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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”

#191

Will the citizens allow it to be passed if they knew about it via some news source? Of course "news" now a days is about kardarshians or justin beiber than about things that requires serious attention. This may have hardly got tiny little square cm area in newspapers or 30 seconds air time. Thus sinks democracy. People who are informed are way less in number than non-informed people, but all get to vote thus diluting…

> I think there needs to be a law that punishes false information Dangerous game to play there - who decides what is 'false information', is it the same body that doles out the punishment? If so, we're back at square one.

There's a push by the state to have communications providers enforce their truth for them going on today.

The above commenter is not speaking about something theoretical.

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

#192
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange the Umbrella App link gives me a 403 https://secfirst.org/fdroid/repo/ Can't find it within the FD app.

Yeah your the third person today to say that to us. We checked it was working outside with direct download link at https://secfirst.org/fdroid/repo/umbrella.apk . As far as we can tell there is an issue with F-Droid build but our devs are looking at it at the moment to see can we solve from our side.

Actually, as a temporary fix its working if you go to F-Droid and then add our repo

"https://secfirst.org/fdroid/repo/umbrella.apk"

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

#193
After I heard this was likely to get passed, I set up a VPN on my server based in France. I now funnel my traffic through this VPN, so now all web connections are end-to-end encrypted and not subject to UK ISP logging. I suggest to everyone who is capable of setting up and running a server to do something like this.

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

#194

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

VPN will not protect your privacy, as VPN providers are monitored by state police and VPN protocols have been broken and backdoored by intelligence agencies (as disclosed in the Snowden Documents).

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

#195
post #81
post #63

What is the easiest way to explain to the average citizen that the "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument is not a good reason to let the Government keep tabs on your online activities? Most people don't give any thought to online privacy that it truly scares me.

the only way I have had any success is to describe the problem in terms of "wrong place wrong time" + "misinterpreted evidence" scenarios. this is something I wrote up a while back to try to explain it to a family member: --------------------------------------------------------------- Imagine a crime takes place in a certain area. Using surveillance technology, police identify everyone who was in the area around the…

This doesn't read as very convincing to me. Do you have experience of the justice system?

There's no way the CPS in the UK would take a "well he was probably in the general area based on his number-plate, and he reads the Toadygraph newspaper and is in the 52% who are for Brexit", even along with matching a general profile for criminals, and seek a prosecution on that basis. Not to mention it would be a huge miscarriage of justice to convict. And that the courts don't have time for arsing around with people who may have a tenuous link to an area where a crime may have been committed; we don't have time, seemingly, for the "certain" cases.

But what about the people who don't support racism/xenophobia, read a mix of news sources, aren't male (and so don't match with crime profiling). Are you saying their argument for not needing strong encryption is valid? That would seem to be a corollary of your hypothetical situation, you've cherry picked long-shot situations compounded together that would lead to a case laughed out of court - no motive, no evidence, no credible witnesses.

>Still think you have nothing to hide? //

Seems like ~99% of people reading that who weren't convinced before hand would say "yes".

Also, if they're savvy they know that the store where you went has your MAC address logged for customer tracking and corroborates your story (due to "privacy violation"), the car-park away from the scene on their number-plate cam shows you stayed in the area long after the alleged crime and so weren't fleeing, another shop has you on their instore tapes at the time the police say the crime was committed.

Now the Toadygraph has picked up your story and someone leaked that you wouldn't have been picked up if you weren't a reader; the Barclay brothers are threatening to pull their Tory party funding and so the PM is putting pressure on the presiding Chief of Police to make an example of the department responsible.

Lawyers are starting to contact you (they got your info because you left your friend list open on Facebook) and are offering to lodge a case for unlawful arrest for you and the compensation they're suggesting looks promising ...

Meanwhile people are wondering why the police didn't catch the perp; the police say it's because they don't have access to all the data they need due to public privacy concerns ...

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

#196

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

VPN will not protect your privacy, as VPN providers are monitored by state police and VPN protocols have been broken and backdoored by intelligence agencies (as disclosed in the Snowden Documents).

just setup own vps with vpn and use encryption

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

#197
post #63

What is the easiest way to explain to the average citizen that the "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument is not a good reason to let the Government keep tabs on your online activities? Most people don't give any thought to online privacy that it truly scares me.

My counter to this argument is I ask "Who decides what you should hide?" The answer is the government, which is not always on your side or right or ethical. I think (hope) people in the US will get this argument now more that Trump has been elected.

>The answer is the government //

Which is short for "the democratic will of the people" in a democracy. If the government is some elite group that you don't want governing you then vote them out.

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

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VPN will not protect your privacy, as VPN providers are monitored by state police and VPN protocols have been broken and backdoored by intelligence agencies (as disclosed in the Snowden Documents).

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, be responsible.

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