100k+ petition: MPs must consider debating Snoopers' Charter again A petition to Parliament requesting the repeal of the Investigatory Powers Act has received the 100,000 signatures required to make Parliament “consider” debating the issue. Although the Investigatory Powers Act doesn't actually exist at the moment — it remains a Bill of Parliament which will not become an Act until it …
The pigs you hear are happily snorring in the pigsty. Any ideas of them being persuaded to trot out onto the runway, warm up the engines and take off are subject to getting a weather forecast of thundersnow in hell. Which is not in most recent metoffice communique.
So forget it. Josephina Vissarionovich always gets what she wants. The Human Rights Act and the other obstacles on her way to become the High Chancellor are next.
they been trying for 10 years and we may not leave the EU anytime soon
There's no connection between the 1998 Human Rights Act and EU membership.
The UK was one of the founding parties to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) of 1951, which predates even the EEC. The Human Rights Act is a purely domestic piece of legislation which requires UK courts to make judgements in a way that is compatible with the ECHR. It can be repealed or replaced by any UK government that chooses, with no impact whatsoever on EU membership.
No explicit connection, however in 2007 the EU said:
"Any Member State deciding to withdraw from the Convention and therefore no longer bound to comply with it or to respect its enforcement procedures could, in certain circumstances, raise concern as regards the effective protection of fundamental rights by its authorities. Such a situation, which the Commission hopes will remain purely hypothetical, would need to be examined under Articles 6 and 7 of the Treaty on European Union."
Respect for human rights is a precondition of membership, respecting the EHCR is the most convenient way to demonstrate it. So the UK would be on unstable ground re EU membership if it rejected the EHCR, especially in the light of the snoopers charter and general right wing disrespect for human rights currently taking hold.
But you're leaving anyway lead by extreme right wingers so human rights aren't likely to play a big part in the future of England or their holiday homes in Wales.
Any Member State deciding to withdraw from the Convention and
Please read what was posted.
The UK is a signatory to the ECHR since 1951, and this has nothing to do with the Human Rights Act of 1998.
That Act requires UK courts to make judgements that are compatible with the ECHR. Repealing it would leave the UK in exactly the same position as it was before 1998, still a party to the ECHR, and still bound by it.
Repealing the Act, and withdrawing from the ECHR, are two separate things, the first does not imply the second.
The Human Rights Act is a purely domestic piece of legislation which requires UK courts to make judgements in a way that is compatible with the ECHR. It can be repealed or replaced by any UK government that chooses, with no impact whatsoever on EU membership.
The UK is bound by human rights rulings made by the ECJ until it leaves the EU. It would still be bound by rulings made by the ECourtHR even if it left the EU.
If the Human Rights Act were repealed it would mean there's a pretty big hurdle as courts could make judgements in a way that is not compatible with the EConventionHR and someone would need to take it all the way up to the ECourtHR. Whackypedia says the average cost would be 30 grand and the average time 5 years. So beware of any government or minister which says or have said they want to repeal that act.
Oh bugger, that's the PM.
AIUI this would have an impact on the Good Friday Agreement.
Possibly. The agreement required that the government "agreed to incorporate into Northern Ireland law of the European convention on human rights (ECHR), with direct access to the courts, and remedies for breach of the convention, including powers for the courts to overrule [Northern Ireland] assembly legislation on grounds of inconsistency." so any repeal of the HR Act, and replacement with some other legislation like a new Bill of Rights would need to take that into account.
Unfortunately some people try to equate "'repeal of the HR Act"with "withdrawal from the ECHR", they are distinct issues.
Prior to the HR Act, British courts were required to make judgememts based on British law, as determined by Westminster. If someone felt that any judgement contravened their rights under the ECHR (which the UK is signatory to) they could take the government to the European Court of Justice and complain that the law was incompatible with the ECHR. The resulting discussions would happen at governmental levels, and if the complaint was upheld the UK would be expected to change the law.
What the HR Act did was to short-circuit this, and require UK courts to directly rule according to the ECHR, effectively placing the ECHR above UK national law. This is why some peope are concerned about it, it places UK courts + European law above UK law as determiend by Parliament. Simply repealing the Act will return to the situation pre-1998, it won't change the UK's responsibilities under the ECHR, it just means that plaintiffs would have to prove that that a UK judgement violated the ECHR, instead of the situation today where the UK has to prove that it did not.
it places UK courts + European law above UK law as determiend by Parliament.
No, the HR Act means the UK courts must abide by the EConventionHR that the UK ratified in 1953. Most western countries have an equivalent to the HR Act which means that cases don't need to be escalated to the ECourtHR.
he HR Act means the UK courts must abide by the EConventionHR that the UK ratified in 1953
No, it does not. that is FUD.
