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Police vs Privacy [ISP bill revived]
Dman
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
A new bill is in the works to force ISP's to keep records for 2 years so they can be used by police.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/20/internet.records.bill/index.html
Promoters always claim such information will be used to catch child pornographers.
Personally I think its likely to eventually be used in other ways (against people who visit certain sites neo-natzi, religious sites, gay sites, minority x website).
Once you give agencies information, controlling how they use it is a pain in the ass and never really works, IMO.
So D&D, should we police the internet? Is there any policy beyond the currently existing ones you would support?
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/20/internet.records.bill/index.html
Promoters always claim such information will be used to catch child pornographers.
Personally I think its likely to eventually be used in other ways (against people who visit certain sites neo-natzi, religious sites, gay sites, minority x website).
Once you give agencies information, controlling how they use it is a pain in the ass and never really works, IMO.
So D&D, should we police the internet? Is there any policy beyond the currently existing ones you would support?
A 1996 federal law called the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act regulates data preservation. It requires Internet providers to retain any "record" in their possession for 90 days "upon the request of a governmental entity."
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True, but "upon request of a government agency" sounds like they could request a record of the last 2 years without a warrant to use as they please.
Would you say you support the retention of the data as long as police have to convince a judge they need to see it before they get to?
The sheer amount of data and the potential for abuse- both by the government and by ISPs AND by people stealing the data- is absurd. Want to monitor someone's internet access? Fine. Do it the old fashioned way. Get a warrant THEN start monitoring.
Not to be on of those 'the man is only there to keep you down', but over here labour has already demonstrated that a) It can't keep that information safe, listing the number of screws ups could let me go on for pages, including top secret documents for Israeli, American, and British eyes only, plus anyone on the 12:10 to Victoria. To list of child benefits for tens of thousands of people, etc. And b) have already used that information for extremely questionable purposes, such as stalking and imprisoning some harmless anti-Israel protestors who were going to join Galloway’s convoy in support of aid for Palestine.
Theres no use in catching them after the fact, the same way giving ID cards to british citizens to stop terrorism is retarded when our major terrorist events are from national citizens.
Arresting someone for something they've already done is usually effective in keeping them from doing something similar again ...
As for cost, I imagine that this could be incredibly expensive.
Here's a credible link for the amount of internet traffic you can expect per capita.
http://www.dtc.umn.edu/mints/home.php
For the US, the average house uses 5G a month.
edited: for more information
Yeah, I was wondering how well it was working in countries where it was already implemented.
#Criminals caught vs #abuses of information
If it is going rather badly is there growing sentiment to get rid of it? It would be nice to capitalize on that to keep it from taking hold in other countries.
@wwtMask, I totally agree, my bullshit meter starts going off when I hear OMG TERRORISTS! or THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
That was what I was going for, yeah.
See: music industry lobbyists.
The transparency doesn't go both ways though, and until it does this is a gross injustice, that will definitely be abused.
I can't believe that any sane person would take such a pollyanna stance on this in the face of the massive expansion of police powers we have already had forced on us since 9/11.
"Oh, surely the police wouldn't abuse these new powers." Sounds like something only a police apologist or a raging moron could say.
Because the judiciary has done such a great job of protecting the public so far?
Are you posting while high?
Yes, because that's how it works with judges. Which is, for instance, why you get your house searched all the time.
I personally am more excited at the prospect of catching white-collar financier-criminals moving around sums of money online than I am about catching kiddie porn watchers.
Judges have heartily approved of no-knock search warrants, exhonerated police who execute warrants on the wrong house and beat/murder the residents, and accepted the practice of seizing massive amounts of money, land, cars and other property from people merely because a drug sniffing dog looks at it funny.
Yeah, the judiciary is totally neutral and fair.
Judges are NOT specifically smart people.
It's been well established that the police rarely bother to go after white collar crime, and it's just as well established that when they do the criminals receive very light sentences.
So how is this worth the further erosion of our privacy?
And please don't say that it's OK because you personally don't mind the intrusion, many people very clearly do. The "advantages" of this are negligible, and the possibility for abuse are vast.
