Warehouse or No, UK's Expensive Net Spying Plan Proceeds 134
Vincent West writes with this excerpt from The Register: "Spy chiefs are already spending hundreds of millions of pounds on a mass internet surveillance system, despite Jacqui Smith's announcement earlier this week that proposals for a central warehouse of communications data had been dumped on privacy grounds. The system — uncovered today by The Register and The Sunday Times — is being installed under a GCHQ project called Mastering the Internet (MTI). It will include thousands of deep packet inspection probes inside communications providers' networks, as well as massive computing power at the intelligence agency's Cheltenham base, 'the concrete doughnut.'"
More like Master(bat)ing the Internet (Score:4, Insightful)
Because really, that's what this boils down to - bureaucrats circle jerking to the "oh look at how great we are now with this latest shiny project." Never mind that it violates people's privacy on a wholesale basis.
Re:Spambot (Score:5, Insightful)
Fight back (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the best way we can fight the intrusion of governments into the privacy of our communications will be to flood the system with false positives.
car bomb
Maybe someone could develop an @home project that sends random packets filled with keywords to other computers running the client.
attack at noon
The only way we are going to be able to keep governments in check is by fighting for our rights.
kill the president
I mean, if we don't fight the powers that be, who will fight for us?
sarin gas
Re:Gives Them Something To Do Until the Revolution (Score:2, Insightful)
note however, that the civil war didn't end well for the plebes
Security problems... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not send all your e-mail voluntarily? (Score:5, Insightful)
just ask (Score:4, Insightful)
If they want to read my spam, they can just ask me.
wrong message (Score:4, Insightful)
You'd think stuff like this would be illegal -- oh, wait.
What is it with democracies these days that they feel the need to snoop on citizens?
Re:VPN & SSH (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, which just shows its main purpose will be to track the general populace who are technically clueless, rather than "terrorists", I suppose.
Re:Bye bye England (Score:5, Insightful)
Hurry up and fuck off then. This is just another tired meme used on every story like this.
Some of us have already 'fucked off' precisely because of crap like this. 'If you don't like it then leave' is just another tired meme used by closet fascists on every story like this.
Anyone who chooses not to leave the UK when the government's police state ambitions are so blatant will hardly be able to complain when, if Labour win the next election, they're unable to leave because they're denied a passport or an exit visa.
Re:Gives Them Something To Do Until the Revolution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:1984 is here (Score:3, Insightful)
You're missing the real trick here. The EU law has typically been proposed and pushed through by UK representatives and their allies. Nobody from the press is watching, since events in Brussels are boring and mostly involve foreign people. Then once the EU law has been passed, the government implement in the UK what they'd wanted to do all along, and when called on it by the media they say 'Nothing to do with us: European law, we're obliged by treaty to implement it. Blame Brussels. Their fault.' Then the reactionary tabloids go away and whine once more about how these foreigners are trampling ancient British liberties.
And people wonder why the British are so ambivalent about the whole European project.
Re:For non UK readers some info (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, turns out she had something to hide. :P
Re:Spambot (Score:1, Insightful)
"better than its current intended use."
It seems the people in power are determined to use technology as far as it can go. Old abuses of power took centuries to overcome and be forced into law books to outlaw such behavior. Now we have a whole new load of ways the people in power can abuse their positions of power. Its going to take a lot of people standing up to the governments and say no more abuses of power. This abuse of people is slowly creeping in all around the world. The people in power need to be told no more.
The people in power are very much a minority of the population. When the majority of people stand together, every government has to listen. All it would take is to generate a resonant wave of anger in the population against the ever greater abuses of power. Also the continuous abuses of power are already building increasing anger in the population, so pressure is already building against such behavior. If the people in power don't start to listen and stop their abuses, they are going to generate ever greater anger against themselves.
The people in power don't want the majority of people to stand together as they know they will loose any argument when people stand together, so they try to convince people they are powerless and unable to stop the people in power. Its classic divide and conquers tactics used to rule over people. But this also suppresses the growing anger against the growing unfairness. It simply delays the retaliation against the unfairness and it helps to build ever greater pressure into society against such rampant abuses of power.
