News - The Home Office plans to allow warrantless police access to private computers.

[Saracen]

It's all moot anyway. It was a single piece in the Sunday Times that none of the TV or Radio press have picked up on from what I can tell yet the intertubes are all over it.

It's been denied by the Home Office, so really it's not going to happen.

Classic 'Yes, Prime Minister' cynicism ...... "Never believe anything 'til it's been officially denied".

Saracen's first corollary to that law .... "and then you can start to really worry".

[cjinsomniac]

Remember people: Cold Dead Hands...

This.

We cannot allow this.

If it is beyond our power to refuse, we have already lost.

We MUST refuse.

[mayhem]

whats the diffreance .

The police and certain services don't need a warrant to enter your bank account and see what has been going in and out. so they will eventually do it to your computer.

Why worrie. !!!! What have you got to hide.

Let me say 1 thing "I agree to the law" in certain aspects and i have good reason to agree. If this law was in place a pedophile wouldn't have got away with raping my daughters and then destroying the info before the police could obtain a warrent to get the Pics off his hard drive .... Before they could arrest him he destroyed the hard drive. Even tough i handed across the mac address and other details.

Its a long story but sorry you privercy before innocent children ,,,, Dont make me laugh ...

[Tidus]

I wouldn't be suprised if the government has been doing this for some time already in some cases, but hacking a computer with a hardware and good software firewall isn't an easy task.

[Biscuit]

In all fairness what is put in a bank is not entirely your property. The bank will hold a value as your posession however it essentially isnt owned by you until you take it out and put it in your pocket (even then does it really belong to you?). You're computer on the other hand is a completely different ball park. Yea it sucks that people can get away with things like that but the moment we give the government the liberty to control the internet in such a way that they can scan anyones computer whenever they want... they will do nothing but continue to widdle away even more of our rights as humans.

if the reasoning behind it was whole heartedly innocent childrens well-beings then maybes i would agree with you but i personally dont see that as the truth.

Always fight for our right t keep the government completely OUT of internet freedom

[moogle]

Would they require firewall developers to put Government accessible backdoors in?

Yeah right, then all the other real hackers and people who reverse engineer programs (mainly the programs with the government backdoors) will have access to it too.

Being behind a router it'll be hard enough for them already

[Animus404]

What next?

Mandatory orifice checks every time you enter or leave the country?
Government in home surveillance?
Bar coding citizens at birth?

At what point do you make a stand and stop chanting "Think of the children"

[TheBloodyNine]

<<post removed>>

It sounds like you have had a terrible thing happen to you and your family and for that I am sorry. However these powers wouldn't have stopped your daugthers being rapped? I very much doubt it.

Would it have made it easier for the police to prosicute? Maybe, however I'm sure that that the high courts/human rights bodies would have something to say about how the evidence had been obtained maybe leading to the case being thrown out.

I doubt these laws would come into force but if they do I doubt they will be used to protect our children, more likely to protect huge companies from piracy.

You also use the old if you have nothing to hide what is the problem argument. However I have private information on my computer, including certain private images that I wouldn't want anyone else seeing, espcially seen as my missus looks quite young. I would hate to be on the wrong end of a "simple misunderstanding".

[Fraz]

<<post removed>>

Reading your post again I see that you've had something pretty horrific actually happen, for which I'm sorry. But as someone has already said, these laws wouldn't have helped you. And if people consistently give up their freedoms because of outcries about terrorism and peadophiles - which let's face it, affect very few (but obviously is still horrible nonetheless) - we could quite easily slip into some horrific regime where very bad things will happen to many many more people.

[Moby-Dick]

thread cleaned up , handbags put away

[mayhem]

Im sorry for my out burst guys.

But yeh they may not have helped in the long run but if powers were put into place properly to allow the montering of suspects in certain things such as pedophiles then it would scare the hell out of these perverts and May help reduce this problem.

Yes we have been through 4 years of hell and if the police ahd the powers it would have helped in court. BUT because they didn't have the correct powers the pedophile nearly got away with it. I could go into full details about the case but i think its pointless and lessons have been learned by the police all ready. Our case ended up making (forcing the police) to have new SOP's regarding this sort of thing.

I think if a law like the above law was to come into place it should only be used at the descression of senior offers for crimes that are against people not company's.

Big company's are getting away with lots of rubbish and i believe that as many do all ready and yes our privacy is of the up most importance. But when one human is hearting / killing / harming another there should be law to help prevent it, help cure it, help prosecute them.

There are too many loop holes in this country laws that help criminals and the devious get away with what they should not do.

[WoLFe]

If you have nothing to hide, no problem.

[crossy]

If you have nothing to hide, no problem.

I'm pretty sure I don't have anything worthwhile hiding (nothing illegal - but even so I wouldn't like all and sundry access to my PCs!) but isn't this is the usual trite comment trotted out by Wacky Jacqui and co, (along with the "think of the children" etc).

