8 ms·

Theresa May pushes for greater surveillance powers

76 points by RobAley 12y ago

bazzargh 12y ago
"Over a six-month period the National Crime Agency alone estimates that it has had to drop at least 20 cases as a result of missing communications data," she said in a speech on Tuesday. "Thirteen of these were threat-to-life cases in which a child was assessed to be at risk of imminent harm. This is utter nonsense. If evidence is absent, you cannot just assume that it would have helped your case.
- rlpb 12y ago
  And later on in the article: "Therefore, if the home secretary is stating that communications data was unavailable in specific cases, then that would suggest that a warrant was either not submitted to, or was rejected by, the companies in question. The question therefore should be why is this the case?" Or is she citing cases where the authorities did not seek a warrant, or the judiciary refused a warrant? And if so, why?
  - mike-cardwell 12y ago
    Presumably in some of those cases, the argument was that if they could scan a large number of peoples email for keywords they might have been able to find some evidence as to who was involved. You generally can't get a warrant to scan a large number of peoples email. Especially if that large number amounts to everyone. I don't agree that they should have the ability to do this, even if it saves lives. Because handing over this sort of power to a government only leads to the creation of a police state, which ultimately will probably ruin more lives. Freedom costs lives.
  - pjc50 12y ago
    This is Theresa May. Her statements will be either fabrications or horrendously contorted torture of a factual core into something wildly misleading. Remember the "I am not making this up" about the cat: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-15171980 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-15171980
- binarymax 12y ago
  I think we need to officially branch "Cogita de filiis" from Moral-high-ground to its own special place in the list of logical fallacies.
- Nanzikambe 12y ago
  It's a blatant appeal to paranoia, "think of the children!" essentially. It's mildly encouraging that at least the refrain has moved on from constant reminders of a nebulous terrorist threat to justify horrific changes .. Oh wait, it hasn't, from TFA: The home secretary says internet phone systems Skype and Facetime, as well as social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, have become "safe havens" for organised criminals and terrorists. sigh
  - nly 12y ago
    phew thankfully I'm safe from the terrorists on IRC, the newsgroups, my BBSs, and while sending unix wall messages.
dTal 12y ago
"The home secretary says internet phone systems Skype and Facetime, as well as social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, have become "safe havens" for organised criminals and terrorists." How exactly do you coordinate a terrorist attack over Twitter?
- arethuza 12y ago
  Twitter was blamed, rather unfairly, for helping the "organisation" of the riots in London a few years back: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/07/twitter-riots-how-news-spread http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/07/twitter-riots-how-... No doubt to our government rioters and terrorists are essentially the same thing...
- mike_hearn 12y ago
  ISIS routinely use Twitter to publish stuff. I don't personally think that's a problem, but I expect that's what she's talking about.
  - polymatter 12y ago
    I suspect that she hasn't given it much thought at all and just lumped all internet media together. I suspect if you told her ISIS was spreading their messages by using paper leaflets she would brand the post office as a 'safe haven' for terrorists too.
rlpb 12y ago
If this sort of thing bothers you, please support the Open Rights Group: http://www.openrightsgroup.org/ http://www.openrightsgroup.org/
- davb 12y ago
  I admire the work of the Open Rights Group, but it bothers me that they try to funnel you towards making Direct Debit (recurring, straight from your bank account) contributions and make it difficult to find the one-off donation button. Six links to recurring payments on https://www.openrightsgroup.org/join/ https://www.openrightsgroup.org/join/ and only one to one-off donations. And even after clicking on that, I have to scroll past more Direct Debit links to get to the one-off payment section. Perhaps I'm just cynical, but I never give charitable donations on a recurring basis. What if I don't support their actions in the future? Or I deem another cause more worthy, at a point in time, of my donations? I have to take action to cancel the Direct Debit. I know it's probably cheaper for them, and it encourages people to sign up and forget that they're contributing, but it feels too much like their website is pushing you towards that and your one-off contribution isn't good enough.
  - Already__Taken 12y ago
    On the other side, if I were running a business on donations I'd sleep far happier at night and concentrate on my goals a lot more with smaller steady recurring donations. As opposed to being on a constant funding drive.
  - ElliotH 12y ago
    Just for historical context, ORG itself was started by pledges of recurring donations of £5 a month. I'd guess that's why the notion of 'Join' is still front and centre.
  - ajb 12y ago
    I normally don't either, but in this case the value is that ORG gets more political clout as a membership organisation than it would as a pure donation funded one. They get to say, 'we represent X000 members, of whom x00 vote in your constituency'. As you note, this does mean you have to check whether what they are saying continues to represent you ,and resign if not. But this hassle does buy you something. Perhaps the web site should make that pitch rather than making the donate option more obscure, though.
dan_bk 12y ago
Modern communication technology also introduces more pressure on governments to behave correctly, which takes power away from them.
- collyw 12y ago
  I don't see much evidence of that.
Create 12y ago
