The vast majority of the population are not criminals, paedophiles or terrorists. Why then does the government insist on treating us as criminals or potential criminals? What happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty’?

The government and the media are using the science of fear to oppress and terrify ordinary citizens into giving up their rights and their freedom in the name of protecting society from obscure threats. The fear of crime and terrorists and the media reporting thereof vastly outweighs the actual risk of ever being a victim of violent crime or terrorism yet the papers and the TV are full of scary reports of planned atrocities, inner city violence and every media report on the internet would have you believe that the net is crawling with paedophiles and hackers and that if you so much as log on, or leave your children unsupervised for a minute or two…….you will become a victim.

We now live in a surveillance society. For the past couple of years the British government has been extremely aggressive in installing surveillance cameras — CCTV on high streets, speeding cameras on highways, and so on. If you are a typical British citizen, your actions are captured on camera hundreds of times a day, and you can be watched with suspicion even without the government having any probable cause to suspect you of anything. Effectively it is now illegal to take pictures of police officers (with the justification being the possibility of terrorist abduction of officers). The erosion of civil liberties in Britain has been short and sharp.

Some of the more crazy Big Brother schemes that are already in place or are planned for the near future include compulsory ID with biometrics (despite the fact that most security experts agree that this does nothing to combat organised crime or terrorism, costs a fortune and is in most cases technologically unworkable…), a database of everything (go figure!), innocent peoples DNA being stored in the DNA crime database for 12 years (just in case they might commit a crime) and the monitoring of ALL civilian communication and internet channels.

This has to stop. We have to fight back to protect our freedom, our civil liberties and our right to privacy.

If you do nothing else, consider supporting civil liberty groups like:

Liberty http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk

Civil Liberty http://www.civilliberty.org.uk/

Electronic Privacy Information Center http://epic.org/

If you want to do more lobby your local MP or write to newspapers and the government to get your voice heard.

Most importantly – stop them being able to intrude into your lives and your data.

Encrypt your e-mail. Encrypt your instant messaging. Encrypt your computer. Encrypt your memory sticks. Encrypt your cell phone calls.

Use proven strong encryption.

http://www.pgp.com

http://www.adalia.ee/crypto-phone/kryptoCOM.html

http://www.securstar.com/products_phonecrypt.php?gclid=CLnZza-DyJoCFQEEZgodi0LY2g

http://www.dpl-surveillance-equipment.com/100602.html

http://www.a-gss.com/?p=50

http://www.alibaba.com/product-free/104720420/Encrypt_Voice_Encoder_For_Nokia_And.html

http://my-symbian.com/s60v3/software/applications.php?name=CryptoGraf_Messaging&fldAuto=294&faq=15

http://www.secway.fr/us/products/simplite_msn/home.php

Feel free to pm me if you need advice or help with encryption technologies.

Ben

Communications firms are being asked to record all internet contacts between people as part of a modernisation in UK police surveillance tactics.

The home secretary scrapped plans for a database but wants details to be held and organised for security services.

The new system would track all e-mails, phone calls and internet use, including visits to social network sites.

The Tories said the Home Office had "buckled under Conservative pressure" in deciding against a giant database.

Announcing a consultation on a new strategy for communications data and its use in law enforcement, Jacqui Smith said there would be no single government-run database.

Communications data is an essential tool for law enforcement agencies to track murderers and paedophiles, save lives and tackle crime

Jacqui Smith
Home Secretary

But she also said that "doing nothing" in the face of a communications revolution was not an option.

The Home Office will instead ask communications companies - from internet service providers to mobile phone networks - to extend the range of information they currently hold on their subscribers and organise it so that it can be better used by the police, MI5 and other public bodies investigating crime and terrorism.

Ministers say they estimate the project will cost £2bn to set up, which includes some compensation to the communications industry for the work it may be asked to do.

"Communications data is an essential tool for law enforcement agencies to track murderers, paedophiles, save lives and tackle crime," Ms Smith said.

"Advances in communications mean that there are ever more sophisticated ways to communicate and we need to ensure that we keep up with the technology being used by those who seek to do us harm.

"It is essential that the police and other crime fighting agencies have the tools they need to do their job, However to be clear, there are absolutely no plans for a single central store."

'Contact not content'

Communication service providers (CSPs) will be asked to record internet contacts between people, but not the content, similar to the existing arrangements to log telephone contacts.

REASONS TO CHANGE WHAT CAN BE KEPT

More communication via computers rather than phones

Companies won't always keep all data all the time

Anonymity online masks criminal identities

More online services provided from abroad

Data held in many locations and difficult to find

Source: Home Office consultation

But, recognising that the internet has changed the way people talk, the CSPs will also be asked to record some third party data or information partly based overseas, such as visits to an online chatroom and social network sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Security services could then seek to examine this data along with information which links it to specific devices, such as a mobile phone, home computer or other device, as part of investigations into criminal suspects.

The plan expands a voluntary arrangement under which CSPs allow security services to access some data which they already hold.

