“Snoopers' charter” petition hits signatures target | Hacker News Reader

“Snoopers' charter” petition hits signatures target

bbc.co.uk

77 pointstooba41 comments

Is it just me or does 118k signatures seem absolutely pitiful? I heard it mentioned over and over that the vast majority of citizens is in support of this (and any other) Orwellian law, and judged from a distance this seems like a correct assessment. If there was any public resistance worth mentioning, shouldn't there be millions of people not only giving signatures but protesting in the streets?

Not as compared to others; I think there's a certain sense of 'why bother' once a petition hits 100k (the requirement to be considered for debate).

Even so, with a concerted effort, you could probably get 118k people to sign just about any petition.

The press generally support it, which tells you all you need to know. I suspect the Mail et al are looking forward to being able to bribe policemen to give them people's browsing histories.

The public are remarkably conformist and illiberal compared to even Hacker News.

(The UK has never had a populist revolution against a "dictator" to look back on, which means there's a lot of "couldn't happen here". The truth is that there is a history of police repression, it's just on a small scale and directed against groups that can be singled out and made to look non-respectable.

Also, I think most UK and US citizens have internalised the idea that intelligence services can look at anything they want, legality be damned.)

I doubt they'll even debate it. And on the off chance they do, it'll be a "we understand the concern, but it's needed and your data will be safe".

Frightening, really.

> "...your data will be safe"

I'd ask for statutory and automatic (no demonstration of harm required) [minimum] damages of (say) £1000 to every citizen for every breach together with the immediate dismissal of the head of the department responsible if the breach came from a government agency. The government should also pay for the insurance premiums of private companies coerced to implement this scheme against their potential payouts.

If my "data will be safe", this shouldn't be a problem to implement as it will have zero cost.

"Oh, did we say 'your data'? Because we meant 'our asses.'"

This sentence says it all:

"The bill provides a clear and transparent basis for powers already in use by the security and intelligence services, but there need to be further safeguards"

People have long gotten used to the idea that the intelligence services are aware of their browsing history, and I think a lot of people are under the belief that this legislation does nothing more than legitimise and regulate the activity that already goes on. People don't seem to realise that it also gives your local council, the Gambling Commission, and the Food Standards Agency the ability to browse this data when they're bored during their lunch hour.

They won't debate it, because they already debated it when they passed the bill in the first place. Here's a list of all the times it was discussed in Parliament:

http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2015-16/investigatorypow...

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new... - I'm very curious why the NHS need access to your browsing history, along with everyone else.

The NHS and at least 47 other organizations according to that list.

Can someone from the UK please explain what is up with your government officials? How do they get away with passing such unpopular, draconian bills? It just seems bizarre that they could go against the will of the average person so blatantly. Are there "people on the street" who support this charter? Why does England pass such harsh, invasive surveillance laws aimed squarely at their own people? And why does it seem like the Lords (or whoever it is that is passing them) just ignore the cries from their own constituents?

I'm sure that I see things tainted through American-goggles but it sure seems sometimes like it's not really a representative-style government.

It's generally justified because "we must do something about the terrorists". Law enforcement agencies claim they need this. In our post-truth world, evidence is not required, and balance doesn't matter. The "terrorist" angle is enough.

> Are there "people on the street" who support this charter?

I believe so, yes. People are too comfortable and the media scare them about terrorists. State-sponsored abuse of citizens and the need for balance when giving the state powers have been forgotten about.

I think most people outside the tech bubble just don't see the importance of protecting privacy. In the USA, I think there isn't that much popular opposition to the NSA? Even after Snowdon? Similar in the UK. Most people just seem to think that if it might help catch some terrorists, then _shrug_.

People don't care cuz they don't think that it'll ever be forced on them "I don't do anything wrong why should I care?". Plus they don't think much about the gravity of the situation, John Oliver did a nice take on this in the Snowden interview episode.

Can someone from the US please explain what's up with your government.

Hey, the USA passed the PATRIOT act with a very strong majority in the House and almost unanimously in the Senate.

People just simply don't care. "If I've done nothing wrong, I've got nothing to hide", they say. People support this thing, because they think it helps stop "the terrorists".

As John Key said in here in New Zealand, people care more about snapper fishing quotas than the GCSB (our equivalent of the NSA or GCHQ). And it's true. Government surveillance is too abstract for the average citizen to care about or notice.

The truth is that the vast majority of people will not be affected by this law passing, despite it having serious ethical issues. We live in a post-Snowden world and nothing has changed much for common people. This combined with the justification to "catch terrorists" presented to a non-technical audience means that hardly anyone will care.

Hard to say, probably they are under intense pressure from gchq to legalise and normalise activity which was recently found to be illegal. Of course, since gchq has been doing this for decades, including to all sorts of officials, they probably have an interesting file on all of them. It's not a particularly popular measure with the public, I think indifference is the best description of popular opinion.

In fairness to this legislation, it was partly introduced to replace a maze of anachronistic, impenetrable and incomprehensible statutes which the intelligence agencies in the UK had been exploiting for decades.

