Theresa May: No emails sniffed in web super-snoop law Home Secretary Theresa May denied today that spooks will monitor emails in real-time under her proposed web-snoop law, which is due to be announced in the Queen's Speech next month. "There are a lot of myths out there," the cabinet minister told MPs at a select committee hearing at lunchtime on Tuesday. May also expressed …
Well the Swedish Försvarets radioanstalt national TITAN database which was built to capture all internet traffic announced that they need to update it to monitor in-Game and in-App communications. TITAN interestingly is able to share an entire copy of their national internet traffic with 'partners', in real-time, allegedly.
"The Home Sec's argument in favour of CCDP to MPs today reflected an opinion piece she penned for The Sun earlier this month in which she pointed out that police and spooks already gathered data from phone records to help solve crime and protect the British public against terrorist attacks."
Why is a British government minister writing articles for one of Murdoch's newspapers? Don't we pay her enough? Maybe she's currying favour in case the bill gets rejected and she has to subcontract the spying to News Corporation?
All (major) politicians are regularly invited/allowed to write OpEd in 'friendly' newspapers. If you read the Guardian or Mirror, then you will see OpEd from people like Wallace^H Ed Miliband, Ed Balls etc, whilst if you read the Sun, Times or Telegraph, you will see OpEd from Boris, Cameron, etc.
If you read student newspapers, then you will see LibDem OpEd :)
Given that the parlous state of the UK economy is due to a bunch of gullible, self-serving politicians (thank you, Tory Blair & co) and their financial advisers should we not be adding a third category to the needle-in-a-haystack search for terrorists and paedophiles - corrupt politicians.
So -for example- can we have a simple assurance from the Home Sec that she will be applying the same scrupulous attention to the communications of those non-tax-paying friends who contribute so generously to her political party?
Nah! Thought not.
When does real-time end??
"We won't read your emails until at least ten minutes after you send them."
This legislation will only affect the innocent and incredibly stupid criminals and terrorists.
If THEY can read my emails, I want to be able to read theirs.
"Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" works both ways.
Technically, a few microseconds should be more than enough.
I.e. about the average time for a mail message to be generated, sent, received by a local mail server and collected (hell, at one-minute intervals if you like) so it can pop up on some computer in GCHQ saying "Mr F Bloggs just sent this email:"
The keyword she needs to remove is "realtime". Ideally, she needs to replace it with "at all".
"The keyword she needs to remove is "realtime"."
Yes. Reminds me of Grant Shapps on the news last night lambasting Newnham Council for seeking to relocate 500 poorer families from London to Stoke. All a plot by the Labour Council, he had it. Absolutely scathing he was, and assured us that such a thing wouldn't happen and might even be illegal. He finished with saying - to paraphrase him - 'however I certainly don't think taxpayers should have to fund families to live in homes they can't themselves afford' - the inescapable conclusion being unemployed families should not get housing benefit for anywhere in London that isn't a slum. If he doesn't believe, then, that said families should be moved elsewhere, presumably he thinks they should simply be evicted and left on the street.
Duplicitous bunch of fuckers.
"to maintain the capability for the security services to access certain data on terrorists, criminals and so on."
If these terrorists and criminals are already known to the security services, why don't they lock them up?
I think she actually means *suspected* terrorists and criminals.
In other words, as anyone can be a criminal or terrorist, the best way to catch them is to snoop on everyone's data and then watch for red flag words and phrases that could mean someone may be a criminal or terrorist, and then apply intensive techniques to gather as much info as possible and look for further evidence on that person and anyone they've communicated with.
A bit like the Private Investigator at the centre of the Leveson inquiry, except this has State approval.
I think the "so on" category covers the heinous villains who try to get their children into better state schools or put paper in with the non-recyclable waste, things like that.
Dropped an apple core on the street - rather than put it in your pocket - because you couldn't see a bin?
They'll grab a frame from the CCTV, use a face scan to find out your name and then dig into your email and phone communications. They'll track your car number plate and build up a complete log of your movements via CCTV and your mobile phone GPS data and when they cannot find any further crimes, they'll serve you with a fixed-penalty £50 fine.
And because the Big Brother cameras are already in place and the various databases will be filled by information from official documents you provided (DVLA, Council tax etc) it'll only take one security bod to press a button to do all the checking, meaning it won't cost very much. It's a win-win situation.
No when they can't find anything else they will flog the information for £2.50 to £3.00 to some private investigator who tells them that he needs to the information because you parked on his auntie's cousin's sister in law's friend's acquaintance's passer by's road where you didn't see the no parking/dogging/feeding the ducks/etc sign and therefore they need to serve you with a civil offence notice just on the off chance you might be suckered into paying their multi thousand pound penalty notice.
Am I the only to read this as reasoning from incompetence? At any rate, she doesn't manage to mollify me, no. It's just more of the same ignorant and untrustworthy prattle we've come to know and expect from anyone in government. A side effect of the bureaucrats actually running the show, Shirley.
Presumably refusing to answer the question about whether this will extend to decrypting SSL communications - means the answer is yes. But how does that work? Surely the box cannot decrypt SSL without knowing the target webservers private key? If they have developed some way around this - Google is very correct about breaking the architecture of the internet.
No, the reason for refusing to answer is probably because she doesn't know what HTTPS or SSL is and so is unable to answer the question without looking (more) like a prize wally.
And this, you see, is why they want this system. In future, people making comments like this at work will have their web-traffic intercepted and will be met at their doorstep when they get home in the evening by a couple of men in a dark sedan who want a word about "troubling comments about a senior government official" on the interwebs.
On the plus-side, they'll probably get Capita to write the seach tool. The development of which will be off-shored...
