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"Three Strikes" To Go Ahead In Britain
David Gerard writes "Lord Peter Mandelson has carefully ignored the Gowers Report and the Carter Report, instead taking the advice of his good friend David Geffen and announcing that 'three strikes and you're out' will become law in Britain. The Open Rights Group has, of course, hit the roof. Oh, and never mind MI5 and the police pointing out that widespread encryption will become normal, hampering their efforts to keep up with little things like impending terrorist atrocities. Still, worth it to stop a few Lily Allen tracks being shared, right?"
Can we also have a 3 strikes law on Slashdot for dupes??
I've contacted my MP. The open rights group has a brief PDF to send to them so they are clued up. Ask them to back EDM 1997.
More info here: http://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/ask-your-mp-to-help-protect-our-freedoms-on-the-net
Not sure if this place has changed over the years, but I'm all for encryption becoming the norm.
For legitimate law enforcement needs, search warrants and traffic analysis are not impeded.
In fact, draconian enforcement of copyright would be the best thing ever - it would illustrate the absurdity of the status quo.
..don't panic
The US 3-strikes rule is based on a concept from baseball, and as a result probably makes little sense in the UK. I'm surprised they didn't go with something more appropriate, like a "bowled, leg-before-wicket, or hit-wicket" and you're out rule.
I propose the three strikes law three strikes law. A politician gets a strike for mentioning the three strikes law in a non-derisive manner, and gets banned from government after three strikes.
My webcomic
I can't wait for some motivated group to deliver a clear message to politicians through a concerted effort to get politicians and their employees cut off from the internet simply by accusing them, three times, of copyright violations. Perhaps, once politicians and their staff are cut off from the online world, they'll begin to realize just how moronic this law is. When a simple accusation carries the weight of punishment, the possibilities of abuse are egregious.
Ah, the days of "innocent until proven guilty" seem like a distant memory now...
The "minister" resposible for this was forced out of office twice for misconduct, he has no place even being in public office.
Not a good idea, it'd take 5 days to make a decision and probably end in a draw.
Well, considering "Mandy" has already been forced to resign from Labour twice already for scandals (involving borrowing money from someone he was supposed to be investigating to buy a lovely house in central london among other activities), one wonders if he's caught with his hand in the cookie jar yet again, will this third strike resignation force his exclusion from Politics?
Allegedly, he'd shown no interest in this whatsoever before going for a meal at a lovely retreat owned by a movie producer, and a few days holiday.. On his return, this was basically mandated with no consultation.
Yay for unelected politicians who keep coming back despite being forced to resign in shame.
Amazing it gleefully says "file sharing" and not "music sharing". So let him grab one graphic he swipes because his office can't be bothered to cleanroom it, grab one little shareware snip that he can ignore even the postcard-terms on, and then let the last one be one of the Britain's Got Talent winning songs. Poof!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Sure this is an attempt to be funny, but don't be surprised. When this 3 strikes thing doesn't prop up profits for the copyright regime like they expect, and the cops start yammering about the crypto tech used by the bad guys making it harder for them to do their job, banning encryption WILL be the next step. Remember the "hey, let's force back doors in all encryption schemes" the US government was trying to pass not too long ago? Clipper chip ring a bell? Skipjack? Key escrow? It will be done.
BTW, there's an editor on wikipedia who keeps on moving the detail about Lily Allen's stance on copyright infringement into a subsection labelled "Social Activism' on her page. Hardly social activism I would think to speak out about something that is in her own financial interest.
The UK parliament is in enough trouble through them dishonestly claiming too much expenses -- time for a real reform. Men of honour don't seem to exist in politics (in large enough numbers), so we need real transparency and accountability.
Guy Fawkes night is soon -- maybe a real reenactment is about due!
And that old favourite, "ban quashed due to bad light".
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
(I'm being silly. Of course I'll be contacting my MP about this.)
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
RIPA already allows the UK police to rubber-hose your password out of you.
The interesting thing will be SSL and Tor-based stuff, which doesn't require you to even have a password to use.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
as long as I can still find nude pics of Lily Allen on google images.
In other news, serial resigner, unelected jobsworth, and general insult to the democratic process "Lord" Peter Mandelson, having been appointed to high government office on a technicality by serial bad decision maker, unelected jobsworth, and general insult to the democractic process Gordon Brown, will shortly be resigning, again, having demonstrated a stunning lack of competence in public office, again.
Sorry, we've got an update: the Labour Party are going to get hammered so badly in the general election next year that they might actually come third, the current administration is already in lame duck mode, and Mandelson's views are all but irrelevant.
