Britain Set for Sweeping Internet, Phone Monitoring

[Hissyspit]

Source: Reuters

Britain set for sweeping Internet, phone monitoring
By Stephen Mangan
LONDON | Sun Apr 1, 2012 7:49pm EDT

By Stephen Mangan

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain is to allow one of its intelligence agencies to monitor all phone calls, texts, emails and online activities in the country to help tackle crime and militant attacks, the Interior Ministry said on Sunday.

"It is vital that police and security services are able to obtain communications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public," a Home Office spokesman said.

The proposed law already has drawn strong criticism, from within the ruling Conservative Party's own ranks, as an invasion of privacy and personal rights.

"What the government hasn't explained is precisely why they intend to eavesdrop on all of us without even going to a judge for a warrant, which is what always used to happen," Member of Parliament David Davis told BBC News.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE8300KD20120401?irpc=932

[Justice4allofus]

1. US, China, now England. At the end the whole world will be a prison

Liberty is being eroded everywhere.

[RKP5637]

3. The authoritarians are winning and the world will be a very

unpleasant place for all but those pulling the strings. We are in a time reversal IMO back to when things really sucked for most people. If there are generations in the distant future, this will be archived as a very turbulent time when freedom and privacy ceased, eventually, to exist.

[freshwest]

7. But how will that archive read? Michio Kaku stated that those who are resisting are terrorists.

[RKP5637]

11. That, is scary in itself. n/t

[woo me with science]

2. Will they be sheeple, too?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002451455

[RKP5637]

4. This, is such a dangerous path IMO. The more people are spied on, freedoms lost,

privacy lost, the more a degenerate society is created wherein sheepie and authoritarians are bred as a way of life. And the motivation for ones behavior will be channeled by authoritarianism making for a nation of menial robots and slaves. That, IMO, is the path we are on.

[Stinky The Clown]

5. Affirming his vision, over and over and over and over and . . . . . .

[RKP5637]

6. Yep, he saw it all ... n/t

[sarcasmo]

8. More police state insanity.

[bighughdiehl]

9. Do they really have the manpower?

Or will this just be about computers picking up on a few hundred keywords, etc?
Christ, US and UK have both turned into some Jerry Bruckheimer version of 1984.

[muriel_volestrangler]

14. They'll store it all, and then can index it automatically

Permanent storage is very cheap these days, and a lot of people know a lot about indexing (look at what Google can do, for instance). I'm sure they won't be examining us all at once; but they will be able to look at anyone they like, without pesky judicial oversight. So anyone involved in successful civil liberties groups, trade unions, environmental movements, and so on, will be under permanent electronic surveillance. And I would think it gives those involved excellent opportunities for insider dealing, industrial espionage, and so on.

[GodlessBiker]

21. And politicians, too, which maybe is why some conservatives are questioning this. It's very scary.

[slackmaster]

10. Everyone should learn Navajo

Gray rabbit running working feeling orange flowers at dawn.

[freshwest]

12. That is sweet there.

[MichaelMcGuire]

13. The rationale for it, is weak (nt)

I'm not too keen on M15 spying on my communication's.

[T_i_B]

15. This exactly the sort of policy...

...that the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats were loudly opposing under the last government.

Labour's record on civil liberties is pretty abysmal so it's not looking good.

[midnight]

16. Really? So all the crimes that Murdoch is being investigated for our now becoming legal? Hmmm...

[suffragette]

17. The Register has a good article. Note how Murdoch and the govt are managing the info on this

The Register's article points out how this is a rebranding of earlier proposals and that the timing of this story in The Times looks like Murdoch's paper is helping to manage the story by making it seem like old news by the time the official announcement comes out. Well worth the full read.


UK.gov to unveil reborn, renamed net-snoop plans in Queen's Speech

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/02/ccdp_government_snooping_plans/

David Cameron's government first published its intentions to snoop on the net back in November 2010, about six months after his Tory party formed a coalition with the Lib Dems, but in fact these plans represented no more than a rebranding of New Labour's "Interception Modernisation Programme".

~~~

Labour of course lost that election, but the idea of IMP never went away. It was instead effectively rebranded by May's department as the "Communications Capabilities Development Programme [CCDP]", which was squarely aimed at tackling perceived threats from rapidly-evolving encryption and other technologies which have increasingly made it difficult even for government agencies to intercept voice and text mobile communications.

The Sunday Telegraph ran a story about CCDP in February, which appeared to us to show that the broadsheet was simply catching up on old news. Now The Sunday Times has added to that coverage by running a story yesterday that was leaked to the Murdoch paper from a "senior civil servant" at the Home Office.

It would appear that the story is being managed: the government is looking to make sure that CCDP is an old news story well ahead of the Queen's Speech to Parliament on 9 May. Sundays - especially Sunday April the 1st - are good days to have potentially unpopular news reach the population at large.


Reminds me of Total Information Awareness, at a time when it looks like The US is also reviving this:

http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/data-mining
Remember when they rebranded the TIA logo? ACLU shows that partway down the page.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/03/16/total-information-awareness-surveillance-program-returns-bigger-than-ever/

http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/government-extends-time-it-can-retain-info-innocent-americans



Also making me think of this more, having watched it recently:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/lastenemy/berry.html

[Blue_Tires]

18. Anybody who saw "The Last Enemy" on PBS knows where this story goes...

[ikri]

19. Low hanging fruit beware!

This will, of course, do absolutely fuck all to stop any actual criminals who will use open wi-fi connections (or just crack weak passwords on nominally secure connections), VPN tunnels, TOR, VOIP, etc. to share information and guarantee that the only people who will be caught up in such a massive fishing expedition will be those too stupid to stay hidden.

There is no justification for this. It will cost too much and continually be at least 3 months behind the tech of anyone wishing to avoid the government's fishing nets.

[cyberpj]

25. The most important post in this thread. Thank you for stating it. nt

[cyberpj]

26. AND... the people who vote for these laws don't even understand enough about the technology

to know what you're even talking about.

But unless and until tech savvy young people get informed about and involved in politics I'm afraid we'll be dealing with these governmental fear tactics being used to obliterate freedom of speech and privacy on both sides of the pond for many years to come.

However, what they want to do WILL have a powerful effect on the ability of the general population to organize and coordinate any large protest movements such as happened with Arab Spring. I believe many governments are wary of what may be to come as the economic inequalities and lack of concern for the future of the globe continue without care for the masses.

[lovuian]

20. Orwell is proven right again

the New World Order gets closer and closer

[Rosa Luxemburg]

22. They have probably been spying for years

they even rummage through your trashcan

[truebrit71]

23. When David Davis is leading the clarion call to defend liberty we have officially stepped through..

...the looking glass...

He is a right-wing conservative, once tipped to be the next Party Leader but for a disastrous party conference speech, that has been no friend to liberals or their causes over the years, but on personal privacy and civil liberties he has (in the last few years) been quite the advocate....

Funny how the cons were all against it when they were in the minority, but now that they run things they're all for it....Guess George Orwell was right...All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others...

[muriel_volestrangler]

24. I wrote to my Tory MP today, pointing out his newsletter attack on "the surveillance state" in 2009

before he was elected. I said I felt sure he would be against these new developments, wouldn't he? And I gave him another attack on the "surveillance state" from 2009, this time by Cameron, for him to use to point out to the government they shouldn't be doing this. We'll see if he is just a yes-man, or if he actually wants to stand up for his words from a few years ago.