Broadband Bills Will Have To Increase To Pay For Snooper's Charter, MPs Warned (theguardian.com) 77
An anonymous reader writes that the UK's Science and Technology Select Committee has been told that ISPs will have huge problems implementing the so-called snooper's charter, and may be forced to raise their prices. The Guardian reports: "Consumers' broadband bills will have to go up if the investigatory powers bill is passed due to the "massive cost" of implementation, MPs have been warned. Internet service providers (ISP) told a Commons select committee that the legislation, commonly known as the snooper's charter, does not properly acknowledge the "sheer quantity" of data generated by a typical internet user, nor the basic difficulty of distinguishing between content and metadata. As a result, the cost of implementing plans to make ISPs store communications data for up to 12 months are likely to be far in excess of the £175m the government has budgeted for the task, said Matthew Hare, the chief executive of ISP Gigaclear."
Good. (Score:5, Interesting)
Good. I'm delighted to hear about this. It's high time that the cost of outrageous government snooping programs are made to fall directly on the public who ultimately vote to support this nonsense.
Oh? You're ambivalent about mass GCHQ/NSA surveillance? OK. Well it'll cost you an extra £11 a month on your telephone bill. Oh you have a problem now?.
Most people will not care about an issue until they see it hit their pocket. Therefore, I say let it.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Meh, the MPs won't care. They've got money. The people will still vote for them.
Look at how much had to happen to piss off people for Khadaffi (or however we're spelling it today) to be ousted. The riot that sparked it all was actually from sisters and mothers from a prison right that happened way back in 1994 (I think?). It took 20 years and severe oppression before people got pissed enough to do something. No, so long as they've got beer and circuses they'll put up with a whole bunch of shit - including p
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Who are the Frech? Citizens from Frace?
Re: (Score:1)
It is where we get Creme Freche from.
It's basically a little republic, very like France but a bit more sour.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, look at how far the Ugandans (I think) went before they finally got rid of the Brits? Shit, they felt Amin Dada was better. At least, for a while.
Heh... Dada was kind of awesome in a sick way. He was tough and didn't afraid of anything. He declared himself King of Scotland. He was also king of all the fishes in the sea and all the land animals. He made the white people carry around his fat ass in a chair. He really embarrassed the Brits and they couldn't do a damned thing about it. He basically went 4
Re: (Score:2)
Look at how much had to happen to piss off people for Khadaffi (or however we're spelling it today) to be ousted.
Yes, all the free education and health care and social security eventually got too much to bear. But actually it wasn't any meeting in Libya that ended Qadafi's (I personally like that spelling) career. It was the thousands of bombing missions that destroyed civilian infrastructure and rendered Libya effectively ungovernable and chaotic - which it still is.
Bloody man - how dare he turn Libya from one of the poorest countries in Africa into the richest? (Especially since we wanted to suck all the wealth out
Re: (Score:2)
It might have had something to do with his being a mad druggie that put tens of thousands to death, many innocent people to death, and siphoning off the wealth of the nation with an estimated self-worth of nearly 1,000,000,000 USD at his death. But no, it was surely the imperialist's infringement that doomed him. It wasn't his systematic rape of women, the abortion clinic under the college, the nearly daily attempts to propagandize the nation via television, the personal screening of allowed television, or
Re: (Score:1)
He was like a mad Keith Richards gone Tin Pot Dictator.
GREAT Imagery!
Re: (Score:2)
It takes a lot of work and danger to overthrow a government with violence. It's much easier to just vote new people in. It isn't easy anyway, but the bar is far lower.
Re: (Score:2)
How many MPs do you think will be ousted specifically over this added fee? Are you willing to bet on it? Are the average people even paying attention?
Beer and circuses seems to be pretty damned effective. :/ You, or I, might be up in arms about this but I suspect we'll look like tinfoil-hat-wearing-crazies to Joe Six Pint. I wish this would wake people up but they don't appear to really give a shit. I don't think they even care about the pedos or terrorists. They just don't give a shit.
The ISPs could post a
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not expecting this to cause a ballot revolution, but it's easier than in a dictatorship, and so comparing Britain with Libya doesn't work.
Re: (Score:2)
No, not a direct comparison but, certainly, markers can be drawn betwixt the two - we're all humans, after all. Point being, history says we'll take a lot of abuse so long as we aren't without hope. This, while irritating to some, probably won't even be a bump in the road. Would that I could, I'd change it.
