Every Email In UK To Be Monitored | Hacker News Reader

Every Email In UK To Be Monitored

yro.slashdot.org

43 pointsnreece40 comments

The saddest thing here is that the primary driver for this isn't true malevolence. There's not an underground of fascists working to make fascism happen.

This is just bureaucrats trying to cover their asses. Collecting more data is something that you can measure and point to.

Look we collected all of this!

Never mind the fact that the real difficulty is in distinguishing the noise from the signal.

And the more data you collect the harder that gets.

Never mind the fact the CIA was watching the 9/11 guys cross from Canada into the US, and called the FBI and told them.

Never mind that there were FBI agents who were trying to get someone's attention because they knew there was something fishy with all those guys taking flight lessons.

Never mind that clearly the problem was not a lack of data collection.

Never mind all that because doing the smart thing is hard and proving you're doing something by being smart is impossible.

But data collection is easy and it's easy to prove you're doing all you can.

"Never mind the fact the CIA was watching the 9/11 guys cross from Canada into the US, and called the FBI and told them."

Nope. They came direct to the US.

I always accredited these sorts of things to malice, not incompetence without thinking too much about it. But I think your're right.

The UK government has a history of being:

Rubbish at implementing IT projects on-time, in budget and to specification. (2 billion GBP+ in failed IT projects in the past 8 years: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9840497-16.html )

Rubbish at keeping personal data secure. (see: lots of poorly handled data stories recently)

Rubbish at not "misusing" legislation. (Last week they used anti-terror legislation to freeze the assets of Icelandic companies in the UK when their banking troubles were announced.)

Geoff Hoon(?), on Question time earlier, said he was prepared to go "quite a long way, actually" into civil liberties if it meant preventing terrorism, as "the most basic right is the right not to be killed by a terrorist".

I can see why, if you believe that, more government data collection seems like a good plan. What I can't really see is how you can believe that without having your scaremongering-detection sense going at full volume.

> cross from Canada

That did not happen.

Silly idea really because terrorists will just route around it.

My personal theory is that the poor quality of comments on YouTube is actually a code system being used by terrorists to communicate.

All the sleeper agent has to do is visit a web cafe and watch the following http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpfYAghuNtU while reading the comments. When he sees the comment "ZOMG cutest eva" he carries out his attack.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_stations

That actually made me laugh out loud. I thank you.

Am I the only one that thinks this plan is full of it?

So, an evil government schemes 1984-style to create a database of all your emails, phone usage, and websites visited. So, they're going to spend many times the budget of Google for practically no purpose? Do they not understand how much data that is? I mean, Google doesn't even store that amount of data given that they store a very small fraction of the internet's email. And the UK government during a financial crisis is going to build something that stores exabytes of data?

Not only the storage of that information, but how are they going to operate on it? Looking for patterns in that much data? I just don't see it happening. I mean, Yahoo and Google don't operate on nearly that much data and I'd say they're probably the largest scale computing operations out there.

Anyone think this sounds like Reagan's Star Wars missile defense?

If you follow the link to the BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7671046.stm

It looks like they aren't recording the content of the messages, just times and dates etc. The worrying is that they are already doing it, and the proposal is to extend the duration the data can be kept for, and to make it centrally searchable (paragraphs 5 and 7).

The purpose of Star Wars was to bankrupt the Soviet Union, at which it succeeded magnificently. Cold War won, without a shot fired. That is strategy, my friend.

The purpose of this is to fill the pockets of EDS shareholders. No-one in the government has the slightest clue about IT, they believe whatever the consultants tell them. From the outside it's obviously a ridiculous idea. But inside the civil service, you've got this budget, you've got to spend it otherwise you'll get less next year, and it's not like you'll get fired whatever you do.

I'm always amazed how many people buy into that idea- do you really think that Reagan knew all along that it was a ploy to run the Soviet economy into the ground? SDI was a huge wealth transfer to the defense industry. The fall of the Soviet Union (if indeed you see that as a bad thing) had very little to do with a need to increase their military spending to keep par with Reagan.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Benjamin Franklin

Does anybody else fantasize about George Washington coming back and becoming president?

As a Brit, I think bringing back Thatcher would equal that.

Since you're a brit I certainly sympathize if you don't want Washington back.

No, I meant Thatcher would be good, certainly better than this government.

