Das überdatabase: Inside Wacky Jacqui's motherbrain

Sign the petition

There is currently a petition against the new bill:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/no-to-1984/

If more people sign, maybe the powers that be will take note. It's worth a try! Stand up for your democratic rights! Fight INGSOC! Down with Big Brother!

Old fashioned methods

When all electronic communication becomes monitored, guess what method of communication the never-do-wells will use. Hint, it's not electronic.

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Good all fashioned snail mail. Pretty untraceable, no backups, and you can tell if it's been opened in transit.

Well...

Good to see the .gov wasting more money while everyone who cares about privacy switches their connection to encrypted VPNs located in free countries.

Where's King Arthur?

Wasn't he supposed to come back when his country really needed him. I'm thinking any time now would be good. Phorm spying, terrorist propaganda, using chldren to pass stupid unnecessary laws, I'm seriously beginning to miss the good old days when Thatcher ruled Brittania.

QUICK MI5! I've Spotted a Terrorist cell

They're in London, They're plotting to overthrow democracy.

The Address?

10 Downing Street.

Qucik send over a squad to give them a Brazilian!

Jacqui Jill went up the hill to get a pail of disinformation.

Sorry, couldn't resist it.

Now, if you were GCHQ and you had just really cracked the problem of monitoring all the VoIP traffic would you send up a cheer, let Jacqui know and have a party. I would have a bit of an off the record moan to The Times about how difficult it all is and how we are loosing. Then I would get Jacqui all fired up about a huge database that will never be financed before she gets the boot* as an MP, and how we need it to overcome our VoIP problem. Spreading this sort of disinformation should set the terrorists of using VoIP for all their calls home to Osama and we listen to the lot.

*Not to difficult for us to arrange!

What passes for education these days?

I do genuinely wonder if she's heard of the Stasi, East Germany, and repressive regimes in other countries.

you've totally missed her whole performance

The old goat already HAS your data. Now she's just trying to get permission to legally KEEP it.

Kind of like AT&T sucking dubya's ass in the states. Oh yeah, we're going to just hoover up every bit of data coming over the lines....internal, external, international.

Do you honestly think she hasn't already stepped; nay, skipped, over that line a long time ago and is only now playing the "we've just GOT to do it to protect (the children, the government, the people, the red electric-line-chewing squirrels)...

Sorry, I don't believe her or her plans any more than I believe anything that comes out of any politico's mouth. When do politicians lie...when their lips move.

Old fashioned methods

@Jon Axtell: "Good all fashioned snail mail. Pretty untraceable, no backups, and you can tell if it's been opened in transit."

<laughs> Oh, I just love the innocents.

Back in 1998 (yep, that's *10 years ago*, folks) I was doing some post-grad studies at U of Q and one of the assignment topics I had to do a presentation on was "computer security". So I did the usual: showed how to break into the Uni's computerised records (hole was fixed soon after, and I kept the method hidden from the audience) compared the normal shared-key encryption with this new-fangled (for the class) public-key encryption, showed journal extracts talking about surveillance systems the US military admitted they had, such as retinal scanners which read the reflection pattern of your screen off your retina, using the subjects REM to read the entire screen (hint: if the military admits to a range of 1Km, you can bet this is a *minimum* range) (BTW, Echelon *does* - or did - exist. No, it's not in Area 51 and its capabilities were blown out of proportion by the relevant outraged citizens. Still, it was impressive for the time), etc...

*THEN* I went on to the "and for those of you who thought snail-mail was the answer" - I pulled out adverts from several US "law enforcement" magazines (*really* scary... the US has magazines for just about *anything* you'd care to name... I'm not sure about "left-handed Nordic historical crochet techniques", but it can't be too far). Anyway, I digress: one of these ads was for a nifty little spray-on chemical that would turn the outside envelope/brown-paper-wrapping of a snail-mail item virtually transparent for up to 15 minutes, evaporate and return the item to normal and be virtually undetectable unless you had your own chemical-analysis lab and could get to the envelope within 2 days. Scary. (oh, and only available to "US law -enforcement agencies", of course. Yeah, right)

This was the state of play 10 years ago, based on a post-grad student's 2 months of research of published papers and relevant magazine advertising. I assume things have gotten a little more sophisticated since then.

