UK's draft Investigatory Powers Bill

Discussion in 'privacy general' started by deBoetie, Nov 4, 2015.

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  1. deBoetie

    deBoetie Registered Member

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    Has been published today as a draft for consultation:

    https://www.gov.uk/government/uploa...le/473770/Draft_Investigatory_Powers_Bill.pdf

    The following link gives a set of "overarching documents" to explain and provide fact-sheets, memorandums and impact assessments.

    https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-investigatory-powers-bill-overarching-documents

    This is the specific operational assessment for the proposed 12 month retention period for "Internet Connection Records".

    https://www.gov.uk/government/uploa...Internet_Connection_Records_Evidence_Base.pdf

    The Bill is open for pre-legislative scrutiny by a Joint Committee of Parliament, who will apparently issue its own calls for evidence and invite views from public and interested parties. It is not clear how and when this will take place, but they are talking about introducing the legislation in the New Year (2016).
     
  2. trott3r

    trott3r Registered Member

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    Still no judicial oversight then?

    Cant trust politicians to sign off consent
     
  3. Daveski17

    Daveski17 Registered Member

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    Well, considering Google inter alia probably already know more about my 'Internet connection records' than I do, why doesn't GCHQ just look up their records?
     
  4. Joxx

    Joxx Registered Member

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    ... so let's snoop on 60 million of our own subjects

    Unfortunately most people buy these scare tactics, which may be understandable considering how the mainstream media parrots the official line.
     
  5. Daveski17

    Daveski17 Registered Member

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    I thought the job description for MI5 actually was snooping on the populace. Isn't that what they do?
     
  6. Joxx

    Joxx Registered Member

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    no, that's what this and other approved/proposed legislations intend them to do
     
  7. Daveski17

    Daveski17 Registered Member

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    I don't know, I'm pretty sure that domestic security is handled by MI5 and overseas intelligence gathering by MI (Military Intelligence) 6. The very nature of intelligence gathering or snooping is clandestine, secretive, invasive and probably bordering the illegal. That's why they are also referred to as 'secret services'. Although I must admit that the term military intelligence is probably an oxymoron. I'm not sure which of the two services James Bond works for but the revolving number plates on his Aston Martin tends to indicate he works abroad a lot. Good luck trying to disguise the steering wheel on that Aston Martin being right hand drive Jimmy.
     
  8. Joxx

    Joxx Registered Member

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    Maybe but that's not the point.


    That is not the same (far from) than preying on everything everybody writes, says and do.


    The difference between security services and snooping on the populace is the difference between the rule of law and total control; these two are not the same, they are antagonist.
    Reading emails, listening to phone calls, abolishing cash... it all falls in the same goal.
    Wake up Daveski, this is like Elm Street, they get you while you sleep.
     
  9. Daveski17

    Daveski17 Registered Member

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    Yes, it is exactly the point. For MI5 to do its job it needs access to modern communication networks that are utilised by terrorists and enemies of the state.

    I've heard the same argument about CCTV security cameras. A friend of mine was raped recently, it was evidence from a CCTV camera that helped convict her attacker. Cameras see everybody. If you aren't committing a crime you have little to fear.

    I don't need to be any more lucid, the democracy I live in is far from perfect, but if GCHQ want to study my browser history or read my emails they're welcome. I have nothing to hide.
     
  10. Joxx

    Joxx Registered Member

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    If you would only speak for yourself it would be fine.
    Unfortunately for them to read your info they will have to read everybody else's and I disagree.
    As to the surveillance making us safer, you're wrong.
     
  11. deBoetie

    deBoetie Registered Member

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    Perhaps I should not burst your bubble, nor react to anecdotal examples - which are also replete in the legislative documents. But for any other readers:-

    GCHQ staff (and all the other "authorised" users) are humans; they are quite capable of doing human things with the data like "Loveint"; Geoffry Prime, a spy and paedophile was a GCHQ employee; financial insider dealing would be a doddle with the data at their disposal. You can bet that auditing will be lax, and none of them will go to jail for abuses.

    Optic Nerve - a disgraceful scheme monitoring webcam chat, was a little flutter of GCHQ - and self-admittedly had a big proportion of teenage sex on it. Would a person's teenage daughter have nothing to hide?

    No-one can keep databases safe; particularly those who do not bear the costs of breaches. Whether insider job or external hack, the data WILL be exfiltrated because it's valuable.

    There is a huge cost to the innocent that false positives can and will impose. When talking bulk data collection and storage, this is a big problem. Particularly so with data mining and algorithmic guilt, but also with bored and lazy human operators. Before you know it, mistaken identify, guilt by association, or rubbish data will result on you being on some list with no redress. There's a lot of historical precedent, e.g. the innocent men fingered as part of Operation Ore. You mention CCTV, before you know it, the poor facial recognition reliability will end up in mistakenly fingering innocent people, who do NOT get decent redress for their false accusation - and facial recognition, ANPR and many many other intrusive identification techniques..

