Cameron wants to ban everything internet he cant snoop on.

All I can say is.......

HASN'T THE BASTARD RUINED ENOUGH PEPOLE'S LIVES WITH THE FUCKING AUSTERITY CUTS ALREADY? OR HASN'T HE GOT ANYTHING REALLY SENSIBLE TO DO RIGHT NOW OTHER THAN WORRY ABOUT WHAT SENSIBLE PEOPLE DO ON THE INTERNET? THE SNOOPY BUGGER!!

form an IT guys perspective... IE some 1 who knows the internet better than most of us.

Quote:What David Cameron thinks he's saying is, "We will command all the software creators we can reach to introduce back-doors into their tools for us." There are enormous problems with this: there's no back door that only lets good guys go through it. If your Whatsapp or Google Hangouts has a deliberately introduced flaw in it, then foreign spies, criminals, crooked police (like those who fed sensitive information to the tabloids who were implicated in the hacking scandal -- and like the high-level police who secretly worked for organised crime for years), and criminals will eventually discover this vulnerability. They -- and not just the security services -- will be able to use it to intercept all of our communications. That includes things like the pictures of your kids in your bath that you send to your parents to the trade secrets you send to your co-workers.

But this is just for starters. David Cameron doesn't understand technology very well, so he doesn't actually know what he's asking for.

For David Cameron's proposal to work, he will need to stop Britons from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of his jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. They are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like Github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you've downloaded hasn't been tampered with.

Cameron is not alone here. The regime he proposes is already in place in countries like Syria, Russia, and Iran (for the record, none of these countries have had much luck with it). There are two means by which authoritarian governments have attempted to restrict the use of secure technology: by network filtering and by technology mandates.

David Cameron has already shown that he believes he can order the nation's ISPs to block access to certain websites (again, for the record, this hasn't worked very well). The next step is to order Chinese-style filtering using deep packet inspection, to try and distinguish traffic and block forbidden programs. This is a formidable technical challenge. Intrinsic to core Internet protocols like IPv4/6, TCP and UDP is the potential to "tunnel" one protocol inside another. This makes the project of figuring out whether a given packet is on the white-list or the black-list transcendentally hard, especially if you want to minimise the number of "good" sessions you accidentally blackhole.

More ambitious is a mandate over which code operating systems in the UK are allowed to execute. This is very hard indeed. We do have, in Apple's Ios platform and various games consoles, a regime where a single company uses countermeasures to ensure that only software it has blessed can run on the devices it sells to us. These companies could, indeed, be compelled (by an act of Parliament) to block secure software. Even there, you'd have to contend with the fact that other EU states and countries like the USA are unlikely to follow suit, and that means that anyone who bought her Iphone in Paris or New York could come to the UK with all their secure software intact and send messages "we cannot read."

But there is the problem of more open platforms, like GNU/Linux variants, BSD and other unixes, Mac OS X, and all the non-mobile versions of Windows. All of these operating systems are already designed to allow users to execute any code they want to run. The commercial operators -- Apple and Microsoft -- might conceivably be compelled by Parliament to change their operating systems to block secure software in the future, but that doesn't do anything to stop people from using all the PCs now in existence to run code that the PM wants to ban.

More difficult is the world of free/open operating systems like GNU/Linux and BSD. These operating systems are the gold standard for servers, and widely used on desktop computers (especially by the engineers and administrators who run the nation's IT). There is no legal or technical mechanism by which code that is designed to be modified by its users can co-exist with a rule that says that code must treat its users as adversaries and seek to prevent them from running prohibited code.

This, then, is what David Cameron is proposing:

* All Britons' communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to intercept

* Any firms within reach of the UK government must be banned from producing secure software

* All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked

* Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software

* Virtually all academic security work in the UK must cease -- security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one's findings, such as industry R&D and the security services

* All packets in and out of the country, and within the country, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped

* Existing walled gardens (like Ios and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software

* Anyone visiting the country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave

* Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons

* Free/open source operating systems -- that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors -- must be banned outright

David Cameron will say that he doesn't want to do any of this. He'll say that he can implement weaker versions of it -- say, only blocking some "notorious" sites that carry secure software. But anything less than the programme above will have no material effect on the ability of criminals to carry on perfectly secret conversations that "we cannot read". If any commodity PC or jailbroken phone can run any of the world's most popular communications applications, then "bad guys" will just use them. Jailbreaking an OS isn't hard. Downloading an app isn't hard. Stopping people from running code they want to run is -- and what's more, it puts the whole nation -- individuals and industry -- in terrible jeopardy.

(Image: Facepalm, Brandon Grasley, CC-BY)

PUBLISHED 12:19 AM TUE, JAN 13, 2015
1201, CHRIST WHAT AN ASSHOLE, CRYPTO, GWOT, LAWFUL INTERCEPTION, POLITICS, TORIES, UK, WAR ON GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTERS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I write books. My latest are: a YA graphic novel called In Real Life (with Jen Wang); a nonfiction book about the arts and the Internet called Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age (with introductions by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer) and a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

http://boingboing.net/2015/01/13/what-da...ropos.html the original article. i quoted the whole thing because i feel this is important.

(12-01-2015 23:14 )Tumble_Drier Wrote:  If the boys from GCHQ, MI5/6, CIA, NSA etc are looking in... Go fuck yourselves! ;-)

I'm not with him!!!

(And I swear I paid my television tax -- the cheque is in the post!)

^^^ All of the above is obviously excellent analysis. But it presupposes that Cameron truly believes in what he says.

