As far as I'm aware this is fairly common. If you read the article, you'll see that the new legislation "would not allow GCHQ to access the content of emails, calls or messages without a warrant".
Looking through your comments it looks like you're in Sweden: Sweden already has similar legislation via the FRA law, which authorises the Swedish government to wiretap all traffic entering the country. A lot of countries have similar arrangements: not all arrangements are backed by legislation.
In many ways it is better to have this thing legislated: at least then it's out in the open. It's naive to think that large ISPs in countries without active legislation aren't linking intelligence agencies into their networks.
The legislation in the UK is presumably intended to speed up the time from getting a warrant to putting the tap in place: I would imagine most large ISPs (BT, Virgin, etc) are already plugged into GCHQ, in the same way the NSA intercepts all AT&T traffic.
"In many ways it is better to have this thing legislated: at least then it's out in the open. It's naive to think that large ISPs in countries without active legislation aren't linking intelligence agencies into their networks."
How about the other option: we make it strictly illegal for ISPs to cooperate with intelligence agencies (or anyone else asking for data) unless there's a warrant involved (and even then only to the extent of the warrant).
Yes, I'm in Sweden and yes we have the FRA law. But there are huge differences between this and the FRA law. The FRA explicitly forbids FRA to intercept/process traffic that is meant to stay within the borders. Both laws are an insult to democracy but my take from this is that this is much worse and they have different intents.
Why is it better to have this thing legislated? The argument that it is better to have laws like this because otherwise they will just do it anyway (illegally) just blows my mind. There are many advantages to having stuff like this unlegislated, without support from the law they can't actively act on the data, something that is far better than having the FRA-law. Especially when the intent of the law isn't to act on it but rather to observe.
In other words that argument is of the lines that "since they already have the information (which they illegally intercepted), why wouldn't we want to give them the legal right to intercept that information so that they act on it as well?". How does that make any sense?
Even with a warrant the data collected by FRA wouldn't be legal to use in a court if both parties (sender and receiver of a message/whatever) was in Sweden (regardless of whether the traffic took a detour across the border or not (too/from gmails servers for instance)).
This is why it is critical to encrypt all communications using a trusted provider or doing it yourself with PGP, if you have the skills to do it.
Whether or not this interception is currently legal / illegal, this has been happening on a massive, global scale. The UK is just catching up to France / USA / Canada in this regard. The EU legislation on the books for Saas, ISPs to log all their traffic for an indeterminate time is also a huge cause for concern.
The problem with encryption is that, as far as I'm aware, it doesn't hide the sender/recipient information. You might not be able to read the content, but intelligence agencies are just as interested in who is communicating with whom as they are in the content of the messages.
Oh, and we have a law in the UK which makes it a criminal offence, punishable by 2-5 years in prison, to refuse to hand over the private key so that your data can be decrypted. :(
> Even with a warrant the data collected by FRA wouldn't be legal to use in a court if both parties (sender and receiver of a message/whatever) was in Sweden (regardless of whether the traffic took a detour across the border or not (too/from gmails servers for instance)).
That does not make me fell much safer. In Sweden there is nothing preventing illegally obtained evidence to be used in court. The idea is that the one obtaining the evidence will also be punished for his crimes, but I can easily see that case not even reaching court.
A friend is a network engineer who has worked on some big UK ISP projects and he says that all had a requirement to mirror traffic and make it available to an external undocumented point/body. It's just understood that it's the security services.
> If you read the article, you'll see that the new legislation "would not allow GCHQ to access the content of emails, calls or messages without a warrant".
Note that this talks about the content of emails, calls or messages. The police will still be able to see the metadata without a warrant.
And how long until some dodgy copper flogs it to his contacts in the tabloids.
I think in the UK the public accept that the security service (MI5) and SIS (MI6) have greater leway but that the police should be much more restricted.
The problem is when you let "uncle tom cobley and all have access" is where people get worried.
This effectively the position the Stella Rimington ex head or Mi5 said in the house of lords a while back.
>In many ways it is better to have this thing legislated: at least then it's out in the open. It's naive to think that large ISPs in countries without active legislation aren't linking intelligence agencies into their networks.
No, it's actually worse having it legislated.
Having it happen covertly (and in shame) by the agencies, would be much preferred.
By legislating it, you enable it to be more widespread, used in court, etc. But the worst thing is, that by legislating, you make it normal, and that pushes the boundaries of what is acceptable. Since now, this monitoring is acceptable, then even worse things can take its place in the "secret" surveillance domain.
This line of thinking, is similar to what (philosopher) Zizek describes when talking against legalizing torture in the US:
"*Why not go further still and legalise the torture of prisoners of war who may have information which could save the lives of hundreds of our soldiers? If the choice is between Dershowitz’s liberal ‘honesty’ and old-fashioned ‘hypocrisy’, we’d be better off sticking with ‘hypocrisy’.
I can well imagine that, in a particular situation, confronted with the proverbial ‘prisoner who knows’, whose words can save thousands, I might decide in favour of torture; however, even (or, rather, precisely) in a case such as this, it is absolutely crucial that one does not elevate this desperate choice into a universal principle: given the unavoidable and brutal urgency of the moment, one should simply do it. Only in this way, in the very prohibition against elevating what we have done into a universal principle, do we retain a sense of guilt, an awareness of the inadmissibility of what we have done.
In short, every authentic liberal should see these debates, these calls to ‘keep an open mind’, as a sign that the terrorists are winning. And, in a way, essays like Alter’s, which do not openly advocate torture, but just introduce it as a legitimate topic of debate, are even more dangerous than explicit endorsements. At this moment at least, explicitly endorsing it would be rejected as too shocking, but the mere introduction of torture as a legitimate topic allows us to court the idea while retaining a clear conscience. (‘Of course I am against torture, but who is hurt if we just discuss it?’).
Admitting torture as a topic of debate changes the entire field, while outright advocacy remains merely idiosyncratic. The idea that, once we let the genie out of the bottle, torture can be kept within ‘reasonable’ bounds, is the worst liberal illusion, if only because the ‘ticking clock’ example is deceptive: in the vast majority of cases torture is not done in order to resolve a ‘ticking clock’ situation, but for quite different reasons (to punish an enemy or to break him down psychologically, to terrorise a population etc). Any consistent ethical stance has to reject such pragmatic-utilitarian reasoning."
"At any given moment, the “window” includes a range of policies considered to be politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion, which a politician can recommend without being considered too “extreme” or outside the mainstream to gain or keep public office. Overton arranged the spectrum on a vertical axis of “more free” and “less free” in regard to government intervention. When the window moves or expands, ideas can accordingly become more or less politically acceptable."
I'm glad I don't live in the UK but pissed since they set an example others might be tempted to follow.