UK Outlines Plan For Internet Black Boxes 419
RobotsDinner writes "In what sounds like a dystopian sci-fi plot, the Home Office has made public plans to outfit the country's Internet with upstream data recorders to log pretty much everything that passes through. 'Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database. The vision was outlined at a meeting between officials from the Home Office and Internet Service Providers earlier this week.'"
That sounds like a really good plan (Score:5, Interesting)
Actively screw up their plan. (Score:4, Interesting)
Write a script to do the following:
Search for a common word on google (eg "the"). Then write a bot to visit every link in turn, and every link referenced by those pages (ie recurse to a depth of 2).
Do this for the forst 100,000 links from google.
Comapred to huge torrents, etc this probably won't take up much of your monthly quota if you have one, but it'll really fuck up their stats. If everyone did it, their stupid idea would become as worthless to them as it ought to be.
UK vs. Australia (Score:5, Interesting)
And here we were joking about how retarded the idea of filtering all traffic in Australia was.
Not only do they intent to capture every packet, but they also intent to store them and analyze them off-line.
Especially considering the growth of bandwidth usage the past couple of years, this is nothing short of an absurd idea.
Social background, please? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm increasingly amazed (well, until my amaz-o-meter reached $FF a while back) at the Orwellian policies being established in the home of Orwell. I mean, from traffic cameras to tracking of people in public places, to storing of all types of personal information and communication -- even the Stazi would be impressed.
I haven't been to the UK in several years. Could someone explain how these projects have any kind of public support at all? Even in the US -- hardly a standard-bearer for liberal thought -- the UK proposals would produce an uproar.
What is the underlying sentiment of the people that continues to produce these ideas?
Re:Elections (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good news (Score:2, Interesting)
One could improve the situation by providing users with a simple method of making the current security situation transparent and improving security.
For example a program named "Secure your Mail" that looks at your Thunderbird config and says: "Ah, I see you connect to mail.foo.com. But mail.foo.com also provides secure transmissions. I have checked it right now that it works. Do you want me to correct your settings? "
It has to be guaranteed to users that more security still works (that's what they care about). Also, if it stays available, the user always knows about the security status (if it is up to what it could be).
Microsoft and other OS update distributers (Redhat, Ubuntu, ...) could deliver such a program (like they do with antivirus checkings) to inform users and even (if the user agrees) collect a list of mail hosts that do not yet provide encryption. Microsoft or others could provide the list to warn users not to use the service and could inform these companies that they should provide encryption. After they do that, the companies is taken down from the list. That way, through some soft pressure, encryption could be reached.
A similar approach could be applied to mail server admins, getting them to improve their settings (e.g. SPF), and step by step excluding violators (first nothing, then latencies, then warnings, then blockings).
Google has a good approach here. They just don't provide unencrypted mail access anymore.
Parent is right, a grassroot approach doesn't work well here since we are blocking each other.
The PGP/GPG surroundings of mails could be more beautiful and come with a information for users that this part is change protected by signature. Maybe even with instructions how the other user can benefit from the same (they care about their benefit only).
Just some thoughts.
Question Time (Score:5, Interesting)
There was a Question Time (BBC programme where people get to question the political parties) where one of the party members asked Jeff Hoon (the transport secretary) "how far is the government willing to go undermine civil liberties to monitor extremists?".
His answer? "To stop terrorists killing people in our society quite a long way, actually." Which sent a chill down my spine.
It also didn't help by the fact that he was deliberately trying to confuse the audience into thinking that the police getting a court order to monitor someone's internet traffic was the same as continually monitoring everyone's internet traffic in case a court order is sought. Even though several people attempted to correct him.
You can see it on iPlayer here [bbc.co.uk]. Start at about 40 minutes in.
Mod this up (Score:5, Interesting)
Boris Johnson has stopped the wastage of cash on extending the London car tax zone westwards. The NHS project is being scaled back. People are beginning to believe that PCSOs on the beat are far more effective at crime prevention than CCTV systems or policemen in cars. These people are desperate to keep their revenue streams intact. They need to sell a vast scheme to the UK Government, and what better than to prey on the control freakery and insecurity of Labour, a government so incompetent that it has illegal immigrants working in the department that is supposed to prevent illegal immigration.
Meanwhile we have massive infrastructural problems in IT because of a lack of people to carry out necessary on-the-ground projects. Dismantling these vast Government willy-waggling programmes and reallocating skilled staff to fixing the IT problems in local and national government all over the country would be a huge benefit - but it would mean dismantling departments, and it would mean overpaid business development managers getting the push and real IT implementers getting more visibility. And we don't want that, do we?
