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."
An e-petition! Brilliant! Since their inception a few years ago they have revolutionised democracy!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17590363
What do critics say?
Nick Pickles, director of campaign group Big Brother Watch, called the move "an unprecedented step that will see Britain adopt the same kind of surveillance seen in China and Iran". Conservative MP Dominic Raab said it was "a plan to privatise Big Brother surveillance" which "fundamentally changes the nature of the relationship between the state and the citizen" and turns every individual "into a suspect". Fellow Tory David Davis warned that until now anyone wishing to monitor communications had been required to gain permission from a magistrate, but the planned changes would remove that protection.
What do internet service providers say?
Trefor Davies, a board member at the UK's Internet Service Providers' Association (ISPA), told the BBC that the technological challenge of collating and storing such vast levels of data would be huge. Although a large amount of data about us is already collected for billing and other purposes - such as who we call and when - ISPs do not currently store detailed data on what websites we visit, or details about the emails we send. Mr Davies said: "The email stuff isn't straight forward, and neither is the web. Those aren't bits of information that traditionally we keep. We don't keep backups of deleted emails. Think of all the spam people get," Mr Davies added. "We delete it, but under the new rules would we be allowed to?"
On a long enough timeline. The survival rate for everyone drops to zero. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, 1996
Of-course this proposal concerns all those, who are concerned about the real-time communications of everybody.
The proposal is this: all of those, who are so concerned about the real time communications and all other forms of communications and thoughts and actions of other people, the concerned need to be protected.
The proposal is to protect those, who are so afraid and are looking for protection, because obviously, there will never be enough done, in their eyes, to protect them. Clearly real time monitoring of all communications is not enough. Eventually everybody will have to have devices built into them, that can monitor everybody's real-time activities, and eventually read their real time thoughts with the long term goal of projecting thoughts in real time into everybody, so that nobody could ever even think something that the concerned individuals would be afraid of.
So the proposal is to protect these poor souls from the rest of us by isolating them into a well guarded facility, where they could really have real time monitoring of all communications that are internal to that facility and monitor each other (I suppose they are paranoid enough to want to do that).
For those, who believe it is not enough protection, they should be isolated within that facility from the rest in well suited, very well protected rooms (and they should have extra set of locks they could use from the inside), and all of them need to be given all sorts of weapons they need to keep safe as well.
I believe it is at the point right now, where those, who believe they are in need of protection and will not stop until everybody is a mechanised food processor without any original thoughts, that these people need to get the protection they so desire so that the rest of us can carry on, having terrible thoughts and killing each other they way we do - left, right and centre.
You can't handle the truth.
This is sheer idiocy.
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.
Time to move... but to where?
Stay right where you are, and start a social movement. Governments aren't land masses; they can only exist by the consent of the governed. If things get bad enough, joining such a group would become a no-brainer and you'd have de facto government reform by a collective choice from all the citizenry. They'd just pick a form of government, select their political representatives, start making policy and wait for support for the old regime to fall away entirely.
It's more or less what BitCoin is doing to the old dominate-through-control-of-the-money-supply regime.
The People always have a choice - that's just the nature of politics. The problem has only been that the choices the People have been making have been in support of the old guard.
Posit: The War for Independence never ended, they just quit shooting. Britain started using bribery on public officials and began to chip away at the society that had formed, until the Union was indistinguishable from the tyranny that it left. The point was to get them to stop making their argument for individual sovereignty; if they'd kept making it, it would have spread back to England where large swaths of the folks there would have been demanding it. Britain would have lost a lot more than a few colonies, because it was a very sound idea. Valid ideas are always a threat to tyrants, and sometimes the best way to stop people from making their argument for them is to let them think they've already won.
Your concept about running out of continents to go off and colonize is quite right. It's time to stop running. The only other alternative is to just roll over, close your eyes and er... "think of England".
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
I'm confused.
Why are they pretending they can't and aren't doing all this already?
Because to do it in secret means they have peoples' information.
But to be able to act upon it systematically, they must publicly admit that they do it. Hence, "We're going to start doing [foo]".
They can also pick up Governmental Power-Up Bonuses from it because the citizens will become too intimidated to dissent once they've implemented it openly.
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
The point is to initially study who people are talking to, right? That can be used to determine (un)reasonable suspicion. Random thought:
What if, say, hundreds of thousands of people were to sign up to a single service. Each day they posted their messages to that service, plus some garbage, to make a nice constant number of daily "posts". Each day everyone downloaded ALL messages posted to that service. The messages are, of course, each encrypted for the intended recipient, and people never download individual public keys - only everyone's or no-one's.
When a computer has downloaded the message batch, it tries to decrypt all of them, but will only be successful with messages actually intended for the recipient.
1) Is this already used?
2) If not, is this technically feasible?
3) I am assuming that a man in authority would be able to listen to all network communications or retrieve all server content and logs. Will it be possible for them to establish who was communicating to whom?
I understand that there are other options which rely on obfuscating routing between particular destinations. This method relies on not having any routing at all - more like listening to a daily broadcast in the style of the old "numbers stations".
