Slashdot Mirror
UK Proposing Real-Time Monitoring of All Communications
An anonymous reader writes "In response to a plans to introduce real time monitoring of all UK Internet communications, a petition has been set up in opposition."
Previously covered here, El Reg chimes in with a bit of conspiracy theorizing and further analysis: "It would appear that the story is being managed: the government is looking to make sure that CCDP is an old news story well ahead of the Queen's Speech to Parliament on 9 May. Sundays — especially Sunday April the 1st — are good days to have potentially unpopular news reach the population at large."
They allow the government to precisely target which sections of the population to ignore.
Western countries have an interesting dilemma, how do you reconcile an open world with any form of control. The issue is this, people have gained an unprecedented amount of freedom to travel and communicate. Take the recent French shootings, the terrorist had traveled all over the world with ease at a very low cost. This simply wouldn't have been possible a century ago and even 50 years ago it would have been costly. Mean time, during all those travels he was in constant contact with the rest of the world in an instant.
It means that those who wish to do wrong have far more capacity to do so then before.
There is a relatively new BBC program "Angels and Saints" that takes a look at benefit fraud. It is an odd program for the BBC as it shows a very negative picture of immigrants. (BBC is rather liberal usually) A lot of the criminals in it are immigrants, either permanent or temporary, using the ease of travel and communication to create multiple identities. The way to combat is to link all the different administations together and run matches across them to see that a person with the same parameters is getting benefits in multiple places. PRIVACY!
There are three solutions:
Pick one. All of them are electoral suicide. The first would just lead to a hellish world in which out of control capitalism would be warm fuzzy memory. The second survives right up until the moment the tax man comes around (and gosh, won't it be hard to collect all the needed taxes to pay for all the abusers if the taxman has no investigative powers)
And three... well that is what this article is about and it doesn't seem to popular.
Greece has run with the number 2 option and it didn't and doesn't work. They have been on the dole for generations and the rest of Europe has grown tired of feeding their relaxed nature to tax collection.
How do you run a modern country western country anyway? Note that in EVERY single god game, taxes just show up by magic. Not a single game I ever played ever had the population lying about their income. Imagine Civilization with a Greek setting, build a granary, food production mysteriously drops while some fat cats get richer. Would be rather hard to win the game right?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is part one of the process of introducing a draconian and unpopular new law. First you come up with something completely over the top and unacceptable. Then, over a few months you water it down here and there, chopping little bits, amending others, until you end up with something that is draconian and unpopular. But it'll be accepted because it's not as bad as the original plan which, by then, will be falsely seen as the alternative. It's a flaw in human logical thought that has been exploited by politicians since they first crawled out of the sewer.
They *already* obtain the records of internet sites visited, phone calls made, and location.
What Theresa May is doing is requiring that the ISP's index all this stuff ready for searching in a distributed database. Once that is done, it is then a simply matter to run queries against that. The upfront cost has already been paid, it then becomes difficult to justify NOT using something that has been paid for.
Warrants are not needed under RIPA (or rather a request for info from a senior officer is renamed a 'warrant'), they just ask for it. Since there are > 3 million queries under this supposed anti-terror law, it is being misused. With the real time queries, it will be seriously abused.
None of the people whose data is indexed have a suspicion at that stage against them. This pre-criminalizes people in order to justify the surveillance.
Already the police are the bigger than the courts, bigger than the political system. It's so bad that we can't even freely discuss the details of this up-coming law. Cameron is a coward, he's backed down on every issue related to the police, he's scared of them and it shows.
What does the general population say?
Read "All comments" on there. Filter the highest first, then the lowest first. The modding is unual on there - I had a +17 (insightful!!!) yesterday, but I can't even find my post today (clearing history is not always a good idea).
People get it. The majority understand exactly what's happening. They have read some history and know the Stasi quotes, the American interment, the whole shitbag.
The UK goverment has been a real twat over the past few weeks. Taxing the elderly more, taxing warm food, letting the rich off tax, phone hacking(!!) scandal, petrol panic buying, cash for policies and more. We've all had enough of it.
I'll leaving you with one quote from our delightful Prime Minister. He said this last week after helping his rich elite besties over dinner:
"I live in a little flat, a very nice flat, actually, above number 11 Downing Street up there. But what I get up to in there, that's private."
Private.
What a fucking twat.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
An e-petition against having my email monitored, but to sign it I have to give the government my name and email address. As far as I can tell, they don't want a Facebook password though. Yet.
As far as I can tell, they don't want a Facebook password though. Yet.
Don't worry, they've already got it.
No sig today...