Slashdot Mirror
UK Plans More Spying On Internet Users Under 'Terrorism' Pretext
Wowsers writes "In vogue with other countries cracking down on freedom and democracy on the internet as discussed in Slashdot recently, the UK is joining in with plans to track all phone calls, text messages, email traffic and websites visited online, all to be stored in vast databases under new government anti-terror plans. As reported in The Telegraph, security services will have access to information about who has been communicating with each other on social networking sites such as Facebook, direct messages between subscribers on Twitter would also be stored, as well as communications between players in online video games. The scheme is a revised version of a plan drawn up by the ex-Labour government which would have created a central database of all the information. The idea was later dropped in favor of requiring communications providers to store the details at the taxpayers' expense."
1984 is here! 27 years too late, but it's here.
Thinkpol report alarmwise, unveiling doubleplusungood possibility of Inparty ideodeviates. Goldstein connects possibility uneliminated. BB declared speechwise in VicPalace Ingsoc traitors must be detected and rehabed nodelay:
"Comrades, how will Ingsoc continuelive victorywise? Ingsoc will continuelive victorywise by vaporizing decay within Inparty core. Inparty exampleserve Outparty and prolemass and must causewise continuebe goodthink. Ignorance is strength, Comrades, unforget."
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
ISPs and mobile phone companies will have to allow various civil servants access to their logs. I didn't notice anything about the access only being at the ISP's premises (some civil servants have been known to do things like leave laptops containing confidential data on trains) or with judicial oversight, both of which are worrying points. I would suggest using encrypted email, but sender and recipient would still be known and you can get 2 years at Her Maj's pleasure for forgetting your password when it's required.
Good luck sometimes arrives disguised as bad
Good luck chronicling all my drunken ramblings on cocktail napkins. Every scandalous thing I've ever put to form is blotted and smeared with spirits. Even I can't decipher the subversion.
dull-eyed footstool-temporary octopus
Are we so terrorized by terrorism that we are willing to put up with anything to avoid it? How far do we want to go to prevent terrorism. Should we just accept that sometimes it's going to happen despite our best efforts? It sucks if you happen to be a victim but terrorism can never do enough take down a country unless it overreacts and spends itself to death trying to counter it.
I'm not saying we should do nothing to fight terrorism but how far should we go?
With this kind of information, are you applying for a job that might be created by the surveillance system described in tfa?
Good luck sometimes arrives disguised as bad
I mean, which country does not do such stuff (or, does not have it planned for the immediate future)?
The UK government has shown time and time again that this is going to be a bad thing. For one, they've had so many data breaches in the last few years (lost DVLA disks, tax details, NHS disks, god knows what else) that a single monolithic data source is just asking for trouble. Secondly, we've had plenty of cases in recent years of jumped up local officials and magistrates using "anti-terror" laws (which were no-doubt passed in good faith) to track people who put their bins out on the wrong week, or don't keep their allotments tidy, or any number of other petty nonsense.
And finally, I'd like to point out to any smug-feeling non-Brits reading this that it's bad for you too. If your communications pass through UK -based servers, odds are you're going to be logged and tracked too. And you don't even have the satisfaction of having voted for this rubbish!
So he likes KDE, Iron Maiden, and Jimi Hendrix? And he tries to weed out astroturfers? Sounds like a pretty awesome dude.
glad i left UK
slowly among the corrupt western gov.'s what they class as freedom & democracy is being turned into autocratic control sold under the guise of 'needed protection/control for your own safety'
screw them & their absurd laws i am not a terrorist so don't assume i am & then expect me to prove i am not!
These plans are great in theory, but in practice, they will never be able to enforce access to all the data they are really after. The terrorists will use intermediates and encryption to make it impossible to yield any practical data out of this ginormous heap of raw information. It will violate privacy, cost an insane amount of money and have no significant positive effect on whatever statistical figure they want to improve upon. A few stupid punters will have their day in court for being so stupid that they get caught for petty crimes, but that's all this enforcement will ever yield. Unless they plan to use it to end file-sharing. Maybe that's the hidden agenda?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The GCHQ never liked been seen in open court, the press or having its "listening post" ability over every aspect of the UK's telecom infrastructure become too well known.
So they hope a Communications Capabilities Development Programme can make the links in open court based on info that the GCHQ "found" and then flagged?
