Just a very quick note on the communications data bill/intercept modernisation programme.
Here in the UK, partly through an EU directive and partly through soverign law, the government is planning to create a database recording the details of all electronic communications in the country. It is claimed that this will be useful in combatting serious organised crime and terrorism, but unless I’m mistaken this kind of monitoring is trivial to get around.
The bill states that the body of communications will not be recorded, just recepient/sender and time/date details. It seems to me then that anybody with a little common sense, for email at least, could simply sign up for a throw away address with Google or Yahoo via Tor or some other annonymising service, ruining the validity of any data collected by the database.
Obviously the ability for those people with extremely sensitive information to hide their activties is a minorr detail here: the main worry is that this data might be shared by the government with 3rd parties, accidentally lost (as has happened many times) etc, or worse, that this data might be used for mining purposes, to discover evidence of wrong doing when none (or very little) is suspected.
Anyway, my main comment was the uselessness of this with respect to its suggested primary goal, that of combatting organised crime and terrorism. Is this just crazy talk?
2 Comments
No, you are right. The goal would not be accomplished by what they propose to do. But, when has government ever, in all of its existence, made new legislation that accomplished its proposed goal? It seems the governments role to make laws just cause, that way we feel like they are doing their ‘job’.
I agree – it’s this particular Bill that made me seriously look into encryption and deniable email addresses. I don’t like it when Google advertises me something that I’ve talked about in Gmail, I clearly don’t want civil servants looking it up on their lunch break. I suspect that free webmail addresses and web cafes will simply become the new phone box for anyone who actually wants to commit a crime by email.
The main problem I have is that the database, as it stands now, will not record the content of messages. To me that’s as useful as installing CCTV cameras that record images that are too murky to secure a conviction (which also happens). As a way of providing police investigating a crime that’s already happened with a record to check and say “why were you
callingemailing soandso at such a time?” that’s really handy but to actually make anyone safer before hand? Especially with terrorism, in the days of suicide bombers investigating the attacks afterwards is frankly not too much of a priority.My primary worry is it’s simply version one and the next Bill will ask for the actual content of the message too. I think it appears ridiculous in the face of many other proposals for ID cards and other ways of identifying yourself, how crazed for information can a Government be?
I thought organised crime organised itself face to face and with everyone checked for snitches? That’s how it can continue in the face of policy scrutiny and phone taps.