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.'"
Do I miss something or you can completely bypass all of the surveillance by using VPN & SSH connection to a remote country.
Considering that TPB is planing to offer VPN for 4â, getting anonymous on the web will be very easy for people who wants to do so.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Ok, so they build this massive surveillance cluster. It can listen in and decrypt all information passing through all the major ISP players. Now that they have this information, it goes... where? These machines sit in between routers and the ISP's backbone (they'd have to). This means that they are connected to the internet and/or they have remote administration capabilities (I'm assuming dedicated machines). They can't keep the information local, that would be asinine. It would only take one leak (and there will be one, because there are people in the government who will not agree with this. A secretary somewhere will get a memo that gets put on the Internet) of either a password, username, or even a hint that there is remote admin possibilities and it will launch the fury of the Internet at large. Machines will be hacked (eventually) and data will be leaked. Some of it will be embarrassing to the people, while all of it will be to the government. Or maybe they have some secure server that the machines VPN into and transmit the databases that way. Who knows how they could 'securely' transfer this information they are getting, but VPN seems an obvious answer at the moment. That means they will need to deploy the VPN server IPs to the IT's in the field; it also means the server configuration is in a manual. If the government employee thinks they can get away with it or if they are an ex-employee... there will be a whistle-blower. Wikileaks, I guess it's UK's turn ^^
"The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec^2" -Marcus Dolengo
Actually, I have a request to all of bot-net operators out there: redeem yourselves.
There is a thing you can do to pay for your sins and help rescue the future of free speech and unrestricted communications: Use your botnets to spread false positives!
Make sure that every PC that you have a bot on has: a) random political messages, b) random terrorist messages, c) random child pornography, d) random pirated media, e) any other "taboo" crap like cartoons of the "prophet" Mohammad.
Ensure that your bots create credible traces in history caches of web browsers, email clients, deleted files on the file system etc.
If all the millions of infected PCs out there are treated like that, you will make witch hunts and mass persecutions impossible, or at least short lived after every second judge and politician or their family member is caught in the net.
Do this and I will forgive you all the spam. Hell, I will go out and order random crap from spa... err "offers"!