'Black Boxes' to monitor all internet and phone data - Polidicks

[table="width: 75%, class: outer_border, align: center"] [tr] [td]As part of the Home Office's communications data bill, internet service providers (ISPs) and mobile phone companies will be obliged to collect communications records and keep them for a year. The government has insisted that the actual content of messages won't be stored, but until now it has not been clear how communications companies will be able to separate content from "header data", such as the sender and recipient of a message, and the date it was sent. It has now emerged that the Home Office has held meetings with the UK's largest ISPs and mobile network operators, and has given them information about the hardware which companies will have to use to monitor traffic flowing through their systems. When an individual uses a webmail service such as Gmail, for example, the entire webpage is encrypted before it is sent. This makes it impossible for ISPs to distinguish the content of the message. Under the Home Office proposals, once the Gmail is sent, the ISPs would have to route the data via a government-approved "black box" which will decrypt the message, separate the content from the "header data", and pass the latter back to the ISP for storage. Dominic Raab, a Conservative MP who has criticised the bill, said: "The use of data mining and black boxes to monitor everyone's phone, email and web-based communications is a sobering thought that would give Britain the most intrusive surveillance regime in the west. But, many technical experts are raising equally serious doubts about its feasibility and vulnerability to hacking and other abuse." A representative of the ISPs Association said: "We understand that government wants to move with the times, and we want to work with them on that. But this is a massive project. We'd rather they told us what they want to achieve, then sit down with us to work out how." "Our other main concern with this is speed. If you're having to route all traffic through one box, it's going to cut down on connection speeds. The hardware can only look at a certain amount of traffic per second - if lots of streams from the BBC iPlayer are going through it, for example, how is it going to handle the traffic?" A Home Office spokesman said - "We have not issued any hardware or software specifications. "The communications data bill is designed to allow the police to maintain their capability to catch criminals and protect the public as technology changes and people use more modern communications. Under this programme the emphasis is to work with industry to determine the best way to achieve this. "The legislation is currently being scrutinised by parliament. Once it has been passed will we work with companies on how to best collect and store communications data, but not the content, such as the detail of bank transactions."[/td] [/tr] [/table] [url]http://www.channel4.com/news/black-boxes-to-monitor-all-internet-and-phone-data[/url]

Wow, Invasion of Privacy much?

[img]http://www.comics101.com/comics101//news/Comics%20101/5/fate_smessage.jpg[/img] Cant wait till they get hacked.

[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/Hy67v.jpg[/IMG] Its not gonna go well.

Encryption, they haven't heard of it. Oh well, at least people will actually start encrypting traffic now.

Home office doesn't understand how technically unfeasible this is.

"After two days, internet black box project mysteriously cancelled as operators participate in mass suicides."

I hope they know sites have encryption of traffic.

[QUOTE=mchapra;36561777]I hope they know sites have encryption of traffic.[/QUOTE] [quote]Under the Home Office proposals, once the Gmail is sent, the ISPs would have to route the data via a government-approved "black box" which will decrypt the message, separate the content from the "header data", and pass the latter back to the ISP for storage.[/quote]

Anything using HTTPS or SSL or any other protocol [I]with encryption built in [/I]will just look like scrambled garbage to whoever is doing the information capture. This literally will do nothing except waste taxpayer money.

-snip- There was an excellent quote I read on Wikipedia a while ago by a John Gilmore. [quote]That's the kind of society I want to build. I want a guarantee -- with physics and mathematics, not with laws -- that we can give ourselves real privacy of personal communications.[/quote]

Im utterly speechless after reading this.

