Web Monitoring laws... again....

[Jonathan]

Tweet

So the government is trying to get laws that monitor the web traffic of every person passed through as "quickly as parliamentary time allows" according to theresa may (home office).

In an attempt to reassure people, the content of emails, VOIP calls, etc will not be accessible without a warrant, but the list of websites you visit doesn't count as content, so they'll have access to your web history.

Somehow they will be able to access who you are sending emails when you use things like Gmail over HTTPS.

They seem to think they will be able to store all this data somewhere, and be able to access it in real time. Where the heck are they getting the money for such enormous capacity? I don't think they realise just how much information people transmit every day.

But lets just say they manage to get the system working and not flood themselves over capacity, it only takes some clever social network style algorithms, and suddenly they can pull up a map of everyone you communicate with and how often you do it.

This means that it becomes ridiculously easy for situation like where you get pulled over by a cop for speeding, and suddenly you being arrested under terrorism acts, because you phone the same group of people every week, whether thats the local gardening group, or an underground ring trying to smuggle in a nuclear WMD. Or you mistype an web/email address and end up on a watchlist, because the mistype is the address of someone/thing already on the list.

So after preaching to the world about how free and democratic our country is, we are becoming more like China and Iran.

(On a conspircy-type front, I'd say this is because the people in power are starting to realise how much freedom the internet gives people, eg London Riots are thought to be fed by the ease of communication of the internet but noone can know for certain as there is no monitoring in place, and they don't like it)

[JasonFWard]

This is just a rehash of what Labour wanted to do, and that was first proposed several years ago, I don't see how it's linked to the English Riots at all. However I do agree it's way over the top surveillance, I've never been too worried about CCTV so long as it wasn't all tied into a database and used for real time tracking, but these proposals are worse still than that, although, of course with things like TOR, which frankly if this ever becomes law is something I'm just going to run on my router (with special routing rules for TVC, iPlayer etc) I don't have anything to hide, and I don't do anything illegal and frankly the authorities have no right to know the minutia of my online life and I will make it hard for them to do so, hell I'll even rent a couple of VPS from different none UK providers and route some of my traffic through those, perhaps run them as TOR nodes as well.

Thing is, if they can get a warrant to monitor me, then so be it, and so long as this law isn't passed they'll be able to do that, but if this law is passed, then with or without warrant it will be impossible to track me. And I can't believe that if Al-Queda is able to run training camps for terrorist cells that they can't run a class on internet security and how to install and run TOR.

i.e. the only people this law really targets is the ordinary guy.