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
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.
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?
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.