (many of whom are not first-generation)? If you just throw them out, won't that make the previously peaceful ones very angry with you?
2) what do you do with the 53% of all residents of Northern Ireland who are protestant (and therefore want to stay where they are)? If you just evict them, doesn't that risk starting yet *another* war in that region?
People have been complaining to England about human rights and liberties for hundreds and hundreds of years and they have a track record that shows they simply don't care.
Has all of their "big brother" work been effective though?
If people who wish to argue against these measures want to prevent or change where things are going, perhaps a new argument is in order. "It won't work" and "it doesn't work!"
Sounds reasonable to me.
In either case, here at Microsoft, we feel standards are important. And we have fun, too. Doug Mahugh, Microsoft
But the civil unrest will only last until everyone of group foo is gone. At worst other bleeding hearts groups will only have the public attention for about 6 to 12 months afterwords.
Jacqui 'Jackboots' Smith is definitely a Nazi. This moron is one of the most stupid, ignorant, and illiberal people ever to assume power in the UK (with a feeble minority, it has to be said)
New Labour have done more to dismantle the fundamental fabric of British society than any previous regime. Even the Tories under Maggie 'Madcap-Psychobitch' Thatcher never did such damage to people's fundamental rights (although she was probably more evil in other ways)
What does it mean to be British?:
- The right not to have to carry papers or ID cards
- The right to privacy, and to know that it is illegal for the state to spy on me.
- The right to protest anywhere I like, without being confined to a police cordoned area to keep me away from the war criminals and terrorists who are running this country.
- The right not to be beaten to death by the police.
- The right to be able to venomously criticise all religions, without them being granted 'special rights', just because certain religions (islam, and judaism) seem to be particularly prone to particularly psychotic levels of violence, and can't accept that their behaviour and beliefs should be scrutinised by sane people.
- The right to access to good public services, unpolluted by private sector profiteers, greedy lobbyists, and corrupt public private partnerships.
New Labour have taken all of these rights, and are consequently anti-British Enemies of The People, who have granted victory to terrorists worldwide, by curtailing the rights of our people in the name of 'fighting terrorism'.
I suspect that their attack on our rights, in reality, has much more to do with protecting the status-quo, as any terrorist can just mow down a busy street in a stolen car, if they really want to kill, without resorting to elaborate bomb plots, or mixing chemicals in the basement.
Fortunately for us, most terrorists are nearly as stupid as New Labour (they'd have to be, to be infected with religion!)
Ya know, I can't find a thing to disagree with there. If you let your country be taken over by foreign interests, the enemies of those foreign interests become YOUR enemies as well, and voila, terrorism.
Tho considering the death toll is a lot higher from ordinary household and auto accidents, maybe it's time to just ban people. Problem solved! :/
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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."
The way I'm reading it is that the Brit govt. realized how expensive keeping all the records would be and decided to make the ISPs and mobile phone companies take the bill. That of course will be passed down to the users.
"Armed forces abroad are of little value unless there is prudent counsel at home" - Cicero
That's because enabling corruption started more like 30 years ago in a variety of forms.
I Love the British government, you guys are awesome.... No, really, I do!
What an opportune time to be a BOFH at an ISP in Britain!
/away packing bags to London
So perhaps it's time for us to start encrypting all our communications? That would negate this issue, right?
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.
We haven't even got our bins back :(, it's not Islamic terrorists MO to put bombs in bins anyway! Also northern Ireland isn't occupied, so "giving it up" would spark up unionist terrorism, and even without the US funding the IRA got, that's still a lot of trouble.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
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?
Oh, it must be serious then.
Why, I thought her views would only be echoed by Mr. William Jones, chairman of the "Disorderly Conducts & Petty Theft Agency"
Or maybe the "Drunkards Peeing Anywhere Watch Committee".
Or, who knows, that renowned subcommittee of PETA, the "Vigilante Agency Against Backwards Cat Petting"
Seriously, now. What's wrong people these days ?
