Says criminals will turn to encryption to avoid detection and “make prosecution harder because it increases the workload significantly.”
Law enforcement is the latest UK group to criticize Business Secretary Lord Mandelson’s “evolved” plan to to disconnect repeat file-sharers from the Internet.
Both police and the country’s spy services, MI5 and MI6, are concerned that the proposal will mean more criminals will begin encrypting their traffic to escape detection by copyright holders, thereby making their job much, much more difficult.
“It will make prosecution harder because it increases the workload significantly,” one law enforcement official told The Times.
MI5 and MI6 are also displeased with how it will too make their jobs much harder.
“The spooks hate it,” adds a source. “They think it is only going to make monitoring more difficult.”
They are especially angry that the govt decided to add disconnection to the list of possible technical measures without first giving them a chance to weigh in.
If you recall, Lord Mandelson feels the current timetable, which stands at 2-3 yrs for a 70% reduction using a combination of notifications and technical measures, would take an “unacceptable amount of time to complete in a situation that calls for urgent action.”
Tom Watson, UK Labour MP for West Bromwich East, and who tabled an Early Day Motion (EDM) calling for a debate on “illicit file-sharing” a few weeks ago, is among the more intelligent politicians there bright enough to have realized that “disconnecting alleged offenders will be futile given that it is relatively easy for determined file-sharers to mask their identity or their activity to avoid detection.”
It seems as though law enforcement has realized this as well.
I guess busting teen music pirates is much more important than nabbing terrorists, online scammers, and identity thieves.
Stay tuned.
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“mountain_rage – October 27, 2009 at 5:57 pm
Wonder if the next law will be an attempt at making services that mask the users activity illegal. Now that they could really enforce or prove what you were actually doing.”
no because if they did this then all of peoples banking information and everything else that is encrypted then would be plain as day. Using ssl would be a federal offense & everyone would be in jail for trying to check their myspace, email, band account, credit card, etc. This would also give a field day to scammers since everything would be wide open, so get rich days in other words. The world would be so corrupts as for almost everyone everything they have would be available for whoever wants it. How would you like everyone to have all your banking info free to distribute & reciprocate along with your email and everything that is encrypted as of now?
Do you think they will make encrypted traffic illegal? I don’t think so as for the above is true.
Oh yeah, the internet is global so unless they were to make it illegal all over the, then it still remain
Ok well fine, they will regulate encryption even more than they already do then, which is likely a possibility. Selective laws are not uncommon, and they could easily state that only certain traffic can be encrypted.
we will go back to the darks ages and send 14meg files via email
ha ha ha ha
the best way to encrypt your traffic is using freenet http://freenetproject.org/
Ya, but in terms of content, freenet has a long way to go. There are vulnerabilities too apparently. But as far as encryption goes its the best out right now.
Wonder if the next law will be an attempt at making services that mask the users activity illegal. Now that they could really enforce or prove what you were actually doing.
It actually wouldn’t surprise me (it would shock me, but would surprise me) if the next round of civil liberties crushing laws included something along those lines. Already, the UK has a law that says that if you encrypt your laptop and the police sieze it, you are legally forced to pass on that encryption of face a few years behind bars. Scary concept in many lights.
The password to break that encryption that is.
Remember hearing about that, which I think caused true crypt to create some kind of hidden volume. Never look into deep enough, but from what I understand it makes it hard to see that a encrypted volume exists. Anyway, always thought one way around it would be to create 2 passwords, one would decrypt the files into biblical tests, or free open documents rather than a proper decryption, while the other would still decrypt the files.
Wow, you would think I was drunk when writing that.
I Remember hearing about that, all it did was cause software manufacturers to create a system where reasonable doubt could be brought forth on the claim of an encrypted volume. Never looked into deep enough, but from what I understand it makes it hard or even impossible to identify a sector as an encrypted volume. You can tell an entire hard drive isn’t being used, but no way to prove that its an encrypted volume. Anyway, always thought one way around it would be to create 2 passwords, one fake decrypt the file and generate random files, the other would actually decrypt the file. This way you can give them a password, and all they can do is assume its a fake, they can’t prove it.
These EU 3 strikes laws will pave the way to a gold rush of technological innovation not seen since Napster was taken down over ten years ago. There’ll be a rush to figure out the best way to hide your IP address from the spooks, the copyright industry and their own ISPs.
The police are totally right in freaking out over the three strikes law because now there’ll be an exponential incentive to be much more sophisticated in masking your trail online.
https://bitblinder.com/
Just how do you mask your identity and encrypt files? I’d like to be able to do that with Vuze/piratebay.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/86732/itshidden-offers-free-vpn-service/
There are a couple p2p apps, that encrypt your IP address as well as the file you are transferring. It does this by sending the request to the recipient through a number of other users, the destination user then gets a command to send the file back, but without knowledge of the original person asking for the file. The file is sent back and transferred encrypted through a bunch of other users. No one can put the file together unless they have all the parts and the key, and no one has either, so the file is protected from prying eyes, and the source is hidden.
Look up Freenet, Ants and Mute.