Your interest in politics was not a flaged but your friend had a friend who said something on twitter or downloaded something and they "stumbled" back to you?
The GCHQ tried "sigint NEW Systems" back in the late 1990's, the Government Telecommunications Advisory Centre, Government Technical Assistance Centre (criminals used codes) ect.
Strange that all this is now so direct and in the open? Everything you do is now can be tracked if your flagged, months of logs can be "opened" and real time use spied on for a long time with very little legal oversight in the USA, UK, Australia....
Why would anyone of interest use the web in any way worth logging anymore?
Back to family, cult, faith, school, tribe, gang, compatriots, business associates - MI6 will be detected long before they can plant a fresh face or bribe their way to something of use.
Why is the UK is giving away generations of hidden signals intelligence excellence for some short term "communications industry" links and PR that they are doing something?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If you are just talking body count "legitimate" governments are responsible for more deaths than any other source. If you are just talking fear and misery well "legitimate" governments probably win there to. They may not be going after you but that is just because you haven't made the right person mad.
People are talking about how Idiocracy was a documentary but if you watch it again Brazil is.
Just in from the North Sea. Britain has finally sunk under the weight of the vast server farms storing every malicious keystroke of the beleaguered populace. This was the final stroke as the cost of analysis of the vast data store had finally exceeded GDP. It is expected that any terrorists perished with everyone else.
Like Jacqui Smith before her, a weak woman. She's shown the exact same pattern of fear, and the exact same capitulation to MI5/6/SOCA/London Police Chief Constable (who also heads anti-terror) as the person before her.
They talk all sorts of imaginary scenarios that may 'happen' as a result of failure to monitor everyone, and she can see her career up in smoke if they campaign against her they way the police have campaigned on other issues.
Similar things happened to the background check reforms, for people who deal with children. The police PR men went out on a PR campaign, and said that if the vetting procedure was removed then pedos would kill your children and it would be the home secretaries fault. So she toned down the changes to the vetting procedure to allow *some* vetting.
Labour of course will accuse Tories of *.*, they'll join in with any criticism of the Tories because that's all that pillock Milliband ever does. So the police can rely on the support of Labour no matter what they want to do, how outrageous the civil liberties violation or how many human rights are violated. Milliband will be there to join in the chorus of criticism.
The fix is to remove the police campaign abilities. They shouldn't be able to campaign as to how laws SHOULD be, since they have to enforce them AS THEY ARE. It's too tempting for seniors police and spys to extend their mandate by using their position to campaign for new laws.
The story could be summarized, roughly, as so: Bureaucrats continue a new iteration of an old legacy in developing a further exaggerated sense of state control, in response to a perceived sense of national threat - this time, endeavoring to revoke some of the citizen's newer liberties, in endeavoring to develop (and substitute, therewith) a notion of "State-owned personal privacy" (TM)
(DNRTA)
I'd like to believe that the pragmatic arguments against it will be enough. I'm not familiar with the UK's own governmental charters, so I cannot argue more to the principles of the matter. I'm sure that the Open Rights Group might be able to chime in on the matter, though. Cheers to them.
Great as an example why the law is a bad idea.
Sadly, it also serves as an example against getting irate about it. Yes, you get a ton of information about a person. No, nobody gives half a shit about it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Aaaaand the ISP's can make a fortune while trolling the system, lots of users setting up randomised conenctions to sites all over the government, random emails to every person in government, random generated skype and IM's to people who let it "run in the background"....
After the ISPs send in the bill for 300 yotabytes of storage +management costs for the storage for the first 3 months and the government (which is paying for it....) has it's fit, what then?
Effectively the government has created an infinite money pool for ISP's. And while some of them are undoubtedly getting pressured to do this they have about 0 technical understanding of what's involved.
What I care more about is the amount of tax pounds my lovely Con-Dem Gov't is going to pay to Crapita or HP/EDS to build some half baked IT system to store this stuff. The record of big IT projects in the UK is piss poor. They've wasted £11bn (£11,000,000,000) on the National Health Service project for IT and currently don't have anything to show for that wastage.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
Given the fact that I always use "sensitive" words in my chats with my friends, just because that's what we consider to be fun (we don't intent to blow anyone, up or any other way), I expect myself to see the inside of a prison some time in the future just based on my comments. And I also expect, if the judicial system doesn't get totalitarian-ised, to sue the hell out of them as soon as this happens, and buy myself half of England and a few patches of Wales with taxpayer money. Then we'll see who sidesteps due process.