[quote] Under the Home Office proposals, once the Gmail is sent, the ISPs would have to route the data via a government-approved "black box" which will decrypt the message, separate the content from the "header data", and pass the latter back to the ISP for storage. [/quote] There's no way this shit is legal.

why? it just puzzles me because i have absolutely no idea what this is supposed to accomplish. [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZqtAiXcfYQ[/media]

Hey, governments... [I][B]Fuck Off[/B][/I]

From my understanding of this its saying that the header data which contains the source IP and the destination IP will be stored and sent to the ISP. The header data is not encrypted otherwise your ISP would be unable to determine where to send the packet however the payload or the content of the packet is encrypted. The payload or content stays encrypted so just connecting to a website that has SSL on by default would be useless since the blackbox is still logging what you do. The black box simply logs where and when packets are sent and received so simply using a VPN who does not log their users traffic or using TOR would be an effective counter measure to this to ensure your privacy and stay anonymous. Correct me if im wrong please.

Dear Mr Cameron, Fuck off and leave my internet alone, and tell Mr Gove to leave my education alone. Sincerely, Someone who has multiple brain cells. Seriously though, they are just saying they will do all these things and, due to the fact they know nothing about how it actually works, they are proposing unworkable and hated laws.

Well that fucking sucks. The internet should be a haven of free speech and in the last few years it seems to have become the last place where true freedom exists. Fuck governments trying to make it their surveillance tool. Also I like how every week we seem to inch closer to some rich person controlled dystopia where you can't say what you want anywhere.

[QUOTE=TheCreeper;36561971]From my understanding of this its saying that the header data which contains the source IP and the destination IP will be stored and sent to the ISP. The header data is not encrypted otherwise your ISP would be unable to determine where to send the packet however the payload or the content of the packet is encrypted. The payload or content stays encrypted so just connecting to a website that has SSL on by default would be useless since the blackbox is still logging what you do. The black box simply logs where and when packets are sent and received so simply using a VPN who does not log their users traffic or using TOR would be an effective counter measure to this to ensure your privacy and stay anonymous. Correct me if im wrong please.[/QUOTE] Until a year or two from now when they vote to ban VPNs.

[quote]programme[/quote] Oh thank goodness. I thought this was going to directly affect me for a moment. This is the first time I'm happy to be American.

This is nearly impossible to achieve. When you take the whole of the UK you probably have hundreds of millions of packets per second going through all these lines at at least 50gbit/s. There's no way to route all this traffic to a centralized point without doing some massive overhaul of the infrastructure. Next to that, imagine how much extra latency (ping) this adds to all packets as they pretty much have to cross the country twice, have to be queued for inspection, etc. I also forgot to mention, to inspect and store all this data you're gonna need a [B]massive[/B] datacenter. Also enjoy decrypting a decent VPN connection without building a quantum computer hehe.

Goddamn, i'm tired of the government doing things like this. The internet is the one of the last beacons of free speech, we don't need it to be monitored or censored.

they could do this [b]tor[/b] they could leave us alone Oops,spelling mistake

Nope.

Oh wow, the entire fucking world needs a different new governmental system.

also in the news : Conservative Party change name to Norsefire

How can they decrypt SSL traffic from HTTPS?

How do they plan to store that much data?

[QUOTE=Thlis;36563929]How do they plan to store that much data?[/QUOTE] They didn't "plan" this at all from the looks of it. At a glance it seems so technically infeasible. If this actually does ever go into effect though I'm gonna march my ass right down there and protest the shit out of it no matter how flawed their system potentially is. After all, it's the idea behind it that's the important part and the idea here is akin to a government official breaking into your house, opening all your letters and making copies of them. Would anyone stand for that? Fuck no they wouldn't, so why should we stand for the same thing within a virtual space?

[QUOTE=Trainbike;36564010]They didn't "plan" this at all from the looks of it. At a glance it seems so technically infeasible. If this actually does ever go into effect though I'm gonna march my ass right down there and protest the shit out of it no matter how flawed their system potentially is. After all, it's the idea behind it that's the important part and the idea here is akin to a government official breaking into your house, opening all your letters and making copies of them. Would anyone stand for that? Fuck no they wouldn't, so why should we stand for the same thing within a virtual space?[/QUOTE] Hardly, it's more like opening your letter after you've sent it through the post, jotting down the desitination and date sent, and then delivering the letter in a new envelope. Doesn't make it okay but the analogy is wrong. I'd like to see how they plan on decrypting these things anyways.