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Waiting for the Knock
Andrew G. Feinberg writes "in this LinuxToday story, Richard Stallman talks about some upcoming laws that could be disasterous for British citizens." Guilty until you prove you're innocent, no right to remain silent, no right to a jury trial, produce your encryption keys or go to jail... At least in the U.S. we have some time off while Congress takes a break.
Shit. Time to write to the MP Methinks...
But what to do about it? Violent revolution is a rather ugly thing, and the "democratic process" seems to work best for businesses and organizations with a particular cause.
Is there a chance for some type of non-violent, global "revolution?" How can we achieve such a goal? Ideas?
..but isn't the scrapping of the right to jury trial being done to bring us in line with the rest of the EU?
This is for all those Brits who mock the US for it's lack of freedoms. They look down their noses at our government and say they have just as luch liberty as us.
Well if it's even possible that any of this stuff could be legal, I would say they don't. That is, even if these don't become law, if they could without being struck down(ours would be in the Supreme Court, I'm assuming there's something at least vaguely similar in the UK), then you do not have more freedoms than we do.
Don't worry, I'm plenty pissed with the guys in Congress, too, but I know if that bill with the Ten Commandments in every classroom passed the Supreme Court would throw it out so fast it would make your head spin. Thank God we have the Bill of Rights, without it, our country would've gone down the tubes long ago.
Although the tories were blamed for introducing this reprehensible legislation, the current Home Secretary Jack Straw looks like he's trying to out-bastard the tories. And he seems to be succeeding.
The Brits seem to be facing the same problems as the Americans in that there's no way a Tory (or Republican) government could get away with this sort of shit, but under Labour (or the Democrats), it becomes acceptable.
I was happy to see Blair get in -- and there's no doubt that he's done wonders in Northern Ireland -- but the laws just keep getting worse and worse. Given the closeness of Britain and Ireland, and the (slight) tendency to follow the lead of neighbours, I fear for the laws of Ireland.
Unfortunately, RMS repeats a few myths about the PTA in this otherwise excellent essay.
1. IIRC, the PTA was passed by a Labour government, not a Conservative one.
2. In fact, the PTA would not necessarily linger on after peace in Northern Ireland. It was only passed for the current year, and must be debated, voted on and passed by the Houses of Parliament, or it lapses. Unlikely, I know, but the potential is there.
3. The attack on the right to silence comes from the Criminal Justice Act, which was passed by the last Conservative Government. In effect, it says that if you choose to rely in court on information which you refused (as in, were asked, but refused) to speak to the police about, they can mention this fact. Any infringement of liberty is bad, but this one is quite mild.
4. However, the CJA does not have any sunset provision like the PTA. WOrryingly, nor will the Electronic Communications Act.
jsm
My understanding of law in the UK is unfortunately limited. The problem is that the United States has baised their legal system on this also - and most other modern democracies have as well. Is it at all possible that the governments could be conspiring to rob the citizen of our rights, probably - will the people allow it, hell no. Yet another law to fuel the fire and piss the people off.
I find it so funny that all the democracies, or otherwise similar government types were all interlocked into this 30 - 40 or more year 'cold war' because the 'enemy' was supressing the individual rights and choices in that country. As scary as it may be we have entered the flipside of that argument... look at the signs, guns are more moderated then ever thought possible - your first ammendment rights can be waved by the NSA or FBI, not to mention your right to a fair trial is out the door. Instead the government spends the enormous amount of money it collects on taxes on special interest programs and bullshit that nobody cares about one bit.
Isn't it wonderful living in a Socialist country? Wanna change it? Start by electing more people like Jesse Ventura - someone who is not afriad to tell the little groups off, someone who doesn't believe that government is big brother - and shouldn't take a ton of taxes from you. He's a social liberal, so he has no hesitation doing what he believes good for the people.
I will now get off of my soapbox.
After a lot of complaints from pro-liberty and pro-cryptography groups (CyberLiberties, for example) it was finally removed from that bill and slotted into the RoIP bill - unchanged. The official slant was that the RoIP bill was a "better vehicle" for this.
The basic problems with it are these:
- You do not need to be even SUSPECTED of a crime - you just need a police officer to be OF THE OPINION that a given file is encrypted.
- If you can't hand over a key (because you don't have it, or the file isn't encrypted) then you are liable to a jail sentence
- If you tell anyone about having been served the warrant, you are liable to a larger jail sentence
- if you tell your solicitor about the warrant for purposes of your defence (and the only defence is to PROVE you don't have the key - an impossible task) HE is also bound by the clause not to tell anyone
- There is only one appeal to the warrant - not to a criminal court, but to a closed panel, not accountable to any judicial body and not required to give an explaination of their decision.
- You are not entitled to compensation unless the warrant was signed personally by the head of the Home Office (a government department). A warrant signed by a police inspector is just as legal, but doesn't carry any compensation.
If anyone has looked at my homepage in the last few months, now they know what my profile means--
-=DaveHowe=-
I agree with you totaly up untill the Jesse part. You've got the right message, but the wrong messanger...the right sale, but the wrong salesman.. the right platform, but the wrong candidate.
I mean, this is pretty clearly human rights abuse.
Take a look at www.stand.org.uk for more information on why this bill is so braindead.
...to the New World Order.
Well... maybe it will, us english people are scarily apathetic, perhaps we care, perhaps we don't, and even if we did there aren't many people that would actually make a stand.
Having said this is was 7 years ago when the single data card idea was proposed in UK government, the card with an electronic chip which would hold all our info (we wouldn't get to know what info it held) and would supposedly have had a chip that could be tracked so the police would always know where we were.
