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UK Plans More Spying On Internet Users Under 'Terrorism' Pretext 189

Wowsers writes "In vogue with other countries cracking down on freedom and democracy on the internet as discussed in Slashdot recently, the UK is joining in with plans to track all phone calls, text messages, email traffic and websites visited online, all to be stored in vast databases under new government anti-terror plans. As reported in The Telegraph, security services will have access to information about who has been communicating with each other on social networking sites such as Facebook, direct messages between subscribers on Twitter would also be stored, as well as communications between players in online video games. The scheme is a revised version of a plan drawn up by the ex-Labour government which would have created a central database of all the information. The idea was later dropped in favor of requiring communications providers to store the details at the taxpayers' expense."
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UK Plans More Spying On Internet Users Under 'Terrorism' Pretext

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  • Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 19, 2012 @04:51AM (#39091145)

    1984 is here! 27 years too late, but it's here.

    • Re:Finally! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 19, 2012 @04:57AM (#39091163)

      And ow we even have to pay for the noose they're putting around our necks: "requiring communications providers to store the details at the taxpayers' expense."

      • Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 19, 2012 @07:16AM (#39091579)

        Either the state foots the bill, where you'll pay for it through taxes of the provider has to pay for it and raise the end user prices. Either way, you're the sorry bastard who'll have to pay for it.

        • Re:Finally! (Score:4, Interesting)

          by click2005 ( 921437 ) * on Sunday February 19, 2012 @11:31AM (#39092581)

          The state doing it is more likely to cost more. Also, they're more likely to have delays, cost overruns and just drop
          the whole idea when they cant get it to work after 5 years and £200million wasted.

          • If it were only £200 million, that might be an acceptable price for keeping our freedoms.

            But given the history of UK government IT procurement, a few billion is more likely.

        • *shrugs* The parasite is outgrowing its host.

          One day, there will only be government, and no people.

          • Re:Finally! (Score:4, Funny)

            by The Askylist ( 2488908 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @04:22PM (#39094577)

            Brecht had it about right - it's a pity we still aren't listening.

            After the uprising of the 17th June
            The Secretary of the Writers Union
            Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
            Stating that the people
            Had forfeited the confidence of the government
            And could win it back only
            By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
            In that case for the government
            To dissolve the people
            And elect another?

    • Re:Finally! (Score:5, Funny)

      by eneville ( 745111 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @07:55AM (#39091663) Homepage
      1984 was about the Thought Police. I don't see any thought on facebook or twitter.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        It's well-policed

    • by nurb432 ( 527695 )

      Not quite, but any day now.

      Once the surveillance net is fully enabled, then other parts of the story will start falling into place. ( the perpetual war concept has already been enacted, as the 'war on terror' )

  • by MRe_nl ( 306212 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @04:52AM (#39091151)

    Thinkpol report alarmwise, unveiling doubleplusungood possibility of Inparty ideodeviates. Goldstein connects possibility uneliminated. BB declared speechwise in VicPalace Ingsoc traitors must be detected and rehabed nodelay:

    "Comrades, how will Ingsoc continuelive victorywise? Ingsoc will continuelive victorywise by vaporizing decay within Inparty core. Inparty exampleserve Outparty and prolemass and must causewise continuebe goodthink. Ignorance is strength, Comrades, unforget."

    • by slick7 ( 1703596 )
      If you are not for Draconian tyrrany, then you are for unbridled anarchy...think of the children!
  • So..... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by anotherzeb ( 837807 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @04:53AM (#39091153)
    ISPs and mobile phone companies will have to allow various civil servants access to their logs. I didn't notice anything about the access only being at the ISP's premises (some civil servants have been known to do things like leave laptops containing confidential data on trains) or with judicial oversight, both of which are worrying points. I would suggest using encrypted email, but sender and recipient would still be known and you can get 2 years at Her Maj's pleasure for forgetting your password when it's required.
    • So the trick is to encrypt stuff that would lead to a >2 year sentence, then you're essentially in profit. Yeah, that sounds like progress to me. What would happen if you encrypted a random pseudoencrypted string and then gave them the password I wonder?
  • by naota-kun ( 705771 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @04:55AM (#39091161)
    Good luck chronicling all my drunken ramblings on cocktail napkins. Every scandalous thing I've ever put to form is blotted and smeared with spirits. Even I can't decipher the subversion.
  • by riverat1 ( 1048260 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @04:58AM (#39091167)

    Are we so terrorized by terrorism that we are willing to put up with anything to avoid it? How far do we want to go to prevent terrorism. Should we just accept that sometimes it's going to happen despite our best efforts? It sucks if you happen to be a victim but terrorism can never do enough take down a country unless it overreacts and spends itself to death trying to counter it.