Re: (Score:3)
All but the staunchest law-and-order-authoritarians hate actually paying for state violence almost as much as they enjoy watching it.
I'm honestly not sure how that happened: back when we still had genuine 'co
Re: (Score:3)
£11 isn't enough. We need to develop some scripts that make millions of random DNS queries, to increase the volume of data and the associated storage cost. Unfortunately it might look like a DDOS attack on the DNS servers... I'd argue that's what a protest is, you walk down a street with a bunch of people who together end up blocking it and denying normal service. Having said that, the government is trying to stamp out protests anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
They actually want to make it illegal to even discuss the surveillance, so that could be interpreted as being in breach of the law.
Re: (Score:1)
Have you considered a thing like the Bill of Rights? And not wattered down versions, so common in modern countries, that offer escape clauses "if the government really really really wants to". As we see in the US with warrantless spying, even that may not be enough, but it is a start. Then you can call out taxes as a line item, as speech.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The constitution in the UK is different, being mostly old laws and customs. There are few absolutely guaranteed rights, as I understand it, but there's lots of things that the government isn't going to do. You might want to ask somebody who knows something about the UK government legal structure for accurate details.
It is likely to be against EU treaties, though.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Good. (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Give it a rest. Moan about the SNP having 58 seats compared to the UKIP's 2 despite a similar number of votes. That's where the system is broken.
Of course, had Blair not fucked the country over for more than a decade for his builderberg mates, and enter an illegal war based on evidence that didn't exist (promising to do so a year before). The masses may not have voted against them just to get rid of the tossers.
Re: (Score:1)
Historical revisionism. The masses never voted against Blair. They voted against Brown. And it wasn't because of the invasion of Iraq. Blair easily got back into power when that was ongoing. Nobody cared. They voted against Brown because he was successfully scapegoated for the global financial catastrophe caused by the blatantly fraudulent activities of the US credit rating agencies. None of this Bilderberg crap was an issue at the time. Occupy wasn't even a thing then, and "the 1%" wasn't a phrase.
Re: (Score:2)
The masses never voted against Blair. They voted against Brown.
In which country? Because in the UK, Blair only received about 40% of the popular vote even on New Labour's second term, and only about 35% going into the third term. In each case the turnout was around the 60% mark. That "historic third term" with the third big majority of MPs in a row was based on the support of just 1 in 5 of the electorate. And even that was with the clear and unambiguous promise that Blair himself would lead the party for a full third term and wouldn't hand over -- as he ultimately did
Re: (Score:2)
Give it a rest. Moan about the SNP having 58 seats compared to the UKIP's 2 despite a similar number of votes.
UKIP actually got one seat, not two, out of the 650 seats in the House of Commons.
"UKIP had 3,881,129 votes (12.6%) and was the third largest party on vote share, yet it won only one seat". (Wikipedia)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
As there are nearly as many people in London than in Scotland + NI + Wales (taking your word for it) then I would expect London people to have collectively as much influence. In fact the system is meant to do that now, because each parliamentary seat is supposed to represent roughly equal numbers of voters. London does not have just one parliamentary seat, you know.
It is the distribution of voters that makes the present system broken - working class peo
Re: (Score:3)
Except it won't be an extra £11 a month. If £175m isn't enough, lets make it an order of magnitude larger to ensure that there will be enough with £1.75b There's 100m+ phone lines in the UK, so £1.75b / 12 months / 100m lines = £1.46 a month. Add in the 20m+ homes that have internet subscriptions, not to mention the number of commercial subscribers and you're barely above an ext
Re: (Score:1)
Good. I'm delighted to hear about this. It's high time that the cost of outrageous government snooping programs are made to fall directly on the public who ultimately vote to support this nonsense.
Oh? You're ambivalent about mass GCHQ/NSA surveillance? OK. Well it'll cost you an extra £11 a month on your telephone bill. Oh you have a problem now?.
Most people will not care about an issue until they see it hit their pocket. Therefore, I say let it.
Unfortunately, many British taxpayers will not think this through so clearly. But the increased ISP bills will discourage Internet use; that would suit the government very much indeed. Just imagine how much frustration and anger there is in Western political circles at the growing tendency to seek news and opinion on the Web. All that money and effort channelled into controlling the mainstream media, bribing editors and journalists, and spoonfeeding them the party line - and what happens? Their circulation
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Meanwhile the PM - Cameron - is promising affordable broadband for all
Do these politicians ever talk to each other ?
Did you perchance overlook the key weasel word "promising"?
