If it's the job of the government to safeguard the interests of citizens, it's sure hard to tell these days with moves like this.
Fresh on the heals of India adopting new surveillance techniques that make privacy one step closer to becoming history in that country, the Home Office of Britain has adopted a plan for British police to covertly hack citizens computers without a warrant.
Basically, if a police officer wanted to, he can go wardriving through the streets to find a persons computer and hack it. Failing that, police can send a malicious e-mail containing something like a keylogger and record things like e-mails and instant messages. Combined with EU legislation, anything found can be sent to other countries in Europe. It's worth noting the irony in this - some authorities might be more than willing to point to how dangerous the internet is with cyber crime and, in turn, make the internet more dangerous with their presence.
Of course, it's not really called hacking if police do it - it's called "remote searching". The euphemism is applied when it is explained that the police have to say that they had reason to believe some crime is about to take place. This can easily be taken in two different ways depending who you ask. Either this translates to, "We needed to go wardriving into your computer under some excuse we made up on the spot" or, "In order to protect the better public interest, we need to make sure people aren't breaking laws on their personal computers."
Either way, British civil liberties groups were not amused.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, the human rights group, said she would challenge the legal basis of the move. “These are very intrusive powers – as intrusive as someone busting down your door and coming into your home,” she said.
“The public will want this to be controlled by new legislation and judicial authorisation. Without those safeguards it’s a devastating blow to any notion of personal privacy.”
The police were on the defense of this:
The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) said such intrusive surveillance was closely regulated under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. A spokesman said police were already carrying out a small number of these operations which were among 194 clandestine searches last year of people’s homes, offices and hotel bedrooms.
“To be a valid authorisation, the officer giving it must believe that when it is given it is necessary to prevent or detect serious crime and [the] action is proportionate to what it seeks to achieve,” Acpo said.
(Source: Times Online)
All the while, the government appears to not have not revealed a stitch of safeguards judging by these early reports (though the government may wind up revealing a few soon since this move has also angered opposition MPs)
Not mentioned in the Times article is what kind of consequences this could have for other laws that could be proposed in the future. Already, the MPAA have been trying to lobby the government for a way to 'automatically' eliminate alleged piracy online internationally. It would be a surprise if the industry didn't try and twist this into something for their own financial interests. It's already starting to look like it'll be another long year.
(Hat tip: Open Rights Group)
AND YET
Despite repeated dire predictions for the health of the movie industry and the welfare of the people it employs, is estimated to surpass last year's all-time box office record of nine and a half billion dollars.
The MPAA would have you believe that these are tough times for the movie biz as it faces the scourges of physical and digital piracy amidst a global economic downturn.
"If you look at the situation, the current economic crisis makes this problem much more serious than before," MPAA head Dan Glickman recently told a forum. "If we don't protect IPR (intellectual property rights), our economic losses will be far worse."
Apparently Glickman either hadn't looked at the overseas box office tallies so far or is keeping them to himself for a recent report indicates that the MPAA is about to enjoy record overseas profits, surpassing even last years all-time record of $9.4 billion!
So why exactly all the fuss? Money. The MPAA, just like the RIAA, suffers from the delusion that each instance of piracy equates to a lost ticket sale, which it does not. How many of you file-sharers would have paid to see "Twilight" or Disney's "Bolt?" Good movies, like "The Dark Knight" for example, will always lure people away from P2P networks and services and convert them into honest moviegoers because they want to see it on the big screen and not on a 19" laptop screen.
Record profits last year, on top of those enjoyed in 2007, prove once and for all that the MPAA's fears of piracy and its clamoring that it's destroying the movie biz is now proven to be the falsehood many of us already knew it to be.
AND THEN YOU HAVEWhat would it be like if all those anti-privacy laws you keep hearing about passed? Just ask someone who lives in India.
When it comes to countries in North America, it's not often that India reaches the headlines unless a Canadian or an American is involved in the story. Then again, there is the occasional report that does offer a small glimpse into what it is like to live in the digital environment of India. A blogger from India recently wrote a piece about the new surveillance laws of India and the arguments used to pass it as well as some of the provisions that were mentioned seemed surprisingly similar to that of laws being brought forth to legislators in countries like Australia, Britain and what is currently being talked about in the United States.
Sometimes, reports like these raises the question of validity, so we took some initiative and verified what was happening through a business article writing in 2007 that suggests that the Indian security market then was worth $170 million. In December of 2008, though, an article essentially proved that legislation referenced in that article was, in fact, passed in India.
The legislation that is being discussed was known as "The Information Technology (Amendment) Bill". The posting says that under these new laws and amendments, the government is now allowed to "intercept messages from mobile phones, computers and other communication devices to investigate any offence. Not just cognizable offence, the kind you witnessed in Mumbai 26/11, but any offence."
Those two sentences alone sounds like the US's FISA act on steroids. It could very well have been inspired by laws from the United States, but other provisions discussed sounds more like provisions currently being proposed in Australia. the blogger writes, "Around 45 amendments have been made to the original Act, which now treats both publishers of online pornography and its consumers on equal footing. A law so sweeping in its powers that it allows a police officer in the rank of a sub-inspector to walk in or break in to the privacy of your home and see if you were surfing porn or not."
It's an observation that would make just about any digital rights activist's skin crawl. The blogger creatively sums up a number of provisions with the following:
- Thou shall not author a joke. Not even forward one
- Thou shall not surf Bollywood news
- Thou shall not watch porn
Wikipedia is also keeping tabs on the legislation saying that "The Bill has since been passed in the Parliament on December 23, 2008. It is awaiting assent of the President and formal notification. The Bill as passed has many changes from the earlier draft indicated in the previous paragraph and incorporates the recommendations made by the Parliamentary Standing Committee."
Apparently, one of the arguments going back and forth looked a bit like this:
‘So what?’ is the familiar rhetoric. Why fear if you've got nothing to hide? Why should law abiding citizens be bothered about some 'inevitable invasion' into privacy in the wake of increasing terror attacks? After all the perpetrators of terror are known to use Internet and other modern communication tools to plan and execute deadly strikes like that happened in Mumbai.
There is only one answer and it is a Thomas Jefferson quote: Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
One observation one can make from this legislation is that it almost appears to be taking some of the worst ideas proposed by many countries around the world and gluing them together in a piece of legislation. It seems to be just another disturbing instance of governments around the world gaining sweeping new powers, sacrificing privacy in the process.
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