    I'm not saying we should do nothing to fight terrorism but how far should we go?

    • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 19, 2012 @05:10AM (#39091211)

      Are we so terrorized by terrorism that we are willing to put up with anything to avoid it? How far do we want to go to prevent terrorism. Should we just accept that sometimes it's going to happen despite our best efforts? It sucks if you happen to be a victim but terrorism can never do enough take down a country unless it overreacts and spends itself to death trying to counter it.

      I'm not saying we should do nothing to fight terrorism but how far should we go?

      What if terrorism is made to take our human rights away?

    • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 19, 2012 @05:24AM (#39091261)

      American here.

      Let's assume they're telling the truth, that it is to fight terrorism and not free speech.
      Let's also ignore the issue that terrorism is a blanket term for crimes committed to incite fear as opposed to simply being crimes.

      The Internet is vast. There is so much information out there that any preventative measures seems utterly impossible. I mean, seriously, I can understand the information could be useful after the fact, but how do they know where to focus before the fact? Do they have a supercomputer to actively monitor every little thing on the Internet? How do they decide what is a red flag and what isn't? Won't those attempting to commit criminal acts just use code? Without knowing who is doing what, how do they know what code for which to look?

      I think it'd be a better idea to look at the socio-economic problems leading to people willing to commit crimes (fear-incited or not) in the first place.

      • by BlueStrat ( 756137 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @06:47AM (#39091503)

        American here.

        Let's assume they're telling the truth, that it is to fight terrorism and not free speech.
        Let's also ignore the issue that terrorism is a blanket term for crimes committed to incite fear as opposed to simply being crimes.

        The Internet is vast. There is so much information out there that any preventative measures seems utterly impossible. I mean, seriously, I can understand the information could be useful after the fact, but how do they know where to focus before the fact? Do they have a supercomputer to actively monitor every little thing on the Internet? How do they decide what is a red flag and what isn't? Won't those attempting to commit criminal acts just use code? Without knowing who is doing what, how do they know what code for which to look?

        I think it'd be a better idea to look at the socio-economic problems leading to people willing to commit crimes (fear-incited or not) in the first place.

        All your points are logical and right on target. Excellent summation.

        However, none of those things are important or relevant to politicians. Only the possibility to increase their (and therefor the government's) power, and remove power (and wealth, which could be argued is the same thing in many ways) from regular citizens.

        The problem that citizens of Western countries are facing, as they all seem to be headed in the same general direction of reducing citizen's privacy & freedom, is a common one...that of government that's gotten too large, powerful, and centralized...and therefor more corrupt and tyrannical.

        Government is like fire, and should be treated very much the same, and for nearly identical reasons. Both are extremely useful, but at the same time extremely destructive, dangerous, swift-spreading, and hard to control, particularly the larger either grows. Both governments and fire, once either has grown to a certain size, becomes impossible for the ones who started it to control and morphs from a useful force for good and champion for freedom and the Rule of Law, to a force for tyranny, evil, and the capricious rule of men.

        Strat

        • Government is like fire, and should be treated very much the same, and for nearly identical reasons.

          Yes, and the stench is terrible if you pee on either of them.

      • by tomhath ( 637240 )

        Do they have a supercomputer to actively monitor every little thing on the Internet?

        Yes. "Siri do you hear anything that might be a terrorist plot?". Once they're on a trail, a human can home in on the details. Been that way for decades with electronic eavesdropping.

        I think it'd be a better idea to look at the socio-economic problems leading to people willing to commit crimes

        *cough* or crimes committed in the name of religion.

      • by Raenex ( 947668 )

        I think it'd be a better idea to look at the socio-economic problems leading to people willing to commit crimes (fear-incited or not) in the first place.

        Being poor is not the main driver of terrorism. Look at the attackers, their backgrounds, and their motives.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 19, 2012 @05:44AM (#39091307)

      Fighting terrorism is merely an excuse. It should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that treating the symptoms isn't going to cure the illness.

      Call it for what it is. A ploy to pass undesirable laws in an effort to assimilate even more power in the government institutions. First, the new system is there to fight "terrorists". Then "child molesters". Then "pirates". Then all "criminals". Then "thought criminals".

