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!
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!
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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).
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
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.
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
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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