Internet data plan back on political agenda

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-30166477

by whyleyc • 12 years ago

53 24 12 years ago

bbc.co.uk

peterkelly• 12 years ago

Articles like this are truly surreal.

It almost feels as if the debate about whether this data collection should be introduced is purely for the purpose of distracting from the fact that GCHQ has already been doing this for years.

rwmj• 12 years ago

Part of it is to retrospectively legalize actions that were (probably) illegal or in a grey area. I say "probably" because RIPA gives wide scope for "national security" actions.

mortov• 12 years ago

Technicalities such as whether actions are 'legal' are of little concern to the UK Security Service (their real name - for some reason, they don't like to use their initials publicly as other departments do).

There is absolutely no possibility of any court review (not even in the new secret courts the UK has started for trials [1]) so debate about ensuring legislative cover is pure theatre probably to bolster the only press statement they ever release in response to questions which always states their actions are legally authorized and nothing else.

What this really looks like is a move to shift the data storage burden away from CGHC offices and place it onto ISPs, Telco's etc. Direct access can then be made to the data without any of the associated costs of maintaining multi-PB databases which grow at eye-watering rates every day.

Passing this legislation is a simple government way of saving them money and passing the cost on to business as a 'compliance requirement'.

They also get the added bonus of plausible deniability - 'don't be crazy - the Government does not store that sort of information on you!'. They don't - they force your ISP to keep if for them.

Sadly the UK seems a great starting point for such measures - experience is people are gullible and swallow the anti-terrorist cool-aid more easily than most.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/law/2013/jun/14/what-are-secret-c...

AlyssaRowan• 12 years ago

…although GCHQ has usually refused to give much of that data to law enforcement, because they don't trust PC Plod to properly not use it. (The National Crime Agency has not been too well received either.)

I wouldn't say this is the "snoopers' charter": that's not quite correct. Reserve that one for the original bill that was forcing ISPs to retain total communications metadata and/or DPI - full GCHQ stuff - and make it accessible to law enforcement, who will… not have the foggiest idea what to do with it, actually - evidentially, metadata is pretty rubbish as it's tricky to properly analyse and conclusions drawn from it can have a rather large false positive rate.

But what this is apparently is an attempt to revive the UK provisions relating to the EU Data Retention Directive regarding ISPs' RADIUS logs—yes, that's right, the directive the European Court of Human Rights just struck down. And it's an attempt to revive it in a way HMG lawyers think will survive another ECHR challenge, by saying it's national legislation for national security reasons and is therefore reasonable, proportionate, exempt (and any other bullshit they think will stick).

TazeTSchnitzel• 12 years ago

Er, wasn't it struck down by the ECJ, not the ECHR?

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

I find it so depressing that the once beacons of "democracy" in the world, are rapidly trying to catch-up to China when it comes to surveillance, and even censorship, most of them already being well past the level of surveillance the Stasi or the communist states had.

UK is probably the most aggressive from the ones trying to "win" this race right now with both its surveillance and its "porn & others filter". But Australia has been making some big moves lately as well trying to catch-up.

US, of course, already has a mature level of surveillance of everyone, and it has also tried to introduce some censorship with with SOPA. It also has some Kafkaesque measure in place such as the no-fly lists of tens of thousand of people, put there with no evidence, just some suspicions. Then there is the TSA, the border checks where border can mean up to 50 miles from the border or more, the cash seizing, the civil forfeiture laws, the militarization of police and the increasing use of SWAT teams and "no-knock" warrants for non-violent crimes and so on.

Canada has also tried a few times to introduce various surveillance laws, but it has been stopped by the population for the most part.

What's even more worrying is that it's now pretty obvious all of these countries are working together and planning together when to introduce such laws, which is why you see statements within days or weeks at most from US, UK, Canada about "Tor being a threat" and online anonymity in general, and so on.

They're also trying to introduce new surveillance laws more or less at the same time, because then they can make it look more like it's a "natural thing" to do - "hey, look, all democratic countries are doing it - how bad can it really be then?!". Except virtually none of them are doing it by consulting the population. The governments in power simply decide by themselves to introduce them, and that's it. At best, they try to push in the media some more extreme murder as a "danger to the nation" - and that we need these laws to protect against those kinds of murders".

