UK Gov't Proposes Massive Internet Snooping, Data Storage

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.'"

encryption

[timmarhy (659436)]

use it. it won't be long before every communication is encrypted and signed

Re:encryption

[Anonymous Brave Guy (457657)]

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

[Sloppy (14984)]

with a network of computers fast enough it is possible to decrypt the data using every possible encrypt key.

Even if that network were available today, and even if you didn't have the option of using a longer key, encrypting would still be a good idea. "A network of computers fast enough" is not free. Why not add to your enemies' expenses, especially when it costs you nearly nothing? This is an arms race that you can win. And if everyone does it, everyone wins (except the bad guy).

Re:encryption

[Original Replica (908688)]

It costs them very little to hold a gun to your head and demand "Hand over the encryption keys."

I wouldn't be surprised if encryption starts becoming the norm, that all encryption keys will be required to be registered with the government. Unregistered encryption will be illegal and the public will applaud as the government sends the men with guns to drag you away, because you will be a "dangerous criminal with suspected connections to child porn and stolen credit card numbers" *
* This is how it will show up on your local Evening News.

Re:encryption

[Original Replica (908688)]

Seriously. What are they going to do once they have the gun to your head? Pull the trigger? That's when the real revolution begins. People will only accept so much.

If that gun is a Taser, then yes they will pull the trigger, probably after you are already handcuffed. It is a great way to cultivate an attitude of compliance, regardless of things like right and wrong. [wordpress.com] Notice how the author of the linked article urges people to never challenge a police officer. I agree that one should never physically challenge an officer, but the serf mentality has progressed into not even verbally questioning an officer's actions, all because of the increasing likelihood of getting tasered. No my friend, the police pull the trigger all the time, there is no revolution.

Re:encryption

[geekgirlandrea (1148779)]

Let me know when you finish building this network. It's going to be somewhat larger than the planet and will still take a few trillion years to do the job.

Another good reason to encrypt your data.

[BPPG (1181851)]

Most network encryption methods might not be 100% bulletproof, but if more people did it, massive data collection projects like this would be a lot less worthwhile.

Re:Another good reason to encrypt your data.

[Reziac (43301)]

Doesn't Britain already have a law in place requiring you to hand over encryption keys on demand??

I see that as a very short hop from "on demand" to "as required by law for all encryption users".

Re:Another good reason to encrypt your data.

[Brian the Bold (82101)]

You're right, Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act does indeed allow for compulsion in dissemination of keys.

That's why it is important not to store anything sensitive in encrypted form, but to pass it about using methods where keys are ephemeral and are never in the possession of the person targeted. If intercepted data simply cannot be decrypted, the authorities will come to understand that they are unable to seize anything of value.

Perhaps this would be enough to get them down from their insane power trip and back to sensible levels of state vs individual power.

Re:Another good reason to encrypt your data.

[seanadams.com (463190)]

Hey, can someone snurf me a baloney kargel? I looked on the stardiffel and didn't see any kegels for it.

You mean Cockney then?

Again?

[puppyfox (833883)]

Dupe! Oh, maybe not. I thought the UK already spied on everything? And Australia censored everything? And the US tasered everyone? And Italy ate all the pasta?

Let Them Try

[sexconker (1179573)]

Humans have an annoying tendency to save things.
We fear our own demise, and we seek permanence in our surroundings and possessions.

We do the same with data.

We create far more data than we will ever be able to manage. In principle, it's a horrible idea. In practice, it's unfeasible. The only thing this will result in is harassment and inconvenience for people when the data is leaked/stolen/hax0red.

The government is NOT watching everyone - they can't. The government wants you to THINK everyone is being watched.

Re:Let Them Try

[Naturalis Philosopho (1160697)]

One word, "panopticon". Jeremy Bentham was a man before his time...

Re:Lets all use whitehouse.gov emails, NEVER saved

[sexconker (1179573)]

Dear Americans.
We have gone through all the data, and we've found that your President Bush was a great guy with no faults.

Sincerely,
Tony Blair

No surprise

[Teun (17872)]

The UK government proposing these kind of things should not be a surprise, worrisome is that other governments might see this as a great example.

The eternal optimist in me feels some will see this as a step too far.

