48 Organizations Now Have Access To Every Brit's Browsing Hstory (zerohedge.com)

schwit1 quotes a report from Zero Hedge on Great Britain's newly-enacted "snoopers' charter": For those who missed our original reports, here is the new law in a nutshell: it requires telecom companies to keep records of all users' web activity for a year, creating databases of personal information that the firms worry could be vulnerable to leaks and hackers. Civil liberties groups say the law establishes mass surveillance of British citizens, following innocent internet users from the office to the living room and the bedroom. They are right. Which government agencies have access to the internet history of any British citizen? Here is the answer courtesy of blogger Chris Yuo, who has compiled the list
Click through to the comments to read the entire list.
Metropolitan police force
City of London police force
Police forces maintained under section 2 of the Police Act 1996
Police Service of Scotland
Police Service of Northern Ireland
British Transport Police
Ministry of Defence Police
Royal Navy Police
Royal Military Police
Royal Air Force Police
Security Service
Secret Intelligence Service
GCHQ
Ministry of Defence
Department of Health
Home Office
Ministry of Justice
National Crime Agency
HM Revenue & Customs
Department for Transport
Department for Work and Pensions
NHS trusts and foundation trusts in England that provide ambulance services
Common Services Agency for the Scottish Health Service
Competition and Markets Authority
Criminal Cases Review Commission
Department for Communities in Northern Ireland
Department for the Economy in Northern Ireland
Department of Justice in Northern Ireland
Financial Conduct Authority
Fire and rescue authorities under the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004
Food Standards Agency
Food Standards Scotland
Gambling Commission
Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority
Health and Safety Executive
Independent Police Complaints Commissioner
Information Commissioner
NHS Business Services Authority
Northern Ireland Ambulance Service Health and Social Care Trust
Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service Board
Northern Ireland Health and Social Care Regional Business Services Organisation
Office of Communications
Office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland
Police Investigations and Review Commissioner
Scottish Ambulance Service Board
Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission
Serious Fraud Office
Welsh Ambulance Services National Health Service Trust

Comments

I want acess too

[stooo]

I want acess too

Re: I want acess too

[LankyBoycie]

Check the list, you've probably already got it...

Re: I want acess too

[Builder]

I believe that politician's history may be excluded from being retained. They're thinking of the children in Westminster.

Re: I want acess too

[TheRaven64]

I think that browsing history for elected officials is in the public interest and so can probably be requested via a freedom of information act request.

Police state

[Anonymous Coward]

'Free', democratic Britain now has the tools the Stasi could only dream of, back when the West criticised such methods.

Re:Police state

[houghi]

This has nothing to do with Liberal or any other form. They ALL want it, because the police is asking for it and to deny it, they will be called out on doing nothing against crime, be it terrorism, rape or whatever crime you can think of.

It is the easy way out for politicians. For the Police it is normal that they are asking for things that make their work easier. That does not mean it should be given.

I am sure that everybody has ideas on how to make their job easier. Does not mean it is always a good idea when you look at the whole.

e.g. Having no internet access will make the job of many network people a lot easier. Not always a good idea. Having no firewall will make their life also easier (bit more work for others) and also not a good idea.

Having a tag on each and every person 100% of the time and seeing what everybody does will make the job of the police a lot easier, but it is also not a good idea.

What would be needed are politicians that say "ok, when we don't do that 150 kids will be killed by terrorists and that is a price we are willing to pay for our privacy." I am not going to hold my breath for that.

Re: Police state

[Anonymous Coward]

Yah, except UK is still a part of Europe and bound by all its conventions. We haven't triggered article 50 so haven't even begun to negotiate Brexit, let alone complete it and untangle ourselves.
So no, you can't blame Brexit for this.

Re:Police state

[leshii]

As the UK is yet to leave the EU I suppose this could be fought as a contravention of article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights

Re:Police state

[TheRaven64]

Most don't know about it. There was a poll a month or so back that showed that 97% of people in Britain were opposed to this, when they knew what it contained, but only around 5-10% were even aware that it was being passed.

