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UK Plans To Allow Warrantless Searches of Internet History (telegraph.co.uk)

Posted by Soulskill on from the they-know-about-your-secret-sharknado-fanfic-blog dept.

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.

3 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Brits love to complain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Brits love to complain by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Brits love to complain by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.