6 ms·

Email and web monitoring laws 'to be brought in soon' [UK]

61 points by earnubs 15y ago

colinhowe 15y ago
sigh In preparation, where's the best place for a startup hacker to emigrate to nowadays?
- DanBC 15y ago
  The new laws don't grant access to content. And GCHQ already have access to this data, the new law just makes access 'real time' rather than retrospective.
  - colinhowe 15y ago
    "The information commissioner said public bodies not involved in dealing with serious crime or national security, such as the Department for Work and Pensions, should have to apply to a court before access was granted." I don't have much of a problem with GCHQ using it... but the Department for Work and Pensions? Also, a lack of warrants is concerning. It feels very much like a law that could be exploited by anyone.
    - mseebach 15y ago
      > Also, a lack of warrants is concerning. It's right there in the bit you quoted: > the Department for Work and Pensions, should have to apply to a court before access was granted
    - DanBC 15y ago
      DWP handles benefits. Organised crime is involved in a lot of benefit fraud. Allowing the DWP to have access to anything without a warrant would be bad. Allowing them to have access to destination / address data with a warrant might be okay. Allowing them to have access to content data is probably a bad thing. I think I'd prefer Serious Organised Crime Agency to all of it; and I'd prefer some better oversight. Whether that's a warrant (good) or a chief inspector of another force (bad) remains to be seen. Don't forget that this is, essentially, just an extension to things like RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) to cover new forms of communication. I agree that we need to be careful that they don't kludge in things like "looking at the content is fine" or "you don't need warrants".
- swombat 15y ago
  Not a definitive answer, but I quite liked the fact that my home country, Switzerland, apart from being neutral and having a government that doesn't have executive power centralised in a single person's hands, and having a relatively sane reaction to violent acts (see the Zug shooting, for example), also recently made a public statement that they did not feel that the issues that the movie/music industries face warranted any change of fair use or internet monitoring laws.
mootothemax 15y ago
It seems like there's little escape these days. I'm from the UK originally, and my adoptive country, Poland, yesterday had a story written about how it's the most surveilled country in the EU: http://thenews.pl/1/9/Artykul/95154,Poles-still-under-watchful-eye-of-Big-Brother http://thenews.pl/1/9/Artykul/95154,Poles-still-under-watchf... All round, rather depressing.
Hates_ 15y ago
Sign the petition to scrap plans to monitor all emails and web Usage. Only 4k signatures so far. http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/32400 http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/32400
- Sodaware 15y ago
  I would also advise writing to your local MP (find them here http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ http://www.theyworkforyou.com/). It's easier to ignore 4,000 digital signatures than 4,000 physical letters. It wouldn't hurt to call them either.
- MattBearman 15y ago
  Just signed it, this really is disturbing. I find myself thinking "I don't want to live on this planet anymore" more and more often these days. Not sure if I'm just getting older, or the world really is going to shit.
- ntmartin 15y ago
  "Actually only 528 so far at this time." Sorry the total is 4,384. For some reason the site only shows you the latest number after signing. (Edit: Correcting previous assertion.)
- nodata 15y ago
  And only 5 222 now. We need 95 THOUSAND more signatures.
buro9 15y ago
I'm actively encouraging the users of the sites I run to encrypt everything. I'm giving advice in private messages about how to use Truecrypt (especially when using Dropbox or any remote backup or cloud sync service), what a VPN is and how to use Relakks or IPredator, etc. Just basic things, yet the reaction has been extremely positive. One of the sites I run exists by donations, and just for giving this advice 1 person donated £100 to the running of the site because in his words "No-one else is telling me to encrypt or helping me.". The big glaring omission in all of this is email. We all want a secure email system, and one that doesn't involve locking yourself into a single provider (Hushmail), and yet can co-exist with sending email to recipients on webmail and corporate solutions. Talk about a big hole in the market. I've not pitched this to my users as "here's how to pirate", it's just been "privacy is core to democracy, encryption protects your privacy". And additionally I've argued to them that if they were amongst the people who turned their Twitter avatars green last year for Iran, then by not using encryption they leave encryption to "terrorists, criminals and dissidents", who cares for the first two, but if you care for the last you'll encrypt too to ensure that their dissenting opinion can be voiced safely in private. I got the idea for telling my users all of this from HN, and specifically a link to a Canadian site: http://encrypteverything.ca/index.php/Main_Page http://encrypteverything.ca/index.php/Main_Page Then I also shared links to: https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere https://www.relakks.com/?lang=eng https://www.relakks.com/?lang=eng https://ssd.eff.org/tech/encryption https://ssd.eff.org/tech/encryption I truly think that the best response that the people of Britain can give to these proposals is to encrypt everything and take away from the government the ability to pervasively spy on their own populace like this. With most governments and corps it always feels like that ask for a mile, and when we object they concede half a mile. We're happy, but then they do this a few times and they get to where they wanted to be. What better way to halt this for good than to encrypt everything. Now, if someone could just give us email v2, secure by default. I'd happily pay for it. Just make it work, and make it open source and aim for it to be standard... don't give me another closed service to achieve it.
- alan_cx 15y ago