    • by cheekyjohnson ( 1873388 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @05:48AM (#39091323)

      If fighting terrorism involves violating people's rights, then I'd rather we not fight terrorism.

      • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 19, 2012 @06:06AM (#39091367)

        This isn't about fighting terrorism. its about control.

        Orwell was an optimist.

      • by Znork ( 31774 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @06:08AM (#39091381)

        If fighting terrorism involves violating people's rights I suspect we're going to breed a lot more terrorists.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        If fighting terrorism involves violating people's rights, then I'd rather we not fight terrorism.

        Why not fight the actual terrorism, rather than the population oriented one defined by govt? From the beginning of the war on terror, followed by the rise of the surveillance state I wondered about this massive clamp down on everybody when there's likely only a few actual terrorists in the world. It's like trying to shoot a fly with an elephant gun, right? That's actually the point: to deter anyone from the masses from even contemplating challenging authority. It's collective punishment on a massive scale,

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Unfortunately I think the only thing that will save us is a "privacy 9/11". Something like the census data getting leaked, or maybe an MI5 database being posted as a torrent. Something so epic it can counteract everything else.

    • by msobkow ( 48369 )

      Well, let's just say that SANE countries like Canada, Australia, and Germany have felt no need to go to the INSANE measures imposed by the UK and US governments on it's people.

      Israel needs the security and surveillance because it literally has bombers and shooters in it's midsts.

      We don't.

      • by rikkards ( 98006 )

        No , Canada not at all. Except for that stupid bill that has been pulled back for modification after the upswell of people freaking out about it. Unfortunately it will probably come back the same (if not worse) but with bigger loopholes that aren't as evident.

      • by Wolfrider ( 856 )

        Everyone in the UK needs to go watch " V for Vendetta " immediately -- and FIGHT this conspiracy!

    • by Computershack ( 1143409 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @06:56AM (#39091527)
      Average Joe isn't frightened at all, certainly not to this extent. Unfortunately there are morons in the civil service who need to justify their jobs and departments at Whitehall that need to protect their budgets so make cleverly worded proposals to members of the Cabinet who then propose such nonsense in the name of the "war on terror". I'm still trying to work out who we have to fear now the Islamic Fundalmentalist Bin Laden is no longer here and the gobshyte clerics such as Abu Hamsa and his mate Qtada are regarded as a bit of a joke by Average Joe.
    • by jo42 ( 227475 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @09:30AM (#39091989) Homepage

      Why are the British, who fought Hitler and the Nazis, and then the red communism menace, so hell bent on emulating and surpassing, the spy on our own people methodologies of both evils? The boogeyman (aka 'terrorist') is winning and he/they don't even have to do a damn thing...

      • Money.
      • Why are the British, who fought Hitler and the Nazis, and then the red communism menace, so hell bent on emulating and surpassing, the spy on our own people methodologies of both evils? The boogeyman (aka 'terrorist') is winning and he/they don't even have to do a damn thing...

        Perhaps it is as my parents say; that Britain lost its soul when Thatcher ripped the country apart and built an Americanised consumer culture in its place.

    • Terrorism cannot be fought. If someone has a fear, they can be terrorized. Not all fears are rational or shared by all humans. Some fears are crafted and given to people. It is simply a banner under which people and behaviors can be placed and then fought without fear of political recourse.

      Fighting such a vague and undefined enemy is a great distraction from real work, its no wonder the law makers continue to do it.

    • by orkysoft ( 93727 )

      Does anyone remember the time when the IRA used to regularly perform bombing attacks in Britain? The government didn't react this way back then. They could have gone all DDR, but they didn't. So why now?

  • I mean, which country does not do such stuff (or, does not have it planned for the immediate future)?
  • Bad news for all (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Patch86 ( 1465427 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @05:04AM (#39091191)

    The UK government has shown time and time again that this is going to be a bad thing. For one, they've had so many data breaches in the last few years (lost DVLA disks, tax details, NHS disks, god knows what else) that a single monolithic data source is just asking for trouble. Secondly, we've had plenty of cases in recent years of jumped up local officials and magistrates using "anti-terror" laws (which were no-doubt passed in good faith) to track people who put their bins out on the wrong week, or don't keep their allotments tidy, or any number of other petty nonsense.

    And finally, I'd like to point out to any smug-feeling non-Brits reading this that it's bad for you too. If your communications pass through UK -based servers, odds are you're going to be logged and tracked too. And you don't even have the satisfaction of having voted for this rubbish!

