If we can’t stop this, it’s beginning of the end for the net in Britain
That’s what Cory Doctorow suggests when reporting the news that Mandelson is seeking to use a back door to grant himself powers that grant him yet more powers to do just about anything in the interest of protecting Copyright.
It’s terrifying stuff that, if he’s successful, will cripple Britain’s technological progress. I use a programme called, “Drop Box” and it allows me to transfer files from my MacBook to my PC using the Internet. I don’t want such files to be publicly available because they’re my own personal private files. But Mandelson wants these services to disable privacy modes so that Movie Studios can check I’m not stealing from them. Forcing us to make the contents of our online storage public is just one of the powers Mandelson wants to gift himself, unchallenged. In addition to other powers he could have if he gets his way is the ability to demand ISPs turn over their records and of course the infamous threat to ban households from the internet if they’re suspected of copyright infringement.
It’s all in the name of Copyright theft – otherwise known as ‘Mandelson’s extremely rich friends’. It’s crony capitalism, favouritism and economic and social planning all rolled into one horrible, toxic bomb.
Whether or not Mandelson could actually succeed in wiping out Copyright theft on the internet is academic (he can’t, as it happens, no matter what he tries). What he can do is condemn Britain to a sort of internet dark age where technology is held back if it’s a threat to the vested interests Mandelson represents.
He wants access to these powers without debate or scrutiny, and that he wants to be able to wield the powers without debate or scrutiny. He MUST be stopped, This MUST not be allowed. Your Twitter Hashtag to go mental on is #webwar. I will (hopefully) have a piece on CiF tomorrow morning about this too.
The Guardian covers the story from the point of view of what the Tories could do with these same powers. If that’s what it takes to stop it, that’s fine – but in and of itself – what he’s already planning to do with it – are more than bad enough to be utterly terrifying.
Shaun Pilkington said...
19 Nov 09 at 7:07 pm
HMG is running at a £170bn annual loss, which, without the taxpayer as debtor of last resort, would make the UK bankrupt. Google, however, is estimated to be worth more than $105 billion. But in the black, as it were.
Who doesn’t want to see these mismatched titans have a spat for an aged media mogul? Wealth, successful and IP-entrepeneurial on the one hand and poor, ramshackle and wedded to industrial dinosaurs on the other – should be an enterertaining spat. For about ten minutes.
Niklas Smith said...
19 Nov 09 at 7:08 pm
Ending the privacy of online storage is just mad. At this rate people will have to encrypt all their files.
Charlotte Gore said...
19 Nov 09 at 7:47 pm
The problem really is that the true effects of banning certain types of services and facilities – not to mention the simple act of banning whole households from the internet – is mostly unpredictable but certainly not *good*.
One power they’ve been after for ages is the ability to get any data they want from whomever they want. It looks like Mandelson’s new powers would allow him to achieve this end, in the interest of ‘copyright protection’ – after all, to do this sort of thing properly he needs to be able to go through the people’s internet records. He will be able to compel the ISPs to hand it over.
It is terrifying how ignorant the Labour party is about this. Perhaps they just can’t stand their complete lack of control over it.
Roger Thornhill said...
19 Nov 09 at 7:48 pm
I believe they can already raddish you for withholding keys to encrypted files.
Forgot them? no excuse in their rancid book.
i’d rather we insert dummy mp4 files that are the right size and name of a blockbuster but is just eg 2hrs 43mins broken down into 5 sec chunks of individuals telling the snoopers where they can shove it.
Will make ‘Lockstock the F’ing short version” look like an episode of Mary, Mungo and Midge.
TheBigYin said...
19 Nov 09 at 8:04 pm
I have shared your page on the Freedom2Choose Facebook and Twitter sites. This is outragous and Mandy must be stopped once and forever.
Paul Lockett said...
19 Nov 09 at 8:08 pm
All he’ll achieve is a demonstration of his own impotence.
There will be no shortage of service providers in other countries prepared to offer private storage and an increased number of people wanting to use them in order to fight back.
Charlotte Gore said...
19 Nov 09 at 8:13 pm
Well the big fear is they start to block services that don’t comply…
Paul Lockett said...
