Sunday, January 04, 2009

The Bad News Is ...

The police may be hacking your network without a warrant.

The good news is - well, let's hope they've outsourced the project to a large IT consultancy, in which case it will go in five years late, 300% over budget, and have lost 80% of the envisaged functionality - you know, all the features which sold it to the government in the first place (on that somewhat hazy consultancy-funded 'evaluation week' held on a private estate with hot and cold running women) .

According to a Times commenter IPCop, TrueCrypt, PGP are the things you need to ward off the baddies. Trouble is that for many of us, it's all a bit of a hassle.

3 comments:

Edwin Greenwood said...

... let's hope they've outsourced the project to a large IT consultancy...

With luck they'll give the work to EDS or to BT (at least under its current management), in which case it will never be implemented at all.

... IPCop, TrueCrypt, PGP...

Using encryption or a working firewall will doubtless lead to a prima facie presumption of guilt under the Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear principle. As with the knife-carrying legislation, I'll bet the onus will be on you to demonstrate innocence rather than on the authorities to prove criminal intent.

"Come on, Mr Tall. You've gone to an awful lot of trouble to keep your activities secret. Why would an innocent, law-abiding citizen need to do that?"

Anonymous said...

I wonder what they're like at penetrating ISA Server? Or a Cisco ASA?

Yeah, I thought that too.

Anonymous said...

But the government can legislate for backdoors to be put in all this software so unless its open source you are not 100% sure you are secure.