  • by dutchwhizzman ( 817898 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @05:29AM (#39091271)
    These plans are great in theory, but in practice, they will never be able to enforce access to all the data they are really after. The terrorists will use intermediates and encryption to make it impossible to yield any practical data out of this ginormous heap of raw information. It will violate privacy, cost an insane amount of money and have no significant positive effect on whatever statistical figure they want to improve upon. A few stupid punters will have their day in court for being so stupid that they get caught for petty crimes, but that's all this enforcement will ever yield. Unless they plan to use it to end file-sharing. Maybe that's the hidden agenda?
    • Hidden? Ok, they've been trying to hide it but far from well.

      It may not be the immediate interest of the governments, but I'm quite sure these laws and regulations didn't spring from the mind of a politician. At least I'd deem it quite unlikely that they had that idea themselves.

      So cui bono?

    • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 19, 2012 @06:38AM (#39091463)

      They're not after data anymore. Terrorists aren't that stupid and learned about cryptography too. The thing intelligence agencies do theses days is map relationships so they can get a view of terrorist networks and cells.

      After that, it's all down to what you consider to be a terrorist...

  • by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @05:29AM (#39091273) Journal
    The GCHQ never liked been seen in open court, the press or having its "listening post" ability over every aspect of the UK's telecom infrastructure become too well known.
    So they hope a Communications Capabilities Development Programme can make the links in open court based on info that the GCHQ "found" and then flagged?
    Your interest in politics was not a flaged but your friend had a friend who said something on twitter or downloaded something and they "stumbled" back to you?
    The GCHQ tried "sigint NEW Systems" back in the late 1990's, the Government Telecommunications Advisory Centre, Government Technical Assistance Centre (criminals used codes) ect.
    Strange that all this is now so direct and in the open? Everything you do is now can be tracked if your flagged, months of logs can be "opened" and real time use spied on for a long time with very little legal oversight in the USA, UK, Australia....
    Why would anyone of interest use the web in any way worth logging anymore?
    Back to family, cult, faith, school, tribe, gang, compatriots, business associates - MI6 will be detected long before they can plant a fresh face or bribe their way to something of use.
    Why is the UK is giving away generations of hidden signals intelligence excellence for some short term "communications industry" links and PR that they are doing something?
    • by Sabriel ( 134364 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @08:20AM (#39091745)

      My theory? Because corporate sociopaths don't give a crap about national defence. They have no loyalty to king nor country, no sense of patriotism or empathy, and they've accumulated enough power from their corporate divide-and-plunder schemes that they have moved onto their inevitable target: the nations that birthed them.

      Data-mining, open-cut style, benefits corporate profiteering more than anything else. Big business knows your teenage daughter is pregnant before you do (google: Target data mining babies). And I daresay it's a lot easier to fight a foreign terrorist than it is to tackle wealthy "pillars of the community" who have the ear (and dirty laundry) of your civilian leaders - if they're not part of the hierarchy themselves.

  • by kawabago ( 551139 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @05:35AM (#39091283)
    Just in from the North Sea. Britain has finally sunk under the weight of the vast server farms storing every malicious keystroke of the beleaguered populace. This was the final stroke as the cost of analysis of the vast data store had finally exceeded GDP. It is expected that any terrorists perished with everyone else.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 19, 2012 @05:40AM (#39091299)

    Like Jacqui Smith before her, a weak woman. She's shown the exact same pattern of fear, and the exact same capitulation to MI5/6/SOCA/London Police Chief Constable (who also heads anti-terror) as the person before her.

    They talk all sorts of imaginary scenarios that may 'happen' as a result of failure to monitor everyone, and she can see her career up in smoke if they campaign against her they way the police have campaigned on other issues.

    Similar things happened to the background check reforms, for people who deal with children. The police PR men went out on a PR campaign, and said that if the vetting procedure was removed then pedos would kill your children and it would be the home secretaries fault. So she toned down the changes to the vetting procedure to allow *some* vetting.

    Labour of course will accuse Tories of *.*, they'll join in with any criticism of the Tories because that's all that pillock Milliband ever does. So the police can rely on the support of Labour no matter what they want to do, how outrageous the civil liberties violation or how many human rights are violated. Milliband will be there to join in the chorus of criticism.

    The fix is to remove the police campaign abilities. They shouldn't be able to campaign as to how laws SHOULD be, since they have to enforce them AS THEY ARE. It's too tempting for seniors police and spys to extend their mandate by using their position to campaign for new laws.