Re:Police state

[TheRaven64]

As the other poster said, we haven't left yet (or even started to officially leave). Add to that, this law was drafted back when the current PM was Home Secretary. It was one of the reasons that she wanted Britain to be able to opt out of the European Court of Justice, as this is almost certainly going to see legal challenges.

Re:Police state

[Plus1Entropy]

He's not talking about "liberals" in general. He means the Liberals, the name of the party that currently has a majority in the Canadian House of Commons, i.e. the Canadian Government.

That being said, I also live in Canada and I'm not sure I agree that they're planning to do that, but who knows.

Re:Police state

[TheRaven64]

because the police is asking for it and to deny it,

Actually, they're not. The police realise that being able to install malware (which the act permits) makes it easy to tamper with evidence and destroys the normal evidence chain, so will open a load of grounds for challenging any evidence that they can bring to court. The intelligence agencies (who would far rather let someone get off a crime than compromise a data-gathering source) are in favour of it.

Re:Police state

[liquid_schwartz]

because the police is asking for it and to deny it,

Actually, they're not. The police realise that being able to install malware (which the act permits) makes it easy to tamper with evidence and destroys the normal evidence chain, so will open a load of grounds for challenging any evidence that they can bring to court. The intelligence agencies (who would far rather let someone get off a crime than compromise a data-gathering source) are in favour of it.

So essentially the secret police rather than the regular police.

Did they ban VPNs, TOR, etc?

[Ihlosi]

If they didn't, I guess there will be an increase in demand for such services.

Re:Did they ban VPNs, TOR, etc?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

You think so eh?

Well, they don't need to ban TOR: companies like Google and CloudFlare already make sure you can't access vast swathes of the internet from a TOR exit node. The powers that be don't need to ban TOR because it's effectively been rendered useless by unaccountable privately-owned companies.

In short, these companies do the government's bidding and they're pretty happy to do it - which, incidentally, is a trait of Fascism.

Not yet

[ContextSwitch]

The IP Bill isn't law yet and ISPs are not yet recording this information (at least, they're not admitting it). It's coming though :(

Group "The Police" to reduce the Sting

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not saying there's not an issue, just that the headline "48" is a bit over-the-top.
Of those "48" separate organizations, the following 12 are really the same, or possibly two organizations, civil and military police:
Metropolitan police force
City of London police force
Police forces maintained under section 2 of the Police Act 1996
Police Service of Scotland
Police Service of Northern Ireland
British Transport Police
Ministry of Defence Police
Royal Navy Police
Royal Military Police
Royal Air Force Police
National Crime Agency

Then there are the spooks (GCHQ etc), and lets face it, they'll have access whatever the law says.

What's even more worrying is the ongoing creep of police powers into non-security organizations:
Government departments (Health, Home Office, Transport, Work & Pensions, Economy etc.)
HM Revenue & Customs
The NHS, fire & ambulance services

and the really weird ones:
Food Standards Agency
Gambling Commission
Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority
Health and Safety Executive
Information Commissioner
Northern Ireland Health and Social Care Regional Business Services Organisation

I'm surprised the council litter and parking wardens aren't in there :-(

Re:Group "The Police" to reduce the Sting

[AmiMoJo]

City of London police force

Those guys are not normal police though, they are a semi-private force that serves big businesses based in the City of London. These days their main concern seems to be shutting down web sites that businesses don't like, for example.

The other issue with the long list of police forces is that it is very doubtful that any of them have proper safeguards in place. The current scheme is that they have to ask one of their own people if it's okay, and they said "yes" at least half a million times a year before this legislation came in.

Government departments (Health, Home Office, Transport, Work & Pensions, Economy etc.)
HM Revenue & Customs
The NHS, fire & ambulance services
Food Standards Agency
Gambling Commission
Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority
Health and Safety Executive
Information Commissioner
Northern Ireland Health and Social Care Regional Business Services Organisation

In the name of catching tax dodgers and finding people at imminent risk of suicide. Doubtless most accesses will just be checking up on lovers and selling dirt to newspapers.