The UK must abide by the ECHR (ratified in 1951) in any case. The difference the HR Act makes is that if there is any uncertainty or ambiguity between UK law and the ECHR, the courts are required to rule according to the ECHR, over UK law. Any disagreement must go to the ECJ to prove that UK law is not incompatible with the ECHR, and should be respected.
Without the HR Act the courts must rule according to UK law, and any disagreement must go to the ECJ to prove that UK law is incompatible with the ECHR and must be changed.
It's not unlike the "presumption of innocence" concept. The HA Act requires the courts to presume that UK law is invalid, and the government must prove it is not.
"The Human Rights Act ... can be repealed or replaced by any UK government that chooses, with no impact whatsoever on EU membership."
True, the UK could (and did) do without the HR Act. However, one key point of the act was that it made it easier to bring cases before British courts, thus reducing the need to go to the European Court of HR.
Incidentally, the more a government claims that there's no need for them to be covered by a treaty or court at a higher, international, level, the more I tend to think they need just that. But perhaps I'm just getting cynical in my old age.
And if there isn't anything to pin on you in your captured logs, something can be put there, and you will have no legs on which to stand as the "evidence" is clear to see. Evidence that could never be tampered with as it wouldn't exist if judicial approval was required prior to creating it
Anyone can tamper with it if it exists - and then point the finger at you.
THAT is the case against "nothing to hide" argument.
If this stupid act does go through ill be sure to download and upload to the maximum extent possible on any internet connection I use.
We will have to engage in a disk space war.
We will have to make it unfeasible to store everything and impractical to grep through it.
May I suggest we also reduce packet sizes as well. If they do indeed collect only meta data then shrinking packets increases their storage burden.
Failing that we now have a requirement for technologies that establish connections to hundreds of endpoints simultaneously to hide the one connection that actually matters.
The internet as we know it is about to get a lot noisier.
Seriously its the average Joe on the street im concerned about here.
The actual criminals are already masking their comms.
This act will achieve nothing.
Yes quite, could this be the law that gets everyday people to start worrying about their privacy ?
Probably not. Those that care will spending money with non-UK based VPN providers. In fact, this act will be counterproductive to the UK Government's purported aims since if I wanted to properly conceal my traffic from interception in the first place I would be using a VPN and be standing out like a sore thumb. Now they will have haystacks of sore thumbs.
Next up I guess, then, will be the War On VPNs.
It'll take some time for the concept of a VPN to trickle into the minds of the gubbermint. They can barely accept the Internet exists - although understanding of how it works is clearly beyond their classical minds.
Once they realise that anyone can simply bypass all of their draconian attempts of control, they will declare VPN's the 'tool of the terrorist', and make a long speech in Parliament to inform anyone using one will be subject to investigation as a possible 'national security risk'.
And then they will ban them. And thus the UK will once again be saved from itself.
It'll take some time for the concept of a VPN to trickle into the minds of the gubbermint.
Nope - it has trickled already. It was in the original act.
And then they will ban them.
A ban on VPNs for non-business use was in one the first drafts and early inter-department consultations.
So, what were you saying once again?
"[...] and make a long speech in Parliament to inform anyone using one will be subject to investigation as a possible 'national security risk'."
IIRC the then Home Secretary David Blunkett proposed random home inspections of anyone's PC. He said "No one with nothing to hide has anything to fear from being investigated by the police".
If you use a VPN, you'll get a visit, or a trojan keylogger on your device.
If you use a VPN, you'll get a visit, or a trojan keylogger on your device.
That will be at least half the population if Theresa May's idea of blocking porn sites which don't implement stringent age verification controls comes to pass too. The choice faced by a great many people will be:
a. Porn-free Internet
b. Giving out their credit card details to the handful of unblocked porn sites, who will either charge it themselves, or let the details be stolen by someone else who will.
c. VPN
> Next up I guess, then, will be the War On VPNs.
And if they ban VPN providers, I will get a cheap VPS somewhere that respects privacy, set it up as a personal open VPN server, and they will still be seeing nothing from me. If this act does ever come into law all they will see from me is connections to VPN's, youtube, netflix, and prime. And the only votes I will cast are for candidates who will repeal this act. I have written my MP and said as much as well.
> May I suggest we also reduce packet sizes as well. If they do indeed collect only meta data then shrinking packets increases their storage burden.
I suspect this will do nothing except slow your connection down - they'll be storing NetFlow records, no doubt, which basically say "This IP had a TCP connection to that IP and this amount of data went in one way and another amount in the other direction." Perhaps they'll "enhance" this data with a quick sniff up the stack to grep out a URL, and perhaps try and add some form of hardware signature and payload protocol from request headers and DPI. The use of a VPN will obviously mask a lot of the info, though.
