Slashdot Mirror
UK PM Wants To Speed Up Controversial Internet Bill After Paris Attacks (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Less than three days after the attacks in Paris, UK prime minister David Cameron has suggested that the process of review for the controversial Draft Investigatory Powers Bill should be accelerated. The controversial proposal, which would require British ISPs to retain a subset of a user's internet history for a year and in effect outlaw zero-knowledge encryption in the UK, was intended for parliamentary review and ratification by the end of 2016, but at the weekend ex-terrorist watchdog Lord Carlile was in the vanguard of demands to speed the bill into law by the end of this year, implicitly criticizing ex-NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for having 'shown terrorists ways to hide their electronic footprints'.
I love Big Brother!
evil begets evil.
Soon we'll live in a totalitarian state as restrictive as sharia law. Woohoo!
...outlaw zero-knowledge encryption
Get them to start with banks. Once implemented, withdraw all of Cameron's savings/investments, and use it to fund eduction on how the Internet works.
Since The RaspberryPi Foundation is UK-based, does this mean that in order to comply with the law, all RaspberryPis produced after this law goes into effect must come with MI5/MI6-approved encryption backdoors ?
Or will the crafty gals & gents from Upton Towers find a way to eschew this ?
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
Worthless, the bad guys will use custom apps and custom encryption scheme to stay ahead. You will end up spying on joe six pack and stupid criminals. Really dangerous guys will find a way to stay ahead. The only way to win is to keep up and being able to decrypt their communications by any means we can. No bill can help that.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I have to share your lol. Panicky people will keep voting for this crap for years to come. It's a mini 9/11 of gov/corp power grabbing. Works every time.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
But the Patriot Act as been so good for America! The UK wants summa that lovin.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Saying you need to make your data available to government law enforcement is like saying it's illegal to walk around in public with a loaded AK47.
Like the real bad guys do as their told, right?
What galls me the most is the way we're being treated like we're too dumb to understand what they are really trying to achieve.
No rushing ANYTHING during times of crises. tsk! tsk!
Unfortunately, a lot of the press are going along with this proposal, despite its lack of support in any logic. Take the case of unbreakable encryption on phones. At the point that the phone is being held by the security services, what information can they not get? They can present a warrant to the app providers, email providers, etc. to get the information about the communications.
Who is the most likely target of abuse of these powers? Probably politicians. These politicians have to be either mind-numbingly arrogant, mind-numbingly stupid, or already being blackmailed to want this (arrogant because they think that no-one would ever dare to spy on them).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Now we know what Cameron got out of the Paris attacks. I wonder what encryption he used to communicate with the perpetrators to help organize them. /conspiracy
It's a mini 9/11 of ... corp power grabbing
So it's imaginary then.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Nope, not imaginary at all, there's gold in them hills. With all the believers, it's a big win for big money. They'll buy all your snake oil, the entire lot.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Lord Carlile was in the vanguard of demands to speed the bill into law by the end of this year, implicitly criticizing ex-NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for having 'shown terrorists ways to hide their electronic footprints'.
Yeah, about that shameless and often repeated lie: Exploiting Emotions About Paris to Blame Snowden, Distract from Actual Culprits Who Empowered ISIS.
These people will never let a tragedy pass without using it as an excuse ram through some ill-conceived legislation. Our own legislators are doing far more damage than terrorists could ever hope to.
Islamic terrorism is the excuse used to roll out state based terrorism. Bills introduced after the attacks in New York were the beginning and they have been consistently rolled out since then.
Generally covering up political incompetence appeared to be the core motivation, at first, but what better way to continue to roll out a campaign of harassing the populations of western democracies than by propping up and enhancing an ineffectual security theatre.
Having spent significant time reading these bills and writing to politicians to either stop or modify the wording of these laws it's pretty clear that ineptitude and general laziness has been behind the services inability to stop these attacks, most governments already have ample power to stop these attacks.
Most western countries passed effective terrorism laws back in the days of the IRA, ample powers were available to all these countries to stop terrorist attacks for decades. Not doing so allows our governments and controlled media to whip the populous into a frenzy that allows more state based terrorism to be rolled out in the form of laws none of us deserve.
Why? Because what the state is saying is you have no right to protect your rights and freedom and that it has a right to inspect the minutia of your life. In doing so it is also happy to expose you to organized crime, which has no impact on the state.
As distasteful as it sounds, the illusion of our freedom was over a long time ago. Orwell was an optimist in terms of what capabilities the state would have and, as usual, the moronic machinations of Islamic extremists give governments the excuse to drive us closer to a police state every day.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I'd expect no less from a guy who literally mouth fucked a dead pig
Because some of us live there!! Doh!