If the people in power don't want to create, build and trigger a full scale revolution against their abuses of power, they are going to have to stop abusing new technology to gain ever more power over people. If they are fearful now of their populations they only have their own greed and self righteousness to blame. This greedy contempt for the majority of people has to stop.
So science loses again? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bye bye England (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with running away instead of fighting something like this is what happens when other countries do this? Are you suggesting that people flee those countries as well?
What happens when there is nowhere left to flee to?
Re:Nana/na na-nana.nana (Score:1, Insightful)
This is one of the most entertaining things I've read in a long time. The effort that went into preparing this is obvious and makes it all the more entertaining.
Scare Tactics (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a scare tactics strategy aimed at the general population (not the outlaws), for the following reasons:
1) civil unrest is growing by the minute. People start to realize that politicians are in bed with the filthy rich oil & media tycoons, so there is a need to scare them back to their caves.
2) the politicians want the donations of their rich oil & media owning friends in order to get re-elected. The media tycoons push for elimination of piracy, because they think their profits will skyrocket without piracy, and push the politicians to do something. The politicians don't have any means other than scaring the Average Joe that he is going to prison for a long time because he illegally downloaded songs and movies. The government has to persuade the Average Joe that they know what A.J. does...
3) political groups are largely coordinated via the internet these days.
In other words, what we have here is the same ol' battle of the classes, like Marx described. The means are different though this time.
The concept of community (Score:3, Insightful)
This is about one of a large number of measures of surveillance, and its part of a program of control of the population with other limitations of civil liberties which used to be taken for granted. The justification given by the present government is usually the threat of terrorism.
The underlying motivation is something quite different. It is a certain cast of mind, and its quite unconscious. It is an unexamined concept of society and what it is for a country to be a community, and how people live in association with each other. The upper ranks of the Labour Party have an instinctive assumption that it is right and appropriate for there to be a surprisingly high degree of social control over individuals by others, in the cause of producing a kind of society that they feel good about. Its hard to put one's finger on it exactly, but it becomes clear in conversations with committed Party members, that they think individuals have or should have a greater say in how other people behave than those on the other parts of the political spectrum. In short, there really is for them such a thing as society, and we have much greater real interest in how others live and relate to each other than most of the general public think.
Once you understand this, you start to realize that many of the very puzzling aspects of recent UK legislation on civil liberties follow from it. Take ASBOS for instance. This is a means whereby a local government organization can get a court order forbidding people to engage in otherwise legal behaviour, because it is deemed 'anti social'. Recently a woman was forbidden by such an order from engaging in noisy sex. It probably disturbed her neighbors. People have been banned from entering or living in certain parts of the country. One young man was forbidden from being sarcastic. Take local government surveillance. People have been subjected to systematic surveillance to prevent them from putting out garbage in the wrong containers. Monitoring devices have been placed in those garbage containers. People have been put under surveillance to verify that they lived in a certain address and so had the right to send their child to a certain school. Just about all journeys in the UK are now recorded by license plate cameras - or on the London public transport system, by records of what trips a given card holder makes. Any public place will be filmed 24/7.
The latest bizarre episode of this sort was the arrest of an opposition MP on the charge that he incited a civil servant to commit misconduct in public office, by accepting information from him that the government wanted to keep confidential. The MP was arrested, actually in his Parliamentary office, then had his computers seized. Guess what was of interest to the arresting officers? His email files, and in particular his correspondence with the head of Liberty, a civil rights organization.
This looks to many people like the former East Germany, in which the country spent half its time spying on each other, but its not how it looks to the leadership of the Labour Party. It looks like East Germany, but it also looks normal. What is normal to them is not a society in which there are well defined legal standards, and you can do what you like as long as you do not violate them. What feels normal to them is a society in which anything you do may be restrained or condemned if it turns out to be undesirable. To who? Well, pretty much to anyone, including anyone in government or the civil services.
Take for instance the question of gender and class. We know that there are over and under representations of men and women, and people from different class backgrounds, in various companies and professions. These may have occurred through unlawful discrimination (though so far, discrimination on grounds of social class has not been made unlawful). The latest initiative from the government seeks to remedy this. Its not simply about equality of opportunity any more. It is about equality of pay levels, and its not just