It disarms Western criticism

[Anonymous Coward]

How can we now criticise China, North Korea and even Zimbabwe if they do the same ?

Re:It disarms Western criticism

[serviscope_minor]

Making massively over the top false equivalences doesn't help. If anything it weakens the argument.

Is the snoopers charter bad? Yes.

Does it make us like the places listed? No. I can still say that Theresa May is a dreadful pm with impunity. No one will arrest me. Literally nothing will happen to me as a result. That is why we are nothing like North Korea.

Re:It disarms Western criticism

[DarkVader]

Nothing will happen to you YET for criticizing her. Not today.

Right now, they're just going after people for things like BDSM porn, which you probably don't like. But with no real constitution, all it takes is one bad act of Parliament and you ARE like those places. The tools are already in place.

Keep in mind that the US Constitution with its protections of rights held above ordinary law was written because of the bad things the British were known to do.

Re:It disarms Western criticism

[swillden]

Keep in mind that the US Constitution with its protections of rights held above ordinary law was written because of the bad things the British were known to do.

That's rather one-sided. The Constitution's model was based on key British documents that blazed the trail of removing the power to restrict certain rights from the King. It went further in many areas, but it was as much following the British path as it was a rejection of British actions (it was both!).

Re:Source?

[Cybertect]

Are you incapable of looking it up in the Bill? It's a matter of official public record.

As you have already been told it is in Schedule 4 of the Act (though technically it's still a Bill until it receives Royal Assent

http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-public-bill-office/2016-17/compared-bills/Investigatory-Powers-AAC-Tracked-Changes-version.pdf

Schedule 4 begins on page 219, though heaven knows why I'm being so helpful for a sweary AC

Home Office, Food Standards, Health and Safety

[Anonymous Coward]

"Health and Safety executive", in case you're dangerously surfing websites in a way that might generate RSI in your hand.

"Home Office" is a political office, so you can imagine the 'Brit Hillary Clinton's' emails and web history being very very useful in political campaigns.

"GCHQ" With GCHQ information sharing agreements, Brits web history is available to Trump's boys. They promised not to spy on politicians with this, but politicians web surfing data is in that captured data (there's no way of identifying it to filter it out), and you can bet Trump will ensure only Trump brand politicians elected in Britain now.

"Food Standards Agency", well you might order an unhealthy take away via internet, and that Chocoloate Brownie recipe is totally unhealthy... you really shouldn't be looking at that.

Re:Home Office, Food Standards, Health and Safety

[butzwonker]

Apart from the obvious destruction of democracy, this also looks like a gigantic security hole. It depends a bit on how access is regulated, but this sure looks as if spying on Brits by foreign intelligence agencies has also become way easier than before. It's almost impossible to imagine that there are no moles or 'bad actors' in those 48 organizations, let alone inside the individual ISPs who store all this data.

Re: Source?

[econnor]

"compiled the list" is internet for "cut and paste" . In this case from Schedule 4 of http://www.publications.parlia...

Re:Source?

[GNious]

The ECHR is not an EU construct, but separate from the EU, formerly EEC

ECHR:
The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) (formally the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms) is an international treaty to protect human rights and fundamental freedoms in Europe. Drafted in 1950 by the then newly formed Council of Europe, the convention entered into force on 3 September 1953. All Council of Europe member states are party to the Convention and new members are expected to ratify the convention at the earliest opportunity.

Council of Europe:
The organisation is distinct from the 28-nation European Union (EU), although it is sometimes confused with it, partly because the EU has adopted the original European Flag which was created by the Council of Europe in 1955, as well as the European Anthem. No country has ever joined the EU without first belonging to the Council of Europe.

When the UK decided to BREXIT, they voted to break off from the EU - they will still be members of the Council of Europe, and subject the ECHR.

Behind the times

[Anonymous Coward]

Australia logs all internet traffic and phone use for two years. Get with it Ukers

Are they going to shaft business like the Chinese?

