It could be just a ploy to entrap UK civil liberties activists into committing a crime.
A Facebook Group a fan site, a website and an email being circulated suggest that recipients do just this by overwhelming the Home Office – since they plan to read all our mail and take dominion over everything we see and do online – with an influx of cc’d email on June 15th.
The general gist is ‘see how they like it up ’em in practice’:
“No government of any colour is to be trusted with such a roadmap to our souls”: Ken McDonald, former head of the CPS.
The government has unveiled plans for a private company to run a
“superdatabase” that will track all our emails, calls, texts, internet
use and so on. This is an immense infringement of civil liberties, not
to mention a major risk to our private data – but it won’t make us any
safer. The sheer amount of information that the Government intends to
collect will be impossible to analyse properly and will undoubtedly turn
up false positives while missing potential security threats amongst the
morass of spam emails and private chat.
Read more at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/31/privacy-civil-liberties
So, for one day, we should send a message to the Home Office – “you want
to see our emails? Ok then, here they are then!”.
The date has been set for June 15th. However for legal reasons, please don’t go ahead with the protest of your own accord. Please enter your details below and we will keep you up-to-date from time to time – and you’ll get confirmation closer to the time that the protest is going ahead. Alternatively, you can become a fan at our Facebook page.
I can see a number of problems with this. To begin with something blindingly obvious – why on earth would anyone want to willingly subscribe to any potential ’round up the usual suspects’ list of political dissidents, whatever their politics? Perhaps the author(s) haven’t quite thought their plan through.
Or maybe they have. Maybe this is a uk.gov fishing expedition.”Please enter your details below”, “Please invite your friends if you have joined and spread the word!”, indeed. Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?
Which brings up another problem, forwarding incoming email ‘regardless of importance and content:
We do this by simply cc’ing or bcc’ing every email we send (and if you like, forwarding every email you receive), regardless of importance or
content, to public.enquiries at homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk.
That way Jacqui Smith and the Home Office will be able to see how
difficult it will be to get on with their actual work – keeping our
country safe – when they’re trying to monitor every harmless private
thing we say and do.
***Please invite your friends if you have joined and spread the word!***<
I really don’t think so.
It’s outrageous even to suggest forwarding received emails as a form of political protest. In doing so you’d be subscribing the identities of all those people who’ve emailed you to the same potential database of political dissenters as you, but by proxy. Nice.
Also politically yet not quite so technologically aware readers might take this to mean that they should send the entire contents of their in and outboxes, since forever – and virtually labelled ‘seditionist’ too – to Jackboot Jacqui on the 15th June. It does seem a foolhardy course of action to suggest, as does the idea to that we forward all the emails we send and receive only on the 15th of June, which is what I think was actually meant.
Of course what the (possibly somewhat naive) authors may have envisioned is just that protestors might perhaps register a disposable email account, use it at a few of the more interesting sites, sit back, watch the reconstituted pork product that pours into the inbox get cc’d to Jacqui. Voila, enough spam to supply police canteens for a century. What larks.
But whatever the authors actually meant, there’s no getting round the fact that what they’re suggesting their fellow citizens do by way of an act of supposed civil disobedience is to overwhelm the Home Office and other UK.gov network resources with traffic – otherwise known as a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) the organisation of or participation in which carries a hefty 10 year prison sentence under UK law.
Why would any activist, however naive and well-meaning, incite that others (albeit unknowingly) participate in conspiracy to commit a crime?
It all smells of entrapment to me.
Who is this ‘Martin’? Who registered the website? Where did this email originate? So far it’s not taking off that well there’s little I can find mentioned about it except on a libertarian/far-rightwing blog (which refers approvingly to the BNP), which inclines me just to say sod it, let them get themselves banged up and good riddance.
But I would hate for anyone who’s not an incipient nazi, who’s just concerned about civil liberties but who feels powerless to be heard, to take this as a legitimate call to action. I don’t trust it a bit.
Please don’t cc your email to Jacqui Smith on June 15th.