I think we need a modern version of the Monty Pythons to ridicule the government paranoia and the cop-o-cracy that is invading our lives everyday and without notice.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
...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 more I read and hear about this woman, the more she appears a corrupt, authoritarian douchebag.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
You're funny. ECHELON, much? Warrantless wiretapping? A country that suspended habeas corpus? A country that had no problem opening Gitmo? Seriously, this isn't even a database (like ECHELON). Get over yourself, emo.
I often use IRC. Sometimes I talk with people from the UK. Sometimes I don't address the comments. How are they going to track that?
I can imagine the burden this will create for the ISP's. The large telco's should love it because they can spread these costs over large numbers of customers. In addition when they lose the data or screw it up there are more faceless employees to point fingers at.
I expect small ISP's will shudder.
Next, what about TLS and tunneling? What about proxies?
This creates a burden but as far as a tool to fight terrorism, it comes up way short. It merely shows that the turkeys in Britain think they should be running the farm because they are in the majority. It shows those in charge understand very little about technology and security.
Any terrorist organization worth its salt will probably be using relatively secure communications.
I am reminded of Richard Feynman and his issues with security at Los Alamos during the Manhattan project. Anyone interested should read "surely you're joking Mr. Feynman".
Their attempts at security at many times was as abysmal as it was funny. One example was when some workmen cut a hole in the fence because they found it too time consuming to go back and forth through the front gate. There were guards at the front gate but none at the hole. So Feynman decided to leave through the front gate. Then he walked over to the hole and went over to the front gate again. This went on for quite some time until the sargent at the front gate started to wonder about the man who always went out but never came in.
The use of safes by the brass was another embarrassment. They often never changed the combinations from what was set at the factory. So Feynman use to take joy in opening the safe and placing his reports in the safe ready for the brass to fetch.
Maybe 50 years ago Monte Python's successor will make a movie.
VPN services are going to become HUGE in the UK.
There will likely be marketing campaigns.
After all, once you get a VPN to another country, the only thing the UK isp sees is one encrypted connection.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Let me guess who foots the bill for this: the end-user. Either the government funds it, and gets the money through increased taxation, or the government forces the ISP to pay for all the data storage, and the ISP has to pass the cost on to the customer to stay in business. Either way, citizens are paying for themselves to be monitored.
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)
While technology is becoming cheaper for them, it's becoming cheaper for us also.
If this trend of recording everything becomes a nuisance, people could have programs doing random web accesses all the time. Get address lists from spammers and make your system send fake emails at random. With enough broadband, this would create an unmanageable amount of traffic for the surveillance systems.
Making it worse, the true criminals could use steganography on top of all that. If a machine sends a million emails and browses a million websites, what kind of surveillance would find the few messages that contain hidden information?
...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?
... the Big List of Proxy Servers and Open WiFi APs.
Have gnu, will travel.
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. Though I gather there were worse or at least equally egregious cases of abuse of authority during WWII. I just wasn't there to see them.
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.
The paragraph is your friend ... oh dear, it appears you only have 1 friend then.
As usual, it's only the average person who is going to be caught by this. I run my own mail and web server. A small sum of money later and I have an SSL certificate and my ISP can no longer see a lot of the information they're supposed to be recording. Or did I just become an ISP by hosting my own services? Am I responsible for maintaining logs about my own communications to be handed over to the police?
The Pirate Bay's VPN system could make a small fortune selling services to the UK populate now.
Does the UK actually believe that the ISPs will be more respnosible with the data than the government would? I wonder how long it will be before an ISP is caught selling that information to interested third parties.
10: PRINT "Everything old is new again."
20: GOTO 10
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.
Would you like to lash me with that nice whip you have there?
Public school boy, are you?
You assume this is about finding the "badguys." It's not. It's all about power and control over "the good guys" (the vast majority of the population). IMO, the last step was when the UK surrendered your firearms. Soon after, then the pervasive CCTV cameras went up, then the taxes increase, all your communications are monitored, the[...]
