Edward Snowden and Julian Assange discuss mass surveillance with Kim Dotcom

[evilsatan]

[billynoguts]

listened to this today at work, it paints a bad picture of those in power. Also sheds light on why that law about data protection policy was rushed through the UK courts in record time!

[Zippeyrude]

listened to this today at work, it paints a bad picture of those in power. Also sheds light on why that law about data protection policy was rushed through the UK courts in record time!

The data protection, or to be accurate data retention law, was passed to continue the practice of retaining telco communications data. Telcos have been under a duty to keep this for a long time, retaining it for 12 months. The European Court of Justice determined the overarching European Data Retention Directive to be flawed on the basis of proportionality (means did not justify the ends) and stated it was invalid. This undermined the basis for the domestic legislation (data retention regulation which was based on the directive), hence the 'need' for the govt to create a new law to maintain continuity.

Interestingly, Austria, which was one of the countries alongside Ireland, that brought cases to ECJ on proportionality grounds, decided to almost immediately revoke their data retention legislation.

So for all of the euro haters, the european courts considered your privacy and abolished a law that unjustifiably encroached on it. The UK created a law to undermine your privacy.

Incodentally, the introduction of the original data retention directive had an interesting journey. Originally mooted after the madrid bombings it was thrown out by the european parliament. Then the london bombings happened and clark pushed the directive through in a very short period. So the UK, in a sense, has always been the driver for this (europeanly recognised) encroachment of privacy.

[JonEp]

The limits on data retention and actual retention follow the downward cost of storage which really means now nothing is deleated.

Hopefully the next generation will be more aware of their digital foot prints than ours have been.

They may even start talking again face to face instead of using platforms that records and mines their interactions with others.

As Snowden said in the talk, its all about the meta data.

Hows this for an example.. Searching just a mobile number or landline number or email address using the subscription service http://www.gbgplc.com/products/etrace/ produces a page full of personal data about you including where you live, who you live with, DOBS's etc.

You can wild card emails so *.thisdomain.com gives you all the consented data about people who own a email address on that domain. When they run you through the demo its the first thing they do on your own works domain.

In one police authority just wild carding the police domain produced hundreds of home addresses of police officers who had along with other personal data given their works email address much to their surpise.

Another one perhaps you tell the wife your going on a golfing holiday with the lads to Spain when in fact your taking the office girl to Amsterdam for a dirty weekend. All your wife needs to do is a HLR lookup to find out where you've gone. Enter your mobile no here http://www.hlrcheck.com/instantcheck or call the automated number on that website.

It will instantly tell her which country your really in! By the way the DWP and other agencies have started to use HLR to silently ping claimant phones and identify those that go out the country without informing them!

When I retire I'm going to live in a field and wear a foil suit, it all too much for me !