NO2ID

It would appear that police have been granted powers to hack into PC's without a warrant.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/lifes ... 28782.html

Then Big Brother truly is watching you. Welcome to 1984. Feels safe, doesn't it?

It's a non-story being promoted by the Home Office for reasons that are hard to guess. (Perhaps it has something to do with the forthcoming 'consultation' on IMP.) There are no new powers and no evidence that they have the capacity to use the ones they have more:

http://forum.no2id.net/viewtopic.php?t=25762

And certainly no evidence that the police want such powers.

Stu

The police force is a beast of many parts, so are we talking about all ranks in all sections/departments here?

Justin.

Justin

If you suspect someone of serious crimes and you need to find out what's on their computer hard drive, you arrest them and search their homes at the same time, seizing their computers while you're at it. Remotely looking at their hard drives must present some terrific technical problems, not least (a) happening to look while their computers are turned on and (b) scanning them without them having any idea you are doing that.

I reckon this power may be useful to people like MI5. and maybe Special Branch and the Anti-Terrorism bunch, but I can't see the point in it for normal policing operations.

Stu

And therein lies the problem, for it is all this cloak and dagger stuff with the bods and spooks from specialist/elite/covert/etc branches pointedly tapping the side of their noses as they address the salivating deputy minister of broom cupboards that persuades the unbalanced fools running the country that greater and ever more intrusive powers are required.

Not that the Tories are any better for there was a period in the eighties when you only had to whisper the letters SAS and multitudes of backbenchers would immediately take to rubbing their genitals whilst spouting the most idiotic and often homoerotic nonsense about their invincibility.

I wonder just what would happen if MI5 were disbanded tomorrow, just like that. Phut! gone in a flash. Would the country really then fall into anarchy overnight, if at all?

Justin.

Ludicrous. For this idea to work, one must accept that somehow the police/security services have some unique way to bypass all the PC firewalls and encryption out there - some way that criminals both don't have and never will. Because if they ever did get hold of it the consequences would be horrendous.

It's absurd to think that it would ever work that you in effect need to leave a backdoor open on every computer out there and to hope that criminals never discover it.

In fact, criminals and otherwise benign hackers have shown that they have far more resources in breaking such things than governments do. Quite simply, you just can't match potentially millions of fanatically dedicated and clever people.

No doubt ministers of the simpler sort really do believe that this is possible.

Probably the same sort as the movie studio execs who believed that DVD encryption would work whereas it was (as expected) got rapidly broken.

On a computer it is built in such a way that you can write a program to scan your memory. Any code run on the machine has to exist in memory, and so just by scanning it you can find out if something is there that shouldn't be. I'm sure there will be free versions available, since hackers just love to do this sort of thing. They could even arrange it so you can send back your own messages to the spies. Actually one program someone had written called Payback actually sent the spies a nasty virus.

Like this for instance as reported in the Independent-



http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ho ... 228149.htm

Alas Stu, it seems that the harder you defend your past colleagues, and I genuinely applaud your loyalty, the more determined the Met becomes to shoot your balls off, if you'll excuse the colloquialism. Perhaps you should have a word.

Again I stress the point that the UK is moving rapidly beyond the era of the police and 'the law' being there to serve the good of society by general consent. You are entering a new chapter, one that is altogether less pleasant and far more divisive.

Justin.

I'm still waiting for the national penny to drop.

Some people will still vote Labour.

What about spyware? Root kits? and the like? There's no need to penetrate PC firewalls because users happily accept them in and once they are there they can send information out over standard ports that will be open e.g. for HTTP traffic. Criminals already have access to and use spyware to capture password details, credit card numbers etc etc. And what proportion of PC users out there actually encrypt data? Even if they do the information can be accessed from RAM.