Monday, April 10, 2006

deeply scary

The Guardian: Kick this legislation out

Crikey, this legislation makes the ID cards bill look positively liberal.

If it becomes law every internet service provider will have to install a black box with a direct link to an MI5 building. That means they can monitor the patterns of all our emails (including who sent them), our visits to chat rooms and every website we click into. All that can be done continuously without a warrant. On production of a warrant, the authorities can force us to surrender any keys, simple or complicated, used to encrypt our emails, so they can read them.

2 comments:

Phil Wilson said...

Hm, it's not quite like that, although it is massively intrusive.

Note that that article was written in 2000 and the Bill is now an Act.

You can read it here: http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/20000023.htm

A lot of us protested about it at the time, but it wasn't interesting enough to garner real interest. Not that it would have really mattered to the government.

Yewtree said...

Er, how embarrassing - always remember to check the date on something you blog about. I remember the hoo-hah about it a couple of years ago, I just never found out what the otucome was at the time, so assumed they had snuck it in with some other bit of legislation while I wasn't looking.