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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."
...at every intersection in London. I guess the ACLU was unsuccessful in setting up a branch office.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
How about: *Proposal* in UK To Track All Browsing, Email, and Phone Calls?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
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.
Hey, guys - we voted against the other lot for this reason. Ah well. Hopefully the libs will decide to stick to one of their election promises and vote against this. If they don't then there's quite frankly no point in having the coalition in the first place.
Encryption of your files is worthless when you can be arrested for failing to give up passwords as per the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. (Which would be more accurately named the Irregulation of Investigatory Powers Act, as it pretty much declares open season on those under suspicion.)
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.
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.
Soon, I shall dawn my cape and mast to fight this tyranny! ... I just have to brush up on my knife throwing skills, police in the UK use guns now right? ...Bummer.
Most mobile phone operators already keep statistics on who you call when (they need it for billing information in case somebody doesn't agree with their bill) and emergency services are capable of pinning down the location of mobile phones in less than a minute. And ISPs are already required to keep quite some information as well by EU regulations. So I'm not really sure this will change anything. Except provide a legal framework to (ab)use this information.
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.
And we've always been at war with eastasia.
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.
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.
How quaint -- they use laws to grant government authority for such things. Over on this side of the pond the President just declares it to be so and tells the judicial they're not allowed to hear any petitions for redress of grievances. Much simpler that way.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Shit, son, you deserve a double whoosh for that one.
WHOOOOOOSH!
WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Been hearing about ideas for complete internet data retention for a good few years now. Here's how it usually goes:
1) An idiot cabinet politician comes up with a "simple good idea"
2) Lots of people speculate about how good an idea it is and how useful it's results would be
3) The media cotton on to the idea resulting in larges amounts of WTF??!!!111!!!1/?1
4) Someone finally tells the cabinet politician how expensive and dangerous the idea is
5) Cabinet politician blusters about how it's still a good idea for years without making any progress towards implementation
6) Cabinet gets reorg'd and the idea is quietly shelved as a higher priority "simple good idea" comes along
Yup, this kind of thing comes along fairly regularly and this old chestnut always gets shot down fairly quickly. Move along folks, this isn't just old news, it's not even news-worthy.
how right you are. in spite of the troll mod i'm going to get and the karma hit... the more they do stuff like this, the more guns and ammo i buy. bottom line, eventually it comes down to boots on the ground and who's willing to kill or more importantly die for what they believe in. a lot of people will kill for this kind of totalitarian crap. however, most won't want to die for it. i have faith that eventually America will see the light and embrace individual liberty and personal responsibility again and limit this 1984 nonsense to the europeans where it belongs.
Wouldn't stick. They can't reasonably claim that you might have known that key.
Sorry, I change keys every two weeks and don't record the expired ones, and since it's 256 bit encryption, there's no bloody way I'm going to remember that sucker a year later.
If your in the UK, have fun in the slammer, Part III of the Act, which requires persons to supply decrypted information
Deni ability, and lack of intent may get you off in other countries, but not likely in this case. You had best start encrypting files with something like truecrypt where you can have 2 passwords on the same file giving up different data. Perhaps if you give them some unencrypted data they won't know to expect another password.
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.
No they can't.
As I pointed out last time RIPA came up, it's much more like a search warrant.
See my post here explaining it in more detail and my followup responses which explains, and provides links to the relevant legislation straight from the horses mouth:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1809504&cid=33806568
RIPA is an awful piece of legislation and has no place in a modern democracy, however there are many myths about it like that which you have stated which are simply just fantasy. RIPA is bad, but it's not quite that bad. It needs to be withdrawn from the books either way, but let's not over-dramatise the issue, else legitimate calls for it's removal based on legitimate concerns will just get lost amongst the madness.
A double whoosh! Oh my god, WHAT DOES IT MEAN!? T_T
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Socially liberal, very strong on individual rights, very strong on limited government.
Some embrace anarchy.
'Lunatics' we are not : this was the position of people like Jefferson, for the most part.
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
A double whoosh! Oh my god, WHAT DOES IT MEAN!? T_T
It means that someone completely missed the point, had it explained to them and then ... missed it again. It was actually funnier than the original joke.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Triple whoosh! All the way!
Whoa! That's so intense!
Whooooooaaa-oh my god!
Wow! Woooooooooooo!
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle