The government, with its ever increasing thirst for control freakery wants to read your emails and follow your footsteps around the web:
Ministers are considering spending up to £12 billion on a database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.
Twelve Billion quid!?! Twelve billion quid to create a behemoth that, frankly, will be unmanageable. If you want to find a needle in a haystack, then building a hay mountain is an odd way to go about it. But, then, we are talking about New Labour here; control freak central. It isn’t that they can see everything that we do that is important, it’s that at any time, they might be watching, that is so effective (h/t George Orwell). But… twelve billion quid, Jesus, has no one told them there’s a recession on?
Hundreds of clandestine probes will be installed to monitor customers live on two of the country’s biggest internet and mobile phone providers – thought to be BT and Vodafone. BT has nearly 5m internet customers.
Well, now, there’s an opportunity to let those businesses know what you think. If you have contracts with them, change, now, and let them know why. If enough people did this, businesses might start refusing to co-operate. Yeah, I know, it’s a wild hope. In the UK, apathy rules.
Ministers are braced for a backlash similar to the one caused by their ID cards programme.
I would certainly like to think so, although I suspect that most will just carry on regardless; you know, “if you have nothing to hide…”
MI5 currently conducts limited e-mail and website intercepts which are approved under specific warrants by the home secretary.
This is exactly as it should be. Where there is reasonable cause to suspect, targeted surveillance is a reasonable tool to use.
What is interesting is the outright lying going on. The government says this:
The Home Office stressed no formal decision had been taken but sources said officials had made clear that ministers had agreed “in principle” to the programme.
Yet earlier in the article, we get this:
GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, has already been given up to £1 billion to finance the first stage of the project.
Um…
And, why, exactly does the egregious Ms Smith want to sift though all our emails and web habits (apart form titillation)?
Officials claim live monitoring is necessary to fight terrorism and crime.
Oh, give me a break, please! Yup, looks like PGP is the way to go.
But, then, we are talking about New Labour here; control freak central.
The most worrying aspect is that they are so incompetent and have employed incompetents through an incompetent personnel policy.
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The incompetence is salt in the wound, but the malign intent is what makes this whole thing so unutterably evil.
Except of course there is the RIPA 2000 which requires you to hand over all the encryption keys for any encrypted data. If for whatever reason you cannot it is up to you to prove that you are not deliberately witholding them or it is 2 years in goal. One of Labour’s first guilty until proven innocent laws.
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Chris, indeed so. However, if everyone started encrypting their emails, what are they to do then? Gaol us all?
Based on their record it looks like they would certainly want to. 😉
The problem is that the major webmail providers like Hotmail, Yahoo, and Google aren’t going to shift to encrypting their traffic so the numbers are going to be fairly small. A more interesting approach would be if you can find a mimic function to mimic as spam. There is a vast amount of spam flying around, most of it meaningless, most of it never read by a human ever. Encrypt and then use Steganography to hide it as spam looks like the way to go.
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Either encryption or steganography or both, has anyone got any tips for encouraging the other party (to our emails etc) to want to play the same game?
Let’s start simple. How do we encourage companies to encrypt emails that include personal details of their employees, or business sensitive information? It really frightens me the amount of plain text information that is flowing about the place. I do hope that the appropriate email sysadmins are alert for rootkits. Just like PlusNet weren’t when they let the pikeys camp on their server for a month or two!
In the 1960s and ’70s I was active in the NCCL [now Liberty]. In 1974 its former General Secretary, Tony Smythe, and Donald Madgwick wrote a book, “The Invasion of Privacy”, which is still well worth reading. This is the blurb:
“The right to privacy is one of the most basic of human rights, yet the public sector, constantly demanding more knowledge about us, is increasingly eroding this right…the agencies of government are insidiously creeping into our personal lives. Information is power; and the frightening advance of technology, spearheaded by the computer, has placed all the tools of Orwell’s “1984” in the grasp of authority. It is the authors’ thesis that the next few years will be crucial to the survival of our traditional liberties – liberties that are not guaranteed by the British legal system. If we are to resist the official intrusion of privacy, now is the time to reassert our values – soon it will be too late.”
That is certainly prophetic! we are now being told by pofaced ZanuLabour ministers not only that if we have nothing to hide we have nothing to fear, but even that we no longer have the right to hide anything but must live all aspects of our lives like goldfishes in a bowl.
I suppose “they” will be installing cameras in our loos next. It is all utterly outrageous.
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LR
“what are they to do then? Gaol us all?”
Effectively this is what the regimes in E Germany and the rest of the old Soviet bloc did – and N Korea still does.
As Government becomes more and more obsessed with the lawful activities of its people, expect many of those normal people to instigate their own security measures to keep information out of the hands of people they’d rather not give it to.