Slashdot Mirror
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.
Every time a bad law is proposed, Slashdot posts a story about it, and the first post immediately jumps in as if it's already been signed into law and professes about how America is so much better.
Except 99% of it is complete nonsense, and never even makes it to a first reading in the House of Parliament, much less past a vote and survives challenges in the House of Lords.
Just because some idiot has proposed bad law doesn't mean it has any chance of ever making it onto the statute books. Sure, we have some bad laws, and sure some bad stuff gets through, but to pretend all of it will is nonsense. It wasn't so long ago we heard here about how Britain was awful and Orwellian because Cameron was going to ban WhatsApp and Skype and god knows what else. Whatever happened to that? Guess what, it never even made it any further than out of the lips of some official spouting drivel precisely because it was unworkable. Any fucking idiot can spout out a stupid law but it doesn't mean it'll ever become reality, or reflects something that the government can and will pass and that the people will accept.
America has just as many bad and stupid laws proposed, but because we're not insecure like Americans apparently are we don't jump in and go OMG LOOK AMERICA IS AWFUL, THIS LAW IS INSANELY BAD IT MUST OBVIOUSLY BE AN ACTUAL LAW THATS BEEN PASSED BECAUSE ITS MENTIONED ON SLASHDOT COMMUNISM ORWELL!!!!! We only do that when you pass actually bad laws, like, you know, the PATRIOT act, the DMCA, or the TPP.
But god, if it really makes you feel better about the fact your country is fucked, then carry on I guess. It's just a shame you're simply lying to yourselves. If you really think you're better off with your militarised police force, summary executions, detention without trial, secret courts, surveillance services that can outright lie to your executive branch with no penalty, schools that require armed officers to patrol around and who end up smacking down the kids violently and so on then fuck me, we'll leave you to it I guess. It would be comical if it weren't for the fact that your nanny state even bans Kinder Eggs because your kids are brought up in so much cotton wool they apparently can't prevent themselves choking to death en-masse on the toy inside for crying out loud.
Come back to us and criticise when your children don't have to be patted down by armed guards to even go into their school. Until then pretending Britain is somehow more terrible than the US because our politicians are also allowed to suggest incredibly bad laws just like yours manage to is incredibly naive. You really do seem insanely desperate to pretend you don't live in a fuck up of a country rather than actually do something about it. Hell, you even argue you have gun rights for this reason, fat lot of good it's done you.