It didn't happen, I don't think these proposals will either.
We *DO* still live in a democracy of sorts, although maybe not for much longer.
I get the impression that the PM can do just about anything he/she wishes as long as it doesn't trigger a vote of "no confidence".
Is there anything in the British system that is similar to the U.S. system of "checks and balances"?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
"By accessing this page you have agreed to an enlistment in the United States Marine Corp."
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
For those of you who would like to lobby Ms P.Hewitt, here is a pro-forma for your conviniance. Fill in the relevent blanks and send it to... e.minister@dti.gov.uk
Dear Ms Hewitt,
I am writing to you in your capacity of "E-Minister" to register my protest at the draft Electronic comminications bill and it's reincarnation in the "Regulation of Investigatory Powers" bill.
In my [somewhat expert] opinion this act would be seriously damaging to citizens rights online and would hence drive away the very business you are trying to foster. I would urge you to find a less draconian method of policing online information.
Please be assured that there are better solutions out there and they are much less frightening to the humble voter,
yours,
[your name here]
[your extremely techie job profession here]
Remember kids! Guns don't kill people - Americans kill people.
Well I'm impressed with him. He may be weird but then again to the common computer user a common geek - or even Linux user is downright fishy.
;-) -- he understands that and does exactally what the people want him to do...
He's an odd one, that's for sure. But he said it right on the Jay Lenno show (how cool is that? - a governor that goes on Lenno heh) - this was regarding a group of unwed mothers that were protesting at the capital saying that they were not getting enough money from the government - "I went out to the lawn and asked the leader of the rather large group 'Who's choice was it to have that child out of wedlock?'" -- needless to say that did not make him very popular with the group but with the general populous it sure did -- he then went on to say on Lenno "The government is not your Mom or your Dad, and it ain't your big brother"... Hell Jesse even cut taxes and gave a *gasp* refund to the people! Isn't that just nuts.. government being representative of the people.
Where as I live in Washington State where I-695 just passed, a wonderful bill that gives the taxpayers the ability to shoot down a bill that would increase taxes, not to mention it cut the car tabs to 30 dollars instead of hundreds -- even thousands in the case of many new cars. What does the government do... Governor Locke said -- "It would appear that the people have spoken, we will begin cutting the transportation, and health care budget in January" -- what the hell was this? We cut their 48 billion dollar budget bu 125 Million dollars (and that 48 billion is only a third of the overall budget) -- and then they turn around and punish us because we were "bad" oh screw off - I would rather have a governor that would be representative of what *WE* want not what *THEY* want. Are they forgetting that we as voters have the ability and right to FIRE them at will?
That's why I like Jessee
Just what I think
Guilty until you prove you're innocent, no right to remain silent, no right to a jury trial, produce your encryption keys or go to jail... At least in the U.S. we have some time off while Congress takes a break.
Congress ain't asleep at the wheel. Brilliant law coming out that lets the government claim that an encrypted message says anything they want it to, and they have no requirement to disclose how they decoded that message. Their decoding becomes presumptive fact.
Steganography isn't the cure for this; quite the opposite! Under this legal system, you could provide all the keys you've ever touched in your life, you'd be unable to prove that the government didn't actually find incriminating evidence hidden under an alternate passphrase channel.
The general idea being bandied around both legal systems is to insert as much nervousness as possible, taking advantage of people's natural laziness and trustfulness to make them avoid encryption technologies. Then, anyone who isn't lazy and trustful can be selected and monitored--go check out the NSA drowning with info story. Imagine cracking a SSH session only to find some teen chat!
The big stick on both sides is as follows: "You try to hide your messages from us, and we'll manipulate the legal system to give us unlimited power to ruin your life and the lives of those you love."
But I must be fair. Power abhors a vacuum. Data Mining is quickly building comprehensive profiles of many more people much more efficiently than any CoIntelPro could have hoped, but the knowledge is not going into any organization with a mandate to the people.
I have to wonder. Which to prefer? A constitution? Or a stock certificate?
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Most countries (EU) do not have the right to
jury trial because a jury trial isn't a guarantee
that you get a fair trial...
Imagine someone very unpopular being trialed,
soemeone with nazi or other tattoos al over his
face, wearing "strange" clothes, etc...
Do you really think the man on the street
(the kind of guys who likes windows because
everyone likes it) is gonna give him a fair trial?
Or imgagine the opposite: someone very popular
being brought to justice. Do you really think all
those nice randomly picked juries are intelligent
enough to have a fair opinion about
him. (Remember the OJ case someone?) Are you
willing to be judged by ten persons picked more or
less at random?
I'm not, thank you...
And what about judges?
Well, at least a judge is a trained, intelligent
person with some serious knowledge of the law, and
not just from what (s)he's seen on TV.
There are express articles that exempt you from this sentence if you can prove or make clear that you, at the time of the question to produce the key, could not do that, as long as you do the moment you can provide it. And that's what scares me the most: apparently a lot of thought hs gone into this bill, to try and be "fair", but those people doing the "thinking" still overlooked the basic unfairness of it all. I mean, there's even a provision to allow you to invalidate the key (which otherwise would be an offence, as well). They think that far, but think not close up, or something.
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
Someone else already posted the link to http://www.stand.org.uk, but I thought it deserved some emphasis. Their latest bit of campaigning was to send Jack Straw a letter which, if the legislation were to pass as proposed, would leave him liable for a two year jail sentence.
