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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”

#151
post #113

As a UK resident: I know that I can only avoid logging traffic by using a vpn. But the domain logging part bothers me the most. Does anyone here know how they will do it? Could I just use another dns server? Or will they intercept http header? If I'm not mistaken, they could still extract the domain names from https traffic but no exact history? Anyway, a reason more to use https everywhere, reduces sharply what they…

VPN has been thoroughly defeated. China, UK and US state law enforcement monitor VPN use. (Snowden documents, for example, revealed that VPN traffic can be readily decrypted.) ISPs and police will use every mechanism including DNS, HTTP, IP addresses, CRL behavior, ad tracking markers embedded in pages and more to determine your browsing behavior and history. The best way to defend yourself against this is to lie dow…

Do you have a link to the "VPN has been defeated" documents? Didn't Snowden say exactly, that the only thing to trust is strong encryption?

> ISPs and police will use every mechanism including DNS, HTTP, IP addresses

Surely VPN will protect you from all of that?

My main concern is police/isp's logging all VPN traffic, and then when they want to use some of it, they subpoena your VPN provider for the keys. Though, maybe forward security fixes this? They could also secretly force every provider to log everything at all time? But surely there are enough providers that some would have leaked it?

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

#152
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a lot of them would be in favour of it as a means of "fighting terrorism". It's not so much what is reported as how it's spun. The really big thing is the "internet connection record": every TCP connection you make is supposed to be logged by the ISP: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm... (just look at that list of justifications. Of course! It's about catching paedos! The all purpose…

its all misuse of language. a spade should be called spade. Here is a situation, the people staying in their own country and fighting against outside forces. Who is real terrorist? Those outside forces that have no business being there in the first place are the ones doing real terrorizing. The war on terrorism is just a double speak. Its war for profits for political and monetary gains. If as much as 10% of the ener…

I accepted long time ago I will never be let into the US because of those HN comments, so...

If you regularly kill civilians at random with high explosives, with no way for them to even know something bad will happen, to the point you instill in them the fear of a clear blue sky, isn't that terrorism?

Hello drone strikes in Pakistan...

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

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VPN has been thoroughly defeated. China, UK and US state law enforcement monitor VPN use. (Snowden documents, for example, revealed that VPN traffic can be readily decrypted.) ISPs and police will use every mechanism including DNS, HTTP, IP addresses, CRL behavior, ad tracking markers embedded in pages and more to determine your browsing behavior and history. The best way to defend yourself against this is to lie dow…

Do you have a link to the "VPN has been defeated" documents? Didn't Snowden say exactly, that the only thing to trust is strong encryption? > ISPs and police will use every mechanism including DNS, HTTP, IP addresses Surely VPN will protect you from all of that? My main concern is police/isp's logging all VPN traffic, and then when they want to use some of it, they subpoena your VPN provider for the keys. Though, may…

I was going to write up a dossier, but found one created by Der Speigel here: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-documents-atta...

Yes, trust strong encryption.

VPN isn't strong encryption. Or rather, VPN is not necessarily strong encryption as most of the VPN standards and implementations have either been backdoored or weren't designed for strength against state actors.

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

#154
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I'm thinking as well. I only need to do a crawler, doing HEAD requests only, piping into /dev/null, in theory.

So all your head requests get filtered out when the db gets queried. Leaving all your gets and posts etc. Also better hope your crawler doesn't hit any illegal sites (there are loads according to UK law).

> (there are loads according to UK law).

No, there really aren't.

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

#155
post #63

What is the easiest way to explain to the average citizen that the "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument is not a good reason to let the Government keep tabs on your online activities? Most people don't give any thought to online privacy that it truly scares me.

John Oliver's "Dick Pics" seem like a pretty good argument that can reach average citizens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M

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

#156
post #14

When this was originally proposed I thought it would never get passed because it sounded like something right out of 1984. Amazing. I thought the ridiculous 'Agree to this cookie' nonsense was stupid but this is now just very creepy. National database for keylogging next?

Don't worry, the 'Agree to this cookie' thing is an EU directive. So that's what the UK is currently destroying their economy in order to be free from.

[deleted]

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

#157

As a UK resident, this irks me beyond belief. It's a sickening invasion of human rights[1]. To echo u/rubberstamps sentiments, it's such that there's been little to no coverage of this in the media. But it's the same everywhere, introduce an encroaching bill, have uproar from those with the heads screwed on (the minority). Let it grow a little stale in the publics eye and keep reintroducing with slight alterations it…

If your off to study journalism you might fit this that I just published today handy. It's important to remember that surveillance in both the media and activism scene in the UK has also meant significant physical surveillance. Meaning both surveillance of movement and also infiltration. We are writing a series of things about this (secure meetings with sources, covering protests, dealing with arrests etc) based on t…

Strange the Umbrella App link gives me a 403 https://secfirst.org/fdroid/repo/ Can't find it within the FD app.

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

#158
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a lot of them would be in favour of it as a means of "fighting terrorism". It's not so much what is reported as how it's spun. The really big thing is the "internet connection record": every TCP connection you make is supposed to be logged by the ISP: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm... (just look at that list of justifications. Of course! It's about catching paedos! The all purpose…

This sounds like a potential (new?) attack type though. Just have software that pings certain illegal websites and bam - the target is now a paedo or whatever the attacker wishes.

In the UK you can already go to prison for refusing to hand over the password to encrypted data. The thing is, anything can be encrypted data. So in theory someone can say that you have encrypted child pornography on your drive, and theoretically, you can go to prison for refusing to give your password to it, even if it doesn't exist.

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

#159
Protect your privacy with a VPN, either run your own or use one of the available providers. It's a shame you need to do this, but that's just the state of things.

Run your own with OpenVPN: https://openvpn.net

VPN providers(not affiliated, just ones myself or colleagues use): https://www.expressvpn.com https://www.goldenfrog.com/vyprvpn https://nordvpn.com

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

#160

The first thing that comes to mind here is that data is only good if it is quality data... dirty data isn't good or reliable. Coming up with a way to dirty the data from our IPs (i.e. a program that randomly hits domains via multiple browsers that everyone just runs as a background service)

Not that simple. Unless you get some prodigies involved in this, the government will be able to apply more math at filtering the noise that we'll be able to throw at generating it.
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