Why are words said in an e-mail any different to those said in conversation?
The following proposal is vile:
THE Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant.
The move, which follows a decision by the European Union’s council of ministers in Brussels, has angered civil liberties groups and opposition MPs. They described it as a sinister extension of the surveillance state which drives “a coach and horses” through privacy laws.
The hacking is known as “remote searching”. It allows police or MI5 officers who may be hundreds of miles away to examine covertly the hard drive of someone’s PC at his home, office or hotel room.
Material gathered in this way includes the content of all e-mails, web-browsing habits and instant messaging.
Under the Brussels edict, police across the EU have been given the green light to expand the implementation of a rarely used power involving warrantless intrusive surveillance of private property. The strategy will allow French, German and other EU forces to ask British officers to hack into someone’s UK computer and pass over any material gleaned.
That’s the equivalent of allowing a policeman into every living room to listen to every conversation, without a warrant. The vagueness of the legislation simply invites abuse. Police may indulge in this espionage if they “believe” it’s “proportionate”; that is, whenever they feel like it. There is no check on this power, and so no check on its abuse.
And the idea comes from the EU Council of Ministers - which means, if previous experience is anything to go by, it’ll be quite hard to shift. Are they really trying to put the entire internet off the entire institution?
Posted in: Democracy, Europe, Fascism, Fear and Loathing, Free Speech, Madness, The Internet
I wonder what they’re looking for? If it’s left-wing dissidents, you and James are in trouble!
They, erm, don’t really need to hack our keyboards for that. Just a brief glance here should do it…
You’ve been more reliably critical of the government than we.
Hi there
What people like yourself who dont want to be spied on need to do is to dump your microsoft windows and switch to free software. If you run windows XP you are generally vulnerable to anyone hacking intoyour machine and if you run vista then you already have a permanant spy in your machine it is called DRM
As a free software user I can tell you that the security of our machines is more robust and in addition we also have state of the art 164 bit encryption software with private keys
For more information checkout the free software foundation http://www.fsf.org/
It’s always good to see a free software fan! In terms of dumping Windows, I write this from a laptop that used to be running XP but is now using Linux. Also, for what it’s worth, this blog is hosted on Wordpress.