Privacy again

It kinda funny, after reading a newspaper this morning I decided that it was about time to write an article on privacy again… and just I noticed that Patrick did the same on his weblog yesterday.

This morning I read that the government has far reaching plans to gain control on the information flow on the Internet. The technique they want to use for this is “Deep Packet Inspection”. This means that they will literally check the contents of the data-packets that are send over Internet (to put it simple, there is more to that).
This means that they can check every mail that is sent and check every file that is transported over the Internet.
They also want to check behavior of people. An example that was literally mentioned was that someone who bought an expensive camera and earned some more money then normal was already a suspect for producing porn with children? This is too stupid for words.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that porn with children is disgusting and should be acted very hard on… but not with any grounded proof. This is even forbidden by our Constitution. There is clearly stated that someone is innocent until proven different and there should be a very clear suspicion before there may be acted on someone.

To be honest, I think whole child porn-argument is not what is really behind this all. Governments and their “secret agencies” fear the Internet because it out of their control (see the whole Wikileaks matter). And I think the real reason is that they want to have grip on what is happening on the Internet.

I agree with Patrick what he writes on his log, that is too silly for word when you use PGP/GnuPG, masked IP-numbers, OpenProxy and things like that make you a suspect of cybercrime.

Me? I already use GnuPG (the Open Source version of PGP) and I will encourage all people I exchange regular mail with to do the same. Already all mail I exchange with Marion is encrypted with GnuPG. Chatting I will do more and more through Skype because of its high level of encryption. And if I can find a thing to protect my privacy…. I will!