Amazing
she didn't claim to be protecting children!??!!?
Home Secretary Theresa May was in combative mode during a hearing with politicians on Monday afternoon as the government's rushed through data retention and investigation powers bill (Drip) was briefly scrutinised. May, pressed by Liberal Democrat MP Julian Huppert as to why the Tory-led coalition had insisted late last week …
she can say all she wants and we can do fuck all to make her explain herself, and then (mad laughter) make them stop because hey, we-the-sheep-are-not-quite-comfy-with-this-ideeeaaaaaa
And Ms May knows perfectly well she's not accountable other than to the "honorable gentleman", whom she told to go forth and fornicate in her usual, ultra-polite fashion.
Matt is actually Project Underpass ("Change outcome of online polls") as revealed in the today's revelations, unfortunately it doesn't quite work right and instead of upvoting other comments which coincide with the government's position to try and change public opinion, it downvotes its own Eliza-style comments by a non-nominal random number.
The EU says the data retention is overly broad and breaches human rights, so the law is invalid...
So what are you going to do? Make another piece of law that does exactly the aame thing that has just been declared illegal? Yeah, because that will work...
Well, it will work for another couple of years, until it is heard by the ECHR and invalidated again, whereupon the circus will start again.
Please remember that EU legislation, although providing a template for national laws, is not directly enforceable in the member countries. This is because we are not the United States of Europe, at least not yet, not until Jean-Claude Juncker starts pressing for closer European ties.
A directive is passed in the EU parliament, and then that directive has to be enacted by each country's parliament in their own national legislation, which then becomes law in those countries.
The converse is true. If an EU directive is overturned, then that does not automatically mean that the national legislation is also overturned. In the UK, this requires a modification of the national legislation, which means action in the UK parliament.
Between the EU directive being deemed invalid, and the corresponding changes in a country's national laws, the government of that country can be taken to one of the European courts for not complying with EU law, but that is unlikely to happen in the short-term, because there is a reasonable amount of time allowed for national laws to reflect changes in EU directives. What is reasonable is open to debate, but can be several years.
So what this means is that the existing UK legislation was still effective, and would be until amended, something that could have waited until the next term. This latest knee-jerk reaction was not required, so there really must be something hiding in there that Mrs May did not want examined too closely!
What does "ripping the government's current regulations to shreds" mean, that the British police or judicial system would have to put together a case and present it to another country's judicial system? I'm not sure how serving a warrant to a foreign company at a British address would fix that unless they want to tick some box saying that the warrant has indeed been served and they can go onto the next step.
Seems to smack of having the data already and building up some case (any case) in the traditional legal system which points to the data which has already been collected, as US government departments have done.
It doesn't matter anyway as although the taps were/are illegal there won't be any court cases as a result, partly because they'll be too much leaning on the relevant companies from other governments keen to join in and partly because the "national security" joker would be played preventing any evidence being admitted.
However, it is foolish in the extreme to change the law before a new EU directive has been crafted.
"However, it is foolish in the extreme to change the law before a new EU directive has been crafted."
Why? Haven't you noticed a trend for the UK, where we get all the crap EU legislation (eg the latest "Balkan" slaughterhouse standards), but as soon as the EU might do anything that might benefit the hoi polloi, Brave Dave leaps into action to block it?
What does "ripping the government's current regulations to shreds" mean,
Moving to AES256 on all server to server connections which in the absense of heartblead (or using gnutls negotiated keys) is proving to be a bit tedious to crack brute force for _ALL_ communications.
Up to 6 months ago the boys from Glostershire could snoop on anything and everything traveling in Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc internally by tapping into the correct dark fiber. While this tap is not useless today (you can still apply brute force if you know where to look), it is proving not as useful as it used to be (when everything is encrypted and you no longer have the exploits to give you the keys you can no longer read everything).
This is one of the problems with total information awareness. It is like absolute power - corrupts absolutely. If someone suddenly turns the lights off you panic.
So all we need to know is who turned on internal datacenter-to-datacenter encryption this month. Google already had it, Yahoo already had it, Microsoft already had it. This leaves the odd man out (who also does not speak about the encryption of its internal comms) - Amazon. It is also a particularly interesting object for "information awareness" freaks as it yields economical espionage (on all those corps using public cloud) as well as espionage against the conventional set of targets already on the hit list - Greenpeace, rights groups, Liberty - you name it. They are all Amazon users.
There's not much point tapping dark fiber. Dark fiber is fiber laid in excess to requirements for future use. If you're digging up roads to bury two strands, you may as well bury twenty - it won't cost significantly more, and you might need it or be able to rent it to someone else in future.
said he was baffled by the government's insistence that there is an emergency requirement to bring in new legislation before MPs break for the summer
Could be they are expecting a few Iraqi Fried Chicken coming home to roost. Could also be another risk of "economic uheavals" in heat of august.
Even assuming that what she said is true, given that those powers they're trying to maintain were just declared illegal, shouldn't May and Cameron be getting arrested about now? Or at least getting various enormous books thrown at them for contempt?
> Isn't she that tasty violinist?
As it turns out, she can't even fiddle an Olympic Qualifier.
"She declined to comment on whether the new law would allow spooks to widen Britain's surveillance net and apply it to non-US undersea cable companies."
Sigh - I know they don't like admitting stuff - but I think it's pretty well known by pretty much everyone - that declining to comment - is basically saying "yes, you are right". I'm surprised though - that it stops short of US undersea cable companies - because you can bet NSA is monitoring everything UK citizens do - whether they admit it or not.....