I think Americans place far too much importance on whether a private citizen can own a firearm or not. I'm not taking a stand on this issue one way or the other as to whether it's right, but if you got anywhere near to the critical mass it would take to forcibly reform our democracy (100k people storming Parliament), there would be a few deaths with or without a bunch of handguns. The 100k people would win by sheer number, with or without firearms.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Jacqui 'Jackboots' Smith is definitely a Nazi. This moron is one of the most stupid, ignorant, and illiberal people ever to assume power in the UK (with a feeble minority, it has to be said)
IMHO she is in no way a "moron". She's actually a clever (and highly sucessful) con artist. Something which undoubtedly helped her to become an MP in the first place... A stupid person just couldn't fiddle their "expenses" they way she has managed either.
Are you sure about that?
Small numbers of well-trained, well-armed soldiers can outfight massively larger forces.
because when you are looking for a needle in a haystack, the answer is to get more hay.
Seriously, who was the numb nuts that started off this whole "revolution" of letting women vote and hold office?
Can't someone find something else for them to mother other than the internet?
I think Americans place far too much importance on whether a private citizen can own a firearm or not. I'm not taking a stand on this issue one way or the other as to whether it's right, but if you got anywhere near to the critical mass it would take to forcibly reform our democracy (100k people storming Parliament), there would be a few deaths with or without a bunch of handguns. The 100k people would win by sheer number, with or without firearms.
Yeah, you can get reform without firearms, if the Government you are attempting to reform respects human rights. India achieved independence largely without firearms. But what happens if the Government doesn't respect human rights? What if they start dropping napalm on your march to Parliament? Ever seen Hotel Rwanda? If you were a Tutsi, would you rather have had a AK-47 or Gandhi by your side?
Regardless of your thoughts on the effectiveness or lack thereof of firearms, shouldn't we be asking ourselves why the Government wants to take away a right we've had for hundreds of years? If we surrender this right then what will we say when some politician comes along that wants to take away another one? Once you set the precedent that the population is willing to surrender one right, what makes you think that will be the only one that you are asked to surrender?
I'm skeptical of the militia types that are waiting for the revolution. I do believe in the right of a population to revolt and change it's Government but only after "all other means of redress are ineffectual" (to quote the New Hampshire Bill of Rights). It seems to me that the militia types have forgotten this little nugget and in any case I find the thought of a revolution to be pretty amusing when the vast majority of Americans are fat and happy.
The militia types don't really scare me though. They aren't harming me or anyone else. The people who scare the hell out of me are the types that think the 2nd amendment is 'obsolete' while using arguments like "Jefferson never had to deal with repeating firearms". Why do they want to render the population powerless and at the mercy of the Government for protection? Governments change, sometimes pretty rapidly. Even if yours is a benevolent one, it can't protect you all the time. It's just not possible. One of my favorite quotes is, "911: When seconds count, help is only minutes away"
No, there's no reason that I can see to disarm the population. I've yet to hear an argument from the gun control crowd that isn't based on FUD.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
So this basically means that you won't want to continue talking to or make new friends with anyone who seems at all odd, for fear that he might be someone they've flagged and who would cause you to be flagged if you communicated. Nice way to encourage everyone to start enforcing ostracization for anything out of the ordinary.
I suggest Sealand, but I hear that their immigration policies are rather strict.
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!".
"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."
Like everyone else, paedophiles choose to communicate with like-minded people. This does not mean that we're breaking the law; we discuss sexuality, politics and unrelated topics. We also discuss children (from TV, places of work, etc), but we can have such a discussion without plotting to commit crimes.
While the UK government claim that they will only target people who are suspected of illegal activity, the UK authorities simply cannot be trusted to differentiate between someone who is attracted to children and someone who actually tries to act on that attraction. Despite having been informed of the difference between paedophiles and sex offenders, the Metropolitan Police have refused to explain the meaning of their plans to engage in "proactive disruption of 130 individuals with a sexual interest in children". In other words, their so-called "Paedophile unit" is happy to knowingly and unashamedly harass innocent people.