The security services already deploy advanced techniques to monitor telephone conversations or intercept other communications, but this is not used in criminal trials.

Ms Smith said that while the new system could record a visit to a social network, it would not record personal and private information such as photos or messages posted to a page.

"What we are talking about is who is at one end [of a communication] and who is at the other - and how they are communicating," she said.

HAVE YOUR SAY

This is a waste of time and money on an unprecedented scale

Sean, Manchester

Existing legal safeguards under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act would continue to apply. Requests to see the data would require top level authorisation within a public body such as a police force. The Home Office is running a separate consultation on limiting the number of public authorities that can access sensitive information or carry out covert surveillance.

'Orwellian'

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said: "I am pleased that the Government has climbed down from the Big Brother plan for a centralised database of all our emails and phone calls.

"However, any legislation that requires individual communications providers to keep data on who called whom and when will need strong safeguards on access.

"It is simply not that easy to separate the bare details of a call from its content. What if a leading business person is ringing Alcoholics Anonymous, or a politician's partner is arranging to hire a porn video?

"There has to be a careful balance between investigative powers and the right to privacy."

DATA CONSULTATION

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Shadow home secretary Chris Grayling said: "The big problem is that the government has built a culture of surveillance which goes far beyond counter terrorism and serious crime. Too many parts of Government have too many powers to snoop on innocent people and that's really got to change.

"It is good that the home secretary appears to have listened to Conservative warnings about big brother databases. Now that she has finally admitted that the public don't want their details held by the State in one place, perhaps she will look at other areas in which the Government is trying to do precisely that."

Guy Herbert of campaign group NO2ID said: "Just a week after the home secretary announced a public consultation on some trivial trimming of local authority surveillance, we have this: a proposal for powers more intrusive than any police state in history.

"Ministers are making a distinction between content and communications data into sound-bite of the year. But it is spurious.

"Officials from dozens of departments and quangos could know what you read online, and who all your friends are, who you emailed, when, and where you were when you did so - all without a warrant."

The consultation runs until 20 July 2009.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8020039.stm

If your data is online, it is not private. Oh, maybe it seems private.

Certainly, only you have access to your e-mail. Well, you and your ISP.

And the sender's ISP. And any backbone provider who happens to route that mail from the sender to you. And, if you read your personal mail from work, your company. And, if they have taps at the correct points, the NSA and any other sufficiently well-funded government intelligence organization -- domestic and international.

You could encrypt your mail, of course, but few of us do that. Most of us now use webmail. The general problem is that, for the most part, your online data is not under your control. Cloud computing and software as a service exacerbate this problem even more.

Your webmail is less under your control than it would be if you downloaded your mail to your computer. If you use Salesforce.com, you're relying on that company to keep your data private. If you use Google Docs, you're relying on Google. This is why the Electronic Privacy Information Center recently filed a complaint with the Federal Trade

Commission: many of us are relying on Google's security, but we don't know what it is.

This is new. Twenty years ago, if someone wanted to look through your correspondence, he had to break into your house. Now, he can just break into your ISP. Ten years ago, your voicemail was on an answering machine in your office; now it's on a computer owned by a telephone company.

Your financial accounts are on remote websites protected only by passwords; your credit history is collected, stored, and sold by companies you don't even know exist.

And more data is being generated. Lists of books you buy, as well as the books you look at, are stored in the computers of online booksellers.

Your affinity card tells your supermarket what foods you like. What were cash transactions are now credit card transactions. What used to be an anonymous coin tossed into a toll booth is now an EZ Pass record of which highway you were on, and when. What used to be a face-to-face chat is now an e-mail, IM, or SMS conversation -- or maybe a conversation inside Facebook.

Remember when Facebook recently changed its terms of service to take further control over your data? They can do that whenever they want, you know.

We have no choice but to trust these companies with our security and privacy, even though they have little incentive to protect them. Neither ChoicePoint, Lexis Nexis, Bank of America, nor T-Mobile bears the costs of privacy violations or any resultant identity theft.

This loss of control over our data has other effects, too. Our protections against police abuse have been severely watered down. The courts have ruled that the police can search your data without a warrant, as long as others hold that data. If the police want to read the e-mail on your computer, they need a warrant; but they don't need one to read it from the backup tapes at your ISP.

This isn't a technological problem; it's a legal problem. The courts need to recognize that in the information age, virtual privacy and physical privacy don't have the same boundaries. We should be able to control our own data, regardless of where it is stored. We should be able to make decisions about the security and privacy of that data, and have legal recourse should companies fail to honor those decisions. And just as the Supreme Court eventually ruled that tapping a telephone was a Fourth Amendment search, requiring a warrant -- even though it occurred at the phone company switching office and not in the target's home or office -- the Supreme Court must recognize that reading personal e-mail at an ISP is no different.

This essay was originally published on the SearchSecurity.com website, as the second half of a point/counterpoint with Marcus Ranum.

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/magazinePrintFriendly/0,296905,sid14_gci1354832,00.html

or http://tinyurl.com/pnv8vq