"Dear Mr Straw,
Please find at the end of the letter a confession to a crime, which has been affirmed by Statutory Declaration. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has been informed that you are in possession of this information.
You will not be able to understand the confession, because the words have been scrambled using a strong cryptographic key. This key was created in your name and has been registered on international public key servers..."
STAND is the main campaigning organisation in the UK tackling the issues raised by this bill, and it's a very well done website by some very clueful people. Visit it, everyone!
--
Xenu loves you!
But surely the European Court of Human Rights would rule against this as an invasion of privacy.
Also is the European convention on Human Rights now incorporated into UK law.
Still it's typical of the current govt which has marked authoritarian and nanny statist tendencies...
Snort. Silly paranoia. And even if the secret police were after you, do you think something like that would help?
It is good that he brings up this issue and makes people aware of it, but remember that it is not a law yet. It is a proposal. Even if the British passes it, you can still go to the European court of human rights and other institutions. Anyway, I have hope for the British. Did you know that they are finally about to get rid of that enourmous undemocratic gerontocratic conservative anchor, the House of Lords?
************************************************ ***
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Senators, representatives and members of parliment are afraid that in 10 or 20 years, terrorism and criminal organizations will be communicating freely over the Internet and will remain beyond prosecution. To combat this they pass legislation (the only way they know how to deal with problems), but in order to get the bad guys(TM), they must stomp on the rights of regular citizens. They don't see another way to deal with it, and trampling the rights of common citizens seems a small price to pay for safety.
As with all reactionary movements throughout time, this will go too far. Some legislation will get passed, some person's rights will be trampled a little too far, and then the protests and media blitz will follow that will end this reactionary era. The government will get over its hangups about encryption and realize that in the long run there is nothing it can do about it and it does not inhibit there standing ability to enforce law and order.
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
This sort of bad legislation doesn't infringe on our rights because we don't, in principle, have any. We are not merely subjects of a monarch, but are in fact her property - as are all our posessions. The monarch does not currently excercise her power, but instead lets it vest in a bloated civil service and an unprepresentative parliament. Any connection between what is decided at Westminster and the "will of the people" is purely tangential.
There is no assumption in Britain that government is "by the consent of the governed". Instead there is a political class which regards the common people as peasants, there to be taxed to death (approx 48% of GNP goes to tax), but not really good for much else. There is no mechanism in the British constitution for balancing power between different parts of government. There is no mechanism for ensuring that basic rights are upheld. There is no meangful local government. There is basically no way for the average, reasonable person to make a difference to the world of government - unless of course they're prepared to become a part of the machine themselves.
And yet, we are smug. We are intolerably smug. We look with disdain across the Atlantic to the USA, and we sneer at your drive-through churches and yourlow-brow TV. We deride what must be the most free society on Earth, and all the while we don't have the right to go pee except by the consent of the Queen.
Americans reading this - you know you have problems in your government and society. And you rightly complain about them, and work to change things. But you know what? Your politicians have to listen, eventually. And you have a strong judiciary who aren't afraid to say "This law is against the constitution - so I'm striking it out".
Sure, laws are made which go against the constitution every year. But at least you have a written statement of rights and principles - so you know when it is being infringed. And eventually, it is put right.
We have no rights. But hey, who needs rights when you've got that nice Mr Blair and a shedload of apathy?
Secondly, all these measures were originally mooted by the last (conservative) government. New Labour is not so much attempting to turn England into a police state as it is continuing policies established by Thatcher and her successors.
Why they're doing this is a strange question. It seems to me that the whole of English culture is in the grip of a wave of security-related hysteria that has nothing to do with terrorism (we put up with the IRA for thirty years, after all) and everything to do with accelerating social change. People feel insecure and worried, and respond by looking for some group to blame. New age travellers, gun owners, paedophiles -- they're all identifiable targets who stand out from the herd and give the herd reason to dislike (or hate) them. So it's no surprise that they come in for attack.
What's new and frightening is the introduction of "zero tolerance" measures in law, in a country that doesn't have a strong constitutional foundation. (There's a bill of rights, and there is an unwritten constitution, but it's hard to attack bad laws on the grounds that they violate constitutional rights.) Add half a million CCTV cameras in public places and a willingness to install another sixty thousand cameras a month and you can see why the UK is now the nation to visit if you want to buy neural-network based face-recognition software. Big Brother is alive and well and living in London.
Digging a bit deeper, we may also be seeing a once-in-a-century re-alignment of British politics. Traditionally, the Westminster parliament has been a two-and-a-half party system. Until 1923, it was Conservative/Liberal with a minor Labour presence. Labour replaced the Liberals, ushering in a period of Conservative dominance -- the Tories ran the UK for 40 out of the 60 years leading up to 1996 and Tony Blair's historic landslide victory. But they blew it, the same way the Liberals blew it in the 1920's; corruption scandals cost them the election and are still haunting them, while the Liberal presence in parliament is the highest it's been since the 1920's. Meanwhile, New Labour has lurched so far in the direction of the authoritarian right that they're staking out a claim to be the true right-wing party in British politics!
There's a general consensus in UK politics about the need for broadly free-market economics, but the traditional proponents of the market in the UK are strongly associated with the authoritarian right. The Liberal Democrats are beginning to reassert liberal values -- civil libertarianism mixed with moderate economics -- and may be staking out a claim to be the new party of the left in the UK, but for now neither of the main parties has any truck with civil liberties.Worse, the current right-wing authoritarian party of government is dominated by ex-Trotskyites. If there's one thing more zealously conservative than a hard-core Tory, it's an ex-Trot who has repented, seen the light, and bought an Armani suit and a BMW. (They're born control-freaks with no sense of humour, and you can't trust 'em either -- they know they've gone over to the Dark Side, and they just don't are about anything other than Power any more.)
