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

[Peter Fairbrother]

On 22/05/13 09:26, Roland Perry wrote:
> 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.

That's true enough, but if they use the end of catching the 
harder-to-reach fruit in order to justify the means, but those means 
will not let them reach that fruit ...

>> Does anyone know the history of how and why telephone logs became fair
>> game for Plod?
>
> I could write a book about it.

I'd read 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 don't have a TV.

(people think that's strange - it was my birthday yesterday, and my 
sister asked if I wanted a TV for a present, as she has every year for 
the last ten years - but I don't want one in the house, I'd just sit and 
watch it and get nothing done).

>> 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),

A legitimate investigative technique, most likely - but that does not 
mean we must make it possible, especially at any cost.


-- Peter Fairbrother

> 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)
>