Comment by sambe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sambe | Hacker News Reader

This was in the news almost as soon as the riots started, with the media lapping it up as an opportunity to get some buzzwords in. I think they are also considering, or have already used, some mass phone record crawling.

The British government - either party - just doesn't seem to "get it" with respect to civil liberties. Poor logic comes up time and time again, the public don't really care much unless they read The Guardian. It makes me glad I left to a liberal cheese-eating European country ;)

At university a law student defended (regurgitated a professor's opinion) our lack of constitution by saying that all the important parts end up enshrined in law anyway and that the constitution's lack of flexibility causes problems as society/technology changes. I think there's more to it than that - the mindset that accompanies having a constitution (particularly in the general population). At least in the US encroachment tends to happen with extreme events and is duly challenged as unconstitutional.

afaik the contents of several days messages from the bbm was handed over to police to hunt for evidence.

"To look for evidence". This is frightening. Searching through something to look for incriminating evidence. It's the reverse of how the system is supposed to work.

Is this all that different than the police entering your house (with a warrant) to look for evidence?

I'd say they have reasonable cause to believe that they will find evidence in the messages.

That's a bad comparison. It's more like entering everyone's homes to look for evidence.

(and I think I'm right in saying that the courts were't even involved, so the warrant part doesn't work either)

It's not a perfect comparison, I agree. Probably I shouldn't have mentioned your house. It's more like the police getting a warrant to search a company's premises.

My thought process went a little like this...

Presumably the police could apply for a warrant to search RIM's premises for something along the lines of "records of messages used to organise a riot"? If they got that warrant, then they could go to the physical servers and search for the relevant data on site? AFAIK that's a perfectly feasible scenario and completely within the law - even though RIM haven't committed any crimes, I think they can still be the subject of a warrant. I'd guess something similar would happen in cases of fraud.

And if they can do that, then they could also ask RIM for permission to do it without a warrant. Which RIM might agree to if they believe that the police would get the warrant anyway.

And if they can do that, then it doesn't sound much worse to give the records to the police for them to search through using their own computer systems instead of going and searching directly on RIM's servers.

My worry is we aren't many steps from "and if they can do that, then why not host the data with the police anyway" and.. you can see where this goes.

The British government often comes up with poorly thought out policy ideas, but in fairness, these ideas rarely end up as actual laws - the obvious logic flaws are picked up on sooner or later. I suspect it's just a case that they needed give out some policy ideas to keep the journalists happy and this is the first thing they came up with.

Anyway, I can't see how removing access to social media would have had much influence on the riots - seems like SMS messages would be just as effective, for organising a riot. Social media just happens to be a cheaper option.

I think it was only 5 years ago that these new-fangled "SMS text messages" were being used to organise such events.

You're right though, such initiatives do not seem to commonly make it all the way through to law, but creeping standards is still a danger (as with the police searching all phone records).

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