[ukoda]

The articles I have seen don't mention the legality of VPNs? That would be the first thing I would do on principle. If normal VPNs get blocked then I would move to tunnelling via SSH to a proxy on a server in a free country. That is what I used to do in China. So if VPNs are blocked are they going to block SSH to? To my mind it is impossible for them to truly block users from private Internet activity unless they are prepare to do it at the expense of legal businesses, like they do in China.

Having managed a development team in China for a couple if years I know first hand how big the disadvantage Chinese developers are at because their access to decent sources of information are block. The way the Internet is broken there seriously impacts productivity there. If Britain really wants to know what everyone is doing then the technical steps they will need to take will impact the productivity of British businesses.

It gets tiring watching law makers passing laws with no real understanding of how technology actually works.

UK citizen and want to do something?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sign this: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/173199

If 118,000 turned up outside Parliament, they'd have a big problem, but our problem is our apathy. The government know this and are taking advantage of our lack of commitment in taking the fight (for privacy!) back to them.

Re:UK citizen and want to do something?

[mrbester]

Protests outside Parliament were banned years ago. Not that any would make the slightest difference; a million people turned up to protest the invasion of Iraq. When that proportion of a country's population travels to the centre of a city to protest and nothing comes of it, what's the point?

They don't have access to EVERY Brit's browsing...

[Oswald McWeany]

They don't have access to EVERY Brit's browsing history:

I live overseas! Only the Americans, Russians, Chinese, Israelis, and probably North Koreans have access to my browsing history.

Re:Fucking Zerohedge!?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all listed in the bill itself, http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2015-16/investigatorypowers.html

best recaction.

[fish_in_the_c]

UK consumers begin requiring strong encryption end to end on all their electronic communications from all products they purchase, beginning a new 'no snoopers' movement that seeps the country as the 'in vogue' political cause.

Re:Source?

[dbIII]

Are you incapable of looking it up in the Bill?

But then those agencies will see he's looked it up from his web browsing history!

Hmmmm.....

[MitchDev]

Sounds like time for a script that hits a new URL every few seconds (as an add-in for when you aren't using your browser).

Time to flood these scumbags with so much useless data they drown to death in it...

Re:Hmmmm.....

[Kernel Kurtz]

Time to flood these scumbags with so much useless data they drown to death in it...

Good idea. You can have some fun while you do it as well.

Flagger is a browser add-on that automatically puts red flag keywords (like bomb, Taliban and anthrax) into the web addresses you visit. Install Flagger to make a statement: government surveillance has gone too far.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

You moved the goal posts

[MobyDisk]

It isn't a false equivalence: instead, you moved the goal posts.

First, we made fun of those nations because the government spied on everyone.
Now we spy on everyone.
So in response, we changed the argument. We claim that it was never really the spying that was the problem, it was that they were blocking free speech.
Next, we block free speech.
Then we can change the argument again: It wasn't the blocking of speech that was the problem, it was that they jailed people and held them without charges.

In the US, we've been playing this game for decades:

We now have a special jail where we can hold people without charges (Guantanamo Bay).
But we can move the goal posts again. We still aren't as bad as those other guys, because they do it on their own soil!
We used to make fun of Russia for requiring paperwork to travel, now we require it.
But it wasn't the paperwork that was the problem! It was that they had special "watch lists." Now we have them.
But it wasn't the watch lists that were the problem! It was that they had to all be personally inspected in order to travel. Well now we do to.

As you can see, we have already gone down the slippery slope, we merely hide it by moving the goal posts. Eventually, the next generation will grow-up expecting this kind of stuff, having never known what it was like to be free. If you find yourself saying "well, we are nothing like place XXXX" then you should pause, reflect, and see if this is the same standard you applied a decade ago.

Re:Are they going to shaft business like the Chine

[drew_kime]

It gets tiring watching law makers passing laws with no real understanding of how technology actually works.

Why do people keep assuming lawmakers don't understand technology? Isn't it possible their goals aren't what they say they are?