@ Easy way round this

"It would even be worth giving half a billion to Jaqui Smiff and telling her to fuck off."

A better and cheaper alternative would be a lead ear ring applied with a .357. Much more satisfying for the rest of us as well.

They're at it again today!!

"Link between child porn and Muslim terrorists discovered in police raids

Paedophile websites are being used to pass information between terrorists"

Today's Times -

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article4959002.ece

So my comment earlier about steg pictures - they're rolling it out today.

Want to lay bets that tomorrow's shocker is about "network security audit tools used by Terrrists" - and a call to execute anyone who even thinks about downloading a packet sniffer.

X-ray glasses, as it appears mine have been upgraded with "see into the future" functionality

12Bn

Its alright i hear on the news today that the goverment is going to pay for this by turfing out all the people with North Rock mortgages and converting there houses into silos.

on a brighter note old wacky jacky can't get anymore wacky well unless they introduce ID cards that you have to use every where you go so the goverment can track you at all times? and with this they'll even know what your saying.

@Gavin Masters

"a terrorist (or worse, a marketing bod) on a train could suddenly pick up a hard-disk telling him how much KY-Jelly I bought last month, along with the rest of the country.

Besides, I'm just going to start using yoghurt"

Messy.

@Xander

By Xander Posted Thursday 16th October 2008 14:56 GMT

Unhappy

I remember when this was *the* conspiracy theory. Echelon I believe was the common parlance. A massive system, built under Area 51 which harvested all communication within the US and looked for keywords.

This is no conspiracy theory - it has existed for decades. And it's global, mostly funded by the US NSA, but participants include the usual suspects - USA, UK, Canada, OZ, NZ. Some other European countries joined in too, although, typically, France have their own system.

They cover most transmission types, like fibre optics, satellite, phone etc. It's well documented, read anything by James Bamford and you'll get the (disturbing) picture.

Police State

Over on the uk.gov eForum:

http://www.westminsterforumprojects.co.uk/eforum/diary.aspx

We see they are having a jolly meeting in January 2009 titled:

"Taming the Wild Web? - Internet Regulation & ISP Responsibility"

Up for discussion is:

"This seminar will ask whether the UK needs its own ‘Great Firewall of China’: should the UK begin to filter the internet to protect citizens from possible harm."

I'm sure all this will never be abused, not like in Russia where a dissenting blogger was "accidentally" shot in the head while under arrest in a police car:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/01/anti_kremlin_critic_death_probe/

So the analogy would be...

Everyone in Britain needs to give the police a set of house keys so that they can enter and have a good old look around any time they like without a warrant. They promise never to come around unless they have a good reason to believe you are a 'terrorist' - whatever that means these days.

Today the police (and just about any other govenrnment agency today) can get a warrant based on reasonable suspicion, and have access to your ISP, mobile phone, banking and any other records they like.

As Jacqui (henceforth know as "The Sow" ) pointed out, this happens in 95% of criminal convictions. So given that there are going to be no 'fishing trips' and that the authorities already have access to your information , why would we need this database?

The only posible reason IS fishing trips. The irony is that the only people who have anything to fear are ordianry people.

Serious terrorists (and I'm not talking about a retard with a flaming Jeep Cherokee) have absolutely nothing to fear.

Tackle out gentelmen

Westminster eForum

Does anyone have any idea how much influence these jokers have? Is it worth spending ca. £200 to have your say?

Then again, what the fuck are people doing charging for admittance to this kind of "policy forum"? government for sale? Surely not!

Ways of avoiding & subverting the database?

So, how can we corrupt the data so that the database is unusable? What technologies can we employ to avoid detection? This is something that us geeks are in the ideal position to counter.

