British police now able to remotely hack PCs without a warrant
By Dave Parrack
The idea of freedom is a hard one to quantify. What someone in the UK constitutes as freedom may be very different to what someone in China thinks of as freedom. But having your personal computer hacked into surely goes beyond the boundaries considered by most to be acceptable in so-called free countries. But that is exactly what the British police can now do, and they don’t even need a warrant to do so.
I’ve been getting increasingly concerned by the encroachments into freedoms, privacy laws, and civil liberties we’ve seen in the West over the past few years. Basically, in the name of “the war on terror”, many rights to privacy and freedom we would have once held dear have been banished to history.
It’s as though law-abiding citizens are meant to just sit back and let their governments and authorities walk all over long-established laws. Any notion of complaining is quickly put down when it’s then assumed that having a problem with these new measures is tantamount to admitting wrongdoing. Which is far from the truth.
The latest move towards a police state, at least here in the UK, is a new policy of allowing the police to hack into and monitor someone’s PC purely because they suspect serious wrongdoing. What’s scary is that unlike a physical search of a property, no court-issued warrant is required, with the intrusive and covert surveillance being allowed on the say so of a senior officer.
According to Times Online, the hacking is known rather obliquely as ‘remote searching’ allows police officers or MI5 agents to snoop into a suspect’s computer hard drive from hundreds of miles away. All Web-browsing activity, email correspondence, and instant messaging conversations can be tracked with the person being snooped not knowing anything about it.
‘Remote searching’ or legal hacking can be achieved by either breaking into a suspect’s home and physically installing a key logger on to the targeted machine, sending an email with an attachment that activates when opened, or using a wireless network. Any of these ways surely constitute a misuse of powers.
The Computer Misuse Act of 1990 reportedly made hacking legal if it was carried out by the state. And the British police claim that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act is in place to keep an eye on activity of this kind to ensure it stayed within the lines of moral and legal obligations. But when those lines are becoming more and more blurred, is that really much of a comfort?
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January 5th, 2009
It is pan-European Union (27 countries); 25 of the other 26 countries do not write about it in English, which is why there are so many of these “UK government does dreadful things” stories when the issue is far bigger and, I suspect, many other countries have police services with less oversight and/or fewer scruples …
January 5th, 2009
But saying the UK is close to being a police state is a bit of fear mongering.
USA agencies have been able to do this same thing since the Patriot Act.
January 5th, 2009
I find it reprehensible that law enforcement agencies in democratic countries are getting powers once deemed undemocratic. It’s disturbing enough that police can go fishing for “illegal activity” without sufficient cause or checks on those causes, but that they can fish for “immoral activity”, who decides that - it’s a value judgement!
January 6th, 2009
Perhaps people (such as blog post writers) ought to actually check out that which they rant about BEFORE they go ranting and spinning and getting people in a lather over a non-story!
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090106-constable-hax0r-loose-in-the-uk-well-yes-and-no.html