UK Outlines Plan For Internet Black Boxes

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.'"

i hate this country

fuck this police state

I hate their lying ways

Reverse spam (reason):
As the cost of listening in on private communication is getting lowerer, we are seeing an effect similar to what we saw when mass-communication was made simple and cheap by email. The marginal cost of listening in on you as well, is close to zero, just as the cost of sending an additional email is close to zero for a spammer who has already sent a large amount of spam.

When that cost is sufficiently low, government has no reason to abstain from listening in. After all, if you look at every individual, you are bound to cover every criminal/hindu/terrorist/addict/pedofile/political opponent/whatever voter negative phrase.

We need to raise that cost in terms of the labour required. If they can not automate it, they will be forced to focus on the real enemies.

Re:I hate their lying ways

The cost of "listening" may drop to zero, but the cost to interpret the data is going to rise exponentially as the volume increases.

Re:I hate their lying ways

Your statement contains two steps: first listening, then interpreting. Apparently the politicians cannot think that far...

Re:I hate their lying ways

Facial recognition software, voice pattern recognition software, intelligent pattern finding software... the list of automated analysis technology developments goes on.

It's easy to discard the majority of meaningless stuff automatically these days so that humans can focus on a subset of the data with a higher signal to noise ratio, and the ability of software to isolate such a subset is getting better, meaning that SNR will only get better, reducing the costs per hit of human analysis.

Does anyone out there still believe the made up religious fanatic terrorist fundamentalist threat pretext any more? I don't know about you, it's pretty obvious to me that that threat was just made up by the US/UK/Australian governments as an excuse to carry out the biggest power grab in history.

If the threat really was from organized groups who are well-resourced and determined to derail Western society, you have to wonder how this would help. 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. The only conclustion that I can come to is that we have been lied to from the very beginning about the real reason behind all these security measures, and that so-called national security threats are nothing more than fabricated pretexts to consolidate the domination of the already rich and powerful even further, and to give their control a new, global reach.

To me, child porn and the terrorist threat are the equivalent of those malware popups. "Your country is infected with terrorism and/or child porn. Click here to install anti-terrorist / anti-child porn legislation, social controls and security-minded leaders who will protect you from the Bad Guys(tm)."

Win win situation

If they store all the raw data, they'll be downloading movies, music etc. Then they'll have to sue themselves... out of existence!

Re:Win win situation

So would they store the individual parts of BitTorrent traffic, or would they just automatically be a client and peer all torrents?

And what about https traffic? I believe the keys used to encrypt the data are normally thrown away after they are used. Is the gov't going to require all business's to forward the keys to these servers?

And given the current high-level of protection that the UK gov't applies to the data and computers under it's control, how soon will these servers be repurposed by hackers for denial-of-service attacks (as they have most excellent tubes connected to the internets)?

However, I am sure they will "catch" some idiot who sends out an email with "I'm so mad at this tax increase for this stupid new internet monitoring system, I want to bomb 11 Downing Street tomorrow at 9 AM".

This would have to get so expensive to do, and yet, only be able to catch the dumbest of terrorist (the ones that would text "Now, where do I set the bomb off again?").

Re:Win win situation

As it stands, they aren't going to store the raw data - just information on the endpoints.

This in itself is disturbing, since as Bruce Schneier points out [schneier.com], data mining of this sort is inherently flawed.

It strikes me that this is politically driven - i.e. that GCHQ has an ample supply of mathematicians who can see that this is useless, but that the idiocracy that is Neues Arbeit still believes the bullshit that their highly paid, poorly educated advisors spew out.

Trouble is, the idiots won't listen to sense, so we'll have to wait until the next election to vote in another lot of idiots who may or may not be as stupid as this lot.

Elections

The sooner we get to vote these clowns out, the better. Thr trouble is, the electorate have very short memories and either don't care about or don't remember such things when they get to vote. Mix in sundry wars, the collapse of banking, big brother mentality, greed etc etc and you have no good reason to let them stay BUT suddenly all the press report people rate Gordon Brown as our best hope to get out the financial state we're in. Ermm... who was in charge when the mess happened huh?
Last night on the radio there was a scary report on the UK radio where there has just been a Scottish by-election and they asked people why they voted the way they did and most camed out with excuses like 'my dad always voted for them', 'my wife told me to', 'they were the best of a bad bunch' etc.

Re:Elections

It is your (not mine, I'm not in UK) to remind other voters about these issues. In return they'll tell you about agriculture and financial problems that were not adressed and that you didn't really mind at the time.

