April 1, 2012

"The government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone..."

"... in the UK under new legislation set to be announced soon. Internet firms will be required to give intelligence agency GCHQ access to communications on demand, in real time."
But Conservative MP and former shadow home secretary David Davis said... "What this is talking about doing is not focusing on terrorists or criminals, it's absolutely everybody's emails, phone calls, web access...

"All that's got to be recorded for two years and the government will be able to get at it with no by or leave from anybody."

33 comments:

rhhardin said...

I spend a lot of effort trying to get my ideas to government. This can only help.

cubanbob said...

The UK government recognizing it is less and less able to perform it's core functions resorts to these pointless efforts at implementing fascism. Why bother when they will equally incompetent at that effort. Sadly we are not that far behind.

garage mahal said...

"The government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone..."

Doesn't Murdoch already do that?

Jason said...

If ObamaCare is upheld, this stuff is coming down the road in this country. In the words of Daniel Hannan, Europe is leading the way in implementing a life run by government, and the USA is getting bigger in the rear-view mirror.

Take note now, so you cant say later that you "didnt expect" this kind of stuff.

Anonymous said...

didn't this country produce orwell?

@gm:
murdoch was just ahead of the curve

leslyn said...

Jason said...

If ObamaCare is upheld, this stuff is coming down the road in this country.

Yep. It's all Obama's fault.

Seeing Red said...

Republicans passed bill to record every keystroke on our computers, didn't they?

MadisonMan said...

Time to send everything in code. A nice Playfair Cipher is called for.

Perhaps the first keyword should be Orwel(l)ian.

bagoh20 said...

"
Yep. It's all Obama's fault."
.

He said "Obamacare." The man is too small and the law is too big for the good of the country.

bagoh20 said...

They don't have to really do it, but saying they will will do more to get terrorist out of the country than anything else they try. It just isn't worth it, and a foul idea by it's very nature.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

You realise what this means?

We have a surveillance gap with the Brits.. How can the Brits be passing us in the surveillance race?

The way you here people praising Phone's location tracking.. Compared to the Brits we are in the rotary dark ages.

This is a wake up call.

Jason said...

Yep. It's all Obama's fault.

Good lord.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Hopefully our surveillance will have a batter spell check than Goggle.

YoungHegelian said...

That a 1st world government is trying something like this makes me think that there may be a governmental back door to the various e-mail encryption packages like PGP.

For folks who aren't in the IT industry, let me say that once a governmental body has access to the telco & ISP servers, storing a copy of all emails, text, calls, etc. is a relatively simple process. It takes oodles & oodles of storage, but it's easy.

Now, content analysis of voice and text, especially in anything close to real time, THAT is another matter in terms of complexity. How agencies such as NSA do that now is kept very much on the QT.

Mumpsimus said...

"with no by or leave from anybody"

The Queen's English isn't even safe at the BBC.

Michael K said...

There is no "Bill of Rights" in the English unwritten Constitution

Paul said...

And that is what encryption is all about. Stop them from snooping.

My suggestion is to use a book as the key and have the page number, line number, and letter on that line as the code.

Say 'Moby Dick' is your key, 57,43,12 is the page number,line number, and how many characters across (including spaces) to the letter desired.

And then change books now and then with the reader you are sending it to.

You can even write a program to do this for you.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Whenever we catch up to the Brits.. we will have an advantage.. we have a freedom of information act.. they dont.. at least I dont think so.

With FOIA requests up the wazzo, not only will the government know what we are up, we are also going to know what we are up to.

Once the surveillance gap is closed, Americas prestige will be restored.

kimsch said...

Are we sure this isn't an April Fool's joke?

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Yep. It's all Obama's fault.

I dont know why people here seem reluctant to give Obama credit.

When people go to the doctor they dont give the doctor good intel.. but if the doctor had a summary of you social media he could get right to the quick of the problem and have you fixed in no time.

Think of all the people that could be helped.

This information would be immensely helpful to the first lady and her eat right campaign.. it was not a coincidence that Supreme Scalia brought up broccoli during oral arguments.

Kel said...

The US government is able to monitor everything because they've got agreements with all major ISPs already, as Wired's article makes clear.

Kel said...

America is already monitoring all internet traffic, on a massive scale. From Wired Magazine's recent cover article:

The NSA is building the country's biggest spy center

"The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

bagoh20 said...