It seems odd to me that the UK's priorities are 'preventing terrorism' rather than saving lives. Not many people die from terrorism a year and this would prevent very few of them.(Let's be generous and say one a year) Are there not other things on which they could spend the money that would save more lives than this. I don't see how deaths from terrorism are any more serious than accidental deaths. Building HS2", for example will probably save more lives than this as a by-product by decreasing the number of car journeys, which are far more dangerous than rail ones. Why do people give terrorism 'special powers'. In what way is a death because of terrorism any more serious than a car death? Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?
Even if they didn't do it themselves, they would be bound by the EU Data Retention Directive to do it.
Sweden has already got threatened with the EU high court for not implementing the directive.
"The scheme is a revised version of a plan drawn up by the Labour government which would have created a central database of all the information.
The idea of a central database was later dropped in favour of a scheme requiring communications providers to store the details at the taxpayers’ expense.
But the whole idea was cancelled amid severe criticisms of the number of public bodies which could access the data, which as well as the security services, included local councils and quangos, totalling 653 public sector organisations.
Labour shelved the project - known as the Intercept Modernisation Programme - in November 2009 after a consultation showed it had little public support."
So it's just the same plan probably being pushed for by the same security service lobbyists for a second time, this time with more success because "the Olympics".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-15734483
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
are you surprised that the "land of opening envelops" will spy after people over the internet?
every envelope that left and went into uk was opened and copied at some point in the recent history, which happened for years.
many stories about encryption tells that uk will not let the people there have there life.
what do you expect? privacy from UK? really? be thankful you have democracy, well sort off.
The merry UK is today fighting tooth-n-nail to retain its reputation as most Fasist country on Earth. On close heels is 'ObamAmerica' which is planning to has a TSA agent shadowing 24/7/365-6 EVERY USA citizen, even to the extent of nightly sleep-overs.
Why?
In Obama's mind, citizens, especially USA citizens, are the enemy, quite simple. A TSA shadow ensurse that termination of the USA citizen will be accomplished at the right moment to soothe the fires of Obama's lust. TSA employees already have 24/7/365-6 shadows for themselves who are ready and programmed to terminate their 'object' at a monemts notice.
Lovely.
Talk about 'marriage', Obama's ObamAmerica makes Hitler's Germany looks like a kindergarten.
... brought to you by your lovely government. You may think of it as of some kind of conspiracy theory but we are here. Degradation of our freedom of speech is directly linked with degradation of our (western) economic system and in my opinion this is just the beginning as long-term economic deterioration shows no signs of slowing down.
Governments (and their corporate sponsors) always wanted to shut down or marginalize independent media that show the world as it is, not as government + corporate oligarchy wants us to see. But freedom of speech was too deeply embedded in our culture and social costs associated with such moves tended to be too high compared to potential gains. Everything changed last year. Since Arab Spring and subsequent Occupy protests spreading like a wildfire, traditional media losing credibility caught again and again (thanks to blatant lies & omissions) and deteriorating economy pushing more and more people onto streets, our ruling class realized that time is running out.
Efforts to shut everybody up went into turbo mode last year - SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, tens of bigger or smaller initiatives in various countries. Sadly, I expect that this year will be even worse. I expect further economic deterioration as most of world economy is dying under crushing debt with no chances of discharging it (thanks to our corrupt politicians and their sponsors), let alone paying it off (we don't have enough natural resources to pay it off!). Ongoing financial "world-war" Jim Rickards writes about in his excelent book makes things even worse. What we desperately need is a round of healthy (if possible - orderly) defaults that will clean up most of this debt (odious or not) and let the economy restart. Iceland took this route and now they have real, healthy recovery with good prospects in the future. Note how silent our corporate media are about Iceland. Greece on the other hand is being fucked the same latin american style used in 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Once again corporate media blatantly lie about this urgent 'need of austerity' and 'Greeks fault' but when you look at it closer - it's good old, well tested latino scenario which turned up to be fraud long time ago. Thanks to banksters and their stooges (that is, politicians) few years from now Greece will become a regular 3-rd world country.
