#UKPoliceState: #Snoop - No Plans At The Moment To Spy On Your Postcards.

The Home Office says it has no current plans to force the Royal Mail to store data on all letters and postcards passing through its system.

The provision is included in the government's draft communications data bill, published this week.

But the Home Office said the bill would just maintain existing powers relating to postal data.
And it stressed that only data about mail - not its contents - would be retained if the law was ever enacted.

Under the draft bill, the Royal Mail and other postal services could be asked to retain "anything written on the outside" of items for up to 12 months so they can be accessed by the police, security services and HM Revenue and Customs.

But a Home Office spokesman said only information relating to the "communications data of mail — who sent the letter to whom, when it was sent and the origin and destination" would, potentially, be stored.

'Snooper's charter'

Asked how the relevant data would be separated from the contents of postcards, for example, the spokesman said: "That would be something the postal services would need to address if they were requested to do so."

The spokesman added: "It does not cover the interception of contents, which will continue to be covered by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and require a warrant signed by the Secretary of State.

"In a very small number of cases, law enforcement or intelligence agencies might have to obtain the communications data of a suspect's mail, but there are currently no requirements to retain postal data and there are no plans for that to change.

"The new legislation will replace current powers relating to postal communications data. The Bill will ensure they are maintained."

Detail of all UK internet use will be stored for up to 12 months so that it can be accessed by the police, the security services and HM Revenue and Customs if the draft bill becomes law.

Records will include people's activity on social network sites, webmail, internet phone calls and online gaming.

It has been dubbed a "snooper's charter" by civil liberties groups but the Home Office says new powers are needed to keep pace with how criminals and terrorists are using new technology.

The Bill includes provision to help postal services and other communications providers with the cost of installing new equipment to comply with any laws, estimated to be £1.8bn over 10 years.

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18477158

#UKPoliceState: Do Not Track - Activist Post - Want More Internet Privacy? How to Turn on 'Do Not Track' in Your Browser

Eva Galperin

EFF

In recent years, online tracking companies have begun to monitor our clicks, searches and reading habits as we move around the Internet. If you are concerned about pervasive online web tracking by behavioral advertisers, then you may want to enable Do Not Track on your web browser.

Do Not Track is unique in that it combines both technology (a signal transmitted from a user) as well as a policy framework for how companies that receive the signal should respond. As more and more websites respect the Do Not Track signal from your browser, it becomes a more effective tool for protecting your privacy.

EFF is working with privacy advocates and industry representatives through the W3C Tracking Protection Working Group to define standards for how websites that receive the Do Not Track signal ought to response in order to best respect consumer's choices.

The following tutorial walks you through the enabling Do Not Track in the four most popular browsers: Safari, Internet Explorer 9, Firefox, and Chrome....read more

http://bit.ly/LethC2

STOP #UKPoliceState - How To Avoid Being Followed On The Internet by Corrupt Politicians Lackey's.

There are no terrorists threats, for if there were Cameron would have shown a great deal more concern for his daughter, you remember the one, Nancy, he along with his wife forgot she was with them as they enjoyed their boozy lunch a couple of months ago. 

Why Anonymity Matters

Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol...read more


https://www.torproject.org/

#UKPoliceState: Snooping Plans Outlined. May Setting Out Plans On How To Monitor The Internet.

Details of internet use in the UK will have to be stored for a year to allow police and intelligence services to access it, under government plans.

Records will include people's activity on social network sites, webmail, internet phone calls and online gaming.

Home Secretary Theresa May said the change was needed to keep up with how criminals were using new technology.

But senior Tory David Davis said it was "incredibly intrusive" and would only "catch the innocent and incompetent".

The Communications Bill is to be published in draft form on Thursday - but the government faces a battle to get it through Parliament intact, with Lib Dem MPs and Conservatives such as Mr Davis calling for it to be watered down or abandoned altogether.

Local authorities are likely to be stripped of their current powers to access phone call data in an effort to win over critics but the proposals have still been branded a "snooper's charter" by civil liberties campaigners.

Rachel Robinson, policy officer for Liberty, said: "It's good that local councils won't be able to watch the entire population but even law enforcement should be targeting suspects - not all citizens.

"Just like the internet, any private home can be a crime scene, but should we install hidden cameras and microphones in every bedroom in the land?"
'Stopping terrorists'

Under current legislation, communications companies must keep phone records and information about messages sent via their own email services for 12 months.

