UK Gov't Proposes Massive Internet Snooping, Data Storage 342
Barence writes "Big Brother Britain moved a step further today with the news that the Government will store 'a billion incidents of data exchange a day' as details of every text, email and browsing session in the UK are recorded. Under new proposals published yesterday, the information will be made available to police forces in order to crack down on serious crime, but will also be accessible by local councils, health authorities and even Ofsted and the Post Office. The Conservatives have criticised the idea, with the Shadow Home Secretary saying, 'yet again the Government has proved itself unable to resist the temptation to take a power quite properly designed to combat terrorism to snoop on the lives of ordinary people in everyday circumstances.'"
Re:I used to feel sorry for Britain (Score:2, Informative)
But then they showed how well they had learned their mistake under Blair by keeping Labor in power. Truly, to paraphrase Mencken, they are getting what they want and getting it good and hard.
Wow, you are truly ignorant. Of the votes cast, 37% went to labour. Reread that number. 37%. The voting system is hoplessly biased, so naturally the people that it favours will never remove this bias. So tell me, what part of 37% makes it apparent that we wanted labour?
Some software that you should look at (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.gnupg.org/ [gnupg.org] - The GNU Privacy Guard
http://getfiregpg.org/ [getfiregpg.org] - FireGPG, "encrypt, decrypt, sign or verify the signature of text in any web page using GnuPG" (untested by me).
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3424 [mozilla.org] - another Firefox extension, also untested.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3208 [mozilla.org] - another one that may be useful (untested).
http://www.gpg4win.org/ [gpg4win.org] - something for MS Windows
Remember folks, even if you aren't in the UK, this still affects you! If you communicate with people in the UK, if you have email based in the UK (I have a Yahoo.co.uk email address, in addition to my 50 other email addresses...), etc. ...
It is as simple as installing Firefox, installing GNUPG, and installing that extension that lets you encrypt text fields when you are emailing...
And don't forget TrueCrypt http://truecrypt.org/ [truecrypt.org] though it isn't strictly relevant in this case, it is always relevant.
Re:I used to feel sorry for Britain (Score:3, Informative)
But then they showed how well they had learned their mistake under Blair by keeping Labor in power.
Oh, come off it. At the last election, the Labour Party came second in England. They only took power again because of the Scottish vote, and Scotland is not affected by several of Labour's more heinous policies because of devolution. In fact, only 22% of the electorate (37% of those who actually voted) supported Labour, which makes the absolute majority they received in Parliament an obscenity.
And that was when they still said Blair would serve a full third term, not the current administration who have no legitimate mandate whatsoever.
And in reply to your later post: yes, a significant number of votes for Labour do come from scroungers who don't contribute anything and live entirely off Labour's benefits hand-outs, but that's not what got them in for the third term. The largest opposition party managed to go through about 17 leaders in as many months or something prior to Cameron, so there was the little problem of who to vote for instead of Labour at the last general election. We simply don't have any significant moderate, central parties in the country today, despite the huge number of voters whose preferences appear to support one, so the anti-Labour vote split. Until someone manages to get a moderate, centrist party off the ground or there's an upset significant enough for one of the smaller parties to pick up some momentum, everyone in that category has no-one stepping up to represent them.
And for the record, Labour have been smashed at every single election since they fluked their way back into office. It is clear what the people do want, but Labour didn't have the integrity to ask them by calling a general election when Brown took over, because their polling told them they hadn't a prayer of winning it.
Re:encryption (Score:5, Informative)
Encryption is no obstacle in Great Britain, home of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. If the authorities don't like anyone who uses encryption, they will simply demand the keys under RIP. If they don't like what they see or no key is provided, they will lock up the individuals concerned and throw away their own key, since the law essentially deems anyone using encryption guilty until proven innocent.
Re:encryption (Score:3, Informative)
No, you only need to make a few scary examples. Everyone else will fall into line after that. And that's all they really want.