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Online Activities To Be Recorded By UK ISPs
SmartAboutThings writes "The United Kingdom online monitoring law just got published, showcasing some disturbing facts. The paper is 123 pages long and is actually a draft of the Communications Data Bill. You might not be so happy to find out that from now, every single thing you do online will be recorded and stored by the good old Internet Service providers (ISP). What do we mean by online activity? Well, everything."
Nothing to hide, nothing to fear.
95% will continue oblivious to the dangers of mass surveillance. Those concerned about freedom and privacy have solutions...for now.
New tech has made it easier than ever before to spy on people in much larger numbers than ever before, and to a much greater degree than ever before.
Bet your bottom dollar that every government in the world wants to do as much of this as they can manage.
www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en
...I am disappoint.
This is apparently a Bill that has not actually been passed yet.
With the requirement to store every single thing users do, it might be a good time to invest in EMC because it is going to require an enterprise (VNX level) SAN to record all what is going on, as well as the licenses for features like deduplication (since a bunch of troll posts are usually alike, the SAN can store one copy, and pointers to the others.)
As a user in the UK, I'd be looking to find the best always-on VPN service, one in the country (since some services are country-locked), and one situated somewhere less repressive but close by, network-wise, perhaps Sweden or Norway.
I'm sure that is going to be coming to the US really soon (if it isn't already present), so guess it is time to find a Canadian VPN provider.
made temporary cloud server instances.
Having not read the paper, or article..... If they're backing up everything, meaning, every BIT that traverses more than 1 hop, does the UK have enough storage for that continuously expanding data pool?
If they don't, then they have to be doing filtering. If they're filtering, what data, and who is deciding what is being filtered? And of course, UK citizens will be footing the bill, either by State tax, or ISP tax.
Even as a foriegner, this is entirely sickening from afar!
A right to privacy is enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights. Exceptions are permitted only as "neccessary". Shall be interesting to see what happens if osmebody challenges this proposal, forcing the ECHR to consider what is "neccessary" in this context.
Protecting yourself against malicious use of your computers will become mandatory...or else you can get framed.
You might not be so happy to find out that from now, every single thing you do online will be recorded and stored by the good old Internet Service providers (ISP). What do we mean by online activity? Well, everything. From exchanging emails, browsing history, instant messaging to the most important use of social networks.
For stuff like emails, wont encryption be an issue?
And for other stuff, storing the MASSIVE amounts of data
I have no stats to back this up, but on a national level, wont the storage requirement touch Petabytes per day? (or atleast 100's of Terabytes per day?)
Why aren't their riots in the streets over this? For years I have heard about Europe being very pro-privacy. I have even worked with their privacy standards from a professional standpoint.
What went wrong? Seriously, how on earth did this ever happen? Your cars and your online activities are all being monitored by your government with your blessing! The communists never had it that good, all they got were phone calls and letters. You gave your own government a blessing to invade your privacy at a level the East German's could have only dreamed of. Something is very, very wrong in UK today. What the hell happened?
Best way to defeat something like this would be to generate as much traffic as possible, max out your internet plan each and every month. If they can't store all the information then they can't mine that information.
Have a program that just clicks random links on your computer 24/7. Send emails that contain as much information that you can cram in there from wikipedia. Set-up chat bots to talk to each other. There has gotta be tons of way of generating useless crap information such as those and more.
Have fun!
"If you have nothing to hide, then why complain?" - That's what they said when I told them I refused to open my car for the police. They'll probably say the same when I say the police should not be recording our websurfing.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
*The* authoritative guide to oppress and subdue your population into submission and complacency.
Warning: Void for the wealthy and/or connected.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
I'm sure many people are thinking about Tor as a way to solve this issue, but I think there is a much simple way to solve it.
Think about this anecdote: kids are on a school trip (at least, that's how I remember it). Their professors don't want them to leave their rooms during the night, so they put small pieces of tape on the door of the kids' rooms. This way, they think it'll be easy to spot the rooms whose door has been opened, the next morning. One night, some clever kids get out of their room and, to cover up their tracks, instead of attempting to repair the tape on their own door, open everybody else's door.
Foor for thought...
Since the bill requires ISPs to collect the information, just use HTTPS. At best, they can determine what IP you have connected to.
And people always trash the USA for eroding civil liberties.
cat /dev/urandom >> file1.txt >> curl http://some.british.web.site/
sudo make me a sandwich
I definitely don't like the idea of my online activities being monitored since I value my privacy very highly.
