UK emergency phone and internet data storage law to be brought in | Hacker News Reader

UK emergency phone and internet data storage law to be brought in

bbc.co.uk

76 pointstimthorn42 comments

Oh for fuck's sake, really. And the LibDems agreed to this? Fuck them too. WTF.

If anyone wants to fight this, please donate a few pounds a month to these guys, they're brilliant: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/join/

And there I was feeling a little sorry for the LibDems after their euro defeat, hoping that they still had some sense of morality.

The main UK parties are siding this and fracking. The political landscape in Britain is looking very bleak.

All the more reason to encourage a vote for an independent Scotland on Sept 18th. You'll be doing Scotland a favour and there will be a friendly place to stay if things get too fucked up south of the border.

I'm seriously considering that as an option at the moment.

England is turning into a surveillance state (something I have been warned many a time to keep one eye on by a good friend who lived through some bad shit in East Germany), half the population is out for the blood of anyone darker than a sheet of A4 paper, military awareness and propaganda is at an all time high and the economic disparity between the rich and the poor is INSANE.

It's rife for an explosion of sorts soon. I don't want to be here when it goes.

Scotland I believe would survive this if independent.

Yes, this is definitely true. All of the issues that rich countries have with their governments and privacy will certainly not apply to that mystical, magical, tartan land, whose politicians shit rainbows.

It's simply a matter of scale. You can ignore the fantasy economics touted by the politicians. For the most part, unless the country becomes a Banana Republic there simply won't be the resources available (and hopefully the will) to run a surveillance state. I also adhere to the, almost certainly naive, view that smaller European countries (at least in the vicinity of our close friends in Scandanavia) are generally better run with less likelihood of vested interests running amok.

EDIT: It can't be any worse than the path we are already on.

When it comes to surveillance, Scandinavia is not a beacon. Sweden has their notorious law that allows any signal passing the borders to be intercepted by military intelligence. Since most of Norways traffic out of the country goes via Sweden, that's caused a few issues...

And Norwegian security services have decades worth of history of blatantly illegal politically motivated surveillance (basically anyone to the left of the Norwegian equivalent of Labour used to be under extensive surveillance - some of it so blatant it was clearly intended to intimidate rather than uncover anything; it was supposedly stopped in the mid 90's, but given that the security services were illegally monitoring the head of the parliamentary committee investigating them while he was investigating them gives me zero confidence anything has changed)

Oh come on, digital copying is very, very cheap.

So your argument is: you hope Scotland will vote for independence, because you think they'll be too poor to do digital surveillance?

(Well I don't get a vote being south of the border. But I do hope that Scotland does get its independence. (I'm not really sure why I feel like that. I'm not anti-europe. Shouldn't the sum be greater than the parts?) Sadly that will most likely leave England, stuck with the Tories and UKIP. Shudder. I still think Salmond only got in because Blair pooch screwed Labour. The Scottish debate has been pretty pathetic so far from both sides, will watch with interest.)

Labour agree to it too.

This is the government changing the law to make the illegal surveillance they do already "legal". Retaining and using the data they make telecomms companies keep used to be legal under EU law but the EU recently repealed said law, so now the government need something of their own.

>Labour agree to it too.

Labour are not considered champions of personal privacy to the same degree the Lib Dems are...

I wonder what would be happening in government now if David Davis hadn't resigned as Shadow Home Secretary to protest against Labour's intrusions into personal liberties, but instead made it to be Home Secretary.

Disgraceful. All we have to do is mention "national security" and we can enshrine whichever human rights violation we fancy into legislation?

Soon they won't even bother with that pretense. It's already happening in the US; people who disagree with pervasive surveillance are "extremists." And so power seeks to preserve itself.

Please don't assume that your view on what constitutes a human right represents that of the majority of the population. Which, after all, is what government represents.

I don't think most "democratic" governments in their current form are a very accurate representation of what people want. The way it works now is that people get to vote once every 4 years on some campaign promises that likely won't be implemented. And then the voted in government/parliament can basically do whatever it wants.

Also, you're wrong. The human rights in Europe are not "up for debate". It's the law, and the highest Court in Europe has ruled that such data retention is illegal. You don't get to say "yeah, but I don't think those are really human rights".