Re:Elections

To be fair, there is a pretty strong history in Scottish politics that leads to replies like that. The Conservatives literally destroyed themselves in Scotland for life during the 1980s; it is unlikely they wil return in any numbers until my kids are of voting age. And do bear in mind that voters who stop and give a considered rationale for their voting decisions are unlikely to be good fodder for a sound-bite.

Good news

Fully encrypted internet coming in 3, 2, 1 ...

Threat escalation in a system whose knowledge limit gives the advantage to your opponent is dumb to the point of retardation.

Our sons will be amazed that once we used a non ecrypted web where anyone could read our personal messages.

Re:Good news

Fully encrypted net NOT coming in 3,2,1

For websites we have the political blockade of mixing up encryption, "trust", and money. Totally broken, totally beyond repair.

Then on the personal side you can't have a one-sided encrypted connection. You can't use encrypted jabber/email/etc because none of your friends or relatives do. In fact you can't use jabber at all because all your friends are locked into msn, or even use web services like facebook to communicate.

Everyone's screwed.

Re:Good news

Tor [torproject.org] might be helful here...

bad idea, perhaps?

Why do I get a sinking feeling whenever I hear the words 'government' and 'database' in the same sentence? It's made much, much worse when the words 'giant' and 'central' are between the two.

These clowns wouldn't be able to keep the data secure anyway, so soon enough any half-witted criminal will be able to do whatever they want with our connection logs.

It's enough to make you vote Tory. Ugh.

Most likely...

raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database
... and then left on a bus.

Re:Most likely...

Never underestimate the bandwith of a bus fully loaded with hard drives... ;-)

That sounds like a really good plan

But I've got a better plan. How about I give you the finger, and you give us our country back.

People "can't wait for ID cards"

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has hailed spectacular, record-breaking public demand for identity cards [today.com] and will allow people to pre-register within the next few months.

"I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they have nothing to hide and want me personally to have every detail of their lives and pressing ten-pound notes into my hands for their very own precious pink and blue card," she said, taking another hit of her pipe.

The first biometric cards are being issued this month to foreigners who can be forced into it. They will be issued to young people on a voluntary basis from 2010, per every teenager's dream of having their every movement tracked.

People applying for cards and passports from 2012 will have to provide fingerprints, photographs and a signature, which Ms Smith believes will create a market worth about £200m a year by the "mended windows" theory of economics. "It takes money that was being wasted on food and rent and puts it into circulation for the betterment of the whole economy, particularly our dear friends at EDS Capita Goatse."

The Home Office is talking to retailers and the Post Office about setting up booths to gather biometric data. "We're sure everyone would be happy with having their fingerprints taken at Tesco when they get their shopping."

In her speech, Ms Smith rejected claims handing enrolment over to private firms would compromise security. "We're introducing new certification authorities and so forth, which will mean that masses of data never leaves our offices and the BNP never gets a database of every immigrant in the country or anything like that."

UK vs. Australia

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?

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?

Look A Little Deeper?

My theory is the big IT contractors that work for the Government have probably pursuaded ministers that this is a good thing.

These IT contractors are mainly responsible for computerising the various departments within the Government (e.g. the NHS, "chipped" passports and implementing National ID Cards). These systems have cost the tax payer millions and millions of pounds and two of these are complete. There are probably just a handful of these companies (and close may have ties to the established "old boys" network) working for the Government and have shareholders(some are also Government ministers) to answer to.

This has been a major cash cow for these companies and now they need to persuade the Government to spend even more money to keep them afloat. As you can imagine the Government is a *huge* client to have on your order books, the last thing you want as a contractor is to lose your client - your survival may depend on it.

The contractor and Government minister(probably a shareholder) will influence Government policy and departments (e.g. the police think monitoring the internet is a "great" idea) to ensure this cash cow is alive and kicking and everybody "wins".
The police get a "mine" of "evidence" to "convict criminals", the Government can justify thier existance, the minister shares gain value (and maybe get a promotion), the contracter gets paid and of course the Government patronisingly "pats us on the head" and tell us they are looking after our best interests.

The whole thing stinks and will get worse while our Labour "Government" is in power.

Mod this up

I have mod points but would like to add to this. I can assure you that there are civil servants at the Home Office who know that this is stupid, though obviously to name them would be to put their jobs at risk. You are exactly right. Let's name the guilty parties. EDS. Cap Gemini. Fujitsu Siemens. A US company, a French company, and a Japanese/German company. We in the UK invented the digital computer (I'm not arguing about whether we beat the US or the Germans to it, but we invented it independently) and yet our infrastructure is entirely foreign owned. Yes of course these leeches want to repatriate our taxes.

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.

Erm...

Isn't this story wildly inaccurate, at least according to The Register [theregister.co.uk]?

Question Time

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.