Personally, I think ALL responsibility for Government IT should be taken away from people like Smith, who should revert to her proper job as an inner city nightclub bouncer, and be handed over to a department staffed by people who would not merely be forbidden to accept any gifts or trips from large IT companies, but would have to agree never to work for an IT company with a turnover in excess of, say, 500 million Euros after leaving Government. There is simply no other way to prevent corruption.
Re:Good news (Score:5, Interesting)
Obfuscated TCP [google.com] might be useful here:
Re:Good news (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Elections (Score:3, Interesting)
In the Netherlands there were some referendums about choosing a maor. A lot of people thought the referendum were bad because choices were lacking. In some cities there was a voting percentage as low as 9%. Adter a few of these failed referendums they stopped doing it and called it failed. It simply didn't have any sense of legitimity it should have. It can work but the voting percentage needs to be so incredibly low so you can show that nobody really cared or was against it.
It can work, but it is highly unlikely.
Re:A few points (Score:3, Interesting)
A better way is for the bad guys, if they want to use the internet to get their messages out, is to use spammers. Steganographically hide the message in the "hash busters" spammers have regularly inserted for years. The authorities won't even be able to tell who the actual recipients are, nor distinguish them from the mountains of normal run of the mill spam.
Wouldn't surprise me if the bad guys are already doing things like this. It would be a bit like a poor man's "numbers station" (but much harder to tell who the sender is).
Re:Having a vote won't stop it (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfortunately, countries that have some direct democracy (Switzerland I believe does some) don't seem to have any better respect for privacy.
The problem is that it isn't an issue for 99% of the population. The reason the government wants to spy on you is to determine if you are outside what society considers 'normal' and then harass you for it. Normal people think this is just fine, because they don't trust 'wierdos' either. Thus democracies, and democracies, have a tendency towards enforcing banality at gunpoint.
I once heard a quote that sums this up; 'Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Freedom is an armed sheep contesting the issue'
Re:A few points (Score:3, Interesting)
You deploy a lot of energy to convince us that this is no big deal. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, your post is full of the usual fallacies on this matter:
1) "People 'with half a brain' arleady use encryption":
People who deliberatly use encryption are so few that the governements do not really care. If you look at the history of wiretap abuses, you'll see that it's mostly about political activists (who think they have nothing to hide, since what they do is legal), or simply random wiretaps to see what people think (see Mitterand's wiretaps).
2) "They have so much data, they can't do anything with it":
I love this one. The head of the NSA used to say the exact same thing a couple years ago. That works well on people who don't realise the power of automated analysis. A simple example: the NSA built a huge graph of who called who, and for how long. Almost no processing power required, and they can extract aquintance relations at the first, second or third degree with ease.
3) "I've seen the government's lack of money/competence on other things, so they will b ineffective at that, too":
Just because they slack on what they're supposed to do doesn't mean they will slack on what they want to do. The soviets had terrible living conditions, but military that rivaled the US (and one might explain the other).
4) "All this evidence will be of no use to them since they can't use it in court":
Ha ha. That would be a good point if they were honest as snow, and if the aim was to convict people. See (1).
5) "It can't be what you think, they would be too afraid to be sued":
Hahahahahaha. As a quick history of political scandals shows, they think they can get away with anything. An they often do, at least for the duration of their mandate; an if the heat is too much, they can always find a scapegoat. Or shout "terrorism".
Where is the storage coming from (Score:1, Interesting)
OK lets do the maths...
Say 15E6 machines connected to the internet at any one time in the UK. Figure plucked from the air. Now assume each message is only 256 bytes large and 1 message a second 24/7.
That's 3.32E14 bytes or 33TB every day.
Now if someone writes a SETI type program that randomly connects to web sites (in the background) at a rate of 1 per second... hmmm...
Re:I hate their lying ways (Score:1, Interesting)
New market. (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds like you're are going to need it, mate.
Accounts can be had from servers in either the U.S. or the Netherlands, depending on your needs.
admin@amigahost.com
Re:Win win situation (Score:3, Interesting)
You know what's funny? I'm polish myself, I live in Poland, I am as financially poor as the next random polish student (polish students' poorness is almost legendary here), I have been planning to work in the UK (coz there's no way you can get any real money in Poland through "hard and sincere work"), and many of my best friends live in UK now (including the girl that I really, really, really, really, really loved).
> What's that, Poland ISN'T Communist anymore?
BTW, have you actually LIVED in a communist (or post-communist) country? Wanna see how fun it is? Maybe that would give you an idea of WHY there are so many polish immigrants in the UK.
