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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.'"
With those specs, once it's compromised, it'll be the spambot to end all spambots!
Caveat Utilitor
I think the best way we can fight the intrusion of governments into the privacy of our communications will be to flood the system with false positives.
car bomb
Maybe someone could develop an @home project that sends random packets filled with keywords to other computers running the client.
attack at noon
The only way we are going to be able to keep governments in check is by fighting for our rights.
kill the president
I mean, if we don't fight the powers that be, who will fight for us?
sarin gas
I'm not sure how they plan on doing this, but it seems a little dangerous to have a system with so much power. What exactly is going to happen if someone manages to turn this into a botnet? Something that big could probably knock out the root servers. Does anyone have more information on the structure of the system? Who came up with this idea? How many experienced opinions were brought into the discussion? From what I've seen in my own local government, a lot of politicians have warped visions of how the internet actually works, and what the dangers are (see: A Series Of Tubes.) Really, this seems like a radical case of the client who has grand visions of his super awesome website idea, but actually has no idea what he ~really~ needs. It just seems dangerous to have non-experts on the subject mandating what we do with the net.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
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
Don't forget CC All Your E-mail to Jacqui Smith Day.
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!