Snoopers Charter passed into Law

On a lot of hard drives. This will be a boon for database consultants I'd imagine.

Will your Internet bills rise accordingly?

 

AFAIK the metadata, what websites and connections our devices make, is going to be stored at each communications provider (ISP's) in a shared searchable database.

The rest of the data (afaik) is and always has been stored by GCHQ, what they had been doing was judged as being illegal for the 17 years leading up to our government changing the law, now it's all above board.

That depends on who you believe, Home Office estimate for the storage of these records was £174m over ten years and that's the amount they've said their willing to reimburse ISPs, others have suggested it's going to cost £1 billion, based on a similar scheme which has since been dropped in Denmark due to cost.

If the government is correct we won't see an increase in our bills, if their wrong we could see big rises.

 

Is the home office defining the infrastructure the ISPs must maintain, like how the data can be accessed, interfaces, connectivity, access control, redundancy levels of the hardware and data, you know proper system specifications or is it just the general instruction to store data on every customer?

 

Again this is just AFAIK, it's just a general instruction to store data on every customer.

ISPreview has a fairly good synopsis of what's known about it so far.

 

That article says MPs are protected from snooping (Imagine that).

 

Although how that protection is going to work is anyones guess, are ISPs going to have a list of all MPs homes and devices and not log anything from those houses or devices, or will they get recorded in the database but be excluded from any searches of the database.

 

Probably easiest to record all and then purge the MPs data every so often by shortening the retention period.

 

Removing the data is the easy part, the hard part is how you, as an ISP, know what data belongs to an MP and what doesn't.

 

For home broadband / mobile contracts they'll probably just tell the providers that they are MPs who will double check with the government.

The harder part will be making sure no MP ever uses public hotspots or some neighbours wifi, while they shouldn't do that in the first place for security reasons we all know old people usually aren't exactly all that clued up on internet safety.

 

Going to be tricky if like most ISPs you don't use static IPs.

Personally i think they'll (the ISPs) will go for the easiest/cheapest option, log it all and depend on the people searching for things to ignore sensitive information relating to MPs.

 

Does it also inexplicably exclude Lords of parliament, top civil servants and judges by any chance?

 

Does it matter? There is already one group that consider themselves above the law and beyond reproach, what does it matter if there are more. Either way you, your family, the people you know and interact with are likely to never be in that group.

 

So... which d'you reckon will happen first?

Database gets hacked into
MP uses what's on it for political gain or to discredit an opponent
Info about someone of prominence goes 'missing'

 

It'll disappear into the sands of time until something gets national coverage as being "solved" because of it, only for it to be discovered that the evidence was wrong, or tampered with.

Then all the history of it being misused will trickle out for so long it falls off news cycles, and people forget again. All while we live under the thumb of whichever marauding ****wit happens to be in charge at the time.

 

There would be a "hidden" upside to it if they stored data from MPs, because they would actually have to try to keep the data secured.
Just imagine the backlash against isps if hackers ended up selling the logged data of MPs on some Tor marketplace

 

I'm going to say the database gets hacked first, it's such a tempting target and security will probably be awful in the early days.

I have my doubts, most likely the ISP will get hacked yet again and then everyone will blame the ISP, there'll be plenty of hand wringing and probably a fine but i doubt most people will see it as a problem with the bill itself.

 

I think that ordinary people won't even know what it means when a news headline says that an ISP got hacked.

I think that most people will be too preoccupied with making ends meet in an increasingly harsh economic climate, and with seeking oblivion in alcohol and Sky TV. Perhaps there will be some tangential half-hearted complaint about foreigners being to blame for it all before they get back to watching the telly.

 

It's not without its charms.

 

Westworld and beers what's not to love!

 

There is a scarily long list of those who can access our ICRs