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Broadband Bills Will Have To Increase To Pay For Snooper's Charter, MPs Warned (theguardian.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the paying-the-price dept.

An anonymous reader writes that the UK's Science and Technology Select Committee has been told that ISPs will have huge problems implementing the so-called snooper's charter, and may be forced to raise their prices. The Guardian reports: "Consumers' broadband bills will have to go up if the investigatory powers bill is passed due to the "massive cost" of implementation, MPs have been warned. Internet service providers (ISP) told a Commons select committee that the legislation, commonly known as the snooper's charter, does not properly acknowledge the "sheer quantity" of data generated by a typical internet user, nor the basic difficulty of distinguishing between content and metadata. As a result, the cost of implementing plans to make ISPs store communications data for up to 12 months are likely to be far in excess of the £175m the government has budgeted for the task, said Matthew Hare, the chief executive of ISP Gigaclear."

13 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. Good. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Good. I'm delighted to hear about this. It's high time that the cost of outrageous government snooping programs are made to fall directly on the public who ultimately vote to support this nonsense.

    Oh? You're ambivalent about mass GCHQ/NSA surveillance? OK. Well it'll cost you an extra £11 a month on your telephone bill. Oh you have a problem now?.

    Most people will not care about an issue until they see it hit their pocket. Therefore, I say let it.

    1. Re:Good. by olsmeister · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Call it out as a separate line item too.

    2. Re:Good. by KGIII · · Score: 2

      Meh, the MPs won't care. They've got money. The people will still vote for them.

      Look at how much had to happen to piss off people for Khadaffi (or however we're spelling it today) to be ousted. The riot that sparked it all was actually from sisters and mothers from a prison right that happened way back in 1994 (I think?). It took 20 years and severe oppression before people got pissed enough to do something. No, so long as they've got beer and circuses they'll put up with a whole bunch of shit - including paying more for internet access. They won't even lose a single member of Parliament over this.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    3. Re:Good. by cdrudge · · Score: 2

      Well it'll cost you an extra £11 a month on your telephone bill. Oh you have a problem now?.

      Except it won't be an extra £11 a month. If £175m isn't enough, lets make it an order of magnitude larger to ensure that there will be enough with £1.75b There's 100m+ phone lines in the UK, so £1.75b / 12 months / 100m lines = £1.46 a month. Add in the 20m+ homes that have internet subscriptions, not to mention the number of commercial subscribers and you're barely above an extra £1 a month. Most probably wouldn't notice a £1 "government compliance and regulation fee" or whatever they call it in the UK.

    4. Re:Good. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      I suspect that even dressing it up won't help: At least on this side of the pond; the "September 11th Security Fee" item on airline tickets was...less than popular...with fliers; even at the time when '9/11!!!!' was considered a perfectly good argument for setting up a network of torture dungeons.

      All but the staunchest law-and-order-authoritarians hate actually paying for state violence almost as much as they enjoy watching it.

      I'm honestly not sure how that happened: back when we still had genuine 'communists', we also had genuine 'fascists' who sometimes sincerely stood for oppression first and profit second. Now they all want their giant penal apparatus to somehow turn a profit. Sellouts.

    5. Re:Good. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      Yeah; but if you want to restore from backup, you have to infiltrate Theresa May's lair and defeat her in hand-to-hand combat(and don't let her media-relations-form fool you; her combat form is considerably more terrifying). The savings just aren't worth it.

    6. Re:Good. by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M · · Score: 2

      Who are the Frech? Citizens from Frace?

    7. Re:Good. by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      £11 isn't enough. We need to develop some scripts that make millions of random DNS queries, to increase the volume of data and the associated storage cost. Unfortunately it might look like a DDOS attack on the DNS servers... I'd argue that's what a protest is, you walk down a street with a bunch of people who together end up blocking it and denying normal service. Having said that, the government is trying to stamp out protests anyway.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    8. Re:Good. by onthemightofprinces · · Score: 2

      As the saying goes: all men are equal, but some are more equal than others.

  2. Re:How to get your enemy arrested by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So... they're just collecting metadata, not actual content

    One of the insightful points made by the head of Gigaclear is that the line between metadata and data is pretty vague. For instance, who are you calling on Skype? "Obviously" metadata .... but if someone is added to a group call in the middle of it, then suddenly metadata might be being mixed in seamlessly with voice and video data. If you post a message to a website like Slashdot that has subject lines and bodies, is the subject line metadata? And if so, how does an ISP extract that and store it separately from the body?

    The real cost of this scheme isn't even in the hardware, really, it's in paying large numbers of skilled people to develop a dizzying array of Wireshark filters to try and separate and index the metadata for every imaginable internet protocol.

  3. Good, and while you're at it, itemize it! by serviscope_minor · · Score: 2

    And whle you're at it, itemize the bill.

    Line rental mothly: 5 pounds
    30 mbit/s package: 10 pounds
    fee for us to snoop on you as legally required by the government: 10 pounds

    If it costs more, pass the cost on to the customer and LET THEM KNOW.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  4. Re:Joined up Government ? by Archtech · · Score: 2

    Meanwhile the PM - Cameron - is promising affordable broadband for all

    Do these politicians ever talk to each other ?

    Did you perchance overlook the key weasel word "promising"?

    --
    I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
  5. Re:Joined up Government ? by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They've also been talking about broadband being some sort of fundamental right one minute, with ominous-sounding ideas about cutting people off for dubious IP-related reasons the next, and then moving government services that many people are legally required to use into on-line systems the day after that.

    I'm pretty sure it's all just an elaborate episode of Yes Minister at this point.

    --
    If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.