I think it is more likely that on this and quite a few related subjects he knows what he is saying is full of holes but he has the belief that the ignorance of the general public is high enough for him to be believed and that he can fool enough of the people into thinking what he is proposing might have some effect.

In other words, like a lot of politicians old and new, he is saying things for the effect his words have today rather than for anything that they might herald in the future.

And as we know talk is also cheap. Proper thought through proposals, ones that might have the desired effects, usually cost a lot of money. Money that this country doesn't have at the moment.

^^^ Yeah, there's always the possibilty, however remote it may seem, that Cameron actually knows that what he is suggesting is beyond the bounds of feasibility, but what he is doing is sowing a seed. From this unrealistic seed, he can grow an idea, something else more achievable, the idea that the government needs more control of the unruly internet, all in the name of defeating terrorism and major crime, because of course the terrorists and major criminals are all too dumb to be able to figure out a way around whatever absurd things Cameron eventually puts in place.

As I previously mentioned, in Canada they have passed a law to require isp's to keep logs of user activity for a period (6 months I think). This kind of logging could be something Cameron shoots for (it may already exist I honestly haven't kept track).
The blocking of websites has become common-place, this could be extended beyond the 'pirate' sites, to whatever 'they' deem too dangerous for us mortals to handle.
GCHQ already does extensive monitoring of net traffic, as highlighted by the Snowden revelations, expect a far bigger budget for those good honest chaps keeping us all safe in our beds at night.

Whatever Cameron eventually shoots for, it will almost certainly curb our freedoms, and fly in the face of what the internet is supposed to be about. What he is trying to do, with these sorts of proposals, alongside the restrictions imposed on the press from the Levison inquiry, is to control the information we have access to. A government that controls information, controls the people, every dictator can tell you that, Orwell covered it well with Newspeak in 1984.
The internet allows the free passage of information. If this government or the law courts try to ban something or hush something up, it will likely surface elsewhere, and through the internet, we get free access to it. I am old enough to remember the Spycatcher fiasco, I still have a copy of that dull and dreary book, not because it was worth reading but simply because it represents something, the government tried to ban it, but it came out anyway, and by various means, we got our hands on it, and read the secrets it contained, and guess what, the world kept turning, nothing bad happened.

So yes, Cameron may be shooting for something totally unrealistic and unachievable, but he may just be starting a ball rolling, a ball that will eventually involve some other, lesser actions, that will nevertheless impinge on the free passage of information, and our basic freedom to make our own choices and our own decisions, and perhaps people will buy into these restrictions because they aren't as bad as what he was originally proposed, so it will seem like a victory of sorts, until one day we are watching the news at thirteen o'clock and being told that the sky is no longer blue, and everyone believes it!

Oh I'm not saying Cameron's rhetoric is not mighty scary. Just that I suspect he knows there is little true powder in his barrel on this one.

The aim high then step back to an apparent compromise position is indeed a tactic that is also used a lot by these kind of people to get their way it seems.

Terrorist atrocities give people like Cameron the perfect opportunity to push through their ideology on a wave of public sympathy. Its opportunistic politics and it stinks.

As you say munch, there is far more to this than GCHQ having access to emails. I've said it before, these people see the internet, ultimately, as a threat to their power and they are fighting back.

@munch, uk isp's have to retain your data for 18 months already mate.

All this high tech electronic snooping seems like typical public sector penny pinching to me. Why can't they just dial in at the standard £2.00 per minute rate and choose the "eavesdrop" option like the rest of us?

It's expensive, I know, but they could always add it to their expenses...

well i decided to contact my local mp and ask her what she though about the above article... this is the response i got back.

Mary asked me to thank you for your email concerning your views on encrypted software and internet censorship.



I think what you are describing in your email is what is contained in the Government’s Counter Terrorism and Security Bill.



Mary and her Labour Party colleagues believe there is a genuine problem with IP addresses being allocated to different people – making it difficult to trace a child abuse image, or communication to a particular device. The Labour Party will scrutinise the detail of the Government’s proposal, which has been put forward by Nick Clegg.



The measure requires Communications Service Providers to retain the data that links a unique IP address to the person or device that was using it, the same way as it works for mobile phone numbers. Some companies already so this.



Mary will be keeping up to date with this issue as she feels the Bill needs to be thoroughly scrutinised as it passes through Parliament.



Kind Regards

Christine Aird pa .


my mp couldnt even be bothered to reply in person and she as a labour candidate seems to fully endorse mr ca(morons) mash hammer to kill a fly approach.

this tells me 2 things they really are ignorant on how the web works and they have no regard for your privacy... plenty for there own but none for yours...

"A Yahoo executive has publicly challenged the National Security Agency (NSA) over encryption "backdoors".

Alex Stamos pressed NSA director Adm Mike Rogers on whether the access to encrypted data requested by the US authorities should also be granted to the Russian and Chinese governments."

Its a fair point. How can a tech company be expected to tell the sovereign government of the country they are operating in (Iran, China, Russia, or, er, France) that they are not entitled to backdoor encryption keys for equipment operated within their own borders (computers, blackberries, routers, cash machines, interbank transfers, emails, GPS, digital signatures, anti-virus, CSS copyright protection) but that a foreign government, possibly a hostile one, can, because the product originated in their country, or at least, sells a lot there.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31604503

Mind you, it seems some security has already been intercepted, using own security certificates, ironically by products supposedly protecting users.

Quote:Researchers have identified a fresh threat to the way consumers interact with websites, this time from software designed to block advertisements.

PrivDog has been found to compromise a layer of the internet known as Secure Socket Layer (SSL) - used to safeguard online transactions.

It follows the discovery of a similar problem with Superfish, software pre-installed on some Lenovo computers.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31586610