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UK Plans To Allow Warrantless Searches of Internet History (telegraph.co.uk)
whoever57 writes: The UK government plans to require ISPs and telcoms companies to maintain browsing and email history of UK residents for a period of 12 months and make the data available to police on request without a warrant. "The new powers would allow the police to seize details of the website and searches being made by people they wanted to investigate." Exactly how they expect the ISPs to provide search histories now that most Google searches use SSL isn't explained (and probably not even considered by those proposing the legislation). Similarly with Gmail and other email providers using SMTP TLS and IMAPS, much email is opaque to ISPs. Will this drive more use of VPNs and TOR?
This comes alongside news that UK police used powers granted to them by anti-terrorism laws to seize a journalist's laptop.
The USA has constitutional prohibitions against this kind of activity. So the NSA and friends have to make a show about complying with the law. British prohibitions against this are much weaker. So the government just comes clean about it.
I'm not certain which society is easier to live with. One that lies to you and the judiciary branch or one that just does as it pleases but admits it.
Have gnu, will travel.
The latter is better.
I don't believe GCHQ gives a shit about the rule of law, seeing as how they're basically a subsidiary of the NSA (to the extent that they seem to share internal networks no less).
But nonetheless, the fact that governments are passing or trying to pass such laws is STILL a big improvement over the previous state of affairs, where their intelligence agencies are/were building these databases covertly whilst lying about doing so. At least this way the regular democratic processes have a chance to work, regardless of how flawed they might be.
I think the British government is going to lose this one (practically, not legislatively). The issue they have is that the UK isn't China: it doesn't have a home grown internet industry. The UK contributes to the global tech industry in big ways: virtually all consumer electronics are using ARM chips, the UK built one of the first computers, and there are tons of Brit's doing great work in the computing field today.
But when it comes to the giant cloud services that store everyone's data there's only really two places in the world that matter, and that's Silicon Valley and Seattle. All that data is entering and leaving the UK in encrypted form: all they and the ISPs can see is which companies are being interacted with. That trend will continue and probably even accelerate now LetsEncrypt is here. So the govt can legislate whatever the hell they like, but the data that results is going to be of low quality.
I suspect they know this and they're going to try and introduce laws that force Facebook/Google/Apple/etc to act as extensions of GCHQ. To what extent these companies go along with it will be the most fascinating fight of the coming years.
Fair enough, but candidly, I just assume any searches I perform without cloaking are accessible to any number of interested parties.
And you might want to take extra care there, too. How effective is your "cloaking"? Are you randomizing your wireless MAC when you fire up Tor at the coffee shop that is 0.34 km from your house? Are you sure your machine isn't leaking all kinds of traceable info when it connects? Is the Tor session at the coffee shop usually accompanied by a connection attempt from an iPhone reporting its name as "rmdingler's iPhone"? Does the coffee shop have a camera?
There's paranoid, and not paranoid enough.
John
"Orwell primarily wrote about what was happening in other countries."
Although he was a critic of UK politics before he wrote "1984", see "Politics and the English Language".