We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world. This should not actually be a complicated inquiry. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/27/-sp-privacy-under-attack-nsa-files-revealed-new-threats-democracy http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/27/-sp-privac... Surveillance is not an end toward totalitarianism, it is totalitarianism itself. http://www.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/europe-24385999 http://www.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/europe-24385999
petepete 12y ago
Do they really think people planning to commit such crimes won't simply encrypt their data?
- rainforest 12y ago
  Playing devil's advocate a little, the value in the data from an intelligence perspective is probably in the network it uncovers. If you know a circle of people are regularly exchanging encrypted messages, then you can try to target one member and get them to compromise the group by turning them into an informant. Similarly, if you suspect someone, you can look at their records to discover the networks of potential conspirators, then fan-out for each member until you have a big picture of interactions between different networks. There's a great example of exploiting simple person-person interaction graphs to generate this information here: http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metada...
  - petepete 12y ago
    An incredibly interesting read, thanks!
  - esteth 12y ago
    If they're smart, it feels like the shady groups would try to push for adoption of something like BitMessage to stop this kind of side-channel information leakage.
Nanzikambe 12y ago
"The home secretary says internet phone systems Skype and Facetime, as well as social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, have become "safe havens" for organised criminals and terrorists" and .. "It would also have extended laws to cover new online forms of communication, such as Skype, and there were suggestions it could also give intelligence services real-time access to the data." In a world where recent controversy has caused a greater proportion of traffic to make use of increasingly strong encryption, it's hard not interpret this as a plaintive demand to subvert free enterprise, law and technology -- so that all the old fun toys work once again. What they really want is to render privacy and encryption moot by making it a legal requirement that any service that facilitates communication, in any form, be required to backdoor or log everything and provide it on a whim. And how're they going to sell it? The age old "think of the children" refrain. Class.
Fuxy 12y ago
Wow somebody get this lunatic lady out of power. First of all 20 cases over 6 months is not bad however they neglected to say what the total amount of cases processed over these 6 months was. Was it 100 or 100000? What is the reason they could not get the data did they not have enough evidence to get a warrant all cases are not created equal. "She dismissed as "nonsense" claims that the UK's secret listening post GCHQ is exploiting a technical loophole in legislation that allows it spy on YouTube and social media messages that are routed through foreign servers" Now that is just living in your own little bubble it's pretty obvious by now that this is true. I don't want delusional people making laws for me. Anybody supporting this will not be getting my vote that's for sure.
- herghost 12y ago
  The problem we have is that Labour have historically proven to be even more draconian and anti-libertarian than the Conservatives. The only realistic alternative the Conservative government is a Labour government. The best we can hope for (IMHO) is another coalition government - this time with Labour and the LibDems, such that we reverse some of the recent nonsense, but it doesn't escalate due to the semi-moderating liberal presence.
  - dTal 12y ago
    Well, we're not going to get it; the Liberal Democrats are a dead party walking. One the one hand, I think it's a bit unfair that they're taking so much heat for what are effectively Conservative actions - on the other, their choice of coalition partner effectively put the Conservatives in power in the first place, and they had exactly one job (reign in the worst excesses) which they have in many instances failed to even pay lip service to. As far as I can tell though, however much we all hate them, the career politicians aren't really responsible for all this bullshit - they just go along with it for political expediency. I've been watching carefully and it all comes from the Home Office (and to a lesser extent, the Met). And the thing is, those civil servants aren't elected. We can't get rid of them.
herghost 12y ago
I absolutely agree that in cases where it can be proven, or it is reasonably suspected, that there is criminal or terrorist activity afoot that the various law enforcement agencies should be able to get access to online communications. Luckily, this is the case already and additional laws won't strengthen this - they will simply remove the need for the burden of proof or suspicion. It all still boils down to a "trust us, we're on your side" refrain, yet at the same time there is no acknowledgement of the already exposed over-reach that is going on - and in fact, there is an explicit denial/rubbishing of one specific claim. They can't have our trust and lie to us at the same time - what they're effectively saying isn't, "trust us, we're on your side", it's "you can't trust us, but don't sweat it we're not coming for you yet".
danmania 12y ago
Currently I am outraged by this proposal. But the sad thing is I won't do anything about it. I'll watch the World Cup tonight, I'll worry about traction for my startup and then I'll make plans for the weekend. This apathy is present throughout UK society. None of my friends give a damn to challenge the proposal. The politicians seem like they don't give a damn either.
- rasur 12y ago
  Bread and Circuses always win, usually.
blueskin_ 12y ago
If you still don't run your own mailserver or use a service like safe-mail or mykolab in this day and age, you're mad.
jackgavigan 12y ago
A full transcript of the speech can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/home-secretarys-defence-and-security-lecture https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/home-secretarys-defen...