It was a joke (If Washington hadn't broken away from the mighty empire and become the first president of the US maybe the brits would have a bit more to say in the world)

:-)

And why he broke out from Britain dependence is probably because he believed that:

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

As a Brit who was actually an adult when she was in office (your answer suggests incredibly strongly that you weren't), and one whose legitimate non-violent political activities (and snail mail and telephone) were subject to monitoring by an agency of the UK government, I think bringing back Thatcher would be roughly equivalent to electing Dick Cheney to the premiership of the UK.

Power, of an absolute nature, unchecked by any constitutional counterbalances, and driven entirely by political fundamentalism, is what she introduced to Britain. It got us a Poll Tax, two wars, and all the excesses of Blair - including this one.

I wasn't an adult, and my family weren't involved politically.

I don't want to veer off topic, but the RIP legislation has 'human intelligence sources' who gather information on terror suspects, and I feel this secret police squad is a huge threat on free speech.

I'm pretty sure that the cybercrime screenplay (a thriller) I sent to Hollywood in 2006 got me unwanted attention from the secret services, and even a veiled threat from a guy in a car (which then raced off) one night when I went to post a letter. RIP (2000) is terribly intrusive legislation, and possibly worse than Thatcher's.

He'd look like Ron Paul.

I've always assumed that every email in the US is already monitored. And not just since 9/11. I assumed it from the time I started using email in the 1980s. Maybe I was overly imaginative, but I suspect the only thing that's changing is that they're doing it openly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_program

Openness is a step forward - the real shame is in doing it covertly, while saying otherwise. Email records should be assumed in this day and age. The electronic trail that everyone leaves through credit cards, atms, security cameras in intersections (license plates). I didn't assume that it was as early as pre-9/11, but electronic data is so prevalent now that it's hard not to track people. Do you really care about the CIA/FBI having records though?

I only care about them misusing the data they have if there isn't sufficient oversight. I don't mind them having my data, but I'm bothered when I find out that police officers are misusing security cameras to spy on naked women for example (also in the UK IIRC).

However once the general populace is accepting that the government records all of their emails, the next step is to vilify encryption and move towards banning that.

The counter of course is to put email encryption in the hands of the general populace so they feel empowered against such snooping in the first place (hello major webmail providers. time for opportunistic encryption yet?)

A long way down the page at slashdot is a comment that points out that in fact, according to the linked BBC article, they're not talking about storing or monitoring content, just dates, times, locations, etc.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7671046.stm

It's also not just a change to how they handle email information--the same changes will be taking place with cell phone call information. Basically the government is stepping in to personally handle the job of storing all that information that has up to now been done by the ISPs themselves.

Still cause for concern, but not as big of a change as the title and comments make it out to be.

That's a good reason to use a discussion system that functions like HN instead of slashdot--I didn't find the comment pointing that out on slashdot until skimming through probably 100 comments.

I wonder if we'll end up with the kind of movement that swept Usenet back in the 80s when everybody's .sig seemed to contain content for 'the line eater': Explosion, terrorism, Osama etc

And encrypted email still isn't catching on. Assuming RSA/IDEA protects against GCHQ, NSA, etc. of course.

PGP (the commercial one) for encrypted email is great, but GPG (GNU's similiar tool) is awful to use. Even PGP takes a little learning curve. But the problem is most people say "I have nothing to hide". But what if you do? In that case, encrypt, and if a friend can't decrypt in return, then they aren't really friends.

Just use a GPG frontend. Like many GNU tools, I don't think it's indended to be used on its own, but designed to be integrated into a bigger solution.

Just FYI.

FireGPG (PGP with Gmail via Firefox):

http://getfiregpg.org

Enigmail (PGP for Thunderbird):

http://enigmail.mozdev.org/home/index.php

I actually use Enigmail (although only for signing, as nobody else I know even has a public key) but FireGPG looks damn cool. I've been wondering for a while how best to handle webmail encryption, given that you don't want the server involved. Looks like they've nailed it with FireGPG.

They're interested in who you're writing to almost as much as they're interested in the content. Encryption won't help with that.

This is of course true; I haven't looked into it, but I vaguely remember reading something about SSL extensions for SMTP for mail delivery, which would encrypt even the preamble and headers; not sure how best to guard against man-in-the-middle attacks in that scenario, however.

Wow, we really are moving closer and closer to 1984.

Safety does not trump freedom.

The worrying thing to me is, if you're American and send an email to the UK, that is monitored as being UK email traffic. This seems wrong.

My question is, will the "quangos" have access to the information as well?

I expect so. And every local authority. (In the same way that local authorities currently use "anti-terrorist" legislation to snoop on people to make sure they are sorting their rubbish correctly).

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