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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”

#231

Post by pbhjpbhj »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #91
noir_lord wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> how would they stop someone running a 'recipe' that creates a VPN on something like AWS/Digital Ocean They don't need to. Even if 10% of citizens were able to do that, controlling and censoring information for the 90% is way more than enough to manipulate people perceptions and ideas, and thus, democracy. Not even Stasi or the "great firewall" of China aimed at 100% success rate - they simply don't need to.

>controlling and censoring information for the 90% //

What you appear to be alleging is that by being able to access the threads I saw on Al-Jazeera or Reddit or what-have-you that the government can somehow control the information I'm receiving enough to manipulate me to serve their political ideals. Freedom of the press may not be perfect in the UK but it seems close enough that a government can't manipulate democracy simply by monitoring internet use.

UK population is 65M. Reported crimes (which includes littering and traffic violations AFAICT) is about 1 per mille in the UK [1]. There's no way the gov are using the criminal justice system to control the population to a significant extent, they certainly can't control the criminals. The prisons are full. The establishment can try to jump up crimes but the scale they need to do that to control the population seems enormous compared to the resources available.

If you can write a lie on the side of a bus and have the country vote against their best interests then why on Earth would you try and carefully contrive criminal activity in order to stop people from visiting websites you don't like to subtly alter a few people's perception of the political situation. Seems entirely bonkers.

[1] http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Total-c...

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

#232

Post by jwtadvice »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #224
xorxornop wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you go down that route, convincing the public to use and standardizing backdoored and broken cryptography would also count as social engineering.

The communications are decrypted.

This is done through a combination of backdoored cryptography, state of the art cryptanalysis, and mass social engineering (propaganda).

Namely, you're not proposing something that's mutually exclusive to decryption of data.

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

#233

Post by jnbiche »

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.

I think you all are missing the bitter irony in the parent's comment.

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

#234

Post by pbhjpbhj »

hash-set wrote: post #30
noir_lord wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why we need to push as many people as possible to use VPN's, they already have too much straw and too few needles so lets give them even more straw. The reality is that no one in the know thinks this has anything to do with terrorism and everything to do with political control. If you don't have the right to privacy then all other rights are subverted, previous governments have used the state security appara…

The surveillance state has always been about political control. Terrorism is merely the justification.

>Terrorism is merely the justification. //

You've lost sight of any balance when you start claiming that terrorism is just an idea used to justify state oversight and not an actual problem of organised harm/killing of peaceful civilians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings - presumably you think that's just a huge fiction created so the government can get hold of your holiday snaps.

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

#235

Post by necessity »

oscargrouch wrote: post #95
necessity wrote: post #3

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…

Its not the same thing, as in Brazil the investigation forces will need to get a warrant from a judge to have access to that data. Exactly the same way it happens for phone records or private bank accounts. This data is protected by law, and is considered private.. so only a judge, in a ongoing investigation, when asked by police forces, when investiganting crimes for instance, can grant access to this data. As i und…

They do not need a warrant, read Article 11.

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

#236

Post by pbhjpbhj »

duaneb wrote: post #64
ryanlol wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is no single method of protecting privacy; VPNs are privacy against commercial-level actors. Tor has its own bounds, but people should use that, too. I generally think the internet is barely usable over TOR, but I don't need state-level privacy. My point being is that these are valid tools with valid uses, and people should understand and use them, NOT that VPNs are anything other than a way of encrypting and p…

>I generally think the internet is barely usable over TOR //

I've only used tor browser (adding to the noise!), nothing beyond web. Could you go in to what makes the internet "barely usable" over TOR, do you mean speed or is there other things you're trying to accomplish that can't be done?

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

#237

Post by bjelkeman-again »

dracht wrote: post #182
datamoshr wrote: post #44

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…

I've noticed that Britons, generally speaking, put a lot of trust in authority. They'll shrug it off or rationalize it when their government introduces another perverted law - the NHS works, so it can't be that bad, surely. Britain lacks a sizeable and vocal government-distrusting counterculture like they exist in Germany or the US. How you go about introducing that artificially, I don't know. The frog is being boile…

That is interesting. Living in Sweden, and having lived in the UK for 15 years, I feel the Brits trust their government much less than the Swedes do. In the UK there is strong resistance against a national ID card, as an example. Whereas in Sweden you can hardly live without one.

I got the feeling that the Brits didn't trust their government with that info and control it implies. In Sweden we have the opposite: ID cards are seen as an asset and surveillance cameras are severely restricted by the government, for privacy reasons.

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

#238

Post by EugeneOZ »

jwtadvice wrote: post #232
EugeneOZ wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's social engineering, not tls decryption.

If you go down that route, convincing the public to use and standardizing backdoored and broken cryptography would also count as social engineering. The communications are decrypted. This is done through a combination of backdoored cryptography, state of the art cryptanalysis, and mass social engineering (propaganda). Namely, you're not proposing something that's mutually exclusive to decryption of data.

I wrote what I wanted to write, enough with sophisms.

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

#239

Post by gambiting »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #234
hash-set wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The surveillance state has always been about political control. Terrorism is merely the justification.

>Terrorism is merely the justification. // You've lost sight of any balance when you start claiming that terrorism is just an idea used to justify state oversight and not an actual problem of organised harm/killing of peaceful civilians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings - presumably you think that's just a huge fiction created so the government can get hold of your holiday snaps.

I think one can acknowledge that terrorists and terrorist attacks are definitely a real thing that exist, and at the same time one can think that the current reaction is completely out of proportion, where the whole society is giving away its freedoms to prevent a really minor threat?

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

#240

Post by jwtadvice »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #238
jwtadvice wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you go down that route, convincing the public to use and standardizing backdoored and broken cryptography would also count as social engineering. The communications are decrypted. This is done through a combination of backdoored cryptography, state of the art cryptanalysis, and mass social engineering (propaganda). Namely, you're not proposing something that's mutually exclusive to decryption of data.

I wrote what I wanted to write, enough with sophisms.

I understand that you wrote what you wanted to write.

Unfortunately what you wrote was FUD in the worst case and misinformed in the best.

Anyway I think we both are at a point where we understand the other's point of view. Thank you for the conversation. I believe we both hope a lot of HN folks will stumble over it over the next few days. :)

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