    GCHQ seem to view themselves as a cost centre who justify their existence (and retain their empire) by making their "services" available to all and sundry. The more you open up access to this stuff, the more abuses of data will happen. Definitions of "terrorism" are hard to come by, and certainly seem to include normal journalistic sources.

    The all-and-sundry include other countries of course, with zero control of what happens with the bulk datasets that they get given. Since these other countries are also economic competitors and the bulk data provides much value for economic espionage (which is what the bulk of espionage is about anyway), I think this is treasonable. The "little" detail of their data sharing arrangements are spookily not part of this legislation.

    The proposed legislation gives me no feeling of security or trust, and imposes an unacceptable change in the relationship between state and citizen (which they have already grabbed in secret, destroying trust). The scale of monitoring has literally never ever been done in the history of the human race. Regrettably, I do not trust the security services in bulk collection because of history, and they seem spectacularly bad at identifying strategic threats, and try to smokescreen with bulk surveillance which has extremely dubious operational effectiveness (in comparison with putting effort into directed tasks), while maximising the social and economic costs.

    You cannot give away my rights - not only HRA, but also constitutional and Rule of Law.
     
  12. Daveski17

    Daveski17 Registered Member

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    It's easy to cherry pick statistics about surveillance, but it really isn't that big a deal, unless you're paranoid or a criminal.
     
  13. Daveski17

    Daveski17 Registered Member

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    I don't want to give away anyone's rights, whether they are proud card carrying members of the tinfoil hat brigade or not, but international terrorism is an existential threat and the security services need to be able to have the tools to combat the new menace. I'm aware of the problem of false positives and general incompetence at a governmental level, but whether you want to accept it or not, the western world is now at war with those determined for whatever ideological reasons (operative fictions/subjective ontological belief in invisible sky pixies?) to cause as much destruction and loss of life as possible. The scale of monitoring has never been attempted before because neither the technology or the internal threat to individual democratic nation states from many of their own citizens has never really existed before.

    If you want a definition of terrorism; think 9/11 and 7/7. How many potential mass killings that we have no knowledge of have been prevented by the security services since then?

    Quite a few I'll wager.
     
  14. Joxx

    Joxx Registered Member

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    You toe the official line too obediently, try to question what they feed you with.


    @deBoetie good post, thanks.
     
  15. quietman

    quietman Registered Member

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    The definition of "terrorism" is very vague , at best .

    The legacy of Dubbya ,Rumsfeld et al is that anything the state doesn't like ( such as freedom of speech , whistle-blowers etc )
    only has to be labelled as a " threat to national security " to justify ANY action by state agencies .....
    Prism , Guantanamo detentions , "extra-ordinary rendition " for the purpose of torture .... need I go on ?

    The oft used line about " I'm not doing anything wrong so I don't care " is a tragic blind-alley in reasoning.

    The right to privacy , and protection from unwarranted invasion , is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

    Among the vast arsenal of cyber-weapons available to the TLAs is a tool which creates " Evil Twin " websites and permits live
    modifications to those sites on-the-fly ..... and manipulation of checksums as needed.

    Anyone who thinks that using something like TAILS can protect their privacy now needs to think again .
    It is almost certain that they will end up with a "poisoned" download , but one that will still pass all attempts at verification.
     
  16. Daveski17

    Daveski17 Registered Member

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    I don't tow any line, and I don't believe most rhetoric that any government, whatever its policies, produces. The plain fact of the matter is that however despicable, mendacious and outright repulsive any government policy on absolutely anything appears to the individual, the government of the UK is not manufacturing the threat of international or domestic terrorism to create a form of Orwellian control and subjugate its own citizens.

    This is a paranoid and delusional fantasy, predominantly perpetrated by conspiracy theorists and believers in concepts like the 'New World Order'. Are governments deliberately disingenuous, mendacious and self serving? Yes, of course they are. That's the nature of democracy.

    Theresa May is just incompetent and belongs to a government that has no real grasp on how to deal with a real and growing threat. She, and the government , are more terrified of the inevitable public outrage when the next terrorist atrocity is perpetrated on British soil.

    This new Investigatory Powers Bill proposal is as ill thought out and inchoate as everything else May inter alios has introduced. The world, both geopolitically and technologically are advancing too fast for recent British governments and they are struggling to keep pace.

    There are far more dubious policies, both economical and ideological, of this government to question than the implementation of this Bill.
     
  17. Daveski17

    Daveski17 Registered Member

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    No, it isn't. But semantics and semiotics aside, there are domestic and international forces that are not necessarily not interconnected, who for ideological reasons want to commit atrocities in my country.

    It is the job of the security forces to prevent this occurring
    .

