Just waiting for the Home Office to be renamed "The Department for Homeland Security (UK)"

I really wouldn't be surprised to see a great firewall of (the) UK.

From there it's not a great leap to think that tools like Tor might be banned.

We're turning into the very countries we call repressive to protect us from these monsterous 'terrorists', heil fuhrer Brown.

Bleh. What's the point in commenting on stuff like this any more, it's a slippery slope and we're already half way down it and yet no-one will do a thing about it.

I think we should teach politics and law (stripped down obviously) as a compulsory subject from primary school onwards, then maybe people would open their eyes and see their rights being stripped from them instead of blindly supporting yet more legislation to 'get the bad guys' because they do not understand the implications of some of these fruitcake laws.

I expect the SAS will be battering through my door any second.

Hat. Coat.

"we should also take action against those who groom vulnerable people for the purposes of violent extremism"

Great - they're going to ban recruiting sites for the US Armed Forces and the CIA?

A terrorist wants to make you change and lose out in someway, to dirsupt normal life.

This government has been in power and now :-

We lose the right to free speech (shout nonsense at the labour party conference, get chucked out.)

Wear what we want, when we want (you wear a get rid of blair t shirt at the labout party conference and join the other 500+ arrested people)

Lose the right to free travel (have you been to alton towers at manchester air port yet, want to carry a 250 ml coke bottle onto the plane?)

Lost the right to ownership. (Software isn't yours as downloading funds organised crime you know, according to triesman)

We can't criticise faith, muslims, asians because of fear.

Police are too busy collecting DNA and protecting "possible targets" so the streets are left to volunteers and no one dares go outside.

Money is diverted to be spent on MP's pay checks or ID cards, because they work so hard instead of useful things. Like the army, or schools.

So have terrorists already won???

"BT and the ISPs could block overseas websites"

Perhaps that is the solution - block domestic access to overseas websites. And then pass a law forbidding individuals from running or owning websites. Make it illegal to use the internet from home. People will have to go to a special government-approved internet cafe in order to surf the internet, albeit that it will be a subset of a filtered minority of the internet.

I notice that Gordon Brown is jetting off to China. Perhaps he is going to pick up some tips.

With a little help from the God-Blessed U S of A for Step 4.

Here's how it will work.

1. Receive report of dodgy site with Bomb Instructions / Jihadist Literature / Slight Criticism of "Tony" Brown and his cronies.

2. Check facts (optional)

3. If site is hosted in Britain, send Men In Suits round to detain author.

4. If site is abroad, invade that country. They're obviously enemies of our precious freedom if they allow material like this to be hosted, and need British / American Democracy (God Bless it!!!!) bringing to them so they can toe the line the way all True Patriots do.

5. ???

6. Profit!!

So, Blighty is going to have to have a Chinese army of Arabic, Russian and err…Chinese specialists constantly playing “wack-a-mole” with websites, IRC etc. I reckon English language websites would be relatively easy to automatically block, but those non-Roman character sets are nightmare to filter – ask anyone who works with Websense or similar.

If it’s not EU-wide, then what’s to stop Mr Terrrist secure tunneling thro to his mates less regulated connections in Belgium or the Netherlands (fast connections, and lots of “sympathisers” to choose from). If it’s EU wide, then I’ll look forward to Europe’s brightest finally *agreeing* what constitutes “terrorism”, since this has been on the table many times – but never agreed. I’m sure some Ulster Unionists would still argue that Sinn Fein was a terrorist organisation. The Greeks would have a field day banning Turkish\N.Cypriot news websites. The French might have a go at banning some Corsican news/blog sites, similar in Spain\Catalunia. Jeez – there are probably just cause for banning the Guardian since it’s advocated the Treasonous overthrow of the Monarchy with a Republic… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason_Felony_Act_1848.

Meanwhile, Mr Terrist will continue to use photocopiers,DVD burners and bookstores etc to spread their wares. The more tech savvy might even keep playing with their steganographic communications.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography#Rumored_usage_in_terrorism

[correction]"technically ignorant voters", whilst technically correct, might better be written as "technologically ignorant voters" which has the virtue also of being technically accurate[/correction].

