Slashdot Mirror
Plans For Widespread Monitoring of Communication In Europe Revealed
TrueSatan writes "A leak from the Clean IT project reveals how it has been subverted from its original, much more innocuous, goals into a surveillance horror story with democratic freedoms and personal rights being the victims."
The leaked document in question. Gems include member states repealing anti-filtering laws and a mandate that ISPs be held liable for not reporting terrorist use of their networks. The Clean IT Project counters that there's nothing to see here (amazingly, through a series of tweets with a journalist).
The next step is to ban it. Do not wait until it is too late to show your disagreement.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
If they hated us for our freedoms, we must be pretty well liked by now.
And then the wrong person gets elected to office and this vault becomes your living nightmare. The problem with this sort of data collection isn't the benevolent intent of the present, it's the malevolent intent of the future.
The government has no idea what to do with this information
I keep on hearing this from posters here on Slashdot and elsewhere in the blogosphere or anywhere there is commentary on the subject.
"the data is going to be too big, to do anything useful with it" is a very common meme.
But this is so far from the truth. Just look at what Google has done with the disparate information on the net. In a sea of data it is very easy to find identifiable information of individuals from very little.
I started playing the "who is this guy emailing me, really" game after dealing with a bunch of "Craigslist Flakes". As a simple example: Just looking at X-Originating-IP in an email combined with Google can reveal a great deal of personal information about the sender.
The editors of Slashdot can even try to extrapolate data on me right now. Submissions I've posted, pages I've visited. They can look for my ip somewhere else on the net and try to associate it with a name. It's not an exact science since they are only going by my IP and it sometimes changes. But as with all things, that can be worked out. To Slashdot I am not really an Anonymous Coward.
The data collected by the government will be easily searched/correlated/whatever when they need it to be. It's not going to be too big.
Some day I am going to have to explain to my son how we managed to defeat a genocidal megalomaniac bend on world domination, narrowly avoid nuclear annihilation, and rebuild an entire continent in the 20th Century, but that in the 21st Century somehow pirates and terrorists are the biggest threat to Western Civilization. But my biggest fear is that he is growing up in a world where the bar for personal privacy, security, and liberty has been set alarmingly low.
Those of us who experienced privacy in the pre-WWW, pre-datamining era--the before time, the long-long-ago--still have a viscerally negative reaction when we learn about how Company X is collecting information on us in some new-and-intrusive way. Even when it's to protect us from pirates and terrorists, we at least object to it even though we have, thus far, just rolled over, muttering under our breath as a glorified hall monitor looks at pictures of our naked bodies before we are allowed to board an airplane. And we still get angry when we find out that a government is spying on us and listening in to our conversations--digitally encoded or otherwise.
People born after 2000 will have no memory of a smart-phone-free world by the time they are of voting age. They won't find it unsettling that you have to enter a credit card number before you can log into your iThing or that their toaster needs to know their birth date. Let's just hope that the elderly continue to have a disproportionate influence in electoral politics--at least until I die.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.