From Monday, all your emails, web browsing history and mobile calls will be stored for a year due to sweeping new laws making Britain a proper kleptocracy, by order of the EU.
(On 15 March 2006 the European Union formally adopted Directive 2006/24/EC, on "the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks and amending Directive 2002/58/EC")
Your web browsing will be stored from your ISP. The Government will force you to have it all revealed to them from your ISP, IP addresses the works.
Story in the Independent here
As a personal protest, I have created the following email signature, which will be added to each and every email that I send. I see this as a completely responsible act, one which does not break the law, but none-the-less an act of defiance, an act of rebellion against those who would take away my right to privacy, supposedly guaranteed by the European Charter of Human Rights, one which I hope will make those who draft such inept laws pay attention.
The following is a disclaimer and a protest at the collection, retention and sharing of my personal mail by the morally bankrupt state.
By adding a string of key words, it will guarantee that each and every mail that I send will now need to be manually viewed as it is picked up by the auto scan software. If every person in the UK does exactly the same, then the entire system will quickly become so unmanageable, so unwieldy that it will become unworkable.
My key words are: bomb, assassinate, president, brown, Osama, Obama, Sargozy, Merkel, government, target, location, rocket, grenade, al-Qaeda, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, UK, America, guns, jets, bombs, machine-gun, terrorists, MP's, pigs, troughs, France, Germany, Italy, nuclear, Korea.
It is time to stop meekly accepting everything that the government throws at us. It is time to stop listening to lily livered politicians who say this is OK, because it really is NOT OK. It is time to stop listening to the apologist organisations or committees who will accept this type of data collection with a rider of wanting a little more protection for the data.
I refuse to be intimidated by my own Government. It is time to make this kind of data collection unworkable.
Now Government, make me stop !!
PS My car is perfectly serviced, I never go walking in the woods alone, and I have no intention of doing anything stupid (for the record). I have also checked the wording of my ISP agreement, which does not include any reference to the use of keywords.
I have already put the text into my email signature. Have you?
Update: It's not gonna work. It's just fearmongering, or will be used against you in a court of law if the Keystoners fall over something else. Or you get ratted on by a neighbour.
34 comments:
http://www.royalmail.com/portal/rm/jump2?catId=500029&mediaId=15400229
Mind your blood presure
Will this work Obn? I don't mind doing something similar. I'm just fizzing at all this New World Order stuff.
I noticed Tom Harris never answered your tweet about how many homes he had that we paid for :)
Surely, if bloggers put a few pertinent 'keywords' in a text box at the side of the blog then anyone visiting it would have to have their activities traced too?
It might actually cause the snoopers more work than checking emails.
Done.
@subrosa -- it depends on what keywords they are looking for, we can but make educated guesses. I suspect "infidel" and "jihad" are probably also in there.
@SteveStark: let me try it and see. :o)
Luckily I did all my Al Quida seaches yesterday along with Republican Sinn Fein.
"Although the new retention powers will not permit the storage of the content of emails"
Like the idea, Obo. But according to the above quote from the Observer article will it have the desired affect?
I've made a text widget at the side of my blog with a few choice words in it - now let's hope we waste the snoopers' time.
microdave: "Although the new retention powers will not permit the storage of the content of emails"
That's just the selling point for MP's who don't read the Bills and 'Liberty'. When they slip through the SI changing the rules, I will publish it for you.
Have you not worked out how they work yet?
Mix it up a bit; the content can be looked at once and marked as spam if you send the same text each time...
Ian PJ - Maybe I'm so depressed by the way things are going I'm just pretending that they can't get any worse...
Pretty poor answer, I know.
There is the other aspect of the sheer size of data storage needed to cope with not just the "To & From", but the actual content of every call & email.
Good post - will link to it.
Thought; racism; NSA; plans; martyrdom; religion; strategy; global; manganese dioxide; travel;
how bout a link to"how to make an atomic bomb for dummies",
That should trip a few arrses.
Have linked to you and posted on Guido's.
That widget from Mr Shark sounds good - will give it a try.
How did we come to this?
wv police state [:)]
Mr Shark
Where does your blog reside?
