UK Security Agencies Unlawfully Collected Data for Decade | Hacker News Reader

UK Security Agencies Unlawfully Collected Data for Decade

theguardian.com

64 pointsmocko4 comments

The UK is not going to stop, they are just going to make it legal thanks to the UK’s Investigatory Powers Bill. There is no opposition to it in the commons, minus SNP, LibDems I think our last chance to stop it is once again with the lords which I have little hope for, "wont they think of the children"

https://www.opendemocracy.net/digitaliberties/julian-huppert...

Direct quote “It is difficult to assess the extent to which the public is aware of agencies’ holding and exploiting in-house personal bulk datasets, including data on individuals of no intelligence interest …" They admitted in 2013 that the data collected is of "no intelligence interest". Anyone before snowden was called a nut job saying the government was doing this, it was all true

Encrypt everything. This is going to force me to VPN to a VPS outside of the UK and route my house's http/https traffic via that, not hard but annoying. Sadly that will then put me on another list where all my traffic is recorded for later decryption.

A limitation of "encrypt everything" is that many of the bulk datasets you referred to aren't taken from communications surveillance, but rather from other kinds of transactional, subscriber, or governmental records, which are maintained by other organizations (like a bank).

We can defend against a lot of communications surveillance by encrypting our communications, but these other data sources are still there and are mostly unaffected. (Note that this is also true outside of the UK.)

I don't know exactly how to address that. It seems like the main options are avoiding interacting with the institutions that create the records, persuading them to retain much less information about people, trying to get dramatically greater legal protection for other kinds of third-party records, or some kind of major cultural shift where institutions fear turning data over or governments fear requesting it.

Also, some datasets might exist partly because companies are legally required to retain certain records, so even if they didn't want to know that much about you, they may be mandated by law to have some of this information.

Does anyone think that the law will be applied here? i.e. does breaking the law result in legal punishment?

I no longer believe that "ignorance of the law is no excuse."

If the judges, policemen, government agents, etc. aren't held accountable for breaking the law (or not knowing it), then I should not be held accountable, either.

The alternative is one where the enforcers of the legal system break it with impunity, while the peasants (that's us!) suffer under the full weight of the law, and of the government enforcement thereof.

Two ways they can avoid breaking the law in the future:

1) Stop unlawfully collecting data.

2) Pass into law a bill that would make it legal.

Which do you think they'll do?

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