If the terrorists get caught plotting via Facebook and whatsapp the chances are they're not the ones we should be worried about. All this will achieve is pushing the lower end terrorists further underground. Publicising it so much is just stupid if they didn't already use encrypted platforms you can guarentee they will now. By all means waste more of my tax that I minimise anyway.
Despite lack of growth of in the UK, there is still plenty more money companies make from offering the UK services that are only over shadowed by the USA and Asia. As an example, if you look at Deloitte's member firms, the two largest ones are 'USA & India', 'UK & Switzerland' - interestingly, UK is the big earner in the latter, the money the UK practice makes goes beyond that of all the other member firms combined, only eclipsed by US & India.
Outside of trade, because of the EU, the UK still extremely relevant to world affairs as the commonwealth and peacekeeping (some peace keeping has been going on since World War 2).
The Netherlands is a nation that countries hold some resentment to because of the high interest loans it has a tendency to dangle in front of suffering nations.
Probably the same people who assume that the first UK phone network, which was operated by the post office was never monitored (it has always been).
I think though that the risk that people don't like, is that numerous companies will meet these standards for encryption to meet country requirements and apply this to an international audience too, making them vulnerable.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
That's not a "power grab," that is at most a sales opportunity.
Let me know when General Dynamics or BAE is appointed governor of Syria, Mosul, or San Francisco.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Blame Snowden, sure. That's exactly the sort of ready-to-print headline we've come to expect from politicians in the UK - the Daily Fail and other FUD-spreading tabloid press won't even have to re-write it.
Sadly, the tabloid-addicted public will believe it - they've spent decades in a sewer of screaming headlines, and have lost anything resembling critical thinking.
This would be a good time for her maj to put her foot down - she does command the armed forces, after all.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Money is power, dork. America proves that companies don't need to actually be named governor to have power over the government.
It's happening literally right now.
an attack on Paris by terrorists is solved by an attack on the citizens and corporations of Great Britain by it's government.
GPG is out, you cant turn off encryption, stop wasting tax payer money you incompetent crony bastards.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
America proves that companies don't need to actually be named governor to have power over the government.
That's kind of funny. So why do the corporations pay taxes to government if they control it? Why all of the expensive government read tape? Why have business executive been going to jail? When two companies disagree on what the government should do, how does that get decided? There is a hole lot more of explaining to do if you want that nonsense to even border on not insane, let alone plausible.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The bill makes no explicit mention of encryption except as it pertains to the existing law. So presumably the legal scholars of slashdot will let me know exactly which of the provisions in this hefty pdf outlaws encryption.
Harper wouldn't even make a fuss about something like that. He'd just bury it in an omnibus bill with little to no debate. In cases where debate was unavoidable, he just used his majority government to play "democracy theatre", where they would sit there for a couple of weeks pretending to listen to, in the case of the "Fair Elections Act" committee for example, 75 witnesses consisting of professors and various other experts in politics and democracy. These witnesses, to a person, explained why the act was an affront against democracy. Afterwards, Harper's committee, having a majority in the committee, simply ignored everything that was said and voted against every single proposal to change the act in any way. Harper then passes it into law and hopes that the Supreme Court of Canada doesn't find it unconstitutional and strike it down (which is really the only way a Harper bill could be stopped).
I watched the whole Fair Elections Act committee proceedings on CPAC, including voting on each of the proposals. At one point just before one of those votes, one of the NDP committee members called the Conservatives out on deliberately curtailing any attempt to alter the Act, with some not nice words aimed at them. When the vote took place immediately after that, one of the Conservatives, when asked for his vote, said, and I quote, "Well, if that's the way you're going to be about this, then I vote no". And that was the point at which I could no longer watch CPAC because it just made me almost physically ill.
Them bad dudes need no stinking encryption, you insensitive clod!
They have something that even the 'five eyes' can't never match ... they have 'allah'
They said the Paris attackers went low tech, communicated using PlayStation 4. So retaining everybody's ISP records will do nothing at all. Laws against encryption will do nothing at all. UK is just plain stupid.
It's a religion to many here. Beliefs don't have to be sane or plausible.
You can say about him what you want (like "why does he have such a big mouth?" "Well, duh, have you seen his feet? How you think he should get it in there?"), but he's reliable.
David, one question: You are aware that the Frenchies already have pretty much outlawed encryption, right? They had that for ages.
I don't expect you to know anything about technology. If anything, your governing style makes me wonder whether you know anything about anything at all. But even you can't be so dumb. So, is it that you think your voters are dumb enough to swallow this attack as a good reason to push legislation that would not even remotely, in no scenario possible, have avoided even a tiny bit of what went down in Paris?
