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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, @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.