A few thousand people running webspiders that trawl through search results for 'jihad' 'bomb' etc should create enough false positives that any data mining becomes a lot more difficult.

Widespread use of encryption and offshore proxies?

If this crazy database that we cant afford goes through, I will do my best to fuck it up.

If I don't post on El Reg again, you know that i'm hooded and shackled in some government torture chamber.

On Skype and TOR

"...the threat posed by Skype and other VoIP applications to counter-terror operations." Threat? Really? I would have thought that Skype was an absolute gift to counter-terror ops. On a land line you need a physical tap in place to monitor a call. Not so with Skype, where simple ARP poisoning is enough.

TOR is not the answer to our security prayers. This law would give the government the budget they need to monitor packets going in to and out of TOR nodes on a large scale. Then it's simply a case of matching the packets going in to packets going out, as was proved recently. There are also concerns over packet modification techniques: http://www.packetstormsecurity.org/0610-advisories/Practical_Onion_Hacking.pdf

In truth, the only true defence in these days of SIGINT madness is a good sturdy tinfoil hat. That and not doing anything worth knowing about...

Jacqui does it again

someone give that bitch a spliff!

paris cause like Jacqui she sucks and blows

Plans, Trains and Automobiles

I wonder which form of public transportation a "back up" of the database can be found it

A suggestion from a few years ago ..

If terrorists wanted to stop the US knowing what they were up to, all they had to do was fax each other in handwritten Arabic. Lots of it. It turned out the CIA had a 2-week backlog on translation (which had to be done by hand) because there were so few *security-cleared* interpreters.

To be honest , most UK crims could adapt the same idea, as the standard of English has fallen so far in the past 30 years, that anyone who communicated in Shakespearean english would slow MI5 down to a dead stop ....

Nice hat!

(Currently illustrated by a witch's hat on the front page). Pretty appropriate as Jacqui Smith seems to be using Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter books as a role model. I think one of the biggest problems is that Home Office policy is based on populist authoritarianism rather than anything to do with being right or left wing. It's like the politicians' logic scene in Yes Minister, where Sir Humphrey explains that politicians feel that something must be done. This is something, therefore they must do it.

While it may be possible to have massive databases collecting all kinds of stuff, being able to get anything meaningful out of them is a lot harder. It's the old problem that you don't find a needle by building a bigger haystack. There's also the problem of mistakes, including getting profiled because you dial a wrong number that happens to be on some watchlist (or what happens if a spammer sends out forged emails), and things like records not being updated when someone moves house. As mentioned on Mock the Week, if the Home Office says that 5% of the records are wrong then the true figure is probably more like 2 out of 3.

Vacancy - Database & System Programmers - GCHQ - UK

Contract: Long Term (Up to 15 years)

Salary: £120,000 PA + Benefits + Council House

Location: GCHQ, UK

We are currently looking to recruit technians and engineers for our unified database and in particular welcome applicants from ethnic backgrounds to help with the UK's biggest security system. You will require experience with MS Office, especially Excel & Access with vast experience of being able to transfer data to USB Memory Stick and CD.

We offer an attractive salary, 5 prayer breaks a day, halal dinners in our exclusive resturant and provide free email and phone facilities to phone home. We can provide a relocation package for properties up to 7 bedrooms if required.

Easier way to avoid detection

If the terrorists have ever read about the Second World War or an Andy McNab novel, they'll just use "clearspeech". The contents of their missives will sound perfectly innocuous - "Shall we come round to a roast at your Aunt's on Saturday?", whereas what they've agreed beforehand is that what they really mean is "Shall we hijack a tanker and drive it into Heathrow T5 on Saturday?"

Hang on - I've just given the terrorists an idea. See you later, my next post will be from 1* accomodation in Cuba...

Competition time!

a) When will someone feel the need to download the data from this database onto DVD-RW?

b) When will they "lose" this disc?

c) What excuse will they use to avoid having to phone the DWP and claim JSA?