     
  18. deBoetie

    deBoetie Registered Member

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    It is vague, legally and by LE interpretation, because it seems it can mean whatever they want it to mean. I'm not mincing words, the problem is that it's whatever threatens them, whoever they don't like at the moment. And it's a very asymmetrical and counter-to-rule-of-law concept in the first place (thought crimes etc). You bear the costs of false accusations, and have to fight against a hugely resourced and secretive machine funded by limitless public money - this is not justice.

    As far as strategic threats to one's own country, it's often useful to assess one's own contributions and ideology, or those of our beloved leaders, and whether the bulk surveillance actually has anything whatsoever to do with that. Certainly, ALL the main recent geopolitical events have apparently surprised western IS (Arab Spring, Libya, Ebola, Ukraine, rise of ISIS), despite all the monitoring. So, rather than focus on largely ineffective and counter-productive bulk surveillance of one's own population, maybe it'd be a better use of resources to have a decent foreign policy for example, or treat your allies decently. And I've never bought that bulk data collection was about domestic terrorism, because the people were already known to the LE; instead, it's about economic espionage and population control, and of course, cementing the empires and power of the spooks.

    It's quite possible to want to have the spooks with decent powers to catch/stop the bad guys, but this does not mean you have to swallow the bulk monitoring and attack methods.
     
  19. Daveski17

    Daveski17 Registered Member

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    It's only vague in the definition, in reality it is not so ambiguous. This Bill probably won't be justice, I'll agree there. It is definitely incompetent or very probably will be incompetently implemented, that's almost certain. Unfortunately, and I'm not sanguine about the situation either, it has become a necessary evil.

    Foreign policy is a straw man, or a red herring, or even a straw herring. Either way, as a counter argument of any description it is a lame duck. Of course ill conceived foreign policies have created various international situations with their concomitant repercussions, but much of the problem with this particular terrorist threat is from fanatical ideologists.

    Whether their grievances or alienated actions were caused by aggressive or misconceived foreign policies, godless infidels, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse or any other constructed, deconstructed, assumed, imagined, synthesised, actual or created bogeyman from their totalist grand narrative and attendant belief system, the root causes of their motivations are by and large irrelevant (even to them). Their underlying ideology has been apocalyptic by nature for over a millennia and their influence on like minded people living on British soil is increasingly growing. Its cult-like nature and the propagation of its ideo-mythology through the Internet to directly radicalise and incite followers to commit acts of mass murder is a problem that has to be addressed.

    As I'm not privy to matters of national security I can't answer that. But rather than see this proposed legislation as a prelude to a Bilderberger new world order/1984 scenario, I just view it as a hastily conceived and possibly flawed attempt to rectify or address a situation that has taken western secular democracies by surprise.
     
  20. Joxx

    Joxx Registered Member

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    Wrong.
    The problem is a criminal and irresponsible foreign policy, the West's post WW2 and America's post 2001.


    Wrong.
    He who ignores the Sunni/Shia question or Saudi Wahhabism understands nothing. Unfortunately it is the case of most our leaders.


    If I were you I wouldn't dismiss the possibility of a new world order being a pet idea of many a powerful figure and organization; from Fabians to Evangelicals, from the Vatican to the UN... yes, there are lots out there dreaming the best for us.
     
  21. Daveski17

    Daveski17 Registered Member

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    No, this idea that it is predominantly irresponsible foreign policy is a convenient operative fiction for the explanation of the origins of religious fundamentalism and its reactionary doctrines of apocalyptic nihilism. It is a Western rationalising of a behaviour which is essentially irrational and not understood by the rationalising secular Western psyche. The mind-set of the religious fundamentalist cannot be explained politically or even necessarily on a logically based set of hierarchical binary oppositional terms. It would be naive to disregard Western foreign policy completely for any dissent or actions by terrorist organisations, but individual governments and their respective policies, Western or otherwise, are not the sole, or in fact the most important reason for cult-like suicide bombings, mass rape, genocide and ethnic cleansing committed recently in the name of an odious religious ideology. All of the same, or at least similar, arguments were put forward in an attempt to explain the atrocities committed by the Nazis and even the rise of National Socialism in 1930‘s Germany. To attempt to claim that 7/7 or the murder of Lee Rigby were the direct result of foreign policy is ludicrous at best. These atrocities were the result of cult-like indoctrination of an ideology that appeals to the mentally disturbed, unempathic and those with a misplaced sense of grievance.

    Neither of these has any real relevance to the domestic terrorism problem in hand. Just more convenient rationalising and deliberate oversimplifying of a complex situation exacerbated by irrational religious supremacist ideologies.

    If I were you, I would dismiss the idea of a new world order outside of the ideological fantasies of religious fanatics and possible Bond villains.
     
  22. deBoetie

    deBoetie Registered Member

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    I'm conscious here of the discussion straying beyond our more technical brief here (given the information that we can reliably infer from what is happening in the wider environment or in the legislation noted above).
     
  23. ronjor

    ronjor Global Moderator

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    Do a search for "Political Forums" using the search engine of your choice.
     
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