People who aren't even attracted to children are also at risk from the proposed database, as it's very difficult for most people to know whether they're communicating with a paedophile. Studies have indicated that up to 33% of adult men experience sexual arousal to "pedophilic stimuli" (pre-pubescent children). Few people can connect their friends or colleagues to a penile plethysmograph, and very few people will admit to being attracted to chidlren (for obvious reasons), so this database could put anyone at risk of being investigated.
This extension of the authorities' powers will lead to more innocent people being harassed, as many of the iron tentacles of the UK state cannot be trusted to act in a sane or balanced manner.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
So how many billions of money that we don't have is the government going to spend on this (or force ISPs to spend on it) before they're left with a useless system as everyone moves to I2P?
Lord Northcliffe, is that you?
What's your asking price?
Whats to stop someone affiliated in some way with a security service from planting information into one of these databases to frame an innocent person?
I'm pretty sure quite a lot of the British elite is still due to being good at killing other people and invading their land, as much as market forces.
David Cameron is a direct descendant of William IV for example and his family got to be kings by either invading England or being invited to rule by the nobility, depending on your reading of history. "Down with the kids and the people" Dave might come over as chummy and merely rich through his ancestors financial dealings and connections to the Rothschilds but that's just him playing up his urban street cred..
An awful lot of the upper class elite in the UK got to be upper class elite a long time back through land grants from the king or doing a bit of land grabbing, killing and invading sometime between the Saxons and now (still quite a few Norman names there today, eh?). Pretty sure that "new money" still means your great great grand dad made money through cotton or the Empire as far as a lot of the Eton set is concerned ;-)
So much for being a democracy. And all this over "EXTREME PORN". So some people like sadist porn. Your limiting their sexual rights too, whats next, mandatory castration.
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.
If any of your visited sites are Tor nodes, then no doubt the security goons will use that as prima facie evidence that you were up to no good. Privacy means nothing to these people. On the other hand, plenty of Tor nodes are already run by the police or the secret police, so it won't make a great deal of difference.
And you'll need to pray NATO/UN allies... etc, etc doesn't send additional forces to bolster the state side.
Given how wishy-washy most NATO allies are about staying in Afghanistan, I doubt they'd have the political fortitude to dig in for a long term occupation of the U.S. Consider that there are millions of Americans who have been arming themselves for decades just waiting for their chance to shoot at a blue helmet. It's one of the signature tenets of our homegrown conspiracy theories.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
My bad ... After enduring the wall of text, I thought that thing at the bottom was his sig ;-)
So, what, you reckon that if we declare independence from the USA and start making our own foreign policy again, then the Muslim terrorists will leave us alone? Well, I suppose it might work. Has something of an air of cowardice about it, mind. Leaving because we're sick to death of going off to pointless wars just so the Prime Minister can get applauded in Washington and the President can use the word 'coalition' and not sound like quite such a unilateral warmonger, that would be reasonable. Leaving because we're scared of oh no the terrorists!, that's pretty feeble.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
There is already a massive surveillance system in place in the UK. I'm not even talking about the police or intelligence services, all sorts of central and local government bodies have the power to undertake surveillance for such a wide variety of reasons, it's actually quite scary.
Often the reasons given are things like benefit fraud or failure to pay council tax but the point is that surveillance has already, to a large extend, been delegated from the police and secret intelligence services to other bodies. Of course the police and SIS also have access to that information.
The point is that most people won't take the effort to obfusticate their activity in such a manner and so simply doing that would be suspicious.
Nick
I submit that only a terrorist would build such a surveillance society.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I think the modern Battle of Mogidishu (the basis for the movie Blackhawk Down) was a good example.
16 US soldiers were killed in defense of a position.
They killed an estimated 1,000 somali and injured between 3,000 and 4,000 in the process.
There was some air support, a few tanks involved, but the total number of troops involved was only under 200, counting support personnel.
