Police 'to be given powers to view everyone's entire internet history'

Soldato
Joined
7 Dec 2002
Posts
3,958
Location
UK
What's to stop me from going down the street with a mobile or laptop bought on e-bay & using someone else's unsecured connection or the connection at McDonalds & googling how to do whatever or communicating with someone via a googlemail account set up by a third party abroad & not linked to me in any way?

If people want to get around this I'm pretty sure there are many ways.
 
Permabanned
Joined
24 Mar 2012
Posts
7,051
Location
Ulster
What's to stop me from going down the street with a mobile or laptop bought on e-bay & using someone else's unsecured connection or the connection at McDonalds & googling how to do whatever or communicating with someone via a googlemail account set up by a third party abroad & not linked to me in any way?

If people want to get around this I'm pretty sure there are many ways.

Mac addresses. There's a reason Apple started using random Mac addresses in their phones when scanning for networks.

https://code.wireshark.org/review/gitweb?p=wireshark.git;a=blob_plain;f=manuf
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/file/index/docid/858324/filename/Wi-Fi_Stalking.pdf

You'd have to know Mac spoofing to be untraceable.
 
Soldato
Joined
7 Dec 2002
Posts
3,958
Location
UK
Soldato
Joined
7 Dec 2002
Posts
3,958
Location
UK
Read the PDF.

I have, but just because a MAC address is known to belong to a Samsung Galaxy sold by Carphone warehouse in Manchester 7 years ago to a Mr Bean who then sold it to some randomer on e-bay in Dubai 2 years later who never powered it up & who then sent it to Achmed the dead terrorist in Edinburgh after 5 years & who is now using it without a sim card to talk to his friends in Syria using some random unsecured Wi-Fi connection the MAC becomes irrelevant?

Sure they will be able to see that achmed was connected to grandad bobs Wi-Fi & was talking to his terrorist friends 3 months ago but that doesn't tell you who Achmed is, it just tells you Achmed had Mr Beans old phone before he put it down the toilet & granddad bob needs to put a password on his Wi-Fi.

Or am I missing something?
 
Soldato
Joined
18 Feb 2006
Posts
9,573
Or am I missing something?


Given a mac address of a device that entered my works premises (doesn't need to connect to the wifi) I can see where you have been. Once you have gone past a CCTV camera, I can see your face. I can then follow you round the site. Used the ATM? The bank could tell me your name.

I'm not overly sure how this relates to the topic though.
 
Soldato
Joined
7 Dec 2002
Posts
3,958
Location
UK
I'm not overly sure how this relates to the topic though.

Because I presumed it would make the whole tracking your usage history thing totally pointless, anyone organised enough could get around it leaving them just tracking the usage of joe public. (and idiots)
 

ajf

ajf

Soldato
Joined
30 Oct 2006
Posts
3,044
Location
Worcestershire, UK
So will it be worth using tor even for normal browsing? Assuming you don't want your every move on the web logged.

I had thought this too. Surely a tor browser would make a complete mockery of these laws?
I don't believe there was anything about this or in fact VPNs so far in the new laws?

I could see these being tagged into the future discussions on encryption laws though?
 
Soldato
Joined
14 Oct 2003
Posts
7,831
I had thought this too. Surely a tor browser would make a complete mockery of these laws?
I don't believe there was anything about this or in fact VPNs so far in the new laws?

I could see these being tagged into the future discussions on encryption laws though?

I'm not sure, they were saying on tv that the logging will only show the root page hit and not the pages underneath (haha, sure, I bet they already log everything already).

For me, this is more about universal monitoring of the population under the guise of protection, since any terrorist will use specific security techniques in communication, which your average non-technical person would not even understand, therefore we sacrifice our civil liberties for little gain.

And for those who use tor, you have to trust the operators of the exit nodes. For VPN services which you pay for, you cannot guarantee they won't just hand your information over anyway, so paying for a service doesn't guarantee you security/privacy, you cannot be 100% sure they don't keep logs of your activities.

To be secure, you require a service where even the operators are unable to discover what the user is doing and probably we are not far off it and the net result is that it will make it harder for them to catch the bad guys, because of ever better security being created as a result of this kind of monitoring.
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
16 Jun 2013
Posts
5,381
Surely the ones you have to look out for are the ones that wouldn't get caught this way? Doubt they googled twin towers structural plans.
 
Back
Top Bottom