My sad feeling is that in order to keep current (broken) system running our ruling elites will block any possibilities to resolve this situation and will cover up all frauds and crimes of themselves and their friends. Economic situation will slowly deteriorate until must of us reach 3-rd world conditions and our ruling elites will treat us with Radio-Yerevan-style propaganda backed by cooked economic numbers to show how wonderfully great our economy is, completely ignoring reality for 99% of citizens. All voices of dissent will be silenced, marginalized, blatantly censored or marked as "terrorists" and held in jail.
Welcome to 'iron fist' phase every civilization comes through before it dies (yet it's still not too late to overturn this).
FTA:
Terrorists aren't making jokes about blowing up airports or destroying LA on twitter. Security services have demonstated an inability to decipher humour, I think encryption is way beyond them.
WARNING - This article may contain high levels of sensationalism, speculation and just plain fabrication. The Daily Telegraph is a far-right tabloid aimed at people who think that "darkies and poofs" are destroying the country.
Then the UK government ministers get onto google and search for 300+ yotabyte management, end up on /. reading posts about why its a stupid idea.
I don't see how Fecebook message tracking will get anywhere. Half of this fee is stupid. Fecebook DON'T DELETE messages, they're simply marked as deleted. Just pay a small fee to Fecebook to access the message steam. Job done.
Stupid idea, the government wouldn't ever go for that.
Why UNIX?
The platform on which Cameron and his coalition were elected included "winding back Big Brother" and the steady reduction of civil liberties under Labor. Predictably, that is now all forgotten.
Let's just say that this will be rulled illegal in the EU, Germany is already fighting the EU data retention directive. This will be next on the list.
Innocent, until pro....
Hang on, is he word "innocent" still in the dictionary?
...let's give them data. I foresee a Thunderbird plugin that randomly sends email to random addresses, to give the government more chaff to sort through. Or you could set up a virtual machine and let it become part of a botnet. Last time I checked, it wasn't illegal to allow someone else to use your computer for spamming...
Just another wannabe fantasy novelist...
With a minuscule investment of resources, they were able to completely destroy the "free world's" way of life. They could not have ever done it via direct hostilities, but instead used the back door and got us to do it to ourselves. ( with our power hungry governments help.. )
Social engineering at its best. ( or worst i guess..)
*sigh*
---- Booth was a patriot ----
the Torries would be any better than New Labour.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
It is about various governemental agency grabbing power, bypassing every check and balance. For a governement a citizen is a potentially unruly seed of chaos. The perfect "governement" has all the power to put all its citizen in place, and keep that power. What the citizen think about this is secondary. Worst, all those nice tech advance we have ? They make for an easier power grab, and putting the citizen in place. Those who think that a revolution will be possible in the future, in case the gvt grab too much power, are deluding themselves. I forsee a bleak future.
...by charging all these government bozos that suggest this stuff with Terrorism against humanity. They threaten the fundamental human right to privacy. They are the real terrorists.
If there is no provision in the law to make all non-terrorist discovered evidence non-admissible, then it is not about terrorism, but creating a police state.
How do we convince people that no, the very small threat of terrorism (which is FAR less risky than the government and media make it out to be) is NOT justification for violating the civil liberties of ordinary citizens.
Or is the propaganda from the government and big media companies so effective that its impossible to counter it?
A 1st and a 4th Amendment.
One would suspect that the very idea of this fills any investigative journalist with a sense of dread (or impending doom...).
Maintaining the annonymity of their sources, a journalistic right (privilege?), suddenly becomes that much more difficult, a difficulty verging on impossible. Gone will be the days of whistle-blowing on shady goings on in the corridors or power, or in our own 3 letter agencies. The balance of power shifts once more, and not in the right direction.
I sometimes wonder if the people who propose these schemes are students of history, and if they are whether this is one huge social experiment, designed to measure demographic breaking points.
Could be time for another chat with my local MP, just to see if the 'liberal' part actually still means anything...
And every bad guy says thanks for the notice, we'll avoid using those services.
I'm sure it's possible to monitor all the popular services, perhaps they already are. So all the real bad guys need to do is not use a popular service. Perhaps they could use this fancy thing called tcp/ip and build a communication method that isn't monitored. Or just use one of the less popular communications sites out there, I'm too lazy too look but I'm sure there are twitter and Facebook competitors out there that are not on this programs watch list.
