Home Sec: Web snoop law will snare PAEDOS, TERRORISTS The Home Secretary has defended her department's decision to resurrect net-snooping plans that were abandoned by the previous Labour government in 2009. Theresa May, writing in The Sun, finally put forward her opinion two days after the tabloid's sister paper – The Sunday Times – ran a story containing a small amount of …
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Of civil rights, I would think the European Courts will have something to say, this smacks of;
Nazi Germany
Soviet Russia
East German Stazi
China
Iran
and all the other tin pot dictatorships that like to keep people in their place.
And please don't say 'you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide'....
As will everything there will be a gradual slide, give an inch take a foot.
Its all about wanting control and it is disproportionate.
Sorry, but the legislation ISNT driven by the EU after all... (Churchill!!)
As far as I can work out, (and I have been asking questions!) the whole current grab for citizens digital data is an FBI push. (when I say I FBI, of course I mean FBI assisted by NSA advisors)
In the mid-nineties the FBI( & NSA) came to Europe because the FBI (& NSA) couldn't get the laws that they wanted for access to digital-data passed in the US Congress. FBI(NSA) were somehow able to persuade the UK Home Office and agencies to push the agenda to the European Union Conseil (Council of Europe) - this is basically the EU Prime Ministers meeting in Brussels.
Some sort of deal was evidently done with the European Commission Department General Justice and Home Affairs and a draft law was agreed and passed by "Consent by TELEX", avoiding at all cost any debate in the national parliaments. (the only person in the UK House of Lords who noticed this new EU law was told that it wasn't important and that he didn't need to study it and so could go back to sleep)
A memorandum of understanding was signed by (who are now) all the 27 governments of the EU, by CHINA, by Russia, by Australia, NZ and who knows who else?. The MOU is still top secret, many of the other ENFOPOL documents (just the file name for 'police co-operation' in the EU) are sensitive - but are available online here or there (statewatch is a great starting point)
We don't actually know who signed this 1990's MOU - but some governments follow it without having officially signed.
Now, EU courts, ECHR (European Commission on Human Rights) and the ECtHR(European Court of Human Rights) are entirely separate from the European Union and its Court of Justice and the Conseil/Council of Europe deliberations. The EU courts still DO have an important watchdog role.
note that the ECHR and the ECtHR were surprisingly set-up by Winston Churchill who was involved in the devising and drafting of the Convention on Human Rights. The current possibly ANTI human-rights grab for data is coming from UK - possibly still from FBI(NSA) pushing on the UK 'open-door' and is supposed to spread to the other EU states' Interior Ministries, which would have the help presumably from 'EC HOME" as it is now called.
I may well be wrong in all the above, I welcome GCHQ actually explaining the IMP/CCDP genesis from their point of view and how they think Sir Winston would view the current developments?
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Well it's a not a democracy either is it? Hasn't been for decades.
The powers that be have made both political sides the same in terms of nothing really changes no matter who is President. Whoever you vote for the government still gets in.
Look at the current President, other than the token Heathcare bill (to give the illusion of change) you'd could imagine that Bush was still in charge. Same old same old.
The politicians are not really in control. They haven't been in most western economies for a long time.
Shirley the PATRIOT Act, NDAA and many others (back at least as far as the 1947 National Security Act) have made the Constitution irrelevant; you've merely swallowed the patriotic kool-aid^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpropaganda that says that it and the BoR have any real relevance any more. Even Dubya said it was "just a goddamned piece of paper".
The US is nowadays essentially a corporatist plutocracy - look up what Mussolini (allegedly) said about corporatism and fascism...
No big, central database? I expect the Tories and Labour to mess with civil liberties, looks like the LibDems are no different!
Who needs a big central database, that's so 20th century, distributed databases in the cloud is more like it, especially when they'll be monitoring all traffic 24/7 in real time. Saying there will be no big central database is a weaselly cop-out.
