Slashdot Mirror
UK To Track All Browsing, Email, and Phone Calls
Sara Chan writes "The UK government plans to introduce legislation that will allow the police to track every phone call, email, text message and website visit made by the public. The information will include who is contacting whom, when and where and which websites are visited, but not the content of the conversations or messages. Every communications provider will be required to store the information for at least a year."
All politicians will have to register all their communication devices, email addresses, phone numbers, and then make the list of all communication (not the content) available to the public.
Who watches the watchers?
We have met the enemy, and it is us.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The same thing is going to happen in the US, ACLU or not. The bills are already written. They are just waiting for another 9/11 to they can ram them through.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
This really reads like something out of fiction. I did not think I'd see the day of such a government, but here I am at 22 years old and already, a modern, 1st world country is to the point where it feels the need and justification to monitor every action of it's populace. The precedent here is staggering, terrifying and morally bankrupt. The possibility for abuse here is strong to the point of certainty. I pray this never makes it to a country I call home.
How about: *Proposal* in UK To Track All Browsing, Email, and Phone Calls?
I guess it depends how cynical you are about the law-making process. Whilst I'm yet to make my mind up on the current government, I can definitely see why some people make the jump to thinking that this is as good as done. It's not as if the previous government particularly cared about our rights after all.
Don't take the above poster too seriously. He doesn't.
The implicit assumption here is that, as long as Big Brother doesn't see the content of the messages, there's nothing to worry about. Of course that's total bullocks. The AOL search data scandal of 2006 shows that one's search history alone can reveal far, far more about a person than an unwarranted government search should be able to see. Amp that up to a list of every site visit, plus everyone I email, call, or text, and this represents the government demanding the right to dig very deep into Brits' communication.
I hope Britons go ballistic in opposition to this proposal.
How about: *Proposal* in UK To Track All Browsing, Email, and Phone Calls?
Not even a proposal. It's speculation that there might be a proposal. If you read the actual quote from the defence review from the article, it more or less says: 'we need to upgrade lawful intercept capabilities to help fight terrorism'.
Now OK, there may be some civil liberties issues with what the government eventually comes up with. But there is a difference between being worried and making shit up, and this article has crossed that line.
Would not help. VOIP usually uses SIP to establish a call (source and destination), and then RTP to stream the media for the voice (content). Encryption is not going to conceal the source and destination in a SIP call and will only protect the content. Even if you were to wrap the whole thing in IPSec, you would still not be concealing the source and destination since either SIP or IPSec would largely be irrelevant since the IP packets themselves contain the source and destination.
What the government wants is the source and destination according to the article. The ISPs are responsible for this so it would not be terribly difficult, although expensive, to monitor all traffic for those SIP handshakes and then create a database. Even VPN tunnels would be recorded as well and probably stand out because that traffic is inherently encrypted.
Unless you have a direct point-to-point SIP call, encryption is useless. You need to wait for ZRTP encryption which is endpoint-to-endpoint. Devices and software that support that will still use SIP to establish the call, but regardless of how many different media servers are involved (Asterisk as an example), the call would be encrypted and recordings would be useless. This is also why it is not that attractive to most people setting up private VOIP networks for business since call recordings would be more difficult with ZRTP and are usually required in a call center.
Most VOIP calls are not point-to-point SIP, but SIP being ultimately routed to PSTN. In the US at least that would make it nearly impossible to hide the source and destination since they would be using ANI and not Caller ID for billing. I am not sure what the analog in the UK is for ANI. Even if you encrypt the SIP portion of the traffic the other end on a regular telephone number is not, so once again largely useless.
Making a truly secure phone call is pretty difficult already, and making it anonymous is next to impossible with 3rd parties involved, or without compromising someone else's networks to hide your traffic inside them.
Freenet, TOR, and other forms of darknets are not well suited to VOIP traffic which requires low latencies to operate. So anonymity, provided through reasonable doubt, will not work unless these networks become far more prolific and a little more advanced. Imagine some guys laptop running a TOR node while he is on wireless Internet. Might as well route your VOIP traffic around the Moon and back. If Darknets are going to support low latency traffic then they have to develop a QoS model that nodes could process and eliminate high-latency nodes from being considered when choosing a route.
The UK is fucked period. I would imagine even if you guys had 100% residential participation in a darknet that the UK government would throw you in jail if you did not hand over the encryption keys to traffic they acknowledge you are not even responsible for creating, but are providing for as an ersatz ISP. One way or the other, the UK will make darknets illegal too, and then you guys have nothing.
My best suggestion for people in the UK is to get out now before they erect the wall to keep you in.
It's so nice to see the lunatics on the far-right agreeing with the lunatics on the far-left. Really makes one hopeful about the future.