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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”

#211

Post by fibbery »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #195
fibbery wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the only way I have had any success is to describe the problem in terms of "wrong place wrong time" + "misinterpreted evidence" scenarios. this is something I wrote up a while back to try to explain it to a family member: --------------------------------------------------------------- Imagine a crime takes place in a certain area. Using surveillance technology, police identify everyone who was in the area around the…

This doesn't read as very convincing to me. Do you have experience of the justice system? There's no way the CPS in the UK would take a "well he was probably in the general area based on his number-plate, and he reads the Toadygraph newspaper and is in the 52% who are for Brexit", even along with matching a general profile for criminals, and seek a prosecution on that basis. Not to mention it would be a huge miscarri…

No, I don't have experience with the UK justice system, so perhaps my comment isn't as relevant for this specific article.

That said, even if this specific scenario isn't realistic, discussions about the problems with surveillance state don't have to be grounded in "what happens right now" because the information stored today is available to future regimes and the specific technology involved is continuously changing.

> But what about the people who don't support racism/xenophobia, read a mix of news sources, aren't male (and so don't match with crime profiling). Are you saying their argument for not needing strong encryption is valid?"

Not at all, and I'm surprised that's what you would conclude from my statement. Obviously not every crime ever has that specific profile. The point was that when you have tons and tons of information about everyone, that is all categorized and geotagged and searchable and machine-learnable, it's a LOT easier for a completely innocent person to become a suspect.

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

#212

Post by fierarul »

hoodunit wrote: post #50
fierarul wrote: post #31

How is this any different from the EU Data Retention Directive we've had for a decade already? Somebody should make a "feature matrix" and explain this.

Are you referring to the Data Retention Directive [1], which was invalidated in 2014? Or are there still other EU-wide laws on data retention? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive

I wasn't aware it was invalidated. Of course, once each member state implemented this directive into national law and I don't believe the national laws immediately became void.

For example, a quick google shows that just last month the Constitutional Court in Romania declared the Big Brother law doesn't infringe on the constitutional rights so data retention continues. All data is kept for 3 years.

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

#213

Post by leonroy »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #99
pjc50 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are also staggeringly ineffective and can't seem to decide what they stand for. Miliband was OK despite the "controls on immigration" equivocation, but since then the party has turned into a circular firing squad. Going back into history, I'm fairly sure we saw attempts at invasive surveillance under Blair's Labour; Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and the failed ID cards scheme. It's not even clear wheth…

That's because Blair's Labour Party was as right wing and authoritarian as the Tories they replaced. Both Corbyn's supporters and opponents know well what they stand for. The problem is it isn't the same things. The only people who have any moral right to oppose Brexit are the Scottish nationalists and the Northern Irish republicans. England and Wales voted to leave.

Not hugely true. Blair's government improved the NHS and vastly improved the mess with Railtrack and decades of Tory underfunding of the railways.

They were more right wing than the proceeding labor administration which was what 1979? But then that's probably a good thing otherwise they'd never have been voted into office.

Parties have to shift with public sentiment and clearly Blair saw that and shifted to the New Labour ideology as evidenced by his 1997 landslide.

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

#214

Post by kwhitefoot »

nailer wrote: post #40
rubberstamp wrote: post #19

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…

Not any more now that no one writes real letters. How many people write letters, come to that how many people did write many letters even when it was the only way of doing it, not many I think. I'm 61 and I don't think that my parents wrote many more letters than I do and that is almost none.

So I think it wouldn't be hard to spin opening letters in just the same way as opening network packets. After all only people who are already unusual write letters and those who are different are automatically suspect.

People should be careful of what they wish for. Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter wrote an interesting novel on the consequences of living in a panoptic society, The Light of Other Days.

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

#215

Post by xorxornop »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #205
jwtadvice wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma_Police_(surveillance_pro... The GCHQ sit on the internet infrastructure, decrypt TLS sessions, and correlate accounts and activity to individual granularity. The backbone of the internet is tapped, including from the termination of IPSEC/IKE into your VPN out to the internet again. Giving the advice to people to "use encryption" and "use VPN" is going to get people killed. Please,…

Decrypt tls sessions? Please fuck off.