Me, I'm just glad that after the last Conservative election victory I resolved to move to another country! (I made good on that promise -- and came to Scotland.)
This was scrapped last week. See:
www.theregister.co.uk/991122-000008 .html
"The controversial Part III, which dealt with police seizure powers for encryption keys, has been shifted into a separate Home Office bill"
ie. they're reviewing it after www.stand.org.uk pointed out Part III was bollocks.
--
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Labour have always had a tradition of making *really* bad laws like this (not just with the PTA). It's usually something like this that ends up getting an otherwise useful government voted out of office.
The sad thing is that the government will keep trying until this gets passed. This is the second attempt at this. It will probably get thrown out, but it will surface again under a different name in 6 months or so. They may end up passing it very quietly, and not telling anyone about it.
This law is the prevention of terrorism act revised. They seem to have fixed all the things that the courts found flaws with, eg letting solictors have publicity (those nasty terrorists would have never been found innocent if Gareth Pierce had been gagged), giving people appeals, and the right to a trial.
The law even allows the minister responsible to alter the legislation later if something isn't working.
When they passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act, a South African minister was said to have retorted "I wish we had laws like that". This law is something from the text book of a dictator, "give us what we want or else we lock you away and there is nothing you can do." I'm sure there are a few people in Chinese government looking at this saying "Oooh... Thats nice. Think we can get away with do that to our people?"
I think I'll start renaming the various ministers as characters from "Animal Farm".
That'll be why we looked down our noses at our government and politely told them to fuck off whereupon they promptly did.
The UK government scrapped the whole mad keys idea last week. This story is very old, very out of date, and very not valid anymore.
Isn't it about time Slashdot got a European correspondent to stop this kind of confusion?
--
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
I would think that juries can be in the best interests of either the crown (or the state, if you're an american) or the defendant, but in either case do not best serve justice as an abstract.
Juries can be corrupted by the crown by exploiting popular prejudice against the defendant. The defendant, on the other hand, can attempt what's known as jury nullification: seeking a mistrial by finding at least one juror sympathetic enough to disregard the letter of the judge's charge. If there are enough sympathetic jurors, you may even get an acquittal.
On the other hand, juries keep the court in touch with the local population. Most of the world, unlike the US, has an appointed, independent, and professional judiciary. This can let a judge drift into the clouds, knowing his job is secure; on the other hand the judge is not necessarily subject to mob appeal.
I would not be overly secure in the competence of trial judges. A recent review by the law society of upper canada revealed that of 100 warrants, 60-odd contained some kind of technical error but only 7 of those were rejected.
The existence of appellate courts, on the other hand, at least allows judicial errors to be put right. A trial judge can set aside a wrongful conviction (or a wrongful civil decision) by jury in some jurisdictions; that, at least, allows errors in the favour of the crown to be put right.
Which, although unpopular, is how it should be.
--
--
There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
Remember back in the good old days when there was no secret information to exchange and everybody got along on the Internet? You know, the world from which rsh, etc. came from? Well I don't. Today everybody is so concerned about protecting their information that the opposite is happening: they are revealing their information, under penalty of law. The problem with most encryption methods is that it is theoretically possible to get almost anything out of the encrypted text, given a suitable input (there are exceptions). It is not necessary to find out what that input is, but only to prove that it exists. The same thing applies to stenography: given almost any stegotext and a suitable algorithm, you can get any content you want out of a harmless-looking file (of course length matters here; under most circumstances you couldn't extract a 5-page document from a bullet graphic). But in any case, it's your information, whether you legally own it or not, and it shouldn't be somebody else's business to go tampering around with it, especially not to incriminate you!
I have to ask if the people who run the British government are mentally stable, benevolent, and fit for positions of power. Maybe they are, maybe not. Anyway, I'm glad I live in America (for now).
Ken
PS - That's just my opinion.
I spoke with Richard Stallman about this last Monday. He seemed dead keen to hear about it, and has obviously done some reading, but I think he's overreacted. I wasn't aware at the time it had been dropped/deferred but we came to the conclusion (myself and others preent) that it would not be written into law as that assumption of guilt would set a legal precedent which all judges from then on would be forced to consider. It is a shame he did not pick up on this, and has chosen to say this stuff, especially the bit about this so obviously being in Britain. I find that a little offensive, to be honest.
One thing that Richard Stallman did not take into account is that the UK is part of the European Union. As such, it is bound to respect the European Convention on Human Rights, which is mandatory to join the EU.
In case this law was passed (which remains to be seen -- we may even have a rare Labour/Tory bipartisan front against this law) and a British citizen lands in prison because of it, I guess there would two major consequences: (a) an outcry all over Europe against the UK and (b) an appeal by said British citizen to the EU Human rights court, whose decision would be binding on both British judicial institutions and (in general) other European courts.
Not to mention Amnesty International, which would probably throw up a ruckus over it. Interesting times to be a Britsih citizen, for sure. First BSE, then this. Hmmmm... Are these related?
=)
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Moderate the above up, it is true.
I was at the RMS talk (in the UK) where he pointed out the new laws being introduced. This was several weeks ago, he did the whole works, etc, and I have a tonne of GNU protected stickers now.
Slashdot should be renamed U.S.Dot or SlowDot, they are really behind. Where is my Karma shield...? Argh... The pain... On the other hand, at least they put the article up, it is not RMS's fault that the peoples will worked in the UK. Anyway, I thought that they had just offloaded the controversial bits to another bill...
