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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.
www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en
This is apparently a Bill that has not actually been passed yet.
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?
"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 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.
Send emails that contain as much information that you can cram in there from wikipedia.
No, use high-entropy random numbers ... much harder to compress/deduplicate :-)
Make sure you invest in all the storage companies first.
Stick Men
Indeed.
It's an interesting yet terrifying time. The limitations of law enforcement are becoming less technical and more social. Technology is creating the potential for massively effective law enforcement, at a cost of massive loss of personal freedom. As a society we have to figure out where we want to draw that line. How much safety do we want to trade for how much privacy.
The terrifying part is that society isn't really deciding so much as certain interested parties pushing in one direction and people en mass shrugging and going about their day.
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.
That's easy. It's already a crime in the UK to refuse to hand over encryption keys. They don't even have to prove that you have the encryption keys, or that the allegedly encrypted data is actually encrypted.
Before long mere use of encryption, or even possession of random data that could be mistaken for encrypted data will be illegal in the UK.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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?
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.
Here, we are simply shifting electrons around, real wealth and power are elsewhere.
People used to make just sound waves with their own mouths. Those waves couldn't propagate farther than a few meters. Still, those people were often arrested, imprisoned and killed. A technology that allows anyone to talk to unlimited audience over unlimited distances [on this planet] is far more dangerous.
Speech in general is dangerous. All palace revolts, all military coups, all popular revolutions started with people who were speaking.
In an ideally peaceful society free speech would be completely outlawed. Without being able to communicate you can only lead a revolt of one, easily suppressable. However such a society is likely to stagnate (see USSR.)
The real problem with human societies is the people. Someone always wants something from others, be it money or power or attention. Those are called "troublemakers." But this is normal behavior for homo sapiens. We might just as well ask molecules to stop their Brownian motion. It's what they are.
Democracy allows free speech on a slim chance that some of those new proposals are beneficial. In practice new political leaders only want to unseat current political leaders, and they use the people as fuel and cannon fodder for their purposes. Will Romney be better than Obama? Or worse? Or the same? Nobody knows; this is quantum information - the act of listening to either of those politicians changes the message. On top of that, the electorate is usually not even aware of all pertinent facts - because the facts are hard to find and because they are hard to comprehend. The electorate simply remembers who called them last and votes for that guy.
I could even understand if a government would offer zero free speech in exchange for absolute safety and stability. But this is not going to happen, in any country. You would lose your free speech but the government would be even more abusive. Losing your freedom of speech (or freedom of speaking anonymously) does not come with any benefits whatsoever. Not to you, at least. The government benefits mightily.
Similarly, Communists in 1917 Russia used their free speech (not really a right, but they had it anyway) to kill tens of millions in 20th century. A certain other person, let he remain unmentioned here, used his right of free speech (which he did have) to construct one of evilest empires in history of the planet. (Pol Pot is nervously smoking in the corner.)
Inverse it is, yes.
It's not those you've mentioned whose power of free speech is the active vector here.
It is the elimination/suppression of other speech that is the evil part, and enables further evil.
The answer to speech you dislike/disagree with is always *more* speech (voice your views as well), not less (suppressing/silencing opposing voices/opinions), in any society that could reasonably be called "free".
The US is falling into this abyss as well as the UK, under an ever-expanding government. To my "scoring", the UK is ahead in blatant, "in your face" public domestic surveillance, but the US is far ahead in covert domestic surveillance.
And please, let's not bring out that tired "shouting 'fire!' in a crowded theater" thing in this thread. That's been rehashed to death on /. and elsewhere. This is about political speech.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.