Fighting Fire with Water
There's a lot of controversy in the press at the minute (rightly so) about the fact that a bill is about to be passed through parliament. All the main party leaders (plus Nick Clegg too) have come out in support of it despite it not even being read in parliament yet. It's being called "emergency" legislation, meaning it'll be passed through much quicker than any other law. In fact, had Tom Watson (the only MP for whom I have any respect whatsoever) not brought it to the attention of the press, we probably wouldn't have even heard about it until after it became law. The big-shot politicians are all saying this is necessary to prevent terrorism (textbook excuse #1) and paedophiles (textbook excuse #2) but a lot of people are beginning to think that, in the wake of the actions of Edward Snowdon and Chelsea Manning, maybe a government isn't really fit to wield this kind of power. Whether you agree with that or not (I'm torn, I must admit) it's not exactly a healthy sign of government when bills get rushed through parliament lickety split before anyone can read them, even when you consider this bill will probably have no effect whatsoever on the powers available to, say, GCHQ.
So you'd think that I'd be outraged at this bill. Well, I'm not. And the reason is simple: technology is a much more effective weapon against law than law is.
Law is slow. I mean, really slow. It's also dumb. I kinda lost my last shred of respect for the law during the infamous Twitter Joke trial when they started arguing over grammatical technicalities, when anyone with more than two brain cells could see the guy had no intention of blowing up an airport. The fact is that law doesn't understand technology, so usually when laws are made to restrict technology there is an awful lot of collateral damage. This is partially because law makers like to cover all bases, but mostly because politicians, judges and lawyers don't know enough about the technology they're trying to legislate. Basically, law is really bad at solving problems, particularly modern ones.
Compare this to technology, which is very good at solving problems. The problem of your ISP being required by law to store logs on your browsing habits, solved by Tor and VPNs. The problem of not being able to smoke legally indoors, solved by e-cigarettes. Heck, when vehicle clamping became illegal suddenly every private car park in Southampton had ANPR cameras installed. Look at any kind of obstacle, good or bad, legal, technical or otherwise, and there's more than likely a form of technology that can circumvent it.
I don't fear a surveillance state because I know that for every wall there is a higher ladder. And as I'm not a lawyer, or anyone with any kind of political influence whatsoever, my ladder is technology. When (not if) the new bill is passed, I will simply continue using Tor to encrypt my traffic. I will continue to use VPNs to mask my IP address, and to fool my ISP's traffic shaping procedures. And the next time a law is passed that I'm not happy about, I'll come up with a technical solution to that too, rather than waste my time lobbying politicians who don't listen.