
Theresa May pushes for greater surveillance powers - RobAley
http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-28013805
======
bazzargh
_" Over a six-month period the National Crime Agency alone estimates that it
has had to drop at least 20 cases as a result of missing communications data,"
she said in a speech on Tuesday. "Thirteen of these were threat-to-life cases
in which a child was assessed to be at risk of imminent harm._

This is utter nonsense. If evidence is absent, you cannot just assume that it
would have helped your case.

~~~
rlpb
And later on in the article: "Therefore, if the home secretary is stating that
communications data was unavailable in specific cases, then that would suggest
that a warrant was either not submitted to, or was rejected by, the companies
in question. The question therefore should be why is this the case?"

Or is she citing cases where the authorities did not seek a warrant, or the
judiciary refused a warrant? And if so, why?

~~~
mike-cardwell
Presumably in some of those cases, the argument was that if they could scan a
large number of peoples email for keywords they might have been able to find
some evidence as to who was involved.

You generally can't get a warrant to scan a large number of peoples email.
Especially if that large number amounts to everyone.

I don't agree that they should have the ability to do this, even if it saves
lives. Because handing over this sort of power to a government only leads to
the creation of a police state, which ultimately will probably ruin more
lives.

Freedom costs lives.

------
Nanzikambe

       "The home secretary says internet phone systems Skype and Facetime, as well as 
       social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, have become "safe 
       havens" for organised criminals and terrorists"
    

and ..

    
    
       "It would also have extended laws to cover new online forms of communication, such as 
       Skype, and there were suggestions it could also give intelligence services real-time 
       access to the data."
    

In a world where recent controversy has caused a greater proportion of traffic
to make use of increasingly strong encryption, it's hard not interpret this as
a plaintive demand to subvert free enterprise, law and technology -- so that
all the old fun toys work once again.

What they really want is to render privacy and encryption moot by making it a
legal requirement that any service that facilitates communication, in any
form, be required to backdoor or log everything and provide it on a whim.

And how're they going to sell it? The age old "think of the children" refrain.
Class.

------
dTal
"The home secretary says internet phone systems Skype and Facetime, as well as
social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, have become "safe
havens" for organised criminals and terrorists."

How exactly do you coordinate a terrorist attack over _Twitter_?

~~~
mike_hearn
ISIS routinely use Twitter to publish stuff. I don't personally think that's a
problem, but I expect that's what she's talking about.

~~~
polymatter
I suspect that she hasn't given it much thought at all and just lumped all
internet media together. I suspect if you told her ISIS was spreading their
messages by using paper leaflets she would brand the post office as a 'safe
haven' for terrorists too.

------
rlpb
If this sort of thing bothers you, please support the Open Rights Group:
[http://www.openrightsgroup.org/](http://www.openrightsgroup.org/)

~~~
davb
I admire the work of the Open Rights Group, but it bothers me that they try to
funnel you towards making Direct Debit (recurring, straight from your bank
account) contributions and make it difficult to find the one-off donation
button.

Six links to recurring payments on
[https://www.openrightsgroup.org/join/](https://www.openrightsgroup.org/join/)
and only one to one-off donations. And even after clicking on that, I have to
scroll past more Direct Debit links to get to the one-off payment section.

Perhaps I'm just cynical, but I never give charitable donations on a recurring
basis. What if I don't support their actions in the future? Or I deem another
cause more worthy, at a point in time, of my donations? I have to take action
to cancel the Direct Debit.

I know it's probably cheaper for them, and it encourages people to sign up and
forget that they're contributing, but it feels too much like their website is
pushing you towards that and your one-off contribution isn't good enough.

~~~
Already__Taken
On the other side, if I were running a business on donations I'd sleep far
happier at night and concentrate on my goals a lot more with smaller steady
recurring donations. As opposed to being on a constant funding drive.

------
Create
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://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/27/-sp-
privac...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/27/-sp-privacy-
under-attack-nsa-files-revealed-new-threats-democracy)

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

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/europe-24385999](http://www.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/europe-24385999)

------
Fuxy
Wow somebody get this lunatic lady out of power.

