Here's the little-known legal loophole that permitted mass surveillance in the UK This article explains the extent to which the national security agencies have been collecting bulk communications data using powers which are being exercised in a way that were never subject to Parliamentary scrutiny. Such data collection is neither subject to the relevant code of practice covering communications data nor to …
What do we pay MPs for? Obviously not reading Bills carefully.
Unfortunately, to properly read a bill, the MP would have to pull themselves out of their aide / one of the bars for long enough to study it. As it stands, the primary focus is nothing more than "Is this bill one of ours or one of theirs?", regardless of who is on which bench. We are truly led by donkeys.
"This was the “Pet” computer; 2KB of memory and a printer. It retailed at 499 guineas and gave rise to the hastily introduced “word processor exemption”; a guinea was 21 shillings for the benefit of the younger readers"
Bloody old codgers, clinging onto obsolete currencies over a decade after it was phased out.
1984. At that time, computers were not networked in any significant way, except in research labs, perhaps via Arpanet, etc.
That might have been true in 1974, but there was no shortage of computer networking by the 1980s. Granted that TCP/IP was was less common in the commercial world, such connections were usually done over X.25 networks and dedicated lines, but to claim that it wasn't significant is to misrepresent the situation.
Yep - The Commordore Pet was 1977. Any geek who didn't have an acoustic coupler (or had nicked a modem from work) with one or a Trash-80 or the (even different then) Apple II wasn't worth knowing. OK networking was mostly chat on BBS but shoving documents around on BT Gold was pretty common by '84 as was email generally in the high tech trade.
Nope, the Acts were partly as a result of the earlier developments rather than being reversed engineered into it. Or did the writer sleep through a decade? Not too difficult after the rather more exciting substance enhancing sixties ;-)
The Civil Servants who draft legislation in the first place are primarily lawyers, and very few have any sort of scientific or technical training. And to be fair, they are no better than the rest of us at foreseeing the future. Add to this the volume of legislation that MPs have to deliberate on (Look up what is in place and coming through on http://www.legislation.gov.uk), and you will quickly see that an MP who did nothing but read draft legislation, full time, could only cover about 10% of it. They do have other things to do.
So the MPs rely on the advice of Ministers, who of course have an agenda when introducing new legislation. "Yes Minister" paints a disturbingly accurate picture. I don't know what the answer is, but my advice is to try to read what is relevant, and watch your backs.
"you will quickly see that an MP who did nothing but read draft legislation, full time, could only cover about 10% of it. They do have other things to do."
You do realise that MPs have expenses that allow them to employ support staff? I don't see where it says that a group of MPs with, say, an interest in civil liberties couldn't employ an expert to scan Bills for potential implications. Years ago I belonged to an industry body who employed people to do precisely that in respect of industrial policy; if our elected representatives won't step up to the wicket then the only scrutiny is by lobbyists and commercial bodies and, as Hitchens put it last week, you end up with the best government hedge funds can buy.
The biggest threat to democracy, in fact, is the leadership of the political parties who try to neuter their own MPs, and it is clear why they all hate Corbyn who has just drawn attention to this fact.
"The Civil Servants who draft legislation in the first place are primarily lawyers, and to be fair, they are far better than the rest of us at foreseeing a future that includes jobs-for-life for lawyers unpicking poorly drafted legislation."
FTFY
"We've been *lawfully* spied on since 1984."
No, it's been going on much longer than that. Wireless Telegraphy Act et al, dating back much further. Also worth noting that the 1984 Bill didn't affect the vast majority of people since the only spying on Joe Public remained pretty much the same as always, which number called which number by phone. Few people had computers at home and even fewer ever went online with them.
" That's over 20 years of data that "they" have about us."
1984 was nearly 30 years ago.
However the ability to collect, aggregate, and analyse such data in bulk was difficult for most of that time. It was only after about 2000 that Wireshark on a PC started to outperform the specialist network analysers. The latter were still dependent on filters to limit the amount of traffic they had to store and analyse.
I remember attending a seminar where a manufacturer unveiled their new, and very expensive network monitor. It only had enough memory to capture no more than a few seconds of traffic from one link - at a speed that wouldn't even suffice for home broadband these days. The salesman's solution was "You have to learn to use the filters". My reply was that if I knew what filters were relevant to the particular case - then I would already know what the problem was.
By about 2010 the network traffic at node points in a company network was again outstripping the available monitors' ability to capture it without connection filtering.
About that time I looked at the big brute arrays that were coming available to do mass collection. It still raised the question of how much computing power was going to be needed to analyse and correlate all the TCP-IP connections to keep up with the collection volumes.
It is probably still a race between network link data collection and the growth in networked traffic over multiple delivery paths. The monitoring is probably losing.
The place to capture data is at the firewall where an abstract can be obtained that is already defined by its higher protocol layers. No doubt firewalls would need to be much bigger beasts to handle even that.
... that this site is rapidly assuming the mantle of the online sibling of The Guardian, what with the endless hysterical wailing and knashing of teeth about GCHQ and that "They" might be spying on us.
FFS - do you think covert surveillance didn't happen before computers were invented? Get a clue. Phone taps have happened since the phone was invented and mail interception has happened for centuries. Computers simply make data collection easier, they haven't changed the ideologies behind them. If you're truly paranoid about "The Man" reading all your data then ecrypt it, use PGP for email and Tor for web browsing. However given the willingness of Millenials to put their entire lives online for public view I doubt GCHQ really need to work that hard to find out almost everything about anyone under 25 in this country right now.
