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Theresa May Named UK's Internet Villain of the Year
An anonymous reader writes with news that Theresa May, the UK's Secretary of State for the Home Department, has been named the UK internet industry's villain of the year. She won this dubious honor for pushing the UK's controversial "snooper's charter" legislation, which would require ISPs to retain massive amounts of data regarding their subscribers for no less than a year. May championed the legislation without consulting the internet industry.
Conversely, "The MPs Tom Watson and David Davis were jointly named internet hero for their legal action against the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act. 'Surveillance has dominated both the hero and villain shortlists for number of years, and it was felt Davis and Watson were some of the best informed politicians on the subject,' the ISPA said."
Conversely, "The MPs Tom Watson and David Davis were jointly named internet hero for their legal action against the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act. 'Surveillance has dominated both the hero and villain shortlists for number of years, and it was felt Davis and Watson were some of the best informed politicians on the subject,' the ISPA said."
The ISPs don't care about their clients' privacy -- what they're objecting to is all the expensive hardware to gather and store all those records.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
GCHQ is already collecting/monitoring the data, consequently, their request is a bit confusing if not redundat, isn't it?
Do they need a backup to their own databases? Or they want to focuss on relationship databases that aggregate all the metadata? Or perhaps they want to focus on analysis of the data, rather than focusing on collection?
It's not going to change anything. She has the power, along with the other Surveillance Age supporters, to pass any laws she sees fit to impose their will. Meanwhile you keep tickling a fire-spitting dragon that will, sooner or later, grow bothered enough to turn around and swat you out of existence. If you saw the birth of the web back in the '90s, I have a message for you: that internet is dead. Forever. Those who killed it wield power you could not even begin to imagine. The vast majority of the populace does not care or will play along out of feat or apathy. They have won. It's over. I know that losing a war - especially THE war for the only cause you ever knew and embraced - is hard, especially when you know that there is not going to be any other one, and that we lost without even firing a shot, but that's what happened. We live in the Surveillance Age now. We will die in it. Those of us who have children have better raise them to live in it as well, because they will live and die in the shadow of ubiquitous surveillance as well. Same with their grandchildren. Unless some unspecified catastrophe wipes away all digital technology, the grip of tyranny will never, ever let go. Get over it.
The solution, the only possible solution, is to encrypt everything and make some mass surveillance impractical. We can't do much about all the cameras and databases, but we can make sure that our activities online are very hard to spy on. It will never be impossible, but if GCHQ has to spend vast amounts of money and attack British companies to get what they want, and end up with very little for their efforts it will curtail their activities.
They will of course try to ban technology that bothers them, but if we make it ubiquitous and a basic part of common internet infrastructure they won't be able to.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Snoopers charter was rejected many many times, and has been sneaked in as amendments in the Lords and rejected.
GCHQ DID MASS SURVEILLANCE ANYWAY, even though they couldn't get the law passed when Jacqui Smith was in power (a Labour version of Theresa May).
*ALL* Home Secretaries know they have a file in CGHQ on themselves, I assume its why women are put in that role since their porn surfing habits won't be so much leverage, but ultimately they are all cleared and approved by the people in the spying agency, so you won't get any radical ideas like "right to privacy" or "protecting the democracy from the fucking spooks who work for the NSA not their electorate".
It's a similar situation to France, Hollande was *approved* by the US, because if he was bad for the US spy machine, they would have leaked against him. I don't feel sorry that he was spied on, its the people who were spied on and acted against to prevent them becoming leader that I feel sorry for. His opponents. Every leader now is one that will try to implement mass surveillance, because they're from the *approved* set of leaders who go along with that agenda!