“Start Quote

In the first instance, it is understood this could involve more than a dozen of the UK's biggest communications companies including BT, Virgin and Sky”

End Quote

Tom Symonds Home Affairs correspondent

---

• How will surveillance laws work?

The new proposals would require UK communications companies to keep details of a much wider range of data including use of social network sites, webmail, voice calls over the internet, and gaming. Websites visited could be recorded, although pages within sites would not be.

Mrs May told BBC Breakfast: "It's not about the content, it's not about reading people's emails or listening to their telephone calls.

"This is purely about the who, when and where made these communications and it's about ensuring we catch criminals and stop terrorists."

The police and security services are concerned that criminals and terrorists are increasingly evading detection by using social media and online gaming sites to communicate with each other.

Officers would still need to obtain a warrant to gain access to the data.

But the government would be able to request any service provider to keep data about internet usage, although initially it will involve about a dozen firms including BT, Virgin and Sky.

'Total war'

The previous government was forced to abandon plans to store every citizen's internet data on a single, giant database following protests - and Mrs May says she has no plan to resurrect this idea.

“Start Quote

Put simply, the police need access to this information to keep up with the criminals who bring so much harm to victims and our society”

Bernard Hogan-Howe Metropolitan Police commissioner

 

The proposals will be subject to scrutiny by a joint parliamentary committee before the legislative process begins in earnest.

Metropolitan Police commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe, writing in the Times, said having greater powers to access data was essential in waging a "total war on crime" - and he warned that police risked losing the fight against crime unless MPs passed a law enabling them to collect more communications data.

He wrote: "Put simply, the police need access to this information to keep up with the criminals who bring so much harm to victims and our society."

Tory backbencher David Davis, a former shadow home secretary who fought a by-election in the last Parliament on the issue of civil liberties, described the proposals as "incredibly intrusive".

He said the ban on local authority officials accessing data was "important but minor".
He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "If they really want to do things like this - and we all accept they use data to catch criminals - get a warrant. Get a judge to sign a warrant, not the guy at the next desk, not somebody else in the same organisation.

"The only people who will avoid this are the actual criminals, because there are ways around this - you use an internet cafe, you hack into somebody's wi-fi, you use what's called proxy servers, and they are just the easy ways."

More on This Story

Related Stories

• How will surveillance laws work?
  14 JUNE 2012, UK
• Data surveillance plan outlined
  09 MAY 2012, UK POLITICS
• Plans create 'nation of suspects'
  19 APRIL 2012, TECHNOLOGY

From other news sites

• Sky News New Powers To 'Snoop' on Emails And Calls > 2 hrs ago

• MSN UK Councils to lose data access powers 6 hrs ago

• About these results

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18434112#

#Olympics 2012 : #UKPoliceState - Clue The Olympics LOGO Spells ZION!

http://olympicsredflag.blogspot.com.es/

#Twitter #Facebook Tracked:Online Privacy - Home Office to write blank cheque for 'snoopers' charter'

Internet and phone companies will be forced to track email, Twitter, Facebook and other online data under new legislation.

 

Twitter and Facebook interaction is being targeted by new government legislation to give police and security services greater access to data. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle/Rex Features

 

The government is to offer a blank cheque to internet and phone firms that will be required to track everyone's email, Twitter, Facebook and other internet use under legislation to be published on Thursday.

The Home Office has confirmed it will foot the bill, thought to run into tens and possibly hundreds of millions, for collecting and storing the extra social media and web browsing records needed to implement the scheme, which critics have dubbed an "online snooper's charter".

Ministers did not put a figure on the cost of the new scheme but said it would be far less than the £2bn price tag estimated when Labour put forward a web-tracking scheme based on a central Home Office database in 2006.

The Liberal Democrats are expected to scale back their criticism of the legislation, which is to be published in draft form on Thursday, after Nick Clegg's intervention secured a series of safeguards, including a scrutiny inquiry by MPs and peers that will report by the end of November.

But the measure is expected to continue to attract fierce criticism from libertarian Conservatives, led by the former shadow home secretary David Davis, who this week attacked it again, calling it "expensive, unnecessary and a huge invasion of everyone's privacy".

An online petition run by the campaign group 38 degrees has already attracted more than 163,000 signatures under the slogan: "Our civil liberties have taken a battering in recent years from politicians of all backgrounds. Now it's time to for us to push back."

Tom Brake MP, co-chair of the Lib Dem home affairs committee, said the decision to publish the bill in draft meant there was now an opportunity to examine all its aspects before it was voted on in parliament.

