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Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”

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Re: Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”

#34

Brazil has passed that a few years ago as part of Marco Civil - 1 year period too, which can be extended per request from the authorities: >Art. 13. Na provisão de conexão à internet, cabe ao administrador de sistema autônomo respectivo o dever de manter os registros de conexão, sob sigilo, em ambiente controlado e de segurança, pelo prazo de 1 (um) ano, nos termos do regulamento. It demands the storage for 1 year of…

It's similar, but a little less bad than this UK one.

- It requires ISPs to identify their clients, and site administrators to keep log of access. Thus, no party must keep a complete identifiable log. The police must join the pieces every time they use the data.

- It has no provision for the government forcing companies into disclosing user's data. Brazilian law has no "decrypt data on demand" requirement. It's only about access logs.

- There's no provision for the government hacking into people's computers (although that may exist on some other law I don't know about).

Anyway, it's a bad law. If it was evenly enforced, it would forbid a lot of services people use in Brazil.

Re: Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”

#35

Will the citizens allow it to be passed if they knew about it via some news source? Of course "news" now a days is about kardarshians or justin beiber than about things that requires serious attention. This may have hardly got tiny little square cm area in newspapers or 30 seconds air time. Thus sinks democracy. People who are informed are way less in number than non-informed people, but all get to vote thus diluting…

Yes, this has received extensive coverage over the last two years. Google "BBC snoopers' charter" for some examples.

Re: Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”

#36
post #15
post #12

> Despite the uproar, the government's opposition failed to scrutinize any significant amendments and abstained from the final vote. Killock said recently that the opposition Labour party spent its time "simply failing to hold the government to account". What the hell is the point of the Labour party these days? They are absolutely not an effective opposition. Worthless bastards, one and all.

Yes, that's the correct response, blame Labour for all of this.

I didn't read it as blaming Labour, but rather stating a fact - they have done nothing to challenge this bill.

Re: Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a very hard fight for them since enforcing it without fundamentally breaking the way the internet works would be very expensive to a lot of very wealthy companies and sadly in this 'democracy' the people with the money are heard the loudest.

> That would be a very hard fight Not at all. It's enough to point the finger at commercial VPN providers and claim the the users are doing suspicious things including filesharing, and encourage ISPs to block VPN providers by address block. Many ISPs would love to do that because they want to inspect cleartext traffic and sell metadata. Of course corporate VPNs would be left untouched. There.

> It's enough to point the finger at commercial VPN providers and claim the the users are doing suspicious things.

The problem there is we live in a containerised world, how would they stop someone running a 'recipe' that creates a VPN on something like AWS/Digital Ocean and uses that as the VPN exit point.

The only way to deal with that is to have a central licensing authority for VPN's where you have to hand over the keys, that's going to be a massive and expensive fight for them.

Re: Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”

#38
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah right, because using PIA==privacy. How about we refer people to actual privacy tools like Tor instead?

Tor has zero to do with privacy and everything to do with anonymity.

Does anonymity not imply privacy?

Re: Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”

#39
post #5

I will just leave this here: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com

Until VPNs become illegal...

then people would just resort to steganography. it wouldn't be terribly difficult to mask asymmetric traffic that appeared to come from a youtube-like "site", or symmetric traffic that looks like skype video but with encrypted packets inside the compressed video transport layer. This is an unwinnable fight and I can't believe anybody would be stupid enough to try.

Re: Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”

#40

Will the citizens allow it to be passed if they knew about it via some news source? Of course "news" now a days is about kardarshians or justin beiber than about things that requires serious attention. This may have hardly got tiny little square cm area in newspapers or 30 seconds air time. Thus sinks democracy. People who are informed are way less in number than non-informed people, but all get to vote thus diluting…

Many people who didn't grow up with online communications don't value online communications and don't expect them to have the same levels of privacy as paper mail - but they'd be horrified if someone else opened their post.

If you mailed each of them (via traditional post) an envelope that was torn open and taped together with a message saying 'the government is doing this to all your mail' they may think differently.

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