Party Vibe

the data is already stored by many ISPs and telephone companies for their internal purposes such as managing traffic at busy times, or can be. the functionality gets built into telephone exchanges etc by companies like Ericsson, Alcatel, Siemens etc however the log files take up room and get deleted every so often and can’t (for obvious reasons) be accessed by every engineer. Many foreign countries already use this data to keep track of their citizens.

It wasn’t that long ago the Post Office was in control of every form of communications and they intercepted and monitored whatever they wanted. There is no way any govt in the world will give up this control, especially when the Internet was designed by universities, governments and big companies to communicate and only begrudgingly allowed to the public.

the govt themselves don’t trust electronic communications for stuff they want to keep secret.

@process 402900 wrote:

good comment on that page..

“1984 anyone? Others are right that the criminals will go into cipherspace. I’d imagine the general public will start using it more and more. I2P, Tor, Freenet and all of the anonymous VPN’s are very easy to set up and will make it impossible for the government to look at any communication. So really they are going to have to wade through more encrypted communications from the general public to find any trace of “criminals”.

In the UK its a criminal offence to not hand over a decryption password when requested to do so by the cops.

The people involved with commercial companies funding the VPNs, and other such things will be scrutinised themselves for links to crime/terrorism (even more than they would normally) and if any are found they will be hung out to dry.

Tor is indirectly funded by and used by the Pentagon and money gives power.

Also the security services aren’t so daft as to even think they can go through all the data they see, encrypted or not.

They still get the bulk targets from normal human based intelligence gathering – i.e the citizen who complains about someone else doing something they disagree with, or the backlash caused by the end actions of the targets themselves, be they selling drugs, distributing illegal content, or blowing themselves up on trains.

A lot of communications is lightly encrypted anyway (such as the GSM mobile voice signals) but there are always ways of getting at it from the point it starts off in clear.

in theory yes but a lot of people who use cryptography don’t understand the implications and/or store passwords in an insecure manner. Encrypted data also becomes bloated and often has headers which hint that its encrypted (not unlike a person wearing a balaclava in the high street)

@Iacchus 402907 wrote:

The more authorities attempt to control the exchange of worldwide information the more they are going to fuck themselves over.

that might be the case with raw data but there is little point in communication, or even surveillance for its sake alone. the most effective surveillance is on a known target who is being watched due to the real or suspected end result of their actions – be that a shipment of drugs being delivered, a political protest/meeting, an act of warfare or terrorism.

Even the oppressive regimes of today and yesteryear don’t control all the information exchange – but they still use a variety of methods to stay in power. A lot of authorities these days only use surveillance as a secondary control method – increasingly they let the communications go through unhindered then deal with the consequences of its action by traditional methods – including simple and effective brute force.