"However given the willingness of Millenials to put their entire lives online for public view I doubt GCHQ really need to work that hard to find out almost everything about anyone under 25 in this country right now."
I suspect we have reached the point where those *without* a twatface account will be "persons of interest" to the security service/Police etc. in the same way TV Licensing continually harass those without TV Licence.
"You are aware that the issue is not individual surveillance, but bulk surveillance without any oversight ?
Nobody is complaining about warrants and normal police work. What people are against is the global hoovering of everything under pseudo-terrorist protection excuses."
You mean like the "hoovering up" of every number you've called at exactly what time that every single phone company has done for decades which you then get on your statement? It might be for a different reason but the result is exactly the same - the police can see who you've called, when and for how long. Ditto the web if this goes through. I really don't see the issue. They'll STILL need a warrant to view it unless you think that nicety will be bypassed now, in which case they've probably done that for the last 50 years wrt to phones too.
" I really don't see the issue."
The issue is that your internet records, even in abstract form, will reveal just about every facet of your life. Your social/financial/religious/sexual interests, connections, political leanings, health issues etc will be open to analysis.
That is not the collated information you want in the hands of anyone who is unscrupulous or just plain careless.
For the time being we assume the latter to be hackers or "bad apples" with access to the data either legally or illegally.
Any democratic government must also be wary of making provisions which a later government can use to persecute sections of the population.
At the risk of invoking Godwins Law the perfect example is the "Enabling Act" created by the democratic parliament of the Weimar Republic. It was a precautionary measure for use if situations like the left/right faction street fighting escalated into a major instability threatening democratic government. Its provisions were used to cope with some outbreaks of that nature - increasingly between 1930 and 1933.
The measures could only be invoked by the Chancellor of Germany - giving him the power to override parliament and rule by decree.
In 1933 by a series of political tactical mistakes Hitler was given the office of Chancellor. He then invoked the powers of the Enabling Act to rule by decree as a matter of course - and the rest is history.
Part of his regime's persecution of sections of the populace was made easier by trawling records about individuals that had been collected by previous governments' departments for benign reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_48_%28Weimar_Constitution%29
"The issue is that your internet records, even in abstract form, will reveal just about every facet of your life. Your social/financial/religious/sexual interests, connections, political leanings, health issues etc will be open to analysis."
"Speak for yourself pal."
Ah, an exciting new variation on the "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" dimwittery. How novel of you.
"I really don't see the issue."
We're only a couple of weeks on from the TalkTalk affair and you're not even slightly concerned by bulk collection of personal data at an ISP? Given it took a handful of teenagers to hack them, the Chinese must be rubbing their hands together with anticipation. Ask the folks who were affected by the OPM hack how thrilled they are that every single aspect of their personal lives is compromised, see what they reckon.
"They'll STILL need a warrant to view it unless you think that nicety will be bypassed now, in which case they've probably done that for the last 50 years wrt to phones too."
Have you actually read the Investigatory Powers Draft Bill? I've skimmed it, and a few points stand out. The text very deliberately turns the Judge into a human rubber stamp. He won't be making reviews based on evidence, but on whether or not a flowchart was followed - to the extent that it's hard to imagine a request ever being turned down.
Have you actually read the Investigatory Powers Draft Bill? I've skimmed it, and a few points stand out. The text very deliberately turns the Judge into a human rubber stamp. He won't be making reviews based on evidence, but on whether or not a flowchart was followed - to the extent that it's hard to imagine a request ever being turned down.
Gee, I wonder wherever they learned to do it that way?
So basically we have no external privacy from these criminal vermin thugs because of the effective tyranny of a socialist demo(n)cracy, with it's inherent corruption of tax collecting (extortion, theft and fraud) and benefit giving (bribery and money laundering), and unrestrained, lawless 'divine right' politicians and 'civil servants'!
I wonder how long until people get fed up with government and form a cooperative and competitive non-socialist anarchy.
In the mean time I'll just continue with my security upgrade process and minimise use of social (no real privacy) media as much as possible.
Something should be done to rein in these excessive powers. But attempting to achieve this by organising any sort of civil protest, let alone an anarchist overthrow would, "thanks" to mass-surveillance, soon be brought to the attention of the authorities. The major players would be rounded up and face the penalty of law.
People change their behaviour when they know they are being watched. Its in the interest of the state to maintain this state of fear such that no one dares to even think about changing things. Be scared of terrorists! Pah! Many more people lose their lives prematurely through smoking, pollution or traffic accidents, which seems to scare almost nobody. But terrorism provides a license for governments to do as they please, as long as a few shocking incidents a year keep happening and some of the perpetrators are brought publicly to justice. Democracy could fix this (Corbyn?), but its unlikely to happen while everyone's happy to placate Big Brother with a life of cat videos, sport and updating their twatface.
Not posted anonymously because unfortunately there's no such thing AND I want the Big Brother icon. On no, I can almost hear the jackboots in the street...
I see the Snowdonites get ever more desperate in their attempts to pretend he released any novel information. Of course, anyone with any interest in the subject knew all this already, so all the author has done is to demonstrate that he'd never given it a moment's thought until recently.
As must be completely obvious, the law was not made in secret. It's been publicly referred to over the years as the justification for various government actions.
Whatever happened to the Reg having journalistic integrity and cherishing old-fashioned ethics? This is undisclosed advertorial, and the Hawker is lying to drum up business.
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