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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?
It's like guns in the US. If they were outlawed then those who don't care about the laws would still use them. Encryption is out there, it is widely available. And the more that governments try to block it the more determined companies and individuals will find more convenient ways to use it. It's a lot of bluster but not very practical. And ultimately (IMHO) the availability of rapid communications does more to help humanity than to hurt it.
Ha ha, did you think he meant warrants? No, no, no... just like every other effort to chip away at freedom and privacy, it comes dressed in the noblest of promises. But once the necessary powers are secured, the promises can be gradually (if not immediately) infringed upon.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Cameron sees the world of V for Vendetta as a utopia [1].
[1] Or rather, "Eutopia", for those who know the etymology.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Has every one forgotten Lavabit already? It was only two years ago. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/... They found out the hard way. http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...
"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?"
"Ladar Levison, founder of the encrypted email service Lavabit that shut down last year because of friction with U.S. government data requests, has an article at The Guardian where he explains the whole story. He writes, 'My legal saga started last summer with a knock at the door, behind which stood two federal agents ready to to serve me with a court order requiring the installation of surveillance equipment on my company's network. ... I had no choice but to consent to the installation of their device, which would hand the U.S. government access to all of the messages â" to and from all of my customers â" as they traveled between their email accounts other providers on the Internet. But that wasn't enough. The federal agents then claimed that their court order required me to surrender my company's private encryption keys, and I balked. What they said they needed were customer passwords â" which were sent securely â" so that they could access the plain-text versions of messages from customers using my company's encrypted storage feature. (The government would later claim they only made this demand because of my "noncompliance".) ... What ensued was a flurry of legal proceedings that would last 38 days, ending not only my startup but also destroying, bit by bit, the very principle upon which I founded it â" that we all have a right to personal privacy.'"
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Be careful: even if this means that they will only require data to be handed over if the requesting agency has a signed warrant, the phrase "no safe space" can only mean that private crypto is outlawed, Encrypted email, peer to peer encrypted chat and even encrypted messages in public channels are closed off to everyone except the key holders, closed even to ISPs, the chat service provider or the app builders. In other words, they are safe spaces.
Requiring a warrant means that the government should have access to our data on reasonable grounds, but only if such data is accessible. I am all for that. But the phrase "no safe space" is a telling one: it means ensuring that our data is accessible in every case, and that goes a whole lot further. If the government has access, then our ISP or the service provider has it, and that means our data is not safe.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Spying on everyone isn't effective if everyone knows about it. They need to publicly back down on the spying, let this blow over, then bring it all back in secret. If they don't do this it means they are not interested in gathering intelligence, but rather in the chilling effect.
It's not just Cameron. The people I know in the UK support this kind of thinking. A few years ago there was legislation introduced to assign a caseworker to *every* child in the UK. It didn't have as little support as you'd think. They are, broadly, a bunch of well-behaved socialist conformists who are afraid of the real world, and think that a panopticon surveillance state will make them "safe". It is disgusting.
Just wow, socialism does not advocate panopticon surveillance, infact I don't think socialism has anything to say about matters relating to observation of the population. This is the sort of bullshit that got the US in the hellhole they're in now. I think the most applicable term for it is fascism.
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.
It's the media. When it was pointed out that Twitter informs users who are the subject of data access requests by the government they framed it as Twitter tipping off terrorists that they were being investigated. Not as Twitter protecting its users from over-use of surveillance and being transparent with them, but as colluding with the enemy. It was disgusting.
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Fascism uses the power of the state to oppress its citizens.
Capitalism uses the power of the state to ensure its corporations can oppress its citizens.
Communism uses the power of the state to oppress its citizens and ensure its economy remains in shambles.
Socialism grants significant power to the state with the expectation that it will use that power for good, and then its citizens are shocked and outraged when the government uses that power to oppress its citizens.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.