Wacky Jacqui's £12bn gIMP could be unleashed by 2012

The government Interception Modernisation Programme (gIMP), a plan by spy chiefs to centrally collect details of every phone call, text, email and web browsing session of every UK resident, could be in place by 2012, according to a Home Office minister. Lord West told the House of Lords yesterday the government is aiming to …

[RW]

A long-overdue move

Now people will be forced to use encryption routinely.

A silver lining to the cloud of Wakkyjakky's malformed mind.

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct me if I am wrong here

but haven't the tories and that 3rd party stated they would not follow this through? And there will almost certainly be a general election in 2010-2011?

[Richard Jones]

Purpose of GIMP

Look on the bright side we might find out where those spam messages are coming from. They might give wacky jakie something else to think about, especially those medical enhancement ones, anyone for a sponsored brain implant so she can find out why everyone hates and does not trust her.

Richard

[Michael]

Someone get the GIMP team

to file a trademark suit.

Then we can ask threatening questions about why a government plan with £1 Billion in funding can't even pick an original acronym.

[John]

Lying toad

<i>"We are not proposing that data that have never been collected are held,"</i>

Nice bit of spin there, deftly sidestepping the fact that these data have been collected by ISPs, phone companies (etc.). They have never been held by the Government - that's a rather sizeable change, surely?

Plus, these data used to be collected (insofar as they were collected) only so that the companies could continue to provide their services in an efficient fashion - including for billing. Starting to use the data for spook investigations is a rather significant change of use, I would think.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck with that

Oh yes, while I think of it: bomb, obama, al qaida, bush, brown, blair, Jacqui Smith sucks

[Nigel Hughes]

Will I be able to use this data?

Will it be possible to use the GIMP data when I have a billing complaint against my provider?

[mittfh]

GIMP?

I always thought that was some kind of image editor...

Mine's the one with a copy of LOAF in the pocket...

[Mark Hagger]

35,000 emails per second?

If the system really can handle 35,000 emails per second thats quite impressive though, especially for a government project...

[Tom Paine]

three billion?

@RW, re:crypto:

(a) this is exactly what people said ten years ago when RIP first appeared on the horizon. Guess what...

(b) they assert that this thing will only hold message data (to, from, subject line, timestamp in the case of email; url / requesting IP in the case of web traffic.) That may be untrue, but even if it is, encrypting the body of your transmission doesn't help. Wikipedia's your friend, you're looking for "traffic analysis". Think of rolling up a terrorist network by looking at who else a subject has been communicating with.

Anyway I just wanted to query the "three billion emails a year" statistic. I would wager that's an underestimate by at least a couple of orders of magnitude. MessageLabs alone claims to handle 150m emails a day (> 50 billion p.a.)

[Anonymous Coward]

money money money

Could we perhaps change how parliament works so that nothing costing more than say 500 million can be spent without parliamentary approval... ideally taxpayer approval but that is just silly to wish for...

We have had a big ole loan to the banks with no conditions whatsoever (such as be nice to the general people who bailed you out by passing on base rate cuts) ... or the ID card system that spent so much in the feasibility stage that it had to carry on to look like it was not a waste of money.

There is a big cost in the NHSIT and Olympics and also in fighting an ongoing war in two countries...

As taxpayers, can we afford another spiraling bill kindly signed for by Jaqui today but paid by us for years and years.

Is wasting money to such an extent considered gross incompetence.

[Martin]

@A long-overdue move

Encryption doesn't help - this is doing traffic analysis it doesn't care about the content.

So you happen to read your encypted mail on a hotmail server. The next user is a terrorist suspect that happens to get load balanced to the same server - you are now linked to the terrorist suspect.

Your cell phone aquires a new base station as you come out of the tube. A second earlier a terrorist suspect turned off their cell phone. You are now linked to the terrorist suspect because they might have been swapping phones.

You go to a download site that has a page counter linked to an adult dating site on another server. That other server also hosts extreme pron for another site. You are now linked to downloading extreme pron.

[Anonymous Coward]

Data Warehouse?

More like Data Shithouse when the UK Government has finished with it.

False positives all round based on people viewing Achmed the Dead Terrorist on YouTube being sent to Whitley Bay....

[chris]

Feed me tech knowledge, register hive mind

How would this be affected by using a mailserver:

* based abroad

* using STARTTLS

* using GPG?

What sort of information would they get? I think from the "not content" thing that GPG wouldn't make a difference (and the headers aren't ever encrypted anyway), but what about the other 2?

Are they planning to collect all mail traffic that hits a UK server? And does STARTTLS hide the headers from govt prying?