David, until now I just had you pegged as someone who enjoys sucking his toes, considering how much you put your foot in your mouth. Maybe a bit on the uneducated side, because I shy away from calling someone dumb until I can actually identify mental deficits, you just come across as someone who isn't weighed down in his decisions with too much knowledge.
But abusing an atrocity where hundreds died at the hands of some assholes into a tool to push your agenda makes you a despicable, utterly horrific person. Until now I only had you down as inept. But now, you're on my asshole list.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You actually think the big companies are paying their taxes? Apple is hiding over 2 billion every year in tax in Australia alone. Google and MS are doing something similar. The mining corporations and all the billionaires pay next to nothing in tax. Even our current prime minister is being investigated for how he handles his tax - because of the multi-millions of dollars going through his Cayman Island "business", which is nothing more than a small 4 storey building where apparently 15,000 corporations are housed.
The bankers who crashed the world economy didn't go to jail, instead, their banks got billion dollar bailouts and they gave themselves millions in bonuses (for a job well done).
So why do the corporations pay taxes to government if they control it?
Except that large enough corporations nearly don't, in practice -- thanks to policy their lobbyists pushed through. If you think your government represents the people you haven't been paying attention.
Why all of the expensive government read tape?
Red tape, presumably. Anyway, because this is all handed off to private enterprise. Paid for with public money, most of which does not come from taxes off other corporations. So the net result is another stream of public funds into private hands. Guess who lobbied for that, and guess whose interests this does not serve.
Why have business executive been going to jail?
Other than Enron, who are you talking about? Given that the banksters who destroyed the global economy haven't even been indicted, you simply cannot be serious.
When two companies disagree on what the government should do, how does that get decided?
A lobbying competition.
There is a hole lot more of explaining to do if you want that nonsense to even border on not insane, let alone plausible.
Given the above, I might say the same of your failure to see that your government is looking out for a vanishingly small subset of the population at the expense of the rest. It really is quite obvious.
Anyway, back on topic: I'm guessing you'd be in favour of this ban on crypto. But then everyone here knows that already, which is probably why you went off on this tangent.
By the way, your .sig: were you already such a francophile back in that shameful "freedom fries" and "surrender monkey" era, when they were (correctly) pointing out that the US' argument for the invasion of Iraq was a bunch of lies?
the only thing to stop a bad guy with a bomb vest is a good guy with a bomb vest
It is sickening how politicians abuse a tragedy to push their personal agendas. Are there really no journalists left calling out their opportunism?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
when you send a box of assault rifles to alqaeda in siria, do not put a return address.
That way those weapons you send to terrorists, or to the mexican cartels (hi obama), dont end up killing your citizens
But i guess since its YOUR citizens that vote for your terrorist aiding ass, i guess whatever fucking happens you can only blame karma
that or you can blame yourself, but we all KNOW that shit AINT HAPPENING
The whole surveillance thing has only one purpose: prevent any more leaks of shady deals done by the politicians.
Whenever dirt is being dug on the politicians, it is released over the Internet.
If every single keystroke is spied on people releasing the dirt will be immediately identified, along with those reading it.
It's all about politicians protecting themselves.
I love how everything about stopping terrorists is reactive and not proactive. The internet bill is not about being pro active, its again about reacting. If you want to be pro active. Stop letting these people get into your Country in the first place! Porous boarders get innocent people killed and allow for this infusion of extreme Islamic recruitment to harvest people to do these attacks. I think the terrorists have already learned how to avoid the electronic foot print as the train shooter and now the Paris multi targeted attack has proven. Nobody has a clue what is going on. Even if you pass a internet access bill the shear amount of data to sift through makes this a ineffective way at finding terrorists among us. Same goes for the US, while Obama wants more control and the NSA keeps accessing more data. We allow for tens of thousands of Syrian refugee's to come into the US. Undocumented, not properly vetted and impossible to know what threat they are to us. Incredibly stupid politicians will get many of us killed.
They simply talk face to face. There were 3 of them, BROTHERS, why would they make some super hi-tech comms?
Really NSA/GCHQ can fuck off, they claim to have foiled 3 or 30 or whatever recent bomb plots BUT WHERE ARE THE ARRESTS??? I call bullshit fantasists defending their failures. These 3 had bombs and automatic weapons, one had even been on the surveillance list for volunteering to go to Syria! So spooks are too busy lookng at little johnneys dick pics to do their jobs and now they're talking fantasy secret plots to make themselves feel better.
Making a bigger haystack does not make the needles easier to find, and in this case the needles are not even in the haystack. They talked, and talk is not a nice easy to grab instant message, and so not captured in their haystacks of noise.
