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.

Comments

Brits love to complain

[Anonymous Coward]

about how the US is treating its citizens with privacy.. But you people are writing the book on the matter.

Re:Brits love to complain

[TWX]

The United States wasn't the birthplace that inspired Eric Blair to write under the penname of George Orwell...

Re:Brits love to complain

[PPH]

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.

Re:Brits love to complain

[IamTheRealMike]

Errr .... that analogy is, I would say, not excellent.

Orwell primarily wrote about what was happening in other countries. Animal Farm was a wafer-thin allegory about the events happening inside Soviet Russia and what Stalin was doing in particular. Orwell found it hard to get published because at the time, Stalin wasn't understood as the monster he truly was: rather the USSR was still seen as the ally against the Nazi's that made huge sacrifices to win, the ally that rolled into Berlin.

1984 was Orwell's attempt to imagine what a Soviet-style totalitarian regime would look like if implemented in the UK. It's full of references to "Ingsoc" because it was another book about the evils of communism as practiced elsewhere.

Orwell wrote those books because, at the time, he felt very pessimistic about the future of his homeland. He felt sure that a communist/fascist takeover was going to happen. Towards the end of his life he admitted he had been entirely mistaken about that and England hadn't worked out the way he thought it would.

Ironically, Orwell was a committed socialist himself. He didn't write about the evils of communism because he was a capitalist. Rather, he saw communism as practiced abroad as a corruption of true democratic socialism, and he believed the right way to bring about a hard-left government was through the ballot box rather than through a fascist uprising.

Re:Brits love to complain

[IamTheRealMike]

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.

Re:Brits love to complain

[plover]

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.

Re:Brits love to complain

[Anonymous Coward]

"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".

Re:Brits love to complain

[BasilBrush]

As a Brit I'd like to apologise for the current British government. They are a bunch of right-wing authoritarian fuck-wits.

Re:Brits love to complain

[cardpuncher]

British prohibitions against this are much weaker.

They are, but European prohibitions are actually quite strict. As long as the UK remains a signatory to the ECHR and remains a member of the EU this proposal is open to challenge by courts that have shown themselves more protective of individual liberties than the US courts have of late.

Of course, at the same time, the present UK administration is also trying to find a way to remain a signatory to the ECHR without actually being bound by it and to renegotiate its relationship with the EU to "repatriate" powers. If it succeeds in these things, then there at least will be an independent Scotland for us to move to.

Re:Brits love to complain

[KGIII]

You have some of the most fanciful... umm... beliefs... Patton was pasted by a drunk driver, not the OSS. Hell, IIRC, Patton even set it up so that the driver wasn't prosecuted. How one goes from that to him being assassinated by the OSS is beyond me but I seem to recall that you think almost everything is some giant conspiracy. "Oh no! Someone died! It must be a conspiracy!"

*sighs*

Well, at least you're amusing. There's that. Deciding to take a look at what evidence there is to suggest your allegation is true, I went to the 'trusty' Google and entered in the query, "General Patton Killed by OSS." I then pounded the enter button until it felt good. I then scanned the initial results, Google is set to give me 100 links per page, and opened a few of them.

Yeah... One discredited Wilcox, self-acclaimed historian (a nominal value that you can assign to yourself with nary a shadow of accreditation) and a bunch of lunatics who decided to follow suit with absolutely no evidence to support the theory. Not one scholarly article. Not one iota of proof (hearsay is not proof). And, more, completely unlikely given the methods, number of people who'd need to be involved, etc... But, of course, that's part of the cover-up, right?

There was an interesting study done on those people who believed in conspiracy theories. The findings were released about six months ago, as I recall. It made Slashdot. Basically, they're inferior people who want to believe they're in the know and thus more enlightened and intelligent than other people and this is their outlet to fix their frail egos and low sense of self-worth. I dunno what to tell you but you might want to look into that. (By the way, Oswald killed JFK as a lone actor.)

Pr0n

[mooterSkooter]

Don't worry, they won't care about your pr0n searches...well, maybe they'll just store them all up for 'later use' should you become a problem in the future.
As Cameron said "For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone"

Fuck them all. You heard it here first.

Re: Revolt

[Godwin O'Hitler]

Brit to fellow Brit in bar: Have you heard? The tories are going to track all your e-mails.
Fellow Brit: Awesome. What time does the match start?

what could possibly go wrong?

[call -151]

According to the article, the proposal would pay the ISPs costs to retain the information. Given the value of the data (blackmail, harassment, etc.) there is strong incentive for many independent agents to try to get it and the track record on security for far less valuable information is not so great. I'm sure the ISPs costs are overstated and their incentive to do a great job securing the data properly is not so clear.

European privacy

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

Just remember, European governments are really concerned about your privacy! That's why they want all the private and personal data of Europeans kept on European servers. You know, so that they can better protect you!

Time to start using HTTPS exclusively

[The-Ixian]

Or just use a VPN service or TOR

Lots of trivial ways around this... no need to panic.

No Problem....

[MagickalMyst]

As long as the government is willing to allow the public access to all government emails and phone records also.

Spy on them as they spy on us. Fair is fair.

Re:HTTPS

[The-Ixian]

They will still be able to tell the IP you connect to, which will tell them the server you queried. That information could be useful to someone.

But they won't be able to see the content of the query.

Of course, this sounds like the legislation, as written, could be interpreted to mean that only layer 7 logging needs to happen (since that is where HTTP lives) in which case, even your destination IPs would be safe from logging under this law.