And in the end they'll be catching some body dumb enoughto say something about some minor crime (read minor as, non-terrorism, like say speeding) the problem is the real bad guys wont be caught.
This makes me think of hiding messages in letters back during, say WW1, everyone in Europe knew that the other side would likely read their mail (real paper mail) so they would hide messages in the letters, using codes and such. (ok maybe that wasn't WW1, but it's a simple enough concept.
I guess the real question is how can your favorite three letter agency effectively catch the real bad guys, without a total police state? Perhaps /. Can solve that problem.
There was a big bruhaha in the USA over pretexting. The upshot of the controvercy was it was ruled unlawful to do pretexting. USA and UK share some legal precident.
JJ
In Canada when the Canadian Securities Minister Vic Toews tried to get warrantless wire taping legislation passed this week Canadians decided to help out his information gathering process by:
Sending the minister responsible our web browsing histories every day.
CC the minister on all our email messages.
Email the minister what we up to are doing several times a day.
Updated the ministers Twitter account with what we are doing.
So much data ran into the Canadian Parliament's servers that they either fell over or were deliberately taken off line. The fate of Bill C-30 is now being reviewed.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
I think Anonymous Coward is pretty cool guy. Eh rants like a lunatic and doesnt afraid of anything.
A bureaucrat in a retro-future world tries to correct an administrative error and himself becomes an enemy of the state.
... seems a method of reflection needs to be developed that allows prying eyes to be redirected back to its source, where the real terrorist are. Consider it helping them with their claim.
he's not weeding out astroturfers. he's trolling and falsely accusing random people who write things critical of google or whatever
you must be one of the morons modding his posts up
is for every UK citizen to become friends on every "watched" social media channel/site. Give the gov that they want, that is everyone is a suspect.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I can hardly believe it but as an officer in a condo association who could in theory write a large check Homeland Security now demands my Social Security number and a driver's license to be on file with them. I do not have to do that unless I am an authorized signer. The joke is that our condo association really doesn't handle big money. And far from being able to ship money to terror groups we always have a large number of people looking for any financial linkage as well as our books going through a CPA all year long. And although we might handle a couple of hundred thousand in a years time the total sum at the end of the month wouldn't buy you most BMW or Mercedes Benz vehicles anyway. they have turned "follow the money" into follow the chump change.
shows like csi and ncis will use real technology instead of made-up tech shit.
omnipotent, omnipresent and now, omniscient! (all joking aside)..
If Orwell was right we wouldn't know it, but we do. Therefore Orwell wasn't right ... yet.
I'm Glad i live in the good ol United States of America where this kind of stuff dosent happen... Oh Wait... Nevermind!
You don't think it's more likely that they were unintentionally cut open by sorting machines, or that a postal worker opened them looking for money, or that they were first opened by one of your friend's neighbours?
I realise that the 1984 references are now in the same realm as 'in Soviet Russia' jokes, 'beowulf cluster of those' comments etc. but some of the paranoia here is pretty far fetched.
PS. What makes you think the government needs to open your letters in order to read them? ;)
Pirates terrorize incompetent executives of corporations and organizations that use antiquated business models.
Repeat after me: "The UK is NOT our friend"...
The base language may be the same, a lot of us came from there way back in the day, but they're not like us. As bad as we think the USA is getting, we have it good here. The UK is rapidly turning into the ol' USSR, and they're trying to spread it to us as well.
Your govt/politicians prefer you to be poor/subservient/defenseless in the pretext of patriotism.
Casteism
This plan clearly shows a lack of understanding of the underlying technology - anyone who wanted to communicate in secret could, and easily. Secure proxy and anonymizing services (such as tor) would prevent tracking the websites visited and private messages, while burn phones would still provide reasonable phone security (although there are secure voip services that would do the job as well). Unless the people running the terror cells they want to crack down on are about as competent as Anna Chapman, the only people who could be reliably tracked are average citizens. When will governments learn and get some nerds, er... experts, in to decide how to write IT legislation?
Is taking down a gangster one of the greatest achievements you could come up with to defend an small government?
As for winning wars vs. Germany or Japan: any serious historian will tell you that the cornerstone of those victories was the USSR, the country with the biggest government back then, bar the Nazis perhaps.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.