And why should they be able to do this warrantless? These brothers were KNOIWN, had CLEAR evidence against them, any joudge would happily give the spooks a warrant, so why should the warrant be skipped?
Red tape, presumably. Anyway, because this is all handed off to private enterprise. Paid for with public money, most of which does not come from taxes off other corporations. So the net result is another stream of public funds into private hands. Guess who lobbied for that, and guess whose interests this does not serve.
Add to that two words: regulatory capture. With a revolving door between the large corporations and the regulators, a lot of that 'expensive' regulation is lobbied for by the established companies and has a disproportionate impact on smaller businesses trying to compete in that market.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There is a hole lot more of explaining to do if you want that nonsense to even border on not insane, let alone plausible.
the hole kit and caboodle
Is it any surprise that the UK government are trying to use the fear of terrorism to get their own way? Government seems to attract the most clueless individuals. This proposed bill means that encryption must have a back door that the government can use to spy on people. So now what happens when the terrorists get hold of those keys and can monitor encrypted traffic used by the government and then use their own proprietary encryption to communicate with each other. A typical ill thought out law that will make the UK less safe not more.
Terrorists are not idiot's. They won't be caught with mass spying. Cameron knows that, but the bill will give him more power, that's what he wants. Apparently this is what the british public wants, they knew he'd do this before they voted for him.
Wait -- how many skyscrapers have been collapsed by hijacked planes in the past 14 years? Say what you want, but al qaeda has been seriously diminished to the point of no longer being newsworthy. I for one welcome our new Patriot Act overlords.
Are you serious? It's the best money they spend. And they throw more on top of the taxes. Lobbying/bribes. The corpsters have locked up the best servants money can buy.
The faster your children will be safe! Yes!
That our goals and values completely coincide with them is of no concern to you! Or are you "against us"?
Try following all of the invisible money, and don't forget to include all the paybacks, massive taxbreaks, war mongering, and in general money laundering these cockroaches hide. When your done you may need to get your eyes checked.
As opposed to you, who is quite irrelevant.
The real issue I see here is how easy it appears to be to get military assault weapons in the EU. An interesting Washington Post article here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Apparently the Charlie Hebdo attackers bought an RPG. How is it possible that you can't get on a plane in Western Europe with a bottle of water, but you can buy an RPG in Brussels for less than $5k? That just seems incredible.
An unarmed civilian population (which I think is something hugely preferable to the USA alternative) should not be exposed to this level of risk. Even if all they could get were hand-guns it would have been a much less bloody outcome than mowing down people with assault weapons. I realise it isn't realistic to eradicate all the AK47s floating around, but it would seem if you really squeezed availability it would make these attacks more difficult and likely make the acquisition of weapons more noisy so that these people can be detected before they use them.
Why do we hear so much about how the government needs to empower a bunch of spooks sitting in air conditioned computing centres, while nobody is talking about how the EU can fix this assault weapons problem?
and explosives and safe houses in downtown Paris. You really think they are not going to be able to get good encryption?
good catch that France isn't FVEY.
clearly it was a setup -- CIA did it, even as they continue to fund ISIL.
911 was to Reichstag fire as Paris is to Kristallnacht.
danke für eine andere distraction, Herr Rothschild.
Huxley was a prophet.
Are You Entertained?
I place credit for the lack of planes hitting skyscrapers in the US post-911 on two things:
1) Locked cabin doors - With these, it's next to impossible for a terrorist to simply walk into the cabin and take over.
2) Changed passenger attitudes - Pre-911 a hijacking meant you sat down, stayed quiet, and were flown to Cuba for a bit before being released. It was stressful and inconvenient, but if you played along you'd get out just fine. The 911 attacks changed this and meant that "this is a hijacking" now meant "you're all going to die." People who are going to die if they do nothing have nothing to lose and will act even if those actions don't raise their survival odds much. For example, Flight 93. The passengers aboard that plane found out what was going on and took action. They didn't survive, but they showed that passengers aren't simple hostages anymore.
If we were to rewind everything to pre-911 levels apart from those two items, we would still be protected against a "plane takeover" terrorist attack.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Less than three days after the attacks in Paris, UK prime minister David Cameron has suggested that the process of review for the controversial Draft Investigatory Powers Bill should be accelerated. The controversial proposal, which would require British ISPs to retain a subset of a user's internet history for a year and in effect outlaw zero-knowledge encryption in the UK, was intended for parliamentary review and ratification by the end of 2016, but at the weekend ex-terrorist watchdog Lord Carlile was in the vanguard of demands to speed the bill into law by the end of this year, implicitly criticizing ex-NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for having 'shown terrorists ways to hide their electronic footprints'.