On the other hand, governments are in a bit of a bind. They are responsible for enforcing the law and creating an effective justice system. This is incredibly difficult for them to do given the scope of activities that can (and do) take place online. After all, you can't exactly place a police officer on a beat to keep the peace without having some sort of electronic monitoring. Likewise, you cannot collect evidence to prove innocence or guilt without maintaining some sort of record of electronic transactions.
I don't know where the solutions to these problems lay. That being said, I would suggest that those of us who oppose electronic surveilence start thinking about solutions to this problem. After all, governments need a way to do their job, and simply opposing legislation like this doesn't exactly help them do their job.
Goes to show what a bunch of idiot reactionaries the people running the show in Westminster are.
Are they going to show us any evidence that such a drastic and draconian law is required? Where is the evidence that this is needed?
It's all down to the idiotic, blind ideology that we've come to expect from the halfwits in power.
Somehow, I'm hoping that these people ARE actually smarter than they appear, and are simply putting this forward to distract the media from something more reactionary and ideologically-driven they're doing elsewhere.
And if you think this is bad, you should see the hysterical "OMG somebody think of the children" crap coming from the Tory back bench, e.g. Nadine Dorries.
How do they record your secure web activities? Seems the only thing they can know from it is where your HTTPS requests are going to. And what about the VPN set up to friends in free countries like Norway and Sweden?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think Governments need to be very very careful about going down this route. Should this go ahead I expect any ciminals to encrypt all their network traffic via a VPN or proxy as well as measrues such as sending emails encryped via PGP. This is next to impossible to break so the government will lost the ability to see what users are doing on line anyway - all they can see is nothing other than an encyrpted connection to a VPN whose data they cannot snoop. If the VPN is located outside the UK then there will be no obligation to store sites that user has visited.
If I want to communicate with others privately I can set up a basic web server (perhaps via something like Raspberry Pi) running web forum software over an https connection with a self-generated certificate over a broadband connection and grant accounts only to those who I want to communicate via the site. All the government sees is encrypted data going to this address.
In addition IP address do NOT identify an individual. Many people can and do share a single internet IP address. Wi-FI can be cracked so an innocent users connection may be being abused without their knowledge. Then there are things like public WiFi. Or just by a mobile broadband USB stick with cash and then the connection cannot be traced back to an individual anyway. Sure the mobile operator would know the rough location it's being used via the base station it's on but not the individual property (especially with blocks of flats).
Communications are private. This is one of the bases of democracy. If you lose that, and you spy on the citizens, then you are already inside the dictatorship style of society. You CAN'T do that, not even to stop a nuclear explosion to destroy a city or something massive like that. Is one of the pilars of our society, and the other options are worse. Plus, we choose to live in democracy, is our choose, nobody should overrule that and force a dictatorship on everyone.
-Woof woof woof!
The RIAA is pushing people onto VPNs, and guess what demographic will not be able to be monitored even after this IMP law comes into effect, *hint* it won't be just the criminals and pedos.
From the first few pages of the document, they are talking about communication data but not content - i.e. source, destination, perhaps size. Stuff ISPs probably log but might not store. It is explicitly excluding content
It's still not great, but to take a telephone analogy it's like the itemised billing stats, not recording all the calls. Or a physical example - getting the post office to record the address written on the envelope, but not open it and read the contents.
From the actual document itself: "Nothing in these proposals will authorise the interception of the content of a communication. Nor will it require the collection of all internet data, which would be neither feasible, necessary nor proportionate."
It will still give ISPs an excuse to increase their prices, but I don't think it's quite time to break out the tin foil hats...
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
Haven't you ever dream of a opensource freeware just for a case like this?
It'd be as simple as ping each second to a random webpage (which count as "online activity").
Now, image that software installed in all computers... and the huge servers that the Big Fucking Spy would need to manage/store/check such info.
Don't like this law? sign the petition: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/32400
Comment removed based on user account deletion
More UK-bashing from timothy again, I see.
It's not "from now on". The proposal has been published. It is not a law, and is unlikely to ever become one.
Do you hate us because we're free, timothy? Is that what it is?