@Plato
http://steveshark.wordpress.com/
I'd imagine the data trawling software used by the authorities is intelligent enough to identify keywords in a grammatical structure, not just those keywords. After all, if a bog standard word processor can analyse your grammar and pull you up on it, I'm sure GCHQ and the NSA can do much, much better.
If you really want to be picked up be the authorities, then the text needs to be some sort of grammatically correct narrative and it will need to be changed regularly, because once spotted, that word structure will be identified manually as chaff and then disregarded afterwards.
Hello Mr Shark
Any tips on copying your widget? It doesn't like me on Blogger.
Frightening pix of Young Tony!
Hi Mr Plato
I can't really help, Wordpress has these widgets - little side bar things for various purposes, including text widgets that can have text or HTML placed in them.
I don't know much about Blogger and how you'd have a box.
If you can edit the CSS in your pages, I suppose you could have the same text box on every page.
Sorry not to be more helpful.
Why are you so afraid of these new laws? Do you have anything to hide by any chance? If not, why are you afraid?
We are currently in the midst of a War on Terror and in a time of war, freedoms inevitably have to be temporarily curtailed for the protection of the people.
The Government is doing its best to protect you from international terrorism. If you refuse to cooperate with the government, you must expect to be legally monitored - because the Government will investigate ALL potential threats to security.
What about:-
Sarin
Ricin
Nerve gas
Mohammed
TriNitroToluene
Semtex
Jihad
Picric Acid
Anarchist's Cookbook
USArmy Improv_Munitions_Handbook_v3
Or you could try this:-
http://www.torrentfreedom.com/index.php
Which seems a good solution, though maybe a little pricey. Money well spent, to my mind.
There is no need to "trawl" through each mail.
Almost a decade ago I saw software used to track criminals graphically. This was phone and address information, but could just as easily be email.
You can see thousands, tens of thousands and I would bet 100,000 conversations on one screen and in a flash that fantastic pattern-matching engine of the human visual cortex would spot "gang", "mr big", "terror cell" and all manner of interactions.
So, fishing and checking is quick but that is not the point, methinks.
The point is now we all know we are being tracked and at some point details could "accidentally" leak out or be bought by someone.
We are, in effect, in an interview suite for the rest of our lives. The tapes are rolling. No charges, yet no immunity.
Harman_Pride said
1)"Why are you so afraid of these new laws? Do you have anything to hide by any chance? If not, why are you afraid?"
We're afraid because time & time again your government has shown itself to be manifestly incapable of safely handling our personal details. And since I might now be regarded as a potential terrorist for leaving an empty bleach bottle outside. (thanks to your latest scaremongering adverts)
2)"and in a time of war"
Sorry, I must have missed the official announcement that this country is now in a state of war. If your lot had actually properly declared this, then you know perfectly well we would not be having this conversation, so stop using it as an excuse to further remove our freedoms.
3)"The Government is doing its best to protect you from international terrorism."
No you're not - you welcome, with open arms, some of the most undesirable individuals on the face of the planet, give them every possible luxury paid for with MY TAXES, and then claim to be "doing your best"!!! When, and only when, you stop fawning around the likes of "Hooky" and kick him and all his poisonous sidekicks out, will you have any justification for claiming this. Of course we all know you won't, because you don't have the power anymore. All thanks to the EU which your "leader" is determined to give total control to, despite promising us a vote on the matter.
4)"freedoms inevitably have to be TEMPORARILY curtailed"
Do you seriously expect us to believe this? Having spent enormous sums of money building a surveillance system which would have been the envy of the Stasi, you will just say "Thanks folks, the wars over. As you were" - Get real....
5)"If you refuse to cooperate with the government" Why the hell should we? You don't have a proper mandate, thanks to our voting system. And you are proving day after day to be the most corrupt, deceitful, bunch of money grabbing, power crazed, traitors, that this country has had for a very long while.
In short, we don't trust you to sit the right way on a toilet, let alone run the country. Just go before you wreck it totally.
We're in a 'time of war'?
So, that explains the massive cutbacks in living expenses Smith, Hoon and McNulty have made.
PS - Does anyone else think that Harman_Pride sounds like a Dalek?
SteveShark said...
We're in a 'time of war'?
PS - Does anyone else think that Harman_Pride sounds like a Dalek? ...
