I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but I don't like the way things are going with mass monitoring of the population. I can appreciate that there are some nasty people out there who wish us harm, but they can be targeted. New powers have just been granted with hardly any public discussion. We're all distracted by Brexit and Trump whilst being fed a diet of fear in TV news. The British opposition parties are in a state of chaos, so the government can do what they like.
Image by Andrea Yori from Flickr
The fact is that it has never been easier to monitor millions of people. Not so long ago it would require thousands of people manually checking post and telephone messages. Not it can be mostly automated with taps on the internet 'pipes'. ISPs have to log data and all sorts of agencies can access it. Not so long ago Edward Snowden exposed the surveillance in the USA. This did spur some companies to lock down their channels, but they can still be forced to give up data. Of course most people in the UK are using US services such as Google, Facebook and Twitter.
Should we be paranoid? In my opinion the governments really do want to protect us from terrorists, but it's too tempting to use the data for other purposes. In the past UK police have infiltrated environmental groups and even fathered children with activists. Similar infiltration has gone on with unions. The intelligence agencies have to be controlled and use of personal data restricted. Once data has been captured it could be kept indefinitely and cross-checked to derive an in-depth picture of our habits.
Can we protect ourselves? Despite what you may hear good encryption can probably not be cracked by the NSA or GCHQ. I say probably as there are chances they have ways to make it less secure. Many of the smartest people in encryption work for those agencies, but there are still many who work for us all to check for flaws in the algorithms. Even if they can't read a message now they can keep it until they find a way.
@ash reported that more people are getting encrypted messaging apps since Trump won. Governments have tried to ban encryption, but this may be impossible without totally locking down the internet and making it unusable. Having companies provide 'back doors' increases the risk of breaches. It may still be possible for the spooks to tell that we are using 'unauthorised' encryption and this may flag us as trouble makers. Just writing this could get me flagged. I don't really have anything to hide, but I want a right to privacy.
We need groups like the EFF to fight for our on-line rights. We should be aware of the issues.
Don't have nightmares.