If this continues along the same path without change, at some point, a section of Brittan's population will become alienated enough from the government's activities that they will be willing to take up arms (IUDs?) against their oppressors. Enough strong arm tactics by the government trying to ferret out terrorists will create terrorists.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I wouldn't be so quick to make that assumption.
For starters, the Supreme Court decision that supposedly "upheld the rights of the individual to keep and bear arms" was disturbing, because it just *barely* even passed!
Justice Stephen Breyer, for example, said:
"About 80,000 to 100,000 people every year in the United States are either killed or wounded in gun-related homicides or crimes or accidents or suicides," he said. "In the District, I guess the number is somewhere around 200 to 300 dead and maybe 1,500 to 2,000 wounded. Now, in light of that, why isn't a ban on handguns, while allowing the use of rifles and muskets, a reasonable or proportionate response on behalf of the District of Columbia?"
"Cogito ergo sum terrorist"
Rene Descartes
http://www.flickr.com/photos/24992147@N03/2644171457/
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
Although I have visited the U.K. I would give serious thought before going there again. With the observation of internet usasge, the cameras on the street everywhere, etc. it looks like it is turning into a "police state". It would be interesting to know what percentage of the public/private budgets are going into monitoring what everyone else is doing and what fraction of the GDP of the UK that is and whether there is any debate on where it will end? IMO, when you have a camera in my bathroom watching me take a #2, and you have someone watching that in real time you have a real productivity problem for the economy.
Plus they can offload the costs to the ISPs!
And, more importantly, the security. Given the government's track record with keeping sensitive data safe, I'm actually slightly happier about that (inasmuch as I can be said to be happy about the plan at all, which I'm not), but we're still replacing a single point of failure with multiple single points of failure...
As would say Topper in a Dilbert strip : "That's nothing".
Here in France, to protect the Artists, with the HADOPI law, some people like mediasentry will give IP addresses of people suspected to have done P2P to the HADOPI (Haute Autorité pour la diffusion des oeuvres et la protection des droits sur Internet).
Then the HADOPI will ask ISPs to send you an email, it happends again, a "real" mail, and if it happens again your connection will be suspended (but it you have an 12 month contract with your ISP, you'll continue to pay).
You will be guilty by default.
The only way out is to put a spying software that forbids you some sites (list not published) that has to be continuously running and communicating with the HADOPI servers to prove it's running.
Software editors will publish these programs that will have an HADOPI agreement, but will not be forced to be open source, or even be interoperating. We won't know what they'll do...
With theses programs, there will be no need to ask the ISPs which website we have visited.
If our data line passes through the U.K., does this mean we can depend on them as a backup medium do a restore of lost data?
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Are you saying that all religious persons are as stupid as you've indicated New Labor is? I don't see how that holds up.
First, there are these people, who I think pretty clearly weren't stupid:
Or perhaps you consider religion to have been tenable in pre-Darwinian days, but not now? Then you'd have to account for these people:
Do you really hold that all of those people are incredibly stupid, as evidenced by their holding religious beliefs?
The big problem is that anyone in power to change the election system will most likely end up with less power if they do. As you say, the best chance is to start small, and hope people see the benefits.
Ontario had a very dispiriting referendum (of sorts) on the subject. Well, sort of. It wasn't for SRV or similar, but it was for giving more power to the popular vote by having a set of seats designed to make up for discrepancies between the popular vote and # of county seats won.
People voted roughly 2 to 1 in favor of the old way. No doubt the confusion played a part; it wasn't really advertised until a couple weeks before the election, and not explained well. I think most people were scared with having two different votes to make (once for your county's seat, once for the popular vote seats, in practice you would probably vote the same for both) and didn't see the benefits.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Although I'm not huge on gun rights personally, Breyer's words come too close to sacrificing liberty for security. Also, the idea of allowing handguns is for self defense... you can't arm yourself with a rifle wherever you go, so until stun guns are perfected, there's an obvious legitimate reason for owning a pistol.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"