  A genuine question and not a smart arse comment: Does any of this really stop the snooping, or is it just giving a false sense of security? Then, would deploying all this on a day to day basis suggest to a paranoid snooper that one is hiding something than there for a legitimate target for more snooping?
topbanana 15y ago
The proposal would allow the UK government to query, without a court order, logs of who talked to whom and when. They would have to apply for a court order to see the content. It would compel UK based startups to keep a log of all this data, which of course costs time an money, reducing the UK's competitiveness.
nodata 15y ago
Taking this back in time a bit, the idea that you would monitor everybody's letters and where they go would never be allowed. Because the monitoring is out of site, and cheap in terms of man power, now it's allowed. I really find it amazing.
- mseebach 15y ago
  No, this was always accepted in times of war. The notion we have to fight is that of perpetually being at war (terrorists! child pornographers! pirates!).
- DanBC 15y ago
  ECHELON is pretty old and is much worse than current suggested laws. ECHELON looked at content, not just destination.
- weavejester 15y ago
  It's worth pointing out that this law would allow monitoring of communications with a warrant. The idea that communications can be monitored with oversight is not a new one. Law enforcement departments have been able to tap phones with a warrant for decades. Edit: Hm, the article is actually a little unclear on whether or not a warrant is needed. At the top it says it is, and then in the middle it quotes a bunch of people saying it isn't...
  - kamjam 15y ago
    It would also reportedly allow intelligence officers to access emails, calls and texts as they happen, without a warrant, rather than retrospectively. I think previously they could only start monitoring after a court order had been granted (same as listening in on your phone calls) whereas now they record everything and (presume) would have historical access once the court order had been granted...
  - rlpb 15y ago
    They're saying that the contents will be only accessible with a warrant, but metadata will be accessible without a warrant.
tgandrews 15y ago
Surely this opens the police open for discrimination law suits. http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-hereby-resign http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-hereby-resign
gst 15y ago
How do all those European data retention laws apply to US companies? Do US companies (with offices in Europe, but servers in the US) need to adhere to those data retention laws, or is it safe to use US-based services?
ksajadi 15y ago
Now you can observe the difference in Europe and US tech journalism. When an anti-internet bill (SOPA) was being discussed in the US, any noteworthy US journalist - those with and without vested interests in the matter - were talking about it very loudly. Compare with the similar situation where TC Europe and others are happily and silently carrying on their daily duties of - mostly - using their media outlet for their own personal short sighted benefits.
- wavephorm 15y ago
  I didn't hear anything about SOPA on cable television news.
  - ksajadi 15y ago
    And I wasn't talking about cable TV. I was talking about tech writers.
- kamjam 15y ago
  It only became news when the likes of Google and Wikipedia decided to protest and carry out a blackout... (I am not in the US, but this is what I have read)
  - ksajadi 15y ago
    No. Google and Wikipedia decided to protest when everyone from Tim O'Reily to Mike Arrington protested and wrote against it. It is hard to compare that with articles from the likes of Mike Butcher, because he hasn't written any on the subject - yet.
alan_cx 15y ago
So, mega snooping, well publicised. Any serious terrorist or lentil rights protester would encrypt or simply stop using electronics for communication. That leaves the rest of us being snooped on for no terrorist or what ever reason. I'm a thick idiot and I can work that out, so presumably the government can too. This is not about terror and all that scare story stuff, its population surveillance. Some how these governments need reminding that we the people are supposed to be the boss. They serve us, not the other other way round.
_djo_ 15y ago
This needs to be resisted. A nearly-identical law, the Recording and Interception of Communications Act (RICA), was enacted in 2002 in South Africa. While in theory it contained all the legal protections that have been proposed for the UK legislation, in practice it has been badly abused. Between 2006 and 2010 just one of the South African government's regional interception centres (of which there are at least four and potentially many more) carried out over 3 million legal interceptions, a number which is known to have increased since then. Subsequent leaks to the media have revealed that even this is a drop in the ocean; illegal interceptions are performed routinely and are easily hidden from oversight amongst the millions of legal interceptions performed every year. Looking at the numbers involved, it's not unreasonable to assume that every single connected South African will have their communications intercepted at some point, sometimes in illegal interceptions with no official control over the data collected. In fact, there have been examples of staff inside the interception centres being bribed by business rivals, spouses and others to spy on innocent citizens. I see no reason why the UK will be immune to these types of abuses, despite having a less corruptible civil service. This kind of power in the hands of poorly-monitored government intelligence agencies is always a bad idea.
tantalor 15y ago
Wait, wasn't this an April Fools' Day joke?
drucken 15y ago
If you think this has not already been implemented in the UK for a LONG time, i.e. pre-RIPA 2000, then you are very naive. Ask anyone who has ever worked on infrastructure at a large UK ISP or exchange (e.g. LINX). Copious secret services systems are already used. The key difference, the key burden that is being (publicly) demanded in 2012 by the services is real-time! Presumably, this was such a burden to the overall infrastructure of the majority of UK ISPs that they just pushed back when requested... hence the new law proposals.
- aes256 15y ago
  > Ask anyone who has ever worked on infrastructure at a large UK ISP or exchange (e.g. LINX). Copious secret services systems are already used. Go on...