To which my argument is merely that where is the harm in getting an unbiased (?) third party granting (or not) access to this information source? If there's a reasonable belief/evidence for such a probe, then surely a review is a good idea - if for no other reason than to prevent wasting resources (bet that the hacking ain't going to be free). I'm not convinced that this'll be used for catching sex predators anyway - more likely to be used for commercial crimes, or maybe just plain vindictiveness.

And why the difference between this proposed hack (which doesn't need a warrant) and a phone tap (which does)? Supposing you're in the middle of a Skype session when the plod break in - does this then mean that they're wiretapping and hence need a warrant?

Keep the system as it is says I - if the cops need to 'spy' on you then they need to present some justification to a judge first. Otherwise I can't help thinking that this is another step towards the environments shown in 1984, V for Vendetta, Escape from LA, etc. Yes, the police need powers to catch the scumbags in society, but we normal folks need those balancing controls in there!

Bob.

[Saracen]

If you have nothing to hide, no problem.

Yes, there's a problem.

Not having anything to hide, in the sense of anything the police could have a legitimate interest in is not the same thing as not having things I don't want discussed or known in public.

For a start, I work from home so I have a lot of business material on my PC. Some of it has intrinsic value (such as IP rights), and some of it is commercially sensitive, such as quotes and proposals. Some of it is commercially sensitive in that it's been given to me by clients, but is commercially valuable to them.

I might also have banking details on my PC. I might have details of investments. I don't want some nosy plod rummaging through that either.

What about medical matters? I might well have details of my medical matters. Or I might have a discussion, perhaps an (encrypted) email exchange with relatives about sensitive family matters.

I do not accept that police have either a moral or (currently) legal right to snoop on my PC whenever they feel like it. That's why there's traditionally been a requirement for a warrant .... so that police have to convince an independent authority (be it judge, magistrate or the Home Secretary) that evidence exists sufficient to justify the intrusion, and the breach of my rights.

Mayhem's issue outlines a typical judicial quandary. There is, and to be honest, should be, a balance between civil liberties and the ability of the police to interfere with a citizen. If I were in Mayhem's position, my blood would be boiling and I'd be quite content to see the individual responsible hanging from the nearest tree, preferably by the jewels.

But the problem is, the police don't always get it right. They have been known to jump to conclusions, they have been known to make mistakes and they have been known to arrest the wrong person. Let's face it, the entire system has been known to get it badly wrong, and even after the courts have done their thing, innocent people have been locked up.

That's why we MUST have a system of checks and balances, or we are all at risk of summary justice based on mere suspicion by the organs of the state. Unfortunately, whenever you have a system of checks and balances, travesties will occur and the guilty go free. We have a choice. If we want to do everything reasonable to avoid unfair treatment of the innocent, the price is that sometimes, the guilty will get away with it. At an individual level, that must be very hard to deal with. I can't imagine what it must be like for Mayhem - I can only say that were I in his position, a bit of carefully targeted mayhem is exactly what I'd feel like dishing out.

But on a wider level, giving police overt powers to do anything they like doesn't just mean that the guilty, like he described, don't get away with it. It'd also mean that the innocent suffer too. Where, after all, do we draw the line? Because if we're prepared to authorise action to be taken on mere suspicion in order to protect children, then the logical extension of that is as soon as someone is simply suspected of a serious offence, we slap them in jail 'to protect the children', and don't let them out unless they can prove they are innocent. In other words, guilty until proven innocent.

And despite the travesty that Mayhem's family suffered, a society where you're guilty on mere suspicion until proven innocent is not one I want to live in.


And back to a more pragmatic point, this authority will have minimal benefits anyway, and if it goes through, won't be long before it's only the ignorant or terminally stupid that get caught by it. It isn't that difficult to set up encrypted drives, and it isn't that difficult to set up a split network where half of it is not connected to the internet-facing part anyway. Nor, for that matter, is it hard to imagine anyone with anything criminal to hide keeping that on a drive or PC that's only powered up when the net-facing router is powered down, or keeping it on DVD or USB memory, etc.

If you combine careful network setup, external drives and USB sticks, and encryption, then a police hacker isn't going to find anything useful anyway, and a little more forethought is going to make it that much harder to find with a physical search too. And it might make a warrant for a physical search and seizure that much harder to get if police can hack your PC, because then the judge issuing the search warrant is likely to want to know if a hack-search has been done, and if not why not, and if it was, why didn't it find anything?

Despite Mayhem's tragic story, the balance between protecting the children and protecting ALL our civil rights is not a simple one.

[Biscuit]

Another epic win post from Saracen!

[vaughan]

but hacking a computer with a hardware and good software firewall isn't an easy task

wanna bet? maybe for you and me.. but if you're mi5, it'll not be hard for you to get that console access from the router/switch. and if they really want, they'd just use the ISP to monitor promiscuously.. or use a promiscuous network monitoring tool to grab wifi signals out of the air & log the packets as they're received.

thre's many options they could use, from inductive couplers to laser/doppler systems. of course with fiber optic then inductive couplers etc will not work, but they could breakbox the fiber, or they'd reroute to 1 of their servers.