Frankly, I'm more worried about what David Cameron and his crew are going to do when they get in. If memory serves, they have publicly backed screwing the people in favour of Big Media pretty much any time the question has come up, also directly contravening overwhelming public sentiment expressed to Gowers et al.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
...And I say we need to be encrypting our traffic anyway. The average computer contains more than enough processing power, and the average 'pipe' width can easily handle the extra resources needed for widespread use of encryption in day-to-day use.
In addition, the recent trend in government is towards snooping and perv-ish behavior: China with its "great" firewall, USA with its unwarranted spying and packet sniffing, and now the UK with its new "three-strikes" policies. I pay my ISP a significant sum of money to deliver me 1s and 0s as fast as they can, and there are very, very few exceptions in which they have a need to know what those 1s and 0s add up to.
I call upon the open source community to lead the way -- while I would love to see the big leagues (Microsoft, Apple, etc) apply their tonnage behind such a problem, pigs are more likely to fly first. How hard would it be for a browser to automatically attempt to negotiate a secure connection for every visited web page and only use normal, unencrypted access when a secure connection fails or cannot be completed in a secure amount of time? People running web servers would not have to make major modifications, only implement a new protocol.
"Still, worth it to stop a few Lily Allen tracks being shared, right?" Truly, the cost is too dear, even for that.
Do you see what I did there?
Thanks for allowing this to happen. I expect it will be only a few months before someone stands up in Canadian parliament to make a speech that includes the phrase "3 strikes laws have already been enacted in other nations, such as Britain...". There comes a point where you should realize that angry letters aren't going to get it done, you're going to have to accept your responsibility to take more aggressive action when your government does not stand up for its people.
It wasn't railing against encryption, it was pointing out that both the police & the intelligence services have voiced their disapproval over the "Three Strikes" idea because it's likely to increase the use of encryption and therefore make their lives more difficult. i.e. It's not just a load of pirates that Mandy's ignored on this one.
If one person in a family is accused of pirating, the whole household gets cut off?
If one person in a company is accused of pirating while at work, the whole company gets cut off?
If one person in a ministry is accused of pirating while at work, the whole ministry gets cut off?
Who is _allowed_ to accuse?
Not a good idea, it'd take 5 days to make a decision and probably end in a draw.
Sounds good to me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL9-esIM2CY
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I'd been trying to make this joke all week, but despite reading the wiki page on Cricket, I couldn't write the joke to make it sound like I knew what I was talking about. Three strikes and I suppose now *I'm* out.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
"Three strikes" laws -- particularly the California version that allows petty crimes to trigger the third strike -- are problematic. There are varying levels of severity for felonies, some that deserve life sentences, some that deserve probation, and everything in between.
One guy commits two two heinous felonies, somehow lawyers his way out of long prison terms, and another guy, a) steals a purse, b) hits a parked car and runs away, and c) steals bubble gum from the store goes to prison for life. I'm not sure how any sane, thinking person on this planet can't see the glaring flaw with this system.
If encryption becomes popular then I can see the point the police are making but why would people using P2P start using encryption to start the cycle?
If everyone on P2P started encrypting the transportation it would make no difference because the arrests and letters to pay or else have not been caused by MITM sniffing.
If P2Pers start encrypting all files you have to have some method of getting the password out to everyone and that would require some club or private site and once you have that it is easier to get a legal right to inspect and copy all infomation on that site. Such a site would have email address and other information about the users, so if anything this is something that P2Pers would avoid.
The only place P2P where encryption would work is with blocking the IP address of the people sharing but that would require some central site that routes the traffic so it is not really P2P anymore.
I don't really understand in depth how P2P works so what am I missing here?
The dealt with this already (sadly). The RIP Act allows the state to send you for jail for 5 years if you can't (or won't) supply the means (i.e. passpharse / key) to decrypt content in your possession.
The legislation was drafted so poorly that it is to the extent that if someone gives you some encrypted data on a disk and you don't know the key and the police demand it, then you fall foul of it and can go to jail.
Anecdote:
Someone actually performed a stunt at a press conference at the time and confronted a minister supporting the bill as I recall, but handing them over a floppy disk with the confession to a real crime they had committed (most likely something real but trivial, like theft I presume) and informed her they had burned the disk containing the key and that as such she was now withholding evidence of a crime and so had fallen foul of the law.
For dramatic flair, they had a video of them burning the disk with the decryption key.
The minister responded "that's not what the legislation says". The protagonist responded it was to which the minster replied "well, that's not what it means".
Would be great if anyone could remember who was involved.