They're almost starting to turn this into a science. After all, they're already researching how to manipulate the public through Twitter, Facebook and so on. They're starting to figure out what "works" and how to press the public's hot buttons in order to get them to support whatever they want to pass.

tptacek2• 12 years ago

The argument in this comment is nonsensical. The UK's civil rights scheme is significantly different from that of the US. The US and the UK do not in fact introduce surveillance bills in any kind of synchrony. The US funded Tor, and continues to fund the security of Tor and tools like it (that might be news to you; take my word for it, though: it's an overt, deliberate, and important program). And appeals to "that's how they do it in the UK" or "that's how they do it in the US" are more likely to alienate voters than to garner support.

This reads more like free-association than truth-finding. But, good job for working SOPA into it!

xnull2guest3• 12 years ago

The argument in this comment is nonsensical.

If I were to summarize higherpurpose's thesis for him I would write:

Western governments once known for their commitments to freedom and civil liberties are now losing their ability to rightfully claim these good reputations. There are a number of current real world issues today, some mentioned in the article and others closely related, facing modern individual expression where the commitments that once gave these Western governments their good names are in fact being actively curtailed. We've seen a simultaneous rise in budding forms of both surveillance and censorship as well as a rise in the militarization of police and invasive executive and judicial techniques. Perhaps because Western countries share historical roots and political goals these changes have been so correlated in them - we've seen a lot of anecdotal evidence of this, some hard evidence in the form of reports from oversight committees and more hard evidence from leaked documents/cables and have good reasons to logically conclude that so partnering would be efficient and desirable to the agencies in question (motive, opportunity and evidence). I'm also starting to become aware not only of programs that watch societies but also ones that have degrees of success in manipulating them in targeted ways at scale. I am struck by how the nature of programs that seek active manipulation of political expression and emotion conflict with the commitments to individual liberty that I was raised to believe is the justification of the state.

The UK's civil rights scheme is significantly different from that of the US.

He doesn't assume or state that. He merely states that both were examples of modern states that enshrine some sort of civil liberty. It does not matter whether the scheme is different or similar.

The US and the UK do not in fact introduce surveillance bills in any kind of synchrony

I believe he's talking about the "UKUSA Agreement". At this level (the UKUSA agreement dates back now 70 years) synchronicity is not a discussion of days or weeks but of years.

The US funded Tor, and continues to fund the security of Tor and tools like it (that might be news to you; take my word for it, though: it's an overt, deliberate, and important program).

I don't think this covers his point - he was using Tor as an example of a subject of internationally harmonized political media coverage.

And appeals to "that's how they do it in the UK" or "that's how they do it in the US" are more likely to alienate voters than to garner support.

I'm not sure how to understand this comment or how it fits the discussion? You seem to be making a meta point about the strategic political value of invoking certain topics? Wouldn't engineering a comment to exclude these divorce it more from 'truth-finding' and more toward overt political maneuvering? Should we read your comments with the understanding you comb prose for how appeals will affect voters?

But, good job for working SOPA into it!

IMO SOPA is on topic as per the summary at the top.

xnull2guest3• 12 years ago

US, of course, already has a mature level of surveillance of everyone, and it has also tried to introduce some censorship with with SOPA.

SOPA, PIPA and ISP provisions in the TPP - there's been a lot of effort to pass legislation that would bring content filtering to the US. If done by the TPP it will be particularly difficult to stop.

Canada has also tried a few times to introduce various surveillance laws, but it has been stopped by the population for the most part.

Canadian intelligence will partner with other countries to circumvent domestic law where it can. [1] [2]

[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/canadas-spy-age...

[2] http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/11/25/court-rebukes-csis-f...

As will others (including GCHQ, NSA). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8457529

What's even more worrying is that it's now pretty obvious all of these countries are working together and planning together when to introduce such laws, which is why you see statements within days or weeks at most from US, UK, Canada about "Tor being a threat" and online anonymity in general, and so on.

You'll even see countries promising each other as part of secret agreements that they will get their people to pass certain laws. http://youtu.be/Pbps1EwAW-0?t=50m29s

After all, they're already researching how to manipulate the public through Twitter, Facebook and so on. They're starting to figure out what "works" and how to press the public's hot buttons in order to get them to support whatever they want to pass.

For those curious.

http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun...

