Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy” • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by bootload » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 10:24 PM UTC

This is bad news for Brits. One problem I see is the storage. If the ISP stores this information it makes their users open to hacking of personal data. A bigger problem than the phone hacking scandal. [0]

The title is inaccurate. Australia introduced storage of Internet usage logs (metadata) at ISP providers for two years in 2015. [1],[2]

[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/17/three-mobile-cybe...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_Australia...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_(Intercepti...

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

#222

Post by xorxornop » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 10:29 PM UTC

masmullin wrote: post #201

jakobdabo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." - Edward Snowden

That argument isn't good enough, unfortunately. As many people will respond with "well, yeah, I don't have anything important to say."

The fact that they can't even think that they might want to be able to say "I value my human rights" at some point is severely worrying. Bunch of philosophical zombies.

If they're anything other than white skinned, blue eyed, blonde haired, heterosexual, male, centrist-politically leaning (or one of the other few extremely simplistic predefined options - analogy: the block-shapes-through-the-board children's game) - history called. It's got some advice to give - but, of course, barely anyone is listening. (except the government. No, they're listening plenty... just not to history - they're too busy listening to the sound of hubris!)

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

#223

Post by EugeneOZ » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 10:39 PM UTC

jwtadvice wrote: post #217

EugeneOZ wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 newsworthin…

Quote from his documents about tls DECRYPTION (exactly decryption) would be much more convincing than "oh there is a ton".

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

#224

Post by EugeneOZ » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 10:40 PM UTC

xorxornop wrote: post #215

EugeneOZ wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It's social engineering, not tls decryption.

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

#225

Post by notahacker » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 10:41 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #173

rwmj wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble with this is that Corbyn has done nothing whatsoever to oppose the Snooper's Charter or Brexit or the Psychoactive Substances Act or the (now delayed) attempt to neuter the House Of Lords (in fact I suspect he fully supports all of those). What could he do? Step aside.

>Corbyn has done nothing whatsoever to oppose the Snooper's Charter or Brexit // Corbyn campaigned on the ground against Brexit all over Britain. It largely wasn't reported on in the national press though. Actually getting out amongst the people is seemingly his thing. Corbyn appears to be being a socialist, shock!, and not dictating the position people should take but suggesting a position and fronting the position…

He expended orders of magnitude more effort on the ground campaigning for himself weeks later. Of course, one campaign might have involved him sharing a platform with other political parties (more unacceptable, in Jeremy Corbyn's head, than attending IRA funerals or events run by SWP front groups that fellow leftists pointedly asked him to boycott) and preferably not use his supposedly pro-EU speeches to dismiss the economic arguments they'd made in favour of staying in the EU. The other involved attend rallies of people that had turned out to deliver him unquestioning applause and adulation.

It's Corbyn's closest ally in the Labour Party who is now suggesting that anyone with the temerity to still think leaving the EU is a bad idea is "on the side of certain corporate elites". That's certainly not following the lead of the membership.

On the Snooper's Charter he abstained, and whipped his party into abstaining. You can't blame anybody but Jeremy Corbyn for that.

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

#226

Post by pfista » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 10:41 PM UTC

TomAnthony wrote: post #175

module0000 wrote: post #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

If you run your own VPN will they not just log traffic from the endpoint (if in the UK) then tie it to you with billing records?

Depends where you're running your VPN. If you're running it on a server in the US they might not have access to that information.

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

#227

Post by StillBored » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 10:49 PM UTC

So, they just codified what they have been doing for the past decade. Much like the E911/etc bill here in the US, apparently ones use of technology removes _ALL_ pretenses of privacy.

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

#228

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 10:53 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #218

TeMPOraL wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm closer to the "nothing to hide" sentiment too (and personally I believe that a lot of privacy we take for granted is a historical aberration created by urbanization and is doomed to be removed by the progress of technology). Nevertheless, reducing the series of laws to the question of "will this particular law allow the government to see my dick (and if so, under what circumstances)" is useful, because it focuses on the things an average citizen can understand and relate to, while at the same time revealing that not every surveillance law actually implies snooping on private data.

"Dick pics" are actually a pretty good example of something one clearly doesn't want to share with third parties, but may not be aware that they're already sharing (or can be sharing under circumstances that may not be immediately obvious).

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

#229

Post by jwtadvice » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 10:55 PM UTC

EugeneOZ wrote: post #223

jwtadvice wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 newsworthin…

Quote from his documents about tls DECRYPTION (exactly decryption) would be much more convincing than "oh there is a ton".

Sure, there's been good journalist work compiling the state of the art here: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-documents-atta...

But also, being familiar with the cryptography you are attempting to have conversation about is a basic starter. For example, there were attacks listed in the prior comment following the "oh there's a ton" header. You seemed to have glazed past those, but they are familiar topics to those who habituate themselves with the technicalities of cryptography and its practice.

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

#230

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 10:57 PM UTC

NumberCruncher wrote: post #208

TeMPOraL wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

One fighting man is a terrorist. Thousand fighting men makes an army.

No, it makes a terrorist organization.

(Also, there's zero fighting men on the shooting side, under these conditions it's more like people taking potshots with Hellfires).