76 points by RobAley 12y ago

"Over a six-month period the National Crime Agency alone estimates that it has had to drop at least 20 cases as a result of missing communications data," she said in a speech on Tuesday. "Thirteen of these were threat-to-life cases in which a child was assessed to be at risk of imminent harm. This is utter nonsense. If evidence is absent, you cannot just assume that it would have helped your case.

rlpb 12y ago
And later on in the article: "Therefore, if the home secretary is stating that communications data was unavailable in specific cases, then that would suggest that a warrant was either not submitted to, or was rejected by, the companies in question. The question therefore should be why is this the case?" Or is she citing cases where the authorities did not seek a warrant, or the judiciary refused a warrant? And if so, why?
- mike-cardwell 12y ago
  Presumably in some of those cases, the argument was that if they could scan a large number of peoples email for keywords they might have been able to find some evidence as to who was involved. You generally can't get a warrant to scan a large number of peoples email. Especially if that large number amounts to everyone. I don't agree that they should have the ability to do this, even if it saves lives. Because handing over this sort of power to a government only leads to the creation of a police state, which ultimately will probably ruin more lives. Freedom costs lives.
- pjc50 12y ago
  This is Theresa May. Her statements will be either fabrications or horrendously contorted torture of a factual core into something wildly misleading. Remember the "I am not making this up" about the cat: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-15171980 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-15171980
binarymax 12y ago
I think we need to officially branch "Cogita de filiis" from Moral-high-ground to its own special place in the list of logical fallacies.
Nanzikambe 12y ago
It's a blatant appeal to paranoia, "think of the children!" essentially. It's mildly encouraging that at least the refrain has moved on from constant reminders of a nebulous terrorist threat to justify horrific changes .. Oh wait, it hasn't, from TFA: The home secretary says internet phone systems Skype and Facetime, as well as social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, have become "safe havens" for organised criminals and terrorists. sigh
- nly 12y ago
  phew thankfully I'm safe from the terrorists on IRC, the newsgroups, my BBSs, and while sending unix wall messages.

dTal 12y ago

arethuza 12y ago
Twitter was blamed, rather unfairly, for helping the "organisation" of the riots in London a few years back: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/07/twitter-riots-how-news-spread http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/07/twitter-riots-how-... No doubt to our government rioters and terrorists are essentially the same thing...
mike_hearn 12y ago
ISIS routinely use Twitter to publish stuff. I don't personally think that's a problem, but I expect that's what she's talking about.
- polymatter 12y ago
  I suspect that she hasn't given it much thought at all and just lumped all internet media together. I suspect if you told her ISIS was spreading their messages by using paper leaflets she would brand the post office as a 'safe haven' for terrorists too.

rlpb 12y ago

If this sort of thing bothers you, please support the Open Rights Group: http://www.openrightsgroup.org/ http://www.openrightsgroup.org/

davb 12y ago
I admire the work of the Open Rights Group, but it bothers me that they try to funnel you towards making Direct Debit (recurring, straight from your bank account) contributions and make it difficult to find the one-off donation button. Six links to recurring payments on https://www.openrightsgroup.org/join/ https://www.openrightsgroup.org/join/ and only one to one-off donations. And even after clicking on that, I have to scroll past more Direct Debit links to get to the one-off payment section. Perhaps I'm just cynical, but I never give charitable donations on a recurring basis. What if I don't support their actions in the future? Or I deem another cause more worthy, at a point in time, of my donations? I have to take action to cancel the Direct Debit. I know it's probably cheaper for them, and it encourages people to sign up and forget that they're contributing, but it feels too much like their website is pushing you towards that and your one-off contribution isn't good enough.
- Already__Taken 12y ago
  On the other side, if I were running a business on donations I'd sleep far happier at night and concentrate on my goals a lot more with smaller steady recurring donations. As opposed to being on a constant funding drive.
- ElliotH 12y ago
  Just for historical context, ORG itself was started by pledges of recurring donations of £5 a month. I'd guess that's why the notion of 'Join' is still front and centre.
- ajb 12y ago
  I normally don't either, but in this case the value is that ORG gets more political clout as a membership organisation than it would as a pure donation funded one. They get to say, 'we represent X000 members, of whom x00 vote in your constituency'. As you note, this does mean you have to check whether what they are saying continues to represent you ,and resign if not. But this hassle does buy you something. Perhaps the web site should make that pitch rather than making the donate option more obscure, though.

dan_bk 12y ago

Modern communication technology also introduces more pressure on governments to behave correctly, which takes power away from them.

collyw 12y ago
I don't see much evidence of that.

