The UK has now made Investigatory Powers Bill/ The Snooper's Bill Law
The TL:DR version of the bill: Requires ISPs to collect data on all of United Kingdoms citizens online activity and store it for a year. Bulk collection. Yeah that's super effective right?/s
First thing: I'm a citizen of the United States of America. Certified as a Paralegal for the United States legal system. I'm in no way a legal expert of UK legal system. A lawyer from there would be able to give you a better legal perspective than me.
Opinion: My gosh. Welcome to 1984 UK. Really that's how bad this law is. The ISPS are recording everything and storing it for a year. That means all your transactions, videos you watch, how you surf the web, it's all collected. The entire time I was reading the bill, I keeping thinking this is awful. I'm so sorry for every citizen of the United Kingdom.
Why is the important: People's privacy on the internet in the UK is gone. Think about that for a moment.
What are your guys thought about this bill? How do you feel about it? To the UK members on our forum what are your thoughts on the bill?
I'm not surprised because surveillance has always been big thing but I can guarantee that most of the population here in the UK don't care about it. I hear people taking the stance of "I've got nothing to hide" or "it'll help catch terrorist" which is incredibility small minded because this amount of data could be used to do terrible things to people if in the wrong hands and I'm not convinced that the authorities won't abuse this data.
But won't it take them decades to build enough infrastructure to collect + store + throw it out when it's old? There's just no way the ISP's will be able to actually do that.
I am not surprised the sniffing country did that. They watched the people long enough to make sure nobody cares and then pulled this. Now I have to watch the German politics more carefully to make sure they don´t do the same. When they do, I run directly to our highest court!
Yup, my country is doing a fine job here. Looks like I'm going to use a VPN on all machines. Probably set my PI to just constantly search for doritos and mountain dew memes. If you want to collect shit you gonna get shit.
(Disclaimer: I think i have limited knowledge on the technicalities of this subject, excuse me if I must have misread something, also I have not read the entire document on the GB case. But here is the story from my country, Denmark)
Just across the pond of GB (to the east, that is) is Denmark. We have had mass surveillance at the ISP level for 10-15 years or so. The big divide between politicians and ISP's here, is whether the ISP's are required to monitor each individual device connecting to the internet (every computer), or only the devices that are directly attached to their main lines (routers). The difference in data collected are supposedly massive.
As it is now, they are only required to gather data on the devices that are directly attached, that's of practically no additional cost to them other than storage. Certain politicians have long wanted them to gather data on every device, which they then found out would bankrupt smaller ISP's and put a heavy toll on the bigger ones, supposedly because they would have to analyse the data more carefully to be able to tell one device from another, when they are behind a router, so it has not gone through, because of course the politicians do not want to subsidize it as much as the ISP's want. Though, regarding your point, nowhere have a time constraint been mentioned as a limiting factor.
I see it differently, I actually see it as a sign that the English form of democracy is not entirely dead yet... at least they have a binding law... other countries all do exactly the same thing without making a law that actually describes what the government agencies can do and can't do... most countries only make laws that enable government agencies to dispose of people that ask to many questions...
It's not nice in general what's happening, but the policing in the UK has nothing in common with the policing in the US or some other countries. For most people, it won't make that much of a difference. If a politician would be exposed posting dick picks to russian female fans, people would laugh at it and carry on. It's Europe lol, the british prince offs his wife so he can make out with a horse, the bloody family slogan is "honni soit qui mal y pense" (be cursed he who thinks bad of it). A similar thing will happen with non-celebrities. So more people will know of more people that they drink a bit too much... until the 80's, everyone in a community knew those things anyway.
It's much better to have a law, than to have none. The fact of having a law is the first step in democratic equality. It separates (a maybe non-ideal) democratic country from a rogue corrupt technocracy.
The GCHQ and MI5 have been illegally spying on citizens since 2000. Back then it was mosly meta-data or they were intercepting traffic from smaller fraction of people because they didn't have the capacity. This bill makes it even worse. The Gov doesn't want to invest any money into it which is why they are forcing all ISPs to store the data. This in turn will make ISPs to charge its customers double or triple for broadband.
That's not enough. GCHQ can probably back-trace your location if they want to. You want to combine VPN with Tor network. Make their life as miserable as possible.
I'm looking forward to the day when I'm murdered in my sleep because of some 15 year of facebook post I made where I said the conservative party was bad due to supporting TTIP.
ISP's have been storing an selling your data since day one, they won't rise prices, because they position the prices as high as they can in the market already... the price is not function of the cost, the price is only function of what market analysis concludes is the highest price the product can be sold at. You have freedom of expression of your opinion. The fact that your opinion is known to be yours, does not inhibit your right to have that opinion, except in a situation like before the investigatory powers law, where you were unsure about the potential for unlawful use of your data. Now you're sure about it, you can sleep on both ears again.
Ugh, this is no surprise to me. David Cameron wanted to get rid of Encryption on the internet because: terrorist. Then used the attacks from a few years ago as the backbone for this... However it was found out they were actually using normal phone to phone text messages to communicate.
I've been waiting for this turd to turn up. People in the UK seem to be either apathetic or entirely compliant, there isn't really the impetus to shoot it down. Just have to hope that this power is inherited by responsible governments, the potential for abuse is outrageous. Even on a slightly more mundane level there are many people who would love this as a tool for character assassination.
For my part I will most likely be getting a VPN at some point in the near future -out of principal if nothing else. This is one of those situations where i feel lucky that I'm "tech savy", unfortunately that selfish stance doesn't help society in a the long run.
Maybe if we are lucky (not entirely sure this would constitute luck) the Chinese or Russians will hack the shit out of the ISPs. The public might feel different when they get violated by foreign powers.
Exactly what I keep hearing... "nothing to hide, nothing to fear".
I'm being told same thing over and over. Also the "only person I will inconvenience will be myself." and "who is really interested in me."
People who say these things just can't grasp the image of the current/future reality. If you write something in China that goes against the Gov in either physical or digital form. You get fucking kidnapped. And that's was happening since the birth of communism.
If you get arrested in your own house and then interrogated 72h straight for something that you did or didn't do I wonder who will be more inconvenienced.
I hear that a lot too, but luckily most of them when we sit down and talk about it they see where I'm coming from and change their idea about it pretty sharply.
Whenever I hear the "I've got nothing to hide" argument, I put on this vid. That shuts people up real quickly without me having to argue with them for hours on end.
Also don't forget.. politicians are exempt from this type of surveillance, that was the only change made to this now law.
At least it is a law rather than some secret thing. But I feel it just shows how out of touch the law makers are. There's correct ways to do this, I don't think this is it.
This is very true, it offers more legal security, but it doesn't offer justice, therefore the law is wrong. But it's still better than no law and rogue ISP's and secret government agencies that do as they please and go 'round snuffing people the y don't like without any accountability.
I mean, this information is just going to be 99.9% bullshit. They spend billions trying to be all minority report and feel all CSI and in the end all they get is someones pizza preferences or what sex toy they ordered on Amazon. What exactly is it they are looking for, the holy grail ? The answer to the universe ?
