Live in the UK? Say goodbye to your online privacy.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7962631.stm

Also note how it says that the huge internet history and e-mail database (likely to be left in a train or just disappear) will go up on the 6th of April.

1984 is a reality!

The hole idea that this is going to catch any terroists is also totally flawed: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... n-goldacre

I was talking about this in my social skills group.
It's stupid. What sort of terrorist uses Facebook to talk about it terrorist plans?
You just don't, you talk about it over a locally hosted server or something... I mean, there's hundreds of ways to do it without the government knowing.
Even the stuff they're paranoid about they can't protect properly -.-.
EMZ.

Who was it that said "there is no privacy, get used to it?"

Privacy is an illusion.

Terrorists would be dumb to communicate using plain email anyway. There are many more ways to communicate anonymously and securely.

If I was a terrorist I'd just embed encrypted text inside an image and post it to an image hosting site or image based usenet forum, or use one of the encrypted peer to peer networks. Throw in a proxy or two and nobody knows who you are communicating with and what you are saying. It ain't rocket science.

I can see a business opportunity for someone here, if the business does not already exist: Provide an encrypted email forwarding service. So you can create and send an encrypted email with the real destination address encrypted within the message, then the business in the middle decrypts the destination email address and forwards it on. The body of the email or any attachments would be encrypted with a different key so only the sender and final recipient could decode the email. Simple. Completely bypasses the UK Governments security measures. The only downside would be that subscribing to such a service could look suspicious anyway, even if the Govt could not snoop on what you were communicating or with whom.

xD Love that Facebook homepage edit. Believe it or not, the police have successfully used Facebook to catch young people with knives who are stupid enough to post photos of themselves with the knives online. This, however, is very different and I think it's far too extreme - the hysteria that the (in my view) largely imagined threat of terrorism can generate never ceases to amaze me. It's just adding to the ridiculous level of surveillance already in our society. Some people say "You shouldn't put intimate personal details online anyway", and I don't usually put anything too detailed on Facebook, but the principle of it is what gets me.

There was a movie last year called 'Traitor' which featured terrorists using email to distribute instructions... what they did was, they set up some email accounts to be accessed by the suicide bombers... then they logged on to each account and saved a message as a draft... the would be suicide bombers then logged on, opened the draft, and got their instructions... nothing was logged because nothing was sent... if hollywood can come up with a plan like this, I can't imagine what kind of techniques the terrorists are using... messages embedded in images, coded messages posted as ads on craigslist, even messages sent as comments to news stories... there are so many ways to communicate using the web other than standard email and chat...

actually, there was a group or two who used the 'draft' method for messages. It's a war, tactics change constantly. In a few months, it will all change again.