New Lords revolt looms over plans to allow police to view everyone’s internet browsing history
Peers are preparing for a fresh showdown with the Government over plans to allow police to examine people’s online browsing histories. They are also concerned that the Government has rejected calls for judges, rather than ministers, to issue eavesdropping warrants.
The moves, which come days after the House of Lords torpedoed George Osborne’s tax credit plans, reflect growing anxiety over the impact of a wide-ranging surveillance Bill to be published next week.
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And who will sign off the review of Ministers email history public and private? It has the same scare tactic Blair smell about all of this and finally tips us finally into a police state.
Well it’s about time the much heralded constitutional checks and balances started grab hold of a Tory party that is so far to the right it’s policies resemble those of pre-war Germany. By that I mean not just the policies it has implemented, but also the methods of propaganda used to control the electorate.
Obviously the government hasn’t heard of private browsing, virtual private networks or the anonymising open source Tor browser (https://www.torproject.org). Either Tor or a VPN will conceal a person’s browsing history from their internet service provider and therefore from the police and an encryption system like PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) can be used to exchange email and other files over the web in a form uncrackable by any authority. What a waste of legislative time. With very little effort anyone with a little internet savvy can surf the web unscrutinised.
@Jarrow
Internet browsing and emails can still be intercepted over the local loop between a user’s home and telephone exchange (or in the case of BT fibre, the local street cabinet). Fibre direct to the home (in my area, Virgin) might still pose a problem to the spooks but of course we are dealing with GCHQ. Bear in mind that WiFi also needs to be switched off and use an Ethernet cable connection between router and PC.
Won’t do them any good if the IP packets have been encrypted before they are intercepted. Just install OpenPGP (Linux) or GPGWin (Windows) with your email client and nobody will be able to read your emails other than their proper recipient (who must also have installed the aforementioned software). Or simply encrypt documents using a file archiving application, like WinRAR, with a strong password, and sent the encrypted file as an attachment with your email, informing its recipient of the relevant crypto-password by other secure means so that they can decrypt and extract the file(s) and read the documents using a relevant program, e.g., a word processor. For big encrypted files use a ftp node, e,g., Dropbox, which allows selected users to download files which have been shared directly.
And that’s just the school sixth form way to maintain privacy!
A bit more effort and you can overcome all scrutiny from ANY government snoopers entirely. I’m sure the more intelligent paedophiles and terrorists have worked out the ways and the means already. Snooper’s charters like the one mentioned will only catch the stupidest and most inept internet villains.