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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”

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fill your downtime with work to fill your pipeline. Unless you plan on selling freelancing services related to anti-surveillance work (Security, building an audience in the area) really filling your time with anything but sales is going to hurt in a years time

If what you do during your downtime is directly related to your work then it can hardly be called down time, now can it?

I assumed with the reference to starting freelancing (s)he referred to "time I normally would have spent at work but now cannot bill (i.e. 9-5 M-F) as opposed to "time that never used to be work (i.e. Sleeping, weekends etc)"

Otherwise the freelancing comment would have been superfluous

But you read it how you like.

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

#272

It will be interesting to see the response when this data is hacked and the browsing histories of the politicians who passed it are released to the public.

It doesn't even need to be hacked. Sooner or later some politician will get that info on his/her opponent, it's inevitable. And, compared to your average person, a politician has a lot more at stake.

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learn political organizing skills, which address these issues: How to build awareness, appeal to people, organize them, etc. As many veterans of past civil rights battles have said: Don't get mad, organize!

I think we should also focus on making our current technology impervious to this type of tracking. If the flaw exists in the system that exposes our personal information then we should work to plug the hole. I think organizing is important too but I guarantee someone is going to try this type of power grab again in the future.

Technology can be made impervious to spies but organisations based on humans cannot.

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just setup own vps with vpn and use encryption

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

How do they do that? Do you understand how TLS works? They would have to MITM every session, and it would be immediately obvious as the key exchange wouldn't line up.

Unless you're implying they've found a way to solve the discrete logarithm problem?

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

#277
post #150

So the British government is just rubber stamping what they had already been doing in secret and technically illegally for the last twenty years. I can't wait till they get hacked and someone dumps every parliamentary minister and lord's dubious Google searches for the public to see.

ISP and mobile phone company 'Three' has 6 million customer database records compromised same day as this story. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38022309

You probably won't have to wait long.

Although it won't actually reveal search content, only that they went to Google.com (and maybe that their browser tried to preload content from the top search result domains?)

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

#278
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.

From the Labour wonks and spads I know, Corbyn was against it, but Burnham was adamant that he needed to support the bill to be seen as "tough on terrorism". Little comfort. Horrible, inevitable news.

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

#279

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.

52 people killed in those bombings, eleven years ago.

More people than that died in 1 week of road accident deaths in the same year, and in 2 weeks of road accident deaths in 2013 [1]

Talking about numbers and causes of deaths in the UK, for comparison:

The UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) published that death registrations increased from 2014 to 2015, saying "There were 24,065 more deaths registered in the first three months of 2015 compared with the same period in 2014, with 11,865 of these extra deaths registered in January alone, when flu was circulating at its highest levels." - totals, 501,424 deaths in 2014 and 529,613 deaths in 2015. [2]

ONS also published: "In 2014, nearly a quarter of all deaths (23%; 116,489 out of 501,424) in England and Wales were from causes considered potentially avoidable through timely and effective healthcare or public health interventions."

and "In 2014, just under a third of deaths (32% or 1,443 out of 4,571) in children and young people aged 0 to 19 years in England and Wales were from causes considered avoidable through good quality healthcare" [3]

In the news today, NHS people are warning that there isn't enough money to provide all the services it needs to, even with the planned budget increases. [4]

There just isn't any comparison in the numbers. Terrorism is not fiction, the hugeness of terrorism is fiction - at least, it appears to be, absent any concrete details of numbers of plots discovered and averted, which we'll never get.

But if 52 dead is one of the biggest attacks in the UK in decades, how likely is it that avoided attacks would even approach 1400 children per year who die of preventable causes, let alone 11,000 people/1 year who apparently died of flu while flu vaccines exist?

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/annual-road-fatal...

[2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

[3] http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthand...

[4] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-38019771

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

#280

What do you do when your leaders go against the will of the people? You get new leaders. When they do t again? Try again? When they just keep doing it? Then what?

What do you do if this is the will of the people?
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