There is so much wrong with the above, it's really sad.
That these politicians can stay in power when they are so obviously sociopaths.
Not one of the so called "agencies" (NSA, GCHQ) caught this before it happened, or (and more in line with what I think) they let it happen.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
These fools aren't qualified to lick Snowden's boots.
John Oliver pointed that out
You're flatly wrong on both points. Locked cabin doors led to a French plane being flown into a mountainside. And 89 people lined up to be executed at a French concert did absolutely nothing.
The former wasn't a terrorist taking over the plane. It was a co-pilot who locked the pilot out and flew the plane into a mountain. You could argue that better procedures should be in place to ensure that one person isn't locked in the cabin by themselves at any given point - and you would be right. However, this doesn't disprove that a group of terrorists who are trying to take over the plane from the passenger area won't be able to do this thanks to locked cabin doors.
As for the latter, I don't know enough about the details of the Paris attack to know how long the executed people had to plan or whether they knew for certain that they would die if they did nothing. From the reports I heard, it was more "march in and shoot everyone on sight" than "line everyone up, tell them they're going to die, and then shoot."
Also, our security will never be at 100%. Bad things will happen. We can prevent most of them with some simple security measures, but you will never prevent ALL of them unless you also give up all of our freedom. In addition, governments (not to mention the corporations that make money off of "security") will often push for more powers/invasive technology to "increase our security" when it doesn't do this at all. It's security theater designed to make it seem like they're doing something, satisfy the appetites of power-hungry politicians, and line the pockets of corporate campaign donors.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
So why do the corporations pay taxes to government if they control it?
Have you missed the millions of complaints about corporations legally not paying taxes?
Why have business executive been going to jail?
Don't forget, Ken Lay was found innocent in court. How many bank execs went to jail for the fraudulent credit swaps? http://www.mintpressnews.com/i... http://billmoyers.com/2013/09/... http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05... The only banking exec sent to jail was one immigrant. The hate of immigrants exceeded the protection of bankers, and served up a single exception, so nobody could say "nobody" went to jail. Though his crime was in internal fraud to get a bonus, not defrauding anyone outside the company.
So the number of business execs who went to jail for defrauding customers is still zero. One exec went to jail for defrauding shareholders.
As that was defrauding shareholders, I think we can say that nobody went to jail for causing the largest recession ever recorded.
Learn to love Alaska
This is pure political maneuvering. Trying to capitalize on or monetize a tragedy is the sign of being an ultra corrupt politician who only thinks of himself and his personal political agenda.
It's been 4 days and they were just Johnny on the spot with that plan.
Of course many of us knew this was coming because CNN and BBC and PRI and NPR started talking about encryption right away, and about security measures.
Most of us in the United States that wen't through this after 9/11 saw how it was abused, and we won't tolerate any further infringments.and we recommend France and the rest of Europe don't tolerate it either.
Stand on your feet now, or live as a slave later.
It's reasons like this that everybody needs to be working on the development of Internet 3. It needs to be....
1. Complete Mesh network
2. DNS free, so government cant control it.
3. DHCP free so government cant control it.
4. Automatically encrypted with non-off the shelf methods. I suggest nothing short of 8192 bit.
"which would require British ISPs to retain a subset of a user's internet history for a year"
Nice. For my history they would just need one line: User opened an encrypted connection to a VPN... and that's it for the whole year.
And I'm not even a terrorist.
The moderators have no respect for quality TV entertainment, apparently.
F**CK !
I just don't trust the GOVERMENT...
So why would I want an ISP to be a agent of the GOVERNMENT. I'm sorry it's just to simple to abuse this power.
By all mean do exactly that the moment the Ministers are willing to publish their full agenda for everyone to see.
Or maybe it was a false flag operation.
Sure you can. Governments make us all victims :-(
The timing of it all is interesting.
Kinda makes you wonder if the whole thing was planned just to push their surveillance bill.
( Insert much death and destruction here )
SEE SEE !!! The bad guys used encryption, so encryption must be bad ! We must ban / regulate / control it.
If I switch out my Tin Foil hat for a Gold One, we can apply the same logic to the World Trade Center.
( Insert much death and destruction here )
SEE SEE !!! The bad guys are attacking us, so we're going to invade . . . . uh. . . . . IRAQ ! Yeah. . . Iraq.
( Voice of reason: None of the hijackers were from Iraq )
Shut up you ! No logic to be found here.
So, buy yourself a Gold Foil Hat and wait for the next controversial bill to show up. Then keep an eye out for:
( Insert much death and destruction here )
just to see if the trend continues. :D