Email and web use 'to be monitored' under new laws

[Whitey]

The government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone in the UK under new legislation set to be announced soon.

Internet firms will be required to give intelligence agency GCHQ access to communications on demand, in real time.

The Home Office says the move is key to tackling crime and terrorism, but civil liberties groups have criticised it.
[bbc.co.uk...]

[Staffa]

This must be the BBC's April 1 joke.
When you read through it it is all too vague, debate if and when there is time; has to pass both houses before becoming law (which it should but here it seems more the cover the (un)likely hood of happening)

However, if it's a true story then their timing for publishing it is very badly chosen.

[Leosghost]

Doubleplus ungood...

[tigger]

no joke all over the radio now .....this will never happen

[lucy24]

Inquiring minds want to know: When did civil liberties groups have time to criticize* something that nobody had ever heard of before April 1?


* Or, if you prefer modern spellings, criticise.

[graeme_p]

Amazingly like the proposals they thought were a terrible breach of privacy when they were in opposition.

Those who favour this just want to keep trying till its passed.

They are really trying hard this time: they have mentioned both terrorism and paedophiles. Of course it will not help much with either, but its a great way of smearing those opposed to it.

[Frank_Rizzo]

Stable doors open, horse bolted
This is already taking place - it's being going on for years. The announcement now is to purely comply with EU laws, and to open up the way for further intrusion.

King Arthur's Weapon of Choice
In the 90's Labour created the Excalibur database. This system recorded (typed into a database) every speech made by every opposition politician. The database would allow Labour dark art masters to instantly rebuttal any attack made by the opposition.

* If a tory MP had a few years earlier said 'We must chop down the trees at Little Swarpington high street', but then in the future attacked Labour policy on tree felling, the Labour spin meisters would be able to embarrass the tory and chop his statement down in one.

Knowledge is Power
The tories - like any major world leader - now know how useful this is in order to stay in power. If they can see what the citizens are reading, tweeting, emailing, pictures they are posting on facebook then they have the power to suppress any threat to their government in the future.

* A 22 year old labour supporter is coming up the ranks and is destined to be the new councillor at A City. But the opposition know everything he wrote as a 17 year old. He talked drug references with his PS3 friends, he sex-texted a 16 year old in an inappropriate way whilst drunk ... You don't know that, I don't know that, an employee does not know that, but the leader of the opposition party in A City does and will use that knowledge to curtail the aspirations of that bright 22 year old political activist.

The Destination and not the Content
Whilst Jacqui Smith did want giant data silos to record everything the Lib Cons are saying that their CCDP will only record who is talking or emailing to who.

They will only know that Reverend Green sent 5 emails to Miss Scarlet on 10th March but will not know the contents of those emails. They will also know that Mrs White visited a cookery website, whilst Colonel Mustard visited dozens of plumbing websites over a 2 week period.

That is obtrusive in itself but they do want to go further. Any major world leader now wants Deep Packet Inspection technology to not only record what websites are visited but to read the contents of most internet traffic in near real time.

They want to know if Colonel Mustard was just looking for a new shower unit, or was he sizing up lead piping. Was Mrs White looking for cake recipes or was she trying to find out the best type of baking soda to mix with vinegar.

Deep packet inspection was trialled 6 years ago and it is in active use now. It is / was used in arab countries to change the contents of messages to suppress the opposition; it is used by the UK and US to intercept and read every piece of information on citizens.

[g1smd]

It won't take much to set up a network of peers that just exchange junk with each other all day long, filling their monitoring system with crap. They could never prove whether something was sent by hand or by a machine.

[engine]

Clegg criticises 'scaremongering' over web and email monitoring plans [bbc.co.uk]

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has said there has been "a lot of scaremongering" about plans for new email and web monitoring laws.

He said they were "not the draconian proposals they have been portrayed as", and safeguards for privacy and civil liberties were "absolutely guaranteed".

Home Secretary Theresa May has said the move will help bring "criminal paedophiles and terrorists" to justice.

But MPs and civil liberties campaigners have warned against the plan.

[g1smd]

I trust our expense fiddling, rent-boy fiddling, second-home fiddling, let the bankers do what they want as we don't care, stuff the ordinary citizen, overlords all the way.