19 Nov 09 at 8:35 pm
They could try, but new ones would keep appearing and even if the block was successful, people would just use proxies or Tor. If an overtly totalitarian state like China can’t succeed in fencing off the internet, I give this bunch of idiots, who have to maintain some impression that they’re operating in a free society, zero chance.
In the long run, he’d succeed in irritating the average user and generating a lot of ill will while achieving absolutely nothing.
James Schneider said...
19 Nov 09 at 9:31 pm
I agree with Paul Lockett, they can try but they do not have universal control. So there’s little to fear. An annoyance, yes. But we’ll be safe from this nasty little law.
The Law, and at some point after that Governments, are going to have to come to terms with a changed nature of property ownership on the internet. You can’t put a fence around it. You can’t beat up people who step on it. A new conception of ownership, rights, and property is required.
Nannyknowsbest said...
19 Nov 09 at 10:04 pm
Oh goody!! So Mandy is now trying to outreach himself.
Firstly
Because of wireless internet, IP addresses are somewhat facile when trying to “trap” Internet “criminals” – as one can simply wander around until they find an insecure network and download off that. One assumes that Mandy’s storm troopers would then march in and arrest the innocent householders for “piracy”.
Secondly
Instead of saving essential files using on-line storage, many people sould simply revert to saving them locally (on a removable drive or similar) – depriving ISPs of much needed revenue – a fact that they will most certainly not be happy about.
Thirdly
With the sheer amount of Internet traffic these days (I did actually work this out once), to be able to actually monitor such traffic would take the efforts of every man woman and child in the country, all working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. Then, we would require all the people in France to actually analyse the collected data. If you add email traffic to that, then we would need the help of most of the population of China.
I could go on but, in short, the man is a complete, ignorant fool, who has no grip on reality. This is clearly demonstrated by his wish to “control” such data. In his world (as in the films he has probably watched), one simply presses a button and anything he wants appears on his screen in a millisecond. If one imagines (if the technology even existed) a database capable of storing 2 million emails a second and being able to search the text content of the same and returning a result (well probably several million results a minute) and, somehow, this “appears” on his screen (as it does in the films) – he would be lucky to find his “target” inside week – by which time, he has probably left England and is sending emails outside someone’s house in Bulgaria.
The sheer storage, indexing and search facilities for this idiot to achieve whet he thinks he already can, will probably not exist in his lifetime – if ever.
As the Internet itself was actually developed on a model from the US military and it’s brief being that “communications could continue, even with major parts of the communication system being destroyed” (in other words, a communication path will always be found if it physically exists, this could go some way to explaining why even China cannot shut it down.
Then, naturally, for those who choose the comfort of their own homes to “surf” from, there are plenty of software programs to hide the actual location of the computer can be more or less anywhere on the planet that the user wishes it to be. I am currently 20 miles North of the nearest road on a moor in Yorkshire connected to a phone line in Germany. Tomorrow, I will be some 1000 miles off the coast of Ireland, connected to a phone line in South America.
Good luck Mandy – you are a pathetic, ignorant, deluded and criminal idiot.
When it’s all comes to the “crunch”, send me a visiting order – I love to gloat</b?
sconzey said...
19 Nov 09 at 10:46 pm
You say: “Unjust Bansturbantion!”
I say: “Business Opportunity!”
Black market internet: a permanently secured net neutrality, an entire generation comfortable users of counter-economics
Tristan said...
19 Nov 09 at 11:08 pm
Also see Obama’s support for ACTA (although its a all secret – National Security apparently – corporate America is the only America that matters apparently), which will have similar effects for all signatories.
The human cost of this will also be huge – already people are being put through hell after being falsely accused of file sharing. Many just pay the hundreds of pounds demanded by the lawyers just to make it all go away…
Philip Hunt said...
19 Nov 09 at 11:33 pm
If you don’t like this misguided and illiberal proposal I suggest you join Tom Watson’s facebook group against it.
You can also:
Join the Pirate Party’s facebook group
TalkTalk’s Don’t Disconnect Us campaign has a facebook group and a petition you can sign.
Join the Pirate Party and the Open Rights Group
aron said...
20 Nov 09 at 12:49 pm
“With the sheer amount of Internet traffic these days……..”
Your missing the point, it’s not about controlling the internet, it’s about being able to control individuals. China can’t stop “the people” from breaking the rules, but they can stop “A Person” and punish them.