61 points by earnubs 15y ago

colinhowe 15y ago

sigh In preparation, where's the best place for a startup hacker to emigrate to nowadays?

DanBC 15y ago
The new laws don't grant access to content. And GCHQ already have access to this data, the new law just makes access 'real time' rather than retrospective.
- colinhowe 15y ago
  "The information commissioner said public bodies not involved in dealing with serious crime or national security, such as the Department for Work and Pensions, should have to apply to a court before access was granted." I don't have much of a problem with GCHQ using it... but the Department for Work and Pensions? Also, a lack of warrants is concerning. It feels very much like a law that could be exploited by anyone.
  - mseebach 15y ago
    > Also, a lack of warrants is concerning. It's right there in the bit you quoted: > the Department for Work and Pensions, should have to apply to a court before access was granted
  - DanBC 15y ago
    DWP handles benefits. Organised crime is involved in a lot of benefit fraud. Allowing the DWP to have access to anything without a warrant would be bad. Allowing them to have access to destination / address data with a warrant might be okay. Allowing them to have access to content data is probably a bad thing. I think I'd prefer Serious Organised Crime Agency to all of it; and I'd prefer some better oversight. Whether that's a warrant (good) or a chief inspector of another force (bad) remains to be seen. Don't forget that this is, essentially, just an extension to things like RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) to cover new forms of communication. I agree that we need to be careful that they don't kludge in things like "looking at the content is fine" or "you don't need warrants".
swombat 15y ago
Not a definitive answer, but I quite liked the fact that my home country, Switzerland, apart from being neutral and having a government that doesn't have executive power centralised in a single person's hands, and having a relatively sane reaction to violent acts (see the Zug shooting, for example), also recently made a public statement that they did not feel that the issues that the movie/music industries face warranted any change of fair use or internet monitoring laws.

mootothemax 15y ago

It seems like there's little escape these days. I'm from the UK originally, and my adoptive country, Poland, yesterday had a story written about how it's the most surveilled country in the EU: http://thenews.pl/1/9/Artykul/95154,Poles-still-under-watchful-eye-of-Big-Brother http://thenews.pl/1/9/Artykul/95154,Poles-still-under-watchf... All round, rather depressing.

