Goverment spying on everything we do?

chopperbyrne wrote: »

As long as you're not viewing anything illegal you shouldn't care.

that old argument always comes up & it doesn't wash with me. I'm not doing anything illegal but i still don't want the government to have that sort of power.

the data itself is not logged, example if u download a 4gb movie file, they wont log every bit of the file transferred just the fact that u have requested to begin the download.

What is the definition of "u have requested to begin the download", because I can think of multiple situations whereby a request can be sent without "u" ever knowing about it.

they will not know what to do with all the data that they collect

Agreed. I believe they will eventually get some group in, which will do some mining. There will be a media scare on their findings, with the sole purpose of trying to scare people in to changing their net usage patterns.

I forsee anonymous proxies and onion routing systems becoming more and more popular as time goes on.

Then ISP's will start to flag a high level of traffic bound to/from a single node outside as suspicious. It's not so much the destination we're trying to hide from, but rather the next couple of hops outside your own private network.

I read that if you get a non EU email address,they won't be able to monitor your mail.

I can't see how it could be any different. They can monitor traffic, rather than sitting down browsing through your email account.

theyre hardly going to be able to monitor gmail, or hotmail etc

They're over SSL, but technically can still be retrieved.

It won't be too long when every financial transaction you make will pinpoint your exact position on this plane

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They're doing this now I expect. I make very few cash transactions these days. Ever since my bank insisted on replacing my ATM card with a Laser/ATM. Hmmm...there's some intresting stats afoot.

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To be honest it's a huge ball of complexity this whole tracking thing. On one end we've got us netizens doing what we do online. Then we've got the systems that we use (because I don't know about you, but I have actually used a computer outside my own house). Then we've got the sites we visit, services we use. We've got patterns of behaviour. Then we've got systems to monitor our behaviour. These systems are generally configured a certain way, looking for specific things. Their job technically, to find specific patterns of behaviour and then trace that back to a human (the offender). Not to mention the dynamics of collaboration between various government and contracted departments/groups involved.

That is a long chain of (systems and relationships). Then we've got a situation whereby someone in government finally understands that there is a need for monitoring (not necessarily understand why, but just that there is a need). They get their photo on the front page of the Irish Independent or Times with a senior member of the Guards and a laptop diplaying a website detailing their "master plan".ie. Where money was thrown in to a "project" by the government and some consultant laughs all the way to the bank while doing something like

Filter a high number of requests to sites of a controvercial nature from a single IP. They'd probably spend half the year trying to distingishing porn hungry teenagers from DoS web bots. But by Chirst when they do catch someone, we'll have Ann Doyle on 6 One trying to scare us all.