It's been done, although there are questions about exactly how secure PD is (closed source, performance-orientated.) There's also Freenet which aims to be considerably more secure/anonymous, but is slower and still under heavy development.
These bastards, and that slimy scumbag Mandelson have spend the past 13 years utterly ruining everything, every institution, way of life, habitat, hobby, social fabric and this?
Basically, people are slowly concluding a few things, some are less than good, but for every action, there is a reaction, clearly 13 years too late. Vote anyone but these bastards, and tell them why at every moment they bang on your door or come to your doorstep. Vote BNP, UKIP, Con, Lib - ANYONE but these slimy dark forces shits.
Their brand of nanny state 1984 insanity, and mass persecution of population, drivers, and all the rest, and their enforced political correctness and multiculturalism, and devolution, and EU fanatisism, and the rest is DEAD. OVER. FINISHED.
Its the worst government the UK has had in any modern times, and people cannot wait to be rid of them.
We`re all equal
Obviously a Government with a suicide wish.
N.B. this user is far too lazy to write a witty and intelligent sig.
The title ' "Three Strikes" To Go Ahead In Britain ' is, err, a little misleading (what, on /. ? never).
My understanding is that the policy is being proposed form inclusion in a new bill. AFAIK this then has to be bounced between The House of Commons and the Lords and finally signed by HRM before it is law. And this assumes it is not removed and/or amended in this process.
so p2p is now like the post office ???
Pot? Kettle is on the phone...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
These people in government have advisors, technical experts and all sorts of qualified people to tell them how worthless this will be.
It boggles the imagination to not even contemplate the number of false positives this will generate, besides encryption, it has been pointed out
many times that all this may do is drive more people to hack their neighbors' wireless networks, using Kismet or other trivial password sniffers.
If up to 10% of all PCs worldwide can be hacked into botnets, it doesn't take a genius to see doing similar things from other people's machines
and let them take the fall for it....
The only explanation I can come up with is that either:
widely-acknowledged cinematic references in truly depressing thoughts, to first be tested on the public for 'authenticity' on how to
best persecute innocent people with maximum effect?
sense, but also cunningly facilitates implementing surveillance and further counter-measures against 'criminalization'. (see above)
Regardless of the answer to these silly questions, one can only wonder what the endgame will be. Enforcement or not, the major content holders
cannot keep going the way they have been, and with ever-dwindling revenue, (especially in the music divisions) will eventually have their assets
ultimately disposed of at the auction block for pennies on the dollar to people like Google, who will love nothing better than to practically give
it away for free, in trying to lure customers to purchase other things, rather than to keep suing them for not buying physical goods in formats
that were once popular during the previous century, and still demanding to charge the same price for it without the old expenses.
And what will this grand adventure have accomplished? There is a name for that special moment in the hunt, when the game is barely walking,
bleeding profusely, surrounded by a pack of growling dogs, but still trying to gore one of them on their way out....In French "La Curée"
That's pretty much what it feels like.... Really!
Scorched Earth Policy..... This too will come to pass.
Where the hell did people get the notion that prison is meant to reform criminals?
You mean the Department of Corrections, incarcerating someone at a correctional facility?
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Agreed - ban encryption.
Anyone using encryption must have something to hide.
Reply to That ||
I loved this section, as found on the BBC:
The pay-off for tough penalties against persistent file-sharers would be a more relaxed copyright regime, Mr Mandelson said. The details of it would need to be hammered out at European level but it would take account of the use of copyright material "at home and between friends", he said. It would mean that, for example, someone who has bought a CD would be able to copy it to their iPod or share it with family members without acting unlawfully.
So now we just need to find three instances that an MP shared any copyright material with a friend or colleague. Presumably accidentaly leaking millions of instances of personal details held in government databases doesnt count?
The massive increase in prison spending which makes a negligible difference in crime rates compared to other states is pretty good evidence that three-strikes laws don't work, yes.
Lacking wisdom and risk assessments are hardly grounds for locking somebody up for life. Something about the penalty fitting the crime comes to mind. If you want to go around locking up people that lack judgment, we'd have more people in prison than not.
And I fail to see how stealing golf clubs constitutes a threat against fellow citizens on the magnitude of "we must lock this guy up to protect everyone around him".
Just a reminder.
encryption being declared illegal in GB, or worse, having to register your encryption key with the government or risk being classified as a terrorist. MI5/6 and the other law enforcement agencies are doing the 'not our idea' dance right now, but they know in the long run the Nanny-State that is the GB will not allow somthing like a persons privacy to stand in the way of spreading fear and mis-information under the guise of protecting the nation.
If they criminalize encryption, only criminals will have it...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?