You were cool man, how did you end up like this?
hard drive prices expected to rise as demand grows
A paper on privacy and why "monitoring is no problem because only criminals have something to hide" is a poor justification. If you compare the benefits of monitoring for the good of society against the usually slight or non-existant damage to an individual from being monitored, society always wins out. However, privacy is not just monitoring. What affect does it have on society when everyone is aware that there are large databases of information about your life and people will use to make decisions about you, but you can't know what is in it, you have no means of making sure it is correct, and you don't know who is using it and for what purposes? There is much more to it than this, and the paper is worth reading for a deeper view on privacy issues.
I'd like to see their working on the financial figures. According to the document the Bill "is estimated to lead to an increase in public expenditure of up to £1.8 billion over 10 years from 2011/12. Benefits from this investment are estimated to be £5 – 6.2 billion over the same period."
Exactly what financial benefits? Where's the saving?
Otherwise, the question we should all, in the UK, be asking our MPs is which hospitals are going to be closed to pay for this?
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
I blame a Daily Mail lobotomy. The majority of it's very sizable reader base (who tend to wrongly self-identify as intelligent, educated and middle class) sing to the tune of, "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear", "only pedos are private" and "my government loves me and will protect me from harm".
Seriously though, here are three articles from today's front-page:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2159370/Soldier-childminder-farmer-paedophile-ring-hosted-depraved-sex-parties-isolated-country-farmhouse.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2159207/Police-Community-Support-Worker-fostered-children-abused-teenage-boys-years.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2159317/Troubled-teenage-girls-given-cash-drink-cuddly-toys-exchange-sex-middle-aged-men.html
Based on this, is it any surprise that a large proportion of the UK population seem to consider the three biggest threats to be immigrants/terrorists (few make the distinction), pedophiles and rising taxes? Very few of them seem to remember much history and ever fewer have any common sense...
How much data do they really think they will need to store pr individual?
What if we multiply that by 1000000?
For every search you do on a search engine, a script could create a few thousand extra.
For every website you visit, the crawler will visit a hundred.
Encapsulating traffic in the wrong protocol may also be fun.
the draft bill excludes storage of content, so much of the paranoia is null and void. They won't be reading you emails etc. They will be storing the stuff that they could beat out of you anyway. Sorry, delete that, just the stuff that they could access via you call-records/phone-bill or the internet equivalent.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Two words: feature creep.
Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
browsing on my Android phone, the maindevice.com site gave a javascript-style alert claiming I'm the 1st Android visitor and prize-winner or some such nonsense, giving me only an OK button - which redirected me to some awful probably malware-infested Android-specific website. Which also means I couldn't read TFA. Way to go guys.
The anti-gov't Tparty etc. are strangely mostly quiet about such issues in the US. It's kind of like the mass spending during Bush's time: other less important issues distract them to waste their froth, until the time that some event makes it The Most Important Thing Ever.
Table-ized A.I.
Ultimately this sort of thing will drive development of all sorts of encryption and identity concealment technologies.
Probably it'll change internet culture where everything used to be open now everything will be concealed.
The internet is growing up.
All this will do is help drive the advancement of technologies like TOR, Freenet, &c., which is a good thing.
Liberty in your lifetime
But everyone's browsing history should be available to everybody at all times. It's the same as monitoring, if I can 'monitor' the hot babe down the road the same way the government can monitor what's growing in my back yard, it all seems fair. Every entity has it's interests, as long as we can all exercise our interests in a fair a reasonable way, then it's all good.
The problem with this legislation is that the government gets to read your dirty laundry, but the government's dirty laundry is a 'state secret'. ie. they're trying to control your life and ensure that you measure up to their standards.
To the government: I can be honest right now .. rarely does a day pass in my life that I don't break one of your laws. If you want to throw me in jail, knock yourself out. But just remember, if 80% of the population is in jail .. there won't be enough non-slave labor to feed your arses while you sit in those comfy leather parliamentary chairs discussing how to further enslave the populace.
...it's fairly simple, IM, social networking, email, etc are another form of communication replacing face to face contact.
The government would never in a million years ask to fit us all with digital recorders so they would have every moment of our life recorded, the conversations we've had, the books and magazines we are looking at, etc, I don't see how telling us they are going to record our online footprint and think it's justifiable.
If the police believed I was selling drugs or dealing in stolen goods much of the time they would have to gather evidence by conducting surveillance (with a warrant), besides CCTV there's no visual or audio archive of my activities with other individuals for them to dip into whenever they want so why should there be a digital one, it would be unthinkable to propose the former, there would be an uprising.
