UK Police Want To Legally Be Able To Read Everyone’s Internet Search History Under New Plan

Not that they probably don't already but it makes it easier when it is "legal".

www.trueactivist.com...

UK Police are asking the government for new surveillance powers to be able to view the internet search history of every single person in the country.

Richard Berry, the National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesman told The Guardian that “We want to police by consent, and we want to ensure that privacy safeguards are in place. But we need to balance this with the needs of the vulnerable and the victims. We essentially need the ‘who, where, when and what’ of any communication – who initiated it, where were they and when did it happened. And a little bit of the ‘what’, were they on Facebook, or a banking site, or an illegal child-abuse image-sharing website?.

“Five years ago, [a suspect] could have physically walked into a bank and carried out a transaction. We could have put a surveillance team on that but now, most of it is done online. We just want to know about the visit,” he added.

It is likely that police are already looking at your online activity, but just want the power to do it legally. As we learned from whistleblower Edward Snowden, governments are very interested what their citizens are doing online, and they do have the technology to spy on every telephone call and internet communication.

Police in the UK have been attempting to reach for these powers through legislation for years, but they have been blocked on multiple occasions. This new effort proves that they will not be giving up on getting legal permission for their spying programs.

MP David Davis told The Guardian “It’s extraordinary they’re asking for this again, they are overreaching and there is no proven need to retain such data for a year.”

Home Secretary Theresa May will announce the specifics of the plan during a meeting about the Government’s new surveillance bill in the House of Commons on Wednesday.

Reading everyone's search history will only push more users to the dark web.

a reply to: infolurker

I have been following this development. It seems the new Chief Constable does not want the "thought police" powers as he put it, well that is what he said the other day at least in an interview. It is a government agenda.

The sharing of our data by corporations and snooping powers are well out of order. It seems most are asleep to the dangers. They are very real. Privacy is a right and we need legislation to recognise and enforce that. Yes, if they get a warrant, that is fine, but not like this.

I don't have anything to hide. I am a very boring user. but there is a principle here. In a free society this is all very wrong. I have been moaning about it in Guardian comments.

I must admit the internet is not used by me so much these days. It is a good resource, but I like to spend my time in reality.

a reply to: infolurker

I have been following this development. It seems the new Chief Constable does not want the "thought police" powers as he put it. It is a government agenda.

The sharing of our data by corporations and snooping powers are well out of order. It seems most are asleep to the dangers. They are very real. Privacy is a right and we need legislation to recognise and enforce that. Yes, if they get a warrant, that is fine, but not like this.

I don't have anything to hide. I am a very boring user, but there is a principle here. In a free society this is all very wrong. I have been moaning about it in Guardian comments.

I must admit the internet is not used by me so much these days. It is a good resource, but I like to spend my time in reality.

a reply to: Nickn3

Or your could use a VPN. There are some that are still free. The browser I use clears all history and searches when I close it but I am not sure if that has all gone to my ISP first.

double post

originally posted by: infolurker
Not that they probably don't already but it makes it easier when it is "legal".

www.trueactivist.com...

Governments are getting very brazen, they probably already do a lot of this and are now, not afraid to try to legally shore it up. Part of the reason is that if a crime is committed, like murder, in court the prosecution will subpoena internet search records and might find that the accused searched say, 'poison' 4 times before the murder, however that is out of thousands of searches and may mean nothing.

The rest of the reason, probably 90% is that governments don't like citizens to have privacy and that has to be fought.

s&f

We need new legislation around the world that protects the freedoms and privacy of citizens. It SHOULD be a given...an inherent right, but for some reason governments never seem to understand that people want freedom more than anything else from their keepers.

a reply to: infolurker

just clear your browsing history at the end of the day ( i do ) and then i run my anti virus app , this i do each and every night before i close down my pc .

let them do it,any system can be hacked just because im sitting here in front of my computer it is not proof im typing this,
these words could be being typed by any person in any country..

the really bad bit is gchq has let the muslim extremists in the uk preach on street corners and let them grow while protecting them from the true english, so they have created the problem so they could push through more control.