Quick rule of thumb - if a politician mentions "terrorists" or "paedophiles", they are lying to you, trying to scare you, or trying to screw you. Or even more likely, all three
This is indeed very odd. The feeling seems to be that this process is driven by GCHQ, but you are quite correct that it will inevitably mean their work becomes much harder.
Perhaps the spooks are as stupid as their political masters. (To be fair, there was quite a lot of evidence in support of that view at the time of the Iraq war.) In which case, can we have our money back? It is clearly wasted if it is being spent on these idiots.
Agreed.
Where does SSL fit into all of this? If you enable it as default on Twitter and Facebook, then what can a snoop reveal except that you visited the site? It couldn't reveal which pages you visited, what messages you wrote and read, and so on, so what the hell is the point?
Unless SSL is an open book to those in the know...?
Google "CNNIC certificate authority"
Essentially, GCHQ sets up a CA (or surreptitiously obtains assistance from one or more established CAs) and gets its root certificate installed in (i.e. trusted by) $ALL_THE_POPULAR_CLIENTS (IE, Firefox, Outlook, Thunderbird, K9, Chrome). Then, when they want to see what you're doing on Facebook, they issue a bogus certificate for a proxy they control and poison your DNS or use NAT to ensure you go via their proxy, rather than a legitimate Facebook server. You'll get the normal SSL "yellow lock" in your browser, and everything will look fine, but they can see (and optionally modify) anything sent and received.
Yes, this is how the Ministry of Defence scans SSL encrypted material at the interface between its internal network and the Internet. It looks to the user as if it's a secured link, but the content scanner at the boundary can tell if one is sending out classified material.
Anon., because.
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The Home Sec said "Last year, police smashed a major international child pornography website based in Lincolnshire. They then used internet data analysis to find other suspected paedophiles,"
And all this with the existing legislation - a perfect demonstration of why we don't need new laws, straight from the horses arse^h^h^h^hmouth.
Those of us who know even just a little bit about how computers and the interwebz tubes work clearly know she is talking out her USB socket.
However your average Sun reader sees the words "peado terrorist" and thinks "well yeah it's a good idea init guv, anything to catch those nasty peados, you get me!" while nursing off a stiffy caused by looking at some barely legal bint with her jugs out on page-three.
I'd like to see Theresa May on page-three, I'd use it as loo paper, then it'd be classed as extreme porn.
"Well thanks a bunch - now I can't get that out of my mind. Arrghhh!!!!"
I can't work out if that is a good thing or a bad thing!
I still honestly believe there is a demand out there for a Tory fetish/porn website. Conservative-Contacts.com? Blue-Rinse-Movies.xxx? Tory-Chief-Whips.xxx? Two-Ministers-One-Policy.xxx? Just a few ideas I'm toying with.
The public is being so screwed by these guys, there's bound to be a few people idea who get off on it.
"I still honestly believe there is a demand out there for a Tory fetish/porn website. "
There's definitely something about that head-girl-at-her-public-school thing that I imagine has many a Tory supporter reaching for their gimp mask and eagerly submitting to a bit of extreme discipline.
Just make sure it's not hosted in the UK of course.
"I want to see paedos and terrorists and criminals arrested and I think this is the way to do it" says Temptress Theresa on Page Three of your Soaraway Sun...
Unfortunately, whilst most Page Three stunners might have an excuse for not understanding the subject, you'd expect the Home Secretary to have at least been briefed by someone who *does* comprehend the fact that this sort of mass data troughing will create more problems than it solves whilst the people they're trying to catch switch to communication methods that are much more difficult to trace.
So essentially I need to find a state with slack internet and pornography laws that is sympathetic to a bit of "Iron Lady Garden" and "Cottaging for badgers on Hampstead heath"!
I wonder where that could be?
And before I go, I must say I am very impressed to see that Firefox's spell checker includes the word "cottaging" in it's dictionary - you just dont get such perviness with closed source software products! It's a shame the word "Firefox's" isint in their dictionary though!
"And before I go, I must say I am very impressed to see that Firefox's spell checker includes the word "cottaging" in it's dictionary - you just dont get such perviness with closed source software products! "
A little homage to Alan Turning perhaps?
