I'm actively encouraging the users of the sites I run to encrypt everything.<p>I'm giving advice in private messages about how to use Truecrypt (especially when using Dropbox or any remote backup or cloud sync service), what a VPN is and how to use Relakks or IPredator, etc.<p>Just basic things, yet the reaction has been extremely positive. One of the sites I run exists by donations, and just for giving this advice 1 person donated £100 to the running of the site because in his words "No-one else is telling me to encrypt or helping me.".<p>The big glaring omission in all of this is email. We all want a secure email system, and one that doesn't involve locking yourself into a single provider (Hushmail), and yet can co-exist with sending email to recipients on webmail and corporate solutions.<p>Talk about a big hole in the market.<p>I've not pitched this to my users as "here's how to pirate", it's just been "privacy is core to democracy, encryption protects your privacy". And additionally I've argued to them that if they were amongst the people who turned their Twitter avatars green last year for Iran, then by not using encryption they leave encryption to "terrorists, criminals and dissidents", who cares for the first two, but if you care for the last you'll encrypt too to ensure that their dissenting opinion can be voiced safely in private.<p>I got the idea for telling my users all of this from HN, and specifically a link to a Canadian site:<p><a href="http://encrypteverything.ca/index.php/Main_Page" rel="nofollow">http://encrypteverything.ca/index.php/Main_Page</a><p>Then I also shared links to:<p><a href="https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere" rel="nofollow">https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere</a><p><a href="https://www.relakks.com/?lang=eng" rel="nofollow">https://www.relakks.com/?lang=eng</a><p><a href="https://ssd.eff.org/tech/encryption" rel="nofollow">https://ssd.eff.org/tech/encryption</a><p>I truly think that the best response that the people of Britain can give to these proposals is to encrypt everything and take away from the government the ability to pervasively spy on their own populace like this.<p>With most governments and corps it always feels like that ask for a mile, and when we object they concede half a mile. We're happy, but then they do this a few times and they get to where they wanted to be.<p>What better way to halt this for good than to encrypt everything.<p>Now, if someone could just give us email v2, secure by default. I'd happily pay for it. Just make it work, and make it open source and aim for it to be standard... don't give me another closed service to achieve it.
Sign the petition to scrap plans to monitor all emails and web Usage. Only 4k signatures so far.<p><a href="http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/32400" rel="nofollow">http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/32400</a>
So, mega snooping, well publicised. Any serious terrorist or lentil rights protester would encrypt or simply stop using electronics for communication. That leaves the rest of us being snooped on for no terrorist or what ever reason.<p>I'm a thick idiot and I can work that out, so presumably the government can too.<p>This is not about terror and all that scare story stuff, its population surveillance.<p>Some how these governments need reminding that we the people are supposed to be the boss. They serve us, not the other other way round.
Taking this back in time a bit, the idea that you would monitor everybody's letters and where they go would never be allowed.<p>Because the monitoring is out of site, and cheap in terms of man power, now it's allowed.<p>I really find it amazing.
It seems like there's little escape these days. I'm from the UK originally, and my adoptive country, Poland, yesterday had a story written about how it's the most surveilled country in the EU:<p><a href="http://thenews.pl/1/9/Artykul/95154,Poles-still-under-watchful-eye-of-Big-Brother" rel="nofollow">http://thenews.pl/1/9/Artykul/95154,Poles-still-under-watchf...</a><p>All round, rather depressing.
This needs to be resisted.<p>A nearly-identical law, the Recording and Interception of Communications Act (RICA), was enacted in 2002 in South Africa. While in theory it contained all the legal protections that have been proposed for the UK legislation, in practice it has been badly abused.<p>Between 2006 and 2010 just one of the South African government's regional interception centres (of which there are at least four and potentially many more) carried out over 3 million legal interceptions, a number which is known to have increased since then. Subsequent leaks to the media have revealed that even this is a drop in the ocean; illegal interceptions are performed routinely and are easily hidden from oversight amongst the millions of legal interceptions performed every year.<p>Looking at the numbers involved, it's not unreasonable to assume that every single connected South African will have their communications intercepted at some point, sometimes in illegal interceptions with no official control over the data collected. In fact, there have been examples of staff inside the interception centres being bribed by business rivals, spouses and others to spy on innocent citizens.<p>I see no reason why the UK will be immune to these types of abuses, despite having a less corruptible civil service. This kind of power in the hands of poorly-monitored government intelligence agencies is always a bad idea.
The proposal would allow the UK government to query, without a court order, logs of who talked to whom and when. They would have to apply for a court order to see the content.<p>It would compel UK based startups to keep a log of all this data, which of course costs time an money, reducing the UK's competitiveness.
How do all those European data retention laws apply to US companies? Do US companies (with offices in Europe, but servers in the US) need to adhere to those data retention laws, or is it safe to use US-based services?
If you think this has not already been implemented in the UK for a LONG time, i.e. pre-RIPA 2000, then you are very naive.<p>Ask anyone who has ever worked on infrastructure at a large UK ISP or exchange (e.g. LINX). Copious secret services systems are already used.<p>The key difference, the key burden that is being (publicly) demanded in 2012 by the services is <i>real-time</i>! Presumably, this was such a burden to the overall infrastructure of the majority of UK ISPs that they just pushed back when requested... hence the new law proposals.
Now you can observe the difference in Europe and US tech journalism. When an anti-internet bill (SOPA) was being discussed in the US, any noteworthy US journalist - those with and without vested interests in the matter - were talking about it very loudly. Compare with the similar situation where TC Europe and others are happily and silently carrying on their daily duties of - mostly - using their media outlet for their own personal short sighted benefits.
Surely this opens the police open for discrimination law suits. <a href="http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-hereby-resign" rel="nofollow">http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-hereby-resign</a>