"You can even write a program to do this for you."

You vastly overestimate my abilities.

kurt mueller said...

"It's all Obama's fault."

The Obama administration just spent the week arguing in front of the Supreme Court but failed to articulate a limiting principal for the commerce clause. If the court upholds the individual mandate, there essentially is no such limiting principal and any aspect of Internet activity (or other individual activity) will fall within the purview of congressional power under the commerce clause.

It's not about being forced to eat broccoli, clowns.

bagoh20 said...

"any aspect of Internet activity (or other individual activity) will fall within the purview of congressional power under the commerce clause."

I don't think Obama and the Dems would use the government like that. They're good people and they love liberty too.

Besides, They're gonna fill my gas tank and pay my mortgage.

The Drill SGT said...

Kel said...
America is already monitoring all internet traffic, on a massive scale


I'm sorry to puncture your conspiracy bubble, but that is a data center and will have the computing base to crack as well. There aren't going to be any analysts there. All the analystical work will still be in Maryland and Georgia.

PS: NSA at Ft Meade is the largest employer in the state AND the largest consumer of power.

PPS: NSA doesn't directly monitor US cits communications. Indirectly US cits can get looked at if the wring numbers call them. NSA can do some traffic analysis of US emails, but not monitorig of US email contents directly.

Alex said...

Guys look at the date. You've been had.

traditionalguy said...

The cost one pays for an order of digital Free Speech just went way up. And extra charges for shipping and handling went up too.

But THEY say this is reasonable and necessary to save the earth by catching and holding for involntary drug treatments all Conservatives whose retardation is also afflicted with the new mental illness called Climate Denier Syndrome.

Michelle warned us that Barack wasn't going to allow Americans to resist the changes he decrees.

The Homeland Security Agency just placed their order for 500 million rounds of armour piercing military bullets. Barack means business.

Kel said...

Drill SGT, are you saying that the ex-NSA officials quoted by Wired are lying?

"Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct “deep packet inspection,” examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light."...

...

"The software, created by a company called Narus that’s now part of Boeing, is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland and searches US sources for target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.

The scope of surveillance expands from there, Binney says. Once a name is entered into the Narus database, all phone calls and other communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the NSA’s recorders. “Anybody you want, route to a recorder,” Binney says. “If your number’s in there? Routed and gets recorded.” He adds, “The Narus device allows you to take it all.” And when Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage and analysis."

...

After he left the NSA, Binney suggested a system for monitoring people’s communications according to how closely they are connected to an initial target. The further away from the target—say you’re just an acquaintance of a friend of the target—the less the surveillance. But the agency rejected the idea, and, given the massive new storage facility in Utah, Binney suspects that it now simply collects everything. “The whole idea was, how do you manage 20 terabytes of intercept a minute?” he says. “The way we proposed was to distinguish between things you want and things you don’t want.” Instead, he adds, “they’re storing everything they gather.” And the agency is gathering as much as it can.

Once the communications are intercepted and stored, the data-mining begins. “You can watch everybody all the time with data- mining,” Binney says. Everything a person does becomes charted on a graph, “financial transactions or travel or anything,” he says. Thus, as data like bookstore receipts, bank statements, and commuter toll records flow in, the NSA is able to paint a more and more detailed picture of someone’s life.

edutcher said...

Given the way things work, a lot of this is already going on.

Big Sis has to watch out for all those right-wing fanatics.

The next thing you know they might be putting bounties on the head of that black guy in Hotlanta who shot and intruder.

crosspatch said...

"Internet firms will be required to give intelligence agency GCHQ access to communications on demand, in real time."

We have had that for a long time in the US. It is called "Lawful Intercept" and it was imposed as a result of legislation proposed by Al Gore.

Dust Bunny Queen said...

I guess we all go back to written missives to preserve our privacy.

Time to resurrect those fancy fountain pens I received as a gift some time ago.

The old ways. Beautiful cursive writing, thoughtfully and carefully composed letters on crisp and possibly scented paper.

Composed by the light of a flickering candle, since Obama is determined to throw us all back into the pre industrial ages by his war on energy and the necessarily skyrocketing electricity prices.

Paul said...

bagoh20,

Even plain old BASIC language would do it.

The real trick to this is getting a camel, that is a courier, to start the process with they one you intend to send messages to. Then with a list of books, one can use the message you send to tell them which book is next to use for the next message!