Yeah, white collar crime is unpunishable unless its murder.
And sometimes even then.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7TSDUHhPIw
however, I do believe that the ball has been set a'rollin already and the risk of abuse and non-warranted seizure of the information is far to high from all these organizations who have gotten used to their inflated power.
I am totally against it. The chance that it could catch 1 in a million criminal is not worth the privacy that everyone else has to give up to do it.
Oh God how I hate that fallacious argument.
It doesn't matter how many incidents we see of the police flat out making shit up, or busting into the wrong house and assaulting little girls before arresting them for "resisting arrest". There will always be a host of right-wing idiots who will insist that the police are infallible and that anyone they go after must be up to no good.
Child pornographers are the modern communist spies. They exist but that doesn't mean you need to go batshit crazy about them.
Wait.
There are cases of police busting the wrong house, then arresting the people for not complying with orders of gun wielding people who busted through the door screaming and shouting?
I demand links, because this kind of stupidity, if verifiable, should be known.
Oh... my God... do you live under a rock?
There have been threads on it already in D&D. Use the search function or google.
http://current.com/items/89658047/galveston_police_haven_t_apologized_for_beating_12_year_old_girl.htm
They brought the little girl they beat and tried to drag into a van to trial.
If you read shit like this and still think "OH WELL I THINK THE POLICE NEED MORE POWER SURELY NOTHING CAN GO WRONG." Then fuck yourself and kill yourself. Do it next to a cliff so no one has to clean up a mess.
No, I just mostly avoid news reporting because it has become more paparazzi than actual reporting of the newsworthy.
That depends entirely on your news outlet.
And I'd say the more damning story would be the consistent reports out of NSA worker bees that people are listening in to information that they have no legal right to, solely because they can and are getting bored trying to stop terrorism.
That is what happens when people have access to stuff they shouldnt and get bored, Happens with the NSA, with office workers, everyone.
I think your point is somewhat self-defeating. If the police already have the ability to bust into my house and cap me in the head, then is it really so scary that they might look up my internet traffic? I personally think that the information that the police already have access to via warrant (everything in your house and car, your medical records, your bank records, etc.) is more important than your search history. So why is adding search history to the list of things they can demand with a warrant so terrifying?
Why give them even more power when they can't even responsibly use the overreaching power they already have?
It removes your anonymity for a start. With the stuff that people get charged with lately, don't be surprised to be slapped with a defamation lawsuit for insulting someone on a public forum. Its all a slippery slope to a V for Vendetta style world where the next thing is to just outright start censoring sections of the internet thought to be unsavoury. You're meant to cling onto these rights of privacy not just shrug your shoulders and accept it.
ISP records all your activity? Use Tor, from the ISP's perspective you're connecting out to random nodes in the Tor network. Once your path passes over a couple of national borders the chance of anyone being able to trace it is practically nil.
Alternatively, buy a shell account hosted in a country without such draconian laws, and use it as a proxy via an encrypted connection (VPN or ssh, say. ssh actually has a proxy function for this very purpose). This has the added benefit of shielding your connection from eavesdropping as well as activity logging. All the ISP sees is that you only ever connect to that one offshore IP.
People always say that people won't actually do stuff like this. Guess what, it's already happening. Skype is pretty much immune to wiretapping because of its peer-to-peer nature. You can't tap a connection that follows an unpredictable path and doesn't go through any central exchange. The Italian police start relying heavily on wiretapping, so people start using Skype to evade it.
The UK government is planning the same thing, and it bugs the hell out of me that I'm forced to use counter-surveillance techniques against the government that's supposed to work for me.
Because that power could be used for legitimate purposes.
Like tracking internet fraud, for instance. Also, the pedos and kiddie porn.
I love this argument. It's such a simple statement. And my response is just as simple:
If I've done nothing wrong you have no reason to monitor me. If I have nothing to hide you have no reason to look at it.
And the silliest part is the people they're really after like child pornographers and terrorists are the first ones to pick up these counter measures.