Otherwise - this is by far the scariest thing I've read today.

So - BT, TalkTalk, Tiscali and their peers are going to save the country? I suppose at least some of them can suppress the information - or make it so slow to get at that any uncommitted terrorist would give up and resort to an A-level Chemistry book from the 1970s or older.

Ah, it's the old BBS witch hunt all over again.

There are 853 days left (max) until we can get rid of these cretins for a few years. Please everyone, vote for a real nutter next time.

Sure, that will work, given HMG's stellar record with computer projects.

The nicely planted item on C4 News last night just seemed to show a couple of YouTube hosted videos by a rap outfit as much influenced by Radical Dance Faction as the mujahadeen. When will governments learn that you can't stop people communicating if they want to, and more to the point, if you do, aren't you making yourself the same as those people that you're trying to stop? While they're at it, why not investigate the activities of the far right in this country, who are far more of a threat to any 'Islamic terrorists' as it's getting increasingly likely that there will be a couple of their odious representatives on the back benches come the next election.

We've had a fair few folk devils paraded this week. Paedophiles are bad, but never mind that we've lost a couple, we'll clamp down on their activities. The trafficking of eastern European women into prostitution is bad, so we'll criminalise the purchase of sex, which will definitely stop an illegal practise that the police can't seem to do anything about, primarily because no-one knows how many immigrants there are in this country, eastern European or not, illegal or legal, kidnapped or here of their own accord. And now the Interwebs are being used to distribute things that we don't agree with and indeed Threaten The British Way of Life, so Something Must Be Done. To quote a certain Doctor, don't you think they look tired?

Jaqui Smith is the vat-grown bastard love-child of King Cnut and The Little Dutch Boy.

What f***wit appointed *her* Home Secretary? Wasn't Miss Piggy available?

Let us sing our national anthem.... "Oceania 'tis for thee.."

""Where there is illegal material on the net, I want it removed" - what a great statement - that's just a joke right? We can't event control dodgy toys on market stalls - how they heck are we supposed to prevent any illegal material coming into the country on the net?"

<legal>

Quite simple actually. Just require that illegal material have a /illegal tag, and prosecute when the tag is missing.

</legal>

The government's contorl of on-line content is complete with MP's profanities being removed from the on-line version of Hansard.

"Mr John Baron (Billericay) (Con): “ ... life-threatening shortages of kit” from which he claims troops fighting abroad suffer, including “electronic equipment to detect roadside bombs” -

Minister for the Armed Forces (Bob Ainsworth): Absolute bollocks.

Mr Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con): Is that a parliamentary expression?

Mr John Baron (Billericay) (Con): I shall move on... "

On-line reads:

"Mr John Baron (Billericay) (Con): “ ... life-threatening shortages of kit” from which he claims troops fighting abroad suffer, including “electronic equipment to detect roadside bombs” -

Mr John Baron (Billericay) (Con): I shall move on... "

If we're going to have a bunch of xenophobic authoritarian morons in charge we might as well have the ones with the honesty to admit it.

Right?

Yes, the one with the swastika armband please...

so my suggestion for the name for the forthcoming national firewall is "the White e-Cliffs", which has a nicely national-jingoistic ring to it. Make the bad man stop, mummy!

> frickin laser beams

A sentence guaranteed to make me laugh out loud!

Somebody set us up the (dirty) bomb!

Government can not stop simple data breaches, so thinks that it can control the internet.

Why do I have picture of donkey in my head?

You bleedingly stupid git. Oh, sorry, sorry, I meant to say...

You have precisely zero chance of preventing people from accessing data over the Internet as long as the Internet exists. Since the UK does not have the armed capability of destroyed every single Internet server on the planet, you are screwed.

Satellite Internet access will continue to exist even if you manage to isolate the UK from the rest of the world's wired communications.

Why don't you just check in o the nearest Home for the Hopelessly Bewildered and save the taxpayers a few pounds, there's a good lass.

Incidentally, the same argument applies to the R.I. Ass. of America, and the BPI.

Remember this is the government that transfers data by CD in the pannier of a courier motorbike - then loses the bloody stuff!!!

