Plans For Widespread Monitoring of Communication In Europe Revealed 166
TrueSatan writes "A leak from the Clean IT project reveals how it has been subverted from its original, much more innocuous, goals into a surveillance horror story with democratic freedoms and personal rights being the victims."
The leaked document in question. Gems include member states repealing anti-filtering laws and a mandate that ISPs be held liable for not reporting terrorist use of their networks. The Clean IT Project counters that there's nothing to see here (amazingly, through a series of tweets with a journalist).
Bill of rights constitudion or whatever (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally I would even like to see my grocery store stopped from gathering my shopping habits. Basically tally my total charge me and then forget that I was there. I want it so that the police aren't even allowed to ask for data from a company's computer unless they have a warrant. Not even a peek.
If these things aren't stopped now then the new normal will be a government and corporations who will be able to know way too much about you. A grocery store that pulls up your phone IMEI and asks the phone company who you are. Then asks to see what sites you have been surfing to see what they can sell you. What is stopping the phone company and your ISP from selling this data?
I can see a 13 year old boy called into the principal's office and expelled because of the "disgusting" sites they were surfing at home the night before. If the ISP were owned by some bible thumper what law is stopping them from handing this data to anyone? Right now as long as you put it into the terms of service where we all blindly click "I agree" the company should be pretty safe. Also those terms of service almost always blah blah about sharing with 3rd parties.
My guess as to the main reason that this isn't done more is that most people don't have the skills to properly mix and match such different data sets. Plus some companies might be reluctant to really piss of their customers. But when any of these companies are on the ropes financially they will make any deal with any devil that comes along.
Re:Just use encryption. (Score:3, Interesting)
Such logic is already in use in the United States where people are arrested for supposed crimes and their unwillingness to hand over the passwords to their encrypted hard drives is used as prime evidence that they have something to hide.
It's a wonderful Catch-22 they have pretty much everyone in. Protect your personal information from the bad guys and then they use the fact that you are using such protection to say that you must be involved in something illegal, otherwise why would you be encrypting your information.
As long as they can keep using this as a tactic to arrest and detain people without real cause other than the encrypting of personal information, they will not make such encryption against the law.
Eu is appointed not elected (Score:5, Interesting)
The wrong people are already in charge. EU Commission is appointed, not elected, They don't take their direction from EU voters, they take their direction, mostly it seems from non-EU governments and lobbyists. ACTA was the rule not the exception.
I'm amazed they're using terrorism, the copyright lobbyists suggested CP as their primary weapon. Give us copyright filtering or you diddle kiddies:
See this article:
http://boingboing.net/2010/04/28/music-industry-spoke.html
"Child pornography is great," the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. "It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites".
The venue was a seminar organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in Stockholm on May 27, 2007, under the title "Sweden -- A Safe Haven for Pirates?". The speaker was Johan Schlüter from the Danish Anti-Piracy Group, a lobby organization for the music and film industry associations, like IFPI and others...
"One day we will have a giant filter that we develop in close cooperation with IFPI and MPA. We continuously monitor the child porn on the net, to show the politicians that filtering works. Child porn is an issue they understand," Johan Schlüter said with a grin, his whole being radiating pride and enthusiasm from the podium.
Re:All paid for by... (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it ironic that the states who want to fine Google for Street View and recording stray broadcasts are preparing to DPI the entire internet.
Yes, I said "ironic." Come at me, pedants.
Re:Just use encryption. (Score:4, Interesting)
You should read about onion routing. Tor is one solution to this problem. It makes it impossible for outside parties to know with whom you communicated. The US Navy thought it would be a cool thing to aid dissenters in oppressive third world countries, not realizing it would also aid dissenters in oppressive first world countries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)
Re:Just use encryption. (Score:5, Interesting)
Onion routing and similar by the big dogs relies on there being lots of other users of such systems. If only a few Western government sponsored spies were using a Tor-like system in a place such as Iran, then the local authorities would be willing to devote a lot of their resources to trying to catch those few people. Devoting those same sort of resources to catching 10,000 people who turn out to be just trying to get locally illegal porn or pirate music to maybe get one spy OTOH is terribly wasteful. The Iranian government does not want to spend that many resources on prosecuting very minor crimes by the thousands or even millions just to get an occasional real spy, just like the United States would not want to conduct house to house searches of the entirity of New York City to catch one bank robber, or set up constantly relocating roadside stops every five miles all over every interstate highway and stop all commercial truck traffic, just to nab the occasional drunk.
The problem here is, the Intelligence agencies that developed Onion routing knew there had to be a lot of trivially illegal, semi-legal and fully legal traffic to hide their uses, and in some cases, they actually spread information to aid that civilian development (as in your example of the US Navy). So, either laws against these systems will not pass because the government people proposing them will be called aside to explain why they shouldn't, or the laws will pass, but all the international Intelligence players will know those countries that passed them have switched to something else and hope to make it harder for the lagging countries to continue to use these methods by encouraging international adoption. Put more simply, if a law against onion routing software was actually passed in the US, it would prove the CIA, etc. were no longer relying on onion routing software, and everybody else's intelligence depts. would know this. But frequently proposing such laws only to have them come to nothing, leaves other people's agencies wondering just what the hell they are dealing with.
And Yet a Pirate party member (Score:4, Interesting)
Pirate Party Switzerland (Pascal Gloor, who also posted a blog about the Berlin meeting, in french) Link to his blog post [pascalgloor.ch]
Re:Eu is appointed not elected (Score:4, Interesting)
The wrong people are already in charge. EU Commission is appointed, not elected, They don't take their direction from EU voters, they take their direction, mostly it seems from non-EU governments and lobbyists. ACTA was the rule not the exception.
And the last time I told people on /. that the EU was a defacto dictatorship in the making people called me insane because there was a massive organization over the top that's appointed. Hah. Yeah, sure I'm the crazy one. You know your post just scratches the surface, these are the same ones that pushed through the "monetary fiat" rule that lets them basically turn on the printing presses of every EU member and bankrupt them, without any say-so of the elected government. If I remember right, the amount they're allowed to print is somewhere around 1T per member state. Yeah, so...enjoy that...
Re:Eu is appointed not elected (Score:2, Interesting)
When you look at its 20th century history, Europe is barely democratic. Spain and Portugal were military dictatorships, East Germany was communist, as were many of the new states, and West Germany was rebuilt by ex-Nazis. Northern Ireland was a war zone. Large parts of Europe are in bed with one church or another. It's silly to expect a continent with that kind of history to have much of a commitment to liberty or democracy. To be sure, the European desire for peace, liberty, and democracy is strong, but they have always had problems achieving it. By historical standards, the current period of peace in Europe is barely a breather.
EU Commission is NOT elected, not even indirect (Score:2, Interesting)
If I want to sack Gordon Brown, I can vote for David Cameron, there is a clear choice which causes the change. ....' because you don't know whose standing and no party can tell you at national election time who they will vote for at the next EU opportunity.
If I want to sack Barosso that's not possible. The EU elections are out of sync with national elections, the candidates for the EU job aren't even known at voting time, let alone who would vote for whom. So it's not 'vote for Labour is a vote for Barosso, a vote for Cons is a vote for
So, IN NO WAY, can European voters choose even INDIRECTLY who will run the EU Commission.
2014 change will not fix this, it token change. A non choice choice.