> ill be sure to download and upload to the maximum extent possible on any internet connection I use
If you're really keen on adding load to their work, instead of doing this and wasting your disk space, write a short script to load up random google searches, and then follow links to random results from the searches, with various random header value selections and MAC addresses, and then load it onto a Pi and leave it trundling along. For added fun (& risk) seed the initial google searches with various naughty phrases - how long before someone knocks on your door with a Ram-It?
If you were malicious, connect it to your neighbours open wifi :)
I suspect this will do nothing except slow your connection down - they'll be storing NetFlow records, no doubt, which basically say "This IP had a TCP connection to that IP and this amount of data went in one way and another amount in the other direction."
Switching to UDP based protocol makes this so much more fun :-)
No formal "connection" to summarise. Log files can be orders of magnitude larger and the trick of playing with the packet sizes would probably work too.
I refer the Hon. gentleman to my earlier reply (2013, blimey I didn't think my memory was that good!):
Rain - n., wet stuff that falls out of the sky. Hence vt. to rain (usu. down) upon something
Reign - vt., to rule over e.g. a kingdom or empire. Hence "a reign of terror", etc.
Rein - n., a piece of horse-harness, attached to the bit. Hence "rein in", i.e. to limit movement or freedom of action.
"Reign - vt., to rule over e.g. a kingdom or empire. Hence "a reign of terror", etc.
Rein - n., a piece of horse-harness, attached to the bit. Hence "rein in", i.e. to limit movement or freedom of action."
It could be argued that they reign over your data, ie they rule your data rather than give your data it's freedom (free rein) :-)
copy pasted from sicipedia ... sic "thus"; in full: sic erat scriptum, "thus was it written"
Reign in this case is written with the sic suffix because it's the wrong word to use ... a bit like when someone writes 'bare with me' ... it sounds the same but it's just wrong!
http://grammarist.com/spelling/free-rein-free-reign/
Done. Here is an extract from my letter...
A bill which effectively provides a police "tail" on all members of the public at all times while they surf the internet, just in case it may be useful in the future, is not acceptable in a democracy, only in a police state.
Done. Here is an excerpt from my letter:
I hope in the future there will be a mandate for MPs to publish their porn viewing habits as well as their expenses as I believe (as do you) that knowing someones surfing habits is in the greater publics interest.
Yours previously anonymously
Angry of Tunbridge Wells
P.s. please reply with a copy of your porn surfing history to demonstrate good faith.
I would also greatly appreciate some candid nudes of that donkey wife of yours. I wont take any personal gratification from these images as cranking one out while staring at your wifes battered flange is a very challenging proposal indeed.
I apologise in advance if your wife does not have a gaping chasm of a minge I am under the assumption that due to the extreme consumption of ketamine and general horse ownership of your section of society that horse fucking is rife.
I promise to only allow authorisation to view these files to people whom I have deemeed competent (based on a secret meeting to which you are not privy).
Sadly when I chose to write to my MP about this when it was still being debated, his reply consisted of a large think envelope containing all the forms that have to be filled out when undertaking surveillance.
Of course this ignores the way in which the various services effectively self-authorise what they do making this whole thing a monumental waste of time but he didn't seem to be interested in hearing that.
Too many MPs are blindly following the government and have done so repeatedly in the past. For them to change course now would involve the acceptance that they had previously made mistakes, and most people should know how difficult it is to get an MP to actually do that.
By random coincidence I was watching "Body of Lies" yesterday.
Total escapist tat, but did make the point that the terrorists realised they were fighting people "from the future" - and so used that against them.
Minimising use of easily surveilled things such as internet, cell phone communication, lots of old school methods instead (and if anti terrorist folk went the more eyes on the ground route, ensuring enough comings and goings meant the anti terrorist folk lacked the numbers to tail everyone and had to guess who to track).
RIP does not catch a non digitally arranged dead drop.
Given every man and his dog knows about obfuscation, be it book codes within long screeds of text, image stego, etc., etc. there's also plenty of scope for false intel.
The repeated revelations that "terrorists x,y,z" responsible for "Atrocity A" were "known to the authorities" implies that the current levels of super data slurping already means the deluge of data means insufficient resources to fully investigate potential bad actors, more monitoring just means more / bigger haystacks making the genuine terrorist needles harder to find.
It's sad, but from recent obvservations it seems to me that the majority of the population don't seem to give a hoot about their privacy as long as they can take advantage of all of the shit black friday crap over the web or stream the latest vacuous piece of "entertainment" served up from the TV companies.
A quote then from Sir Bill of Hicks that even though almost 25 years old, still seems relevant to both the UK and US : "Go back to bed, America. Your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again. Here. Here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed, America. Here is American Gladiators. Here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go, America! You are free to do what we tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!"
