The Communications Data Bill is both Stupid and Wrong
No time for a lengthy post today, but then again I don’t think this topic merits one.
The government’s draft Communications Data Bill has now been published. The measures contained in this Bill would allow the security services to snoop at will on emails, web browsing, social network sites, internet phone calls, etc.
In other words it will give the government license to pry into personal communications between law-abiding individuals without any need for a warrant. The potential for abuse is obvious, so much so that it can only have been drafted by a government that intends to abuse it if and when it becomes law. It’s yet another deliberate erosion of our civil liberties and a further step towards a totalitarian state. Big Brother is here.
On top of all that, the proposed law is also entirely useless. All the measures proposed can be circumvented by anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of IT. Even me. It won’t catch criminals, at least not important ones, because they’ll know the (easy) ways around it. This law will simply be used by the government to spy on anyone it doesn’t like the look of.
And that could be you.
Follow @telescoper
In the Dark 
June 14, 2012 at 5:50 pm
A corollary to Godwin’s Law prevents us from comparing this to the Stasi. So long as people are trained to think of goodies and baddies, ‘our side’ will be able to do whatever they want.
June 14, 2012 at 9:08 pm
phillip – for once i agree with you… this sounds like the most extreme PC response to something which may be misused – but equally may not be. ian
June 14, 2012 at 9:19 pm
I read the phrase as ‘the government’s daft communications data bill’. Maybe more apposite….
M
x
June 14, 2012 at 9:36 pm
I always make a PC response because those are my initials…
🙂
My point however is that I think the government’s intention is to ensure they can’t be prosecuted for doing what is *currently* illegal. In other words they are introducing this new law as a pretence. Arguments it might not actually be abused seem to me to be wilfully complacent in the light of recent events. How long before your private emails end up in Rupert Murdoch’s inbox?
And it seems to be, Ian, that if there’s a 50-50 chance (as you suggest) that it might be misused then it should not be part of the laws of the land…
June 14, 2012 at 11:20 pm
Listening to Ms May on the Today programme this morning, the line seems to be that we should all be ready to cede a small amount of privacy in order that the state can keep us all safe by catching the evil people who, just like the villains in a Marvel comic strip, are constantly plotting to do us harm. The more we believe we are at risk, and the more we believe that the government are able to protect us, the more compliant and easier to govern we become. Governments have always used fear to rule; and this one is no different. This bill is not about crime detection/prevention, it is about trying to convince us that we are all vulnerable and that HMG is what keeps us safe.
June 15, 2012 at 11:07 am
Anyone whose ability to weight their dataset was mangled by an intense experience would think differently. You have to know the actual risk and how it would be ameliorated. Bruce Schneier is always good reading on this stuff.
June 15, 2012 at 12:58 am
Phillip, you have to remember that the people you’re willing to cede power to are humans exactly like us. That means they’re petty, spiteful, lazy, smallminded, malicious, racist arseholes. And while it’s true that in Britain we justifiably live in constant fear of crime… oh, no wait a minute… In fact there is no upside whatsoever. It’s purely a power grab.
June 15, 2012 at 8:46 am
Phillip,
Even politicians have a conscience – they just do their best to ignore it. So changing the law to let them do nasty things legitimises themselves in their own eyes.
There is also the fact that the judiciary is at least nominally independent of the legislature, and the politicians don’t want to come a cropper in court.
I believe that this is about something that is novel – the availability of data-mining software to help identify networks of terrorists from patterns of communications. For the first time since the 1970s there is a significant terrorist threat from a sector of the UK population. Some of us think that that was predictable and that wiser governments might not have let it arise. Then the case for these totalitarian laws would be much weaker.
July 2, 2012 at 11:24 am
[…] The Communications Data Bill is both Stupid and Wrong (telescoper.wordpress.com) […]