Create 12y ago

We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world. This should not actually be a complicated inquiry. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/27/-sp-privacy-under-attack-nsa-files-revealed-new-threats-democracy http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/27/-sp-privac... Surveillance is not an end toward totalitarianism, it is totalitarianism itself. http://www.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/europe-24385999 http://www.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/europe-24385999

petepete 12y ago

Do they really think people planning to commit such crimes won't simply encrypt their data?

rainforest 12y ago
Playing devil's advocate a little, the value in the data from an intelligence perspective is probably in the network it uncovers. If you know a circle of people are regularly exchanging encrypted messages, then you can try to target one member and get them to compromise the group by turning them into an informant. Similarly, if you suspect someone, you can look at their records to discover the networks of potential conspirators, then fan-out for each member until you have a big picture of interactions between different networks. There's a great example of exploiting simple person-person interaction graphs to generate this information here: http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metada...
- petepete 12y ago
  An incredibly interesting read, thanks!
- esteth 12y ago
  If they're smart, it feels like the shady groups would try to push for adoption of something like BitMessage to stop this kind of side-channel information leakage.

Nanzikambe 12y ago

"The home secretary says internet phone systems Skype and Facetime, as well as social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, have become "safe havens" for organised criminals and terrorists" and .. "It would also have extended laws to cover new online forms of communication, such as Skype, and there were suggestions it could also give intelligence services real-time access to the data." In a world where recent controversy has caused a greater proportion of traffic to make use of increasingly strong encryption, it's hard not interpret this as a plaintive demand to subvert free enterprise, law and technology -- so that all the old fun toys work once again. What they really want is to render privacy and encryption moot by making it a legal requirement that any service that facilitates communication, in any form, be required to backdoor or log everything and provide it on a whim. And how're they going to sell it? The age old "think of the children" refrain. Class.

Fuxy 12y ago

Wow somebody get this lunatic lady out of power. First of all 20 cases over 6 months is not bad however they neglected to say what the total amount of cases processed over these 6 months was. Was it 100 or 100000? What is the reason they could not get the data did they not have enough evidence to get a warrant all cases are not created equal. "She dismissed as "nonsense" claims that the UK's secret listening post GCHQ is exploiting a technical loophole in legislation that allows it spy on YouTube and social media messages that are routed through foreign servers" Now that is just living in your own little bubble it's pretty obvious by now that this is true. I don't want delusional people making laws for me. Anybody supporting this will not be getting my vote that's for sure.

herghost 12y ago
The problem we have is that Labour have historically proven to be even more draconian and anti-libertarian than the Conservatives. The only realistic alternative the Conservative government is a Labour government. The best we can hope for (IMHO) is another coalition government - this time with Labour and the LibDems, such that we reverse some of the recent nonsense, but it doesn't escalate due to the semi-moderating liberal presence.
- dTal 12y ago
  Well, we're not going to get it; the Liberal Democrats are a dead party walking. One the one hand, I think it's a bit unfair that they're taking so much heat for what are effectively Conservative actions - on the other, their choice of coalition partner effectively put the Conservatives in power in the first place, and they had exactly one job (reign in the worst excesses) which they have in many instances failed to even pay lip service to. As far as I can tell though, however much we all hate them, the career politicians aren't really responsible for all this bullshit - they just go along with it for political expediency. I've been watching carefully and it all comes from the Home Office (and to a lesser extent, the Met). And the thing is, those civil servants aren't elected. We can't get rid of them.

herghost 12y ago

I absolutely agree that in cases where it can be proven, or it is reasonably suspected, that there is criminal or terrorist activity afoot that the various law enforcement agencies should be able to get access to online communications. Luckily, this is the case already and additional laws won't strengthen this - they will simply remove the need for the burden of proof or suspicion. It all still boils down to a "trust us, we're on your side" refrain, yet at the same time there is no acknowledgement of the already exposed over-reach that is going on - and in fact, there is an explicit denial/rubbishing of one specific claim. They can't have our trust and lie to us at the same time - what they're effectively saying isn't, "trust us, we're on your side", it's "you can't trust us, but don't sweat it we're not coming for you yet".

danmania 12y ago

Currently I am outraged by this proposal. But the sad thing is I won't do anything about it. I'll watch the World Cup tonight, I'll worry about traction for my startup and then I'll make plans for the weekend. This apathy is present throughout UK society. None of my friends give a damn to challenge the proposal. The politicians seem like they don't give a damn either.

rasur 12y ago
Bread and Circuses always win, usually.

blueskin_ 12y ago

If you still don't run your own mailserver or use a service like safe-mail or mykolab in this day and age, you're mad.

jackgavigan 12y ago

A full transcript of the speech can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/home-secretarys-defence-and-security-lecture https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/home-secretarys-defen...