[Anonymous Coward]

Message to my cell

You can pick up the kit for the conference 43 days after Sam's birthday in the restaurant where Jim puked on the waiter.

Come on Jacqui. Who is in my cell? Where and when will what be delivered?

[Nomen Publicus]

Who pays?

£12 billion for this.

£20 billion for ID cards

£12 billion for NHS IT

At a time when government borrowing is vast, can the country really throw away £44 billion on open ended projects of dubious usefulness?

[Jim Carter]

A step too far indeed

The Government has no need for this information- frankly it smacks of desperation from a tired, deluded and frankly clueless government trying to justify its' existence. The same could also logically apply to the minister in question, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

"around the same time as BT completes its 21CN transition"

So, not likely to be any time in the next millennium then? Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

She can't break the law

Article 4 of the directive she seeks to implement says

"Member States shall adopt measures to ensure that data retained

in accordance with this Directive are provided ONLY to the competent

national authorities IN SPECIFIC CASES...."

She's not fit to hold a position of power, her judgment is broken, if Brown thinks he's electable right now, he'd better have a quick election. For all the talk of deflation, he'll get a wave stag-flation from the borrowing.

This is not good:

http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/salinasprice/2008/1106.html

[Someone]

Re: A long-overdue move

Be careful what you wish for. If you read the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s Closed Environment Testing of ISP-Level Internet Content Filtering, you will see a government seriously considering the systematic interception of all HTTPS traffic. In effect, it is a government considering the restriction and regulation of Internet encryption. The UK government has already made it a criminal offence to fail to hand over encryption keys. It would only take a few lines of legislation to limit what encryption may be used and, for that which is allowed, to mandate the use of government-issued root certificates.

[Anonymous Coward]

@ Anonymous Coward

'but haven't the tories and that 3rd party stated they would not follow this through? And there will almost certainly be a general election in 2010-2011?'

Yes but there's a terrifyng prospect that Labour will go to the polls with a snap election in the next few months under a campaign that can be summed up as 'free money!', 'beastly Tories talking down the Pound', 'more money for pensioners!', 'horrible American mortgages', 'lovely money for nurses!', 'ooooh look - puppies.' And any mention of civil liberties won't get a look in.

Knowing the British public, a quick tax cut is all that Labour will need to get Jacqui's GIMP and ID cards.

[Anonymous Coward]

With this story

Where is mr. kemph frothing at the mouth and telling you lot how you're cowards afraid of databases. Just asking cus I need a good laugh today and seeing him lose his mind is hysterical.

[Stuart]

KISS my mail

Do you get the feeling that in order to handle the load the 'sniffer' may be simply programmed for the ISP's own mailserver, well known webmail services and maybe other port 25 traffic.

Doesn't take too much intelligence to navigate around that. Indeed I would avoid obvious encryption as that may attract attention. All the terrorist needs to be able to do is read up on secure communication in time of war and have some offshore resources.

Meanwhile we innocents pay billions to have nothing of interest sieved. And no government will admit all the money was waste, will they? Like what we spent in Iraq - oh and if we hadn't spent that we wouldn't even be thinking about this extra security - would we?

[David Hicks]

How paranoid is Jaqcui Smith?

One starts to wonder just how important the UK government thinks the UK is, to justify spending this and the other billions on security theatre.

Really, are we that paranoid?

Am I paranoid enough to think that the government's out to turn us into a police state?

I don't know. Their aims could be honest, paranoid and misguided, but the odds do seem to be stacking up in favour of a full big-brother rollout on the books.

[Anonymous Coward]

Allo....

As 'message to my cell' said the idea of just posting a message to a forum etc would mean no rolling up of the cell.

Using something like a public broadcast/media to send coded messages to people - not exactly original, on the plus side if they used BBC's have your say maybe we could get that banned.

[Chris G]

IngSoc Doubleplusungood

Thoughtcrime Jaquispeak

[Dave Bell]

Clandestine Communications?

Ces sanglots longs

De violons d’Automne

Blessent mon cœur

D’une langeur monotone

But how do you make sure the people you want to understand the message know what it means

[Anonymous Coward]

What an utter disgrace...

... this whole idea is.

Built on lies and marketed as if we need it for our own protection.

Add to the list of reasons why I have emigrated away from the Prison Island.

[RogueElement]

SEMTEX

ah - that's better. Now, where was I? Oh yes... "nothing has been decided"... so how will it work? (we haven't decided yet), where will you store all the information? (we haven't decided yet), how safe will it be? (we haven't decided yet) and my personal favourite... what will the final bill to the tax payer be? (we haven't decided yet)

[Paul]

operations moving abroad

is this why Postini are moving their operations to Amsterdam (or have just done so).

