Unplanned opposition to government internet snooping

May 20, 2004
Thursday

Unplanned opposition to government internet snooping

Brian Micklethwait (London) Arts & Entertainment • Civil liberty/regulation

(0)

Something rather remarkable has just happened. I am watching Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned, and they have just had a serious discussion about how they really did not like the fact that the Government can tell exactly which internet sites you have just been visiting, and read all your emails, and send you to prison if you encrypt them and do not tell them the key, or whatever it is. Baddiel and Skinner never have serious discussions.

A bloke in a beard (of the trimmed sort rather than ZZ Top style) asked a question about this, and instead of him being laughed out of the studio, they found themselves discussing it quite seriously. Bearded bloke was allowed to add a further comment (about the emails). Baddiel in particular seemed quite upset.

Interesting.

Comments

The government is only able to do this with the apathetic. Smart folk use anonymous proxies, anonymous remailers. I myself am writing this comment via the (in testing) Tor network (http://freehaven.net/tor)

Cypherpunks are beavering away, writing code, creating tools to allow people to defend themselves. You should help. If you want to do something about this, run a Tor node, run a mixminion node, run a mixmaster node.

Don't ask the State to leave you alone... that won't work.

Posted by Secret Squirrel at May 20, 2004 12:16 PM

Secret Squirrel

I wasn't asking the state to do anything, and I am well aware that doing this won't work - certainly not in this matter.

What I was doing was noting an interesting little flurry of public opinion. I just said it was interesting. It is.

Not least because the next question is, as you say, what people can then do about it that might work.

Posted by Brian Micklethwait at May 20, 2004 01:56 PM

Secret Squirrel + everybody you may also want to look at www.freenetproject.org as an example of what may be done in regard to free surfing.

Also "Don't ask the State to leave you alone... that won't work." I hope that if enough of us ask the have to listen....

Posted by Freedom at May 20, 2004 03:53 PM

and in the midterm, using GnuPG (or PGP) allows you a minimum of privacy!

Posted by erwan at May 21, 2004 01:49 PM

Editors note: We do not tolerate spammers

Posted by jhansen at May 23, 2004 09:31 PM

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