Ever since I saw a rather delightful interview with a women dev who described the OO paradigm with an analogy involving "Bottoms and tops" I've been less surprised about such matters.
After all what is the Internet made for?
"There's definitely something about that head-girl-at-her-public-school thing that I imagine has many a Tory supporter reaching for their gimp mask and eagerly submitting to a bit of extreme discipline."
Just to be clear I have *no* problem with anyone of any political persuasion pursuing any interests with any *consenting* adults (with or without a gimp mask :) ).
It's not my business.
And frankly it should not be the business of *any* government either.
"They then used internet data analysis to find other suspected paedophiles,"
I wonder how many of the suspected paedophiles were actual paedophiles. The quote doesn't mention whether they were guilty, or merely innocent bystanders drawn in by analysts who thought they looked suspicious.
Im cool with this once the official secrets act is dropped, and every elected official and every one employed and known to them has all of their electronic communications dumped directly to an open government website.
BTW, why are democratic governments so scared of their citizens that they need to behave like dictators?
Because the country is massively in debt and the cuts haven't really started to bite yet. Once they do then the aforementioned citizens might show their displeasure. It would therefore be prudent to ensure such avenues as were used across a number of Arab countries are not open to them. BTW, it's probably not an initiative coming from the government so much as the civil service. Although I'm sure there are plenty of government members who didn't really need persuading - just as was probably the case with the previous lot. Now that I've identified myself online as either a conspiracy theorist nutcase or a dangerous perceptive intellectual I'm wondering if, in either case, I have nothing to fear. Oh well, keep calm and carry on I suppose.
I was thinking almost the same thing about Phorm style spying. Is this ex-Phorm people who are partly behind this who are coming back with their new business model version 2, where they lobby government and the home office to introduce and use Phorm style spying on everyone. Also by getting it supported on the side of the government, they earn a lot of money from that and then they also find it easier to go back to the ISP's to add a sweetener to them to introduce spying so they also gain advertising money from spying on all of us. This way government and business can totally screw over our privacy for their profit in both more money from us and more power over us.
Of course to block that move, we all go encrypted through the ISP's, but that will take time and a fight as they will wheel out their nothing to hide ploy once again and try to legislate and demonise encrypted connections as only used by bad people.
Unfortunately I think we have got to the point where the people in power have shown enough to prove they cannot be trusted long term with us all keep using unencrypted connections any longer. We are already there for example with mobile phone companies who blatantly violate net neutrality at will to squeeze more money out of people (For example, mobile company Three charges £10 per month tethering to a laptop on top of £15 a month “All you can eat Internet access” on your phone. So you can stream videos to your phone at £15 a month but you have to pay £25 a month if you want to download emails to you laptop through your phone. Its crazy, it makes no sense, other than a way to squeeze more money out of people whilst giving nothing in return. Data is data, yet Three think its ok for us to download a 100MB video from Youtube, but not ok for us to download a 100kB email to our laptop without us having to pay £10 a month extra?! … We need to treat all ISP's as pipes where they don't know at all what is traveling through that pipe, because its encrypted in such a way as to prevent them spying on the data.
I think unencrypted connections have got to come to an end for all but totally non-essential connections. We place too much trust in governments and companies by not encrypting connections and they cannot be trusted. They keep showing there is no end to their power hungry greed driven duplicity. They are determined to get more more more. We need to stand up and draw a line against them and say enough is enough, no more, in every way we can. This has got to stop.
That's what they always say.
"If you're not in favour of <insert intrusive or oppressive law here> then YOU'RE A PEDO!"
Or communist, conspiracy theorist, partisan, socialist, non-patriot, witch, heretic etc etc
Why bother making an argument when the fucking monkeys get in line with simple trigger words?
Ah but they won't. A large number of false positives, when acted upon and publicised as though simply positives, is how the desired climate of fear is created and maintained. There are numerous examples of prior art in both history and fiction.
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