Makes the processor ID look lame, doesn't it?
There are express articles that exempt you from this sentence if you can prove or make clear that you, at the time of the question to produce the key, could not do that, as long as you do the moment you can provide it.
Yes, that's a wonderful option. I think a recent open letter to Jack Straw put the best slant on this (I don't have the URL to hand, but I am sure someone here on
- Basically, a group of hackers did the following:
- Created a key in the name of Jack Straw
- Uploaded that key to the keyservers
- had a criminal make a signed confession of a currently unsolved crime
- Scanned and encrypted that with the JackStraw key
- Destroyed all intermediate work - the key, the original (paper document) and the unencrypted disk file)
- posted the encrypted file to a website, along with a description of what they had done
So, here is the situation - any police officer can find a file that blatently contains information useful to clear up a crime. According to the file, the key is held by one Jack Straw, Home Secretary. How is Mr Straw to PROVE he does't have that key, and in fact has never had it? it has his name on it, after all.....BTW, can you point out the clause that allows you merely to "make clear" that you don't have the key, not prove the negative?
And that's what scares me the most: apparently a lot of thought hs gone into this bill, to try and be "fair", but those people doing the "thinking" still overlooked the basic unfairness of it all. I mean, there's even a provision to allow you to invalidate the key (which otherwise would be an offence, as well). They think that far, but think not close up, or something.
Hmm. it has obviously been "tweeked" a little more since the last draft I saw (which does't have that provision, and indeed, now even allows you to chose to decode the document yourself (the previous draft didn't even allow you to see the document claimed to be encrypted by your key)
I must admit though, in a quick scan, I couldn't find a option to revoke; any chance of a section number? I am not doubting you, just trying to locate these loopholes without having to re-read the entire thing again....
--
-=DaveHowe=-
Also the Convention covers rights for a fair trial, which should be even more powerful argument if this stupid law ever ends up in the courts.
Also the EU legislation may prove problematic towards proposed rules, since the UK businesses could claim that the rules are in breach of common market's equal competition rules. This is a long shot, though..
-mjpk
If we are outraged over things like this, what assumptions are we making?
Bottom line: Until the British make the same decision as the early Americans that they are no longer willing to be subjects, it's pointless to argue on their behalf.
--
Some keywords for the NSA in the Lord of the Rings universe: One Ring bind find Sauron quest Nazgul freedom
For your info, you might like to have a look at stand.org.uk's website. They are a campaigning organisation raising the awareness of privacy and crypto issues in the UK... Interesting reading.
Where can I learn more? The opportunities for sending mixed messages will be endless.
"You guys have rights, your not allowed to do anything other than those things your rights allow you to do."
Rights under U.S. law are restrictions on the government, not on the citizens. Those rights allow us to do anything not specifically prohibited by law, and there are strong restictions on the law itself.
In other words, you have it backwards. You folks across the Pond can only do what your government lets you do, unless told otherwise. Over here, we can do pretty much what we want, unless the government comes up with a specific restriction that says other wise, and even those restrictions have very specific and strong limits.
...I'm going to be leaving the UK in the next year or two. If I'm going to live in a police state anywhere on the planet I'm going to live in one which at least has nice weather.
Although, I disagree with the proposal, it is incredibly hypocrtical of Americans to attack them, as they have always had this system - the vast majority of offences in the US are not and cannot be tried by juries.
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
Sorry - but no. The bill it WAS part of (the eCommerce one) will go ahead without it, but the provisions have been moved to a "more appropriate vehicle" - in this case, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill, and as far as I can tell, without even a cursory edit.
Isn't it about time Slashdot got a European correspondent to stop this kind of confusion? /., but then, the majority of web users are still merkins. I think what you are actually asking is for a european story reviewer, which is a different matter :+)
There IS a strong Merkin leaning on
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-=DaveHowe=-
And these are the reasons:
New Labour proposed the bill.
New Labour and Tony, the messiah, are infallible.
Anyone who disagrees is a pernicious conservative influence or insane.
Simple. Richard Stallman is clearly mad because he dosent agree with uncle Tony, the most caring and ethically minded man in the world. I say we get him extradited to Britain and lock him up.
You're wrong. As the Stallman article points out, if you'd bothered to read it, the controversial parts are being removed from the e-commerce bill, to be reintroduced in a "Regulation of Investigatory Powers" bill. Stallman is trying, among other things, to keep people from being deluded that they've eliminated these provisions - they're just moved to clear the way for the e-commerce bill to pass immediately.
I pay fairly close attention to the UK situation and though it's possible that I would post something out of date, in this case at least, I'm more up to date than you are...
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Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
To a libertarian, "the government" is just another bunch of people
It is my understanding that to the libertarians, "the government" is the most evil bunch of people, as opposed to big corporations, who are always a good bunch of people, no matter of hard they hit your privacy and freedom of speech.
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This guy is serious! You'd better give him what he wants!
..an outright assault on the British way of doing things is perhaps unjustified.
It's my belief that the British constitution muddles along quite nicely - certain people/ organisations, e.g. the monarch, Parliament have great power in theory but in are incapable of converting theoretical power into actual power. There are certainly miscarriages of justice, but they too happen in EVERY system, not just ours, and like every system there are checks and balances available.
