UK Communications Bill: Why allowing this access is all or nothing

UK Communications Bill: Why allowing this access is all or nothing

www.bbc.co.uk

Queen's Speech: Internet monitoring plan to have 'strict safeguards'

Plans to make it easier for the police and intelligence agencies to monitor e-mails, phone calls and internet use have been unveiled, but with promises of "strict safeguards".

The Draft Communications Bill would update existing procedures for allowing access to "vital" information.

This includes phone numbers and e-mail addresses but not content of messages.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Much like American attempts, Britains GCHQ wants to be able to access our internet data - but the thin end of the wedge says they will only snoop Who has accessed What sites, How, Where and When.

The "safeguard" is that they will not be able to access the CONTENT we generate or read... without a warrant/court order.

This thread is to throw light on how impractical this is and why, in effect, once we allow them access to the data we cannot control which bits they access...

As an IT manager with 25 years experience in design, analysis, programming, processes, project management and Data Protection/Quality systems, I will summarise my argument in the next post and seek an enlightening debate on how to control/subvert access to our data content.

www.bbc.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

I was thinking of putting together an email app that sends all the text as a picture with interference lines to prevent charactor recognition. Sure they can still read it but it would mean they DO have to physicaly read rather than letting their spyware search for keywords. What do you think? Imagine if we ALL did it that way!

I for see a lot of coded text messages and encrypted emails in the near future. I can see it now. Two housewives trading cookie recipes using 256 bit encryption that a super computer can not crack being SOP.


EDIT==Forget 256 bit encryption. I just learned there is 65536 bit encryption software available.

Nowadays we have advanced and efficient methods of storing and indexing data, whether it be our Internet historys, facebook picture posts, emails or our phone calls stored digitally.

For clarity of argument though, I will use the concept of data files, with Header record which form the index, and data records which hold the contents. The concept will apply to other forms of data storage such as databases, Microsoft Outlook data files (.ost, .pst etc), VOIP call recordings, etc.:

1) The argument made by the bill is that the government will access the "Record Headers" but not the "data records",
2) Header and Data Records are almost always held in the same file or database, within which, you read a Header record, which details where data is from, what type of data it is, what protocol/language should be used to read it, and the start position, end and length of the Data contents,
3) ISPs, Telephone companies, Googlemail etc., will retain their data for X years in case the government asks to access it. These companies main costs are in running datacentres and Storage, so they will not want to keep additional copies of the datafiles which contain only the record headers, especially as the government may then ask to see the data contents after getting a court order. Therefore they will provide copies of the original data files and tell GCHQ "Its your job to read only the header records",
4) Once the government has a copy of the data file, they have to access the whole file in order to get to the header records - the only way to avoid this is for the government to write custom software for every popular type of data file that only looks at Header records... but this won't work for corrupted files and would require hundreds to thousands of custom programs,
5) Even if they write custom programs to only look at Headers, when they read the files their computers will store backup copies of the file, as well as temporary working copies of the file to be processed,
6) Even if external liberty groups could do adhoc quality audits to check the custom "header only" programs were working correctly, they would not be able to check that backups or temporary files were not being accessed in other ways...

So effectively... once we allow the government access to our data files, they can access all of it!
4)

Originally posted by VoidHawk
I was thinking of putting together an email app that sends all the text as a picture with interference lines to prevent charactor recognition. Sure they can still read it but it would mean they DO have to physicaly read rather than letting their spyware search for keywords. What do you think? Imagine if we ALL did it that way!

Or just use what everyone else has been using for the past 20 years.
If you're concerned about plaintext data being intercepted via email use PGP.

www.gnupg.org...
en.wikipedia.org...

Most email clients (such as thunderbird) have add-ons available to manage signatures and encrypted messages with PGP.

EDIT:
To add, being british myself... this is the road to fascism. It's laughable to say that the UK isn't already a fascist state in disguise, because it already is. This "law/bill" is a step further to a country being run by right-wing extremists.

reply to post by InsideYourMind


Encryption always gets cracked in the end. My idea was to physicaly swamp them with work. There must be BILLIONS of emails every day, if they had to physicaly read them to know the contents they got no chance.

Also its likely they will make encryption a crime, for your own safety of course.

reply to post by InsideYourMind


Personally, I would expect any format, even a bespoke encyrpted method I designed myself, to be readable by TPTB.

Look at it this way:

A) Typically, IT companies that develop software have 1000 staff per £1bn p.a. turnover,

B) Per 1000 staff only 5 to 15% will be programmers, say 50 to 150

C) Government bodies like GCHQ pick the cream of the programmers and analysts - and I would imagine that CIA/FBI have spent $bns hiring programmers in preparation for controlling this,


I would take up pigeon fancying and send my mail old-style, but:

A) They'll lose their way with the changing magnetic fields, or

B) HAARP will knock them out of the skies, or

C) The working class will shoot them down because the can't afford to buy food after the banking meltdown.

reply to post by RelSciHistItSufi

Inject end-to-end encryption for Web browsing. Add e-mail that's stored in encrypted form, so even Calyx can't read it after it arrives. Wrap all of this up into an easy-to-use package and sell it for competitive prices

an isp who encrypts end to end accross the internet

and i started a thread today about a start up ISP that will work on the principal of privacy first
using a "fully" encrypted platform that is simple to use


xploder

Originally posted by VoidHawk
reply to post by InsideYourMind

 

Encryption always gets cracked in the end. My idea was to physicaly swamp them with work. There must be BILLIONS of emails every day, if they had to physicaly read them to know the contents they got no chance.

Also its likely they will make encryption a crime, for your own safety of course.

edit on 9-5-2012 by VoidHawk because: (no reason given)

This is not gonna happen. The average terrorist sympathizer is a young middle Eastern male won't be bright enough to use common encryption software anyway.

I support this bill as would all of you if your jobs required you to keep your country safe.

reply to post by XPLodER


Thanks for the pointer XPLodER!

This looks useful... but as compute power increases will be liable to key decryption so they'll have to stay ahead... bring on Gigabit encryption!

Originally posted by RelSciHistItSufi
reply to post by XPLodER

 

Thanks for the pointer XPLodER!

This looks useful... but as compute power increases will be liable to key decryption so they'll have to stay ahead... bring on Gigabit encryption!

interesting thing is the acual connection is encrypted ie the internet is encrypted from you computer to the ISP,
through the isp backbone and to the target, and this is done AT THE ISP LEVEL
so you click to connect and then encrypt over that encryption and the ISP has one set of keys and the user has the other

this means that the ISP only has encrypted white noise and without YOUR key they couldnt force ISPs to give them anything other than WHITE noise.

as home computer CPUs increase, so to does our ability to run higher and higher compresion and encryption protocals.

at this point the home computer software encryption plus the ISP hardware encryption would make it almost take a super computer to crack, and that would be for each encrypted session, each user one at a time.

the upside is it would protect you from advertising trackers, and to some degree hackers as well.

yesterdays ats thread
www.abovetopsecret.com...


xploder