Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Watching me, watching you


My thoughts about the recent changes to internet snooping laws in the UK are summed up nicely in this photo. Unfortunately, Humans being Humans, something as useful as an instant Global communications network could never be immune from being used for unethical and evil purposes. Where the criminals go the authorities have to follow, a law of physics I suppose. What surprises me more is how easy (and cheap) it is to hide behind traffic tunneling protocols and encryption in ways that effectively makes internet activity more or less invisible if you so desire.

Another inevitable side effect of being a "global" platform is that it's easy to selectively chop up and route traffic through countries that don't exactly have a sophisticated criminal justice systems or cooperative legal channels. Surely the well funded, determined terrorist or criminal will have worked this out by now and Governments will know they know this; which does beg an obvious question, who do they hope to catch by snooping on ISP records?

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