A possible problem is that Labour is actually far more prone to want to "protect" us fropm the big bad world than the Conservatives, and with their large majority are able to drive through some very ill-advised legislation. A government with a small majority, Labour or Conservative, has to listen to its critics, but a large majority allows it to only listen to its friends.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
The Jack Straw letter was mentioned in a previous slashdot story and included links to the
letter and the photo essay.
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I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
This upcoming law is pretty useless, because one could encrypt the messages with XOR (one-time-pads) using multiple keys.
It works this way:
Secret Message:
"We rob the bank at 11pm."
Encrypt with Key 1:
"asfksjaflsajfklsjfsfsdjj"
Officer comes to you and asks for decryption.
Decrypt with Key 2:
"Hi, I love you so much. "
The second Key could be generated at the Receiver or sent with the Message, whatever.
Bzzt! The role of government is (or ought to be) to safeguard individual liberties. This entails on people infringing the rights of other people. Since "government" is, basically, just another group of people, these restrictions would also apply to the government.
I can't speak for how things work on your side of the puddle (and won't even try, even though I lived there for two years in the mid-80s), but you are totally mistaken as to what our Bill of Rights does. It is not an enumeration of the people's rights, to the exclusion of other rights which the founding fathers may have neglected. It is, instead, a command to government that under no circumstances are certain rights to be infringed by the government. It says, among other things, that the government may pass no law restricting free speech/press/assembly (First Amendment), the right to keep and bear arms (Second Amendment), or the right to a speedy and public trial by jury in criminal matters (Sixth Amendment). There's even an amendment (the Tenth) which was intended to serve as a catch-all amendment to prohibit the central government from trying to claim any powers not granted it by the states or the people. (A case could be made that the Tenth Amendment has been a dead letter in recent years (possibly as far back as the Civil War), but that is beyond the scope of this discussion.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Mathematical or political majority? i.e. more than %50 or the largest group?
Well, just as I was begining to feel glad that I
live in the UK, and don't have to worry about all
those evil ITAR regulations (other than the fact
it reduces the amount of secure software I can use)
Then the UK.gov does this.. Great. I actually
read about this in PC Plus (UK PC mag) a month or
two ago. That was when I downloaded ppdd, encrypted
my hard drive, started GPG signing/encrypting email,
and started using ssh1 for everything not
just randomly when I remembered.
I urge everyone in the UK to write to
their MP, newspaper, anyone. This law is evil.
Pretty Good Privacy is rather crap if Privacy is
illegal -- so fight for your right to silence,
privacy, and innocence...
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David Taylor
davidt-sd@xfiles.nildram.spam.co.uk
[To e-mail me: s/\.spam//]
How is this different than, say, makeing an neigh unbreakable safe and locking your notes up in it? The police can get a search warrent and go so far as destroy your safe if you refuse to open it and imprison you for not co-oporating in opening what is obviously your safe which you obviously have the key to. The only difference is that this is electronic information instead of physical. This is a GOOD THING people. This means that the government has acknowledged that data is equivalent to physical property. This also means if a hacker [you cracker wonks spell woman with a y, admit it] steals your data, they can be charged for theft of property and not for stealing $0.01 of electricity. The only people confused over this whole issue afaict are people that confuse electronic information with thoughts. I don't know, thats my read on it. RS's Nazi overtones were a bit overdone.
I dare say it'll also be on the Guardian's web site soon.
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Bah. Eurobigots.
Corporations don't have armies.
Stop mischaracterizing that which you do not understand.
Try reading a little American history, moron. The Pinkerton Detective Agency, at it's height in the 1890's, had more armed personnel working for it than the US army at that time. Can you say "private army"? I thought you could. Here's another tid-bit, back in the 190x's Carnegie and other industrialist had their own police force with the legal right to arrest and imprision anyone they wanted. They were called "industrial police". Can't happen again? Yeah, right. You really are a moron if you believe that.
From the Gunner's Dream, by Pink Floyd:
...
Where you can speak out loud
About your doubts and fears
And what's more no-one ever disappears
You never hear their standard issue kicking in your door.
...
Both. Americans are both numerically the largest group, and well above 50% of total internet traffic.
The UK has had fucked up laws for quite a while now. I remember bitching and screaming when they introduced computer virus laws. First it was the releasing of computer viruses into the wild that was made illegal. Big deal, this law makes sense. Then they decided they wanted to stop people "trading" viruses so they made computer viruses contraband and starting picking up people for virus warezing. Then the obvious extension was to ban the possession of computer viruses. This not only showed niavity on the part of the government (getting infected is a crime) but also gave police the right to seize your computer without a warrent. The stupidest bit was that they started hauling people into court because they found asm sources on their pc's. Viruses are written in asm so any asm source must be a virus right? AntiVirus researchers, the folks who openly admit to collecting computer viruses (now contraband) have never been bothered by the highly selective laws. My opinion has always been that this is a question of free speech. What I want to write on my own person computer is none of anyone else's business and I certainly shouldn't be silenced from others who may be interested in hearing what I have to say. Computer viruses are not so much of a problem (regardless of what the clueless media and the anti-virus propoganda machine tells you) to throw away our rights to privacy and free speech.
How we know is more important than what we know.
1984 took place in london. How fitting considering how complacent the europeans are at fighting for their rights.
There are juries in France but it's not a right for the defendant, but a requirement for some specific crimes.
;-)
As many countries France's judicial system has multiple orders of justice : some are paritary courts also know as the consular justice. You're judged by your elected peers : prud'hommes for labor disputes and commercial courts.
Others are specialized courts with professional judges and specific law corpus : Instance and Grand Instance for civil affairs, administrative court and Conseil d'Etat for disputes with the state, correctional courts for most felonies and lesser crimes.
