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
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.
I wonder why the TSA has a /. account
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"
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.
I left the UK when the government changed the laws against my personal interests some years ago, and was joined in exile by some friends for the same reasons.
Ended up in Jamaica (a quiet part)
Where did you settle?
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.
I've had this account since 1997 or so, waaaayyyy before the TSA even existed.
-- Cheers!
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.
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?
against my personal interests [...] Ended up in Jamaica
Hm, I wonder what those interests were. ;)
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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".
Competitive target pistol shooting. Now teach scuba diving in clear and warm waters, but used to program realtime embedded systems (nitty gritty stuf, sod database programming!)
... 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).
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.
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.
Fortunately for the UK, we have an active resistance group that goes by the initials EDS. Their typical modus operandi for thwarting this kind of attack on our freedoms is to bribe or mislead civil servants to be awarded the contract for delivering the system, and then to delay and delay, while pushing the budget up, until another government takes power. The new government then blames the cost overruns on the previous one and cancels the project.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
...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...
waaaayyyy before the TSA even existed.
Officially, anyway. :-P
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 ----
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