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED-The...

http://mirror.as35701.net/video.fosdem.org//2014/Janson/Sund...

http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world...

http://mprcenter.org/blog/2013/01/how-obama-won-the-social-m...

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/04/former-l-times...

http://www.msi.org/reports/distinguishing-among-mechanisms-o...

http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/massive_turnout.pdf

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8476106

k-mcgrady• 12 years ago

It's interesting the the internet has been a tool that has allowed people in repressive states to rebel and at the same time has made states that were supposedly 'free' become more and more like that states those people were rebelling against. The difference is that those other states were open about their corruption - everybody knew it and understood it - and rebellion could take place. The internet allows the 'free' governments to break laws in relative secrecy and even when caught regular people find it difficult to understand the details anyway.

adventured• 12 years ago

It's not the Internet that made the US or the UK act less free. It's enabling them to do things they wanted to but lacked the technology for.

Were this 1965 or 1970, and were the Internet deployed to the extent it is now, Hoover and or Nixon would be all over these same types of programs. The abuse would be rampant, the secrecy would be extreme. Echelon dates to the 1960s, but it wasn't capable of easily reaching into the pocket of every citizen; they lacked the technology to record everything, and to automatically sift through everything.

The sole difference between then and now, in terms of doing these programs, is the technology 40 years ago made it impossible.

What the modern Internet has exposed, is culture rot inside many countries. That rot has existed in the US for a very long time. You're merely seeing the military industrial complex laid bare; it has been there for 60+ years.

Rather than making the US or UK act less free, what the Internet is doing is showing you the rotten insides.

lifeisstillgood• 12 years ago

Sadly this is probably true. So what do we do about it. Conor Gearty (LSE podcast) recently talked about the awful idea of UKs withdrawal from the EU Human rights declaration.

To me (and I am still working on this) it seems we need to understand the new and old landscapes and hopefully put in place trustworthy institutions (and I would class crypto-currency as an institution too)

- ensure we keep the 18th/19th/20th century evolution of human rights (ie rights for white men through to rights for all)

- expand (somehow) rights to privacy and rights to ownership and control of data about oneself (I suspect commercial ownership of my data is a solution)

- start persuading the new UKIP voters that print for a different set of politicians is not the same as ending this.

In the end I think that the new Labour Party is really the Pirate Party

okasaki• 12 years ago

Huh. Don't all ISPs already keep these logs? I would be very surprised to find one that doesn't.

justincormack3• 12 years ago

Andrews and Arnold do not.[1]

[1] http://aastatus.net/1984

nly3• 12 years ago

From what I've read, the soft spot for them seem to be mobile internet access. Perhaps someone who knows a bit about mobile systems can comment on logging procedures in the industry, but while I'm connected to 3G my phone has an RFC 1918 IP address, so presumably everything goes through some form of 'carrier-grade' NAT.

This is actually pretty interesting, because once you get to the NAT level you're logging every TCP connection individually...which has huge privacy implications.

justincormack3• 12 years ago

VPN all your traffic?

badgersandjam2• 12 years ago

I wonder what Andrews and Arnold's approach to this problem will be. They're the last bastion of common sense in the UK.

justincormack3• 12 years ago

See http://aastatus.net/1984

"Just to be clear on our policy here - when DRIPA comes in to force, and if A&A become subject to a retention notice for all customers, we aim to work on all practical legal means to minimise the amount of data retained under that legislation - making full use of the bad wording in the Schedule in the 2009 regulations where possible. We also aim to clearly publish what is retained under such a notice and what steps we have taken to minimise such data. Such steps may mean separate companies running email or other services, or even hosting some servers outside the UK, if those are practical steps we can take.

Why? Because blanket mass surveillance is illegal under EU law as it is against our basic human right to privacy as decided by a court, that's why!"

badgersandjam2• 12 years ago

Fantastic - thanks for the link.

nly3• 12 years ago

Technically not the same snoopers charter, but it does sound like they want to force ISPs to maintain DHCP and NAT logs. Despite a lot of the rhetoric about stopping terrorism, a lot of the public support for this, and pressure from this in the UK media comes, from complaints about abuse on Twitter (the mainstream media has recently discovered the definition of 'trolling' and love it). I have no doubt this will be one of the primary exercises for these new powers.

A good showcase : https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Abbc.co.uk+twitter+a...

Internet data plan back on political agenda

Related Stories