Photo: hughelectronic on Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA
The use of warrantless hacking is soon a reality in Great Britain. Yes, that is Police breaking into citizens computers in order to see if they’ve done something wrong or not without evidence or a court order.
From The Times (via HAX (Swedish)):
THE Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant.
The move, which follows a decision by the European Union’s council of ministers in Brussels, has angered civil liberties groups and opposition MPs. They described it as a sinister extension of the surveillance state which drives “a coach and horses” through privacy laws.
The hacking is known as “remote searching”. It allows police or MI5 officers who may be hundreds of miles away to examine covertly the hard drive of someone’s PC at his home, office or hotel room.
Material gathered in this way includes the content of all e-mails, web-browsing habits and instant messaging.
Read the full article over at The Times.
This isn’t really news and the Swedish Government has similar propositions being prepared. Another step to the total control society indeed.
To protect yourself you can do several things out of which installing and using Linux (and keeping it up to date) might be the first. If you’re stuck in a Windows environment you should keep up with your patches and install an Anti-Malware (anti-virus) application that does not solely rely on signatures as some vendors agree to exclude certain states spy-tools from scanning by those. Choose one that has behavioral blocking of some sort or other mechanisms for detecting hostile code without having an exact signature. Also choose a solution which has some kind of personal firewall shipped with it so you can see the applications that tries to connect to the outside world and pay attention to its warnings.
If you are in need of a wireless network, buy an AP (Access Point) that you then connect to your router (another separate unit) in a port which is isolated from the rest of your internal network. There are guides on how to do this in your manual (if not, buy a new router) and you can also leave a comment if you need further help. I’m can also do ultra-cheap consulting for those that need help evaluating their current security during evenings and weekends.
And yes, these are the same basic instruction that I give to home users when educating them on how they can protect themselves from getting their credit cards and/or identity stolen…
What’s wrong with the people suggesting and implementing these laws?
God damned idiots…
