UK Government Backtracks On Black Box Snooping

judgecorp writes "On the day the so-called snooper's charter was included in proposed UK legislation, as part of the Queen's Speech, it has emerged that the government is already backtracking on the controversial idea of making ISPs install black boxes to collect traffic and pass it to the authorities. The bill is not yet in a draft form, and TechWeek has learned there is a lot of maneuvering behind the scenes."

Comments

you don't understand how politics works

[Anonymous Coward]

You never ask for what you want. You ask for more than what you want, and pretend to have made concessions. You end up with exactly what you want.

Also, the big ISPs have so many government contracts that they will happily cooperate voluntarily. If you want privacy, you would do well to use a small ISP - particularly ones like A&A with a vocally anti-censorship and anti-snooping agenda.

Re:you don't understand how politics works

[ppanon]

That's not just politics, that's Negotiation 101, which applies to far more than politics. The difference is that in most other negotiations you don't want to be so outrageous that the other party walks away, whereas in 21st century politics that can be a bonus that makes your base happy.

Encrypted VPN

[sleiper]

I already use a lightly encrypted and anonymised VPN service to avoid traffic shaping when watching movies and playing games, and when accessing US services, all this would do is make me plug my service directly into my router, instead of just activating it when I needed it. All these laws will do is force more people to go down this road, I'm not doing anything wrong, but I also don't want Johnny Government looking over my shoulder at everything I do.