Brake said there was no objection in principle to extending the capability of the police and security services to access communications data from emails, texts and mobile phones to Twitter, Facebook and other new forms of social media. But the party wanted assurances that it was technically possible to access the "who sent what to whom, when and where" traffic data without accessing content – a point about which there is much debate.

Brake said they wanted to see the list of state agencies who could not access such personal data without a warrant extended to cover bodies such as the Food Standards Agency.

He said he also wanted to know what proportion of the 500,000 requests for communications data already made each year successfully contributed to investigations and whether it was possible to reduce the volume.

The safeguards secured by Clegg include the joint scrutiny committee of MPs and peers, who will hear expert evidence, including that from the Home Office, and examine all aspects to ensure the measure is not "rammed through parliament". It has already been quietly agreed that the committee should report by the end of November, implying a timetable that could see the measure on the statute book within 12 months.

It is also expected that inquiries into the bill will be mounted by parliament's intelligence and security and home affairs committees before it emerges in its final form.

Other safeguards to be detailed in the draft bill are a "case-by-case" oversight by the interception of the communications surveillance commissioner, the publication of a privacy impact statement, and powers for the information commissioner to ensure the stored data is kept secure then destroyed when the 12-month retention period expires.

Individuals who feel they have been subject to unlawful tracking will be able to complain to a panel of senior judges in the investigatory powers tribunal.

It will also remain the case that the police and security services will not be allowed to access the content of emails, texts, mobile calls and other confidential web use, without a warrant signed by the home secretary.

The communications data police and others may seek about an individual includes email addresses and phone numbers of people who have been in contact, when this happened, and where, the details giving the police records of suspects' associates and activities.

Internet and phone companies are already required to give the police and security services access to the communications data they retain for their own billing and business purposes. But the Home Office states that the rapidly changing nature of the net, including the widespread use of social media that is not billed item by item, means that this power is no longer sufficient for tracking the activities of criminals online.

Officials say that 25% of requests for communications data by the police and security agencies can no longer be met.

The legislation to be published today will break new legal ground in requiring internet and phone companies to collect this new communications data and not just pass on data they already retain.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/13/online-privacy-legislation-internet-phone-data?CMP=twt_gu

SOPA Opponents Release Digital Bill Of Rights.

Two leading opponents of SOPA are taking their fight for Internet freedoms to a whole new level. This time a team of bi-partisan lawmakers are offering a Digital Bill of Rights to help ensure that Americans continue to have an open Internet.

“I believe that individuals possess certain fundamental rights,” Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) writes on his website this week. “Government should exist to protect those rights against those who would violate them. That is the revolutionary principle at the heart of the American Declaration of Independence and US Constitution. No one should trample our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That's why the Bill of Rights is an American citizen's first line of defense against all forms of tyranny.”

Rep. Issa’s proposal has been drafted along with the help of Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who together have taken on the issue of Internet rights on Capitol Hill countless times, particularly in recent months when they championed an effort to abolish the Stop Online Piracy Act , or SOPA. While the two lawmakers are split on some issues, such as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) currently being considered in Washington, they both agree that the Internet rights of Americans needs to be protected during a day and age when lawmakers — especially those that are misinformed — are fighting for online regulations that could essentially eliminate freedom on the Web.

"Government is flying blind, interfering and regulating without understanding even the basics," Rep. Issa explains on his site. “We have a rare opportunity to give government marching orders on how to treat the Internet, those who use it and the innovation it supports."
Along with Wyden, Issua has done exactly that by publishing the just-penned Digital Bill of Rights. And like many historic American documents, the two lawmakers are looking for help in drafting a completed version of their proposal. “I need your help to get this right,” writes Issa, “so I published it here in Madison for everyone to comment, criticize and collaborate. I look forward to hearing from you and continuing to work together to keep the web open.”
Speaking from New York City on Monday, Sen. Wyden said that Congress indeed someday crumble the Web as we know it and called for "changing power in Washington, DC." In an unusual example of a bi-partisan project getting off the ground quickly, their call for chance is already being widely circulated on the Web:

The Digital Bill of Rights:

1) The right to a free and uncensored Internet.
2) The right to an open, unobstructed Internet.
3) The right to equality on the Internet.
4) The right to gather and participate in online activities.
5) The right to create and collaborate on the Internet.
6) The right to freely share their ideas.
7) The right to access the Internet equally, regardless of who they are or where they are
8) The right to freely associate on the Internet
9) The right to privacy on the Internet
10) The right to benefit from what they create


http://rt.com/usa/news/digital-bill-internet-right-667/