Surveillance train has left the station, can't be stopped any more. It's just too cheap to use cameras, wireless and large HDDs. AI can sift through videos efficiently.
So, the only way back to balance is to do government surveillance, and more generally, to have a multi-way surveillance society in which a single actor doesn't have monopoly. We have to go all the way now, short of destroying all surveillance equipment everywhere and making sure nobody recreates it, which, given incentives, it's impossible to enforce.
The main problem now is balance of power, not if we like surveillance or not. This new power must not be put only in the hands of an elite. By the same doctrine of "separation of powers", we should not concentrate all surveillance power in a single point, because it lacks checks and balances.
This act is more about telecommunications data than CCTV cameras.
Something that really bothered me is Shami Chakrabarti, previously head of Liberty and a strong supporter of human rights, now shadow Attorney General, abstained from voting.
I don't really buy this paranoid viewpoint. If "they" were trying to use information from surveillance to blackmail people into doing what "they" wanted, considering the scale of these programs I find it hard to believe that they would not have tripped over someone who is either functionally unblackmailable or who is willing to take the hit for the greater good. Furthermore, at some point it becomes very difficult to not trace leaks of such information back to government surveillance programs and entities, so every execution of a blackmail threat poses a serious risk to the blackmailers It works against key people when used occasionally, but it can't be used at scale without someone figuring out what is going on.
I agree to a point, that it's an issue of balance of power, but I think the arms race solution could cause a lot more damage to our society than the current arrangements.
Surveillance of government could open the floodgates to much broader interpersonal surveillance. For example, imagine a company that offered 'surveillance as a service'. We've been here before with private investigators, but that tended to be a niche market, just imagine if it was mainstream. The mechanisms we'd need to enable ad-hoc surveillance of government officials could also enable the general public to spy on each other to a much greater extent. At what point does that start to impact on our personal relationships and our business relationships? I'd suggest it could cause a much less forgiving society to emerge.
Our current arrangements fill the data coffers of FaceBook, Google, Apple and mobile operators with troves of personal data. It's already a multi-way surveillance society. We need to expand this even more, to surveil the surveillers or have access to their data.
Perhaps you've misunderstood what I said. I'm suggesting that promoting much more widespread surveillance will seep into civic life, e.g. people spying on employees/employers, neighbours, acquaintances, etc... and at a much greater level than sites like Facebook allow.
In other words, I'm suggesting an arms race in the field of surveillance available to the general public is likely to have unwelcome effects on society at large.
> require communication service providers (CSPs) to retain UK internet users' "Internet connection records" – which websites were visited but not the particular pages and not the full browsing history – for one year
In what world is a serial list of IP connections that a customer made not a "browsing history"?
Presumably, it's not required to record "particular pages" because
- It sounds reassuring
- It's not possible to record, for instance when someone accesses secure sites (the majority of time and pages)
- It's not necessary, since the a server's logs can easily be cross-referenced to the TCP connection logs
- It's not necessary, since plenty of insight results from knowing who, when, how much, for how long and how often everyone communicates with everyone else.
wonder how long before people abuse this to setup redirects or malicious code to connect suspicious sites/ip addresses and render the whole thing pointless and get everyone on government shitlist
would be easy to provide "evidence" against someone who has no knowledge of said sites simply by presenting logs
i guess a way to avoid this would be surveillance on all online accounts (read: making logs mandatory on everything ever); including search history, browsing habits etc, (not that im a fan of having my life and every interaction on display to others) but that leaves you vulnerable to anyone trying to impersonate you for whatever reason
It's odd that the usual hysteria by media, academics, assorted human rights organizations and concerned citizens about surveillance has been 'toned down' since the Snowden revelations.
It's nearly guaranteed there would be an earthquake of hysteria and frothing about totalitarianism and human rights were the revelations not about western countries. There is nearly zero activism about surveillance apart from the odd EFF press release.
It telling about the things we are supposed to care about, and the level of manipulation in local and global affairs over the last few decades and how countries are run. It seems like all societies we too want to think the worst of others and make excuses for ourselves. But that kind of posturing by our media, human rights orgs and reps is now going to become impossible to pull off with any credibility.
Groups like Liberty and the ORG have been campaigning against this for as long as it's been an issue, but if no-one in the mass media is interested in reporting it, there is only so much they can do. It hasn't even made the "back pages" of the BBC News web site much in recent months, as far as I've seen, nor been mentioned on any mainstream TV news broadcast that I've seen.
I'm confused about the current status of the bill. The linked Guardian article says it received royal assent, thus becoming law, on Thursday. However, as I write this, Parliament's own web site[1] says it is still in the "ping pong" stage.
Spending my day off upgrading router to dd-wrt, installing openvpn in an country that is less friendly to this shit, hardening all my personal machines and encrypting everything I can encrypt (most of which I should frankly have done ages ago but I got lazy).
This was pretty much the straw that broke the camels back for me, I've nothing to hide but fuck them for doing this anyway (and everything they've done before).
You may be aware of this already, but for anyone thinking along similar lines... make sure your VPN client guards against DNS leaks. Using a VPN does not automatically mean your DNS traffic is obfuscated, it's necessary to configure the VPN so that your ISP does not see your DNS traffic.
You could argue that this is another unfortunate consequence of brexit. Theresa May is now prime minister, which she wouldn't be if it wasn't for brexit.
The only thing we can do now, as developers and creators, is to create simple and easy tools, softwares, systems for the general public that make this kind of surveillance difficult or impossible. We need to work together to conserve and expand what little privacy we have left.
Technical methods are part of a response, but shouldn't be the only part.
We can also write to our MPs and lords, support organizations like ORG and Liberty who may challenge this law in court, and educate less-technical friends, relatives and colleagues.
Still, I would be particularly interested in anything exploring the extent to which people did or did not actually believe their 'official' faith throughout time.
So, the only way back to balance is to do government surveillance, and more generally, to have a multi-way surveillance society in which a single actor doesn't have monopoly. We have to go all the way now, short of destroying all surveillance equipment everywhere and making sure nobody recreates it, which, given incentives, it's impossible to enforce.
The main problem now is balance of power, not if we like surveillance or not. This new power must not be put only in the hands of an elite. By the same doctrine of "separation of powers", we should not concentrate all surveillance power in a single point, because it lacks checks and balances.