Email and web use 'to be monitored' under new laws

[Tank]

Email and web use 'to be monitored' under new laws

A good or a bad thing?

[DeterminedJuliet]

If there's an investigation, I don't mind the government having access to any information that is related to the case. But the carte blanche approach that a lot of these laws take bothers me. I don't think the government should have the right to snoop on anyone just "cuz".

[OldGit]

Government agencies will always want to control everything.  How necessary this really is to prevent nasty stuff, I don't know, but you can bet it goes further than a neutral observer would deem necessary.  Scary.

[Anne D.]

Scary, indeed.

Attempts by the last Labour government to take similar steps failed after huge opposition, including from the Tories.

Do you think the legislation will meet with the same resistance this time around?

[Tank]

Scary, indeed.

Attempts by the last Labour government to take similar steps failed after huge opposition, including from the Tories.

Do you think the legislation will meet with the same resistance this time around?

I hope so.

[Sweetdeath]

I feel like they have been trying to monitor net use since 2004, when the internet became more home based than office only.

[xSilverPhinx]

I wouldn't be surprised if they already do that anyways, and now need legislation to legitimise it. Privacy has been dead for many years now.

[Jimmy]

In the U.S., since the Patriot Act, pretty much anything can be seen at will. So I'm aware that anything I do could be viewed, which would probably be incredibly boring to the government and a BIG waste of tax payer $  I think I'm more concerned about being tracked by companies than by the gov.

[Tank]

This isn't law in the UK yet. The Sunday Times broke the story yesterday. It still has to be written in detail and pass through parliament before it gets on the statute books. Its got a long way to go yet and there are a lot of people already up in arms about it.

There is one thing to be said in its favour. At the moment you can't do a cluster analysis effectively on internet use. You can monitor individuals and known groups but you can't derive patterns of behaviour from mass raw data. For example if this law was enabled one could look at all the people who visited a site associated with a known extremist. You could then look at all the other sites all these people looked at and find all the people that looked at all those sites etc etc. Some patterns of use would be reinforced while others were dissipated, very much like the way the brain works if you considered a person to be analogous to a neurone. This could well provide information on who one should be looking at in detail.

However! Anybody who would use the internet for communication for nefarious means would do it via proxy servers or Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) which negates any ability to track them. Thus the smart dangerous people will circumvent the trace anyway rendering the whole idea useless for the people you really want to catch.

Personally I hope that the logic beats emotional desire and this legislation never gets on the books as it's counter productive in my opinion.

[Asmodean]

My Internet habits are boring - I don't even look for porn while browsing. So for me, that law is a "meh". I wouldn't mind the government putting a camera in my shower - I would, however, mind the government taking the shower from me for fear of what I do with it.

So there it is, in a nutshell: Against censorship, don't care about monitoring.

[Crow]

I don't like it 

Not that I have anything to worry about but it pisses me off that the UK keeps getting more and more 1984 due to "fears over terrorism". *sigh*

Saying that though I don't think it will be passed.