Britain’s snooping watchdog reveals grave doubts over the mass surveillance project
Internal documents say plans could lead to innocents being wrongly identified as criminals
Project has sparked huge row at Westminster, dividing the Coalition

Big Brother plans to spy on all internet visits, emails and texts will cost the taxpayer £2billion.

The extraordinary bill was revealed amid revelations that Britain’s snooping watchdog has grave doubts about the mass surveillance project.

The Office of the Information Commissioner said the case had ‘not been made’ to justify the sweeping expansion in the power of the police and other public bodies to trawl through private communications, including visits to Facebook and eBay.

Internal ICO papers, marked restricted, say the Orwellian plan could lead to the innocent being wrongly identified as criminals or terrorists and barred from flying.

Grave doubts: The mass surveillance project has sparked fears that it could lead to the innocent being wrongly identified as criminals or terrorists

WHAT THE CHANGES WILL MEAN TO YOU

Many of us have several devices to communicate with others. Here, we explain how the new system will affect them:

Under surveillance: In future, every website visit via your iPad or laptop would be kept for a fixed period by your internet service provider

LANDLINE

No change. Police, the security services and other public bodies can already access data on who you are calling and when, but not the details of what was said. This information is stored by phone companies, but a ministerial warrant is required to access it.

MOBILE PHONE

Officials can already find out who you have called or texted and when, and even pinpoint your location. The law does not currently cover modern ways of communicating, such as BlackBerrys. In future, those platforms would be tracked too.

LAPTOP/IPAD

Some basic data is currently stored, such as when a person started browsing the web. In future, every website visit would be kept for a fixed period by your internet service provider. This would only detail the address of the website, and not the exact content.

EMAIL

No change. Officials can already see who you email, and when. If there is a suspicion of wrongdoing, police and security services can access your correspondence under a warrant.

SKYPE

Terrorists have turned to Skype, as existing laws do not cover internet telephone calls. Security officials say this loophole must be closed. If their demands are met, they would be able to check who you call and when.

FACEBOOK

As with web browsing, social networking data is not routinely stored. New rules would give the authorities the right to know who you have been talking to on Facebook, and when.

GAMES CONSOLE

Security services suspect online gaming – which allows players to chat using headsets or text messages – could be used to plot terrorist activity. In future, data would be stored on who gamers play with or talk to.

Background reading :

EU: Communication from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament: Tackling Crime in our Digital Age: Establishing a European Cybercrime Centre (pdf) press release(link). The centre will be established within the European Police Office, Europol in The Hague (The Netherlands). The centre will be the European focal point in fighting cybercrime and will focus on illegal online activities carried out by organised crime groups, particularly those generating large criminal profits, such as online fraud involving credit cards and bank credentials. from : http://www.statewatch.org/

NETWORK NEUTRALITY 101: Why The Government Must Act To Preserve The Free And Open Internet (2010 resource): The Internet has become a deeply ingrained in the lives of most Americans. It looms so large, in fact, it is easy to imagine that it is immune to change — that it will always remain the free and open medium that it is now. But there are no such guarantees.

Online Free Speech (2006 resource): In a clear victory for free speech, the Supreme Court has announced that it will not hear the government’s appeal of a ban on the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), the federal law that would criminalize constitutionally protected speech on the Internet.

Online Censorship in the States (2002 resource): In a sweeping victory for free speech rights in cyberspace, the Supreme Court struck down the Communications Decency Act in Reno v. ACLU in June 1997. The Court granted the highest level of First Amendment protection to the Internet, and cyber-activists are still dancing in the streets. Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling, states are busy crafting censorship laws at home.

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The government will soon outline its plans to give security officials the power to monitor emails and internet use.

The proposals, which are predicted to feature in the upcoming Queen’s speech, have been described by supporters as a much-needed “modernisation” of current measures which allow the monitoring of telephone calls.

Critics, however, call the plans an unnecessary extension of the law, and an infringment of civil liberties.

Although the specifics of exactly what data will be collected is still unclear, we know the measures are likely to include never before seen powers to monitor our online activity in real-time, which the government says will help combat terrorism.

“It is vital that police and security services are able to obtain communications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public,” the Home Office said.

“We need to take action to maintain the continued availability of communications data as technology changes.”

Huge upheaval

But the plans are concerning Britain’s internet service providers (ISPs).

An earlier plan to monitor the internet – put forward, but then abandoned by the last Labour government – called for a single body responsible for aggregating all the data.

Now the ISP’s will have to store the data generated by their users.

But one major UK ISP told the BBC there was a risk that data could be fragmented as different companies use various methods and third-parties to handle the vast amounts of information.

And Trefor Davies, a board member at the UK’s Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA), told the BBC that the technological challenge of collating and storing such vast levels of communication would be vast.

Although a large amount of data about us is already collected for billing and other purposes – such as who we call and when – ISPs do not currently store detailed data on what websites we visit, or details about the emails we send.

Mr Davies said: “The email stuff isn’t straight forward, and neither is the web. Those aren’t bits of information that traditionally we keep. We don’t keep backups of deleted emails.

“All of this is do-able, but it could potentially involve network redesigns. And then there’s the storage… you’re into multiple petabits of data.”

A single petabit is the equivalent of around 130,000 gigabytes.

“Think of all the spam people get,” Mr Davies added. “We delete it, but under the new rules would we be allowed to?”

For real-time monitoring of internet traffic and use, UK ISPs were “almost certainly not” ready to implement such a system, Mr Davies said.

And costs are huge: When similar plans to monitor internet and email use were outlined under the Labour government, estimates for a 10-year period of running the system hovered around the £2 billion mark

‘Underground’ web

Technical logistics aside, privacy advocates argue that should criminals wish to mask their behaviour, it is relatively easy to circumvent any data collection using simple tools and techniques.

For example, by using a web-based service like Google’s Gmail or Microsoft’s Hotmail, information that can be collected is limited owing to the security measures put in place by those sites.

Likewise, for sites such as Facebook, private messages sent within the service cannot be obtained without a court order. Under the new proposals, the authorities would simply know that Facebook had been visited, and at what time. Actions within the service are not monitored.

Mr Davies predicted that the use of proxy servers will increase if these proposals are implemented – boosting an “underground web” beyond police and government control.

A proxy, which anonymises the users actions on the web by routing any data requests through an extra server, is the tool of choice for hackers wanted to cover their tracks – but also by people wanting to access location-blocked content like streaming television programmes.

Mr Davies said these proposals could lead to more people to experiment with proxies – meaning the government’s desire to gather data could in fact have the unintended side-effect of encouraging more and more people to mask their online activity completely.

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