Only the worst crimes (murder, aggravated assault, rape, torture, kidnapping, etc) are brought to a jury in the Cour d'Assise. And then, having a jury is not a right for the defendant, but a requirement. The jury stands there for the Nation as a whole, and is sole able pronounce capital punishement (life in jail with restricted parole).
And last, but not the least, the 1rst Chamber of Justice is a Cour d'Assise without a popular jury but a panel of 9 professional judges. This court judges all things related to terrorism and mafia-like organized crimes. Most of the time, they're very heavy handed. You have to do very stupid things to have to deal with them, but then you're really deep down in shit
Oh, and by the way, there's no appeal to a Cour d'Assise decision. Actually, there are some serious projects to reform the Court d'Assise, with a two level system. First, a professional court and a jury court upon defendant appeal.
The US already blocks certain food products from Europe.
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As a Scot, (admittedly living in London) I've always found the English legal system to be exceedingly bizarre.
The sooner Scotland becomes an independant country, the better. Runs for cover...
Deleted
Looks like you will be facing it again, later... (http://www.fipr.org/polarch/draftbill99/index.htm l), but has been withdrawn from there, probably to be reintroduced shortly in a separate "Regulation of Investigatory Powers" bill. (Proposals to extend government power are often secreted in bills with opposite-sounding names.) The country that gave the world the concept of the rights of citizens, of protection from abuse of government power, of the right to remain silent and not be compelled to testify against yourself, is tearing up the concept and throwing it away.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Yes, indeed, Big Brother living in England is somewhat ironic. Why? Because Orwell's 1984 was actually set in England. Coincidence? Prophetic foresight? You decide.
Thomas Jeffrey (the US count him fondly as one of their much-admired 'founding fathers') was pretty spot on when it comes to abuses of power: the only path to safety is an active, informed citizenry. You simply can't rely on someone else.
Civil liberty through empowered institutions are a great idea - now show me the code.
be well;
JC.
-- The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the fictional entity who may or may not have expressed them
Yes, implementation is broken, but the basic idea is sound.
Welfare should have incentives to get people back to work. One incentive would be to pay much less cash, and issue the rent money directly to landlords (in the form of a check) and crack down on landlords who split these checks with the welfare client, who doesn't actually live there.
And incentives to get a job by adding the wages to the welfare for a few months. Switching jobs is a costly process and it's often impractical to buy a bus pass, work clothes, etc, out of what's barely enough money to live on in a normal month.
I'm always disgusted at how in Canada (dunno about the USA) it's easier to apply for welfare (one form, instant check) than UI (unemployment relief) which is multiple forms, a dismissal notice from your work, and three to five weeks...
The system is insane. But, if you reward people for paying out less benefits, you can't be suprised when they complicate the system to make it harder to collect.
A lot of the problems come from rewarding the wrong behaviour.
I see no reason why a government run agency can't be as efficient as a private one, if you're allowed to be as ruthless as a corporation would in cutting out useless jobs and firing people for incompotence.
But, I don't see much happening as long as we live in a representative democracy where we have to pick the least corrupt person to 'represent' us. When electronic voting becomes possible, if used right, it could remove a lot of corruption simply by removing the politicians who hire incompotent relatives, etc.
Jesse isn't the person I'd have picked, if I was in his state (or country for that matter), but he's a lot closer than any of the other politicians.
Even if you only judge him by how corrupt he is, he's had a lot less time to be corrupted by big money advocates. He'll have just as many biases as the next person, but until he's in office for as many years as most politicians, he won't be bought on as many issues.
It's partly because he just got into politics (well, fairly recently) and partly because he's not from a rich family that would already have a lot of these connections.
And, I also think that having been a SEAL, he's less likely to support pointless wars and military operations, knowing what it's like to risk your life for some moron politician who's just vote pandering. Finally, a politician who didn't get a cushy National Guard position, or go straight into officer school and sit behind a desk during the war.
Yeah, what does he want, anyways?
So God writes a document full of encoded criminal plans, without handing over the keys.
Now, that makes God a criminal right?
All opinions are my own - until criticized
I may be totally wrong... but if it's a crime to refuse to surrender the key to an encrypted message then I'd have thought the prosecution would have to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that a message was encrypted and you possess the key. This is rather different from being jailed simply because you don't produce the key to some random message which you may have been sent. If the burden of proof really is being thrown onto the accused then I agree that's completely unjustified and a very dangerous move.
In a lot of trials, juries are a waste of space. They do not descide whether someone is guilty or not.
Juries descide issues of FACT! e.g. would the REASONABLE MAN have whalloped him over the head? the jury is the reasonable man + has to descide whether they would have done the whalloping.
Many criminals plead not-guilty, get to trial (waste a lot of cash) and then change their plea.
Further to this, in big fraud trials + stuff, a jury is a major problem. Big trials are complex, and the average man isn't informed or clever enough to cope with it.
Don't all go american and say "There's no jury, it's not a fair trial!" 'cos it simply ain't true
finally, we'll be having a Human Rights Act soon which will make the sensationalist interpretation of this illegal (meaning, the interpretation given will not be valid).
Sounds like the Brits should create lots of scram disks with innoncent data (and a trivial passphrase) and superencypher them with a one time pad--save those pads on your hard disk, please. Then, for your real secret data, put it in a scram disk file (with a different passphrase) and pair it with a scram disk of the same size containing innoncent files (and the weak passphrase). Now calculate the one time pad that converts the guilty cache to the innocent one. Throw away the innoncent files.