"There are new methods of communication and we wish to be able to apply what has been there with previous communications"
Tell you what then May, you can do the same to my internet packets that you do to my snail mail. What's that you say? You don't actually do anything with snail mail unless you know I am a suspect, but you want to harvest all of the internet packets of EVERYONE?
How is that "...what has been there with previous communications"
You are aware of telephones, aren't you?
The telcos keep logs of phone calls, including endpoints and duration, which they use to charge the customers. This information is made available to the security services on presentation of a warrant.
There is also provision for mail to be intercepted, again on presentation of a warrant.
at least have a go at preserving some privacy, whilst tsaving millions of pounds of wasted money.
i swear that one day soon, it will be illegal to have you're own bloody curtains closed!
and if you are a twitter user please RT this http://action.openrightsgroup.org/ea-campaign/clientcampaign.do?ea.client.id=1422&ea.campaign.id=8227
thanks
she says.
and then, they will bury the news and it will be real time, but hey, who's going to be go after her when this happens? Will they put the ex-minister May against the wall? She will have been gone, and forgotten, along with all her honourable predecessors.
Really, how do they manage to recruit the same type of a nasty character to the same post over and over again? The same spiel about terrorists and pedophiles and pirates with every new one. As if any piece of snooping legislation has made them disappear... those nasty characters ;)
They won't need to go as high level as getting root. If you've ever run a packet capture then you get the idea.
The thing that confuses me is the whole argument about not reading the 'body' of packets. But at which network layer are we talking? One layers body is the next layers header...
> "There are a lot of myths out there," the cabinet minister told MPs at a select committee hearing at lunchtime on Tuesday.
"For example, some people actually believe I am somehow qualified for this job," May continued happily, "when in fact I haven't got the slightest fucking scooby what is going on."
Myth 1. The government acts in the interests of the people
Myth 2. It won't read mails in real time so long as that is defined as while you are writing it
Myth 3. It will help capture terrorists most of whom have been captured in the last 10 years without this level of interference and which interference would probably never have caught the ones who did commit offences
Myth 4. It's for you own good
Myth 5. Theresa May is some sort of attractive looking Tory minister 'cos she wear kitten heels
Myth 6. We will all be on the watch list for having posted on this web site. OOOPS that is not a myth.
were the second last ones to piss off the electorate.
According to wikipedia she went to several raving Catholic convent schools, from where she studied (I'm shocked,) Geography, which if not a science, is at least a real subject.
So while she did study a real subject, she's still a girlie with no technical expertise, but this isn't her job. Her job is to get re-elected, and that involves stopping nutters blowing up busloads of children.
As I learned from scratch AWS, and then wrote here in an hour a foolproof communications method using S3, I'm sure the nutters can. All that's happening, so far as I can see, is that the underpaid guys from marry your cousin country are saying they can still track what you're doing but they need permission. The laws we had were designed for an earlier age. Florida was around before Turing. They just need them up to date.
I see no problem. My wife travels on London bus, I don't care which pikey's rights they violate, or even shoot, so long as she gets home ok.
People
we who actually live in the reality fo the majority recognise this for what it is, a massive attack on civil liberties by a few brain dead politicians responding to the provision of a nice wedge of cash for the party funds and a directorship of a nice bank or multinational company (who is probably investing in the technology firms making the required products to achieve this, or even the companies doing it). It is time that we rose up and fought for our freedom, demanded that they retract this infamous Act of Parliament and if they don't let us take to the streets and show them that it is we the people who have the power in this country not the so called political masters.
On the other hand on the basis of the governments view of what constitutes a terrorist my next posting may not be for sometime and potentially from a US prison (even though my alleged crime is perpetrated in the UK).
>to maintain the capability for the security services to access certain data on terrorists, criminals and so on.
In that case target the terrorists, criminals and so on not the innocent.
>It will not be looking into emails in real-time.
This is more worrying than it first appears. Forget the definiton of real-time, in it's ambiguity it implies that there will be the ability to read emails at a later time which would involve the storage of the content of emails and by extension other communications, something which they have so far skirted around and not out and out denied.
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This is to enable the prime ministers press secetary to dig for dirt when a citizen or civil servant has the audacity to point out when the prime minister is telling lies (e.g. the WMD report, and the mud slinging from an AC close to the prime minister)
Now instead of having to hunt for mud and rumours, they will be able to access all at the touch of a button, and possibly sell it to their form boss and staff at places like NewsCorp.
Given the existing surveilance powers have worked adequately well since 7/7, as demonstrated by the fact that the only victim of a terrorist related incident in england was a law abiding citizen killed by the Met screwing up, I see no logical argument or evidance for more powers.
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Do you seriously think that it's not possible to intercept mail in transit? Or that the Royal Mail aren't able to record where a mail from sent from, they certainly know where it is sent to.
This is what we're dealing with here, an endpoint recording excersise, it gives much more information than you may think.
Two important differences:
1) Royal mail can only log recipient and original postbox. Sender logging isn't possible.
2) It is relatively easy to ensure that you at least know that a letter has been opened.
The downside, of course, is that you're using a slower and more unreliable means of communication.
So er... what exactly is proposed?
Does anyone know?
Why is Ms May willing to give us a few hints, but unwilling to publish a spec?
I don't think we can really have a debate about this system when we don't know what it does. I strongly suspect that it actually won't be that useful compared to just increasing powers to demand data from web service providers like facebook, skype, and playstation network...
Theresa May dogged the really intersting question from Julian Huppert: if, for example, GCHQ black boxes sitting on ISPs' networks would decrypt such information.
"I don't think it's appropriate for me to say. It's a technical detail and I'm clear what the legislation will say on access," said Ms May. But this is not only a technical issue, it is a budget issue and it is what everybody wants to know.
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