So the system must enforce a service user's lack of choice on what to download and whether to upload (even if you just upload garbage). Anyone reading IPs in a similar "broadcast" service's access logs (e.g. Twitter) will have a good idea who is receiving what - which I think is what this law is taking advantage of(*) - but what if the service's logs were open for all to see, law enforcement or otherwise, because the logs revealed nothing useful?
The practical questions would be concerning whether the idea scales, i.e.
1) how many messages can everyone download at regular intervals (multicast?) before there'd be a need to split the batches?
2) is it feasible to attempt (part) decryption of all these messages to identify which are for you?
(*) The proposed law isn't afaict demanding warrantless "wiretapping" (i.e. of content), but denying privacy of association. This seems to be the route the EU has tried to go down, and mirrors recent legislation in Canada.
Thoughts?
If that is what they were thinking I reckon they will get something of a shock. There is no better way to militarise subversives than to actually threaten them.
Easy, they just ban the encryption altogether. You have nothing to hide right? Easy cheap solutions, remember? Make the sheep pay for their own surveillance/persecution is the best way, it does not cost anything! They are doing it to themselves, muhahahaha!
See the guys with the British accents *are* the bad guys.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
You require people by law to retain all comm for N years on their own machines at their own expense. You require them by law to install a tool which indexes and reports the info back to the command center. You make versions available for Windows and Mac.
Then you just imprison anyone who doesn't comply (terrorists). Problem solved.
Deleted
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.
Typical Marxist strategy is to have so many rules, regulations, by-laws and other bits of legislation that at any time someone is always breaking something. Then they can drag any opponent through the courts, give them a criminal record as well as confiscate their property.
Look up the lyrics to "The Ostrich" by Steppenwolf.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Kidding me? The Empire's been suppressing dissenters and subversives for centuries. Where do you think the Punk movement came from? You take the poorest people who are on the dole, you get them to network together to become an astroturf movement. As proof, you make the trappings of the movement thoroughly degrading and abusive (just like the more official representatives of The System are). And you bribe the more knowing and corrupt people within the scene to report dissidents back to you, at which point they "coincidentally" get arrested for whatever forms of vice or minor crimes they partake of with your agents. Deep cover can be had on the cheap, when everyone involved is on welfare to start with.
At that point, good luck forming a subversive network when you never know who's a sell-out. Sort of like the cloak-and-dagger sell-out kids planted within the Occupy movement, that have been spotted on YouTube.
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
It's more or less what BitCoin is doing to the old dominate-through-control-of-the-money-supply regime.
You mean, it will be used by organised crime, totally unworkable on a large scale, and ignored by anyone with any influence?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You do know what the people behind this kind of legislation would say when you are in this state of mind?
Indeed. "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED"...
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Please extend my sympathies to your future editor.
There's still oil. You're not getting independence.
Deleted
The west is ruled by democracy and for the UK and the US at least that has resulted in a two party system (oh okay, the brits got the liberals) who seem to be fighting each other as if there are only absolutes.
Anyway, what is common sense? We can't even agree on a common sense maximum speed limit, how do you agree on a common sense level of privacy? Or is what you really mean "My sense"?
Another poster above also talks about common sense as if that is so simple. The moment it affects YOU, common sense goes out of the window. It might seem common sense to have medical aid freely available for all so doctors first question is not a for bank statement showing you can afford to have your wounds taken care off. Right up until the moment YOUR taxes go up.
Just follow the elections in any country and then talk to me about common sense.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Typical Marxist strategy is to have so many rules, regulations, by-laws and other bits of legislation that at any time someone is always breaking something. Then they can drag any opponent through the courts, give them a criminal record as well as confiscate their property.
Look up the lyrics to "The Ostrich" by Steppenwolf.
Not sure why this counts as Marxist, I am fairly sure Marx did not come up with this as a good way of running society.
It does sound very similar to the UK legal system though as we do have a series of law saying the many things we cannot do, but no bill of rights to say the things we can do.
I dont read
Like the American political system, there are good guys and bad guys. However, they do not split along party lines. As an old lefty it annoys me that I have to approve strongly of people like Tomlinson, David Davis, John Bercow and Geoffrey Bacon (all Conservatives) while maintaining a deep loathing for most of the Labour leadership. But that's real life: people's standards of behaviour and their expressed opinions are often at variance.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I see it this way: They keep knocking at your door trying to knock it down. It's not that you're doing anything illegal, you just don't want government in your living room while you're courting your wife. But they keep knocking and you tell them not to enter but they continue knocking. All it takes is one moment of distraction and you will be distracted long enough for them to barge and start monitoring for illegal activities.
It's an invasion of privacy, what you do in your private quarters is your business. Your communications with a third party is private between you and the third party. The government has no business trying to get pry itself into your privacy unless they are charging you with a crime.
A government needs to fear its people, not the other way around. The government needs to be punished for knocking and asking for this. You wouldn't let your government get away with trying to pass a law legalizing prima nocta, yet they try to pass this sort of invasion of privacy and all we do is give them a light slap on the wrist and say "no, not now". There needs to be stronger repercussions for this type of deviant behavior.