Postini reckon to punt 3 billion emails per day; let's say one tenth of that is in the UK, and assuming mail headers are, say 512 bytes, that's 150GB bytes per day just for email tracking!

Are the government going to pay for a big fat pipe^Wtube to connect GCHQ with all these internet providers? What about those of us who do our own smart-hosting and use SSL and TLS? What about instant messaging (and OTR plugins)?

Sure the government would save more lives by spending 12B on better social workers in haringey!!!

[Moss Icely Spaceport]

Old business model

Whacki Jaqcui needs to get with the program. In a few months The Great Pretender (Dubya) will be gone and so will his phony war on terrah. All this anti-bad-guy stuff is old hat, expensive and ineffective.

[Anonymous Coward]

Beware MI5

I don't trust MI5 or GCHQ an iota. The track record of the security services is a little bit dubious to say the least. Back in 2001 Sir Norman Tebbit no less suggested that MI5 had infiltrated UKIP. Recent revelations suggest MI5 listened in to the Omagh bombers on their way to plant the device (but possibly didn't realise it's importance). Just yesterday Bertie Ahern & Albert Reynolds, former Irish PMs said they had to take precautions to avoid being bugged while discussing the Northern Ireland peace process with their British counterparts (John Major & Tony Blair). John Major warned Reynolds not to disclose sensitive info. Tony Blair developed his own system to speak to Ahern. Now if even British PMs can't avoid surveillance & don't appear to trust MI5 with that information, what hope did we mere mortals have. To quote Ahern from the Belfast Telegraph: "The British tape everything...".

[The Fuzzy Wotnot]

Nice name!

gIMP, nice name, 'cos were all being bent over and...and did we mention, you'll all have to help pay for it as well?

Time for the dial-up BBS to rise again! Up to the loft and dust off those 14k modems if you value your privacy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Some sample data

Some sample data which I I think covers about 98% of kind that will be found in "gIMP".

To: [e-mail]

"wot ya doin nit Tish?"

To: [e-mail]

"grayt nite out mate! I drank 27 pins of stella and frew up on this birds. we all laffed so hard!"

To: [e-mail]

"u fkn slg! u luk at daz agn n il rp ur tts off!"

To: [e-mail]

"gt sm cls blw u cmin rnd nite?"

Some URLs?

sad-lotr-fans.com

stupid-user-malware-infection-site.com

virus-masking-as-free-stuff.com

latest-vid-of.trog-falls-and-breaks-neck.com

Yeah, well worth collecting that lot eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiots!

All you people suggesting that anyone doing anything illegal will just encrypt it seem to have totally missed the point.

This is for spying on EVERYONE. It's basically going to be used like a vast web filter, only instead of getting an "Access denied, you filthy little deviant" message, you get sent to prison.

Also, when did the government invent quantum storage? 'cause they're going to need it.

[Dave]

(untitled)

"The final system will be fully compatible with human rights legislation, he said."

Translation: "We are going to need to slightly alter some existing legislation. Nothing major, just remove a few 'nevers', the odd 'not' and the like."

Why does my grammar checker not like the phrase: 'Fuel-Air Explosive' ? I think it is great fun. Much better than some damp gunpowder...

[Anonymous Coward]

The U.S...

instigated deliberate policies, in the early 1950s, to make their citizens paranoid, because fear is the best way to control an unwittingly public. Since 1997 Labour has been attempting to do the same with UK citizens, however, the affects of this NuLabour policy seem to be affecting the proponents in the party more than anyone else. The problem with this is that they are the people that make things happen, ignoring anything they're told via their own consultation committees or the public.

Someone's got to invent a way the public can trigger an election outside of the normal cycle. Everything's gone too far under this government, well over 1 trillion quid budget deficit (counting the bank's bail out, purchase of BradBing & Northern Rock, and projects committed to, including the uberdatabase) and the continual erosion of our rights to privacy with their warrantless wiretapping gIMP system.

NuLabour F.O will you. Go to America where you may still be welcomed with opened arms, at least until 20th January, anyway.

Wacky Jaqui you are the ultimate obsessive compulsive, get some bleedin' therapy.

[Tom Chiverton]

@AC

"when did the government invent quantum storage? 'cause they're going to need it."

Hell yeah. ADSL users don't have an out bound gap, generally, so can happily send fake traffic all the time to random* locations, masking their real activity.

It worked in Cryptonomicon...