Not.


If it does happen, it might at least expose a few more MPs internet p orn habits. Ah, no. They'll be exempt of course.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

G1smd, political figures and "people of interest" are always protected even when guilty of crime. This is aimed at you and me.

[johnhh]

If it happens .. I'll find somewhere else to live ...

[Frank_Rizzo]

You can run but you can not hide.

What if you moved to China. But you still needed to communicate with British websites or email users: you will still be intercepted.

I choose not to use gmail because the way google intercepts and profiles it. But I can not help that if I reply to a gmail user.

And as I said earlier: it is already happening.

* BT were using phorm DPI and are now using Huawei routers
* Virgin Media are using Huawei routers and network management
* TalkTalk are using Huawei for site (user) profiling
* Vodafone are using Bluecoat

You can see how this has come about and where it is going. Jacqui Smith wanted one giant data silo - possibly at GCHQ - but that is too costly.

The Lib Cons have realised they can break this up into smaller silos at each ISP and possibly at social media service sites such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Skype.

By placing the data silos at the ISP it reduces cost. But will the ISPs want to run this? Yes! The sweetener for them is that they will get to analyse all the data for marketing purposes.

This is what went on with Phorm. There were two payoffs. The government got to trial DPI monitoring at a stealth level, the ISP got to trial highly lucrative behavioral targeted advertising. Both desperately need this technology running right now.

[engine]

It's a fact of online life that our profile is somewhere. Each time you connect to the web the browsing data and e-mail must be passed from one service provider to another. That's the way it works. There are two aspects to this that are changing the ad-hoc way it was done in the past.

Security: I don't object to it from a security point of view, however, I do object to it without the proper safeguards in place.

Commercial: I do object to security monitoring by commercial businesses as I don't believe the safeguards are going to be in place. If it's just commercial data for relatively simple IBAs there should be opt-ins and opt-outs.

The only true way to avoid all this is to disconnect and go offline. Even so, that is harder than you think because certain data has been transported to the Net as part of public databases, such as phone numbers, electoral role records, etc. There are some opt-outs, but you need to look hard for the option.

[Frank_Rizzo]

The answer is to not have control freak and lobby infiltrated governments.

* Blair and Brown were psychotically paranoid about security and crime that they even wanted to profile babies in the womb.

* Cameron has strong links with media companies and google seem like they have their hand up there pulling the puppet strings. Connections: Steve Hilton, Rachel Whetstone.

* Wife of Minster John Penrose at DCMS is CEO of TalkTalk

* Ed Vaizey (DCMS, BIS) as with Louise Mensch seem to be heavily connected with the music industry

If you take all that lobbying and donor funding out of politics you can have a society that does not need to opt out of anything.

[londrum]

someone, somewhere, is reading this thread and noting down all our names. we better be careful what we say

[Leosghost]

Prescience prompted me to finally leave the UK in 87..the rise of the chav(ette) as an icon of popular culture came just after I did so..their entry in #10 was a few years later..this kind of "control" of the masses was inevitable there..

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I agree, phase one of implementing all the hardware seems complete and the push is currently on to force people to ditch user names in favor of real names.

[Leosghost]

[bbc.co.uk...]

[Staffa]

Anonymous claims responsibility for taking down government sites

Home Office, Ministry of Justice and No 10 sites fully operational after apparent denial-of-service attack by hacking collective

[guardian.co.uk...]

[aleksl]

will never happen? oh, the innocence of naive.

happened 60+ years ago.

ECHELON, UKUSA agreement. Whatever it is called now. US monitored UK's data, UK american, to circumvent the laws of no citizen monitoring by the gov.

Declassified UKUSA Signals Intelligence Agreement Documents Available

NSA PRESS RELEASE
24 June 2010
For further information contact:
NSA Public and Media Affairs, 301-688-6524

Today, the United Kingdom's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) are making publicly available declassified intelligence documents relating to the UKUSA (pronounced "Eu-Koo-SA") Agreement made between Great Britain and the United States. These declassified documents cover the period 1940–1956 and are available on the NSA website and the UK National Archives website.

[nsa.gov...]