Your guilty data is now just one of many one-time-pads (stored on your hard disk with its purported encrypted data, all the better for the secret police to recover your innocent files).
Every file can be demonstrably de-encrypted on demand with the same passphrase to yield innocent data.
Or something like that. You get the idea--cryptographic experts step in here and help me!
Everyone does it as a protest--wasted Megabytes for Freedom! Now the secret police have to sift through millions of Megabytes of bogus one time pads. It's a moot point now--good time to get started before the next wave hits!
This is truly nasty, I'll agree, but...
Is it legal? I mean, will this get through the European Court of Human Rights?
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
If you had read my post, you would have noticed that I said that the bad bits were offloaded to another bill.
So ner ner ner. Or whatever.
At least my karma survived...
In fact, I don't know when the Human Rights Bill will pass (has it passed yet?), but this could go down merely on a Judicial Review against the Human Rights Act, right? It wouldn't even need to have to go all the way to the ECHR. That's supposed to be the point of incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, I thought.
It's totally amazing how they can be passing human rights acts and freedom of information etc. with the one hand, and yet be taking away fundamental human rights with the other!
Female Prison Rape in NY
It really is. There's been no doubt about that in all the press articles about this (AFAIK).
Female Prison Rape in NY
We are well known for speaking out at our governement. And we will do so again if needed. The poll tax was axed twice. Trade Unions were eventually started. We will also get rid of this and if its true its already been dropped, then great. I've already emailed them explaining my utter disgust over this matter. Brad
Thanks! IANAL so I wasn't prepared to go out and say it, but as worked up as we can get about this, it isn't going to happen. It's not legal.
What is now worrying me is why they're trying to pass it despite this problem...
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Yeah I can see him now in the whitehouse with his minigun saying to his staff "Your a bunch of slack jaw faggots, this stuff will make you a sexual tyrannosaurus, just like me." Brad
If someone isn't being tried by jury then they're being tried in a Magistrate's Court. The trial is conducted before at least two magistrates. The magistrates decide guilt or innocence, and pass sentence (up to £2000 fine or 6 months jail).
A Judge is only involved in cases at Crown Court, which are heard before a jury. The jury decides guilt or innocence. The judge acts as general "moderator" throughout the trial and decides the sentence if the jury convict.
Anyway, I'm glad I live in America (for now). Hmm so am I. Along with ronald "senile" reagan and Bill "blowjob" clinton. The pot calling the kettle back or what.....
The European Convention on Human Rights is already law in Scotland and will soon be in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (presumably in the course of the current parliament, along with the long promised and water down more than a supermarket prawn freedom of information act).
This legislation will not stand up to judicial scrutiny if the system for handling human rights cases actually works properly. Given the slightly flakey nature of the British legal system outside of Scotland it may not. The Court of Session in Edinburgh has recently upheld two complaints on human rights grounds, one of which has forced the Scottish Government to stop employing temporary sherriffs. There will be more such cases, and probably a lot of ensuing chaos - getting the crypto stuff heard might be hard.
Until then we'll have to stick with good old fashioned public/private key pairs.
It's a bit like the CDA which was obviously unconstitutional yet they passed it anyway. More an act of public relations than an act of legislation. In this case I think it's a measure designed to give police even greater powers to harass political activists and suspected criminals. But in the long term it is stupid because it can't possible stand up to human rights scrutiny.
Female Prison Rape in NY
In the small Texas city where I live and work (for the city, no less) you can get a jury trial at the municipal court, even for the most minor of traffic offenses, since those are all types of misdemeanors. There are some types of city ordinance "infractions" that are less than misdemeanor offenses, for which you cannot get a "jury" trial such as failure to mow your yard, posting signs on city utility poles, stuff like that, but virtually 100% of which you'll get the charge completely dropped if you just promise the municipal judge that you'll cease the offending behavior or make whatever appropriate amends to remedy whatever it was you did wrong and then live up to that promise. A jury of your peers in these such cases would likely net you much more severe punishment than the municipal judge magistrating over your infraction case since most of the local folk around here who would compose your jury tend to prefer to "rub-it-in" to their neighbors who get caught screwing up in public.
IX - The enumeration in the Constitution of Certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. ... and ten gives all powers to the states and the people unless explicitly granted to the feds. these are the two biggies, from a philosophy view. For pragmatics, the biggies would prob be numbers 1,2,4 and 5.
We won that fight. This is their *next* braindead idea, and I think this "stunt" is a highly effective and dramatic demonstration of its unworkability.
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Xenu loves you!
I know I should not take the flamebait, but why comment as an AC? Are you afraid of being persecuted because of your political beliefs? Or is it that you have no balls? If you want us to value your opinion, get an account (or log in if you have one already). Otherwise people will dismiss you as a crackpot...
The reason government is the biggest threat is because it has a monopoly on legal coercive force... Corporations don't have armies.
Well, history shows that United Fruit did not need an army to overthrow the Guatamalan government in the fifties. Many corporations are also major polluters -- I can't remember the last time the government pointed a gun at me and coerced me to do something (I pay taxes willingly because I get back services - national defense, roads, schools, etc.) but I suffer each and every day from dirty air. Corporations (especially multinationals) are not as benign as Libertarians make them out to be!
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A man who wants nothing is invincible
Absolutly. Scotland needs to be independant because that is the only way it will thrive. The English tend to look after the English and they also pretty much control The westminster Parliament. (from what i understand around 80 or 90% of MPs are english)
Anyhoo, if you support scottish independance then vote for the Scottish National Party...