UK Proposing Real-Time Monitoring of All Communications 145
An anonymous reader writes "In response to a plans to introduce real time monitoring of all UK Internet communications, a petition has been set up in opposition."
Previously covered here, El Reg chimes in with a bit of conspiracy theorizing and further analysis: "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."
Re:Where to move to? (Score:5, Interesting)
Time to move... but to where?
Stay right where you are, and start a social movement. Governments aren't land masses; they can only exist by the consent of the governed. If things get bad enough, joining such a group would become a no-brainer and you'd have de facto government reform by a collective choice from all the citizenry. They'd just pick a form of government, select their political representatives, start making policy and wait for support for the old regime to fall away entirely.
It's more or less what BitCoin is doing to the old dominate-through-control-of-the-money-supply regime.
The People always have a choice - that's just the nature of politics. The problem has only been that the choices the People have been making have been in support of the old guard.
Posit: The War for Independence never ended, they just quit shooting. Britain started using bribery on public officials and began to chip away at the society that had formed, until the Union was indistinguishable from the tyranny that it left. The point was to get them to stop making their argument for individual sovereignty; if they'd kept making it, it would have spread back to England where large swaths of the folks there would have been demanding it. Britain would have lost a lot more than a few colonies, because it was a very sound idea. Valid ideas are always a threat to tyrants, and sometimes the best way to stop people from making their argument for them is to let them think they've already won.
Your concept about running out of continents to go off and colonize is quite right. It's time to stop running. The only other alternative is to just roll over, close your eyes and er... "think of England".
Privacy of association: an immodest proposal (Score:5, Interesting)
The point is to initially study who people are talking to, right? That can be used to determine (un)reasonable suspicion. Random thought:
What if, say, hundreds of thousands of people were to sign up to a single service. Each day they posted their messages to that service, plus some garbage, to make a nice constant number of daily "posts". Each day everyone downloaded ALL messages posted to that service. The messages are, of course, each encrypted for the intended recipient, and people never download individual public keys - only everyone's or no-one's.
When a computer has downloaded the message batch, it tries to decrypt all of them, but will only be successful with messages actually intended for the recipient.
1) Is this already used?
2) If not, is this technically feasible?
3) I am assuming that a man in authority would be able to listen to all network communications or retrieve all server content and logs. Will it be possible for them to establish who was communicating to whom?
I understand that there are other options which rely on obfuscating routing between particular destinations. This method relies on not having any routing at all - more like listening to a daily broadcast in the style of the old "numbers stations".
So the system must enforce a service user's lack of choice on what to download and whether to upload (even if you just upload garbage). Anyone reading IPs in a similar "broadcast" service's access logs (e.g. Twitter) will have a good idea who is receiving what - which I think is what this law is taking advantage of(*) - but what if the service's logs were open for all to see, law enforcement or otherwise, because the logs revealed nothing useful?
The practical questions would be concerning whether the idea scales, i.e.
1) how many messages can everyone download at regular intervals (multicast?) before there'd be a need to split the batches?
2) is it feasible to attempt (part) decryption of all these messages to identify which are for you?
(*) The proposed law isn't afaict demanding warrantless "wiretapping" (i.e. of content), but denying privacy of association. This seems to be the route the EU has tried to go down, and mirrors recent legislation in Canada.
Thoughts?
Re:BBC Q and A session (Score:5, Interesting)
I honestly don't know how politics is in the UK, but in America I think the costs associated with forcing ISPs to save the entire internet in its every iteration would result in quite a lot of ISPs lobbying against shit like this.
You'd do well to assume that things are relatively similar here. Margins in the ISP business are thin.
Now, if it were up to the ISP's discretion as to what they want to save (Hello the bullshit that will be July 1st) or if the government subsidized a load of their costs, I can see ISPs going for it, but just saying "spend a shitton of money OR ELSE" legislation seems unlikely to survive.
Right now, it's mainly a kite that's being flown by the spooks. They'll run into problems over funding it and from the privacy advocates too. (There was a Tory blathering on about how unacceptable it was on the radio this morning; I turned it off because he sounded like an annoying git, even if he had a point on this matter. Wanting to punch someone in the face before starting your morning commute isn't healthy!)
Of course, if this does get implemented (a sad day if it comes to pass) then it becomes important for all spam headers to be sent on as well, including all the stuff that a responsible ISP would normally filter. Ideally, it should all go to the same Exchange server that all their internal messages are hosted on. After all, Exchange is an enterprise-ready solution! ;-)
Some do (Score:5, Interesting)