The only "debate" MPs do on these petitions is in which round filing tray to put these timewasters in. These petitions are already discredited by political activists hijacking them though using false details to boost the number of signatures. All you need is a few dozen like-minded activists, each with a collection of a few hundred fake email addresses and the detailed knowledge of housenumber/postcodes and you can "add" as many people to a petition as you like. There's no proper sanity checking on these petitions as to whether the signee is a real person.
Time to make all official petitions be signed ONLY by UK citizens with a valid GOV.UK ID.
It does have a requirement for you to verify the email address used - which would be difficult with fake email addresses.
You need real, accessible ones, to verify
It also asks if you are a UK citizen, and asks for a name and a postcode (which needs to be valid)
It's not quite tying it to a verifiable UK ID, but it does what it can.
It doesn't need to work, or be within budget.
It's carte blanche to monitor anybody at all.
So PC "Dodgy" can decide to monitor that bloke down the road who looks a bit foreign, until they find something to hang them.
As can anyone who hacks into the system.
But I've signed and emailed my local MP detailing the fact this database would be a goldmine for hackers, blackmailers, tabloids, husbands/wives suspicious of hubby, etc etc. Given that every man and his dog in government will have access, the chances of this database not being compromised are pretty remote.
And any criminal/terrorist that isn't completely 'tarded will simply use Tor, VPN etc etc to avoid being monitored. So they might catch a few of the dumber terrorsts/crims but they will compromise nearly every internet user in the UK.. Well done big gov! Putin must be laughing his ass off!
"Labour have never knowingly been against more surveillance."
Yep, only the LibDems are openly against it and managed to stall it/reject it while in the coalition. Then their so-called supporters shit all over them because they didn't get everything they wanted. (the minor partner in a coalition is never, ever, going to get much passed. They just get to modify, delay or reject Big Brothers proposals while having a few crumbs handed to them for playing "nice".)
"In the face of several legal battles, Killock recommends that the debate be used as an opportunity to amend the bill's more questionable legal provisions."
I really can't see High Chancellor May allowing that sort of thing.
(it's enough to curdle your warm milk)
Fingermen to the rescue I suspect..
There has been an almost total lack of media coverage on the Investigatory Powers Act. In the mainstream media a handful of articles in the Guardian and the Independent , not much else. Many people I have spoken to have no idea that this was being proposed and has been passed. Tthe UK has become a surveillance state with barely a whisper.
Dunno about this, I've seen articles in the Guardian, Independent, Mirror, Daily Mail to name just a few - and that's a pretty diverse section of the UK - it's also being fairly heavily discussed online, though granted I expect that's within groups that probably already knew about it.
Still, will be interesting to see the response from the Daily Mail reading crowd
All we need is some enterprising soul to develop a simple browser plug-in or separate client that randomly generates terms for a Google search then randomly follows some of the links returned.
Leave it running all the time you are on-line, and swamp them with a massive ICR list of garbage.
The even more enterprising of us could even run such a robot on something like a RasberryPi, and have it run 27*7. Let's see just how good their "Big Data" credentials are.
Sadly I've cone to the conclusion that the only thing that will fix the UK is a war. Just like when the Yanks had enough 200+ years ago. Sadly there are no more empty(ish) spaces to run to so it will be messy. That is what all this spying on the masses is about. Any dissidents will be routed out before their voices are heard.
I'll use this database to eliminate my enemies when I seize control in a Marxist revolution.
I will live like a King, as will my top henchmen, whilst all you minions will live in your Marxist Utopia of Equality, where all are equal, no matter what skills, talents, attributes you may have.
The Newspapers will be full of great stories, not the fake propaganda we have at the moment, at how great life is under my rule and how terrible it would be if the alt right ever got back in power.
I'll label anyone who disagrees with my opinions as Nazis, and Racists, and have them silenced or sent for "re-education" as patently anyone disagreeing with me is a fascist bigot.
On my eventual death, pinnacles of journalistic talent, like the Guardian, and all the great leaders like Obama & Corbyn will mourn my passing and glorify my achievements.
Glory to you, the people.
Right, I'm off to walk on my hind legs whilst oinking four legs good, two legs better.
Run along Donkeys.
You've a farm to keep.
I'll be watching.
Brexit means Brex... hang on
Brexit was democratic - we had a referendum. The snooper's charter is not. They know that if they gave us a referendum the electorate would never ask for more surveillance and less freedom - which is why we are never consulted, and our representatives vote the way they are told.
If those in authority think the public cannot be trusted they deny us our freedoms, which empowers them and dis-empowers us. Yet we are all fallible so the public have no reason to trust authority with greater powers - the more they attempt to take power away from us the greater the incentive for us to take it back.
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