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Cybercrime Treaty Pushes Surveillance Worldwide
bs0d3 writes "As part of an emerging international trend to try to 'civilize the Internet', one of the world's worst Internet law treaties — the highly controversial Council of Europe (CoE) Convention on Cybercrime — is back on the agenda. Canada and Australia are using the Treaty to introduce new invasive, online surveillance laws, many of which go far beyond the Convention's intended levels of intrusiveness. Negotiated over a decade ago, only 31 of its 47 signatories have ratified it. Many considered the Treaty to be dormant but in recent years a number of countries have been modeling national laws based on the flawed Treaty. Leaving out constitutional safeguards, gag orders in place of oversight, and forcing service providers to retain your data may all be coming soon."
There is no better argument for encrypting everything that can be encrypted than this.
Yeah, sure, most governments aren't going to do anything with that data NOW, but once they have it, they have it forever. And political climates can and do change. It is not inconceivable that the US will elect Big Brother bread-and-circuses socialists who model their ideas on the surveillance state of Britain, or religious whack-jobs who will simply say "God's law is higher than Man's law" and start criminalizing homosexuality, abortion, titty-pictures and religions that aren't Christian, or frothing-at-the-mouth Greenies who formalize in law the already-existing mapping of "skeptic" to "heretic". And they will be sitting upon a treasure-trove of information to identify who needs to be put in their place.
That's what ideologically-driven governments do. All of them. In the name of "social equality", God, or "global warming", it's the same.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Do we expect anything less? Who couldn't see this coming from a thousand miles away? So let's start hearing some good news about real ad hoc networks that can actually keep us out of reach.. And please, if you all are gonna squeal about using encryption over their wire, save your breath. It won't work
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Orwell will start rolling again soon enough...
Then proxy server providers get told to keep logs just like the ISPs to be perused at leisure by any LEO, who desires it. The guy who got into Palin's Yahoo used a VPN server, and those guys were more than willing to burn him when the Feds came knocking.
Then proxy server providers get told to keep logs just like the ISPs to be perused at leisure by any LEO, who desires it. The guy who got into Palin's Yahoo used a VPN server, and those guys were more than willing to burn him when the Feds came knocking.
Staying under the radar hoping they won't target you next ... that's not the same thing as fighting back.
The way to fix this is to make passing these kinds of laws even more detrimental to a career in politics, than, say, destroying Social Security.
Sometimes I think we should just hurry up and implement global fascism and get it over with. I'm tired of all the suspense. We can have neighbor snitching on neighbor for thoughtcrimes. We can have full-time martial law since that's cheaper than building enough prisons to house every man, woman, and child. Maybe we can make people fight their neighboring cities to save ourselves the transportation costs of fighting pointless wars overseas. That seems to be more like the society so many people really want to live in. That's why they keep swallowing the bullshit excuses for each baby-step towards its implementation.
Then when the whole thing collapses under its own weight we can all admit what we should have known from the very beginning: that the other way for politicians to feel secure is to be noble and to truly seve the people then they won't feel so threatened by unfettered exchange of information, that there was never a justification for fascism, for the nanny-state, or for ever telling consenting adults what they may do or how they may do it. Perhaps attempting to do so could be the only capital crime on the law books.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
LOL, you're confused.
It wasn't socialists, it was people masquerading as socialists. Including a few out and out fascists, such as the National Socialists of some country or another.
They also masquerade as Communists, Christians, Liberals, Libertarians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and so forth.
About the only thing they don't call themselves is anything accurate.
The guy who got into Palin's Yahoo used a VPN server, and those guys were more than willing to burn him when the Feds came knocking.
I went to college with the guy who ran that VPN server.
The only reason he cooperated with the Feds so readily is because he didn't want them flagging him as a Person Of Interest.
The guy who got into Palin's Yahoo used a VPN server, and those guys were more than willing to burn him when the Feds came knocking.
I went to college with the guy who ran that VPN server.
The only reason he cooperated with the Feds so readily is because he didn't want them flagging him as a Person Of Interest.
Thanks for clearing that up. None of us could have imagined that our own federal government would find ways to make someone's life miserable when that person stands between them and someone they'd really love to apprehend. That's so unprecedented.
Sarcasm aside, I would never consider running a VPN sever or a proxy of any kind unless I had a log retention policy of 30 seconds, and/or all personally identifying information was scrubbed from all logfiles prior to their being written to disk.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
but I guess that my skull will still be crushed so if I am not a terrorist (also known as freedom fighter) who value ideals more than is own life that is a bad thing...
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Sarcasm aside, I would never consider running a VPN sever or a proxy of any kind unless I had a log retention policy of 30 seconds, and/or all personally identifying information was scrubbed from all logfiles prior to their being written to disk.
Why log at all?
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
You assume that the U.S. military would be used by the government to put down any significant rebellion, but I do not think this is very certain; it may seem counter-intuituve, but the U.S. military culture has a strong streak of distrust of high authority. There is a lot of thought and language devoted to classifying orders as lawful and unlawful. Some few will no doubt go along with any order, but as a whole I think it's hard to say where they would come down in the long run.
The police seem to be getting kitted up with all the military hardware:
Why do the police have tanks?
Then there is Operation Fast and Furious
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
The US is scary, but at least it has a real Constituion. This constituion is being ignored in many cases, but at least some people care about this.
Canada is currently less scary than the US, particularly if you are a Canadian citizen. But I live in a city with a zillion cameras, which I hate. What I hate even more (and what scares me even more) is that the cameras went up and no one seems to care. I don't know how much debate there was about them, but Canada has very little except tradition to prevent it from turning into a police state.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
You got it: "add more surveillance to your citizens"
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
If even 10% of the population encrypted everything, the government wouldn't have enough wrenches or people to use the wrenches.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
Yeah, well..... As a Canadian citizen I am better protected in Canada than I would be anywhere else, although our constitution and rights have been granted by the government, and what the government can grant, it can take away.
Theoretically, the US is better, in that the constitution defines roles and limitations of the government (rather than the government granting rights to people). But the US is a very scary place in some ways. The Bill of Rights in the US has, in some cases, been interpreted to apply only to citizens which (I believe) is not what the Constitution says and not what the Founding Fathers had in mind.
This business with Guantanamo is very scary - holding and basically torturing political prisoners in the one(?) country that US citizens are (generally) not allowed to visit. The US used to at least have the image of holding the moral high ground; that this has been lost is tragic and scary.
One nice thing about Canada is that it is small enough that it can't be as scary internationally as the US. The US, next door to Canada, is the most dangerous country to Canada. I realize that this situation would be different if we were next door to Iran.
Everything considered, the US is a somewhat scary place for US citizens and quite a scary place for non-US citizens. It is such a shame - it used to be so different. Canada has gotten scarier too, but, all told, Canada is one of the least scary countries in the world.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST