Tech firms seek to frustrate internet history log law

A majority wont care since it has nothing to do with Britain got Talent or Goglebox

A minority will be pushed to use proxies and vpn's which will flag them for closer examination

Everything is going according to plan so...

The most scary thing for me is that both political left and political right is nowadays for increasing surveillance - and there is no one in opposition.

Except probably for Pirate parties, which are mostly irrelevant.

Well, if memory serves, for the most part haven't most terrorist attacks been coordinated over either completely open channels or over non-technical channels? If I remember correctly, the Bin Laden operations were orchestrated via sneakernet, the more recent attacks in France were orchestrated with check-out aisle cell phones.

The technical difficulties law enforcement faces with terrorism and crime isn't that criminals are upping the ante with complex and difficult to penetrate technology; it's that they're methods are a needle in a haystack, ubiquitous devices and protocols that apparently law enforcement is just having difficulty filtering. Remembering back to a lecture I attended from an officer explaining the technological issues used in modern harassment and abuse cases, often times stalking would be achieved by purchasing a check-out aisle cellphone with a cheap plan, registering it with family tracking from the provider, then putting the phone into Do Not Disturb and hiding it in the victim's car or day bag, using the tracking to get an idea of where the victim went.

Sneakernets and system abuses like this are clever enough certainly, but they're not high-tech solutions for criminal activities. Most of the time just looking at a person's facebook account is enough to get the information you need to do something malicious to them or their property, and terrorists seem well aware of the ease by which they can operate in plaintext or on just normal phone calls. I don't recall any stories about terrorists using an IRC channel, for example, they're just using what they'd normally use.

Most of the surveillance security actions strike me as purely theatre - there's a difficult problem and a convenient scape goat, so rather than do the hard work, law enforcement and governments rely on a scapegoat. Unscrupulous tech vendors abuse law enforcement/government's lack of knowledge and pressure from the public to sell security snake-oil, promising them the answer to keep the people safe.

There probably is a good future where technology does help stop terrorists and criminals, but right now, they're not doing anything special or unique, just different than we're expecting, and apparently that's more than enough.

> the people who are left committing the vast majority of crime do so in part because they're not good at long term planning.

Maybe. But your data could well be flawed. You've only got to watch any of these police shows on TV, and you'll see them pick up a drug dealer because he's driving a car with no insurance, or not wearing a seatbelt, or any number of other minor transgressions. I saw one the other day where a guy yelled obscenities at the officers as he drove past, which caught their attention and caused them to recognise that he was a banned driver. That's just a special kind of stupid.

If these are the guys getting caught, then the most obvious way to not get caught is to dress smartly, drive an insured and roadworthy car at a sensible speed, and generally blend in to the thousands of commuters that take to the road every day.

Equally, while the dumb criminals will look at the new bill and not be too concerned because they don't plan that far ahead, the smart ones have already been using VPNs for years. The really smart ones aren't even using commercial VPN providers - they're using offshore VPS services with a prepaid VISA, and a script to set up OpenVPN in a couple of seconds, so they can rotate providers and destroy the VPS every couple of months or so.

> I've been nursing a theory for a long time that modern society has an accidental saving grace. And that is, if you're competent, its usually better to just not commit crime.

This is an odd comment. Clearly the mechanism you describe is correct, but there's literally nothing accidental about it at all. The entire stated purpose of the criminal justice system is to create a set of incentives sufficient to ensure this calculus applies.