If they have reasonable suspicion that I am conducting illegal activities online, get a warrant for a month and wiretap my internet, phone, etc the way it has always been done in a democratic society.
This bill is almost amusing, how about put 1.8 billion into policing which has always had problems with budgets and make the police actually do some investigating when they believe a crime has been committed. ...also having had dealing with the police I now know that they are not there to find the truth, simply add some more notches to their statistics, give them a database of everyone's communications and they will copy and paste anything which can be taken out of context to re-enforce their case, and we have all said and done things we aren't proud of, either intentionally or by accident. I doubt anyone can say they have never had a moment they weren't proud of, imagine every conversation you had on the street, in the pub, etc was recorded, you wouldn't be too happy to see of some of those conversations being played in court, they may not represent your true views on a subject, simply a moment of stupidity.
I think this is a core issue in this matter, yet I never see it discussed.
TL;DR They wouldn't ask to archive conversations in real life without a warrant, why should it extend to online, the facility for temporary wiretaps are essential to public security though, I'm not a privacy nut.
I'm done with this government and this country, as soon as my circumstances permit, I'm off, I don't like staying where I'm not welcome or respected, even if I was born here.
Their ISPs record activity. The NSA records ours.
I'm not sure either one is really better than the other.
...it's fairly simple, IM, social networking, email, etc are another form of communication replacing face to face contact.
The government would never in a million years ask to fit us all with digital recorders so they would have every moment of our life recorded, the conversations we've had, the books and magazines we are looking at, etc, I don't see how telling us they are going to record our online footprint and think it's justifiable.
If the police believed I was selling drugs or dealing in stolen goods much of the time they would have to gather evidence by conducting surveillance (with a warrant), besides CCTV there's no visual or audio archive of my activities with other individuals for them to dip into whenever they want so why should there be a digital one, it would be unthinkable to propose the former, there would be an uprising.
If they have reasonable suspicion that I am conducting illegal activities online, get a warrant for a month and wiretap my internet, phone, etc the way it has always been done in a democratic society.
This bill is almost amusing, how about put 1.8 billion into policing which has always had problems with budgets and make the police actually do some investigating when they believe a crime has been committed. ...also having had dealings with the police I now know that they are not there to find the truth, simply to add some more notches to their statistics, give them a database of everyone's communications and they will copy and paste anything which can be taken out of context to re-enforce their case, and we have all said and done things we aren't proud of, either intentionally or by accident. I doubt anyone can say they have never had a moment they weren't proud of, imagine every conversation you had on the street, in the pub, etc was recorded, you wouldn't be too happy to see of some of those conversations being played in court, they may not represent your true views on a subject, simply a moment of stupidity.
I think this is a core issue in this matter, yet I never see it discussed.
TL;DR They wouldn't ask to archive conversations in real life without a warrant, why should it extend to online, the facility for temporary wiretaps are essential to public security though, I'm not a privacy nut.
I'm done with this government and this country, as soon as my circumstances permit, I'm off, I don't like staying where I'm not welcome or respected, even if I was born here.
Realize that she's saying "everyone is a pedo, so we need to record your surfing to obtain the proof". The surveillance comes BEFORE the warrant, the ISP is simply the agent employed to do that surveillance on justification that your a terrorist pedo.
Tor isn't the answer because Tor will flag you for a search/arrest.
The answer is to eject Theresa May from power. She has the same defects as the labour equivalent, Jacqui Smith, had. You know how some/most people seek an authority figure to give them a lead. Both Jacqui Smith and Theresa May have that. You'll see them view the Chief Constables as the authority figure to be obeyed. Which is the flip of the reality, she's supposed to keep them in check, not they demand she writes laws for them, and she complies.
So instead of leading the police, the police lead them.
Part of it is self interest, when they wanted to reduce ASBOs the police campaigned against them, and Labour joined in on the attacks. When they wanted to remove the police vetting powers, their police PR people were out on TV saying removing their vetting powers would result in the deaths of many children from pedos. Again the opposition party joined in.
Really you don't want the police to campaign against you, because when they're interview on TV, the interviewers are fearful of them, they let them tell outright lies without challenge. So they have a debating advantage, and people are misled. So if you don't give the police what they want, then you will be out of power soon enough.
It's really spiralling the UK into a police state. I bet every male MP has seen a bestial pic or similar extreme porn, this is a crime in the UK, it can put you on the sex offenders register and prevent you getting a job for life in many professions. So the police will have a very strong lever against MPs if they get to snoop on internet traffic just from that alone.