I can't help but visualise Home Pride - wasn't that flour with some dumpy little bowler-hatted gent and blue stripes (before Tesco Value patented blue stripes)?
p.s., I'd like to donate my front garden railings to be melted down to make an anti-terrorism Spitfire, does anyone have the address I send them to please?
"Harman_Pride" is a Nu Liebore site:
http://www.gofourth.co.uk/
It's basically John "2 Jags" Prescott.
Harm_our_pride : "The Government is doing its best to protect you from international terrorism. If you refuse to cooperate with the government, you must expect to be legally monitored - because the Government will investigate ALL potential threats to security."
I reject "protection". Protection is about proactively removing any possible sources of harm but infantilising in the process. I want a State that DEFENDS us - has in place the means and the will to respond should anything happen. Give those willing to chance it a moment of pause. Your distorted viewpoint is sad, pathetic, enfeebling. I reject it outright.
p.s. if this is "its best", then, really, the Government should just step away from the vehicle.
I have been warning about this invasion of privacy for many years - ever since I learnt of Carnivore and Echelon.
It is like people are unaware - totally ignorant of the abuse these sort of systems have on your rights.
Here is something I wrote several years ago:
[b]Government Surveillance
Why do government have no respect for your right to privacy?[/b]
Liberty has to be one of the most important things in life. Well up there, behind health and safety of your family, must be the right to go about your daily life without being forced to live it under oppressive surveillance. For it surely is oppression - being spied upon by the authorities in all that you do. Knowing this information could be used against you, for any purpose they see fit. The so-called all-seeing eye of God over you - meant to instil respect of them and fear of authority.
It can be proven they use propaganda to deceive you into believing them. How?
Ask Security Services in the US, UK, Indonesia (Bali) or anywhere for that matter, to deny this:
Internet surveillance, using Echelon, Carnivore or back doors in encryption, will not stop terrorists communicating by other means - most especially face to face or personal courier.
Terrorists will have to do that, or they will be caught!
Perhaps using mobile when absolutely essential, saying - "Meet you in the pub Monday" (meaning, human bomb to target A), or Tuesday (target B) or Sunday (abort).
The Internet has become a tool for government to snoop on their people - 24/7.
The terrorism argument is a dummy - total bull*.
INTERNET SURVEILLANCE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO STOP TERRORISTS - THAT IS SPIN AND PROPAGANDA
This propaganda is for several reasons, including: a) making you feel safer b) to say the government are doing something and c) the more malicious motive of privacy invasion.
Government say about surveillance - "you've nothing to fear - if you are not breaking the law"
This argument is made to pressure people into acquiescence - else appear guilty of hiding something illegal.
It does not address the real reason why they want this information (which they will deny) - they want a surveillance society.
They wish to invade your basic human right to privacy. This is like having somebody watching everything you do - all your personal thoughts, hopes and fears will be open to them.
This is everything - including phone calls and interactive TV. Quote from ZDNET: "Whether you're just accessing a Web site, placing a phone call, watching TV or developing a Web service, sometime in the not to distant future, virtually all such transactions will converge around Internet protocols."
"Why should I worry? I do not care if they know what I do in my own home", you may foolishly say. Or, just as dumbly, "They will not be interested in anything I do".
This information will be held about you until the authorities need it for anything at all. Like, for example, here in UK when government looked for dirt on individuals of Paddington crash survivors group. It was led by badly injured Pam Warren. She had over 20 operations after the 1999 rail crash (which killed 31 and injured many).
This group had fought for better and safer railways - all by legal means. By all accounts a group of fine outstanding people - with good intent.
So what was their crime, to deserve this investigation?
It was just for showing up members of government to be the incompetents they are.
As usual, government tried to put a different spin on the story when they were found out. Even so, their intent was obvious - they wanted to use this information as propaganda - to smear the character of these good people.
Our honourable government would rather defile the character of its citizens - rather than address their reasonable concerns.
The government arrogantly presume this group of citizens would not worry about having their privacy invaded.
They can also check your outgoings match your income and that you are paying enough tax. What do you think all this privacy invasion is for? The War on Terrorism? You poor dupe. All your finances for them to scrutinize; heaven help you if you cannot account for every cent.
The authorities try make everything they say sound perfectly reasonable.
e.g. Officials from US Defence Department agency have said they want, quote: "the same level of accountability in cyberspace that we now have in the physical world".
