UK Government Backtracks On Black Box Snooping 32
judgecorp writes "On the day the so-called snooper's charter was included in proposed UK legislation, as part of the Queen's Speech, it has emerged that the government is already backtracking on the controversial idea of making ISPs install black boxes to collect traffic and pass it to the authorities. The bill is not yet in a draft form, and TechWeek has learned there is a lot of maneuvering behind the scenes."
you don't understand how politics works (Score:5, Insightful)
You never ask for what you want. You ask for more than what you want, and pretend to have made concessions. You end up with exactly what you want.
Also, the big ISPs have so many government contracts that they will happily cooperate voluntarily. If you want privacy, you would do well to use a small ISP - particularly ones like A&A with a vocally anti-censorship and anti-snooping agenda.
Re:you don't understand how politics works (Score:5, Informative)
Re:you don't understand how politics works (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not just politics, that's Negotiation 101, which applies to far more than politics. The difference is that in most other negotiations you don't want to be so outrageous that the other party walks away, whereas in 21st century politics that can be a bonus that makes your base happy.
Or, as I like to put it, "If you want a puppy, ask for a horse."
Re:ask for a horse (Score:2)
If we ask for a Horse can we get the OMG Ponies! as a permanent slashdot skin?
Re:you don't understand how politics works (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm. So that's what I've been doing wrong all these years. I tell people exactly what I want (read: programmer needs), and they think it's the beginning of negotiations, instead of the end of them.
Re: (Score:1)
It's also important to come up with false bases for your position and get people arguing over the details.
For example, in the UK there is no problem with government "overspending" on public services beyond PFI contracts (the pension age was too low but that's already being fixed). We've had a century since the National Insurance Act 1911 of unprecedented improvement in the life of the average Briton. What we do have, however, is a lack of the government support for infrastructure and education and promotion
Re:you don't understand how politics works (Score:4, Insightful)
You never ask for what you want. You ask for more than what you want, and pretend to have made concessions. You end up with exactly what you want.
True, although in any civilised country the mere act of asking for such a broad sweeping surveillance system should be sufficient grounds for the requestor to be immediately removed from office for being some kind of batshit crazy voyeur/control freak. How would we have reacted 20 years ago if the Home Office had asked that the Post Office open every letter sent, and photocopy it before sending it to its intended destination? We'd think them crazy. This request for the automatic routing of data to GCHQ is no less crazy than this, so in this case there should not be negotiation or haggling - just the immediate sacking of the person requesting this stuff.
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This request for the automatic routing of data to GCHQ is no less crazy than this, so in this case there should not be negotiation or haggling - just the immediate sacking of the person requesting this stuff.
If that's what the public wanted, that's what it would get.
And when I say "wanted" I mean really wanted to the point where it was politically untenable to not-fire someone.
But the reality is that most shitty legislation is created with "a lot of maneuvering behind the scenes" and not presented to the public until the votes have been more or less lined up.
Is it really a democratic process when the legislators and businesses are "maneuvering behind the scenes" without public input?
Doubt (Score:1)
I would guess it's almost entirely due to money, the price the ISPs want in order to retain the information, perhaps someone has hit them with a clue stick about how little useful, terror or crime related information they are likely to harvest, but who knows the vested interest in collecting the data, not only to have the data but the gigantic amount of computing power and storage required, there is a lot of gold in them thar hills.
Sudden outbreak of common sense? (Score:3)
Maybe they realized that it would just push people to use more encryption and make the security service's job even harder.
Re:Sudden outbreak of common sense? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a problem I have with a lot of these laws including those in the US - they're getting implemented with the intention whether explicitly stated or not that they be used for minor crimes like file sharing. Yet there's a price to these laws - the effect is what you state, and it means the criminals they really should be catching, i.e. child abusers, become much harder to catch, whilst the file sharers continue sharing.
There's a kind of an unspoken honour system on the internet in a way - if you let people file share etc. then those with the abilities will not attack your sites, they will not produce anonymisers, they will not produce technology that disrupts law enforcement, but if you start going after every petty little crime online like that, then expect a response that will benefit file sharers, terrorists, and paedophiles alike. The authorities need to realise that - that the real winners of a war between authorities and those who commit minor crimes will be people who commit serious crimes.
Perhaps this really isn't about minor crimes, but excuse me if I get the feeling that it wouldn't take long for this snooping charter to be used for exactly that which would only crate an arms race which slow moving leglislatures can never hope to win.
Re:Sudden outbreak of common sense? (Score:4, Informative)
At a population level, it isn't really the existence or nonexistence of a tool that matters as much as its availability to laypeople. As long as you don't exert any overt pressure, even relatively tiny barriers to use(whether inherent to the technology, because of common ignorance, or because of UIs that uphold the finest stereotypes concerning why programmers aren't UI experts) will keep people away in droves. The only ones bothering will be privacy geeks and atypically clueful criminals, both of which are relatively scarce.
If you do exert overt pressure, you create a substantial incentive for even people who care nothing about technology to know about some basic circumvention tools. This creates not only a wider skill base; but a much larger pool of basically-legitimate users among which to hide.
If you block facebook, even people who are socially obligated to dislike geeks will take a sudden interest in the otherwise alien notion of 'proxy servers'...
BACKDOORS - they delight in inhaling your fumes! (Score:1)
BACKDOORS in YOUR hardware & software!
You'd be surprised how much hardware and software have back doors built into them, much of it legally.
GOOGLE: Cisco routers back doors
and you'll find hours of reading material alone just for one company.
WIKILEAKS: published information on dozens of companies making spyware for hardware and software and selling it to governments.
When is the last time you checked the firmware on your PCI devices and network card?
Your router?
Dumped and checksummed/debugged your BIOS la
What the hell Britain? (Score:4, Informative)
Don't you know how these things are supposed to be done now?
You do it illegally, then after the fact pass laws retroactively granting immunity. Noobs.
Room 641A [wikipedia.org]
Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act [wikipedia.org]
"It's particularly important for Congress to provide meaningful liability protection to those companies now facing multibillion-dollar lawsuits only because they are believed to have assisted in efforts to defend our nation, following the 9/11 attacks."
etc etc
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It will be back (Score:2)
Encrypted VPN (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Encrypted VPN (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just to add to the list: encrypt your emails. Get in to the habit. Last time I checked, most of the people tend to use envelopes for the rl letters, so why should not people use digital protection for their emails?
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the queen never backtracks... (Score:4, Insightful)
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We are at war with Eurasia...we have always been at war with Eurasia
Orwell is all well and good, but things are stacking up to be much more Huxley-ish.
in case it does get through, here's the solution (Score:1)
step 1 setup web server that only delivers goatse or 2girls1cup with random filenames, compression rates, pixel size, and cropping ratio's
step 2 setup a proxy in the UK
step 3 run a script to query the web-server every second
step 4 laugh maniacally while you imagine all those twits who'll be forced to watch goatse all day long =D
Wait for it... (Score:1)
George Orwell [wikipedia.org] was English.
For what it's worth.
Which was apparently not much. :(