Can you imagine emails between MPs visible to the police/security, internal communications between cabinet members and their families.
I'd also like to remind you of Murdochs, News International, where the head of the paper admitted to buying info from the police. The police also had a very cosy relationship with Murdoch, hiring ex News International PR people as PR (even while they were still on the Murdoch payroll), lending a horse to the head of News International, turning a blind eye to previous phone hacking accusations.
Well Murdoch already probably has them, given his newspapers habit of hacking phones, its difficult to imagine he hasn't already paid ISPs to snoop on MPs' Internet surfing and communications.
Just because he hasn't got caught yet, doesn't mean he doesn't do it.
Really this just makes it easier, this way the ISP can pretend to be recording all the data "just in case they're a pedo/terrorist" instead of "for Murdoch's Sun Newspaper".
We could pretend that we're conspiracy theorists and Murdoch doesn't really do that, but News International already admitted to paying police for information, so its a pretty sure bet he does.
You mean https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/trackmenot/
"Protects privacy in web-search. By issuing randomized queries to popular search-engines, including Google, Bing, and Baidu, TrackMeNot obfuscates users' search data profiles"
If everyone used this we all would have a lot less to worry about it.
Even better, have two instances of web browser installed on your PC: FF installed locally with your usual configuration and trackmenot .. and FF Portable run from a mounted encrypted drive share .. so if the computer is taken or powered off they can't get anything and the 'local' install looks like your 'normal' web activities
Also install https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/betterprivacy/ to delete flash cookies
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
If I was part of the security services/police I would NOT be asking for mass surveillance. The hard part is anaylysis of the data, which will inevitably become backlogged, so when a terrorist event happens it will turn out that the security serivces had all the information which - when published after the event - will make them look stupid because it will demonstrate that they had all the information needed to prevent the event.
To be fair to the lib-dems...
Being in coalition with the Tories must be like trying to pick up a turd from the clean end.
At the time of the election, Nu-Labia were far too authoritarian to enter into a coalition with. For example, they were still spouting loudly about ID cards amongst others.
All the same, if the Lib-Dems don't wake up, I dare say the Green's will pick up a few alienated lefty Lib-Dem voters who don't want the authoritarianism of Nu-Labia.
Somebody is actually going to store the whole Internet - actually each ISP will have its own copy. It is always useful to have backups of the Internet
The things that concerns me regarding this bill are as follows;
1. This bill will almost certainly cause a bottleneck on internet traffic, as ISP's will need to supply more resources into recording and storing our activity.
2. The predictions of the cost for this will be way off, when has ever the government been accurate with a financial cost? The time it takes to implement?
3. This monitoring will soon spark off more requirements of ISP's to obey stricter ruling, with this I predicate service provider costs will go up to compensate for the requirement of change (i.e. expect the internet bills to sky rocket with added taxes etc for virtually the same service on our part)
4. This action will go against the nature of why the internet exists. The internet is designed to be as flexible as possible so that global communications should be possible in no matter what situation.
5. This bill also encourages the work to censor and ban websites, eventually getting to the state where the only websites are accessible are ones limited to British ruling, which I would not be surprised if groups like the BBFC got their grubby hands into the pie.
6. A more underground network(s) will emerge, much like when bluetooth was popular in mobile phones, where file sharing and piracy will be done in ad-hoc manner which is uncontrollable by the government.
7. It will make our public appearence of British citizens as being incapable of accessing the internet on our own, that we are children to the nanny state
1. create a screen saver for all OS's that does the following;
a) endless loop to send /dev/random data from your PC to the ISPs router at full UP rate when idle.
b) making sure that the destination isnt billed as its internal to ISP only
c) watch their harddrives FILL UP exponentially forever at stagaring rates at 1 HD per minute.
d) after a few days , they will get DISK FULL dialog.
e) watch their costs go so high, no govt can afford to pay for 1 HD per second per ISP
f) seagate/wd stock soars as orders go into the millions of HDs.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
How do Tor, VPNs, etc help? I always thought they protected you at the other end i.e. a website couldn't tell who had accessed it. Surely the details of the web page as it goes from the ISP down the phone line to your router is goint to be pretty much wide open and that's the point where it's being monitored. I can see encryption making a difference at some level but surely there's still some detail about what's coming in? Unencrypted headers or something? happy to be pointed to a 'Internet Security 101' guide but I've looked and not really found much.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
"You might not be so happy to find out that from now, every single thing you do online will be recorded and stored by the good old Internet Service providers (ISP)".
