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Tech firms seek to frustrate internet history log law

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Tech firms seek to frustrate internet history log law

#31

Post by stevetrewick »

"To ensure they do not succeed, we do not comment publicly on the methods or capabilities available to the security and intelligence agencies."

Oh but you don't need to, because it's obvious. All my encrypted traffic to my overseas based VPN will be logged (legal). Then you'll demand my keys so that you can decrypt it. If I don't or can't comply then I will be - by definition - a criminal and potentially a terror suspect.

Which is why 'just use a VPN' is not really a satisfactory response to this kind of legislative landscape. Just doing so paints a target on you.

Which is not to say I don't appreciate the VPN providers stepping up, the more VPN users there are the more expensive it is to persecute them individually.

Re: Tech firms seek to frustrate internet history log law

#32

Post by pjc50 »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #20

The thing I don't get about the UK is that they have very pervasive surveillance set up both online and in the real world, yet anyone can buy a mobile phone and a prepaid SIM at some random Tesco's and pay with cash without giving their name or ID. Why do they keep allowing this? Other countries have always required presenting ID to buy a SIM. It's a surveillance measure that's presumably quite effective, but also fa…

Surveillance isn't particularly rational or consistent, sadly.

Re: Tech firms seek to frustrate internet history log law

#33

Post by JBReefer »

TheGrumpyBrit wrote: post #27
josephg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the weird thing is, despite being easy to circumvent these sort of measures are often very effective! So long as using a VPN requires any baseline of knowledge, technical skill and effort, I expect 90%+ of criminals won't do it. 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. Think about…

> 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 g…

I also see this in my friends that do dumb stuff for their income. Most of them are flat out stupid and the rest are only able to think about the next few days.

TV isn't a good representation of most of it - it rarely shows how little profit drug dealers actually clear, for example.

Re: Tech firms seek to frustrate internet history log law

#34

Post by ptero »

oliverjudge wrote: post #2

The scariest line was this: "Terrorists and serious criminals will always seek to avoid detection." The fact that in the public eye they're going to be claiming they are doing this under terrorism, will give a lot of weight with non-technical people.

To me, even bigger problem is a general fact that a large majority of people easily agree to restrict liberties (some of them hard won) because "terrorists can also do this". A more defensible argument would be "outlaw X if a fraction of law abiding citizens snagged would be tiny".

I would be curious though how big a majority would still support the logic that "we should restrict/track any X if X helps terrorists", if the question were to be posed cleanly (i.e., without scaremongering examples on the same page). If the problem is presentation, not internal beliefs the pendulum may swing back sooner rather than later.

Re: Tech firms seek to frustrate internet history log law

#35

Post by wotstowaway »

In fact, it's already possibly (and easy) to obtain the un-anonymized browsing history of millions of people. I was part of a (journalistic) team that got their hands on a free sample from a company that offers "website traffic analytics", and which uses browser extensions as well as mobile apps as their main surveillance tools.

The data set contained the complete browsing history of almost 3 million German Internet users, and except for a few popular sites (like Facebook), no URL cleaning/anonymization was performed at all.

So here we have a single provider that is able to capture the browser traffic of 5 % of the population already, and is ready to disseminate this data to anyone who can pay the price (even giving out months of data for free). As there are dozens more companies that collect data using a variety of ways, it wouldn't be surprising to me if you could stitch these individual data sets together to get the traffic of > 50 % of all Internet users, without having any central point of data collection.

So although the government is a real threat to citizens privacy, unregulated private actors are much more dangerous in my opinion.

Re: Tech firms seek to frustrate internet history log law

#37

Post by MereInterest »

josephg wrote: post #14
iamben wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. It makes no sense. "Let's bring in a law that logs everyone not seeking to avoid detection." Any serious criminal/terrorist will use a VPN, disposable phones with end to end encrypted messaging, or pen and paper. Any criminal/terrorist that doesn't take these measures shouldn't be a problem to prevent in the firstplace.

Yeah the weird thing is, despite being easy to circumvent these sort of measures are often very effective! So long as using a VPN requires any baseline of knowledge, technical skill and effort, I expect 90%+ of criminals won't do it. 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. Think about…

I would argue that the notion of "crime" is typically biased by the observed criminal acts. For example, criminal theft is usually thought to be some form of robbery, including everything from bank robberies to residential break-ins. However, wage theft, consisting of employers illegally withholding wages, is more than 2.5 times larger than all robberies combined [1].

It isn't that smart criminals don't exist. Rather, smart criminals don't fit our mental image of "criminals", which makes it harder to target laws against it.

[1]: http://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-for...

Re: Tech firms seek to frustrate internet history log law

#38

Post by stevetrewick »

josephg wrote: post #14
iamben wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. It makes no sense. "Let's bring in a law that logs everyone not seeking to avoid detection." Any serious criminal/terrorist will use a VPN, disposable phones with end to end encrypted messaging, or pen and paper. Any criminal/terrorist that doesn't take these measures shouldn't be a problem to prevent in the firstplace.

Yeah the weird thing is, despite being easy to circumvent these sort of measures are often very effective! So long as using a VPN requires any baseline of knowledge, technical skill and effort, I expect 90%+ of criminals won't do it. 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. Think about…

I fail to see how placing an entire population's electronic communication under surveillance is a proportionate response to this kind of 'low hanging fruit' offender.

Re: Tech firms seek to frustrate internet history log law

#39

Post by JoeAltmaier »

oliverjudge wrote: post #2

The scariest line was this: "Terrorists and serious criminals will always seek to avoid detection." The fact that in the public eye they're going to be claiming they are doing this under terrorism, will give a lot of weight with non-technical people.

Terrorists also have mothers, and eat apple pie. This is not about terrorists; this is about frustrated law enforcement who seek to break privacy to facilitate their efforts. When we see it that way, we see the emotional rhetoric for what it is - scaremongering to make enforcement simpler.
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