Re:No surprise

[Darkness404 (1287218)]

No, what is worrysome is they assume that everyone could be a terrorist. If we assumed everyone within a 20 block radius was a murderer, real murder cases would take forever to be solved. Same with this, if everyone is a terrorist, they look for all the people who are obviously not terrorists and try to make them be a terrorist rather then actually figuring out who really are terrorists (and no, 80 year old English grandmothers are not terrorists).

Re:No surprise

[Gat0r30y (957941)]

80 year old English grandmothers are not terrorists

Thats just what they want you to think. then bam. tea and crumpets everywhere. oh the humanity!

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Brave Guy (457657)]

The eternal optimist in me feels some will see this as a step too far.

Oh, I would think that's a fairly safe bet. The Information Commissioner will be all over it, and the public profile of his department is rising every time he speaks these days. The courts will be all over it, since blanket surveillance is going to be just a little difficult to reconcile with article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Opposition are already all over it, since any sort of claims about adequate data protection by the government are a joke thanks to repeated media coverage of numerous major leaks in recent months. Speaking of the media, they'll love this too, as it's another good opportunity to bash the government while it's down. And all of those are before we even get to the practical issues like who is going to pay for all of this and the overheads it would impose on service providers, presumably at their own expense if historical moves are anything to go by.

Finally, of course, we have the guy in the street who gets to vote, and he's becoming a lot more aware of privacy and data protection issues at the moment. Fortunately, the government will probably be so busy looking for a new Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer after the summer recess that they won't be able to do much about this, and they're toast at the next general election anyway since it's pretty hard to find any major group of voters they haven't seriously upset lately in one way or another.

Not necessarily a bad thing...

[Gat0r30y (957941)]

I've often wondered if there is a way to make disturbing draconian legislation like this and turn it around. I think that there is - radical transparency in government. Allow every government agency access to the public's SMS and email data, but in conjunction publish the SMS's and emails of every government employee, so the public has access to them. If there is no right to privacy, and they are doing nothing wrong, they should have nothing to fear right?
On another note completely - what is the over under on how long till this is abused (and they get busted)? I have 3 weeks.

Some software that you should look at

[apathy maybe (922212)]

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.

The opposition say...

[catalupus (695072)]

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.'"

An of course, once they are in power, they will stop the data logging? - or will they conveniently forget and keep it going?

Re:ISP Tape Storage

[BPPG (1181851)]

I wonder what would happen if somebody decided to record and archive all "incidents of data exchange" on the UK government's end, and then make that data publicly available?

I mean, obviously you'd want to avoid getting the public's data that the government is recording, otherwise they'd probably record you recording their records, and the feed back loop would cause BT workers to commit sepuku. On the other hand, would that be a bad thing?

Re:Open source it

[Original Replica (908688)]

Seriously, though, if you want to solve the problems of government intrusion, you gotta open source the government.

To make any significant change to the deeper power structures of any large government you need a revolution. People in positions of global scale aren't going to give up that power just because you have a lot of signatures on a petition. You cannot vote high ranking bureaucrats and lobbyists out of power. But for ordinary citizens to attempt to use force to uproot those currently in positions of power would require them to be "terrorists" (gasp!) The only way to take down a large modern government without warfare is to wait for it to collapse under it's own bloated weight like the USSR did.

Re:Nothing to hide == nothing to fear

[apathy maybe (922212)]

So you don't mind me watching you have sex (wait an anonymous coward posting shit on Slashdot, you don't have sex)? Masturbate? Bathe? Shit?

How about we set you up in a glass cage for a week in the middle of (say) Times Square?

Or, how about you read this article http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565 [ssrn.com] linked to by another Slashdotter at one time. You have to register to download it, but a fake email address works just as well.

But more to the point, you have got something to hide, everybody does. Who hasn't broken the law at one stage or another? Speeding? Jaywalked? Partaken of some illicit substance? Blasphemed? (You know why Mary was a virgin? She only had anal sex.) You get the idea, everyone is guilty of something, and that means everyone has something to hide from the government.

Re:I Hate British People

[by Anonymous Coward]

That's OK, we hate ourselves, too. That's one of our characteristics. In fact, I'm hating myself even for thinking this, let alone typing it in and posting it.