> [rant on how Polish people > English people]
You'd like to come to Poland and look and see how it's done THERE. I've been working for like, 5 zloty/hour, 6 zloty/hour (http://www.google.com/search?q=pln+gbp) and been very happy (it wasn't a full time job though, as I'm a student). My mom used to earn 15 zloty a day a few years ago and it was fine, too.
By the way, when I had that job, I've seen in practice, how true were the findings that many people in Poland waste 30-40% of time, pretending to be working. Not only are we lazy whenever we can, but we cheat. I've seen by myself how my friend cheated when working at a cash register, selling stuff cheaper to another friend of mine. I've seen another guy damage some of the stuff in the magazine, then go to the boss and tell him it must've been damaged during the transport (the stuff has been consequentially given away to the workers at the magazine). The list of similar tricks goes on and on.
When I was working with my (now ex) girlfriend, we used to lengthen every our 30 minute break into about two hours, and we excelled at doing this unnoticed by "the management" (details of what we were doing during these lengthened breaks will go unmentioned
> where hardly anyone speaks their language
Only before there were half a million of us only in London. I see quotes like "(guy with a pl-en dict in one hand, in english, on a street, to a bypasser): excuse me sir... how do i find the polish embassy... (the other guy, in polish): yeah, yeah, it's down the street, I'll lead you" on bash.org.pl all the time.
And by the way: it's not anything new, surprising or rare that a friend comes back from the UK after being there for over a year and still has problems with communicating with me in simple english. Maybe I'm just fuckin' unique or what that I learned english (well, not perfectly, but still) without having anyone to talk to in it, but you'd think that after sitting for a year in an english-speaking country you'd have a little more to say in english than just "umm... can we talk in polish?" (only of he/she would not just switch to polish outright), and I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with nostalgia.
---
I know that I sounded trollish in my OP, but I actually... Have been living in this country for 20 years (like, my whole life), and >99% of people I know are polish. I hate this fucking country, the way it works, and the way you have to live there to earn for that living, and I would love to be an ignorant, racist, lazy asshole you were accusing me of being, with three cars and watching TV all the day. Hell, I'd even love to go and work in the UK, but then my dad goes on about studying and becoming a "real" programmer with a paper and earning 6000 zloty a month (a sum that is like a dream here, but to remind you: it's 1330 GBP
Re:I hate their lying ways (Score:1, Interesting)
You also have to wonder how it'd even help catch child porn purveyors who are typically reasonably computer literate, at least enough so to use encrypted ZIP files.
I have to post anonymously given where I work, but let me tell you that the overwhelming majority of child pornographers online are NOT that smart. The sheer volume of pedophiles and pornographers sharing their shit on Yahoo Groups, MySpace, and other incredibly dumb locations in mind-boggling, yet we deal with it every day.
Now granted, a serious criminal IS smart enough to take a good amount of encryption and anonymization meaures. However, that's an altogether different ballgame requiring totally different tactics (which we do handle rather well). Thing is though that they are the minority and they're hard to catch, so while we work on them the majority are the stupidly easy, "I'll just attach them to a G-mail message and Google will never know," types.
All that said, I don't support this kind of crap from any country. "Think of the children?" Yeah, we're thinking about the children, the rest of you get on with your lives and donate when you can, there's no need for this kind of police-state scare-tactic crap. We are doing JUST FINE as we are without using government-sponsored eavesdropping, we've got more than enough information for serious busts on a regular basis, and this kind of bullshit will not help, only hurt.
Duh! (Score:3, Interesting)
Labour is the same as the Tories.
Democrats are the same as Republicans.
You people never learn, do you?
You just keep voting them in, year in and year out.
Someone once pointed out that if you put cheese in a maze, mice will navigate that maze until they find the cheese. But if you take the cheese out, eventually the mice will stop trying.
But with humans, once they think the cheese is in there, they'll keep navigating that maze no matter how many times they never find the cheese. Because they "know" the cheese is there.
Same thing with the state - people just keep on believing that if they just had the "right" people in the government, everything will magically work out just fine.
Humans vs robots - as Dr. Tim used to say, anyone who doesn't realize that they're 99.95 percent robotic is too stupid to talk to.
You think Obama is going to make a difference?
Making Excuses for Obama
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13698 [antiwar.com]
The Limits of Change
What to expect from the Obama administration on the foreign policy front
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13709 [antiwar.com]
Forget the Honeymoon
Getting down to bizness with Obama
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13728 [antiwar.com]
I can only laugh at Britain. (Score:2, Interesting)