Hates_ 15y ago

Sign the petition to scrap plans to monitor all emails and web Usage. Only 4k signatures so far. http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/32400 http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/32400

Sodaware 15y ago
I would also advise writing to your local MP (find them here http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ http://www.theyworkforyou.com/). It's easier to ignore 4,000 digital signatures than 4,000 physical letters. It wouldn't hurt to call them either.
MattBearman 15y ago
Just signed it, this really is disturbing. I find myself thinking "I don't want to live on this planet anymore" more and more often these days. Not sure if I'm just getting older, or the world really is going to shit.
ntmartin 15y ago
"Actually only 528 so far at this time." Sorry the total is 4,384. For some reason the site only shows you the latest number after signing. (Edit: Correcting previous assertion.)
nodata 15y ago
And only 5 222 now. We need 95 THOUSAND more signatures.

buro9 15y ago

I'm actively encouraging the users of the sites I run to encrypt everything. I'm giving advice in private messages about how to use Truecrypt (especially when using Dropbox or any remote backup or cloud sync service), what a VPN is and how to use Relakks or IPredator, etc. Just basic things, yet the reaction has been extremely positive. One of the sites I run exists by donations, and just for giving this advice 1 person donated £100 to the running of the site because in his words "No-one else is telling me to encrypt or helping me.". The big glaring omission in all of this is email. We all want a secure email system, and one that doesn't involve locking yourself into a single provider (Hushmail), and yet can co-exist with sending email to recipients on webmail and corporate solutions. Talk about a big hole in the market. I've not pitched this to my users as "here's how to pirate", it's just been "privacy is core to democracy, encryption protects your privacy". And additionally I've argued to them that if they were amongst the people who turned their Twitter avatars green last year for Iran, then by not using encryption they leave encryption to "terrorists, criminals and dissidents", who cares for the first two, but if you care for the last you'll encrypt too to ensure that their dissenting opinion can be voiced safely in private. I got the idea for telling my users all of this from HN, and specifically a link to a Canadian site: http://encrypteverything.ca/index.php/Main_Page http://encrypteverything.ca/index.php/Main_Page Then I also shared links to: https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere https://www.relakks.com/?lang=eng https://www.relakks.com/?lang=eng https://ssd.eff.org/tech/encryption https://ssd.eff.org/tech/encryption I truly think that the best response that the people of Britain can give to these proposals is to encrypt everything and take away from the government the ability to pervasively spy on their own populace like this. With most governments and corps it always feels like that ask for a mile, and when we object they concede half a mile. We're happy, but then they do this a few times and they get to where they wanted to be. What better way to halt this for good than to encrypt everything. Now, if someone could just give us email v2, secure by default. I'd happily pay for it. Just make it work, and make it open source and aim for it to be standard... don't give me another closed service to achieve it.

alan_cx 15y ago
A genuine question and not a smart arse comment: Does any of this really stop the snooping, or is it just giving a false sense of security? Then, would deploying all this on a day to day basis suggest to a paranoid snooper that one is hiding something than there for a legitimate target for more snooping?

topbanana 15y ago

The proposal would allow the UK government to query, without a court order, logs of who talked to whom and when. They would have to apply for a court order to see the content. It would compel UK based startups to keep a log of all this data, which of course costs time an money, reducing the UK's competitiveness.

nodata 15y ago

Taking this back in time a bit, the idea that you would monitor everybody's letters and where they go would never be allowed. Because the monitoring is out of site, and cheap in terms of man power, now it's allowed. I really find it amazing.