If that were the case it wouldn't be possible for the government to create a new law that over-ruled the highest court in Europe, surely...

I'm not assuming anything. As a European citizen my rights are enshrined in the ECHR.

In April the European Court of Justice ruled the previous 2006 Data Retention Directive invalid, stating that it severely interfered with two of these rights (the right to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data)

For those who haven't been following UK politics, there used to be an EU-wide law doing this. That law was created and pushed for by a previous UK government, and the reason they did it as an EU law rather than a UK one was to avoid all the pesky democratic accountability involved in passing UK laws. The ECJ recently squashed the existing law, so they tried to sneak a UK one in by not telling most MPs about the vote and got publicly rumbled by Tom Watson MP last night.

That's a perfectly good review of the situation.

You know when they try and sneak something in that the system is broken. The question we have to ask:

Do these people really represent our best interests at this point in time?

If the answer is no, something needs to be done, but over 100 years of population pacification (since the world wars) and the recent 30 years of entertainment-driven culture has sucked the energy away from any dissidents.

It's all working nicely for everyone, until one day it doesn't.

The energy is still there, it's just misdirected.

Thank you for that insight. I couldn't upvote it enough.

We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world.

This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.

http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html

Surveillance is not an end toward totalitarianism, it is totalitarianism itself.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/europe-24385999

I doubt that retaining this kind of information is going to make the UK any safer. The truly dangerous people are going to know that their calls and texts are being monitored, so they'll just start communicating in more secure ways: using VPNs or Tor to get to web sites in other countries, having face to face meetings, etc.

Just as in the U.S., the national surveillance apparatus is going to be used to go after drug dealers rather than terrorists, but the justification is always going to be "fighting terrorism", since that's what always seems to convince people to give up their civil liberties.

Any legislation they like is put through because the population are distracted by shiny iPhones and are too busy hating each other to notice or find the energy to take action in response. "Quick, let's get this through before the pedo news really dies out" (Britain is being fed news of pedophile celebrities and government ministers at the moment, causing 'outrage')

> "More controversially the new law will also produce what is being described as a "clearer legal framework" to allow access to the content of calls, texts and emails after a warrant is signed by a senior government minister."

Government ministers can sign warrants? Is this new? It does not sound like a good idea.

The Home Secretary has a wide range of powers to authorize all kinds of things that aren't a good idea, like secret trials and "public interest immunity certificates". I believe they can also direct the Director of Public Prosecutions to prosecute (or not) crimes.

"The law will include a so-called sunset clause - ensuring that these powers will die in 2016 - so there will be a longer and wider debate about what replaces them."

Because something has to replace them, right? Can't just not do anything. Got to keep the country safe... /s

This smells like a rat. They appear to be introducing this law to protect their current activities, which were declared "invalid" by the European Court of Justice.

The sunset clause is an attempt to prolong the debate to the point where the public loses interest, at which point all that needs to be passed in 2016 is a simple "confirmation of existing practice" for this to become permanent.

I wonder, though, how much the European Court's ruling is binding on the UK, and if they would fall foul of it if this law is passed.

"...all-party talks agreed that this law would enshrine existing rights and not be used to extend them..."

I am certain that they will sneak more powers into this bill than they had before.

Can you give more details on who "they" are, and any insight you have in to the nefarious schemes they're hatching?

The government, police and security services.

I never mentioned any 'nefarious schemes' so you appear to have filled that in yourself. My guess is that GCHQ and others have demanded more powers (some of which to cover stuff that they already did but they knew was illegal all along)

Write to your MP about this today - it has a much bigger impact than complaining on HN:

https://www.writetothem.com/

Sadly, the law will be passed before their researcher gets round to reading your letter.

>their researcher

Read unpaid intern.

I just did this. I encourage everyone else who can to do the same. It may not have any effect now however it will let our representatives know that their actions are not going unnoticed and that we're unhappy.

This is how "democracy" works. Courts declare something illegal. Government changes the laws. All without the consent of the ruled.

Don't the security services have this data already? Through Tempora/XKeyscore etc. So national security should already be covered.

"The government is tacitly admitting that our current data retention laws are illegal and that they are required to re-legislate..." - https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press/releases/threat-of-leg...

Fuck them all to hell.

I have nothing more to say.

Time to acquire a taste for victory gin...

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