gchq supporting muslim extremists in the uk,

a reply to: tom.farnhill
I think people don't realise how deep they want to go. At the moment the police are alerted "someway" and they raid your house and remove ALL devices and they recover what information that they want off your devices to convict you. But this new "law" they want is to short cut your devices and draw the information directly off your ISP. The difficulty being trying to tie the ISP data with your personal devices. Yes, the data might have been accessed by your devices, but might not be you. Also it has already been proven that the authorities can "plant" a eronious history on your server.
Another thing (I don't know) but according to my son when you clear your browsing history it does not erase it, it just moves it to another place on your device and the police have people that can retrieve it, THAT'S why they have to have your devices when the search your home. The only way to wipe it is to re-format and you aint gonna do that every day.

a reply to: stuthealien
You are wrong! If it's your personal computer you will be tried on the fact that it was you that accessed that data. No matter how loud you shout about being hacked you will go down if found guilty.
Your computer, your information.

a reply to: crayzeed

dont be silly even nasa got hacked

Run a virtual setup. Check out VitualBox HERE

Virtualbox allows you to set up a windows/Linux that opens on your desktop, just like any other app. But its completely self contained, its like a universe within a universe.

Set up your virtual windows/Linux to how you like it.
Use the clone feature! This enables you to create a copy of what you just setup.
Use it for your internet activity. Then delete it!
When you next go on the internet use another clone.

By doing this you use a new os every day.

If you know what you're doing, create a small partition about the same size as your virtual clone. Run your clone on that partition. When you delete it, copy your next clone into that partition, this prevents anyone from recovering the deleted clone.

I don't really understand the desire to be able to have surveillance on people in the first place. I understand that advertisers might wish to know about you and your purchasing habits, but is it just a power trip to have more control over people. I'd much rather live in a state, with the possibility of terrorism than a surveillance state that guarantees permanent safety from bad people with bad intentions. Why would you want total security provided by the state from a small potential of harm?

a reply to: Metallicus

I agree that we should have our freedom and privacy of doing so and that's human spirit that the government want to tread on to rule over all of us.

originally posted by: woodwardjnr
I don't really understand the desire to be able to have surveillance on people in the first place. I understand that advertisers might wish to know about you and your purchasing habits, but is it just a power trip to have more control over people. I'd much rather live in a state, with the possibility of terrorism than a surveillance state that guarantees permanent safety from bad people with bad intentions. Why would you want total security provided by the state from a small potential of harm?

Agreed, but I think there's more to this than people realise.
I think there's bad things ahead of us, and they're expecting the public to get pee'd off. By having access to peoples online history they can target those people who are most likely to be a problem!

Sure, as long as we can read all of theirs.

a reply to: VoidHawk

*Offtopic: First post, ooh..

I personally believe they wish to collect this data so they can create databases flagging users and giving them a risk factor via an algorithm they'll try to design with this new data.

They will throw around claims of Crime Prevention while they're removing Police from the streets and now asking citizens to use the internet to record crime.

The police and the government know as a collective we the people can organize and communicate, the ability to communicate with like-minded people worldwide is a very powerful tool, the government should be afraid of it's people, but the people should not be afraid of it's government, governments were created to protect the interests and well being of it's people, however, they're trying to take away right after right after right.

I believe through meta data the police wish to collect information about everyone who uses popular search engines and social media to create psychological profiles, and find out the local hotspots citizens use, daily routines, if these laws pass, we citizens will be in danger, it's not a case of "I'm a law abiding citizen this does not affect me", yes it does.

In the wrong hands this information can be used to build a case against you whether legitimate or not, online communication is easily susceptible to hackers, this is a stance of guilty until proven innocent and it's one step that leads to another step that's going to infringe more and more rights until suddenly you realize you've got no freedoms left.

originally posted by: tom.farnhill
a reply to: infolurker

just clear your browsing history at the end of the day ( i do ) and then i run my anti virus app , this i do each and every night before i close down my pc .

Your ISP will maintain a log of all the http requests made. This is the most compact form of logging. The last thing they want is a bazillion flash adverts, images, CSS frames, TTF fonts when all they need is the webpage.

In the past, some people just placed all the text in an image file. Those were invisible to search engines, and couldn't be modified by middleware.