Cameron Asserts UK Gov't Will Leave No "Safe Space" For Private Communications

An anonymous reader writes with the story from Ars Technica that UK prime minister David Cameron "has re-iterated that the UK government does not intend to 'leave a safe space — a new means of communication — for terrorists to communicate with each other.'" That statement came Monday, as a response to Conservative MP David Bellingham, "who asked [Cameron, on the floor of the House of Commons] whether he agreed that the 'time has come for companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter to accept and understand that their current privacy policies are completely unsustainable?' To which Cameron replied: 'we must look at all the new media being produced and ensure that, in every case, we are able, in extremis and on the signature of a warrant, to get to the bottom of what is going on.'" This sounds like the UK government is declaring a blustery war on encryption, and it might not need too much war: some companies can be persuaded (or would be eager) to cooperate with the government in handing over all kinds of information. However, the bluster part may leave even the fiercest surveillance mostly show: as Ars writer Glyn Moody asks, what about circumstances "where companies can't hand over keys, or where there is no company involved, as with GnuPG, the open source implementation of the OpenPGP encryption system?" Or Tor?

Comments

Re:David Cameron is actually a genuine idiot

[digitig]

Cameron sees the world of V for Vendetta as a utopia [1].

[1] Or rather, "Eutopia", for those who know the etymology.

Re:You know it's not going to work

[mlts]

It also is going to backfire.

Take SSL/TLS. Are they going to demand both parties stash the session key, or do their handshaking through a proxy logging each packet? The first time some intruders nail that data store and find out a bunch of banking passwords, the cost of that breach will be incredible. If they alter the SSL/TLS algorithm, will it bring unexpected changes that destroy the algorithm's security, or the code used not implement the changes in a secure fashion?

As for outlawing it, it -could- be done, but it would require far-reaching internal and external controls, with very sophisticated algorithms to detect unauthorized encryption, and pull that machine from the net. However, this is a cat and mouse game... and ultimately, the bad guys are just going to do like Daesh, and AQ before them... and go back to couriers, dead drops, and burner phones. Yes, it doesn't give as fast results as the Net, but it is a lot tougher to intercept. So, it an be done... but it is doubtful that even the British people would tolerate this much interference in their lives.

Nevermind the bollocks, here's David Cameron

[LessThanObvious]

Do the Brits just not want any rights? Why do you tolerate this? At least American politicians still have to pretend to give a damn about basic civil rights while they try to scare us into forgoing them. Communication in the modern world is an unstoppable force. Even prison gangs that live in a tightly controlled environment where they are forbidden from free communications and have little or no technology, find ways to communicate without authorities knowing the contents of their communications. Spying on all communications all the time may sound good in theory strictly from a security standpoint, but the moment the actual bad guys know that is the environment in which they operate, they will find ways to evade that scrutiny. Everyone else should not have to tolerate being constantly observed just so the government can pretend that it offers reasonable assurance that they will get the intelligence they seek from the small number of actual persons of interest.

Re:Nevermind the bollocks, here's David Cameron

[AmiMoJo]

Our democracy is broken. Here are the the numbers of votes each party received, followed by the number of MPs they got:

Party                        Votes                Seats

Conservative Party            11,300,303 (36.9%)    330 (50.8%)
Labour Party                9,344,328 (30.4%)    232 (35.7%)
UK Independence Party        3,881,129 (12.6%)    1 (0.2%)
Liberal Democrats            2,415,888 (7.9%)    8 (1.2%)
Scottish National Party        1,454,436 (4.7%)    56 (8.6%)
Green Party                1,157,613 (3.8%)    1 (0.2%)

So as you can see, 3.8 million people voted for UKIP (a bunch of wankers, but still...) but ended up with just one MP and no power at all. The greens got the same number of MPs with juste 1.1 million votes. Only 1.5 million people voted for the SNP and they got 56 seats.

The system is rigged so that power is always held by either Labour or the Conservatives. No-one else can get a look in, even if like UKIP they manage to gain quite and impressive amount of support. 12.6% of the vote, 0.2% of the seats. See how it works?

So at election time the choice is basically Labour or the Tories. The Tories will sell our freedom off with glee, and Labour aren't much better. But no-one cares about that come election time. Since the system is designed to avoid hung parliaments and any kind of power sharing it tends to produce totalitarian governments who rip away our rights and freedoms (human rights are being flushed away as we speak).

Re:David Cameron is actually a genuine idiot

[DocHoncho]

Also, what kind of bizarro definition of "socialist" implies wanting a surveillance state? If anything, the more socialist states in the EU tend to be the ones that have better protections for privacy and freedom because they understand that the government works FOR the people.

That would be the American(tm) definition of socialism. As in the U.S.S.R. was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, therefore Socialism is completely equivalent with the Soviet system, and so it is anti-American(tm).

It's a really simple calculus: If you're a simple minded American(tm) Patriot(tm)(R) who is informed of world events solely by the one true Media: Fox News, Breitbart and the Drudge Report, then Socialism == USSR == Communism == Bad.

HTH.