There was an inter­est­ing arti­cle in the Guardian: MI5 dont want unlaw­ful file­shar­ers cut off the Intar­webs. This, it seems, will encour­age peo­ple to use encrypted inter­net con­nec­tions. That, in turn, will make it harder for them to spy on law-abiding cit­i­zens. The con­cern is that peo­ple cur­rently using bit-torrent, Usenet or host­ing ser­vices like Rapid­share will use secure SSL con­nec­tions to pre­vent their own ISPs spy­ing on what they are down­load­ing. While many believe that the spooks at GCHQ can break SSL encryp­tion if they throw enough CPUs at it, it is believed to need a seri­ous amount of horse­power and so only worth­while for high inter­ests tar­gets: non-white UK cit­i­zens, civil lib­er­ties trou­ble­mak­ers, the com­mu­ni­ca­tions of friendly gov­ern­ments, plus min­is­ters domes­tic emails.

Under pro­posed gov­ern­ment leg­is­la­tion ISPs will be com­pelled to rat-out their cus­tomers to the US movie and record indus­tries. A pretty unsavoury thing to do but this gov­ern­ment has had a long and illus­tri­ous his­tory of com­pelling com­pa­nies and pro­fes­sion­als to act as spy­ing arms of the state. The quaint prac­tice of bank­ing pri­vacy is a warm dis­tant mem­ory, like that trip to Brighton Races in a Ford Model-T; gone because the gov­ern­ment needs to fight these new 21st threats of what are being called ‘crime’ and ‘ter­ror­ism’. Shock­ing inven­tions of the mod­ern age: of course per­sonal pri­vacy and trust must yield to the state’s need to see every­thing we do in order to make us safe. Yes.

This is a clas­sic exam­ple of the law of unin­tended con­se­quences. One bunch of gov­ern­ment sleaze­bags (Peter ‘Pink Mandy’ Man­del­son) want to make polit­i­cal cap­i­tal but in doing so it ham­pers another bunch of gov­ern­ment sleaze­bags also look­ing to make polit­i­cal cap­i­tal: MI5 look­ing for ‘Prod­uct’ (in spook jar­gon) to sell to ministers.

In the mean­time the Open Rights Group have a thing or two to say about gov­ern­ment Inter­net dis­con­nec­tion policies.