Blow me up.

Seeing the only politicians with any common sense were the Guy Fawkes clique and they were done for terrorism... there isn't an alternative opposition, outside of Arabia, with any power to defeat such scurrilous government.

Seems to me that Bin Laden had a valid point. No wonder they never put anyone on trial out of all the prisoners kept in GITMO.

@ mittfh

As long as it's a DVD-minus-RW, it won't be a problem; as the data will be completely unrecoverable in any drive, not even the one that was used to write it.

Now, if it was a DVD+plus+RW, there might be cause to worry .....

@steve

"The bit about Area 51 is just them trying to sound glamourous and it probably wasn't *all* communications. However, we do have an American listening base at RAF Menwith Hill in Yorkshire. So you're probably looking for an old airbase somewhere in the mid-west with very few actual planes and an unusually high proportion of Oxbridge educated Brits.

We can't spy on our own people, but you can spy on ours and we can spy on yours and then swap data."

Or, this being America we are dealing with, they can spy on us and we can't spy on them.

Lies, damned lies, ....

"95 per cent of serious crimes since 2004, the Home Secretary said yesterday"

This is so wrong... If the evidence is already available in 95% of serious crimes, why do we need this new law?

And what's the definition of serious crimes? ABH and worse? GBH and worse? Mugging? Rape? None of which lend themselves to solution by communication intercept [ Except in the case of yoofs who feel the need to brag about their exploits on myspace etc.]

Mine's the one with the tinfoil hat.

DIY related accidents

As accidents in the home involving DIY have accounted for more deaths in the past three years than terrorism, when is the government going to put in place a widespread programme of civil-liberty infringement in the name of combatting this menace? I demand the banning of all screwdrivers, and the immediate internment without trial of anyone who has ever been to B&Q.

Incidentally, I was going to sign that petition, but I found on the site that : "You must be a British citizen or resident to sign the petition". Being a Subject rather than a Citizen, I find that I am neither, and therefore ineligible to sign. Shame.

New Icon Required

...Can we have a Wacky Jacky Icon please..

Whats in the fucking water....

down at the home office?

It seems that since Jack Straw left someones been putting nazi pills in the water down there. Maybe we should just close the home office and create something new.

Motives

I've just thought of a couple of other reasons for the pork barrel spending - control of the population, and knowing to what extent they can shut down all forms of modern day communication.

Not sure about that second one though, surely they just need to cut all the telephone lines and knock down the mobile/cell towers and that would be that. Cheaper than monitoring all the traffic too.

So I'll make a tin foil conspiracy out of the first one.

If you know what people think then you can target propaganda at them and get them to spread around stock phrases from your propaganda. It can be repeated by the proles to each other, like a viral campaign.

We've already got proles watching FACT propaganda and saying things like 'copying is theft' ad infinitum whilst paying dogy looking people a fiver for some dvd's in the street, or downloading music.

You see? It works folks; we've had posters on here spouting that same stuff.

Next:

War is peace

Freedom is slavery

Ingorance is strength

@Jimmy

re idea nobody else has a database/interception programme like this; wrong.

Sweden has it, the USA is implementing it, France has been working on it, Australia is implementing something like it, China has it, the UK is mirroring the USA.

Please Remember the 5th of November....

There has been much talk. Some of it about mr Fawkes.

Perhaps it's time to act?

http://bastardoldholborn.blogspot.com/2008/07/old-holborn-is-going-for-walk.html

come with us for a perfectly legal walk......

Mines the one with the distinctive mask in the pocket.

die zauberflöte

I hope that Jacqui Smith's guts fall out.

And for good measure:

PLASTIC EXPLOSIVE, ALLAHU AKBAR, CRACK COCAINE, THE WORLDWIDE JUDEO-CHRISTIAN MASONIC CONSPIRACY, BDSM, CHEESE SANDWICHES.

Stick that in your silo and smoke it.