SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Despite loudly, and repeatedly, raised concerns from activists and members of Parliament, the UK's Snooper's Charter (a.k.a., Investigatory Powers bill [PDF]) has been passed by both parliamentary houses and only needs the formality of the royal signature to make it official.
[...] The government, of course, is trying to portray this as nothing more than a fine tuning of pre-existing laws, specifically the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). Glossed over in its perfunctory "nothing to see here" explanation is the fact that RIPA was also rushed into existence to codify other secret and illegal surveillance programs.
But it's no ordinary update of existing investigatory laws. Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group calls the Snooper's Charter "the most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy." Thanks to the new powers, UK intelligence agencies should be able to put together very extensive dossiers on pretty much anyone they feel like.
Quick, Deucalion, run!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 19 2016, @12:07AM
For that comfortable illusion of privacy, use a VPN.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Saturday November 19 2016, @12:09AM
In a different country.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 19 2016, @12:19AM
Sure just give MI6 an excuse to get involved, and that's assuming your endpoint in the People's Republic of Ruritania isn't already compromised.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday November 19 2016, @12:39AM
Read the bill. They don't need an excuse.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 19 2016, @01:00AM
So you should use a VPN because ... ?
Oooooo I know! You should use Tor! because Tor is trustiness.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 19 2016, @01:42AM
I use Tor ... behind seven proxies! Seven! And each one is connected via a separate VPN! Sure, there's some latency but ... hold on, some news is coming across the wire ... Lincoln's been shot!?!?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 19 2016, @01:59AM
> So you should use a VPN because ... ?
Because you will be unique.
When collection is the standard, then it is easy to trawl through everybody's data.
If you use a VPN then if they do manage collect your data, its not going into the same bucket as everybody else - its going into the bucket of people who are probably terrorists. That means you will be outside of routine privacy violations. You will only be subject to special-case violations. Either way you are at risk, but at least you avoid you will avoid most of the risks.
Think of it this way - if you are a pirate and they decide to go after pirates, they are going to look at the data collected from regular people because that's the low hanging fruit. Maybe they will also look at the extra suspicious people too, in which case you are no worse off than the normals. But if they decide to skip that group because its a different database and its pretty small so its not worth their effort, then you come out a winner.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by vux984 on Saturday November 19 2016, @03:24AM
If you use a VPN then if they do manage collect your data, its not going into the same bucket as everybody else - its going into the bucket of people who are probably terrorists. That means you will be outside of routine privacy violations.
This is why more normal people need to do it, to make that bucket as big as possible. So that the journalists, activists, whistleblowers, etc have some cover. (And yeah i guess the terrorists and perverts too... but I'd rather we catch terrorists and perverts by other means than mass surveillance so I can live with that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 19 2016, @06:41AM
Sorry, I do not follow your logic.
If there are two buckets - one for normals and one for extra-suspicious people, what is the benefit of increasing the size of the later bucket?
Do you think that an automated search is deterred by the size of the bucket? I sure don't think so.
The only thing that deters the search of a bucket is the hassle of getting access to that bucket.
The drag-net searches are always going to be in the biggest bucket because there are just more low hanging fruit in that bucket.
Targeted searches may or may not be applied to both buckets. But if they are directly going after you, it won't matter how many other people are in the same bucket as you because computers are really good at searching databases.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Sunday November 20 2016, @09:26PM
Do you think that an automated search is deterred by the size of the bucket? I sure don't think so.
False positves = Yes. The more regular people in the bucket, the more regular people will be caught in the net, the less the net is useful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 19 2016, @03:02PM
If you use a VPN then if they do manage collect your data, its not going into the same bucket as everybody else - its going into the bucket of people who are probably terrorists.
Yes, I can confirm, most employees that are away from their office are terrorists.