First of all 20 cases over 6 months is not bad however they neglected to say
what the total amount of cases processed over these 6 months was. Was it 100
or 100000?

What is the reason they could not get the data did they not have enough
evidence to get a warrant all cases are not created equal.

"She dismissed as "nonsense" claims that the UK's secret listening post GCHQ
is exploiting a technical loophole in legislation that allows it spy on
YouTube and social media messages that are routed through foreign servers"

Now that is just living in your own little bubble it's pretty obvious by now
that this is true.

I don't want delusional people making laws for me.

Anybody supporting this will not be getting my vote that's for sure.

~~~
herghost
The problem we have is that Labour have historically proven to be even more
draconian and anti-libertarian than the Conservatives. The only realistic
alternative the Conservative government is a Labour government.

The best we can hope for (IMHO) is another coalition government - this time
with Labour and the LibDems, such that we reverse some of the recent nonsense,
but it doesn't escalate due to the semi-moderating liberal presence.

~~~
dTal
Well, we're not going to get it; the Liberal Democrats are a dead party
walking. One the one hand, I think it's a bit unfair that they're taking so
much heat for what are effectively Conservative actions - on the other, their
choice of coalition partner effectively put the Conservatives in power in the
first place, and they had exactly one job (reign in the worst excesses) which
they have in many instances failed to even pay lip service to.

As far as I can tell though, however much we all hate them, the career
politicians aren't really responsible for all this bullshit - they just go
along with it for political expediency. I've been watching carefully and it
all comes from the Home Office (and to a lesser extent, the Met). And the
thing is, those civil servants aren't elected. We can't get rid of them.

------
herghost
I absolutely agree that in cases where it can be proven, or it is reasonably
suspected, that there is criminal or terrorist activity afoot that the various
law enforcement agencies should be able to get access to online
communications.

Luckily, this is the case already and additional laws won't strengthen this -
they will simply remove the need for the burden of proof or suspicion.

It all still boils down to a "trust us, we're on your side" refrain, yet at
the same time there is no acknowledgement of the already exposed over-reach
that is going on - and in fact, there is an explicit denial/rubbishing of one
specific claim.

They can't have our trust and lie to us at the same time - what they're
effectively saying isn't, "trust us, we're on your side", it's "you can't
trust us, but don't sweat it we're not coming for you yet".

------
danmania
Currently I am outraged by this proposal. But the sad thing is I won't do
anything about it. I'll watch the World Cup tonight, I'll worry about traction
for my startup and then I'll make plans for the weekend. This apathy is
present throughout UK society. None of my friends give a damn to challenge the
proposal. The politicians seem like they don't give a damn either.

~~~
rasur
Bread and Circuses always win, usually.

------
dan_bk
Modern communication technology also introduces more pressure on governments
to behave correctly, which takes power away from them.

~~~
collyw
I don't see much evidence of that.

------
petepete
Do they really think people planning to commit such crimes won't simply
encrypt their data?

~~~
rainforest
Playing devil's advocate a little, the value in the data from an intelligence
perspective is probably in the network it uncovers. If you know a circle of
people are regularly exchanging encrypted messages, then you can try to target
one member and get them to compromise the group by turning them into an
informant. Similarly, if you suspect someone, you can look at their records to
discover the networks of potential conspirators, then fan-out for each member
until you have a big picture of interactions between different networks.

There's a great example of exploiting simple person-person interaction graphs
to generate this information here:
[http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-
metada...](http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-
find-paul-revere)

~~~
esteth
If they're smart, it feels like the shady groups would try to push for
adoption of something like BitMessage to stop this kind of side-channel
information leakage.

------
jackgavigan
A full transcript of the speech can be found here:
[https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/home-secretarys-
defen...](https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/home-secretarys-defence-and-
security-lecture)

------
blueskin_
If you still don't run your own mailserver or use a service like safe-mail or
mykolab in this day and age, you're mad.