  • by Gimbal ( 2474818 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @05:47AM (#39091317)

    The story could be summarized, roughly, as so: Bureaucrats continue a new iteration of an old legacy in developing a further exaggerated sense of state control, in response to a perceived sense of national threat - this time, endeavoring to revoke some of the citizen's newer liberties, in endeavoring to develop (and substitute, therewith) a notion of "State-owned personal privacy" (TM)

    (DNRTA)

    I'd like to believe that the pragmatic arguments against it will be enough. I'm not familiar with the UK's own governmental charters, so I cannot argue more to the principles of the matter. I'm sure that the Open Rights Group might be able to chime in on the matter, though. Cheers to them.

  • by Dark$ide ( 732508 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @06:16AM (#39091401) Journal
    I don't care if they store all of my email, they're going to get fucking bored reading them.

    What I care more about is the amount of tax pounds my lovely Con-Dem Gov't is going to pay to Crapita or HP/EDS to build some half baked IT system to store this stuff. The record of big IT projects in the UK is piss poor. They've wasted £11bn (£11,000,000,000) on the National Health Service project for IT and currently don't have anything to show for that wastage.

  • by danielt998 ( 1348307 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @06:32AM (#39091439)
    It seems odd to me that the UK's priorities are 'preventing terrorism' rather than saving lives. Not many people die from terrorism a year and this would prevent very few of them.(Let's be generous and say one a year) Are there not other things on which they could spend the money that would save more lives than this. I don't see how deaths from terrorism are any more serious than accidental deaths. Building HS2", for example will probably save more lives than this as a by-product by decreasing the number of car journeys, which are far more dangerous than rail ones. Why do people give terrorism 'special powers'. In what way is a death because of terrorism any more serious than a car death? Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?
  • by j1976 ( 618621 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @06:33AM (#39091449)

    Even if they didn't do it themselves, they would be bound by the EU Data Retention Directive to do it [wikipedia.org].

    Sweden has already got threatened with the EU high court for not implementing the directive.

  • by Dulcise ( 840718 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @06:36AM (#39091457)

    "The scheme is a revised version of a plan drawn up by the Labour government which would have created a central database of all the information.
    The idea of a central database was later dropped in favour of a scheme requiring communications providers to store the details at the taxpayers’ expense.
    But the whole idea was cancelled amid severe criticisms of the number of public bodies which could access the data, which as well as the security services, included local councils and quangos, totalling 653 public sector organisations.
    Labour shelved the project - known as the Intercept Modernisation Programme - in November 2009 after a consultation showed it had little public support."

    So it's just the same plan probably being pushed for by the same security service lobbyists for a second time, this time with more success because "the Olympics".

  • by boorack ( 1345877 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @07:15AM (#39091573)

    ... brought to you by your lovely government. You may think of it as of some kind of conspiracy theory but we are here. Degradation of our freedom of speech is directly linked with degradation of our (western) economic system and in my opinion this is just the beginning as long-term economic deterioration shows no signs of slowing down.

    Governments (and their corporate sponsors) always wanted to shut down or marginalize independent media that show the world as it is, not as government + corporate oligarchy wants us to see. But freedom of speech was too deeply embedded in our culture and social costs associated with such moves tended to be too high compared to potential gains. Everything changed last year. Since Arab Spring and subsequent Occupy protests spreading like a wildfire, traditional media losing credibility caught again and again (thanks to blatant lies & omissions) and deteriorating economy pushing more and more people onto streets, our ruling class realized that time is running out.

    Efforts to shut everybody up went into turbo mode last year - SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, tens of bigger or smaller initiatives in various countries. Sadly, I expect that this year will be even worse. I expect further economic deterioration as most of world economy is dying under crushing debt with no chances of discharging it (thanks to our corrupt politicians and their sponsors), let alone paying it off (we don't have enough natural resources to pay it off!). Ongoing financial "world-war" Jim Rickards writes about in his excelent book makes things even worse. What we desperately need is a round of healthy (if possible - orderly) defaults that will clean up most of this debt (odious or not) and let the economy restart. Iceland took this route and now they have real, healthy recovery with good prospects in the future. Note how silent our corporate media are about Iceland. Greece on the other hand is being fucked the same latin american style used in 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Once again corporate media blatantly lie about this urgent 'need of austerity' and 'Greeks fault' but when you look at it closer - it's good old, well tested latino scenario which turned up to be fraud long time ago. Thanks to banksters and their stooges (that is, politicians) few years from now Greece will become a regular 3-rd world country.

