I will just leave this here: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com
The reality is that no one in the know thinks this has anything to do with terrorism and everything to do with political control.
If you don't have the right to privacy then all other rights are subverted, previous governments have used the state security apparatus to monitor perfectly legal political activities, they've proven again and again they can't be trusted with this kind of power and we let them give themselves more (and legalise all the illegal shit they where already doing).
The reality is the UK (which traditionally has been a less free society for a 'free' society) is rapidly sliding into something you can't realistically call a free society.
You've lost sight of any balance when you start claiming that terrorism is just an idea used to justify state oversight and not an actual problem of organised harm/killing of peaceful civilians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings - presumably you think that's just a huge fiction created so the government can get hold of your holiday snaps.
Trading the rights of millions of people to combat terrorism hurts more people than the terrorists could ever hope to touch.
This doesn't even factor in solutions terrorists can use to avoid surveillance, or answer the question of if all this surveillance even reduces terrorism in the first place.
More people than that died in 1 week of road accident deaths in the same year, and in 2 weeks of road accident deaths in 2013 [1]
Talking about numbers and causes of deaths in the UK, for comparison:
The UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) published that death registrations increased from 2014 to 2015, saying "There were 24,065 more deaths registered in the first three months of 2015 compared with the same period in 2014, with 11,865 of these extra deaths registered in January alone, when flu was circulating at its highest levels." - totals, 501,424 deaths in 2014 and 529,613 deaths in 2015. [2]
ONS also published: "In 2014, nearly a quarter of all deaths (23%; 116,489 out of 501,424) in England and Wales were from causes considered potentially avoidable through timely and effective healthcare or public health interventions."
and "In 2014, just under a third of deaths (32% or 1,443 out of 4,571) in children and young people aged 0 to 19 years in England and Wales were from causes considered avoidable through good quality healthcare" [3]
In the news today, NHS people are warning that there isn't enough money to provide all the services it needs to, even with the planned budget increases. [4]
There just isn't any comparison in the numbers. Terrorism is not fiction, the hugeness of terrorism is fiction - at least, it appears to be, absent any concrete details of numbers of plots discovered and averted, which we'll never get.
But if 52 dead is one of the biggest attacks in the UK in decades, how likely is it that avoided attacks would even approach 1400 children per year who die of preventable causes, let alone 11,000 people/1 year who apparently died of flu while flu vaccines exist?
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/annual-road-fatal...
[2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
[3] http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthand...
How do you think that murder rate will change if you don't seek to address it at all?
USA should ban private gun ownership, obviously. This would do a lot for their murder rate, it would do a lot for their "people killed by toddlers" rate, and it would be a lot cheaper and less invasive than ISPs logging 300M internet access records for a year.
Prioritize things which have high impact, are easy to address, and have specific good outcomes. Not "anti terror" metrics which are vague, difficult and expensive to address, and have extremely low impact.
TSA isn't a good system. And it doesn't become a good system just because 'we have to do something about some crimes'. Sure. Do something better, and do it about more important problems.
Targeted attacks by intelligence agencies and police forces are probably a lost battle anyway.
So sure, I'm probably on a bunch of watch lists, but at this point it's hard to care anymore, it feels like everybody is in one way or another, everybody will be found guilty should someone decide so... I actually have legitimate reasons for using VPNs, but moves like this from governments around the world just give me even more of an incentive to use VPNs.
One can only hope that politicians will be done in by the very same rules they're blissfully pushing through.
Not at all. It's enough to point the finger at commercial VPN providers and claim the the users are doing suspicious things including filesharing, and encourage ISPs to block VPN providers by address block.
Many ISPs would love to do that because they want to inspect cleartext traffic and sell metadata.
Of course corporate VPNs would be left untouched. There.
The problem there is we live in a containerised world, how would they stop someone running a 'recipe' that creates a VPN on something like AWS/Digital Ocean and uses that as the VPN exit point.
The only way to deal with that is to have a central licensing authority for VPN's where you have to hand over the keys, that's going to be a massive and expensive fight for them.
They don't need to. Even if 10% of citizens were able to do that, controlling and censoring information for the 90% is way more than enough to manipulate people perceptions and ideas, and thus, democracy.
Not even Stasi or the "great firewall" of China aimed at 100% success rate - they simply don't need to.
What you appear to be alleging is that by being able to access the threads I saw on Al-Jazeera or Reddit or what-have-you that the government can somehow control the information I'm receiving enough to manipulate me to serve their political ideals. Freedom of the press may not be perfect in the UK but it seems close enough that a government can't manipulate democracy simply by monitoring internet use.
UK population is 65M. Reported crimes (which includes littering and traffic violations AFAICT) is about 1 per mille in the UK [1]. There's no way the gov are using the criminal justice system to control the population to a significant extent, they certainly can't control the criminals. The prisons are full. The establishment can try to jump up crimes but the scale they need to do that to control the population seems enormous compared to the resources available.
If you can write a lie on the side of a bus and have the country vote against their best interests then why on Earth would you try and carefully contrive criminal activity in order to stop people from visiting websites you don't like to subtly alter a few people's perception of the political situation. Seems entirely bonkers.
[1] http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Total-c...
Throughout the last 100 years there has been examples across many dictatorships and engineered democracies where incredible amount of efforts has been spent on achieving information control. Dragnet surveillance proved many times to be effective at chilling free speech and intimidating dissenters.
Sure, with a huge regime change this sort of law could later prove troublesome but we'd have to have changed our entire way of life first it seems.
Your reaction seems reasonable if you're in a malevolent dictatorship, despite its problems I don't find the UK being anywhere close to that politically.
China does this. They fundamentally break the way the internet works. They don't seem to care.
But this is much cheaper, any experience? Especially using it in the UK, does it increase latency significantly?
How about we refer people to actual privacy tools like Tor instead?
They still know know someone out there is doing something, and can build ad profiles and threat profiles on them, they just can't link those profiles to you easily: that is anonymity.
Privacy would be inability to build useful profiles.
Tor has its own bounds, but people should use that, too. I generally think the internet is barely usable over TOR, but I don't need state-level privacy.
My point being is that these are valid tools with valid uses, and people should understand and use them, NOT that VPNs are anything other than a way of encrypting and proxying traffic.
I've only used tor browser (adding to the noise!), nothing beyond web. Could you go in to what makes the internet "barely usable" over TOR, do you mean speed or is there other things you're trying to accomplish that can't be done?
Of course, maybe I should put my money where my mouth is and use it to improve it for people who DO find the tradeoff worth it.
PIA is $3.33/month. My internet bill is $50/month.
I like to think of it as a $3 upgrade from an open line to a secure line. It's a no-brainer for me. Really it should be a default option from your ISP, only they can make a hell of a lot more than $3.33/month from you if they can read all of your data.