Re:Joined up Government ? (Score:4, Insightful)
They've also been talking about broadband being some sort of fundamental right one minute, with ominous-sounding ideas about cutting people off for dubious IP-related reasons the next, and then moving government services that many people are legally required to use into on-line systems the day after that.
I'm pretty sure it's all just an elaborate episode of Yes Minister at this point.
Re:How to get your enemy arrested (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the insightful points made by the head of Gigaclear is that the line between metadata and data is pretty vague. For instance, who are you calling on Skype? "Obviously" metadata .... but if someone is added to a group call in the middle of it, then suddenly metadata might be being mixed in seamlessly with voice and video data. If you post a message to a website like Slashdot that has subject lines and bodies, is the subject line metadata? And if so, how does an ISP extract that and store it separately from the body?
The real cost of this scheme isn't even in the hardware, really, it's in paying large numbers of skilled people to develop a dizzying array of Wireshark filters to try and separate and index the metadata for every imaginable internet protocol.
No, the subject line is data. (Score:1)
If you post a message to a website like Slashdot that has subject lines and bodies, is the subject line metadata?
Re: (Score:2)
The scrutiny is the point. Blanket surveillance is shit for finding actual criminal / terrorist activity because the false positive rate means that your agents will all be tied up investigating bad leads forever.
As a tool to gain insight into a population and thus control over them, it's excellent.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly this. Finding "criminal/terrorist" activity can be a needle in a haystack endeavor at the best of times. However, mass surveillance just adds more hay to the stack under the notion that maybe perhaps you'll possibly be tossing in another needle or two. Of course, now you have to sift thro
Re: (Score:2)
It seems highly unlikely that this is the interpretation the government is looking for. They've been quite explicit that they don't just want to know which communications channels you use, but also who you communicate with and the like.
The trouble is that, as many here will understand but I fear many in the government do not, there is no black and white distinction to be made based on some universal technical test to achieve the results the authorities say they want. Leaving aside the usual issues with encr
Re: (Score:2)
I frequently do R&D work in this kind of area and I am familiar with the in-the-trenches details here. It really isn't as simple as you're making out.
For example, you referred to using regular expressions for the decoders, but there are several details you're glossing over. The first is that you're presumably referring to application layer processing, but before you can do that you have to get hold of that application layer data and get it to something that can process it.
Just identifying which applicat
£175m??? (Score:1)
Of course it's going to cost more. Every time the "snooper's charter" proposal came up with Labour and then the Coalition, the cost was placed at around £2bn at least. Even during the Coalition, it was estimated at around £2bn to do this. Nothing has really changed with the proposals, and yet the government thinks it's now going to cost £175m. I know storage costs are getting cheaper, but the amount of data generated is far more than it was when Blair and his cronies were trying to push a
Re: (Score:2)
The public must be protected at all cost. No matter how much money it takes or home much privacy we must lose it is imperative that the public be kept safe.
Good, and while you're at it, itemize it! (Score:3)
And whle you're at it, itemize the bill.
Line rental mothly: 5 pounds
30 mbit/s package: 10 pounds
fee for us to snoop on you as legally required by the government: 10 pounds
If it costs more, pass the cost on to the customer and LET THEM KNOW.
The datas have gravity. (Score:1)
Have you ever wondered how long it would take to record so much data that to read it would take the same amount of energy as it would take to boil all the water in the world's oceans?
Thankfully we have ZFS but how much data do they really intend to store? It is cheaper to just put everyone in prison and give them a free iphone. As long as tasty meals are provided there shouldn't be many complaints. I shotgun top bunk.
This sounds slightly familiar (Score:2)
Urban legend has it that back in Old Days of the Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party billed the family of an executed criminal* for the cost of the bullet used to execute him.
There's some dispute to this, of course. It is hard to believe because it would be beyond the pale of decency, even to the extent it would be acknowledged by Communist revolutionaries, to bill you for the cost of their oppression.
But not, apparently, in Oceania.
*"criminal" often meant political opponent, not necessarily an actual c
Sites you 'visit' (Score:2)
OK, say you take them at their word and they're just logging sites you visit (as in the domain). Have you ever looked at all the domains you 'visit' when you open a 'modern' web page?
What's to stop a random site from including an iframe or other call to http://dodgy-jihadi-site.com/ [dodgy-jihadi-site.com] in their page? Does that get logged? If not, what's to stop a site from just being a wrapper page that lets you browse dodgy sites without triggering their metadata capture? What's the chances that loads of sites will put malici