UK.Gov plans black box spyware !

I've never heard of iSafeguard Freeware 6.2, has anyone else ?

HushMail has been caught out decrypting emails etc & handing them over to the Feds !

The (redacted) options & blanked out 2 paragraphs sound intriging

 

The Conservative side of of the UK coalition govt are quite keen to push the Snooper's Charter ahead but it hasn't received the support it needs to go ahead. I think it might be another decade before it goes through and I pity the people who have to go through internet records of millions of people.

Here's the latest on the Snooper's Charter:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2013/feb/05/snoopers-charter-pretty-heroic-assumptions

 

I'm sure it'll go through sooner than a decade. Russia already has this in the form of a "child protection act". The U.S wants it and may in fact already have it because it would explain many things like room 641A at ISPs (that particular and only one known publicly at AT&T), the massive data center in Utah and more. It's not all that difficult to do minus the political stink and I'm not sure why so many still think it's an impossible task. If Russia, with all of it's domestic issues can make it work, the U.K and certainly the U.S can through the massively funded intelligence organizations.

@Merisi: It's not a case of "people going through millions of records". It is more akin to the Carnivore and Echelon programs that flagged "suspicious" communication automatically and logged the emails and what have you to be sent for further investigation. There aren't millions of people using the terms that are flagged in the database commonly. Those two programs didn't track "everyone" though, the type of black box tech that is being talked about here is more advanced and quite capable of logging just about anything you can think of. I don't believe encrypting communications will always work or be welcome legally. I haven't the slightest clue when places such as the U.S or the U.K will frown more on it, but I believe it's coming and, in the case of Russia and their black box setup, trying to get around it is very much frowned upon and can bring legal problems.

I'm going to leave as much politics out of this as I can because we all know where that will lead, but I don't think people understand just how little their "rights" protect them and how easy it is to start a mess that once it goes far enough, will be next to impossible to get out of. No tin foil hat here, just a bit of healthy concern.

 

@Mman79 actually it makes a lot more sense that the UK govt would introduce a system such as the one you have described based on suspicious behaviour otherwise it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. If this does become the law then I'd definitely choose not to use a VPN or encryption as I wouldn't looking to be drawing attention to my actions.

The reason I don't think that this is going to happen in the UK at least this decade is because the current govt doesn't have a strong enough mandate and I doubt whether then next one will either. As you said it's likely best to leave politics out of this and stick to computers.

 

Well, as far as VPNs go, I don't see a situation where the government takes an official "If you use encryption, you're a terrorist/criminal" stance happening for a while. There are still enough legitimate uses for that sort of attitude to be rushed into law. I think where they'll most likely start looking harder is TOR. Not that TOR is really all that safe considering by now there's probably more trap nodes than legit nodes, but TOR has taken a beating with Silk Road, Lolita City and others like it operating freely through it. With Silk Road especially now in the crosshairs after being infiltrated, TOR will be watched like a hawk and may even eventually be shut out of the encryption game. If you watch your connection to TOR carefully, you'll see yourself occasionally being connected to NATO and NSA-operated nodes (no tin-foil hat stuff, the actual nodes can be looked up in Google), so that right there is enough to show that these agencies have their fingers embedded into services like this.

As far as governments are concerned, it doesn't always take a majority to pass such measures and indeed there are plenty of cases where the "checks and balances" so to speak were and are bypassed. That's about all I'll say on that situation though

 

The conservative side of the uk coalition government is also planning on trying to get everyone away from mobile broadband usage and instead use cable internet services.
Im sure the major mobile broadband companies will have strong views on these proposals.

 

Well, if we stick with the topic of surveillance and not get into all of the other reasons mobile is growing, mobile usage is beneficial to such programs when you factor in geo-location and other tracking abilities. You can't really even get away with using the old tried and true "toss-away" cells that once upon a time were a reliable way to not be tracked because they are too now.

 

politics as it is against TOS?