News : Surveillance bill to include internet records storage.

[BandOfBrothers]

Internet firms will have to store details of people's online activity for 12 months under a new surveillance law.

The requirement is included in the government's draft Investigatory Powers Bill, to be published later.

Excerpt from the link "Such data would consist of a basic domain address, and not a full browsing history of pages within that site or search terms entered.
For example, police could see that someone visited www.bbc.co.uk - but not the individual pages they viewed."

Source : BBC News. 

Surveillance bill to include internet records storage

Whats your thoughts ?

Big Brother watching........  or a necessity to help against "terrorism suspects, organised criminals and people involved in abuse, exploitation and kidnappings."

[jeffkinn]

In this day and age, regrettably it is a prudent course of action to take. We also see new regulations that companies like Apple and Google cannot offer data encrypted message services that cannot be read by them if it's needed. This isn't ideal either but is better than the alternative of banning iMessage, Whatsapp and the like.

[Nabs]

To an extent it's pointless; The people they are targeting (terrorists, major ciminals etc) will be using techniques to cover their tracks anyway. Many will be using the so called "Dark Web" which is near on impossible to track people through and certainly wouldn't show up in ISP browsing history.

Personally don't have a problem with this as I have nothing to hide + in the unlikely event I would want to do something online without them knowing I know there are easy ways I can.

[hrym]

It's frequently suggested that, if you can see everything, you know nothing - bit like a needle and a haystack - and that good intelligence and targetting are the most effective weapons.  It's entirely possible that evyerthing else is chaff and window-dressing.

All that said, being able to look at the records of people who are already on your radar is sensible.  I do worry (a little) about the unrestricted access, even if it's only to sites and not content.  There's an argument that no-one has time to read everyone's internet history, but equally, a lot of the searching is done by bots which simply flag up things like keywords and will produce a lot of false positives that will have the spooks looking at innocent people.  As long as they have good intentions, that's not a problem.  We are, though, handing a lot of capability to an administration that wasn't perhaps acting in our best interests.