They do, if your connection can be forced into using a low grade cipher, or you made the mistake of allowing DH[E] with a common group. Both mistakes which were (are?) common, incidentally. They were decrypting a good fraction of global TLS traffic not so long ago...

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

#217

Post by jwtadvice »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #205
jwtadvice wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma_Police_(surveillance_pro... The GCHQ sit on the internet infrastructure, decrypt TLS sessions, and correlate accounts and activity to individual granularity. The backbone of the internet is tapped, including from the termination of IPSEC/IKE into your VPN out to the internet again. Giving the advice to people to "use encryption" and "use VPN" is going to get people killed. Please,…

Decrypt tls sessions? Please fuck off.

Oh there's a ton of ways to do it, from stripping, downgrade attacks, backdoored constants, precomputed tables for low order groups, shadow ca certs, etc.

I recommend reading the Snowden Documents, which disclosed a number of successful at-scale attacks on the PKI infrastructure.

I find it surprising there's so much ignorance in the Hacker News community about the state of encryption, especially given the newsworthiness of the Snowden Disclosures.

I also find the prevalence of 'shoot the messenger' regarding HN folks getting angry at me for pointing out publicly known issues with the current practice of commercial and consumer encryption.

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

#218

Post by pbhjpbhj »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #155
anondon wrote: 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

The relevant part is https://youtu.be/XEVlyP4_11M?t=1487, at 24m47s in.

Do average citizens send pictures of their genitalia to people? Are you saying that the gov is downloading everyone's photos, or are you saying they have the capability.

I want law enforcement to have the capability to access images pertinent to an investigation when they have a warrant; it seems harmful to justice to prevent that by legislation. Oliver appears to be saying because the government can access such information they're necessarily over-powered; surely without such capability then they'd be incapable of following even the most basic of criminal organisations and certainly incapable of tracking information pertinent to defence from foreign powers and, yes, domestic terrorism.

"If the government were looking at pictures of my penis that would upset me."

The question is if you say "would you agree to the government being able to see all the pictures on a device of a suspected criminal, eg in a murder investigation" how many will say "no because they might see an image of the suspects dick and so it would be an invasion of privacy". Now "if you were the main suspect in a murder investigation, should the government be allowed to see the pictures you stored on your device"?

We all now a large proportion of people would want to hide naked images of themselves from casual observers, but TBH if the cost of cracking a terrorist ring is a government operative seeing a picture of me naked then I'll tie a bow on it and send it in gift wrap; I'm shy but it's only a body part.

The argument has been simplified by Oliver beyond what is relevant. There's much more nuance than he's pretending there is IMO.

Now, if the government agencies have agents viewing for private reasons images that are downloaded, or they're accessing data that has been acquired illegally then we have something to work on. Doubtless that happens.

PS: I'll admit I've not followed the Snowden case in depth as it's not particular interesting to me. I'm much closer to the "nothing to hide" people than the "the government know what toilet paper I use the world will end tomorrow" people [nice and objective!] as you may have surmised.

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

#219

Post by jwtadvice »

anondon wrote: 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.

Point out that surveillance is an issue concerned with the integrity of attorney-client privilege, dissidents and journalists who DO have things to hide even though they are not criminal.

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

#220

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

rubberstamp wrote: post #106
burkaman wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Snoopers charter did get coverage. I didn't think it would pass. If people in UK voiced enough against it to their corresponding representative and this still passed, what good is democracy. It's a new government. They can keep it untill next elections unless there is massive rally against it. By then all this becomes status quo and the slippery slope continues

It passed because uk.gov is passing all kinds of vile crap while everyone is distracted by Brexit.

Most people barely have time and energy for one campaign, never mind ten. So we're going to be seeing a lot more of this.

This is the most toxic and least competent government I've ever seen. And I've seen a few.

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