Do they keep record of all the people that you send letters and faxes to (and receive from)? Worse still - record the text? Do they record your phone conversations? Do they keep a record of peoples houses, shops and establishments you visit - or the magazines and books you pick up to browse? Do they keep record of books you take out of library? Do they keep record of purchases you make from the shops?
Indeed - do government currently keep records of everything that you say, touch and do in the physical world to analyse?
No they do not. So then - is that the same level of accountability?
They wish to keep an electronic tag on you, like some kind of animal. Actually it is even worse than this - like some pervert sex offender - a child molester that they have to keep track of.
Would ANY person of intelligence call that accountability?
Do not believe the lies of Government - even more of your money spent on these measures will not protect us from terrorists. Every argument they use is subterfuge - pure spin.
In UK, the RIP Act is unjust - dim-witted ill-informed MPs believed governments 'experts'. Remember - they will get everything about you, your phone calls, emails, TV viewing - everything. It would be like having a spy living in your house.
Americans - the Total Information Awareness plan, USA Patriot act and Homeland Defence - you are generally more technologically aware, are you really that easily misled?
Quote from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: "The goal of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program is to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists -- and decipher their plans -- and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully preempt and defeat terrorist acts."
The declared GOAL is to, quote: "identify foreign terrorists" - what rubbish. They know you are American citizen, not even a suspect foreigner - yet want to know what you buy, where you travel - everything. They want to profile you, like a criminal. I find it hard to believe that U.S. politicians are that dumb to go along with this violation of the American Peoples Rights. Looks like TIA initials stand for Totally Ignorant Acceptance (for their propaganda).
It should be noted that the UK government will be violating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - which we have adopted.
Article 12 states: "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
You may be interested in the psychology of this type of surveillance. Here is a piece, wrote by another who did a better job of explaining than I could:
Foucault focused on Bentham's prison model, or the Penopticon as Bentham called it - which literally means, that which sees all. The Penopticon prison, which was popular in the early nineteenth century, was designed to allow guards to see their prisons, but not allow prisoners to see guards. The building was circular, with prisoner's cells lining the outer diameter, and in the center of the circle was a large, central observational tower. At any given time, guards could be looking down into each prisoner's cells - and thereby monitor potentially unmoral behavior - but carefully-placed blinds prevented prisoners from seeing the guards, thereby leaving them to wonder if they were being monitored at any given moment. It was Bentham's belief that the "gaze" of the Panopticon would force prisoners to behave morally. Like the all-seeing eye of God, they would feel shame at their wicked ways. In effect, the coercive nature of the Panopticon was built into its very structure.
The government will be watching all you do.
You will be good people now - won't you?
Or else!
Obo - time to turn on comment moderation methinks.
Back on the topic. Don't send email. Set up a free mail account. Write your message and store it in the Drafts folder.
Somehow inform your addressee (who knows the password, natch) that there is something to be read.
Job done. Communication effected, nothing has gone though mailservers. No smtp traffic, no snoopers alerted.
Alternatively, and more geekily, run your own mail server, hosted in a free-er country (the choice is wide!), and connect to it through a VPN tunnel. ISP has no idea what all that stuff is. But whatever it is, they can't read it.
Of course, the latter would tend to draw attention. And might be banned in future.
Captcha: mystio
(are these things psychic or what. Or perhaps they are already being written and monitored by Jacqboots Schmidt's people)
http://www.gofourth.co.uk/
Surely that's a total pisstake?
The passage below is taken from something purporting to be Prescott's blog which - if serious - must be one of the saddest things I've ever read:
Pauline and I had a wonderful treat last night. Our daughter in law Roz had bought us tickets to see our favourite band Simply Red. We're very lucky to see have seen Mick Hucknell and his band a few times over the years but last night's performance at the 02 Arena (I still call it the Dome) was the best we've seen. Whilst I was listening to Mick belting out our favourite track (it's 'Fairground' by the way) I was told just how successful the Dome has become.
Do you mind if people use your text?
They may not keep the contents of the email, but surely it will waste their time scanning it.
Anon 21:50 -- of course not, but I suggest you change it and keep changing it fairly frequently so that they can't set up a spam filter to stop it.
Post a Comment