    My sad feeling is that in order to keep current (broken) system running our ruling elites will block any possibilities to resolve this situation and will cover up all frauds and crimes of themselves and their friends. Economic situation will slowly deteriorate until must of us reach 3-rd world conditions and our ruling elites will treat us with Radio-Yerevan-style propaganda backed by cooked economic numbers to show how wonderfully great our economy is, completely ignoring reality for 99% of citizens. All voices of dissent will be silenced, marginalized, blatantly censored or marked as "terrorists" and held in jail.

    Welcome to 'iron fist' phase every civilization comes through before it dies (yet it's still not too late to overturn this).

  • by Gordonjcp ( 186804 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @08:04AM (#39091701) Homepage

    WARNING - This article may contain high levels of sensationalism, speculation and just plain fabrication. The Daily Telegraph is a far-right tabloid aimed at people who think that "darkies and poofs" are destroying the country.

    • by Cederic ( 9623 )

      ...and yet, the previous Government wanted a central database, the security services keep demanding this data and the current Government wouldn't know what a human right was if they sat in Liverpool Crown Court listening to the current trial of alleged child molesters.

      This would represent an excessive intrusion, it does hark back to the information gathering activities of the Stasi and I don't trust this or future Governments with this level of information. They've proven - repeatedly - unable to use it pr

  • by wdef ( 1050680 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @08:30AM (#39091773)
    The platform on which Cameron and his coalition were elected included "winding back Big Brother" and the steady reduction of civil liberties under Labor. Predictably, that is now all forgotten.
  • by Pembers ( 250842 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @08:55AM (#39091853) Homepage

    ...let's give them data. I foresee a Thunderbird plugin that randomly sends email to random addresses, to give the government more chaff to sort through. Or you could set up a virtual machine and let it become part of a botnet. Last time I checked, it wasn't illegal to allow someone else to use your computer for spamming...

    • by MLCT ( 1148749 )
      That is the way all of this will ultimately be defeated if it ever becomes a reality. I would be interested in the scaling laws of progress in data storage vs data transmission vs data processing. Unless the power of the last one always scales more than the other two then deluges will always win.
    • that'd be kinga legitimizing what they're doing, and turn it into a game. a game only 0.5% of the population would play, too.not to mention how trivial it would be to distinguish the faked stuff from the real stuff. "false sense of security" ring a bell? what a terrible, terrible idea. no, instead face the predators of the real world in the real world, not with thunderbird plugins. just a thought.

    • Wait, are they going to save all the spam too?

    • In Canada they actually did that. They emailed and Twitted everything to the minister. The fate of the bill C-30 is now in question as is the Minister especially after he admitted that he never read the bill C-30 before he tabled it and did not know what was in it.
  • by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @09:08AM (#39091899) Homepage Journal

    With a minuscule investment of resources, they were able to completely destroy the "free world's" way of life. They could not have ever done it via direct hostilities, but instead used the back door and got us to do it to ourselves. ( with our power hungry governments help.. )

    Social engineering at its best. ( or worst i guess..)

    *sigh*

  • the Torries would be any better than New Labour.

    Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

  • How do we convince people that no, the very small threat of terrorism (which is FAR less risky than the government and media make it out to be) is NOT justification for violating the civil liberties of ordinary citizens.

    Or is the propaganda from the government and big media companies so effective that its impossible to counter it?

  • A 1st and a 4th Amendment.

  • by arthurpaliden ( 939626 ) on Sunday February 19, 2012 @01:27PM (#39093369)

    In Canada when the Canadian Securities Minister Vic Toews tried to get warrantless wire taping legislation passed this week Canadians decided to help out his information gathering process by:

    Sending the minister responsible our web browsing histories every day.
    CC the minister on all our email messages.
    Email the minister what we up to are doing several times a day.
    Updated the ministers Twitter account with what we are doing.

    So much data ran into the Canadian Parliament's servers that they either fell over or were deliberately taken off line. The fate of Bill C-30 is now being reviewed.

  • ... seems a method of reflection needs to be developed that allows prying eyes to be redirected back to its source, where the real terrorist are. Consider it helping them with their claim.

  • is for every UK citizen to become friends on every "watched" social media channel/site. Give the gov that they want, that is everyone is a suspect.

I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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