Investigatory Powers Act – devil in the detail | Hacker News Reader

Investigatory Powers Act – devil in the detail

revk.uk

49 pointsdavidgerard11 comments

I think one should reconsider purchasing products or services from UK companies. Economic impact will be the only force that changes these laws.

Hoping that the RIPA laws do not apply to your communication provider product or services is wishful thinking.

When they come for your metadata, or want you to back door your customers, one must either shut down or comply.

So what do I do if I live in the UK? I've already written a letter to my MP, and in reply got a copy-pasted response that doesn't even make a coherent point. You can't complain, you can't even pay your way out of the problem - the best I can do is have a VPN enabled by default on all of my devices, but it's a pain sometimes(can't access my bank or my paypal account through VPN for some reason, so I have to switch it off from time to time). It really feels awful to be living in the UK at the moment from the privacy point of view.

A brain drain of skilled information technologists from the UK will also drive home this message to the authorities.

Consider EU or US

Nah, they'll become leaders of free trade by deporting all EU citizens.

I also wrote to my MP (and to one of the ministers above her). The response was a wall of polite non-comprehension.

I'm leaving the UK because of this act. Brexit doesn't help (Brexit probably means we can't fight the act in the EU human rights court), but this act is so bad, it is such technologically illiterate bull, it will /at best/ do nothing and at worse expose the nation to criminal hacking, blackmailing, and identity theft.

Get out while you still can?

That's just so sad... "get out while you can" is something people in third world countries do, not a country like the UK.

I have to say that A&A are expensive, but they are damned good, a case of "you get what you pay for". And in this case, they're also trying their hardest to do the right thing for their customers.

They wont break the law though. Obviously. And if the law says your traffic is logged, your traffic is logged. I don't know if this is going to be done at the A&A level, or at a higher level in the network stack, but it will happen regardless of whether you're using A&A or Sky or Virgin or whatever.

He says he spoke to a lawyer, yet also suggests he'll be able to get away with claiming that his individual customers are "telecommunications operators" so he can't log their data. I'm not a lawyer, yet this sounds highly unlikely to work to me.

Seems like a loophole not likely to last long.

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