There's been a lot of noise about a recent UK Government proposal to store the details of email and web browsing activities by UK citizens. PCPro has covered the highlights and provided some interesting quotes on this new initiative [click here], and the story has been reported by most of the national newspapers too. On the face of it this sounds like yet another mass invasion of privacy by the UK Government, regardless of the actual content that's being stored.
The stated reason for this proposal is as part of a crackdown on serious crime and terrorist activity, which of itself is fair enough, but there are two serious problems with the practicalities. First, UK public bodies have been shown to be worryingly ready to use these investigative powers - intended for serious crime and terrorism investigations - against innocent citizens in trivial matters. There are scores of reports of local Councils using anti-terrorism laws to snoop on citizens accused of commiting minor infractions (such as this example, where a council spied on a family to check their children's eligibility for a school place), and there is serious concern about the extent of invasive surveillance used against the British public. Allowing public bodies to snoop on email and web access records is a gross invasion of privacy.
The second problem is that these proposals are useless. The only people affected by them will be the innocent public who aren't technically savvy enough to obfuscate their browsing habits and hide their emails. Everyone else, from those with basic technical knowledge all the way to organised criminals and terrorists, will find it simple and easy to avoid the monitoring systems. It really is trivial to prevent a monitoring system from tracking your activities on the Internet and it doesn't come with a cost in terms of reduced speed or functionality. A couple of mouse clicks or keypresses and any monitoring system proposed by the UK Government can be simply and invisibly bypassed.
So, Mr Brown, before you go spending our tax dollars (or pounds), please try to understand the meaning of encryption, SSL, VPNs and proxy servers. In the meantime I hope you enjoy reading the shipping manifest for my latest Amazon order.
