Slashdot Mirror


Warehouse or No, UK's Expensive Net Spying Plan Proceeds

Vincent West writes with this excerpt from The Register: "Spy chiefs are already spending hundreds of millions of pounds on a mass internet surveillance system, despite Jacqui Smith's announcement earlier this week that proposals for a central warehouse of communications data had been dumped on privacy grounds. The system — uncovered today by The Register and The Sunday Times — is being installed under a GCHQ project called Mastering the Internet (MTI). It will include thousands of deep packet inspection probes inside communications providers' networks, as well as massive computing power at the intelligence agency's Cheltenham base, 'the concrete doughnut.'"

3 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Fight back by robably · · Score: 4, Informative

    Possibly the Trackmenot plug-in for Firefox?

  2. For non UK readers some info by mrphoton · · Score: 5, Informative

    Thought I would just put this in perspective for non UK readers:

    This is quite ironic because the politician Jacqui Smith who was backing this crazy plan. Justified the plan with logic such as if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. Well.... last month she found out that this was true. Somebody leaked her expenses claims to the nation press it turned out that she had claimed for two porn films along with a load of other essentials for her house such as flat screen TVs which were of course essential for here to carry out her job. Oops.

    Secondly, the last few months and in especially the last week has been very bad for the government. It is generally agreed in both the left and right wing press that the government has totally lost the plot and is also losing control of its MPs. (there is talk of the ruling party splitting in two and senior ministers defecting) Add to this that the UK is in massive debt, and I mean massive. This means that after the next election (in 12 months time) the ruling party will most probably be out. The incoming party will HAVE to cut expenditure and things such as this mad project will be cut and all the employees fired. I can not wait!

  3. Re:Fight back by IgnoramusMaximus · · Score: 4, Informative

    The whole tactic is nonsense. A sent email is essentially something that was placed upon your property by a 3rd party. There is no proof at all that it was intended to be sent to you or that you consented to receive it.

    You misunderstood. I was merely taking the idea of encrypted emails and files from the poster, not the actual process of sending them. My proposal was for botnets to create false positives, and so they would fake both sending and receiving of these emails, complete with appropriate "trace" in the email client.

    What ever happened to actual investigative work? If your really a pedophile you would expect other media, and activity. Being caught masturbating near elementary schools or something sick and twisted like that. Or trips to Thailand to molest young boys.

    Catching paedophiles is hard and they are far rarer then some of the "moral panic"-riding fascists would like everyone to believe. And all actual paedophiles are still innocent until they actually go out and try to molest a real child and even then things get questionable if it was the "child" who was soliciting. And yes there are pervert kids out there - just check out any sex-oriented boards to find out when the perverts on them started having their sex drive, most of the TV talking heads would faint from hyperventilation if they ever found out.

    Catching "thought criminals" however is very easy and painless and profitable.

    Guess which of the two The Righteous Crusaders focus on?

    A real pedophile is going to have far more incriminating evidence and behavior than just some encrypted files.

    Not at all. Some are savvy tech users who are likely to have well hidden data. Some do not do tech at all. Some get off on pictures. Some do not. There is only one common critical element: a molested child. The rest, if it is not direct evidence pertaining to that child, is all thought crimes.

    The fact it is used to justify a complete and total invasion of all of your encrypted data is egregious when there is no other evidence to support their accusations.

    They do not care. Catching paedophiles, terrorists, witches and what-not was never the objective. Just a pretext. The objective was always to create an ability to have total surveillance and thus to permanently and irrevocably shift the balance of power firmly toward the "intelligence" and "policing" complexes, away from the public. And this is all about just that one thing: power. As it always was, since times immemorial.