In reply to a post by robertcrowther:

No problem with the correction.

Not sure if you are in favour of safety or not? I would rather have everyone's internet access monitored in some way. One prime example is the work that POLIT do (Paedophile Online Investigation Team).

Don't you believe in keeping people including children safe?

But it doesn't achieve any of that. Those people with something to hide will just use a VPN, Tor, DNScrypt, etc.

All it actually achieves is monitoring average citizens.

It's like saying F1 drivers go too fast on the track so we're installing monitoring devices in every private car. Has zero impact on an F1 driver on a track. Has lots of impact on everyone else.

Edited by nemeth782 (Mon 20-Nov-17 08:05:09)

Or perhaps it is more like some drivers speed and therefore they install speed cameras - something they have done and they say it is for public safety (and I suspect that is one of the primary motivations - although I know there are others).

There is definitely a lot of intelligence that can be gathered by monitoring Internet activity. The extent to which it should be done is debatable but doing it at some level is almost certainly needed.

However, I don't personally ascribe to the point of view that just because something is sponsored by government that it would be monitored any more than your average service (especially in the case of DNS). I also am not overly concerned personally that government can see where I have surfed or what I have posted online - they have far better things to do than look at what I'm doing and I have at least some trust in this country that the stuff I do wouldn't be seen as nefarious or illegal.

+1

In reply to a post by ian72:

Or perhaps it is more like some drivers speed and therefore they install speed cameras - something they have done and they say it is for public safety (and I suspect that is one of the primary motivations - although I know there are others).

Not really, the key difference is that it could all be avoided by those that wanted to. E.g. speed camera jammers were easily available at no cost, and completely impossible to ban. In which case the cameras are pretty pointless.

You start your sentence with"Not really" but don't offer anything different to what I said - whether they are "pointless" or not is irrelevant. Also anyone using speed camera jammers is presumably doing so because they actually plan to break the law - people doing the speed limit don't need them. I would also argue that the amount of money collected in fines would suggest that most people aren't using anything to jam the cameras and therefore they aren't completely pointless.

In reply to a post by ian72:

You start your sentence with"Not really" but don't offer anything different to what I said - whether they are "pointless" or not is irrelevant. Also anyone using speed camera jammers is presumably doing so because they actually plan to break the law - people doing the speed limit don't need them. I would also argue that the amount of money collected in fines would suggest that most people aren't using anything to jam the cameras and therefore they aren't completely pointless.

You can't make such assumptions with encryption though. Someone using encryption might be doing perfectly legal things, or even legally required things. For example, you need to encrypt card data for PCI compliance. You encrypt your online banking. For your speed camera analogy to work, speed camera jammers are freely available and have legitimate and even mandated uses, and your cameras log everyone that passes. As such, they are useless at catching someone that wants to speed, yet can be used by criminals for example, who could hack them, get the traffic logs, and then blackmail people, e.g. "you told your wife you were going to work but actually went towards the strip club, hand over £1,000 or we embarrass you".

There is nothing to be gained from monitoring, it is a waste of time and money, and only has risks and downsides.

You can't make such assumptions with encryption though

I don't believe I did. And using a government DNS service only tells them what site you are going to not what is within the transaction. So, no problem with visiting bank sites, etc - they are all perfectly legal and visiting them doesn't give a great deal of information to the government as they are perfectly legitimate activities.

And as I don't do things like visiting strip clubs behind peoples back I have nothing to hide. It is similar to an article that was in the news recently - a woman unlocked her husbands phone using fingerprint and found he had been having some level of relationship with another woman. He blamed the phone for having been unlocked - but if he hadn't been doing it in the first place he wouldn't have been caught. There is nothing wrong with someone visiting a strip club - hiding it from their nearest and dearest though suggests something is already wrong in the relationship and there are other ways she could find out.

There is a balance between catching bad guys and intruding on personal rights. The balance may not currently be right but to say there is nothing to be gained from monitoring is not a view I can agree with - I strongly believe there are a number of crimes that have been stopped due to the ability to monitor (Internet, phone, CCTV, etc) - stopping doing those things would I am certain result in an increase in crime.

Monitoring to stop terrorism must be a good thing?

In reply to a post by broadband66:

Monitoring to stop terrorism must be a good thing?

Only if it had any capacity to stop terrorism. As it doesn't, it's monitoring for the sake of monitoring.

So the government is wasting money. What a load of tosh.

If you've nothing to hide then let them monitor.