Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/11/23/uks-new-surveillance-law-cre.html
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This will be law in the United States within a year or so, depending on when the next domestic terror attack (non-white) happens
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It’s a small price to pay to pretend to be safe!
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and yet another reason to never move to the UK, though sadly the USA seem eager to catch up to them in this way.
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Next up in the UK, more pretexts for using those tools to snoop into the private lives of civilians. At least they give people in North America a preview of what to expect.
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It’s worth noting that we’ve had something like that in Denmark since 2007. Four things are especially noteworthy:
- It’s trivially easy to circumvent.
- The EU Court of Justice struck down this law for being too invasive. The actual logging has since been partially dismantled. Not that that helps the UK any these days.
- The police has denounced the practice as not useful in the real world. criminal evidence gathered this way is expensive and of questionable value.
- There was a cost associated with establishing it, both monetary (taxes + more expensive connections), and more unexpected social ones. A number of ISP employees suddenly needed security vetting from the internal intelligence service, a process which was bungled so that their dossiers were shared with employers. For instance, a number of people were outed as gay or trans to their bosses. Others simply quit rather than go through the procedure.
… Not to mention that the oversight more or less stopped at the security vetting of individuals. As usual with procedures established these days, no transparency or public oversight was included. Not even the basic right to review your own logs. Expect similar in the UK, I’m afraid.
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It will be the blackmailers full employment bill.
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It’s amazing that an ostensibly democratic state could grant itself more invasive surveillance powers than most dictatorships. (Or possibly all dictatorships - I’ve seen it suggested that this surpasses what any other government is doing.) How are people not completely outraged by this?
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If you aren’t a pervert of a criminal, you should be fine. Juuuussssttttt fiiinnneeee…
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TrollTrace?
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Exactly
Any recommendations on good VPNs with exit nodes established in countries without this kind of legislation? In the meantime buy shares in storage suppliers. It’s a massive government subsidy to hard drive manufacturers to store oodles of irrelevant data.
Reasons why this is a bad idea:
- The UK database of all web searches is bound to leak at some point. If you thought Ashley Maddison was bad, wait until the next teenager hacks the complete ISP history of BT or TalkTalk, or until a reporter at the Daily Fail bribes one of the database admins to precipitate a little leak
- I don’t actually want to end up on a government watchlist the next time I find myself down the YouTube clickhole watching the effects of VX gas on unsuspecting bunny rabbits, etc.
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Fire up Tor and the VPN.
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Profoundly disturbing.
Let’s have a look at who will have access to your browsing history - Who can view my internet history?
Source (pdf).
Next up - censoring all unconventional sex acts like errr…female ejaculation(!) in the new and improved digital economy bill. 
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Well look at the bright side: this sounds like a great way to discover new types of pornography. Just gotta get access somehow.
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Sadly, nobody believes politics is anything more than a game these days, designed to generate funny news stories for the media. It’s hard to see how we fix this.
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Because as usual, the main news outlets have been crying about the size of a fucking Toblerone rather than anything that actually matters. Other than the Guardian mentioning it below the fold two days ago, I haven’t seen or heard anything in the press. It’s disgraceful, but I’m no longer surprised.
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That’s what I’m thinking. You create something like this and it is guaranteed to get hacked. If it’s actually tracking everything for everyone, you could find out a lot of interesting things about people in power.
I’m sure they’ll find ways to exempt themselves, but spouses and children might still be easy targets. It just seems like a colossally stupid thing to do.
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I’m shocked that so massively invasive a program could be introduced with such stealth, but I suppose the build-up has been long enough that the final pieces being put in place didn’t seem like news. A warning about the dangers of normalization, I suppose…
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