BBC News - 'Fresh proposals' planned over cyber-monitoring

[Roland Perry]

In article <519BFD2D.5070102 at zen.co.uk>, Peter Fairbrother 
<zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk> writes
>Of course throwaway dongles, unsecured WIFI, free public wifi, TOR, and 
>so on need no mention here. But I wonder if Her Majesty knows about 
>them?

Her government does. But it's never a good argument that you should give 
up picking the low-hanging fruit, just because there's some harder to 
reach fruit elsewhere.

>Does anyone know the history of how and why telephone logs became fair 
>game for Plod?

I could write a book about it.

Did you watch 'Endeavour' (the 'Morse' prequel). I've not seen the whole 
series yet, but they've done reverse-DQ phone numbers in two of the 
plots so far.

>I mean. it's not obvious that Plod should have pretty much unrestricted 
>access to comms data logs anyway.

There's two elements to this. One is whether the access is required at 
all (and checking who a suspect has been in contact with is normally 
regarded as a legitimate investigative technique), the other is to what 
extent it's "pretty much unrstricted".

I won't re-run the RIPA [vs DPA 29(3)] debate for the nth time.

>Even then there is a big difference between telephone logs and internet 
>logs, which are much more revealing.

Which is why there's the tailpiece in RIPA s2(9)

-- 
Roland Perry