“If you don’t like this misguided and illiberal proposal I suggest you join Tom Watson’s facebook group against it.”
I’d rather piss in the wind, it will have more effect.
Philip Hunt said...
20 Nov 09 at 12:57 pm
Tristan,
You’re right, ACTA is very bad and will make the Digital Economy Bill look positively benign. That’s why we need a strong Pirate Party to fight this nonsense.
FaustiesBlog said...
21 Nov 09 at 1:58 pm
Obama is in bed with the corporations to a dangerous degree.
Whereas in decades past, the lawmakers were Congressmen and the Senate, these days, law is drafted by corporations and passed to Congress to ratify.
Corporations literally buy politicians, who therefore have little or no interest in vetting the laws which they are paid handsomely to sell to their cronies and the public at large.
They are the traitors of our age.
Gregory said...
22 Nov 09 at 1:36 pm
“Because of wireless internet, IP addresses are somewhat facile when trying to “trap” Internet “criminals” – as one can simply wander around until they find an insecure network and download off that.”
James Rennie ( my old enemy) was detected in the USA by investigators there.
(in Britain you didn’t get to know that – and similarly, Nick Davies ’single sex slave’ article turned into a fair copy of Living Marixism out of a sheer ignorance of the background facts)
You can link wireless to static stuff eventually if you labor at it. One just works at it. It can be like the old spycatcher/watcher thing.
Put a memory stick in a lead lined safe – and somebody in DC will spend money trying to read it from the back of a van.
Difficult – doesn’t mean anything, impossible just means it is going to cost a lot of money.
There is no such thing as private.
Gregory
Gregory said...
22 Nov 09 at 1:46 pm
http://www.the-investigator.co.uk/viewnews.php?newsId=975
That’s part of the story with the usual pro-Brit spin.
Rennie and some of his colleagues were simultaneously detected by investigators in the USA. The Brit media were not told of the other emails or disks.
If wifi is worth doing, it can be done.
Though in the Scottish case they were using gay brothels as a 3D ‘in-person’ bulletin board for a community interested in raping and murdering babies.
So hi-tech wasn’t the solution, ordinary policing could have dealt with it years ago.
They had immunity.
Gregory
Michael said...
22 Nov 09 at 4:51 pm
I’m sure this isn’t the first time Mandy has used the backdoor to try and slip something in.
Sorry for that, but the proposed policy is the real bad joke here. A free internet should be as precious as every town/city having a library. The manipulation and control of information is at odds with the mythical brand of democracy that we force feed the rest of the world with.
Again New Labour demonstrating that they have a complete inability to vet prospective policies based on affordability, practicality and chiefly value for money. Copyright theft is a criminal act in this country and as such government has a responsibility to police it, however his shouldn’t be at the expense of our civil liberty. We have a right to protect our privacy as much as the copyright holders have an obligation to protect their copyright.
How far to right can these guys go?
Gregory said...
23 Nov 09 at 8:59 am
New Labour has a remarkable talent for finding the very worst person to lead technical anything. There are quite a few of billion dollar examples of dumbness.
For example, a special force, Chinook, is going to cost money, it has to whizz low, in the dark, with other stuff hanging around static, with cluster munitions being spread, with ultra-high rate weapons popping away from above into the ground.
It is also not ( entirely) unknown for an enemy requiring the attention of special forces, to fire back. Only the Brits would buy a a budget version and tell Boeing they would delegate a sixth form at a tech academy or whatever, to juice the thing up.
The internet?
The Brits tend to franchise out their working philosophy to Senator Shelby’s chums. If we are talking about the internet, the key players generally view Brit govt. ministers as plonkers, the industry is not impressed re: Brit savvy.
I don’t think smart policing is within the realm of the possible re: Britain.
How important was the war against the IRA, re: billions of dollars of damage in the City of London, how well did they do? Even with a few decades run-in, ‘clueless’ is very often the short verdict.
It isn’t easy to move a truck full of ANFO to the city of London from South Armagh, it was only possible, because the Brits were not that smart.
“Again New Labour demonstrating that they have a complete inability to vet prospective policies based on affordability, practicality and chiefly value for money. Copyright theft is a criminal act in this country and as such government has a responsibility to police it, however his shouldn’t be at the expense of our civil liberty”
Well, the Brits don’t do privacy.
Gregory