In the wake of the Snowden revelations, the UK government was advised to provide a more solid legal footing for its intelligence activities.

Because they can just say "to stop terrorism" and get away with whatever they want. It won't be unpopular with the majority of the (uninformed) public.

P.S. Please don't say "England" when you mean UK. And I think you mean MPs, not Lords (which is a different house that isn't elected and just exists to confuse things).

It seems like a lot of people believe (and I believe they are at least partly right) that GCHQ already captures this data as a matter of course, and the new law just legitimises it. They further imagine that GCHQ are only interested in James Bond style espionage and high level terrorism. You'd need to be plotting something at the level of 9/11 to even raise an eyebrow from them.

"Of course, under the new law these powers are expanded, but that's fine - after all, GCHQ have far bigger concerns than that dodgy looking brown bloke who lives down the street, but if local police had the same access to information, they'd be far more effective. Sure, it means my internet history is logged as well, but even if I occasionally download a dodgy movie, the signal/noise ration means they're not going to look unless they have a reason to, so why should I care?"

A lot of people in this country are under the impression that the law is too soft, and are widely in support of stronger enforcement and better detection, and this will continue until it starts to directly affect them. For example, my local newspaper had an article about an 18 year old who was prosecuted because he had child porn on his phone and had consensual sex with a 15 year old when he was 17. The comments were unanimously calling him a vile paedophile and expressing outrage at the non-custodial nature of his sentence. For all you can tell from the article, it could just as easily be his slightly younger girlfriend and a few rude selfies. Still illegal, yes, but a far cry from anything I'd call abuse.

> The required data covers only the domain name of each site visited - www.facebook.com or www.bbc.com, for example - not the individual pages within them.

So this article was the first time I learned the law only requires host logging. But now I'm even more confused...how does the UK Gov argue that logging your access of facebook.com, but not what you do in facebook.com, will help fight terrorism? Like, are terrorists going to isisrecruiting.com? I would've thought they would just use subportions of more popular and general hosts.

yes it does seem pretty silly. Even googling "how to make a homemade bomb" will just be logged as "google.com"

For the first year...

Then there'll be amendments that force ISPs to log the pages viewed, time spent on each page, downloads, etc.

>time spent on each page

Is that even universally loggable? Once a page has finished downloading, that's it, your connection is closed and you were technically only 'on' the site for as long as the total transfer took. Of course you could track it via some other (semi)persistant means - but that's more of a site thing than an ISP thing.

I haven't read the legislation but I would fully expect that it would need a warrant to know the details. This sounds like they are formalising the collection of metadata rather than blanket access.

Sounds reasonable (to the extent any of this does).

In the event of an actual terrorist, this gives them a lot of data so that they can argue they have the UK equivalent of probable cause to subpoena various sites for more detailed browsing history.

In theory, it would be something like "Crazy Joe Devola spent 16 hours a day at some hacking site. Better find out what he was looking at". In practice it will be "Facebook, give us access to his file"

Set a script to visit every website daily? Defeats the intent of the law if the isp doesn't record more info than domains visited..

Set a script to visit EVERY website? There must be hundreds of them by now.

A positive thing is that with so much centralized internet (facebook, twitter, etc), rather than isolated websites, there's not much they'll be able to read from it just by the domain. Are you on the facebook terrorist group or the nanna's group? Everyone will look the same to them.

Everybody visits a wide variety of websites. This data is likely to reveal:

  - if you are suffering from any illnesses (HIV, cancer)
  - your sexual orientation
  - your religion

Within months, ISPs or govt agencies will be hacked and 3rd parties will have access to this information. The implications are horrifying.

EDIT: Also, I suspect the data will be URLs, rather than just domain names, so they will be able to tell a lot from facebook etc.

EDIT2: Actually, apparently it will be just IP addresses and domain names (not full URLs): https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

Snowden was right. It's turn key tyranny!

Sic semper tyrannus

I think you want the dative "tyrannis" rather than nominative "tyrannus".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension#Second_declen...

Or if you hunt dinosaurs, sic semper tyrannosaurus

I obviously cannot tell what he meant, but in context I think that "tyrannus" makes more sense.

As opposed to the Latin expression?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic_semper_tyrannis

Legitimately asking. I'm not sure why it would be anything other than "Thus always to tyrants".

Latin isn't a set of cast-in-stone strings of words. While sic semper tyrannis is very well known, sic semper tyrannus is also grammatical.

"Rest in peace" is well known, but "Rest in pieces" is neither unhead of, nor wrong. It's a riff on a well known phrase.

Same here: "Thus always (do) tyrants"

As I said, I think it makes more sense here. I think he wanted to call the UK government tyrants, not the spied-upon people.

Gotcha. Thanks for the explanation. I interpreted it more along the lines of the petition as a form of rebellion against the government, which I think would warrant sic temper tyrannis, correct?

(Maybe the poster will weigh in and save us the trouble of deciphering his intent :)

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