I thought they were already recording everything, of course this won't affect the online crooks, what it will do is suppress online discent, a watched population is a compliant one, a bad day for democracy.
AccountKiller
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,...
---Bill S., 1600
Not a sparrow shall fall...
---Matthew 10:29
Now if only one could get a copy of the script in advance....
jbd
"Whoa, kind of feel like God!"
---"Cereal Killer" in Hackers I
Didn't they announce this like ten other times?
Anyway. I'm going to be randomly generating multiple terabytes of encrypted data on the net, just so they can have fun with it.
If politicians and corporations are doing nothing wrong, then they have nothing to hide, so there is no reason not to leak it all.
"They" or their data-mining algorithms, read your emails already, in the US, legally or not. I'm sure the UK is no different. I remember cell techs telling me 25 years ago about Feds camping out at the switches listening in on conversations, too. Presumably so they would know where to "stumble upon" grounds for warrants and the rest of the dog-and-pony show that was, and partly still is, the U.S. court system. Nowadays, of course, it could be for admissible evidence in secret courts. Back then, they'd let coke-dealing gang-bangers under surveillance plan murders and then carry them out, since they were "trying to build a case for cocaine trafficking convictions". It was a trickle-down benefit from the whole "Clear and Present Ollie North Days", the mulitplier effect working on alll those black budget dollars spent on guns for hostages, neo-con fearmongering, FLETC psyops training, etc.
You may be right about feature creep, but it would be redundant, as would feature creep for the NDAA. The authority is there, whatever the promulgated intent.
Don't just complain, don't just circumvent, don't accept. Stop it dead in it's track. Use whatever means are necessary, break the law if you have to.
Because if you take this lying down then it's just that much easier for the rest of the world to accept it.
Please explain, as almost all did ten years ago, why such rantings about "they" tracking us were paranoid delusions, and how no-one cares what you are doing. I'd like that trip down memory lane. Yes, I am vindicated and bitter. Deservedly so.
GPS for cell phones IS for tracking everyone in real time (whether you switch it "OFF" or not, it's software, they switch it back on), they WILL mandate tracking for cars, voting computer systems ARE intended for Republicans to steal elections at will and will soon serve the same function for conservatives in Canada, they have mandated every damned motherboard in the last ten years a spying/tracking device, and the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. Looking forward to further vindication, and possibly a large bottle of scotch whiskey. Daily.
Another way to fight this is obfuscation. If someone could create an application that opens any one of a billion random websites at randoms intervals all day and all night we could overwhelm their ability to store/track effectively. Enough people using this software we make this a nightmare project to implement.
Keep in mind that the government is footing the bill here. The easiest way to kill a government project is to make it impossible/expensive. That will get media attention and that will lead to politicians thinking twice before putting their name on the project.
Could someone with more skill than me please stand up and create this? I beg you.
The important thing is that this is the DRAFT Communications Data Bill. It would have been a normal bill where amendments are possible but usually opposed by the Government (who have the majority). But Nick Clegg and other Lib Dems insisted it be published as a draft, so people can comment on it and so changes can be made. Julian Huppert MP is already working to change it, and has got himself on the committee of MPs who will be considering it - see http://www.libdemvoice.org/julian-huppert-mp-writes-communications-data-we-have-to-get-this-right-28964.html
We MUST have a new bill, if only to replace RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) passed by the previous Government, which introduced state snooping on a grand scale, (did you know that in the past year alone, there were 540,000 data requests under RIPA?). But the proposed bill has many flaws too; jsut to start with, Part 1 gives far too much arbitrary power to the Secretary of State.
So it is up to those who oppose the bill to make their views known and put reasoned arguments and views forward to the Committee considering it. This government has shown it /will/ change its mind if enough people object to things it is doing, and in this case it's easy for them to do so as it's a draft, with changes expected. See also http://carons-musings.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/169-days-to-help-julian-huppert-protect.html
Small comfort in being a prophet if no one listened, huh? Well, actually they did, but thought they could have their cake and eat it, too, in a plausibly deniable way. They know who I'm talking about, now that they're moaning and wailing, and gnashing their teeth, too.
The whiskey sounds like a better idea. Make mine bourbon.
Just use a VPN and no need to fear :) :)
VPN service can be rather inexpensive
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