"...it isn't hard to use relays such as Tor to effectively browse from a point overseas....

No machinery under the UK government's control needs to see anything other than a stream of encrypted traffic in order for a user located in Britain to merrily enter hardcore terrorist chatrooms, download bomb-making instructions, coordinate operations and all the rest."

Not necessarily, according to Steve Topletz (of Torpark/Xerobank) on the Wilders Security forum. ( http://tinyurl.com/yo2dhq )

Originally Posted by caspian:

"I don't understand how they could tell who someone is or where they live by analyzing traffic coming from Tor. If tor does not even know your IP address at the exit point, how could analyzing traffic do so?"

Steve's answer:

"Because the ISP can see *who* your computer is talking to, and intelligence agencies have the internet tapped. They can see you visit website x, talking through tor node 3, talking through tor node 2, talking through tor node 1, talking to your computer. They can see who is talking to whom, and depending on your computer sending requests that get relaying through the network, they can follow the string right back to you because they are capable of observing the whole internet."

Originally Posted by caspian:

"I thought the XeroBank browser and the Vidalia bundle with privoxy prevented the ISP from knowing what websites you visit. I know that they can see that you connect to a Tor server, but I thought that it was impossible to see where it leaves Tor and where it goes from there."

Steve:

"It prevents your ISP from knowing what website YOU visit, but they know you are talking to Tor node 1. Tor node 1's ISP knows he is talking to Tor node 2 and so on. If all ISPs collude, or simply an intelligence agency can monitor all the ISPs, they can perform traffic analysis."

Originally Posted by caspian:

"Wow. I did not know that this was possible. But is this some kind of far fetched scenario that would be used under extreme circumstances......like for terrorists or something? It seems awfully involved and complicated a technique to employ just for some minor legal violoation, like downling music. I mean there are all kinds of internet scams that no one seems to be able to track or resolve. Identity theft seems to be rampant and I have NEVER heard of any of these thieves being tracked this way. Could traffic analysis be done with XeroBank? And if so, who would be capable of this and for what reasons would they go to such trouble?"

Steve:

"Powerful governments (US/UK/China) have this ability, as do super telecoms such as UUNet, QWEST and AT&T. This can be done with pretty much any low-latency anonymity network. This is why I say there is a tipping point, those who are less than a superpower don't have the capability, those who are don't need to bust your encryption to bust your identity and traffic."

Quite why they think the internet is to blame when it is THEIR OWN ACTIONS that has caused offence to muslims.

The making of bombs has been the main point of interest in anyone studying chemistry at GCSE level. Oh, and the making of smells too.

As an example, guns are used to commit crimes, so, lets ban all guns and then we wont have gun crime. It is sad for those who like shooting as a sport, but it is a small price for them to pay so we can walk the streets safely. Did gun crime cease to exist? No. Why not? Because the criminals got their guns illegally and they just don't give a toss for the law. Lock them up! Well, if only we could catch one, we might.

A point here, most criminals are happily shooting each other in turf wars. It is rare for a member of the public to be shot.

A bit more freedom taken away, with an ever so good excuse, to stop terrorism. It would be easier to stop terrorism if you stopped bombing their countries. We had the IRA doing serious damage for 35 years, well several hundred really. Now, we have to go around like some frightened rabbit because of some Saudi looney living in a cave in Afghanifuckinstan.

Give it a rest.

I am more scared of Harriet Harman.

" Now here's the strange thing, we have an invisible member! Don't believe me, check the group out, there's always <visible members>+1 in the number of members list.

Who is this invisible member, I didn't even know you could do that with facebook, is this monitoring?"

It would be pretty crap monitoring if it gave the game away so blatantly, wouldn't it!

No, it's just someone who's got his privacy settings turned up, or has blocked you.

Re: Tor

"If all ISPs collude, or simply an intelligence agency can monitor all the ISPs"

That's still one hell of a big "if". I reckon if a tor tunnel goes through a few different countries, the chances of the necessary collaboration being agreed between them has to be tiny. If you're really concerned, make sure your tunnel goes in and out of China... I don't think the CIA will have much access to anything going on the other side of the great firewall.