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UK PM Wants To Speed Up Controversial Internet Bill After Paris Attacks (thestack.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the striking-while-the-iron-is-hot dept.

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'.

2 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Let's just skip right to 1984 by Squiddie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's as they say: Never let a good tragedy go to waste. As soon as I heard about this incident, I knew they were going to try and use it. The first thing they were talking about was the "going dark" problem, before the bodies were even cold. These people will scale a mountain of corpses to make themselves heard. These are the politics of fear.

  2. Re:Let's just skip right to 1984 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's as they say: Never let a good tragedy go to waste. As soon as I heard about this incident, I knew they were going to try and use it. The first thing they were talking about was the "going dark" problem, before the bodies were even cold. These people will scale a mountain of corpses to make themselves heard. These are the politics of fear.

    And the fucked up part is, it doesn't even work. France has had draconian anti-cryptography laws (relative to Britain) for decades. They're not one of the Five Eyes; NSA has probably completely infiltrated and pwn3d every packet transmitted to and from France.

    And with all this surveillance, the bad guys still carried out their attack.

    I can come to only one of two conclusions. Either the good guys knew about the attack in advance, and let it happen in order to avoid tipping their hands about their surveillance capabilities (in which case, what the fuck are they protecting us from?), or the good guys had the data but couldn't sort the wheat from the chaff (in which case, laws to further expand the dragnet of surveillance against the general population will reduce our security, not enhance it, by enlarging the haystack of data through which they're trying to search for the terorist needle.)