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
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?
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!
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?
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.
This is the Telegraph, take the story with a pinch of salt. I don't think that even the UK government is mad enough to try this.
Parts of it don't make sense anyway. For example why log Twitter private communications when Twitter already logs them anyway. They can just demand Twitter hands the data over, no need to duplicate it at enormous expense.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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?
My theory? Because corporate sociopaths don't give a crap about national defence. They have no loyalty to king nor country, no sense of patriotism or empathy, and they've accumulated enough power from their corporate divide-and-plunder schemes that they have moved onto their inevitable target: the nations that birthed them.
Data-mining, open-cut style, benefits corporate profiteering more than anything else. Big business knows your teenage daughter is pregnant before you do (google: Target data mining babies). And I daresay it's a lot easier to fight a foreign terrorist than it is to tackle wealthy "pillars of the community" who have the ear (and dirty laundry) of your civilian leaders - if they're not part of the hierarchy themselves.
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 ----