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."
The issue isn't so much whether law enforcement can scrutinize your web access, but rather that the information could leak out. A distressing amount of private information seems to be kept on laptops that keep getting stolen out of cars.
Requiring ISP's to keep this data is also iffy. ISP's don't want to be in the business of spying on their subscribers. There's no profit in it, it only angers the customers, and potentially the ISP could be drawn into a legal tangle if it potentially knows that someone is doing illegal stuff like, say, downloading and emailing nuclear bomb schematics to someone in North Korea or Iran.
Anyway it sounds like the government is leaving enough wiggle room to discard the policy if it generates too much controversy.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Also I'm not sure of the specifics but if they really wanted to they could probably insist you give them the encryption key for a particular session... one which was generated and discarded by your browser long since.
then throw you in jail when you don't comply.
Wouldn't stick. They can't reasonably claim that you might have known that key.
I used to blame the politicians, but these days I think they're almost as powerless as the rest of us.
The No2ID campaigner Guy Herbert is quoted in the article as saying:
We should not be surprised that the interests of bureaucratic empires outrank liberty.
And that's it. These plans represent job security for civil servants. They mean bigger budgets, bigger offices, higher salaries, more staff. More bureaucrats will be needed to operate the system, to answer requests for information from it, and implement whatever mechanism of "accountability" is considered sufficient to safeguard privacy.
The people who are pushing this will never face an election. They will never be sacked. This is why the plans persist from government to government. Ministers come and go, but the civil service is permanent, and always attempting to expand. The bureaucrats lost their battle for ID cards, but they're still winning their war.
So, I think if we want to impose surveillance on anyone, we should start with the public servants. And the more responsibility they have, the more closely they should be watched. The only problem is, in order to do this, we're going to need to hire a few more bureaucrats...
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Yes, you're right, there were many a time when Jefferson would go on a long-winded THC-fueled rant about having "boots on the ground" and being "willing to die" to defeat a democratically elected government.
Of course, thankfully the lunatics usually aren't as industrious as Jefferson was, otherwise we might really be in trouble.