mseebach 15y ago
No, this was always accepted in times of war. The notion we have to fight is that of perpetually being at war (terrorists! child pornographers! pirates!).
DanBC 15y ago
ECHELON is pretty old and is much worse than current suggested laws. ECHELON looked at content, not just destination.
weavejester 15y ago
It's worth pointing out that this law would allow monitoring of communications with a warrant. The idea that communications can be monitored with oversight is not a new one. Law enforcement departments have been able to tap phones with a warrant for decades. Edit: Hm, the article is actually a little unclear on whether or not a warrant is needed. At the top it says it is, and then in the middle it quotes a bunch of people saying it isn't...
- kamjam 15y ago
  It would also reportedly allow intelligence officers to access emails, calls and texts as they happen, without a warrant, rather than retrospectively. I think previously they could only start monitoring after a court order had been granted (same as listening in on your phone calls) whereas now they record everything and (presume) would have historical access once the court order had been granted...
- rlpb 15y ago
  They're saying that the contents will be only accessible with a warrant, but metadata will be accessible without a warrant.

tgandrews 15y ago

Surely this opens the police open for discrimination law suits. http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-hereby-resign http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-hereby-resign

gst 15y ago

How do all those European data retention laws apply to US companies? Do US companies (with offices in Europe, but servers in the US) need to adhere to those data retention laws, or is it safe to use US-based services?

ksajadi 15y ago

Now you can observe the difference in Europe and US tech journalism. When an anti-internet bill (SOPA) was being discussed in the US, any noteworthy US journalist - those with and without vested interests in the matter - were talking about it very loudly. Compare with the similar situation where TC Europe and others are happily and silently carrying on their daily duties of - mostly - using their media outlet for their own personal short sighted benefits.

wavephorm 15y ago
I didn't hear anything about SOPA on cable television news.
- ksajadi 15y ago
  And I wasn't talking about cable TV. I was talking about tech writers.
kamjam 15y ago
It only became news when the likes of Google and Wikipedia decided to protest and carry out a blackout... (I am not in the US, but this is what I have read)
- ksajadi 15y ago
  No. Google and Wikipedia decided to protest when everyone from Tim O'Reily to Mike Arrington protested and wrote against it. It is hard to compare that with articles from the likes of Mike Butcher, because he hasn't written any on the subject - yet.

alan_cx 15y ago

So, mega snooping, well publicised. Any serious terrorist or lentil rights protester would encrypt or simply stop using electronics for communication. That leaves the rest of us being snooped on for no terrorist or what ever reason. I'm a thick idiot and I can work that out, so presumably the government can too. This is not about terror and all that scare story stuff, its population surveillance. Some how these governments need reminding that we the people are supposed to be the boss. They serve us, not the other other way round.

_djo_ 15y ago

This needs to be resisted. A nearly-identical law, the Recording and Interception of Communications Act (RICA), was enacted in 2002 in South Africa. While in theory it contained all the legal protections that have been proposed for the UK legislation, in practice it has been badly abused. Between 2006 and 2010 just one of the South African government's regional interception centres (of which there are at least four and potentially many more) carried out over 3 million legal interceptions, a number which is known to have increased since then. Subsequent leaks to the media have revealed that even this is a drop in the ocean; illegal interceptions are performed routinely and are easily hidden from oversight amongst the millions of legal interceptions performed every year. Looking at the numbers involved, it's not unreasonable to assume that every single connected South African will have their communications intercepted at some point, sometimes in illegal interceptions with no official control over the data collected. In fact, there have been examples of staff inside the interception centres being bribed by business rivals, spouses and others to spy on innocent citizens. I see no reason why the UK will be immune to these types of abuses, despite having a less corruptible civil service. This kind of power in the hands of poorly-monitored government intelligence agencies is always a bad idea.

tantalor 15y ago

Wait, wasn't this an April Fools' Day joke?

drucken 15y ago

If you think this has not already been implemented in the UK for a LONG time, i.e. pre-RIPA 2000, then you are very naive. Ask anyone who has ever worked on infrastructure at a large UK ISP or exchange (e.g. LINX). Copious secret services systems are already used. The key difference, the key burden that is being (publicly) demanded in 2012 by the services is real-time! Presumably, this was such a burden to the overall infrastructure of the majority of UK ISPs that they just pushed back when requested... hence the new law proposals.

aes256 15y ago
> Ask anyone who has ever worked on infrastructure at a large UK ISP or exchange (e.g. LINX). Copious secret services systems are already used. Go on...